“Mr Kramer, let me tell you a story. In nineteen-seventy-nine I ticketed a brown Dodge Diplomat for parking in a Church zone. That fine was never paid, and since then that scofflaw has piled up more parking tickets than anyone in New York City. For sixteen years I pursued him, only to see him give me the slip, time and time again. I never got a clean look at his face, but he's become my ‘white whale.’ Mr. Kramer, that day was yesterday! But thanks to you, I don't know if I'll ever get that chance again!”
—Cop with eyepatch to Kramer, “The Scofflaw”
The botched Kenny Kramer interview put me in a week long depression, and suddenly everything contributed to this hopelessness to the book about Seinfeld. What was once a brilliant insight—George Costanza is Ishmael—ready to be transcribed into an essay entitled “Call me a marine biologist”[1] became the perfect illustration of my grasp on reality. My contributions to Wikipedia concerning the show were deleted: The Merchant of Venice entry was once again too important to note the reference of a situation comedy to its most famous speech, and my most recent qualification to the show’s main article, that dubiously cited my own blog, of the notion that Seinfeld “is arguably consistent with the philosophy of nihilism,” amending that some view it, not as nihilist but, as a deconstructionist critique of the superficiality of network television and, on another level, on univocal meaning. I also finished reading Confederacy of Dunces for the first time and was quite disconcerted to the parallels between myself, my residence with my parents, and my literary project with that of Ignatius J. Reilly, his burdening of his mother, and his, in progress, epic reworking of Boethius. I was a fat, delusional, hypocritical, unemployed affliction on my mother, suspended in idealistic clueless adolescence, convinced of my own genius, at least when I was reading the book and cringing to myself.
This translated to all out despair one afternoon when I got out of the shower after working in the front yard of my parents’ house all day, heard the phone ring, hurried to pick it up in a towel, and sat in the front room of the house, still in the towel, and talked to my friend Ian—a white truck drove up to the house and I could see a woman in the passenger seat scowling at the mounds of dirt that were our front yard, and then her husband got out and walked toward the front door, and rang the bell. In a panic, thinking he had already seen me in the front room, I told Ian I had to go answer the door and went, in the towel, to chat with this fellow who had something to say to our house and it’s residents.
He asked for my father, I obviously did not strike him as a home owner, even the fact that I lived there seemed strange to him, though I regretted to inform him that he was out of town. I soon picked up that he was not a friend of my father but rather of the type who don’t let their wives drive, left them in the car, and asked to speak to the man of the house, and that he was of the home owners’ association. I asked if it was about the front yard and he said to me throwing his hands up, as though seeking my sympathy in the absurdity of the situation, “what’s, ha ha, the deal.” I explained that I was in a towel and that my father would be back within the week, closed the door, called Ian back and cursed the fascists among whom I lived.
To be fair we had taken out our magnolia tree over a year before to put the tree out of its misery and worked slowly on landscaping the rooty and dirty wasteland ourselves instead of hiring Mexicans to do it for us in a week. And worst of all, in that time, black people had rented the house next to us, another domino in the end of our neighborhood, begun by our unkempt yard. Whatever one’s perspective is on the situation, in that moment this republican misogynist who intruded on my pleasant phone conversation was questioning my very essence: “What’s, ha ha, the deal,” for I was the one who worked in the yard all day, and there I was practically naked in front of him, and it didn’t help that that tree was the veritable pen by which I began this book one year before, that I oscillated between this ludicrous project in the front yard and this one inside the house. Well, I didn’t know what the fucking deal was, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing inside or outside the house. All I knew was that wikipedia didn’t think what I was doing was of value, the neighbors were dubious, Kenny Kramer not only doubted my book but didn’t understand a word I said, and I was all alone with the biggest skeptic of myself in existence: me.
I was happy to be leaving the house within the week. And I didn’t need Myrna to rescue me: unlike Ignatius Reilly I was not afraid of the Greyhound.
[1] “your insular city of the Manhattoes”; and while a failure in the 19th century’s understanding of whales made Ishmael uncertain of whale classification, it is George’s nostalgia for the anachronistic that causes him to refer to mammal as a fish; both are great storytellers, and George’s finest moment came in his account of his moment as a marine biologist, beginning, “the sea was angry that day like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli”; each receives this narrative capacity from his detachment from the professional world; each is at the bottom of the ladder, with the least investment in the task at hand because, symbolized by whale as spiritual, other-worldly ambition; George is not a Marine Biologist, though he is passionate about being one, while Ishmael is a whaler though far from officially being one: his passion for talking about it gives him the title; Costanza is constantly in these “certain queer times and occasions,” while they are only occasional to Ishmael—
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