Waiting for the Man (4 page)

Oh Mr. Postman

And then a few days later, a sad, tired-looking guy with droopy eyes from one of the papers came and sat next to me and started asking questions. He carried a pen and notepad, which I found quaint. He also had a laptop, a digital recorder, and a leather pencil case, all in a cheap nylon backpack. His hair was short, the sides speckled with gray. He was from the
Post
, which didn’t seem surprising. His name was Dan Fontana, the name of some eponymous character from an old cop show, I thought. But he was media. And I was wary. “How’d you find out about me?” I asked.

Before she’d stopped talking to me, Angie had predicted I would become a celebrity if I kept the wait up and now here was someone from the media, ready to write my story, the first act in the making of celebrity. The
Post
is as good and legitimate a place as any to start this kind of ascent. I knew how this worked. A newspaper story. A blog. Something shared on social media. A few links. Another newspaper. The battle between old and new media. I looked at Dan looking old, a representative of the dying breaths of an industry, perhaps, and I saw the future.

“My brother told me about you,” he said. “He owns the pizza shop on the corner.”

I had been sending the kids to the corner to buy me slices when the Tupperware mothers were not forthcoming with tastier fare. So at least once a day the kids were buying me slices, and the pizza man had tipped off Dan. That the pizza man’s brother was a reporter for the
Post
was beyond humor. The pizza was bad. Just another block away, the pies were made with love. But it was too far for the kids. Because kids are lazy. And to them there is no such thing as bad pizza.

Dan looked like a reporter; his suit was rumpled and creased and pinched at the shoulders. His tie was crooked, as if he’d just taken it out of his pocket and rushed to put it on because of some old-fashioned sense of what looked professional. His shirt wore the morning’s coffee. His shoes, however, were spotless. Brown brogues. With an elegant heel and toes that just stopped short of pointy. He was a shoe man. The spotless shoes spoke of a culture behind the facade of the rumpled suit. And of someone not necessarily in the
Post
’s target demographic. Of cultivation. A desire. I understood desire. As any woman will admit, you can tell a lot about a guy by the state of his shoes. Dan’s life suddenly interested me. “I’m curious,” I said. “I’m curious how it is that you became a journalist and your brother became a pizza man.”

Asking reporters personal questions renders their lives strangely meaningless. I’ve always felt this. Once, when I was a kid, I ran after a mailman and asked him for a stamp. And then laughed. And the face he made was what I was seeing now. Dan’s face turned sour. Whether or not he was interested in me then, I don’t know. I think I threw his world off balance. Just by asking a question. “How do you mean?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Your brother bought that place, what, seven years ago?”

“He bought it from our uncle,” Dan said and I immediately knew that he meant Sal, the man who could make a decent calzone, unlike his nephew, Dan’s brother, who put shit for all anyone knew into his calzones. Students bought his calzones. Crackheads when we had them. You drink seven beers and his calzones start to taste decent. Tourists who think everything they eat in New York is superior to what they can get back home order his calzones. I can imagine some out-of-date guidebook wrote them up. There was a time when the eating options in this neighborhood weren’t so varied. That’s not true anymore. The only culinary limitations now are those imposed by your wallet. The neighborhood has seen glass boxes come. There are now fake speakeasies hosting theme nights centered around, say, flavored gin. There’s a hotel down the street and it attracts a lot of Brits with messy hair and Germans in linen suits. This neighborhood got built up and people could keep wearing their aviator sunglasses because they were suddenly cool. Dan’s brother was a reminder of what the neighborhood used to be, of the fabric stores and machine parts wholesalers and greeting card shops. Dusty places that had endured and sold goods and services to a local clientele. I could remember rusted out cars here, not so much parked as dumped, used as hiding spots for paper thin guys, feral and wired, selling low-grade dope. That’s the feeling you get eating that pizza. I don’t miss the grit of the old neighborhood. I like the fact that leggy blond models from Brazil are eating sushi a block away.

“So the joint’s a family business?” I asked.

It was early in the morning and Dan needed more coffee. And now he was going to have to go through his family history to get a lousy story out of me. In my boredom, I sensed in Dan an unexpected source of entertainment. Who was it that said comedy was tragedy that happened to someone else? “You could say that,” he said.

“And it didn’t interest you?” I asked. He wanted to close his notepad, I could tell, but he didn’t and that, too, changed my story forever.

“It was my uncle’s,” he said. “He was closer to my brother.” Dan had the air of having lost the battle. I was a two-paragraph story buried between car and futon ads somewhere near the obituaries and this was going to be work.

“And what about your father?”

Dan tapped his pen on his notepad. He sighed. “He’s in the mining business.”

“Mining?” I said, impressed by the word’s implication of wealth.

He could see where this was going. And I saw the Man across the street. He was doing a crossword puzzle and sipping a coffee. “We lived in a good neighborhood if that’s what you mean,” he said. And I could tell he was a New Yorker, too. He had that air. And so I saw him somewhere, perhaps not Manhattan, but Brooklyn maybe, growing up surrounded by more people like him, like his father, in a solidly upper middle class milieu.

“What kind of mining?”

Dan exhaled. “He didn’t actually dig.”

“Gold?” I asked.

“Something weird. Like molybdenite. It’s an ore. Tungsten. Stuff like that.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said.

Dan put the recorder in the backpack. “He used to go to Utah a lot when I was a boy. But he had an office not far from here.” He pointed north. Which meant the office could have been anywhere.

“What’s it for?”

And at that, his gaze bore into mine and he lost his patience. He cleared his throat. “I came here to interview you.”

“I heard you,” I said. The Man walked across the street to the sidewalk before us. He was going to listen. As if he couldn’t already. “Your family situation seems interesting. Two brothers, two wildly divergent career choices. I’m not a philosophical person, but I have time now. There’s something to be said for things like fate.”

Dan opened his notepad. “Mind if I take notes while we talk?”

“I keep thinking what would have happened if I were, say, a garbage man,” I said. And this was true. I was wondering if I would have had the dreams, if I had listened to the Man, had my situation been different. Were my dreams some kind of odd bourgeois affectation? As an ad person, was I chosen because I could sell this?

“What do you do?” Dan asked, trying to steer me toward a quote or two he could use in the article. Trying to do his job.

“Do you think you can convince your brother to give me free pizza while I wait?” I asked. This was shameless, but I was being rational. The more I got for free, the less I would worry about not working. I needed sponsors. I needed the business community to look after my costs. I had no income. And I wasn’t getting up to walk to the bank. The thought of not receiving a paycheck gave me a scare. What if I ran out of money? What if I had to call this off because of
economics
? The Man took another sip of his coffee. He looked ready to whistle. “Because if I can get free pizza once in a while, then I can do this for as long as it takes. Neighbors keep giving me free food.” I pointed to the small pile of empty multicolored Tupperware next to me. “And I appreciate that. It’s the kindness of strangers thing. But moneywise . . . I don’t want to touch the investments, the savings. I’ve never been good at saving and I finally have something put away and, sure, I got hammered, everyone did, and my lack of urgency about this before is finally going to screw me.” I laughed. “My parents will kill me if they read that.” They saved and cut coupons and treated anything that was “on sale” with the formality of a military funeral. They bought a house in Jersey and my father started his own business and they succeeded. Their story is why millions still want to come here and are willing to die to do it. “I don’t care what you write. Really. I make, or made, a very good living, but I’m young. Sort of. Thirty-something’s the new twenty-something, right? So I’m in my mid-twenties given that calculation. I haven’t always been smart with money. And I guess that doesn’t make me all that different from anyone. I don’t think I’m old enough to worry about the future.” I paused. “Which obviously isn’t true.”

“What are you waiting for?” Dan asked.

And with this, the Man leaned in. It’s annoying, I thought. And I’m sure he heard me. How could he not?

“Isn’t this fucked?” I said. I pointed to our audience, to the kids, to the old men coolly leaning over, trying to pretend they weren’t listening. Was the Man old? Did he have an age at all? “You should talk to them. They know the story. If you’re looking for action, you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“I’ll talk to my brother if you help me out here,” Dan said. “I need to get something out of you and then I need to be at City Hall. I figure you’re a few stories, depending on how long you end up doing whatever it is you’re doing. So what if I can get you the pizza? What do I get?” I knew it would come to this. Despite our systems and Adam Smith and supply and demand and the rest of it, life is really about barter. Back scratching. Lice picking. Grooming.

I told Dan about the dream. I described the Man to him. I felt oddly self-conscious talking about the Man while he stood a few feet away from me. I told Dan about the floating. I told him about my job, some of the campaigns I had worked on. He told me he hated the Berlin campaign but congratulated me for it. I told him I liked to drink bourbon, which wasn’t true, it wasn’t my go-to drink, but it made me seem more interesting. I told him I loved Italian food but that his brother’s calzone should be sent somewhere and burned. Dan agreed with me. And I told him that he could ask all the questions he could think up, but nothing would explain what I was doing. “It’s not in the realm of explanations,” I said.

“I think there’s more to you than you realize,” he told me when he had stopped scribbling in his notepad.

“Don’t flatter me,” I said. “I flatter people for a living. I dream up elaborate methods in the delivery of flattery.”

He smiled for the first time since he introduced himself. He saw something. That I might play along. “I’m just trying to write a story here.” He stood up and put his notepad away. “A small story. I’ll go talk to my brother. If he gives you the pizza, what do I get?”

“Unfettered access,” I said. “And your brother gets free advertising.”

And I think that’s when Dan realized that I inhabited the same kind of mind-set; that I saw his paper as just another piece, a prop in the play that was being performed in the city every day, that we were all a part of, in the country, the world, for our own amusement and collective sanity. Or insanity. This was how the world worked. Barter.

Dan had heard of me and decided to make some news. I was going to become a newsmaker. And Dan and I were going to be friendly opponents in a friendly game of “fill up the paper, get the advertising, pay, buy a product, make the owners happy, sell more advertising, repeat.” Except the advertising wasn’t so much there anymore. It was moving. Money was going in different directions, attention was going in different directions. If traditional media had been a dam, with a giant reservoir of ad dollars holed up behind it, well, that dam was broken. Dan was playing for the losing team. And I felt vaguely sorry for him.

This is what I was thinking as I looked into Dan’s eyes, at his
understanding
. And my cynicism, which was never far from the surface, came rushing out of me. People in advertising, journalism, and entertainment are the three horsemen of the cynics.

It says much about the state of things when a simple person sitting on his front steps can take a shot at celebrity. But I know I’m being naive here. We are all celebrities now, aren’t we? If you’re not, something’s wrong with you. My boss used to say that. People become famous for getting kicked in the balls and posting the video online. They get famous for singing badly. For fighting with pneumatically breasted Amazons in tank tops. For being so stupid that people wonder if you’re smart. People become famous for wanting to become famous. Wanting to become famous used to be an aspiration and now it’s a career.

The middle class of fame is everywhere around us. Angie said this. She said this is how people live their lives now, by watching others live it for them. We have become our own entertainment, she said. Instead of fighting it, instead of making something better, all the producers decided to join in. TV gave up. Publishers gave up. They just threw up their hands and said, “We’re too lazy.” Reality is packaged for us now. Tragedies have their own graphics and music on CNN. We share our bodies now because people like me sold the idea that people like you could end up in porn.

“That’s why I love food,” Angie had said. “It’s not an Italian thing. It’s because you can’t give up on food.” She told me about visiting France and seeing the
Mona Lisa
at the Louvre. An old man pushed his way next to her and videotaped the painting. And after ten seconds he stopped and pushed his way to the next painting and videotaped that. He was going to videotape the entire museum and watch it on TV back home. Then it would become real. And then she showed me an app for the Louvre on her phone. “He didn’t even have to go,” she said.

Angie stopped bringing pastas or seafood. Her deliveries evolved into pastry. The tiramisu at her restaurant was light and floated on the palate. It was a wonder of the baker’s art. Also, she said the sugars would warm me up at night. And Dan got me the pizza deal.