by Herbert Gold
Dan Kasdan was not alone in his sense of the difficulty in finding access to what Ferd had in mind.
On the sidewalk outside 850 Bryant, among its geologic layers of litter and grief, they watched the once and future perps conferring with loved ones and crack connections. Bereft significant others of men moving along on the great chain of perpetration crunched their takeout tacos, licked guacamole from their fingers, dreaded the afternoon sessions in court, where smoking was not allowed. Hustlers hustled in winsome microminis, seeking those who could use an open-air spasm during the lunch break – females with short fat legs, trannies with long skinny ones and shadowy mustaches. Carts wheeled paper products up a ramp into the courthouse, bringing photocopy packs and toilet rolls and forms to be filled out, filed, and shredded. Jerry Barrish, the bail bondsman and metalwork assemblage artist, strolled by, treating himself to a sit down and be served lunch destination.
“That’s Jerry,” said Ferd. “Hey, Jerry!” – a hello transmitted by waves and delighted mouth-openings.
Jerry had better things to do than to wave back at Mex-eaters. He was aimed toward souvlaki or moussaka at the Six Brothers from Piraeus in the alley.
“That was Jerry,” Ferd said with satisfaction.
Kasdan jiggled an invisible weight in his open hand, up and down and up and down. “So, Ferd. So. What are we doing?”
Ferd sighed. So hard, so delicate. Well, he had this money and the IRS seemed to think he might have it. They could go after the big corporations, the piggy LA partnerships which only hired kids out of Yale, but no, not the fuckin feds. In terms of legal art – he hoped his pal, the court translator, could understand this – it was a single-bind situation. Normally the f.f.’s would be too stupid to audit him, but in this case they were going for some kind of civil service quota deal. They were sniffing around what they considered hints or evidence or maybe just hints of evidence. Assholes. Probably someone told them something, someone who had something to gain by blackening the reputation of a well-respected San Francisco attorney, which was not the worst thing that could occur in a devil-may-care life filled with festival, but these jerkoffs were darkening his financial independence, his freedom of investment and quote-unquote joy-de-veever. These assholes, these jailhouse informers, these convicted criminals.
“What’s the job, Ferd?”
Ferd had a good friend, mention no names, who as a courtesy accepted a Lexus plus a watch instead of a fee from a coke dealer who was going to prison anyway; you can’t take the bling with you to San Quentin; drove the vehicle awhile, showed up with it on dates; wore the watch; sold it for cash in South City – the wheels not the watch – no taxes to declare – but did the IRS bother this close personal friend, no names, of Ferd? Not. Instead, they were looking to bother Ferd Conway, probably some Asian auditor in a cubicle in the Federal Building, doesn’t even understand that an attorney is a person who represents the guilty and the not provably guilty alike, because that’s the American way. Some jealous Asian auditor who lives his life at the YMCA without a festival attitude and sends his pay to a wife with a bunch of kids in South Korea...
“Ferd! What’s the job?” Besides English, Kasdan spoke Spanish. That was his professional expertise. So Ferd, please stop the charm and the info about other people’s tax scams and, instead, tell: How did Kasdan qualify?
Ambling buddies together; yet Kasdan still didn’t have a grasp on the proposal. Pardon, but would Ferd excuse his incomprehension?
Ferd sighed. This was okay with him, to sigh, because in any case a man had to breathe and he might as well do it by sighing. People in general were pretty lacking in mental swiftness. Ferd did a lot of breathing by means of sighing. He was glad to review the deal for his dear friend and junior associate. “I thought you’d see that on a need-to-know basis, it would be better not to ask too many questions.”
“I’m nosy,” Kasdan said.
“Your kind, no offense, your people, they get ahead that way. Even if you personally never did, get ahead I mean, probably because gelt, no offense, money was not your object until your daughter is in abject need of some. The kid, what’s his name again? The grandkid?”
Kasdan thought he replied ‘Sergei’, but distracted, didn’t actually speak. Ferd thought better of repeating the question. On a need-to-know basis, he didn’t need to keep on the tip of his tongue Kasdan’s autistic or dystrophy or cerebral palsy gargoylism or whatever kind of shit syndrome grandbrat’s name. The rug rat. Sergei Mose.
The reason Kasdan didn’t reply aloud was not that he wasn’t attentive. He was concentrating on the question about where some kind of money came from and why Ferd particularly needed Kasdan’s help with it and whether, without being informed, he could afford to continue along with Ferd’s offer.
Dot com... treasury... loans with interest... backers... stockholders... “But the fucking feds!” Ferd was still happily emitting static.
Kasdan was thinking: Asian massage parlors? Uncut cocaine? Skimmed payments to cops? Judges? Vigorish? After-hours protection for Matey’s Down Under, plus regular hours payment to facilitate hospitality for chicken queens dating fresh-faced kids playing hooky from middle school?
“Fuckin feds are nosier ’n your people, excuse it again, I’m on a roll. It’s just an expression. ‘Jesus saves, Moses invests!’ Excuse the kidding! Mean no harm! Nosier ’n Armenians or Hungarians. They’re grabby, too.”
“You don’t want to tell me,” Kasdan said.
“I just did.”
“No you didn’t.”
Ferd’s repertory of sighs included a new tune. It was a contented and respectful one. “That’s why I like you, that’s why I pick you to collect your commission, let’s say a good per cent on the deal, off the top, and not someone else. Because what if people say you’re sort of a nothing guy except you speak Spanish and translate okay, but actually you’re one hell of a lot smarter’n anyone but me thinks – one fuck of a lot. I take off my hat to you.”
Kasdan watched while Ferd lifted an invisible derby or perhaps a fedora into the air above his head. South of Market motes, dust stirred by feet and traffic, flickered like fireflies in the sunlight. The hat was not visible.
“Only I’m not wearing a hat, but you get the idea.”
“Cause I’m basically smart,” said Kasdan.
“Any smarter, you could wear a roadie tee shirt, take up a retirement career in bike messaging, deliver meth, make good tips. Steal muffins off the food carts...”
In one of the alleys named for Gold Rush era washer girls, Jessie, Minna, Tehama, or Clara, between a parking lot and a whorehouse said to have been used most recently as a rehearsal space by a Grateful Dead cover band, the tribe of mighty-calved Frisco bike messengers had homesteaded a space for lunch, comradeship, and an occasional restorative jolt of methamphetamine. They understood each other about pumping up hills in low gear, muscle cramps, dehydration, and taxi pigs suddenly opening a door as a crippling or concussive joke when a dude was just trying to earn his tip by quick use of a shared lane. The bike messengers didn’t know enough to harvest the wild urban fruits nearby, ignored the blackberries that had somehow appeared among the vines, weeds, and bushes in the broken pavement next to the fence. Maybe they worried about thorns. The pigeons knew better, avoided scurvy through Vitamin C nutrition, eagerly darted among the berry clusters, stained the sidewalks with creamy droppings. Tobacco chaws added brown bike messenger droppings. Rugged individualists, some of them liked to tuck Skoal into their cheeks, while others preferred Copenhagen. Pedestrians tended to avoid this corner, but as a friend to the working man, Ferd waved cheerily: “Hey, Bilge! Chillin’ out? Marvie! Your band got a gig at the Chameleon?”
And still with his friend of the working man cheeriness, murmured under his breath to Dan: “Fucking losers. Speed kills, plus it gives pimples. Don’t you love how this town takes care of the losers?”
When Ferd began to skip grammatical sequence, subordination of cl
auses, pauses for logic or breath, it was a sign that he was in passionate convincing mode. Kasdan appreciated passion in a person, especially one who sought to protect him from a late life career as a bike messenger, one who was busy remedying his own return to the dust from whence we came. But having shown Dan a gathering of losers, Exhibit A, Ferd proceeded to a phase of sober brooding.
“It’s in my condo. I keep it in, you may not believe this, a shoebox, and you can guess the consequences. No interest on the principal, just that polish smell. Tied up with a shoelace on a temporary basis. Someone needs to carry it, invest it, pay the charges, have a nice tropical vacation, but that’s in addition to the per cent handling fee, which is only right. No taxes from you and me for the Feds to steal. My thought: foreign real estate in a place with rotten computers and the law of the forest!”
“Me,” Kasdan said.
Ferd nodded. “You’re the guy, Cowboy.”
“Don’t call me Cowboy.”
“Sorry, I forget. You the man, Gaucho.”
He waved away a fruit fly traveling incognito among the inorganic motes in the atmosphere surrounding this negotiation. They were entering Panchita’s Numero Tres. Ferd was hungry and hoped Dan was the same. Appetite was always a good sign. “Let’s order first, okay?”
Due to the stress of business, Ferd had forgotten his plan about a sit-down and wait for the waitperson lunch. At the counter, while they watched undocumented servers doing their jobs, hands encased by regulation in clear plastic, Ferd plucked a blackened strip of emery board from the pocket where he kept pens, cards, scraps of reminder paper. The pocket was his all-natural-fibers portable office. He buffed his pinkie. He shrugged and apologized to Dan for his manners; it would be different when they took a table. “Snaggle-nails. Maybe I got to eat more protein. Do you have any thoughts on gelatin, Dan? What I hate is I really hate a snaggle-nails problem, how about you?”
There was also a smell of shoe polish when he held up for inspection the results of his buffing. Ferd Conway was improving his look for Dan Kasdan, sincerely telling the truth about his shoebox full of money, while also asking for extra guacamole on that pork burrito, “Chica,” because avocado and sour cream might be just the ticket to save a fellow from the embarrassment of fragile fingernails. “Feefty cents for extra,” said Chica.
He splurged on a side dish of Mexican garnishes. He dipped a finger into the guacamole and sour cream, soft and oily food elements which can be the best part of an okay day. He licked his finger. He sucked at the soft stuff, preparing to deal with the sinewy stuff in due course. “Veggies,” he commented. “Very beneficial.” When Ferd’s precedents about Mexican garnishes became habitual, they graduated into a tradition.
He held up a warning hand, when Dan reached into his pocket. Don’t grab! “One check, Chica.” He paid. They carried their compartmentalized Styrofoam plates toward the patio picnic tables and benches which served for casual indoor dining at Panchita’s Numero Tres. They scored a corner under a SKI CANCUN poster. Ferd preferred privacy for today’s indoctrination activities. The poster depicted an Indian-faced, serape-draped peasant, under a sombrero, slaloming down a sand dune.
They ate in silence for thirty or forty seconds.
Fortified by nourishment, Ferd shifted into philosophic gear. He explained to his best friend why it was more expensive to be poor than rich, “not that you’re really dirt poor, Cowboy, I’d never say that, you’re rich in precious family and that’s priceless. But if you’re without depth in financial resources, you have a moral obligation to spend money to show you’re on top of things, like a real man. If you’ve got it, you get to not give a fuck.”
“I see.”
“Not yet you don’t. I’ll continue. Consider this a lesson from the other side of the mountain. If you’re poor, you think about money all the time. You worry. You spend more than you got – credit cards – to prove you’re in good shape when, actually, you’re dying. Sound familiar? Me, I’m mezzo-mezzo, which means I could be better. But you’re not even single mezzo, Dan…”
“I’m okay.”
“… so that’s what I’m here to remedy.”
He touched Kasdan’s elbow. He offered another compassionate moment of talk-lessness so that the import could sink in. He wiped a tortilla across his garnish dish, but all but a green smear of the fifty cents supplemental guacamole and sour cream had already been gleaned.
“If you carry cash offshore, to Grenada, say, or Switzerland, that’s so yesterday, so twentieth century. The feds plant their agents everywhere who should be protecting us against terrorists, but no, what do they care? So depending on the regime we put in due to corruption and payoffs by the big boys, the Trilaterals, they can go after it. Offshore banking isn’t the safety thing it used to be. It’s tacky.” He glanced at the SKI CANCUN poster, shrugged, made a what-can-you-do grin. He leaned close. He was moving in. Okay, now: “That’s why I’m sending you to buy this beachfront property in Jacmel.”
“What? Jacmel? What Jacmel?”
Ferd beamed. He was winning Dan over. They were already quibbling about details. He asked What? And What Jacmel? Ferd had worried that Dan might just say no, walk away from the deal, which was why he had softened, sweetened, greased, treated for the Super Burrito Extra with corn tortilla, done the job he was so good at – making friends, bringing trust into a suspicious world.
He pulled his tan lock across his forehead. “Jacmel, Haiti,” he explained. “Hardly even offshore, if you think about it. Puerto Rico a stone’s throw? Could be the Havana of our time, jalopies and faggoty little French cars, and the real estate is depressed these days, but when things straighten up, the chaos and killings and shit, and all that foreign aid and tourism starts back to a real picturesque-type black negro island in our midst…” He kissed his bunched fingertips. “Soars. Retirees who dig tropical weather, beachfronts, cheap servants during their sunset years! Girls of fourteen, fifteen, whatever their heart’s desire! Twelve! Nice clean boys, if such be the delight! So voy-la, the real estate soars, and who do you think soars with it?”
They both knew the answer, but the question demanded a response – the uplifted eyebrows, the recent hair transplant, the sparkling eyes, the hand on the shoulder pressing for a query.
“Who?” Kasdan said.
“Cowboy. My man in Port O’ Prince.”
Once more an interlude of pensiveness so that imagination could flourish. Because he wanted to give Dan the leisure to meditate and he didn’t trust himself not to indulge in over-persuasion, Ferd headed off for the Caballeros room. Because he knew Dan would be watching, he strode briskly, giving from behind an impression of lean agility and devil-may-care determination. Truth to tell, he also really needed to pee.
Upon his return, he would change the subject awhile, having piqued Dan’s curiosity, let him feel the concern and affection. Dan could be recalling all the fruitful smalltime legal business they had already done together. Soon they would engage in serious business.
Ferd’s most recent contribution to Dan’s career had presented him with a Cholo client who complained in good-enough English on the witness stand, “What the fuck you mean, driving with a suspended license? I don’t have a license.”
The basic matter at issue was how much time Juan would serve for running over that pedestrian, a seventy-four-year-old Asian woman on the sidewalk, up to the point where she had to be considered dead. Juan, in a red neckerchief, had been doing wheelies and got distracted by rival colors, blue scarves, hanging out against the video store window. As mitigating factors, Ferd Conway would tell the court that the Cholo sometimes visited the mothers of his children when he felt like it.
Ferd explained about license suspension; Dan translated; Juan broke into a brilliant smile of total comprehension. He made it clear Kasdan’s services were not required, merely a Ferd Conway shuck, by speaking in perfect English: “This blah-blah-blah is all caca, dude, but okay, you the man, Counselor.”
Ferd hoped Dan recalled what he had already done for him, such as getting him hired at the city’s expense, including paperwork, depositions, and standing by in court. The meditative silence for Dan under the SKI CANCUN poster during the interlude of Ferd’s restorative peeing was now concluded.
Serendipitously, just as he returned to the table, something advantageous came into their lives. Ferd took a pause in his convincing, although his karma had been going great guns; the universe paused in its normal catabolic breakdown efforts; the miracle of Nature, mankind’s friend, reasserted itself. Always a pleasure. A young somebody’s receptionist, carrying takeout in a carton with a knotted plastic handle, leaned back through the open door of Panchita’s Numero Tres to say Hi to a friend, and she stretched a leg to keep the door from closing, and the carton pulled at her extended arm, and the Vanessa or Stacy was a person who filled her tee shirt like a healthy girl who had just broken into triumphant adolescence, and the tee shirt was one which provided her boobs with pride of place – a SKI CANCUN tee shirt from Panchita’s Numero Tres. Oh, that lean forward; oh, that blessed offering. They jiggled. Vanessa or Stacy (or Samantha) concluded her Hi. It was more refreshing than guacamole with sour cream.
Ferd nodded swiftly; nothing needed to be stated; res ipsa loquitur.
Nothing needed to be said, but Ferd said it anyway. “What we both like, am I right? Lunch all day and breakfast in bed in the morning, hey Cowboy?”
Dan said nothing.
Ferd continued. He took a deep breath, preparing for a major speech, the most important he had made during the past ten or twelve minutes. It was time; no shit. His lips emphatically compressed, he lay his hand on his heart. “When you’re yay many years old and you really really really need the cushion for your poor sad daughter who’s really pretty, I grant you that, but she made a few bad choices through no fault of her own because of her non-father rearing, no paternal guidance, due to... okay, and then, additional rotten luck, your poor sick grandkid is... okay, so something’s got to, no, scratch that, everything has got to give. You can’t just go along like you were an on-the-scene dad who always did his best, carpool, personal attention, birthdays, and the kid was a healthy mix-breed, was gonna grow up to be a running back or something useful, shop for a lot of bling-bling in the off season. Listen, my friend, like the fella said, I want to be perfectly clear, even if it hurts a tad, wounds maybe out of a deep longstanding affection – don’t we?”