Waiting for the Man (12 page)

Walk This Way

Dan came out with more printed emails, more unopened letters, the next morning. He suggested a laptop for me again, and again I refused. “This is a dance you can’t win,” I said.

“You metaphor mingler,” he said. “You are a phenomenon.”

I protested meekly.

“A celebrity,” Sophie said.

“You realize this, right?” Dan said.

“What is there to realize?” I said.

“When you become a celebrity, not just a news item, not just someone famous, but a celebrity, you become a kind of pet,” Dan said. “Or, to put it in words you might understand, a brand. That’s what’s building here.”

Sophie stroked my hair. As if I were a puppy.

“The public starts to care for you in a significant way,” Dan said. “They project feelings and desires. And once someone invests feelings in you, you’ve passed from mere fame to celebrity.”

I had not dreamed of the Man during the night and this caused me an odd kind of worry.

“Look, we could go through all the letters and print the most interesting ones,” Dan said. “Publish them. That’s a book.
Letters to Joe
. Bang. No names, nothing, just the letters. A title that pulls at the heartstrings a bit. With something interactive on the web. Or a TV special where we read them to the camera. Get stars to read them. I’m just saying.” He shrugged and gave me a sympathetic look that I found discomforting. “It just seems easy right now,” he said. He returned into my apartment.

Sophie continued stroking my hair. I looked at her and smiled. “Do I look like a celebrity to you?” I asked.

“You’re cute today,” she said. “On TV, you don’t look so cute, but in real life, you have a nice smile. And soft hair.”

“Soft and greasy,” I said.

“You should take a shower,” she said.

I knew I should do a lot of things. I should just do what Dan says because there’s merit to it. I should control this story before I became an item in
US Weekly
, an obnoxious arrow pointing to my greasy hair. The text would read “Gross!!!!” I should go back to my office and beg for my job. I’ll start over, I’d tell them. At the bottom. I leaned my head on Sophie’s shoulder and closed my eyes. And the Man appeared on his horse, dressed liked a cowboy from the chorus line of
Oklahoma!
and said,
Go west. You know where to go
.

I opened my eyes and stood up. The cameras around me, the crowd, everything, fell silent. There was an air of expectation. As if everyone had heard what they were sure they could not hear. Life stopped. The world did not move. At that moment the city was as quiet as I’d ever heard it. The millions of cars and buses and subway cars and trains. The millions of people. Their cell phones. Everything appeared to stop. “What is it?” Sophie asked.

“I have to go,” I said.

And then the sound returned, the cacophony of daily life, of New York, that sound that makes up the city. The cameramen sensed something and starting working. There was a storm. It sounded like hail, like millions of balls of ice hitting the sidewalks. Dan ran out. “What’s this?” he asked. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I turned to him. “I think I have to go.” I looked down at Sophie and saw the concern on her face and the sadness and knew she would not be accompanying me. She wasn’t crazy enough. And at that moment, I might have loved her. “I have to go,” I told her.

She smiled. She stroked my leg. “I’m happy for you,” she said.

I stood up. I looked at Dan. “I’m going to take a shower,” I said.

And his face dropped. His wonder turned to concern. “You’re going inside?” he asked. “That’s the drama?”

I walked past him and into my apartment. For the first time since Dan had moved in I looked at it. I studied it. This place. These walls. This house. Mine. And now, it was a mess of cables. The junk that runs our world, the stuff we rely on to communicate. The couch had been moved closer to the TV. Dan had been sleeping on my couch. There was food on the coffee table, boxes of pizza and Chinese takeout. Dan had an open suitcase on the floor. The TV was turned on and on it a reporter I recognized from outside was delivering an account of the latest happenings. My latest happenings. She was trying to parse my words, what I might have meant by “I have to go,” whether this meant a break or something more permanent.

“It’s not like you haven’t seen the place,” Dan said.

I had once slept in here. This had once been my home.

Sophie stepped inside. “I want to take a shower, too,” she said.

I turned to her.

“After you,” she said.

And I deflated. And felt oddly comforted knowing she didn’t want to have sex with me, or wouldn’t, or possibly hadn’t even considered it.

“I have to go,” I repeated. Outside, the murmur was like the whistling of leaves in the wind. “Where the fuck am I supposed to go?” I asked.

OUTSIDERS

The fancy dude ranch. It makes perfect sense to me. People need to feel that what they’re doing is more exciting or exotic or dangerous or interesting than it really is so they can go home after a week here and say they went to a dude ranch in northern Montana. What they really should say is they went to a spa in northern Montana. Instead of busting broncos, they busted their guts on T-bone. They spent days in the whirlpool or experiencing the joy of shiatsu. They lounged around in the library drinking martinis. They watched movies in a theater sitting on fat couches covered in buttery leather. And sometimes, when they felt they really should see some of the countryside, they got on the horses. Or they went for a hike.

Which is what some of them are doing today. This takes me out of the kitchen on my days off sometimes. It allows me to see the area without much effort and planning. I’m driven to a ridge a half-mile up the mountains where I prepare a picnic lunch for the hikers before they arrive. Rare roast beef sandwiches served with stone ground mustard and wilted greens. Grilled vegetables. Polenta cakes smothered in creamed porcini mushrooms. An Oregon pinot noir, a cab from California, a Washington shiraz. All laid out on herringbone-patterned linens created by a small outfit in Idaho and served on designer china. This is the language this place speaks, the currency of its sale. The reward. Everything here is about the reward, the promise that effort brings.

Before the hikers arrive, I stumble up some rocks and sit on a perch overlooking the valley. I take out a cigarette and light it and spot the hikers edging their way up the gentle switchbacks that will lead them to their picnic. The size of the ranch is a constant surprise. It’s a small country. And the ranch is just a small piece of what I can see. This place does a good job of making you feel like nothing. Down on the plains, the size you feel is dependent on your mood. The color of the sky. In the mountains, the only grandeur is the rocks. Not you. Never.

And here it is easy, perhaps, to acknowledge a collective failure of the human spirit to be soothed by this. People like John Muir shouldn’t be exceptions. No one should have fought Teddy Roosevelt as he established the idea of the national park. We should not need to experience a feeling to know it is true. Too many of us are so far removed from the natural world that it has lost its reality. Its meaning. The natural world risks becoming a figment of the imagination, a good idea, maybe, but scary, too, a repository of old stories. Nightmares.

I suffered from those feelings, too. And it will never happen again.

A gust of wind blows the faint laughter of the hikers my way. One of them is singing. I see a group for a second before they switchback and are again hidden by the side of the mountain. I don’t know if the guests who come here are happy in general but most of them seem to let loose at the ranch. It’s hard to stay uptight in this place. This landscape touches something very basic in people. It should. The serenity is a given. It’s obvious.

People come here to relax. If they can’t, the vacation has failed. It has served no purpose. It is the kind of failure that humbles and humiliates. The people who come here are not good at failure. Or at admitting to it. Failure is for sessions with the therapist. A secret. The awful shadow behind the sunshine of their smiles.

Six hikers reach the picnic spot, out of breath, exhilarated. They look over the valley and stare at the vista. They break out the cameras and snap photos. Video cameras scan the endlessness of it. They nestle up to the food and eat it and salute their achievement. They suck back the wine. I spend the next hour filling wine glasses, dishing out more polenta, more sandwiches. And then I call out, “I have one more thing to show you,” and I take them to the Perch, a spot where the vista is especially fine, poetic even, and I’m asked to take photos. And then it’s done. The food is gone and the hikers get themselves ready for the return and are gone. We load up the garbage and the dishes and the linens into the jeeps and drive back to the ranch. By the time I’m back in the trailer, the sun is low over the mountains, the day complete. I can open a beer and look at the sky. And fall asleep trying to count the stars and not feel overwhelmed by the sensation of unknowability. It’s not in our nature not to know. It’s what drives us. There’s nothing left to discover. What drives us now?

Storm Before the Calm

And I took a shower. I stepped into the tub and unleashed the water and let it drown me. I stood in the current and closed my eyes and let the world vanish. It left me. The days and nights and weeks went down the drain. And I scrubbed myself with a bar of soap. I used up what was left of the soap and then I shampooed and rinsed and shampooed again. I rubbed the shampoo all over me. Into my armpits. And then I shampooed my head again. I turned the cold water low and lost myself in the warmth of what was around me. In the steam.

I turned the shower off. “I can hardly see you.” It was Sophie. She was somewhere in the steam. I opened the curtains and I could barely make her out. She hovered, somewhere in the small room and I forgot about my nudity. My state seemed relative then; I had been naked before the world for so long already.

And I noticed she was naked. “I hope you didn’t steal all the hot water,” she said. And she stepped by me and into the tub.

“Should I stay?” I asked.

She laughed. So I stepped out.

“I’ll find you a clean towel,” I offered.

“Dan gave me one,” she said and she turned the water on and closed the curtain.

I dried off and went to my bedroom. Dan had not touched it. Some part of him respected me enough to stay out of my bedroom and I found that odd. I toweled off, put on fresh underwear, a pair of jeans, a white T-shirt. My clothes still fit, the physics of the wait more meta than actual. I thought for a moment of making my bed, disheveled all this time, and so I did. I made my bed. I straightened the sheets and punched the pillows and all the while questioned why I was doing it. The Man sat in the corner of my room, a huge smile on his face.

Sophie walked into my room and toweled off and got into her clothes. She was extraordinary. “Why?” I asked.

“What are you talking about?” she said, smelling her bra and making a face.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t even know what I had wanted to ask. Perhaps everything. I left the room and stepped back outside, to a storm of lights and questions.

The news of my latest revelation spread through the media and then out to the world. In the following twenty-four hours, I was asked repeatedly about my destination, which I didn’t know, and about what I expected to find once I got there, which was even more impossible to know, and how I would get there, which was the point at which the interviews became either redundant or funny, depending on one’s point of view. I saw massive redundancy, Sophie saw great humor, and Dan saw a logistical nightmare.

The news was big. I understood this. And people needed to make sense of it. I didn’t understand that part. Dan had not planned for this, of course. So he saw in my pronouncement an attempt to get out from under his yoke. As long as I remained on the steps, he could stage-manage things. My announcement made the situation more serious. It broadened the scope of the story. The inclusion of travel made his role, for the first time, potentially untenable.

I tried to make him understand the transcendent nature of the Man, something that seemed silly at this point. Like trying to teach a newborn the meaning of life.

“You need a car,” Sophie said, perhaps the most logical thing anyone pointed out during this time. And this was true. Transport. I was headed west. Meaning what? New Jersey? Or California? I had no idea. Dan put out a press release and that evening a Honda dealer from Long Island announced that he was prepared to let me use a minivan as long as he could be the official sponsor.

“The official sponsor of what?” I asked Dan. “You say you’re an official sponsor it has to be of something.”

“Of this,” Dan said, his arms sweeping across the circus before us.

“But I won’t be here,” I said. “I’ll be driving. And I don’t know where I’m going. So he’s sponsoring what exactly?”

“You, I guess,” Dan said. “Your adventure.”

The Honda dealer was a short, spindly legged man with a thick head of white hair. He was obviously proud of this decision. He said with car sales the way they were, this was a great opportunity. For him and for Honda. He had no idea what to call his proposal either. “You’re in advertising,” he said. “Come up with something.”

The calzone and pizza were mere prelude to the commerce my antics would generate. After all, the corner store had become my official supplier of Coke. A café supplied my coffee. A linen store in Soho had supplied me with blankets and pillows. I was media in and of itself. Even though I didn’t say or do anything. And so having this short successful man standing before me, offering a minivan, a Honda Odyssey to be exact, comforted me in a way, because it made more sense than anything else that had happened. The logic was consistent with the factory of inanity my life had become. I was producing another reality now. There was a symmetry to the situation, I felt this, even though I couldn’t understand it. Or perhaps I didn’t want to. “I want a red vehicle,” I told the dealer.

“I can arrange that,” he said.

“I don’t want rental colors. Green. White. Fuchsia. I don’t want to be a sitting duck in Buttfuck, Ohio, in an obvious rental.” I could imagine myself on the wrong side of the tracks in a small Rust Belt town, as a band of bored teenagers decide to rough up the deluded out-of-towner.

“So you’re going to Ohio?” Dan asked.

“I’m going to be adamant about the red,” I told the Honda dealer.

“I understand,” he said. “I’m familiar with the color.”

“A good red,” I said. “Not feminine.”

“Depends on the tone,” he said. “Red can be virile. Like a punchy Italian wine.”

“I guess I can’t be choosy,” I said. “You have me in a minivan.”

“You’ve made a request. I can fulfill it,” he said. “And you need a minivan. You need size. Who knows how long you’ll be on the road? You’ll need to pack. You’ll need space. I’ll make a call. We have good inventory right now. A macho red.”

“How does this play in the media?” Dan wondered out loud.

“In Peoria?” I asked.

“Will you be driving though Peoria?” Dan said.

“I don’t know where this is taking me,” I said. Again. “I feel like a broken record saying this.”

“And I would want to indicate my sponsorship on the side of the Odyssey,” the Honda dealer said.

Sophie laughed.

“What would it say?” I asked.

“You think of anything yet?” he asked. “Official Sponsor of Joe Fields,” he said slowly, conjuring. He smiled half-heartedly. It sounded idiotic to him as well.

Sophie’s laughter had become a sustained giggle.

The Man was back inside of me now. And he was laughing, too.

“You’re not really sponsoring me,” I said. “If anything you’re sponsoring the trip. You’re providing the vehicle that makes it possible.”

The Honda dealer scratched the white mane of hair that perfectly rounded the top of his round head. “How about just Official Sponsor, with my name and logo and the such,” he suggested. “We’ll keep it simple.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Dan said.

“It would be something,” the dealer said. “I would be the official sponsor of something and that would be enough for me.”

“Plus, it’s an Odyssey,” Dan said. “It writes itself.”

“What a great way to get a car,” Sophie said.

“It’s a minivan,” I said.

The dealer turned around and faced the masses. He raised his arm to ask for silence. Incredibly, he got it. The buzz quieted to a low hum. “Joe Fields, as you all know, has announced his intentions of driving west. And he will do so in a Honda Odyssey supplied by Rolston Honda of Uniondale, Long Island!”

The media descended upon him and he was lost inside a cluster of microphones. “What’s the level of whelmed below underwhelmed?” I asked no one in particular.

Dan leaned over. “I’ll make sure everything’s done properly,” he said ominously.

“This is all very tacky,” I said.

“It’s interesting,” he said.

“There’s a gulf between interesting and tacky,” I said. “An ocean.”

“I don’t know that anyone makes that comparison,” Dan said.

“I know what you mean,” Sophie said.

“There’s an odd classlessness to this,” I said.

“Said the adman,” Dan said.

And I shut up. And I understood finally what my father had called America’s odd lack of shame. He claimed that the lack of order and dignity would one day be the county’s undoing. The singular lack of shame kept breaking down barriers and soon there would be nothing worth breaking down anymore. I remember this conversation. I was being scolded for spitting on the sidewalk. I can see him in the silly purple sweatshirt that he’d purchased at a souvenir stand in Pompano Beach. I had always thought him wrong. American’s strength was its shamelessness. Because this shamelessness was just another side of fearlessness. It’s what the rest of the world doesn’t understand.

The Japanese version of shamelessness had everything to do with humiliation, with the order of their society, its endless way of rendering one small. America’s shamelessness was different. Yes, we don’t care. It’s too bad, but in the end, it’s true. We don’t care. And this allowed us the freedom to innovate, to aspire, to lead the world without fear of failure. He kept on about how this singular shamelessness allowed people to believe they could purchase class and that the worst type of person was the shameless who comes into money. Every time television hit a new low, he called me up to rejoice in his supposed triumph. I thought of this then, because this carnival was my doing. All of it. I may have felt powerless to stop it but I did possess that power. At some point. The fact that the tackiness of my situation was self-inflicted hit me with the force of a truck. Or a Honda Odyssey. And I was annoyed by a growing sense of something approaching self-importance.

I turned to Sophie. She was looking at me intently, studying me, thinking. I could see what was going on inside her head. Sophie was the kind of person whose face was simply a window into the mysteries of her being. And suddenly, I felt alone again. “Why aren’t you coming?” I asked.

“I can’t,” she said, slowly shaking her head.

“You should,” I said.

“I can’t,” she repeated. “I should go home. I’ve stayed longer than I thought I would.” She kissed my cheek. “I’ll stay here until you leave.”

Through Dan I granted two interviews to the television people. To NBC because I felt sorry for the entire network. Because I used to like them and then they lost their way and then they lost it some more. And to PBS just to please my father. We did the interviews in my apartment. To both interviewers I repeated the fact that I had no idea how this would end up, how long it would take, where I was going, or that I would even recognize my destination once I’d reached it. And during the interviews the Man was inside of me, laughing. He couldn’t stop laughing.

Later that night, sitting on the steps, Sophie leaned over and said, “I know you’ll make it.”

“Make it to what?” I asked.

“To something,” she said.

Sophie had been doing interviews herself. A large contingent of media had come down from Canada. “I’ve been booked on some talk shows back home,” she told me. “Maybe I can stop selling perfume.”

I was glad that some good had come out of this. At least Sophie saw a brighter day. “You should go then,” I told her. “Return to Montreal and become a local celebrity.”

She held my hand.

Dan sat beside me. “I have to make arrangements.”

“I don’t doubt it,” I said.

“You’ve thrown me a bit of a curve,” he said.

“I’m here thinking about throwing you curves,” I said.

“Don’t get sarcastic,” he replied.

His cell phone rang and he stood up and walked inside.

“You’re angry,” Sophie said, releasing my hand. She began stroking my back.

“I’m not angry,” I said. I wasn’t. I was annoyed and tired and fed up but I was not angry. Any anger I might have had was washed away in the shower.

“You’re what then?” she asked. “I don’t know the word in English. You don’t know what foot you’re dancing on. It’s cute.”

“I’m not cute,” I said, like a fifth-grade boy trying to be a man.

“Disoriented,” she said. “Is that a word?”

I sighed. I felt as if the world, or at least the picture I had of it, was melting. I felt that all the mysteries of life that had shot by me for so many years were crashing down suddenly, like a box of ball bearings released. I felt like letting the wind pick me up and drop me far away, to an island somewhere far removed from this city, another island, uninhabited. I closed my eyes and saw myself alone. I saw myself on this street, alone. And then I knew this was impossible. I faced a future where I could never be alone again. “Is there some place where they don’t have television?” I asked.

“I once read that the Chinese don’t allow television in parts of Tibet,” she said.

“Television-free Tibet.” I sighed.

Sophie reached for a slice of pizza. “I’m so tired of this stupid pizza,” she said, picking a piece of pepperoni off her wedge. “When I go home, I’m eating a nice salad; I’ll have some wine. Read. I like reading; did you know that?” she asked. “I’m going to light some scented candles and lie in my bathtub and read a good book.”

This was an image I wished I could hold on to. Something that might keep me going. “Don’t drown,” I said. I felt as if I were speaking from authority on that at least.