T.C. Boyle Stories

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Okay. So I’m burned from jet lag anyway, and I figure I’ll write the day off, go back to the hotel, have a couple Tanqueray rocks, and catch some z’s. What a joke, huh? They don’t have Tanqueray, Bob. Or rocks either. They don’t have Beefeater’s or Gordon’s—they don’t have a bar, for christsake. Can you believe it—the whole damn country, the cradle of civilization, and it’s dry. All of a sudden I’m beginning to see the light—this guy really is a fanatic. So anyway I’m sitting at this table in the lobby drinking grape soda—yeah, grape soda, out of the can—and thinking I better get on the horn with Chuck back in Century City, I mean like I been here what—three hours?—and already the situation is going down the tubes, when I feel this like pressure on my shoulder.

  I turn around and who is it but the interpreter, you know, the guy with the face. He’s leaning on me with his elbow. Like I’m a lamppost or something, and he’s wearing this big shit-eating grin. He’s like a little Ayatollah, this guy—beard, bathrobe, slippers, hat, the works—and he’s so close I can smell the roots of his hair.

  “I don’t like the tone you took with the Imam,” he says in this accent right out of a Pepperidge Farm commercial, I mean like Martha’s Vineyard all the way, and then he slides into the chair across from me. “This is not John Travolta you’re addressing, my very sorry friend. This is the earthly representative of the Qā’im, who will one day come to us to reveal the secrets of the divinity, Allah be praised.” Then he lowers his voice, drops the smile, and gives me this killer look. “Show a little respect,” he says.

  You know me, Bob—I don’t take shit from anybody, I don’t care who it is, Lee Iacocca, Steve Garvey, Joan Rivers (all clients of ours, by the way), and especially not from some nimrod that looks like he just walked off the set of Lawrence of Arabia, right? So I take a long swallow of grape soda, Mr. Cool all the way, and then set the can down like it’s a loaded .44. “Don’t tell me,” I go, “—Harvard, right?”

  And the jerk actually smiles, “Class of ‘68.”

  “Listen, pal,” I start to say, but he interrupts me.

  “The name is Hojatolislam.”

  Hey, you know me, I’m good with names—have to be in this business. But Hojatolislam? You got to be kidding. I mean I don’t even attempt it. “Okay,” I say, “I can appreciate where you’re coming from, the guy’s a big deal over here, yeah, all right … but believe me, you take it anyplace else and your Ayatollah’s got about as positive a public image as the Son of Sam. That’s what you hired us for, right? Hey, I don’t care what people think of the man, to me, I’m an agnostic personally, and this is just another guy with a negative public perception that wants to go upscale. And I’m going to talk to him. Straight up. All the cards on the table.”

  And then you know what he does, the chump? He says I’m crass. (Crass—and I’m wearing an Italian silk suit that’s worth more than this joker’ll make in six lifetimes and a pair of hand-stitched loafers that cost me … but I don’t even want to get into it.) Anyway, I’m crass. I’m going to undermine the old fart’s credibility, as if he’s got any. It was so-and-so’s party that wanted me in—to make the Ayatollah look foolish—and he, Hojatolislam, is going to do everything in his power to see that it doesn’t happen.

  “Whoa,” I go, “don’t let’s mix politics up in this. I was hired to do a job here and I’m going to do it, whether you and the rest of the little ayatollahs like it or not.”

  Hoji kinda draws himself up and gives me this tight little kiss-my-ass smile. “Fine,” he says, “you can do what you want, but you know how much of what you said this morning came across? In my translation, that is?”

  Then it dawns on me: no wonder the Ayatollah looks like he’s in la-la land the whole time I’m talking to him—nothing’s getting through. “Let me guess,” I say.

  But he beats me to it, the son of a bitch. He leans forward on his elbows and makes this little circle with his thumb and index finger and then holds it up to his eye and peeks through it—real cute, huh?

  I don’t say a word. But I’m thinking, Okay, pal, you want to play hardball, we’ll play hardball.

  So it sounds like I’m in pretty deep, right? You’re probably thinking it’s tough enough to market this turkey to begin with, let alone having to deal with all these little ayatollahs and their pet gripes. But the way I see it, it’s no big problem. You got to ask yourself, What’s this guy got going for him? All right, he’s a fanatic. We admit it. Up front. But hell, you can capitalize on anything. Now the big thing about a fanatic is he’s sexy—look at Hitler, Stalin, with that head of hair of his, look at Fidel—and let’s face it, he’s got these kids, these so-called martyrs of the revolution, dying for him by the thousands. The guy’s got charisma to burn, no doubt about it. Clean him up and put him in front of the TV cameras, that’s the way I see it—and no, I’m not talking Merv Griffin and that sort of thing; I mean I can’t feature him up there in a luau shirt with a couple of gold chains or anything like that—but he could show some chest hair, for christsake. I mean he’s old, but hell, he’s a pretty sexy guy in his way. A power trip like that, all those kids dying in the swamps, giving the Iraqis hell, that’s a very sexy thing. In a weird way, I mean. Like it’s a real turn-on. Classic. But my idea is maybe get him a gig with GTE or somebody. You know, coach up his English like with that French guy they had on selling perfume a couple years back, real charming, sweet-guy kinda thing, right? No, selling the man is the least of my worries. But if I can’t talk to him, I’m cooked.

  So I go straight to my room and get Chuck on the horn. “Chuck,” I tell him, “they’re killing me over here. Send me an interpreter on the next plane, will you? Somebody that’s on our side.”

  Next morning, there’s a knock on my door. It’s this guy about five feet tall and five feet wide, with this little goatee and kinky hair all plastered down on his head. His name’s Parviz. Yesterday he’s selling rugs on La Brea, today he’s in Tehran. Fine. No problem. Only thing is he’s got this accent like Akim Tamiroff, I mean I can barely understand him myself, he’s nodding off to sleep on me, and I’ve got an appointment with the big guy at one. There’s no time for formalities, and plus the guy doesn’t know from shit about PR anyway, so I sit him down and wire him up with about sixty cups of crank and then we’re out the door.

  “Okay, Parviz,” I say, “let’s run with it.”

  Of course, we don’t even get in the door at the Ayatollah’s place and these creeps with the Uzis have Parviz up against the wall, feeling him up and jabbering away at him in this totally weird language of theirs—sounds like a tape loop of somebody clearing their throat. I mean, they feel me up too, but poor Parviz, they strip him down to his underwear—this skinny-strap T-shirt with his big pregnant gut hanging out and these boxer shorts with little blue parrots on them—and the guy’s awake now, believe me. Awake, and sweating like a pig. So anyway, they usher us into this room—different room, different house than yesterday, by the way—and there he is, the Ayatollah, propped up on about a hundred pillows and giving us his lizard-on-a-rock look. Hoji’s there too, of course, along with all the other Ayatollah clones with their raggedy beards and pillbox hats.

  Soon as Hoji gets a load of Parviz though, he can see what’s coming and he throws some kind of fit, teeth flashing in his beard, his face bruised up like a bag of bad plums, pissing and moaning and pointing at me and Parviz like we just got done raping his mother or something. But hey, I’ve taken some meetings in my time and if I can’t handle it, Bob, I mean who can? So I just kinda brush right by Hoji, a big closer’s smile on my face, and shake the old bird’s hand, and I mean nobody shakes his hand—nobody’s laid skin on him in maybe ten years, at least since the revolution, anyway. But I figure the guy used to live in Paris, right? He’s gotta have a nose for a good bottle of wine, a plate of crayfish, Havana cigars, the track, he’s probably dying for somebody to press some skin and shoot the bull about life in the civilized world. So I shake his hand and the room tens
es up, but at least it shuts up Hoji for a minute and I see my opening. “Parviz,” I yell over my shoulder, “tell him that I said we both got the same goal, which is positive name/face recognition worldwide. I mean billboards on Sunset, the works, and if he listens to me and cleans up his act a little, I’m ninety-nine percent sure we’re going home.”

  Well, Parviz starts in and right away Hoji cuts him off with this high-octane rap, but the Ayatollah flicks his eyes and it’s like the guy just had the tongue ripped out of his head, I mean incredible, bang, that’s it. Hoji ducks his head and he’s gone. And me, I’m smiling like Mr. Cool. Parviz goes ahead and finishes and the old bird clears his throat and croaks something back.

  I’m not even looking at Parviz, just holding the Ayatollah’s eyes—by the way, I swear he dyes his eyebrows—and I go, “What’d he say?”

  And Parviz tells me. Twice. Thing is, I can’t understand a word he says, but the hell with it, I figure, be positive, right? “Okay,” I say, seeing as how we’re finally getting down to brass tacks, “about the beard. Tell him beards went out with Jim Morrison—and the bathrobe business is kinda kinky, and we can play to that if he wants, but wouldn’t he feel more comfortable in a nice Italian knit?”

  The big guy says nothing, but I can see this kinda glimmer in his eyes and I know he’s digging it, I mean I can feel it, and I figure we’ll worry about the grooming later and I cut right to the heart of it and lay my big idea on him, the idea that’s going to launch the whole campaign.

  This is genius, Bob, you’re going to love it.

  I ask myself, How do we soften this guy a little, you know, break down the barriers between him and the public, turn all that negative shit around? And what audience are we targeting here? Think about it. He can have all the camel drivers and Kalashnikov toters in the world, but let’s face it, the bottom line is how does he go down over here and that’s like nowheresville. So my idea is this: baseball. Yeah, baseball. Where would Castro be without it? What can the American public relate to—and I’m talking the widest sector now, from the guys in the boardroom to the shlump with the jackhammer out the window there—better than baseball? Can you dig it: the Ayatollah’s a closet baseball fan, but his people need him so much—love him, a country embattled, he’s like a Winston Churchill to them—they won’t let him come to New York for a Yankee game. Can you picture it?

  No? Well, dig the photo. Yeah. From yesterday’s New York Times. See the button here, on his bathrobe? Well, maybe it is a little fuzzy, AP is the pits, but that’s a “Go Yankees!” button I gave him myself.

  No, listen, he liked it, Bob, he liked it. I could tell. I mean I lay the concept on him and he goes off into this fucking soliloquy, croaking up a storm, and then Parviz tells me it’s okay but it’s all over for today, he’s gotta have his hat surgically removed or something, and the guys with the Uzis are closing in again … but I’m seeing green, Bob, I’m seeing him maybe throwing out the first ball this spring, Yankees versus the Reds or Pirates—okay, okay, wrong league—the Birds, then—I’m telling you, the sun on his face, Brooks Brothers draping his shoulders, the cameras whirring, and the arc of that ball just going on and on, out over the grass, across the airwaves and into the lap of every regular Joe in America.

  Believe me, Bob, it’s in the bag.

  (1987)

  THE MIRACLE AT BALLINSPITTLE

  There they are, the holybugs, widows in their weeds and fat-ankled mothers with palsied children, all lined up before the snotgreen likeness of the Virgin, and McGahee and McCarey among them. This statue, alone among all the myriad three-foot-high snotgreen likenesses of the Virgin cast in plaster by Finnbar Finnegan & Sons, Cork City, was seen one grim March afternoon some years back to move its limbs ever so slightly, as if seized suddenly by the need of a good sinew-cracking stretch. Nuala Nolan, a young girl in the throes of Lenten abnegation, was the only one to witness the movement—a gentle beckoning of the statue’s outthrust hand—after a fifteen-day vigil during which she took nothing into her body but Marmite and soda water. Ever since, the place has been packed with tourists.

  Even now, in the crowd of humble countrymen in shit-smeared boots and knit skullcaps, McGahee can detect a certain number of Teutonic or Manhattanite faces above cableknit sweaters and pendant cameras. Drunk and in debt, on the run from a bad marriage, two DWI convictions, and the wheezy expiring gasps of his moribund mother, McGahee pays them no heed. His powers of concentration run deep. He is forty years old, as lithe as a boxer though he’s done no hard physical labor since he took a construction job between semesters at college twenty years back, and he has the watery eyes and doleful, doglike expression of the saint. Twelve hours ago he was in New York, at Paddy Flynn’s, pouring out his heart and enumerating his woes for McCarey, when McCarey said, “Fuck it, let’s go to Ireland.” And now here he is at Ballinspittle, wearing the rumpled Levi’s and Taiwanese sportcoat he’d pulled on in his apartment yesterday morning, three hours off the plane from Kennedy and flush with warmth from the venerable Irish distillates washing through his veins.

  McCarey—plump, stately McCarey—stands beside him, bleary-eyed and impatient, disdainfully scanning the crowd. Heads are bowed. Infants snuffle. From somewhere in the distance come the bleat of a lamb and the mechanical call of the cuckoo. McGahee checks his watch: they’ve been here seven minutes already and nothing’s happened. His mind begins to wander. He’s thinking about orthodontia—thinking an orthodontist could make a fortune in this country—when he looks up and spots her, Nuala Nolan, a scarecrow of a girl, an anorectic, bones-in-a-sack sort of girl, kneeling in front of the queue and reciting the Mysteries in a voice parched for food and drink. Since the statue moved she has stuck to her diet of Marmite and soda water until the very synapses of her brain have become encrusted with salt and she raves like a mariner lost at sea. McGahee regards her with awe. A light rain has begun to fall.

  And then suddenly, before he knows what’s come over him, McGahee goes limp. He feels lightheaded, transported, feels himself sinking into another realm, as helpless and cut adrift as when Dr. Beibelman put him under for his gallbladder operation. He breaks out in a sweat. His vision goes dim. The murmur of the crowd, the call of the cuckoo, and the bleat of the lamb all meld into a single sound—a voice—and that voice, ubiquitous, timeless, all-embracing, permeates his every cell and fiber. It seems to speak through him, through the broad-beamed old hag beside him, through McCarey, Nuala Nolan, the stones and birds and fishes of the sea. “Davey,” the voice calls in the sweetest tones he has ever heard. “Davey McGahee, come to me, come to my embrace.”

  As one, the crowd parts, a hundred stupefied faces turned toward him, and there she is, the Virgin, snotgreen no longer but radiant with the aquamarine of actuality, her eyes glowing, arms beckoning. McGahee casts a quick glance around him. McCarey looks as if he’s been punched in the gut, Nuala Nolan’s skeletal face is clenched with hate and jealousy, the humble countrymen and farmwives stare numbly from him to the statue and back again … and then, as if in response to a subconscious signal, they drop to their knees in a human wave so that only he, Davey McGahee, remains standing. “Come to me,” the figure implores, and slowly, as if his feet were encased in cement, his head reeling and his stomach sour, he begins to move forward, his own arms outstretched in ecstasy.

  The words of his catechism, forgotten these thirty years, echo in his head: “Mother Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our—” “Yesssss!” the statue suddenly shrieks, the upturned palm curled into a fist, a fist like a weapon. “And you think it’s as easy as that, do you?”

  McGahee stops cold, hovering over the tiny effigy like a giant, a troglodyte, a naked barbarian. Three feet high, grotesque, shaking its fists up at him, the thing changes before his eyes. Gone is the beatific smile, gone the grace of the eyes and the faintly mad and indulgent look of the transported saint. The face is a gargoyle’s, a shrew’s, and the voice, sharpening, probing like a dental to
ol, suddenly bears an uncanny resemblance to his ex-wife’s. “Sinner!” the gargoyle hisses. “Fall on your knees!”

  The crowd gasps. McGahee, his bowels turned to ice, pitches forward into the turf. “No, no, no!” he cries, clutching at the grass and squeezing his eyes shut. “Hush,” a new voice whispers in his ear, “look. You must look.” There’s a hand on his neck, bony and cold. He winks open an eye. The statue is gone and Nuala Nolan leans over him, her hair gone in patches, the death’s-head of her face and suffering eyes, her breath like the loam of the grave. “Look, up there,” she whispers.

  High above them, receding into the heavens like a kite loosed from a string, is the statue. Its voice comes to him faint and distant—“Behold … now … your sins … and excesses …”—and then it dwindles away like a fading echo.

  Suddenly, behind the naked pedestal, a bright sunlit vista appears, grapevines marshaled in rows, fields of barley, corn, and hops, and then, falling from the sky with thunderous crashes, a succession of vats, kegs, hogsheads, and buckets mounting up in the foreground as if on some phantom pier piled high with freight. Boom, boom, ka-boom, boom, down they come till the vista is obscured and the kegs mount to the tops of the trees. McGahee pushes himself up to his knees and looks around him. The crowd is regarding him steadily, jaws set, the inclemency of the hanging judge sunk into their eyes. McCarey, kneeling too now and looking as if he’s just lurched up out of a drunken snooze to find himself on a subway car on another planet, has gone steely-eyed with the rest of them. And Nuala Nolan, poised over him, grins till the long naked roots of her teeth gleam beneath the skirts of her rotten gums.