by Chris Eaton
•a DJ they’d met through the banjo player, making a name for himself in clubs none of them had heard of, not that anyone cared for the details;
•the son of a left-leaning politician;
•a sommelier, who threw up all over the bathroom and successfully cleaned it up so they never noticed, until the next time they went for the lubricant under the sink, only to discover the mouldering facecloth he’d stashed behind the plumbing;
•and a portfolio manager, who was a friend of the Ecuadorian’s husband, who came uninvited because he was visiting on business and who, when asked what he did, listed his full work title as Head of International Equity Portfolio Construction for the Colorado Association of Educators (CAE) Pension Plan, in charge of investing over seven billion dollars for the retirement of the state’s teachers.
And when he heard this, the owner of the sports memorabilia store, who had arrived drunk, started into a tasteless joke about an investor with three girlfriends. And the Ecuadorian, who Chris felt might be flirting with him, turned away. The DJ, whose distant Great Aunt had recently passed away, and who had just inherited several thousand dollars, said he could use a few tips on what to do with it. And Julie who loved money but was still uncomfortable around it, made a joke about student loans. The sports memorabilia collector, after several attempts, finally hit his own punchline, just as the Ecuadorian’s husband was trying to diffuse, for his friend, the assay at unpaid financial advice. And the Ecuadorian squeezed her husband’s arm, distracting him momentarily and allowing the DJ to mention specific tech stocks. And he heard the portfolio manager say: Tech stocks are for amateurs. And he and the Ecuadorian’s husband had a good laugh. And the collector said his stock in an online browser company was doing fine. And he heard the copywriter say: Gaming systems. That’s where it’s at. And someone else said: Have you heard about hard-disc storage? And he heard the portfolio manager say: Look, maybe you should just leave this sort of thing to the experts, at which the sensitive Ecuadorian tried to change the subject to Julie’s cat, and eventually even that, too, turned into a confrontation, and he heard someone say: All they do is kill the birds. And he heard that same person later respond: But it’s not like they’re really wild animals, because they wouldn’t really exist without human intervention, they’re more like robots. Or weapons. And Julie decided to go to the kitchen. And he heard the portfolio manager whisper something to the Ecuadorian’s husband. And finally he heard someone say: Bullshit, it’s all bullshit, and realized it was himself.
What is, whispered the Ecuadorian to her husband. What is, said the Ecuadorian’s husband, only louder. Oh, you know, Chris Eaton said. And finally the portfolio manager himself chimed in with: No, we don’t, why don’t you tell us. And it was obvious his back was up, which made Chris Eaton dig in even more, until the two of them had tightened their grips on their drinks, refusing to break eye contact. And Chris Eaton said what he said. And he heard the DJ laugh uncomfortably. And he heard Julie say: This is ridiculous. But the Ecuadorian seemed to be egging him on, smiling coyly at him when her husband wasn’t looking, and so he continued, listening to the portfolio manager list off his credentials and, again, the seven billion dollars. And eventually the same challenge re-emerged: You do what you do and I’ll just flip a coin for a month and we’ll see who really deserves your salary. And they shook hands in the pretense of being gentlemen and everybody went home.
For the next month, despite the obvious outcomes to various friendships, they ran the experiment anyway. Like they were taking part in a high school economics class, each was given a hundred thousand virtual dollars to invest how he saw fit, and whoever had the most money on the first of November would be the winner. The coin never missed. And as word spread in their circle, the coin became more of a party focal point. An assistant to a city councilor with some favor in the mayor’s office queried the coin (for this was how they referred to it now, not asking Chris Eaton to make his toss but “querying the coin”) about a home she was considering purchasing. Should they purchase stocks in this Canadian gold claim in Borneo? Would the Avalanche win the Stanley Cup this year? And they continued to joke about its accuracy, even as they scribbled the predictions down in their notebooks and went home. One night, after showing the news anchor and her husband to the door, Julie said it had to stop. “I know,” he said. “It’s like I’ve stopped existing or something. The only reason they come now is for the coin. I could completely disappear, for all they care.” And he was happy that she saw it the same way. But no, she didn’t mean stopping entirely, just no longer giving it away for free. Did he realize how much those stocks were making people?
“But it’s just a game,” he said.
They merely asked for ten percent of the action, win or lose. And the weekends were thus transformed into old spiritualist-style séances, with the pretext of dinner all but forgotten and replaced with Chris Eaton seated behind their round dining room table with the coin in his outstretched palm.
Julie bought a new tablecloth.
***
With her marketing savvy, Julie was able to increase the circle of their influence, now attracting many of the local celebrities and sports heroes, politicians, and to make it all legit (because it was practically impossible at this point, despite having the mayor as a client, the chief of police and several judges, to remain under the radar), Chris wrote the Series 7, Series 63, 65 and 66 exams over the course of a week. Their multiple choice format meant he had nothing to study, just ask Is it one of the first or last two answers?, toss the coin, and then flip again over the two remaining choices. At this point they were even advising several members of the Avalanche, one of whom came with a collection of his own good luck charms with which to test him, as well as the Broncos’ John Elway, a prominent folk singer seeking help with airplane purchases and the star of a successful television program who wanted to know if he should extend his contract for another two years or immediately make the move to film. They even began taking their own profit and investing it alongside their clients, doubling and trebling their take.
They were the talk of Denver. On weekends, their home was the place where everyone wanted to be invited. During the weekdays, however, they continued to grow apart, as though they were from completely different countries, with completely different cultures and languages, trying to explain to each other proper etiquette. He was feeling more and more separated from himself. He gave up painting. But since Julie was at work all day, he saw no reason to leave the house. And in the evenings, if he could think of no film to see, or overhyped concert to attend, and she had no pilates class, he would pretend to enjoy her TV forensics or medical drama, and then they would go to bed and fuck like they were strangers, except on the day that he called her Emily by mistake, wherever that came from, after which he made stronger efforts to make her feel special and loved.
One day he asked the coin – for at this point its power was undeniable, even to him – if they should split. It said no. He queried again. It said no. Again. No. In total, he flipped the coin twenty times, and each time it urged him to stay the course. Had he known the story of Aar, he would have known the coin had lost its magic, and was simply leading him to his end.
PART 7
The first time Chris Eaton really fell in love was after he’d moved back to the US, to New York City, which he chose mostly because he didn’t know a soul there – he’d never been – and so it felt like a place he could start all over, be reborn, be someone else.
And within the first day of landing at JFK, with no more than half of the clothes he’d started with, the garbage bag he’d been forced to pack so hastily having ruptured in transit and the cardboard box that replaced it hobbling off the oversized luggage belt like a possum that had been struck by a car, the assistant manager/cashier/cow at the Tower Records in the Village was staring at the name on his credit card in disbelief and boring him with her Amazing Stories of Retail.
“Is that your name? Really?”
There he was, half-drunk, in banana-yellow short-shorts, his shirt tied up Daisy Duke-style, a black leather jacket that seemed to sweat more than he did, and a cardboard Burger King crown he’d mangled to read Urge King. And she wanted to know if he needed a job. Just because he shared a name with the person who’d quit the day before. The job didn’t pay particularly well, at least on paper. And he disliked almost everyone he worked with. But for all her talk about names meaning something, he’d begun to believe it. Maybe he was meant to be here in this place. Maybe there was some destiny he’d been given by his parents at birth. Plus, all the cashiers had the authority to discount prices if the customer claimed it cost less down the street, so by memorizing the relative final costs with tax to the actual sticker price, he could tell the customer one total, then ring it through as something else and pocket the difference. This was good for an additional fifteen to thirty dollars per shift. And so long as his cash was off by no more than five dollars, no one asked questions. This meant, if he played his cards right, he could make another $4.50 per hour.
It was brilliant.
Then one day they showed him the video surveillance tapes and escorted him to the door without even a final paycheque. He took out two displays on the way out, and screamed at the door from the street about sexual discrimination.
And that’s how he ended up working at Hollywood Montrose.
***
“I support the gays,” Ernesto Monterossi would say. Like he was supporting the Army. Or a Presidential candidate. Or cystic fibrosis research. “My nephew’s a gay. So I know how it is.”
“…”
“You need a job?”
And just like that he was filing the nipples off mannequins that had gone out of fashion, for “one of the leading manufacturers of display-window mannequins in the country.” Or so Ernesto liked to tell it. In reality, his set of leading manufacturers included the several top dozen. And even if he didn’t count Pucci, or Cranston and Cymbalist in San Francisco, or Auton (the only major player in the UK), or Silvestri California (who was already becoming the behemoth of the synthetic clothes-monkey racket, buying up the competition instead of designing a better product), there were still a handful of companies right in New York City that probably didn’t even know he existed. Montrose was that small. Of course, no one knew those other local shops existed, either, except maybe Ernesto. And every time one of them succumbed to a Silvestri bid, Ernesto – or Ernest, rather, as he preferred to be called – would make one of his rare appearances in the warehouse proper, peering over the tops of his Vuarnets as he rang the bell near the break table and made his important announcement. Congratulations, everyone, he would say. We just moved up one spot!
Ernest was well-acquainted with the story of Silvestri California because he was planning to do it in reverse. Serafino Silvestri was the son of the Italian sculptor, Talone Silvestri, best known for his proficiency in papier maché, a medium that had largely seen its peak in the late 1800s with works by the anonymous Chinese and Kashmiri masters, but also by the Russian greats like Lukutin and Korobov. Check out any thesis on papier maché and within the first few pages you are likely to find Lukutin classics, based on Russian folk tales, like The Drunk Man in the Boat (1894), or The Great Green Belt (1899; sometimes also referred to as The Wall, after which a British band had named their crucial 1980 album). By the time Lukutin’s protégé Rudnitsky was done with the form, exhibiting his magnificently referential Lukutin Accompanies Himself with Shadows in Paris in 1916, everything was largely considered to have “been done.” (This despite Rudnitsky himself having declared in his autobiography that “There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in lovemaking. There are simply different positions whereby one can sit and look at it.”) Born too late to really contribute to the glory days of the papier maché pantheon, the elder Silvestri was more of an ornamental frieze, never a pillar, but it was the muse that chose him, and not the other way around. So Talone labored away in poverty and obscurity, and sometimes now appears in the footnotes of papier maché research as the last heartbeat, the last blip, the last dying gasp, before the motion picture industry exploded and turned the art into a craft again, the walking undead of creative expression.
Talone’s son, on the other hand, would be labelled the one who killed it. It was clear that young Serafino, even as a child, had inherited his father’s solid jaw and plentiful salivation glands. They had to keep plastic sheets on the floors, he drooled so much. Newspapers needed to be read almost immediately or into his mouth they went. Serafino’s mother tried to dissuade him from this path of disappointment and poverty by baking with coarser, whole grain flours, which were more difficult to convert into a suitable binding paste, but he merely developed more alternatives to bond the paper, using anything from cinnamon to mashed potatoes to his own belly button lint as the main ingredient. And perhaps because of these constraints, his work exceeded even that of his father. Perhaps they were even greater than those of Lukutin, not necessarily in beauty, because any claim like that would be ridiculous, but with such an intense devotion to realism that a candidate for California Governor – the actor, who should have really known better – was once embarrassed trying to kiss one of his maché babies, and the actress Chanti Rose wore one of his paper dresses to the Oscars at which she was not nominated (much to the surprise of most critics, who felt she was a shoe-in for her supporting turn in the film Nicer Oaths, about a young nun who falls in love with a blues guitarist). At his father’s grave, Serafino placed a bouquet of paper flowers he’d created out of his father’s own paste recipes, and no one could tell the difference until several days later, when they were the only ones not to lose their petals.
The movies were probably the only thing that kept the genius Serafino from eventually taking his own life. Unable to find work in his hometown of Salinas, he’d moved to Hollywood to live with some relatives, and had worked his way up to relative poverty in a boarding house called the San Bernardino Arms, rarely leaving his room. In fact, it was unclear how a big-time director like William Wyler would even have heard of him. But Hollywood was built on rumours and hearsay; you didn’t truly know anything until you had heard it secondhand, or possibly third. So there you were. All Wyler needed were a couple of fake boulders and breastplates for his remake of Ben Hur (there’s no way Heston would have been able to lift the real thing), which was so beneath Serafino as to be laughable. Boulders?! He was a genius! But the young Silvestri surprised everyone and accepted, recognizing the resources that he would be able to tap, and he eventually persuaded Wyler to let him construct almost everything else, including the arena, the chariots, and even the horses and lions. His work was so believable that animal rights activists are still claiming six horses died during the filming. In the famous chariot race, when the competitors round the first sharp turn, unbeknownst even to Wyler, Silvestri inserted a fake soldier.
Suddenly Silvestri was famous. He became rich, built himself a papier maché mansion, was seen at all the biggest parties. The legend of his skill grew and grew. There was even a rumor that he created little Ricky during his work on I Love Lucy, which was why the boy’s acting was so wooden. When a famous actress fell ill during the shooting of her breakthrough film (he would never disclose who), he created a stand-in for several scenes.
Then word came down from the peak of the Chicago Sears tower. Young Alvah Roebuck and his partner were planning to branch out from their mail order business, with actual department stores across the country, where young housewives could see their new line of clothing up close and personal. But Roebuck’s feminine tastes tended toward the more weak and helpless. He liked his women practically see-through, and found the European mannequins too husky for his new national ideal. Plus, they had more old catalogues than they knew what to do with, so…?
Silvestri, with dreams of creating people so real they might one day replace us, accepted.
Tragically, he died by choking on a significant
wad of hundred dollar bills before the first model came off the assembly line. Some random stranger bought the business and kept the name.
***
Domenico Monterossi had only one son. Ernest was it. When he immigrated from the Northern Italian village of Cinque Terre in 1923, evading mandatory military duty under Mussolini, he had dreams of creating an electrical family dynasty. This was what America had promised him. Instead, his beloved Isabella amped out girl after girl, with only the third youngest child, Ernesto, to show for his troubles. And the little brat never did learn the difference between a volt and a watt, spending all of his time at the movies instead of apprenticing with his father where he should have been.
When America finally joined the Second World War, Domenico enlisted, a much older man, just so he could contribute like his nephews and brothers and cousins in the resistance back home. He never returned. Ernesto’s mother pressured him to take things over, for his father’s sake, but because he had built up a dream of celebrity for himself, he refused to be part of the laboring class, and instead decided there was more money to be made in creating cheaper parts for other electricians to purchase. He was right. And he eked out a decent living with his small stable of employees for several years.