Make Me Work (27 page)

“Pathetic?”

“No! Fluid! It's a fluid situation. We've talked about those. What happens in fluid situations?”

“Us little piggies have roast beef?”

“Yes, Walter!”

“You know what?” Anita says. “I don't want to do this anymore. I quit.”

“You can't quit. You're the producer.”

She takes a small video camera from a shelf and points it at me. The red light starts blinking. “Tell me how you feel about moving in with Rebecca,” she says. “Talk about that.”

“Da!” says Dwight Jr., pointing at the camera.

“See that? He sees the camera and says ‘Da.' Is that adorable or what?”

“Anita, could you turn that off?”

“People pay good money for this, Walter. Video therapy. You talk about your problems on camera, and it helps you work through them.”

“It's not helping me. It's making me upset.”

Dwight Jr. stands on my lap with his killer Stride-Rites, then flings his head back and swooshes down the front of me, pretending I'm a slide. He hits the floor with a squeal and climbs back up to do it again.

“You're an actor, you can't get nervous in front of cameras. Plus, therapy doesn't always feel better at first. Lots of times it feels crummy for quite a while. So what about moving in with Rebecca?”

“First of all, I might not do it. I'm leaning against it, in fact.”

“Don't listen to Dwight, Walter. He acts so hard-boiled, but deep down he's incredibly romantic.”

“Really. What about Tempesto and the Doctor? They're against it, too.”

“Tempesto and the Doctor. Men who think women should be dragged around by their hair.”

I was eating dinner at Rebecca's a few weeks ago, when, out of the blue, she said, “Isn't it about time you moved in?”

The tableau shimmers in my mind like one of Tempesto's holograms: the oakey Chardonnay like gold in my upraised glass, Rebecca's homemade chicken pie on my plate, Rebecca herself across the table with her dark hair in a red ribbon and her steaming fork poised in the air. “Moved in what?” I replied innocently.

“Moved in
here,”
she said, her eyes hard and moist.
“Moved in with me.”

For some reason, I suddenly remembered the story of a famous jazz critic who suggested to Miles Davis that he, Miles, drop by the next time he was in the jazz critic's neighborhood. “What for?” Miles reportedly said. “What for?” I blurted to Rebecca.

It took a night and a day to make up with her, and then I negotiated for more time, and sometime after that I mentioned the episode to Anita—seeking, I suppose, impartial womanly guidance, though what could I have been thinking?—and soon people were stopping me in the hallways of Paradise Productions to clap me upon the shoulder and say, “Things are getting serious, Walter!”

Not Dwight, however. He's opposed to it. Men shouldn't do things like move in with women, he told me. Men have their freedom to think about.

“Freedom to do what?” I asked.

“To sleep with other women, for one thing.”

“Dwight, how could I do that?”

“Easy!”

“What else?” I asked, but he couldn't think of anything. Anita lets Dwight do whatever he wants, except that one thing.

“Dwight, you yourself moved in with a woman,” I pointed out.

“So?” he said.

Anita drops down on one knee for a different angle with the camera. Dwight Jr., the most videotaped child in history, hams it up by wrapping an arm around my neck and taking a bow as though we're doing some old biplane stunt.

“Anita, we're getting punchy. I'm gonna make fresh coffee.”

“Just tell me your gut feelings. Not what everybody else says. Tell me what you, Walter, personally feel.”

“I feel it's an awfully big step.”

“But you want to do it.”

“That's the problem.”

“Talk about how you feel with that cute little boy on your lap. Isn't he a doll? How would you like a little boy of your own?”

“I want a little girl.”

“A girl! Wonderful! Tell me.”

“Well, if I had a girl, I wouldn't have to get symbolically killed or kicked in the crotch all the time. She'd worship me and love me forever.”

“No, eventually she'd nail you.”

“You think?”

“It's part of human development. Dada gets it in the coconuts.”

Susie's voice comes over the intercom.
“Dwight for Anita on
3. Anita,
pick up
3.”

Anita punches the button for the speakerphone. “Where the hell are you?” she says at her husband, but it's Tempesto's voice that comes out.

“Captain's log, Stardate 4217. We have established contact with the space colony. But something has gone terribly wrong. The men are no longer in charge. The slave women have taken over
.”

“Yay!” Anita says at the phone.

Dwight's voice comes on.
“Anita? What's going on? Where's Walter?”

“We're doing video therapy. I'm taping Walter talking about moving in with Rebecca. We're getting some really great, heartfelt stuff. His anxiety level is dropping dramatically.”

“
I happen to know Walter has decided against that. Nothing personal about Rebecca. Lovely girl. But Walter needs to be near his work
.”

“When did I say that?”

“
Is that you, Walter? Your voice sounds funny.”

“Your son has his finger up my nose.”

“Well, take it out. Hi, Dwight
Jr. It's
Jah speaking. Jah.”

“I never said I decided, Dwight.”

“You said words to that effect.”

“I said I couldn't make up my mind.”

“
That's not how it sounded to me. What kind of shape is the tape in?”

“The way you left it,” I say. “The sound of outer space clapping.”

We've spent the morning staring at Dwight's all-night samurai recut of Vernon's tape—talking heads answering questions no one has asked, narration that doesn't go with the pictures, ten-second black holes, all in the structure, more or less, of our Harborfront condominium video. When Dwight left with Tempesto, he told us to fill in the holes and polish it up.

“
You haven't done
anything to it?”

“We have some ideas,” Anita says.

“Wonderful. Say goodbye to Walter and we'll talk about it.”

“Dwight, no!” she says. “I need him!”

“Well, we need some help over here, too.”

“Help doing what?” I say.

“Walter, bring little Dwight with you. Dwight Jr., leave
Mommy
alone now. Come to Jah.”

The door swings open and the Doctor comes in. “Ready?” he asks me.

“Ready for what?”

“To venture into the field. Didn't Dwight call you?”

“
Yes, I called him,”
says the speakerphone.

When the Doctor got his Ph.D. in anthropology years ago, he was all set for a big academic career, and then he signed up to work for a summer on an ethnographic documentary. Somewhere out in the bush he went cinematically native. He's been in the film business ever since, where there's more raw anthro than in any tribal village. At some point in the Doctor's barefoot wanderings with the 16 millimeter, he was promised to a chieftain's daughter, and he's theoretically next in line to become king of an obscure South Pacific island. Among the principals of Paradise Productions, he is the most genuinely excited about Vernon DeCloud's delusions. The Doctor, it turns out, has some unfinished personal business with the academy, and Vern's project is how he plans to finish it—by becoming the first anthropologist to live in space, where he will undertake a trail-blazing scholarly study of private-sector space cowboys, combined with documentaries for public TV and a two- or three-volume coffee-table book tie-in.

The Doctor is also an amateur folk musician, and in this capacity he composed the anthem “Hardware Dude,” theme song of Marco Tempesto's
Commando Cuisine
. The show is taped each week in the home-ec labs of a local high school, to which the Doctor has now driven us in his bottle-green Austin-Healey. The taping is done on Thursday nights, not Saturday afternoon, but since Tempesto was cooking anyway, he wanted to get a special episode out of it—catering the large banquet event. Dwight Jr. refuses to walk, so I'm conveying him piggyback down the wide school hallway, spurred on by the Stride-Rites. My adolescence is flooding back to me. We pass countless padlocked student lockers filled, I presume, with weapons and drugs. “This is where you'll be spending your days, Dwight Jr.,” I say. He slaps the metal doors as we lumber by.

I've never been here, but the Doctor knows where he's going. He hangs a left and pushes open a set of double doors to reveal Tempesto under movie lights in the center of a vast lab room, standing at a worktable in an achingly white jumpsuit with
COMMANDO CUISINE
stitched across his chest in glossy red script—the name of his catering service as well as of the program. He breaks eggs one-handed into a bowl and fluffs them with a whisk.

Dwight directs, standing off to one side and pointing to things he wants his camera operator to shoot. He sees us, and wheels over a stainless-steel table piled with large net bags of onions. Dwight Jr. climbs down my body to be with Da. “Have you ever had Tempesto's onion tart?” Dwight asks me. “No? You're in for a treat.” He takes a whopping chef's knife from a wooden table side holder, flicks its edge with his thumb, and hands it to me.

“I'm chopping onions instead of working on the video?”

“Sometimes the only thing to do is to leave Anita alone, and then she pulls it together. Plus, we have to think of the big picture. What if the video's a bust? We want to make sure there's plenty of good food, right?”

“Maybe Tempesto could do one of his laser-light shows.”

“Good thinking, Walter. We're going to get it right now. That's why you're taking over for us.”

“This reminds me of a wonderful feast I once filmed in New Guinea,” the Doctor says.

Tempesto beckons him over into the camera's purview. “We have a world-renowned anthropologist in our studios today, ladies and gentlemen. Doctor, any little-known culinary lore you'd like to share with us?”

“Well, Marco, did you know that the natives of Coney Island have more than one hundred words for Sno-Kones?”

Marco Tempesto got his start as Vernon DeCloud's technical wizard. Back in the days when Vern was doing his first big venture-capital deals, the young Tempesto was pulling cable through Vern's ceilings, installing phone systems, configuring computers, maintaining databases. Tempesto even wrote software back then, though he won't type one line of code today. Language is a quagmire, he says. He works only on machines themselves now, machines and food, and then only if he's made them himself.

His real heart is in gargantuan visual art. Not the thousand-mile serpentine trenches you've seen in travel magazines, the ones requiring a bulldozer and a bullheaded grant-recipient. Tempesto doesn't work with dirt. He doesn't work with brute force. He works with light. Though hardware is his mistress, Tempesto's deepest passion is for the immaterial, for things you can't take apart with a screw gun, things that don't really exist outside the concatenating powers of the mind. You wouldn't know it from the lather he can get into over gigabytes and megaflops, but the physical world, for Tempesto, is merely a doorway into the metaphysical.

More than anything, he would like to turn the nighttime sky into 3-D color TV. That would be the most incredible hack of all, he says, and he claims to know how to do it, but it would cost a lot of money, even for a few seconds, and so far the funding has been elusive. He pitched the idea to his old friend Vernon DeCloud—financing celestial television by selling some sky-time for advertising—and though Vern would be perfectly happy to go down in history as the man who turned the stratosphere into a Coke commercial, he said no. Vern didn't believe Tempesto could do it. He thought it was just techie hand-waving, and that's what hurt the most. In desperation, and though he considered it an ugly idea, Tempesto submitted a proposal for turning the new moon into a Gulf Oil sign. The Gulf people said his idea wouldn't work and sent it back.

Meanwhile, another laser artist beat him to a synthetic aurora borealis, and Tempesto still smarts over that, though by all reports it was less colorful and shorter-lived than his own would have been. And a holographic northern lights was pretty obvious anyway. Tempesto envisions art videos viewable from one-third of the earth's surface at a time. Why? For the transformation and unification of human consciousness.

Tempesto's staff went to the Marriott in two panel trucks full of food and drink, leaving the Doctor and me to button things up in the laboratories of American culinary education. Dwight Jr. got to use the big boys' urinal in the high-school bathroom because it was the kind that goes all the way down to the floor, and that seemed to be the high point of his day, if not of his life. While the Doctor helped him, I washed my hands three times with the anti-bacterial soap from the pump dispenser, but they still smell like onions. My eyes continue to cry, too, here in the passenger seat of the Doctor's Lilliputian car, with Dwight Jr. sitting on my lap and the seat belt around the two of us.

We corkscrew down into the garage beneath the Marriott, where the Doctor unfurls himself from the Austin-Healey, lifts Dwight Jr. out, and then pulls me from the car like a vet birthing a calf. We ride a mahogany-lined elevator up a few flights, and when the doors slide open we're in a lobby with scores of people milling around, name tags plastered to their shirts and jackets saying,
HELLO! MY NAME IS
, followed by their names in red Magic Marker. A cloth banner spans a wall, saying, in two-foot-high letters,
WELCOME INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR PRIVATE SPACE EXPLORATION
.