This represents most of the fiction, at least what I knew at the time to be fiction, that I have authored. Comments appreciated, including where, if anywhere, I might get it into print.
A KNACK
Lawrence Crocker Draft 6/16/14
Even if you have never been to New York, you have some familiarity with Grand Central Terminal. Movies reaching back through most of the last century have featured its ticket windows, train platforms, and clock kiosk, the latter being the situs of even more actual rendezvous than fictional ones. (A study once asked non-New Yorkers where and when they would go to meet someone else on a particular day if neither of them were told anything other than it should be in New York City. The leading answer by far was high noon at the Grand Central clock.)
Trains to Chicago and Montreal left from Grand Central in the old days. But these are the new days, and Poughkeepsie, Waterbury, and Wassaic are the most distant termini. Wassaic may sound as exotic as Montreal, but, trust me, it isn’t. One favorite movie cliché, the late passenger just making his train by jumping onto a moving car, was authenticated to me by my father, who claimed to have executed that exact maneuver to meet on time a girlfriend in Connecticut. Unromantic doors now close with an electronic boing before the train lurches into motion.
I had not on this particular day gotten very near the platforms or the clock, having gone up from the subway then down to the Oyster Bar for lunch with a college classmate. The vertical circuitousness of the route I had to take was no doubt intended to dissociate the restaurant from the motley crowds of the subway in favor of the Terminal and the traveling class.
I would, in any event, be ready to go much farther out of my way for this particular restaurant, as several oyster dishes are among my very favorites. They are all dishes in which the oysters are subject to at least moderate application of heat, uncooked flesh, whether from land, sea, or air falling outside bacteriological prudence on my view. For food that has flown, at least, you are probably with me on this, duck tartare enjoying a very limited following. When it comes to oysters, however, the real connoisseurs are they who slurp the mollusk raw from its shell while discoursing knowingly on its briny, buttery, melony, or coppery nuances. This, both the slurping and the discoursing, are facilitated by a champagne chaser. Oyster snobs are a more esoteric variation of the wine snob culture, of which they are always also members in good standing.
My feelings of being, for this reason, something of a second class Oyster Bar patron did little to lessen my enjoyment either of the food or of the conversation. My friend and I had both noticed that our time at Yale was much better than we had then thought it, a reassessment due, perhaps, to the tendency of the dull, routine, and even the mildly stressful, episodes of life to fade in memory while the really good times, which happily outnumber the really bad ones in fortunate young lives, remain reasonably vivid.
Following this thoroughly satisfactory lunch, it was back up the ramp and then down the stairs to the turnstile level, the escalator being out of service as usual. I passed the barrier losing only two games of chicken to outbounders, morally convinced that they had the right of way. Oddly enough, on my way to the Oyster Bar, it was the inbounders who had showed no hesitation in asserting their rights to turnstile precedence.
Standard turnstiles, like those at Grand Central, are a compromise in fare collection. Less friendly to fare beaters than the “have your fare card with you” systems still found in parts of Europe, but susceptible to an easy vault by anyone who is reasonably fit and daring. Very different are the floor to ceiling turn gates increasingly found in lower traffic entrances. Aptly called “iron maidens,” after the favorite device of medieval interrogators, these gates give claustrophobes agonizing visions of imprisonment from routine mechanical malfunction. You can imagine the reaction of subway commuters to the screams of "please get me out."
A decade ago standard turnstiles fell prey, not only to vaulters, but to a technically specialized coterie. A segment of the criminal population of particularly unsqueamish stomach made their living by the subtle crime of token sucking. The enterprising perpetrator usually picked some less patrolled station than Grand Central to stuff paper – a gum wrapper was good – into a token slot. An intending rider would deposit a token; the stile would not turn; the rider would curse, deposit a second token in a second turnstile, and go on to his or her train. The malefactor would then emerge from the shadows, encircle the token slot with his lips, and suck out the token. This crime, which was its own punishment in my book, has been entirely eliminated, not through stiffer penalties or more vigilant policing, but by the replacement of tokens with fare cards.
Once through the turnstile, I preceded across the crowd sorting floor with its tile mosaic representing the points of the compass. The practical value of this medallion for orienting yourself is slightly diminished by the fact that you cannot stand in its center and sight your direction, as a surveyor's manual would prescribe. That is you cannot so situate yourself unless you are a thick, squat metal clad pillar. I passed near the north northwest point of this work of art as I headed for the downtown Lex, more fully the Lexington Avenue Subway, more officially the green circled 4, 5, and 6 lines. Did the MTA policy types really think we were going to start referring to the Green, Red, Blue, Orange, Yellow, Brown and Light Green lines? Too Boston. Boston on steroids.
Trains were coming in or going out below, and the noise was barely bearable. The usual stream of bodies was surging up the stairs on my right side, of benign ambiguity, of the dividing handrail as well as their right side. They seemed zealous to reach the airy world yet a couple of levels above, or perhaps just to get to the Times Square shuttle. Somewhere in this current was a foreign tourist trying to shout to his companion over the din. I caught part of what the tourist yelled.
It was not until I was heading downtown on a 5, standing of course, my arm cocked around a post, that I was struck by the fact that I had not only heard what had been yelled, but had understood it. I had understood it even though it was German. I knew it was German from the course that carried me past my language requirement at Yale. What brought me up short for a moment was that I understood it so well. I didn’t think I had remembered much of anything across the five years since that course. My German was less than rusty; it was decayed. Still, I had gotten it. I tried now to remember his exact words, maybe,“ . . . ein Reiseburo auf die zweiundvierzigste Strasse. Sollen wir unsere Flugkarten nachsehen oder willst du zuerst nach dem Hyatt . . .” Not sure if that was exactly it, but I knew the guy mentioned a travel agency on 42nd Street and then asked whether his interlocutor wanted to go look after their tickets or go to the Hyatt first on some mission that we had separated too far for me to hear.
I felt quite pleased with myself on remembering that much German. It was probably because numbers and travel arrangements were standard fare for German 1. I couldn’t remember learning “nachsehen,” but it was easy enough to figure out. I thought about the old saw that we really only use five or some other surprisingly small percentage of our brains. I also recalled reading, however, that this figure was an urban legend, as such erroneous nuggets are now called, whether or not they have any certifiable connection to a large city. Perhaps, I was, more “sprachbegabt,” language-talented, than prior evidence had suggested. This hypothesis would be confirmed soon enough.
The second occurrence affected me much less pleasantly. It was the next morning, and I was doing my fair weather fast walk from my apartment in Greenwich Village downtown towards the mega-law-firm, Swaine, Cromwell & Rifkind, for which I was paralegaling. A career as a legal assistant is not just the right thing for an Ivy alumnus. This is universally agreed by all the people who count on such matters. In fact, pretty much all the twentysomethings, of whatever alma mater, will tell you that they are only temporarily playing the role of paralegal. What they are really doing is trying the legal profession on for size as they decide about law school. Either that, or they are, less specifically, “finding themselves.” On a couple of occasions I have caught myself using some near equivalent of the latter locution. Is that really the best I can say in defense of what I am doing? A few months, in any event, had made me increasingly doubtful that my self was going to turn up among the thousands of documents that found their way to my desk or computer screen for first stage review and numbering, one after another, world without end, amen.
Yet that was what I was heading for at such a brisk pace. It was at one of the few dead stops of my hike, the light at Canal Street, that I became aware of a woman’s loud voice. She was haranguing a man of her own advanced middle age, probably her husband. She was Chinese, as was he, and her monologue, with its rising and falling pitch, was utterly unintelligible – at first. Then I realized that she was upbraiding him over his social club, about how smoky it was, and about the lack of edifying conversation. The light changed and I hit my top walking speed in two strides. I fled down Centre Street past the great gray court houses and into St. Andrew’s Plaza, where I saw some overgrown concrete flower pots. I thought to sit on the rim of one of them to clear my head. It was less comfortable than I had hoped, more perching than sitting. Still, it would do for a minute or two.
My first thought was that I must be crazy. Obviously, I could not understand Chinese. I mean the lady was not talking about Kung Pow Chicken, the outermost limit of my Chinese competence. It must have been some kind of auditory hallucination. Or maybe she switched into English and I just imagined she was still speaking Chinese. The more I thought about it, the better that second explanation seemed. Minds can play funny tricks, and mine had clearly not grown up so far as not to enjoy an occasional practical joke on its owner, if that is the proper way to put the relationship that I have to my mind. Somewhat reassured, I hurried back out to Centre and on a few more short blocks downtown to my job, the monotony of which, on this day seemed a blessing.
I usually take the subway home unless some document production emergency runs so late into the night that the client can ethically be charged with the cost of a car service. This night I caught an uptown 4 and changed at Brooklyn Bridge to the local. As usual there was a mostly empty train sitting in the station waiting for its appointed departure time. Yes, there really is a schedule for New York subway trains, which is sometimes even corresponds roughly to their arrivals and departures. After a couple of minutes two men came in wearing red vests with reflective yellow stripes, probably MTA track workers at the end of their shift. One of them was trying to persuade the other to visit Dr. Ortega, who must have been a chiropractor. I was embarrassed for the naive faith that the one guy had in the good doctor and a little cheered by the other's skepticism. But mostly I was numbed by the fact that I understood almost every word perfectly despite the fact that they were unquestionably speaking Spanish. I do not know Spanish, beyond “Cinco de Mayo” and perhaps a dozen other words and phrases that have become part of the lingua franca of even only modestly hip members of my cohort.
It’s a short ride up to Bleecker Street, too short for me to regain much composure. The possibility that one has crossed over into the twilight zone, or, more probably, has suddenly contracted a disease of the mind, is not so easy to deal with. I kept walking on Bleecker, across Broadway and past my apartment.
Greenwich Village is a great place for a walk, and I am sure that more disoriented pedestrians than I were even then on its streets. The Village is also a good place to hear foreign conversations, and I decided to try to gauge the nature and scope of whatever was going on by eavesdropping whenever I heard a foreign tongue. I continued west on Bleecker, in my perhaps partisan view, the paradigmatic Greenwich Village street. Well, Mc DougDougal between Bleecker and West 3rd is also very Village. I almost turned into it, but its sidewalks were packed with the stop and go foot traffic of daring tourists from the burbs. So I continued on Bleecker across 6th Avenue, which maps and signs but no living souls call “Avenue of the Americas” and into what is self consciously the West Village. Up 7th Ave and past Sushishamba. In this neighborhood, a Brazilian themed sushi restaurant is not particularly remarkable. As my west-most and uptown-most turning point, I selected the intersection of West 4th Street with West 10th Street. Not everyone would feel any compulsion to visit this cartographic paradox, but I have always had a fondness for its evidence that Greenwich Village is beyond New York City's regularizing conventions. I followed 10th to Waverly, then around the eighteenth century cemetery now known as Washington Square Park, and back to my apartment through the NYU neighborhoods.
In a little less than an hour’s trek I had listened in on pieces of conversations in Spanish, French, a Slavic language, and one that must have been Japanese or maybe Korean. The Spanish and French I seemed to understand almost from the first word. The eastern European and Asian language required a couple of sentences before I “locked in” and started to get the meaning, as I could not prevent myself from believing, or at least half believing.
My robust sense of reality required me to assure myself that it all had to be a trick of my unconscious mind, which was constructing its own imagined meanings having nothing to do with what the people were actually saying. This was not such an uncomfortable possibility. All I had to do was confirm that there was nothing more to it than that, and I could congratulate myself on my fertile, if intrusive, imagination, relax, and, hopefully, forget about it. Perhaps the whole thing would fade away as quickly as it had come on. Wasn’t it psychoanalytic doctrine that once we understand the root causes of our neuroses that we gain the upper hand over them?
It was troubling, however, that some of the conversations seemed to involve subjects I didn’t know anything about. Strange names would be no great problem for a fertile imagination, and disagreements about restaurants would be easy, even if neither I nor my unconscious had ever sampled the particular squid dish extolled by one of the advocates. Whether a chair in a corner of an apartment was or was not feng shui, with supporting reasons and critiques, would have been a greater challenge for the unconscious imagining machine, but I was willing to concede it substantial horsepower. Besides, I had no way of knowing if its proffered deliverances on feng shui had any relation to that practice or were complete nonsense.
This unconscious imagination theory did seem to have some vulnerability in the case of the guy speaking the eastern European language. I supposed he was speaking Czech for no particular reason. He had asked what I took to be “How late are we?” His partner immediately pulled out a cell phone, looked, and said, I thought, “It’s already 7:10, and the subway will take at least 10 minutes.” The exchange I could easily have spun out in my imagination, but I had not hallucinated that responsive look to the cell phone. Then there was what I thought in French was “let’s give it a try,” followed immediately by the couple turning into a restaurant. Well, maybe it was sort of an about-to-head-into-a-restaurant tone of voice.
On balance, I was feeling less reassured as I pulled off the top of a can of Progresso soup. The possibility of some form of insanity was still right up there. Even if I could explain away the cell phone incident and settle on the unconscious imagination theory, the idea of the unconscious asserting itself in this way was beginning to seem a little disturbing itself. Wouldn't that be a delusion big enough to count as some form of mental illness? I didn't know which was the more disagreeable prospect: anti-psychotic drugs or a regular schedule with a New York shrink. I was surely too young for the latter, so Manhattan-y, affectation.
As this line of thought was depressing, I willed myself to think about how much still seemed perfectly normal. I was not imagining space aliens or that I was a cockroach or was surrounded by legions of those insects beyond, of course, the usual population for a New York apartment. (Did you know that cockroaches will not really take over New York City after humans disappear? They are a semi-tropical species and are dependent upon our furnaces for their winter survival.) More to the point, I did not seem to be any danger to myself or others. I was functioning. Here in front of me was a bowl of soup, properly supplemented by a handful of peas from the freezer. There just didn't seem to me anything different about me or the world around me except this language business. If a mental illness, then, it must be a localized one.
Just how localized? What were the boundaries of the phenomenon, I wondered, returning to an experimental frame of mind. What would happen if I took things at face value and acted on the premise that I really could understand some foreign languages that I had never studied? Could I also speak these languages? How about reading them?
I turned to my largest bookcase. I have more lineal feet of books than I probably should at my stage of life and certainly far more than an interior designer would find acceptable for my tiny apartment. At the far end of a high shelf, there was a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, printed in Peking and bound in semi-stiff red plastic. It featured facing pages of Chinese and English. I had deemed it worth its three dollar Strand's price as a testament to the era when Mao was chic in New York. I covered up the English side and stared at the Chinese characters. I ran my eyes slowly down the columns, trying to make my mind a blank slate, open to the reception of any bits or pieces of meaning. One character looked a little like a man waving, but I got nothing beyond that for any of the characters alone or in groups. I next grabbed my German book and turned to the last sample paragraph of German prose, one we hadn't gotten to for the course. I knew several words, and one whole, if short, sentence, but I was not going to be able to make any real sense of the paragraph without a dictionary.
I inferred that my new apparent skill was a matter of oral language only. Well, then could I speak, say Czech, as well as understand it? If I tried would I find myself in a friendly conversation or would or would my interlocutor hurry away from the crazy man speaking in tongues? This should be an easy enough experiment, and Justin, my senior year roommate, would be the perfect test subject. He had spent junior year abroad in France, and claimed to be nearly fluent in its language. More important, he would tell me straight out if I needed psychiatric help. It was still well before 10:00, so I figured he would be awake in Boston where he was attending a medical school which, given my own college loyalty, shall remain nameless.
After what passes for pleasantries among my contemporaries, I told Justin that I had been studying some French. I wanted his opinion whether I was wasting my time. He launched immediately into a few simple, carefully enunciated, questions in French. After I gave my simple, carefully enunciated, answers, he became more aggressive, asking longer, harder questions. With each answer my confidence grew. I began to throw in asides and commentary. Back in English Justin, with something resembling genuine respect in his voice, queried, “How long have you been working at this? I mean, your accent is detectably American, but your vocabulary is awesome. I have seen some sweet Parisian ladies laid waste by guys whose French was not in your league.” I figured that was about the highest compliment Justin could pay. So I could count this experiment as a “success,” and, with a minute or two more of small talk, I signed off.
Well, this language thing wasn’t any simple mistake on my part or even a limited delusion. I was either in the world’s longest and most elaborate dream, was totally out of my mind, or was the walking talking incarnation of the Star Trek universal translator – except, of course, that the universal translator turned alien tongues into English, whereas I could understand, and then speak, the foreign language itself. I did not then think of, and will henceforth ignore the detail that Roddenberry should really have called his remarkably portable and unobtrusive computer program a “universal interpreter” rather than a “universal translator,” as its primary function was spoken rather than written language.
As for dreaming, that was a non-starter. Yes, in general it's great evidence that you are dreaming if things happen that cannot happen in reality. In reality I could not understand Spanish or Korean and certainly could not speak French. Still, this was waking life. I know the difference between being awake and dreaming. I recalled from a philosophy class, but was unshaken by, Descartes's skeptical argument, roughly: If when we dream we ask ourselves “Am I dreaming?” we usually answer the question, “No, I am certainly awake.” So that you now confidently believe yourself to be awake gives you no justification for thinking you are – because you could be just as confident if you were dreaming.
I am perfectly willing to grant Descartes's premise about what may happen in dreams. I have even sometimes argued to myself in a dream that I must not be dreaming because there was too much detail in what I was seeing for it possibly to be a dream. I am tempted, however, to rebut Descartes with, “Yes, we can make mistakes about whether we are dreaming when we are dreaming, but we make no such mistakes when we are awake. There are no awake false positive awake judgments.” Descartes, I concede, would say that I was begging the question. If it is at issue whether I am awake or asleep, I cannot rely on the fact that if I am awake my certainty of wakefulness is inerrant. If asleep the same certainty would be decidedly errant.
I tried a different tack: “There is something about being awake, a specific quality of the experience, that we cannot possibly be wrong about when we have it.” That seems right, and I am persuaded by it, but I can hear Descartes continuing to object that even if I cannot be wrong about experiencing this special something when I do experience it, I could still be wrong in thinking that I had it, even were sure I had it, but did not because I was dreaming.
Well, maybe Descartes had the better of the argument, but that was only because he had been so good at that line of work. I was sure I was not dreaming, and I was going to continue to be sure – unless with arms outstretched I started to fly around the city. That might shake my confidence.
The problem with the Treky universal translator hypothesis was that it suffered for want of any semblance of a causal mechanism. Where did my supposed linguistic competence come from? One possibility was that I had unusual insight into the structure of the deep grammar, the linguistic universals that MIT professor Chomsky contends underlie all languages and the abilities humans have to learn therm. Even if Chomsky is right, however, that could only possibly go towards explaining my grammatical ability, not my semantic ability – my recognizing what words mean and which words to use to express myself. I had displayed an “awesome” French vocabulary, a vocabulary that I had never learned, “escargot” and “cherchez la femme,” excepted. I did not possess this vocabulary in the ordinary way. I found I could not make any but a very short list of French words, shorter still of Czech. Yet, accepting on face value what seemed to have happened that evening, these vocabularies were somehow available to me when I heard the language spoken.
I would have to have tuned into the whole foreign language in all its structure, vocabulary, plus grammar. I pictured French as a huge network of lines and nodes, somehow encoding grammar and having words and phrases suitably attached. It would be an abstract object, I suppose, like the rational number system. Plato might have been pleased with this extravagance, but I wasn't sure that I really believed that languages had an existence separate from their speakers.
Well, how about the speakers? Maybe what I had tuned into was the collective linguistic unconscious of the Czech people. There was still the problem what sort of bizarre action-at-a-distance causation could give me access to the pooled linguistic competence of a whole language community. In fact, was there such a thing as a free floating competence of a language community? What were its boundaries as one dialect edged into another in the borderlands between Chinese provinces? Was the special resonance of “to be or not to be” in English part of linguistic competence or of knowledge of literature? How much American history was contained within the meaning of the phrase “American history”?
A third, and less grand, hypothesis suggested itself at this point, one not troubled by questions about the essential nature of a language or the membership of its community. Perhaps what I had, if I had anything at all, was an ability to pick up on the language competence of the particular person I heard speaking. If he knew the meaning of a word, then so did I, with whatever associations it had for him. If she was prone to grammatical mistake, then I would make the same mistake. I was nothing more than a linguistic parasite. I felt acutely that this demoted me several steps from my status on the earlier theories. It was, however and for that very reason, easier to fill in an explanation of sorts. I needed to assume only some form of mental telepathy, if an unusually intrusive form – reaching well beyond the speaker's conscious thoughts. In fact, it had to be both intrusive and selective, as I had no better than the usual insight as to what people were really thinking. I only understood what they were saying. It also had to be telepathy of substantial bandwidth as I could apparently call on a great deal of the speaker's language ability nearly instantaneously.
A test occurred to me. I pulled out a DVD of “Blue is the Warmest Color,” slid it into my laptop, turned off the subtitles, and listened. Well, I watched too, but it was listening that was the key. Once dialogue started, it was clear that I wasn't getting anything more than I might guess from what I saw. Without a live speaker whose words I was hearing, I was nowhere. The speaker did not have to be in front of me. That I already knew from my conversation with Justin in Boston. But there apparently had to be a person who at that time was producing the speech I was listening to.
I could further confirm what I now adopted as my working hypothesis, “Ned the linguistic parasite,” by having a conversation with a foreign language speaking child, the younger the better. I assumed I would find myself master of only a limited vocabulary. An adult listening might think I was making fun of the child by intentionally messing up the grammar. The adult might also wonder, I realized, what I was up to speaking in that way to a young kid, and jump to the worst of conclusions. Starting a conversation with the parent first would be less risky, but then would my parasitizing mechanism switch over to the child when I heard him or her speak, or would it stay with the parent? I decided to put off the playground experiment indefinitely.
What I decided to do immediately was to go to sleep. I now pretty much believed the parasite theory, although I decided I should find a better name for it so that flatworms and leaches wouldn't keep coming to mind. My belief was tempered by the intellectual realization that it couldn't possibly be true, and that mental illness, objectively speaking, was a far more eligible conclusion. Then there was Descartes with his dreams. Maybe all the evidence I thought I had that I was awake was poorly evaluated because I was in fact asleep. Well, going to sleep in a dream might well lead to my waking up out of it. So, all in all, I decided to see what the morning would bring. Things might well be back to normal.
Upon awaking, I went straight to the TV, and a Spanish station. Things were not back to normal. The newscaster I followed easily; the commercial was unintelligible Spanishy talking.
Without seeing any very attractive alternative, I decided that for the time being I was just going to run with it, and see what happened. If it was insanity, something worse would surely befall me. I would seek help then. Were matters as they seemed, I was sure someone in the NYU psychology department would be thrilled to study me, but the idea of becoming a lab rat was not immediately appealing. Perhaps someday I would give science a crack at me, if this continued, but not now.
Would it continue? It had been fantasizing a little about advantages that might come with being a linguistic parasite. Some practical uses were obvious enough, starting with the one suggested by Justin. There was no reason to think, however, that my apparent talent wouldn't vanish as suddenly and inexplicably as it had come on.
Spurred on by this thought, the next Friday night found me on an internet-cheap flight to Las Vegas. In my carry-on was a cashier’s check of amount only slightly smaller than my accumulated savings. With my scholarship and summer and term time work, my parents' incomes had been enough, if just enough, to cover my undergraduate bills. That makes me part of a small minority of not rich graduates without college debts. My parents' aid, however, by agreement, had ended on that day they sat proudly on the Old Campus. I would be paying the tab for graduate education, if graduate education there was to be.
After eating my bag lunch, with a cup of tomato juice so generously contributed gratis by the airline, I started thinking about the task ahead. I made a list of the languages that I had managed to try out in the four days since I took an unpaid leave from work “for pressing personal reasons that I am not comfortable discussing.” I had managed to hold conversations in five languages and had overheard another seven. The important thing, the crucial thing, was that I had never failed. The only time I had trouble was when there was a lot of background noise. If I could clearly hear a couple of sentences worth, I was off to the races.
I picked up a van to the least expensive accommodation I had found on The Strip. The next morning, Saturday, I spent touristing around the sin city. The place is not to my taste. I don't think of myself as being overly refined, but Las Vegas is Vulgar. I put one silver dollar into a slot machine, and thereby maximized my maximum possible profit for the trip. I simultaneously decreased my expected profit, though only by two cents if the casino's 98% return signs were to be believed. In fact, the entire dollar was no longer with me, as you are not surprised to learn.
When evening finally came, I settled into a casino restaurant far more upscale than were my lodgings. The menu's numbers were, correspondingly, well larger than I find comfortable. I put up with it, and the salmon was acceptable, if unremarkable. I had made it a general rule not to eat salmon anywhere to the east of the Cascade Mountains. A Seattle native, I know good salmon. Now being farther west than I had been for a couple of years, I stretched the rule, but probably shouldn't have.
As I was eating, my waiter, Andrew by name, made frequent stops by my table. During one of these I asked whether there was anyone around whose thing was to place bets on happenstance or odd contests of skill. Andrew looked blank. “Like betting whether the next woman to walk through the door will be a blonde or whether someone can stack five wine glasses.” Comprehension and a smile came over Andrew’s face. “I once saw Mike Montford bet a thousand bucks that the number of peas on his plate was even. I got them an extra plate to hold the counted peas.” After being assured that Montford was a very high roller, I asked Andrew if I could arrange to meet him. Smelling a generous tip, Andrew told me to come back at 8:30, which was Montford’s dinner hour with rarely broken regularity.
Leaving an extra twenty dollar gratuity, I headed for my room to while away an hour and change. I was back at the Casino’s posh restaurant by 8:25. After a few minutes, I caught Andrew’s eye. Coming over to me, he pointed to a corner table, and told me that the “larger” of two men was Montford. He would be glad, for a “little finder's fee” to introduce me to him, but there was one hitch. The other man at the table was Andrew’s boss’s, boss’s boss, Tom Luce, the owner of the Casino. “I can’t take you over while he’s there. Wait at the bar. If there’s an opportunity, I’ll get you.”
I positioned myself at the short arm of the bar, which afforded me a fair view of Montford's table. Waiting, as instructed, I hoped that Luce was a beer drinker with a small bladder. I was well into my $8 orange juice, when a man in a surprisingly conservative suit for Las Vegas approached the target table. He whispered in Luce’s ear, and the latter excused himself and walked off with Sober Suit.
It took a long two minutes before Andrew emerged from the kitchen. After distributing the contents of his tray, with overdone deference, to a table near the window, he hurried over to me. He whispered that he would need $50, and that he would only introduce me, not “vouch for” me. I paid my bar bill, and slipped Andrew his bribe.
“Oh, what’s your name?” Andrew asked quietly, after we had taken a couple of steps. Pausing a half second, I replied “Ned Kluey.” No reason to give a false name, I thought, I’m not doing anything illegal – maybe not even immoral.
Andrew made a quick introduction and quicker disappearance. I adopted a demeanor that I hoped would come across as both worldly and cocky, and told Montford that I had a wager of skill he might be interested in. “I am a linguist. In fact, modesty aside, I may be the world’s most accomplished practical linguist. For sufficient, and I mean very long, odds, I will wager that you will not be able to find anyone in Las Vegas between now and midnight with whom I am unable to converse in his or her native language. You may select any three candidates, and I will satisfy them and you, that I speak their languages.”
I could see that I had not made the sale. “Interesting, Mr. Kluey but I don’t think . . .” At this point Luce reappeared. Montford apparently felt compelled to do the civil thing and introduce me, adding “he offered a wager that he could talk to any foreigner I could find in his native language.” Luce, who seemed in a jovial mood, asked, “and are you taking him up on it?” “No, I, ahh, don’t think it’s a well considered proposal and . . .” I interrupted, with more than a touch of arrogance. “I have considered the proposal quite well indeed. I am disappointed that you choose not to risk taking me on. Of course, it may seem impossible, and I do expect long odds. But I am not a nut; I am just very, very good.”
The unctuousness of my second “very” may have been too much for Montford. With some antipathy in his eyes, he asked, “what odds?” “200 to 1,” I replied, hoping to do half that well. “I wouldn’t give 200 to 1 on the sun’s rising tomorrow, I’ll give you 30 to 1, and I get four shots, not three.” I reluctantly agreed, adding the condition that each foreign speaker would give me a minute’s worth of biography in his or her language to start the conversation. I also proposed that Luce hold the stakes.
I produced $9000 in high denomination casino chips, and pushed them a little ways towards Luce. “Now Mr. Montford, if you could go to the cashier for yours.” Montford suppressed what I think was consternation at the size of the bet. But he clearly did not want to lose face with Luce, who seemed to be enjoying the whole scene immensely. “I don’t need to get any damn chips for you. I’m good for it.”
“That he is,” Luce interjected. “I will back him. Mike, just sign this chit,” he requested as he pulled out a small check sized slip wrote “$270,000" on it along with his initials. Montford signed, and Luce put the chit on top of my chips.
Montford left the table, returning in a few minutes with a slight, short man of darkish beige complexion. “If you don’t mind, we’ll skip formal introductions. You may proceed Mr. Kluey.” Inasmuch as I could not possibly proceed, I reminded Montford of the condition that his speaker was to begin with a minute’s biography.
By the middle of the third sentence I was picking up details of the man’s childhood just outside of Manila. When he had finished, I asked him some friendly questions about his life in the United States. He in turn asked me how I had learned Tagalog so well. Fortunately, this seems to be a question universally asked by foreign speakers of Americans who display competence the speaker’s native language. I say “fortunately,” because otherwise I might or might not know what language it was that I was speaking fluently, which could prove embarrassing. The name of the language always came to me, but not always right away. As it was, I was able to chide Montford about his trying to beat me with the major indigenous language of the Philippines. My interlocutor quickly assured Montford and Luce that I was able to speak fluent Tagalog.
The next candidate Montford produced was a handsome man with a square jaw and dark skin, presumably an African. I had a moment of concern as my New York sample had not included any African languages. But it went just as before. I was soon having quite an interesting discussion about the entrepreneurial spirit of the Senegalese. In this case, it turned out to be Wolof that we were speaking.
Montford’s third absence from the table was of longer duration. He came back with a woman who made the Manila native look like a giant. She was tiny, although she still gave an impression more sturdy than delicate. Montford seemed confident, and well he might. Once I was into the conversation, I discovered we were speaking a dialect of Tibetan. She wondered how I could possibly know a tongue spoken by perhaps five thousand people in her remote valley home. I replied, somewhat vaguely, that obscure dialectics were my specialty. She warmed to me on account of my strong, and genuine, support for Tibetan independence. She enthusiastically informed a shocked Montford that, yes, I could speak her language very well indeed.
Montford was not gone quite so long the fourth time. He returned with an African who somewhat resembled candidate two, the Senagalese. I was sure, however, that I would not hear Wolof again. Indeed, his first words meant nothing to me. But that was usual. What was decidedly unusual was that twenty seconds later, I still understood nothing. He stopped speaking. I indicated with a small Ferris wheel motion of my hand that he should continue. Sweat was running down my sides inside my shirt. I am sure that my face was white. Montford was grinning,
Well, I knew that my mysterious power might vanish, but it could not have picked a worse moment for its departure. I looked at the pile of chips that represented my life’s savings, and was about to push them towards Montford. “Betreesh ferumfun, dablee feraben faedon” I rolled the sounds through my mind “ferumfun ... feraben . . . faedon” I suddenly looked the speaker straight in the eye. He hesitated for an instant, looking down. I took a deep breath and a grasping at the only available straw, began speaking in Wolof. “I will not report you to the police for this fraud, but you must do as I say.” My desperate guess had been right, even as to his being Senagalese. I had his complete attention.
“Do not switch into English yet. After we chat for a minute or two, you will report to these two gentleman that I speak your language excellently. Which is true, right?” He admitted that, yes, I spoke Wolof quite well, but how did I know . . .? He seemed reluctant to finish his question, so I jumped in.
“When you are alone with Montford, you can tell him that I caught you. Tell him that I said you did a good job, but that no one could pass off made up words as a language to a linguist of my abilities. But follow Montford’s lead while the other gentleman is with you. If Montford doesn’t mention your arrangement, you keep quiet.” He explained to me, still in Wolof, that Montford had promised him $100 to pay “a little joke on a friend.” While we exchanged some small talk I glanced at Montford, who was starring in utter unbelief.
When I gave the word, my conversational partner switched into English, saying “he speaks my language well.” “But you . . .” I cut Montford’s outburst off with a hand gesture and a very firm voice, “Mr. Montford, I’m sure you don’t want to be a bad sport. Whining over a losing bet is unworthy of your reputation.” I put just the slightest extra emphasis on the last word. Montford got my drift. His body language turned from angry aggression to angry defeat. “Take the chit, and go,” was all he could say.
On the flight back to JFK, I figured that, although $279,000 was a long ways south of making me independently wealthy, it would get me through a not yet to be named business school in Boston. International transactions seemed the natural career choice. I might admit to fluency in, say, German, Spanish and Mandarin. That should be enough to give me a leg up in the job hunt. The other languages I could leave my little secret, lying in wait for Japanese or Latvian negotiators who thought it safe to consult among themselves in their own language.
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