The Enthusiast (5 page)

“There is?”

“As of today, yeah. I caught Arnold just after he made some money.”

“From our magazine, or the other ones?” I hadn't meant to say “our.”

“No, on the Broncos,” Rensselaer said. “He said I could hire an associate editor so I don't keel over. Not that you should suddenly move here. Hold on a second. Jillian wants to say hi.”

 

B
arney drove straight from Cal Poly to Doctor Taco and walked in at 11:00
P.M.
I was thrilled to see him till I registered the expression on his face, which put me back in Rancho Cahuenga the day I spilled Sprite on his centrifuge.

I hadn't expected him to be mad—I'd told him on the phone a few times how slowly the lawsuit was going, and he hadn't seemed concerned—but the stare of concentration was a ray gun now. We sat at a table and he said, “I don't understand what happened here, Henry.”

“I was offered a job,” I said.

“A job?”

“At a publishing company.” I told him the titles, which sounded ridiculous when I said them out loud.

“Is that what you want to do? People's hobbies?”

“The lawyer's still there,” I said. “He's still doing the lawsuit. But it could be years before they have the trial.”

“See, that's okay, Henry, because Mom and Dad are going to be alive for years, and they're going to need the money. You see how that works?”

“I screwed up college, Barney. I can't do what you can do.”

“No, you're not doing what
you
can do. This was for you, Henry. The material in the experiment was you.”

What a memory on this guy. I looked over at the phone. The Doctor Taco Hunger Hotline was for incoming orders, but employees were allowed to make calls for family emergencies, and this definitely was one. I could have walked over and left Rensselaer a “really sorry” on Dobey Publications' answering machine. Historically my threshold for Barney being mad at me was zero, and my stomach was killing me now, but I said, “I want to try this for a while.”

Even Jillian patting the couch next to her couldn't explain what I was doing. It had to be that I'd finally found my town, a place that would demand no more of me than I could deliver, but how would you explain that to Barney, who could meet any demand you gave him out to the hundredth decimal place? He got up, went out to his car, and started it with a sound like an old photograph being torn down the middle.

 

T
he train was Gerald's idea. I had too much stuff to take on a plane and too little for a U-Haul, and if I slept sitting up in coach, the travel money from Dobey would cover it.

Mom had said on the phone that just because I was changing my mind didn't mean I couldn't change it back, or that I had to. Dad said I should do what I was interested in and not worry about him. Gerald said, “Stop feeling like shit,” as we sat on a bench by the ticket kiosk and the train from L.A. rolled toward us. “Do we doubt for one minute what Buck Owens would do with a woman like this in the picture?”

“It's not just her,” I said.

“Do we think those songs of his are just
songs
?”

“No.”

“No. We're learning that, aren't we?”

The train stopped and we dragged my stuff over to it. Gerald had even advised me on what food to take: Pilot crackers, beef jerky, apples, and white cheese. That was what the forty-niners had brought to California, he said, and it was about time someone took it back.

A
t the second building I tried in Clayton, a chalk-green box called The Tradewinds, I rented an apartment with looming ceilings, light-sucking gold carpet, and an alley view. I unpacked, went shopping at a quart-beer grocery store, made a liverwurst and chutney sandwich, and slept on the floor, all in a dense new loneliness. In the morning I was at the
Kite Buggy
office an hour before anyone else.

When Suzanne came in she gave me a desk and an employee orientation packet containing a zero-tolerance drug policy and two pizza discount coupons. Rensselaer arrived a few minutes later, waved me over, and said, “Ever been to Glassell Park?”

Once, I said, when I'd gotten lost between Pasadena and downtown L.A. He opened a manila envelope and shook out some snapshots of six tough-looking Latin teenagers posing
with two kite buggies in front of a graffiti-covered culvert. The guys wore wife-beaters, high-water khakis, and pompadours that looked like the Brancusi sculptures Gerald had stood me in front of at the L.A. Museum. The buggies were customized with chromed rails, pleated seats, and brass cutouts of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

“Low buggiers,” I said.

“I love them,” Rensselaer said, and pointed to a guy with
HIJO DEL VIENTO
tattooed on his shoulder. “Nacio Moreno. He wrote the letter.” He read aloud from loopy red cursive on notebook paper. “
Let me tell you…
What's this word?”

“Ese
,” I said. “It means ‘this.'”

“They call people ‘this'? That's great. Hey, This.” He poked me.
“Let me tell you,
ese,
the cops chase us every time we ride here, and we don't give a shit. Those beach boys come up here from Venice to ride and we send them back to their fucking beach. We think you have an outstanding magazine.”
He put everything back in the envelope and handed it to me. “This is a story,
ese
. You must question these men closely.”

I was on my way back to my desk when Jillian came in. “Henry ‘Hank'!” she said. “Amazing. Where are you living?” I told her and she winced. “You should get your furniture at Massey's. Tell me when you go and I'll help you.” She'd grown bangs, an unnecessary perfecting touch.

That night at the Tradewinds, I was making sardines when I heard a guy scream, “YOU SAID WE WERE HAVING SPAGHETTI!” loud enough to be coming from my oven. A woman yelled at him to stop yelling. He yelled, “I'M NOT EATING THAT! YOU FUCKING BITCH! YOU NEVER TELL THE TRUTH!”

I went into the hall, traced the yelling to the apartment across from mine, and went back inside. It went on for forty
minutes before one of them slammed the door and pounded down the stairs.

When it started the next night I knocked on their door. It was opened by a woman in her forties with marsupial circles under her eyes, and dressed in the navy skirt and white blouse of a work uniform. Her son, sixteen and muscular, hung back and stared at me with Wanted-poster calm. Their place was blanketed with old newspapers and back issues of the low-impact enthusiast magazine
TV Guide
.

I introduced myself and asked if they could hold it down. The woman said, “We don't complain about you,” and closed the door. A guy came out of an apartment two doors down, said, “He exposes himself, too,” and went back inside. I ate my sardines, walked to the drug-and-discount store by the highway, and got stuck in a consumer warp where I couldn't find anything to buy but couldn't leave until I'd bought something, which turned out to be a purple towel.

I called Barney once a week, keeping him on the phone for three minutes that cost me $4.55 while I told him about my new life and he answered with short
Mm
s or silence. At work I took my associate editing seriously. My skills were modest, but a lot of the copy that came in was written by fifteen-year-olds and hard not to improve. I made frequent mistakes, though, getting names mixed up in captions or pushing the wrong button on the phone, saying, “Hello?” into Dobey's private calls and scaring his bookie.

Rensselaer said not to worry about it. “The economy runs on mistakes. You ever have a problem with an insurance company?” I said no. “But you've seen their big buildings,” he said. “Every other floor is for making mistakes. The floors in between are for saying the mistakes are being straightened out.”

I rationed the number of times a day I looked over at Jil
lian and the minutes I spent talking to her. After a few weeks she invited me to go with her and some friends to hear Ricky Skaggs play Paducah. The friends had all gone to college, most of them to the one in Clayton. Jeff, who raced kayaks and restored pinball machines, drove. I sat in the back of his Galaxie between Dina, a journeywoman plasterer, and Scott, a county computer administrator and upright bassist. Jillian introduced me as “Henry ‘Hank' Bay,” though I'd never used the nickname.

Dina asked where I was living. When I said the Tradewinds, Steve, who made artistic fireplace implements, said, “What for?” Dina flicked the back of his head and said, “That's real mature.”

Megan, who sold dresses at Mode O'Day and sewed her own designs at night, said, “I'm going to Kenya in the fall for two weeks.”

“Plush toy!” Jillian said, one of her terms of approval.

“I know,” Megan said. “I'm learning Dahalo. It has the click consonant.” She said a foreign phrase with two loud
pocks
in it. “That was ‘Where can I buy fabric like you're wearing?'” Everyone tried it. Steve said, “When do the
pock
hyenas stop swarming?” and Scott said, “I will
pock
give you all my
pock
money for the antidote.” I threw my jaw out.

Steve said he was being stiffed on some andirons he'd made for a movie producer and his wife. “Now I'm stuck with these stupid andirons with the little flute-playing Hopi guy on them. I have to send them to the houseware gallery in Chicago.”

“What movies did he make?” Jillian said.

“I'm not sure,” Steve said. “I think he did that one where the learning-disabled guy can talk to the dead.”

“I'd love it if I could talk to them,” Jeff said. “I always get nervous. Especially with the cute dead.”

Jillian asked Dina if she knew a guy named Jack, who taught adult-ed bookbinding in Clayton. Dina said, “No, and don't fix me up with him.”

“Me, either,” Megan said.

“I called it first,” Dina said.

“Lick rocks,” Jillian said.

“She's always trying to fix people up for romantic bliss,” Megan said. “She's terrible at it. Don't let her do it to you.”

“I won't,” I said.

The theater had a bar in the lobby, and all the friends drank Heilemans for an hour, especially Scott and Jeff. When the lights started blinking for the show, Jillian came over to them and said, “It's time.”

“It's
time
,” Scott said.

“Time to take control of your family's financial future,” Jeff said.

“Time to decide if you actually like Elgar.”

“And we can help, with our worldwide resources. Who are we?”

“Hell if we know.”

“At this stage of the evening?”

“You should live the way we live now so long.”

The friends seemed like sophisticates to me—that night, anyway—and I didn't talk much. When the show started I grabbed the seat next to Jillian's and smiled diligently at the music. In the fourth song, the let's-slow-things-down one, I put my hand on hers on the armrest. She gave mine a friendly squeeze and slipped hers away, but I didn't see anything going on between her and Scott, Steve, or Jeff, or between anyone else. Maybe the six friends had a ban on being more than friends, or maybe they'd already run through one another the first year of college.

I kept up the watch all summer, but saw nothing except a week of flirtation between Scott and Dina that was too ironic to go anywhere. I spent my evenings with all of them at Riddenhauer's Bar, trying to play pool and listening to Jillian say, “Lick rocks,” when someone impugned her judgment or her car. It was a PG-13 imprecation that fit her perfectly, but she used it only with the five of them.

The answer to the boyfriend question came on a cold night in the fall, when we'd all gone to the movies. It was my first time alone with her and my first visit to her duplex, where she was lending me a book about the Swedish emigration to America. The place was a shrine to the friends, decorated with collages of group vacation photos, napkin caricatures, and notes they'd left under her windshield wipers.

She sat on the bed to look through the book before letting it go. I sat next to her and put my hand on her knee. She looked down at it and said, “Outside the clothes but below the waist.”

“How do you mean?” I said.

“I miss the system,” she said. “As soon as you grow up, it's supposed to be all or nothing. Who says you want to go all the way with everyone?”

“I don't want to with everyone,” I said.

“See?” she said. “It was useful. You should be able to say, ‘Here's someone who should be inside the clothes but above the waist,' or whatever.” She lifted my hand like a derrick and put it on the bedspread. “How come you're not going to be a lawyer?”

I told her about Dad, Troup, discovery, and motions. She said, “Is this better?”

“I think so. Do you like working there?”

“It's okay.” She paused. “You know, I lived with Steve for a year.”

“I didn't know that.”

She nodded. “It keeps trying to grow back. Do you like him?”

“Sure.”

“Yeah. He's a fine young man. He'd do anything to be of help.” She stood up, led me to the door, and said goodnight. Outside it was so cold and dry that I could hear dogs and car doors blocks away. I had three layers of clothes on, but I was from the desert and it was freezing here.

 

A
week later, on the TV set at Riddenhauer's, a newscaster said that the bomber who called himself Freebird had blown up a lab that developed identification chips to be implanted under the skin of animals. “Sure, these are strictly for pets,” he wrote in a communiqué to
The New York Times
. “Have you had a vaccination lately? A ‘routine' blood test? Whose little pet are you?”

At work I interviewed Nacio Moreno, the low buggier, who said the L.A. kite buggiers feuded like surfers over the best riding spots. When I showed Rensselaer my interview with an African American buggier called Chief Boy R.D., he said, “Yeah, good, but I can't show that language to Arnold.” I edited it so that a passage in which the Chief warned rivals away from his turf read,
“Some of these [rascals] are trying to [interfere with] our [activity] up,” says the seasoned Compton buggier. “That [situation] is [messed] up. If they [interfere] with our [activity], we'll put a cap in their [actual] [body]. Go on, [disrupt] my [activity] up, [bad-hygiened] [rascal].”

One day Dobey called me across the hall into his office, whose door said
OWNER
in the black-and-gold letters people stick on their mailboxes.

“Jim tells me you're doing this thing about the Spanish kids in L.A,” he said. I nodded. “That's good,” he said. “Things get started out there. I just want us to be careful. He said there's some of this ‘screw the police' stuff. We don't champion that.” I said we wouldn't.

“Good,” he said, and a few days later he took me to lunch at the Clayton Hofbrau, where no one else from work went, but several other Popeye-like guys did. “Do you think this is really going to be a sport at some point?” he said. “I mean, in the kinds of numbers like paintball?”

“It might,” I said. “I mean, it could.”

“Because the thinking was, all the other sports were taken. Look at the newsstand. You need a magazine just to go jogging.”

“Here's how to tie your shoes,” I said. He smiled and pointed at me. I felt a flush, happy and then annoyed at myself for being happy.

“What about long range?” he said. “Where do you see yourself?”

“I haven't thought too much about it,” I said.

“You should. This business you're working for? Grew out of wedding invitations. School menus were a big piece of business.” He paused. “I have trouble talking to Jim sometimes. I think he thinks all this is funny.”

They'd had a few arguments in Dobey's office lately, their voices loud but indistinct from across the hall. “He works on it seriously,” I said.

“That's good that you say that,” Dobey said. “That's a good tact for you to take.”

We went back to the office. As I passed Rensselaer's desk he smiled and said, “Count your change.”

That night I walked in on Jillian and Steve in the back hall
at Riddenhauer's. He was leaning on the wall, pulling her toward him, and she was saying, “This is how we get in trouble.” He let go of her when he saw me. She said, “Hey, Henry,” and pointed toward the room where the pool table was. “I've got losers.”

 

A
few days later, Rensselaer said, “Look at these,” and dropped a handful of skateboarding magazines on my desk:
Thrasher, Transworld, Bow to No Man
. The stories inside were set in green type on orange background, and the photos of emancipated minors flying off handrails were spattered and solarized. The magazines offered not just a sport but an inverse world, where ramps and drained pools were the places of business, and the normal life squatting just off the page was the dangerous hobby. Sitcoms and Filofaxes, you take your life in your hands with that shit.

Half an hour later Rensselaer took the magazines back and went into Dobey's office. I heard their raised voices again. When Rensselaer returned he pointed at me and gestured across the hall.