The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  “Shit.”

  “I know. A man can’t even eat his supper.” He opened four cellophane spice envelopes and shook them over the food on the grill. Oregano and cumin steamed up the room.

  “They finished him in the finished basement,” I said.

  Gerald smiled and said, “That’s right, big boy.” Ramon looked at me blankly. I never knew what to say to Ramon. Gerald scooped the stuff on the grill into the Enchi-Rito wrapper.

  Ramon said, “Did they eat it? The guys that killed him?”

  “That’s what I want to know!” Gerald yelled, throwing up his hands. He and Ramon laughed. “It wasn’t reported! It’s going to be missing from the record forever!” He handed the Enchi-Rito to Ramon, who took a bite.

  “Damn,” Ramon said. “That’s great.” I finished changing the fryer oil and threw away that day’s paper hat. For weeks afterward, Ramon asked me when Gerald was coming in again.

  Some people wondered what a history degree was good for, but I knew Gerald’s success after college was guaranteed, that he’d have no trouble with the future because he knew it to be a weak fifth Xerox of the past. He told me that the people who really made money in the gold rush were the ones who sold the miners their pickaxes and sturdy pants. He would find the next gold rush, talk his way in, and know exactly where to stand.

  He educated me more than college did, dragging me to museums and nightclubs in L.A. One evening, walking to his car to go hear jazz, I complained to him about pre-law. It wasn’t the numbing subject matter that bothered me but the pity my fellow majors expressed when they heard my plans to go into public interest. Raised in a renaissance of land flips and LBOs, they knew which law schools fed into the business-moll firms of New York and Houston, and exactly how much the associates made there. They couldn’t understand why I’d want to be on the losing side. I thought Gerald would be with me on this, but he sat on a bench by the library, closed his eyes, and said, “I see a K-car.”

  The K was an economy model that Chrysler had introduced to stave off insolvency. “I dig the brother Lee Iacocca,” Gerald said. “He’s not a railroad man. He means it. But I can hear that little four-banger. I can see a small office building in one of our nation’s tertiary markets. Primary and secondary areas, the rent is prohibitive. I see metal desks and acoustical ceiling tile, and in spite of that tile I can hear the dental equipment in the next office. I see a Silex with half an inch of coffee always getting burned in it. The ground coffee comes on a truck from the office-supply place.” He opened his eyes and looked placidly at me.

  “You don’t think it’s a good thing to do?” I said.

  He shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I see.”

  “I should get going,” I said. We didn’t go to the jazz club and I didn’t speak to him for two weeks. I missed him, but I owed it to Dad.

  Our estrangement ended on November first, when I called Dan Troup, the lawyer who was suing Controlled Dynamics. He said there was an opening for an intern two days a week, and that I could come in the following Tuesday and give it a try. That afternoon I caught up with Gerald at the dorm’s front doors and said, “Hey.”

  He gestured up at the building’s façade, twelve stories of gray slab with slotlike windows and flattened concrete drip marks. In a Slavic accent he said, “One day they come and said my farm is collectivize. Three years I wait the permission to come Moscow. Now I live in all-modern worker building.” He opened the door. “Pliz.” Relieved, I followed him upstairs and told him about my appointment with Troup, and we figured out the three buses I would take to get there.

  I got up at five on Tuesday and put on my suit. On the first bus, I read a newspaper someone had left behind. A mail bomb had been sent to a laboratory that developed satellite tracking systems, killing a research assistant and costing an engineer half her hearing and most of her left arm. A communiqué sent to The Washington Post took responsibility for the bomb, which it said was a blow against “the tracking, banding, and tagging of the most endangered species of all, the free-ranging human individual.” The communiqué’s signer, “Freebird,” had claimed credit for three other attacks, all in the past year. The parts of the bombs that were recovered were handmade and untraceable. The name Freebird was believed to be taken from the old Lynyrd Skynyrd song that jokers were always requesting at rock concerts, regardless of who was playing. The problem for the jokers was that while the bomber was at large, yelling “Freebird!” at a concert would cause people nearby to wheel around and ask, “Song or the guy?” If you said the guy, it could lead to a fistfight, but of course so could the song.

  The last bus went up Sepulveda Boulevard, a tertiary line through a primary city: movie theaters converted to Apostolic churches, marble banks turned Army Navys, and bowling alleys that were still bowling alleys. I thought the neighborhood would stay like that all the way to Troup’s office, which would have the Silex and ceiling tile Gerald had predicted, and that Troup would be the flinty avenger I’d been picturing since our first phone call. He’d wear Haband and drive an Aries K, but the fiduciary cowboys who screwed deputy program managers and their fry-chef children would be sorry they’d ever heard of him.

  I saw myself, the lanky one, sitting next to him in court and handing him smoking-gun depositions. The cowboys would be almost openly snickering at him when the trial started, but by the time he got to his summation those smirks would be coming in staticky, and when he wound up with “Because these are lives we’re talking about, ladies and gentlemen,” they’d be gone. He’d bite his lip, look up at the slow-grinding ceiling fan, then turn back to the jury. “I’m done.”

  But the bus continued to Century City, where the buildings were shiny and tall. Troup’s firm had half of a fifteenth story, and the waiting room was as big as our first floor at home. Swallowed by a bottomless suede sofa under gleaming Chagall posters, I tried to read The Financial Times and Golf Digest while my graduation Weejuns bounced nervously on the three-inch carpet.

  After twenty minutes Troup came out. Instead of the white-haired scrapper I’d expected, he was forty and smooth, in a blue dress shirt with white cuffs and collar and an expensive haircut that draped over one ear, Edwardian hip. He spoke in the same deliberate way he had on the phone, though, so that “Would you like some water?” sounded as if he’d roughed out the offer by himself for a few days and then finalized it with his partners that morning.

  We went into his office, which had two brass nautical clocks and a view of the fancy shopping center next door. He leaned against his desk, the antique-dining-table type, folded his arms, and looked somewhere over my shoulder as he spoke.

  “The Controlled Dynamics situation continues to unfold in an interesting way,” he said. “The other side filed a request to deny access to certain of the documents. We’ve filed a request to deny their request. We hope to have a ruling on that within sixty days.”

  “That sounds good,” I said. “So the trial could be…”

  “Could be some time off, yes. You have discovery, motions…. The lead counsel for the other side is a fellow named Ken Radnitz. Kenny was with a firm here in the building at one time. It’s interesting. He and his wife are fencers. You know, with those suits with the heart on them. I think they’ve won some of the competitions. Not many people I know are involved with that. It’s a little off the beaten area. How are you enjoying pre-law?”

  “Good. It’s good.”

  “Okay. Let’s try you out on some proofreading.”

  I spent the rest of the day in a room with a stack of documents and two hundred books of statutes, getting up only to go to the bathroom and to buy a chili dog from a catering truck outside. On the bus ride back to school I wondered how Troup could fight for the little guy from an office like that, or think fencing was interesting, but I decided I was overreacting. The clocks and the haircut could be ploys to lull the cowboys into thinking he was like them, when really he’d never be like them. It was possible.

  The next day hi
s secretary called to say I could keep coming in on Tuesdays and Thursdays at a hundred dollars a week. It wasn’t enough money to give up frying, I had to drop a class, and the eyestrain from the proofreading gave me myopia. The addition of glasses made me look less lanky than ever.

  My third week there, Troup leaned his head into the room and said he was going to a settlement conference with some opposing lawyers on a product defect case and that I should come with him to take notes. As we walked across the shopping center to the other lawyers’ hotel, he said the case involved a boat part made by a company in Minneapolis, and that it was possible to hurt yourself because of the defect but, between Troup and me, you’d have to work at it.

  We met the two other lawyers in a conference room with fruit, coffee, and a bowl of wrapped candies. The three of them talked for a while about judges and lawyers they knew and then took out copies of the settlement. They changed a thirty-day waiting period to forty-five, made discount vouchers available in Guam, and added a phrase to cool out the attorney general of Maine. It took twelve minutes, after which they stood up and gossiped a while longer. Troup, gesturing widely with his left hand as he recommended restaurants, swept a handful of the wrapped candies into his coat pocket with his right.

  Walking back, I said I was surprised that the opposing lawyers had flown in just for that. “Henry,” Troup said, “they live in Minnesota. The whole key to this work is compassion for people.” I smiled with him, which made me feel complicit in the candy grab. As we got on the footbridge from the shopping center to the office buildings, I saw some high-school kids hanging around a fountain, the boys playing hacky sack and the girls talking in shrieks. In Rancho Cahuenga or Los Nietos my three months of college would have made me feel like their uncle, but now I wanted to go join them. Troup saw me slow down on the footbridge and said the shopping center was considered premier.

  In March I got a phone call in the dorm lounge, an unfamiliar voice with office clatter in the background. “Yeah, Henry Bay? Jim Rensselaer at Kite Buggy. I called your house and they gave me this number.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

  “You got that issue with—I’ll call him back—you got the issue with your stuff in it, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That wasn’t my stuff, though. You put in people saying things they never said. They were in places they’ve never been in.”

  “Yeah. No, we blurred the geography a little. We wanted to spread it around.” I was trying to be stiff with him, but he didn’t seem to get it. “Yeah, that looks like shit, Devon. Henry? You get spring break there, right? You have plans for it?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said. Troup was going to Telluride and I’d put in for double shifts at Doctor Taco.

  “How’d you like to cover a major buggy event?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s at a dry lake in Nevada. It’s going to be great. I’d go myself but it’s right before we close the issue.”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Can you borrow one?” I didn’t answer. “Look, I’ll tell you what. You go there, take some notes, take some pictures, and then come here and we’ll work on it together. You can meet everyone. You’d just drive up to Las Vegas and fly here. Wait, hold on a second.” He put the phone down, came back after a minute, and said, “That’s a regular college you go to, right? Not like a weird Bible college or anything? No offense. It’s just whether you can get a student fare.”

  “It’s a state college,” I said. “State university.”

  “Perfect. So you can come here. We’ll pay you.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Henry, be a guy. It’s a perfect spring break. Don’t tell me you’re going to Florida. You know what that is? It’s a bunch of girls in bikinis. This is Clayton, Illinois. We’ve got girls in jumpers.” A woman in the background cheerfully said, “Fuck you,” and there was laughing.

  “Are they corduroy?” I said.

  “Corduroy, muslin. It’s a wide-open town. Henry? We’ll put you in a hotel. You can look over my shoulder if I start screwing around with your prose stylings, okay?”

  I had a fatal weakness for people who spoke smartass and could get me speaking it too—Barney, Gerald, and now this guy. Weighing Doctor Taco’s fryer hood against a kite buggy event and an office where they blithely told the boss to fuck himself, I chose the trip.

  Gerald was going home for spring break and wouldn’t need his car. I dropped him at the airport and drove into the desert, a sun-wrecked eternity of sand, scrub, and the occasional yucca. On the highway along the Mojave Preserve the air was so dry I didn’t seem to be sweating, but when I walked into an air-conditioned Denny’s I was soaked in thirty seconds.

  In the afternoon I crossed into Nevada, got off the freeway at a town consisting of two casinos and an outlet mall, and followed Rensselaer’s directions to the dry lake. There was no road, but steel poles every fifty feet marked the way across rose-tinted dirt that had cracked into a hypnotic pattern of polygons.

  After twenty minutes I started worrying that I was in the wrong place, till I saw a kite in the sky, then two and then seven, and cars and vans parked by a big plastic shade tent. Kite buggies were crossing the lakebed in all directions, their lines buzzing softly in the hot wind.

  I parked on the fringe. There were a hundred people, mostly men, with bodies ranging from young and athletic to sixty and shot, T-shirts that said things like BUGGY TILL YOU FRY, and the goatees and handlebars that come standard with speed sports. There were no spectators and no media but me, with a borrowed camera and a Los Nietos Geckos spiral notebook.

  I knew I should interview people, that someone was probably nailing the essence of the sport just out of my earshot, but I was already getting curious looks for being there without a buggy and doing something that looked like work. I smiled in response, ducking my head to emphasize my harmlessness, and eavesdropped on the lulling hum of enthusiast talk.

  “What are those tires off of?”

  “Roof-tarring machine. We tried wheelbarrow tires, but that was pushing it.”

  “Let me tighten that. What this country needs is a Phillips-head dime.”

  A guy getting ready to race his buggy on an improvised oval course said, “If I’m turning behind someone, should I have my kite high or low?” and the guy he asked said, “If you die, can I have your stuff?”

  After the race a guy did a few figure eights on two wheels, came to a stop, and then sat there with one wheel off the ground, deftly working his kite lines to stand still in the shifting wind. No one in Rancho Cahuenga would even have tried that. When he dropped the wheel and let the kite fall, I ran over and held it for him while he wound up his lines.

  “Thanks, man,” he said, and flipped up his sunglasses. He had a wide smile, grooving black eyes, and a windbreaker imprinted with the logos of a kite maker, a buggy designer, Chap-Stick, and Desenex. “Freddy Pasco.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m Henry Bay. I’m from Kite Buggy.”

  “Oh great. Yeah, you guys did that thing on me. Jim, right? The guy I talked to? How’s he doing?”

  “He’s good.” I pointed to where he’d been two-wheeling.

  “That was great just now.”

  “Thanks. Yeah, this is some funny wind today.” I scribbled fun wind tdy in my notebook. “If it’s steady tomorrow I’m going to try and get some air. So what do you guys think, is this going to catch on? I’d love if I could do it full time. I’m top-ranked now and I’m selling toner.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s starting to spread out now, geographically. Jim was saying.”

  At sunset everyone drove to the casino hotels or made camp in the desert, barbecuing under plastic canopies rigged to their vans. I dined on the Vienna sausages and Gatorade I’d brought, unrolled Gerald’s sleeping bag, and made camp fifty yards away from everyone else, in accordance with the journalistic ethics I was making up in the course of the trip.


  At sunset the next day I drove to the Las Vegas airport. I started to write up my notes on the plane, but the lights went off and I woke up in St. Louis four hours later with the fake flu of airplane sleep. I took a bus across the Mississippi into southern Illinois, got to Clayton at midday, and stepped out into a world that felt like I’d been born missing it.

  Unlike Rancho Cahuenga, Clayton had taken its time being built, and was fading gradually now instead of crashing all at once. A Clayton street was twenty different colors of weathered paint, a make-good for all the treadmill walks I’d taken past the Klondikes and Ponderosas back home. The air off the river had twice the ply of what I’d grown up breathing. Kids bicycled slowly past frame houses on soft asphalt that dipped where the trolley tracks had been. Business was slow downtown, and the talk under the awnings kept pace with it.

  The Hotel Clayton was four floors of blanched brick, with a lobby full of pedestal ashtrays and lodge meeting plaques. I showered and changed in a room with old duck-hunting paintings on the wall and set out for the Dobey offices, in a squat three-story building on the edge of downtown.

  Up a dim flight of stairs there was a waiting room with a worn orange couch and blown-up magazine covers on the walls: Kite Buggy, Tropical Fish Owner, Crochet Life, and Nine-Hole Golfer. I told the receptionist I was there to see Rensselaer, and she pointed at the doorway to a bigger room.

  There were six people in there, all under thirty, working at metal desks. They were acting aggravated—shaking their heads over pages of copy, recoiling in horror from page proofs, and jerking off air cocks to denote the intelligence of distant phone callers—but you could tell that the aggravation was their happiness, that the whole scene was an elaboration on the cheerful “Fuck you” I’d heard on the phone.