This Is Not America

by Jordi Puntí

  Mike Franquesa got quite prolix at this point, maybe because he liked reliving the good moments of the relationship, but I won’t record too many adulterous details now, except to say that the lovers enjoyed the thrill of lying and the natural highs and lows of it all for nearly four months. In the morning, as soon as Glenn went out the door, often tasked with taking their son to high school, Jane and Mike indulged in fantasies that were both romantic and methodical, a sped-up sex life that our hero recalled as self-conscious days of sheets and sloth, and other days of reckless risk-taking. When they fucked, Mike had to shoo away the image of Glenn coming through the door in his boxing gear, gloves dripping with blood and gore, about to give him a new face. Jane’s imagination, in turn, transformed these gymnastic festivals into therapeutic exchanges, as if they, too, were a consequence of the financial crisis that had torpedoed their family life, justifying them with carpe diem, an expression she’d learned on some self-help website. Excitement did the rest, and Jane knocked at Mike’s door with her heart racing a thousand miles an hour, a latter-day Lady Chatterley visiting the gamekeeper’s hut.

  “Now that I’m a long way from there and it’s all in the past, with no ill feelings for anyone,” Mike said in the bar, “I’ll tell you something that gives quite a good idea of how laid-back we were. One of the early days, when we’d been fucking all morning, I looked Jane in the eyes, hit my chest, and said, ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane.’ She laughed. It was a joke I’d been tempted to share from the beginning when she first told me her name, and now it seems to be a good summing-up of the jungle atmosphere, the almost zoolike logic of what we were getting up to.”

  “And how did her husband find out in the end? Don’t tell me he caught you in flagrante . . .”

  “No, no. Let’s say we always managed to keep things well within the bounds of inscrutability. As I told you, in Las Vegas, apparently nothing can be normal. It’s as if everything has to be sorted out on the fateful road to bankruptcy or, as in our case, with the clairvoyance that tells you when you have to stop playing. And it also turns out that sometimes two arbitrary but perfectly normal facts come together in one impossible combination. It’s as simple as that. You don’t know why, but all of a sudden a coincidence looks dubious. One day Jane went and got her hair cut short, a style she hadn’t worn for years. That afternoon I drank one of Glenn’s ginger beers. It was hot and I’d just finished my beers and was too lazy to go to the supermarket. He had a six-pack in the fridge. I thought he wouldn’t mind and planned to replace it the next day. Glenn got back from the gymnasium, opened the fridge, and saw there was a bottle missing. Just then Jane came into the kitchen, sassy with her new hairdo, asking what he thought, and Glenn put two and two together. The mysterious arithmetic of coincidences. We’d been overconfident. At the time, he hid his feelings and praised Jane’s hairdo—‘You look so much younger!’—and didn’t say a word about the ginger beer. That evening, though, she must have noticed that he was bemused, silent, distracted, as if he was weighing up the possibilities of adultery. At one point when I was alone with Jane, just the two of us in the kitchen, she looked at me wide-eyed, with raised eyebrows, without saying a word, and it wasn’t difficult for me to decipher her message: I think he suspects something. The next morning everything seemed normal, but, just in case, I stayed out all day, pretending to be looking for work. I didn’t see her, not for a single moment, and of course I missed her. That night I’d just got into bed, when there was a knock at the door. I stayed put. At first I thought it might be her, that Jane couldn’t bear not seeing each other either, but then I was appalled by a terrible premonition. What if it was Glenn and he’d come to get even? The person knocked again, this time louder. I was ready for anything, and when I finally opened the door with my fists clenched and trembling all over, I was surprised to see the son. Now I realize I haven’t even told you his name. It doesn’t matter. The thing is, this kid, with his ganja-fogged brain and always in a trance, gave me instructions for my future. ‘Leave tonight, please.’ He told me this with all the aplomb of an older brother. ‘You have to disappear. Tomorrow’s Friday. Make it look as if you’ve cut and run because you can’t pay the rent. My dad will forgive that, but another thing he won’t. We’ve been having a hard time for years and we don’t want to make things worse.’ I took his advice and, a few hours later, scuttled away like a thief in the night.”

  “What about Jane?”

  “I don’t know anything about Jane. That’s life. I kept convincing myself that we’d never really fallen in love, that the whole thing was just a way of not feeling lonely. But in fact, ever since then, I always think about her on our birthday and mentally send her a greeting.”

  Now working his way through his meal, Mike Franquesa went quiet again for a few seconds, observing some sort of reverential mourning rite for those superannuated times. Then, after calling the waiter to ask for another serving of french fries and more ketchup and mustard, he got on with his story. I watched him eating with a businesslike appetite without savoring the food, as if taking some kind of medicine. It was simply a matter of filling his stomach.

  “So you see, after telling you all about my crazy love life, maybe I can now move on to my courtship with calories,” he said smugly, tapping his prominent belly, “because, strange as it may seem, that’s what saved my life and brought me to this point. After my nighttime escape, I went back to the Blue Cockatoo. It was a sort of return to origins. I felt as if I’d just arrived in Las Vegas, with everything to discover—although, with the experience of those months, I wasn’t going to make the same errors. In

  a flash of lucidity, I understood that my future took me back to Wilfredo Bonany and, swallowing what pride I had left, I went looking for him in his usual haunts. Time heals all, I told myself, especially in a city where time has no value.

  “Luckily, after the car parking fiasco, Wilfredo still valued my labor power and helped but also punished me. So, when he offered me a crappier, more demanding job, it also meant I earned more money. I was to be both dishwasher and diner in a restaurant. ‘I assure you, you’ll never be hungry,’ he promised, trying to convince me to take it. The restaurant was near one of the most famous churches in Las Vegas, the Guardian Angel Cathedral, which mainly attracted penitents, the faithful needing to confess after nights of sex and alcohol, and loved-up brides and grooms who’d married in a fit of enthusiasm in a casino and now wanted to consolidate their conjugal status before God. It takes all kinds to make a world. The restaurant aimed to capture this pious clientele, and it was called the Loaves and the Fishes. And in case the gospels reference wasn’t clear enough: its slogan was “All-You-Can-Eat Christian Buffet.” The United States is full of crazies who believe these things and even more far-fetched stuff, and in this case, the singularity was that, as good Christians—but I don’t know which particular branch, not to mention sect—the owners swore they threw nothing away. In other words, for a reasonable price, you walked out of there with a full belly and a clear conscience. Everything clients left on the plate, either because they were too full or didn’t like the food, was eaten by us three dishwashers.”

  And that’s how Mike Franquesa became a professional gorger. Besides washing dishes and pots and pans in the kitchen, he and his two colleagues took turns at sitting at a table in a corner of the restaurant, in front of everyone, acting out a particularly assertive kind of advertisement in which they polished off all the leftovers.

  “When I started working there,” he went on, “I was the beanpole and the other two dishwashers, who’d been there for a while, were the roly-polies. They took one look at me and started laughing. In five weeks I put on twenty kilos, believe me, and after that I stopped weighing myself. Since it was all-you-can-eat, the clients came and piled their plates high. The only condition was that, before taking the first bite, the head of the family had to say grace. Once the table and food were blessed, the Americans, who fortunately tend to enjoy life, didn’t leave much, but ther
e was always the stubborn brat who wouldn’t open his mouth, or the wannabe model with eyes bigger than her belly, the kind who, with prodigious amounts of food stacked on her plate, suddenly gets finicky, takes a couple of mouthfuls, and complains she’s full. After overcoming the revulsion of the first few days, I learned to eat without a second thought. Slices of bread and pizza with a sullen bite taken out of it just for show and fried rice and lasagna and guacamole and Caesar salad and corn on the cob and chunks of salmon and chicken wings and tiramisu . . . down it all went!”

  Just listening to his list made me feel bloated and queasy, but Mike made it clear he didn’t want me to interrupt.

  “I have to say we chose it all in the kitchen, OK, and put it on clean plates. The owner was very scrupulous about these details because basically, for him, it was an article of faith. For example, we didn’t have to strip bones that weren’t chewed bare—no way—or lick up leftover grains of rice, or crumbs of fish, or streaks of sauce left on the plates. A limit was set and that limit was human dignity. At no point did we feel like rats in a garbage dump, or even hobos in a soup kitchen, but just that we were getting paid to stuff ourselves.

  “What did bother us, if anything, were the cooks. There was an Indian who used too much spice and chili, and a half-French guy who put cream in all the sauces. With this diet dictated by the daily whims of cooks and clients, our digestive systems were in a terrible state and we were antacid junkies. In the long run, of course, this deal changed your character. I got a decent wage, and I had a full belly and quite a lot of free time, but the days were getting more and more boring. Insipid as a plate of boiled rice. So one night, after leaving work, I went into a casino gaming room again and, this time, with my wallet more or less full of dollars.”

  “I guess that was inevitable,” I ventured. “But I still don’t understand how you detoxed. Or have you been stringing me along all this time and now you’re going to ask me for money?”

  “Don’t offend me,” he said, brandishing a french fry at me, smiling as he dunked it in ketchup and put it in his mouth, savoring the pleasure of telling me his story. “I remember that the casino was the Paris Las Vegas, and as you can imagine, that night I threw myself into the arms of the goddess Fortune and soon lost every cent I had on me. A week’s pay. Six days of washing plates and pots and pans and, moreover, downing kilos of chicken curry. (At the time, the Indian cook had just returned from a trip back home and was battling his homesickness with chili.) To make matters worse, the casinos in Las Vegas, never losing sight of the point of the game, set the betting limit much higher than it is in Barcelona, which means you win or lose faster. When I saw that I didn’t have a single dollar left, I started retching and went outside to puke in the street, under an ornamental palm tree. I felt empty like I hadn’t felt for months, but, needless to say, it wasn’t a nice emptiness. I looked up, took in the whole scene around me, and, for the first time since I arrived, I felt like a jerk, a bum, a total louse. They should have given me a part in the musical they were doing in that nearby theater. Like so many others hanging around the sidewalks of the city, I’d joined the army of specters floating about, lost at all hours of the day and night, always on the lookout for one last dollar to stake, always waiting for the chance to snatch a few more hours of hope. Wanderers consumed by debt; lives run aground in a bog of sand and make-believe; the unemployed, the pensioners, the unskilled youths, losers of every color and ethnic group who’d been chasing a dream for a long time, and now they only wanted to connect with reality by way of roulette, cards, or a jackpot. You could see them leaving the pawnshops, sagging invertebrates in tracksuits, shambling away after receiving a pittance for a watch, a set of barbells, a plastic-covered autograph signed years ago by Cher . . .

  “Realizing that I was one of them, my first reaction was to put an end to it all. That was easy. I only had to climb up the Eiffel Tower at the casino, which was nearly as high as the original one, and throw myself off it. A vaguely romantic suicide, product of imitation, though the death would have been real.”

  Instead of opting for such a tragicomic fate, Mike made a decision that looks terrible at first sight but, in the end, it saved his life. In other words, he went looking for a way of “financing” his gambling habit.

  “This needs some explaining,” he noted. “One of the things I learned parking cars was that nobody gets dressed up in Las Vegas except for workers. Uniforms are a trademark distinguishing between workers and bosses, between customers and the guys who keep the show going, and I’d gotten into the habit of wearing well-ironed trousers and a matching jacket. This was indirect advice from the tight-lipped Armenian who once opened his mouth to observe that uniforms attract tips. And it was true. That night of my relapse, I stood by one of the entrances, pretending I was superintending the parking operation, and it didn’t take me long to get a tip. And then another. Very soon, thanks to the benevolence of a few generous clients, I had a hundred bucks, the minimum bet for most of the tables. Then I took off my jacket, went into the casino, changed my money for chips, and started to play . . .”

  “So let me tell the story now: you won.” I made a dramatic pause for him to fill with a laugh, but Mike looked daggers at me. “No. You lost again.”

  “Exactly. They cleaned me out once more. But, anyhow, that’s not the important part. What happened is that, after losing the whole lot in ten minutes, like a total greenhorn, I couldn’t react. In the claws of the chimera I stared at the roulette ball, the green velvet, numbers, chips, hands sweeping up and down. I think of it now and tell myself it was pretty well the same as being in Barcelona that summer of the final rout, as if not a single day had gone by. Then I started watching a player who was sitting at the head of one of the tables, a fair-haired, athletic, cocky peacock of a guy escorted by three spectacular girls who clapped their hands and tittered every time he won. The chips he was raking in were piling up in front of him like buildings in a gorgeous multicolored little city, and I was suddenly swamped with envy. I took a dislike to the guy. I know it was arbitrary. But then, almost immediately, he started losing. And losing. In no time at all he’d lost the lot and, watching him deflate, I revived inside. I even felt hungry. When the peacock got up and left with the three wilting chicks halfheartedly straggling after him, I went over to another table. A Chinese couple was sitting there in silence and playing punctiliously, as if they were discussing each bet following an extended telepathic calculation. Their winnings also had me drooling, and the more I concentrated on their formal, almost ritual gestures, the more they lost. I cleaned them out, in a manner of speaking, and the same thing happened at two other tables. I wasn’t winning but I was making other people lose. Then a security guy came over and asked me to accompany him. ‘What have I done?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer. He took me to an even better dressed gentleman who said, ‘We’ve been watching you from our control room. You, sir, are a cooler.’ I didn’t get it, so I asked him to explain. ‘You, sir, have an extremely rare gift. Your aura of mediocrity breaks the best winning streaks and the luckiest clients start losing systematically. You have to work for us.’ ”

  Later, I discovered that in the parlance of the Valencia region, this kind of bearer of misfortune in casinos and card games is called a cremaor. In other words, guys like Mike Franquesa cool the game in Las Vegas but in Valencia they burn it, but both coolers and burners steer players away from the road to Lady Luck. The day after this revelation Mike Franquesa stopped being a dishwasher and professional guzzler and started working in the casino as a cooler. In any case, he didn’t stop frequenting the Christian all-you-can-eat, not because he was one of the faithful but because he understood that his ability to mess with the luck of others was linked with leading the good life himself. If he lost a little weight, he was less effective. As I said, he told me this story one summer afternoon, stuffing himself all the while, getting ready for his shift at the Barcelona casino.

  “I must be the first profession
al cooler in Catalonia,” he said with undisguised pride. “Sooner or later, we all get to find out what role we have to play in the theater of life.”

  PATIENCE

  I was in a café at the Luxembourg railway station and had just finished a sandwich and a Coca-Cola. I asked for the bill and wanted to pay by credit card. The waiter brought the terminal and asked me to key in my PIN. Meanwhile, for a few seconds, he stared into the distance, at some indeterminate point. All salespeople and waiters do this. They look at nothing, being discreet and offering a little privacy to the client. Some don’t make much effort to pretend and turn their faces away looking put out or overcome with an attack of shyness, but there are others who go into personal daydream mode, closing their eyes for a few seconds to look at an imaginary horizon and not coming back to the real world until the machine makes some kind of sound. Maybe we should give a name to this brief, vague, mental vanishing point. Maybe we should call it Timbuktu or Farawayland . . . Well, anyway, I keyed in my number while the Luxembourger waiter got lost in his vanishing point somewhere in the south, toward Marseille or further down, wherever, and the little screen showed some words in French: Veuillez patienter. I wondered how we could translate that. The most logical rendering would be “Wait a moment, please” or something similar, but in fact what interested me was the verb patienter. I don’t think we have an equivalent verb in Catalan but only the opposite, impacientar, and the derivative despacientar. Yet, if the screens on our machines said, “Wait a moment. Don’t get impatient,” we’d take it as a slight, as if we were jittery to begin with, or testy because the whole thing was too slow and wasting time. I understand that, for the French, the Veuillez patienter is gentler. It’s just an idiom you don’t take to heart, and maybe you don’t even read it. All right, then, I’ll wait for a few seconds. You’re welcome.