Good to Be God (9 page)

The highest compliment from Bamford would be to call you a cunt, as in “I can’t believe you made that sale, you cunt”. That was if he liked you. If he didn’t like you he wouldn’t talk to you. Yes, he was from Yorkshire. On the other hand, if he was wrong, you could simply tell him to fuck off. His was a style of management almost extinct even then. Almost everyone liked Bamford, he was how you wanted God to be really – hard but fair.

Bamford’s retirement lunch was one of the first times I had doubts about the whole running of the universe. What happens 63

TIBOR FISCHER

when you’ve worked at a company for thirty years, when you’ve essentially built the company? You get a retirement lunch and a farewell present. The retirement lunch was faultless, everyone turned up, colleagues who loathed each other were cordiality itself, the food was great. He got an expensive dust-gatherer to put on his mantelpiece. Loader, the new boss, shook hands with Bamford, and told him, “We must do lunch.”

Normally when someone says to you “We must have lunch” or

“We must have a drink” it means precisely the opposite. If you want a lunch or a drink why not arrange it, why shove it off into the future? It’s like someone calling you “my friend”. It’s precisely people who aren’t your friend who will call you “my friend”, individuals who are either ripping you off or about to rip you off or kill you. “My friend, you have nothing to worry about” is a phrase that should make you run as fast as possible.

What frightened me most, however, was, the second, the very second Bamford walked out of the restaurant, he was gone. Everyone rushed off to further their interests, and he was nothing. Finally, we all are a dense nothing, but it’s not nice to be reminded. It was a dress rehearsal for death.

Bizarrely, despite the “we must have lunch” brush-off, Loader did invite Bamford for lunch the following month.

Everyone in the company had heard how Loader had once ended up in court on charges of theft, as a large amount of company gear had been found in his flat. The favourable interpretation of these facts was that the stolen stuff had been in the room of his lodger, who also worked for the company.

Bamford went to court to testify on Loader’s behalf, though there was debate as to whether this was because he believed Loader innocent or whether he couldn’t stomach losing his best salesman.

64

GOOD TO BE GOD

The day of the lunch, I saw Bamford waiting in reception and said hello. It occurred to me I should mention I had seen Loader go out minutes earlier, but concluded it was none of my business, and I assumed Loader would be coming back.

The new receptionist also thought about that, but she had been strictly briefed never to give away the movements of company personnel, so she couldn’t tell Bamford that not only was Loader out having lunch but so was Loader’s secretary – so no one could explain to Bamford he had been forgotten.

Bamford sat there for an hour, because he didn’t give up easily. So everybody in the company filed past and witnessed his stranding. The lunch never took place. Ironically, I was more upset by Loader’s behaviour than Bamford was. Loader had quite liked Bamford (just because you’re a sack of shit doesn’t mean you don’t have emotions) and he forgot him not because he wanted to forget him, but because he had no need to remember him. Bamford had attained the invisibility of those unable to dispense benefits.

A year or so after, Bamford’s name came up, and Loader said to me: “We must have that lunch. What’s his number?” I was confused. Everyone knew Bamford’s number. He had lived in the same house for forty years.

It’s only now I grasp that Loader had to believe that there was some difficulty with Bamford’s number: that was the only scenario that would permit him not to see himself as a shit. Loader is close to the top of my list in case civilization falls apart.

I check my watch. I’ve been in Bertrand’s office for forty minutes now.

“Okay, okay. The ceiling is higher. The ceiling in Mynt is higher, but that doesn’t do you a lot of good, now does it? No, if you take out all the furniture…”

65

TIBOR FISCHER

My job is to hand over the package, but Bertrand is pushing his luck. I’m not interested in being nothing. If Bertrand had just once uttered “sorry” or “hang on” it would have been different.

I take a piss on one of Bertrand’s pot plants, because I need one, and perhaps this will get his attention. It doesn’t. I stroll out in case that gets his attention. It doesn’t.

Downstairs the barman is now yelling at the two chumps.

“Yeah, I have to feed the monkey, but the monkey does the job.”

“We did the job,” responds a chump.

“We had fifteen people in here last week,” shouts the barman.

“Fifteen. And ten of them were my friends.”

“You can’t fire us,” says the other chump. “You didn’t pay us, so you can’t fire us.”

“You’re right. I’m not firing you. What I’m doing is giving somebody else the opportunity of using your turntable skills.”

“The monkey can’t do the job.”

“It’s true it took him two hours to learn how to use the decks, but I’m willing to nurture his skills…”

The monkey yawns. It opens a large, leather-bound book which has a biblical appearance. It skilfully rips out a thin page, which it then begins dexterously to roll into a joint with weed taken from a pouch. It lights up and puffs mellowly. I suppose anti-marijuana legislation doesn’t apply to monkeys either.

I’ve seen enough. I exit, and as I’m basking in the sun wondering where to go for an expensive sandwich I have no intention of paying for, the two chumps storm out, and attempt to slam the door, which they can’t, since it has one of those slow-close mechanisms. They charge up to me. I feel fear. Am I going to be mugged?

“He’s fired us,” says one to me. Does he think he knows me? That’s the price you pay for usual features. The two of 66

GOOD TO BE GOD

them are wearing white T-shirts with a picture of grapes. My interlocutor has large sideburns: one is dyed purple, the other is dyed yellow.

“He’s replaced us with a monkey,” says the other one. “A monkey called Stinky.” If I had been fired and replaced with a monkey, particularly a monkey called Stinky, I don’t think I would go round telling the world.

“It’s not about the strippers. No one comes for the strippers.

They come for the music. Without the music, man, the strippers are nothing. What does a monkey know about music?”

“Yeah,” I say sympathetically, trying to load the word with all the things they want to hear. The two guys are twenty, beefy, and they’re standing very close to me in a blocking sort of way.

Is this a preamble to a beatingful robbery?

“You’re Bertrand’s dealer, aren’t you?”

“No,” I say, surprising myself by how convincing I sound.

Denial, outrage, surprise, a hint of menace – all present.

“I knew it,” says the other one. “I knew you were.”

“You’ve got heavy connections, right?”

“No.”

“Oh, man. Which cartel do you work for?”

“I don’t work for anyone.”

“We want to work with serious people.”

“We want to work with serious people, not monkeys,” says the other.

The one with technicolour sideburns reaches into his pocket.

I’m alarmed for a second, but the trousers are too tight to conceal a weapon. “I’m Gamay,” he says. “This is Muscat.” He hands me a crumpled card with the inscription “DJ Gamay and DJ Muscat – Rhythm Gods”.

“Hey,” says the other one, handing me another card with 67

TIBOR FISCHER

an identical layout that reads “DJ Muscat and DJ Gamay –

Rhythm Gods”.

It’s taken me a while, but I grasp that they are that stupid.

It’s partly youth, but mostly stupidity. Of course, I’ve never regarded DJing as a job. Where’s the skill or enterprise? You buy a record, which in most parts of the world rarely involves a journey of more than a few miles or the investment of an hour.

You play the record on a turntable. Indisputably, some technical ability is needed: plugging the turntable into a power source, but frankly, Stinky rests my case.

“Give us a chance,” says Gamay.

“Guys, I work at a local church.”

“Give us a chance,” says Muscat, going down on his knees.

“Phone us anytime. We need to be big-time. We need to be nationwide. ”

“Thank you. If I need any DJing I’ll call you first,” I say. I drive off. Now I’m worrying about Bertrand. Will my walking out cause serious repercussions? Will there be bloodshed?

By the time I get back to Sixto’s I’m sweating about my decision. I know nothing about the practice of this profession.

Sixto is in charge of everything in Miami. The house itself is a money-laundering exercise for his bosses. Buy ruined house, spend fortune doing it up, sell it for bigger fortune, claim decoration skills, all legal. Sixto’s renting out rooms to earn some pocket money for himself. But just because I’ve saved his life doesn’t mean he’ll let me do anything I please; however, when I tell Sixto what happened (omitting the pot plant) he says: “Bertrand’s fantastically irritating. We can live without him. You should have walked out straight away.”

G

68

GOOD TO BE GOD

Doubtless my being asked to come along is a mark of approval, an acknowledgement that an apprenticeship has begun. Hierophant Graves drives us out to Opa-Locka to visit a family who aren’t members of his congregation, but former neighbours of his former neighbours, who are in need of tribulation-easing. I contemplate the rosary that Hierophant has had fitted on his dashboard so he can knock off a couple of prayers when he’s stuck in traffic. That’s religion, there’s really a lot of praying.

They have lots of differences, but I can’t think of one that doesn’t go in for prayer. Right rite. Rite right.

I’ve become a fan of the Hierophant’s grit. He’s an also-ran.

Granted, so am I, but he’s taken thirty years to build up a church with an average congregation of twenty, he’s not very smart, and I can’t see him upping his game.

The Hierophant talks of the end of time and nuns’ arses. He’s of a generation for whom humour means nuns and farmers’

daughters. But there comes the point where you have to stop talking of the end of time and nuns’ arses and get out of the car and deal with a dying child.

We’re here to tackle the big one. The mollification of the really unjustifiable. I’m sure this former Marine’s sergeant would be proud of the way he hits the beaches of suffering, rushing straight for the hardest section.

The Locketts are a young couple. Balvin is an unemployed jai-alai player and his wife, Nina wants to give up her job as a food-standards inspector to look after their three-year-old daughter, Esther, who has leukaemia and, they say, a few months to live.

There is of course, nothing the Hierophant or I can do to alter the injustice of their daughter dying, but he is good. As I listen to him pastor, I grow more confident and optimistic. Our ears 69

TIBOR FISCHER

tend to be more open to sentences we want to hear, and there is something soothing about someone telling us again and again, with confidence, that it may be all right.

The one problem with turning cynical and dishonest is that you can never succeed completely. I dislike children. I dislike children because they’re typically noisy and smelly; you have to spend your whole time escorting food in and out of their bodies, but you’re expected to be charmed by them.

The problem with Esther is that she is completely charming.

She sits quietly on her own, playing with some strange counters on a board, smiling, looking perfectly healthy and happy.

Why are we all equipped with such honest joy at the start?

It’s so radiant even I am momentarily invigorated by it, before knowledge of her illness defoliates me. I believe I would give her my life if I could (or at least I feel as if I would, who knows? I’d probably chicken out at the last moment if it could actually be arranged), mostly because I don’t have much left anyway, and because she is bright and good-natured and won’t mess up like the Hierophant or me.

We leave. I’m weighed down by how astonishingly hard life is, and my opinion of the Hierophant is considerably raised.

It’s easy to talk about benevolence when the sun is shining and bank accounts are full, not so easy when the torture’s going on.

He may have done some good, and if he didn’t, he was trying.

There is a season for bullshitters.

On our way back, the Hierophant suggests we do some shopping. We stop off at Publix. It’s important to keep your shopping holy at all times, because you never know who might snoop into your basket. The Hierophant is doing the weekly shop and his trolley is heaped with spare rib, but I have only a loaf of bread and some price-reduced papaya in my basket. Like 70

GOOD TO BE GOD

everything else, if you make frugality a habit it’s quite easy, and it makes the splurges all the more enjoyable.

As we join the queue for the checkout, four aisles over, I spot the Krishna. A group of four. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a devotee solo. Probably they need one person who knows the way to the supermarket, one person who knows the way back from the supermarket, one to steer the trolley and one to deal with the cashier.

“Don’t look,” the Hierophant whispers to me. “Act natural.”

As our items are processed I wonder what acting natural in my case would involve? Act like an unemployed lighting salesman? Act like an unemployed lighting salesman acting like he’s God?

Outside, we load our goods into the car, but the Hierophant doesn’t start the car up. He smears some dirt on the number plates. He ushers me into the driver’s seat and then surveys the exit. He fiddles in the glove compartment and produces a Miami Heat cap and a pair of sunglasses which he dons; he fiddles some more and finds another one for me, and produces a pistol.

“Tyndale, I can’t see any cameras out here, can you?” I look around. If we’re on camera, I certainly can’t spot it. “Drive as I tell you,” he says ominously.

The Hare Krishna appear and load up their people carrier.