Discover how a childhood bully, an academic background, and a love of PI fiction inspired Randy Eggert’s latest story, “The Grammar Dick,” in our Nov/Dec issue, on sale now!
I’m a fan of hard-boiled detectives, practical men and women who see life unfiltered. They are capable, uncompromising, and violent. They keep their hearts unpolluted in a filthy world. And they know their way around a fist and a gun.
Like any reader, I picture myself as one of them. But the picture is incongruous. I am a professor so transparently nerdy that when, after a friend made a deep-cut Star Trek reference and I told him he always managed to out-nerd me, a woman I didn’t know glanced at me and said, “Really?”
I’ve been in exactly one fight in my life. I was fourteen. He was a bully, a year younger than me, and though I was short, he was shorter. Flanked by two large friends, he goaded me, saying I was too chicken to fight. I threw my jacket on the ground, and I shoved him. To my surprise, he landed on his back. When kids in middle school fought during recess and one of them was down, the other sat on his chest and pummeled his face. I supposed I should do that. But when I tried, the kid stuck his foot up, making it hard to sit on his chest. I said, “Get up!” It sounded tough, the way I said it—at least I thought so. As he rose, he swung his fist into my jaw. He must have been as inexperienced as me because it didn’t hurt. Unable to bring myself to punch him in the face, I chose his chubby middle. He hunched over and grabbed my fist with two hands. It was an odd tactic. I batted his ribs few times with my free hand until an adult broke us up. Both of us claimed victory (I was right, he was wrong).
But back to hard-boiled detectives. If things in my life had gone differently, what would have turned me hard-boiled? What if, while I’m working on my PhD in linguistics, a malicious thesis advisor betrays me, sabotages my dissertation proposal? Given few options, I resort to private practice, praying on clients’ grammatical insecurities. The job is seedy and disreputable, but not without romance. Despite the world I now work in, I retain my dignity, my moral compass, and my nose for what’s syntactically right and wrong.
Thus was born the hard-boiled hero of The Grammar Dick, Ed Wolfe, private grammarian, or, as he prefers it, gick.
