Jim Gavin - Middle Men - Stories

“There’s a nice restaurant up on the terrace. I know everybody there. It’s nice, we get a table by the window, watch the races, hit the buffet.”

“Nice,” I said.

“Fig likes a trifecta. So we talk to some of our guys and start going through the book. There’s no doubt on the first horse, everyone’s agreed on that. Pretty much the same for the second, but maybe a little more iffy. Fig calls up his guy and gets a little more out of him, so we feel okay. But the third horse, we have no fucking clue. A day at the races, right? Now Fig’s hungry, if you can believe it, so he goes up to the buffet and I’m sitting there going through the book. I’m sitting there and Fig comes back with a roast beef sandwich. He’s upset. ‘What’s the matter?’ I ask him. ‘Look at this,’ he says, ‘look what they did to the fucking thing.’ He opens up his sandwich. It’s just swimming in mayonnaise.”

Fig, piling steak tartar on his buttered bread, shook his head in disgust at the memory.

Ray continued. “This is a problem, the mayonnaise. There’s no reason to just slap it on like that. ‘What I would like,’ Fig says, ‘is just a cup of mayo on the side. So I can put it on myself.’ Which is totally rational. Who wants that much mayonnaise? Why should some guy making a sandwich get to decide how much mayonnaise you get? It’s tyrannical, if you think about it.”

Ray paused to let me think about it.

“I tell Fig, ‘You should’ve just asked for a side of mayo.’ ‘I know,’ he says, ‘but the guy was already making it.’ I grabbed the maître d’ and I told him the situation. ‘Listen. Bring us another sandwich, but have your guy put the mayo on the side. I mean, for the love of all that’s holy and merciful, bring us a side of fucking mayo!’”

Fig looked at Ray. Their faces were turning bright red.

“So here it comes. Roast beef, open-faced, and a big cup of mayo. Victory is ours.”

“Well done,” I said.

“But here’s the thing,” Ray said.

“I figured there was a thing.”

“I go back to the book. I go back to pick the third horse for the trifecta. I look down the page. And there he is, right there at the bottom— Side of Mayo !”

Ray poured his wine to the top of the glass. He took a sip and then pounded his fist on the table. “We both took home ten grand! Well, give or take. Can you believe that?”

There was silence. Ray, as always, had taken over the room. At other tables men were grinning and hanging on his every drunken word. Alcohol, for Ray, was a kind of charm, allowing him to barge through doors and announce his place in the world. Over the years he had diligently boozed and golfed his way to the top. This path to glory belonged exclusively to men. My mom could drink most men under the table, but her talent was considered grim and unsightly; instead of opening doors, alcohol isolated her, and no matter how hard she tried she was never able to drink her way into the magic circle.

“It’s a good story,” I said, finally. “But…”

“What do you mean, ‘but’?”

“I wouldn’t really know what to do with it. At this point it’s just an anecdote.”

Ray squinted at me. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I mean, characterwise there’s definitely something.”

Ray and Fig both looked confused.

“That wasn’t the story,” said Ray.

“It wasn’t?”

“Fuck, no!” Now they were laughing. “Who’d want to see a movie about me and Fig?”

“Okay,” I said, “what’s your story?”

Ray nodded gravely at Fig, who finished chewing and carefully wiped his mouth with the linen napkin.

“There’s this alien,” he said, and looked nervously at Ray.

“Go on, tell him.”

“There’s this alien. And what he does is come here, to earth, to hunt humans.”

Fig, sweaty and exhausted, sat back in his chair.

“The way humans hunt deer,” Ray explained. “You know, for sport.”

In front of me there was a plate full of bacon-wrapped shrimp. I ate one and said, “That’s Predator .”

“What?”

“ Predator , with Schwarznegger. You’re describing Predator .”

Fig was devastated. He dropped his head and began to massage the loose cartilage in his nose. I gathered that one of them had recently watched Predator on cable in a drunken haze, totally forgetting about it until this morning, when the dim memory surfaced as an idea of their own. Ray wasn’t giving up.

“It doesn’t have to be an alien,” he said. “It could just be some crazy guy who hunts humans for sport.”

“That’s The Most Dangerous Game ,” I said.

“Well, Christ, it’s all the same cha-cha,” said Ray. “We can come up with something else.”

My steak was unbearably delicious. We stayed in the dining hall for a couple hours, getting drunk, throwing out story ideas, and discussing the possibilities of studio financing. Ray, who had been installing sprinkler systems for the last thirty years, seemed to know way more about the process than I did. On our way out we filed into the men’s room. My uncle and his buddy Fig belonged to that vanishing breed of men who piss with their hands on their hips. In another age such confident figures would’ve been immortalized in stone.

As the valet brought around Ray’s Cadillac, Fig pulled a flask out of his pocket and took a sip. Suddenly, he put a hand on my shoulder.

“You’ve always been like a son to me,” he said.

I laughed. “ Son? ”

Fig dropped his eyes in embarrassment. “I’m sorry, Sean. I’m just really proud of you.”

He climbed into the backseat of the Cadillac and lay down. Ray yawned, handed the valet a twenty, and got in the car.

“We’ll talk!” he shouted over the revving engine.

• • •

I had a parking ticket when I got back to my car. It was almost four o’clock. I got lost going to the freeway and ended up following the train tracks west for a few miles. I came to a beaten down section of Riverside where every block had the same rhythm. Auto body shop, tattoo parlor, bail bonds, checks cashing. The sidewalks were empty but for one guy, a twitchy, shirtless maniac wearing camouflage pants. He had a garden hose coiled over his shoulder and he kept turning around quickly, again and again, like he expected to catch someone following him.

On the way home, I decided to stop by my mom’s new place in Buena Park. I got stuck in traffic on the 91, which gave me time to sober up. I inched along for an hour and finally pulled off the freeway. The front door of her apartment was surrounded by empty clay pots. She brought the pots with her every time she moved, saying she was going to fill them with dahlias and marigolds, but she never did. I knocked but she wasn’t home, and her cell phone went right to voice mail. She probably had an evening shift. The stucco walls were cracked and peeling and the pool in the courtyard was full of leaves. I tore up Ray’s check, scattered the pieces in the water, and sat down on a lounge chair. I knew it would be a long time before she got home, but I was willing to wait.

O mother, save me from the wisdom of men.

Bobby’s office, for the time being, was the Berkeley Public Library. On a Thursday afternoon in August, with sunlight pouring through the arched windows of the reading room, he closed his book and quietly observed the homeless man sitting across from him. The man was bald and sunburned and he had grimy strips of duct tape wrapped around his fingertips. With a chewed-up pencil in his hand, he scrawled notes in the margins of an old physics textbook that was crawling with ants. Bobby couldn’t take his eyes off the ants; he watched them moving in clusters across equations and diagrams, and it occurred to him that the ants were messengers, reading the book for this infernal professor, and when they were done they would crawl up the man’s arm and into his ear, burrowing directly into his brain.