In Persuasion Nation (10 page)

"I hope that day come soon," said John's wife.

"I hope it come damn soon," John said. "I don't like
all this living separate from my babies."

The kids giggled that he'd said
damn
. He went around kissing
them all as I paced and lectured myself in the hallway, trying to
sober up for the long drive home.

As long as it didn't snow, we could roof. Every morning, I woke at
four, checked for snow. If there was no snow, I called in. If someone
skill-less and slow might be useful that day, Warner told me to come
in. I rose, put on all five of my shirts (I had no coat), and drove
down in my Nova, de-icing the windshield as I went, via reaching out
the window and hacking with a putty knife I kept for that purpose.

From the roofs, the city looked medieval, beautiful. I wrote poems in
my head, poems that fizzled out under the weight of their own bloat:
O Chicago, giver and taker of life, city of bald men in pool
halls, also men of hair, men who have hair, hairy men,
etc., etc.
On the roofs, we found weird things: a dead rat, a bike tire,
somebody's dragon-headed pool floatie, all frozen stiff.

Mid-December then, and still no snow. Strange Chicago crèches
appeared in front yards: Baby Jesus, freed from the manger, leaned
against a Santa sleigh half his height. He was crouching, as if about
to jump; he wore just a diaper. Single strings of colored lights lay
across bushes, as if someone had hatefully thrown them there. We
patched the roof of a Jamaican immigrant whose apartment had nothing
in it but hundreds of rags, spread across the floor and hanging from
interior clotheslines. Nobody asked why. As we left, she offered us
three DietRite colas.

Then it was the Christmas party. The way we knew it was festive was
the garage had been cleared of dog shit. It had also been cleared of
the dog, a constantly barking mutt who even bit Warner. He bit
Warner, he bit the shovel head Warner thrust at him, sometimes we
came in and found him resolutely gnawing the leg of the worktable
with a fine sustained rage. Tonight, festively, the dog was locked in
the cab of a truck. Now and then, he would hurl himself against the
windshield, and somebody, festively, would fling at the windshield a
plastic fork or a hamburger bun. The other components of the
festivity were a plate of cold cuts on the table where normally the
gutters were pre-bent, a garbage can full of iced beer, and a
cardboard box holding some dice.

We ate, we drank, the checks were distributed, we waddled drunkenly
across South Chicago Avenue to the Currency Exchange to cash the
checks, after which the gambling began. I didn't know a thing about
gambling and didn't want to. I rolled my four fresh hundreds and put
them in the front pocket of my tar-stiff jeans, occasionally patting
the pocket to make sure they were still real.

Finally, in terms of money, I got it: money forestalled disgrace. I
thought of my aunt, who worked three jobs and whom I had not yet paid
a dime for food, and of my girlfriend, who now paid whenever we went
out, which was never, because my five shirts were too stained with
tar.

"You ain't gambling, Tyrell?" said Rick.

Tyrell said something nobody understood, and disappeared out the
door.

"I suspect Tyrell is pussy-bound," said Terry.

"Smart man," said Rick.

John did gambler things with his shirtsleeves, spat on his hands,
hopped around on one foot, blew on the dice. Then he laid his four
hundreds out near the craps box and gave them a lecture: They were to
go forth and multiply. They were to find others of their kind and
come scampering back.

Rick had gone to the bank that morning. He showed us his roll. It
held maybe three thousand dollars. His wife didn't dare say shit
about it. Who earned it, him or her? "I do," he answered
himself.

The gambling began. One by one, the guys lost what they felt they
could lose and drifted back to stand against the worktable and diddle
with the soldering irons. Soon only John was left. Why was John left?
Rick kept taunting. A whole autumn of such taunts now did their work.
All belittled men dream of huge redemption. Here was John, dreaming.
In response to John's dreaming, Rick and Terry began to speak with
mock-professorial diction.

"Look at this, kindly look at this," Rick shouted. "John
is not, after all, any more a gambler than he is a ergo roofer. That
is, he is a equally sucky gambler as he is a suckass roofer."

"Are you saying," said Terry, "that his gambling, in
terms of how much does it suck, sucks exactly as much as does suck
his roofing?"

"Perzackly, yup, that is just what I am saying, doctor,"
Rick burped.

John burned. They were going to see. They were going to see that the
long years of wrongs done him had created a tremendous backlog of
owed good luck, which was going to surge forward now, holy and
personal.

And see they did. Soon John was down to his last hundred, and then he
broke it, and then he was down to his last twenty. Then Rick cackled,
and John threw his sole remaining five at Rick's chest. Rick caught
it, kissed it, added it to his tremendous wad.

A light went on in my head and has stayed on ever since: It was all
about capital. Rick could lose and lose and never really lose. Once
John dipped below four hundred, he was dead. He was dead now.

Which was when Walter came in and passed out the bonus checks.

Walter was the owner, the big man. Tonight he was wearing a tie.
Afternoons he drove from site to site in his Lincoln, cranking out
estimates, listening to opera, because, he said, though it was fag
music, it floated his boat.

John took his check, made for the door. I followed him out.

"You're doing right," I said. "Go on home."

"Ain't going home," John said, and numb-footed across South
Chicago again.

"No, no, no," I mumbled, vividly drunk, suddenly alive.
What had happened to me? Christ, where was I? Whither my promise, my
easy season of victories, my field of dominant, my dominant field of
my boyhood, boyhood playful triumph?

It was so cold my little mustache had frozen.

Our bonuses matched: three hundred each.

The man at the Currency Exchange looked at us either sadly or
suspiciously, I couldn't tell which. When I doubled back to ask, he
reached for something under the counter.

"Go home, man," I said to John out on the street. "You
at least got your bonus, right?"

"Can't, can't," John huffed. "Got to get all that
back. No way that man's taking my Christmas money for my babies."

"You're not going to get it back, John," I said.

"Ain't I, though," he said.

The same law that had broken him the first time broke him again. Rick
took it and took it.

"Rick, Rick," I said, so drunk I was unsure I was actually
speaking.

"What am I supposed to do?" Rick said, glaring at me. "He's
a man, right? He wants to play. Ain't nobody forcing him."

"Ain't nobody forcing me," John said.

Rick had a fat round face and little black glasses. He was Polish but
looked Kamikaze. His cheeks were red and his glasses were fogged, it
seemed to me, from the gross extent of his trickery.

"You want to quit, John?" Rick said. "Great White Dope
here thinks I'm hustling you. Maybe you should quit. So what if you
suck as a gambler? Just walk away, right?"

"Nobody hustling nobody here," said John.

"See, Dope?" Rick said to me. "John's a man."

"I am that," said John.

Soon John was wadding and throwing his last ten.

"Fair's fair," he gasped, and lurched out.

I followed. Should I offer him mine? If I offered him mine, he might
take it. So I offered him a portion of mine in a way that
simultaneously offered and made it clear I was not offering. He said
he didn't want none of mine. He had to get home. His babies were
waiting. He didn't know what his wife would say, or what he would say
to her.

"I'll have to just tell her, I guess," he said. "Just
up and say it, get it over with: Baby, they ain't no Christmas. And
don't give me no lip about it."

He wiped his face top to bottom, the saddest gesture I'd ever seen.

Then he walked off into the side-blowing snow.

I was sad yet happy. I was drunk. I was deeply, deeply glad I wasn't
him.

Back inside, Rick was protesting, though nobody was asking him to.

"A man's a man," he was saying. "You play, you lose,
you accept it. John's a man. He knows that. He gets that. I admire
that."

"He's gonna have a shit Christmas, though," somebody said.

"These people live for shit Christmases," Rick said. "They
run right directly toward shit Christmases. It's all they know. It's
in their blood." Then he put his wad back in his pocket.

The craps box was cast aside, and the roofers bent to their drinks.
Somebody hauled over a length of gutter and a few of them went at it
with tin snips, proving some point or other.

I stumbled out to my Nova, putty-knifed myself a sight-hole, drove
home.

There comes that phase in life when, tired of losing, you decide to
stop losing, then continue losing. Then you decide to really stop
losing, and continue losing. The losing goes on and on so long you
begin to watch with curiosity, wondering how low you can go.

All that winter, once a week or so, I'd been stopping at a pay phone
off Stony Island to call the Field Museum, where a kind woman had
once praised my qualifications.

"Anything yet?" I'd say.

"Not yet," she'd say. Once, she said, "We need a
security guard, ha-ha, but that, of course, is way beneath your
level."

"Oh, ha-ha, right," I said.

But I was thinking, Could I work my way up? Could I, in my
security-guard uniform, befriend a doddering curator, impress him
with my knowledge of fossils, my work ethic, my quiet respect for
science?

"Keep calling, though," she said.

"Oh, I will," I said.

And I did, until finally it got too embarrassing, and I stopped.

Early spring, I fled town, leaving my aunt unrepaid, my girlfriend
convinced, forever, I suppose, that this snivelling lesser Me was the
real one.

I went somewhere else and started over, pulled head out of ass, made
a better life. Basically, I've got stores. If you've ever had a store
that supports a family, a family that actually brightens when you
come in at night, you know what a good thing that is. And I wouldn't
go back to that roofing Me or that roofing time for anything in the
world.

But sometimes I imagine myself standing at that pay phone, in my
tar-hardened clothes.

"This is so great," the Field Museum woman is saying. "Come
down, come down, we finally have something suitable for you. I'm so
happy to finally be able to tell you this."

"I'll be right there," I say.

Then it's a few weeks later, after first payday, and I pull up to my
then-girlfriend's house, wearing clean clothes. All day long, I have
been, say, writing about the brontosaurus. I have certainly, at this
point, learned a lot about brontosauri. In fact, I have been selected
to go to a Brontosaurus Conference in, say, Miami, Florida. We go out
to dinner. My aunt meets us there. I have by now repaid her for all
the food she fed me those many months. Also, I've bought her a new
dress, just to be nice. The dinner is excellent. I pay. After dinner,
the three of us sit there laughing, laughing about the fact that I,
an Assistant Curator at the famous Field Museum, was once a joke of a
roofer, a joke of a roofer so beat down he once stood by watching as
a nice man got cheated out of his Christmas.

I never could stomach
Adams and then one day he's standing in my kitchen, in his underwear.
Facing in the direction of my kids' room! So I wonk him in the back
of the head and down he goes. When he stands up, I wonk him again and
down he goes. Then I roll him down the stairs into the early-spring
muck and am like, If you ever again, I swear to God, I don't even
know what to say, you miserable fuck.

Karen
got home. I pulled her aside. Upshot was: Keep the doors locked, and
if he's home the kids stay inside.

But
after dinner I got to thinking: Guy comes in in his shorts and I'm
sitting here taking this? This is love? Love for my kids? Because
what if? What if we slip up? What if a kid gets out or he gets in?
No, no, no, I was thinking, not acceptable.

So
I went over and said, Where is he?

To
which Lynn said, Upstairs, why?

Up
I went and he was standing at the mirror, still in his goddam
underwear, only now he had on a shirt, and I wonked him again as he
was turning. Down he went and tried to crab out of the room, but I
put a foot on his back.

If
you ever, I said. If you ever again.

Now
we're even, he said. I came in your house and you came in mine.

Only
I had pants on, I said, and mini-wonked him in the back of his head.

I
am what I am, he said.

Well,
that took the cake! Him admitting it! So I wonked him again, as Lynn
came in, saying, Hey, Roger, hey. Roger being me. And then he rises
up. Which killed me! Him rising up? Against me? And I'm about to wonk
him again, but she pushes in there, like intervening. So to wonk him
again I had to like shove her back, and unfortunately she slipped,
and down she went, and she's sort of lying there, skirt hiked up—and
he's mad! Mad! At me! Him in his underwear, facing my kids' room, and
he's mad at me? Many a night I've heard assorted wonks and baps from
Adams's house, with her gasping, Frank, Jesus, I Am a Woman, You're
Hurting Me, the Kids Are Watching, and so on.

Because
that's the kind of guy he is.

So
I wonked him again, and when she crawled at me, going, Please,
Please, I had to push her back down, not in a mean way but in a like
stay-there way, which is when, of course, just my luck, the kids came
running in—these Adams kids, I should say, are little
thespians, constantly doing musicals in the back yard, etc., etc.—so
they're, you know, all dramatic: Mummy, Daddy! And, O.K., that was
unfortunate, so I tried to leave, but they were standing there in the
doorway, blocking me, like, Duh, we do not know which way to turn, we
are stunned. So I shoved my way out, not rough, very gentle—I
felt for them, having on more than one occasion heard Adams whaling
on them, too—but one did go down, just on one knee, and I
helped her up, and she tried to bite me! She did not seem to know
what was what, and it hurt, and made me mad, so I went over to Adams,
who was just getting up, and gave him this like proxy wonk on top of
his head, in exchange for the biting.