The Education of Brainiac by David E. Lapin

Author:David E. Lapin [Lapin, David E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781532080647
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2019-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

With Edward Turk at 31 Winchester Street, 1985

Working with Lucy was a constant pleasure. But how Edward and I survived for so long without killing each other is yet another chapter in Brainiac’s tale.

Chapter 27

Roller Coasters

It took about six months for the rose to lose its bloom at the Music Center. Ditto for living with Edward, though that time period was more like six days.

***

On our first meeting in New Haven, Edward not only did not like me, he actually thought I was trying to expose him as intellectually weak and inferior. I for my part barely gave him a second thought. He was four years older than me, out of my league, and already a member of the Yale faculty. A seventeenth century scholar of Baroque French fiction making, Turk somehow construed my sophomoric badinage with him as thinly veiled threats to his super-fragile ego. He was, in short, paranoid and delusional.

Despite his crackpot thinking, I grew to like Edward who I found smart, stimulating and funny. He was a mass of neuroses, but so was I, and we both shared the same self-perceived indignity of having gone to The City University of New York, in his case Brooklyn College. If we weren’t peas in a pod, we had enough in common to form a nascent friendship.

The trick was to ignore reality and converse as characters other than ourselves. Edward became Judy Garland and I was the pre-Johnny Carson Tonight Show host Jack Paar interviewing Judy. Edward had grown up idolizing Garland—he must have been one of the few teens who watched her Sunday night television show over the horse opera Bonanza—and he had absorbed all of Judy’s mannerisms and ticks. As the cliché goes, he WAS Judy Garland, and I was happy to play her straight man Paar if it meant ironing out the emotional wrinkles that got in the way of us having good times together.

Edward and I also shared the trauma of losing hair at an early age. By the time I first encountered him in 1973, Edward was completely bald, though he tried to hide the obvious with a combover. I still had a mop, but I was obsessed at keeping it combed just right because the great recession had already started. Moaning over our mutual hair loss became a chronic plaint.

In 1978, Edward had surgery for ulcerative colitis. He had accepted an appointment to MIT’s Humanities Department the prior year, and the stress of building a career in a new city set off an inflammation that nearly killed him. The surgeons performed a colectomy—removal of the colon—and cured him thereby of colitis. It saved his life more than once, because in leaving him with a six centimeter stump for a rectum, Edward had to abandon his time-honored role as a bottom. No one in 1978 could have foreseen just how serendipitous this development was as AIDS would expand throughout Boston and the nation in the nineteen eighties.

***

By the early eighties, the Music Center had one big problem: losing money.

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