What We Are

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

  “So you two went to high school together?”

  I remember now where I’m at, the kind of cat surrounding me.

  Chinaski says it again. “You went to St. Cajetan together?”

  “Indeed,” says Who Dere. He’s smiling at Chinaski, not meeting his fawning eyes but rather the top of his head, the comb-over, softly but visibly chuckling to himself. This is why the guy irritated me back in the day. He’s one of those people always shitting on the saps below him with pizzazz, under the impression that his defecatory act is one of generosity.

  “And this was at Cajetan?”

  “Yes, sir,” Who Dong continues. “Paul was ranked number one in our class until the end of our sophomore year.”

  Jab number one. I take it lightly on the ribs. It tickles. I breathe in deeply and blow it away. Meanwhile, Chinaski is on the edge of his seat, excited by the all-around possibility of milking the boss’s all-star nephew. “At Cajetan?”

  “Yes,” I say. “It was at Cajetan, okay? I went to Cajetan. I went to St. Cajetan and you didn’t go to Cajetan. Though you probably wanted to.”

  “Oh, no,” says Chinaski. Oh, yes. “I’m just curious, I guess. My mother wanted me to go there. All she did for the first fourteen years of my life was ramble on to anyone in her vicinity how little Chuckie was going to be the first in the family to attend Cajetan.”

  “Well,” says Who Dong, “It was a fine school. Is a fine school.”

  I want to say, And where did you go to school, Chinaski? just to shut him up, but instead say, “It’s in decline.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” says Who Dat. “It’s just growing.”

  “Exactly,” I say. “It’s growing beyond its identity.An all-boys Jesuit educational enterprise since 1851 is now a community of women and men conjoined in its vision of growing an organic citizen to enter the world and brighten it. I twas a poemhink they stole that from Alcoholics Anonymous.”

  “I went to Blackford and I don’t regret one minute there,” says Chinaski. Translation: He was one of the 1,400 applicants that St. Cajetan turns away each year. “Although I’d like to go back and watch a football game now and then.”

  “Have you been banned from your campus for some reason?” asks Who Dere, smiling with perfectly polite fakery.

  “Blackford was shut down back in ’ninety,” I say happily.

  “One year after I graduated,” Chinaski says sadly.

  “Did you make the one-year reunion?” I say.

  “Paul here,” says Who Dong, “was the hero of our alumni game in ’ninety-six. Eight thousand fans were in attendance at Kirk Shoe Stadium. Paul liked to say that Kerouac should’ve lived just to watch that game and write a better poem.”

  “Who is that?” Chinaski says.

  “Jack Kerouac,” I say. “He wrote about watching St. Cajetan play on a Friday night in ‘October in the Railroad Earth.’”

  “So he’s like a sportswriter then?” Chinaski asks.

  “It was a poem.”

  “That’s right,” says Who Ding. “The book was Lonesome Traveler.”

  “Sounds like a downer,” says Chinaski.

  “Paul here made an interception with thirty-five seconds left in the game. Took it eighty yards down the sideline for the score. And the best part was that he did it right in front of the St. Dwynwen bench. They all just stood there, hoping Paul would trip. But he didn’t. Not that time, anyway.”

  There it is: the second jab. Let’s get ready to rumble!

  “Oh, I’ve been tripped up a number of times,” I say. I look at the Greek-potted ferns posted at either side of the piano, take in the faux-Doric pillars in earth tones at ten-yard intervals through this ballroom, watch a bellhop wheel a golden cart of luggage toward the Fountain Restaurant. Holding the hour in my hand like a crystal ball, I say, “But I’d guess that you haven’t.”

  “You’d be right on that front, Paul.”

  “It’s easy to see why.”

  “The usual talent, commitment, intelligence,” he says.

  “Not at all. It’s the usual aptitude to recognize what other people want. You’re extraordinary at that. And then you give it to them. You play the course out. Stay within the lines, the boundaries. You never ask if they deserve what they want. Or need it. Everything is navigable on your course, and you sprint through it with the feet-pumping pistons of Carl Lewis. Everybody loves you, but your vision is small, and their love is superficial. As is yours. Meanwhile, the truly memorable folks have broken off the course and are hiking ...” (here I lift the Sierra Nevada and pound it) “... mountains you wouldn’t go near. It’s unavoidable that one trips every now and then when there’s a snow-capped peak to hurdle.”

  “I’m sorry I took the valedictorian from you, Paul.”

  Chinaski’s shoulders drop back down: a misfit like myself messes with his baby formula of: I (Intelligence) + C (Connections) = S (Success) = C (Cash) = P (Prestige) = F (Friend).

  “A simple thank-you will do,” I say to Who Ding.

  “Thank you?”

  I say with total confidence, “That’s right. You’re welcome for the VD, as I call it, that you were given by me. I checked out of that school before my sophomore year ended. There was nothing left for me to learn. Oh, the minutiae were there: the periodic table, the love sonnets of Shakespeare, Lincoln-Douglas debates, all that good shit, there’s always more info to absorb, always more data. Even now, there’s a galaxy of facts out there that I couldn’t speak to with any authority. But the vision of the school is another thing. By fifteen, I had the hidden forces at work figured out at St. Cajetan College Preparatory. I was sure I didn’t align myself with their vision, our vision, whatever. And that was the start of an endless journey yielding the same result over and over again.”

  “The big trip,” Who Dat says, rolling his eyes. He does some delay tactic of his own, registering the skylights above us, way above us. “I’m unimpressed, Paul. I would have thought that by now you’d have a better rationalization for your recent failures. You were always so adept at arguing the counter to the counter to the counter to the counter.”

  Chinaski’s brain is in remission. He went into A-wave mode when I mentioned the periodic table: he’s sleeping with his eyes open, he’s zoning out on the television, though (miraculously) there’s no television here in the ballroom. Chinaski may as well be fingering his way through a bowl of extra-buttery popcorn, sipping on a $6 small Coke at the theater. Maybe it’s right that he’s shit upon: he’s a borderline peasant who thinks he’s an aristocrat. Even in his unconscious dream right now, he’s issuing orders to a custodian.

  I say, “The difference between us is this: You won’t ever hear me whine about the raspberries and bruises on my knees. And I don’t have to hunt you down and challenge you to feel good about myself. You and a hundred others offer a paltry remedy for the nothingness I feel in my head and heart. The problems I carry around would end a fragile bird like you. You wouldn’t get out of the nest with my nihilistic inheritance.”

  “But I did get to Harvard. Then to Boalt. And now to Eismann, Lichter & Smith. With ease. And soon I’ll get to partner. Where did you get other than San Quentin, Paul?”

  “You were in San Quentin?” asks Chinaski, snapping awake.

  “He was indeed,” says Who Dere, sipping his drink, holding in a smile.

  “That’s one of the mountains I’m talking about,” I say.

  “Is there any doubt now which anarchist put a brick through the dean’s window?”

  “You were in San Quentin?”

  “Listen,” I say to Who Dong, standing, shaking out my arms, my hands, “aside from the fact that a punk like you would’ve been crushed up in that mutherfucker and aside from the fact that what I took from that place translates directly into this moment, right here, right now, in that only my compassion“—here I get in Who Ding’s face, grit my teeth, eyes flaring like Tyson pre-fight—”prevents me from biting your fucking fruity cheerleader
nose off your face”—Who Dat swallows, steps back, almost trips on the colorful man-of-war behind him, and I sit down, content with his concession—“the only thing you have to worry about is what I read in the latest issue of the Cajetan Column. How did it go? Ah, yes: Dong-hoo Choi, ’96, invites all members of the Korean Alumni Association to meet at Ga Bo Ja in late December. Now tell me that ain’t true. It’s a misprint. I misread it, right?”

  “I’m founder and president,” he proudly parrots, before he sees his error.

  “Hah! What happened to your anti-kimchi crusade?”

  “I realized I was wrong.”

  “Bullshit,” I say, “that’s bullshit. I’ve got your game figured out, man. You’re transparent as a snowstorm. Back in the day, you gave up your bloodline to curry favor with the haves. The enrollment of our class was ninety-percent white and they ran the show. So you went around and told everyone to call you Michael. But when it became hip over time to embrace your culture everywhere on the planet, you aptly identified the power shift and realized that a rediscovery of your former culture was politically savvy. So now you’re back to Dong-hoo. Well, they may have forgotten your original whitewashed position with a tidy donation to the endowment, but I remember how readily you abandoned your roots. You had no balls. Still don’t. It doesn’t matter if you’re here at the Fairmont every day, ringing up a fat bill comped by the firm. It doesn’t matter what you drive, where you live. I’ll destroy you, Who Dong, Who Ding, Who Dat, Who Michael, Who Whatever. I got nothing to lose.”

  He’s silent, as he should be. I detest the guy, this master player of the game.

  “I’ll eat you alive.” Chinaski is about to get up and walk off to the bathroom, and I can’t help saying, “Sit down.”

  He sits as ordered, slumps back, shoulders hunched, whistling air through his lips.

  “Let’s agree,” says Who Ding, “that you were always smarter than me, but that I will always be more successful than you.”

  “Well, I’m in accordance with that,” I say, lifting my empty glass. “Here’s to your stupid success.”

  He lifts his own half-full glass. “Here’s to your intelligent failure.”

  Chinaski suddenly pops up, like a beaver out of a hollow in the earth, his four strands of hair tingling with the cerebral activity below: Could it be true? his shocked eyes are asking. Does intelligence truly presage failure? Am I, Charles Chinaski, simply too damned smart for my own good?

  24

  We’re Driving with Bling-Making Intent

  WE’RE DRIVING with bling-making intent out to North Santa Clara in Chinaski’s apple-green ’06 VDUBBUG, the Jesse James custom-built convertible, top down, the wind rushing through our ears, pumping Usher and Ja Rule, looking cool for all the girls who laugh with us, not at us. The conditions are a test for Chinaski’s new condition: hair implants. I didn’t say a word aloud when I first saw it, don’t say a word now. It’s a new beginning for the both of us: he’s got a thousand threads of string growing out of his head, and I’m committed to the silence mandated by the elephantine woofers. This silence will carry me to self-sustenance in the Silicon Valley; as ordered by my good sister, silence is the new rule for me, not just today but all the days that I find myself officially a subject of “The West.” For the past few days, I’ve been cast in the role of the fifties child who is to be seen, not heard.

  The great techie capitalists sprang from the well-tilled soil of this valley, and though I’ve a relatively late start at twenty-eight, and though we are presently winding through the Silicon ghost towns of northern Sunnyvale and central Milpitas, their spirits having vacated the premises for the warmer, more fertile climate of New Delhi, and though I have a disposition that questions any possible direction my life takes, I’m nonetheless positive that my cooperative attitude (“Bend but don’t break,” advised Chinaski) will—a propos of the mad beats—Usher me into millions of bones in no time, which, as Ja Rule would no doubt point out at gunpoint, is clearly what’s important.

  WHY NOT GROW A HEART ON A YACHT? reads Chinaski’s bumper sticker.

  We make our way into the suburbs, this great classless society where there’s no wrong side of the tracks. No plantation mansions with Italian names, no families with Borgian pull, no inherited social customs. And no character either, no life force. Everything appears even, yes, fair, but facelessly dull. The monotonous train of banal architecture needs no mason, “giveth no man a house of good stone.” No Usonian vision could spice up this endless drywall of conformity, where the streets fill up with junk like its inhabitants.

  One wonders why: there are no kids in view to enjoy the junk. The houses here aren’t vacant: more cars than trees in the neighborhood. More cars than people. The rest of the world would build the most elaborate and sturdy jungle gym on the playground with our (metallic) scraps on the table. All through the merit of hunger and hope.

  Consume, baby! Consume, amorphous beast!

  I recall now the message of our good Prez one day after 9/11: Just go right back to what you’re doing, mi Americano hermanos, don’t let them change your lifestyle. In other words, don’t let this travesty be a lesson. The meat of our economy, the good Prez was saying, driven by our lifestyle.

  Our lifestyle? Our impermanent lifestyle—Impertinent lifestyle! Consummate insult to the world!

  Where have we heard that before, Romans of the Seven Hills, Mayans of the Yucatan? I don’t remember seeing silicon implants and weekly therapists and bathroom spas and Dancing with the Stars and cordless laptops slotted into Maslow’s pyramid of needs, not even as a bottom brick. Just like my newfound nameless friend said, we’re gods on earth, or so we think. We’ve elevated our wants, wants, wants to the status of needs, needs, needs, this Pillsbury doughboy society, us Pillsbury people, rolling toward our comeuppance day of getting baked in the oven.

  But these are moot points now, I know, since my adoption of the mature American attitude of earning an honest buck. The capitalist’s euphemism for Get it, baby, just get it. There’s no more internal dilemma in me: I know the code: At all soulful costs, get it!

  Oh, I got it all right: Chinaski pulls up to the newly erected house of interest, the acreage of dusty plain in front of us, ripe for rampant construction. Ninety percent of the homes are empty out here, awaiting the resident heartbeat. He opens his door, steps out, and reaches back into the car. I lean back accordingly with my straight right cocked, but he goes for some contraption that he’s been sitting on the whole time: an inflatable red cushion, horseshoe in shape, the words Roid Void in creamy white logo across its hollow center.

  There’s no way that a guy with a droopy body like Chinaski’s takes animal tranquilizers, human growth hormone, or crushed African tree bark. Even if he never worked out a day, there’d be some sign of strength in his frame.

  When I realize that the shortened Roid has another meaning, he’s already guiding me by the elbow (which calmly I keep trying to reclaim) up the lamp-edged walk, past the crucifix of a Santa Clara Real Estate West sign with an I’M PRETTY INSIDE placard staked into the stark green lawn. It’s artificial-turf shiny, level as a bocci ball course, porous where the dirt has been punched out to oxygenate the soil. Its designed order reminds me of the hair implants on this drip of a Polish sausage, dragging me along with one arm, his customized hemorrhoid cushion tucked under the other.

  “I’m gonna teach you how to prep a sale today,” he says. “You just follow my lead.”

  He veers me under the door into the empty (but pretty inside) house. Two stools are positioned on the unscathed hardwood floor of the living room. He points at a stool and I take it. He lays the Roid Void across the other stool, which is nearer the kitchen, plops down, says nothing. I’m twiddling my thumbs round and round, and he puts his hand out and covers my little rotary. I let my hands sit there in my lap for minutes upon minutes, thinking of the rotten, stagnant, backwood home life this idiot to my left must lead—his poor neighbors, his poor banker, doctor,
grocer—when she finally glides in, owning the house and anything in it.

  “Shhhhh,” whispers Chinaski.

  She goes right to the window and slides it open, looks around the barren living room with a detached yet possessive air, sniffs, looks at us with disappointment, sniffs deeper, looks at us again, through us, above us, appearing to grow angry, walks toward us, her heels clicking like a bomb about to blow. Despite his sphincteral affliction, I can hear Chinaski nervously shuffling on his stool, and as she zips by without the least acknowledgment I feel a tug on my elbow.

  “Shhhhh,” Chinaski reminds me.

  I nod, not knowing how the hell this cat got the authority to raise a single child, let alone many. Just let us alone, Daddy! Let us alone! Knowing which hole to put it in does not a father make, Daddy!

  She’s behind us in the kitchen flicking switches, closing cupboards, turning faucets and disposals on and off, tapping on Formica, her heels rapping on the floor in perfect count, suddenly saying in the most enunciatory voice I’ve ever heard second to James Earl Jones (CNN or Cooome to the daahk side, Luuke), “Yes, Mr. Gupta, I am presently awaiting your arrival. The door is open, and the lights are on in the West.”

  The heel taps get louder, and as she passes under the arch of the kitchen I hear a rapid whisk and I know Chinaski’s been hit. I look over and he’s violently coughing from the fragrance glistening on his face, as she pumps her Lavender Febreeze throughout the living room, heels a-click.

  She’s making her way into the back rooms of the house and I can hear toilets flushing, toilet seats dropping, windows popping open. Chinaski is still coughing but, since she left his presence, not covering his mouth, and at the precise moment I move my seat a yard or two away from my gagging one-up in the West, I am soothed again by Amadeus. His Eighteenth Piano Concerto now lightly flowing through the place, like a hovering hummingbird with chimes on its wings. Two miniature speakers hug the adjacent corners of the ceiling line, both of which I missed at my uninterested first glance.