Con Ed

by Matthew Klein

  “All right,” I say. I can’t help myself. She’s pretty. A little too young for me, but what else do I have to do? Sit in traffic? Drink alone in my apartment? “But not at that bar.”

  “We can go somewhere else.”

  “You’re on.”

  We walk down the block to another bar, McMurphy’s Irish Pub. There’s nothing Irish about it except for the “Mc” on the sign outside. Even that rings false—painted in a different color than the rest of the sign, an owner’s bright afterthought—probably inspired by a last-minute discovery that there’s another Murphy’s on the east side of town. The pub is filled with young kids who just got off from work. They dress messy, in jeans and T-shirts. This being the center of the Internet Universe, at the height of the Internet Boom, I suspect these kids are programmers, and each one of them is worth more than I ever was—even at the height of the Kip Largo Boom. You don’t remember the Kip Largo Boom? It was a brief glorious period in the life of Kip Largo—that’s me—before I went to prison. I was worth maybe twenty million dollars. Now I’m not. You want to know the whole story? Have patience; I’ll tell you soon.

  Jackie O and I sit at a table in the back, far from the programmers. She goes to the bar and orders drinks. Soon she returns with my scotch on the rocks. For herself: a martini, dirty. She’s still wearing her big dark sunglasses. I suspect that underneath them, I will discover two things. One: a pretty face. Two: purple bruises. Like I said: Most women don’t wear sunglasses in a dark bar.

  When she sits down she says, “So are you a cop?”

  I laugh.

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “Because I’m the furthest thing from a cop you can be.”

  “What does that mean? Are you a criminal?”

  “I was,” I say. I’ve learned to get this part of the conversation out of the way as early as possible. The longer you wait, the more cheated the other person feels. You spring the fact that you’re an ex-con on someone more than a day after meeting them, and they feel violated. It’s better to set expectations low and then exceed them. “I was in prison for a little while. I’ve been out for a year.”

  “What’d you do? To go to prison?”

  I can tell from her face that she’s asking if I killed anyone. If I’m dangerous. “White-collar stuff,” I say, vaguely. The way I say that, it sounds like I took a few boxes of paper clips from the supply closet at work. “Nothing too colorful.” Which is not exactly true. I served five years in a federal penitentiary for securities and mail fraud. It was pretty colorful, by the time I was caught.

  “I see,” she says. She’s trying to reconcile this new information with what happened in the Blowfish, where I was a Good Samaritan and saved a young kid from getting his face broken, or worse. How can I explain to her that I’m a con man? That I’ve always had a passion for cons? That if I see a badly run con going down, I always want to step in and give advice. It’s like what would happen if Renoir went to one of those art schools advertised on the back of a matchbook. He’d see a kid painting a portrait of Dumbo the Elephant, and he’d be horrified. He’d throw up his hands and shout, “No, no! Zat is not how it’s done!”

  I say, “Those days are long gone. I’m just a plain guy now, trying to get on with my life.”

  She stares at me. Something is bothering her. “You seem so familiar.”

  Here it comes. This is when they try to place my face. It takes most people a few minutes. Then, after they give up, and I tell them, a look of relief washes over them. Of course, they say. I knew it. Then they stare at me a bit longer, comparing my current face to the one they remember. Inevitably, I see their expression change to one of sadness. I’m a poster child for the phrase Time Is Kind to No One. I used to be on TV hours every week, usually late at night, on infomercials touting a diet plan in the form of a deck of playing cards. It was called the Diet Deck. Maybe you remember it? You would deal yourself a card at random—say, with a picture of a steak—and then you got to eat a steak. If you dealt yourself a picture of steamed broccoli, you got to eat broccoli. There wasn’t much science behind it. Except that there was only one steak in each fifty-two-card deck, and there were five broccolis and five apples. I suspect that when a fattie dealt herself a broccoli, she called a misdeal and dealt herself another card, again and again, until she got what they wanted: the Popcorn Card, or the Chocolate Card.

  I say, to put her out of her misery, “I was on TV. The Diet Deck?”

  “Oh,” she says. “That was you?” Now the comparison begins. I was in the low-security part of Lompoc. But low-security is not what you think. It’s not a country club. Not unless you belong to the kind of country club where the golf pros perform rectal searches regularly, where the tennis courts are locked down for head count twice a day, and where you get stabbed for accidentally taking someone’s bar of soap. Five years of being out-of-control—of being on someone else’s schedule, of being able to take a crap only when you’re allowed to take a crap, of being visible to guards twenty-four hours a day, of being fed strange slices of meat with arterial cross-sections around the edges—five years of this have changed my face from B-Actor handsome to C-List has-been. You’re never the same after you get out. Ask any ex-con. He’ll tell you.

  “My television days are behind me,” I say. “Like I said, I’m just an honest man trying to earn an honest living.”

  “Really?” she says. “That’s too bad.”

  I smile. The line is so perfect, so surprising, I have to bite. “And why is that?”

  “I have a job for you.”

  “I’m not interested,” I say.

  “You don’t know what it is.”

  “I don’t need to. Look, lady, you wanted to buy me a drink. I never turn down a drink. I’ve enjoyed it.” I hold up the glass of scotch, to show her how much I’ve enjoyed it, and also to see what’s left. I’m surprised that a few gulps remain. I throw it back into my gullet and put down the glass. “But I already have a job. I’m very happy with it.”

  I work at Economy Cleaners—a dry-cleaning and laundry shop—in Sunnyvale. I get paid ten dollars per hour, plus tips. You ever leave a tip at a dry cleaners? That’s what I thought. In a year of working there, I’ve gotten tipped three times. Twice was loose change that accidentally dropped from someone’s slacks.

  “I’ll pay you a hundred,” she says.

  “Dollars?”

  “No.”

  “Hundred thousand?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s tempting,” I say. “But no.”

  “Don’t you want to know what the job is?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know who my husband is?”

  “No.”

  As if to answer her own question, she takes off her sunglasses. As I suspected, she has a black eye the size of a crumpet. “His name is Edward Napier. Do you know who he is?”

  I do. He’s a Las Vegas magnate. What the media call an impresario. I guess that’s because he impresses people. And why not? He owns The Clouds casino, on the Strip. He’s tall and handsome. He’s worth maybe a billion dollars. No exaggeration. He also has mob connections. Nothing has ever been proven, mind you. It’s just that people who negotiate too hard with him tend to disappear. So deals get done.

  Now that he has conquered Las Vegas, Ed Napier has come to Silicon Valley. Recently he has fancied himself a venture capitalist. He’s been throwing money around, investing tens of millions of dollars in Internet companies. He was quoted in the Wall Street Journal as saying that, when the dust clears, he’s going to own a small percentage of the New Economy. Not many people doubt him. Out loud.

  “No,” I say. “Who is he?”

  She smiles. “It’s a simple job.”

  There’s no such thing as a simple job that pays one hundred grand. Unless you’re a newscaster or a senator. “Like I said, no thanks.” I stand.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why?”

&nbs
p; “Because I don’t believe you. I don’t believe you just happened to run into me in a bar. I think you know who I am, and this is a setup.”

  “But I swear to you.”

  “Oh, you swear? Well, in that case . . .” I sit back down.

  She looks surprised.

  “Just kidding,” I say. I stand up again. “Last chance. Who sent you?”

  “No one.”

  “Goodbye.”

  I turn to leave.

  “Wait,” she says. She tugs my pant leg. “Here.”

  She hands me a business card. It says, “Lauren Napier.” Just a telephone number. No job title. No address. “That’s my private cell phone,” she says. “You can call the number anytime.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” I say. “Thanks for the drink.” I leave Ms. Lauren Napier sitting at the table, and I hurry out to my Honda. If I’m lucky, my trip home will consist of exactly one hour sitting on Highway 85 in the hot sun.

  I get home at seven o’clock. It’s summer, still plenty of daylight left.

  I live in a four-plex apartment in downtown Palo Alto. It’s not exactly run-down, but it’s not up to neighborhood standards, either. On all four sides are beautiful gated condominium buildings where one-bedrooms go for half a million dollars. My place is old, cheap stucco, with an open carport in the front, like the neighborhood cold sore. My landlord—who lives in the apartment above mine—is ninety years old. He bought the building in 1958, long before the area was known as Silicon Valley. For the first ten years he owned the place, he kept a chicken coop in the backyard. Nowadays he charges me four hundred dollars to rent my one-bedroom, when the market would command twelve hundred per month. It’s not clear if his policy is the result of stubborn decency or senility.

  In return for the low rent, I help out. There’s not much to do: clip hedges, bring the recycling out to the curb each Tuesday, call the Sears man when the communal washing machine conks out.

  Today, Mr. Santullo meets me in the driveway. He’s wearing a wife-beater undershirt and a terry-cloth bathrobe. He shuffles over to my car and says, “Kip, can you change the light bulb upstairs?” He’s a little man, shrunken and worn like a well-chewed dog toy. He speaks with an Italian accent. I’ve heard his life story dozens of times: came over from Italy during the Depression, worked at the Swift meatpacking plant in San Francisco, made good union wages, started buying real estate while the rest of his family mocked him for paying too much for rural land in the middle of nowhere—Palo Alto. Now the land under the apartment where I live—downtown, at the epicenter of the biggest economic boom in the history of capitalism—will fetch a million dollars whenever he wants to sell. Chances are, he never will. So his heirs will get the money. In fact, they’ve already started to circle, visiting him more frequently now, as they sense impending death. Nothing like money to inspire love.

  I say, “No problem, Delfino.”

  He leads the way, slippers scuffing concrete. I follow as he circles to the back of the apartment and climbs the stairs. There are two units on the first floor—mine and that of a young divorcée—and two upstairs—Delfino’s and a Stanford professor’s. It takes Delfino a good minute to climb the thirteen stairs. Finally he reaches the second-floor landing. He points to a ceiling-mounted exterior light. “Here,” he says. He reaches into his bathrobe and produces a light bulb, as if he’s part of a magic act. He hands it to me.

  I look at the ceiling light fixture. On my toes, I might be able to reach. So I stretch, hands high above my head, to unscrew the glass cover from the fixture. I am precariously near the edge of the concrete staircase. I unfasten the fixture cover. My body strains.

  From the bottom of the stairs, a voice calls, “Delfino, no!”

  I nearly drop the glass cover. I look down. It’s Mr. Santullo’s grandson, trotting up the stairs toward me.

  Even though Delfino calls him his grandson, he is not actually related. He is the husband of Mr. Santullo’s granddaughter. Which means: He married into Delfino’s family, just in time. For years, I seldom saw the granddaughter visit the old man. But now that Mr. Santullo is approaching death, and his assets are about to be distributed, grandson has been making frequent appearances. Perhaps he smells a payday?

  The grandson is from somewhere in the Middle East, maybe Egypt. He has dark wavy hair, a swarthy complexion. He speaks perfect English, hardly an accent. He’s a commercial real estate broker. He always has the look of a man measuring how much something is worth.

  Recently Delfino told me that his grandson has been helping with paperwork—bills, bank account statements, taxes. It’s not merely because I’m an ex-con that I smell something fishy. I would not be surprised if Mr. Santullo’s will is rewritten, perhaps without his knowledge.

  But like all elderly marks, Mr. Santullo suspects nothing. He affectionately calls his grandson his “Arabian,” like the kid’s a horse. I think the kid bristles at that, but he does a good job hiding it. Just a year or two more, he must tell himself.

  The Arabian flies up the stairs, to make sure I stop helping grandfather. No one can be invited into Mr. Santullo’s inner circle now, not when wills are being rewritten. He joins us on the landing. “Delfino, how many times have I told you?” he says, angrily, as if to a child. “You can’t ask tenants to do your chores.”

  “It’s really no problem—” I start to say.

  He ignores me. To Mr. Santullo, as if I don’t exist: “You call me next time.”

  Mr. Santullo laughs good-naturedly. He’s hard of hearing, so it’s not clear he heard or understood what his Arabian said. He turns to me. “That’s my grandson,” he explains. “He’s my Arabian.”

  “Yes,” I say gently, “I know.”

  Grandson holds out his palm in front of me. It takes me a moment to understand that he’s asking for the light bulb. I hand it to him. “I’ve got it now,” he says to me. Whether he means the light bulb or the real estate under our feet is unclear.

  “Sure.” I turn to Mr. Santullo. “Take care, Mr. Santullo.”

  Mr. Santullo chuckles. Maybe he knows what’s going on; maybe not. Without a further word to the Arabian, I head down to my apartment.

  My apartment contains: one bedroom, a galley kitchen, an old GE electric stove with three of the original four eyes still functioning, green carpet that was laid down when Eisenhower was president, and two broken windows patched with Saran wrap and Scotch tape. There’s a bathroom with an exhaust fan that sounds like the engine room of the QE 2. When something breaks, I don’t bother Mr. Santullo with it. Like I said, he charges me only four hundred dollars each month for rent.

  In my living room I keep a computer and dozens of cartons filled with vitamins. I run a business selling nutritional supplements over the Internet. It’s called MrVitamin.com. It’s totally legitimate. Unfortunately.

  I net about twenty dollars each month.

  I had to order eight hundred bottles of vitamins from the wholesaler in order to receive any kind of reasonable discount. My living room looks like a warehouse, stacked high with cartons of vitamin E, beta-carotene, multivitamin pills, and selenium tablets. In the unlikely event that the world ever switches to a selenium-based economy, I will become a very rich man.

  Until then, it’s slow going. I stumble over the vitamin cartons to the computer. It’s set atop an old rickety card table. I asked my programmer to write a program that displays up-to-the-second sales results. He created a screensaver that shows a little vitamin pill bouncing around the screen. Inside the vitamin is the daily sales total. According to my bouncing vitamin, while I was at work today, I sold $56.23 worth of vitamins. My gross margin is about 7 percent. That means today I earned $3.94. It costs me about ten dollars per day to run the Web site. Like the old joke, I lose money on each sale, but I hope to make it up on volume.

  In the kitchen, I play my telephone messages. There are two. The first is
from Peter Room, my programmer. I met Peter back in my Diet Deck days. When sales started to take off, I was taking hundreds of orders each day. Our telephone operators scribbled down orders on index cards. I realized I needed a professional computer database to store all of my fatties’ names and addresses, and to keep the orders straight. Anderson Consulting offered to write me a piece of custom software and install it for seventy-five thousand dollars up front, plus a ten-thousand-dollar monthly maintenance fee. That sounded a little steep, so I biked over to the Stanford campus and I posted a handwritten sign on a tree that said, “Computer Programmer Wanted. $10/hr.” I got twenty responses. One came from Peter Room. By the time I got sent to Lompoc, I had paid Peter a total of twenty thousand dollars. I’m sure nineteen thousand of that went to Peter’s pot dealer. If I could have set up some kind of direct deposit with Miguel, it would have made everyone’s life easier.

  In his telephone message, Peter tells me that he finished the software project I requested for the Web site: automatically recurring orders. Here’s the idea. People take vitamins every day, so a jar of thirty pills should last exactly one month. So why should customers have to return to MrVitamin.com to reorder each month? I asked Peter to allow customers to request automatic monthly shipments of their vitamins. Once per month, their credit card gets billed and a new jar of multivitamins gets shipped. Automatically.

  I know what you’re thinking. In my old, pre-Lompoc days, I may not have told customers that they were signing up for this convenience. And maybe the billing would have been more regular than the shipping. But that’s the old me. I’m a new man. Straight as an arrow.

  On his message, Peter tells me the good news, that recurring orders are now available on the MrVitamin.com Web site. Then he clears his throat. “So, um, listen,” he says. “Maybe we can settle up the bill soon?”