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(Continued from part 1)
You knocked and he came to the door in his painting whites. He pointed for you to sit at his kitchen table while he was on his cell phone, yelling over the CD player that was blasting Lupe Fiasco. “The deposit is non-refundable,” he yelled on the phone. “And I will have a guy out there this morning for certain, for sure. He’s right here,” he said looking at you, the door of his dishwasher in the kitchenette was open and sparking clean paintbrushes hung from the upper rack. There were ski’s everywhere, leaning on walls, stacked on the floor. Dusty trophies in cardboard boxes by the fireplace.
But now, here in the Persian Rug Emporium, you just want to get home to your wife and hug your daughter, be done with the day. Gary tucks his loose blond bangs behind his ears, adjusts the rubber band that holds his short ponytail. He stands and walks to get another beer. Frank is pissing off the loading dock.
“Jesus Frank. Use the fucken john.” Gary says, throwing up his hands in disgust. “There’s a lot of rich fuckers who come here. Do you ever fucken ever think before you do anything?”
Frank shrugs his shoulders, slowly zips up and adjusts himself.
“You know what, Frank?” Gary says, looking at his watch. It’s about five-thirty, and it’s about time to kick your fucken ass. You fucked around all day! But Fortune 500 over here,” Gary says, looking at you and then back at him. “He fucking trimmed out Saddam’s office today, cutting in all day long, steady as a train, man. No splatters. You’re working ‘till midnight with me, Frank. I’m gonna fucking increase your efficiency one way or a fucken other.”
Wafa Yakhlef, “Saddam” to Gary and Frank, owner of the Persian Rug Emporium, appears in the doorway that leads from the warehouse loading area into the rug showroom. He pulls a thin cigarette case, a chrome flicker, from his vest pocket and pops it open with a flip of his wrist. He shakes his head and looks at you and then to Gary.
You look at Frank. He looks ghostly, evil, his moist eyes slightly askew—a sign of his wicked and depraved life, you think. His particle mask now rests on his forehead, leaving a flesh colored triangular shadow around his nose and mouth, amidst the drywall powder. “Where do you get your workers, Gary? I don’t have much hope for this one,” he says in his thick accent and points his cigarette case at Frank. “In Persia, he would be dead.”
“Yeah, like you Islamics ain’t fucking nuts?” Frank says. He stands and lopes toward the case of beer. “Terrorists blowing up shit, torture and shit,” he says. He draws a can of beer from the cardboard box, flipping the aluminum container in the air and catching it just before it hits the floor. “President George fucken kick ass Bush, president of the United fucken States of America hammered your sorry asses and he’ll do it again if he has to.”
“Shut up, Frank,” Gary says. He looks at his customer. Yakhlef has now drawn a cigarette from the silver case and is tapping the filter on his long thumbnail. He’s wearing a nice tweed sports jacket and he brushes some plaster dust from pressed his navy slacks. He flicks his Zippo and lights the cigarette. He shakes his head.
“You’re a lucky guy, Gary,” Yakhlef says, half smiling, now leaning on the unfinished door frame. Beyond, you can see the imported rugs covered with huge plastic dropcloths. The room looks more like a morgue than a rug store. “You’re lucky still to be working for me. You are two weeks behind since you started and now it’s down to the wire. Tomorrow is the downtown street fair and we are kicking off our annual Blowout. If it is not done, Gary, things will become very serious.” He now blows a stream of smoke from his lips. “Very serious, Gary.”
“We’ll finish tonight,” Gary says. “You’re gonna work too, right, Fortune Five Hundred? Time and a half, you know. I know you need it.”
Frank shuts his eyes and clenches his fist and presses his thin lips firmly together. “Fucking Islamic,” he mutters to you under his breath. His face is a plaster death mask. This job is just temporary, you remind yourself. Just, temporary, please God, just temporary. And, you remember the place where Frank lives. One day last week you picked him up on your way to work when his car wouldn’t start, a beat up Chevy Nova with only one seat remaining inside, the driver’s torn leather bucket seat. It was parked in front of a duplex with a dirt yard. Inside, there was a bong on a makeshift coffee table, a worn green sofa. His girlfriend’s two daughters were peering into the living room from behind the dirty white walls of the kitchenette. There was a poster of a long-haired barbarian and a big-breasted woman in a tight superhero outfit riding a saber-toothed tiger, chasing a dragon flying by the rings of Saturn in the background.
The rug merchant says, exhaling smoke as he speaks, “Finished, Gary. All the plastic gone and the scaffolding out of here. Finished. Done. Absolutely. By eight A.M.”
“Hey man, don’t worry. We’ve got it covered. A little more sanding of the sheetrock and we’ll spray it out like fucken madmen,” Gary says and looks at you. “Our felon here is gonna be masking ahead of us. And it’s gonna look great.”
You shake your head. You just want to get home, send out more resumes, but twenty-five an hour would help with the insurance.
“Gary, don’t forget that you have promised that you will re-paint the ceiling in the main gallery,” Yakhlef says.
“The white is fine. Jesus. In fact, I think it looks fucking great. You wanted it white, we painted it white and it has a fresh coat of white just like I said I’d do. We gotta finish the rest of this place.”
“The ceiling looks horrid,” the Yakhlef says. “The white does not work. You should have known the pipes and cracks would show up more. It doesn’t make the place seem lighter; it makes the place look like shit, Gary. This has to look good. We sell valuable rugs here.”
“Two coats. White. You agreed. It’s done.”
“You have agreed already to repaint it black, Gary. Look at it, Gary.” Gary stands and goes around the rug merchant. He passes through the doorway into the showroom gallery, swaggering with a hitch in his right knee, like he always does when he walks. The owner follows him, and you and Frank follow along. Gary looks up at the ceiling and walks around the space, going between the stacks of the visqueen covered rugs, a labyrinth of small aisles.
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“I said I’d do it, if , if, I could fit it in. I said I might do you a favor,” Gary says. “If there was time.” He casually sips his beer. He has nerve. You can say that much. You’d try to please the customer at any cost if it were your business, especially when the job looks as bad as this one. Now that the ceiling is white in this old warehouse building, your eye is automatically drawn to the high ceiling, and you can’t help but notice the disturbing, dandruffy shadows of flaking layers of paint, at least fifty years of stratified sediment that Frank half-hearted scraped. Flat black would have made it all invisible, unobtrusive, even stylish, if they’d taken the time to roll it in.
“Okay. How much, Gary? A black ceiling?” Yakhlef asks and shuffles expensive eel skin shoes over plastic covered cement floor. “Just to get it done all done by tomorrow.”
“Another two grand,” Gary says, standing with his thumb in his belt loops, head thrown back, still eyeballing the mess he knows he has made, the bad advice he’s given.
“You’re joking,” the Iranian says. “Two grand? You could hang ceiling tiles for two grand.”
“Fucking A,” Frank pipes in. “Let’s fucking pack up.”
Gary eyes the merchant. “I’m gonna eat it. What about seven hundred? That’s just barely covering the cost of the paint, though.”
The merchant laughs and tosses his cigarette butt on the floor of the aisle and grinds it with the toe of his shoe, twisting the plastic covering. “Listen Gary, I have a special carpet for you.” The merchant says. “A thousand dollar rug. Gorgeous. We can trade. I’ll give it to you if you just paint the ceiling black tonight. Tonight, Gary.”
“What am I going to do with a rug?” Gary laughs.
“Let me show you.” Yakhlef waves Gary to follow him over to a back corner of the showroom. Gary finishes his beer. “I need your help, guys,” the merchant says to you and Frank.
He directs you and Frank to carefully peel back the thin plastic drop cloth covering a stack of rugs. “It’s like you’re unveiling some fucken treasure in Timbuktu,” Frank whispers, his breath smoky.
As you pull the dropcloth back, plaster and paint dust rises like pond fog. Yakhlef then orders you and Frank to lift rug after rug off the pile. When you come to a thick rug, a black one with intricate geometric designs, the Iranian pauses for a moment and then regards Gary. Even amidst the smell of construction, the room suddenly seems to smell of Middle Eastern coffee and black tobacco. “It’s yours for a black ceiling.”
Gary crosses his arms and looks at the rug. He closes one eye and nods his head. He furrows his eyebrows and brings his finger to his lips after shaking his bangs away from his eyes. Then he moves closer and feels the pile.
“It’s a weird fucker. No wonder you haven’t sold it.” Gary bends back the corner of the rug. He rubs his hands over the dense wool. “It seems pretty fucken well made.”
“The best quality in the world. But I have not wanted to sell this rug. You don’t sell a rug like this.”
“So why in the hell would I want it?”
“Women, Gary. Women like this carpet. It shows impeccable taste. They melt on it. “
Gary laughs. “Women! Ha. I’m done with women.”
“A fucken magic carpet,” Frank says and hoots at Gary. “Fly it over to Sally Rippy’s, Aladdin. Sweep her off her feet.” He starts singing and air guitaring, “Close your eyes, girl. Look inside, girl…Why don’t you come with me…on a magic carpet ride.” He grins.
“Gary,” the Iranian says, exhaling a drag of another cigarette. He rubs his forehead. “Please shut him up. My brain is about to burst.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Gary says and shakes his head. He looks at his watch. “Jesus fucken Christ. I can’t believe this shit.” He looks at you. He says to you. “We should’ve sprayed it black. Home Depot is still open, I guess, but paint’s more expensive there.”
Yakhlef motions you and Frank to cover the rugs. “It’s yours if everything is absolutely done tonight.” He pulls his key ring from his pocket and spins it on his forefinger. “It is a holiday for us today. My wife has been cooking all day. I must go.”
The rug merchant walks briskly to his desk, picks up his briefcase, and walks through the front entrance to his Mercedes parked in front of the glass storefront.
Gary shakes his head, rolls his eyes and scratches his head. He looks at you. “You can work late tonight, right?”
(to be continued)
My audio interpretation and reading of “Viewfinder” by Raymond Carver (about 6.5 minutes).
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(This short story is rated R)
Pressure
“It’s like this, Five Hundred. You’re approaching one hundred eight miles per hour, maybe one o nine. You’re on these long fucken boards. And they’re wobbling all over the place totally out of control, and then finally they smooth out at about one fucken twelve when you get off the ground, and suddenly everything is velvety and you’re riding cushion of air, like snarly lotion, man,” Gary Stafford, your new boss says.
He’s crouching low, bending over, arms extended as if he is in his downhill racer’s tuck, one hand holding a can of beer. His skin is ruddy, freckled and prematurely wrinkled from many years of sun and wind of skiing. Otherwise, he looks angular, almost teenage from certain angles with sharp, lean features.
You can’t believe you’ve had to take this job. You’re a victim of corporate downsizing at Digital Communications and there isn’t a damned job around in telecommunications, even as a code monkey. They’re outsourcing those to Indians and Pakistanis now, and your buddies who are still “lucky” to be working at Digital Communications complain about the sixty to seventy-hour weeks they have to work since everyone is gone now. DC is getting good press these days because of it’s increased productivity, emerging strongly from the recession.
Screw “increased productivity,” you think, it’s a euphemism for working your employees to the bone. You’ve got bills to pay. The pressure is on to bring home the bacon for your beautiful little girl who is epileptic and needs expensive meds. Your wife is working a few hours at a fabric store, but it hardly makes sense when childcare costs more than she brings in. She’s frayed with everything so uncertain. The COBRA health insurance is expensive as hell and it’s going to run out in three months, now that you’ve been looking for a real job for fifteen months. Maybe Obamacare will help if the idiots who want to take it away get their way. And it would be really nice if you could keep the Beemer, but those payments are eating into the food budget big time now, and if something doesn’t break soon, you’re going to have to just give in.
Gary takes a deep breath. He takes a big swig of beer now that it’s five o’clock. He sits down on one of the five large, unopened containers of white latex paint near the open service door of Persian Rug Emporium, not far from Waweeta Street in the upscale warehouse district downtown.
“So fucken what,” Frank says. He is Gary’s senior employee, with him now for two months. He has been sanding drywall seams in the north gallery addition, which the “Persian” owner has hired this Gary dude to paint. “It don’t mean you actually flew. And even if you did, what the fuck makes you crazy enuf to waste your fucken time and fucken money chasing nothing but your own big fucken assed ego?” Frank grins crookedly and winks at you. He needles Gary all the time. He peels a banana left over from lunch. He’s wearing an Iron Maiden tee shirt and he’s powdery white, head to toe, as if a sack of flour has fallen on him, a ghost revealed. He has been recently released from the county jail—some ninety days ago. He has also spent four years in the State Penitentiary.
“Because, Frank, you want to make it to at least one hundred and forty-three miles per hour, asshole. At least!” Gary says through his teeth. “And because, this fucken arrogant old fucker, Claude Zufferey, this forty-five year old surgeon from Switzerland, set the speed record at one forty two point five in fucken Chile last year and broke my fucken record, and I got to take it back. And two, because the sissies on the fucken prissy Olympic Downhill squad pee their pants thinking of that kind of speed, so fuck them for cutting me. And, C, because of the hill, Jesus, it’s a fucken thing of beauty down by Silverton. A perfect parabolic surface. Velocity Peak. Way above tree line. Speed skiing, man. Because it’s speed skiing…in which you fly.”
“Because it’s speed skiing,” Frank says in a mocking falsetto voice. “In which you fly.” He grins his crooked grin again and flaps his arms. He circles Gary once like a buzzard, which he looks remarkably like. Then he swoops around the case of beer and snags his third. He shakes it hard and pops the top, aiming it out the service doors and sprays a thick stream of beer into the alley. He shakes off the foam, gulps the rest down and tosses the can toward the dumpsters by the back of the building. “Are we having fun yet?” he yells.
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“Fuck you, Frank,” Gary says. He shakes his head. Then he turns back you like you understand. He likes you because you’re intelligent and educated. “So like it’s hard to describe, Five Hundred. It’s like, like everything is metallic blue as you drop. You got your speed suit on, stuffed in it. You’re a fat lady in pantyhose. The air pressure is unbelievable, clamping down on your face like this big fucking vice, and you’re just barely holding on.” Gary says. He’s jittery now. All stirred up. “You’re shoving your chin into your knees to reduce the pressure any way you can, just going after speed, but your muscles feel like they’re piano wire and you’re constantly thinking that you’re going to smear down the track, micro-sliced by the corn.” Gary says as he barely sits on the paint container. He bends over again, puts the beer on the concrete floor and assumes the tuck position again:
“And you think smaller. You want to disappear. You start seeing things like, like numbers from the table of periodic elements appearing, just materializing out of nowhere, like dragonflies on some highway in Texas—at sunset—coming at your windshield. But they’re not dragonflies and you’re not in a car. You’re just flying, centimeters off the snow. The track is glaring in bright sun, and you want to become like a hydrogen electron, cruising light speed down the face of your orbit, like a satellite ripping a red seam across the evening sky,” Gary says. He’s shaking now, like a little electrical current is running over his skin. He sits straight up on the five gallon paint container, bouncing his knees. He reaches in his pants pocket and pulls out a Tic Tac box with a torn label and pops one in his mouth. Frank says, “Hey, give me one a them too, Speedy.”
Gary he shakes his head and flips him off. He looks at the ground and says after a long pause, “And then, and then when you hit the speed trap at one forty, you’re seeing your fucken old lady, Ms. Sally Rippy, the Sally Rippy of the Revlon shampoo commercials who won bronze in the bumps two years ago, the bitch who you were really skiing for the last three seasons, and she’s in bed with Paul Parker, rich daddy’s boy FIS silver medalist, that goddamned sonofabitch. He pauses and quickly shakes this out of his mind. He blinks several times and he’s pumping his legs nervously again.
“But then you realize you’re on the fucken hill and you’re a fucken scream half way out your throat. You’re a bullet with gunpowder packed up your ass with the hammer coming down.” He starts to laugh. Hysterically. “You’re a trouthead, with fins on your calves, shooting down the falls,” Gary Stafford says. He leans back like an outlaw and chugs the rest of his beer. “Fuck you, Paul Parker!”
He throws the can across the long, dark cement expanse of the receiving area of the Persian Rug Emporium, over the fork lift, past the huge bay doors that are open to the warm summer air, and the beer can crashes perfectly into one of the fifty-five gallon barrels that serve as trash containers.
This guy interviewed you in a tiny studio apartment on the north side of town, this guy who likes to push limits. He has a lot of energy and a certain charm. He actually has accomplished something, a member of the Olympic team, it seems, if he’s telling the truth.
On the morning you “interviewed” for the “position” that you saw on Craig’s List, there was a gleaming candy apple red Chevy Impala on tiny tires parked on the street outside his apartment complex, with tuck and rolled white vinyl seats and a blue fuzz dash. There were a couple big trucks with Mexican plates and fringe hanging in the windshield. Finally, you saw a little white Ford truck with a magnetic sign of his painting company stuck cockeyed on the door, SpeedPainting.
(To Be Continued…)
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Kind Hearted
Bailey’s mother had been gone again for five days. Her name was Luna Bianca, and like the moon, she lived the nightlife, going out to bars, or wherever, staying out for days on end. He never knew where she was or what she did or when she would call.
He lived with his Aunt Lily who was older and kept to herself, reading in her room. She kept the apartment clean and made sure he had clean clothes, but she was a little difficult to talk with, and when she was not working at Johan’s fashion boutique, she was playing bridge or mahjong. Aunt Lily would never discuss his mother, or where she was. She just said, “She loves you. That’s all you need to know.”
He loved his mother with all his heart and worried for her, fretting and pacing as he made himself another package of macaroni and cheese for dinner. The middle of his back got to itching as it did when she was gone and he scratched it on the corner of the doorway into the kitchen. He fretted that she might never come back, that she would die in a car wreck, be kidnapped by some crazy, or actually climb a ladder to the moon and disappear forever as she once said she had been tempted to do.
His mother was so attentive and sweet when she finally wold return home. Her short-cropped hair, brunette and blond and black, with maroon highlights, like a crazy calico cat, would be all wild. Sometimes she smelled of cigarette smoke. Sometimes she smelled of woodsmoke. And sometimes she smelled of fresh air, like cotton. Sometimes she smelled of exotic spices or perfume and she would stroke his blond hair and rub his strong, large forearms, curious about his teachers and his school assignments.
They would talk late into the night at the wooden table in the kitchen overlooking the alley. He told her about school and his dreams, which she would analyze. She always found a way to make his nightmares about her disappearing better, pointing out the positive meanings of his nightlife, that the dreams were multiple reflections of his psyche as he continued to grow into a fine young man who was in charge of his own life. This always made him feel better and proud for dreaming so creatively, instead of so psychotically as he often feared.
She laughed riotously as she told him fabulously detailed stories of places she might have been on her latest outing, and though he could never get a straight story from her, he was so happy to see her that he forgot his torment and fretting. Someday, she explained with a broad smile, she would reveal where she would disappear to, but it was not time yet, and she drifted off to another topic such as the secrets of the quantum physics of love. She would explain how he could create a prom date with the popular high school beauty, Jessica Livingston by just imagining her saying yes. Bailey told her that he couldn’t imagine himself actually asking her out because she was too beautiful. Luna hunched her shoulders and said, “Don’t limit yourself, Bailey, my beautiful, kind-hearted and too shy boy,” she said getting up to warm up a can of Spaghetti O’s.
In their small apartment, Bailey now sorted through a peach crate filled with his mother’s old cassette tapes. He had homework to do for his advanced writing class at high school– a short autobiographical sketch.
He flipped through the cassettes, clicking through them one by one for inspiration – Aretha Franklin, Janet Jackson. He stopped at Run DMC. It was her first cassette, bought when she was eleven, only four years before she delivered him into the world like a magical mackerel, slick, shimmering and glistening.
He had grown into a towering, stocky, freckled-faced young man. He had no idea who his father was, but she described him as a big-boned Swede, a pensive Viking, who was a foreign exchange student for one semester at the university where she would go to listen to classes that she sneaked into.
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Bailey was thinking of writing his essay about that lonely night when he emerged in his unbroken birthsack – “You are a special, spiritual boy, so kind-hearted,” she always said. According to one of the hundreds stories of his birth, this one told last year on Christmas eve: When her contractions began, she was sipping Bailey’s Irish Cream (that was how he got his name) at Mickey’s tavern. The bartender allowed her to sneak in because she looked and acted old enough. The bartender’s girlfriend who was leaning back agianst the pool table, said, “You’re going to have a baby, girl!” She placed the cue stick in the rack and took her by the hand, driving her to St. Joseph’s Hospital in a Camaro that blew thick streams of oil smoke. He had no idea if the story was true. She had also told him he was born in a dirt floor cabin during a blizzard in Leadville, delivered by a Mexican mid-wife who had given her herbs that made the birth painless. She also said she delivered him at Smiley’s Laundromat in a basket of satin bedsheets. Always, in any story, she would say that he was born in his unbroken birthsack, so that much, he figured, was true.
Bessie Smith, Whitney Houston, Beyonce, Celone Dion. He pulled a cassette by Aretha from the crate and slid it into the boom box with his meaty fingers. He moved around the apartment, bobbing his head to the music. He looked at the alarm clock on his mother’s nightstand. He patted her bed and soft white bedspread that was always made neatly before she disappeared again, before he came home from school.
He looked at the perfume bottles aligned on her dresser. He looked at a photo of him and her at the aquarium where she took him every Sunday when he was younger. In the photo, he was two years old in a backpack with his chubby, smiling face peering around her shoulder, smiling through her hair that was long and black at the time. She was only seventeen, the same age as he was now.
He looked at her alarm clock. It was only five o’clock, and he thought he would take the bus to the aquarium to watch the fish. Maybe he would get inspiration for the essay there, he thought. He didn’t feel like writing anything. He was sure his mother would not show up that evening. He wanted to cry. He closed his eyes and moaned, “Mother, where are you?”
He grabbed his hooded sweatshirt. He only had a B+ in Mrs. McMillan’s writing class. She was tough and he was determined to write an essay that would finally impress her. It would somehow collapse upon itself when it ended. He loved the idea of self-referential writing, stumbling across old writers from the 60s in the library.
The baseball, basketball, and even the football coaches had encouraged him to go out for sports since he was a natural athlete with giant, powerful forearms, but he shook his head. He was determined to get into college with straight A’s, and to become a marine biologist, adventuring around the world, diving for big bucks. He had finally concluded that he was going to have to leave his mother. He was going to have to stop worrying about her. He put an MC Hammer tape in his pocket. He pulled the Aretha cassette from the boombox and put it in his pocket too. He didn’t have an iPod like everyone else, or even a CD player, only a cassette Walkman. He put on the headphones, grabbed his skateboard, and walked out the door and down the dim hallway to the elevator, thinking of how to do it.
At the aquarium, he stood in the great underwater gallery, gazing at the schools of fish. Small colorful fish flickered by. Jellyfish hovered like diaphanous parachutes. Stingrays flew past like great birds and he kept thinking of the stories of his birth, looking for the mackerels. The fish swirled like liquid diamonds to the music, now that he was high, and he could not imagine where his mother could possibly be and what her life was like.
He pulled out his spiral notebook and began scribbling, “His mother’s name was Luna, and like the moon, she lived the nightlife….” As he wrote, he became vaguely aware of a crying child.
He looked up and there was a little boy walking in circles, looking completely lost. Bailey folded his notebook and approached the boy, who looked up at him tentatively. The boy tugged at Bailey’s shirtsleeve, and whispered, “I don’t know where my mom is,” gulping air, trying to be brave. The boy looked toward the dark opening of the nocturnal fish exhibit and started to sob quietly and hopelessly, just shaking, holding it in, squeezing his eyes closed. Bailey swallowed. He knew what it was like to be away from your mother, the life-giver not to know where your lifeline is, your history.
“Hey, kid, I’ll help you find your mom.” The boy put out his hand and nodded. “Hold my hand.” He placed his headphones over the boy’s ears, Aretha booming it out. That’s how he got along, listening to her cassettes. He grinned looking at the boy smiling. He looked out the huge atrium window, as if he were one of the fish in the aquarium.
For a second, he thought he saw his own mother outside by the fountain. It was only for a second. She was walking arm-in-arm with a dashing man wearing a white fedora and using a walking cane…just another hallucination he had frequently. He shook his head, and gazed at the rising moon, wondering where his mother really was, holding the hand of a boy who, like him, didn’t know where is mother was, which is where he figured he would end his autobiographical sketch, the first chapter of his first novel, in third person, for Ms. McMillan.
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