Paranoia (10 page)

“Yeah, and they always turn right around when they figure out there’s nothing here worth stealing.” I kept my voice down, but I was pissed. “Number one, Dad, we don’t really have a choice here, because the agencies won’t even
deal
with us anymore, because you’ve made so many people quit, okay? Number two, I can’t stay with you, because I’ve got a day job, remember? And number three, you haven’t even given the guy a chance.”

Antwoine came back down the hall toward us. He approached my father, almost menacingly close, but he spoke in a soft, gentle voice. “Mr. Cassidy, you want me to leave, I’ll leave. Hell, I’ll leave right now, I don’t got no problem with that. I don’t stay where I’m not wanted. I don’t need a job
that
bad. As long as my parole officer knows I made a serious attempt to get a job, I’m cool.”

Dad was staring at the TV, an ad for Depends, a vein twitching under his left eye. I’d seen that face before, usually when he was chewing someone out, and it could scare the shit out of you. He used to make his football players run till someone puked, and if anyone refused to keep going, they got the Face. But he’d used it so many times on me that it had lost its power. Now he pivoted around and turned it on Antwoine, who’d no doubt seen a hell of a lot worse in the joint.

“Did you say
parole officer?
”

“You heard me right.”

“You’re a fucking
convict?
”

“
Ex
-con.”

“The
hell
you trying to do to me?” he said, staring at me. “You trying to kill me before the disease does? Look at me, I can’t hardly move, and you put me alone in the house with a fucking
convict?
”

Antwoine didn’t even seem to be annoyed. “Like your son says, you ain’t got nothing worth stealing, even if I wanted to,” he said calmly, through sleepy eyes. “At least give me a little credit, if I wanted to pull off some kinda scam, I wouldn’t take a job
here
.”

“You hear
that?
” Dad puffed, enraged. “You hear
that?
”

“Plus, if I’m going to stay, we gotta come to agreement on a couple of things, you and me.” Antwoine sniffed the air. “I can smell the smokes, and you’re going to have to cut that shit out right now. That’s the shit that got you here.” He reached out one huge hand and tapped the arm of the Barcalounger. A compartment popped open, which I’d never seen before, and a red-and-white pack of Marlboros popped up like a jack-in-the-box. “Thought so. That’s where my dad always hid his.”

“Hey!” my dad yelled. “I don’t believe this!”

“And you’re gonna start a workout routine. Your muscles are wasting away. Your problem isn’t your lungs, it’s your muscles.”

“Are you out of your fuckin’ mind?” Dad said.

“You got the respirtary disease, you gotta exercise. Can’t do anything about the lungs, those are gone, but the muscles we can do something about. We’re gonna start with some leg lifts in your chair, get your leg muscles working again, and then we’re going to walk for one minute. My old man had the emphysema, and me and my brother—”

“You tell this big—tattooed nigger,” Dad said between puffs, “to get his stuff—out of that room—and get the hell out of my house!”

I almost lost it. I’d just had a supremely lousy day, and my temper was short, and for months and months I’d been busting my ass trying to find someone who’d put up with the old guy, replacing each one as he made them leave, a whole long parade, a huge waste of time. And here he was, summarily dismissing the latest who, granted, may not have been an ideal candidate, but was the only one we had. I wanted to let into him, let fly, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t scream at my father, this pathetic dying old man with end-stage emphysema. So I held it in, at the risk of exploding.

Before I could say anything, Antwoine turned to me. “I believe your son hired me, so he’s the only one who can fire me.”

I shook my head. “No such luck, Antwoine. You’re not getting out of here—not so easy. Why don’t you get started?”

16

I needed to blow off steam. It was everything—the way Nora Sommers had rubbed my face in it, being unable to tell her to go fuck herself, the impossibility of my surviving at Trion long enough to steal even a coffee mug, the general feeling of being in way over my head. And then, the cherry on the cake: my dad. Keeping the anger in, stopping myself from telling him off—
you fucking ungrateful bigot, die already!
—was corroding my insides.

So I just showed up at Alley Cat, knowing that Seth would be working that night. I just wanted to sit at the bar and get shitfaced on free booze.

“Hey, homey,” Seth said, delighted to see me, “your first day at the new place, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“That bad, huh?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Seriously bad. Wow.” He poured me a Scotch like I was some old drunk, a regular. “
Love
the haircut, dude. Don’t tell me you got drunk and woke up with that haircut.”

I ignored him. The Scotch went immediately to my head. I hadn’t eaten any supper, and I was tired. It felt great.

“How bad could it be, bud? It’s your first day, they like show you where the bathroom is, right?” He looked up at the basketball game on TV, then back at me.

I told him about Nora Sommers and her cute little Apple Newton trick.

“What a bitch, huh? What’d she come down on you so hard for? What’d she expect—you’re new, you don’t know anything, right?”

I shook my head. “No, she—” Suddenly I realized that I’d left out a key part of the story, the part about my allegedly being a superstar at Wyatt Telecom. Shit. The anecdote only made sense if you knew the dragon lady was trying to take me down a peg. My brain was fried. Trying to extricate myself from this minor slip seemed an insurmountable goal, like climbing Mount Everest or swimming across the Atlantic. Already I’d gotten caught in a lie. I felt gooey inside and very tired. Fortunately someone caught Seth’s eye, signaled to him. “Sorry, man, it’s half-price hamburger night,” he announced as he went to fetch someone a couple of beers.

I found myself thinking about the people I’d met today, the “cast of characters” as the bizarro Noah Mordden had referred to them, who were now parading through my head, getting more and more grotesque. I wanted to debrief with somebody, but I couldn’t. Mostly I wanted to
download
, talk about Chad and Phil Whatever, the old-timer. I wanted to tell someone about Trion and what it was like and about my sighting of Jock Goddard in the cafeteria. But I couldn’t, because I didn’t trust myself to remember where the Great Wall ran, which part no one was supposed to know about.

The Scotch buzz began to fade, and this humming low note of anxiety, a pedal note, was slowly growing louder, gradually getting higher-pitched, like microphone feedback, high and ear-splitting. By the time Seth came back, he’d forgotten what we were talking about. Seth, like most guys, tends to focus more on his own stuff than on anyone else’s. Saved by male narcissism.

“God, women love bartenders,” he said. “Why is that?”

“I don’t know, Seth. Maybe it’s you.” I tipped my empty glass toward him.

“No doubt. No doubt.” He glugged another few ounces of Scotch in there, refreshed the ice. In a low, confiding voice, barely audible over the din of whooping voices and the blaring ballgame, he said, “My manager says he doesn’t like my pour. Keeps making me use a pour tester, practice all the time. Plus he’s always testing me now. ‘Pour for me! Too much! You’re giving away the store!’”

“I think your pour’s perfectly fine,” I said.

“I’m really supposed to write up a ticket, you know.”

“Go ahead. I’m making the big bucks now.”

“Na-ah, they let us comp four drinks a night, don’t worry about it. So, you think you’ve got it bad at work. My boss at the firm is always giving me shit if I’m like ten minutes late.”

I shook my head.

“I mean, Shapiro doesn’t know how to use the copier. He doesn’t know how to send a fax. He doesn’t even know how to do a Lexis-Nexis search. He’d be totally sunk without me.”

“Maybe he wants someone else to do the shitwork.”

Seth didn’t seem to hear me. “So did I tell you about my latest scam?”

“Tell me.”

“Get this—jingles!”

“Huh?”

“
Jingles!
There—like that!” He pointed up at the TV, some cheesy low-production-value ad for a mattress company with a stupid, annoying song they were always playing. “I met this guy at the law firm who works for an ad agency, he told me all about it. Told me he could get me an audition with one of those jingle companies like Megamusic or Crushing or Rocket. He said the easiest way to break in is by writing one of them.”

“You can’t even read music, Seth.”

“Neither can Stevie Wonder. Look, a lot of the really talented guys can’t read music. I mean, how long does it take to learn a thirty-second piece of music? This girl who does all those JCPenney ads, he said she can barely read music, but she’s got the
voice!
”

A woman next to me at the bar called out to Seth, “What kind of wine do you have?”

“Red, white, and pink,” he said. “What can I get you?”

She said white, and he poured some into a water glass.

He circled back to me. “The big bucks is in the singing, though. I just got to put a reel together, a CD, and pretty soon I’ll be on the A list—it’s all who you know. You following me? No work, mucho bucks!”

“Sounds great,” I said with not enough enthusiasm.

“You’re not into this?”

“No, it sounds great, it really does,” I said, mustering a little more enthusiasm. “Great scam.” In the last couple of years, Seth and I talked a lot about scamming by, about how to do the least work possible. He loved hearing my stories of how I used to goof off at Wyatt, how I used to spend hours on the Internet looking at
The Onion
or Web sites like
BoredAtWork.com
or
ILoveBacon.com
or
FuckedCompany.com
. I especially liked the sites that had a “manager” button you could click when your manager passed by, that killed the funny stuff and put back up whatever boring Excel spreadsheet you were working on. We both took pride in how little work we could get away with. That’s why Seth loved being a paralegal—because it allowed him to be marginal, mostly unsupervised, cynical, and uncommitted to the working world.

I got up to take a leak and on the way back bought a pack of Camel straights from the vending machine.

“Again with this shit?” Seth said when he spied me tearing the plastic off the cigarette pack.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said in a leave-me-alone tone.

“Don’t come to me for help wheeling your oxygen tank around.” He pulled a chilled martini glass out of the freezer, poured in a little vermouth. “Watch this.” He tossed the vermouth out, over his shoulder, then poured in some Bombay Sapphire. “Now
that’s
a perfect martini.”

I took a long swig of the Scotch as he went to ring up the martini and deliver it, enjoyed the burn at the back of my throat. Now it was really starting to kick in. I felt a little unsteady on the bar stool. I was drinking like your proverbial coal miner with a paycheck in his pocket. Nora Sommers and Chad Pierson and all the others had begun to recede, to shrink, to take on a harmless, antic, cartoon-character aura. So I had a shitty first day, what was so unusual about that? Everyone felt a little out-of-their-element on the first day in a new job. I was
good
, I had to keep this in mind. If I weren’t so good, Wyatt would never have chosen me for his mission. Obviously he and his
consigliere
Judith wouldn’t be wasting their time on me if they didn’t think I could pull it off. They’d have just fired me and tossed me into the legal system to fend for myself. I’d be bent over that bunk in Marion.

I began to feel a pleasant, alcohol-fueled surge of confidence bordering on megalomania. I’d been parachuted into Nazi Germany, with little more than K rations and a shortwave radio, and the success of the allies was riding entirely on me, nothing less than the fate of Western civilization.

“I saw Elliot Krause today downtown,” Seth said.

I looked at him, uncomprehending.

“Elliot Krause? Remember? Elliot Port-O-San?”

My reaction time had slowed; it took me a few seconds, but then I burst out laughing. I hadn’t heard Elliot Krause’s name in years.

“He’s a partner in some law firm, of course.”

“Specializing in . . . environmental law, right?” I said, choking with laughter, spitting out a mouthful of Scotch.

“Do you remember his face?”

“Forget his face, remember his
pants
?”

This was why I liked spending time with Seth. We talked in Morse code; we got each other’s references, all the inside jokes. Our shared history gave us a secret language, the way twins talk to each other when they’re babies. One summer in high school when Seth was working at a snooty tennis club doing grounds maintenance during a big international tennis match, he let me sneak in without paying. They’d brought in some of those rented “portable restroom facilities” for the influx of spectators—Handy Houses or Port-O-Sans or Johnny On the Job, whatever cute name they had, I don’t remember—those things that look like big old refrigerators. By the second or third day they’d gotten full, the Handy House crew hadn’t bothered to come by and pump them out, and they reeked.

There was this preppy kid named Elliot Krause we both hated, partly because he’d stolen Seth’s girlfriend, and partly because he looked down on us as working-class kids. He showed up at the tournament, dressed in a faggoty tennis sweater and white duck pants, Seth’s girlfriend on his arm, and he made the mistake of going into one of the Handy Houses to relieve himself. Seth, who was spearing trash at the moment, saw this and gave me an evil smile. He ran over to the booth, jammed the wooden handle of his trash-picker-upper thing through the latch, and me and a friend of ours, Flash Flaherty, started rocking the Porta Potti back and forth. You could hear Elliot inside shouting, “Hey! Hey! What the hell’s going on?” and you could hear the sloshing of the unspeakable contents, and finally we got the thing flipped over, with Elliot trapped inside. I don’t want to think about what the poor guy was floating in. Seth lost his job but he insisted that it was worth it—he’d have paid good money just for the privilege of seeing Elliot Krause emerge in his no-longer-white tennis whites, retching, covered in shit.