Naked (25 page)

I was not the only one mortified by his sales pitch. The shoppers recoiled, their faces blanched of color. Wheedled to within
an inch of their lives, they fled toward the surrounding booths. “They’ll be back,” Jon said. “I planted a seed of interest,
and it’ll sprout any minute now. Just give it some time.”

A man and woman wearing matching fringed jackets approached our table and Jon began his spiel. “I might be cuckoo, but I think
it’s time you two bought a clock.”

The man picked up one of my boxes and turned to the woman, saying, “Nathaniel uses a pipe, doesn’t he?”

Sold. Because they were already stoned, it was fairly easy to smell my customers approaching. I had priced my boxes at twenty-five
dollars each, and by noon all four of them had been bought.

“Say, Goldilocks, you want a nice clock to go with that? I’m giving a thirty percent discount to anyone wearing paisley boots.”

By late afternoon Jon had begun invading other people’s booths in search of customers. “Stained-glass tissue dispensers? What
do you want with those? Let me show you something that’ll really knock your socks off.”

The people of Portland winced. They shrugged and apologized, but not a single one consented to purchase a clock cut in the
image of their fair state.

“Cheap sons of bitches,” Jon said. “Hey, Lord, why didn’t you tell me these creeps would be such tightwads?”

When the other craftspeople began packing up, Jon told me to stay put. “This way, the latecomers will have less of a selection.
They stuck us all the way out in the back where nobody can find us, that’s the problem. By the time the customers get here,
they’ve already spent all their money. Now’s our chance, boy. Our day is just beginning.”

Vans and trucks were summoned, and I watched as our neighbors loaded up their folding tables and portable wall units, congratulating
one another on their recordbreaking sales. It was after dark when Jon finally allowed me to pack up the station wagon.

We rode in silence past the city limits and onto the highway, the clocks ticking the words
choke, choke, choke.
It had been a while since I’d spent any time in a city, and several times during the course of the day, I’d looked up thinking
that this or that backpacked stranger was someone I knew. It was a heady, joyous feeling.
“Oh, look, it’s Veronica; it’s Gretchen.”

It was implausible, but that never stopped me from drawing a quick breath and bolting up from my folding chair. The disappointment
that followed was crushing and only served to remind me just how much I missed the people I’d left behind. I watched shoppers
buying Christmas gifts and pictured myself spending the holiday alone in my trailer, waiting for well-meaning Christians to
deliver a ham or casserole to my doorstep. And these people
were
good. They were kind and thoughtful, but their grace was wasted on me because, regardless of my circumstances, I would never
genuinely accept it. Perhaps that didn’t matter to them, but it meant something to me. A chicken, a cardboard box, a jade
clock: these things were much more forgiving than I could ever hope to be. I was a smart-ass, born and raised. This had been
my curse and would continue to be so. Instructing me in religious faith was like trying to teach a goat to cook a fine meal
— it just wasn’t going to happen. I was too greedy and inattentive, and the ultimate reward meant nothing to me. I didn’t
want to quit my job. Quitting involved a certain degree of responsibility I didn’t want to assume. Rather, I hoped that Jon
might remove that burden and dismiss me as soon as possible. I had felt contempt for him, even occasional hatred, and now
I was fighting the urge to feel sorry for him. He must have known it, and clearing his throat, he proceeded to cut me off
at the pass.

“Let me tell you a little something,” he said finally. “I don’t appreciate being used. I’m not talking here about all the
free coffee and rides I’ve given you. I mean used in here.” He meant to point at his heart but, swerving to pass another car,
wound up gesturing toward his lap instead. “You’re a user, kid. You used my tools and my patience and now you want me to pat
you on the head and tell you what a good little boy you are. But you know what? You’re
not
a good boy. You’re not even a good girl.”

More,
I thought.
More, more.

“You swish into town, expecting everyone to bend over backward and roll out the red carpet, and, oh, some of them did it.
You ate their stuffing and came back for seconds, but this is
it,
Piglet, the cupboard is bare. I taught you a skill, and now you can pay your own way for a change. That’s right, let’s turn
the tables. Why not? It’s only fair! For starters, you owe me a hundred dollars for that booth rental. Why should I pay? You’re
the one who reaped the benefits, not me. All I did was break my back teaching you a skill and listening to you blubber like
a baby every time you skinned your delicate little knuckles. You wear me out with your sob stories and then expect me to dust
you off and tell you Daddy’s going to make everything all right. But you know something, kid? I’m
not
your daddy and I’m tired of being used like one.”

He pulled off to the side of the highway. “I’m not your daddy
or
your chauffeur
or
your goddamned Santa Claus.”

I handed him the money I’d made and stepped out of the station wagon.

“The God part I’m not charging you for,” he shouted. “Him, you can have for free.”

I watched him pull back onto the highway and, having selected a good-sized stone, I blessed the back of his car. It wasn’t
terribly far back to Odell, no more than ten miles. I walked for a ways and then held out my thumb, eager to get back to the
trailer, where, if I hurried, I could clean the place up and get my things together in time to catch the morning bus home.

The day after graduating from college, I found fifty dollars in the foyer of my Chicago apartment building. The single bill
had been folded into eighths and was packed with cocaine. It occurred to me then that if I played my cards right, I might
never have to find a job. People lost things all the time. They left class rings on the sinks of public bathrooms and dropped
gem-studded earrings at the doors of the opera house. My job was to keep my eyes open and find these things. I didn’t want
to become one of those coots who combed the beaches of Lake Michigan with a metal detector, but if I paid attention and used
my head, I might never have to work again.

The following afternoon, hung over from cocaine, I found twelve cents and an unopened tin of breath mints. Figuring in my
previous fifty dollars, that amounted to an average of twenty-five dollars and six cents per day, which was still a decent
wage.

The next morning I discovered two pennies and a comb matted with short curly hairs. The day after that I found a peanut. It
was then that I started to worry.

***

I have known people who can quit one job and find another in less time than it takes to quarter a fryer. Regardless of their
experience, these people exude charm and confidence. The charm is something they were either born with or had beaten into
them at an early age, but what gives them their confidence is the knowledge that someone like me has also filed an application.
Mine is a history of almosts. I can type, but only with one finger, and have never touched a computer except to clean it.
I never learned to drive, which eliminates delivery work and narrows my prospects to jobs located on or near the bus line.
I can sort of hammer things together but have an ingrained fear of electric saws, riding lawn mowers, and any motorized equipment
louder or more violent than a vacuum cleaner. Yes, I have experience in sales, but it is limited to marijuana, a product that
sells itself. I lack the size and bulk to be a guard, and the aggression necessary for store detectives, crossing guards,
and elementary schoolteachers. Years ago I had waited on tables, but it was the sort of restaurant where customers considered
the phrase “Have a good day” to be an acceptable tip. On more than one occasion I had found it necessary to physically scrape
the cook off the floor and scramble the eggs myself, but this hardly qualified me as a chef.

It wouldn’t have worked to include the job on my résumé and list it as a reference, as the manager never answered the telephone,
fearful that it might be someone phoning in a take-out order. The waiters in Chicago tended to apply with a modeling portfolio
in one hand and a gym bag in the other, and it seemed useless to compete. If my shirt was pressed, it was more or less guaranteed
that my fly was down.

When luck was with me I tended to stumble into jobs, none of which were the type to hand out tax statements at the end of
the year. People gave me money and I spent it. As a result, I seemed to have fallen through some sort of crack.

You needed certain things to secure a real job, and the longer you went without them, the harder it was to convince people
of your worth. Why
can’t
you work a cash register or operate a forklift? How is it you’ve reached the age of thirty and still have no verifiable employment
record? Why are you sweating so, and what force compels you to obsessively activate your cigarette lighter throughout the
course of this interview? These questions were never spoken but rather were implied every time a manager turned my application
face down on his desk.

I leafed through the Art Institute’s outdated employment notebook, and page by page it mocked my newly acquired diploma. Most
of the listings called for someone who could paint a mural or enamel a map of Normandy onto a medal-lion the size of a quarter.
I had no business applying for any of these jobs or even attending the Art Institute in the first place, but that’s the beauty
of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no
talent. I was ready to pack it in when I came across the number of a woman who wanted her apartment painted. Bingo. I had
plenty of experience there. If anything, I was considered too meticulous a painter. As long as she supplied the ladder and
I could carry the paint on the bus, I figured I was set.

The woman began by telling me she had always painted the apartment herself. “But I’m old now. It hurts my hands to massage
my husband’s feet, let alone lift a heavy brush over my head. Yes, sir, I’m old. Withered and weak as a kitten. I’m an old,
old woman.” She spoke as if this were something that had come upon her with no prior notice. “All the sudden my back gives
out, I’m short of breath, and some days I can’t see more than two feet in front of my face.”

This was sounding better all the time. I’d learned to be wary of people forced to pay others for a job they used to do themselves.
As a rule they tended to be hypercritical, but with her, I didn’t think there would be any problem. It sounded as if she couldn’t
see anything well enough to complain about it. I could probably just open the paint can, broadcast the fumes, and call it
a day. We made arrangements for me to visit her home the following morning, and I hung up the phone cheering.

The apartment was located in a high-rise building on Lake Shore Drive. I knocked and the door was answered by a trim, energetic
woman holding a tennis racket. Her hair was white, but except for a few spidery lines beneath her eyes, her face was smooth
and unwrinkled. I asked to speak to her mother, and she chuckled, poking me in the ribs with the handle of her racket.

“Oh, I am just so happy to see a young person.” She grabbed my hand. “Look what we’ve got here, Abe: a young fella. Why, he’s
practically a toddler!”

Her husband bounded into the room. Muscular and tanned, he wore a nylon fitness suit complete with a head-band and sparkling
sneakers. “Ahh, a youngster!”

“He’s a graduate,” the woman said, squatting to perform a knee bend. “A kid, thinks he’s ready to paint our sarcophagus. He’s
looking at us thinking he’s discovered a pair of fossils he can maybe sell to the museum. Oh, we’re old all right. Out to
pasture. Long in the tooth.”

“Built the great Pyramids with my own two hands,” the husband added. “Used to swap ideas with Plato and ride a chariot through
the cobbled streets of Rome.”

“Face it, baby,” his wife said. “We’re ancient. A couple of has-beens.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “You’re not old. Why, neither one of you looks a day over fifty. Look at you, so trim and fit, you’re in
much better shape than I am. I’m sure you’ve got plenty of time left.”

“Yeah, right.” The woman hopped onto an exercycle. “Time to forget our own names, time to lose control of our bowels, time
to stoop and blather and drool onto our bibs. We’ve got all the time in the world. Days were when I’d throw on a rucksack
and head out for a good two-, three-week hike, but now, forget it. I’m too old.”

“She’s older than the hills she used to climb,” her husband said.

“Oh, look who’s talking, Father Time himself.”

“I’m an old geezer and I’ll admit it,” the man said. “Still, though, I’m what you call an ‘up person.’”

“That’s right,” she cackled. “Washed up and used up!”

I understood then that this was their act: the Squabbling Old Folks, appearing interminably.

“I guess if you’re going to be painting the place, I might as well scrape these tired old bones together and give you a tour,”
the woman said. She guided me through their home, where every room was furnished with a piece of exercise equipment. A NordicTrack
stood parked beside a rowing machine, both facing the living-room television. In the bedroom they kept a set of barbells and
colorful mats upon which to practice aerobics. Swimsuits hung drip-drying in the bath-room, and athletic shoes neatly lined
the floors of every closet. Except for a few smudges near the guest-room punching bag, the walls were spotless. The doors
and baseboards were in fine shape, not a chip or scratch on them. They led me beneath the chin-up bar and into the study,
which was decorated floor to ceiling with photographs documenting their various adventures. Here they were riding a tandem
bicycle through the streets of Peking or trading beads in a dusty Peruvian marketplace. The pictures spanned the course of
forty years spent kneeling in kayaks and pitching tents on the peaks of snow-covered mountains, hiking muddy trails and taking
the waters of frigid streams.