The Enthusiast (17 page)

“I think it's great,” Patti said, and I knew that by “it” she meant the moment when she'd be on the plane with earbuds and a drink.

Barney had dropped back by himself. I slowed down to join him. “That was weird, with those people last night,” I said. The
protestors had been gone when we got to the lab after the concert, and no one had mentioned them since.

“It was going on when I got here,” Barney said. “You can't not do the work.”

“Right, no,” I said.

“It's like those shirts you guys brought, with the burning skulls,” he said. “You know what I think that's about? It's how your head would feel if you wanted to think but you didn't have the resources for it. It's like, ‘Is it just me, or is it hot in here?' We should sell those shirts to everyone that has that problem. We could all quit what we're doing.” He sped up to catch the others, leaving me behind.

 

B
ack at the house Patti and I sat on the living room floor with the kids, cutting gift cards out of construction paper, gluing yarn and noodles to them, and sticking them on the mountain boards. No one scored hugs when we left except for a quickie Patti got off Pearl, and Barney's mumbled goodbye left me with as big a phantom limb as ever. A week later, in San Jose, I took one of the mountain boards for a novice ride in the park. When I saw a kid watching me the way I'd watched Don on his kite buggy, I handed it over.

I
got a call at work from Pete Levitan, the editor of
Model Kit World
in Learned, Pennsylvania, one of the titles I oversaw. “I've got a Dane Fredericks problem,” he said. “He's two weeks late with a story on burnishing. I think he's going through some kind of, I don't know what. We were having a conversation about gloss creep and he just went off on me. I was wondering if you could take him for coffee or something.”

I said okay and called Fredericks late that afternoon, when he'd be home from his job dispatching BART trains in San Francisco. He was one of
Model Kit's
star freelancers and I'd met him once, at a no-host coffee Clean Page gave for its local writers. He was a radio, capable of talking about fuselage decals for forty minutes, but that was typical.

“Dane?” I said. “It's Henry Bay at Clean Page.”

There was a pause, and then he said, “Hi,” in a guilty exhalation, as if he'd been moving from state to state for years but always knew they'd get him on the overdue burnishing story. “I'm really sorry about this,” he said. “That they had to call you in on it.”

“They didn't call me in,” I said. “I was just talking to Pete and he thought maybe we should get together.”

“I'm sorry I yelled at him. I've got a situation going on here.”

“What are you doing Saturday?”

“Saturday.” He sighed. “That's kind of the crux. Saturday is KitFest. I mean, I'll go, but it's not going to be pleasant.”

“Okay,” I said. “We can do it another day.”

“I mean, if you wanted to go over there together, that would be great. Rather than me walking in there by myself.”

I was running behind and had to get off the phone, so I said I'd go with him. When Saturday morning came I was still running behind, with three shirts taking too long in the dryer. I checked on them in the middle of shaving, triaged two of them onto hangers and let the third one ride, remembered my car needed gas, realized I had only enough time to go to the gas station that had the problem panhandler, and heard Patti, on the phone, say, “God. Let me—hold on a second.”

She caught me by the dryer. “I've got an emergency with one of my Rollerbladers,” she said. “Can you take Kris and Strother to their in-store?”

“Kris” was Santangelo, the one she might be sleeping with, although the way she said his name revealed nothing. “I'm taking that guy to the model kit thing,” I said. “I'm picking him up at ten thirty.”

“So they're all in San Francisco and the in-store's at one in Pacifica. Cici can bring them back.”

“No, but I'm taking him to the airport Hilton,” I said. “He wants me to go in with him.” The shaving cream was doing something chemical on my skin. “Can't they take a bus?”

“It's in their deal to get driven.”

“Okay.”

“It wouldn't be one bus. It's like three separate bus districts. They'd have to be gone two hours ago.”

“Okay.”

“Strother knew the kid that got shot on the bus.”

“Okay,” I said, punching the
kay
more than I should have, and rushed past her to finish shaving. The shirt in the dryer felt almost dry until I put it on. I hadn't eaten breakfast and my stomach made a noise like the word
diurnal
.

I said, “I need their addresses,” and went looking for my keys, annoying myself by trying a few places more than once. I looked twice on a table where a newspaper was open to the headline
THE PARKS ARE IN HIS BLOOD
. I'd been walking past that phrase for three days and it was starting to strobe. I found the keys on a chair the second time I looked there.

Patti came back from her computer and gave me a piece of paper with the addresses and phone numbers of the skateboarders, the store where they were appearing, and the restaurant near home where we were meeting people for dinner. She was on the phone when I left, saying, “What's the probation officer's name? No, the mother's officer.”

When I sat back in my car the shirt wasn't dry by any standard, and I leaned forward till Palo Alto. It wasn't raining for once, but the sky was black. We were having a long rainy season, with ants, mildew, wet cuffs, darkness at lunch, and lost-dog flyers washing off phone poles in smeared shreds, a world gone bad in the refrigerator.

Dane Fredericks, the
Model Kit World
writer, lived in a
stucco cottage in the Excelsior district of San Francisco. A woman in her forties was working in the yard, which was covered in lumps of white rock instead of grass. She was putting the sootier lumps in a bucket and replacing them with new ones from a Lowe's sack. She wore gardening gloves and waterproof clogs despite the lack of water involved. I said, “Hi. I'm Henry Bay.”

She stood up. “Yes. You're Dane's publisher.” We shook hands. “I'm Candice.”

“That looks nice,” I said, pointing to the rocks. She thanked me, opened the front door, yelled “Dane,” and left me in the doorway.

I went in. Every level surface in the house was covered with plastic models: cars, planes, blimps, castles, ad mascots, and Kodiak bears, all in the same half-melted realism, interspersed with piles of styrene, balsa, molding wax, and airbrush nozzles. In the kitchen the models had overrun the stove, but the microwave, with Mary Martin and the firing on Fort Sumter on top of it, still looked functional.

Dane came in wearing sweatpants, a
GLUE KEEPS ME TOGETHER
T-shirt, and a BART windbreaker on a walrus body. “Henry,” he said glumly, and picked up a three-foot-long black carrying case. He shook his head and sighed. “I guess we should do this.”

We went outside. He told Candice he'd be back by six, and they kissed as she handed him some money. When he started to put the model case in the backseat I said, “Can that go in the trunk? We have to pick a couple of guys up.”

“What guys?”

I told him about the skateboarders.

“Oh, God,” he said, “is that really necessary?” He wedged into the front seat with the case standing up between his knees.

“They're my wife's guys,” I said. “I'm helping her out.”

“I wish you would have given me some kind of warning,” he said. “I hate those kids. They come into a public transit system that people are trying to use, and that's their playground. They're told over and over, ‘Carry your skateboard, carry your skateboard,' so what do they not do? They literally go down the stair railings on them. God, that pisses me off.”

“No, I can imagine,” I said. “These guys probably don't use the system that much, though. They get driven as part of their deal.”

“Oh, that's a nice deal,” he said. “Not to have to lower yourself down with regular people.”

We drove in silence to Noe Valley, where I double-parked at Strother's house and beeped. He came out right away, seventeen and skinny in faded jeans, sky-blue Hindenburg shoes, and a short-sleeve plaid shirt in the L.A. beach style of 1962. His hair was from then too, a pomaded shelf shading his forehead. He tripped down the steps like a gyroscope and landed in the Echo's backseat with his skateboard on his knees, wheels up. The artwork on the board's underside was a street scene that leveraged the aesthetics of Japanese schoolgirls, Mexican graffiti taggers, and fifties Futurists. As we pulled out he said, “All right. Patti's husband.”

“Yeah, hi. I'm Henry Bay. This is Dane Fredericks.”

“Dane. That's a great name. I'm Strother.” He turned to me.

“So how sick is Patti?”

“Yeah, she's great,” I said. Dane looked confused. Don't worry, I thought, I'm the Switchblade Priest. I can talk to the young.

“Like in Hong Kong?” Strother said. “These local guys took us to a hotel with these great railings, and the hotel guy instantly comes out and goes, ‘You can't be here! I only tell you
once!' So Patti goes up to him and says, ‘Hi, what a beautiful structure you have here,' and she's saying how the greatest thing the local kids could ever dream of is for us to be there, and she's like, ‘You could be a hero to all the vast kids of Hong Kong,' and the kids start cheering for the guy, so he goes, ‘Okay. Ten minutes,' and Kris ollied this huge railing, so then it actually
was
the greatest thing for them. But Hong Kong was pretty cool, because Singapore is perverted. You skate where they don't want you to in Singapore, they
whip
you. Literally. It's like pirates. The guy should have a parrot. But Patti, yeah.”

“I didn't know you guys went to Singapore,” I said.

“No, that was orchestra. American Youth Orchestra? I had jet lag and I just got a new oboe. I was pulling notes out of my butt completely. But Singapore was worse than here, and this is pretty bad as far as people getting pissed at you for skating. Not just yelling, but people will literally aim their car at you so they just miss. I swear. But yeah, oboe. Do you play music at all?” I shook my head. “Dane?”

Dane shook his head, glowering out the window and tapping on his black case. I didn't know what bothered him most, the skateboard nationalism, the free travel, or the implicit cello girls, with their load-bearing thighs and their journals full of violet-inked entries about Strother.

Kris Santangelo lived in a condo complex near Stern Grove, where he opened the door wearing nothing but blue bikini underpants. He was trim. He said “Wait a minute” to someone on his cordless phone and “What?” to me. Before I could answer, he saw Strother in the Echo, said, “Oh,” and waved me inside.

The bedroom blinds were drawn, the bed a mess, and there was a smell of recent sex, like air let out of a beach toy. He continued his phone call, his hair flapping in his eyes. “Yeah, well, now it's definitely coming to a, you know, a culmination,
because the guy is here to take me down there and I don't know if I'm going. A guy. I don't know. Hold on. Who are you?”

“I'm Henry Bay. I'm Patti's husband.”

“Oh yeah? You're getting that?” He grinned in a way that could have meant anything from “Why would she want to sleep with you?” to “Who would want to sleep with either one of you?” to “That's funny, I was just sleeping with her two weeks ago in the hospitality suite in Austin.” It beat me. I wasn't the Switchblade Priest.

“It's Patti's husband,” he said on the phone. “I don't know, but he's here. Well, yeah, I'm getting in the car if this is resolved. I'm not getting in the car otherwise.” He parted the blinds, looked out at the car again, and saw Dane. “God, look at
that
guy. Hold on.” He put the phone down and slipped on a coral-colored T-shirt that showed Lucy from
Peanuts
with her head thrown back in porn-star ecstasy. She was reaching down on herself, her hand just out of the picture and wiggle lines around her wrist. The back of the shirt said,
I'M COMING, YOU BLOCKHEAD
.

“No, I did voice it,” he said on the phone. “I voiced it to Patti and she said she was voicing it to you.” He snapped the bikini's elastic. “Because I'm out there exemplifying you guys' shoes, and I'm supposed to have X number of stickers that are mine to sell, and—No, no way, because I give of myself out there, and do you see me going around with the thing where they measure your foot? In the shoe store? Because I'm not a shoe salesman, I'm—no, the metal thing, with the—okay, forget that, that's not the point.” He pointed at a pair of jeans in the closet. I handed them to him. “This has nothing to do with your and my's sex relationship. I'm trying to keep this separate from that. What? I don't know.” He put the pants on. “She's some cunt. I can't speak for that. I have to go. What? Yeah, no, I'm going. Yeah, the business thing is fine. I don't care. What? Oh, fuck off.”

He pushed End and threw the phone on the bed. I followed him out to the parking berms, where he got his skateboard out of a Passport with off-road lights. The artwork on his board showed bleeding hands gripping a crown of thorns. In the car he said to Strother, “She's torturing me to the fucking death, man. Hey, can we go?”

They started discussing kick-flips and seemed to be ignoring Dane and me. “The story you're doing for Pete,” I said to Dane. “Is there something about it that's kind of stopping you?”

“The five most common burnishing mistakes?” Dane said.

“No, I could do that in my sleep. It's like I said on the phone, there's this other thing going on.” He glanced at the rearview.

“I have a club with some guys where we get together and model every week. It's always at my house, and I always have to get the snacks. It's supposed to be BYO snacks, but isn't it just the strangest thing how some people forget? ‘Oh, I remembered to bring my 1:72 Mercury that I keep screwing up the foiling on and I have to ask you to help me, but somehow I can't remember to bring taco chips.' Then they enter these things in competition and people go, ‘Wow, that looks good.' Yeah, I wonder how
that
happened.

“So this one guy, Craig Decker. I call him Craig
Dicker
now. I mean, not to other people, but that's my name for him. He's a good modeler. Or in certain ways he's good. He's good with brass. So, but Craig's big thing now is making his own decals on the computer. He got a printer that does decals. So two weeks ago, everyone's there, and he holds up these decals and he says, ‘
These
insignia can go on a
life
-scale car,' and they're city parking stickers. An Area A sticker and an Area C. And these guys are going, ‘
Wow
, Craig, that's
great
.' And I got”—his voice tightened—“so fucking angry.”

Kris and Strother had stopped talking, but Dane didn't notice. He said, “But I didn't—I just waited for the merriment to die down, and I said, ‘I don't want that in my house.' Just calmly, I said, ‘Craig? I don't want that here.' And he says, ‘Why, what's the problem?' I said, ‘The problem is it's illegal, A, and it's selfish, Craig,' and he goes, ‘Oh, give me a break,' like I'm being unreasonable. I said, ‘You make those in your computer, and all your friends' names and phone numbers are in that computer, and when this gets discovered and your computer gets confiscated, everyone here that thinks this is so wonderful is going to have to go down and lose I don't know how much time off of work, and be fingerprinted, and then you're permanently in the database, and for all I know you have porno on there,' and this guy Terry jumps up and goes, ‘Okay, calm down, Dane. Just calm down.'”