As Manny happily explains to us, until smart-ass "Thalia" tells him the lambda looks to her like a pair of wide-open legs, and smart-ass Yours-Truly-"Aglaia" says that if that one has her legs open, the other one must have hers closed, which is no way to make a living. And then our driver — Bob, I believe his name was? — finally joins the fun by saying, "That chick's legs aren't closed; she's upside down with 'em spread wide open," and Manny says, "Welcome to Lambda Upsy-daisy, girls" as he hands us out of the car, and Gracie says, "Ten bucks a head to dine at the Y, guys," and in we go.
In we went, and out we came by midnight, nearly four hundred to the good, if that's the right word for it, having scored nearly a score of Lambda Upsies at our twenty-dollar group-rate special—
Including a couple of first-timers too nervous to get it up and a couple of old hands too drunk to; but nobody asked for a refund, so we gave 'em rain checks. Gents and scholars indeed, those guys, serenading us from downstairs while we turned our tricks in three separate third-floor bedrooms. Gentleman songsters off on a spree…
"Doomed to get laid by the Graces three?"
Who then gratefully rewarded Pledge Dickson with a freebie Threebie to add to his catalogue of triples: a stunt not to be found in his old-time myths. We improvised it on the spot, as I remember, having had a few beers ourselves by that time.
"And what Manny couldn't manage, we managed for him. Put that in your oral history, Junior, since Cindy saw fit not to in her novella-thing: your pop's first pop."
Which so shot his maiden wad that some other brother — the least plastered one we could locate — drove us home in exchange for another little trick en route.
And tired and sore and two-thirds sozzled as we ourselves were by then, we douched and showered, set the alarm, hit the books bright and early next morning, and got our weekend schoolwork done on time.
Which just about wraps up Episode One of our connection with Manfred Senior as a freshman. Which laid the foundation—
"In a manner of speaking—"
— for all that followed: his whole fucking career, I guess.
Also in a manner of speaking. And since there's not tape enough left on this cassette for us to start the next chapter, let's close this one by adding that Manny and his pals invited us back a few times that semester and the next, separately and together, until MDU got wind of it and cracked down on Lambda Upsilon, and the brothers lost their lease on the row-house. "Dickson's Masons," they used to call us.
And once we'd gotten him started on that business of Threes and Y's, and said what we'd said about those two Greek letters, Manny notebooked everything we told him as if we were one of those whatchacallum oracles. Philadelphic?
"Delphic Orifices, maybe?"
Not only siblings, but sibyls. And this was before the guy had decided or discovered who he was! But in his second year at MDU — and Thelma's at ASTC, and Aggie's and my junior year there — he took up with a girl at Western Maryland College that he'd known from high schooclass="underline" the one he wound up marrying as soon as they both graduated. And since we sibyl types were still paying our freight in our particular way, it's no surprise that he didn't introduce us to his fiancée — that's your mom-to-be, Junior — or seek us out for more input, shall we say.
So we all commenced from our respective alma maters and went our separate if not quite equal ways—
"Some of us even went straight, once our last tuition bill was paid…"
— while some others found ourselves hooked on hookering, faute de mieux. But that's another story.
To be told another time, maybe, on another tape, before Cindy-Ella beats us to it with another novella à clef: how at least one ex-Mason reconnected with a much-changed Dickson. Let's close this one with a bit of oral oracularity for Junior-boy: that famously cryptic dedication of The Fates, which the lit-crit types have read as a salute to everything from the classical Muses as literary architects to the secret fraternal order of Freemasonry.
Try it orally with us, Manny-boy, and one more mystery will be demystified. All together now: one… two…
"To the Gracious Masons, who lent me—"
[End of tape.]
TAPE 3
…their rears: another Dickson triple-entendre lost in transcription, Listener, not to mention in translation.
"Like wise."
At least one of which not even Grace is sure about: that queer Y-on-its-side that marks the last book of Manny's trilogy.
Though she has her hunches. Your dad himself would never talk seriously about things like that, Junior, especially in later years. Depending on his mood — which more and more came to mean his booze intake, after MDU sacked him — he'd say something like, "You and I are the oracles, doll, not the commentators," or "Let's leave footnotes to the kinds of assholes who fired me."
"Like you-know-who, Junie-boy."
Not fair, Thelma: The kid's father gets booted when a conservative English Department finds they've got a nontenured Henry Miller on the faculty. His parents' marriage crashes, and his mom probably fills the kid's ears with made-up tales of his dad's fuck-arounds and orgies, which Manny's not there to deny 'cause he's out wrecking his liver. No wonder the kid's neutered! My Cindy and her brother were luckier, poor kids, having their pissed-off dad conveniently drop dead.
Amen. But "made-up tales," you said?
For the record, Junior, your pa may've been less than a model parent (likewise your ma, I'd bet my butt), but he was neither the big-time cocksman that some of his detractors and admirers alike have made him out to be, nor the fantasizing jerk-off that some others have maliciously proposed. In my own not-uninformed opinion, M. D. Senior was a man of no more than average libido, more curious than lecherous or lustful, and more fixated on his freaking Threes and Y's and capital-Q Quests — not to mention language and storytelling — than on literal cunts and cocks.
"I'll second that."
And I'll third it — though Thelm and I never came to know him the way Gracie did.
"'Came to know him…' Wait'll Junior goes to work on that line!"
What I suspect, girls, is that while J-boy's declared objective is to restore his dad's critical reputation (now that the guy's doubtless long since dead), his actual motive might be to get even with him for not having been a better father. Piss on his ashes, et cet?
"Amen to that, Aggie: Intentionally or not, that's what any quote critical reappraisal unquote of his will likely do, given where its author's coming from."
Ergo, guys, our Corrective Oral Testimony, if we ever get around to it before we've used up all three tapes. That side-wise Y, by the way — that Manny used for space-breaks and such right through the Atropos novel? — might be like scissors, mightn't it, whatever else it stands for? She being the Fate who snips the thread that Clotho spins and Lachesis measures out…