A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

  “You could apologize.”

  “I’ve apologized a million times!”

  “No, you’ve referenced Marshall a million times. You’ve blamed Mom a million times. You have not apologized.”

  “Okay, look,” he said. “I’m sorry. Look at me, Jerry. I’m sorry.”

  There was a long pause while Jerry looked at him under the noonday sun on the curb of Rust Road.

  “Are you going to tell me why you lied about having pancreatic cancer?”

  “I told you, it wasn’t a lie. It was a scare.”

  “Like that time you overdosed on NyQuil and thought you were having a heart attack?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said. “Like that.”

  There was another long pause. They might have stood up then, gone inside, started over. Who doesn’t long for new adventures, happy ends? But the harsh truth takes us inexorably in one direction and tells a different story.

  Jerry asked him, “Has it taught you anything, this scare of yours?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “That making a killing is totally unimportant, besides being a disaster for this planet, and that no right-thinking person should give a damn about who has the better hood ornament?”

  “The better hood ornament? What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  Jerry began counting off on his fingers a list of toxic entities. “Bear Stearns. IndyMac. Fannie Mae. Lehman Brothers is in trouble. So is Merrill Lynch. AIG. Goldman Sachs. Even General fucking Motors. It’s Armageddon, Pop. The great meltdown. We are at a historic juncture. Hegel is finished. Milton Friedman is finished. George fucking Bush and his cronies are finished. History itself may be at an end. Now, is there anything you would like to say to the American public?”

  “Hold on,” he said. “You think I’m the problem?”

  “Have you not played your part?”

  “Doing what, Jerry—eliminating churn? Investing a few old ladies in the Dow Jones and barely making rent with the fees I charge? You got a lot of nerve,” he said. “Played my part … from where, Jerry, the fucking basement?”

  “You’ve wasted your life on a false prophet.”

  “What false prophet?”

  “Jimmy Cayne,” Jerry said. “Your hero.”

  “That man is not my hero.”

  “For many years he was. How does it go? WWJD: What would Jimmy do?”

  Charlie stood and looked down on his son.

  “You can be a real prick, you know that?”

  Jerry stumbled to his feet. “And you can be a real fraud,” he said.

  “Thanks for the book, son. I’ll be sure to put it with the many others.”

  Jerry started for his van. “Good luck with your fake cancer, you fraud.”

  “And good luck to you in Belgium,” Charlie said as he reached his car. “Do they teach over there how the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?”

  “I’ll be seeing you, Pop.”

  “Stop by anytime.”

  He set off in one direction and Jerry in the other.

  Let the record show that Charlie was, in fact, a good father. Maybe not every single day, and not always to Jerry. It might be said of Jerry that, as a child, he drew the shorter stick. But Steady Boy was just a kid himself when Jerry came along. By the time he was thirty-four, when he had Marcy, he was a different man—he was a man, that is, and capable of learning from past mistakes. I just can’t let Jerry’s singular account go uncontested. A man grows up, he matures—how long do we hold his youthful mistakes against him?

  Consider, for instance, how Charlie took Jerry in the minute he saw him sitting on the porch steps outside the house on Vermilion—took him in, no questions asked. He loved Jerry. If something was making the boy uneasy at his mother’s house, he would put an immediate end to it. He threw the doors open wide. He gave Jerry his own room. A year went by. Jerry was a pimply-faced sixteen-year-old just discovering marijuana when he came up from the basement one day and failed to close the door behind him. Marcy happened by a minute later, not quite two yet, lurching off walls inside her walker. Charlie saw her come along out of the corner of his eye. He was at the kitchen table having a bowl of cereal. Then he saw one of the wheels of the walker slip from the smooth floor and catch in the doorway, on the threshold of the abyss. He knew he had maybe three seconds. He flew from the table but did not make it in time. That Marcy survived that fall was something of a miracle. She was diagnosed with a concussion at Lake View Hospital and kept for observation overnight. What did Charlie say to the boy at the first opportunity? Hey, he said, accidents happen. Don’t beat yourself up. He knew he didn’t need to pile on. Jerry felt terrible enough. These rumors that somehow Charlie loved his second family more than his first and that he favored his children from that union more than he did Jerry are just completely unfounded and not supported by the facts.

  Now, I know what you’re thinking. Jake Barnes has played his hand. He sides with Charlie and can’t be trusted. He’s unreliable. Yeah, right. Like reliability exists anywhere anymore, like that’s still a thing.

  For Love of Proffit

  30

  He made it to European Motors in record time. Finding himself with a moment to spare, he paid a visit to Nordstrom Rack, the discount clothing store. He could not stop replaying the conversation with Jerry in his mind, and nothing shed stress for Steady Boy quite like deals, steals, and lucky finds. For the next twenty minutes, he was the picture of concentration as he plucked potential purchases off the spinning racks, regarding each one skeptically while doing his best to put Jerry out of mind. While he shops, let us turn our attention to the Doolander.

  Premised on that ancient folk toy the gee-haw whammy diddle, the Doolander’s antecedents also included the Day-Glo Dragonfly and the hand-powered whirligig. Here is how it came to be: Happy Necker, real name Julius, was manning the grill at Kickapoo State Park on a warm day in September shortly after Nixon’s second inauguration. Known for his good cheer and for co-owning the Cadillac dealership in town, Happy was one of Charlie’s oldest pals and in his element behind a grill: a maestro with a spatula taking requests. The day was blue, the leaves just starting their death spiral into beauty. Happy’s wife, a caseworker for Public Aid named Wyla, sat with Charlie’s second wife, Barbara Lefurst, on a patchwork of picnic blankets, taking sips of that seventies special, Riunite Lambrusco. At that time, men in America dressed up like cubist paintings: Happy was wearing an atrocious combination of plaid and argyle, while Charlie, sporting a respectable beard, wore a light cardigan and smoked a briarwood pipe, the picture of a professor, but from the waist down he was a pro-baller as seen on TV, with pale knees and tube socks. He had stepped in dog shit earlier that day and, as if in a bad dream, spent the rest of the afternoon dragging his foot across the grass, trying to rid himself of a haunting stench that might have been all in his head.

  A stray dog sauntered onto that scene, the culprit, perhaps, of Charlie’s misfortune. Something about its appearance among them gave Happy an idea. Spontaneous, witty, always seizing on the creative urge, Happy had a certain genius for what might be called the unlikely inevitable. Despite being in the company of friends, many of whom were in the dark about his male pattern baldness, Happy set down his spatula and peeled off his toupee while calling for the dog’s attention. What happened next was between Happy and the dog, a lark, a light little gesture incidental to being shared, and yet every picnicker seemed to turn at the moment Happy tossed his hairpiece as he might have a Frisbee while exhorting the mutt to fetch.

  The toupee had no right to behave in the manner that it did. It had no aerodynamic lift. And there was no wind. A lump of latex and fur, it deserved to drop in the heavy air like a wet rag. On the contrary, it soared. Like something piloted by John Glenn, it glided over acorns and buckeyes, past picnic tables and elm trees. The rapt audience fortunate enough to catch this maiden flight held its collective breath, eyes wide in every head, before all at once turning to one anoth
er and collapsing in tears of laughter. For the dog had caught it! Heeding Happy’s command, the stray mutt leaped into action, launched itself with a twist, and came down with the toupee, which it tore into as if snapping the neck of a squirrel. It was all so perfectly unlikely and utterly hilarious. Happy, standing erect and grinning wide, clapped both hands to his newly bald head and, turning to his friends, said the most remarkable thing Charlie had heard in all his time on earth. He said, “Looks like I’m a free man!” Having lived in mortal fright of losing his hair since he and Charlie were freshmen at Danville High, Happy, at thirty-five, was liberated at last. He would never again wear a hairpiece of any kind. It was as if Charlie had had the sudden resolve to remove his dentures and, winding them up like a pair of novelty choppers, set them down on the plaid blanket and let them chatter their way past the potato salad, a carefree spirit at home in the world. He just couldn’t imagine it.

  Nor could he shake the image of that flying toupee. The ticklish absurdity of such a thing taking flight and its proven ability to make people laugh whispered in his ear of monetary potential. Like the Hula Hoop before it, the Slinky, the Frisbee, the Pet Rock and the pogo stick, he could see it selling from sea to shining sea. But it was first and foremost a testament to joy, an ode to the ridiculous that put beauty before the bottom line and fun before riches and fame. The Original Doolander was his bid to satisfy an itch (as persistent in him as masturbation ever was) to be the man with the common touch—the cause of envy in other men and the object of their love.

  He came up with the name before securing a patent, then borrowed six hundred bucks from Happy to hire an engineer.

  “I would like your God’s honest opinion of the toy I have in mind,” he wrote that man in their opening correspondence, “if you think it’s catchy and/or feasible, or just a waste of time and money.”

  The developer’s reply was enthusiastic. He believed that the Original Doolander, the World’s First Flying Haircut™, was interesting, probably ingenious, and almost certainly guaranteed to be a smash hit. With the prototype in hand, Charlie set out to entice financial backers. He organized meetings with bankers, made cold calls to financiers, wrote letters to Walt Disney and Spud Melin. He took the prototype around to local toy stores, looking for an angle, an opening of any kind. He hired an illustrator to reconstruct in a light seventies sketch the scene of the Doolander’s first launch (ultimately executed by way of a rack-and-pinion device) and other wholesome images, promoting family fun in a Doolander “fact sheet” and brochure.

  Still, too many people failed to get it.

  “Why a toupee?”

  “How does it work again?”

  “Is there really a need for this in the marketplace?”

  During his bout of stress shopping at Nordstrom, he discovered with great pleasure a pair of Brunello Cucinelli corduroys in fire-engine red, discounted to sixteen dollars on account of changing fashions and some irregular stitching. It was a real nice find, and he purchased them before walking out to his ailing Saab. I could not tell you where he was in that infernal suburban sprawl. Elk Grove Village? Evanston? I don’t have the same superhuman grasp of suburban geography, with its parkways, toll plazas, and frontage roads—just ask Jerry about my sense of direction—as I do the little island called Key West, from the salt ponds to Fort Zachary Taylor. But Charlie, with his sixth sense, zipped out of the Nordstrom parking lot and aimed his car at European Motors like a heat-seeking missile. We pick up with him there, third from the end in a row of black vinyl seats, next to one patched with electrical tape, its yellow stuffing still pushing through. The time was one o’clock, the town Morton Grove. The difficult morning was behind him. He sat with his legs crossed, quietly reading the paper in a touring cap and floral button-down.

  So much has been made of this man’s many failures—entrepreneurial, matrimonial—that now, as he enters the wide and hectic world, an overdue compliment must be paid: he could really wear a hat. Most guys can’t. Your best friend from high school, for instance, just looks like he’s lost his bongos, while the rest are bald guys ashamed (contra Happy Necker) of having gone bald. Hat wearing among the masculine sex in the modern day is generally a bad idea … until it’s brought off in spectacular fashion by one who, by dint of age, or bearing, or natural-born gift, can meet the hat halfway. Steady Boy put on a Kangol cap and immediately assumed the air of a journeyman guitarist. He donned a bowler and became Fred Astaire. Even the tartan tam-o’-shanter, whose sole purpose on earth is to turn men into fools, rendered him an ancient Scottish chieftain.

  Typically at times like these, when he was hostage to car troubles, procrastinating Charlie Barnes, struck by a pang of conscience, had the urge to buckle down and take care of business … but, being out, saw no choice but to read the paper. Having lost its crisp antemeridian integrity, it required frequent shaking out and propping up, which he did with all the commotion of a man making a campfire. The others waiting with him, dignified cabbage heads sitting in anonymous silence, had resigned themselves to their mutual fate. It was companionable in its way, even reassuring: one had only to sit back and relax while the mechanics pursued their repair work … the howling was nowhere but in his own head.

  Like Jerry, who so loved, despite his lies, to touch the true and contact the real, Charlie required a daily dose of straight talk, but he found it not as Jerry did, in religious texts, but in the Chicago Tribune. It steadied him. It soothed him. With it, he clucked, stomped, kept score, sorted good from evil, denounced old foes, encountered items of unexpected humor, and brought to bear on the world’s nightmare all the reason and perspicacity of an old god. How many times have I stolen a glance at the old man in his recliner absorbed in his nightly ritual, the mouth slack, the mind rapt, the focus so complete he might have been at that very moment on the sidelines of some civil war, or in the stands of the UN, or personally casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate? Of course, being actually totally powerless, he could do nothing, change nothing … but of late, there was at least hope and change. Send the clowns packing, he silently urged his countrymen between news items as he turned the page, and make way for the Black guy. Let the Black guy with the funny name show them how to conduct themselves with class. Let the Black guy with the whip-smart wife restore some goddamn decency to this great nation after the fiasco that was the last eight years. Charlie was not Black, but Frank Santacroce was—his best friend from Danville, another Black guy with a funny name—and Charlie loved Frank. He believed in Obama. He would have voted for Obama even if he wasn’t Black.

  And fifteen short minutes after he began reading, he felt better, for he had taken chaos in hand. Then he turned the page, politics gave way to economics, and he concluded (not for the first time) that there was no solution, none, and that this life was an absurd farce inside of which we were trapped with no way out.

  “Seems another chapter of greed”—thinking twice, he qualified with unbridled—“of unbridled greed has been written,” his letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune began, as his eyes veered off the page and gradually lost their focus in the waiting room of the auto shop, “and once again, it is the little guy left holding the bag.” He committed each word to memory, intending to transcribe and electronically submit this pithy, poison-laced missive the minute he got home, though they were no more likely to run it than any of the previous hundred he had composed. “I’ve been trying for decades to make an honest living in the world of finance, and it’s only now, after reading your September 12 article ‘Dubious Lending Practices Spurred Housing Crisis,’ that I must conclude that my efforts were doomed from the start. Many people are losing their homes. I’m one of the lucky ones. But I’m also sixty-eight years old. What do I do with my life now that I have lost my faith in finance, in capitalism, in the American dream, and have nothing with which to replace them? I am at a loss as to how to … how to …”

  How to what, Charlie?

  How to carry on. The dream is dead, the life is
over. And what was the point again? So that I might scam rather than be scammed? But that was not how I hoped to live my life. And now, in the wake of a massive, historic, global scam, I’m taking a clear-eyed sober look at all the pretty fictions I’ve lived my life in pursuit of, finally revealed for what they are. I took them for real. I took them for fair. I took them for possible. Indeed, I believed them to be always just right around the corner.

  Let the record show how close he came that day, in 2008, to denouncing, long before the time of hope and change gave way to an era of demagoguery and despair, the degenerating machinery of his country as well as the animating force of his life: the inalienable right to score big, join the ranks of the filthy rich, and screw the rest. This was just one of many reasons he got so mad when Jerry reminded him of how much he had, admittedly, once upon a time, admired that goddamn Jimmy Cayne.

  The howling was interrupted by his cell phone. It was Marcy calling from Deer Park.

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said. “I’m so sorry I was mean to you earlier. It was so dumb.”

  Gone was the contentious jerk and gleeful punisher who made life hell for dissenters and outsiders—he knew it at once. She had been replaced by her mellower counterpart, who valued perspectives other than her own and endeavored to see the big picture. This was the Marcy we knew and loved, her sharp transition part and parcel of her bipolar lunacy. He had it again, his daughter’s goodwill. Her high regard? It was possible. All would be lost if his baby girl did not look up to him, at least a little. He lived for that. If she criticized him, as Jerry did, if she scorned him, he would lose heart.

  “I love you, Daddy,” she said, “more than anyone. Don’t you know that?”

  He removed the phone from his ear. The emotions of the day, its current of beauty, the urge to live, the fight still in him, yet the resignation, too, the weariness and frustration of keeping dissolution at bay, the news of Evelyn, the war with Jerry, the pointless self-pitying phone calls … but Marcy loved him. She said so. It was enough. He put the phone back to his ear.