“Do you know where professor Bermill’s office is?” I was sitting in the shade waiting for my friend Sean to get out of swim class. He didn’t have a cell-phone because he’s Jewish and wished not to complicate his bank account by deducting money from it, so I had to be like a surgeon when meeting up with him. I had agreed to meet him outside his class and was fine with that until this haggard voice cut into my day-dreaming.
“Professor Bermill? No, I have no idea. Did you check the directory services at the Doe Library?” This man had just come out of the Hearst Annex, which houses some fossils from the anthropology department and a women’s gym. He clearly had no fucking idea where he was and would probably have a brain aneurism trying to find the Doe Library.
“Fuck man, this Bermill guy’s a fucking genius. He knows more about calcium and potassium than anyone I’ve ever met, a true bad ass.”
“Yeah, sounds like it man,” I said.
He lit a cigarette and took a puff. I tried to act callous, but I could tell this guy had been through the shit, and I’m not just talking about his recent experiences in the women’s gym. He had seen better days, and those days were filled with bombs, muck diving and utter horniness and despair, probably in Vietnam but also via flashbacks every time he saw an Asian, which is quite frequently around the Berkeley campus. This man looked familiar, like the creepy uncle everyone but me wishes they didn’t have. He was a spitting image of Al Pacino and Jim Varney’s child if they were able to procreate and then if that child was able to have reproduce with a ferret. He had a deep smoker’s voice and had clearly been experience in the art of puffing down tar. I saw bruises on his forearms. It looked bad, but I bet his mind had gone through twice that.
Despite my judgments, I found this man to be a compelling testament to the human spirit. This man had been through it all, maybe twice, and he had the audacity and strength to still pursue intellectual interests at Berkeley. I decided to listen.
“So why do you want to see this Professor Bermill genius?” I questioned.
“You see this book?” I noticed he was holding a hard-covered book with a red cover. “This book has changed my life. He wrote it.” I nodded in confused understanding. The book was either born in the Forties or he had flipped through it so many times in was worn down to a fragment of what it once was, just like him. I decided to open the car of worms he was begging that I pry open.
“What’s his book about,” I asked, suddenly wanting a cigarette but then reminding myself that I don’t smoke, especially around old fossils in women’s gyms.
“Oh man, you opened a can of worms with that question. There’ so much in here it’s fucking ridiculous.” He opened the book and I could see that nearly every word was underlined, sometimes twice, and when he felt especially compelled he used circles. All and all the book looked more like a coach’s playbook than a dietary book, though I’ve never seen either. This book was his bible and he seemed a devout believer in it. Even if some of the material seemed to be a stretch, it certainly was more practical and scientific than the Bible, however so is a coloring book. I wondered if it was sac-religious to underline things in the bible, but discarded the idea as a useless thought.
“I don’t know where to start. I’ve underlined the fucking Jesus out of this book.” I again wondered if you could do that with the Bible. “Bermill’s and this Steiner guy tell you what you can and can’t eat what chemicals, amino acids and ingredients to eat and which to stay away from. Fucking Genius.”
I started to realize that I wasn’t going to get a word in and thus went into nod and smile mode as I usually do with old people and sports news.
“I mean, I’m a mess. I’ve been through the shit, sometimes I joke that I’ve been through it twice. I’m a diabetic and I’ve got arthritis and I think I might have cancer or some shit.” I nodded. “All this shit has been brought on because of all the horrible food I used to eat. Everything has toxins in it. Toxins. Toxins. Toxins,” he said, particularly emphasizing the word toxins and foreshadowing how much he was going to be saying the word in the near future. “Fucking everything. Toxins.”
I didn’t know how to respond, but he continued to talk so I didn’t have to.
“Too many toxins out there and they’re worse for us than the terrorists. Look around and you’ll see what I’m talking about.”
I looked around and noticed a golf cart. I fucking love golf carts and always fantasized about owning one. I had a friend who lucky enough to tear his MCL and thus was given a golf cart to get him around the undulating Berkeley campus. He loved that golf cart. Every time I saw him, he would be cruising around in that cart, subtly rubbing in the fact that I owned a grand total of zero, but I was thankful his aliment provided him with the opportunity, and so were old ladies. He used to speed around campus looking for the oldest bag he could find, and once located, he would offer them a free ride. My other friend Tom would sit in the back drinking beers and smiling. Later, my friend KC crashed the cart and was down-graded to crutches. He didn’t like them nearly as much.
A loud and piecing “Fucking Toxins” pulled me out of my day-dream tangent and back to the reality at hand.
“Most of America’s obese. Everyone’s got cancer or diabetes or both and you know why? The toxins. Everything has them. Your fucking cat has them,” he rallied on. I didn’t have a cat, but if I did, it would be filled with toxins, thus preventing me from eating it. Damn.
“Well, if you can’t even eat your cat, then what can you eat?” I queried.
“Fuck, even water has toxins in it. We are basically drinking shit water.” I took a sip from an avian bottle I filled up at a library drinking fountain. “And you know what bread has in it?”
“Toxins?” I guessed.
“Fuck yes toxins. The terrorists are the FDA administrators and the farmers and the cows. Fuck toxins.” He lit another cigarette.
“Well, then what can you eat?” I questioned again.
“I’ve got one word for you,” he said with genuine enthusiasm.
“Plastics?” I said with a tint of condescension.
“No, potassium,” he said, not getting the joke.
“I was close.” He ignored my comment as he did with most things I said.
“Bananas and a few other non-processed fruits are about it. The water here is shit water. They get all the toilet water, filter the shit out of it and give it to us, so bottled water’s about all you can drink. But yeah, potassium is great. If you have enough in you nothing can touch you, not cancer, not diabetes, not arthritis. Nothing.” He took a long puff from his cigarette. “I can do whatever I want if I have potassium. That’s why I smoke. Potassium keeps cancer away.”
His logic didn’t make much sense to me, but I really wasn’t in the mood to question it. Plus, he has evidence in the form of a book and everything in print is fact, as proven by the Book of Mormon. All the information in Bermill supposedly backed what he was saying and he had made it into his Bible. Potassium played the role of God. I didn’t want to question him, not to his narrow face at least.
“So I’ll I have to do is eat bananas and I can then eat anything and smoke anything I desire?”
“Yeah, except hamburger bums,” he said taking another puff of his smoke. I was really eager to smoke one, and then chase it down with a banana. He continued, “Potassium is a miracle and Bermill proved it in this book with science or experiments or some shit.” His voice was getting rapier probably because he hadn’t eaten a banana in the few minutes he was talking to me. “You wan one?”
“A cigarette? No I don’t smoke,” I reminded myself.
“No a banana. I don’t give up my smokes.” He reached into his bag and pulled out an elongated, yellow banana.
I grabbed it from him. “Thanks.”
“Well, I’ve got to go find this Bermill faggot,” he said, suddenly transforming him from hero to fag with one lash of the tongue. “I hope he still works here.”
“Yeah, me too, me too,” I said almost to myself as he limped away. My friend finally approached with an astonished grin plastered on his face.
Sean talks like a corvette. “Who was that? Thanks for meeting me here. What’s with the banana?”
I usually picked one question to answer. “Oh, that guy was just teaching me how to get away with smoking.”
“Oh. What? How? Do you want to get something to eat?” Sean shot off.
“Sure,” I smoothly replied.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing, I’ve got a banana.”
