The Lay of the Land (2 page)

But as for my role as his business adviser, Mike’s name has gotten around some in our mid-Shore real estate circles—it’s no longer possible for any single human act to stay long out of the public notice—and as of last week he was contacted by a subdivision developer up in Montmorency County, close to Haddam, with a proposition to enter a partnership. The developer has obtained a purchase option on 150 acres currently planted in Jersey yellow corn, but that lies slap in the middle of the New Jersey wealth belt (bordering the Delaware, bordering Haddam, two hours to Gotham, one from Philly). Houses there—giant mansionettes meant to look like Versailles—go for prices in the troposphere, even with current market wobbles, and anybody with a backhoe, a cell phone and who isn’t already doing hard time can get rich without even getting up in the morning.

What Mike brings to the table is that he’s a Tibetan
and
an American and therefore qualifies as a bona fide and highly prized minority. Any housing outfit that makes him its president automatically qualifies for big federal subsidy dollars, after which he and his partner can become jillionaires just by filling out a few government documents and letting a bunch of Mexicans do the work.

I’ve explained to him that in any regular business situation, a typical American entrepreneurial type
might
let him act as substitute towel boy at his racket club—but probably not. Mike, however, believes the business climate’s not typical now. Many arrivees to central Jersey, he’s told me, are monied subcontinentals with luxury fever—gastroenterologists, hospital administrators and hedge-fund managers—who’re sick of their kids not getting into Dalton and Spence and are ready to buy the first day they drive down. The thinking is that these beige-skinned purchasers will look favorably on a development fronted by a well-dressed little guy who sorta looks like them. He and I have also discussed the fact that house sales are already leveling and could pancake by New Year’s. Corporate debt’s too high. Mortgage rates are at 8.25 but a year ago were at six. The NASDAQ’s spongy. The election’s going in the toilet (though he doesn’t think so). Plus, it’s the Millennium, and nobody knows what’s happening next, only that something will. I’ve told him now might be a better time to spend his ethnic capital on a touchless car wash on Route 35, or possibly a U-Store-It or a Kinko’s. These businesses are cash cows if you keep an eye on your employees and don’t invest much of your own dough. Mike, of course, reads his tea leaves differently.

T
his morning, Mike has offered to drive and at this moment has his hands cautiously at ten and two, his eyes hawking the Toms River traffic. He’s told me he never got enough driving time in Tibet—for obvious reasons—so he enjoys piloting my big Suburban. It may make him feel more American, since many vehicles in the thick holiday traffic on Route 37 are also Suburbans—only most are newer.

Since we rolled out of Sea-Clift and over the bridge toward the Garden State Parkway, he has spoken little. I’ve noticed in the office that he’s recently exhibited broody, deep-ponder states during which he bites his lower lip, sighs and runs his hand back across his bristly skull, frowning apparently at nothing. These gestures, I assume, are standard ones having to do with being an immigrant or being a Buddhist, or with his new business prospects, or with everything at once. I’ve paid them little attention and am happy to be silently chauffeured today and to take in the scenery while shifting serious thoughts to the outer reaches of my brain—a trick I’ve gotten good at since Sally’s departure last June, and since finding out during the Olympics in August that I’d become host to a slow-growing tumor in my prostate gland. (It
is
a gland, by the way, unlike your dick, which is often said to be, but isn’t.)

Route 37, the Toms River Miracle Mile, is already jammed at 9:30 with shopper vehicles moving into and out of every conceivable second-tier factory outlet lot, franchise and big-box store, until we’re mostly stalled in intersection tie-ups under screaming signage and horn cacophony. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when merchants hope to inch into the black, is traditionally the retail year’s hallowed day, with squadrons of housewives in housecoats and grannies on walkers shouldering past security personnel at Macy’s and Bradlees to get their hands on discounted electric carving knives and water-filled orthopedic pillows for that special arthritic with the chronically sore C6 and C7. Only this year—due to the mists of economic unease—merchants and their allies, the customers, have designated “gigantic” Black Tuesday and Black Wednesday Sales Days and are flying the banner of
EVERYTHING MUST GO
!—in case, I guess, the whole country’s gone by Friday.

Cars are everywhere, heading in every direction. A giant yellow-and-red MasterCard dirigible floats above the buzzing landscape like a deity. Movie complexes are already opened with queues forming for
Gladiator
and
The Little Vampire.
Crowds press into Target and International Furniture Liquidator (“If we don’t have it, you don’t want it”). Christmas music’s blaring, though it’s not clear from where, and the traffic’s barely inching. Firemen in asbestos suits and Pilgrim hats are out collecting money in buckets at the mall entrances and stoplights. Ragged groups of people who don’t look like Americans skitter across the wide avenue in groups, as though escaping something, while solitary men in gleaming pickups sit smoking, watching, waiting to have their vehicles detailed at the Pow-R-Brush. At the big Hooper Avenue intersection, a TV crew has set up a command post, with a hard-body, shiny-legged Latina, her stiff little butt turned to the gridlock, shouting out to the 6:00 p.m. viewers up the seaboard what all the fuss is about down here.

Yet frankly it all thrills me and sets my stomach tingling. Unbridled commerce isn’t generally pretty, but it’s always forward-thinking. And since nowadays with my life out of sync and most things in the culture not affecting me much—politics, news, sports, everything but the weather—it feels good that at least commerce keeps me interested like a scientist. Commerce, after all, is basic to my belief system, even though it’s true, as modern merchandising theory teaches, that when we shop, we no longer really shop
for
anything. If you’re really looking for that liquid stain remover you once saw in your uncle Beckmer’s basement that could take the spots off a hyena, or you’re seeking a turned brass drawer pull you only need
one of
to finish refurbishing the armoire you inherited from Aunt Grony, you’ll never find either one. No one who works anyplace knows anything, and everyone’s happy to lie to you. “They don’t make those anymore.” “Those’ve been backordered two years.” “That ballpoint company went out of business, moved to Myanmar and now makes sump pumps…All we have are these.” You have to take what they’ve got even if you don’t want it or never heard of it. It’s hard to call this brand of zero-sum merchandising true commerce. But in its apparent aimlessness, it’s not so different from the real estate business, where often at the end of the day, someone goes away happy.

We’ve now made it as far as the Toms River western outskirts. Motels are all full here. Used-car lots are Givin’ ’em Away. A bonsai nursery has already moved its tortured little shrubs to the back, and employees are stacking in Christmas trees and wreaths. Flapping flags in many parking lots stand at half-staff—for what reason, I don’t know. Other signs shout
Y2K MEMORABILIA SCULPTURE
!
INVEST IN REAL ESTATE NOT STOCKS
!
TIGHT BUTTS MAKE ME NUTS
!
WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS
. Yellow traffic cones and a giant blinking yellow arrow are making us merge right into one lane, alongside a deep gash in the freshly opened asphalt, beside which large hard-hatted white men stand staring at other men already down in the hole—putting our tax dollars to work.

“I really don’t understand that,” Mike says, his chin up alertly, the seat run way forward so his toes can reach the pedals and his hands control the wheel. He eyes me as he navigates through the holiday tumult.

I, of course, know what’s bothering him. He’s seen the
WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS
sign on the Quality Court marquee. My having cancer makes him possibly worry about me in this regard, which then makes him fret about his own future. When I was at Mayo last August, I left him in charge of Realty-Wise, and he carried on without a hitch. But on his desk last week I saw a
New York Times
article he’d downloaded, explaining how half of all bankruptcies are health-related and that from a purely financial perspective, doing away with oneself’s probably a good investment. I’ve explained to him that one in ten Americans is a cancer survivor, and that my prospects are good (possibly true). But I’m fairly sure that my health is on his mind and has probably brought about today’s sudden test-the-waters probing into suburban land-development. Plus, in exactly a week from today I’m flying to Rochester for my first post-procedure follow-up at Mayo, and he may sense I’m feeling anxious—I may be—and is merely feeling the same himself.

Buddhists are naturally unbending on the subject of suicide. They’re against it. And even though he’s a free-market, deregulating,
Wall Street Journal
-reading flat-taxer, Mike has also remained a devotee of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His screen saver at the office actually shows a beaming color photograph of himself beside the diminutive reincarnate, taken at the Meadowlands last year. He’s also displayed three red-white-and-blue prayer flags on the wall behind his desk, with a small painting of the thousand-armed Chenrezig and beside these a signed glossy of Ronald Reagan—all for our clients to puzzle over as they write out their earnest money checks. In the DL’s view, utilizing a correct, peaceful-compassionate frame of mind will dissolve all impediments, so that karmically speaking we get exactly what we should get because we’re all fathers of ourselves and the world’s the result of our doing, etc., etc., etc. Killing yourself, in other words, shouldn’t be necessary—about which I’m in complete agreement. Apparently, the smiling-though-exiled precious protector and the great communicating Gipper line up well on this, as on many issues. (I knew nothing about Tibet
or
Buddhists and have had to read up on it at night.)

It’s also true that Mike knows something about my Sponsoring work, which has made him decide I’m spiritual, which I’m not, and prompted him to address all sorts of provocative moral questions to me and then purposefully fail to understand my answers, thereby proving his superiority—which makes him happy. One of his recent discussion topics has been the Columbine massacre, which he believes was caused by falsely pursuing lives of luxury, instead of by the obstinance of pure evil—my view. In the otherwise-pointless Elián González controversy, he sided with the American relatives in a show of immigrant solidarity, while I went with the Cuban Cubans, which just seemed to make sense.

Mike’s moral principles, it should be said, have had to learn to operate in happy tandem with the self-interested consumer-mercantile ones of the real estate business. Working for me he gets one-third of 6 percent on all home sales he makes himself (I take two-thirds because I pay the bills), a bonus on all big-ticket sales
I
make, plus 20 percent on the first month of all summer rentals, which is nothing to bark at. There’s another bonus at Christmas if I feel generous. And against that, I pay no benefits, no retirement, no mileage, no nothing—a good arrangement for me. But it’s also an arrangement that allows him to live good and buy swanky sporting-business attire from a Filipino small-man shop in Edison. Today he’s shown up for his meeting in fawn-colored flared trousers that look like they’re made of rubber and cover up his growing little belly, a sleeveless cashmere sweater in a pink ice-cream hue, mirror-glass Brancusi tassel-loafers, yellow silk socks, tinted aviators, and a mustard-colored camel hair blazer currently in the backseat—none of which really makes sense on a Tibetan, but that he thinks makes him credible as an agent. I don’t mention it.

And yet there’s much about America that baffles him still, in spite of fifteen years’ residence and patient study. As a Buddhist, he fails to understand the place of religion in our political doings. He has never been to California or even to Chicago or Ohio, and so lacks the natives’ intrinsic appreciation of history as a function of landmass. And even though he’s a real estate salesman, he doesn’t finally see why Americans move so much, and isn’t interested in my answer: because they can. However, during the time he’s been here, he’s taken a new name, bought a house, cast three presidential ballots and made some money. He’s also memorized the complete
New Jersey Historical Atlas
and can tell you where the spring-loaded window and the paper clip were invented—Millrun and Englewood; where the first manure spreader was field-trialed—in Moretown; and which American city was the first nuclear-free zone—Hoboken. Such readout, he believes, makes him persuasive to home buyers. And in this, he’s like many of our citizens, including the ones who go back to the Pilgrims: He’s armed himself with just enough information, even if it’s wrong, to make him believe that what he wants he deserves, that bafflement is a form of curiosity and that these two together form an inner strength that should let him pick all the low-hanging fruit. And who’s to say he’s wrong? He may already be as assimilated as he’ll ever need to be.

M
ore interesting landscape for the citizen scientist now passes my window. A Benjamin Moore paint “test farm,” with holiday browsers strolling the grassy aisles, pointing to this or that pastel or maroon tile as if they were for sale. More significant signage:
SUCCESS IS ADDICTIVE
(a bank);
HEALTHY MATE DATING SERVICE; DOLLAR UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE FOR HIGHER EARNING
. Then the cement-bunker Ocean County Library, where holiday offerings are advertised out front—a poetry reading on Wednesday, a CPR workshop on Thanksgiving Day, two Philadelphia Phillies players driving over Saturday for an inspirational seminar about infidelity, “the Achilles’ heel of big-league sports.”