Other Resort Cities (21 page)

Katie, she had a little class. A respect for authority. He kept thinking that he should Google her name from home to see if she kept a blog, see if maybe she was harboring a small crush on him. Who could blame her?

“ Yes, Katie, I understand,” he said. He liked the way her name sounded in his mouth. It helped that it was also his ex-wife’s name, though that was just coincidence, he was sure. “That makes perfect sense. So why don’t we do this. Everyone, take your quizzes home with you. Complete them at your leisure and bring them back, and all of you will get the grade you’ve earned.”

That was enough for the Back Row of Fucktards, which meant it would be enough for the Good Students, since all the Good Students really wanted in life was to be like the Back Row of Fucktards, the kinds of people who managed to pass their classes without any mental exertion at all. The whole school was filled with future middle managers anyway, Cooperman thought. It really was no use being like Katie Williard. Ten years from now, someone from the Back Row of Fucktards would be her boss regardless.

Cooperman felt absurd pulling up to the Sonic in his white-on-white Escalade, but it was important to convey a positive image while doing business. It was the rap music he had to blast out of his speakers that really bothered him, particularly now that it was 2:44 and there was no sign of his business associate, which made the fact that there was a middle-aged white guy dressed like a professor sitting by himself listening to The Game all the more obvious.

It was all that bitch and ho shit he couldn’t stand—he’d grown up on LL Cool J and Run-DMC, even liked Public Enemy despite their anti-Semitism and Farrakhan crap, always sort of thought Chuck D had his head wired for revolution, could have been like Martin Luther King Jr. if he hadn’t been saddled with that clown Flava Flav. The big joke was all that drug hustling rap music. They even had a media class at Fullerton on the subject; it was called Street Documentary: The Socio-Economic Impact of Rap Music, and every semester kids lined up to get in, as if that class would ever save the goddamned world from itself.

Anyway, he only listened to gangsta rap now so that he could figure out what the hell people were saying to him, both in class and on the streets, and so guys like Bongo Fuentes, who was now officially late for their appointment, wouldn’t think he was a complete asshole.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Fresh out of graduate school, Cooperman got a top-shelf research job working for Rain Dove, the sprinkler industry equivalent of being drafted in the first round by the Dallas Cowboys. Within a year he was the big dog in the Research & Development department, but by his fifth year on the job he was thinking about even
bigger possibilities. The sprinkler industry had always been about making the world green, about giving customers the impression that no matter where they happened to live, they were in lush surroundings; that their backyard could look like the eighteenth hole at Augusta if only they purchased the latest automatic sprinkler system. It was a successful model—one only had to visit Rain Dove’s corporate offices in the middle of the Sonoran Desert of Phoenix for tangible proof.

Nevertheless, Cooperman saw the future one night while watching a Steven Seagal movie, the one were Seagal plays an eco-warrior who, after breaking fifty wrists over the course of a two-hour period, makes an impassioned speech to save the world from the disasters of human consumption. As far as epiphanies went, Cooperman recognized that this was one he’d probably have to keep to himself, but what he realized while watching Seagal pontificate was that change was coming—that if even marginal action heroes were taking time out of their gore-fests to admonish the very people they entertained to conserve, hell, it was only a matter of time before the offices of Rain Dove would be picketed by some fringe water-conservation terrorist cell or, worse, Seagal himself. Better to be ahead of the curve than be the curve itself.

He spent the next two years developing new technology that would actually
limit
the need for the expansive sprinkler systems Rain Dove was famous for. He migrated Doppler technology into existing systems to measure air moisture and barometric pressure, developed a probe that would constantly measure soil dampness, linked it all to a master program that calculated exact field capacity reports which would then decide,
without any human interaction whatsoever, when exactly the sprinklers needed to go on. Or if they ever needed to go on.

And that was the rub. Test market after test market determined that most people who were buying Rain Dove systems actually lived in places that needed absolutely no irrigation at all. Grass would grow and die in precisely the manner it had since the beginning of time, with or without a system, and specifically without Cooperman’s vaunted RD-2001.

At the time, he had a huge house in the Sunny Hills neighborhood of Fullerton (the locals called it Pill Hill because of all the doctors who took up residence there); he and his now-ex, Katie, were talking about having kids (which meant he’d have to cut down on his weed smoking, since their doctor said it was lowering his sperm count to dangerous levels) and seriously considering a little condo in Maui. Still, he always had the strange sense that he was living in the opening shot of a Spielberg movie, right before the aliens showed up to turn the bucolic to shit.

He shouldn’t have been surprised, then, a week after the last test market showed everyone just how cataclysmic the RD-2001 would be to the sprinkler industry, to find himself out of a job. But that was his problem. He was like one of his goddamned students, never thinking about ramifications, never watching the ripples, even when his own fear system kept setting off alarms.

A month later, he was out of a wife.

A year, he was living in his parents’ house in Buena Park and making pro–con lists about his life, trying to figure the relative value of killing himself.

Two years and he was using the RD-2001 technology to grow some of the most powerful weed in the universe.

Three years, he was supplying.

Cooperman checked his watch again. It was now 2:55 and The Game was pledging allegiance to the Bloods though suggesting even Crips could enjoy his rhymes. Where the fuck was Bongo? In the years they’d been doing business, Bongo had never been late for anything; in fact, Cooperman couldn’t remember showing up to a meeting and not finding Bongo already impatiently shifting from foot to foot like a five-year-old needing to piss. Back in the day, when Cooperman just bought weed for his own consumption, Bongo was his connect. Now they were essentially partners, though he never really got the sense that Bongo liked him. They didn’t have much in common, of course, apart from the weed, but they’d made each other a lot of money, and because of that they often shared moments of happiness together, which Cooperman thought gave their relationship a unique value.

At 3:00, Cooperman’s cell phone rang, the opening strains of “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” replacing his preferred rotary dial ring tone. It was one of those songs that he thought would make him sound authentic if anyone he needed to impress happened to be nearby when the phone rang, but that was never the case. No one ever called William Cooperman because he usually didn’t give anyone his number. Still, when he looked at the display screen and saw Bongo’s digits he felt inordinately relieved.

“You had me worried,” Cooperman said when he answered.

“You wanna tell me again what the fuck happened in Mexico?”

“I thought we were meeting.”

“You at Sonic?”

“Yeah.”

“Then we’re meeting.”

“ This is bullshit, Bongo,” Cooperman said.

“So was shooting a motherfucker in the face,” Bongo said. “So now we’re even.”

The problem in dealing with criminals, Cooperman had learned, was that most of them were paranoid and narcissistic, which isn’t an ideal combination. Everything was a personal affront. There were only so many ways of telling someone that you weren’t going to fuck them and that you respected them completely, before you started to think of ways to fuck them and disrespect them just to change the conversation. Cooperman hadn’t reached that level with Bongo yet, but he recognized that his problem in Mexico was probably a subconscious manifestation of that very thing. Since losing his job at Rain Dove, he’d read several books on leadership structures and realized that he was guilty of doing that very thing with his RD-2001. Made sense he’d do it again. But that didn’t mean he wanted to lose this job, too.

“Listen, Bongo,” Cooperman said, “it was completely my fault. I got nervous and everything fell apart super quick. But I want you to know that I’d never fuck you, and I completely respect you and your position.”

“ You shot a motherfucker who couldn’t even read,” Bongo said. “You realize that? You killed a motherfucking illiterate.”

“The failure of education isn’t my problem.”

“You think this is funny?”

In fact, Cooperman did think it was funny, if only in the way everything seemed off kilter to him these days, as if each moment were separate from the next. He liked to think that he’d finally learned how to compartmentalize, finally got over his obsessive tendency to overanalyze all things, what Katie used to call his “ego-driven OCD.” But the truth was that once he set something aside, he never even bothered to think of it again. Cooperman realized this likely meant he was losing his fucking mind, but even that got shoved aside in time. Like this Mexico shit. He’d driven down to Tijuana with a trunk full of his reconfigured RD-2001s to sell to a contact of Bongo’s, who was then supposedly going to move them to some influential people in Nicaragua, who, if they liked the system, would bankroll an entire development program. Or at least that was the story. But when Cooperman finally met up with the contact—he was just a punk, really, maybe eighteen or nineteen, who didn’t look all that different from the faux gangsters and frat boys who rolled across the Fullerton campus en route to their Freshman Comp sections—a switch flipped in Cooperman’s head. He finally saw the ripples in their entirety: The Nicaraguans would take his technology, backwards engineer it, and he’d be out of a job in two months, maybe less. This adjunct teaching shit, which he only did so he could pay off his monthly alimony, would be his entire life. Teaching Intro to Goddamned Water to a whole legion of consumers who wouldn’t change anything for the better, would just perpetuate the world’s problems, so that in ten years, or twenty, when people were really staring at the end of things, they’d eventually ask who was responsible for teaching these morons how to conserve, and that’s when fingers would
start getting pointed at the educational complex and guess what? He’d be out of a job again anyway.

Cooperman ran it all through his mind from several different angles to make sure he wasn’t overreacting, examined the empirical evidence, and then he shot the kid in the face.

It wasn’t even like it had happened without Bongo’s complicity, really. Bongo had asked Cooperman months before if he wanted a gun, since Cooperman refused to have any additional security at his house, apart from the rent-a-cops who worked the gate at the Coyote Hills Country Club, and since Cooperman thought the neighbors would find it odd that a bunch of gangsters were loitering around the community pool. So he said sure, absolutely, since it sounded like the type of thing he really should want, even if the idea of shooting a gun went against all of his previous political inclinations. Yet, once he had his handsome chrome-plated nine, Cooperman started going to the Orange County Indoor Range in Brea to shoot, and found he rather liked unloading into the bodies of the various people who’d done him wrong over the years, at least metaphorically. The problem was that Cooperman wasn’t much on metaphors, and after a while he started thinking about making a trip out to Rain Dove’s corporate offices in Phoenix to discuss further his anger regarding his termination. It wasn’t like he wanted to kill anyone, specifically, only that whenever he left the range he felt positively Republican for the first time in his life. Like the kind of guy who handled his problems versus having his problems handle him.

So when the switch flipped, Cooperman did what those leadership structure books always advocated: he
rightsized
his problem.

Crazy thing, it felt pretty good. Taking the power back. All that.

“I admit my mistake, Bongo. What do you want me to do? The kid shouldn’t have stepped to me. You know me. I don’t G like that.”

Cooperman heard Bongo sigh. It wasn’t a good sound. He’d already sketched out for Bongo a general idea of how things had gone down in Mexico the day previous, substituting the moment of self-realization for a hazy recounting of the kid waving a knife in his face and trying to steal his car. He knew when he told Bongo the story the first time that it was filled with holes, so he tried to cover his tracks by saying things like, “And I’d never seen so much blood!” and “I can’t sleep now, Bongo, I keep seeing that knife blade in my face!” and “It was all slow motion. One minute, we were sitting there in the Focus, the next he was jabbing a knife at me. What was I supposed to do?” Cooperman thought his mania would make Bongo realize he’d been really scarred by the event, since it wasn’t every day Cooperman killed somebody, and that it was therefore only reasonable things weren’t lining up correctly.

“All you had to do was hand him a couple fucking boxes. That’s it. No reason for you to feel threatened in the least. It wasn’t even
illegal
. And this is what you do? You make some shit up about a knife?” Bongo said. “That kid had parents, Dog. Relatives. Motherfucker had an existence, you know? That shit went over five fucking borders. You think the Nicaraguans are going to just let that shit slide?”

“I highly doubt Sandinista death squads are coming for me,” Cooperman said, but as soon as he said it, he began to think of it as a real possibility. “This is Orange County.”