by Chris Kenry
His face relaxed into a smile, but then fell as he looked over my shoulder to the bar. I turned around and saw a man in his forties, good-looking but a little thick around the middle, emerge from the shadows and lower the antennae of a small cellular phone.
“Duty calls,” he said, and in his voice I detected a faint tone of disappointment. “But hey,” he added, removing a card from his wallet, “maybe we should go for coffee sometime, Jack. Seems like we have lots to talk about.”
I took the card and quickly put it in my shirt pocket. “Yes,” I said. “I’d like that.”
He got up, patted me on the back with one gloved hand while waving at Hole with the other, and then walked back to the bar. I watched his reflection in the mirrors and watched as he spoke briefly to the man with the phone. The man then paid their tab and they left together.
A few minutes later Hole came tottering back on the arm of the piano player.
“That Ray!” he said. “I didn’t even get to say good-bye.”
“No,” I said.
“Did you like him?” he asked.
“He’s ... different,” I said.
“I’ll say. That boy’s a treasure. My absolute favorite.”
In the car on the way home I asked some questions about Ray and was given, not surprisingly, some lengthy answers. I learned that he had moved here the year before from Los Angeles because of his drug problem. Allegedly he was in recovery “. . . although he still smokes pot like there’s no tomorrow.” His only income, as far as Frank knew, was from hustling “. . . but he uses most of his money to pay for his little art hobby.”
Back at the loft, I undressed Hole and put him in a fresh pair of pajamas. While he was in the bathroom, I hung up his clothes, straightened up his bed, changed his oxygen bottle, and fashioned a doorstop out of several bar coasters I’d had the foresight to pocket from Monroe’s. He waddled out of the bathroom, his wheezing worse than it had been all evening. I led him over to the oxygen and connected the tubes, and he sat breathing deeply until he could speak again.
“I’m fucking exhausted,” he said as I removed his robe and lifted him into bed. He lay on his side and I tucked him in all around. I then went to the doorway, switched off the light, and hesitated for a moment, not knowing what to do next. I walked slowly back to the bed and lay down next to him, our bodies spooned together, my arm around him. I could feel his thin shoulder blades as they rose and fell with his labored breathing, and felt the faint touch of his fingers caressing my forearm as he gradually fell into sleep. I stayed for maybe an hour, thinking about the evening—about Hole’s stories and about Ray, and then I got up, as gently as I could, and went back upstairs to Andre’s.
13
MICROBUSINESS
The next morning I didn’t get up until after eight because I had mistakenly set Andre’s alarm for P.M. instead of A.M. This was unfortunate because I had to report to my first day of microbusiness classes at nine and would have to wear my same smoky clothes from the night before, since I didn’t have time to go home and change. I tried on some of Andre’s clothes, but after ripping the seam trying to squeeze into one of his shirts I gave it up and decided I’d better wear my own.
The microbusiness office was at the upper end of downtown, which is a short shuttle bus ride away from Andre’s. I figured I might as well take the shuttle and leave my car parked in his garage rather than attempt to find parking on a weekday morning. The office building was nice on the outside, all streamlined Bauhaus steel and glass, but on the inside it was typical government-issue: dirty, neglected, and devoid of any decorative touches. No office art or reception desk. No furniture. Just an empty lobby with elevators on either side and a podiumlike structure on which rested a black tablet indicating which offices were on which floors. I examined it briefly, found what I was looking for, and took the elevator to the third floor. From there I followed some handwritten signs indicating that room 300 was for beginning GED classes, 301 was for teen mothering classes, and 303 was for microbusiness classes. I made my way to the correct classroom and opened the door. It was a large room with a whiteboard on one wall and tables arranged in a C-shape facing it. I took a seat to the left, between a woman who looked to be in her fifties, and seemed grandmotherly and gentle as she sat quietly doing a cross-stitch, and a stout man of indeterminate age in a black suit. He wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes several times and emphasized that one of them was lazy. On the other side of the table were two young Latino men, one stocky, the other skinny, both clad in oversize clothing and dark sunglasses. They sat, arms crossed, and looked very bored. Next to them was a short, thin African-American woman, her hair pulled tightly back in a ponytail, and next to her, coloring quietly with crayons, was her young daughter.
We all sat silently, staring into space or doodling on notepads, for what seemed like a very long time. Finally a small woman shuffled in, her head and torso completely obscured by stacks of files and notebooks that she carried. Blindly she made her way to the desk and managed to set everything down in a tottering heap without any of it falling to the floor. She then looked around the room, smiling at us all, and repositioned a stray piece of hair that had fallen into her face. Although her beauty was a bit dated, most would agree that she was very good-looking. She was in her mid-thirties, heavily but not unattractively made up, with artificially blue eyes and a black mane of hair, elaborately feathered. She was obviously short, but just how short could not be determined because she wore heels that added several inches to her height. Unlike many women, she was adept at wearing heels and strutted back and forth in front of the whiteboard as easily as if she had been wearing cross-trainers. She went back out of the room, and returned a moment later with her coffee mug, from which she took a long, slow drink, examining us over the rim. She set down the cup, pulled a marker from her heap, and wrote her name on the whiteboard.
“Good morning,” she said. “My name is Tina DeHerrera, and I’ll be your main instructor for the next ten months of the microbusiness program.” She picked up her mug again and took another long sip.
“You are all here because you expressed an interest in starting your own business.” She looked each of us in the eye as we nodded. “Unfortunately, the statistics for new-business success aren’t very good. Seven out of ten new businesses will fail in the first three years,” she said, pausing for effect. “Not very encouraging, is it?” Another pause as we all shook our heads.
“What those statistics don’t tell you,” she continued, pacing back and forth in front of the whiteboard, “is that most of those businesses fail because of poor planning and management, not because the concept or the product was bad. Always remember, someone made money from the Pet Rock. You understand?”
We nodded; the older woman chuckled.
“What this program will do, over the next six months, is give you the knowledge to make your idea succeed, okay? We will teach you how to market your business, how to open a bank account, keep books, and pay taxes. You will learn how to hire employees and do payroll, and finally, before we’ve finished you will submit a written business plan—a road map—to tell yourself and the rest of us where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Not having that road map at the beginning is the reason most businesses fail.”
She looked around the room, again pausing to make eye contact with each of us.
“At the end of the six months,” she continued, “you can submit your business plan to the rest of the class, and to the advisory board. Then, regardless of your credit history, you can apply for a five-hundred-dollar loan.”
My heart sank as I calculated that five hundred dollars would pay roughly one-eighth of my MasterCard bill.
“Some background on me,” she said, and came around in front of the desk, leaning her ass on it and crossing her legs.
“I have a B.A. in business, which I have to say didn’t really teach me much. I have run two small businesses of
my own, and that taught me plenty!”
“What kind of businesses, ma’am?” asked Slow Eye.
“I ran a small advertising firm for four years, which I sold for a small profit, and now I run a small trucking company with my husband. It’s just getting off the ground, but last year we saw a profit for the first time since we started it two years ago. Okay, why don’t we go around the room and you can each introduce yourself, and tell us your idea for a business.”
She pointed to the African-American woman, who stood up confidently.
“My name is Sharise, and this is my daughter, Brandy. Um, my idea for a business is to help people make their own Web pages for the Internet. I learned how to do it really well at my last job, but my boss was stealing money and the company went broke, so that’s why I’m here, um, because I think I could do it better than he did.”
She sat down quickly.
“Thank you,” Tina said. “That’s a good point. Many businesses are started by people who watched someone fail and have learned from watching others’ mistakes.” Her gaze moved on to the next table, where the two Latino guys stood up in tandem. The larger of the two spoke.
“My name’s Antonio and this is my homie, Victor, and we’re sick of working for other people and getting paid shit and treated like shit, see, and we want to start our own construction company. We got our own tools and Victor’s got a pretty good truck, and what I don’t know, he knows, and what he don’t know, I do.” They looked at each other and nodded and then looked around at all of us and we nodded and they sat down.
“Okay, great, thank you. You brought up an excellent point: how many of you are sick of working for other people?”
Hands shot up all around, no hesitation.
“Excellent,” she said. “That’s one of the biggest reasons for wanting to start your own business. I’m glad to see you all have that spark inside you.”
Next was the old woman sitting next to me. She set her cross-stitch on the seat next to her and stood up shyly, pulling her cardigan closed and adjusting her glasses.
“My name’s Millie,” she whispered, “and—”
“Millie,” Tina interrupted, “we can’t hear you, sweetie.”
Millie blushed, cleared her throat, and started again, louder and much more rapidly.
“My name’s Millie and I like to sew, and my idea for a business is to make children’s clothing.”
She then sat down hurriedly and stared down at her lap.
“Okay. Great,” said Tina. “And Millie, do you have anything that you’ve made that you could bring to the next class?”
Millie looked up, startled, but then smiled. “Oh, yes!” she said.
“Okay, good, we’d like to see it.” Tina’s gaze fell on me, and I realized that I was totally unprepared. In an instant I saw that all of these people had some idea, some plan, whereas I was here only to avoid being forced to look for a job. I stood up and looked around, feeling as shy and awkward as poor Millie.
“Uh, well,” I stammered, “I’ve sort of been doing some fitness training and teaching some aerobics classes at a gym I go to, and, um, I’d like to expand on that, I guess.”
“Okay, good, and what did you say your name is?”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t. It’s Jack. Jack Thompson.”
“Okay, Jack Thompson, and who do you want to target with your business—what kind of clients do you want to attract?”
“Um, I guess clients with money.”
Everyone laughed.
“Yes,” Tina laughed. “That always helps. Thank you.”
I sat down feeling foolish, but was curious about the slow-eyed man next to me, so the feeling didn’t last. I could see that his black suit was old and in dire need of dry cleaning, and yet there was a quiet elegance about him as he rose and buttoned his jacket, folded his hands in front of him, and in a deep, soothing voice, scarcely louder than Millie’s, said, “Good morning, my name is Salvatore Varga. The business I’m interested in starting is one in which I would videotape weddings and other happy occasions.” He looked around the room somberly, unbuttoned his jacket, and sat down.
“Okay, great, and what kind of work did you do before, Salvatore?” Tina asked.
“I was a mortician, ma’am.”
“Sounds like you are looking for a change.” She chuckled.
“Yes, ma’am, that is quite true,” he said softly.
“Okay,” she continued, moving back around behind the desk, “you all have some interesting ideas. I think this is going to be a good class.”
The rest of the time was used in explaining the mandatory attendance policy (no more than one unexcused absence or we were out of the program and would lose our stamps), handing out reading materials, which she deftly extracted from her pile of props, and watching a segment of 60 Minutes in which Mike Wallace interviewed the Bangladeshi originator of the microbusiness idea.
The program was initially created to help third-world women who had business ideas, but no money to realize them, and who would have been laughed out of a bank had they gone to apply for a loan.
Great, I thought as I sat there in the dark. I’m on par with a third-world woman.
In the shuttle on the way back to Andre’s, my thick packet of materials under my arm, I thought back to the other students in the class and how they all had at least a sketchy road map of where they wanted to go. Then I compared their ideas to the one I’d thoughtlessly given as my own and I felt humbled. Gone was the feeling of snide superiority I’d felt when I’d first gone in. It would be possible, I thought, to expand the personal training, but somehow my heart wasn’t in it. I thought of the five-hundred-dollar loan and how I had somehow managed to get almost thirty thousand dollars in what were essentially loans through credit-card companies, and again I shuddered to think how I’d ever pay it back.
When I got back to Andre’s there was a pink envelope on the floor that had been pushed under the door. Inside there was a blank thank-you card containing three one-hundred-dollar bills.
14
SATAN CALMS
The next day I woke up at seven-thirty feeling rested and refreshed, as I had stayed home the night before, attempting to be domestic and settled. I had cleaned my apartment and made dinner, resolving to be more frugal with money. In this vein I made the decision to stop using my credit cards for anything other than the most pressing emergencies. I should have cut them and burned the pieces, but my plan was much less final and, if I do say so myself, quite clever, like something Martha herself might have thought up if she had credit problems. What I did was this: I took all of my credit cards and put each one in its own Ziploc bag. These I filled with roughly eight ounces of water, sealed them up, wrapped them in craft paper, labeled them with permanent marker, and placed them in neat rows in the freezer. The idea was that if I wanted to use one of the cards I’d have to wait at least long enough for the ice to thaw, during which time I could weigh the importance of the emergency or the necessity of the purchase.
With that in mind, I got out of bed, pulled on a pair of boxers, and immediately went to the freezer to examine my handiwork. Such a simple solution, I thought, and I almost believed that freezing the cards had effectively frozen the debt, too. Feeling lighthearted and proud of myself, I skipped over to the window and looked out. The weather was hardly reflective of my spirits. It was cloudy and cold and rain splashed off the lid of the Dumpster. I returned to the kitchen, made some oatmeal and a protein shake, and sat down to write out long-overdue payments to Chase Visa and Allstate. It was a relief to finally be able to send them some money, and I found I didn’t dwell on how it had been earned. I felt no shame. On the contrary, I felt the saucy little thrill that goes along with having pulled something off that is slightly naughty. I’d made more in those two dates than I would have in two weeks of working at the coffee shop. I thought back to the guy from the museums, and wondered how much he made. I took my wallet from the pocket of the pants I’d worn yesterday and
removed his card. Ray was all it said, and listed a phone, pager, and cell phone number, all of which indicated to me that he was fairly successful at what he was doing. I tapped the card on the table, considering. Maybe he could help me out, I thought, although in what way I really wasn’t sure. I picked up the phone and was pleasantly surprised to hear a dial tone. Finally US West had flipped the switch. I dialed the first number on his card and it rang once before I remembered it wasn’t even eight o’clock. I hung up quickly. I felt antsy and wanted to talk to someone, but the only ones I knew who were up this early were my parents. I thought of my sister’s message and decided to venture a call to my mother. My dad had probably already gone to work or was in his study, where he received only business calls, so maybe he wouldn’t answer. Just to be safe, before I dialed their number, I dialed *67 to block the call, so that my name would not show up on their caller ID. That way I could hang up if my father answered, and he couldn’t trace the call. I had nothing new to tell him about my employment status and was not in the mood to be grilled about it. It rang twice.
“Hello.” It was my father’s deep baritone. I hesitated, but didn’t hang up.
“Dad?”
“Jack?” He sounded surprised. “That you?”
“Yeah.”
“Where are you calling from? It says your number’s blocked.”
“Uh, I’m calling from Andre’s. He must have that permanent-block thing. My phone’s not hooked up yet.”
“Tell me about it.” He groaned. “US West gives me nothing but headaches. How are you, son?” He sounded concerned.
“Uh, yeah, I’m fine. I got another job,” I lied. “This one almost pays the bills.”
“You doing okay?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, wanting to reassure him. “I’m even taking this sort of business class.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s offered through the state. It just started yesterday, so I’m not sure what it’ll be like.”