You Are Not A Stranger Here (2 page)

from conventionalism speaks through his mouth like a ventriloquist: Your-idea-is-fantasy-calm-down-it-will-be-the-ruin-ofyou-medication-medication-medication. He has a good mind, my son, always has, and somewhere the temerity to use it, to spear mediocrity in the eye, but in a world that encourages nothing of the sort, the curious boy becomes the anxious man. He must suffer his people's regard for appearances. Sad. I begin to articulate this with diamond-like precision, which seems only to exacerbate the situation.

"Why don't we have some champagne?" Eric interjects.

"You two can talk this over at dinner."

An admirable suggestion. I take three glasses from the cupboard, remove a bottle from the case, pop the cork, fill the glasses, and propose a toast to their health.

My niece's SAAB does eighty-five without a shudder on the way to dinner. With the roof down, smog blowing through my hair, I barely hear Graham who's shouting something from the passenger's seat. He's probably worried about a ticket, which for the high of this ride I'd pay twice over and tip the officer to boot. Sailing down the freeway I envision a lane of bicycles quietly recycling efficiencies once lost to the simple act of pedaling. We'll have to get the environmentalists involved which could mean government money for research and a lobbying arm to navigate any legislative interference. Test marketing in L.A. will increase the chance of celebrity endorsements and I'll probably need to do a book on the germination of the idea for release with the first wave of product. I'm thinking early next year. The advertising tag line hits me as we glide beneath an overpass:
Make Every Revolution Count.
9

There's a line at the restaurant and when I try to slip the maitre d' a twenty, Graham holds me back.

"Dad," he says, "you can't do that."

"Remember the time I took you to the Ritz and you told me the chicken in your sandwich was tough and I spoke to the manager and we got the meal for free? And you drew a diagram of the tree fort you wanted and it gave me an idea for storage containers."

He nods his head.

"Come on, where's your smile?"

I walk up to the maitre d' but when I hand him the twenty he gives me a funny look and I tell him he's a lousy shit for pretending he's above that sort of thing. "You want a hundred?" I ask and am about to give him an even larger piece of my mind when Graham turns me around and says, "Please don't."

"What kind of work are you doing?" I ask him.

"Dad," he says, "just settle down." His voice is so quiet, so meek.

"I asked you what kind of work you do."

"I work at a brokerage."

A brokerage! What didn't I teach this kid? "What do you do for them?"

"Stocks. Listen, Dad, we need--"

"Stocks!" I say. "Christ! Your mother would turn in her grave if she had one."

"Thanks," he says under his breath.

"What was that?" I ask.

"Forget it."

10

At this point, I notice everyone in the foyer is staring at us. They all look like they were in television twenty years ago, the men wearing Robert Wagner turtlenecks and blazers. A woman in mauve hot pants with a shoulder bag the size of her torso appears particularly disapproving and self-satisfied and I feel like asking her what it is she does to better the lot of humanity. "You'll be riding my bicycle in three years," I tell her. She draws back as though I had thrown a rat on the carpet. Once we're seated it takes ten minutes to get bread and water on the table and sensing a bout of poor service I begin to jot on a napkin the time of each of our requests and the hour of its arrival. Also, as it occurs to me:

*

Hollow-core chrome frame with battery mounted

over rear tire, wired to rear wheel engine housing, wired to handlebar control/thumb-activated accelerator. Warning to cyclist concerning increased speed of crankshaft during application of stored revolutions. Power brake?

*

Biographer file: Graham as my muse, mystery

thereof; see storage container, pancake press, tricycle engine, flying teddy bear, renovations of barn for him to play in, power bike.

Graham disagrees with me when I try to send back a second bottle of wine, apparently under the impression that one ought to accept spoiled goods in order not to hurt anybody's feelings. This strikes me as maudlin but I let it go for the sake 11

of harmony. Something has changed in him. Appetizers take a startling nineteen minutes to appear.

"You should start thinking about quitting your job," I say.

"I've decided I'm not going to stay on the sidelines with this one. The power bike's a flagship product, the kind of thing that could support a whole company. We stand to make a fortune, Graham, and I can do it with you." One of the Robert Wagners cranes his neck to look at me from a neighboring booth.

"Yeah, I bet you want a piece of the action, buddy," I say, which sends him back to his endive salad in a hurry. Graham listens as I elaborate the business plan: there's start-up financing, for which we'll easily attract venture capital, the choice of location for the manufacturing plant--you have to be careful about state regulations--executives to hire, designers to work under me, a sales team, accountants, benefits, desks, telephones, workshops, paychecks, taxes, computers, copiers, decor, watercoolers, doormats, parking spaces, electric bills. Maybe a humidifier. A lot to consider. As I speak, I notice that others in the restaurant are turning to listen as well. It's usually out of the corner of my eye that I see it, and the people disguise it well, returning to their conversations in what they probably think is convincing pantomime. The Westinghouse reindeer pops to mind. How ingenious they were to plant him there in the diner I ate at each Friday morning, knowing my affection for the Christmas myth, determined to steal my intellectual property.

*

Re: Chevy Chase incident. Look also into whether or not I might have invented autoreverse tape decks and 12

also therefore did Sony or GE own property adjacent to my Baltimore residence--noise, distraction tactics, phony road construction, etc., and also Schwinn, Raleigh, etc., presence during Los Angeles visit.

"Could we talk about something else?" Graham asks.

"Whatever you like," I say and then inform the waiter our entrees were twenty-six minutes in transit. Turns out my fish is tough as leather. The waiter's barely left when I have to begin snapping my fingers for his return.

"Stop that!" Graham says. I've reached the end of my tether with his passivity and freely ignore him. He's leaning over the table about to swat my arm down when the fellow returns.

"Is there a problem?"

"My halibut's dry as sand."

The goateed young man eyes my dish suspiciously as though I might have replaced the original plate with some duplicate entree pulled from a bag beneath the table.

"I'll need a new one."

"No he won't," Graham says at once.

The waiter pauses, considering on whose authority to proceed.

"Do you have anything to do with bicycles?" I ask him.

"What do you mean?" he asks.

"Professionally."

The young man looks across the room to the maitre d', who offers a coded nod.

"That's it. We're getting out of here," I say, grabbing bread rolls.

13

"Sit down," Graham insists.

But it's too late. I know the restaurant's lousy with mountain bike executives. "You think I'm going to let a bunch of industry hustlers steal an idea that's going to change the way every American and one day every person on the globe conceives of a bicycle? Do you realize what bicycles mean to people? They're like ice cream or children's stories, they're primal objects woven into the fabric of our earliest memories, not to mention our most intimate connection with the wheel itself an invention that marks the commencement of the great ascent of human knowledge that brought us through printing presses, religious transformations, undreamt-of speed, the moon. When you ride a bicycle you participate in an unbroken chain of human endeavor stretching back to stone-carting Egyptian peasants and I'm on the verge of revolutionizing that invention, making its almost mythical power a storable quantity. You have the chance to be there with me--like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He stared at the Pacific--and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise--/Silent, upon a peak in Darien. The things we'll see!"

Because I'm standing as I say this a quorum of the restaurant feels I'm addressing them as well and though I've slipped in giving them a research lead I can see in their awed expressions they know as I do not everyone can scale the high white peaks of real invention. Some--such as these--must sojourn in the lowlands where the air is thick with half measures and dreams die of inertia. Yes! It is true.

This seems to convince Graham we indeed need to leave. He throws some cash on the table and steers me by the arm 14

out of the restaurant. We walk slowly along the boulevard. There's something sluggish about Graham, his rounded shoulders and bowed head.

"Look, there's a Japanese place right over there we can get maki rolls and teriyaki, maybe some blowfish, I can hear all about the brokerage, we might even think about whether your company wants to do the IPO on the bike venture, there could be an advantage--"

He shakes his head and keeps walking up the street, one of whose features is a truly remarkable plentitude of shapely women, and I am reminded of the pleasures of being single, glances and smiles being enjoyed without guilt and for that matter why not consummation? Maybe it's unseemly for a seventy-three-year-old to talk about erections but oh, do I get

'em! I'm thinking along these lines when we pass the lobby of a luxury hotel convention center kind of place and of course I'm also thinking trade shows and how far ahead you have to book those things, so I turn in and after a small protest Graham follows; I tell him I need to use the bathroom.

"I'd like to talk to the special events manager," I say to the girl behind the desk.

"I'm afraid he's only here during the day, sir," she replies with a blistering customer service smile, as though she were telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.

"Well, isn't that just wonderful," I say and she seems to agree that yes it is wonderful, wonderful that the special events manager of the Continental Royale keeps such regular hours, as though it were the confirmation of some beneficent natural order.

15

"I guess I'll just have to take a suite anyway and see him in the morning. My son and I will have a little room service dinner in privacy, where the sharks don't circle!"

Mild concern clouds the girl's face as she taps at her keyboard.

"The Hoover Suite is available on nineteen. That's six hundred and eighty dollars a night. Will that be all right?"

"Perfect."

When I've secured the keys I cross to where Graham's sitting on the couch.

"Dinner is served," I say with a bow.

"What are you talking about?"

"I got us a suite," I say, rattling the keys.

Graham rolls his eyes and clenches his fists.

"Dad!" There's something desperate in his voice.

"What!"

"Stop! Just stop! You're out of control. Why do you think Linda and Ernie don't want to see you, Dad, why do you think that is? Is it so surprising to you? They can't handle this! Mom couldn't handle this! Can't you see that? It's
selfish
of you not to see a doctor!" he shouts, pounding his fists on his thighs. "It's
selfish
of you not to take the drugs!

Selfish!
"

The lobby's glare has drained his face of color and about his unblinking eyes I can see the outlines of what will one day be the marks of age and then all of a sudden the corpse of my son lies prostrate in front of me, the years since we last saw each other tunneling out before me like some infinite distance, and I hear the whisper of a killing loneliness travel 16

along its passage as though the sum total of every minute of his pain in every spare hour of every year was drawn in a single breath and held in this expiring moment. Tears well in my eyes. I am overcome.

Graham stands up from the couch, shaken by the force of his own words.

I rattle the keys. "We're going to enjoy ourselves."

"You have to give those back to the desk."

By the shoulders I grab him, my greatest invention. "We can do so much better," I say. I take him by the wrist and lead him to the elevator hearing his mother's voice behind us reminding me to keep him out of the rain. "I will," I mutter,

"I will."

Robert Wagner is on the elevator with Natalie Wood but they've aged badly and one doesn't take to them anymore. She chews gum and appears uncomfortable in tight clothing. His turtlenecks have become worn. But I figure they know things, they've been here a long time. So I say to him, "Excuse me, you wouldn't know where I might call for a girl or two, would you? Actually what we need is a girl and a young man, my son here's gay."

"Dad!" Graham shouts. "I'm sorry," he says to the couple, now backed against the wall as though I were a gangster in one of their lousy B movies. "He's just had a lot to drink."

"The hell I have. You got a problem with my son being gay?" The elevator door opens and they scurry onto the carpet like bugs. For a man who watched thousands starve and did jackshit about it, the Hoover Suite is aptly named. There are baskets 17

of fruit, a stocked refrigerator, a full bar, faux rococo paintings over the beds, overstuffed chairs, and rugs that demand bare feet for the sheer pleasure of the touch.

"We can't stay here," Graham says as I flip my shoes across the room.

His voice is disconsolate. He seems to have lost his animation of a moment ago, something I don't think I can afford to do right now: the eviction notices in Baltimore, the collection agencies, the smell of the apartment. "We're just getting started," I say quickly.

Graham's sitting in an armchair across the room and as he bows his head I imagine he's praying that when he raises it again, things will be different. As a child he used to bring me presents in my study on the days I was leaving for a trip and he'd ask me not to go. They were books he'd found on the shelf and wrapped in Christmas paper.