Waiting for the Man (7 page)

And no one asked about the apples.

Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag

Tomas loves the Cubs. He grew up in Wrigleyville. And though his father tried to raise him in some kind of Church of Stan Mikita, Tomas was a Cubbie. That’s what the staff calls him. He lives a half hour south of the ranch in an old barn he had restored by a local husband and wife architect–interior designer team who have since gone on to host a TV show. They moved to L.A., signed a lucrative deal, and are set to become a ludicrously asexual design empire. Their work is Style for People with No Time. It is a kind of Wonder Bread interior decorating, inoffensive until you know there’s more to the world. Tomas is extremely proud of his barn. It’s been featured in magazines and coffee table books. And will be on TV soon, he’s sure of it.

Every morning, Tomas drives to the ranch in his vintage BMW 700 and that’s when our toil kicks in to a higher gear. I work every day from six in the morning to eight at night. Two shifts. Six days a week. I don’t plan on peeling fruits and vegetables for the rest of my days. But I don’t mind it now. It clears my head. It allows me to think. To understand. To once again become a part of the world.

My work station is small but ergonomic. The place is designed in such a way as to prevent excessive bending. Everything I need is within reach. I fill buckets with peeled fruits and vegetables. Apples. Always apples for the godforsaken clafouti. Bananas. Kiwi. Kumquats. Tomas loves kumquats. Apparently this love is seasonal. Potatoes. So many potatoes. But when he’s making his “dirty” mash, my job is to peel the potatoes badly. That is, leave some skin on. Which is what I’m doing.

I hear Tomas walk into the kitchen. Like Norm entering Cheers, his entrance is met with rounds of “Cubbie!” On most days, he walks into his office to change while speaking to the executive chef, an impossibly thin black guy from Phoenix named Carlos. Then the inspections.

Today, he walks over to me. Everyone watches. He stares them down until they return to their tasks. “I’ve been thinking about the clafouti,” he tells me.

I put down a potato. “I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I was speaking to Athena last night,” he says. This would be our general manager, a Greek woman from Thessaloniki. Her heavy accent, combined with her love of all things western, makes for an eloquent statement about the benefits of globalization. She is tanned and beautiful with a head of thick dirty-blond hair. Light brown eyes offset her honey-colored skin. She favors white cotton shirts and blue jeans. She could be a Ralph Lauren model. Most staff think that she and Tomas are an item.

“She’s with you on this stupid anti-clafouti thing,” he says. “On our brand.” He shrugs at this, as if I’d been a party to some debate and had won. “She knows you have advertising in your background.”

“How?” I ask.

“How what?”

“How does she know?”

Tomas shrugs again. This is something I hadn’t noticed before. Our chef is a shrugger. He is insecure. Now his shrugging is going to distract me. “I told her.”

Had I ever told him? “And I’ve told you?”

“When you were hired, yes,” he says. “You told me. Well, you told Carlos. I think you told Carlos. You even told him some of the specifics. Like that beer. Berlin? That was yours, right?”

I had also told Carlos about the cat food and the diapers. The relevance my past has to peeling apples and potatoes still mystifies me. “Yes,” I say. “I’m surprised he told you anything.”

“Me, too,” he says. He smiles. “Anyhow, you used the word ‘brand.’ Her ears perked up.”

“Lovely,” I say. There’s too much respect for that word. It has ruined people and products and entire countries and has made a lot of really dumb people very rich. It is a word that has lost meaning. Very few people know what it means, but everyone uses it. The word is the start of every prayer in every agency in the world. Sell the brand, make it indispensible, reap the rewards. Once you have a client talking about brand you know you’ve won.

“She’d like to have a discussion about this,” he says. “Perhaps tomorrow night. In her apartment. The three of us.”

He speaks slowly as if in code. For all I know he’s just told me we’re going to enjoy a threesome in a hot tub.

“About what?” I ask. I’m here peeling the roughage and getting on with my life.

“Everything,” Tomas says. “I don’t know. I opened my stupid mouth and now she wants to have this meeting and that’s all she told me. And if I know her, she’s going to talk, we’re going to listen, and it will feel long. So OK?”

He walks away, into his office, his den. And then I’m smiling. I’m smiling because I have bested the chef with his girlfriend and the idea is stupid. I’m smiling because of the inanity of my situation, how a few months ago this would have seemed a stranger dream than the ones that got me here. I’m smiling because Yogi Berra might have been right about the fork in the road. Perhaps I won’t be peeling potatoes for much longer. Perhaps there’s an odd logic to this. Perhaps. I pick up a potato and peel it extra dirty.

Wishful Thinking

Dan wanted to give me a cell phone. I already had one and I had shut it off and I said no. “Who refuses a cell phone?” he asked.

“No,” I repeated. I found it intrusive, which was silly, I knew that.

Dan’s blogs detailed my every breath, trip to the can, sneeze. What is privacy when someone can tell the world how many bites it takes for you to devour a slice of pizza? He told me someone had set up a Tumblr account that showed me eating pizza exclusively. It was timed. There were stats. About me eating pizza. “You’re my mouthpiece,” I told him.

He said the
Post
was starting to feel a very paternal sense of ownership over me. I understood that. I only had to think of how I felt about Berlin. The beer, not the city. Whenever I saw a poster or a display case or someone drinking one I thought, That’s my beer. I helped put that beer into that person’s hand. I sold that thing. I sold this idea. I crafted desire in a stranger. I had a dumb idea that was quite brilliant. We went to Berlin, the city, just to get a photo op for Berlin, the beer. The Germans were flabbergasted by the chutzpah of the thing. I couldn’t tell if it made them more or less anti-American. So I understood the
Post
’s thinking. It terrified me. “I can stop this right now,” I said.

I heard someone in the crowd laugh, and I was pretty sure it was the Man.

Dan typed this into his laptop. “No, you can’t,” he said. He didn’t even look up from his keyboard.

The crowd was reaching tremendous proportions. The block had filled in with bystanders and media and commerce. A group of people awaiting a spectacle. The cops had closed off the street now during the days. They even threatened to arrest me for causing a disturbance and were chased away.

The Man walked up to me and said,
I like that this is bothering you
. And then he disappeared into the crowd.

My wait was being seen in a theological light. This was perhaps inevitable. Every day another priest, father, rabbi, nun, saffron-robed Buddhist monk, mufti, you name it, every day more of them showed up to catch a glimpse of the guy who had acted on a vision, and they would try to articulate for me what I had seen. According to their beliefs. I had never uttered the word “God” in any of the interviews I had granted and yet the religious somehow knew who the Man was. It is this certainty that has always annoyed me about the religious. Even the Man’s horse was significant, an object of debate. A horse showed up in much of the world’s mythologies apparently.

There were theological precedents to my actions. I was told how often something like this had happened in the past, how adherents were gathered through the actions of others. A philosophy student from NYU, who also happened to be a practicing Hindu, brought me up on Plato, the Aristotelians, the Academy. I heard about Chinese monks and Buddhist sages and Jewish mystics and Christian thinkers. A priest from Baltimore told me there’s no Christ without Paul. And then he looked at Dan. And Dan may have blushed.

The Hare Krishnas were in the crowd.

Evangelicals. Fundamentalists of all stripes. Colonies of Hasidic men, praying, bowing so quickly they resembled those drunken dunking bird toys from the seventies. The amount of prayer around me was startling. Dan said the paper had received inquiries from the Archbishop.

“Of what?” I asked dumbly and Dan didn’t answer.

The Man came and sat next to me then.
Don’t look for love
, he said.

One night, each person in the crowd looked like a bobblehead doll. I was starting to hallucinate. I was starting to lose whatever sense of humanity I may have possessed. And I understood how removed I felt from the whole thing, the event. I was at the center of an event that I was not even a part of anymore. I felt alienated from my own narrative. The story of my life had been taken from me.

“This is your fault,” I told Dan the morning after another dreamless night. “All for your brother’s pizza. You and him have issues or something and I’m paying for it.”

“If you think I did this just to win some free publicity for my brother, you’re as simpleminded as you claim to be,” he said. There were no notepads open on his lap. He no longer interviewed me. The laptop lay open on a corner of the balcony. The wait was the story now, the crowds, the police, the people who hovered around me hungry for the meaning of it all. “I saw something that maybe you didn’t,” he said.

“I never said I was simpleminded,” I said. “Simple, yes, but not simpleminded.”

“You have a story. These people are interested in it,” he said with a dramatic wave of the hand.

Tour buses started coming around. The police presence was constant now. Members of the force had been assigned to me. I had been waiting for the Man to tell me what to do for three weeks. I felt I should be more embarrassed by it all than I actually was. The ridiculousness of my situation was going to be a tattoo. I would forever be known as the guy who . . . what, what was I doing? I would be the waiting guy. The guy who waited. I would have an official name.

Dick became a fixture, an official photographer. The
Post
ran more and more photos of the unfolding event. Their website was updated hourly. Dan told me my pages — the photos, his blogs, the news — were receiving tremendous traffic. I wasn’t a hit, he said, but something more like a sustained minor sensation. He said this without irony. He had taken to speaking directly into the cameras. His personal blog now had a sponsor. There would come a time when an entire section of the paper would be devoted to me. I feared the inevitable TV special.

Dick and I had never had a conversation; he had made no attempt to speak with me. He was very professional this way. I looked at his obscene eyelessness and figured his story to be far more interesting than Dan’s and infinitely more interesting than mine. The further you had to travel to get where you are, the more interesting the story. “What’s with Dick’s eye?” I asked Dan.

“He doesn’t talk about it. I’m assuming he lost it in Cambodia.”

And now I saw Cambodians as small as well.

“He doesn’t talk much at all,” Dan said. “No one in the office really knows him. He’s been here at least fifteen years, and his English still sucks. That’s the impression you get. The other photographers suspect he can speak English perfectly but chooses not to.”

I wanted to speak to Dick. He had hovered around me for almost two weeks and I hardly knew what his voice sounded like. I wanted to know about his eye. I wanted the backstory. “I would like to talk to him,” I said. “Have a conversation. Two humans learning about one another.”

“He’s working,” Dan said. “Don’t bother him.”

“I’m interested. Just like I was interested in you.” Before the crowd in front of me was nothing more than Dan’s wildest dream. A crowd where it was not uncommon to see white robed imams discussing the nature of divinity with Hasidim, strangeness captured by Dick and printed on the front page of this morning’s
Post
.

Dan scanned the crowd to find his photographer. He waded into the mass. The crowd parted for Dan as he searched for the one-eyed Cambodian. In the distance, I could hear the drums and bells of the Hare Krishnas. I could hear sermons of brimstone competing against those of treacle. Hipsters with guitars playing songs in minor chords. I could hear the sounds of cheap digital cameras clicking; kids laughing, playing with balls and balloons that the sidewalk capitalists had set up about us and had sold to parents. I could hear orders being delivered to cute blond girls manning the food trucks. I could hear the discussions, the debates, the cops speaking into their shoulder-harnessed walkie-talkies. I could hear it all. And I could hear my heart, too. I was sinking into myself. The less real my life became, the more I sensed my own body and the less it seemed to work or even matter. The more people my wait attracted, the more in tune I was to the voice of the Man in my head. I felt him watching the crowd and sharing my bemusement. I could hear his horse running above the sound of the crowd. I could hear the reality of him. But more than that, I could feel him. He was sitting inside me. Looking out.

Dan dragged Dick toward me, a quizzical look on his one-eyed face. “Don’t worry,” Dan was telling him before pushing him to me. Dick was so slight he fell on me like a piece of paper blown by the wind.

“That’s great,” I said. “I didn’t say you had to manhandle him.”

“I think he’s afraid of you,” Dan said. We were speaking as if Dick were deaf. Or worse, as if he wasn’t there at all. “Ten bucks if you get the story.”

“And if I don’t?” I asked. I was Dan’s new toy. He was a big child playing with an expensive toy. I was going to line a lot of pockets with money. “Just ten bucks?” I said, as Dan waded back into the crowd.

I tried to face Dick. He eyed me warily. I smiled and held out my hand. “My name’s Joe.”

He looked at my outstretched hand and blinked. He transferred his camera to his other hand and took mine and shook it. “I know,” he mumbled.

“I feel the need to explain myself to you,” I said.

Dick shook his head. He looked down at the ground. He was uncomfortable and I immediately felt guilty for making him feel so. He transferred his camera back to his right hand. He put it to his face and looked in the lens and snapped a shot of the crowd. “How many rolls of film you think you’ve gone through so far?” I asked, realizing it was a digital camera.

He took another shot. “Digital.”

“Of course,” I said.

He adjusted the focus on his lens. “Film’s still better,” he said in perfect, heavily accented English. “You have more control. You feel like a real photographer. It’s more artistic. More everything.” He pronounced “more” to sound like what you would do to your overgrown lawn. He snapped another picture. “Except with digital, the photos get to the office right away. Remotely. There’s no running around. It’s faster. And no chemicals. I’m old enough to miss the chemicals.”

Dan would owe me ten dollars. But what did money mean to me? “What do you think about all of this?” I asked.

He put the camera down. His face was disorienting. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that. You look at someone in the eyes. Looking at Dick’s face was like being on a lurching ship. You lost your balance. “Crazy,” Dick said. He scrunched his nose. “Americans are fuckin’ crazy.”

The skin that had formed around his empty eye socket was a garish mixture of purple and green, the kind of color combo you could put on bubblegum and sell to little boys. I now realized the socket was empty. I don’t think Dick had stood this close to me before. Why hadn’t he invested in a glass eye? Or a patch? Or sunglasses? “You don’t think this would happen where you come from?”

He almost smiled. “Where I’m from was crazier,” he said. “That was political. The killing. The shooting. Cambodia’s better now. It’s more normal.” He picked up the camera again and scanned the crowd, looking for, what? What do photographers look for before deciding to snap the shutter? How was his photography affected by his mono-vision? Surely it must have shaped the way he saw the world, in the broadest sense.

“Did you lose your eye in the war?” I asked. I imagined him as one of the wretched lumps at the reeducation camps I saw in
The Killing Fields
.

Dick snapped a photo. It was of Dan. He was interviewing a young girl. She was holding a doll.

“I’m curious,” I said. I shrugged apologetically. “I’m curious about people’s backstories. My parents have tremendous backstory. They traveled a long way to end up in New Jersey. And you’ve traveled a long way as well, and I’m guessing your story is more interesting than mine. I’m sure of that.”

Dick ignored me and focused yet more attention on his camera. He was overcompensating. He fidgeted with the lens, flicked switches, reached into his bag, and pulled out an airbrush.

I raised my shirt to show him my belly. The crowd hushed up. Dick’s head turned slowly and he looked at my naked torso. “See this scar?” I said, pointing to the tiniest of scars just south of my belly button. “When I was thirteen, I tried to break up a fight and someone nicked me with a steak knife. Only took three stitches to close. My mother kept crying about how it could have been a lot worse. The kid who did it could have really stabbed me. He held back. I think. It gave me some bowel trouble.” It hadn’t, but I thought admitting this kind of problem would help Dick open up. Who wants to admit to bowel trouble? “And it gave me an excuse to lift up my shirt for no reason,” I added.

I put my shirt back down. Dick stared at my torso, his eye transfixed by who knows what. I could only imagine what those viewing the scene through the webcams thought of the display. The crowd started to mumble and very soon the clatter that I had grown used to was back. It drowned out the noise of city, that background chorus that lets people here know they’re alive. “I was stabbed, too,” Dick said.

“In your eye?” I said, grimacing as I imagined the pain.

“I was at a work camp,” Dick said.
The Killing Fields
came storming back into my head. I saw Haing Ngor eat a lizard. And, for whatever reason, I saw John Malkovich developing film in a makeshift darkroom. Dick lifted his camera again, scanning the crowd. “I asked for food. A young soldier, maybe twelve years old, he stabbed me. Just because I asked for food. I was so hungry. I was hungry all the time but that day I was just stupid hungry.” He snapped a photo. “Like I said, it was crazy. Everybody died. My whole family. My wife. My son. My mother and father. Two brothers.” He sighed and snapped a photo. “But not me.” He put his camera down. “I guess I’m lucky,” he said softly. “After the war, I went to Vietnam. Then Hong Kong. Then here. I was sponsored by a church in Kentucky. I got a job. And then I moved here and got a better job. I found a new wife.” He shrugged again. “But no children. I can’t do that again. I don’t trust enough, you know? To bring another kid into the world. No way.”

Dick nodded. He took another photo. He checked something in his camera and picked up his bag, slinging it over his shoulder. He faced me and took a quick photo. His eye was dead. I was looking inside Dick and saw emptiness. “People tell me I’m lucky,” he said. “All the time with the good luck. But sometimes good luck is also bad. And sometimes bad luck is the best luck of all.” He shook my hand and held it. “Are you crazy?” he asked.