The Delivery Man

by Joe McGinniss, Jr.

  In the Tropicana Gardens parking lot it takes close to a minute before Rachel realizes she’s home. She finally kicks the back door open and when it slams into a giant potted plant Chase whips his head around and says, “What the fuck?” Rachel stumbles out of the car and falls to the ground. On her hands and knees Rachel heaves but doesn’t vomit. Michele stares straight ahead. Rachel turns and looks at Michele, who is now lighting a cigarette. Rachel seems to wait for Michele to help her up or at least acknowledge her. When Michele doesn’t, Rachel pulls herself to her feet and trudges away. Rachel is halfway up the staircase when Michele sighs bitterly and calls out her name. Michele motions her back to the car where she hands Rachel a wad of folded bills.

  Rachel says, “I’m really, really sorry.”

  And then Rachel looks at Chase for some reason. Chase thinks she’s about to apologize for the car door but she says nothing and continues to stare sadly at him. Chase wonders if she’s dazed from what happened earlier at the house in the Lakes or if he’s simply an invisible thing in her line of sight. But when Chase meets her eyes it’s clear that she’s aware of him and it seems as though she’s processing something.

  “What?” Chase asks. “What are you looking at?

  “Nothing,” Rachel says and finally walks away. “Thanks for the ride.”

  Chase drives fast alongside shimmering black pools and the bright white geysers stretching from the Strip to the entrance of the Palace. He slows to a stop behind an idling white Hummer limousine. He leaves the engine running. The rush of splashing water from the fountains seems louder tonight and he tells Michele that he’s not coming up to the suite after she asks him to. Chase tells her he needs to lie down for a while before seeing Julia. Michele starts to insist but he cuts her off.

  “Not now. Don’t do this now.”

  A wave of nausea forces his eyes closed. The last time Chase ate something—an orange and a cup of coffee—it was morning.

  Michele asks him when he wants his money. He tells her it doesn’t matter. She starts to hand him some of the cash from tonight. But when she sees Chase’s gaze stuck to the crisp bills in her hand she reconsiders and puts the cash away.

  “You look awful,” she says.

  Chase is shivering in the warm wind. “I don’t know what’s wrong. I feel sick.”

  “Come on,” Michele says and touches his leg as she gets out of the car. “I have something upstairs that’ll help.”

  The rush of cool air flowing through the gleaming gold hallway on the twenty-second floor relieves Chase’s dizziness, but Michele says he looks green and when she asks him if he’s going to be sick he can’t answer. Hip-hop blares inside the suite. The air reeks of marijuana. The room is filled with girls rapping along to Ludacris, mock-taunting each other and rolling their necks. “Stay the fuck up out my biznass!” they keep shouting along with the heavy beats of the chorus. All the BlackBerry messages Michele sent out were obviously received. Michele moves easily through the girls and Chase follows closely behind—he just wants to make it to the bathroom. Then it occurs to him: the girls are here to be recruited.

  Chase catches a glimpse of Hunter slumped on the edge of a bed gazing blankly at the television, a white sheet draped loosely over his shoulder. They exchange a glance as Chase pushes past Michele to the bathroom. He manages to get the door closed and the toilet seat raised before vomiting so violently that it feels as if something has torn loose from the lining of his stomach. When Chase can finally stand up the harsh vanity lights make the lacerations on his neck look brighter, irritated, infected. He turns away appalled and slowly moves out of the bathroom. Hunter stands up still wrapped in the sheet. He leans in to Chase. “Are you okay?” Chase closes his eyes and nods.

  “Bailey was looking for you,” Hunter yells over the music. “He says to keep your phone on.” Then Hunter grabs Chase’s shoulder. “Look,” Hunter says. “I’m ready for an upgrade, if you don’t mind. I’ll get dressed and we’ll move on to the adult world.” Hunter grabs a pile of clothes off the floor and staggers into the bathroom.

  Two girls share a joint on the couch across from the bed where Chase has taken Hunter’s spot. He stares past them and loses himself in the swaying mass of bodies. He finally looks away when he feels a cool hand on his neck. Michele says something into his ear but Chase can make out only one word: Bailey. This night has taken forever, Chase thinks.

  “Pay me,” he says. “Just pay me and I’ll leave.”

  “Bailey said later.” Michele moves her forehead against his until it’s resting there.

  Chase pulls his head away from hers and wraps his hands around her wrists.

  “Now, Michele.” Chase squeezes them and she smiles but stops when he doesn’t.

  6

  Julia is not in her room at the Hard Rock and Chase is relieved. He didn’t call her after he left the Palace because he still felt sick and needed time to pull himself together. He splashes cold water on his face and gently touches the red gashes on his neck. Sitting on the edge of the unmade bed, he eats half of a cold Snickers from the minibar and downs a bottle of Evian and considers skipping the parties. It’s midnight. Chase just wants to get undressed and hide under the covers. He’ll lie down. He’ll turn off his cell. He’ll eventually fall asleep. Tomorrow he’ll feel better. He’ll explain that he wanted to meet her but simply didn’t have the energy. Tomorrow his mind will be clear. Tomorrow there will be a space between tonight—picking up and delivering Rachel to that house in the Lakes, getting sick in the suite filled with all those girls, taking Michele’s money—and the morning. But his cell rings and it’s Julia and without thinking he takes the call and tells her he’s on his way.

  * * *

  Julia’s choking on a cigar. It looks huge in her small hands and at one point almost slips from her fingers. “I got it,” she keeps insisting, “I got it.” She squints when a breeze sends gray smoke back into her eyes. The guy who offered Julia the cigar is tall and dark-skinned and has an immaculately shaven head that’s so clean-looking it almost glows. He’s wearing a black Hugo Boss suit and an expensive Tank watch and seems to enjoy watching Julia struggle. The guy yells something over the loud hip-hop beats into the ear of a light-skinned girl in a halter top who is Monique, Julia’s friend. There are, according to Julia, two crowds at the National Black MBA Conference: the Anxious and the Arrived. And they have both convened on the fake beach at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on a warm and windy Friday night in May.

  Those still in school are the Anxious: wide-eyed and spreading rumors about fielding offers and twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonuses and 100 percent annual salary increases, New York “I-banks,” Goldman, Morgan Stanley, a quarter million in three years. Compared to the Arrived, the Anxious see everything unfolding in front of them in ways they never dreamed. An example: Accenture will offer Julia one hundred thirty a year with a twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus upon successful completion of an internship this summer. Julia’s parents taught in an elementary school in Philadelphia for twenty-five years and only recently earned forty thousand annually—a fact Julia finds instructive but that just bothers Chase.

  The Arrived is a smaller and mostly male group. They offer fifty-dollar cigars to the Anxious, laying the foundation for inviting the girls to an after-party party in their suites, a reward for all that hard work. The Arrived are deserving of a little extra, the wife and infant child at home notwithstanding. They savor the moment with the knowledge that the ninety thousand for Harvard or Chicago or Stanford was totally worth it. They talk matter-of-factly about imported luxury cars that idle in subterranean parking lots for weeks on end in Manhattan and complain that they never get to drive that thing and then it’s the Hamptons and the outrageous monthly American Express Platinum bill and the golf club in Bermuda and the Brazilian masseuse at the W on Union Square.

  “It’s not weed,” Chase tells Julia when she takes a long drag off the cigar and holds her breath. She nods, cheeks expanded, a pained
expression on her face. Slowly, unevenly, Julia exhales, sputtering a stream of acrid smoke. She looks relieved—and then confident—as the smoke evens out and the last of it leaves her mouth. She manages to make a crude but discernible smoke ring that impresses everyone.

  “It’s a 1999 one-off Julieta, one of the better non-Cubans,” the guy tells Hunter, who asked.

  “I love one-offs,” Hunter says as if he knows the difference, nodding to the hip-hop, grabbing another beer from one of the pretty Coors Light Girls wearing tight silver minis and clear plastic six-inch heels who move through the crowd handing out complimentary beer. Hunter tries to talk to the Coors Light Girl and tells some lame joke that she either doesn’t hear or doesn’t get because she stares blankly, fixes her hair in the wind, thanks him for the small tip, and walks away.

  “I’ve got some Cohiba Esplendidos upstairs,” the guy grins. “Cubans,” he tells Hunter.

  “Aren’t those illegal?” Julia asks. Chase glances at her wondering: when did she learn that shit?

  Hunter mentions something to Monique about his year as an apprentice to a muralist in Rome, which was actually four months in an exchange program paid for by his father, where Hunter met a gay painter who let him attend a private workshop that he led especially—and exclusively—for Hunter (Hunter, like always, took it in stride).

  The guy says something to Monique that makes her laugh and they both look at the scratches on Chase’s neck. The guy asks Chase what he did.

  “I teach.”

  The guy shakes his head. “No, I meant what did you do?” The guy points to Chase’s neck.

  “One of the inmates showed a little too much courage.”

  The guy raises his eyebrows.

  Julia turns to Chase. “Yeah, I’d like to know, too. What really happened?” she asks.

  “Nothing.” Chase shrugs.

  “I thought it was from basketball,” Julia says, remembering the lie he told when he met her at McCarran.

  Chase looks back at the guy. “What can I say? The kids are wild here.”

  “What do you really want to do?” the guy, suddenly and inexplicably interested, asks.

  Chase hesitates. It’s been a very long day and he realizes he’s a little drunk.

  Julia speaks up. “He’s a painter. An artist. A really good one.”

  The guy nods, considering this.

  “You hear about that dude? What’s his name in New York? Arular? Arulo? Some one-name motherfucker? I know someone who paid three hundred fifty thousand dollars at auction for that painting of those three naked girls.”

  Hunter nods. “Yeah, I heard about that dude.”

  “Three hundred fifty thousand.” The guy whistles. “I saw his show at the Whitney.”

  “Yeah, so did I,” Hunter says, glancing nervously at Monique.

  “The money can be so fucking sick,” the guy says. “And Arulo’s really good. I mean, enough of this postmodern shit. Reward something real. Something people can fucking relate to. You know what I’m talking about?”

  Julia grabs Chase’s hand.

  For some reason Chase looks to Hunter for a way out of this but Hunter’s staring at Monique, who starts sharing whispers with Julia.

  The guy takes the opportunity to lean forward and smile, offering a sudden unwanted intimacy and a set of gleaming veneers, and says, grabbing Chase by the wrist, “You realize what she’s giving up for you?”

  Shocked, Chase tries to pull away but the guy tightens his grip.

  “You know that staying with you just might be a half-million-dollar decision when she could have any guy here? Are you going to make it worth her while? Giving up a two-income household worth over a mil?”

  Chase shoves the guy’s arm away but the guy keeps leaning closer.

  He whispers into Chase’s ear with the same horrible grin.

  “That’s a lot of pressure on a brother.”

  * * *

  The suite they move to—where a Stanford alumni party is in full swing—is about the same size as Michele’s suite at the Palace but feels smaller because the room is overcrowded with people dancing in small clusters to a loud OutKast CD. All the men are trying to convince the women to come to their rooms for the night and they seem to be succeeding. Chase is now officially drunk and he just watches Hunter talking to Monique, gesturing with his arms, crouching, and then Hunter hops a few inches from the ground, explaining the concept of pylometrics: jumping exercises that have increased Hunter’s vertical leap so that he can dunk a basketball with two hands instead of one. Monique looks over her shoulder for help.

  And then Chase catches Julia staring at him. She is standing with a group near the balcony, a serious expression creasing her face. She used to do this in college when they got separated at parties or sat at different tables in the dining hall. She would study Chase as though trying to figure him out: a white boy from Las Vegas who ended up at NYU, a guy who took a work-study job as a “Safe Walker” for students uncomfortable walking around the city alone at night. When she used to stare at him he felt reassured. Julia knew what it took for Chase to get all the way to Greenwich Village from that hotel room in Bally’s, in Vegas, after that terrible week of the body on the lawn.

  Julia was the first person Chase had ever met who seemed to have an innate understanding that everything could always be worked out. There were always solutions. For example: if Chase couldn’t handle flying home then Julia would go with him. When Chase stayed in New York for Thanksgiving his freshman year—this was his first Thanksgiving away from Vegas and his mother was going to Tahoe with her boyfriend and Chase never heard from his father—then Julia didn’t go to Philadelphia and stayed with him. They ordered Chinese take-out and watched a DVD of Honeymoon in Vegas in his dorm room. When Nicholas Cage and Sarah Jessica Parker checked in to their hotel, Julia asked if that was the Bally’s Chase stayed in after what Chase referred to as “the incident.” There was only one in Vegas, he said, so yes. Julia even understood when Chase explained why he was leaving New York. Everything was too fast and crowded and everyone except him seemed so comfortable and confident. He couldn’t keep up. He hated the kids who wore designer scarves and expensive boots and sat on hallway floors eating apples they had bought at the farmers’ market in Union Square and talked about foreign movies Chase had never heard of. Julia pointed out that she’d never been to the farmers’ market and never sat on the floor and saw none of the same movies and yet she was staying. But in the end she reassured him about his decision. She always insisted, gently, that everything would be okay. Chase could never tell Julia the real reason he left NYU. The real reason was that everyone was better than him.

  Her understanding used to comfort him—it used to make Chase feel grounded. But now it only makes him uneasy, as if the longer she stares the more she will figure out about him and the greater the chances are that she will change her mind about everything. Chase raises his glass and she does nothing. She just continues to stare and as Chase lowers the glass (he doesn’t even know what’s in it) he wonders for the first time since Julia arrived if he’s ready for this. The hot crowded suite is filled with men and women more like her than like Chase: better-educated, more accomplished. The Anxious and the Arrived fill the room, dancing and flirting, giddy with the knowledge that the party is just getting started. They divide Chase and Julia, causing a large and impossible rift. Getting to Julia from where Chase stands will take real work and he’s just not up to the task of pushing through all these bodies so he stays on the other side of the suite, where it occurs to him that it might always feel this way.

  “She looked a little scared,” Julia tells Hunter as they weave down the hushed cool hallway to the elevator. “I think the fall from the couch kind of threw her off.”

  “I thought the thing was longer,” Hunter mutters. “I don’t know. It was dark and that leather was slippery.”

  “Did you happen to tell her you were a pirate?” Julia asks on the ride down in the elevator.
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  “She wasn’t too impressed with that either,” Hunter says glumly. But then he lights up and says, “I feel optimistic anyway.”

  “What do you do?” Chase asks himself.

  Julia looks at Chase quizzically.

  “What do I do? That fucking guy’s in my face about what do I do. You know what I do? I beat the shit out of punks who get out of line. That’s what I do.” Chase slaps Hunter’s chest. “He’s the pirate. I’m the teacher.” Chase wraps his arms around Julia, clasping his hands over her breasts. “And Julia—my all-American girl—is a Master of the Universe.” He kisses her flushed cheek. “Yes, she is. A little Master of the Universe. Aren’t you, baby?”

  “You’re drunk,” Julia mutters.

  “No, I’m unemployed,” Chase says quietly. “That’s what I am.”

  Julia looks at him. “I’m not sure what you mean by unemployed.”

  “And once I leave here and get to Palo Alto, I’ll be unemployed again,” Chase tells her. “Because the teacher is also the fuckup!”

  After a long silence Hunter says, “Dude, you can always temp.”

  And then suddenly they’re in Julia’s room and Michele calls and Chase doesn’t answer and Michele leaves a message telling them to meet her at Curve. “I want to see this girl,” Julia says, staring at Chase. He smiles nervously. “I want to see who I beat out.” Hunter says that if this is where the night is heading then he is either going home or getting shitfaced with the chubby Goth chick at the Double Down or calling Brandi again. Chase ignores this and is relieved when Monique calls Julia’s cell and wants to know why they left her at that awful Stanford party and Monique’s hungry and wonders where everyone’s going tonight and if they want to get something to eat. Chase knows a place. “Monique!” Hunter bellows and leads them from the room. And after a late meal at Aqua (that Julia pays for), Julia, Monique, Hunter, and Chase play roulette at the Mandalay casino and drink Cuba Libres (Monique insists) and Hunter leans over to Chase and tells him that Monique’s brushing her leg against his again and it’s driving him crazy. “That’s me, dude,” Chase tells him. Getting in the Mustang Julia kisses Chase and Hunter lets Monique get into the backseat first and she smiles slyly at him and Chase wonders for a moment if it’s possible that they’ll hook up—he hopes so. The four of them leave the Hard Rock—the top down, the warm wind strong tonight—and Julia holds Chase’s hand and when Monique laughs at something Hunter says Chase sobers up and thinks: maybe it’s all possible.