Middle Men (15 page)

“Nice,” I said.

“Fig likes a trifecta. So we talk to some of our guys and start going through the book. There's no doubt on the first horse, everyone's agreed on that. Pretty much the same for the second, but maybe a little more iffy. Fig calls up his guy and gets a little more out of him, so we feel okay. But the third horse, we have no fucking clue. A day at the races, right? Now Fig's hungry, if
you can believe it, so he goes up to the buffet and I'm sitting there going through the book. I'm sitting there and Fig comes back with a roast beef sandwich. He's upset. ‘What's the matter?' I ask him. ‘Look at this,' he says, ‘look what they did to the fucking thing.' He opens up his sandwich. It's just swimming in mayonnaise.”

Fig, piling steak tartar on his buttered bread, shook his head in disgust at the memory.

Ray continued. “This is a problem, the mayonnaise. There's no reason to just slap it on like that. ‘What I would like,' Fig says, ‘is just a cup of mayo on the side. So I can put it on myself.' Which is totally rational. Who wants that much mayonnaise? Why should some guy making a sandwich get to decide how much mayonnaise you get? It's tyrannical, if you think about it.”

Ray paused to let me think about it.

“I tell Fig, ‘You should've just asked for a side of mayo.' ‘I know,' he says, ‘but the guy was already making it.' I grabbed the maître d' and I told him the situation. ‘Listen. Bring us another sandwich, but have your guy put the mayo on the side. I mean, for the love of all that's holy and merciful, bring us a side of fucking mayo!'”

Fig looked at Ray. Their faces were turning bright red.

“So here it comes. Roast beef, open-faced, and a big cup of mayo. Victory is ours.”

“Well done,” I said.

“But here's the thing,” Ray said.

“I figured there was a thing.”

“I go back to the book. I go back to pick the third horse for the trifecta. I look down the page. And there he is, right there at the bottom—
Side of Mayo
!”

Ray poured his wine to the top of the glass. He took a sip
and then pounded his fist on the table. “We both took home ten grand! Well, give or take. Can you believe that?”

There was silence. Ray, as always, had taken over the room. At other tables men were grinning and hanging on his every drunken word. Alcohol, for Ray, was a kind of charm, allowing him to barge through doors and announce his place in the world. Over the years he had diligently boozed and golfed his way to the top. This path to glory belonged exclusively to men. My mom could drink most men under the table, but her talent was considered grim and unsightly; instead of opening doors, alcohol isolated her, and no matter how hard she tried she was never able to drink her way into the magic circle.

“It's a good story,” I said, finally. “But . . .”

“What do you mean, ‘but'?”

“I wouldn't really know what to do with it. At this point it's just an anecdote.”

Ray squinted at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I mean, characterwise there's definitely something.”

Ray and Fig both looked confused.

“That wasn't the story,” said Ray.

“It wasn't?”

“Fuck, no!” Now they were laughing. “Who'd want to see a movie about me and Fig?”

“Okay,” I said, “what's your story?”

Ray nodded gravely at Fig, who finished chewing and carefully wiped his mouth with the linen napkin.

“There's this alien,” he said, and looked nervously at Ray.

“Go on, tell him.”

“There's this alien. And what he does is come here, to earth, to hunt humans.”

Fig, sweaty and exhausted, sat back in his chair.

“The way humans hunt deer,” Ray explained. “You know, for sport.”

In front of me there was a plate full of bacon-wrapped shrimp. I ate one and said, “That's
Predator
.”

“What?”

“
Predator
, with Schwarznegger. You're describing
Predator
.”

Fig was devastated. He dropped his head and began to massage the loose cartilage in his nose. I gathered that one of them had recently watched
Predator
on cable in a drunken haze, totally forgetting about it until this morning, when the dim memory surfaced as an idea of their own. Ray wasn't giving up.

“It doesn't have to be an alien,” he said. “It could just be some crazy guy who hunts humans for sport.”

“That's
The Most Dangerous Game
,” I said.

“Well, Christ, it's all the same cha-cha,” said Ray. “We can come up with something else.”

My steak was unbearably delicious. We stayed in the dining hall for a couple hours, getting drunk, throwing out story ideas, and discussing the possibilities of studio financing. Ray, who had been installing sprinkler systems for the last thirty years, seemed to know way more about the process than I did. On our way out we filed into the men's room. My uncle and his buddy Fig belonged to that vanishing breed of men who piss with their hands on their hips. In another age such confident figures would've been immortalized in stone.

As the valet brought around Ray's Cadillac, Fig pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a sip. Suddenly, he put a hand on my shoulder.

“You've always been like a son to me,” he said.

I laughed. “
Son?
”

Fig dropped his eyes in embarrassment. “I'm sorry, Sean. I'm just really proud of you.”

He climbed into the backseat of the Cadillac and lay down. Ray yawned, handed the valet a twenty, and got in the car.

“We'll talk!” he shouted over the revving engine.

•  •  •

I had a parking ticket when I got back to my car. It was almost four o'clock. I got lost going to the freeway and ended up following the train tracks west for a few miles. I came to a beaten down section of Riverside where every block had the same rhythm. Auto body shop, tattoo parlor, bail bonds, checks cashing. The sidewalks were empty but for one guy, a twitchy, shirtless maniac wearing camouflage pants. He had a garden hose coiled over his shoulder and he kept turning around quickly, again and again, like he expected to catch someone following him.

On the way home, I decided to stop by my mom's new place in Buena Park. I got stuck in traffic on the 91, which gave me time to sober up. I inched along for an hour and finally pulled off the freeway. The front door of her apartment was surrounded by empty clay pots. She brought the pots with her every time she moved, saying she was going to fill them with dahlias and marigolds, but she never did. I knocked but she wasn't home, and her cell phone went right to voice mail. She probably had an evening shift. The stucco walls were cracked and peeling and the pool in the courtyard was full of leaves. I tore up Ray's check, scattered the pieces in the water, and sat down on a lounge chair. I knew it would be a long time before she got home, but I was willing to wait.

O mother, save me from the wisdom of men.

B
obby's office, for the time being, was the Berkeley Public Library. On a Thursday afternoon in August, with sunlight pouring through the arched windows of the reading room, he closed his book and quietly observed the homeless man sitting across from him. The man was bald and sunburned and he had grimy strips of duct tape wrapped around his fingertips. With a chewed-up pencil in his hand, he scrawled notes in the margins of an old physics textbook that was crawling with ants. Bobby couldn't take his eyes off the ants; he watched them moving in clusters across equations and diagrams, and it occurred to him that the ants were messengers, reading the book for this infernal professor, and when they were done they would crawl up the man's arm and into his ear, burrowing directly into his brain.

Bobby hadn't slept in two or three days.

He looked around for another table, but the reading room was packed with the elderly and the unemployed. Some people seemed hard at work, or at least pleasantly engaged, but most were either asleep or staring out the windows, as if
waiting for something. It felt more like a bus terminal than a library. Bobby wore a Cal T-shirt and a pair of board shorts. He was trying to read a reference manual on patent law, but it was boring and his eyes kept slipping off the page. The hours were melting together. Last night, after
Conan
, he had fallen into a vortex of infomercials and then, at some point, he snuck off with his roommate's laptop and sent another pleading email to Nora, his dearest cousin and benefactor. When the sun came up, he left his apartment in the Berkeley flats and rode his bike up University Avenue. He ate breakfast at McDonald's and when he got to the library at nine o'clock, a crowd was already waiting to get inside. He struggled with his work all day—he kept taking long breaks to read magazines—but his lack of concentration, he knew, had more to do with excitement than fatigue. If anything, he worried that he was too awake.

It was three o'clock. Far up the hill, on campus, the tower bells were ringing. Bobby closed his eyes and listened. As a student, he had always loved the swirling bronze melody of the carillon. Ten years ago he had gone to Cal on a swimming scholarship. He majored in business, pledged a fraternity, and flunked out his junior year.

“See you later,” he said, standing up and collecting his things, but the homeless man ignored him. In his own pungent way, this guy was a snob, and Bobby could respect that. It was a snobbery well earned. When he died alone in a gutter, in a puddle of his own piss, he would take with him a crazed and singular form of expertise. Bobby ran his fingers through his buzz cut. He wished he had a nice hat to doff, a bowler cap or fedora. He hated belonging to such a crude and hatless generation.

He sat down at a computer. His Yahoo mailbox was filled almost exclusively with undeleted spam. Someday, Bobby
imagined, a single pill would grow hair, restore virility, and consolidate debt, but until then the market was wide open and he still had a chance to capitalize on his terrible idea. With this in mind, he scrolled down and was relieved to find a response from Nora. He had been trying to reach her all week, to get her advice on how he should go about branding the Man Handle, but she wouldn't answer her phone or reply to his emails. This happened sometimes. She was director of marketing for a company that sold investment management software. When she was on the road, she closed ranks and forgot about everybody in her life who wasn't a client or prospect. He would go weeks without hearing from her. Then she would come back to the city, haggard and lonely and claiming that she was sick of her job, that she was ready to meet a decent man and go into full suburban lockdown. Nora was tall and pale and, because of her pixie haircut and listless expression, men often asked her if she was a model. She had actually paid her way through college doing catalogue work, posing in cardigans next to duck ponds, but she liked to tell potential suitors that she was dying of consumption. Bobby and Nora had always been allied by a certain ghoulishness. At his father's funeral, when they were both seniors in high school, she met him on the front steps of St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach and said, “Your eulogy sucked.” They rode together from the church, passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth, and when they got to the grave site Nora took off her heels and ran across the expansive lawn, scattering crows like a burst of black confetti.

Now and then she met a guy who appreciated these qualities in her, but it would never last. They either got frustrated with the demands of her career, or she got bored with them. Bobby despised most of the men she dated. She had a
weakness for solvent hipsters—architects, creative directors at advertising agencies, and other lieutenants in the corduroy mafia. They all supported progressive causes, not in any active or financial way, but just in general, as a kind of ambience that made them feel good about themselves as they walked around the city in vintage Japanese tennis shoes. And yet, in some ways, Bobby understood the plight of these slender princelings. Nora had a unique gift for turning cold on people.

The last time he saw her was three months ago, in May, when she asked him to accompany her to Geneva Software's annual Client Appreciation Party. The latest staff restructuring had left the marketing and direct sales teams looking grim and sparse, so her boss, Dave Grant, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts, had encouraged the survivors to bring a guest, because the clients would feel more at ease in a full room. “There's free food for you,” Nora told Bobby. “Just look presentable and keep me entertained.” He got a haircut, wore a gray suit that he found in one of his roommate's closets, and in a hotel bar overlooking Union Square he shook hands with Nora's colleagues, mostly men, who seemed weirdly impressed by the fact that Bobby was stuck doing plumbing work. He used to work summers with his dad, doing repair and remodel jobs, so he knew what he was doing most of the time, but he didn't have a license and he was getting paid under the table by a shady house flipper in Castro Valley who had posted an ad on Craigslist. But still, the men from Geneva software expressed wonder and delight, as if they were shaking hands with a sea captain or gunslinger. When Bobby asked what they did, most seemed vaguely ashamed that they were marketing associates or software engineers; in parting, they all shook his hand with a substantially firmer grip.

Nora introduced him to Dave Grant, who, despite being the boss, seemed nervous and fumbling around her. “That fucker's in love with you,” said Bobby, as soon as Dave left, and Nora feigned vomiting. They were having a great time. Someone handed Bobby a drink; someone else, mistaking him for a client, handed him a gift bag filled with coffee mugs and key chains emblazoned with the Geneva logo. He watched a stray red balloon wedge itself in the crystal arm of a chandelier. Bobby told Nora that he wanted a job with her company—“I have sales experience,” he reminded her, crushing a lime into his vodka—but then one of her company's actual clients found her and said hello. Nora turned her back on Bobby and began speaking in tongues. Bobby heard the word “functionality” repeated over and over. She made no attempt to introduce Bobby and for a long time he hovered awkwardly behind her, feeling invisible. When the client finally left, she turned around like nothing had happened. Later, in the cab, Bobby screamed at her, “You
literally
turned your back on me.”