Retirement Projects

by Charles Hibbard

  Chapter 8

  Whatever the drawbacks of having to deal with Victor Carogna on a regular basis, I was somewhat heartened by my first experience with the knitting group. They had been tolerant, if not actually warm, and now at least my empty weeks swung at a kind of anchor. Besides which, knitting even a bad scarf is quite difficult and requires a lot of concentration; it's a welcome distraction for a person who's afraid of the sound of orange juice. I also noticed what was doubtless a false sense of belonging to a team, and I was able to bask in that illusion for a few days.

  Not long after that first meeting, while I was sitting on the couch ripping out a few botched rows of The Scarf, the landlord, Mr. Clabber, rapped on my door, with the unexpected news that he was about to start renovating the building.

  Mr. Clabber is roughly my age, shortish, with a shaved head, thick eyebrows riding uneasily above rimless spectacles, deep dark eyes, and a wide, drooping broom of mustache. Among landlords, Mr. Clabber is a paragon. Leilah and I have been living in his building since he bought it and renovated it for the first time, nearly 25 years ago. It's been a mutually satisfactory arrangement: we always paid the rent in full and on time and never asked him to paint, and he always left us alone, except for the rare emergency situations, such as when the toilet backed up in the middle of the night, causing water to run down between the walls. Routed out of his bed, Mr. Clabber drove all the way up from South San Francisco to deal with that situation.

  He also only occasionally remembered to raise the rent, so that eventually we were paying about half market value. By the time of this story, in fact, Mr. Clabber didn't really care much about the rent or the mess in our four-room pad, because he'd parlayed his first building into a small real estate empire whose tentacles curled all the way to Vegas and even Phoenix. Early on he'd learned that it was a good idea not to scare off any tenants who always paid on time and didn't trash the apartment. He and his wife were recent immigrants from Djakarta when we first moved in, and they had a naive faith in their first few tenants. This led to a number of interesting and educational experiences for them and for his more conventional renters.

  There had been, for example, what Leilah had sardonically identified as a troupe of Eastern European gymnasts who moved into the place above us early in our own tenure. There seemed to be dozens of them. We met them on the stairs, always smiling, but never the same ones. They lasted only for a few months before absconding; but during that time the ceiling above us resonated constantly with bumps, thumps, slidings, shouts, occasional screams, sexual groans and yelps, and atonal chamber music. It sounded as though the entire apartment was rotating like a musical laundry dryer with all its furniture and inhabitants, who first rode the turning walls upward, then crashed to the floor like huge clumps of damp underwear, only to repeat the process over and over, day and night, until Leilah and I were screaming for mercy and denting the ceiling nightly with a furious broom handle. Luckily, they never paid the rent, and left abruptly once Mr. Clabber began eviction proceedings.

  Other unorthodox tenants flickered in and out over the years, with varying degrees of impact on us. There was the professional agitator who flushed bath towels and pots of spaghetti down his toilet and then complained to the health department that his plumbing didn’t work. For him it was a matter of principle not to pay the rent, an ethical stand that eventually led to his eviction. And there was the amateur chemist who cooked up his methamphetamines in the bottom apartment. He's of interest only because when he was finally evicted, after numerous triggerings of the smoke alarm, he left behind a cat, the very same ill-tempered tabby that Leilah had recently carried out of the apartment in the United Airlines carrier when she decamped (also not paying her share of the last month's rent, I feel I must add).

  Each eviction cost Mr. Clabber thousands of dollars in legal fees and lost rent, and with every defeat he became more gun-shy, letting the apartments sit empty for months while he sat biting his fingernails over the sheaves of references from prospective new tenants and wondering which one was least likely to screw him. This is how Leilah and I finally began to look good to him despite our dwarfish monthly payments. Leilah in particular, being very sociable and no fool, was able gradually to install her friends in most of the other apartments by playing on his anxieties. By the time she left, the place was as quiet as a churchyard and Mr. Clabber's rent checks were coming in with gratifying punctuality. He was therefore somewhat distressed to learn that she had moved out. Although it was I who had always signed the rent checks, he preferred her on a personal level, having the good taste to recognize an unusual woman when he met one. He may also have viewed her disappearance and the unwonted tidiness of the apartment as disturbing signs of instability on my part; and I suppose he wasn't wrong about that.

  The current lineup in the building looks like this: Across the hall from me is Ayn, whom you've already met. She lives alone with her bikes and an elliptical machine whose eccentric revolutions I can sometimes feel faintly in the floor at odd hours of the night. Upstairs are April and Arthur. They are, in my opinion – and this also had a part to play in my later discomfiture – an unlikely pair, Arthur being round and massive, bearded, very grave, invariably business-suited, and considerably older than his girlfriend. I've already outlined April's physical parameters. Finally, in the apartment below me dwell Julia the night nurse and her neurasthenic canine, Raton. I can often hear their conversations too, which are like arguments between two people speaking in different tongues, both trying to make themselves understood by talking louder than the other. Raton generally seems to get the last word.

  On the bottom floor is the garden apartment, recently vacated by the meth chemist, and it was there that Mr. Clabber planned to begin his revolution. “You... feel noise” he told me in his still rudimentary English, “and the wall...” He held one hand up parallel to the wall and pumped it back and forth. “Don't want to worry.”

  After Mr. Clabber's visit, I was no longer troubled by the lonely sighs of the wind in the pine tree outside my window, because my days were now filled with the tramp of booted feet up and down the stairs, the banging of hammers and the screaming of tortured nails being torn from their ancient beds, the keening of a chorus of power tools, and deep seismic disturbances whose source I couldn't determine. Not to mention the shouted conversations in Indonesian and the clouds of cigarette smoke drifting through the hall from the workmen who had shouldered the burden of chain-smoking shrugged off by us clean-lunged Americans. I suppose the roar of activity in the building was an improvement of sorts. Coming upon one of the laborers in the hallway, I could smile and say hello and almost believe I belonged to the brotherhood of man, even though the connection was severed at 5 o'clock sharp every day. The bustle of construction, along with the knitting group and Victor Carogna's masculinization program, provided an illusion of community.

  Although Victor Carogna believed that in me he was introducing a weapon-shy wimp to the manly world of firearms, guns in fact have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. There's at least one picture of me at age 3 or 4 in cowboy hat and holsters with twin pearl-handled .45s. They were cap guns, of course; but my point is that already at that age I was in training to assert my God-given rights under the Second Amendment. This seems a little odd to me in retrospect, given that my mother literally shrank from hurting flies and my father, while an anxious guardian of his maleness in other ways, had no real interest in weapons of any kind.

  But guns were my favorite toys, and I remember getting new ones for almost every birthday and holiday: revolvers, automatic pistols, rifles, shotguns, Browning Automatic Rifles, burp guns, machine guns. If Mattel had produced an affordable howitzer that would fit in our garage, I would have requested one, and my pacifist mother would probably have given it to me. I will confess that there was and is something fascinating about the weight and silky metallic soul of a gun, and I subscribe also to the theory that whatever that something is, it has a p
articular grip on people who carry around a Y chromosome. I don't pretend to know why. Not that there couldn't be other reasons than biology for getting into guns, and I've heard that these days women too are learning the joys of blowing holes in cardboard silhouettes, if not in actual people.

  In any case, by the time I was 14 or so my fascination with firearms was already beginning to fade, overshadowed by the usual adolescent biological concerns. I turned my back definitively on guns the day our neighbor Jonnie Lucero took me hunting with his new pellet gun and used it to shoot a bird. It was a hapless sparrow, pouring out his April heart on a budding tree branch, and I was astonished at how easily the feverishly singing wood sprite could be turned into a silent clump of feathers. Not that I have any particular sympathy for the avian world, you understand, especially in view of its recent impact on my life. But the thought of that martyred bird still makes me cringe, and it may have been that very cringe that Victor Carogna, with a sort of contemptuous resignation, recognized and determined to train out of me at the shooting range. He had some success, as it turned out, but at a cost to himself.

  Victor Carogna's efforts in this area had been anticipated, in much more determined fashion, by the US Army. Drafted during the Vietnam years, I had been instructed in how to walk like a robot, crawl 40 yards through mud on my stomach, disembowel a rubber dummy with a bayonet, and – perhaps most usefully – clean the grease trap in the company kitchen. One of the drill sergeants had also demonstrated for our platoon, drawn up at attention one frosty morning, the approved army technique for eating pussy, a dry run so to speak, and we were reminded almost daily that it was our presumed taste for this activity that truly made us men. We were also taught to disassemble, clean, reassemble, and competently shoot an M-14 rifle at cardboard enemies that fell over backwards when hit by a bullet. No one seemed concerned that the rifle in use in Vietnam was not the M-14 but the M-16; and indeed, after basic training I did my time in a lab in Huntsville, Alabama, where the only weapon was a 2-kilowatt carbon dioxide laser, used to impress visiting brass by melting hacksaw blades with its invisible infrared beam.

  After my army days, I don't believe I ever set eyes on another real firearm until Victor Carogna, shaking his head disgustedly, took me by the ear and marched me to the Lake Merced shooting range, where he first tried to teach me to use a shotgun. Like any good and thorough teacher, he spent a lot of time showing me the rudiments of skeet shooting: weapon safety first; then how to point the shotgun, proper hand and elbow position, how to lead the streaking disc, compensating for its distance by aiming high, clichéd instructions about how to “squeeze off” shots as though I were caressing female skin rather than triggering a swarm of destructive lead pellets. Of course he wanted me to learn to hit the targets; but the underlying goal was more cosmic – to help me take possession of my male inheritance. Victor Carogna saw right through my superficial manly bluster about Leilah's desertion to the limp, clueless soul that lay beneath, and whether because on some level he actually liked me (doubtful), or because he felt that such an abject specimen as I was threatened the virility of all mankind, he made me his project. The idea was not just to teach me to hit a silly clay frisbee with a shotgun but to release the inner savage that lay snarling even deeper in me than the worm Leilah had trampled.

  The mere mechanics of shooting were thus strictly secondary; Victor Carogna wanted me to learn to destroy those clay pigeons not with good elbow position but with my mind, my WILL. I wasn't to aim at all, in fact. He taught me that it was possible to actually see the deadly squadron of pellets as it left the barrel, a slight, hurrying shimmer against the green background of trees, like a small, toxic cloud. The idea was to think of that cloud as being attached to the end of a long stick whose movements I controlled. The trick was not to aim when the pigeon was pulled, but simply to SEE the flying disc and then REACH OUT and DESTROY IT with a touch of the stick, which I was to regard as an extension of my arm, or really of my murderous intention.

  I was quite taken with the whole concept, and spent several afternoons with Victor Carogna, REACHING OUT to disc after rocketing disc, thrilling to the report of the gun like a baseball bat on rotten wood and the acrid perfume of gunpowder, even enjoying the hammer of the recoil against my bruised shoulder. But somehow my little personal cloud of venom only rarely intersected the trajectory of the discs, and then probably by accident. I noticed that Victor Carogna himself, notwithstanding his steely eye and handlebar mustache, had some difficulty in whacking the elusive targets, and when he missed tended to fire off an ill-humored and unsportsmanlike volley of shots. Etiquette required, of course, that the shooter take only one shot, and merely puff a little faster on his cigarette if he missed. He could also say shit, but only once.

  Victor Carogna was annoyed, but not dismayed, by the failure of his initial efforts to revive my primal hunter. After a few frustrating sessions he packed up the shotguns, got out his handguns, and took me to the police shooting range, where he still had some friends as bloody-minded as himself who allowed him the run of the place. There, his faith that the masculine elan could be teased out of almost any man, even me, was validated.

  Perhaps with the shotgun there still lurked in me some neural memory of Jonnie Lucero and his pellet gun, and the ghost of the glassy-eyed sparrow. Shotguns are, after all, designed primarily to kill birds, although used on larger game by the ungentlemanly heroes of gangster films. Handguns, in contrast, have no other obvious purpose than to kill human beings; no helpless birds or other cute animals are involved. Victor Carogna soon realized that he had no reason to be dissatisfied with the state of my soul in this area, at least in terms of my ability to plug paper targets.

  You may suspect that the simple joys of revenge somehow catalyzed the immediate sympathy that sprouted between me and Victor Carogna's Glock 17. I have to admit that those cardboard hearts and foreheads I effortlessly peppered with 9-millimeter-diameter holes were sometimes replaced in my mind by the lanky contours of a certain pony-tailed birdwatcher. But the fantasies involving Beresford more often took the form of acupuncture with #6 aluminum knitting needles, tapped in just far enough to agonize but not to cause any major organ failure, thus side-stepping the US government's official definition of torture. Only after having had a smoke while savoring his screams would I lean over without taking the cigarette from the corner of my mouth and administer the coup de grace to this porcupine-like object. That sort of shooting requires no particular skill.

  No, the truth is, some shadowy fish from the deeper waters surfaces when I get hold of a handgun. Personally I think it has something to do with the news of the world, which you can't read these days without seeing a story about the body of a man with a burning face flying into somebody's back yard in Iraq or someone else cutting off his best friend's leg with a hacksaw in the living room of his mother. Or there's just some asshole farting by on his unmufflered Harley-Davidson and mindlessly screwing up the world for everyone within a radius of a half-mile. These things make my palm, like Hermann Goering's in a different context, itch for the gnurly grip of Victor Carogna's Glock.

  Blowing holes in a cardboard silhouette of a human being seemed a harmless enough way of venting those vengeful impulses. I was quite good at it, better than good in fact, and my blossoming skill seemed to go some way toward defusing Victor Carogna's contempt. He openly admired my knack with the pistol, to the point even of occasionally cracking his knife-edge smile, and flattered himself that he had at least sliced open enough of a rent in my soft metrosexual carapace to let out a small red glow from the primal inferno within. I believe he still doubted my ability to pull the trigger even if I did have in my sights a child rapist or Harley-Davidson driver, but he never lost hope. “The human race is a fuckin disaster,” he kept chanting in my ear, in much the same way the army had tried to imbue me with the spirit of the bayonet. Despite his efforts, though, I continue to have trouble executing a cockroach, let alone a human b
eing. Although I probably feel more sympathy for the roach, which is after all only trying to survive and would never cut off anyone's leg unless food was involved.

  The shooting expeditions coincided with a period of thaw in my relations with Victor Carogna. After my bumbling attempts at skeet shooting he was generally in a bad mood, and would simply throw the guns in the trunk and take off, sometimes not even bothering to drop me at a bus stop. I don't attribute all his grumpiness to my failures. He wasn't very good with the shotgun himself, as I've mentioned, which doubtless left him in a bad mood; and then there was his immobilized wife waiting for him at home. I'm sure he loved her, whatever that meant to a caveman like him, but it must sometimes have been an effort to maintain his usual sarcastic good humor.

  He softened a bit, though, once he began to appreciate my natural genius for firing a handgun, and once or twice drove me all the way to the J-car turnaround out by the Great Highway, and even treated me to coffee at the weatherbeaten pastry shop that crouches there in the lee of a sand dune. We could sit outside in the fog and sip our coffee (Victor Carogna's good mood always dissipated somewhat when I ordered my nonfat decaf latte) while he smoked a couple of cigarettes down to his sandpaper knuckles and regaled me with tales of the police department, hoping, I suppose, to further stimulate my testosterone production, or maybe just to help me construct a more realistic view of life. He had an endless supply of stories: girlfriends thrown down stairs, the dried brains of three-week-old suicides spattered on ceilings, police vans loaded with vomiting drunks and overdosed drug addicts, mothers watching TV while their battered babies died in the next room, and so on. I tried to match him with anecdotes from my classrooms, but it was an uneven contest, although I did have a hatchet incident and a gang fight or two to throw at him.

  Once, in what must have been the high-water mark of his mentorship, he actually took me to Cupertino to meet his wife, Margaret. She was a far more pleasant and less embittered woman than I'd expected, and actually looked kind of happy. She served us coffee and home-baked cookies, slowly but quite efficiently I thought, rolling smoothly from room to room in her wheelchair on floors from which Victor Carogna had removed all the carpeting. She seemed a little younger than her husband, short-haired and big-earringed, and the difficulties presented by her condition had not prevented her from maintaining her eye makeup. As at the cafe, Victor Carogna sat smoking cigarettes, but he let her do most of the talking. Her obvious intelligence, rationality, compassion, and charm presented themselves to me as a puzzle: what was she doing riding through life in the turret of Victor Carogna's armored car? Just out of curiosity, I tried a couple of times to steer the conversation toward political topics. Once she sailed right over my reef without even dragging her keel; the other time she just laughed and said “Watch out now, we don't want my husband to swallow that cigarette, at least not until he finishes it.” Victor Carogna merely smiled, but I could see from the glitter in his python eyes that he didn't appreciate my meddling.

  Margaret insisted on giving me a motherly peck on the cheek as I left and made me promise to return. Victor Carogna, however, was ominously quiet on the trip to the train station, and I seriously doubted that I would be invited back. From that day on, the patch of open water in our relationship began to freeze over again. Although there may well have been other reasons for that, as you will soon hear, but not yet. And I did see the inside of Victor Carogna's house again, but by that time a lot of things had changed.