The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  “How much they paying?” Esmerelda asked, eyeing the stack of overdue bills on the counter.

  “Zero,” she lied. “Just a résumé builder.”

  “Sounds like slave labor to me,” Esmerelda noted. “Dead wrong and unfair and exploitative. Tell you what, I’ll print up some pamphlets and we’ll shellac the place, protest, start a movement: ‘Pay child workers!’ Can you see it?” She framed her hands into a chubby square. “They’ll eat that stuff up around here.”

  “I’ll go,” Marat mumbled through a mouthful of meat. He was listening to fifteen reggae albums a day holed up in his room, sucking on spliffs and staring blank-eyed at the heavy shadows traipsing across the wall while the ocean of noise floated around him. It was a schedule, he sometimes noted, which alarmingly mirrored his grandmother’s diet of gin and soap operas.

  Robespierre reached into her purse. “Thursday matinee. I got you front-row seats,” she said and pushed an envelope across the table.

  Esmerelda pulled out the tickets and ran her fingers over the particulars, 1 PM on a nonholiday. “During work? Crap, honey, I’m the boss. You know how Slippy is with punctuality and everything, that leading-by-example stuff.”

  “I’ll go,” Marat repeated, stuffing fries in his mouth like he was packing a bowl.

  “Could you throw in some free smoothies?” Esmerelda whined. “That way I can write it off as a business lunch.”

  But the last time Esmerelda came by BlastOff, she’d demanded free samples of all fifteen varieties, then listed the failings of each flavor at top volume, laughing so hard at the amateurish Carrot-Coconut Moonshot smoothie’s ridiculous cinnamon overtones that she sprayed snot-foam out her nose and onto a team of undercover food critics. “I really can’t, mom.”

  “I’ll buy them for you,” Marat said, just to shut her up.

  “Well, at least one of you turned out polite,” Esmerelda retorted, crumpling her chicken burger bun into a gelatinous ball and chomping off an edge. “It will be my pleasure.”

  They arrived after the play started, noisily filing into the front row, Esmerelda slurping on her smoothie sampler and Marat grooving with the last remnants of bud warming his lungs. It took a little while for them to place Robespierre working behind the bar; she seemed lankier and older, empowered and alone. She nailed the constant motion of service industry jobs, Esmerelda observed, changing the channel on the TV and running off to answer the phone, pawing change from the register, slicing lemons, greeting newcomers, whipping out the rag tied to her belt to mop up spillage and polish highball glasses, astonishingly deft with alcohol. About time she picked up a few shifts at CopySmart, Esmerelda decided, help pay down the family deficit while permitting Esmerelda to expand her social calendar with more cultured long lunches like this one.

  Marat observed as close as he could through throbbing, arid eyeballs. He could pull off the role better, he thought; Robespierre had all the right ingredients but lacked honesty, the depth that pulled it all together. Artless, pinched; she behaved as if she didn’t know drugs, as if she could never understand how they made you into someone sloppy and different and beautifully bad. Even surrounded by people, with all her smiling spasms and hitting off the checklist of poses and giggles and dangerous little mouth moves, she looked distanced up there. False. As if this didn’t matter. Which it didn’t.

  “That’s not what happened! I swear to God!” a skier exclaimed, half frightened and half excited, making the least of a juicy adulterer role.

  Robespierre slapped him, openhanded. “Fucker,” she hocked, and let him have another one with the backside.

  “Hey,” the actor squealed, shying back a half step and hiding behind stick forearms.

  “Nice one!” Esmerelda hooted.

  “You pathetic leech!” Robespierre vented, her sultry barmaid voice frazzled with static. “Take your little ding-dong and get out of here!”

  “Damn!” Esmerelda called, clapping her hands over her head.

  “I’m sorry,” the actor shuddered, an amateur half smile forming on his mouth.

  “Go!” Robespierre shouted, and threw a plastic cup full of beer into the audience on a trajectory dead set for Esmerelda’s nose, dousing her eyes and screwing with her breathing and forcing out seven or eight mucus loads onto the floor in front of her.

  Marat laughed more deeply than he had in forever, long irrepressible strokes that lasted well past the moment and on into the next scene, past where Robespierre stormed off the stage at the end of a decidedly noncomedic sequence, past anything remotely resembling reasonable. The delight of fucked-up justice, the absurdity of a world that rewarded childishness and good aim and doing the wrong thing. How amazing this public shaming was, even better than smoking up to mind-crushing bass lines and pissing out the window and never leaving his room. His mother glared at the stage with openmouthed hatred, a hideous deceptive head made for mounting over an alpine fireplace. How easy it would be to punch her out, whack her with a pool cue, shove her down some stairs. He wanted to try it, was winding up the courage, when he felt a troubled silence, the show out of sync, the house lights coming up, the shushes hitting him from twenty directions.

  “OK!” he said, rising to leave. “I’ll go!” But he hyucked it up the whole way out, faster and louder, a thousand monkeys yeeping for their lives.

  When he fell out into the street he was laughing his hardest, his pitch climbing and tapering, his lungs bleeding vapors. Yet beneath the outward manisfestation of cheer he recognized that somehow his sister had made this happen. He’d been discredited in some subtle way. She knew everything important and how to use it and win.

  Ice coated his neck; he felt pickpocketed, exposed. She’d turned out to be a far better actor than he’d been led to believe, and at that realization the chortling finally rolled out and died, replaced by a mile-wide tidepool of seething coral-green jealousy.

  When they got home, Marat was reclined in Fanny’s old chair, his shirt a wet rag, his eyes salted and stained lime green. A thick gray haze hung at his ears, an ivory pipe carved with gargoyles balanced on his belt. “How’d the play end?” he asked.

  “Like crap,” Esmerelda said. “It finished with a stupid class reunion where everybody got in a fight and went home angry. No jokes and no sex. I’ve had more fun at the podiatrist’s.”

  “Do they chuck beer in your face at the podiatrist’s?” Marat asked.

  “It was an accident,” Robespierre interjected, “I apologized.”

  “You guys have always sucked at sports,” Esmerelda confirmed. “I can’t get mad when a throw goes off-base.”

  Marat’s face was unresponsive, a stone wall with a loose brick in the corner, a vital step short of completion. “Marat,” Robespierre said, “are you OK?”

  “Blow off,” he said, and lifted a Bic from his lap, set flame to his pipe, and sucked in nice and slow until Esmerelda’s eight-ring keychain crashed against his knee. He dropped his pipe and wheeled up in a blue coughing fit.

  “HEY!” Esmerelda shouted. “This may be San Francisco, but you’re still my kid! No smoking, and definitely no drugs, capiche? Especially not in the goddamn living room!”

  He cringed and curled up, a dog busted for chewing a shoe. “Sorry, Ma,” he croaked.

  “Clean it up!” Esmerelda shrieked back. “Last thing I want is to roll around in your spittle.”

  “I got it,” Robespierre said, and soundlessly began picking marijuana off the carpet. He was her brother, her partner, with all the right tools, the wiring, the irreplaceable genetics, but something wasn’t processing. How to read people, how to break through, to identify weaknesses and wedge them into opportunities, when to keep your mouth shut and when to charge ahead to the end zone like a turbocharged ICBM. Bad judgment calls and inattentive errors, tactless miscalibrations and a general naïveté, the kind of second-tier mediocrity that ruins premier organizations. The anchor to her accelerating rocket ship.

  And the drugs, all day long. Black smok
e on the rooftop, making him aloof, stupid and sluggish, addled and weird. Building a rap sheet, liability, incriminations and attacks. Unreliable from sunup to Taps, a minefield of mistakes.

  “You’ve got to go,” she said, instantly regretting it, an extraordinarily rare slipup of verbal control. His crap rubbing off on her.

  “Go where?” he asked, flashing black evil eyes.

  “Upstairs,” she recovered, “so I can clean up the chair.”

  He sloshed out of the chair and trudged up to his room, taking with him a funk, a miasma, an ecosystem of decay. Filthy and fucked up, he should be so much better. She would make him that way.

  But it would hurt.

  A February morning, the sky studded with rain. Marat walked through the hall to English class, the only class he attended regularly, because he liked the stories and how he only had to pick a side and sell it to be right. He kept a novel in his front pocket and read on the bus, over beers at Joel’s Ale House, on his back in his redecorated bedroom while girls got dressed and left, cross-legged on the beach while he waited to do deals with the dope acquired by Joel’s library of forged prescription cards. He skipped slow sections and quit whenever he wanted to, reread riveting passages over and over, savored the scenes on his schedule. Even as a time-agnostic pothead, he recognized this small freedom for the wonder that it was.

  “Marat Van Twinkle?”

  Principal Quince was next to him, flanked by Max and Darrell from security. The guards were grade-A guys, scrawny police force rejects thrilled to have summers off, both soca lovers who sometimes burned him mix CDs; two of Marat’s best customers.

  “Huh?” he responded, detached and dim as always, not about to deliver incriminating behavior until he saw some proof.

  “Come with me, please.”

  “Why?” Marat looked around, other kids drifting along like they didn’t see him, zoning and spacing and bored.

  “I’ll explain in a moment.”

  The security guards reluctantly took his backpack and escorted him in a floating triangle to Quince’s office in the front of the school. A police officer stood by the door, thumbs hooked on his pockets and chatting up barbecue recipes with the school secretary.

  Max unzipped his backpack. “What’s going on?” Marat asked.

  “Where’s your locker?” asked Principal Quince.

  “I don’t use a locker.” He watched Max gingerly excavate his scant collection of notebooks and folders. “Careful. I got homework in there.”

  “You’re assigned locker 1-8-0-8,” Quince said. “We found a quarter pound of marijuana inside this morning.”

  “Shit!” Marat laughed. Keeping pot in a locker was bush-league stupid, something any serious runner knew not to do from the earliest afterschool special. “Got any leads?”

  “Clean,” Max reported.

  “Have a seat,” Quince said icily. He walked behind his desk and gestured to a squat wooden chair. Marat kept an eye on the door, the cop leaning against the frame, wondering if an all-out sprint might do it.

  “Have a seat,” Quince repeated, and Marat obeyed.

  The cop closed the door. “Dope’s tagged from the Green Mountain Dispensary on Haight Street,” he said. “They’ve confirmed selling it to a kid who matches your description. We also know you work with a guy who drives a very nice Mercedes that changes license plates every few days, and that you’ve supplied most of the football team. And the marching band. And the cheerleaders.”

  Marat’s insides collapsed into green soup. He held his mind on staying in character, something his sister would do so well. Faces flew by him, crazy customers and prank-playing punks, the crazy girls, the quiet girls, the dumb girls, the meatheads. Every one of his customers a suspect, not to mention his boss.

  Quince sat down and looked the kid over, in sweatpants and burned-out sneakers, his duct-taped backpack held shut with safety pins. Radiating anger, impossible to tell if he was lying or not. Sure didn’t look like a drug dealer, or else the bling was in storage. “Robespierre’s your sister?”

  “Yep.”

  “Didn’t she get into Stanford early?”

  “Yep.”

  “Huh.’ Quince scanned Marat’s file, reports of suspensions and fighting, straight As in English, associations with known felons, tremendous truancy. “What are your plans for next year?”

  “Finding the guy who planted drugs in my locker and turning him in.” Marat smiled white slabs, and Quince couldn’t help but like him a little.

  “Besides that,” Quince said.

  “Haven’t figured that out.”

  “I see.” Quince made his back rigid and folded his hands, projecting sternness with a glimmer of sensibility. “I’m supposed to turn you over to the police. I can’t say exactly what they’ll do with you, but my guess is they’ll take you down to the station and interrogate you. They might put you in jail for a few days, or even longer. I honestly don’t know.”

  “All depends on you,” the cop chimed in.

  Marat shrugged and raised his voice, as expected of a cool customer done wrong. “I told you, I don’t use my locker. Was there anything else in there that belonged to me? Fingerprints?” Marat eyed the security guards, who were rolling their tongues through their cheeks and looking away sheepishly, as if nabbed mooching apples from a neighbor’s tree. “No. Because I don’t even know where it is.”

  Quince waited. Few of the kids brought to his office knew when to shut up. Marat kept quiet and threw back a half-lidded stare, wary and coyote cool. “I could suspend you for five days and ask Officer Greeley not to take you in,” Quince said finally. “No police record. He doesn’t have to listen to me. But he might.”

  “For what?” Marat asked.

  Greeley stood in front of him, an overweight man made normal-sized in his police uniform, the beneficiary of excessive pockets and flaps and badges. The double chin gave away his heft, the lower half of his face overflowing his collar like a calving glacier, left unbalanced by his pewter eyes and thumb nose. “Who do you work for?”

  Marat dangled his head over the back of his chair. The four adults ringed him like moons, their gravitational fields shielding the snitches buried among the student body. “Nobody at the moment,” he said, calibrating his response. “Your mom fired me for a cheaper fucktoy last week.”

  “That’s it,” the cop said, reaching for his handcuffs. “Let’s go.” He lunged for Marat’s hand, but Marat was moving, spidering across the office, shoving the officer over the chair, ripping open the door.

  “I came as soon as I heard!” Robespierre’s eyes were pink and puffed, and she froze him just enough. “It’s gotta be a setup. You don’t even use your locker!”

  Then the security guards had him, his chin hit the floor, arms and legs locked behind his back. “What the hell is going on?” Robespierre screamed. “That’s my brother!”

  “Get my shoes,” he told her through the black in his mouth. “Under my bed.”

  “Shut up!” Greeley barked.

  Marat woke up diagonal in the back of a squad car, his shirt torn at the neck. At the police station they put him in a room with a table and two men for three hours. He said nothing. He nodded once. His sister was waiting for him outside, doing her homework under a streetlight.

  “It was either jail time or the army,” he told her. He laughed quick skip-beats, nervous irritation. “So I enlisted.”

  She hugged him. Her seditious, amazing brother, too smart for getting stuck like this, his precise tactical execution crushed by grand strategies he never saw coming. “Thank you,” she whispered, flush with shame. “For the shoes.”

  “It’s for college. Don’t tell mom.”

  “I won’t.” The police were behind him. “Be careful.”

  Thirty-six hours later he was doing push-ups in Texas, sweating through his hat.

  When college started up, Robespierre hired away Jamba Juice’s most colorful staff to uphold the smoothie stand’s quirky reputation,
then stocked her schedule with drama, psychology, accounting, and English, plus jazz history as an elective so she could better relate to intelligentsia theatergoers. She tried out for five plays in her first two weeks of school, nailing leading tragedians and acerbic sidekicks alike, drawing buckets of laughter and misty-eyed gulps, culminating in a Taser-like full-body shock at the depth and breadth of her abilities. Her unrivaled talent outweighed her middling looks; all the plays wanted her, piling on compliments and bumps up to bigger roles and even offering a cut of the gate. It came down to Lady Macbeth or a lesbian rodeo champ in a student-written comedy, classic vs. upstart, laughs or tears, the two faces of drama spinning toplike in her head. She headed out for a jog to clear her head and nearly collided with a wall of chirpy students milling about the Quad.

  “What’s going on?” she asked a heavily tanned surfer-type scratching his back with a guitar.

  “Barack Obama, man!” He gave her an unfiltered smile and put out a gangly hand. “Join us!”

  She hadn’t ever paid much attention to politics, aside from Fanny’s lusty jeremiads comparing San Francisco mayors to Soviet premiers and the politicians at the gay pride parade her mother liked to put on TV and snicker at. She had enough sense to know that most people were trained to hate politicians’ guts no matter what, and considered elected office your classic no-win career with bad money. But here were the people, apparently in good spirits, wearing—she started to look around now—T-shirts and caps with Obama’s picture on them, teaming up to wave huge banners. Outside together on a chilly school night, the feel of autumnal shifts and cycles and change. It was exciting, intoxicating, this power to shape behavior. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s a Meetup.”

  “What for?”

  “For Obama, man!” With a chin-twist at the end, happy fresh-faced certainty.

  “And are you doing anything special? Is he coming to talk?”

  “Obama? I wish. Dude’s got California sewed up like a . . . a sweater. Nah, we’re just here, you know, to support the cause. See how we can help and everything.” Sounding hokey, back-of-the-cereal-box starry-eyed stupid, like a ranch hand describing investment strategy to Goldman Sachs’ board of directors.