“Oh, he has a gold one,” says a different poker-playing guy.
“I’m the boss,” Dwight says. He points at the cards. “Are you ahead at least?”
“Yeah, but we’re playing for obsolete memory chips. They wouldn’t let me play for my bill.”
Out front, Dwight signs the slip and the clerk heaves three identical computer printers onto the counter—big old ones from the dinosaur days of the daisy wheel. Each of us grabs one of the brutish, heavy things and staggers into the parking lot. “Why are we buying these crummy printers?” I ask, on the way to Tempesto’s van.
“Because Tempesto has made an amazing discovery,” Dwight says. “This particular old crummy printer happens to contain exactly the right gears—”
“With exactly the right spindles and teeth and ratios,” adds Tempesto.
“For gearing up a Makita electric belt sander. The kind of belt sander we’re racing tonight. No other machine known to man contains those gears.”
The most astonishing variety of junk—part electronic, part lumber, part dirty clothes—is tumbled in Tempesto’s van. He heaves his printer in with a crash. Dwight and I heave ours in, too.
“I’m starved,” Dwight says. “Anything in the fridge?”
“I’ve got leftovers you wouldn’t believe,” Tempesto says. “Did a big dinner last night. Had a lot of people over. There’s a feast waiting for you guys.”
“Tempesto’s a great cook, Walter. Wait’ll you see.”
“You are, Tempesto? Really? What’s your cuisine? Tuscan Transistor?”
For a minute, his incredulity grapples with my incredulity. Then I see that his feelings are hurt. “You never came to my house?” he says. “You never ate my food?”
Tempesto’s apartment is basically Tempesto’s van on a grander scale, without wheels and with electricity. A lot of electricity. Things are plugged in at Tempesto’s place in a way the early electrifiers of America never intended. Power strips are scattered across the floors in every room, not a single empty socket left for one more computer, or television, or synthesizer, or CD player, or oscilloscope, or neon sculpture to take suck, from this address, at Boston Edison’s breast.
Copies of The Journal of Irreproducible Results are lying on the counter in the kitchen. “I thought you made this up,” I say, leafing through an issue of it.
“I don’t make things up,” Tempesto says. “There’s too much that’s real already.” He’s pulling plastic-wrapped dishes out of the fridge and sliding them onto the counter. He calls out their contents as though announcing the guests at a ball. “Roasted eggplant with herbs and garlic. Veal Marsala, sautéed broccoli rabe. Chicken breasts with red peppers. Marinated mushrooms, mozzarella in brine, sun-dried tomatoes in virgin olive oil. Green beans in tomato sauce.” He pulls a big flat bread out of a drawer—“Focaccia,” he says lovingly—flips open the microwave, cranks up the conventional oven, gets a double boiler going on the stove. When everything’s warmed up, we leave the kitchen for the living room, where the table is covered with circuit boards and schematic diagrams. Tempesto pushes it all aside, and we sit down with plates of food and big goblets of Corvo table white. He is a great cook. These are the best leftovers I’ve ever had. They’re better than most things I’ve eaten the first time around.
“Drama factoid for you, Walter,” Tempesto says, raising his glass. “This serviceable vino is exactly what Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons drink in the lunch scene of the film version of Betrayal.”
“What happens in the lunch scene?” Dwight asks.
“That’s where Ben Kingsley has just found out that Jeremy Irons has been sleeping with his wife for, like, years,” I say. “But Jeremy Irons, who’s his best friend, doesn’t know he knows.”
“They drink a load of this wine in that scene,” says Tempesto.
“Whatever happened to free love?” Dwight asks. “I kind of miss it.”
“It was just an introductory offer,” Tempesto says.
“Speaking of cheating,” I say. “Are you guys fixing this race?”
“Cheating?” Dwight says. “Progress is cheating? Early man ties a rock to a stick and he’s cheating ‘cause he has a hammer?”
“Did you ever consider the seminary?” Tempesto asks me. “You did, didn’t you? You know how I know? I did, too. It’s the truth. I was gonna be a priest. I never really escaped it—the red lights, the magic. They may get me yet. I can always spot a brother.”
“I never knew that about you, Walter,” Dwight says. “Maybe you shouldn’t be doing corporate video after all.”
“I probably shouldn’t. It’s probably a place I’m passing through.”
“On your way to the priesthood,” says Tempesto.
Dwight has one rule for eating—stop before it hurts. Failing to observe it, we finish our supper and waddle to Tempesto’s workroom. In the middle of his bench is a plastic gallon jug lying on its side, a power cord coming out its spout, machinery dimly visible through its translucence like a ship in a bottle. The words “Veritas Grit” are written along each side in red Magic Marker. Tempesto holds it up for my admiration. The jug’s bottom side has been sliced off, and a belt of sandpaper occupies the rectangular opening.
“That’s a belt sander? What happened to it?”
“We modified it, Walter,” Dwight says. “This is no longer a street machine.”
It doesn’t look anything like a belt sander. The plastic hood hangs around it like a lady’s hoopskirt. “Didn’t that used to be a jug of milk?”
“Spring water, actually,” Tempesto says merrily. He puts a screwdriver bit in his drill and reverse-engineers one of the old printers until the precious gears are out. Then he removes the sander’s pearly housing and puts the gears in there. “Makes it like lightning,” he says. “Except that after a few minutes the teeth start to shear off the gears, which is why we need a steady stream of these printers.” When he’s finished, he hooks it up to some kind of tachometer on his bench. I don’t know what’s normal for a belt sander, but when he revs this one the needle flies right off the scale. “Yow!” he says.
“You’re gonna cream those poor guys,” I say. “You’re gonna sand their faces off.”
“Yes!” says Dwight.
The sun is going down on the beautiful city. We’re heading east on Memorial Drive—me in Dwight’s passenger seat, Tempesto in the back with the sander and video gear and two of his famous lasers. Red-gold light suffuses the Bonneville through its rear window. This is Dwight’s favorite stretch of road in Boston, especially at this time of day; the sunset has turned the buildings of Back Bay and Government Center into fiery pillars blazing in the air—geometrical solids made of light, pure as Tempesto’s holograms or computer graphics. Their painterly twins shimmer in the silver-blue river below. The traffic is thick and fast at MIT, then thick and slow down around Lotus and Lechmere and the optimistic new structures of East Cambridge. It’s a scorching Friday in August, and the prosperous people are making their break for the Cape. We escape the throngs by swinging past the Museum of Science, wherein some of Tempesto’s creations are displayed, and on into the tattered margins of Somerville.
Our destination is a block-square brick building five stories tall, its entrance shadowed by an elevated piece of Route 93. Dwight carries the video camera and a black plastic garbage bag with the Makita inside. Tempesto has the two lasers. I have the tripods and the cables and the little color TV. We take the freight elevator to the top, where Tempesto’s friends are hosting the belt-sander races in their custom-cabinetry shop. The shop is the whole fifth floor of the building, pulsing with loud Chicago blues from the stereo. There must be a hundred people here, but the shop has floor-standing fans and cross-draft from every direction, and the heat’s not that bad. Sheets of plywood on sawhorses are covered with bottles of hooch and bowls of punch, dishes of hummus and baba ghanouj, salsa, chips, and wheels of cheese. The worktables have been pushed away, and people are dancing beneath springy cords fo
r power tools which hang like bright-blue pigs’ tails from the ceiling. The racetrack runs all the way down one side of this huge warehouse space—a three-foot-wide channel like a boccie court but longer, framed by upright two-by-fours to keep the Sanders inside.
You wouldn’t think a two-hundred-pound man in a white jumpsuit with the words CYBER SWINE stitched across the back in large red letters could disappear into a crowd, but this is what Tempesto now manages to do. Most of the men here have ponytails and beards, mesh caps advertising lumber-supply houses, big hanks of keys snapped to belt loops of their jeans. I see several guys wearing T-shirts silk-screened with the legend HIPPIE TRASH, and more women in attendance than I would have predicted. Unlike the men, they seem to have ventured outside this building since Woodstock days. They have actual haircuts, stylish ones, and color on their faces, glittery earrings and hair clips and slinky legwear, and they all look nice, but the most interesting women in the room are the two over by the stereo, holding drinks and nodding their heads at a large middle-aged man in a gray tropical suit two or three shades lighter than his blow-dried hair.
“Benjamin Silk!” Dwight cries out, and then Benny looks up and sees us, and scoops us toward him with his outstretched arm. I detect that he doesn’t know who Rebecca is. And that he’d like to find out, the weasel.
She casts me a piercing look. “We’re learning some secrets of corporate life,” she says.
“‘For every back there is a knife’?” I ask.
“That’s what I always say,” says Benny.
“Of course it is, Benny. Where else would I have heard it? Who else has been through the wars the way you have?”
“Have you been introduced?” asks Dwight. “This is Walter’s sweetheart, Rebecca.”
“No!” Benny says. “I didn’t realize that! You and Walter! Well, isn’t that wonderful. What’s a nice girl like you doing with a bum like this?”
“I’ve always had a thing about bums,” Rebecca says.
“You think you can save ’em, right? Lots of women think that. Can I give you some advice? Forget it.”
Anita puts her fingertips on her belly like someone testing a melon at the market.
“Dancing?” Dwight asks.
“It’s at the Whisky a Go Go in there,” Anita says. She’s had all the ultrasounds and the amniocentesis, but she and Dwight want the baby’s gender to be a surprise.
“It dances?” I say.
“The baby likes music,” Dwight says. “I think it’s the bass.”
“Feel the baby, Walter,” Rebecca says, pushing me forward. “I want Walter to learn about babies,” she tells the others.
“Watch yourself there, Walter!” Benny says.
I don’t know how you feel a pregnant woman. “I’ve never done this before,” I say. I put my palms on Anita’s belly through her paisley maternity smock. The first shock is how taut it is. I didn’t think it would feel exactly like a drum. The second shock is that somebody’s in there, drumming. An up-tempo blues is playing on the speakers out here, and inside Anita the baby is jamming like a veteran of the Muddy Waters band.
“You could have one of your very own,” Rebecca says.
“I don’t know. It seems like an awfully big decision.”
“Or none at all,” Anita says.
Diagonally across the room, beneath one of the big industrial windows overlooking Route 93, Tempesto has set up his lasers on the camera tripods. “Streetlamp shooting gallery!” he calls out now over the music. “Three shots for a buck!” he adds, and we join the crowd in front of the window to see his demonstration. It’s that sublime moment in a cloudless day when the smoggy yellow horizon dissolves slowly upward through values of blue into an indigo chamber containing Venus and a few airplanes. Most cars aren’t using their headlights yet, but the mercury-vapor lamps have begun to glow like giant luminous insects flying in formation over the lanes of 93. The traffic north is moving, but south to the Cape it seems to be backed up for miles. Tempesto trains one of his lasers on the highway and presses the button to shoot. He misses a few times, then hits the photoelectric cell controlling a street-lamp on the northbound side. It goes black, to the amazement and cheers of the flock around him. Dwight pays Tempesto a dollar and aims the other beam. He’s done this before; on his third shot he gets a lamp.
“I’m next!” the carpenters shout, waving their dollar bills. “Let me try!” they cry, pushing one another out of the way.
After a few minutes a knocked-out lamp wakes up again, so the underlying game is to see how many you can zap before they come back on. Little by little, patches of Route 93 go dark.
“Do men ever grow up?” Rebecca asks Anita.
“No,” Anita says.
Meanwhile, Dwight has led Benny across the room to the racetrack behind us, where he stands looking down at the long enclosure on the floor and shaking his head. Dwight moves him toward the drinks. I drift over there around the dancers, and when I arrive at the plywood bar Benny is sipping a gin and tonic while Dwight drizzles hoisin sauce into a plastic cup. “This is the flakiest thing I’ve ever seen,” Benny says as Dwight pours tomato juice and vodka in on top of the hoisin.
“They don’t have any Worcestershire,” he explains, and then he takes a sip. “Delicious. Walter, help me out. Benny thinks belt-sander races are a stupid idea.”
“No,” I say. “Really? Ever seen one?”
“I didn’t even know there was any such thing.”
“Well, don’t judge a book by its cover, Benny. Try to imagine yourself as early man. All around early man are sticks and stones. One day it hits him: tie a stone to a stick. What’s he got?”
“A hammer!” Benny says.
“Right. And then?”
“Civilization!”
“Now you’re getting it,” says Dwight. He fetches his plastic garbage bag from beneath the bar, and extracts the modified Makita.
“Well, get a load of this!” Benny says, turning it over in his hands, looking at the name of his new product emblazoned on its sides, the fresh belt of Veritas Grit installed on the machine. “We’ve got a nag running in this race?”
“Tell Benny our idea, Walter,” says Dwight.
“It’s simple,” I say. “Winners use Veritas Grit.”
Benny’s smile opens up like a streetlamp coming on in the darkness. “They can’t argue with that, can they?” He sips his gin and tonic and thinks. “They just might go for this back at the ranch! They just might! But you gotta show us. We’re from Missouri.”
“I’m from the Bronx,” says Dwight. “Follow me.”
At the far end of the room, the contestants have gathered with their precious horses in their hands—Makitas and Milwaukees, Black & Deckers, Skils. The races are held in heats, two sanders at a time, until two finalists remain to race the best three out of five. Yellow extension cords emerge from two knife switches at the beginning of the long, enclosed track. A racer hooks his sander to a cord, waits for the signal, and throws the switch. Anita starts taping the first racers getting ready to run.
“Can you do that?” Rebecca says. “Are you O.K.?”
“It’s just a tiny little camera,” Anita says. “I’m fine. I love shooting.”
Her camera goes through a cable to the small monitor propped on a chair. I watch the proceedings on the screen, through Anita’s eye. The racers get into position; the official gives the signal; they throw the switches. The whole thing takes about three seconds—the sanders hurtling down the track so fast I’m surprised Anita can pan to get it. Somehow it’s not quite the mythic deed I imagined. But Benny’s enjoying it thoroughly. “Way to go, boy!” he calls out to the winner.
Most of the thirty or so contenders have shown up with the sanders they use every day, rugged machines that put bread on the table but don’t know the taste of glory. After a half hour of heats, all but ten have been eliminated. Tempesto, known to be fast, has skipped the preliminaries. Now he’s up. The guys with the HIPPIE TRASH T-shirts h
ave the hot sander, an expensive-looking Milwaukee, but Tempesto doesn’t go against them at first. He has to grind his way up through the ranks. He approaches the track holding Dwight’s garbage bag, and with a grand flourish he unveils Veritas Grit.
“What the hell is that!” the other racers cry, laughing at the ugly homebrew thing. “What’s Verified Grit?”
“Veritas,” Tempesto corrects them. “It’s Latin for Harvard.”
He plugs the machine in and places it on the track next to a spanking Black & Decker, lots of heavy chrome. The official counts down to the start. When the Makita gets the juice it makes a cracking sound they haven’t heard around here since Yastrzemski retired, bucks into the air, hits the floor and zigzags out of control, pinballs against the wooden boundaries, knocks its opponent over, and finally flips right out of the track and across the floor before Tempesto shuts it down.
“What the hell was that!” the carpenters shout.
Dwight and Benny huddle around Tempesto for a conference. Tempesto seems to know what’s wrong. He sticks a screwdriver into the machine to adjust some things, installs a new sandpaper belt, and they run again. Whatever he’s done is what it needed, because now Veritas Grit just makes the Black & Decker look silly, smoking past the finish line before the poor Decker is halfway there.
The carpenters are mad. They demand to see the Makita. They want to hold it. “It don’t weigh nothin’!” one of them exclaims. “Disqualify this thing!”
“No, boys,” says Dwight. “No, no. Nobody said this was a stock-sander race. You don’t change the rules in the middle of a game.”
The carpenters run their knowing thumbs along the belt of Veritas Grit. “Where did you get this?” one of them asks. “I’ve never seen this anywhere.”
“That’s our sponsor’s new product,” says Tempesto, winking at Benny, who is happily florid on the sidelines, gin and tonic coming through the armpits of his suit. “Soon at a store near you.”
The carpenters call a time-out to tweak their machines. Rebecca puts Anita in a chair by the window and rubs her with ice while Dwight rewinds the tape to look at it.
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