The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  “Henry?” A long-haired guy, thin except for a spongy waistline, had his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone. He waved me over. “Jim.” He wore jeans, a waffle jersey, and a flannel shirt. “See, that’s what’s great about what you’re doing,” he said into the phone. “It’s not just some guys dicking around on a dry lake somewhere.” He shook his head for my benefit. “That’s why you need to advertise it, so you—okay. No, I understand. Thanks.”

  He hung up, shook my hand, and said, “Welcome. You get pictures?” I nodded. He yelled “Jillian” to a woman who was on the phone across the room, and turned back to me. His expression was energy-saving, low eyelids and a sketch of a smile. “How’s college? What are you taking?”

  “Pre-law,” I said.

  “Mine was Italian literature,” he said. “It’s made all the difference.”

  The woman across the room got off the phone and came over. She was tall, with a sand-blond ponytail, in a chambray shirt, fishing vest, hiking boots, and jeans. Rensselaer said, “Henry, this is Jillian, your managing editor.”

  “The film,” she said, and held out her hand. She was a few years older than I was. Her camping clothes and lack of makeup made her beauty seem like a knack, something she’d picked up along with fly-tying. Her face was friendly, but the gray eyes reserved the right to assess and make fun. There was the prospect of a radiant smirk.

  I fumbled the four rolls out of my pocket and met her look as I handed them over. Out of nowhere I saw something, a room I’d never been in, with sunlight on a worn wooden floor, and the sound outside of a breeze over water. As I let go of the film I realized I’d made up a frame of her childhood, a lakeside house where she’d run through that room keeping up with a brother or two, as if she’d just told me about it. When she spoke again the image was gone. “Where do we have you staying?”

  “Hotel Clayton,” I said.

  “Firetrap,” she said.

  “It is,” Rensselaer said. “Although they make a turkey and rice soup over there that’s…”

  “Real turkey and rice lover’s soup?” I said.

  “Liker’s,” Jillian corrected me.

  “You get interviews?” Rensselaer said. I nodded.

  “You asked who their favorite sculptor is, right?” Jillian said. “We try to get that in.”

  “Definitely,” I said. I gave her good odds of being the “Fuck you” woman.

  My annoyance over Cliff being transposed to Florida, and me to Alabama, was from another time. I already loved the town, and I was liking the office more by the minute. Rensselaer stood at his desk like a guy grilling burgers on his patio. There was stained acoustical tile on the ceiling, and a Silex with half an inch of coffee getting crisp. Everything Gerald had specified for Troup’s office had been shipped here instead.

  Jillian showed me to a vacant desk, where I spread my notes out, turned on the computer, and went to work. I didn’t have an extensive magazine-reading background to draw on—three issues of Kite Buggy, other kids’ Rolling Stones and Penthouses, and the bewildering Wooden Boat while waiting in my underwear at the doctor’s—but as I watched her walk back to her desk I decided to give it whatever I had.

  Freddy Pasco’s been waiting for this wind for two days—wind that blows a steady 35 mph, sandblastin’ your face with half the Mojave Desert. He’s killed the time doing some awesome Crazy Ivans. But now it’s here.

  Freddy’s wind.

  He’s going 54 miles per when he starts to lift. Five…ten…fifteen feet over the lakebed, with his five-meter Ozone out in front of him.

  You’re back by the tent watching. You think he’s just going to grab an airplane hangar’s worth of air and come down. A day at the office.

  Dude, you’re wrong.

  Freddy stays up there…and then he starts to turn.

  When I looked up from what I was doing it was dark outside, everyone else had left, and I was hungry. I ate one of the three Lorna Doones in the break room and kept going.

  The noise builds. People are yelling, but they don’t know they’re yelling. Nobody here knows if this is even possible.

  And then the wind slacks off.

  Freddy’s wheels sink a foot. Two feet. Three. The crowd is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. Or Freddy, whichever comes first.

  But you look at his face, and you don’t see panic there. You look at his arms, and he’s working his lines like a cowboy throwing a lariat over the hot Mojave wind.

  His buggy rises a few inches…and keeps turning. Ninety degrees. But now he’s falling again, even faster. Nobody can look. But nobody can look away.

  And then Freddy Pasco throws his weight to one side, puts his arm muscles on turbo, and racks his kite across the sky like you or I can only dream of. He catches a gust, finishes the first airborne 180 anyone here has ever seen, and brings it down on the lakebed like a Huey. You can hear the cheers all the way at the Kite Buggy office in Clayton Illin’ Noise.

  It was four thirty in the morning and I still had to write up my interviews. I slept on the waiting room couch for two hours, washed my face, drank some Silex carbon, and went back to work with bursting silver spots in front of my eyes.

  When the wind fell off, “I wasn’t thinking about dying or getting hurt,” Freddy says. “I was thinking, Look at that. Look how we’re not in charge of our energy on this planet. It can change any time. If you don’t change with it, you

  I stopped there when Rensselaer came in. He leaned over my shoulder, read what I’d written, and said, “You’ve mastered the idiom, Henry. You should get out while you can. At least get yourself a malt cup. You look like hell.”

  He pointed me to the break room freezer, where there were chocolate malt cups like the ones at a baseball game. I started scraping one and went back to work. A few minutes later Rensselaer came over to my desk with a wiry guy in his sixties and said, “Henry, this is Arnold Dobey. He owns this place. Henry’s writing the Buggy Break story.”

  The Dobey in Dobey Publications leaned over me and read my copy. “We should say how many spectators,” he said. His voice went rat-a-tat and he wore a tight polo shirt that showed off his biceps. The combined effect was Popeye.

  “There weren’t really spectators,” I said. “Everyone there was—”

  “But people watched him do it, right?” Rensselaer said.

  “Right, but they were the other—”

  “But at that moment, they were, we would call these people…”

  “Spectators,” I said.

  “Five hundred?” Arnold Dobey said.

  I said, “No, there—”

  “Three hundred,” Rensselaer said.

  Dobey said, “Four hundred.”

  Rensselaer said, “Done.” Dobey pointed to the screen. After like a Huey I added in front of four hundred spectators. Rensselaer reached over me and typed in breathless before spectators. Dobey said, “Good,” and went away.

  “There you go,” Rensselaer said. “You should come over to the press tonight and watch it come off.”

  “Tonight?”

  “We’re nimble here, Henry. We’re trained professionals.”

  I went back to work, alternately eating the malt cup and holding it to my forehead. I finished at 11:00 A.M., went back to the hotel, slept till evening, ate turkey and rice soup in the deserted dining room, and went to see the press.

  It was a big roomful of deafening machinery in an unmarked brick building near the bus depot. Rensselaer, Jillian, and three other staff people were already there. The four pressmen wore dirty blue aprons and paper hats made from page proofs.

  The press had printed cereal boxes for twenty years before Dobey bought it. The millions of roosters and Johnny Unitases had worn out the color registration, so that kite buggiers were dogged by blue shadows, and the pictures on the afghans in Crochet Life looked like action paintings instead of Raggedy Anns.

  The opening of my story came off, one of four pages on an uncut sheet. The press was as loud as a rock conc
ert, not the way the audience heard it, but the way it would sound if you were the star onstage, with lights glaring on the mike stands and your finger in your ear for the harmony parts. The clay smell of offset ink was the marijuana. I didn’t even see Jillian come over to me as I watched the copies pile up in the hopper. She had to shout to get my attention: “Are you wearing underwear?”

  The six of us drove from the press to the Days Inn on the interstate at 3:00 A.M., sneaked around to the back, undressed to our underwear, and slipped into the heated pool. I breaststroked underwater, passing beneath Jillian as she floated on her back.

  Rensselaer got out first and padded to the chaise where he’d left his clothes. I got out a few minutes later and sat on the one next to it. He went into his shirt pocket, and there was the marijuana for real. He lit a joint, drew on it, passed it to me, asked about my life at home, and hit the jackpot. I told him about Dad’s pension, the web chairs, the frying, the proofreading, and Troup being buddies with the fencing-enthusiast lawyer for Controlled Dynamics.

  “Yeah, these people all know each other,” Rensselaer said.

  “They went to fucking-up-the-country school together. Trust me. I’ve covered state politics for a daily newspaper.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes,” he croaked, and exhaled smoke. “And the guys I covered? The bright young lawmakers? They’re the worst fucking people. They’re the Junior Chamber of Commerce guys you cross the street to avoid. It’s like that in Washington, too. All the way up the echelon.”

  I sneaked a look at Jillian. She had kept her shirt on but clearly wore no bra. “Then you have the newspapers themselves,” Rensselaer said. “If you work there, you’re supposed to actually read the stories. Boy, do you get used to the stories. Pawnshops shedding seedy image. Retirement not just shuffleboard anymore. Kids’ bookbags too heavy, experts say. Kids not getting enough exercise, say experts. You make an effort not to run those last two on the same day.” He killed the joint. “That’s why I’m not embarrassed to be working at Kite Buggy magazine. Would you be?”

  “What? No,” I said, and meant it, with the sudden conviction that I was fine and so was Dad, that there were pluses to being ancillary, that the people I was with would still be swimming in their underwear at three in the morning long after Freddy Pasco’s rotator cuff blew out for good. I wanted to find a pay phone, call Dad, and tell him, but then I remembered that he had to be at the salad bar at 7:00 A.M.

  I also decided not to try anything with Jillian that night. Rensselaer’s dope made my voice seem to come in by radio, and there was no telling what suave things I might say.

  I got up early the next day and walked around town. There was a railroad switching yard that had once been busy, and a small college that supported two blocks of foreign restaurants and vaguely hip stores. At a meeting to plan the next issue, Rensselaer assigned me a story on the new breed of traction-kite designers.

  “There’s a new breed?” the art director said.

  “We’re breeding them right now,” Rensselaer said. “In the back.”

  Boxes of the new issue came in during the meeting. Rensselaer said he knew I wanted copies for all my friends and relatives but that he had to limit me to forty. I said I couldn’t take forty on the plane, but he kept pushing them at me and saying, “Be reasonable, Henry. Forty’s the most we can spare. This isn’t Crochet Life here. We run lean.” I pushed them back, but he found my duffel bag and stuffed them in.

  When it was almost time to leave, I saw Jillian go into the break room, waited a minute, and followed her. She was drinking guava nectar and doing the cryptogram in the St. Louis paper. She said, “Hey, Henry,” and patted the spot next to her on the couch.

  “Hey,” I said, and sat down. “So, do you ride?”

  “A little. I did a trip last year where you go through Banff on Appaloosas. It wrecks your butt but it’s fun.”

  “I meant kite buggies.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I tried it once at the proving grounds.”

  “Are there actually proving grounds?”

  “The high-school field. Jim and Devon and those guys go crashing around in the test equipment. In certain circles it’s called the ‘Just What Are You Proving?’ grounds.”

  “So how’d you get into this?”

  “I was working down the hall at the title company and I kept hearing laughing.” She put the paper down. “Will you be back to see us?”

  “I don’t know. I have school and everything.”

  “Yes, but Jim is very persuasive. I’m ever modest but he gets me to go swimming with everyone. But law school, right?” I nodded. “Isn’t that like twelve years?”

  “No, it’s another five. You know, if I do it all the way.” If you what? Wake Dad up and tell him that, jerk-off. “Do you ever get to California?”

  “I haven’t yet,” she said.

  “You should call me if you come out. I could show you stuff.” Soviet dorms and Doctor Taco. You’ll love it.

  “That’s so nice of you. I want to see Bakersfield, the home of Buck Owens. I mean, who knows when I’d get to go. But, yeah.”

  I dig the brother Buck Owens,” Gerald said in the quad. “‘I’ve got a tiger by the tail, it’s plain to see.’”

  “Me, too,” I said. I was frying, proofreading, sleeping on buses, and interviewing the new breed of traction-kite designers from pay phones. I had so little time to study that the classes I made it to seemed like experimental theater. The last time I’d asked Dan Troup how the Controlled Dynamics case was going, he’d said it could be years before there was a verdict, “and at that point, of course, the appeals process chimes in.”

  “Most people would say San Francisco,” Gerald said. “Or Hollywood. But Bakersfield, that’s good. ‘And all I’ve got to do is, Act naturally.’”

  “Yeah. I’ve got to go to work,” I said. “Fuck.”

  “What?”

  “I missed Statistics.”

  “‘It’s crying time again,’” Gerald said.

  Rensselaer, calling up about the kite designer story, showed impressive powers of retention for the complaining he’d heard, stoned, a month earlier. He asked how the lawyer with the collars was, how Dad was holding up, and whether my forearms were crispy good yet. When I told him, he said, “At least you know there’s a job here if you want it.”

  “There is?”

  “As of today, yeah. I caught Arnold just after he made some money.”

  “From our magazine, or the other ones?” I hadn’t meant to say “our.”

  “No, on the Broncos,” Rensselaer said. “He said I could hire an associate editor so I don’t keel over. Not that you should suddenly move here. Hold on a second. Jillian wants to say hi.”

  Barney drove straight from Cal Poly to Doctor Taco and walked in at 11:00 P.M. I was thrilled to see him till I registered the expression on his face, which put me back in Rancho Cahuenga the day I spilled Sprite on his centrifuge.

  I hadn’t expected him to be mad—I’d told him on the phone a few times how slowly the lawsuit was going, and he hadn’t seemed concerned—but the stare of concentration was a ray gun now. We sat at a table and he said, “I don’t understand what happened here, Henry.”

  “I was offered a job,” I said.

  “A job?”

  “At a publishing company.” I told him the titles, which sounded ridiculous when I said them out loud.

  “Is that what you want to do? People’s hobbies?”

  “The lawyer’s still there,” I said. “He’s still doing the lawsuit. But it could be years before they have the trial.”

  “See, that’s okay, Henry, because Mom and Dad are going to be alive for years, and they’re going to need the money. You see how that works?”

  “I screwed up college, Barney. I can’t do what you can do.”

  “No, you’re not doing what you can do. This was for you, Henry. The material in the experiment was you.”

  What a memory on this guy. I look
ed over at the phone. The Doctor Taco Hunger Hotline was for incoming orders, but employees were allowed to make calls for family emergencies, and this definitely was one. I could have walked over and left Rensselaer a “really sorry” on Dobey Publications’ answering machine. Historically my threshold for Barney being mad at me was zero, and my stomach was killing me now, but I said, “I want to try this for a while.”

  Even Jillian patting the couch next to her couldn’t explain what I was doing. It had to be that I’d finally found my town, a place that would demand no more of me than I could deliver, but how would you explain that to Barney, who could meet any demand you gave him out to the hundredth decimal place? He got up, went out to his car, and started it with a sound like an old photograph being torn down the middle.

  The train was Gerald’s idea. I had too much stuff to take on a plane and too little for a U-Haul, and if I slept sitting up in coach, the travel money from Dobey would cover it.

  Mom had said on the phone that just because I was changing my mind didn’t mean I couldn’t change it back, or that I had to. Dad said I should do what I was interested in and not worry about him. Gerald said, “Stop feeling like shit,” as we sat on a bench by the ticket kiosk and the train from L.A. rolled toward us. “Do we doubt for one minute what Buck Owens would do with a woman like this in the picture?”

  “It’s not just her,” I said.

  “Do we think those songs of his are just songs?”

  “No.”

  “No. We’re learning that, aren’t we?”

  The train stopped and we dragged my stuff over to it. Gerald had even advised me on what food to take: Pilot crackers, beef jerky, apples, and white cheese. That was what the forty-niners had brought to California, he said, and it was about time someone took it back.