Clancy Martin - How to Sell

I did not tell him that Lisa and I had been taking it together. But she would only give me a half at a time because she was worried that otherwise people would notice.

Jim and I swallowed two each. Then after an hour or so, as we were getting ready to land, he said, “This is fun. Let’s take another.” When we got off the plane we were in very good moods. We took a taxi to a topless bar. “We want some girls,” Jim told the taxi driver. He was a Mexican fellow and he shook his head at us. There was a crucifix hanging from his rearview mirror. But then he smiled. “Maybe there is a place,” he said. “But it is a long drive. It will cost you maybe one hundred dollars. Each way. But I can wait for you. I wait in the car.”

We stopped for a six-pack of beer and took some more of the pills. We had our arms around each other and explained how we felt about our childhood. Jim was embarrassed. He checked on the driver by looking in the mirror. But the radio was playing tinny Mexican music.

“It’s the drugs talking, Bobby,” he said. “It’s okay. I know.”

“No, no, this is how I always felt,” I said. “I was just afraid to say it.”

When he woke me we were at a warehouse in the desert. There were pickup trucks and old cars parked around it. It was dark except for one shy spotlight and the illuminated sign above the front door: CHILLI WILLI’S. Later I learned that this was not the original Chilli Willi’s. The real Chilli Willi’s is not in the United States at all but twenty miles back in the scrub south of the slums around the city — not the resort — of Cancún, Mexico.

“Is he all right?” a bouncer asked my brother. I had my arms around his neck and shoulders like a little kid.

“He will be fine,” he said. “He’s had a nap. I’ll sit him down. He doesn’t want anything more to drink.”

Inside it was dark and there were rows of seats like in a theater, but in front of the seats were long tables, like the tables in a school cafeteria, so you had a place to put your drink. There were no waitresses; you went to one of the bars or a dancer brought you your drinks.

Jim brought us two beers. “Take it easy,” he said. “You should do one more X,” he said, and gave me another pill. “It will sober you up. Chew it up. It will go into your bloodstream faster.”

There was competition, so Jim gave a bouncer, a big Mexican with a beard, two hundred dollars and then we had a girl immediately. This was the girl Jim wanted, a Mexican, short, like our mother, but athletic, and with big breasts. She was about my age but had a square chin that made her look older. She grabbed my leg.

“So it will be two? Two of you? Sounds like fun to me, man,” she said. “Three together is what I like. That works good for me, man. Is he okay?”

“He’s good,” my brother said. “He’s just had a little too much to drink.”

“Here,” he said, and took out his little brown bottle. “This will help him. Come on, Bobby, this will perk you up.” He started to tap out a line of cocaine on the table.

“No, man, you can’t do that in here,” she said. “Let’s go up to the room. We can have all the fun you want up in the room, man. Put that away. Let’s go.”

“Hang on. We need a girl for my brother.”

“Okay, two girls, no problem, man. I got a friend. I get my good friend. He is going to like her. You going to like her,” she said, and put her hand between my legs.

•

Upstairs, the cocaine revived me. We laughed and cut long lines for the women on the wooden coffee table and fed them the rest of the Ecstasy.

“Don’t worry,” Jim said. “I’ll have Lisa FedEx some more out tomorrow.” But he was only reassuring himself.

There was beer brought to the room and then the woman with me, the friend, took me to a different room. She was not attractive but she was kind and interesting, what I could understand of her words. She explained her family, who were not in Arizona. There were no children, only nieces and nephews and her mother. Her father was dead. She did not speak much English. I took out my wallet and showed her my green card. She did not have one yet, of course.

Ours was a small dark room. I wanted to talk more than I wanted to have sex. She was on top and eventually we both agreed that that would not work. She got on her hands and knees and I struggled from the back. We needed to do what we came to do so that we could sleep with good consciences. We were determined, fit, young, and in time we succeeded.

In the morning the taxi driver was waiting according to his promise. We drove slowly down the desert road. There were rocks in the road, the sky was yellow, and long Sonora cacti inspected us from above. Those are the cacti like in the Road Runner cartoons, the ones with round arms reaching up. Twice I had to tap the driver’s shoulder to pull over so I could vomit. Jim slept heavily.

At my father’s apartment his roommate or girlfriend told us we could not stay.

“I can’t have you sleeping around here,” she said. “You are grown men. It doesn’t look right.” She had red hair and was wearing a bikini. I tried not to look at her too closely. Jim was eyeballing her breasts. He did that entirely innocently. If you told him later he was staring he would not even believe you.

“I am going out to the pool now,” she said. “I have to lock up.”

“Give us a minute,” Jim said. “I want to bring him a couple of things. Bobby, find his binders. Look on the bookshelves. I’ll get his shaving kit and some clothes.”

“I’ll get him a couple of books, too,” I said. The woman sat on the sofa. “Maybe he would like a couple of his medals for next to his bed?”

“This better not take long,” she said. “Is your dad all right? I hope he’s okay and everything. But seriously.”

My father always kept a special room, his study, for his framed press clippings, ribbons, and medals. When we were little, bored at home alone while he was at work, we would look through them, Jim and I, especially the ones he hadn’t hung yet, in their frames on the floor. Mostly they were press clippings. “Local Boy Breaks Ski-Jumping Record.” “Jimmy Clark Wins Hill Climb.” “Freshman Scores Record Six Touchdowns.” “Boy Wonder Takes Gold in Wrestling, Shot Put and Diving.” He had won every athletic contest you can imagine. He played goalie for Canada in the Olympic Games. He still held the Shattuck Military Academy record for the hundred-yard dash. In early adulthood the success continued for several years. I remember one of the big ones, the color cover of Maclean’s magazine. He and my uncle Robert — whom I was named after — were both on their motorcycles, and the headline read “The New Millionaires.” That was when they were doing real estate development together in Calgary. When I was three and four — which would make Jim ten or eleven — he would drive us around town and show us the cedar-shake apartment buildings they built. He loved those false-mansard cedar-shake roofs. Even today in rundown parts of Calgary you can identify his apartment buildings by those roofs. “That’s quality, boys,” he would say. “If you always build quality you will never lose money.”

I picked a few books from the shelves, Ram Dass’s Be Here Now , two of the orange-covered Sai Baba readers he loved, and a kind of photocopied manual or training book from the Rosicrucians, and off a little Chippendale lyre table that I recognized — he liked to tote it around with him; it was small enough to fit in the back of the car, and it was from my grandparents’ house back in Winnipeg — I took the invitation to the wedding of the Prince of Monaco in its green fake malachite frame. Then I asked his girlfriend where the bedroom was.