Middle Men (19 page)

“You're a soft touch, Ringo,” said Bobby. “That's what Nora says whenever she loans me money. She says, ‘Lucky for you I'm a soft touch.'”

“My wife will be asleep,” Ringo said. “So we have to be quiet.”

They drove somewhere in the vicinity of Eddy and Divisadero and parked in the underground garage of a drab apartment building.

“What neighborhood is this?”

“I don't know. It's kind of a nonneighborhood. My wife calls it NoSo.”

“What's that?”

“North of South.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Fifteen years.”

When they entered his apartment, Ringo shushed him, and went down the hall to change out of his suit. The furniture looked dingy and secondhand, but the walls were resplendent with Beatles memorabilia. Ringo came back out in sweatpants and asked Bobby if he wanted some tea.

“Nora drinks tea,” said Bobby absently, and walked over to the small strip of linoleum that marked off the kitchen. “Let me see your hands. Hold them out like this.”

Ringo put out his hands and Bobby grabbed them. “Now, these are hands. This is what I'm talking about.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There's texture here. Strength. Is that from drumming?”

“And guitar. I can play anything, really.” Ringo dropped his head a little. “Jack of all, master of none. As they say.”

“You look like a master to me.”

Bobby grabbed his bag and handed Ringo the prototype. “This is the Man Handle. It gives your hands strength and texture.”

“I don't get it,” said Ringo.

“Right now it's just some pipe and grip tape. But when you're sitting around, doing nothing, you squeeze it and roll it in your hands. That's all. After a while you get calluses.”

Ringo started to roll it in his hands. “Okay. But I still don't get it.”

“We're going to market it toward managers and executives, so they don't feel bad when they shake hands with plumbers and other righteous members of the working class. It puts everybody on equal terms.”

“Why would they feel bad?”

“I don't know. It's psychological. Bankers want to be cowboys.”

The teapot whistled. Ringo made two cups and brought them over to the couch.

“It sounds dumb when I say it out loud,” said Bobby.

“I don't think it's any dumber than half the infomercials I see.”

“Thank you! The bigger the lie, right? Well, the dumber the idea, the more people will buy it. These are standard marketing concepts. What's your real name, anyway?”

“Alex. But my last name is actually Ringo.”

“Bullshit!”

“Shhhh.” Ringo showed him his driver's license. “You can't fight destiny.”

Bobby picked up his tea and looked around the room. “Nora missed out. She should be here. Do you think something happened to her?”

“Are you worried?”

Bobby stood up and started pacing back and forth behind the couch.

“She was a fuckup in high school. She went to junior college and now she's making six figures.” He sat down on the couch, and immediately got back up. “She hasn't been picking up her phone. I don't know if I should be worried. I think she's just mad at me. What part of town is this?”

“We can call the police,” said Ringo. “If that would make you feel better.”

Bobby sat back down. “No. I'm getting worked up over nothing. I had fun tonight. I've been talking and talking, but what about you? Are you good? Some of these guys Nora dates. They don't have any manners. They go on and on, and by the end of the night I know everything about them, and they don't know anything about me.” Bobby looked out the window. “What floor are we on?”

“Third floor.”

Ringo moved toward the hallway. He came back with a neatly folded blanket and placed it on the coffee table. “I'm going to bed. Will you be all right out here?”

“Don't go. There's probably something on TV.”

Ringo declined with a polite smile and moved into the hallway.

“Have you ever been in a fancy hotel lobby, with all the clocks set to different times around the world?”

Ringo didn't answer. There seemed to be some invisible force dragging him toward the shadows.

“All of us should hang out sometime,” Bobby called after him.

He watched
SportsCenter
for a while, on mute, and then brought a chair to the window. He stared at a streetlamp farther down the street. He stared too hard and it flickered. All the streetlamps flickered, one by one. Bobby wondered how many units were in the building. He closed his eyes, trying to hear how many. But the place was silent.

Ants were crawling on the tiles above the kitchen sink. He looked through the cabinets, but couldn't find any snacks. Then he was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, shaving, first his face, and then his head. In college, he used to shave his head before every swim meet. He ran the razor through sticky mounds of Barbasol, giving himself little nicks on the top of the skull. Halfway through, he stopped and looked at himself. He suddenly wished he hadn't told Ringo about the Man Handle. It seemed to break the spell. Tomorrow he'd be back in the sunny East Bay, without any ideas. He wiped his head off and walked down the hall to the bedroom.

The door opened with a squeak and there was Ringo,
sleeping alone on a futon mattress. He was on his side, with his back to the door and a sheet pulled tightly to his chin.

“I can't sleep,” said Bobby, walking into the room.

Ringo jerked awake. “What are you doing?”

“Scoot over, man,” said Bobby. “I can't sleep.”

Ringo tried to turn on a light, but Bobby jumped on the bed and knocked his hand away. Ringo rolled against the wall, with his back to Bobby. “Don't,” he said weakly, covering his head.

Bobby slid toward Ringo and put his arms around him, burying his face in the back of Ringo's neck. For a long time they didn't move.

“Let me turn on the light,” said Ringo finally, slinking down the bed. “Just for a second. Can I do that?”

“I can't sleep.”

“I have something you can take.”

“Don't go.”

“I won't,” he said, and the room filled with light.

•  •  •

Nora woke up right before her alarm went off. Halfway through her shower, she remembered that Dave was in the other room, sleeping peacefully on the couch. Only a few a hours ago he had announced, with a sense of triumph, that he couldn't go through with the act itself. Nora had shrugged and made coffee; then she listened to Dave talk about his family, the heartbreak and joy. “I'd be a fool to throw all that away,” he'd said. She was impressed. By some miracle he had transformed the most despicable moment of his life into an opportunity to celebrate his own virtue. Now he would return home a better and more loving husband. Nora had fulfilled her role in his personal quest, just not in the way she had imagined—this chaste and redemptive
version, somehow, was even more hollow—and he thanked her for understanding what he was going through. “I quit,” she'd said, and for a while he tried meekly to talk her out of it, strongly advising her to wait for the next restructuring, so she could collect severance. “But I'm not getting laid off,” she'd said, confused. “I thought I was moving to a liaison role with sales.” Dave admitted that he hadn't totally worked out the specifics on that.

Later, in bed, she thought of Bobby swimming the butterfly, the way his head would pop out of the water in perfect rhythms, and the way he would suck in the air, as if every breath was going to be his last.

It was a bright gray morning. Nora finished dressing and came out to the front room. Dave had already left. The down comforter she had given him was piled on the floor between the couch and coffee table. She folded it and left for work.

Jill was waiting for her when she got out of the elevator. She was her normal chipper self, having already forgotten the horrible way Nora had treated her yesterday. Nora found this deeply annoying; she had no patience for people who didn't hold grudges.

“Are you okay?”

“I'm hung over.”

“There's a funny-looking guy in your office.”

She recognized him from Beatles night at the pub. It was absurd seeing him now, in this context. He wore jeans and a ratty fleece, but the mop top remained, crowning his pudgy red face.

“I'm Alex,” he said. “Bobby's asleep at my place.”

Somehow this made total sense. He drove her to his apartment. The car's ashtray was overflowing and he used T-shirts for seat covers.

“He thinks the world of you,” he said.

“Why'd you take him back to your place?”

He looked at her as if he didn't quite understand the question. “He was stuck out here.”

Back at the apartment, Alex warned her that Bobby had tried to shave his head. “Wonderful,” she said. Alex made tea while Nora went to check on Bobby. When she sat at the edge of the bed, he looked at her with groggy eyes. He smiled and ran a finger along one his bald streaks.

“How do I look?”

“Come on,” she said. “I'll fix it.”

She brought him into the bathroom. He knelt in front of the sink, staring at himself, while she quietly shaved his head. He smelled like chlorine. When Nora finished, she sprayed a wad of cream into her hand and ran it through her hair.

“What are you doing?” said Bobby.

Nora didn't say anything. She just handed him the razor.

A
s a boy, Matt Costello often wondered what his dad did when he left the house in the morning. The old man was in sales, he knew that, and from the brochures and catalogues stacked in the garage, he knew it had something to do with toilets. This always seemed like a joke to Matt—toilets!—and he didn't understand why anyone would choose to go into this line of work. Years later, while half-assing his way through college and trying to decide what to do with his life, he finally asked his dad how he got into the plumbing industry. The old man, with his usual modesty and good humor, explained that when he returned from Vietnam in 1969, his only goal in life was to work someplace with air-conditioning. To that end he answered a classified and got hired to work the order desk at a toilet warehouse somewhere in the industrial corridors of South Los Angeles. This decision led to a lifelong career as a plumbing salesman, a twist of fate that seemed funny to Matt, or did for a while, anyway, as he wasted away his twenties bartending, coaching soccer at his old high school, and not quite finishing his university education.

Then his mom got sick. Matt quit all his jobs, moved home to Anaheim, and spent the next year helping to take care of her while she endured chemotherapy. Several of his closest friends had lost their moms to cancer, so he knew the drill. This happened to everybody sooner or later, and he marveled at the quiet and dignified way his friends had moved on with their lives. He looked forward to doing the same, earning his credentials as a stoic and joining their club, but when his mom died, he failed to live up to their example. His mom was a fierce, deadpan woman, and deeply practical. Before the cancer got to her brain, she carefully planned her own funeral. She wanted “On Eagle's Wings” for the recessional hymn and she dispatched her daughters to JCPenney's to pick out a dress for the coffin. “Nothing too fancy,” she said.

After she died, Matt, for his pain and loss, felt entitled to many rewards. He secretly anticipated, in no particular order, a moment of spiritual transcendence, the touch of a beautiful and understanding woman, and some kind of financial windfall. Instead, at thirty, he was broke and living at home. His sisters, the true stoics in the family, had both moved out and resumed their careers. The house was empty in the afternoons, so he sat by the pool and watched the water turn green. At night, when his dad went to bed, he'd load up on his mom's leftover Vicodin and watch
The Office
over and over. That bit in the Christmas special, when Tim says he'll get a drink with David Brent, crushed him every time.

Enough was enough. A month after the funeral, his dad talked to his boss, Jack Isahakian, of Ajax Plumbing Sales, and Jack offered Matt a job selling toilets. With no other prospects, he accepted. Now, a year later, deeply aware of his own vanity
and foolishness, he was sitting through another sales meeting at the Ajax warehouse in Compton.

•  •  •

Larry Rembert, the factory guy from Brentford, paced back and forth in the dusty light of the wood-paneled conference room. Ajax repped Brentford toilets throughout SoCal. It was one of their glamour lines. Larry, a short, paunchy black man in his fifties, finished his third can of Budweiser and held up the new Brentford catalogue. He turned to a picture of the new vitreous china siphon jet urinals.

“The flushing velocity on these things,” he said, “is fucking breathtaking.”

Matt noticed all the veteran outside salesmen taking notes. Realizing he didn't have a pen, he sank down in his seat. At the front of the room, his father, Marty Costello, the top outside salesman at Ajax, tapped his fingers on his knees, jonesing for a cigarette.

Larry assured Jack that the improved pricing and rebates would strengthen their position with commercial contractors. On the residential side, he hyped the Ultima 900, an elongated vacuum-assist two-piece with a newly designed anti-siphon ballcock, and apologized, once again, for the old ballcock, which was recalled this past spring, causing chaos for new-work plumbers throughout Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire.

Afterward, Larry repaired to the Panorama Lounge of the Holiday Inn in Long Beach, where, amid moody neon tube lights and smooth jazz renditions of contemporary pop hits, he bought drinks for all of Ajax's outside salesmen and for a group of aerospace engineers who had been laid off earlier in the
afternoon. He rehashed key points from his recent speech at the Association of Independent Manufacturers' spring conference in Reno, and spoke with conviction on a variety of topics. He had his doubts about the war in Iraq (“Rumsfeld's a fag”), he worried about the state of the NBA (“all these Serbian dudes look like vampires”), and he loved the new season of
24
(“a total mind-fuck”).