by Greg Olear
Taylor was not paying attention. She didn’t care about baby boomers and Gen Xers, financial companies or entertainment conglomerates. Her motive was, and always would be, visceral. She killed for how it made her feel. And she didn’t like that the Borden job, a rogue action not under the aegis of Quid Pro Quo, exposed her to arrest. He should have told her. It was like lacing a joint with PCP and not saying so until after the hit. But unlike a laced joint, it killed her buzz.
If she had been in love with Asher Krug the day she was poring over their horoscopes—and I believe she was—the spell had worn off by the time they hit the Holland Tunnel. The subsequent sex, while still good, was not as good as it had been. All she could think, as he pounded away on top of her, was that his carelessness had spoiled her good time.
I can’t be his partner, she wrote in her diary the next day (although I didn’t read it until later, of course). Somehow, I have to do this on my own.
CHAPTER 15
S
ometime after her mini-murder spree, Taylor did take a few moments to mention my employment woes to Asher, who consented to see me. So that Friday, two days after the Bordens bit the dust, I strode through the ornate lobby of 520 Madison, and the even more ornate lobby of the Quid Pro Quo Employment Agency. I raised an eyebrow and turned a nose at the ridiculous owl statue. I gave Mae-Yuan—who was smokingly gorgeous; Taylor hadn’t mentioned that in her diary—my résumé and my own list of personal references (Taylor, Jason Hanson, Laura Horowitz). I joined a crowd of wet-behind-the-ears hipsters, with whom I didn’t belong. Then I sat through Asher Krug’s lecture, allowing me to study him up close for the first time. My impression that morning was that Asher was the quintessential alpha male, a man’s man, the kind of guy who would never get a shy bladder whipping it out to take a leak in a crowded lavatory. He was my age, which is to say around twenty-six, but there was nothing boyish about him. I couldn’t imagine him as a boy, or an awkward teen; he must have hatched, fully formed, the way he was. He had the confidence, the gravitas, the carriage, of someone twenty years older. Not that he looked old—he didn’t, not really—but he oozed maturity. He was all grown up. Ready for anything. He was the sort of man guys like me unquestionably follow. A leader of men. The dude was something else. No wonder Taylor was smitten. Hell, I was practically smitten.
Asher fed us more or less the same stump speech Taylor heard, right down to the jokes about Don Corleone and The Merchant of Venice. The audience reacted with the requisite awe.
Afterwards, I joined him in his office. I felt like I was in the room with a celebrity, like he was Redford or Brando—he had this intimidating glow about him that just about rendered me speechless. Thinking back, I might have even been a little attracted to him—and I’m not gay, not even remotely. Put it this way: I totally would have done a three-way with him and Taylor. (Then again, I’d have done a three-way with Taylor and just about anyone—Richard Simmons, Manuel Noriega, Larry “Bud” Melman—as long as I had a turn with her.)
“It’s nice to finally meet you,” I said when I’d found my tongue. “Taylor’s told me so much about you.”
“Likewise,” he said, although I’m not sure I believed him.
“Nice suit. What is that, Italian?”
“Japanese.”
“Very schnazzy.”
“Thanks.”
“I feel underdressed.”
Asher regarded my flannel shirt, stone-washed Levi’s, and Doc Marten boots with disapproval, but said nothing.
I couldn’t place his ethnic origins. He was dark, as I mentioned, with blackish hair and olive skin, and although he was meticulously shaved, he had the sort of face on which a full beard could sprout in a matter of hours.
“Krug,” I said. “What sort of name is that?”
“My grandparents were from Breslau. Please. Have a seat.”
In addition to the earlier description of the office that I relayed from Taylor’s diary—the martini stand, the Modigliani and Mondrian, the view—I noticed a few more details. Next to the three-ring binders and stack of résumés on his desk sat a well-worn copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People; even the great Asher Krug, apparently, was not above self-help. There was a blue legal-sized folder on his desk, tucked into the corner of his blotter, marked RUSSELL TRUST ASSOC., and behind him, on a credenza, a silver-framed photograph of a younger Asher shaking hands with an older man whose face I recognized but whose name I couldn’t place.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice,” I told him.
“My pleasure. Any friend of Taylor’s, as they say. So, she tells me you’ve lost your job.”
“Something like that.”
“Please explain.”
I laid out the circumstances of my dismissal as best as I could without mentioning the fact that Donna Green fired me for leaving work early just about every day—an action that was completely justified. As I spoke, Asher nodded his head, like a professor listening to one of his pupils regurgitate his own lecture.
“What the hippies don’t understand,” he said when I had finished, “is that the only way to level the playing field is to level the playing field. You can’t prevent discrimination against black people by discriminating against white people.”
I hadn’t mentioned to Taylor that Donna Green was black—I don’t think I even mentioned it in these pages—so this was out of left field, although I didn’t realize it at the time.
“The audacity,” Asher continued, “of these so-called civil rights leaders invoking slavery in their arguments. How much mileage can they get out of that? Now they want the government to pay reparations to the descendents of slaves—as if a few more dollars could somehow erase the horror of what happened in this country a hundred fifty years ago. The nerve of those people! What the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of the world don’t seem to appreciate is, if they weren’t descended from slaves—if their conquered ancestors had managed to stay put; if there’d been no slave trade—they’d be in Africa right now, living under the yoke of some corrupt dictator, half-starved, circumcising their daughters with sharp stones, dying of AIDS-related illnesses at age thirty. For some reason, no one ever mentions this. Was slavery terrible? Without question. And so was the Reconstruction period, the Jim Crow laws, the separate-but-equal—all of it. But that time is past. Those days are over. Our generation understands that people are people, unlike the hypocritical baby boomers. And the truth, the unpleasant truth, is that every black person in this country, without exception, is better off here than he would be in Africa, where there’s no such thing as civil rights, or rap music, or professional basketball. In Africa, there’s no way out of the muck. Here, there’s opportunity. They act like they’re entitled, these people, but we owe them nothing. We saved them, plain and simple. We saved them from themselves. Even if our motives were less than pure.”
I didn’t, and still don’t, support affirmative action. But it’s one thing to favor a meritocracy; quite another to suggest, as Asher did, that African Americans are better off for having been slaves. How would Jackson or Sharpton have responded to Asher’s lecture? That would have been a Crossfire worth watching. Me, I couldn’t think of what to say, confronted with such egregious racism. So I held my tongue.
We sat there dumbly for a moment, and then, to break the silence, he moved on. “I do hope we can help you.” He looked at a copy of my pathetic CV and wrinkled his brow. “To be brutally honest, Todd, I’m a bit hesitant about this.”
“Hesitant? Why?”
“Your résumé is…well, it shows a pattern that I’m not altogether comfortable with.”
“A pattern?”
“You’ve had seven jobs in four years. Assuming the dates on here are accurate. That indicates a propensity for movement, an inability to hold onto a position.”
“Most of those jobs were temporary in nature,” I explained. “And I got laid off a couple times. The market…it’s hard out there for a guy like me.”
“I know. That’s what keeps us in business. What is it that you want to do, exactly?”
“Well, I’m an actor by trade.”
“Taylor mentioned that. Acting jobs are harder to come by than office jobs, you realize.”
“I’d be happy with anything in the entertainment industry.”
“That’s not very specific.”
“I’m open to every opportunity.”
“Let me explain my reservations, then.” He hit an intercom switch on the desk. “Mae-Yuan? Coffee, please. There is a trend,” fixing his commanding glare on me, “for want of a better word, among people of our generation to slack off, to withdraw from society. There is a cynicism, a bitterness, accompanied by a snide arrogance I find most unbecoming. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
I was at a job interview dressed like Eddie Vedder. I knew all too well what he was talking about.
“I understand the compunction to stand up for our generation, to usurp the baby boomers who have made a cesspool of this country. What I don’t understand, and can never abide, is the method. This business of standing down. I don’t understand it, I don’t think it works. I think it’s lazy. I don’t get why people don’t vote, for example. I don’t get why people don’t try harder to succeed. We’re smarter than our parents, Todd; we should be able to take over, to seize power, not just sit on our asses whining all the livelong day. This movement, this slacker bullshit, it makes me sick. It makes me want to puke. It makes me want to kill someone.”
Asher showed great passion, just as Taylor described. So much so that for a fleeting—and quite icky—moment, I found myself drawn to him. I wanted him to cradle me in his big strong arms and protect me from harm, in a way that my own father never could. I wanted this, and he was my age, if not younger.
“My sense, based on your résumé and your choice of attire for our meeting, is that you are one of these shall-we-say fallen angels. If this is true, there’s nothing we can do for you.”
A sudden sinking feeling made me swoon—and not from Asher’s raw, Brandovian sexuality. When I got shitcanned, the idea that Quid Pro Quo might help me get back on my feet somewhat softened the blow. If even the mighty Asher Krug couldn’t help, I was, in a word, fucked.
“I’m not a slacker,” I told him emphatically, determined to win his approval. “I don’t not participate. I voted. I just had temp jobs so I could audition—that’s all.”
“Fair enough.” Asher took a three-ring binder from the desk and leafed through it, as Mae-Yuan materialized like an apparition with two steaming cups of coffee. She presented the drinks and vanished just as ghostily.
“Something in entertainment,” Asher said, sipping his joe—he took it black, of course, like a man. “There may be an opportunity at MTV in a few weeks, if you can hold out for that. There’s a program they’re developing…it might even lead to an acting gig, who knows.”
“MTV? That’d be…wow, that’d be amazing.”
“If the job doesn’t blow your mind—if it’s not a job to kill for—the arrangement is not going to work.”
He really did say a job to kill for. Taylor already knew the gruesome truth, but I still operated under the assumption that this was just a figure of speech, an ironical idiom. How could I have imagined otherwise?
“It will be. Believe me.”
“Good.”
As he collected some forms for me to complete, it hit me who the old guy in the picture behind him was.
“Asher,” I asked, “what’s with Lee Atwater?”
As he turned to the photograph, a wan smile formed on his face, and for the only time in my presence, he looked boyish. “A great American. One of my heroes.”
“One of your heroes?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Lee Atwater was Karl Rove’s mentor, the sleazy spin doctor whose shady dealings propelled Ronald Reagan, and then George Herbert Walker Bush, into the White House. His lack of scruples was so legendary—the Southern strategy, anyone?—that he wound up recanting on his deathbed. No one in the liberal, Nation-reading universe that I inhabited felt anything but contempt for him. In fact, when he’d died that past March, one of the bars in the East Village threw a little party. “You’re joking, right?”
“Do I look like I’m joking?” Asher did not look like he was joking. His sense of humor, deficient as it was, didn’t run that dry. “I suppose that if you did in fact participate in the last election, you voted for Dukakis.”
“Of course I voted for Dukakis. You voted for…for Bush?”
“Obviously.”
Dana Carvey’s impression on Saturday Night Live muddled the then-president’s true colors. George Bush père was far from the wimp the popular media portrayed him as.
“The guy’s evil incarnate,” I said. “He was the head of the CIA, he’s in the Saudi’s back pocket, he started the Gulf War for no good reason, he was in Skull and Bones at Yale…I even heard he was in on the JFK assassination.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Asher said, which was true—all of my information came from an exposé I’d read in Spy magazine. “None. I see you’re a conspiracy theorist, like so many of our coevals.”
Coevals. Who talks like that? Asher’s voice trailed off, but he was not done speaking.
“The Democrats,” he told me, “have done nothing but fuck this country up for the past half century. Every time they come to power, they make things worse. Without exception. Beginning with FDR and his ridiculous and expensive social and welfare programs.”
He didn’t like John Lennon, he didn’t like Franklin Roosevelt, he worshipped Lee Atwater, and Taylor was fucking him instead of me. Fucking great.
“What about Kennedy?”
“Overrated. The playboy charm and the assassination, the haze of nostalgia, they cloud the real picture. He got us into Vietnam, because he couldn’t handle Khrushchev in Berlin, and he completely fucked up the Bay of Pigs. Cuba would be the fifty-first state by now, if his sleazebag father hadn’t bought West Virginia for him in ’60. LBJ precipitated matters, and this affirmative action horseshit you’re so fond of originated on his desk. Remember that. Things only settled down under Nixon. He would have gotten us out of Vietnam sooner, too, if Watergate hadn’t happened. What a travesty! So what if he bugged McGovern’s headquarters? We should trash national security for George Fucking McGovern? The seventies were ruined—ruined—because the Democrats wouldn’t just let that go. That turncoat Woodward and that little shit Bernstein—they were responsible for escalating the war. People blame Kissinger, but it was the Washington Post’s fault. But we’ll have our revenge. Next time there’s a Democrat in office—hopefully not in my lifetime—we’ll take him down for something trivial, something stupid, inconsequential to the greater good. Like Watergate was. Then you’ll understand how things really work, how presidents should be above the law.”
This, apparently, was the end of the interview. Asher hit the intercom button. “Mae-Yuan, please escort Mr. Lander out.” He rose, reached across the desk. “I’ll see you October 30th for your follow-up. And wear a tie next time, would you? This is a place of business, not a lumberyard.”
This went in one ear and out the other. All I could think of, as I toddled out of his office, was MTV. Fame was knocking on my door. I was going to be a star.
CHAPTER 16
R
oger Gale, author of The Lap of Uxory, stood in the lobby of the Royalton Hotel, waiting for his editor to arrive for lunch. He wore black horn-rimmed glasses and a black suit over a black shirt and tie. In spite of all the black, he didn’t come off as remotely cool, probably because of his involuntary habit of rocking from side to side, as if the floor were a surfboard upon which he alone found difficulty maintaining balance. He checked his watch—she was twenty minutes late—and rocked more furiously. At last, Taylor arrived, spotting her author at once, even though she’d never met him in person before.
“You must be Roger.”
Novelists a
re generally not lookers—Martin Amis is the exception; Stephen King is the rule—and right away, Taylor could see there was no threat of Roger Gale’s name being added to her list. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a dork is a dork is a dork.
“Hi, Taylor. It’s, uh, nice to meet you finally.”
Gale’s hand, as Taylor shook it, was drenched with sweat. She hadn’t been expecting eye candy, but then, neither had he—they worked in publishing, after all. Taylor was easily the hottest chick he’d ever had lunch with. Which only made the poor sap rock all the more.
They sat, they ordered, they drank glasses of wine (one of the Braithwaite Ross perquisites Nathan Ross had implemented but neglected to mention during his speech was the expense account at the Royalton, one of the trendier hotel restaurant/bars in the city). Roger Gale launched into a tired tale of the impetus for his novel—what his process involved, who certain characters were based on, how he’d used certain leitmotifs throughout the piece, and so forth. The way he went on, you’d think his Russian protagonist was Anna Karenina. If you come across The Lap of Uxory at a yard sale sometime, you won’t be surprised to learn that, historical fiction or not, the shelves of university libraries aren’t exactly teeming with literary criticism of it or its author. The whole time, Gale’s left leg popped up and down like a piston, as if all his brain power were generated therein.