What We Are (41 page)

He floors the accelerator, I can hear the engine cry out like a dozen angry pigs about to be slaughtered—
zeeeee!
—and suddenly the weight of the car feels light in the wind of the highway. Like it could tip over at any moment. I feel alive, too, and then, as often happens, I don't trust the feeling. Or I don't trust the person in control. I use my leadership skills and turn down the radio.

“
Finito
,” I say. “Wanna hear it?”

“I'm not into the oral tradition.” I kick out Johann Sebastian and press in the slack-key slide of Gabby Pahinui, the old
ki ho'alu
master himself. He goes into his Hawaiian cowboy yodel and my uncle says, “Who the hell is this?”

“Who cares? He makes good music and he's happy.”

My uncle picks up the
CD
case, scans the cover, says, “That's 'cause he smokes more marijuana than the country of Jamaica. What the hell is he whining about?”

I turn serious on him. “It's called
paka
. And what are
you
whining about, losing fifty bucks to a homeless guy?”

He doesn't say anything.

“You know,” I say, “he's just gonna buy a forty with all that cash you kicked down.”

I don't know how he does it, but I can feel his disdain in the silence.

“Well,” I add, “about fifty forties, anyway. Stockpile a makeshift bar of King Cobra behind a Dumpster.”

I want to say to my uncle that if I were one of his true recruits of the streets I'd have knocked the both of them down and taken the shoes right off their feet. All in the name of
SCREW
. And then, I want to say to him, I would've knocked you down, too, Uncle, same treatment, no distinction, your generous nepotism aside. Or, I'd say, if they were smart free-market capitalists like you, they'd use the Ulysses Grant you gave 'em to buy some crystal meth, which they could then sell double or triple to some frat punks at Silicon University of the Valley. But just to really fuck with him, I'd like to say—in fact, officially announce—that it was a very nice pseudo-socialistic gesture on his part to give up fifty bucks for the cause and I'm proud of him.

Instead I say, “But hopefully they'll get a little food into 'em.”

Still nothing.

“So where we going, Uncle?” He doesn't look over at me. I say with force, “Did you hear me?”

“We're gonna make a visit to the hens.” Still looking straight ahead.

“What?”

“The pheasantry.”

“What's that mean?”

“The Blue Pheasant.”

The Blue Pheasant. I remember coming across the place in the
Mercury News
a few years back. Some poor lady got so badly raped in Cupertino that NOW came out in numbers and called for a citywide curfew in honor of the victim. There was a lot of chanting on television and calls from various women to reclaim the night. The cops traced the victim's steps back to the Blue Pheasant. It turned out she was there with her swinging husband and they were recruiting players for the evening. The last anyone at the bar saw of her, she was leaving in the arms of two Afghan cats, her husband trailing behind, keys in hand. When the cops came, the wife was hysterical, hurling silverware at her husband. He'd been there through it all, hiding out in a locked closet. She picked the door with a hanger and stabbed him with it. So I remembered the strange name of the place because I more or less decided after reading the story never to go in it. But there was something bigger about the article that I can't quite pinpoint. Not something sinister, really, but something laughably odd about the place, an eccentric frame to the story.

I say, “You know about that big rape case?”

“It's all history, nephew. History.”

I swallow at the thought of history, of yesterday vanishing in a sentence, reach out and blast the slack key so loud my uncle gasps, uncool, ugly.

We trail off of the 85 and De Anza exit and make our way up Stevens Creek. We're going away from the lights, away from civilization, toward the black hills. We pass houses and houses and more and more houses, and in the interlude of the white-lined road we await the next string of houses, which always appears. If I cared who sold them or who owns them, I'd ask my uncle, who'd know both answers.

I don't say a word.

Finally the trees grow in density and width and it feels as if we're going up an incline when—zeeeee! cries the engine—we descend a slope with an aerial view of the Blue Pheasant. At the bottom is a miniature canyon, phone wires of lights zigzagging across a lot. They hit the establishment at the roofline and run along the rim. Looks like the flashing grid of a computer chip. We can see it clearly, as could any passing plane, any airborne bird. I feel like I'm entering into the Tenth Circle of Hell, yet to have been invented during the good bard's age of tricks and cuckoldry.

I'm about to say, You ever seen
Apocalypse Now
? when I remember my uncle's recent confession of cowardice at the hill. I'd like to say, This is like that scene where they pull up into that coastal village. You know, with the lights and firecrackers and explosives going off. Ten minutes later they're done for. Too deep into the jungle. Once you're in, you can't get out.

That's what I want to say as we pull into the parking lot. But I don't say a word. I watch, listen, look around. The marked and unmarked spaces are packed tightly with cars. Cadillac Sevilles, Oldsmobiles from the eighties, the kind with the spare tire on the trunk, pop-up outline, silver trim. Suddenly I remember: This place is for geezers. According to everything I'd heard, visitors to the Blue Pheasant were at, past, or well beyond a midlife crisis. The poor lady who'd gotten raped was a grandma of six.

We pull to a stop at a platform of steps leading into the joint. Three gray-haired men, all balding badly, sixty and up, each with skin baked crimson, are on the stoop. The one in the middle has his sleeves rolled to his deltoids, the shirt wrapped around his torso like an Olympic swimsuit, ivory-white teeth. He slaps the shoulder of the man closer to him, lifts his red head like a beast of the Serengheti, and howls. He's mocking my ride, this geezer who spends his idle afternoons in a tanning booth.

“I'm not going in, nephew.”

“Why?”

“You wanted to ask me about your aunt, didn't you?”

“Well, yeah. I guess I did.”

“Get out of the car and go see her then.”

I don't know what to do except look out the window at the three elderly fraternity brothers, and I don't know what to say except, “What the fuck is wrong with us?”

“This is it, nephew. I'm sorry.”

“Not just us, you and me.” I look up at the Glory Days threesome. “But
us
.”

“The end of the line, nephew. Hop out.”

I slowly open the door and put a foot on the pavement, feeling this eerie inertia centered somewhere in my knotted guts, lining the winding road of my intestines. My tongue is paralyzed, a slug in the cave of my mouth. The earth has stopped revolving, or so I'd think. This is the time—
right now
—to say something of conviction, something worth my life, something human. Not for myself so much and not for my uncle's sake, but for those of us in need of a lasting divinity, which is to say all of us, of something outside the empirical calibration of business, science, and tech, that heartless twenty-first-century trinity.

Now is the time, now!

And if the word still falls within the cursed purview of these corn-fed gods, at least give me something that passes undetected beneath them, some little bubble of mystery they miss. Something that escapes the prying scope of their cyclopsian eye. Let me give my uncle a golden line that is officially between us but somehow seems bigger than every breath of air we could ever take.
He must face eternity, or the lack of it, every day
. Is it still possible? We need to be convinced that our lives matter, not finally matter but firstly matter. The old assumptions inherent to the old equations no longer fly.
Convince him, convince me, convince us that this earthly blink of the eye matters.

“Uncle.”

“Step aside and step back, nephew. And shut up. This thing was way done before it ever started.”

“Uncle, I have to believe that this life is of the purest, realest, finest—”

“I know, I know, nephew. I heard that song. I wrote it. But I can't sing it anymore. You stay right where you're at and live it. And remember: there's more than enough hurt in the world without you throwing in your pennies of pain. The suppression of suffering can be achieved.”

“Are you firing me, Uncle?”

“Let's just say it's time to quit.”

“Are you taking this car back too?”

“Let's just say I am.”

“You're my only ride back home.”

He explodes into waves of laughter. Hilarity. Nearly lunacy. I don't look around and I don't smile because I'm embarrassed and it's not funny. He's coughing out this high-pitched whine akin to the heckling banter of hyenas at the kill. This attack of laughter is an attack against me, an easy target—when it comes down to it—of ridicule. He's hunched over, two hands on his stomach, forehead pressed into the ancient steering wheel.

There is no home
, he's cackling.
And do you think I'd let you back into this '82 two-door Honda Civic once you've set foot on the soiled grounds of this place? You're defiled forever
.

Finally he stops. “You'll have no problem getting a ride, nephew.”

“Uncle.”

“A final word of advice: Try staying on the ride as long as you can.”

He speeds off, and the passenger door slams shut in the acceleration. He's not fifty yards before he's sliding into a bank in the lightless end of the muddy lot. I'm thinking,
You're stuck, you're stuck
, even as he spins out of the pit with grinding tires, sputters up the house-infested hill, and is gone.

Maybe I'll hail a cab. I have enough money now to do it. Instead I take to habit and start the long walk back to New Almaden. I like when the fresh night air swirls into the hollows of my nose and my mouth and I'm forced to use the moonlight as guide. I never know where I'm going but I always hope it's somewhere good. Everything ends up being at least tolerable, though all that means, really, is I'm still alive. When it gets intolerable, I guess, it will no longer matter.

A small crowd of geezer swingers near and pass me in a cloud of combined fragrances, Brut and Sunflowers. One of the ladies smiles. She has a spiked bob with highlights, a turtleneck sweater over a leopard-print dress, and those knee-high Eskimo boots you see on leggy Scandinavian runway models. Her earlobe is lined with studs of jewelry. I cough into my hand, head down, when a man with chains up to his chin, a purple polyester shirt fanned open to the sternum, and a stark black cowboy hat materializes from the darkness and slaps me on the arm. “Hey, hey, hey, youngster.”

It's Chinaski. Who the hell else would it be? I try to keep walking as if I haven't recognized his desperate voice and fat face, but he spins me around and shouts, “We gotta pay our respects to the elders, youngster!”

I look back at the Blue Pheasant. In a crowd of twelve, I see a lady in white limping up the steps with a cane, the outline of her panties halfway down the leg of her skintight polyester pants. The three men give her more space than she needs. I say, “You mean pay respects to the dead?”

“Now, now, youngster,” says Chinaski.

Chinaski thinks that our mutual aversion to greetings means mutual embarrassment. That it might affect our fate at Santa Clara Real Estate West to be caught in such a lowly establishment. It's like screwing your own cousin: neither party can say a word because both parties will be equally crucified by family, friends, society. Against the universal urge to share bed stories, you both keep your sin to yourselves. But Chinaski has no clue that I could care less about the incestuous hoodlums of the West. You can screw whoever you want to in these free, unrestrained, morally relative days.

Now he's popping spearmint Tic-Tacs, playing cocky. What would he say if he knew how close I was to being his boss? He'd start calling me Massah, Boss-Pa, Mr. Trump. He doesn't know it, but he was one minute removed from hard labor. If the Civic had stalled in the Blue Pheasant parking lot, Chinaski would have had to rip off his shirt again and push my uncle up the hill.

I say, “You're a regular at this place, aren't you?”

“Aren't
you
?”

“I've never been here.”

“Me neither,” he says, too quickly. He's about to hide his face again. Says instead, “Guess who I just saw?”

I'm afraid to ask.

“Your Aunt Lanell. On the arm of some muscle-bound hotshot.”

It's irritating that, between us, he's seen her last. I shake my head and try to remember good things about my aunt. From Vermont. An old
WASP
. Dark green eyes that turned brown in the evening. Habit of tapping her nails against her coffee cup. Loved old Jimmy Stewart movies. Laughed a lot.

Yes, a nice lady overall whom I never really knew.

“Don't frown now, baby. We all need love.”

“We all need rocking chairs. I'll see you later.”

He grabs me again, almost bear-hugging me from behind. “Where you going?”

“Away.”

He spins me and I can't help but turn my face to the street. His body deflated, he's slumping like a stand-up comedian whose jokes have all died at the mic. “Please come in with me. You're handsome enough to get a crowd of ladies. I just want a little take-home plate for the night.”

“A doggie bag of dentures?”

“I'll buy you a drink, youngster.”

“I ain't going in there. And stop calling me youngster.”