Middle Men

by Jim Gavin

  “I’m having steak for lunch.”

  “Nice!” he said, raising his fist in solidarity. He kept walking and for a while I stood there on the dumpster, watching him until he disappeared around the corner.

  There were two empty cans of Tecate in my passenger seat. I swept them down to the floor. Then I started my car. Then I kind of spaced out and forgot that I had started it, and started it again. That’s the worst sound in the world. A dead bottomless shriek, like a knife in a blender. For the first time in months I felt awake.

  • • •

  I was still driving around on a spare tire. The Triple-A guy who had assisted me said that as long as I drove under thirty-five miles per hour, the spare wouldn’t give out. Not for a while, anyway. A couple weeks had passed and so far it had held up. There was no traffic and the freeway felt quiet and peaceful, like an empty church. Instead of saying a prayer, I rolled down the windows and listened to the wind. A few people honked at me to drive faster. When they passed, some of them noticed my spare, and they waved at me, trying to apologize. I waved back, as if to say, No problem!

  Somewhere east of Yorba Linda the tire disintegrated. Triple-A got there fast, like they always do, and the guy replaced my spare with a spare spare that he had on his truck. It didn’t cost me anything. He told me the same thing, about not driving over thirty-five, and then I watched him merge into the bright and hazy afternoon.

  When I got to Riverside, I parked on a side street and walked toward the Mission Inn, a bizarre configuration of domes, turrets, and flying buttresses. Once a perennial retreat for oil tycoons and matinee idols, it was now a clubhouse for men like Uncle Ray, who had made a killing in the commercial irrigation business. He and Fig ate there a few times a week.

  A black iron gate led to the atrium, where birds chirped and fountains bubbled. Passing through another gate into the hotel proper, I found myself in the same dim and mazy corridors I once ran through as a kid. Ray and his wife Holly had moved to Riverside in the early eighties. According to Ray, that’s where the action was—“irrigation-wise.” I loved going out there as a kid, climbing the giant rocks that littered his sprawling property, and then going for dinner at the Mission.

  When I was in high school, we stopped coming to Riverside. Later I found out that Ray had loaned my mom some money, a lot of money, a great deal of money, actually, and he never let her forget this imperishable act of Christian charity. It wasn’t the first time she had gone to him for help. Over the years my mom had come to the bitter conclusion that the only reason Ray loaned her money was because he knew she would never pay him back. Instead of breaking her thumbs like a loan shark, Ray did something worse: he made her feel guilty and small for being such a financial wreck. Now and then, tired of paying tribute to his generosity, she would tell him to go to hell and they wouldn’t talk for a couple years. But then my mom would screw something up, drinking her way out of a job, falling back into debt, and she’d have no choice but to ask Ray for help. Ray once took me aside and said, “It’s not your mom’s fault. Some people understand money, and some people don’t.”

  When I was a kid, Ray liked to roll twenty-dollar bills into tight little balls and bounce them off my head. To his credit he always let me keep the money. At the time I thought it was hilarious, and I still do. It was easy for my mom to portray Ray as the bad guy, but as I got older I got tired of her putting on the poor-mouth. Ray did care about her and he tried to help in the only way that made sense to him. I respected him for making his own way in the world. He came from nothing. I knew he had come from nothing, because at every opportunity, Ray would say, “I came from nothing.” Plus he could tell a story and make people laugh. Not many people in the world can do that. Even when he and my mom were fighting, he could make her laugh, especially when they got drunk. Once he made her laugh so hard she fell backward over the couch, Jack Tripper–style, a scene he would often reenact whenever there was a couch available, and she would start laughing all over again. When I finished college he called once a year to offer me a job in the irrigation business. For a while, after I sold the script, he called more often, asking when it was going into production. He got a genuine kick out of having a nephew in show business. He had an exaggerated sense of my career, and to better track my movements around town, he got a subscription to Variety.

  And now I could still smell his cologne, permanently embedded here, like the mosaic tiles, and I followed the scent all the way to the bar.

  “Hey, muscles,” he said, emerging from a crowd of middle-aged men wearing pastel golf shirts.

  In my mind, Uncle Ray would always tower over me, the pink, splotchy Irish face looking down, giving me the business. But in reality I had him by six inches. I could see every capillary in his nose. He put a shot of Jameson in front of me.

  “Health,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re gonna shit yourself when you hear this story.”

  “I hope so. It was a long drive.”

  “How are you?”

  “Hungry,” I said.

  “Your mom said she’s done with her nursing thing.”

  “Just her LVN,” I said.

  “Does that mean salary?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, it’s a good start. Right?”

  “She’s working weird hours but she likes it.”

  “How’s her new apartment?”

  “It’s nice,” I said. “There’s a pool.”

  “Her old place was a dump,” he said. “I was always worried she’d get mugged.”

  He reached in his pocket and handed me a printed business check, made out to my mom, for a thousand dollars. The memo said: “Forklift Repair.”

  “Mind giving that to her?” he said.

  “Is this why you got me out here?”

  “No! I just figure every little bit helps, right?”

  I put the check in my pocket. Ray asked what I was working on. As I gave my vague answers, he casually practiced his backswing with an imaginary driver. It was his signature move. When I had finished talking, he looked out on the imaginary fairway where he had hit his imaginary ball. “Shot three under today.”

  “How’s Aunt Holly?”

  “What?” He squinted at me for a moment, confused. Then he realized I was referring to his wife of thirty years. “Yeah. She’s great. Drink this.”

  Two more shots appeared.

  “Look at Fig!” Ray announced, drumming the bar. He pointed across the room. “He’s posing for holy cards!”

  Fig, to the seeming delight of several young waitresses, was balancing an empty pint glass on his forehead. He was a short, wiry man with a sunburned face. For the last half century his hair had been slicked into a pompadour. The waitresses smiled relentlessly. My mom used to work at a restaurant in downtown Long Beach, near the convention center, and after a long night collecting tips from boozy conventioneers, she would come home with that same miserable smile.

  “When do we eat?” I asked.

  “I want you to meet some people,” said Ray. He put his arm around my shoulder and guided me toward the magic circle of men. One by one, I shook hands with the Illuminati.

  Gus Lavelle, a general contractor who built houses in the high desert, said, “I’ve heard all about you.”

  “They call Gus the ‘Inland Emperor,’” Ray said.

  “Fuck off!” said Gus, in good cheer.

  Then I met Jerry Tolliver, who owned a shipping company.

  “Wait till you hear this story,” Jerry said. “It literally gave me the chills.”

  “When can I see your movie?” Gus asked.

  “Never,” I said. “It’s not getting made.”

  Jerry, sucking meat from a chicken wing, said, “How come they won’t make it?”

  I shrugged, affecting a look of martyrdom.

  “But if it’s good, I don’t get why they won’t make it. It’s good, right?”

  “It’s genius,” I said.
/>   “It’s all who you know,” said Gus.

  “Get in good with the schnozolas,” Jerry advised. “Otherwise you’re fucked.”

  “Once you write this thing,” said Ray, “we can start talking to people.”

  “We?”

  “It’s our idea. Me and Fig.”

  “Quid pro quo,” I said. “I’m going to etch that on your fucking tombstone.”

  “There’s no Easter Bunny, baby,” said Ray, laughing, as the hostess summoned us to the dining hall.

  • • •

  Two years ago, all my dumb ideas and tenuous connections came together. I sold a screenplay to a finance company that was working with a production company that was developing a project for a pair of comedians who had appeared in commercials for a popular men’s body wash that wanted to distinguish their brand by underwriting a feature film in which the body wash somehow played a crucial role in the plot. At the time I was doing close-captioning for television. I could type ninety words per minute and I made $24,000 a year. At night I took screenwriting classes through a collge extension program and one of my instructors was nice enough to pass along my script to his manager, who liked it, or thought he could sell it, at least, and one thing led to another. My script had nothing to do with body wash, but everyone thought that was an easy fix. After it sold, I was acutely aware that something absurd had just happened to me and I felt obliged to mock myself and the shadowy figures who had lowered the drawbridge on my behalf, letting me into the castle. The day I signed the papers I told the head of development an anecdote about Flaubert. I told him that as Flaubert was nearing the end of Madame Bovary, he wrote in a letter to a friend that he could actually hear the rhythm of the final chapters, the fall of every phrase, though he didn’t yet have the words. I explained that I had experienced something similar as I approached the third act of my multiethnic buddy cop adventure comedy, Hyde & Sikh.

  I planned this in advance, thinking it would be funny and convey some sense of proportion to the proceedings. But then the head of development, bright, sincere, handsome, looked at me with sudden admiration and asked which translation I preferred.

  “Of Madame Bovary?” I said slowly, trying to buy some time.

  I said I wasn’t sure, which was nonsense, because I had only read one version. I never paid attention to things like that. I had ripped the anecdote from the intro to whatever edition I had. I looked at the young man sitting behind his glass desk. Who was this gorgeously literate sociopath?

  “It’s a tricky business, translation,” he said dreamily, as he walked me to the door. I thanked him for the opportunity he had given me.

  After taxes, and after my manager and lawyer got their piece, I took home $57,000, a figure that somehow was both less than I imagined and more than I ever dreamed possible. I took my mom out to El Torito and told her the good news. I told her I had money, lots of money, a great deal of money. This was the happiest moment of my life. I paid off my student loans and a good chunk of my mom’s credit cards. I still had about twenty-five grand, free and clear, and according to my calculations, this would last forever. I moved to Redondo Beach, a few blocks from the water, and I quit my job. Over the course of the next six months, I took meetings with a few production companies—“What worlds do you want to explore?”—and I spent the remainder of my afternoons kicking around the beach like a bona fide asshole.

  Then nothing happened. The finance company dissolved, the production company lost their studio deal, and so forth. Nothing always happens. The literature of Hollywood is depressingly consistent on this point. During my brief period of decadence, I tried to remind myself that the fun probably wouldn’t last, that all good fortune is prelude to disaster, and soon I would be starting over at a temp agency, trying to raise my scores on the Excel test. I tried very hard to remind myself that I was a fool, that the definition of a fool is anyone who thinks he is not a fool, but my weekends grew brighter and more expansive and I felt increasingly worthy of the exalted visions I had of my future, which for reasons I still don’t understand, always involved sitting next to one of those “zero horizon” pools that seem to blend into the ocean.

  • • •

  We sat beneath an enormous painting of Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, charging up San Juan Hill. The dining hall was quiet and dimly lit. In this prosperous gloom, Ray listened with impatience to the wine steward.

  “Just bring us a bottle of dago red,” he said, slapping shut the leather-bound menu.

  Fig buttered every piece of bread in the basket. His mouth was stuffed. He had a scar on his chin and a big gold ring on his right pinkie. Fig served with Ray in Korea. Once their superiors found out they were both scratch golfers—Ray had actually led El Camino College to a California state title—they spent most of their tours getting flown to Japan to play golf with generals. I had known Fig all my life. He’d show up with Ray at my birthdays and Little League games, but after so many years I still wasn’t sure of his full name and I had no idea what role he played in this world beyond that of Ray’s eternal golf buddy. I always assumed he was in the irrigation business.

  “Look at this beauty eat,” said Ray, amused. “His thyroid is out of control.”

  Fig gave him the finger and kept chewing. The waiter poured our wine.

  “So listen to this. Last week me and Fig went to Santa Anita.”

  Another waiter brought our appetizers. I sipped my wine and settled in.

  “There’s a nice restaurant up on the terrace. I know everybody there. It’s nice, we get a table by the window, watch the races, hit the buffet.”

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Fig likes a trifecta. So we talk to some of our guys and start going through the book. There’s no doubt on the first horse, everyone’s agreed on that. Pretty much the same for the second, but maybe a little more iffy. Fig calls up his guy and gets a little more out of him, so we feel okay. But the third horse, we have no fucking clue. A day at the races, right? Now Fig’s hungry, if you can believe it, so he goes up to the buffet and I’m sitting there going through the book. I’m sitting there and Fig comes back with a roast beef sandwich. He’s upset. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask him. ‘Look at this,’ he says, ‘look what they did to the fucking thing.’ He opens up his sandwich. It’s just swimming in mayonnaise.”

  Fig, piling steak tartar on his buttered bread, shook his head in disgust at the memory.

  Ray continued. “This is a problem, the mayonnaise. There’s no reason to just slap it on like that. ‘What I would like,’ Fig says, ‘is just a cup of mayo on the side. So I can put it on myself.’ Which is totally rational. Who wants that much mayonnaise? Why should some guy making a sandwich get to decide how much mayonnaise you get? It’s tyrannical, if you think about it.”

  Ray paused to let me think about it.

  “I tell Fig, ‘You should’ve just asked for a side of mayo.’ ‘I know,’ he says, ‘but the guy was already making it.’ I grabbed the maître d’ and I told him the situation. ‘Listen. Bring us another sandwich, but have your guy put the mayo on the side. I mean, for the love of all that’s holy and merciful, bring us a side of fucking mayo!’”

  Fig looked at Ray. Their faces were turning bright red.

  “So here it comes. Roast beef, open-faced, and a big cup of mayo. Victory is ours.”

  “Well done,” I said.

  “But here’s the thing,” Ray said.

  “I figured there was a thing.”

  “I go back to the book. I go back to pick the third horse for the trifecta. I look down the page. And there he is, right there at the bottom—Side of Mayo!”

  Ray poured his wine to the top of the glass. He took a sip and then pounded his fist on the table. “We both took home ten grand! Well, give or take. Can you believe that?”

  There was silence. Ray, as always, had taken over the room. At other tables men were grinning and hanging on his every drunken word. Alcohol, for Ray, was a kind of charm, allowing him to ba
rge through doors and announce his place in the world. Over the years he had diligently boozed and golfed his way to the top. This path to glory belonged exclusively to men. My mom could drink most men under the table, but her talent was considered grim and unsightly; instead of opening doors, alcohol isolated her, and no matter how hard she tried she was never able to drink her way into the magic circle.

  “It’s a good story,” I said, finally. “But . . .”

  “What do you mean, ‘but’?”

  “I wouldn’t really know what to do with it. At this point it’s just an anecdote.”

  Ray squinted at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I mean, characterwise there’s definitely something.”

  Ray and Fig both looked confused.

  “That wasn’t the story,” said Ray.

  “It wasn’t?”

  “Fuck, no!” Now they were laughing. “Who’d want to see a movie about me and Fig?”

  “Okay,” I said, “what’s your story?”

  Ray nodded gravely at Fig, who finished chewing and carefully wiped his mouth with the linen napkin.

  “There’s this alien,” he said, and looked nervously at Ray.

  “Go on, tell him.”

  “There’s this alien. And what he does is come here, to earth, to hunt humans.”

  Fig, sweaty and exhausted, sat back in his chair.

  “The way humans hunt deer,” Ray explained. “You know, for sport.”

  In front of me there was a plate full of bacon-wrapped shrimp. I ate one and said, “That’s Predator.”

  “What?”

  “Predator, with Schwarznegger. You’re describing Predator.”

  Fig was devastated. He dropped his head and began to massage the loose cartilage in his nose. I gathered that one of them had recently watched Predator on cable in a drunken haze, totally forgetting about it until this morning, when the dim memory surfaced as an idea of their own. Ray wasn’t giving up.

  “It doesn’t have to be an alien,” he said. “It could just be some crazy guy who hunts humans for sport.”

  “That’s The Most Dangerous Game,” I said.