We all laughed at that and stared back into the fire, sipping our beers as the water licked the shore.
“Boy, what’s your name?” Freddy said to the kid.
“Marlin.”
“Like Brando?”
“Like the fish.”
“Marlin, let’s hear you play that hammer.”
The kid looked into the fire and kicked some embers around with his old combat boots.
“Do I gotta?”
“Hell, yes,” said Freddy. “Beach fire got to have a guitar.”
Marlin reluctantly lifted the guitar out of the case. He set it in his lap and looked at the fret board for about fifteen seconds, as though it might finally reveal the answer to some mystery. Then, apprehensively, eyes still trained on the neck, he started picking “Seven Nation Army” on his E string.
Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun.
I thought I heard a little improvement myself, a little more confidence, a little less clumsiness, but Freddy was wincing.
“Don’t you know any chords, boy?”
“I can play something else, if you want,” the kid said.
“Well, no wonder you ain’t got but fifty cents in your case. Boy, get over here and let me teach you some chops. Freddy’s known primarily for his bass licks, but he can find his way around a six-string.”
Marlin stood up and lugged his guitar over to Freddy’s side of the fire, where Freddy immediately started instructing him, first in the art of tuning, as Nate watched on absently in a food-induced stupor. I scooted a little nearer to Nick, to where our arms were grazing, and Nick shifted ever so slightly on the log, like it might have made him uncomfortable. Then, as Freddy strummed a few soft chords, I leaned in real close and whispered in Nick’s ear.
“Do you want to see my dick?”
“The fuck!”
Nick hauled off and punched me in the shoulder so that I tipped backward off the log, spilling my beer. I landed on my back, looking up at the stars, laughing my ass off. After a second, Nick started laughing, too, then gave me a hand and pulled me up. I dusted myself off and grabbed the whiskey from Nick and took a pull, then he grabbed it back and did the same, without wiping the rim of the bottle.
Marlin was holding the guitar now, trying to strum a chord, with Freddy’s encouragement.
“That’s it, boy, easy now. You ain’t angry at the strings.”
“Remember back in fifth grade,” Nick said to me, “when we used to break into the school cafeteria at night and steal ice cream?”
“And cold Canadian Jumbos.”
“Remember when Nate got stuck in the window?”
“How could I forget?”
“Man, we were lucky. Weren’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just running free like that. Nobody stopping us from doing whatever we wanted. We had it made.”
“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.”
I couldn’t help but love Nick a little more right then, knowing what his childhood looked like. The thought of it made me a little sad.
Before we knew it, Marlin was jerkily strumming “Wild Thing” in bona fide chords. The kid was thrilled, bright eyed and smiling. Suddenly his sound was so much bigger.
Freddy was pretty happy with himself, too. Hell, we were all happy with ourselves just then. Even Nate, who kept silently crop-dusting us. I looked around at everybody’s face in the glow of the firelight, and I wondered why we didn’t do this every night. Here we lived in this beautiful place, and I’d never even thought of it as beautiful before. It’d always been ugly by association, I guess. Now I felt like I was seeing it for the first time. The lights twinkling across the bay, the stars winking above, the forest rearing up behind us on the bluff.
I was pretty drunk by that time and pretty goddamn grateful for the crumbs life had been dropping in my path lately, like maybe they were leading somewhere new, some destination I couldn’t see yet. I couldn’t help but count my blessings: my job with Chaz Unlimited Limited, my new digs in the guest cottage, the $217 still miraculously sitting in my checking account. And then there were Remy and all the great books waiting to be read on my workbench. And the dim but compelling possibility that I might one day write a book myself or do something else of distinction.
For now, I had this beach fire, the lapping of the surf, these people, this beer, this laughter. These pretzels, this music, this momentary sensation that in spite of all the unrest and injustice, and hatred and greed, in spite of the cold, uncaring stars wheeling above us, we live in the most beautiful of all possible worlds. And yes, the moments are fleeting, like my mom’s smile, and it’s not often we have control over them, and that just makes them all the sweeter. Fuck it, if that sounds like a Jack Johnson song, it’s true.
I started misting over in spite of myself, wiping my eyes as though the smoke were to blame, but my friends saw right through it.
“What’s the matter, boy?” Freddy wanted to know.
Nick put a hand on my shoulder. “What up, bro?”
“Just happy,” I said. “That’s all.”
How to Seize the Day
My high spirits lasted through Sunday, and Monday morning I awoke refreshed, ready to go out and seize the day. On the bus, I read Richard Brautigan, and anything seemed possible. After all the vitriol of Céline, I’d told my library friend, Andrew, I was looking for something gentler, and he steered me to Trout Fishing in America. Old Brautigan made heartbreak seem jaunty, and the world, for all its messed-up shit, seemed like a place with soft edges.
But when I showed up to work, there were three squad cars in front of the warehouse, and Austin and his roaster buddies were standing in front of the warehouse in their skinny jeans and ironic T-shirts, drinking macchiato and rubbernecking at the scene.
“What’s up?” I said.
“Pretty sure your boy Jazz is getting pinched,” said Austin.
“What the fuck?” I said.
No sooner did the words leave my mouth than two cops escorted Chaz out, hands cuffed behind his back. Always the optimist, Chaz was smiling like Bill Clinton in a sea of big red balloons.
“Chaz!” I called out.
He looked at me and shrugged like it was no big deal.
“A minor setback, Muñoz, trust me. Nothing to worry about. Stay the course, comrade. Stand by and think big, Muñoz.”
The cop gave Chaz a little shove and dug an elbow into his kidney as he guided him into the backseat.
“Keys are under the floor mat—driver’s side,” he said as he disappeared into the depths of the cruiser.
“What a loser,” said Austin.
“Fuck you,” I said.
Why the fuck I ever thought I could be friends with that guy, I have no idea. You just know a little punk like that has a safety net. Two parents somewhere with money. All I know is, whatever Chaz did, whatever crime he perpetrated to get busted (provided it wasn’t human trafficking or child pornography), he was nobler in my eyes than that little phony Austin. What did Austin ever do but eat expensive sandwiches, pet his beard, and act superior?
It was looking like I had the day off, along with the foreseeable future—as in, the cops put a chain on the door. Hopefully, they cleared out Thing One and Thing Two first, or they could still be in there, not talking and not going to the bathroom. After the roasters dispersed and the squad cars pulled away in a motorcade, I was stuck standing in the parking lot. All I could think about was my last paycheck that I’d never see. Fourteen hundred bucks.
Yes, old Mike Muñoz was screwed again. Suddenly, a tidal wave of buyer’s remorse crashed down on me. The fishing rod, the breakfast buffets, the Indian tacos, the bottle rockets, and salmon dinners—frivolous, all of it. Who did I think I was spending so thoughtlessly these past months? God, what an idiot I’d been. And now what? Two hundred seventeen bucks from destitution all over again. If only there was something I could do to get all that money back.
It took
me a half hour to decide what I should do about Chaz’s BMW. Probably the smart thing would have been just to leave it parked where it was, but Chaz seemed to want me to do something with it, and Chaz had always been a stand-up guy with me, so I felt obliged. Also, I figured the car gave me my best chance of seeing that last paycheck.
I found the key under the mat, activated the blow-and-go, and drove the limit all the way home. I parked it in the driveway, behind the moldering Festiva, where the BMW didn’t take long to attract the attention of the whole neighborhood.
Don’t get the idea that I had any intention of driving that car around town like I owned it. Oh no. That car was staying right where I parked it until such time as Chaz came to claim it or provided me with further instructions.
Standing By, Thinking Big
I stood by, just as Chaz told me to do. I tried to think big, I really did. I worked at it. I even wrote every afternoon for three hours and piled up eleven pages. They were terrible, but they were pages. As long as I didn’t go back and read them, I was making progress. I didn’t buy a single tallboy for at least a week. I went to bed early and sprawled on my air mattress in the shed, lulled by the screeching caterwaul of Dale’s band saw. I tried to imagine my current situation as the minor setback that Chaz assured me that it was. I tried to imagine bigger and better things for Mike Muñoz. A new job, a new truck, my own place, a real novel with my name on it. But the thing of it is, I don’t really know how to think big. God knows, nobody ever taught me. In fact, I was taught precisely the opposite. I was taught to always expect and prepare for something less, because eight times out of ten, that’s what was coming. To actually expect anything bigger or better was simply beyond my reach.
But just for the sake of argument, supposing I actually did manage to envision some ideal for myself—a Pulitzer Prize, a BMW, a drawer full of matching socks—how was I realistically going to make such a thing happen, given my current circumstances? Yes, there was hard work, to which I was no stranger, but what had my hard work ever achieved? Maybe Chaz was right. Maybe it’s smarter to take the path of least resistance. There was commitment, to which I was also no stranger, but what had my commitments ever done but shackle me to my threadbare reality? And like Chaz said, the more you committed to, the more you had at stake. That left luck and big risks, the very things that Chaz encouraged me to court. But when had Mike Muñoz ever been lucky?
By ten o’clock, I was biting my nails, tossing fitfully atop the air mattress. I turned on my lamp, and reached for my fourteen-dollar paperback, a “luminous debut” I’d recently picked off the new arrivals table at Liberty Bay Books, written by an MFA grad named Joshua. But it was no use. I couldn’t connect. The writing was overwrought, and the story was lagging. I just couldn’t concentrate. I kept reading the same sentence over and over. The protagonist was eating an apple and walking across a parking lot toward her mother’s car, “her thoughts gleaming with a smoky chiaroscuro of nostalgia.”
All I could think about was the money I’d blown the past few weeks; it had to be four hundred bucks—next month’s rent. Somehow I had to recoup that money.
I’d like to think that I am somewhat self-aware. I’ve got some blind spots, that’s obvious, but all in all, I feel like I’ve got a pretty clear view of reality. More often than not, I know when, and why, I’m making a bad decision. Most of us do—and by us, I mean broke people. Take smoking, for example. If Mom didn’t smoke away ten bucks a day, we never would’ve had to rent out the guest cottage to Freddy in the first place, right? Mom knows that, she’s done the math a million times. But there’s more to consider. For starters, she’s perpetually tired. She’s been working fifty-hour weeks for as long as I can remember. And there’s a good chance she’s clinically depressed. Smoking gets her through that second shift. It relaxes her when the pressure is mounting. It gives her something to look forward to during her break and after work, and before work, and when she wakes up in the morning. It makes her heart beat faster. At ten bucks a day, that’s a bargain.
Then there’s the casino. You won’t find Warren Buffett slumped at a one-armed bandit. Don’t expect to see the CEO of Verizon hooked to a rolling oxygen tank, cigarette dangling from his lip, pumping tokens into a slot machine like an act of faith. No, it’s usually us poor fucks. And yes, the very act of poor people gambling defies reason. Isn’t that the point? All the observable phenomena in our lives, all our personal experience, encourage us to keep our heads down and not expect any windfalls. Hell, not even a fair shake. Your boss won’t give you a break. The bank won’t give you a break. The landlord won’t give you a break. The politicians and the corporations sure won’t give you a break. Even the clerk at the Masi won’t give you a break. Why not give Lady Luck a shot? She’s no crueler or more fickle than any other master. At least you feel like you’ve got a ghost of a chance with her. You know what you’re up against. The rules aren’t always changing like everything else. Gambling fools us into thinking we’re somehow impervious to the odds, that the universe might grant us an exception.
But then, don’t dreams do the same thing?
So, yeah, on the surface, walking to the casino last night was probably not a wise decision, not for a guy with two hundred seventeen bucks to his name. It was a dry seventy degrees with a slight breeze, so the trees whispered all around me. There were hardly any cars on the road. The old Milky Way was spray-painted across the sky, and when I stopped on the gravel shoulder to look up at it, it didn’t seem hostile, just vast. It was almost a relief to see the casino squatting on the bluff, a garish display of throbbing light.
At first, I only withdrew sixty bucks from the ATM, so it’s not like I wasn’t showing some restraint. And I was up eighteen bucks by midnight, which is two salmon dinners, if you’re doing the math, so it’s not like I was losing. In fact, I was feeling downright impervious to the odds, convinced I could recoup all the money I’d blown if I just played it smart. I guess you could say I was thinking big when I staked myself to another sixty bucks and took to the blackjack tables.
I recognized the dealer by the little scar running down her cheek. She used to work at the Masi, an Indian lady about my mom’s age, and like my mom, she looked tired and worry-worn in her rumpled work uniform. She didn’t seem to recognize me, or maybe she was trained not to be too familiar with patrons. Not that she wasn’t friendly. Even when I was up thirty-eight bucks, there seemed to be pity in her eyes. Her name tag said GEORGIA. Sweet Georgia, with the little pink scar on her cheek and the pity in her eyes. She was my lucky charm for the next hour and a half.
Before long, I was up eighty bucks. Then a hundred four. Then one twenty-six. Then one seventy! No, not life-changing money, not even enough to impress anyone at the table, but with every chip I collected, something was redeemed—a fishing pole, a DVD, a singing bass. And sweet Georgia was my redeemer, my dealer of good fortune. It was like she wanted me to win. If I ever found a stray cat or managed to buy another truck, I vowed to name it Georgia.
I was up two twenty-five when Georgia’s shift ended. That’s when the guy next to me, who was down big, cut his losses and called it quits. I probably should’ve done the same, but I was thinking big. I asked myself WWCD, as in, What would Chaz do? And I knew without a shadow of a doubt, Chaz would keep laying down his chips.
The new dealer was fresh. Clean and pressed, like he just woke up and took a shower and shampooed his beard. His name tag said PHILLIP. He had a sharp nose and a wolfish grin, and unlike Georgia, there was no pity in his small eyes. The first hand he dealt me was an eight up and an eight down, then he hit me with a queen. The next three hands looked about the same. Before I knew it, I found myself back at the ATM for sixty more bucks and paying another three-dollar surcharge, determined to win my money back.
Well, you can guess how it all ended, kiddos. Old Mike Muñoz shit the money bed. Yep, I lost everything—and mostly on decent hands, too. I don’t blame Phillip, but if I ever find out which car is his, I’ll
slash his goddamn tires anyway.
“The casino offers a free door-to-door shuttle,” he offered, sweeping up the last of my chips.
“Blow me,” I said.
I left the casino on foot. With fifty-eight cents in my pocket, and twenty-eight dollars left in my checking account, I began the long, dark walk home. The stars were still out, and once I got away from the highway, I found a little peace. Things were only slightly worse than when the night began. What was two hundred bucks in the big picture? Nothing like the breadth of the night sky to make your worldly troubles seem insignificant.
Miguel Is El Mejor
After leaving the casino, I was about a mile down Suquamish Way when headlights washed over me, and a beat-up pickup slowed to a crawl as it passed. The driver promptly hit the brakes and swerved to the shoulder, stopping altogether. The way my luck was running, it gave me the creeps.
The pickup sat idling hoarsely on the dirt shoulder for a few seconds as I froze in place, aglow in the red taillights, spooked by the prospect of getting brutalized and left in a ditch. I don’t know why, but I felt a little better once the passenger’s door opened, and salsa music spilled out of the cab.
“¿Queeeé ooooonda, eseeee?”
It was my old compatriot Tino, obviously drunk.
“Hop in, vato!”
Approaching the truck, I deduced in the glow of the brake lights that there were already three bodies in the cab.
“What, you mean in back?”
“Naw, man. ¡Muévate, puto!” he said, shoving the guy next to him. All three of them squished over, even the driver. Still, there were only about six inches to fit my ass on, and I could barely close the door.
“Rocindo,” Tino said. “This is Miguel, the one I told you about.”
“Hey,” I said.
“Where you going, man?” said Tino. “Where’s your truck?”
“At home,” I said.
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