A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

  “So … you want me to tell her to come?”

  “Tell her to come. She can’t, she won’t, she doesn’t need to, I’m sure I’ll be fine, I’m trying to be more optimistic.”

  “Okay,” Barbara said. “I will give her a call.”

  25

  He returned to the basement, to his desktop computer and the spring-breeze odors that battled the static cling.

  “I want to reiterate just how sorry I was to learn this morning that your mother had passed away,” the letter he composed at his desk to Bruce Crowder began. “Evelyn was one of my first clients when I started as a stockbroker, in 1985. We have been a heck of a team these twenty-three years. In that time, I have overseen a 400 percent return in her portfolio. (With the current economy in free fall, Mr. Crowder, your mother’s holdings have taken a knock, which I regret. I put some of the blame on Bear Stearns and its CEO, Jimmy Cayne.) I always made sure that she was conservatively allocated and well diversified. I saw to it that her monthly distributions did not erode the principal she was intent on leaving her heirs. I advised her on mortgage rates and minor legal matters. I did her taxes every year free of charge.

  “Mr. Crowder,” he continued, “in January of 1993, I offered your mother the chance to be an angel investor in a new enterprise called the Third Age Association (TTAA), which was designed to revolutionize the whys and wherefores of the retirement experience in this country. Our intention was to stop the churn that infected retiree accounts in every big brokerage shop across the nation and to align the financial adviser’s interests with the client’s, placing fiduciary duty front and center, with the added vow that profit would never be our motive. Evelyn learned about this and chose, entirely of her own accord, to invest ten thousand dollars in TTAA. I believed that she had an opportunity for a return that would make the annual dividend from her beloved Alcoa and her beloved GE look like child’s play. Well, it didn’t work out exactly as I had hoped. You see, in May of that year, the SEC contacted me with some concerns—”

  Days after he launched the Third Age, in May of ’93, the SEC contacted him with some concerns. He was in breach of this and in breach of that—most vitally, his fiduciary duty under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. Oh, the bitter irony, for it was in the name of fiduciary duty that he had created the Third Age in the first place, to counteract the Jimmy Caynes of the world and their indefinite churn. The SEC saw it differently: he could not act as a registered investment adviser working in the best interest of clients like Evelyn Crowder while also serving as the CEO of an independent for-profit entity meant to revolutionize the retirement experience. In other words, no investing other people’s money while running an investment company of his own. It presented a clear conflict of interest. But investing other people’s money was the fucking company! Didn’t matter. He had to choose one or the other, and fighting the SEC on that score ate up what little capital he had remaining after buying the billboards and brochures.

  “Couldn’t you have mentioned this before I dropped a hundred grand on marketing?” he asked the regional SEC guy in a Loop conference room.

  “I’m not your lawyer,” the SEC guy shot back. “Do you even have a lawyer?”

  He did. Some tool named Einsohn out of Aurora.

  As he put the phone to his ear (back in his basement office) and dialed, a moment of blinding clarity, ordinarily so rare, came over him, and he saw the dash and the two dates between them, and the headstone, and the sky above, and the absence of laughter and life on his walk back to the car after saying a final goodbye to the previous fifteen years, for now he knew how they had been permanently laid to rest: he went broke, the SEC lost interest in him, and no one gave a damn anymore that some poor slob called himself the CEO of TTAA while managing eleven million.

  “Hartwell and Einsohn.”

  “Good morning,” he said. “Charlie Barnes calling for Aaron Einsohn.”

  There was a long pause.

  “Mr. Barnes,” the woman said. “Haven’t we been over this?”

  “He ruined my life.”

  He was placed on hold.

  “This is Aaron Einsohn.”

  “You ruined my life, Aaron.”

  “Hello, Mr. Barnes.”

  “Remember when the SEC used to call me? It’s been fifteen years now. They don’t call anymore. They don’t give a shit. No one gives a shit.”

  “Frankly, Mr. Barnes, I don’t give a shit, either,” Einsohn said.

  “I had one shot and you blew it, goddamn it.”

  Einsohn had heard it before, and hung up.

  26

  Charlie’s father was an orphan who came of age at the Vermilion County Poor Farm on the Catlin-Tilton Road. He was twenty-five the year he made love to Charlie’s mother in the middle of a cornfield, two strangers meeting cute on a night the circus was in town. Delwina found Alden dashing, with his pale eyes and pencil-thin mustache. They abandoned the campgrounds and cut through the cornstalks like children playing at a game, only to end up naked and mudbound in a little clearing organized just like a sacred cross. When the deed was done, pious Delwina, flooded by images of lambs and leather Bibles, broke into tears. A series of images quickly crowded into Alden’s own mind—of mobs gathering, brothers swinging bats, and the shadow of jailhouse bars falling across a dirt floor. He tried to soothe her, but her ingrained Christian guilt proved too strong for his clumsy rhetoric, and he got to his feet.

  “Well, guess what,” he said. “I should be the one crying, because you’re ugly.”

  With that, he tucked in his shirt and stormed off, expecting never to see the girl again.

  They came for him two months later at Junior’s Pool Hall in the Hotel Grier-Lincoln, where, in exchange for a taste, he laid bets for a man out of Little Egypt. Delwina’s father and uncle offered him no choice but to get inside the car. He was quite surprised, after watching miles of generic dirt road go by, to be delivered to a farmhouse where the woman he had called ugly because she was as tall as a man and as flat-chested as a boy was waiting for him on the porch in her best dress from Cramer & Norton’s.

  She was just beginning to show. The family belonged to the Church of the Nazarene, a severe congregation whose chapel was then located on the Indiana state line. The farmhouse, as many miles west of Danville as Danville was of the chapel, belonged to the church organist and her husband, a soybean farmer. All the congregation’s wayward were married in the front parlor of that farmhouse, far from the parish glare. Alden realized he was presently expected to marry the tall one with the satin frill. The idea dizzied him. He chose to concentrate on his growling stomach, as it was almost noon and he’d had nothing to eat. When he and Delwina stepped inside the farmhouse, the most heavenly scent of Alden’s young life greeted him. Despite the vows he was being forced to exchange as his young bride hovered on the brink of tears and her parents shot daggers at him from the wings, the sweet warmth of some tender loaf wafting out of the kitchen and filling the organist’s unadorned living room served as a reminder that life on earth wasn’t exclusively arbitrary and dumb. Ten minutes later, the two strangers were married without joy or fanfare in a ceremony solemnized by nothing—not a flashbulb, not a church bell, not even a kiss.

  This was immediately compelling history for Charlie, for obvious reasons, and from time to time he would suggest to his son the writer what a great novel it would make in the right hands. This was one of the old man’s more curious features: an antipathy toward novels as a general rule, and absolutely no taste for reading them, together with a tendency to find their shimmering starts almost everywhere in the course of ordinary life. When I asked him to explain why, exactly, this episode between his parents would make a good novel—he had, on this occasion, called me up out of the blue with the express purpose of urging me to write it, and by now no one can doubt what a genius this man had for placing the random phone call—he replied, “Because it’s true.” I never found that very persuasive. Why should I give a damn about
a quorum of sepia-toned sadists who forced two innocents into holy matrimony and the biggest mistake of their lives, all in order to save face? But I did care deeply about the man who would emerge out of that swamp to become the source of love in me. I’d been making a study of that man all my life, and I can tell you: it was never the truth of his circumstances or the facts of his life or the history I’m peppering you with now that made him an object of fascination, but rather the fantastical mind-set and the many fictional selves he hoped to make real, without which life, for him, would not have been worth living.

  But to return to his father. He was pleased to have the wedding ceremony behind him. Now he could sink his teeth into whatever delicious comestible they had made in celebration. The preacher averted his eyes when Alden attempted to shake his hand; his bride hugged her fat aunt. The church organist excused herself from the proceedings. Alden watched her enter the kitchen and pull a piping-hot coffee cake from the oven. Then he watched as she departed for the farmhouse that stood directly across the country road, where a neighbor was convalescing from tuberculosis. It was, for Alden, a loaf of bitter ashes. Not a minute later, the newlyweds climbed into the car together, two strangers bound for a shared life in a Westville shack.

  27

  After the failure of the Clown in Your Town™, there were other strokes of genius, hook-a-duck schemes, napkin-doodled empires and fever dreams full of franchises, including one for-profit endeavor he called Dog Owners of America, Inc., which required a membership fee and was DOA indeed. He also tried his hand at art.

  Over a lifetime of Sundays, Steady Boy came to love the funnies like nothing else. He was twenty-five when he invested in a drafting set and sat at the kitchen table a few hours every night after Jerry had gone to bed dreaming up narratives based on his life as a harried young husband and father. After a month of effort, he concluded that he had no eye for a line and no talent for story, which is why the comic strip The Too Bad Busters never came to be.

  His disappointment gave way, however, to a bigger and better idea. Was there not an unmet need in the marketplace for individuals like him, stymied artists who lacked the skill to draw but would eagerly pay to learn how? To test the theory, he placed an ad in the back of a popular boys’ magazine: is bringing the world to life your dream? are you finding it next to impossible and ready to throw in the towel? look no further than this definitive booklet—ILLUSTRATION ILLUMINATED!

  The first check arrived three days after the ad ran, proof positive that this was a viable and necessary product. He deposited that check and the others that soon followed in a savings account at the Palmer Bank opened for that purpose and vowed to spend none of that money until he had located an illustrator. But try as he might, he never found the right man. The closest he came was Howie Rylance, the courtroom sketch artist, who couldn’t write a sentence in English to save his life, while the fine-art appraiser in town, a man named Glen Glamour, didn’t appear to know anything about art. In the meantime, the checks kept arriving. He began returning them to sender straightaway and canceled the ad in the boys’ magazine. The roughly two hundred dollars he did deposit in good faith as he tried to commission the how-to guide languished at the bank; when it became clear that he had defrauded a handful of individuals of $6.95 apiece, he could no longer find their names or return addresses. He and Sue were constantly moving in those years, and he must have misplaced or discarded them. That money sat there earning interest for another year while his guilt and shame ripened until finally he closed out the account and donated all the money to the March of Dimes.

  All the while he worked his day job at Jonart’s. Jonart’s was followed by a stint at rival Mosser’s (“See the Experts … on the Mall”), followed by stints in the sales department at Flo-Con Systems, Hyster, Inc., Autotron, Enhance Corp., Dante Global, and Twin Tree Associates. Goddamn, he did move from place to place back then.

  By ’67, he’d had enough of such demeaning hustles and their quarter-hour coffee breaks, strict dress codes and petty squabbles over commissions. He wanted something better for himself and applied to college. In the fall of that year he moved the whole family into married housing on the campus of Michigan State, in East Lansing, and began attending classes. They left after a semester and a half. While his carefree classmates were jaunting off to their tailgates and frat parties, he, a young father required to work a full-time job, was slaving at the East Lansing Sears, or helping Sue hold on to whatever shred of her sanity still remained by taking Jerry off her hands for a night. It was just too much. His dream of a college degree was one more opportunity cost of starting a family while still a child himself.

  Or so he told people. Being honest with himself, he knew he hated the nightly reading and simply couldn’t finish it. Home by ten from Sears, he’d crack open the books and by ten fifteen start bleeding tears of terminal boredom. There was simply no narcotic like a textbook. It set off a tidal wave of exhaustion, just an absolute tsunami overwhelming every blood cell and muscle fiber of his being, and seven hours later, he would wake on the floor of the living room with no memory of how he got there. It was like going on a bender. Sue would come into the room and stand over him as if he had no pants on and someone had tattooed asshoole across his brow. He could not recall even a single line from the page and a half of Western civ he’d managed to weed through before conking out. Then he’d make Jerry breakfast, having seen not one lick of him the day before, and get him off to school before heading to class, cramming in whatever he could on campus before the day’s deadlines. There is the old fighting chance, and then there are the house odds, whereby one is guaranteed to lose by year’s end what seems a modest gain on any given day. The house odds caught up to him by final exams. Eventually he wondered what the fuck he was doing playing the scholar when he could go straight to bed being a dropout.

  And as difficult as that admission was to make, even to himself, it still didn’t get at the half of it, the really shameful half. Something more alluring than sleep, only something of a pathological compulsion, could truly explain the … oh, Christ, the burden, the fucking back-borne monkey that pounded its fists and shrieked bloody murder in his ear day and night, making a complete fucking shambles of the facade of Scholar/ Father/Full-time-Jobber. On nights he wasn’t bleeding tears by ten fifteen, he was pulling his pecker out of his pants! He was giving it a yank before his brain exploded with the frustrations of (2) the adult learner and (3) the rebuffed spouse. And what was (1)? Number one was always the unspoken law of his existence, as constant as gravity and as strong as the tides: the irresistible, properly deranging, life-affirming, and yet also totally annihilating urge to fuck. Surrounded all day long by campus coeds, by married ladies seeking his assistance on the sales floor at work, by memories of bras on hangers, naked ankles under fitting-room doors, and the not infrequent plainspoken propositions that certain desperate housewives made to him at checkout … altogether, man, he needed release, and no amount of institutional resistance in the form of deans, marble busts, flowering quads, big-ass globes, Greek notations on chalkboards, large lexicons lying open in hushed libraries, or the many ponderous halls of learning all within spitting distance was going to make that pecker stay put. But when, ten minutes later, he would return to his reading, he always felt so demoralized. You never read about Napoleon having to masturbate. Napoleon never paused laying waste to fucking Europe by turning to his men and declaring that he’d be back in just a minute, he forgot something in the tent. Was that Napoleon’s true importance to Western civilization, to give young men like Charlie some idea of the peril of hand-jobbing your life away? What was wrong with him? He couldn’t do a damn thing without masturbating first. He had to masturbate even in married housing. They were back in Danville by Easter.

  28

  He returned his attention to the letter he was writing to Bruce Crowder.

  “I hope you will consider allowing me to continue managing what is now your mother’s legacy,” he concluded, with so
me daring, “which I would happily do at a discount from my normal fee. But either way, Mr. Crowder, I promise to return to you the ten thousand dollars your mother, Evelyn Crowder, invested in my company, the Third Age Association (TTAA), one month from today, on or before October 12, 2008. As I mentioned earlier on the phone, the investment is not liquid, but that is not your concern. Your mother would want me to honor your request, and I want to honor your mother. You have my word.”

  He sealed and stamped the letter and addressed it to Evelyn Crowder’s house in Barrington, collected the solicitation for kindly Dr. Skinaman along with his rebuttal in writing to any claim Credence Credit Corp. had on him, and marched all three out to the mailbox. Midway there he became aware of all the outside world flooding his senses—asphalt, birdsong, heat—now firmly beyond Evelyn’s reach. Poor Evelyn, poor old girl. Life alone avails. And he was alive. He would live, not die. He halted. Looked up. Peered around. From a Westville shanty to the Chicago suburbs in a single lifetime. Not too shabby for a college dropout. And there was still time, still time. He shivered.

  But the birdsong and bounty were soon drowned out by the low steady hum of paranoia. There was an unmarked white van parked at the curb. It hadn’t been there an hour earlier when, pursued by terror, he burst from the front door and fled the house. It looked FBI-ish, kidnappery, lone shooter–like. Probably just some repair guy. He collected the day’s mail, put the flag up for tomorrow, and while tracking the van with his eyes headed back inside.