"What Pope Innocent III Once Said"

It felt as if it had taken him a week to cross the crowded smoky barroom, and when finally  the Professor reached the bar and climbed up on a stool, he looked to the right and to the left for someone to expound to. This was the longest bar he had ever sat at, it seemed to extend to infinity to both the right and the left. Was he at the middle of the bar? It was hard to say. But what mattered was that he was at a bar, which was all he had ever wanted in all his life.

"Whaddaya want?" said a bartender, a big fellow in shirt sleeves and a bowtie.

"Hello," said the Professor. "How are you?"

"Who gives a shit how I am?" said the bartender. "I'm a fucking bartender, that's how I am, for my sins, which were many, apparently. Now what the fuck do you want, because as you can see I am busy back here."

"I wonder do you have a bock beer."

"You can stop wondering, because, yes, we have a bock beer."

"Splendid," said the Professor. "And my second question is –"

"And I hope it's the last," interpolated the bartender.

"Ha ha, yes," said the Professor, "my second question, and I shall try to make it my last, is I wonder if I may run a tab."

"Relax, big guy, all the drinks here are on the house."

"Oh, dear God," said the Professor. "Then is it true, am I in paradise?"

"I'll let you be the judge of that."

"Ha ha, yes, well then, could I have a bock draft?"

"Sure."

"Could I have a large one?"

"You can have whatever the fuck you want."

"Then I'll have the largest glass of bock beer you have, please."

"One imperial pint of draft bock, coming up."

The bartender went away.

"First time here?" said a man to the Professor's left.

"Yes," said the Professor.

The man's face was the color of an old gunny sack, and it appeared to be of the same texture. He wore glasses which magnified his eyes in such a way that they appeared to be two mud-colored amoebae pressing against the lenses. But he wore a jacket and tie, and a concrete-colored trilby hat and so presumably he was a gentleman.

"I take it you are an academic," said the man.

"Yes," said the Professor, although it had been over two decades since he had been fired from his last teaching job.

"So also am I," said the man. "I wonder if perhaps you read my article, 'The Semicolon; Is It Really Moribund?' It was in the Reader's Digest Digest."

"The Reader's Digest Digest?"

"Yes, it was a short-lived offshoot of the Reader's Digest, aimed at readers who wanted material even more digestible than those in the parent publication."

"Well, I'm sorry to say I missed that article."

"A pity. I truly believe it was the last word on the semicolon. What is your own line of country, if I may be so bold as to ask?"

"European History, primarily pre-Renaissance. Perhaps you read my monograph, 'The Albigensian Heresy: Its Mysterious Origins', which appeared, in regrettably severely truncated form, in The Late-Medieval Quarterly?"

"Sounds utterly fascinating, but, alas, I'm afraid I've never even seen a copy of the Late-Medieval Quarterly. Oh, your libation is here."

The bartender had laid down a great tall swooping glass before the Professor, filled with a dark liquid and topped with a thick foaming white head.

"There's your bock, buddy," said the bartender.

"Oh, thank you, good sir," said the Professor, and he quickly took the enormous glass in both hands, lifted it, brought its brim to his lips, and drank.

Yes, he was in paradise.

When he laid the glass down, one-third of it now empty, he turned to his new friend.

"They call me the Professor," he said.

"My name is Doktor," said the man with canvas-colored skin, and he spelled it out. "I am also a doctor, of philology, therefore I am known as Dr. Doktor."

"May I clasp your hand in donnish good fellowship, sir?" said the Professor. 

"It would be my pleasure, Professor," said Dr. Doktor. 

The fingers of his right hand had been touching the stem of a partially-emptied martini glass, but now he disengaged them, and he took the professor's proffered hand. Dr. Doktor's hand was thin and bony, the Professor's hand was fat, but the two mismatched appendages embraced, briefly, with neither trying to overpower the other, and then they separated, with a faint husking sound.

"I can envision us having many long and in-depth conversations," said Dr. Doktor.

"I also," said the Professor. 

"Because what is life but the wagging of tongues, the pretending to listen to the blatherings of others while one waits for one's own turn to blather?"

"Fueled by the alcoholic beverage of one's choice," said the Professor.

"Of course," said Dr. Doktor. "And let us not forget cigarettes. Speaking of which –" He lifted a pack of cigarettes from the bar top. "May I offer you a Husky Boy?"

"Don't mind if I do," said the Professor.

And soon the two gentlemen were smoking and drinking and gabbing like old friends, neither of them listening to the other, because what did it matter what anyone said? It was the talking that mattered, not the words that were said.

At last the Professor had found his place in the universe, and, as Dr. Doktor droned on about dangling participles and the subjunctive mode, the Professor could feel in his bones the great droning boredom of all the other people in this enormous bar, talking, not listening, drinking, smoking, talking some more about nothing and everything, repeating the same old phrases ad infinitum, and, yes, this, this was heaven, at long last.

"Don't you agree, Professor?" said Dr. Doktor.

"Oh, yes, entirely," said the Professor. "It reminds me of something Pope Innocent III once said. Would you like to hear it?"

"Yes, of course," said Dr. Doktor, and now once again it was his turn to let his mind wander where it would, and to enjoy his martini and his cigarette while the Professor's voice droned on, blending with the voices of all the other bores in this heavenly establishment.

{Please go here to read the unexpurgated "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious Rhoda Penmarq…}

"The Albigensian Heresy"

 

"All right, Professor," said Hector Philips Stone, the doomed romantic poet, "take a hike."

"I beg your pardon?" said the Professor.

"You heard me. Unless you're willing to buy a round, beat it."

"Well, I never –"

"Scram, Prof," said Lucius Pierrepont St. Clair III, the Negro Poet.

"How dare you," said the Professor. 

"Hitch up your pony and ride, Professor," said Howard Paul Studebaker, the western poet.

"Am I to be attacked on all fronts?" said the Professor.

"Stand not upon the order of your going, Prof," said Frank X Fagan, the nature poet. "But go at once."

"I have never been so insulted," said the Professor.

"Make like a breeze, Professor," said Scaramanga, the leftist poet, "and blow, daddy, blow."

"Bolshevik!" cried the Professor.

"Ah, feck off, Professor" said Seamas McSeamas, the Irish poet. And turning to Angie, the retired prostitute, he said, "You should pardon my language, Angie, but sometimes harsh words are necessary."

"Don't apologize to me, Seamas," said Angie, "I can't stand this tinhorn bum."

"And you a common trollop," said the Professor to Angie.

"Professor," said Father Frank, the whiskey priest, "that is no way to speak to a lady."

"I shall speak to her any way I please," said the Professor.

"You be nice to Angie, Professor," said Gilbey, the demented mystic. "Jesus don't like it when you ain't nice."

"But why must I be exiled from the table?" said the Professor. "I don't see Angie and Father Frank or Gilbey offering to buy a round."

"They're not obnoxious know-it-alls like you," said Hector Philips Stone. "Now hop it."

"Oh, very well," said the Professor, and he heaved his round body up from his chair. "I won't linger where I'm not wanted. You can all go to hell as far as I am concerned."

He waddled over to the bar and found an empty stool, and Bob came over.

"Bob," said the Professor, "I wonder if I might have a glass of your excellent basement-brewed house bock."

"You got a nickel?"

"In point of fact, Bob," said the Professor, "I am temporarily financially embarrassed, but if you would let me have a glass of bock 'on the arm' as they say, I should be most obliged."

"No," said Bob.

"Very well, that is your prerogative as the proprietor of this fine establishment, but let me ask you then if I may start a tab. I am expecting a check tomorrow, and as soon as the post arrives I will hurry here at once, and –"

"You're a professor, right?" said Bob.

"Retired, yes," said the Professor, which sounded better than fired.

"So you can read."

"Of course," said the Professor.

"You see that sign?" said Bob, and he pointed with his thumb to the placard on the wall behind the bar, the one that said NO TABS. THIS MEANS YOU.

"Oh," said the Professor. 

"Now get out," said Bob.

"Just one glass?" said the Professor.

Bob rapped his Marine Corps ring against the bar top.

"Next time I rap this ring it's gonna be on your nose," he said. 

The professor had seen Bob rap his ring on men's noses, the blood gushing, the tears cried. But still he couldn't help himself.

"It's snowing out," he said.

Bob raised his mighty fist. This would not be a backhanded rap, no it would be a straight right to the button, and the Professor had seen Bob's straight right before as well, huge dockworkers sent sprawling backwards to the sawdust and cigarettes on the floor.

He climbed off the stool.

"So be it," he said. "I shall leave, and –"

"Good," said Bob. "And don't come back."

"What?" said the professor.

"You heard me," said Bob. "Get out of my bar and don't come back." 

"You mean ever?"

"That's right."

"But why? Because I requested to have one small glass of bock on credit?"

"No," said Bob. "Because you're the most annoying motherfucker I've ever met."

"Well," said the Professor, "as the young people say, 'Wow.' That's all I can say."

"Out."

"I don't think you're being very fair."

Bob didn't say anything, but even the Professor, as dense as he was, possessed enough of an instinct for self-preservation to know that he'd better accept defeat and beat a retreat in silence and with at least a semblance of dignity.

He turned and shambled slowly toward the exit, through the smoke, through the shouting and laughter and the music of Bob's recently installed juke box.

Why did everyone treat him so?

He made it to the door and opened it, the heavy cold snow falling down harshly from the uncaring dark heavens, and he went out into it.

It was so unfair. Life was so unfair. That it should come to this. And he, an educated man, a scholar, author of a published monograph on the Albigensian Heresy! 

It was a two blocks' walk to his room in the Parker Hotel. Two blocks, but it might as well have been two miles, because he suddenly felt weary, weary to his soul, if he had one, and he wasn't sure that he did. 

To the left of Bob's was a dark alley, filled with garbage cans and discarded boxes on which the Professor had sat on fine evenings, drinking from a bottle of muscatel, or, if he was in funds, Taylor port. The alleyway seemed to beckon him, and he went in and sat down in the snow, his back against the brick wall, the fat snowflakes falling down all around him, and on him.

I'll just rest here a moment, he thought, a brief rest, and then I'll get up and go home to the hotel.

He closed his eyes, and his head sagged forward, and he fell into oblivion. 

When he awoke he was standing below a enormous gabled mansion on a hill, and he followed the winding brick path up to a broad columned porch. He floated up the steps, and St. Peter, dressed in a faded canvas jacket and smoking a pipe, sat at a table.

"Name?"

"They call me the Professor."

St. Peter ran his finger down the page of a great book.

"Oh," he said. "You."

"What does it say about me?"

"Irritating. Boring. Opinionated. Not funny. Shall I go on?"

"No, thank you."

St. Peter wrote something on a pad with a quill pen, ripped the sheet of paper off the pad and handed it to the Professor.

"Go in, cross the big hall, follow the corridor to the very end, then go through the last door you see and show this slip to the doorman. Can you remember that?"

"Yes, I think so."

"Good. You can go in now."

"Thank you."

St. Peter said nothing, but picked up a paperback book and began reading it.

After what seemed like endless days and nights the Professor came to the last door. He opened it and inside was what appeared to be a cavernous smoky barroom, filled with the low murmur of voices. A man sat on a stool by the doorway, chatting with another man, and they both looked at the Professor.

"I was told to show this slip to the doorman," said the professor, proffering the piece of note paper. 

The man took the paper, glanced at it, then handed it back.

"Fine," he said. "Sit anywhere."

The Professor made his way through the smoke and the babble of voices to the bar. 

Perhaps here he would find someone to whom he could explain his theories on the origins of the Albigensian Heresy.

{Please go here to read the unexpurgated "adult comix" version in A Flophouse is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious Rhoda Penmarq…}