Other Resort Cities

by Tod Goldberg

  “You had me worried,” Cooperman said when he answered.

  “You wanna tell me again what the fuck happened in Mexico?”

  “I thought we were meeting.”

  “You at Sonic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then we’re meeting.”

  “ This is bullshit, Bongo,” Cooperman said.

  “So was shooting a motherfucker in the face,” Bongo said. “So now we’re even.”

  The problem in dealing with criminals, Cooperman had learned, was that most of them were paranoid and narcissistic, which isn’t an ideal combination. Everything was a personal affront. There were only so many ways of telling someone that you weren’t going to fuck them and that you respected them completely, before you started to think of ways to fuck them and disrespect them just to change the conversation. Cooperman hadn’t reached that level with Bongo yet, but he recognized that his problem in Mexico was probably a subconscious manifestation of that very thing. Since losing his job at Rain Dove, he’d read several books on leadership structures and realized that he was guilty of doing that very thing with his RD-2001. Made sense he’d do it again. But that didn’t mean he wanted to lose this job, too.

  “Listen, Bongo,” Cooperman said, “it was completely my fault. I got nervous and everything fell apart super quick. But I want you to know that I’d never fuck you, and I completely respect you and your position.”

  “ You shot a motherfucker who couldn’t even read,” Bongo said. “You realize that? You killed a motherfucking illiterate.”

  “The failure of education isn’t my problem.”

  “You think this is funny?”

  In fact, Cooperman did think it was funny, if only in the way everything seemed off kilter to him these days, as if each moment were separate from the next. He liked to think that he’d finally learned how to compartmentalize, finally got over his obsessive tendency to overanalyze all things, what Katie used to call his “ego-driven OCD.” But the truth was that once he set something aside, he never even bothered to think of it again. Cooperman realized this likely meant he was losing his fucking mind, but even that got shoved aside in time. Like this Mexico shit. He’d driven down to Tijuana with a trunk full of his reconfigured RD-2001s to sell to a contact of Bongo’s, who was then supposedly going to move them to some influential people in Nicaragua, who, if they liked the system, would bankroll an entire development program. Or at least that was the story. But when Cooperman finally met up with the contact—he was just a punk, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen, who didn’t look all that different from the faux gangsters and frat boys who rolled across the Fullerton campus en route to their Freshman Comp sections—a switch flipped in Cooperman’s head. He finally saw the ripples in their entirety: The Nicaraguans would take his technology, backwards engineer it, and he’d be out of a job in two months, maybe less. This adjunct teaching shit, which he only did so he could pay off his monthly alimony, would be his entire life. Teaching Intro to Goddamned Water to a whole legion of consumers who wouldn’t change anything for the better, would just perpetuate the world’s problems, so that in ten years, or twenty, when people were really staring at the end of things, they’d eventually ask who was responsible for teaching these morons how to conserve, and that’s when fingers would start getting pointed at the educational complex and guess what? He’d be out of a job again anyway.

  Cooperman ran it all through his mind from several different angles to make sure he wasn’t overreacting, examined the empirical evidence, and then he shot the kid in the face.

  It wasn’t even like it had happened without Bongo’s complicity, really. Bongo had asked Cooperman months before if he wanted a gun, since Cooperman refused to have any additional security at his house, apart from the rent-a-cops who worked the gate at the Coyote Hills Country Club, and since Cooperman thought the neighbors would find it odd that a bunch of gangsters were loitering around the community pool. So he said sure, absolutely, since it sounded like the type of thing he really should want, even if the idea of shooting a gun went against all of his previous political inclinations. Yet, once he had his handsome chrome-plated nine, Cooperman started going to the Orange County Indoor Range in Brea to shoot, and found he rather liked unloading into the bodies of the various people who’d done him wrong over the years, at least metaphorically. The problem was that Cooperman wasn’t much on metaphors, and after a while he started thinking about making a trip out to Rain Dove’s corporate offices in Phoenix to discuss further his anger regarding his termination. It wasn’t like he wanted to kill anyone, specifically, only that whenever he left the range he felt positively Republican for the first time in his life. Like the kind of guy who handled his problems versus having his problems handle him.

  So when the switch flipped, Cooperman did what those leadership structure books always advocated: he rightsized his problem.

  Crazy thing, it felt pretty good. Taking the power back. All that.

  “I admit my mistake, Bongo. What do you want me to do? The kid shouldn’t have stepped to me. You know me. I don’t G like that.”

  Cooperman heard Bongo sigh. It wasn’t a good sound. He’d already sketched out for Bongo a general idea of how things had gone down in Mexico the day previous, substituting the moment of self-realization for a hazy recounting of the kid waving a knife in his face and trying to steal his car. He knew when he told Bongo the story the first time that it was filled with holes, so he tried to cover his tracks by saying things like, “And I’d never seen so much blood!” and “I can’t sleep now, Bongo, I keep seeing that knife blade in my face!” and “It was all slow motion. One minute, we were sitting there in the Focus, the next he was jabbing a knife at me. What was I supposed to do?” Cooperman thought his mania would make Bongo realize he’d been really scarred by the event, since it wasn’t every day Cooperman killed somebody, and that it was therefore only reasonable things weren’t lining up correctly.

  “All you had to do was hand him a couple fucking boxes. That’s it. No reason for you to feel threatened in the least. It wasn’t even illegal. And this is what you do? You make some shit up about a knife?” Bongo said. “That kid had parents, Dog. Relatives. Motherfucker had an existence, you know? That shit went over five fucking borders. You think the Nicaraguans are going to just let that shit slide?”

  “I highly doubt Sandinista death squads are coming for me,” Cooperman said, but as soon as he said it, he began to think of it as a real possibility. “This is Orange County.”

  “You think that matters?”

  “This is America!”

  “Dog, this is what it is. Place don’t matter in the least.”

  “I’m just a scientist,” Cooperman said.

  Bongo sighed again. It was an especially pitiful noise coming from him. He was one of those Mexican guys who looked like he had some Samoan in him, his torso like a barrel, his hair always shaved close, though sometimes he grew a rat tail off the back of his head, which he then braided. He had a tattoo of his own name on his stomach, which Cooperman thought he must have gotten in prison, though he didn’t even know if Bongo had done any time, but who would be bored enough on the outside to get that done? Funny thing, though, was that Bongo was actually pretty easygoing. Married to a woman named Lupe, whose face he had tatted up on his forearm. A kid. Coached soccer. One time Cooperman even saw him at the Rockin’ Taco eating with his family, and they just nodded at each other. He had some hard knocks in his employ, there was no doubt about that, but Cooperman always admired Bongo’s approach to business—apart from the timing issue—which boiled down to the simple credo tattooed in Old English on the back of his thick neck: Not To Be Played.

  “I left what I owe you in the bathroom, second stall, taped inside the toilet tank,” Bongo said. “I can get you twenty-four hours to get ghost. After that, I don’t know you.”

  “That’s not going to work,” Cooperman said. “I’ve got a job. I’ve got a life here. I can’t just get ghost. Let�
��s be reasonable. Bongo? Bongo?” Cooperman pulled his phone from his ear to see if he’d lost the signal, but it was still four bars strong. He called Bongo back, but the phone just rang and rang, didn’t even go to voicemail.

  “Well, fuck you then,” Cooperman said and set the phone down on the passenger seat. Thinking: I’ll just let it keep ringing. See how annoyed that makes him. Let him know I’m not just going to lie down. William Cooperman doesn’t get played, either.

  Cooperman reached under his seat for his nine, shoved it into the front pocket of his Dockers and got out of his Escalade. He circled around the Sonic once to make sure there wasn’t a SWAT team waiting for him, and then entered the restroom. The only person inside was a Sonic carhop, still in his roller skates, washing his hands at the sink. The only sound was the running water and the constant ringing of a cell phone, which sounded like it was coming from inside the second stall.

  “Oh,” the carhop said when he saw Cooperman. “What’s up, teach?”

  Cooperman looked at the carhop, tried to see his face, but he was finding it hard to concentrate on anything. Bongo had been right fucking here, the entire time; probably got off watching him stew in the front seat of his car, probably thought about killing Cooperman himself. Probably should have. Christ.

  “Who are you?” Cooperman said.

  “Ronnie Key?” He said it like a question, like he wasn’t sure that was his own name. “I’m in your Intro class.”

  “Where do you sit?”

  “In the back,” Ronnie said. “I know, it’s stupid. I should sit up front. All the studies say people who sit in the front do better, but, you know how it is when you have friends in class, right?”

  “Right,” Cooperman said. The longer he looked at Ronnie, the less he seemed real, the less the words he said made any sense. Maybe it was that constantly ringing phone that was making everything skew oddly. Maybe it was that he could feel his nine pulling the front of his pants down, making him aware that he looked like one of those slouchpanted thugs he avoided at the mall. “Was there a big fucking Mexican in here a minute ago?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “There is no ‘not sure,’ Ronnie. Either a human being meeting the description of a big fucking Mexican was in here or was not in here.”

  “Professor, I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

  Professor. Of all the times to finally show some deference. It never failed to amaze Cooperman how often people could astonish you, because even the way Ronnie had said the word indicated a kind of awestruck reverence for the moment, for all the time Cooperman had put into his place of academic standing, even if the truth was that he’d put in shit for academics, it was all just the sprinklers that had brought them to this shared moment. Or maybe it was just confusion Cooperman heard. Either was fine with him.

  Cooperman stared at Ronnie Key for a moment and tried to decide what to do next. His options seemed simple enough. Shoot him or let him roller skate back into his mundane life. The realization that those were his two best choices sealed the deal.

  “I have to take a shit,” Cooperman said. He walked over to the second stall, opened the door and closed it behind him, then waited until he heard Ronnie skate out the door before he dropped Bongo’s ringing phone into the toilet. The cash was right where Bongo said it would be, but there wasn’t much there. Maybe ten thousand. Enough to get out of town, but then what?

  This whole thing was ridiculous. At his house in the Coyote Hills Country Club, where he’d lived a grand total of six months, he had another fifty, maybe more, plus his entire harvest growing in his backyard, which would net three times that much this month. Probably closer to four. He wasn’t a big mover. Cooperman had no delusions about that, he was just happy to provide a niche market, so maybe he’d been wrong ever thinking globally with this whole Nicaragua thing in the first place; but he’d realized that in time, that was the ironic thing now.

  Cooperman just wanted to go home, spark up a bowl, grade some papers, and forget this mess, but going home didn’t seem all that prudent. He realized Bongo was trying to do him a favor, realized that Bongo could have killed him if he wanted to, could have alleviated this now-international incident without a problem, but didn’t. Cooperman didn’t know what to make of that precisely, except that perhaps Bongo felt a level of loyalty. Another surprise. Getting out of town was a gift from Bongo, but where would he go? He’d lived his entire fucked up life in Orange County, and it’s not like moving to Palm Springs was going to somehow change the end result that a bunch of angry Nicaraguans were now looking for him.

  He stepped out of the stall and saw that the sink where Ronnie Key had been standing not five minutes before was now overflowing with water, the tile surrounding the sink a growing lake of piss-colored water. His natural inclination was to turn the faucet off and conserve the water, but then he thought about where he was standing; thought about how just up the street there used to be groves of orange trees that grew wild from the water in the soil that had, nevertheless, been ripped up and paved over; thought about the chimpanzee and gorilla that lived in a cage next to that weird jungle restaurant on Raymond back when he was a kid and how no one seemed to give a shit that it wasn’t in the least bit natural; thought about how nothing in this place has ever lasted, how it’s always been a course of destruction and concrete gentrification. And what did that produce? Nothing came out looking any better, Cooperman thought. No one had figured out a way to make the Marriott across the street from campus as pretty as the citrus trees that once lived in the same spot. No, Cooperman decided as he walked back out into the furnace of the late afternoon, the faucet still going strong behind him, no one ever recognized the ripples.

  The indignity of teaching adjunct at Cal State Fullerton extended beyond the known quantities of indignant students and the horror of keeping a clock. On top of it all, William Cooperman, who’d invented the most technologically advanced piece of sprinkler machinery ever, who thought he should be held up as a paragon of conservation and awareness in this new “go green” world, who’d figured out how to grow marijuana in an environmentally sound way that actually heightened the effectiveness of the THC in ways that could probably help a lot of cancer patients (and in fact, that was what Cooperman had always thought he’d use as his alibi when he was finally busted, that he was growing a mountain of weed in his backyard as a public service to those poor souls with inoperable tumors and such), “the William Cooperman,” as his ex used to call him, had to share an office.

  It was up on the second floor of McCarthy Hall and overlooked the Quad. During the term, it wasn’t such a bad view. Cooperman even sort of liked sitting at his desk and watching the students milling back and forth. As long as he didn’t have to teach the students, he actually rather liked the idea of them, of their determination to learn, their collegial enthusiasm for stupid things like baseball and basketball tournaments, their silly hunger strikes protesting fee hikes, the way every few years MEChA would demand that California be recognized as “Occupied Mexico” even while they happily wore Cal State Fullerton T-shirts and caps. Back in the 1970s, riot police beat the shit out of students in that Quad, but now things were much more civil. Protest was just as cyclical as the tides and, in a bizarre way, it comforted Cooperman during the school year. It also made the prospect of sharing his space with fostering Professor James Kochel less offensive since there was something to occupy his vision other than Kochel’s collection of “family” photos, all of which were of cocker spaniels, and shots of the geology professor in various biblical locales.

  In the summer, however, it was just the two of them with no view to speak of, since the students who liked to protest and march and rally in the Quad typically avoided summer session. Cooperman didn’t know where they went and didn’t really care normally, but the loneliness of the campus this evening made him nervous as he walked from the faculty parking lot to McCarthy. He paused in the Quad and looked up the length of the building
to see if his office light was on, and sure enough he could see Kochel moving about. Cooperman found it strangely comforting, especially since he’d left his gun in the car, figuring he’d just run upstairs, grab his laptop, maybe heist a few other laptops from open offices since they’d be easy to sell along the way to wherever, and then . . . get ghost. Bringing a gun onto the campus might awaken his worst traits, a likely scenario since he was supposed to be teaching another class within the hour, and that meant a few students might show up early wanting to talk.

  He harbored a fantasy, momentarily, that when he got to his office Katie Williard would be waiting for him and he’d grab her, too, and they’d run off and start a life. Tend the rabbits together, Cooperman thought, and realized the sheer folly of it all, but that’s what fantasizing was for.

  Anyway, he hadn’t figured out where, precisely, he was going, but had a vague notion that the Pacific Northwest would be a hospitable place for the world’s finest weed grower, even sort of liked the idea of finding himself in a place like Eugene or Olympia or Longview or Kelso, particularly since he’d spent the last few hours liquidating his bank accounts and now had forty thousand dollars in cash stowed in the Escalade, a couple RD-2001s, and, finally, a reason to leave. The idea of living in near constant rain had a sudden and visceral appeal, and it astonished Cooperman that he hadn’t thought of living in Oregon or Washington previously. He liked apples as much as oranges.

  Cooperman climbed the two flights of stairs up to his office. He was surprised by how light he felt, how clarity had lessened the weight he felt about all of this crap. It wasn’t just about water anymore; it was about living a more principled life. He’d stood for one thing for a very long time and what had it earned him? Cash, of course, but in the end no one cared that he possessed the key to saving the world. What good was it being a superhero if no one respected your superpowers?