T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

“Felix,” I whispered, somehow feeling as if I were covering up the truth, “Phil’s friend.”

She glared at me as if she hadn’t heard. Her hair was a cracked fluff of peroxide blond, her eyes were green as glass marbles, she had no eyebrows. I watched her nipples harden in the cold. “I’m looking for Phil,” I said.

“Who?” The tone was barely under control, the upward swing of the interrogative a scarcely suppressed snarl. “Listen, mister”—drawing the comforter up under her armpits—“you better get your ass out of here or, or I’ll—“ She never finished the phrase, gesturing vaguely and then fumbling for a cigarette on the coffee table.

This is what an inept rapist must feel like, I thought. Or a cat burglar who catches the Mother Superior with her habit down. Despite myself, I found I had an erection. “Phil,” I repeated. “Phil Cherniske? The guy that rents this place?”

Suddenly the rage went out of her face. She looked up at me over her cigarette as she lit it, shook out the match and took a deep drag. Eyebrowless, she looked like Humpty-Dumpty or the Man in the Moon, too much pale unbroken space between eyes and hair. I watched her exhale a blue cloud of smoke. “Oh, Phil,” she said finally, wearily, as if she’d just experienced a revelation that hadn’t seemed worth the effort. “He’s in jail.”

Phil and I had been close all our lives. Our parents had been friends before we were born, we’d attended the same elementary and secondary schools, had quit separate colleges in the same year. Phil went west, I stayed in New York. I got married, went back to school, dropped out, found a job selling life insurance to pensioners with trembling hands and hated myself for it. Phil made a brief splash in L.A. (Pasadena, actually) as Phil Yonkers, sculpteur primitif. He roamed junkyards with the avidity and determination of a housewife at a Macy’s white sale, collecting fascinating slabs of rusted iron, discarded airplane wings, scalloped fenders, anvils, stoves, washing machines, useless but intrinsically edifying cogs, springs and engine parts from obsolete heavy machinery. These he would weld together in random configurations, hose down to encourage oxidation, and offer for sale.

I remember a brochure he once sent me in advertisement of his first (and last) show. The cover featured a poorly reproduced photo of the artist (the sagging pompadour, pointed nose, emaciated frame and wandering eye) grinning in the lee of a gargantuan iron monster that dripped oil like saliva and seemed to be composed around the gap-toothed shovel of an earthmover and a set of pistons frozen at descending intervals. The text indicated that the piece was titled Madonna and Child , and compared the artist to Herms, Smith and Keinholz. Unfortunately, the show had to be canceled the afternoon it opened, owing to irremediable structural damage to the building that housed the gallery. The immense, crushing weight of Phil’s pieces, combined with the exuberance of his friends and acquaintances — who turned the sedate, champagne-sipping gathering into a foot-stomping celebration of rock and roll and the sculptor’s muse — fractured several floor joists and collapsed a section of the foundation. Phil did manage to sell one piece — three table saws welded together beneath a corona of conjoined lug wrenches molded in the shape of a butterfly’s wings — to a retired tool-and-die maker from Boyle Heights. Then he went into the restaurant business.

The restaurant business, as far as I can see, harbors a greater assortment of misfits, bon vivants, congenital crazies and food, drug, and alcohol abusers than any other méeAtier, with the possible exception of the medical. Phil, disappointed in his effort to combine artistic expression and pecuniary reward, was only too willing to give himself up to the pharmaceutical oblivion of the world of waiters and plongeurs. He stood before a blazing grill at a steak house in Boulder, washed dishes at a Himalayan restaurant in Montpelier, tended bar in Maui, Park City and Aspen, bisected oysters on Bourbon Street. For a time, like most restaurant people, he attained restaurant nirvana, opening his own place. He borrowed money from his parents, his friends, relatives whose existence he’d forgotten, went partners with a savvy Greek in his mid-fifties, opened an impeccable haute-cuisine eatery in the suburbs of Sacramento, and went broke in nine months. Bad location, he said, but he later confided to me that the savvy Greek had been skimming money off the top. When I came to town that early morning with the proposition Vogelsang had made me, Phil was employed as a dishwasher at the Tahoe Teriyaki and, as I learned from the girl on the couch, temporarily incarcerated.

I blinked at her two or three times. My eyes felt as if they were bleeding. I staggered to my feet, dragging the sleeping bag like the corpse of a dead enemy, fumbled my way out the door, across the blackened and pissed-over snow, and back into the Toyota. Ten minutes later I pulled into the courthouse lot where the Eldorado County Sheriff’s Department maintained its drunk tank and holding facility.

If the stereotypical desk sergeant is loose of jowl, corpulent, balding and noncommunicative, the man I encountered at the Sheriff’s Department didn’t break any new ground. A cardboard container of coffee steamed on the counter before him, his eyes were as puffed as a prizefighter’s, and his loose jowls were reddened with a thousand tiny nicks and abrasions that gave evidence of a recent and clumsy shave with one of the new, ultramodern, reclining-head skin-whittlers reinvented by Gillette, Bic and the rest each month. I wear a beard myself.

“Excuse me, officer,” I said. “I’d like to put up bail for someone you might be holding here.” I felt like Raskolnikov in Myshkin’s office, born guilty, guilty in perpetuity, guilty of everything from not honoring and obeying my parents to adolescent masturbation and stealing cigars to the larger and more heinous crimes of adulthood. I wanted to blurt it all out, confess in spate, be shriven and forgiven. Uniforms did that to me.

The desk sergeant said nothing.

I repeated myself, with a slight variation, and began to think wildly of all the possible permutations of this simple communication I might have to sift through until I hit the right one — the combination that would set clicking the tumblers of the policeman’s speech centers — when I hit on revealing the name of the incarceree after whom I was inquiring. “Cherniske,” I said. “Philip T.”

Still nothing. The man was immovable, emotionless, a jade Buddha serenely contemplating some quintessential episode of a TV police show, perhaps one in which a mild-mannered desk sergeant is moved to heroics by the sick and sad state of society, leaping out from behind his deceptive mask of lethargy to pound drunks, pleaders, crooks and loophole-manipulating lawyers back into the dirt where they belonged. I tried again, this time making it a question: “Phil Cherniske? Brought in this morning? Public intoxication?”

The thick neck swiveled like a lazy susan, the blue beads of the eyes hesitated on me with a look of hatred or impassivity — I couldn’t tell which — and continued past me to focus on an object over my left shoulder. The officer’s next motion was almost magical, so abrupt and yet so conservative of energy: his chins compressed briefly and then relaxed. I looked over my shoulder to a wooden bench flanked by a battered water cooler and a forlorn flag. “You want me to wait over there?” I said, my voice unnaturally loud, as if in compensation for his rigorous silence.

I watched his eyes for the answer, in the way one watches the eyes of a stroke victim for life. They squeezed shut, slowly, tenderly, then flashed open again — he could have been a dragon disturbed in its sleep — before drifting down to contemplate the steam rising from the cup. I turned, obsequiously dodging leather-booted, black-jacketed, hip-slung patrolmen, who stomped and jangled across the scuffed linoleum floor, and started for the bench. Halfway there, pausing to maneuver around a fleshy colossus who stood yawning and scratching before the water cooler, I was suddenly arrested by a summons at my back, a croak really, like some barely breathed disclosure of the oracle. “Sixty-five dollars,” the voice whispered.