by Richard Ford
I’m aware Mike’s been cutting his eyes at me and frowning. He can possibly smell my soaked shoes. Mike occasionally broadcasts condescending, hanging-back watchfulness, which I take to mean I’m acting too American and not enough the velvet-handed secular-humanist-spiritualist I’m supposed to be. (This always pisses me off.) And perched on his seat in his fawn trousers, pink sweater, his ersatz Rolex and little Italian shoes with gold lounge-lizard socks, he’s pissing me off again. I’m like chesty old Wallace Beery ready to rip up furniture in the barroom and toss some drunks around like scarecrows.
“What the fuck?” I say, as menacing as I can manage. All around us are mostly tour buses, Windstars and church-group vans headed down to see Engelbert Humperdinck at Bellagio. Mike ignores me and peers ahead into the taillit traffic, little hands gripping the armrests like he’s in a hurtling missile. “Are you going into the land-developing business and start throwing up trophy mansions for Pakistani proctologists and make yourself rich, or what? Aren’t I supposed to hear the pitch and give you the benefit of my years of non-experience?” The aroma I’ve been sniffing since we left Haddam is not just urine but also, I think, garlic—not usual from Mike. Benivalle has given him the full gizmo—some gloomy il forno out on 514, where ziti, lasagne and cannoli hang off the trees like Christmas candy.
Mike turns a serious and judicious look my way, then returns to the taillight stream, as if he has to pay attention in case I don’t.
“So? What?” I say, less Wallace Beery-ish, more mentorish Henry Fonda-like. The car in front of us is a wide red Mercedes 650 with louvered back windows and some kind of delta-wing radar antenna on the trunk. A big caduceus is bolted to the license plate holder and below it a bumper sticker says ALL LIFE IS POST-OP. GET BUSY LIVING IT. Back-lit human heads are visible inside, wagging and nodding and, I guess, living it.
“Not sure.” Mike is barely audible, as if speaking only to himself.
“About what? Is Benivalle a cutie pie?” Cutie pie is our office lingo for shit-heel walk-ins who waste your time looking at twenty listings, then go behind your back and try to buy from the seller. Cutie pie sounds to us like mobster talk. We always say we’re “putting out a contract” on some “cutie pie,” then laugh about it. Most cutie pies come from far east Bergen County and never buy anything.
“No, he’s not,” Mike says morosely. “He’s a good guy. He took me to his home. I met his wife and kids—in Sergeantsville. She fixed a big lunch for us.” The ziti. “We drove out to his Christmas tree farm in Rosemont. I guess he owns three or four. That’s just one business.” Mike’s laced his fingers, pinkie ring and all, and begun rotating his thumbs like a granny.
“What else does he do?” I’m only performing my agreed-to duty here.
“A mobile-home park that’s got a driving range attached, and he owns four laundromats with Internet access with his brother Bobby over in Milford.” Mike compresses his lips to a stern little line, all the while thumbs gyrating. These are rare signs of stress, the inner journey turning bumpy. Entrepreneurship clearly unsettles him.
“Why the hell does he need you to go into business with him? He’s got a plate-full. Has he ever developed anything except Christmas trees and laundromats?”
“Not so far.” Mike is brooding.
In Benivalle’s behalf, he is, of course, the model of the go-it-alone, self-starter that’s made New Jersey the world-class American small-potatoes profit leader it is. Before he’s forty, he’ll own a chain of Churchill’s Chickens, a flush advertising business, hold an insurance license and be ready to go back to school and study for the ministry. Up from the roadside vegetable stand, he’s exactly what this country’s all about: works like a dray horse, tithes at St. Melchior’s, has never personally killed anyone, stays in shape for the fire department, loves his wife and can’t wait for the sun to come up so he can get crackin’.
Which doesn’t mean Mike should risk his hairless little Tibetan ass in the housing business with the guy, back-loaded as that business is with cost over-runs, venal subcontractors slipping kickbacks to vendors, subpar re-bar work, off-the-books payouts to inspectors, insurers, surveyors, bankers, girlfriends, the EPA and shady guys from upstate—anybody who can get a dipper in your well and sink you into Chapter 11. Guys like Benivalle almost never know when to stay small, when a laundromat in the hand is worth two McMansions in the cornfield. This deal smells of ruin, and neither one of them needs a new ruin when 30-years are at 7.8, the Dow’s at 10.4, and crude’s iffy at 35.16.
“He’s also got an eighteen-year-old who’s mentally challenged,” Mike says, and aims a reproving glower to indicate I’m, again, more American than he’s comfortable with—though he’s just as American as I am, only from farther east.
“So what? He’s raking it in.” A mind’s picture of my son Paul Bascombe’s angry face—not a bit challenged—predictably enters my thinking with predictable misgiving.
“His wife’s not really well, either,” he says. “She can’t work because she has to drive little Carlo everywhere. They’ll have to put him in a care facility next year. That’s expensive.” Mike, of course, has a seventeen and a thirteen-year-old with his wife, now in the Amboys—little Tucker and little Andrea Mahoney. Plus, because he’s a Buddhist, he’s crippled by seeing the other guy’s point of view about everything—a fatal weakness in business. I’m crippled by it, too, just not when it comes to giving advice.
“Yeah,” I say, “but it’s not your kid.”
“No.” Mike stops gyrating his digits and settles himself on the passenger’s seat. He’s thinking what I’m thinking. Who wouldn’t?
We’re suddenly five hundred yards from Exit 82 and Route 37. Our turn-off. I have no memory of the last 15.6 miles—earth traversed, traffic negotiated, crashes avoided. We’re simply here, ready to get off. The red Mercedes with the caduceus dematerializes into the traffic speeding south—a Victorian manse on the beach at Cape May in its future, a high-roller suite at Bally’s.
I slide us off to the right. And then instantly, even in the dark, the crumpled remains of a tour bus come into view. Undoubtedly it’s the bigpileupontheGardenState that made the news crawl and stoppered the Parkway this morning when we tried to get on. The big Vista Cruiser’s down over the corrugated metal barriers into the pine and hardwoods, flipped on its side like a wounded green-and-yellow pachyderm, left-side tires and undercarriage exposed to the night air, a gash opened in the graded berm, as if lightning had ripped through.
All passengers would be long gone now—medi-vac’d to local ERs or just limped away, dazed, into the timber. There’s no sign of fire, though the big tinted vista windows have been popped out and the bus skin ripped open through the lettering that says PETER PAN TOURS (no doubt the Jaws of Life were used). Men in white jumpsuits are at this moment maneuvering a giant wrecker down the embankment from the Route 37 side, preparing to winch the bus upright and tow it away. No one who isn’t getting off at Toms River would see anything, though an Ocean County deputy’s at the ramp bottom, directing traffic with a red flare.
Neither Mike nor I speak as we slow and get directed by the deputy toward the left, in the direction of the bay bridge. Something about the accident requires a reining in on our conversation about Benivalle’s family sorrows. Tragedies, like apples and oranges, don’t compare.
Route 37 back through Toms River is changed from the Route 37 we traveled this morning. Road construction’s shut down and the sky’s low, mustard-colored and muffled, the long skein of traffic signals popping green, yellow, red through a salty seaside haze. Only it’s not a bit less crowded—due to the Ocean County mall staying open 24/7, and all other stores, chains, carpet outlets, shoe boutiques, language schools, fancy frame shops, Saturn dealerships and computer stores the same. Traffic actually moves more slowly, as if everyone we passed this morning is still out here, wandering parking lot to parking lot, ready to buy if they just knew what, yet are finally wearing down, but have no impulse to go home.
The old curving neon marquee at the Quality Court has had its WELCOME amended. No longer SUICIDE SURVIVORS, but JERSEY CLOGGERS and the BLIND GOLFERS’ ASSOC are welcomed. The blind golfers have earned a CONGRATS, though they’re unlikely to know about it.
My neck, arms, jaw and knuckles have gone on throbbing and burning where miscreant Bob Butts throttled me. Bob should be thinking life over in the Haddam lockup, awaiting my decision to bring charges. I’ve been able to let the unhappy prospect of Ann coming to Thanksgiving sink out of mind. But the slow-motion consumer daze on the Miracle Mile has revived it. It’s the time of day in the time of year when things go wrong if they’re going to.
In Ann’s case, she simply didn’t have any attractive Thanksgiving plans (not my fault), wished she did and exerted her will (strong-woman-getting-to-the-bottom-of-things) on me, in a depleted state. She’s ignored Sally like temporary house help, played the sensitive dead-son card, the kind-man card, plus the L word, then stood back to watch how it all filters out. For years, I dreamed, shivered and thrilled at the idea of remarrying Ann. I pictured the whole event in Technicolor—though I could never (I wouldn’t admit it) work the whole thing through to its fantastical end. There was always a difficulty—a door I couldn’t find, words I got wrong—like in the dream in which you sing the national anthem at the World Series, except a lump of tar’s for some reason stuck to your molars and your mouth won’t open.
But this visit and all attached to it seem like the wrongest of wrong ideas even if I’m wrong as to motivation (I’ve had it with tonight). I don’t even know Ann’s politics anymore (Charley’s I knew: Yale). I could also be impotent—though no trial runs have been attempted. She and the children have grinding life issues I don’t want to share. And I have to piss too much to be perpetually amusing at dinner parties. Given Ann’s power-point certainty about everything, I’d end up a will-less sheep at De Tocqueville faculty do’s, a partial man who sees life from a couch in the corner. Plus, I have this sleeping-panther cancer that could roar back on me.
We all need to take charge of who we spend our last years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds, final fidgeting eye-blinks with, who we see last and who sees us. Like the wise man said, What you think’s going to happen to you after you die is what’s going to happen. So you need to be thinking the right things in the run-up.
“They bundle up those Christmas trees so they look like torpedoes,” Mike says out of the blue, taking his glasses off and rubbing them on his blazer cuff, blinking eyes attentively. We’re passing the bonsai nursery, transformed now into a bulb-strung Christmas tree lot. “There’s a big machine that does it. Then they’re trucked out to vendors in Kansas. All Tommy’s customers’re in Kansas.” He’s thinking about commerce in general—if it’s a good idea or if it could possibly be his punishment for cheating someone out of his wattle ten centuries back. Belief, in Mike’s view, is not a luxury, but still needs to keep pace with known facts and established authority—in his case, the economy. It’s the theory-versus-practice rub that all religions fail to smooth over.
We’ve passed beyond the mall-traffic chaos and are headed toward the bay bridge, along the strip of elderly clam shacks, red-lit gravel-lot taverns, Swedish massage parlors, boat-propeller repairs and boss & secretary tourist cabins from the fifties, when it was a hoot to come to the Shore and didn’t cost a year’s pay. Out ahead spreads Barnegat Bay and across it the low sparse necklace lights of Sea-Clift, visible like a winter town on a benighted prairie seen from a jetliner. It’s as beckoning as heaven. New Jersey’s best-kept secret, where I’ll soon be diving into bed.
Mike goes reaching under his pink sweater as if reaching for a package of smokes, his gaze cast over the dark frigid waters toward the bull-semen lab. And from his inside blazer pocket he produces, in fact, a pack of smokes! Marlboro menthols, in the distinctive green-and-white crushproof box—my parents’ favorites and my own fag of choice during my military school days of experimentation eons ago. I could never hack it, though I perfected the French inhale, learned to finger a fleck off my tongue tip à la Richard Widmark and to hold one clenched between my teeth without smoke getting in my eyes.
But Mike? Mike doesn’t smoke cigarooties! Buddhists don’t smoke. Virtuous thinking can’t possibly permit that. Does he know about his already-increased cancer susceptibility that comes with the oath of citizenship? To see him expertly strip open the pack like a fugitive is shocking. And revelatory—as if he’d started whistling “Stardust” out his butt.
I look over to be sure I’m not hallucinating, and for an instant veer into the other bridge lane and nearly wham us into a septic-service truck on its holiday way home. The truck’s horn blares into the background, leaving me strangely excited.
“You mind if I smoke?” Mike looks preoccupied and vaguely ridiculous in his little dandy’s threads. He even has his own matches.
“Not a bit.” My surprise is really just the surprise of waking up to the moment in life I’m currently in: I’m in my car, driving over the Barnegat bridge with a forty-three-year-old Tibetan real estate salesman who’s my employee and looking to me for advice about his business future and who’s now smoking a cigarette! An act I’ve never known him to perform in eighteen months. We’re a long way from Tibet out here. “I didn’t know you were a Marlboro man.”
He’s already fired up, cracked the window and blown a good lungfull into the slipstream. “I smoked when I worked in Calcutta.” He’s referring to his telemarketer days of selling Iowa beef and electronic gadgets to New Jersey matrons from bullpens in the subcontinent. What a life is his. “I quit. Then I started again when I got separated.” He takes another hungry suck. He already has it half-burned down, rich, stinging gray smoke hissing through the window crack. With one simple, indelible act he’s no longer strictly a Tibetan, but has become the classic American little-guy, struggling under a wagonload of tough choices and plagued by uncertainties he has no experience with—in his case, about whether to become a sleazy land developer. It’s our profoundest national conundrum: Are things getting better, or much worse? Poor devil. Welcome to the Republic.
“I was thinking when we were driving through Toms River.” Mike actually plucks a fleck of tobacco off his tongue tip Dick Widmark-style. “All that mess back there, those people driving around aimlessly.”
“They weren’t aimless,” I say. “They were looking for bargains.” I’m still thinking about the septic truck that almost flattened us. Some guy heading home to Seaside Park, kids at the front windows, hearing the truck rumble in, happy wife, supper steaming on the table, brewsky already cracked, TV tuned to the Sixers.
“So much of life’s made up of choosing things created by other people, people even less qualified than ourselves. Do you ever think about that, Frank?” He is graver than grave now, fag in mouth, its red tip a beacon as we reach the Sea-Clift end of the bridge. The illuminated NEW JERSEY’S BEST KEPT SECRET sign flashes past Mike’s face and glasses. Once again, his snappy apparel and anchorman voice don’t go together, as if someone else was talking for him. I’m about to be treated to some Buddhist ex cathedra homiletics in which I’m a hollow, echoing vessel needing filling with someone else’s better intelligence—all because I’m patient and forbearing.
“We don’t originate very much,” Mike adds. “We just take what’s already there.”
“Yeah, I’ve thought about that.” This very morning. Possibly he and I even talked about it and he’s appropriated it and made it the Buddha’s. I’m tempted to call him Lobsang. Or Dhargey—whichever one comes first—just to piss him off. “I’m fifty-five years old, Mike. I’m in the real estate business. I make a good living selling people houses they didn’t originate and I didn’t, either. So I’ve thought about a lot of these things over the years. Are you just a numbnuts?”
Lighted houses, wimmering up on the bay side as we circle off the bridge, are mostly ranches with remodeled camelbacks, and a few larger, modern, all-angles board-and-batt
ens that solidify the tax base. I’ve sold a bunch of them and expect to sell more.
Mike further narrows his old-looking little eyes. This isn’t what he expected to hear. Or what I expected to say.
“I mean, what about mindfulness being a glass of yak milk sitting on your head?” This is straight out of the Dalai Lama book, which I’ve read part of—mostly on the crapper. “I mean, you aren’t acting very fucking mindful.” I’m speeding again, off the bridge and onto Route 35, Ocean Avenue, the Sea-Clift main drag, also the main drag for Seaside Heights, Ortley Beach (with a different boulevard name), Lavallette, Normandy Beach, Mantoloking—concatenated seaside proliferance all the way to Asbury Park. Mike’s Infiniti is parked at the office. I’ve so far given him little good advice about becoming a housing mogul. Possibly I have very little good advice to give. In any case, I’ll be glad to have him out of the car.
Northbound Ocean Avenue is a wide, empty one-way separated from southbound Ocean Avenue by two city blocks of motels, surfer shops, bait shops, sea-glass jewelers, tattoo parlors, taffy stores (all closed for the season), plus a few genuine lighted-and-lived-in houses. In summer, our beach towns up 35 swell to twenty times their winter habitation. But at nine at night on November 21st, the mostly empty strip makes for an eerie, foggy fifties-noir incognito I like. No holiday decorations are up. Few cars sit at curbs. The ocean, in frothy winter tumult, is glimpsable down the side streets and the air smells briny. Parking meters have been removed for the convenience of year-rounders. Two traditional tomato-pie stands are open but doing little biz. The Mexicatessen is going and has customers. Farther on, the yellow LIQUOR sign and the ruby glow of the Wiggle Room (a summer titty bar that becomes just a bar in the winter) are signaling they’re open for customers. A lone Sea-Clift town cop in his black-and-white Plymouth waits in the shadows beside the fire department in case some wild-ass boogies from East Orange show up to give us timid white people something to think about. A yellow Toms River Region school bus moves slowly ahead of us. We have now traveled as far east as the continent lasts. There’s much to be said for reaching a genuine end mark in a world of indeterminacy and doubt. The feeling of arrival is hopeful, and I feel it even on a night when nothing much is going good.