What We Are

by Peter Nathaniel Malae

  Chinaski nods. “Yes. It’s better if you sit there like we don’t know each other. That makes two potential buyers of the house.”

  I move my stool yet another yard away, trying not to think of the absurdity of the bidding couple: Chuckie Chinaski and me.

  The clicking returns, too fast. As if she’s read my mind’s latest disturbance, she deposits a handful of red, white, and blue prophylactics into our laps. Despite his taxed system, Chinaski already has one in his mouth. He’s breathing in through his nose, filling the balloon with his CO2. Staying in theme, they read, THE DOOR IS OPEN & THE LIGHTS ARE ON IN THE WEST.

  I start to blow up my balloons (there are four in my lap), and she’s right out the door. I’m silently excited by her exit and now work a little harder, which means I blow more hot air than before. I breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, but not anywhere near the pace of Chinaski. I’m waiting like the proverbial crook for the pop of the picked lock, dying to hear the car start, signaling her departure. Little Engine That Could, fire up, fire up, fire the fuck up! Spontaneously combust with her in it, seat belt fastened. Nobody need tell me what it takes to be successful in this industry: presumption, trickery, slopes.

  My hope for her parting graces is premature; she’s coming back up the walk. Chinaski grabs the unblown balloons in my lap and starts in anxiously, expert lips first. She’s got a grocery bag in the base of her bent arm and a pile of leaflets, no doubt Xeroxed articles from the free local papers about her recent sales, the top three in value highlighted (probably by Chinaski the stoolie), her résumé going back to the honors bestowed upon her at Realtor’s Institute, her attendance five years running at the National Association of Realtors Convention, a bundle of business cards, plus a listing of community events and farmer’s markets, cultural fairs and wine festivals. Pinched between her elbow and waist, a rolled newspaper.

  She drops the grocery bag and newspaper on the faux-brick raised hearth, and Chinask slaps my arm.

  “Not it,” he says. “You’re the crumpler, baby.”

  I join him on my knees at the fireplace, assuming that “crumpler” means the guy who crumples newspaper into kindling. I start with the front page, which is weeks old, and find an article of minor note in the Local section. There’s a photo of me being hoisted in chains to the van. The header of the three-sentence article is ARE HATE CRIMES ON THE RISE? and the last sentence reads, “The suspect, Paul Tusifale, has a history of public violence.”

  I shake my head, add myself in handcuffed repose to the airtight ball of kindling, throw it in the fireplace.

  Chinaski’s carefully taking the firewood out of the bag. “Put it in the middle, Chicken Little,” he says.

  I almost say, It is in the middle, you idiot, but stay silent instead, reach into the fireplace pretending to move things around.

  He carefully leans the logs vertically against one another, around the newspaper, a skeleton of a tepee about to go up in flames. I haven’t heard the clicking in some time, but there’s a new sound, just as mnemonic. It’s a thousand flies. Not quite in my head. Not yet, anyway.

  It’s out in the street.

  Chinaski stands up to look out the bay window and says, “Oh ... my ... God.”

  “Chuckie!” we hear from the porch.

  Chinaski jumps at the sound of her voice, pulling at and tightening the belt of his pants, I strike a match, put it to the kindling, listen to the paper catch and the crackling wood speak its first words in the flame. I have no interest in what’s going on outside. It’s funny—or sad: we long for company in the dark corners of our solitude, and then when company comes along we aren’t happy.

  A cell with myself or a day of freedom with Chinaski?

  Pick ’em.

  I don’t have time to decide. “Ms. Clannonite wants you!” he shouts from the door, the sound of the buzzing flies growing. Chinaski tosses me the keys to his car and retrieves his Roid Void from the stool. He passes both times as if I’m a statue in the park covered in dried birdshit, and then he’s out the door. At the street he tosses the Roid Void in its place on the driver’s seat. Then he trots off, a stalking jog down the sidewalk, ducking as he runs, his progress slow but determined, surreptitious as a charging rhinoceros. I shrug, pocket the keys, and head out the door of the house to meet our empress.

  Ms. Clannonite is looking down at her planner, leaning against the passenger side of her four-door silver ’06 Benz, a shiny bullet on wheels. I nod; she doesn’t look up. I haven’t seen her operate yet with her potential clients (“Everyone’s a client of the West,” I can hear her say correctively), but I’d hazard a guess that she gives them all the eye contact she doesn’t give underlings like me. She’s flipping through what looks like a series of portraits with PowerPoints, colored portraits.

  “You’re a good-looking guy,” she says.

  An illicit romp already? I think.

  “You’ve got a hell of a future here in the West if you play your cards right.”

  I don’t say anything. I anticipate a favor of some sort. Not from her, for her. She’s a go-getter all right, a first-string capitalist quarterback. She knows I’m the big boss’s nephew. If I were even a waterboy on the capitalist gridiron squad, I’d have the West already in my back pocket.

  Suddenly she stops scanning and is intently reading one sheet with a photo of a couple at the top. From my view, the picture is upside down, but I know the couple is Hindi from the sindoor on the broad forehead of the woman. It dawns on me: These two dupes are the Guptas.

  Meanwhile, Chinaski has disappeared down the block. The buzzing is returning behind me. So today the flies come in the form of your average suburban runt. A wild-haired, pudgy-faced, Hindi/Punjabi kid in a red Adidas windbreaker, iTunes line running from an ear to his unrestrained waistline, munching a hot dog with one hand, steering his scooter with the other, the bending aluminum frame beneath his obese type-2 diabetes ass making welder’s sparks on the unscruffed blacktop.

  I don’t know if I should feel excitement at seeing an actual teenage boy enjoying what’s left of the elements, or if I should be bothered that he needs a lawn mower motor to escort his shrinking frankfurter around the neighborhood. I can’t tell his age: Is he a supersized thirteen-year-old bound for early twenties gout or a stunted seventeen-year-old still riding his Mickey Mouse scooter? He can’t hear his own engine, hooked up to his top-thousand tunes. The vision of his passing puts a dent in one’s hope for the future.

  This junior porker is the soft result of winnerless-loserless PAL soccer matches on wet and foggy Saturday mornings. When one team scores, guess what? Don’t worry, no tears, stop weeping, the other team scores too: 1–1, 2–2, 3–3, free yourself of the harness of competition, Peewee. Everyone’s a winner. It’s one big lovefest! Work ethic, athleticism, courage, decisiveness, savvy, precision—all merely foreign forces of an older, more savage age to whose dead rules we no longer need pay homage.

  Line up at halftime, kids, for your combo meals from Carl’s Jr. Or do you want tacos and chalupas, boys? After the game, we’ll go to the video arcade aka our living room and loosen on a plastic button all that pent-up energy that wasn’t spent on the field.

  He’s weaving down the street, he’s tossing the bun into the bushes of this house, he’s issuing us the middle finger, he’s gone. I remember the transient at the county jail who required an imaginary Little League scenario for me to tolerate—just to look at—him. This kid’s got the exact opposite problem: he’s got so much parental compassion dripping from his pores that he’s impossible to handle, like a manatee.

  I see Chinaski emerge from the construction site, follow at the same slow jog the path of the scooter.

  “I learned a lot from your Uncle Richard,” Ms. Clannonite says, interrupting my thoughts.

  I nod, shrug, smile to make up for the shrug. I’m determined to be just a good-looking guy. If only all the pimps and dealers out there could see how valuable their hustle would be in th
is field. If only a lot of things.

  “He taught me how to farm.”

  I try an inquisitive look—“I didn’t know my uncle was a man of the fields”—but I really don’t want to hear it. The less I know about my uncle in business, the more I can hold on to a working relationship. Not a working relationship in business, a working relationship in life.

  “Farm lawyers,” she says, smiling assuringly. Her teeth are dry-wall white, purely lasered of plaque. “Farm bankers. Farm insurance agents. Build up five to ten each in your arsenal. Successful lawsuits, business foreclosure, home and life insurance referrals—all of it affects the real estate market.”

  Don’t want to hear it.

  “He taught me to know my product and then to jazz it up. This place you’re looking at is not a three-bedroom one-and-a-half-bath house. I defy you to call it anything but a cozy top-of-the-line, modern American domicile on a ventilated six-thousand-square-foot lot featuring multi-temperature bath and showers, hardwood floors, custom-carved oaken cabinets, earthquake-proof granite countertops, matching washer and dryer, forced air and heat, insulated by hand-carved panels, and an all-weather fireplace, adorned by a warm reading room with yet-to-be implemented alcove stacks, an emerald-green yard, and a secure two-car garage with an ADT alarm system, a sky-high redwood fence, and pre-set peripheral-motion lights.”

  Translation: three-bedroom one-and-a-half-bath house.

  “He taught me that you never forget past clients. Stay in touch. Send out birthday and Christmas cards. Past clients have family and friends in search of referrals. And eventually past clients get tired of the house you sold them and need a new one. Not just once. Not twice. Before the decade’s over, three times. This is a valley of movers and shakers. And then: past clients get tired of each other. Your uncle taught me that divorce is good in this trade. It’s healthy. When past clients go to court to finish their life together, you’ve got two new sales at opposite ends of the valley. There’s no such thing as a past client. Even when dead, past clients will appreciate a visit to the funeral home where you can make their grandchildren into future past clients.”

  I look at the crucifix on the lawn: Yes, I want to say, but are you pretty inside?

  “The past and the future do not shape me. The time is now. A sale starts with the confidence of attitude. Of not merely being in the moment but being the moment. You prospect for but don’t hope for a better future. Hope means nothing. Your uncle is a now thinker. Do you know why you’re moving all that office crap to Burlingame?”

  I don’t say, Because I was told to and I’m trying to be a cooperative guy.

  “Because we don’t have an office anymore. We have a weekly meeting at the Fairmont, paid for by your uncle. You see, he’s a visionary. He saw that everything could be stored on some database on his laptop. That he could eliminate not only rent but a secretary as well. And he did.” Here she smiles. “That’s right, your Aunt Lanell. Whatever you lack in not having an office can be made up for on-site. Clients are interested in the house they’re about to buy, not the office they visit. Your uncle understood this and—not one by one but all at once—closed each of his offices in the valley.”

  Yeah, sure. He was probably afraid you were gonna steal his files and torch the place.

  “He taught me that it’s about the five senses of sales: sight, smell, sound, touch, taste.”

  As I’m about to break my vow of silence from the gutter of my imagination—Taste? Taste what?—a stripped and beat-up Ford Tempo pulls up, blasting mariachi, and a young paisa emerges from the car, carrying yet another grocery bag up the walk of the house. I can smell the chicken tikka masala from fifteen feet away. The kid’s about to speak but thinks better of it. She’s already breaking him off a twenty from a roll of green bills, as if the sound of crisp papers separating from one another were rather a soothing way of saying shhhhh, the Esperanto language of love.

  He takes it, bowing, and she says in perfect accent, “Muchas gracias, Miguel.”

  Suddenly I’m famished: for healthy servings of Indian food off the nude belly of the Godmother of the West.

  So you’re just yearning to be authentic Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Gupta? Okay. All right. Why not walk in on some Americana in the raw? Witness us being “in the moment.” Observe the screw screwing. This is what your children will be doing on MySpace in no time anyway.

  My fantasy is starting to get loose, and the beast from below is responding with surprising vigor, here on the edge of no-man’s-land, when the lady of the private showing counts out five twenties—”shhhhh“—and lays them seductively in my palm. Before I can say that my services are worth a wee bit more than that, ma’am, she adds her business card to the pile: Kelly Clannonite. I look down on her flawless smile, the clean glare of teeth like a ceaseless reminder to visit the dentist, and say nothing.

  “Today’s clients will buy the place,” she says. “Know how I know?”

  I shake my head no, but inside I’m rolling my eyes. I can think of nothing I detest more than when supposed specialists think their acute observational faculties and marked experience equate to Nostradamus prophecy. This is the kind of romantic self-inflation that has gotten many a world leader into irreparable trouble.

  “The Guptas just came from an apartment complex in East Palo Alto. Know what that means?”

  I think, That they’ve learned the vernacular of modern American West Coast gangs?

  “It means they’re desperate for quiet. Now I ask you: What’s more quiet than a half-built neighborhood with virtually no occupancy?”

  Genius, I want to say. But you’ve a little problem with the Punjabi porker.

  “Just keep an eye on him for the next five or ten minutes.” My guess is she means Chinaski. “Often his motive to please gets the better of his limited reason.”

  That makes me smile. Definitely Chinaski. She takes advantage of my affable silence and walks off toward the human nest for sale. I, too, walk off, but in the opposite direction. Up the street toward the buzzing sound, empty houses right and left, behind me and in front. Keep an eye on him for the next five or ten minutes can mean any number of things.

  I put up a soft whistle of the Mozart I heard back at the house, and before I’ve finished the ditty I reach the corner of the block, stop, and wait. Chinaski is squatting behind a fire hydrant facing the street. I step back behind a fence but I can see him through the gaps. He needs another fire hydrant to hide adequately. But no one’s around; the brand-new houses are empty. Chinaski is breathing hard, as am I for some reason. I sense something twisted about this setup, I feel as used as a wet handkerchief.

  Chinaski has his dress shirt unbuttoned and then—what’s this? Oh, no, don’t do it—he pulls the shirt over his shoulder and off altogether like a cheap stripper. His head pops out and he shakes out his spaghetti hair wildly, rock star extraordinaire. Thankfully he’s wearing a T-shirt underneath, this one all green with a yellow Green Lantern insignia on the chest: the same superhero symbol that dangles from the rearview mirror of his green ’06 VDUBBUG.

  Chinaski’s one of those grown men who camped out in the hailstorm at AMC theaters for tickets to Incredible Hulk. Braved snow and ice for X-Men. Making big bucks for the comic-book folks. Yes, it was the kids who dragged him out there. One likes to think that nurturing the imagination is a good thing—Imagine all the people living life in peace, you-who-oooo—but a position like that is no longer impregnable in this lame age: by what mutant superhero do I define myself?

  Imagine all the people living life in orange polyester jumpsuits. Cuck-oo-ooo.

  It’s no wonder men are on the decline.

  Well, I don’t want any part of it. What else is new? I don’t want any part of a lot. Of metrosexuality. Of militias in Idaho. Of peace marches in the city. Of absolute capitalism. Of (microscopic) ear and mouthpieces. Of celebrity mania. Of scrolling a screen for your soulmate. Of SUVs and three TVs for the kids. Of psychotherapy and Prozac nation. Of the Minute
men with too much time and land on their hands. Of infantile Me-Gen authors. Of Sean Hannity. Of Michael Moore. Of Cindy Sheehan and of whoever is her flag-waving opposite moron: I don’t want any part of it!

  How could I sidle up to one side and call myself wise? There are twenty-five answers to the question. Twenty-five more questions after that. Then you can turn a single page of the twenty-five-volume questionnaire. No answers in the back of the book this time, no all-knowing master to guide us into the future.

  Hell, while I’m at it, I don’t want any part of Chinaski rising slowly as the kid emerges from his house, a fat slice of pizza in his hand. No part of the zealot at the temple, the cannonball-bellied cannon fodder. I want no part of this “service.” That’s what this preposterously is: a simple transaction with Ms. Clannonite, the Godmother of the West: “Ask the kid not to ride his scooter for the next hour.”

  Chinaski steps out from behind the hydrant in a predatory crouch, fists pumping like dual hearts at the end of his arms, and then he’s up the grass of the house, scooter now in hand, underneath him, fired up, a simultaneous spinout and wheelie past the kid. Chinaski slides down the grass and flies over the walk, down the street at full speed, the steel on concrete a dragon tail of Chinese firecrackers.

  I’m jogging over to help the kid and snitch off Chinaski to the authorities when I stop in my cold hard tracks. The kid drops down on his ass and bawls, “Mom! Mom! Help meee!”

  I can’t push out of my head the image of Cyrus fighting off his attacker. This kid just watched it happen, a reality-show television stunt. His whining pierces my eardrums, and I half turn at the sound, pause at the sight. Can’t help the kid up, just can’t. He’s got enough soccer moms to patch up his boo-boos. If he’s lucky, he’ll learn to live with this wound for a few years.

  I U-turn and speed walk like the ladies at the track, as Chinaski leans into a turn on the scooter, his dopey pumpkin head hanging over the handlebars like the crude tributary bow of an ancient Viking boat, his thread implants flat across his head as if someone heavy has sat on them.