Middle Men

by Jim Gavin

  “Well, Christ, it’s all the same cha-cha,” said Ray. “We can come up with something else.”

  My steak was unbearably delicious. We stayed in the dining hall for a couple hours, getting drunk, throwing out story ideas, and discussing the possibilities of studio financing. Ray, who had been installing sprinkler systems for the last thirty years, seemed to know way more about the process than I did. On our way out we filed into the men’s room. My uncle and his buddy Fig belonged to that vanishing breed of men who piss with their hands on their hips. In another age such confident figures would’ve been immortalized in stone.

  As the valet brought around Ray’s Cadillac, Fig pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a sip. Suddenly, he put a hand on my shoulder.

  “You’ve always been like a son to me,” he said.

  I laughed. “Son?”

  Fig dropped his eyes in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Sean. I’m just really proud of you.”

  He climbed into the backseat of the Cadillac and lay down. Ray yawned, handed the valet a twenty, and got in the car.

  “We’ll talk!” he shouted over the revving engine.

  • • •

  I had a parking ticket when I got back to my car. It was almost four o’clock. I got lost going to the freeway and ended up following the train tracks west for a few miles. I came to a beaten down section of Riverside where every block had the same rhythm. Auto body shop, tattoo parlor, bail bonds, checks cashing. The sidewalks were empty but for one guy, a twitchy, shirtless maniac wearing camouflage pants. He had a garden hose coiled over his shoulder and he kept turning around quickly, again and again, like he expected to catch someone following him.

  On the way home, I decided to stop by my mom’s new place in Buena Park. I got stuck in traffic on the 91, which gave me time to sober up. I inched along for an hour and finally pulled off the freeway. The front door of her apartment was surrounded by empty clay pots. She brought the pots with her every time she moved, saying she was going to fill them with dahlias and marigolds, but she never did. I knocked but she wasn’t home, and her cell phone went right to voice mail. She probably had an evening shift. The stucco walls were cracked and peeling and the pool in the courtyard was full of leaves. I tore up Ray’s check, scattered the pieces in the water, and sat down on a lounge chair. I knew it would be a long time before she got home, but I was willing to wait.

  O mother, save me from the wisdom of men.

  Bewildered Decisions in Times of Mercantile Terror

  Bobby’s office, for the time being, was the Berkeley Public Library. On a Thursday afternoon in August, with sunlight pouring through the arched windows of the reading room, he closed his book and quietly observed the homeless man sitting across from him. The man was bald and sunburned and he had grimy strips of duct tape wrapped around his fingertips. With a chewed-up pencil in his hand, he scrawled notes in the margins of an old physics textbook that was crawling with ants. Bobby couldn’t take his eyes off the ants; he watched them moving in clusters across equations and diagrams, and it occurred to him that the ants were messengers, reading the book for this infernal professor, and when they were done they would crawl up the man’s arm and into his ear, burrowing directly into his brain.

  Bobby hadn’t slept in two or three days.

  He looked around for another table, but the reading room was packed with the elderly and the unemployed. Some people seemed hard at work, or at least pleasantly engaged, but most were either asleep or staring out the windows, as if waiting for something. It felt more like a bus terminal than a library. Bobby wore a Cal T-shirt and a pair of board shorts. He was trying to read a reference manual on patent law, but it was boring and his eyes kept slipping off the page. The hours were melting together. Last night, after Conan, he had fallen into a vortex of infomercials and then, at some point, he snuck off with his roommate’s laptop and sent another pleading email to Nora, his dearest cousin and benefactor. When the sun came up, he left his apartment in the Berkeley flats and rode his bike up University Avenue. He ate breakfast at McDonald’s and when he got to the library at nine o’clock, a crowd was already waiting to get inside. He struggled with his work all day—he kept taking long breaks to read magazines—but his lack of concentration, he knew, had more to do with excitement than fatigue. If anything, he worried that he was too awake.

  It was three o’clock. Far up the hill, on campus, the tower bells were ringing. Bobby closed his eyes and listened. As a student, he had always loved the swirling bronze melody of the carillon. Ten years ago he had gone to Cal on a swimming scholarship. He majored in business, pledged a fraternity, and flunked out his junior year.

  “See you later,” he said, standing up and collecting his things, but the homeless man ignored him. In his own pungent way, this guy was a snob, and Bobby could respect that. It was a snobbery well earned. When he died alone in a gutter, in a puddle of his own piss, he would take with him a crazed and singular form of expertise. Bobby ran his fingers through his buzz cut. He wished he had a nice hat to doff, a bowler cap or fedora. He hated belonging to such a crude and hatless generation.

  He sat down at a computer. His Yahoo mailbox was filled almost exclusively with undeleted spam. Someday, Bobby imagined, a single pill would grow hair, restore virility, and consolidate debt, but until then the market was wide open and he still had a chance to capitalize on his terrible idea. With this in mind, he scrolled down and was relieved to find a response from Nora. He had been trying to reach her all week, to get her advice on how he should go about branding the Man Handle, but she wouldn’t answer her phone or reply to his emails. This happened sometimes. She was director of marketing for a company that sold investment management software. When she was on the road, she closed ranks and forgot about everybody in her life who wasn’t a client or prospect. He would go weeks without hearing from her. Then she would come back to the city, haggard and lonely and claiming that she was sick of her job, that she was ready to meet a decent man and go into full suburban lockdown. Nora was tall and pale and, because of her pixie haircut and listless expression, men often asked her if she was a model. She had actually paid her way through college doing catalogue work, posing in cardigans next to duck ponds, but she liked to tell potential suitors that she was dying of consumption. Bobby and Nora had always been allied by a certain ghoulishness. At his father’s funeral, when they were both seniors in high school, she met him on the front steps of St. Bonaventure in Huntington Beach and said, “Your eulogy sucked.” They rode together from the church, passing a bottle of Jameson back and forth, and when they got to the grave site Nora took off her heels and ran across the expansive lawn, scattering crows like a burst of black confetti.

  Now and then she met a guy who appreciated these qualities in her, but it would never last. They either got frustrated with the demands of her career, or she got bored with them. Bobby despised most of the men she dated. She had a weakness for solvent hipsters—architects, creative directors at advertising agencies, and other lieutenants in the corduroy mafia. They all supported progressive causes, not in any active or financial way, but just in general, as a kind of ambience that made them feel good about themselves as they walked around the city in vintage Japanese tennis shoes. And yet, in some ways, Bobby understood the plight of these slender princelings. Nora had a unique gift for turning cold on people.

  The last time he saw her was three months ago, in May, when she asked him to accompany her to Geneva Software’s annual Client Appreciation Party. The latest staff restructuring had left the marketing and direct sales teams looking grim and sparse, so her boss, Dave Grant, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Global Accounts, had encouraged the survivors to bring a guest, because the clients would feel more at ease in a full room. “There’s free food for you,” Nora told Bobby. “Just look presentable and keep me entertained.” He got a haircut, wore a gray suit that he found in one of his roommate’s closets, and in a hotel bar overlooking Union Square he shook hand
s with Nora’s colleagues, mostly men, who seemed weirdly impressed by the fact that Bobby was stuck doing plumbing work. He used to work summers with his dad, doing repair and remodel jobs, so he knew what he was doing most of the time, but he didn’t have a license and he was getting paid under the table by a shady house flipper in Castro Valley who had posted an ad on Craigslist. But still, the men from Geneva software expressed wonder and delight, as if they were shaking hands with a sea captain or gunslinger. When Bobby asked what they did, most seemed vaguely ashamed that they were marketing associates or software engineers; in parting, they all shook his hand with a substantially firmer grip.

  Nora introduced him to Dave Grant, who, despite being the boss, seemed nervous and fumbling around her. “That fucker’s in love with you,” said Bobby, as soon as Dave left, and Nora feigned vomiting. They were having a great time. Someone handed Bobby a drink; someone else, mistaking him for a client, handed him a gift bag filled with coffee mugs and key chains emblazoned with the Geneva logo. He watched a stray red balloon wedge itself in the crystal arm of a chandelier. Bobby told Nora that he wanted a job with her company—“I have sales experience,” he reminded her, crushing a lime into his vodka—but then one of her company’s actual clients found her and said hello. Nora turned her back on Bobby and began speaking in tongues. Bobby heard the word “functionality” repeated over and over. She made no attempt to introduce Bobby and for a long time he hovered awkwardly behind her, feeling invisible. When the client finally left, she turned around like nothing had happened. Later, in the cab, Bobby screamed at her, “You literally turned your back on me.”

  “It was client appreciation night, not Bobby appreciation night,” said Nora, offering him a sip from the bottle of champagne she had stolen on the way out. When they stopped at a light, he grabbed the champagne bottle and threw it out the window. It smashed against the curb and for a moment they both sat there in silence; then Bobby jumped out of the cab.

  He hated Nora for a couple weeks, but kept hoping for her to call and apologize to him. When his cell phone got shut off, he checked his email obsessively, but there was nothing. Since they were kids, growing up a few blocks from each other, they had always fought and made up, and the time in between was pure desolation. But he never heard from her and he realized that he was being overly sensitive and a little self-righteous. He envied Nora’s ability to turn herself on and off, to indulge in vile misanthropy one minute and false pleasantry the next. This golden switch guaranteed her future. She had a great place in the Inner Richmond, and on more than one occasion she had loaned money to her dearest cousin, though both knew it was a donation. She had worked hard to establish her place in the world, while he had made a shambles of his education and drifted from one crappy job to the next. He didn’t have the on/off switch, and he understood now, with thrilling clarity, that Nora’s path to success—corporate, dignified, incremental—would never work for him. Bobby required a bonanza.

  In the email he sent last night, or early this morning, he told her he would be in the city tonight, ready to show her the prototype. He encouraged her, only half joking, to bring along some of her venture capital friends. The Man Handle, he explained, would appeal to the very men who had the power to invest in it. Indeed, it was a tool that no depraved capitalist could do without. He sketched out his business plan, which had evolved over the last few days from a few bullet points of satirical bombast to something that actually seemed plausible and real, and then he took some time to tell her how things had been going for him, personally, since they last spoke that night in the cab. In June, the house flipper had disappeared, without paying Bobby for his last month of work. After that he answered a Craigslist ad—“$$$$ Sales Pros Needed $$$$”—and got hired to sell ad space for an East Bay newspaper conglomerate. It was horrible and he discovered, once again, how much he hated sales. At some point he stopped going to work and by now he was pretty sure they had fired him. He was broke and the walls were closing in, but in this moment of darkness, he had found inspiration. Cometh the Hour, Cometh the Man Handle: the thing pretty much marketed itself. However, his sudden lack of income and increase in free time was causing friction with his latest batch of roommates. The guy farthest down the hall, a programmer from Lahore, had caught Bobby using his laptop a few times, and Bobby knew that it was only a matter of time before the guy slit his throat with a bejeweled dagger. Looking back, it was a pretty macabre email and it worried Bobby that her response was so short. Nora usually wrote back in a tone and style that was as equally paranoid and macabre, but this time she just said that if he was around, she could meet him for a drink in the city at eight o’clock, and she named her favorite Irish pub. Even worse, she had signed her name without the usual “love” or “cheers” above it.

  As he left the library, the alarm went off. A security guard asked to see his duffel bag. Bobby complied and watched the guard remove a book.

  “I forgot to check it out,” Bobby admitted.

  The guard then pulled out a twelve-inch length of brass pipe that had been wrapped in black grip tape, the kind that went on skateboards.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “It’s a prototype.”

  “Of what?”

  “The dumbest thing ever invented.”

  Bobby grabbed the bag from the guard and brought his book to the front desk.

  “Please get in line,” said the young librarian, a cute and supremely archetypal librarian—shy, bespeckled, and wearing a green cardigan, the kind Nora used to model. Bobby had wanted to talk to this librarian for the last couple weeks, but it seemed that whenever he had a book to check out, the desk was occupied by some miserable crone who would give him grief about his fines. Now, with a clear-cut opportunity, Bobby felt suddenly embarrassed by his appearance; he wished he had shaved, but all of his roommates’ razor blades were dull.

  The librarian stood a few feet back from the desk.

  “This will only take a minute,” said Bobby, putting his book on the counter.

  “You can’t check out reference books,” said the librarian.

  “Just me, or everybody?”

  “Everybody.”

  “I’m joking!” Bobby handed her the book. “What’s your name?”

  “Catherine.”

  “I’m Bobby.”

  She nodded, and Bobby felt good when he got outside. He finally knew her name, at least. In the distance he could hear the final movement of the carillon. Before he got on his bike, he turned back to the library, a block of dusty green marble reposing in the milky afternoon light. It looked like the palace of a Babylonian king.

  • • •

  Earlier that morning, on her flight back from Los Angeles, Nora examined a laminated safety card that depicted plucky cartoon figures surviving a series of airborne catastrophes. Whenever she got on a plane, some part of her hoped for a crash landing. She was interested in her own reaction to mortal danger—would she act stoically or just shit herself?—but more than anything she thought about how fun it would be, afterward, going down one of those big yellow inflatable slides.

  They were somewhere over the central coast. She could see brown hills, the ruffle of breaking waves. A few clouds dotted the sky, but otherwise it would be a pure blue drop. Members of the Geneva marketing team were spread throughout the cabin, sipping coffee and cooing into the bonnets of their laptops. In the next seat, Nora’s assistant Jill scrolled through her iPod. Nora ordered a gin and tonic and when the drink came she asked the stewardess if she ever had the chance to go down the rescue slide.

  “No,” whispered the stewardess, a cheerful older woman with gorgeous silver hair. “And I hope I never do.”

  Then she patted Nora on the shoulder and, feeling her touch, the touch of a stranger, Nora almost melted with gratitude. She wanted to follow the stewardess down the aisle and sit with her on the jump seats. She wanted to ask for a job application.

  This year’s CTI Media B2B Software Development Con
ference & Expo had been, as Nora had feared, a brutal dry hump. Geneva had dropped ten grand for their booth, five grand for collateral inserts in the official conference backpacks, fifteen grand to have the Geneva logo placed on water coolers and cups spread throughout the exhibit hall, and twenty-five grand to sponsor a luncheon that featured, as entertainment, a sullen stand-up performance by a former cast member of Saturday Night Live. The carpet-bombing strategy had come down from Dave Grant, and with another staff restructuring on the way, Nora had asked him how he could justify this kind of spending. Dave felt confident that the risk would pay off, not so much in the short term, for staff, but down the road, for the company. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but that’s the reality of the situation.” He showed some discretion, however, by staying in San Francisco and sending Nora to Los Angeles to handle the conference. That way, when she came back with a meager list of new prospects to hand over to sales, her name would be tarnished, not his. It was a suicide mission. Nora, who had always taken great comfort in the endless sorrow of Irish history, thought of De Valera sending Michael Collins to sign the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

  For three days the pipe-and-curtain corridors were empty; the only people she really talked to were other software exhibitors. The asset managers and hedge fund reps who did show up to sample the goods were greeted as liberators; they nodded their heads, shook hands, exchanged cards, and left each booth laden with spoil. Yesterday was especially bleak and after packing up their booth the Geneva marketing team ran up a huge tab at a trendy tapas bar. Nora considered tapas a scam, so she left early and walked by herself through the barren maze of downtown Los Angeles. Part of her was hoping to get mugged—a major trauma would simplify everything. Her responsibilities, though dreary and minor, were all-consuming, and a nonfatal stab wound seemed like just the thing to get people off her back for a while. She hailed a cab and instructed the driver to take her to the nearest Del Taco, which was the only thing she missed about SoCal. At the Bonaventure Hotel she ate her No. 6 combo in a concrete alcove above the main lobby and then spent an hour riding the glass elevators, feeling more relaxed than she had all week. Later, curled happily in bed, with a full stomach, she turned off her BlackBerry and finished rereading O’Flaherty’s Famine.