by Charlie Haas
“What?”
“Dobey Publications. That’s great. That’s the press from the cereal boxes, right? It’s that guy, Arthur Dobey.”
“Arnold,” I said.
“Yes. Arnold Dobey. Jesus. I saw him at a convention once. I think that’s the guy in this business I most fear turning into. Although that’s a crowded field.”
He handed it back to me. “Here’s the deal with Tom. Eight years ago he was going around in a Hyundai delivering Penny-Savers to liquor stores. He lived on Nabs. That’s the guy you don’t want to fuck with. The guy that had to wait. People call me up and go, ‘Why does he yell and scream all the time?’ That’s why he yells and screams.”
“Okay,” I said. “That sounds a little scary.”
“What?”
“That he yells and screams all the time.”
“No, it’s not scary if you’re here.” He finished his coffee. “It’s scary if you’re Arthur Dobey.”
On the outside the Clean Page building reflected light like five stories of cop sunglasses. On the inside it had the kind of fluorescent lighting that puts a vampire in your motel mirror. Ten feet into the lobby the fresh air gave way to synthetic-fiber molecules defecting from the carpet. Walter and I took the elevator to the top floor and started past the receptionist, but she held up a finger and talked into her headset: “Walter plus one to see Tom.”
“Henry Bay,” Walter said.
“Do you have a visitor badge?”
“He can’t have anything on his nipples,” Walter said.
“Nobody likes you,” she said. Walter nodded and led me down the hall past framed covers of Spearfish, Skysurf, and Quick Raffia.
Patrick’s secretary said, “He’s just wrapping up.” We sat on a couch and listened through the closed door to Patrick yelling at someone. After ten minutes he opened the door, said, “Walter, yeah,” and waved us in.
He was in his thirties, tall and trim, with short curly brown hair and ice-blue eyes. He wore a blue shirt, red tie, gray suit pants, and black socks, his wingtips parked in a corner. On the wall were floating-frame photos of a private plane, horses, and his family. He sat low in a chair and put his feet on a table so his body was a long flat line, and he passed an orange from hand to hand as he talked. It was a way of sitting that said he had the money a few times over and nothing more to prove but that he still came in, suffering everyone else’s slower brains, so they would keep having a building to go to.
“That was Spalding,” he said, nodding at his phone. “We have to cut these guys loose.” He gestured to Walter to take care of it.
“Really. Okay,” Walter said, and tried to get back to the tone he used for kidding about my nipples. “So here’s Henry. He wasn’t going to work here. Not Henry.”
“Yeah,” Patrick said. “Did you bring a résumé?” I handed it to him. He scanned the list of magazines. “Bought it, bought it, don’t want it, bought it…” He put it down. “People hate us.”
“I don’t think—”
“Hate us. Because we came along and said ‘What if this was a business?’ We go to buy someone, the first thing they say is, ‘Gee, do we have to leave North Dakota?’ I say, ‘No, because we want to preserve that unique character.’ They say, ‘Oh, that’s great, because my brother Zeke is here, and my dog.’ I don’t want them near here. A square foot in North Dakota is free. But the product needs to meet minimal standards. So that’s you. Anything you need, Walter is here.”
I started to say something, but Walter clapped his hands on his knees, said, “And we’re off,” and stood up. In the hall he said, “That was good. So Monday,” his hands wafting me onto the elevator.
There was a vending alcove off the parking garage. I wasn’t a candy bar enthusiast but I started feeding dollars into a machine and didn’t stop till I’d bought a Payday, a Hundred Grand, a Butterfingers, a Snickers, a NutRageous, and a Dark Milky Way. I finally have a job with dental, I thought. I should use it. I ate the Snickers before I started the car but I couldn’t touch the other ones. When I got to Santa Cruz I left them on top of a newspaper machine, figuring that with all the kids and homeless guys walking around, someone would end up eating them. No one said it had to be me.
part two
empty hand
9
Tom Patrick bought everything he saw, and no one could keep up. Before I knew it I was troubleshooting twelve troubled magazines, including Hacky Sack World, Easy Felting, Handgun Shooter, and Spelunk. At night Patti and I came home to a small wooden house with plumbing issues and a black-hole mortgage, in a San Jose neighborhood shuddering between two loud freeways that had slashed through it thirty years earlier. It was the kind of house, and the kind of job, that make you look around sometimes and wonder where you’ve misplaced the fat catalogue of possibilities you left home with. It was here a minute ago, I’d think, and then: I want to see Barney.
We’d seen him and his family a few times in the five years we’d been married, but we’d never been to their house in Kansas. I almost called him to ask if we could come, but I held off. Sometimes, calling just to talk, I’d catch him at a bad time and get pauses and monosyllables, my brother the tough interview.
I decided to ask Patti to call Deirdre, but I had to wait a few days because it was possible now for me to catch Patti at a bad time too. In fairness, catching me at a bad time was no trouble at all.
Patti and I had started out speaking the same language, but these days our fluency was suffering. We had better and worse days, but the great ones, of late-night laughing and pet names for genitals, were going fast.
We were both overworked, with Clean Page piling more titles on me and Hindenburg dropping more kid athletes on her. They phoned her all the time, anguishing over their sprains and stepparents, and her method of dealing with them was efficiency itself. When a skateboarder called up freaking out, she’d listen sympathetically and then divert him with the discreetly disguised troubles of a motocross rider who’d called half an hour earlier. Then a Rollerblader would call up crying, and Patti would calm her down with the skateboarder’s story, and so on. The cure for each one was the last one’s nightmare. She was a better gossip than any therapist, and vice versa.
The only problem was that, wading deeper into their lives, she seemed to be wading away from ours. Or maybe it was just what she’d said in Seal Beach long ago: they always get to be the baby and you never do. I could live with that. It was when she gave me the stare she’d used on Misty’s dad that I felt myself sinking.
I was more to blame than she was, though. We both traveled for work all the time, flying separately but having jet lag together, and I fell into a special logic in which everything—the house, our monthly nut, the existence of Clean Page—was her fault. She may have blamed me for Hindenburg the same way. Frequent flying gives you magic powers of reasoning. Sometimes I wanted to call Gerald and talk to him about all of it, but there was no good time for me to catch him, not since our day in New York.
I got Patti at a good time, she got Deirdre at one, Deirdre got Barney at one, and the trip was scheduled. Five days before we left, the editor of Handgun Shooter asked me to join him at a gun show in Dresser, Iowa, and meet advertisers.
I followed him around a baking Quonset hut as he shook hands and touched guns. Not everyone was buying guns, but everyone was touching them. The Glock tables were petting zoos. Along with the guns were blowguns, garrotes, and manuals on how to make silencers, convert semiautomatics to true machine guns, or drop out of sight forever.
In an alcove off the main floor there were tables selling conspiracy-theory pamphlets and a few novels, white-uprising stroke books with print quality worse than Dobey’s. At one of the tables a mountain man was selling FREEBIRD T-shirts.
The drawing on the shirts was based on a police sketch of a guy who’d been seen leaving a package behind a climate research lab a year earlier. After examining the defused bomb’s parts, the FBI was pretty sure the guy was Freebird. The sk
etch, showing a clean-shaven face with sunglasses and a hat pulled low, had produced no good leads, though he’d been sighted on the Appalachian Trail, in Hayden Lake, Idaho, and foraging in Dumpsters in Georgia, sometimes on the same day.
The T-shirts said FLY, FREEBIRD, FLY! and the artist was talented, a queasy fact in itself. In the drawing, a fierce bird with a face like the sketch soared over a map of the country, a stick of dynamite in one claw and a gun in the other. It was a caricature of a sketch of a disguise, and the silkscreen diluted it further, but the eyes spooked me anyway. When I looked up, the mountain man was grinning, daring me to object.
Back at the hotel I had seventeen phone calls to return. I started with Dick Donadio at Monster Truck Tunin’, who said, “Have you heard anything?” as soon as he picked up.
I said I hadn’t. Clean Page had been through a round of layoffs four months earlier and another one was rumored. All my phone calls started with “Have you heard anything?” and ended with “Anyway,” a word that had risen from meaning “Please let me off the phone now” to become an asterisk attached to all of life: I can’t sleep, history’s off its meds, I’m one surprise urine test from eating government cheese, but anyway.
I returned calls for two more hours, picking yellowed laminate off the Hotel Dresser’s phone information card. When I walked out of the hotel to go to the airport I stood looking at the street for a minute, wishing I had time for a walk. Sometime in the last few years I’d developed the closest thing I had to an enthusiasm of my own, collecting Claytons—towns that in the right light could stand in for the one in Illinois.
Nothing in my collection came up to the real Clayton, but I’d gotten less picky over time. The original was off-limits to me for reasons of both Jillian and Dobey, and there were a lot of honorable mentions out there. In a gracefully fading tertiary town I could find a trace of what I’d felt getting off that bus on spring break years ago, when just the river air made me happy.
Dresser showed promise. There were two old spangled movie houses, the Fox (FOR LEASE) and the Mexico (YOUTH CHOIR RECITAL FRI.). The department store, with HENLEE’S still inlaid on the entrance’s marble apron, had become a nail salon, a cell phone store, and five vacancies.
In a good Clayton the ads for the old hotel say, “MEET ME UNDER THE BIG CLOCK” AT THE HOTEL SO-AND-SO. Sometimes the big clock has been stopped for years and the young business leaders have a fund drive going to fix it, with a thermometer sign in the park. In an outstanding Clayton there’s a thousand-watt radio station, its announcers a little halting, on the hotel’s mezzanine. In a lot of Claytons there are junk stores where you can page through old copies of Life and Look from a time when the job was to cover what interested everyone, before we split up into separate discussion groups for the closing session.
Some Claytons are college towns, and you know you’re there when Senegalese pop music sifts onto your car radio after a few hundred miles of guys yelling that the UN is a pestilence down to its gift shop. In a few Claytons the conversation has moved on from “Back when the factory” and “Ever since the Wal-Mart” to “Some of us are trying to” and “Did you see what they’re doing downtown,” because that Clayton is getting its fifth or sixth wind and the people there feel useful instead of shunted off.
I drove to the airport with regret. I could have used an hour in the margins of a marginal town, walking past gravel-bed train tracks and the high school’s stoner hill, the landscape that’s left when the gold rush moves on.
When I got home that night Patti was on the phone, sitting up in bed in a HINDENBURG T-shirt with a picture of people on a ski lift pointing in horror at a burning snowboard in the sky. She waved at me but kept talking: “You have to put all that out of your head, and think about how big you can be.”
I could tell who she was talking to. Kris Santangelo was in his late twenties, from La Puente, and Hindenburg saw him as the kind of skateboard star who could have his poster in a few million kids’ bedrooms and his motions captured for choppy replication on the Xbox. He had the talent, the look, and enough attitude for the whole team.
A few months after signing with Hindenburg he’d moved to San Francisco. On the night he arrived, Patti got home at 11:30, saying she’d had to get him settled in his apartment and find him some warm clothes. A week later, as she told me a story about some duneboarder’s sister’s parents having her kidnapped to an unregulated teenage boot camp in Utah, I started to feel like my face was going to slide off my head if she didn’t stop talking. It was the first time I’d ever felt that way, and I realized that I thought she and Santangelo might be sleeping together. I almost asked her a few times but I wasn’t sure we’d bounce back from that one, even if I was wrong.
“You can be international now,” she said on the phone. “You can be huge.” I went to take a shower. When I got into bed she was asleep, or wanted to be.
I went to work at six the next morning, trying to get ahead so I’d be free on our weekend at Barney’s. I ghostwrote the editor’s columns for three magazines, making them adjustable so that a piece for Spearhunting could be adapted for use in Quilting Basket: I look at these young guys/gals with their fancy gear, who’ve never had to thread/kickstart/program/cast/whittle a J-37, and I have to smile. They are me. They are all of us.
Walter Denise walked in at 10:30 twisting a rolled-up magazine in his hands and asking how the gun show had been. When I told him about the FREEBIRD T-shirts he said, “Did you get me one?”
“Why would you want one?”
“I love things like that. They confirm all my worst shit about people.”
“Did you talk to Tom?” I had asked to be relieved of a few magazines before I drove into an abutment some night.
“I did,” Walter said. “Here’s where we are.” He unrolled the magazine he was holding. It was Inside Trout, not one of mine, with a hooked fish in a death lurch filling the cover. “He needs you to ream this out.”
I took off my glasses and rubbed my eyes. “Walter—”
“I brought the other thing up with him but I caught him at a bad time. We’re going into some cutbacks.”
He handed me the magazine as Tom Patrick opened the door. “Walter, the exhaust kit people,” he said. “We’ll do ten percent off the card for nine months. That’s it.”
“Right,” Walter said. “That’s a little different from what we—”
“I don’t need the minutes of the meeting, I just need you to—”
“No, I—”
“—pick up the phone. Fucking nuisance, the whole thing.”
“Yeah. No, it is,” Walter said. “We’ve been more than—”
“Am I clearing it with you?”
“No,” Walter said.
Tom looked at me, said, “How are you?” and left.
“He’s very happy with what you’ve been doing, by the way,” Walter said. After a few months on the job I’d realized that Walter lived for Tom’s abuse. “You want to have lunch?”
“I have to go to Sacramento,” I said. “Kustom Chopper’s having a rally against the helmet law.”
“Good. Who thought up that bill? ‘Mister Chairman, we’re losing precious members of the Nazi Jokers.’”
When he left I pushed a stack of papers aside so I could go through Inside Trout. My office was a mess, the furniture hidden under piles of manuscripts, memos, back issues, spec sheets, and press releases. Somewhere in one of the piles was a book about how to organize your paperwork and optimize your life. I hadn’t read it but it was supposed to be one of the better ones, and had been a big seller. It was by Dad.
10
Patti and I walked out of the Kansas City airport into hot soaking air, rented a Spectra, and drove to Barney and Deirdre’s yellow house and vegetable garden on a half acre at the edge of Lawrence. Beside their front door was a long row of hiking shoes, gum boots, galoshes, cross-trainers, clogs, and sandals. I remembered this folkway from the other college towns I’d been in: the number of shoes ou
tside the door, and the activities they were muddy from, signaled the family’s wealth in the next world. When we added Patti’s clean lime Hindenburgs and my black Rockports to the lineup, they looked like the mean developer at the town meeting in a movie with sass and heart.
Barney answered the door in a brown flannel shirt, oatmeal jersey, gray cords, and brown socks, a dirt rainbow. Deirdre came up behind him in a gray sweatshirt and one of her mossy long skirts. Barney looked like he hadn’t been sleeping, and an activist’s despairing smile had settled on Deirdre’s face.
In the hugs Patti got elbow clutch and brief cheek contact from Barney, I got a three-count nose-to-ear off Deirdre, Patti and Deirdre gave each other full waist-up, and Barney and I shook hands. Over his shoulder I saw the living room: futons, paper-lantern lights, and a few hundred books on each of whose twenty-sixth pages I would have bogged down for good.
The kids ran in, yelling, “Hello!” and wearing most of the color in the house. Michael was eight, Pearl ten. After their hugs they grinned curiously at us, wondering what treats we might have brought from California: grosser candy, thunkier music, or rubbery black-and-yellow clothes like Aunt Patti was wearing. They were right: our duffel bags were too big for overnight. We put our stuff in the guest room upstairs, and when we came down everyone was in the pale yellow kitchen making dinner.
We offered to help, but Barney, oiling a wok, said, “No, the kids like to do it. Michael, please get me twelve grams of dried mushrooms. Pearl, let me have half a liter of quinoa, please.” The kitchen counters were lined with jars of dry foods, their names in calligraphy on old, red-bordered filing labels—MILLET, BUCKWHEAT, ADZUKI BEANS—with a lab scale beside them. Deirdre chopped vegetables that Barney stir-fried in sesame oil. She weighed the portions before putting them on plates.
