The Enthusiast (14 page)

Upstairs was much grander, as if to say, “You thought that was it?
Puh
, give us a break, something better is always coming. The ceiling up here is so far over your head we've painted constellations on it, and the windows are framed with ruinous man hours of bas-relief birds, branches, globes, and ship's wheels, because this is the compass everyone has to pass through, and the bustle of a thousand people is as calm as a mountainside because you're finally here, your ticket punched at last, although what kind of shadowy hick existence did you get yourself into that you've put it off this long?”

I pushed through a door into the wet air outside and was pressed into a sidewalk army that was ass-deep in purpose. Everyone, happy or miserable, well dressed or in Air Clown sneakers and sex-boast T-shirts, had the most know-where-they're-going faces I'd ever seen. All of them could tell you
what was coming next and the five things after that, because on the most real and official of American streets that knowledge was the minimum. The rest of the country, people like me, were the dim relations these people kept having to break it down for, a nation of Henries holding a city of Barneys back. Even the mumbling schizophrenics here were the best in the country at what they did.

I went south on Madison Avenue, trying not to gawk but unable to resist the buildings' upward pull, the old ones climbing to gargoyles and gold ziggurats, the new ones so tall I pictured catapults instead of elevators. Soon I was passing Gerald's leafy side streets, with doormen, songbirds, and trees in wrought-iron cages with brass plaques that said
THANK YOU FOR CARING TO CURB YOUR DOG
.

Wendy Probst's art gallery shared a building on West Twenty-eighth Street with twelve others, all with white walls, track lighting, attractive women at big-screen Macintoshes, and shaved-head guys like Wendy's friend talking on phones. The throws in
Throes
were thirty thousand dollars and up. She'd branched out from the miseries of Belton, Ohio, to crochet couples falling from the World Trade Center and the stoning of Afghan adulteresses. She had all the material she could use now. The ratty horizon was on world tour.

I spent an hour there, then walked over to Fifth Avenue and north to the Plaza Hotel in a pedestrian traffic jam. People walked here like they drove elsewhere, cutting each other off with shoulders and using briefcases for bumpers. I felt the pressure. There was too much of everything, signs and faces racing at me, the subway's damp breath blowing from caves with stairs, and an untenable anarchy of fake vendors, flyer-thrusters, and marauding plaid school kids.

I wanted in. I wanted to be offhand, to lean on a building
with one foot up on the wall behind me and one hand at the small of my back, having a smoke and nodding half an inch at people I knew, in a muscle shirt, with muscles. I wasn't going to get it, though. New York put out the strongest could-I-live-here I'd ever felt, and the answer was no, not if I'd never once worked for a business that could afford the rent. Even if they could, who had the bulletproof morale to put out
Frisbee Golf
with
Sports Illustrated
three blocks away?

Half the sidewalk army was on cell phones. When I stopped for
DON'T WALK
signs I kept hearing guys Dad's age, with tired musical voices, saying things like
Don't let it get to you, I can't see the point, At a certain point it's not worth it, It's worth your life these days, Life is too short, Don't make yourself crazy, Okay take care of yourself, Okay it's good to talk to you, Okay
. I loved these guys. I felt like it was me they were talking to, their resigned sweetness my lullaby, but then the light would change and I'd lose them.

When I got to the Plaza at three they were serving Orchid Oolong in the lobby, but I went outside and waited while taxis and horse-drawn carriages dropped off everyone in the world but Gerald. By 3:40 I was embarrassed in front of the doormen. At 3:55 a black Crown Victoria pulled up and Gerald, in a blue blazer and gray pants, got out of the backseat, came toward me smiling, saw my face, looked contrite, and said, “Really sorry. Please.” He waved me into the backseat, got in next to me, and told the driver, a foreign guy in a black suit and shades, “We need to get my man to…”

“West Broadway and Grand Street,” I said.

“We don't have a lot of time,” Gerald said. “Seventh Avenue might be good.”

The driver said, “I take a try, my friend,” as we pulled into traffic.

“Thanks,” Gerald said, and turned to me. “That's a great thing here. If you don't know someone, you say ‘my friend.' It's like, ‘For purposes of this discussion, we grew up together, we went in the woods and smoked cigarettes, we enlisted the same day, we got laid on twin beds in a motel room that one time, and I lied to the FBI for you. You don't remember all that? No problem. Thirty-eight cents is your change, my friend.'” The car turned west. “Can you forgive me? My friend? At least tell me how you are.”

“I'm okay,” I said. “How are things going with the metals?”

“Yeah, that's a funny business,” Gerald said, looking away for a second and then turning back to me. “It's good to see you.”

“It's good to see you, too,” I said. “I just have to do this thing for work.”

“Hey, I understand. You got your mind on your money and your money on your mind. Same reason I'm late. I was talking to a guy, and then I was just listening to him talk, and then I was faking appendicitis to get out of there, but you know how people are these days.”

We were ten minutes late downtown. Gerald asked if he should wait and I said, “No, come in with me. I have to go back after this.” He sent the driver away.

The showroom was like Wendy Probst's gallery, but with spotlit mounds of tea leaves on stone columns instead of art. A short thin man in his thirties came out of the back, wearing the pants and vest of a pinstripe suit and a Julius Caesar haircut. “Good afternoon,” he said. “Stephen Randolph.”

“I'm Henry Bay,” I said. “From
Cozy
.”

“Oh. Okay, so not Richard. And you're?”

“Gerald.”

“Hi, Gerald. Tea?”

We said yes and he put a kettle on. I read a price list, letterpress on deckled paper. Nothing cost less than seventy dollars a pound. Randolph said, “People say the prices are obscene, but in fact they're not. They're the price of having one thing in your life that isn't a compromise”—a sentence I never got tired of hearing from people who sold things to enthusiasts.

He swirled tea and water in a clear glass pot. “So Richard and Agnes are at the point where they're hiring people? That's nice. What do you think about what they're doing?”

“I think it's good,” I said. “I mean—”

“Because I like them personally, but is it unfair to ask you that? It's like, here's a girl with doilies on her tits. Okay, but could we have something about tea for people who actually know about it?”

“I know what you mean about the doily thing,” I said.

“She didn't have the tits for it, either. Not that it's my business.” He served the tea. “This is the first Indian tea we did, and I'll keep importing it no matter how ridiculous it gets.”

“How about that rupee?” Gerald said.

“Fuck me,” Randolph said. “The year I've just had. What do you do?”

“Strategic metal trading.”

“Oh, interesting. You trade for a company, or…?”

“A few investors.”

“Okay. Wow, so nerves of steel. Good for you.”

Gerald tasted his tea and did an “Oh” of appreciation exactly like Richard's. “I get that a lot on this tea,” Randolph said. He turned to me. “Your thoughts?”

“It's really good.”

“I'm relieved to hear that, but what do you
think
of it?”

“Well, it seems like an Assam, from the…body, and—”

“You think so? You want to get back to me on that? It's
Satrupa Kama Black. Reasonably basic. See, this is what I'm talking about.” He clapped his hands once. “Okay, can we get this picture taken?”

 

W
e walked north. “Clients,” Gerald said.

I didn't answer.

He said, “What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “It's fine.”

“Are you pissed that I was talking to him? I was just trying to be the color guy.”

“No, it's fine.” We walked for a minute. “You know the thing you said to me when you came to Albany?”

“I don't know where I was this morning. What did I say in Albany?”

“You said, ‘Living in shitty apartments and everything, that's what you should be doing, because you're—'”

“Okay, I definitely didn't say that.”

“—because that went with what I was doing, so I—”

“Henry.” He stopped walking. “What I
will
say is whatever you've got up your ass, I don't know what it is, and I don't know how it's going to get dislodged, but I've always had faith that it will be. I don't have that faith in too many people.”

“I appreciate that.”

“It's up there pretty far, though.”

“Thanks. I have to catch a train now.”

“You want to get a cab?” I shook my head. “Okay,” he said.

“I'll see you.”

I took a last look at him. He wasn't the picture of good fortune he'd been in Albany, but it was too late to ask him about it now. I headed for the train station as late-afternoon light fell on the corners of the buildings and spilled down to the pave
ment, screwing me up worse than anything, because any one square of sidewalk was as beautiful as my clean wet sheets on the line.

 

I
got off the train at 10:30 that night, drove to the
Cozy
house, and knocked softly on the door. When Richard came out onto the porch I gave him the ad layout and the digital camera. He looked at the pictures on the LCD and said, “Did he give you any trouble?”

“No, he was fine.”

“How was New York?”

“It was great.”

“Yeah, isn't that something?”

I nodded. “Do you want help with that?”

“Naah, I've got it. Thanks. I'll see you tomorrow.”

He went back inside and I stood looking at the garden, the lighted paths like city streets. I wanted to go back to New York both immediately and never; I couldn't leave
Cozy
and couldn't stay. New York was one of the things that had been recommended to me over the years, along with big socks,
favela
music, Emulator sex, and celestial navigation. Here at
Cozy
the recommendations were certain alkaloids, compassion for our fellow fuckups, and self-immolating arts and crafts.

These things worked, I could see that. They did wonders for the ballerina, the song cycle guy, and even Tom Foley, and until that afternoon I'd been thinking they were doing something for me. I'd risked injury for someone I wasn't close to—my landlady, in fact—and I'd been going around noticing my surroundings, working outward from the treetops around the garage apartment. Weren't these signs that I'd advanced?

Right, I'd advanced enough to go to New York and blow off
my oldest friend. I was more Henry than ever, standing on the porch and denouncing myself to my onboard secret police. Maybe if I stayed longer, I thought, and Dobey said, “Sure, another two hundred years should do the trick.” Three days later I was on a plane with one of Richard's old black suits in my luggage, headed for
Wakeboarding Monthly
in Imperial Beach, California.

I
t fell to me to be the public face of
Wakeboarding
at Hypergames VIII in Seal Beach. We had a writer and photographer there, but I still had to go to the wakeboard competitions and look wowed. The rest of the time I worked our expo table, giving fourteen-year-old enthusiasts logo key chains and questionable advice on mastering the hoochie glide.

The second day, I asked a woman in the O'Neill booth to watch my stuff while I went up to my hotel room for more ad rate cards. On my way back to the elevator there was a guy talking to a closed door, trying not to raise his voice.

“Misty, open the door, right now,” he said. “I swear to God, open this door.” Someone inside said something. “Because I need my jacket,” the guy said. He was thirty-five and sunburned, in a
B.U.M. EQUIPMENT
T-shirt, cargo shorts, and sandals. “The hell am I giving you a reason for?”

I was five feet from him when a fifteen-year-old girl sprang out of the room holding a bunched-up silver windbreaker. She was an athlete, in Lycra bike shorts, a crop-top with the word
HINDENBURG
and a picture of a flaming BMX bike on it, bruise-colored makeup, and an eyebrow ring. She said, “Here's your fucking jacket,” and hit him with it.

He got hold of the jacket and tried to take it away from her. “I'm your father,” he said, grabbing for her wrist. “You don't close the door on me.”

I dropped my rate cards and got between them. “Hey,” I said. “Let's, okay. Hey.”

She tried to hit him but got me instead, a solid shot to the chest. He reached around me on the other side, squeezing my shoulder. I said, “Okay, look, no,
hey
.”

The elevator opened down the hall. A woman my age, in sweat shorts and a
HINDENBURG
T-shirt, came our way, neither hurrying nor wasting a second. “Hi, Misty. Hi, David,” she said.

They let me go as she got closer. I guessed she was some kind of coach, not an athlete—her body wasn't chiseled like the kid's, but compact in the clinging sportswear. Her hips and auburn ponytail swayed slightly while everything else came straight toward us, full lips in the lead, followed by clear brown eyes under faintly dark lids. “How are we doing?” she said.

“Fucked,” Misty said.

“Excuse me, what are you doing here?” the dad said.

“Misty called me a minute ago and asked me to come up.” She turned to me. “Hi, I'm Patti. You're…?”

“Henry.” She waited. “I was just walking by.”

She did a slightly impressed thing with her eyebrows. Her eyes said brains, while those dark lids were like half-lowered shades. It was a bracing combination. She turned back to
the dad and daughter and said, “Is it something we can talk about?”

“No, thank you,” the dad said. “I didn't let her go off with these people—”

“These people,” Misty said. “Ooh ooh.”

“—and get gang-raped or—”

“Oh fuck you,” Misty said. “I wasn't going to get gang-raped. Jesus Christ.”

“With who, with Daryl and those guys?” Patti said. Misty nodded. “Daryl's a good guy,” Patti said to the dad. “As I know you are too.” She had that here's-the-deal diction I'd kept hearing on my day in Manhattan. “We're all just trying to have a good weekend here.”

“Oh, it's a wonderful weekend,” the dad said. “I'm so glad her mother stuck me with this.” He turned to Misty. “This is why I had to leave.”

“Blow me,” Misty said. She walked ten feet away and sat against the wall with her knees at her chest.

“Are you connected with all this?” the dad asked me.

“I'm with one of the magazines,” I said.

“So you're promoting this too. To these kids.”

“Are you
embarrassed
?” Misty called over to him. “Did I
embarrass
you?”

“You're not being in the thing tomorrow,” he said to her.

“That's for the disrespect. We're going home.”

“That's completely up to you two,” Patti said, miming hands-off, giving Misty a vote but slipping it in there.

The dad looked at Patti's clear eyes a second, turned to Misty, and said, “You know what? Do be in it. Break your neck, if possible. I'm good with that.”

I picked up my rate cards, went to the elevator, pushed the button, and snuck a last look at Patti while I waited. Misty
caught me at it and almost smiled, but she wasn't going to do that in front of her father.

 

B
ack at my booth I formed a plan to go to the next day's BMX competition and bump into Patti by chance, but she walked up to me as I was giving out my last key chain of the day.

“Thanks for that upstairs,” she said.

“Oh,” I said. “No, I was…are they okay?”

“In a sense,” she said. “That's not that unusual. His kid finds something she can do so he goes movie of the week on her. I work for Hindenburg, obviously.” She was still wearing the T-shirt but had changed into slacks. Hindenburg Heavy Industries made clothes, accessories, and watch caps for skateboarding and other X sports, and sponsored a few teams. “I'm the athlete coordinator. Theoretically I just make sure they show up on time, but that's theoretically. I personally don't care if she rides tomorrow. I mean, we need her, but let her skip it if it keeps them from killing each other. In case it looked like I was doing it for business.”

“No, it didn't.”

“Good. Anyway, you were the first responder, so I owe you a dinner,” she said, and I looked at my watch.

 

W
e took a fifth-story pedestrian bridge from the hotel to the shopping mall and found a Japanese restaurant. Picking up her menu, Patti said, “Those people are making me have a drink. So is wakeboarding your life?”

“Just the part where you get swept under.”

“That's so sad.”

“No, I mean when I tried it. I've only been at the magazine a few weeks.”

We started telling stories, comparing notes on a life of helping enthusiasts do things that thrilled their tiny fan bases and eluded the real world's notice. “They always get to be the baby,” Patti said. “You never do.”

“But you don't need to,” I said.

“No, everyone needs to sometimes.”

“No, that's right,” I said, hearing myself start with “No” like her, trying to catch up.

“How'd you get into this?” she said. I told her, and around my ninth job we both started laughing.

“You're the restless kind,” she said.

“I don't know,” I said. “I wouldn't mind going somewhere and resting.”

“Oh God, I know,” she said, her wave dismissing the supposed romance of working too hard, which was big then. When she agreed with me my brain surprised me with homemade opiates, the warmth spreading out from the back of my neck. We concurred like that twice more that night, but we might not have, because her opinions fit no pattern. Only she knew what she thought, but she knew it solid. You had to bring your best game with her.

She said she'd grown up in New Jersey, the second of three kids, and after college she'd gone to work for a city youth program on the south side of Philadelphia. “Basically the program didn't exist. I think there was a kickball. But all the playgrounds were turf.”

“Turf?”

“Of gangs. No, they were paved. They
should
have been turf. Anyway, a few of the kids had BMX bikes, and they could do
like two tricks, so I said, ‘Okay, here's something we can do, we'll have a bike rodeo. We'll build some ramps, or whatever you build, and we'll all learn how to do this.'

“By the second year, we closed off two blocks and the
paleta
guys came. The kids were doing seven-twenties and double tailwhips. A guy from Hindenburg came and signed up two of them for regional, and then he asked me. I wish I could say I had a crisis about it, but I was running from the bus to my building with my key out for three years because of the neighborhood.”

We kept talking till they kicked us out. Patti was like a greatest hits of my life so far: she had special knowledge like Barney, she made fun of special knowledge like Gerald, and like those guys in New York saying, “Don't let it make you crazy,” on their cell phones, she had hope that just edged out fatalism, the attitude it took to make the best of a factory-second world.

When we finally got back to the pedestrian bridge there was nobody on it but Misty. She was halfway across it, leaning out over the three-foot safety wall, pushing down on it with her hands like a gymnast about to vault. Her feet were six inches off the ground and her head was poised sixty feet over the wishing fountain—whether she was preparing to jump or just looking wasn't clear, but Patti didn't wait to find out. She kept walking but didn't speed up. Four feet from Misty, just short of spooking distance, she said, “Hi. You doing shoulders?”

Misty's feet quickly rose three more inches, but then stopped and slowly lowered to the floor. She turned toward us, her face a million miles away but coming back. “Yeah,” she said.

Patti got next to her, turned her back to the safety wall, put the heels of her hands on it, did a few dips and said, “My back is so fucked up.”

When she finished she stepped away from the wall, and
after a few seconds Misty did too. She put an arm around Patti's waist and Patti put an arm over her shoulders. Misty noticed me and said, “Hi. I'm sorry about my dad before.” I said it was okay. Misty looked me over and said, “So,
Patti
.”

“This is Henry,” Patti said.

“Hi, Henry,” Misty said. “Are you here for the thing?”

I nodded. “I'm from a magazine.”

“Are you going to write about Patti? You should put in there that everyone loves Patti.”

“It's a wakeboarding magazine,” I said. “Otherwise I would.”

“Good. See you tomorrow,” she told Patti, and walked off toward the hotel.

Patti took my hand without taking her eyes off Misty. Her hand was sweating. After a few steps Misty turned around, pointed at our hands like a triumphant detective, and turned around again.

 

P
atti's hotel room was like mine, full of strewn personal effects, piles of promo chum, and frantic lists on legal pads. We stood there holding each other for a minute, then kissed—sea-weed, plum wine, relief—and made a hurried trail of clothes to the bathroom. In the shower she turned her back to me, lightly hitched a leg, reached back, and slipped my cock inside her before I knew what she was doing. We rocked that way for a minute before she slipped me out and turned to face me. Then I was on my knees, half-drowning, and then we were out of the shower, drying each other. In bed her moan had a laugh in it, for a while.

The phone woke us at six. She picked it up and said, “You know, I want to thank you. This has really been a wake-up call
for me.” She hung up and said, “They never laugh. You should go before my kids start coming.”

We started kissing, though, and it was 6:40 before I walked out of the sleeping hotel onto a wide suburban street. The cars still had their headlights on, and I thought the headlights were beautiful and somehow witty. That afternoon Misty took second in the BMX finals, best on her team, and wouldn't let Patti get on the van to the airport until she kissed me hard in front of everyone.

 

P
atti lived in Santa Cruz, 450 miles north of Imperial Beach, in the bottom half of a gray Victorian six blocks from the ocean. Every weekend I could afford the Fun Fare, I flew up to San Jose, where she picked me up in her Rabbit and drove us to her place over a winding mountain highway.

My life had been the same for so long that the changes now put me in a state of continuous surprise. I started seeing things from Patti's point of view, which made mine look like a squint. We talked all the time, and under the conversations we had out loud there was another one going on, with me saying, “You mean it's okay?” and her saying, “Yes, who told you it wasn't, and why were you waiting for someone to tell you it was?” Once, as we walked on a cliff road over the ocean, I said my work wasn't taking me anywhere. “Really?” she said. “It sounds like you go everywhere. What if you were one of those lawyers you were going to be? You'd be looking forward to casual Friday.”

I didn't talk about the future, or what was happening between us. I wasn't worried about my independence. I'd had years of independence and never known what to do with it. Rent it out to married people? Make it into an end table? I just didn't want to push her.

But then
Wakeboarding
ran its course, and the only openings I could find were in Kentucky and Vermont, far from her. Suddenly I was looking at a commitment that would have been unthinkable a year earlier: Clean Page.

They'd been buying up magazines for five years. People at my jobs called them what people always call these things: the Death Star, the Evil Empire, the Brain Police. A Clean Page executive named Walter Denise had called me twice in three years, making jokes and trying to hire me. I'd said no both times, but their office was in San Jose, just over the hill from Santa Cruz.

Patti and I talked about it in a coffee shop where Highway 1 curled out of town, with fog blanking the windows. “I feel like I'm being a traitor,” I said.

“Okay,” she said, “but to what?”

I realized I had no answer to that. As the conversation went on I was moved, not by what we were talking about but by the fact that I had someone to talk to about it, being serious together the way people do, in a place where the waitresses patrolled with Silexes. “Did you like the guy on the phone?” Patti said. “What would you do there?” The harder I frowned and rubbed my temple, the happier part of me felt. This is how it's supposed to be, I thought, and asked her to marry me.