Steve Toltz - Quicksand

So why didn’t he listen to himself? Two reasons. First because Aldo was a precocious sucker of the success industry. He’d always be listening to motivational talks, lining the pockets of a succession of tacky gurus, Tony Robbins types, and once, Tony Robbins himself. He read books with obnoxious titles like See You at the Top and It’s Yours — Take It , and listened to audio-biographies of successful business leaders like Zig Ziglar and Warren Buffett and J.W. Marriott, Jr. He said things with an intonation that let you know he was speaking in quotation marks. He said, ‘Belief creates its verification in fact.’ He said, ‘I’m the only asset I’ll ever have.’ He said, ‘The prepared mind takes advantage of chance.’ He said, ‘The secret to success is hard work.’ I thought: It’s not much of a formula. The opposite is also true. Some failures work like bastards.

The second reason was Stella: while he provided emotional support and material for her music, found her rare records and allowed her to use his wilder pronouncements as lyrics, she in turn gave him strength to believe in his ideas even when they weren’t inherently worth believing in. They were a genuine team, charmed by each other’s blather; they regularly removed fear from one another’s path and never let the other feel foolish, even when his businesses crashed and fizzled or she played some pretty bad songs in some pretty public places to raucous derision. They were an all-time great couple, one of those who even argued respectfully, like two nations stopping warfare to let the other bury their dead. After they divorced, I suspected it was the hope he might win her back that inspired him, each time he was ruined, to get back on his feet.

I always knew my insolvent friend was about to remount the entrepreneurial horse when he started talking about untapped markets. The ageing population! Women over forty struggling to conceive! Couples with mismatched libidos! Honeymooners with creeping malaise! Insomniacs with global dread! Shoppers with ecoparalysis! Corporate bandits ashamed of their bodies! Upscale couples one set of genitals away from being totally interchangeable! Under-tens with overweening narcissism! Baby boomers in terminal decline! Rich space tourists! Face-transplant recipients! Speakers of all 6909 living languages! That was Aldo, always trying to solve a dilemma. How does one delineate between hope and false hope? How can one tap into the nauseating pandemic of public marriage proposals? How do you sell a product to anticonsumerists? Where should one go to manufacture clothes for obese toddlers and newborns in the ninety-seventh weight percentile?

It was the answer to the last that took him to India. I drove him to the airport, and can still remember the thick veil of fear on his face as he disappeared through the departure gates. One month later he came back with a beard and mysterious scars and monkey bites and another series of rabies shots (his third!) and even further in debt, with only scraps of information about problems communicating with the tailor, about waists too high, crotches too low. I suggested he take a break. Just get a regular job like a regular person. Three months later he opened a steak restaurant on King Street called High Steaks, but Newtown, famous for its vegans, did not bite and High Steaks shut its doors. He stopped reading self-help and prosperity literature, wanting to go deeper into the psyche of his customers, and moved on to psychology texts, both popular and academic, and read people like Jaspers and Binswanger and Hoogendijk and Achenbach and Skinner and Piaget and Adler and Horney and Laing. Then he moved on to reference books: the APA Dictionary of Psychology; Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology; Clinician’s Guide to Neuropsychological Assessment . He said he needed a product that would appeal to people’s solipsism, their unembarrassed love of self and abiding fondness for their own point of view. He seemed desperate to make anything on an industrial scale. Yet he had substandard luck and submental ideas: for instance, transdermal chocolates, patches that transmit after-dinner mints and dark almond whirls through the skin into the bloodstream, a product line that Time Out Sydney gave a devastating (if amusing) one-line review: a confectionary Willy Wonka wouldn’t touch with an Oompa Loompa’s dick. Aldo sold off the remaining merchandise for this last idea and came out even, which somehow, for him, was worse than complete failure. He said, ‘Often the thing that drives you crazy about failure is its proximity to success.’ Still, he bore his losses uncomplainingly. If only his investors would too.

The last time I was conscripted into action to assist him, he phoned me when I was at my desk gazing at a basket of pens, waiting for a transformation of the spirit. ‘I’m being chased!’ Aldo hollered in a panicked tone, puffing theatrically as if to prove he was running. Agonising quagmires and near-fatal setbacks were Aldo’s specialty, so I had no reason to doubt the urgency of his situation. ‘Keep moving,’ I told him and he gave me his cross streets. I stuck my head in the senior sergeant’s office and told him my best friend was yet again in mortal danger.

‘Need backup?’

‘Nah, I’m good.’

A violet night sky was darkening with storm clouds. I schlepped out east to a fancy suburb full of up-market pubs with sophisticated bouncers, and clothing boutiques so expensive they needed only one customer every seventy-two hours to stay afloat. I had to be careful; during a similar ‘situation’ I’d phoned him only to give away his position to his pursuer, so this time I opted to scour the low-lit streets without fanfare. A white sedan was circling and when I approached, it U-turned and disappeared down a side street. I cut the lights, idled a moment outside a councilman’s office and stared at the poster of his bilious face, which I doubt had ever begat a single sexual fantasy. A light rain fell soundlessly on the windscreen; on the streets, late joggers and contemplative men walked minuscule dogs. I moved off again, took a sharp turn down a residential street, and shone my spotlight on the discreetly lit sandstone houses. It was on my fourth tour of the block that I heard a shout; bright halogen house lights flicked on, and sprinting out from behind a flowerbed was Aldo, moving like a projectile in the damp glow of orange streetlamps, a solid brick of a man charging after him.

I hit the siren. It startled me, as usual.

The assailant tackled Aldo and they rolled, looking like two men sharing a seizure. I hit the brakes and leaped out. Then they were on their feet and it happened fast: they were taking swings like old hillbillies settling their great-granddaddy’s squabbles. Aldo went down while his attacker kept going, throwing wild punches in the rain. You could hear the thwacks of skull against pavement. I made straight for the aggressor and pulled him off.

‘Taser him!’ Aldo yelled.

I pinned the man facedown on the pavement and kept my knee pressed between his shoulderblades while I cuffed him.

‘Taser him! Taser him!’

Residents staggered stiffly out of their houses, as if off their couches for the first time in a week. One of Aldo’s eyes was beaten shut and there was gravel rash on his upper cheek; blood trickled down his neck over his older scars. He clutched a bruised or broken rib. He wasn’t wearing shoes.

‘Now,’ I said, assessing Aldo’s attacker. Gelled hair. Thick, dark moustache. Colonel Mustard in his youth. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’

‘Officer, this fucking cunt owes me fifty thousand dollars.’

‘What for?’ I asked.

‘I invested in his horror movie.’