I understand now that Aunt Liz could sense, just from Paul’s presence, that she was dealing with someone who possessed vast intellectual powers, that her citing his shabbiness and strangeness was just a smokescreen, that when it came right down to it she didn’t want to get in any kind of argument with his superior mind. Aunt Liz said that I had to be more judicious, that was the word she used, about who and how and when I spoke with people, and more careful about making friends, especially in Panorama City, people were not to be trusted. She repeated to me the phrase This is not Madera, again and again. And as sorry as it made her to say it, her words, Panorama City was no longer the haven it had been when she’d first moved there, before all of the elements arrived. But she was going to stay the course, she said, decent people would be back soon. Which made no sense to me, Juan-George, I could see already that Panorama City was full of decent people. Only the people in the milky blue house would turn out less than decent, or decent in their own way, but not of like mind, which is only to say that there are many different reasons for letting a lawn grow in a wild state of nature, not all of them philosophically sound.
C: Your Aunt Liz is right, you know, about the people down there. When Juan-George listens to these tapes, I want him to know that. I want you to know that, my little toronja.
O: I was there, I was there for forty days and the people were decent. I mean there were a few exceptions, of course, there are always exceptions, but I can say with some certainty, and with experience, it was my experience that everyone I met and made friends with in Panorama City was decent.
C: Listen, Juan-George, take it with a grain of salt, your father’s always giving people the benefit of the doubt.
O: It’s true I don’t judge a book by its cover.
C: Panorama City is gangs, drugs, lowlifes. Stay in Madera, it’s safe here, it’s families here.
O: I can only say what my experience was.
C: I don’t know why your Aunt Liz stays there. She’s crazy to stay there, Oppen.
O: She was a generous host.
A CAREER IN SALES
A few days later, I was on top of the fast-food place dumpster corral, I was pulling a broken television off the chain-link roof of the dumpster corral, it had appeared since the last time I’d been up there, I am doomed to be haunted by televisions, at least this one was broken, I was up top when a large maroon Mercedes-Benz pulled up, Paul Renfro at the wheel. You should have seen him, he looked like the king of the neighborhood, talk about a man of the world, he was wearing a white button-up shirt and a red bow tie, and when he got out of the car I could see he was wearing fancy black pants too. His shoes weren’t fancy, his shoes were plain running shoes that looked like he’d painted them black, they looked ratty, in fact. I was going to ask him about the shoes, but he told me we didn’t have a lot of time, he wanted to talk with me, he had a proposition. He explained that he’d borrowed the car from his job, the people who had dropped it off were elderly, they were in for a long lunch, their situation was leisurely compared to ours. Paul pointed at the dumpster corral and said that this was typical of what society did these days with thinkers, with real thinkers, he said, not those hiding under piles of professional paper, but real thinkers, no wonder the world was short of us. To put food in our mouths we take out the trash and park other people’s cars, his words, even while we single-handedly shove history forward. A prophet is not recognized in his own land, Jesus himself complained about it, Paul’s words. He asked me whether the drive-thru microphone was always on, I did not know, so we moved to the outdoor dining table behind the restaurant, the lone table on a square of concrete next to a patch of grass, out of earshot, out of microphone shot, of the drive-thru. Paul asked me whether I wanted to work at the fast-food place for the rest of my life, whether I wanted to be absorbed into the mass of anonymous nonthinkers. I hadn’t thought about it that way, I had been focused on the philosophy of the training video, I was trying to live by it, I was trying my best to be a part of the great big family that was the fast-food place, I told Paul that Aunt Liz and I were looking for the same thing, that we were both interested in my becoming a man of the world, and part of that idea was working at the fastfood place, and part of working at the fast-food place was what was on the training video. Paul’s eyebrows went up. He said that nonthinkers have always treated the thinkers like this, always, and the thinkers have always taken it, the thinkers have always locked themselves up and starved themselves to death and only a hundred years later do their papers appear and everyone realizes they were unrecognized geniuses, his words, this has always been so but it doesn’t have to be. In Paul’s estimation there was no reason we couldn’t build a solid financial base to enable us to think some advanced thoughts in comfort for once, without all of this car parking and garbage clearing nonsense. Which made sense to me, after all I wasn’t doing any advanced thinking on top of the fast-food place dumpster corral.
They say, Juan-George, and by the time you listen to this you will have heard them say, that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And when they say it, they mean that you can’t spend all of your time thinking about your far-off destination, that you have to start somewhere, that if you don’t take a single step first you’ll never get anywhere. They’re encouraging you to act, to stop thinking about the big stuff and just get going, they’re having faith in you, they’re having faith that you’ll get there, wherever there is, and saying that you should have faith too. But one thing they don’t say is that the journey of a thousand miles usually begins with a single step in the wrong direction.
That night I waited until Aunt Liz had taken her sleeping pills and gone to sleep professionally. I changed out of my pajamas and into street clothes and set out. Following the directions Paul gave me, he had drawn me a little map on a fast-food place bag, I took the bus to his penthouse apartment in North Hollywood. I took Paul’s elevator to the fifth floor, which was as high as it went. Stairs at the end of the hall led to a door marked with some words and a picture of a ringing alarm, which did not ring when I pushed it open and onto the massive roof patio. I wasn’t impressed with the building or the neighborhood. Sometimes people hold grudges against their own homes, is the best way I can put it. Paul’s penthouse was a big patio, he explained to me that he was remodeling the apartment and so had torn the whole thing down, he was renting a room in an apartment downstairs, which was shelter fit for a king, he said, for a deposed king, a temporarily deposed king, while he worked on plans to rebuild the penthouse itself. The patio was crowded with containers for Paul’s experiments. The heat of the day had settled into the warmth of night and Paul offered me a beer from a cooler. We unfolded a couple of aluminum lawn chairs and sat. The excited and enthusiastic Paul Renfro of the fast-food place’s lone outdoor table had transformed into a contemplative, gazing-at-the-stars Paul Renfro. Later he would explain that there are times for planning, times for implementing, times for considering, times for reconsidering, and times for drinking beer while looking at the sky.
We went downstairs into an apartment, in the living room a group of men were watching soccer and eating noodles out of Styrofoam bowls. Paul said they were illegals, Guatemalans, migrant workers. They were a constant source of inspiration to him. It is natural, Paul’s words, that in this most bureaucratic age the last true improvisational thinkers should be called illegals. He said this loudly and with a tone of great public authority. The men did not seem to notice. Paul’s room was filled with cardboard boxes, no wonder he slept on the roof. For several hours Paul and I filled the elevator with those boxes and brought them to the fifth floor and I carried them the rest of the way up. After emptying trash cans all day and cleaning up a second grease spill that was not my fault and being reminded not to talk to customers, it was a relief to work for a friend until the job was done instead of working for strangers until the clock ran out. Once we got everything onto the roof, Paul and I took another half hour to drink beer and look at the sky
, I don’t like to drink, but if you’re just looking at the night sky and there’s no one around trying to pick a fight it can be okay. Paul and I had profound conversations on many subjects such as science and the scientific method, in fact he recruited me as a fellow scientist, and then we opened the boxes and made a sort of assembly line, one box that was full of empty antioxidant cream tubes, and then several boxes full of two other kinds of cream, the kind you buy at the supermarket. One smelled like coconut and the other smelled like mint. Together they were the very odor of youth itself, Paul’s words. My nose couldn’t make that out. We poured both into a plastic tub, combined them, and then poured the mix into the antioxidant cream tubes using a little funnel, it was slow work, cream doesn’t flow like water. When we were done Paul unrolled a large sheet of dark purple plastic and a hole-punching device and we punched out gels for what he called his proprietary penlights. Then he opened a box of plain white penlights, and we popped off the caps and slipped in the gels until all of them were done. Paul said that all was fair in love and war, and this was a war, the territory we were trying to capture was time to think. I never worried about having time to think until I moved to Panorama City, I had always just done my thinking, nobody had tried to keep me from thinking in Madera. Paul told me that in his research he had stumbled upon a simple combination none of the other lotion or cream companies had tried, and that by mixing these two commercially available creams and activating them with the UV penlight he could indeed make people look younger. Then he added unnecessarily that the creams we had blended had high SPF values, whoever applied them regularly would be protected from certain kinds of skin cancer, which was a side benefit, which was something we could also feel good about, while we were appealing to their vanity we were also looking after their health, it is the business of thinkers to be guardians, his words, to guard over the health and well-being of nonthinkers, someday we will need them around to park our cars and clean up our garbage.
Several nights that week I snuck out from Aunt Liz’s, she never suspected anything, I snuck out and together Paul and I prepared cream tubes and penlights for sale, we labeled everything, Paul had custom labels printed, they looked medical. It all went smoothly, aside from my not getting enough rest, which was compounded by the fact that I was sleeping on the air mattress, sleeping with my hands and arms off the edges of the air mattress, careful not to roll off, though by dawn I usually found myself on the floor. It was an exhausting time, Juan-George, made pleasurable by real work, punctuated with long hours of being the floater and a session with Dr. Armando Rosenkleig, who continued to baffle me, I didn’t know what we were supposed to be talking about and he was no help.
The day arrived, the day I was to leave behind my life as a floater and wage slave and start my career in sales, and instead of putting on my fast-food place uniform I put on your grandfather’s suit jacket and hat and a crisp white shirt. I did my best to steer clear of Aunt Liz, I thought I could avoid notice and go straight to Paul Renfro’s without her seeing me, but Aunt Liz was everywhere in the morning, Aunt Liz would not let me go without a solid breakfast, which to her meant eggs. I have always been partial to oatmeal but Aunt Liz was always pushing eggs. The beginning of life for the beginning of the day, her words. When Aunt Liz noted that I was wearing my traveling clothes, as she called them, instead of my uniform, I worried that I was finished before I’d even started. I thought she was going to ask questions about what I was up to. But she only said that she was relieved I’d finally stopped wearing my fast-food place uniform everywhere, if only she could do something about the binoculars around my neck. When breakfast was over I hopped on the bus and went to Paul’s building. If I could go back and do it all over again, which I cannot do, which is impossible, I might have contacted Roger, or dropped by, to let him know that I wouldn’t be coming in. I hadn’t really considered that not showing up to work would be cause for alarm, I’m the type that once I’ve made up my mind I forget that the world hasn’t been informed. So I didn’t tell anyone what I was up to, and maybe I should have, although who knows what would have happened if I had, unintended consequences being what they are and operating like they do. Really what was going on was that in the middle of the night, while sleeping poorly, while not getting a good night’s sleep, while debating whether I should pull myself off the floor and onto the inflatable mattress again, knowing that I would end up on the floor by morning, I couldn’t help but think about rude commerce. Obviously, as Paul pointed out, the first step would be to secure time to think, the first step would be to use rude commerce as a tool to remove ourselves from the world of rude commerce, but then undoubtedly we would have additional money, we would have wealth to spare, and my mind reeled at the possibilities, which may have been one reason I was distracted from covering my tracks, so to speak, I was too busy looking forward, I didn’t think I’d be coming back this way. Which was also why I missed the bus stop by Paul’s place and had to get off at the next one and walk back.
He was waiting for me on the sidewalk with a large cardboard box full of antioxidant cream and ultraviolet penlights, he was wearing his valet parking uniform again, together we must have looked impressive, we must have looked like men of the world, we sure made an impact, a visual impact, I mean, when we got on the bus to Sherman Oaks people took notice. I had asked Paul where we were going and he’d told me he’d explain on the way, we didn’t have time to waste, but once we were on the bus he didn’t seem to be in the mood to explain, he seemed far more concerned with the safety and security of his box. Paul was blinking strangely, he was blinking as if by force of will, whatever automatic motor in the head that makes us blink without thinking was shut down or not operating correctly, and so he forced his eyes shut and open every twenty seconds, his mouth open, always open when he did this. I asked if he was okay, if he was feeling okay. The illegals had been up all night watching soccer matches, he explained, and construction machinery on the next street over prevented any sleep during the day, but otherwise he felt alive. Stepping off the bus had an emancipatory effect, Paul’s words, he could feel it was going to be a good day, he said, and he let me carry the box from there onward. We walked several blocks through a business district in Sherman Oaks, language on everything, until we reached what Paul called ground zero.
***
You could see through the front windows, you could see machines, dozens of machines, people on treadmills and exercise bicycles and rowers and other machines I could not recognize or name, I had never seen anything like it, the only thing I knew from personal experience was the exercise bicycle, Wilfredo had a catalogue full of them. Everyone who was exercising was watching television, there were televisions everywhere, which I shouldn’t have been surprised about, but I was, I couldn’t help but be, and while everyone was exercising and watching television, everyone else, I mean people outside the so-called health club, everyone on the street, we all could see, or would be hard pressed not to see, the people inside the health club, exercising. Clearly, with the giant windows opening onto the sidewalk like that, those of us on the outside were meant to look in at those on the inside, but nobody on the inside seemed to care or notice anybody outside. They acted, strangely, as if the glass was one-way, as if they couldn’t see us or anything going on outside, they moved and sweated and watched their televisions, it was like an aquarium without the water, it was like television.
Behind the front counter sat a woman in tight clothing, her ponytail tied up high, arms crossed tight across her chest. Paul walked up to her and said a few words, she picked up the phone, spoke into it, hung up, and recrossed her arms. When health club members came in, they swiped a card over a box, she nodded at them. I recognized her as a fellow wage slave and gave her a smile, she smiled back quickly with her mouth only, no other motion in her face. I sat on a bench, the box at my feet, I tried to place the smell in the air, laundry, sweat, and a third thing, an air freshener that must have been designed in a lab somewhere, there was no wa
y to describe it. Paul sat next to me and explained that we were waiting for the head honcho, that he would liaison with the head honcho and then let me get to selling, he explained that he would love to stick around and help me, but that in order to keep up appearances he would have to return to the field office. I was about to ask him what he meant when the so-called head honcho came out. His name was Carter, he had a bumpy bald head and strange eyebrows, it looked like he had shaved off his eyebrows and then darkened the skin where they’d been, his skin looked like it’d been burned and then fixed by doctors, is the best way I can put it. He was large, I mean he was thick, I couldn’t tell if he was in shape, or had been in shape but no longer was, there was no way to know whether he was built of fat or muscle without touching him. I realized immediately that he and Paul had talked before, which was a relief. Paul explained that as the West Coast regional sales representative for a pharmaceutical firm he couldn’t name because of market research-related privacy concerns, all his words, he couldn’t be more excited to roll out this new antioxidant cream through selected, by which he said he meant exclusive, outlets in Southern California, by which he meant Carter’s health club. He then introduced me as a rising star on his sales team and told him I’d be handling the table today. I shook hands with Carter, his hand was warm like it had been resting on a radiator. Carter said that if there was anything he could do for me, and then he didn’t finish the sentence. Paul and I set up a folding table near the entrance, just past where people swiped their cards, and together we arranged a few rows of antioxidant creams and penlights, and then he pulled out a little folding cardboard sign that listed the benefits of the product and so on. He said that there was one thing I shouldn’t forget while I was working today, which was that we were in a temple, that we had entered a sacred space, that this was a temple to the body, and that the most important organ was not the brain, as some thought, or the heart, but the skin, without the skin the brain and heart would be useless. We had brought with us a product to honor that organ, we had brought with us the most advanced antioxidant skin cream available, and then he said surely I could riff on that for a while, surely I could elaborate on that pitch, he had many things to take care of, he was already late for the lunch shift, but soon there would be no more parking cars, he said, no more picking trash off dumpsters, he was putting his faith and trust in me, he had no doubt I would succeed.
Panorama City Page 7
