The Price of the Ticket

by Jim Nisbet

  So Martin homeward trudges pretty sweaty by this time smelling of gasoline and depressed enough to stop by Rainbow Records up there on Market and plasticize the new Madonna CD and while he’s at it an old Sylvester he loaned to Marcie and fat chance she’ll ever it was the cassette anyway to cheer himself up, ditto a bottle of retsina and some hummus from that really reasonable nouvelle Greek place on Noe that takes plastic. He took all this home on the bus and threw away the shirt and took a really long shower of course there’s a drought on but sometimes a long shower is really the only way to deal with a depression in both hemispheres. Martin didn’t call any of his friends that night to tell them any of this he waited until the next morning when he couldn’t stand it any more, Sundays are tough enough with only a hangover and the Chronicle’s pink entertainment supplement to distract you, and even called Marcie to try to make her feel sorry enough for him to ask him out to brunch but after about fifteen minutes of hearing about the weird people on the bus out to Hunter’s Point and just getting started on Herb Lee she pulled that old trick where you tap the hang-up gizmo on the phone and pretend it’s call-waiting and say oh hey I know this is my mother her oldest friend from college is in the hospital full-bore mastectomy she said she’d call right after she got out of post-op and it’s very I’ve got to go Martin byeee–without even an I’ll-call-you-later. After that he was nearly sub-surface hysterical and kidding himself it was news to him Marcie could afford call-waiting and how many calls could a girl get anyhow, let alone mothers, total denial will get you through, having nothing to do with himself until work on Monday morning but he needn’t have bothered getting himself worked up, though it was a horrible day you know, really horrible, like, Madonna’s really lost it, and listening to Sylvester just made him sad and nostalgic for the days when all anybody Martin knew did was just dance all the time and everybody was automatically thin and the clubs weren’t full of these suburban creeps any decent doorman would keep out, life a lot more fun even really loud it didn’t help, it was a long depressing day, he couldn’t even get it up to depilate his legs, really a drag, and nobody called, as usual.

  But he needn’t have bothered. Because first thing he got to work on Monday with a new flash of energy and actually a pretty bad hangover from the retsina dehydrated from that and the garlic in the hummus but enough energy to cruise Men’s to see if they had any left of those cool shirts and whether any of his friends in the Clothes Patrol were working there that week, and just to get himself feeling slightly normal stuck another Nite-Mode in the secret pocket of his backpack, you know, the razor that leaves your beard looking like a three-day growth only all the same length with a French curve edge-trimming attachment like architects use on fancy store fronts–Martin already had one of them but it was the principle of the thing and anyway without the right shirt the look doesn’t really make it. But he had just put the pack under the counter in cosmetics when Mrs. Hillegass his supervisor called him into her office and he just about had a heart attack, that’s all he needed was to get fired for stealing a stupid trendy battery-powered razor and have to spend the next week selling clothes and records and standing on line at Unemployment to get enough money together to get his truck out of the shop and put some gas in it so he could really enjoy being unemployed maybe go to Great America and besides, everybody in the place was stealing all the time and she knew it, why pick on him and he was just about to give her a piece of his mind before she could start in on him when she handed him the phone with that look and it was Herb Lee, calling to tell Martin he had a “cracked cylinder wall.”

  Well that just about wrapped it up for Martin. He didn’t know a “cracked cylinder wall” from a “blown head gasket” and he didn’t wait to find out he just started screaming over the phone about buying stuff from junkyards and the ruin of the $150 shirt which Mrs. Hillegass was particularly interested to hear he claimed to own at 210 bucks a week before taxes although how they expect anyone to dress for this job before or after taxes putting his hand over the mouthpiece to stage-whisper it’s just a ploy for sympathy they’ll believe anything among this otherwise incoherent stream of mostly garbled automotive invective and Herb Lee himself probably wondered what was going on although guys who fix cars for dweebs must hear this kind of stuff all the time, he was probably holding the phone out the door of the office so the boys in the bay eating lunch over piled-up Toyota guts like some kind of automotive Donner party could share his kick over the tone of the response, the Vietnamese love to laugh they’re an amazingly gentle people although you know the Chinese couldn’t ever conquer them even though they kept on trying for 5,000 years?

  You want another grasshopper?

  Chapter Four

  CELESTE BONNARD WORE A RING IN HER LIP, QUITE A FEW BODY tattoos, and a scrimshawed bone in her nose. She smoked and chewed gum, too. Martin Seam liked her immediately, but he didn’t think she liked him. The guy with her ignored the social contract and kicked a tire on the Toyota.

  “What year is it?” he asked.

  Because he imagined it was hip in tattoo society not to know what year it is, Martin hesitated, making eyes at Celeste as he did so.

  “Why–why, it’s nineteen seventy-um … no it’s nineteen ninety-um.…”

  But he was also tentative and distracted because he was wondering whether the slight shadow of a moustache on Celeste’s upper lip was there because she was into testosterone injections. He’d waited on such creatures at the Emporium, and always imagined there would be certain advantages to a butch girlfriend.

  He shrugged and spread his hands. “Whatever the number, it’s the Year of the Female Earth-snake.” He smiled broadly. He’d seen a female earth-snake on a wall calendar at Herb Lee’s, but Celeste’s appearance blotted out his memory of whatever was above the caption. She had coal-black eyes and hennaed hair and high hollow cheeks and an altogether fierce aspect propagated by the savage flare the nose-bone lent her nostrils. If Martin had been watching her from the relative safety of a dark movie theater he might have slumped further into his seat to be intimately tactile with himself. She was that far-out.

  Celeste considered him back, and Seam fidgeted in his carefully pressed ensemble–all-black except for the delicately dark olive pinstripe on his shirt. After a moment she asked, very softly, as if she might be interested in the answer, “Is there anything you’d like to tell me about female earth-snakes?”

  She sounded like a therapist. Martin shuddered at the association. If she was into being intellectually challenging he might not like her after all. All kinds of people read the want-ads. You see people reading them on the bus every day. An even greater number of people never read them. Why did these two have to read his want-ad?

  “Hey, man.”

  Seam looked at Celeste’s companion, who gazed back at him. This customer looked to be about fifty-five years old going on seventy and mean as migrating silicone. His pulled-back hair was solid white from the widow’s peak to the tip of a long ponytail. He had a scar at the corner of his upper lip, a pretty good physique for an old guy, eyes the color of burning magnesium, completely white eyebrows, and this daughter-figure with him who couldn’t have been 27 years old. The only tattoo on him that Seam could see was a small blue teardrop, foreshortened by the crow’s foot spreading through it, just below the outside corner of his left eye.

  “The short,” the guy said patiently. “What year is it?”

  “Oh!” Seam hastened to correct himself. “Excuse me. It’s an ’83.”

  “Right,” said Celeste. “The ad said.”

  “Shut up,” said the guy.

  Celeste smiled. “Year of the road-killed rabbit.”

  All kinds of people.… And would they be here just to jerk him around? Should he have brought along his Mace?

  “How many miles?”

  “I don’t know,” Seam said, grumpily.

  The guy glared at him.

  Seam shrugged.

  The guy tried the door, which was loc
ked. They guy looked at Seam.

  Seam handed him his keys–all of them.

  “Take me,” breathed Celeste, observing the gesture. “Please.”

  “Later,” the guy muttered absently, choosing a key.

  Celeste rolled her eyes, stood on her toes, settled back on her heels. “Promises, promises.” Her riding-heeled cowgirl boots with ruby stitching kept her calves visibly tense.

  I am hetero, Seam thought happily. I am, I am.

  The chosen key worked. “Maybe he really does own it,” said the old guy. “So,” he smiled and pulled open the door, “You just drive it to work and back?” He moved the door back and forth on its hinges, listening.

  Seam’s face became all innocence. “Not even.”

  “Oh? Do you work at all?”

  “Sure. Retail Sales.”

  Silence.

  “Uh.…” Martin stammered, “Cosmetics?”

  Silence. Still standing outside the truck the guy rotated the steering wheel, watching the front tire.

  Martin tried a different tack. Small talk it up, just like in Retail Sales. “Mind my asking what you do?”

  The guy said nothing.

  The girl responded, rather brightly, “He makes torture racks.”

  The guy said nothing and got into the truck.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Torture racks. Some genius designs them, Pauley builds them, another genius sells them to subgenius guys who tie up and torture sub-subgeniuses on them until they have orgasms.”

  “I … uh.…” said Martin.

  “Girls, too,” she added, “You know.” She flicked a forefinger, back and forth. “Thip thip, thip thip–to the brink of ecstasy?”

  Visibly, Martin was drawing a blank.

  She made additional little whipping sounds with her tongue and lips.

  “Torture racks,” he said weakly.

  Celeste nodded.

  “Girls…” he wet his lips, “…too?”

  Celeste popped her gum and watched the street. “Socially speaking it’s a stigma, I suppose. But the money’s good.”

  Torture racks? Stigmatizing? These people were putting him on. He cleared his throat and started over. “So. The name’s Pauley?”

  The guy shrugged, reading the odometer. “Eighty-five thousand?” He looked at Martin and smiled. “Original?”

  Martin opened his mouth.

  “He wouldn’t know,” the girl said.

  “Take your time,” Pauley added pleasantly, moving the gearshift. He turned the lights on, checked their reflections in the bumper of the car parked in front of the truck, turned them off, did the same with the turn-signals.

  In fact, Martin had no idea of the pedigree of the mileage, he hadn’t even thought to inquire after it when he’d bought the car himself. Of course, he knew what he should say about the mileage, keep it low, though not so low as the number of previous owners. But suddenly he wasn’t as confident about lying to this particular pair of want-ad readers as he would have been to almost anybody else.

  The guy pumped the brake pedal. “Anything wrong with it?”

  More silence. Pauley turned his eyes on Seam.

  “Yeah,” Seam said with a sudden, winning smile. “I can’t afford it.”

  Pauley looked unwon. “Burn oil?”

  Martin looked from Pauley to Celeste. For all he knew the odometer had turned over three or four times, and it had never occurred to him to check the oil. Herb Lee had taken care of the oil. Hadn’t he? Celeste, her silver lip-ring glinting in the afternoon sunlight, stared right through him.

  “Oh,” Seam blurted, “The guy I bought it from was only the first owner.”

  Now, he had completely made that up. But a jump-start was all he needed. “I’ve only had it for fourteen months,” he continued, spontaneously lopping ten months off his term of ownership. “Just to drive around town on weekends. Maybe a few trips to Napa, a-and a couple to Great America, a-and, oh yeah, M-Marcie and I took it down to Monterey to eat at the Hog’s Breath Inn, once.”

  They looked at him.

  “Shitty food,” he said.

  Nobody spoke.

  “Don’t tell Clint Eastwood I said that,” he added, smiling weakly.

  Celeste nodded.

  Martin smiled a little more. “M-Marcie’s my g-girlfriend.”

  Celeste raised her eyebrows.

  “Seats are in pretty good shape,” said Pauley.

  Martin quickly named a product, famed for upholstery care.

  Pauley ignored him. “How do you adjust this thing?”

  Martin kneeled, down and out of his web of mendacity, next to the truck and showed Pauley the adjustment lever for the driver’s seat. Pauley suddenly drew very close to him and observed, “No radio?”

  There were two adjacent and architecturally meaningless portholes high up in the clerestory above the mezzanine at the Emporium. Only blue sky was visible through them, and this was the only blue sky to be seen from anywhere inside the building. Martin could see them from the cosmetics counter, and to him they represented everything he’d never done or would do and every place he had never been or would go. The blue eyes of this man Pauley reminded Martin Seam of the two blue portholes at the Emporium, and what they represented to him.

  Those eyes were too much for Martin. He recoiled from them suddenly enough to topple backwards, toward the curb, catching himself on his hands in time to save himself a nasty bump on the head and a dry-cleaning bill from the dog scat in the gutter, just inches beneath him. A strong whiff of it assailed his nostrils. Pauley and Celeste watched him. Suspended backwards over the gutter by his heels and the palms of his hands, he looked as if he were about to limbo under the rocker panel. “Y-You!” he stammered, nearly panicked. He tore his eyes away from the blue ones and, rolling over one hand, he levered himself back onto the sidewalk and stood up. “You … you can’t keep a darned … darned radio in this neighborhood,” he said, brushing his hands and pants. “It’s stolen immediately, no matter what it’s worth.”

  Celeste and Pauley looked at Martin, looked at each other, looked at the buildings around them. Seam could tell what they were thinking. They stood in the flatlands just below Pacific Heights, on Bush near Baker Street. Lovingly restored Victorian homes ranked for blocks in every direction, routinely changing owners at $700,000 and up. That a dog-owner had allowed his animal to soil the sidewalk where Martin Seam or anyone else might fall into it was probably the most serious blue-collar crime to have squeaked past the Neighborhood Watch in quite some time. But if Celeste and Pauley suspected that the high-end stereo spirited out of the Emporium’s Electronics department in one of Martin’s greatest capers now languished in the bottom file drawer of Herb Lee’s metal desk, waiting to be redeemed, they didn’t say so.

  The only person including himself Martin had given up trying to fool was Herb Lee. But, Martin reflected bitterly, but, maybe these two would figure Martin didn’t want to sell his radio with his truck, was lame enough to lie about it, and let the lie lay.

  So much the better.

  “You must have left it unlocked with a sign on it,” Celeste commented.

  Seam bit his lip and said nothing. Just keep it up with the reverse snobbism, he was thinking. For a moment there you seemed like a nice couple, I was having second thoughts about selling you this piece of shit. But just you keep those insults coming, capiche?

  All the same, these two weirdos made him nervous, he couldn’t deny it. He liked to think he could fool anyone, except for Herb Lee, but there was such a thing as fooling the wrong people. Or so he’d heard.

  For his part, Pauley reconsidered the specimen. Seam’s haircut was so outlandish it must have been a la mode somewhere, and he was so palpably fashion roadkill that Pauley judged him a fool rather than a petty criminal. Most of the professional criminals Pauley knew affected completely normal exteriors; camouflage only made sense in their line of work. For that matter, it was his opinion that they affected more
or less normal interiors, too. People, like cars, they all had engines. Some came with eight cylinders, some came with six, some even came with one or two or twelve cylinders, but all cars had engines. Some engines fired on all their cylinders and some didn’t. It was that simple.

  Pauley pulled the hood latch and keyed the starter.

  The engine caught and fired immediately. Martin’s smile of relief looked like pride. Herb Lee had done a good job, getting the machine back together.

  A little electronic bell with female voice-over had begun to sound as soon as Pauley twisted the key in the switch.

  “The driver’s door is open. The driver’s door is open. The driver’s door is.…”

  “I guess you don’t mind thinking you’re in a hospital elevator,” Pauley scowled.

  “Ding… ding… ding… ding…”

  “Actually,” Martin smiled sweetly, “I prefer to close my eyes and pretend I’m going right past triage.…”

  “And all the way the up to Lingerie,” suggested Celeste.

  “Ding… ding… ding… ding…”

  Pauley stuffed his arm through the spokes of the steering wheel and felt under the dash. He had an expression of distant concentration on his face, like a man thinking of blowing up the building across the street.