The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  3

  At the second building I tried in Clayton, a chalk-green box called The Tradewinds, I rented an apartment with looming ceilings, light-sucking gold carpet, and an alley view. I unpacked, went shopping at a quart-beer grocery store, made a liverwurst and chutney sandwich, and slept on the floor, all in a dense new loneliness. In the morning I was at the Kite Buggy office an hour before anyone else.

  When Suzanne came in she gave me a desk and an employee orientation packet containing a zero-tolerance drug policy and two pizza discount coupons. Rensselaer arrived a few minutes later, waved me over, and said, “Ever been to Glassell Park?”

  Once, I said, when I’d gotten lost between Pasadena and downtown L.A. He opened a manila envelope and shook out some snapshots of six tough-looking Latin teenagers posing with two kite buggies in front of a graffiti-covered culvert. The guys wore wife-beaters, high-water khakis, and pompadours that looked like the Brancusi sculptures Gerald had stood me in front of at the L.A. Museum. The buggies were customized with chromed rails, pleated seats, and brass cutouts of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  “Low buggiers,” I said.

  “I love them,” Rensselaer said, and pointed to a guy with HIJO DEL VIENTO tattooed on his shoulder. “Nacio Moreno. He wrote the letter.” He read aloud from loopy red cursive on notebook paper. “Let me tell you… What’s this word?”

  “Ese,” I said. “It means ‘this.’”

  “They call people ‘this’? That’s great. Hey, This.” He poked me. “Let me tell you, ese, the cops chase us every time we ride here, and we don’t give a shit. Those beach boys come up here from Venice to ride and we send them back to their fucking beach. We think you have an outstanding magazine.” He put everything back in the envelope and handed it to me. “This is a story, ese. You must question these men closely.”

  I was on my way back to my desk when Jillian came in. “Henry ‘Hank’!” she said. “Amazing. Where are you living?” I told her and she winced. “You should get your furniture at Massey’s. Tell me when you go and I’ll help you.” She’d grown bangs, an unnecessary perfecting touch.

  That night at the Tradewinds, I was making sardines when I heard a guy scream, “YOU SAID WE WERE HAVING SPAGHETTI!” loud enough to be coming from my oven. A woman yelled at him to stop yelling. He yelled, “I’M NOT EATING THAT! YOU FUCKING BITCH! YOU NEVER TELL THE TRUTH!”

  I went into the hall, traced the yelling to the apartment across from mine, and went back inside. It went on for forty minutes before one of them slammed the door and pounded down the stairs.

  When it started the next night I knocked on their door. It was opened by a woman in her forties with marsupial circles under her eyes, and dressed in the navy skirt and white blouse of a work uniform. Her son, sixteen and muscular, hung back and stared at me with Wanted-poster calm. Their place was blanketed with old newspapers and back issues of the low-impact enthusiast magazine TV Guide.

  I introduced myself and asked if they could hold it down. The woman said, “We don’t complain about you,” and closed the door. A guy came out of an apartment two doors down, said, “He exposes himself, too,” and went back inside. I ate my sardines, walked to the drug-and-discount store by the highway, and got stuck in a consumer warp where I couldn’t find anything to buy but couldn’t leave until I’d bought something, which turned out to be a purple towel.

  I called Barney once a week, keeping him on the phone for three minutes that cost me $4.55 while I told him about my new life and he answered with short Mms or silence. At work I took my associate editing seriously. My skills were modest, but a lot of the copy that came in was written by fifteen-year-olds and hard not to improve. I made frequent mistakes, though, getting names mixed up in captions or pushing the wrong button on the phone, saying, “Hello?” into Dobey’s private calls and scaring his bookie.

  Rensselaer said not to worry about it. “The economy runs on mistakes. You ever have a problem with an insurance company?” I said no. “But you’ve seen their big buildings,” he said. “Every other floor is for making mistakes. The floors in between are for saying the mistakes are being straightened out.”

  I rationed the number of times a day I looked over at Jillian and the minutes I spent talking to her. After a few weeks she invited me to go with her and some friends to hear Ricky Skaggs play Paducah. The friends had all gone to college, most of them to the one in Clayton. Jeff, who raced kayaks and restored pinball machines, drove. I sat in the back of his Galaxie between Dina, a journeywoman plasterer, and Scott, a county computer administrator and upright bassist. Jillian introduced me as “Henry ‘Hank’ Bay,” though I’d never used the nickname.

  Dina asked where I was living. When I said the Tradewinds, Steve, who made artistic fireplace implements, said, “What for?” Dina flicked the back of his head and said, “That’s real mature.”

  Megan, who sold dresses at Mode O’Day and sewed her own designs at night, said, “I’m going to Kenya in the fall for two weeks.”

  “Plush toy!” Jillian said, one of her terms of approval.

  “I know,” Megan said. “I’m learning Dahalo. It has the click consonant.” She said a foreign phrase with two loud pocks in it. “That was ‘Where can I buy fabric like you’re wearing?’” Everyone tried it. Steve said, “When do the pock hyenas stop swarming?” and Scott said, “I will pock give you all my pock money for the antidote.” I threw my jaw out.

  Steve said he was being stiffed on some andirons he’d made for a movie producer and his wife. “Now I’m stuck with these stupid andirons with the little flute-playing Hopi guy on them. I have to send them to the houseware gallery in Chicago.”

  “What movies did he make?” Jillian said.

  “I’m not sure,” Steve said. “I think he did that one where the learning-disabled guy can talk to the dead.”

  “I’d love it if I could talk to them,” Jeff said. “I always get nervous. Especially with the cute dead.”

  Jillian asked Dina if she knew a guy named Jack, who taught adult-ed bookbinding in Clayton. Dina said, “No, and don’t fix me up with him.”

  “Me, either,” Megan said.

  “I called it first,” Dina said.

  “Lick rocks,” Jillian said.

  “She’s always trying to fix people up for romantic bliss,” Megan said. “She’s terrible at it. Don’t let her do it to you.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  The theater had a bar in the lobby, and all the friends drank Heilemans for an hour, especially Scott and Jeff. When the lights started blinking for the show, Jillian came over to them and said, “It’s time.”

  “It’s time,” Scott said.

  “Time to take control of your family’s financial future,” Jeff said.

  “Time to decide if you actually like Elgar.”

  “And we can help, with our worldwide resources. Who are we?”

  “Hell if we know.”

  “At this stage of the evening?”

  “You should live the way we live now so long.”

  The friends seemed like sophisticates to me—that night, anyway—and I didn’t talk much. When the show started I grabbed the seat next to Jillian’s and smiled diligently at the music. In the fourth song, the let’s-slow-things-down one, I put my hand on hers on the armrest. She gave mine a friendly squeeze and slipped hers away, but I didn’t see anything going on between her and Scott, Steve, or Jeff, or between anyone else. Maybe the six friends had a ban on being more than friends, or maybe they’d already run through one another the first year of college.

  I kept up the watch all summer, but saw nothing except a week of flirtation between Scott and Dina that was too ironic to go anywhere. I spent my evenings with all of them at Riddenhauer’s Bar, trying to play pool and listening to Jillian say, “Lick rocks,” when someone impugned her judgment or her car. It was a PG-13 imprecation that fit her perfectly, but she used it only with the five of them.

  The answer to the boyfriend question came
on a cold night in the fall, when we’d all gone to the movies. It was my first time alone with her and my first visit to her duplex, where she was lending me a book about the Swedish emigration to America. The place was a shrine to the friends, decorated with collages of group vacation photos, napkin caricatures, and notes they’d left under her windshield wipers.

  She sat on the bed to look through the book before letting it go. I sat next to her and put my hand on her knee. She looked down at it and said, “Outside the clothes but below the waist.”

  “How do you mean?” I said.

  “I miss the system,” she said. “As soon as you grow up, it’s supposed to be all or nothing. Who says you want to go all the way with everyone?”

  “I don’t want to with everyone,” I said.

  “See?” she said. “It was useful. You should be able to say, ‘Here’s someone who should be inside the clothes but above the waist,’ or whatever.” She lifted my hand like a derrick and put it on the bedspread. “How come you’re not going to be a lawyer?”

  I told her about Dad, Troup, discovery, and motions. She said, “Is this better?”

  “I think so. Do you like working there?”

  “It’s okay.” She paused. “You know, I lived with Steve for a year.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  She nodded. “It keeps trying to grow back. Do you like him?”

  “Sure.”

  “Yeah. He’s a fine young man. He’d do anything to be of help.” She stood up, led me to the door, and said goodnight. Outside it was so cold and dry that I could hear dogs and car doors blocks away. I had three layers of clothes on, but I was from the desert and it was freezing here.

  A week later, on the TV set at Riddenhauer’s, a newscaster said that the bomber who called himself Freebird had blown up a lab that developed identification chips to be implanted under the skin of animals. “Sure, these are strictly for pets,” he wrote in a communiqué to The New York Times. “Have you had a vaccination lately? A ‘routine’ blood test? Whose little pet are you?”

  At work I interviewed Nacio Moreno, the low buggier, who said the L.A. kite buggiers feuded like surfers over the best riding spots. When I showed Rensselaer my interview with an African American buggier called Chief Boy R.D., he said, “Yeah, good, but I can’t show that language to Arnold.” I edited it so that a passage in which the Chief warned rivals away from his turf read, “Some of these [rascals] are trying to [interfere with] our [activity] up,” says the seasoned Compton buggier. “That [situation] is [messed] up. If they [interfere] with our [activity], we’ll put a cap in their [actual] [body]. Go on, [disrupt] my [activity] up, [bad-hygiened] [rascal].”

  One day Dobey called me across the hall into his office, whose door said OWNER in the black-and-gold letters people stick on their mailboxes.

  “Jim tells me you’re doing this thing about the Spanish kids in L.A,” he said. I nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “Things get started out there. I just want us to be careful. He said there’s some of this ‘screw the police’ stuff. We don’t champion that.” I said we wouldn’t.

  “Good,” he said, and a few days later he took me to lunch at the Clayton Hofbrau, where no one else from work went, but several other Popeye-like guys did. “Do you think this is really going to be a sport at some point?” he said. “I mean, in the kinds of numbers like paintball?”

  “It might,” I said. “I mean, it could.”

  “Because the thinking was, all the other sports were taken. Look at the newsstand. You need a magazine just to go jogging.”

  “Here’s how to tie your shoes,” I said. He smiled and pointed at me. I felt a flush, happy and then annoyed at myself for being happy.

  “What about long range?” he said. “Where do you see yourself?”

  “I haven’t thought too much about it,” I said.

  “You should. This business you’re working for? Grew out of wedding invitations. School menus were a big piece of business.” He paused. “I have trouble talking to Jim sometimes. I think he thinks all this is funny.”

  They’d had a few arguments in Dobey’s office lately, their voices loud but indistinct from across the hall. “He works on it seriously,” I said.

  “That’s good that you say that,” Dobey said. “That’s a good tact for you to take.”

  We went back to the office. As I passed Rensselaer’s desk he smiled and said, “Count your change.”

  That night I walked in on Jillian and Steve in the back hall at Riddenhauer’s. He was leaning on the wall, pulling her toward him, and she was saying, “This is how we get in trouble.” He let go of her when he saw me. She said, “Hey, Henry,” and pointed toward the room where the pool table was. “I’ve got losers.”

  A few days later, Rensselaer said, “Look at these,” and dropped a handful of skateboarding magazines on my desk: Thrasher, Transworld, Bow to No Man. The stories inside were set in green type on orange background, and the photos of emancipated minors flying off handrails were spattered and solarized. The magazines offered not just a sport but an inverse world, where ramps and drained pools were the places of business, and the normal life squatting just off the page was the dangerous hobby. Sitcoms and Filofaxes, you take your life in your hands with that shit.

  Half an hour later Rensselaer took the magazines back and went into Dobey’s office. I heard their raised voices again. When Rensselaer returned he pointed at me and gestured across the hall.

  “Have a seat,” Dobey said when I entered his office. “This is what I mean, about Jim. He thinks this is the way to broaden the appeal.” He held up the skateboarding magazines. “Let’s hate all the regular people. Over-inked bullshit.” He threw them in the garbage. “Remember we talked about where you see yourself going? That’s where we are now. There’s a chance here for you to step up.”

  So this was it: office politics, ruthless. Dobey wanted me to take over the magazine, but I couldn’t do that to Rensselaer unless he’d had it here. Even if he had, was I ready? Maybe I was. I cleared my throat. “I think—”

  “Have you looked at Crochet Life lately?” Dobey said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Cerise Lander does it. She could use some help. It’s gotten a little stagnated. This is a year ago.”

  He handed me a magazine whose cover was split into four photos of crocheted throws muddied by the cereal-box press: a unicorn, a raccoon family, the letters saying LOVE from that painting, and Rip Van Winkle yawning awake. The cover line was EASY PLEASERS!

  “Here’s the most recent,” he said. It looked like the first one, except that the throws showed a koala bear, a soapbox derby car, the eye-rolling angels of gift-wrap fame, and a leprechaun guarding his treasure chest. The line was DO-ABLE DAZZLERS!

  “You see what I’m saying?” Dobey said. “It’s lost some snap.”

  Was this a test? A joke? If anything, I thought the koala bear had more snap than the unicorn.

  “She’s fine with someone coming in for a couple of months,” Dobey said. “She’s in Wellfleet, Michigan.”

  “I don’t know anything about crocheting,” I said.

  “No. Well, you know. Rosey Grier. The Rams? Bobby Kennedy?” I had no idea what he was talking about, though I later found out it was needlepoint. “Eileen has your travel.”

  I went back and told Rensselaer what was happening. “Jesus,” he said. “I can’t believe I got you to quit school for this. I thought I was managing him.” I said it was okay, but when I got to Rosey Grier and the unicorn, he said, “See, he’s actually losing it. That’s what I didn’t count on.”

  Jillian came over and said, “Cerise is nice, but two months? God. When are you going?”

  “Friday.”

  “I’ll make you a kit,” she said, and the night before I left we had dinner at the Thai restaurant on Stovall Street. It was the first time since the Swedish book night that I’d seen her without the friends. When she put down her menu she said, “Do you ever get
this big feeling of well-being for no reason? Just really happy all of a sudden?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I think so. Like you go outside and everything looks perfect? I think I get that about twice a year for, like, twenty minutes. Is that the kind of thing?”

  She nodded, but her look gave me the feeling I’d just blown it, that she spent whole seasons in that condition and that forty minutes a year was the record low score. She picked up a canvas knapsack from the seat next to her and handed it to me.

  “Your kit,” she said. Inside were three sweet potato mini-pies from the Lofton Street Bakery, a beer from Riddenhauer’s, a George Jones CD, a novel about fly-fishing, and a topographic map of the area I was going to.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You went crazy.”

  “Not at all. It’s the minimum of what you’ll need.” She opened the map and pointed to a whorl of elevation lines. “Megan and Steve and I camped up here. If you take this trail there’s like fifteen waterfalls on the way.”

  “Do you go a lot?”

  “As much as I can,” she said. “Even if it’s just over by Jonesboro in the Shawnee Forest. Sometimes just putting the big socks on gives me that feeling you were talking about. When people tell me their problems I want to say, ‘Buy a pair of hiking shoes and call me when they’re worn out.’ Most of them would never have to call.”

  “I wondered about that.”

  “What?”

  “When I met you,” I said. “You were wearing that vest and the boots and everything. I was wondering if that was something you really did or, you know. A style.”

  “Lick rocks,” she said, drawing herself up in the booth and saying it with the same mock umbrage she used on the friends. I felt both anointed and doomed, as if I’d been grandfathered into those photo collages and stuck safely to construction paper, mugging at a bowling alley birthday party or making cowboy coffee in a national wilderness.

  Later, though, when she was dropping me off and I already had the car door open, she said, “Henry?” I turned to face her and she was on me with a kiss that lasted twelve seconds and crossed the blood-brain barrier. When it was over I tried to do it again but she pulled back, shook her head, and said, “I don’t know what that was. Call me when you get settled, okay?”