Imperfect Solo

by Steven Boykey Sidley

  I press. “But why doesn’t she like me? She makes it obvious.”

  At that moment, Marion arrives with a tray of tea. With scones and jam, for fuck’s sake.

  “I heard that, Meyer. What makes you think I don’t like you?”

  “Signs and semaphores, Marion. I have a degree in those.”

  “I wouldn’t go as far as to say I don’t like you, but you are a typical misogynist.”

  I feel my hackles rise. “Is that a fact?”

  “Yes.”

  “How so?”

  “You have a history of many failed relationships and superficial sex. You are a serial philanderer. I don’t trust you.”

  “Do you trust women who have a history of many men?”

  “That happens less frequently, but yes I do. Sexual politics gives them a greater right.”

  This conversation is on the edge of rapid expansion, like a science lab experiment that will surely end in an explosion. I weigh up the options. Sarcasm. Reasoned debate. Complete surrender. Spirited defense. Insult.

  “Maybe we should have a threesome after tea.”

  She stares at me dully and retreats. My brand of humor has never quite gelled with her.

  “Thanks for the tea, Marion,” I say to her retreating form.

  She probably has a point. No need to be impolite.

  Van and I head up to the Beachwood Cafe for lunch. It is a landmark lunch restaurant, perched halfway up the canyon. Those people below the café are almost exclusively apartment renters, those above are generally homeowners, among them residing some of the feted and famous. The restaurant acts as a metaphorical fulcrum, on any given day feeding both the aspirant and the arrived, the scrabblers and the players. The waitresses have been there for decades, their faces now weathered, their dreams dulled in the cast of their eyes. The clientele is the story of Hollywood, if not America, if not the whole Western world.

  The menu is quaintly old-fashioned; I suspect it has not changed since the days when studios actually made movies instead of outsourcing them. We order the special, meat loaf.

  “So, Van, what’s the story with Marion?”

  “Haven’t we just had this conversation?”

  “Yeah, but I am soon to be single and you owe it to me to break up with her so that we can be her imagined philanderers.”

  “No.”

  “Why? And don’t tell me about the sex.”

  “I dunno. We don’t argue. We like the same movies. We don’t have many friends. I still find her attractive. She doesn’t really want my money. She wants sex about as often as I do. What more do I need?”

  “How often?”

  “What, sex?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Often enough. We don’t break records. When the mood strikes.”

  “You’re not going to give me any more, are you?

  “No.”

  At that moment, one Astor Grand walks in. I haven’t seen him in ten years. At the time he was the top keyboard player in LA, most in demand in the studio and onstage, supporting everybody who was anybody. He had his own band too, made up of studio luminaries hungry for the chance to stretch in front of an audience without charts and headphones and producers and divas. Every time they did a gig, which was never advertised, the who’s who of the muso world turned up.

  He looks shocking, aged, beaten. The lush hair has thinned to a malnourished colorless fuzz, his skin sallow, and there is sag of tired skin below his chin. I call him over, he sits down.

  “Astor, long time. How’ve you been?”

  “Yeah, OK. I see you guys play weekends at The Beast Belly. I should come by.”

  “Anytime. Bring your ivories.”

  I glance at Van. He looks uncharacteristically openmouthed, shocked. He is obviously speechless.

  “So, Astor, where you playing these days?”

  “Not playing much anymore.” He does not meet my eyes as he says this, his gaze bouncing around the room.

  “What you up to?”

  “I’m gonna be putting a band together soon.”

  The tense, the phraseology, the delivery tells its own story. He was dead center ten years ago, sitting atop the mountain, gazing down upon the less fortunate. There was nobody who came through LA for a gig or recording session or concert who didn’t want him. He could play in any genre. He could shine or support. His stage presence was amped up or restrained in deference to the personality of the headline star. He made more money than he could spend, and he was married to Star, a uni-named songwriter of distinction who churned out hits for almost any young singer passing through the brief portals of MTV fame. I vaguely remember a divorce announcement in one of the music rags some years ago.

  He suddenly stands up. “Hey, nice to see you, I gotta run.”

  “Come by the club.” It is the best I can manage.

  “Yeah, yeah, this weekend maybe. You got a keyboard I could use?”

  Fuck. He doesn’t even own a keyboard. After he is gone we are silent for a while.

  “Huh,” say Van with typical loquacity.

  “There but for the grace …” I say.

  “Wonder what happened?”

  “Sure it’s the same old sad story. Drugs. Ego. New talent. Indiscipline. Whatever.”

  “This is the advantage of a trust fund.”

  “This is the advantage of being able to program computers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah.”

  After lunch, we head out into the parking lot. The tire of my car is flat.

  “Fuck, why me?”

  “C’mon, not a big deal—let’s get the spare on.”

  I open the trunk. Haul out the spare. Haul out the jack. Start the whole rigmarole.

  It starts to rain. Hard.

  “FUCK! Didn’t I just say why me?”

  We get the spare on and lower the jack. The spare is flat.

  “FUCK FUCK FUCK.” I am dripping. I reach into the car to get my cell phone. It’s dead.

  “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK. What are the chances? What are the fucking chances? JESUS!”

  We head back inside, drenched, to make a call. It is then that I realize that I have just locked my keys in the car.

  Van starts laughing. It feels like someone is out to get me. The universe, perhaps. I am not amused. I am really not amused.

  CHAPTER 10

  IT’S A MONDAY morning, I am a salaryman, and I must earn my keep.

  I go to the gym before work, just as I have been doing for over fifteen years. Although it goes against my lifelong tendencies toward sloth, which I overcome only with extreme effort and berating and occasional illegal stimulants. At the time I started working out, contemplating a music career that had certain visual requirements onstage, I considered it a business decision. Now it is habit.

  I suspect there are two types of people who go to the gym on a regular basis. Those who do so for health reasons, believing with fetching optimism that three sessions of light exercise per week will allow them to live longer and more sparkling lives, and those who go to look better. The narcissists. Who wish to attract a better class of mate, or to have something to preen about in the mirror, or to lord it over their flabbier citizens. This is where I belong. Wallowing in guiltless and indulgent narcissism. To which I must add, it is not now the narcissism of beauty and youth, it is the narcissism of wanting to be able to peer over my stomach and still see my dick. Without that, we are nothing.

  I wish I could say that I love going to the gym. Wax eloquent about zinging pheromones, or the wonder of the fit and the firm, or the joy of sweat, or the conquering of pain or some other splattered and broken cliché. But I don’t. I hate it. You know that feeling as you walk into a dentist for some potentially life-threatening tooth rot that can only be palliated by extreme pain delivered by torture-chamber implements? That’s what I feel like when I arrive. Every morning. But I do it, grim-faced, self-flagellatory, and cursing the convergence of cultural spandrels and memes that have led me he
re.

  Actually, to be honest, the whole rock-star-onstage image was only a part of it when I took my first hesitant steps through these portals of vanity. I was—to be kind—what one would call an unathletic kid, not graced with bulk, height, or speed. And here I must get into the dark secrets of male attitudes toward their own. … I began to notice, at some point in my early twenties, that not only was the weak and skinny thing a demerit on the girl front, but it was clear that men, in manly places like bars and sports stadiums and hardware stores, would view me with a tiny tremor of disgust. I was letting the team down. Worse—beneath that disgust, there was a message of violence. You are a bloodless ninny and I can take you anytime I like. This runs deep, even for a failed liberal like me. I remember the first time I moved up the rank from skinny nerd to not-so-skinny nerd, after about three months in the gym. I went to a club. And in walks a girl I know. With her is a guy. Undernourished, sunken chest, shapeless arms. My first thought was not, how do you do, nice to meet you. It was—I can take you, you weak pathetic motherfucker.

  It wasn’t overt, you understand. Just under the surface. I had moved up a rank, like from Private to Private First Class. That’s the real reason why I started working out. To be sure that there was someone, anyone, to whom I could give a good ass-kicking. That’s all we are. Mere aspirants, clambering over weaker bodies toward the vaunted pedestal of alpha male. The rest is disguise.

  And then there’s the inner sanctum. The men’s locker room, where sexual social science reveals its dark logic. The point of the locker room is, primarily, to wash and change. The logistics of changing very often involve a degree of nakedness. This is where dick swinging comes in. It is a big moment for the well-endowed, their moment in the sun. These guys can’t wait to strip off. At which point, they strut—quite literally. Their actual gait changes, from a normal walk to a rhythmic tilting of the hips, hither and thither, setting up what is known in engineering as sympathetic resonance, the phenomenon that causes bridges to sway and collapse. Except in this case the desired effect, available only to the long schlongers, is for the fascinating appendage, usually at rest halfway down the leg, to start swinging, left right left right, until, like a heavy length of chain, it is swaying from horizontal to horizontal, displacing air with each oscillation so that the whole locker room can hear this unearthly sound—woosh, woosh, woosh, woosh—and all eyes are drawn down to pelvis level, affording the proud owner full accolades and envy. On the other side of the coin are the less fortunate, those who shed their clothes like magicians, where they can go from fully clothed to naked and then towel-bedecked without revealing even a nanosecond of view of what is presumed to be their shame. Eyes downcast, expressions of grim resignation, they make their way to the showers, limp towels strategically hung to protect their reputations.

  I am at my desk by 9 a.m. Crack my fingers and plunge in, writing an extension to an ancient piece of institutional code that will allow smartphone access to the application. This amuses me greatly. Most companies spent fortunes in the 1980s and ’90s buying and developing and installing large lumbering pieces of software that colonized powerful servers, pushing and pulling information from users tethered to their desks and PCs. Then, wham! Mobiles. Most of these pieces of software were conceptualized and developed before anyone had ever heard of a cellular network. And in every boardroom in the world the cry went up—MOBILITY! Let’s get this software working on the mobile phone, so that our guys can be productive on the subway, at the amusement park with their kids, in restaurants, in toilets, after sex with their partners. They pay large fortunes for the grand new capability. For me, guaranteed employment, as usual.

  After an enjoyable hour of wrestling the API—which is fancy jargon for the doorway that original programmers had built into their bloated architectures to allow future explorers like me to extend the capabilities of their software beyond their original intent—I head over to the canteen for a coffee and a brain reset.

  I spot two of my colleagues, Ellen and Eduardo, sitting and chatting. They are IT support people, meaning that they take calls from angry employees whose passwords have been reset. It is a thankless job, akin to janitorial services. They are an item now, having moved from vague flirting at the help desk to the tipping point of our last IT strategy session, where they got bat drunk at the cocktail party and were spotted fornicating in the server room behind the printer. I was the spotter. We keep a camera in the on-site server room, a security monitor. I recently fed the video stream to the cloud, and have programmed it to stream to my iPhone if there is undue and anomalous movement. I can’t say I wasn’t gratified to see a porno movie rather than a mute set of computer hardware. I didn’t tell them—that would have been too cruel and would have opened me up to all sorts of legal trouble. Or perhaps a beating from Eduardo. Or perhaps a firing.

  “Yo. E and E. What’s the gossip?”

  Eduardo doesn’t talk much. He’s from Chile. He prefers to smolder. Ellen smiles at me.

  “Meyer. Sit down, we were just talking.”

  “About what.”

  “Getting married, maybe.”

  “No shit?”

  “What do you think?”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-four, Ed’s twenty-eight.”

  “Are you still virgins? Have you done the deed?”

  Eduardo smolders hotly at me. Ellen giggles.

  “OK. Have you agreed on a child strategy?”

  “Yup. When I turn thirty.”

  “OK. Have you agreed on a cheating strategy?”

  Eduardo now smolders threateningly.

  Ellen raises a suspicious eyebrow. “What d’you mean?”

  “If someone cheats, is it over, or do you get a mulligan?”

  “This is obviously why you’re twice divorced, Meyer.”

  “Only kidding. Do it, my children. Tie the knot. Make roots. Become a nuclear family. Go forth and multiply. Commit. Lest you become like me. An elder, trapped in loneliness and disquiet. Contribute to the world. I bless you, my children.”

  And I mean it. I was always happier married. At least it seems so now.

  I head off back to my office. As I turn into the main corridor, the CEO strides past, face purple and apoplectic. He stops outside the Human Resources director’s office.

  “I WANT HIM FIRED.”

  The small voice of Jim, the HR guy, trickles out.

  “It is quite difficult to do that. We need to show cause and prove guilt, and go through due process.”

  “HE IS AN INCOMPETENT JACKASS, AND HE IS TOO OLD. FIND A FUCKING WAY. I DON’T WANT TO SEE HIS UGLY FACE AGAIN. AND FIRE HIS UGLY GIRLFRIEND TOO.”

  The CEO turns on his heel and flies down the corridor. I am rooted to the spot. As he gets closer he notices me.

  “What are you staring at, Meyer? Get back to work,” he snarls.

  I continue on to the HR director’s office and pop my head in.

  “Hey, Jim. Fire who?”

  “Can’t tell you.”

  “What did he do?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Jim, I’ve been here for twenty years. C’mon.”

  Jim, a colorless, featureless man with no discernible personality, sighs.

  “Gomez.”

  Gomez is one of the facilities guys, a handyman by any other name—doors, lights, plumbing, locks, paint touch-ups, schlepping boxes, that sort of thing. He has been at the company since it started.

  “He apparently scratched the Maserati while he was cleaning it.”

  “How big?”

  “The scratch?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Invisible to the naked eye, or thereabouts.”

  “Figures.”

  I walk across the parking lot to one of the warehouse buildings where Gomez resides in a small cubicle. His office is the size of a matchbox. His walls are covered with pictures of swarthy, stocky people, like him. They are smiling, sisters, brothers, parents, cousins, friends. Gom
ez smiles a lot. Not now.

  “What’s up, Gomie?”

  “Hi, Mr. Meyer. Not much.”

  “Why so glum?”

  “I fucked up.”

  “How?”

  “Scratched the boss’s car.”

  “Ah. No big.”

  “Very big. He called me a dumb spic.”

  “Lovely. What did you do?”

  “Nothing. I walked away.”

  “Sorry, Gomez.”

  “He’s gonna fire me. I need this job.”

  I shouldn’t have come here. What the fuck can I do? I’m an impotent spectator to blood sport. I have no advice, no counsel, no words of wisdom. No backbone. There are no protections for guys like Gomez. They toil at the base of the pyramid. A thousand replacements await, their breath hot and cloying. He will lose this job, and his chances of finding another are slim. I am not really political these days, my passions for the fight diminished. If I was, I would move smartly left. That’s the problem with a good education; you always end up on the fence, with 360-degree vision, always ready to see the other point of view, unable to cleave to principle of any kind. I was in a debating team at high school. I remember coming home after a victory, feeling sullied and dishonest. Like now.

  “I’ll put in a word if I can.” My shame and fraud raise blood to my cheeks.

  He says nothing, simply looks at me, haunted. We both know how this is going to end.

  I am on my way back to the office, resigned to the inequities, travesties, and the lack of fairness in an uncaring universe.

  And then suddenly I am not.

  Steal the thing that he loves. Wasn’t that what Van said?

  CHAPTER 11

  STEALING FROM THE company turned out to be ridiculously easy. I know every nook and cranny of our IT landscape. I have such seniority that I have what is known in computer parlance as “administrator access,” which is like being the director of the CIA—you can look at and change anything and everything, including things you don’t want people to know about. Although you cannot convince the president to invade foreign countries on the flimsiest of evidence.

  The scam was simple. There are hundreds of thousands of transactions per month, of various sorts. They are classified and fed into the labyrinthine sets of processes and software that eventually ensure that somebody gets paid. These processes are authorized by various financial and other authorized managers through an arcane process called workflow. The largest of these, transactions worth millions and more, need the personal approval of many people, including the CFO and CEO. But here’s the rub. There is a converse to this. The really, really small transactions are barely noticed by anyone, not even the auditors. They are just financial noise, and simply require a passing electronic nod from a generally disinterested low-level manager. How small do they have to be to be ignored by all and sundry? Less than $50. And there may be thousands of these every day.