The Enthusiast (9 page)

“Gerald?” I said.

“You
flight
risk.”

“Hey.”

“Hey
, baby.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm in New York City. That was true about the fourth phone number, by the way.”

“I know,” I said. “And I'm moving again.”

“When?”

“Sunday. To Albany, New York. I've got a job at
Martial Arts World.”

“Oh, that's wonderful.
Martial Arts World.
Now, have you hired professional movers to break your belongings?”

“I'm getting a U-Haul.”

“And sir, you are aware that the vehicle may have higher clearance than you're accustomed to.”

“I just need you to initial here and here.”

“I'll have your contract and all that good stuff in just a minute,” he said. “Don't you hate that? ‘All that good stuff'? That's worse than ‘puppy.' ‘We'll have this puppy wrapped up by close of business today.' You want a hand with those boxes?”

“Seriously?”

“On a Sunday? In Albany? I'm all about helping, big boy. I'm all about helping with the boxes.”

“That's great.”

“That's another one. ‘I'm all about.' Fucking horrible.”

 

M
y new apartment was in a three-story building five blocks from the state capitol. I got there on Sunday afternoon, parked the U-Haul van, and waited for Gerald, who came speeding up the street in a two-year-old Lexus, braked hard to stop nose to nose with the van, got out laughing, and embraced me in the gutter. He'd dropped the ex-GI look for a blue blazer, white business shirt, and tropical-weight khakis, and he looked like he'd seen nothing but good luck and health since college.

He stepped back and assessed the building. “We'll need to go in that window,” he said. “We can do block and tackle. I hate to bring in the crane unless it's completely necessary.”

“The union comes into play,” I said.

“Look at you!” he said. “
Martial Arts World
! They say Henry Bay knows the way of the Shaolin masters. They say he knows the way of fighting that is not fighting.”

“Yeah, I'm great at the not fighting.” I opened the back of the U-Haul. Gerald jumped in, hung his blazer on a hook, and picked up the back of a leather armchair I'd bought used in Massachusetts.

“Chair like this is indispensable,” he said. “A man subjects himself for ten long hours, he comes home, he needs this chair.
‘It's all going to greater metropolitan Hell out there, honey. I'm not talking about in the streets.
That
battle is
long
lost.'”

“‘I'm talking about what at one time was a
business
,'” I said, taking the legs.

“‘What we liked to think of as a certain set of
standards
,'” he said. “I say that to my woman every night. You need a chair like this to say that in.”

“Who's your woman?” I said.

“Chloe,” he said. “She's wonderful. You'd love each other. She'd leave me for you like that.” We carried the chair inside. The little lobby was dim and mop-smelling, the brass mailboxes tarnished almost black. “She's in graduate school. City planning. One man to another? She has the largest student loans of any woman I've ever seen.”

We took the chair upstairs on a groaning lattice-caged elevator. As I unlocked the apartment a guy came out of the one next door and said, “Hello, I'm Robert. Are you fellows moving in?”

“I am,” I said. “I'm Henry Bay.”

“Gerald Hauser. I'm just advising.”

We shook hands with Robert, who was in his seventies, with two thick brown growths on his forehead and his pants up on his stomach under an old cardigan. “Glad to meet you,” he said.

“Now, are you in government?”

“No, I'm going to be working for a magazine,” I said. “
Martial Arts World
.”

“
Martial Arts
. No, we never sold that one. I was the concessionaire over here in the capitol building for many years. But that's the karate.” I nodded. “There were times when I could have used that,” he said.

Gerald said, “Someone told me that
karate
means ‘the empty hand.' It's from the same root as
karaoke
. That's ‘the empty orchestra.'”

“Empty orchestra,” Robert said. “Oh, because it's just the music playing. That's good.”

“Isn't that nice?” Gerald said.

“I went to one once,” Robert said. “One of the lawmakers was retiring, so they had a big group and they asked me to come along. I wouldn't get up. They said Robert, Robert, but you couldn't get me up there.”

“No, you don't want to do that,” Gerald said. “If the orchestra's empty, that's their problem.”

Robert smiled. “That's very good. Now, are you in that business also, the magazines?”

“No,” Gerald said. “I buy and sell metal.”

“Oh, boy,” Robert said. “I had a car that I let them do that with. I took it out there and watched them pick it up with that machine and drop it on all these other old cars. All the way there I was thinking, This is terrific, I'll get a bus pass and to heck with this thing, but boy. I didn't think it would affect me, but it did.”

“It was part of your life,” I said.

“No, I wouldn't say that,” Robert said. “Well, I don't want to hold you fellows up. I just wanted to welcome you. This is a good building. We don't have any of the lawmakers themselves, but there are a couple of gals downstairs that are legislative assistants. They serve as the front lines very often. Okay. Gerald and…”

“Henry,” I said.

“Okay.” He went back inside.

I'd found the apartment online. It was my usual, but with Gerald there the standard features—armchair ghosts on the walls, phone wires painted lumpily to the moldings—shone with sordidness. I hurried the move and we got into his car to go to dinner.

“Concessionaire,” he said as he started the engine.

“The unique vocal stylings of the Concessionaires,” I said.

“Yeah, they were unique. Do we know where we're going?”

“No. I thought we'd just look for something.” We pulled out.

“What kind of metal do you buy and sell?”

“Strategic,” he said. “I play the palladium. Although gallium is more and more on my mind these days. They use that in your silicon chips. You can't make a karaoke machine without it.”

We circled out from the dead downtown and finally found a brightly lit storefront restaurant with a neon sign in an alphabet I didn't recognize. There was one other customer, a woman eating a pink entrée and reading Richard North Patterson. The waiter, who could have been Indonesian or Inuit, brought menus. When he left I said quietly, “Do you know what cuisine this is?”

“No, and I live in New York,” Gerald said.

The menus were in the same alphabet as the neon, with semi-translations:
Chicken pektânnu. Beef pektânnu.
We both ordered the chicken. “Spaetzle or taro with that?” the waiter said. We said taro.

“How's New York?” I said when he left.

“Well. You've been there, right?” Gerald said. I shook my head. “Wow. Well, you owe it to yourself. And they're ready for you. I moved there the day after I graduated; I gave them no lead time at all, and they were ready for me anyway. By my third day of walking to work I had my coffee guy, my bakery guy, and my fruit guy. The whole city runs on guys. It's like polytheism with immediate rewards.

“You know how your big cities are supposed to diminish people? You're supposed to feel small in the face of it? That's bullshit. You walk down the street in New York, you see all these sagas going on, you smell thirty smells in a block, and
you
snowball
. These things are
added
unto you. If you want people to feel small, you have to put them in the suburbs. They drive those cars that look like dump trucks to make up for it. They put on weight so they won't blow away.”

The food came, a greenish stew and chunks of steaming, soap-like vegetable. “Have you heard this music that's coming out now?” Gerald said.

“Probably not,” I said.

“They've got a guy rapping, and then there are these little snatches of talking and like Arabic wailing going in and out. I didn't know what that was about till I moved there. Because two hundred years ago, you went for a walk and you heard the birds singing and you went home and wrote the
Pastorale
, right? But New York, you go outside, it's like a radio that gets every station at once, plus the bonus cursing-nanny channel. So you go home and write that.” He jabbed at an air synthesizer, “‘I was a, I was a,
what
is a,
you
were a,'” scratched a turntable, “
Wheersht wheersht
,” and jabbed a key again, “‘Kali
zulfon
, I was a.'

“But then you turn onto a desirable side street? And there are the birds! The birds haven't gone anywhere! There are trees with little rubber collars on them. There are doormen. There are gifted children. You want
Pastorale
? Your guy has some nice
Pastorale
today, no problem.”

He was leaning back in his fiberglass chair, draping himself over it like a high-finance guy in an interview photo. I congratulated myself on having been right about his future, a gold rush with hipper minerals.

We ordered coffee. It came in jelly glasses with straws, and Gerald's had an umbrella. “So,” he said, “the publishing game. I hear that's a sweet racket. I hear you boys talk into Dictaphone machines and drink Martini cocktails. I hear you get your collars made to order.”

“It's all true,” I said. “Actually, I don't think I'm getting anywhere.”

“No? But you work with people who devote themselves to things, right?”

“Are you kidding?” I told him a few enthusiast stories, and every time I finished one he made me tell another. He couldn't get enough of people who got interested in something and looked around one day to see that the something was everything.

“I take all that back about New York,” he said. “You don't need New York at all. That's wonderful, what you're doing.”

“Why is it wonderful?” I said.

“To help people give themselves over? If you live in Japan, you see the monk with the begging bowl, you put something in there, because he's not just trying to get
his
parking validated. He's doing it for everyone. It's like, ‘I have a tea guy, a rice guy, and a guy who touches the essence.' But Japan's got nothing on us. We don't just go in for things, we go in and never come out again. Skydiving. Model trains. Wars. Whatever's handy. And you're right in the middle of it. You should take some national pride.”

“You saw my apartment, right? That's a bad apartment.”

“No question. You're doing public interest work. You always wanted to. Don't worry about the apartment. Those things will come.”

He dropped a twenty on the table and drove me back to my building. As we idled at the curb he handed me a business card and said, “Now, Henry, this card has my telephone number on it. Anything you hear that might help us solve this thing, day or night, I want you to call that number. You understand?”

“Take me with you,” I said.

“Get your toiletries. You'll love it. They'll love you.”

“Yeah. I'll come down and see you, though.”

“I should fucking well hope so. We'll have a large time.”

“Okay.”

“That's another one,” he said. “‘A large time.' Don't you hate that?”

I said I did and went up to my apartment. I was too tired to unpack my sheets so I slept in the chair.

The job at
Martial Arts World
was okay except that I kept finding myself on the floor. Jerry Wing would say, “Henry, look at this layout a second,” or Lisa Schneider would say, “Henry, quick question.” I'd start walking with them, then feel a light pressure behind me and my weight lifting off, and then I'd be looking at the ceiling, amazed that I'd gone for it again. Bill Lam, the editor in chief, would say, “Dojo's down the hall, boys,” being extra cool by not looking up from what he was doing.

I put off going to New York to see Gerald because
Martial Arts World
was understaffed and I worked on weekends. When we hired some new people, the weekends cleared up but the new people made me superfluous. I found a job at
Rock Hunter
, in Peking, Kentucky, and when I packed I put Gerald's card in with my pictures of Jillian.

I
n my ten years on the road I never got two hundred dollars ahead, and I ran up a long list of places I didn't need to see again. Evenings fell hard in those scraping-by towns. You could chart my lack of progress by the cars I drove: a Sidekick, an Escort, a Protégé, a Kadett, an Aspire, a Justy, and for six awful months a Flurry, one of the most entry-level cars ever made by a Big Three manufacturer.

The TV commercials for the Flurry had shown college-age kids, braless and Fugee-haired, silently laughing it up as they drove down a mercury vapor–lit expressway with Scottish techno on the soundtrack. In real life Flurry was a perfect name for the car because it weighed nothing and a gust of wind could move it over a lane and a half. There were two recalls after I bought it, one for its gossamer steering linkage and one for its Molotov gas tank. Mine was stolen twice, but viciously
turned up a few blocks away both times. My model was the Hatchback GS, but if they'd called it the Associate Editor I wouldn't have argued.

I had the Flurry when I worked at
Spelunk
, in Silica, Missouri. For the first five weeks I managed to duck my caving lesson, but the day came when I had to get up at 4:00
A.M.
and put on orange coveralls, Wellington boots, abseiling gloves, and a helmet with two headlamps and a chinstrap—all new items sent to the magazine for review. I looked like a guy in a ballet about a mining disaster.

Geoff Florian, the other associate editor, picked me up at five in the company Willys. “Morning, lad,” he said as I got in. He had a lower-middle-class English accent, a little social grievance in every vowel. His skin was pink going on purple, his straw hair flyaway, his belly a placidly rising and falling dome. He was wearing the same outfit I was, but his had been in caves.

Years ago, in London, Geoff had written columns for the celebrity magazine
Hullo, Then!
, the travel magazine
Off You Go!
and the fashion magazine
Good on You!
Then he'd gotten caught up in some journalistic scandals, the fake Hitler diaries and the morphed Kiki Dee nude photos. He'd taken a long slide, passing through the Hollywood overseas press corps and two Yeti tabloids in Florida before bottoming out here.

“Sleep any?” he asked.

I pointed across the street at the Silica Tavern, home of the bottomless beer pitcher and a 1970s cover band whose patch-cord thunderclaps had trained me to dream fast. “They were racing their trucks all night,” I said.

Geoff pulled out, shaking his head at the view of stubby black mountains under constant storm heads. “Never quite believe this is where I've come to,” he said, smoking a Merit down past its logo and starting another with the Willys' ancient,
spark-dripping lighter. “
Mmf
. I'll confess, though, Henry, there are times I feel it was waiting for me all along. Silica, Missouri, lying there so quiet I never heard it. ‘We're ready when you are, Geoff. No, take your time, we brought something to read. What is it? An entire magazine about people who go about in caves. Oh, you laugh now. Laugh while you may, Geoff. We'll wait.'”

It started to rain as we got onto the state highway and kept it up most of the way. Twenty miles out of Silica, Geoff said, “Possibility of our being sold, by the bye. Nothing confirmed, but you want to keep your feelers out.”

“Really?” I said. “Who would buy it?”

“Company in California. San Jose. That's in the Silicon Valley, isn't it? Modern marvels. Fit all the world's wisdom in a handy suppository. Off you go!” He flicked a finger. “Any rate, that's where they are. Outfit called Clean Page. Plan is to buy every enthusiast title on the rack, sell the ads from one shop, and own the trade shows as well. Maximize efficiency, like Henry Ford. Rivet number two-eighty-three, day upon day, it's all I know and my father before me. Downsizers, naturally. Find ourselves in Miami, covering the hound dog races.”

In the afternoon we got off the highway west of St. Louis, followed a two-lane road into low scrub-covered hills, parked under a pin oak, and put on backpacks full of ropes and gear. It had stopped raining and the air smelled like metal. Geoff checked a map and found the cave entrance, a five-foot crack in a hillside half hidden by trees. The cave was prized for its tight passages, icy mud storms, and swarming bats.

We lit our carbide lamps and stepped from the muggy world into a cool hallway of rock just tall enough to stand in. “Nice phreatic passage,” Geoff said. He'd been an amateur caver in England, “just mucking about at Swildons Hole and Easegill. Into the hollow and get the damp on you. Sexual, I don't doubt.”

To me it felt more like walking around inside an eggplant. Half a mile in, Geoff yanked me back at the last second from a thirty-foot hole and shined his lamp down a metal rope ladder bolted to the rock. “Thoughtful of someone,” he said. “Won't be needing the descenders.”

At the bottom of the ladder we walked down another corridor, this one with a stream in the middle of it. Geoff pointed out cave pearls, calcite straws, and degenerate-eyed fish. When I got my head stuck in a tight passage, he barked at me to relax till I scraped free. Just past the squeeze, we came into a room-like chamber twenty feet across.

Geoff turned in a slow arc, his headlight illuminating a bedroll, sealed food containers, aluminum dishes, a hibachi, and a milk crate full of folded clothes.

“Dweller,” he said.

I shined my lamp around too. There were clothes soaking in a washtub by a pool of water, and a pair of tan pants hanging from a clothesline attached to the walls with pitons. Beside the bedroll were worn paperbacks of
Centennial
and
Shogun
and a magazine called
Wet and Ready
, from an old heritage of enthusiast titles.

“Current,” I said.

Geoff nodded. “Shame no one's home. Readers love it. Living the dream.” We started back the way we'd come. “See it in England now and then, front page of the
Sun
—
THE NEW TROGLODYTES!
Filthy little face peering out at the camera, mental as anything, of course—”

He stopped suddenly, and I looked up from the cave floor to see a guy pointing a handgun at us. We threw our hands up, yelling, “Hello! Sorry! We're sorry!”

The guy was in his thirties, a little beefy in twill pants, a white business shirt half-soaked with sweat, a small backpack,
and a caving helmet. “Who are you?” he said in a Missouri twang.

“Very sorry,” Geoff said. “Let's be calm. We must have given you a start. We were—”

“I
said
, Who are you?”

“Right. Sorry. I'm Geoffrey Florian and this is Henry Bay. We're with
Spelunk
magazine. About caves?”

“I don't think I've seen it,” the guy said.

“Not important,” Geoff said.

My voice shaky, I said, “We can just—”

“I don't suppose you'd like to talk to us,” Geoff said. “A short interview?” The guy's eyes narrowed. “It's just that our readers are always interested in people who've actually made their homes in caves. Or we can be on our way and sorry for the interruption. Entirely up to you.”

“It's up to me? The guy with the gun? Amazing.” He lowered it, though, and thought for a minute. “You can't put my name in there. Or where this is.”

“No, no,” Geoff said. “Complete discretion.” I had no idea where he was getting his calm from. Either the Kiki Dee thing had battle-hardened him or Silica had gotten him past caring.

The guy thought some more, then nodded us back to the room we'd found. When we got in there he put his gun and backpack on the floor, scooped water from the pool, drank, and sat down on a rock.

The three headlamps brought the light up to winter gloom, and I could see a drawing that covered most of one wall. It had the plain dark lines of an Altamira mammoth but it was some kind of flow chart, ovals and rectangles with names in them. Some of the names had been crossed out. I wondered if they were serial murder victims.

“Sir—” Geoff said.

“Larry,” the guy said.

“Larry. It's good to meet you, Larry.” He took a tape recorder out of his pack and held it up. “I could use this or it's perfectly fine not to.” Larry shrugged. “That's very kind. Thank you,” Geoff said, and pressed Record. “So, to jump in, then, ah, how long have you lived here?”

“Few months,” Larry said. He squirted lighter fluid on the coals in the hibachi and lit them.

“Have you done any mapping of these caves?” Geoff said.

“Or animal counts?”

“Nope. I bet that would be real engrossing, though.”

“So, in general, then, what would you say led you to, uh, live here?”

“What led me. Yeah.” He stared at the fire for a minute, shook his head, and turned to us. “How much do you guys know about market research?”

We looked at each other. “Not that much,” I said.

“Yeah, well, that's what led me here. Market research. Working at a company in St. Louis. We broke the population down into groups and found out everything about them. What they bought, what they wore, what they watched, what they drank, how they talked. We started out with all the old classifications, like Sustainers and Achievers and I Am Me's, and then we broke them
way
down. We had eighty subgroups. Nobody's Homies, Dior Christians, Home Despots, Shaft in Golf Pants. The energy just to think up the names would power a small city. But the data were beautiful. The ad agencies? Political parties? Wanted to marry us.

“I did interviews. I ran focus groups. These women would come in to talk about hair extensions, or diet shakes…”He trailed off, studying the fire's shadows on the cave wall.

“It's harder to hit on women now than it's ever been before,”
he said finally. “I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it is. You almost have to be from the same little tribe they are, and like I say, there are eighty. You can have a conversation, but you both know nothing's going to happen, because she's a Guyless in Prada and you're a Keg with Legs.”

The flames had died down and the coals were glowing. He opened a food canister and put some lumps of raw meat on the grill. “But I
knew
these women,” he said. “From the research. I knew how to talk to them. I don't mean the ones that came in for the groups. I was strict about that. Fairly strict. But I'd see other ones out there that were just like them. I knew their psychographics. I knew which commercials made them mist up. I knew where they lived and I knew where their kids went to school.”

He plucked a piece of meat off the grill, waved it around to cool it, and ate. “The first time was at the mall. Naturally. My wife is shopping and I wander off and I see this kiosk girl. I see that little hand working the jewelry pliers, the little tank top and the four pony tails…”He looked at Geoff. “Tell me you never wanted kiosk. But you didn't attempt it, right?

“I look at her and I think, ‘Yeah, you're an Emulator, aren't you? I can see your apartment from here. It's bad but it's near water, your desk calendar's got angels on it, you splurge on underwear, you listen to K-101 regardless of what city you live in, and you're taking a class, screenwriting, songwriting, greeting card writing. You've got half a dozen start-your-own-business ideas, but people are unfair. They screw over your dreams, but you don't give up. You're upward-aspiring. Guess what I'm aspiring up.'

“Emulator sex. Boy.” He shook his head. “It's like a movie where they're overacting, but that's what's great about it. The curtains are blowing in and out and there's screaming.
Afterwards she goes to get beers and she goes, ‘You stay right there, you.'” He pressed a playful finger, covered with charred fat, to an invisible nose. “Just poignant, because you both know you're going to have to talk her down at some point.

“I'd never done anything like this. My wife was only my third sex partner. But I had the
keys
now. I'd see a Tightie Whitey in a sweater set and I'd be like, Guess who's getting into
that
gated community.” He saw Geoff look down. “Am I offending you? Is this a little coarse? I'm sorry. I live in a cave, okay? Wolves are raised by
me
.”

“Right, no, I—”

“I got kiosk, I got arthouse, I got sales conference. They were stashing the kid at phonics. They were flying in an hour early and meeting me at Embassy Suites. The clothes were
sailing
off. So many opening nights. And it's only opening night once, right? And you do not get jaded. I don't know who propounded that shit. My heart was going louder every time. Like, look at this, I'm getting it
again
! I escaped from all my troubles. Actually, I didn't
have
any troubles, going in, but I escaped from the troubles I was making for myself by escaping. Or maybe I escaped from how we're all going to escape for real one day. That's what they say about sex, right? Like I needed to know what they say.

“So naturally I fucked it up. I just had to have a Sustainer. That's the group where they're just getting by. Crisis to crisis. Heavy users of paycheck advance stores. This was some seriously forbidden-assed fruit. Sustainer sex is a crisis in itself. You feel like an asthma inhaler.

“Week five, she comes to the house.” He sighed. “We were having people over, some Peaked in Colleges my wife, Kelly, peaked in college with, but that was no barrier to entry, right? Dolores, the Sustainer, comes in sobbing. She'd confessed to her husband and she prayed that Kelly could forgive her some
day although she'd never forgive herself, and so on. So forget the marriage. I had zero money. I'd been out here and seen this cave…”

Geoff said, “You lost your job, then? For using the information?”