What We Are (40 page)

I've got the attention of one, who shouts out, “Wassup, bro?”

“I'll show you wassup, you little punk mutherfucker.”

My uncle steps in front of me. “Nephew, nephew.”

I stop, regain my business sense: this is my boss, the chief exec.

“Let's go,” he says. “This is a public place.”

“All the better. Expose their asses for what they are.”

“You touch her and she'll sue. Let's go.”

I think,
Sue me? Fucking absurd. Because he's right. It's absurd because he's right
.

They're skating in a circle, derelict pack of fake wolves, offering a vast range of lurid gestures. Casually, in obscene safety.

I shake my head out urgently. “All right, let's go, Uncle. Come on.”

Suddenly we're speed walking up the street in the opposite direction, making distance on their mockingbird calls, and he says, “Why do you let them get you worked up?”

“Why do you let them not get you worked up?”

“All right, all right,” he says, flicking the snipe of his cigarette into the air, its ash spreading red-orange then gray-white in the gutter of the street, fumbling into the pack for another coffin nail, lighting it, dragging it, offering it my way like an earnest, pestering peanut vendor at a ball game, my easy refusal, his disappointed
pssshhh
. Would I get the capital P
pssshhh
if I shunned his business acumen in the same way? I wonder.

“I think you just missed five clients, Uncle.”

“Let's get back to the topic at hand.”

“Okay. So what's that catch you were talking about?”

“Oh. Well. You're paying the interest.”

“You said I'd pay no interest in the first year.”

“That's right.”

“Then how can I be paying it at the same time?”

“Well, let me put it this way: you
will
be paying it. I should've used the future tense. I'm conditioned to using the present tense in this trade. You remember our motto?”

“How could I forget?
Santa Clara Real Estate West: Bend over and we'll screw
.”

“Come on. Stop fucking around.”

“All right. ‘Jingle, jingle. The door is open and the lights are on in the West. Jingle, jingle.'”

“Not that one. The one on our T-shirts.”

“WE WORK THE ANGLE OF RIGHT NOW.”

“Yes.”

“Genius,” I say.

He flicks the cigarette, which isn't a snipe, lights another. Is it uncool to smoke a cigarette longer than a minute? Yet another example of American extravagance? Or is it his weird way of convincing himself that he's saving his lungs? If that's the case, he's missing the sixth-grade arithmetic of the habit, a return to fractions, dear Uncle:
¹
/
₃
+
¹
/
₃
+
¹
/
₃
= 1. No break in between, so no difference.

He says, “Anyway, at the start of year two, the balance of the loan jumps to one hundred fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Okay.”

“And the interest jumps to seven percent. On the whole hundred and fifteen.”

“That's a big jump.”

“Yep. And you know what happens next?”

“What?”

“Some people can't pay it.”

“They fold?”

“Of course.”

“So why do the banks give out the money if they ain't gonna get the money back?”

“Let's say you came at me and said, ‘You can have one of two situations with these no-interest loans. Either (a) you can make ten loans, in which case ten are paid back or (b) you can make a hundred loans, in which case ninety are paid back. Which do I take?”

“The first.”

“Wrong. I take the second.”

“Don't get it.”

“It's better to be big and fairly inefficient in this market than small and purely efficient. Or, rather, better to get bigger. Growth is the goal.”

“Even if the growth is artificial?”

“Those ten loans are paid back five times over by another ten loans over a five-year period. The bet is that the house of cards won't fold because of its size. You assume the system can eat it,
it
being loss. The whole thing's about the short term
now
. Or, rather, about the short-short-short term
now
. They're pushing this thing to the limit. You know what's gotta happen.”

“Too much air in the balloon?”

“A few soothsayers have said it's gotta pop. And it will. Something's gotta give. Let's hope it's confined to the valley and doesn't hit the macro level: the NYSE, the Dow, and all the rest. Too many people around the world are relying on our word to be good. But you wanna know the worst part of this trend?”

“Gets worse?”

Another cigarette flicked, another lit. “I was one of the principal engineers of the idea.”

I'm about to say,
Yeah, Ms. Clannonite told me all about you
, but don't.

“Monster real-estate mogul,” he says.

“You're all right, Uncle. Seen worse monsters at the Motel Six.”

“That bucket of fleas?”

“Yeah. This flea included.”

“You won't go back ever again.”

“You never know. Even a big shot like you could find yourself in a place like that.”

“No one wants to be there, nephew. Not even you.”

“Wasn't that bad. I had my own little jail cell to myself.” For some reason, the image of Chinaski on the stolen scooter whizzes through my head. “That was nice.”

“Well, don't sham yourself into thinking you're living a life of decency because you don't mind squalor and solitude.”

“Okay, Uncle. You tell me then: Can I find truth in that cheap pitch to the bidding suckers:
The door is open
—”

“—
and the lights are on in the West
. That's right.”

“What do you gain by seducing me to your ways?”

“I never gain anything in business terms with you, nephew. I've everything to lose. Which is about as truthful as you can get. When I talk about the marginality of the real estate market and the fluff of these no-interest loans, I'm fingering me. And you.”

“Indict yourself. I move desks and chairs for a living.”

“Listen.”

“Have been.”

“Your weakness as a businessman is feeling bad for the loser in the deal. But someone always goes down for the sake of someone else coming up. That's not only life, that's capitalism. Profit couldn't exist without loss. Conceptually impossible. And just the same, capitalism can't exist without profit. It's self-sustaining by the concept of wealth and poverty. You'll never have one too many rich men out there that the system can't sustain. Even when it cashes out like in 'twenty-nine, it was merely a cleaning of the slate. It was basically the United States' turn to be a third world nation. Someone else out there was having for the sake of us not having. It doesn't matter that
there wasn't much to have. What matters is that however much there was, we had less.”

“Or not enough.”

“Same difference. Because here's what you and Mr. Marx can't accept. Based strictly on the instinct of getting what you don't have, the best businessmen out there are amoral.”

“So Karl Marx was a moralist? Don't think we disagree.”

“Let me put it to you another way: the earning itself is the morality. Think about it. Everything else exists only because of and for the earning.”

I'm a bit frustrated that my uncle has either (a) forgotten that I was making these very points at the lake during my dissertation on Tillman, (b) he took the unpatented argument so deeply to heart that he's now unwittingly stealing it, or (c) consciously stealing it, or (d) he's now merely flipping the point about, attaching it to his issue and using it against me. I'm not certain whether it's better to be the originator of an idea or the last to use it. Or the loudest to use it. Or the oldest with supposedly more experience to use it.

He says, “Are you with me?”

“Yes,” I say, uninsulted. “Of course.”

My uncle holds the cigarette out in front of me again and this time I take it, drag it deep into my lungs, blow the smoke right back in his face. We've stopped in front of an Afghan liquor store, two homeless cats sitting under the pay phone. I wish I had that Fuji apple now.

My uncle says, “I can see you don't believe me.”

“Oh, not at all. I believe you, all right. I know you're describing the true nature of business. And the justification is that you're getting at the true nature of man.”

“That's wrong. I don't need a justification. The whole world follows this paradigm.”

“I know, Uncle. I ain't all eyes and no sight.”

“Then see this: I'm breaking it down as a mere courtesy to you.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“And listen here.” I can see the two transients watching our exchange amusedly. “I'm gonna shut your elusiveness down for good.”

“Gonna bear-trap me?”

“You old enough to remember when Exxon came out with the that big environmental ad program back in the early nineties?”

One of the transients digging his nose is smiling.

“Well?” he presses. “Why did they do that?”

“Um, pressure? Maybe lobbyists? A greener youthful generation making demands.”

“Demands? Who the fuck cares about demands? It's just talk. They don't have to listen, and they won't. I assure you that wasn't the reason.”

“Okay then, Uncle. What was it? You tell me.”

“I will,” he says, blowing smoke right back in my face. “It was because lobbyists and that greener youthful generation were affecting their profit base. The talk only mattered when it affected the demand-supply curve. Those people were simply variables. If they were reps for the tobacco industry or the Tennessee Home Owners Association it would've been the same difference. If they were reps for your kindergarden's sandbox. The question is this: Is our profit base affected?”

“I get you, Uncle. Just take it easy.”

My mind provides an image antithetical to the transients' life: they sit quiet as aristocrats at a symphony.

My stiff-arming of and high stepping over being pinioned to a permanent position truly pisses my uncle off. I don't blame him. If I could get outside of myself like a twin Dostoevskian shadow, I'd probably join his cause and hurl stones at me. His eyes are saying,
You think you're worldly, punk? You ain't shit
. Sardonic yet affable interrogation only brings out the ugliness of his and what he'd hoped would be my
profession. If he's neck deep in this morally bankrupt business world for three decades at 40 to 70 hours a week, obviously that bankruptcy starts to invade the organism itself. It's not a hostile takeover, no coup d'état. It's an outsider moving into a room of your house one day and taking over, square foot by square foot. And then before you know it, you're about to drunkenly defend the system you've so skillfully de-cried because the system is grotesquesly yourself.

“I don't care enough to see you get mad over it, Uncle.”

“Well, then, let me tell you something else.”

“It's cool, man. Let it rest for a minute. Jeez.”

“The only reason people started paying attention to the lobbyists and the greenists was because the
Exxon Valdez
went down off the shore of Alaska.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that dead birds and dirty water are the same meaningless variables, one ripple removed. Come on, nephew! What the fuck are we talking about here? It doesn't matter until it matters fiscally. All kinds of birds had died before that damned ship grounded. We'd had dirty water in this state for decades. What's the matter, you don't like what I'm saying?”

“I guess I don't.”

“Well, don't guess anything, because that's the way it is. And you have no place in this world, goddammit, if you don't cede this point.”

“I agree with that view, anyway: I've no place.”

One of the transients pipes up. “We've no place either!”

My uncle pays him no attention. “It doesn't matter if you do or don't agree, get it? And guess what, big shot? You too are a variable on someone's spreadsheet.”

I look at the two transients, who must take great offense to the stupid academic conversation they're hearing about what is in fact their lives. As if my uncle and I were authorities on the matter, jousting in an unpoppable bubble where we won't have to fight for our
words, for the air we breathe, for our lives. I want to walk on, at least respect their sordid little square on the sidewalk, respect their gone-bust story, but my uncle grabs my shoulders, holding me there.

“What do you know anyway? Where do you plant your flag, nephew? What is your stance?”

He tries to push me against the phone, but I twist my feet and, with better leverage beneath me, shove my uncle down the street, which he takes to, stumbling off. The two transients are standing now, riled out of their cloudy realities, mumbling curses and threats. I offer conciliatory words worth at least my uncle's flight, but if I have to fight alone again in this frivolous city on the edge of America, I'll know this go-round will be for no other cause than the hell of it.

WE'RE COASTING
down 85 blasting Brandenburg Concertos
and not talking. Swerving a bit but it ain't too bad. Or my uncle ain't too bad. He came back with my car to get me at the liquor store, tossed the transients a fifty and no words of wisdom, which was kind of him, and now seems very focused, pushing the two-door Honda Civic to the limit. I'm writing a poem in the planner Tali bought me as a business talisman, each day filled up with a stanza.