Then We Came to the End (19 page)

“Are you guys not in the least curious why Brizz had it in his backyard to begin with?” Benny asked.

Sure we were curious. But there was probably a simple explanation for it. Brizz himself had inherited the thing from those who sold him the house, or something along those lines.

“So why did he leave it to me in his will,” asked Benny, “if he just found it in his backyard when he bought the place? Why deliberately leave it to me?”

One night we had drinks after work at this nearby underground sports bar. We brought together several checkerboard-cloth tables and talked around pitchers of beer in various stages of consumption. We were getting buzzed on that airless bunker’s dank fumes more powerfully than on the watered-down swill they served, when Karen Woo asked if we knew what Benny was doing with his totem pole. We ran through Benny’s options for her. “No,” she insisted, “no, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you know what he’s actually doing with it.”

We did not.

“He’s visiting it,” she said.

We asked her what she meant by that.

“He’s going down to Brizz’s,” she said, “and spending time with it.”

There were several plausible answers for why Benny would do a thing like that. It was a novelty item, and Benny got a kick out of owning a novelty item. Or he was measuring it for removal. Or he was meeting with someone to appraise it. Maybe it was worth some money.

“No, you guys don’t understand,” Karen said, “this isn’t a onetime deal. He’s been down there . . . Jim,” she said, just as Jim returned to his seat after tending to some business with Mr. B. “Tell them how many times Benny’s been down there to see that totem pole.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim, shrugging his shoulders.

“You do too know, Jim — how many times?” Jim was reluctant to give up his friend. “Ten times!” cried Karen. “In a month! Isn’t that right, Jim?”

We asked Jim what Benny was doing down there.

“He’s just looking at it,” said Jim. “It’s something to look at. I got goosebumps the first time I saw it.”

“The Art Institute has things in it that’ll give you goosebumps, too,” Karen replied. “Not many people go there ten times a month, Jim.”

The following day we asked Benny if he was really going down to Brizz’s to visit the totem pole. If so, we asked, why? We said Jim Jackers mentioned he’d been down there ten times in the past month. Was that true?

“I don’t know, I don’t count,” Benny said. “What’s with the third degree?”

We asked if he was going down there to meet with someone to appraise it because maybe it was worth money. Or if he was measuring it for its eventual removal. Or if he got a kick out of owning a novelty item.

“What does it matter?” he replied. “I go down there. What’s the big deal?”

We didn’t understand, that was the big deal. Because soon we found out that he wasn’t just going down there. He was leaving direct from work. In other words, he was driving down there during rush hour. We asked him why he would brave traffic just to look at a totem pole. He mumbled something evasive and wouldn’t commit to an answer. Had he given any more thought, we asked him, to what he was going to do with it when Bizarro Brizz put Old Brizz’s house on the market? The sensible thing was to leave it for the future owners. Benny replied he didn’t think he would do that. In that case, we wondered, what were his plans for it? Somebody mentioned there might be some real Indians out there who’d like to have their totem pole back, who would know what to do with it better than he would. Benny’s response?

“Brizz gave that totem pole to me,” he said. “He didn’t give it to a real Indian.”

That was the stupidest thing we ever heard. A month earlier, there had been no totem pole. The idea of owning a totem pole would have probably seemed totally absurd to Benny. Then Brizz leaves him a totem pole, and he’s braving traffic to go visit the thing. We just wanted to know why.

“You guys need to get a life,” he said.

We asked a favor of Dan Wisdom. He lived in Brizz’s neighborhood. We asked Dan to take a few hours off one night from his fish paintings, drive by Old Brizz’s, and find out what Benny was doing — you know, how he spent his time.

“He told us how he spends his time,” said Dan. “He looks at the thing.”

Yes, but it had to be more complicated than that. Get out of the car, we told Dan, and look at it with him, and then ask him what’s going through his head.

“Who knows what’s going through his head?” said Dan. “What’s going through his head is his own business. Besides,” he added, “I don’t really live in Brizz’s neighborhood. I do live on the South Side, but the South Side, you know, it’s a big place.”

We told Marcia Dwyer that Benny had had a crush on her for a long time. Just ask to go down there with him, we urged her. Tell him you want to see it. He would be thrilled to have you join him. Then ask him why he’s become so obsessed with the thing.

“Okay, first of all,” Marcia said, “you guys are losers. And second of all, I don’t really care what he’s doing down there. Maybe he’s finding out something about himself. Maybe — and I know, this sounds crazy to you guys — but maybe he’s looking for something. A signal from Brizz. Some sort of sign.”

We had forgotten that Marcia was into Buddhism in a big, sloppy way — reincarnation, the laws of karma. Religious fancies she probably didn’t know the first authentic thing about.

“And third,” she said, “Benny Shassburger has a crush on me?”

We’re not sure what you may or may not know, we said one day when, happily, we stumbled upon Benny’s father, waiting for Benny in the main lobby. Some of us recognized him from the picture in Benny’s office, an imposing man with beard and skullcap. But about a month ago, we said to him, his son was given an odd little bequest by a guy who used to work here. Did he know what we were referring to?

“The totem pole?” his father asked.

Yes, the totem pole. And did he also know that during the past six weeks, Benny had gone to the guy’s house a dozen or more times? After work, when he had to sit in traffic, he went all the way down to 115th Street to look at the totem pole. We asked him if he was aware of that.

“I knew he went down there.” His father nodded. “I didn’t know it was that many times, but I knew he went down there, sure. I’ve been down there with him.”

He had been down there with him?

“Sure.”

And what did the two of them do while down there?

“We looked at it,” said Benny’s father.

That was it? All the two of them did was look at it?

“Well, then we put on our headdresses and prayed for corn. Is that what you’re looking for?”

No doubt we had the right man. That was a response that would have come from Benny Shassburger’s own mouth in the days before he clammed up and refused to say a word about why the totem pole had such a hold on him and drove us crazy with his secrecy. We asked Benny’s father if he was at all curious about why someone Jewish like Benny would become obsessed with a pagan artifact like a totem pole.

“If you’re asking me, does my son pray to it,” his father replied, with a change in tone, “I don’t think he prays to it. I just think he likes it.”

Yes, we said to Benny the next day, we had a conversation with his father. No, we never asked him if Benny prayed to it. We didn’t mean to offend anybody. We just want to know, we said to Benny, honestly, we just want to know why you go down there to look at the totem pole so often, and what you’re thinking about when you’re down there.

“I go down there,” he replied simply, “to think about Brizz.”

So it was funny. While Benny was thinking about Brizz, we were thinking about Benny. What could Benny be doing down there in Brizz’s backyard, what is he thinking about standing in front of the totem pole — that’s what we were wondering. And Benny, he was wondering — well, what, exactly? What was there to think about with respect to Brizz? His cigarettes, his sweater vest, his conversation with the building guy, and all the unmemorable days he spent in our company. That takes about ten seconds. Where do you go after that? What more was there to think about?

“Look,” said Benny, reaching the limits of his patience. “I didn’t purchase the thing. I didn’t put it in my backyard. I’m just visiting it. What would you have done to Brizz if you’d found out he had a totem pole in his backyard, and when you asked him why, he refused to tell you?”

Hound him, threaten him, torture him, kill him. Whatever it took.

But the point wasn’t Brizz. We weren’t going to get any answers from Brizz. Brizz was gone. Benny, on the other hand, was still alive. Benny could tell us what we wanted to know.

“I’ll never tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret I share with Brizz and you scumbags can’t know about it.”

“Has Benny gone insane?” Karen asked Jim.

Inexplicably Benny gave us all ten dollars. He went from office to office, cube to cube, handing out ten-dollar bills. What’s this for? we asked him.

“A refund,” he said. “I don’t want your blood money.”

Turns out he was returning the ten bucks he’d won from each of us when he put Brizz on his Celebrity Death Watch.

“He’s gone insane,” said Jim.

Bizarro Brizz finally put Brizz’s house on the market, and now the situation, we thought, had to change. There would be no backyard for Benny to visit anymore. There was no — what would you call it? — memorial site, or whatever, to spend time at, and to reflect upon the recently departed, and all the mysteries Brizz left behind, or whatever else Benny was chewing on down there. Naturally we thought he would give it up. He would either leave it for the future owners, or give it away, or have it appraised, or hire a stump-grinding company to dispose of it. Instead, he hired a moving company to transfer it out of the backyard into the largest unit available at the U-Stor-It facility at North and Clybourn, where he kept it in bubble wrap horizontally upon the cement floor, because it was too big to fit inside his apartment.

When we heard Benny was not getting rid of the totem pole but had chosen to keep it, even going so far as to store it at great personal expense, we kept asking him why. Why, Benny? Why? Benny, why? When he continued to refuse to tell us — or perhaps he just found himself unable to explain his reasons even to himself — we let the full force of our dissatisfaction be known. We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark. And we thought it was the height of hypocrisy for Benny, who was always telling everyone about everyone else, to try and keep a secret from us. So we took up squawking at him. We did mockeries of ceremonial dances in his doorway. The worst thing we did was take scissors to this old toupee Chris Yop had in his basement, and put the mangled thing on Benny’s desk, which Karen Woo doused with a bottle of fake blood she kept in her office, so that what lay on the desk looked like a fresh scalping. Someone suggested we find a yarmulke to put on top, but we all sort of agreed that to marry those two atrocities together would be stepping over a line.

In our defense, it was Chris Yop and Karen Woo’s idea, the fake scalping, and they were really the ones who went in and executed it. Hank Neary said it best when he said, “Yeah, that was really just a Yop and Woo production.” We picked up on that, and afterward, it became the name of the tribe Benny belonged to, the Yopanwoo tribe. We said, Hey, Benny, how do you and the Yopanwoo stay warm in the winter? Have you and the Yopanwoo received restitution from the U.S. government, Benny? Your fellow tribesmen, Benny, do they consume firewater to excess? Benny just smiled at these jibes and nodded his head amiably and returned to his desk, and without a word of explanation, continued to store Brizz’s totem pole for three hundred and nineteen dollars a month.

On the afternoon Lynn Mason should have been recovering from surgery, Benny discovered they were raising the price of his storage unit by thirty bucks. That in and of itself was not outrageous, but compounded with the rest, he was shelling out a preposterous monthly sum.

“It’s time I get rid of it,” he said to Jim. “It’s not doing anything except sitting in there.”

Jim was chomping at the bit to tell Benny his news of riding the elevator with Lynn Mason when she should have been at the hospital. But he was surprised to hear that Benny was thinking of giving up the totem pole.

“You’ve always said that Brizz gave that totem pole to you for a reason,” he said. “Now you’re talking about giving it up?”

“What choice do I have?” Benny replied. “I can’t spend three hundred and fifty bucks a month on a totem pole. That’s insane.”

“It wasn’t insane at three-nineteen?”

“No, it was insane then, too,” said Benny. “By the way, you want to know how much it’s worth? I had an appraiser look at it. On the antiques market, this guy tells me, it could sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars.”

Jim’s jaw dropped. He let out a few choked grunts of disbelief.

“Oh, and here’s another thing,” said Benny. “Lynn Mason’s in the office today.”

Jim’s expression turned from incredulity over the worth of the totem pole to disappointment at hearing from Benny the very news he had been waiting patiently to reveal himself.

“Aw, man!” he cried. “I wanted to tell you that!”

Joe Pope suddenly appeared in Benny’s doorway carrying his leather day planner.

“Guys,” he said, “we’re meeting down at the couches in ten minutes.”

A TRIPLE MEETING
was bad news. Especially if it came so quickly on the heels of a double meeting. The announcement of a triple meeting could only mean the project had been canceled or postponed, or changed. We had ten minutes to ruminate on which was the worst fate. If canceled or postponed, our only project went away, and with it, all hope of looking busy. Looking busy was essential to our feeling vital to the agency, to mention nothing of being perceived as such by the partners, who would conclude by our labors that it was impossible to lay us off. (No need to look too closely here at the underlying fact that our sole project was pro bono, and so something we weren’t getting paid for.) If the project was changed, the work we had put in so far on our concepts would all be for naught. That was always a pain in the ass. As much as we loved a double meeting, we always approached a triple meeting with trepidation and discomfort.