The Dream Merchant (3 page)

It's not real gold, but I can't turn off the faucet.

I don't give a shit about anything. I'll eat anteater, heated-over anteater with maggots stirred in—that's what we ate for the next three days from the barrel. Only someone completely mad could eat such vomit. I would sleep on the ground with bugs crawling up my legs. I'm going to make it, whatever it takes. We'll cut an airfield into the jungle with machetes and our bare hands. We're going to bring in heavy equipment. Whatever happens, I'm going to find the gold, because other guys in the jungle are finding it. In Manaus, all I would hear about was gold, gold; men were putting together expeditions with every dollar they could muster.

It was something more than just getting excited. A force was running through me. On that first day the rules changed.

After a few days on the property we started to find the real thing, small amounts, but it was gold for sure. And I knew nothing was going to get in my way. All the things that I went through in my life prepared me for this. I had no fear. Nobody's going to take anything away from me. If you get in my way, I'm going to trample you. You could put a gun to my head. That happened to me, and I didn't give a shit. I was one son of a bitch. I had to deal with my people and some of them were brutal. I did bad things. People died. So what?

Jim looked at me a beat and then back toward the moving lights. So what! I thought.

I loved it, he said. I loved it. One time I was speeding along a rutted street outside Manaus and this euphoria built up in me and I just started screaming into the night like I was on something. Because I was.

People can see it in you. You could see it in me. They called me
gringo maluco,
the crazy American. I was another person. As if you had a dream about wanting to be a certain type of guy—a real tough guy, you see them in the movies. And these guys can do things you could barely imagine. Well, these guys are for real, a lot of them, because they have something inside. A lot of CIA agents, or people who are killers—well, they have this drive. It's a fever. Some people who kill a lot of people—these multiple killers—what do you think they have inside of them? Something's driving them. Nothing's stopping them. Nothing was stopping me.

Now Jim was quiet for a time, looking out at the dark ocean.

Are they coming any closer? I asked for the third or fourth time, unable to get my mind off the gunmen in the boats.

Hard to say, he answered.

Jim was returning from the jungle and didn't seem concerned about the boats. I imagined that he was thinking where this experience had left him—whether a man can come all the way back and be normal, live again with his wife in a neat little house in the suburbs as if he never left.

The plan was for us to keep our vigil, behind the Boston Whaler where the Colombians couldn't see us if they came back. That way, surprise would be on our side. Jim told me that he was a good shot, and I didn't doubt it. We would have a fighting chance, if we stayed up the night and remained alert. That was the key. He'd learned about such things in Brazil. He had a plan and I believed him.

In the morning, when I woke up, I was still clutching the rifle. It was a calm, picture-postcard day in the Bahamas with no Colombian speedboats anywhere that I could see. Jim was sleeping beside me on the deck, snoring like a bull.

 

2.

T
WENTY
YEARS
LATER
, H
OMESTEAD
, F
LORIDA

Jim raises his bare thigh a little and Mara, in shorts and T-shirt, settles on him, her body moving smoothly against his dry white skin. The petite, shapely twenty-six-year-old spreads her legs a little and raises herself, rubs her sex back and forth against my friend's thigh. I am sitting to the side of them in his old La-Z-Boy recliner, moved hastily, two weeks earlier, from his apartment with Phyllis. Jim is grinning, his left eye tearing as it has for the past eight or nine years.

I've just met this girl who now turns back toward me, strikes a pose, and smiles as though to ask, Do you like this? I feel aroused watching them and confused about why she is performing like this on my first visit to their tiny dark house. This pose, this angle, staring at her small raised behind, legs spread, is about the same view as the snapshot Jim had showed me five weeks earlier on my last trip to Florida, before Mara arrived from Israel, where they'd met. In the picture, her head is turned to the side on a pillow after they had had sex. She is spent, entirely pleased. Jim had made a show of snatching the photo from my hand, but first he'd wanted me to relish her youthful ass and bushy dark hair with their wetness spilling onto her inner thigh. And now he is grinning at me. Do you like her? They are both selling me even while they sell each other.

Jim is now rounding the bend to eighty. He and I have been best friends for twenty years, although it feels like a puff of time since the night vigil alongside Jim's Boston Whaler. And yet there have been so many lavish dinners with Phyllis in their condominium, fishing trips to the Bahamas, fervent promises and plans for the future, money schemes, so much history flashing past, it is hard for me to take her in, this brand-new leading lady. Or maybe it's that I can't quite see where I fit in.

Jim and Mara are flat broke, but he doesn't seem worried. Jim has been a moneymaking machine his whole life, but now his boundless energy and ambition have narrowed to this twenty-six-year-old who has been a shock to his family, friends, to a virtual army of customers and salesmen, to everyone who knows him. How could he leave Phyllis, his faithful devoted wife, his home, his business (though it wasn't doing very well)?

Here they are in a worn-out bungalow with aged matching appliances. Two children are sleeping in a closet-sized bedroom, her kids. Empty pizza boxes are strewn in a corner—not a trace of gracious living anywhere to be seen. For most of his adult life Jim has lived in gorgeous, spacious homes. This? This would have been a tragic place for my friend, banishment.

Mara brought a few thousand from Israel, just enough for them to scrape by for eight or ten weeks. Then what? He cannot move back to Canada, where he is still a fugitive. Returning to Phyllis would be humiliating and bewildering, though she would take him back.

I could never have concocted this late chapter. I know him so well. I can often anticipate his words, practically read his mind as I could my own father's, particularly in the last years of his life when he was very sick and no longer on top in his business life. When he needed me I traveled to his shabby rooms in Cambridge, Massachusetts (rank smelling, and fashioned in nearly the same torn-and-crumbling endgame style as Jim and Mara's). I became my father's source of energy and hope. He no longer had vocal cords, so I became his voice. A few times I drove his Buick to the office of an electrical distributor he knew in Boston, held Dad's arm as we walked inside. I made his audacious pitch while my father grinned and tapped on the desk with a pencil. I was going to do the same service for Jim, help him make his way as an old man. His wife, Phyllis, never minded our scheming and intimacy—in fact, she found us amusing. I looked forward to our afternoons together on his spacious, breezy terrace over the Intracoastal, replaying our greatest fishing days or listening to him tell stories of his life in the jungle.

But this? This?

*   *   *

Mara is beautiful in the half-light of the small living room, a kid with smooth milky skin, without a wrinkle or a bulge. She could be his granddaughter. For an old man, what a miracle she is. She is wearing shorts and a white T-shirt, no bra. She wants me to look at her. No, she dares me to look.

She begins to kiss Jim on the mouth, hungry kisses; her tongue is working like a puppy—perhaps for my benefit—while she moves steadily against his leg. He's getting aroused and beginning to giggle. She won't stop. Mara's quite a salesman herself, plays us both smoothly. She has decided that to make this sale she needs to seduce both of us. She's amused by his stiff cock, turns back toward me. She is entirely comfortable speaking this language. Speaking English is more of a strain. Although her English isn't bad.

Don't you trust me? she asks. This is our new life together, she seems to say with her smile.

Their new life together. She waits for my answer. I nod my head, as if to affirm, Of course I trust you, even while I am not sure.

She is soft with me, and seductive, but underneath, a fierce woman. What does she want from Jim? Love? I don't get it.

Jim watches us, amused. He is so proud of her selling. She has become his everything.

Mara wears too much rouge on her cheeks, which makes her look trashy. I wonder, with time, if she will wear less. Except, how is it possible that for these two time can move ahead in unhurried, evolving years? He is an old man.

Jim and I could spend our life in bed. But our bed is too soft, she continues. We need a good bed.

He could die there, I say.

Not a bad way to die.

I can't shock or even jostle her. She is very sure-footed.

We'll buy a good one tomorrow, baby, he coos.

What will they use for money? He has no more credit cards.

She attaches herself to his neck, burrows into him, making a mark. She won't let go. She is digging into his life. Jim has promised to marry her. Soon they will market the Wow Card together. They will be business partners, fifty-fifty. Phyllis is out. Jim and Mara will have a new home by the water and a yacht in the backyard. There won't be any regrets. She wants a little white BMW convertible. Jim will be a millionaire once again. His whole life he has made it and lost it. Who is winning, making the sale? I fear she is winning. Jim is hooked very deep.

*   *   *

I am resolved to confront him about this precipitous course change, but the words that pop into my head are too miserable: Jim, what about all of the adventures, the promises you made? What we were going to do? I would pester him with questions about Brazil—a hundred times we had vowed to go back there together.

Instead, I ask him, Jim, what will you do when there's no more money?

In six weeks we'll be ready to put the Wow Card in stores, he answers smartly. There is nothing in the world like the Wow Card. Did I explain the marketing plan? We'll sell millions of cards; actually, we'll give them away. That's the beauty of it. Hold one in your hand and it looks like any other debit card, but it throws off a hefty residual income for the rest of your life. Let me show you some numbers—he still has ardor for the hunt despite a run of failed deals and the specter of oblivion, which he greets as a new and beguiling acquaintance. Jim has never been reluctant to experience new tastes, to walk new paths, even now while he walks the plank. This seems like the final chapter for my friend, but who knows? Jim has crashed before.

Even now, living with the girl, who feels like my enemy, he pulls me back in. I am enticed by his scheme, maybe “connected” is more accurate, preposterous and gaudy though it is. This has nothing to do with logic. Jim's ideas are the dreams of my own father.

Jim lays out the terrain: stacks of Wow Cards piled high in stores across America. He'll put them in topless bars, gas stations, and eventually they'll go into supermarkets. The Wow Card is a debit card that works in ATM machines, but its primary purpose is to allow a buyer to rent pornography anonymously at steeply discounted prices. Jim talks a little about the value of pornography while the girl smiles as if he's preparing to open a flower shop. My friend can turn a deal on its side and make it seem adventurous or cozy or sexy or the very answer to a life of pain and wanting. I've seen him do it many times. For me his pitch is a child's song.

We'll soon buy a big fishing boat together, he says to me, a sixty footer. We'll cruise the islands in style.

She listens to each word and seems to adore him.

He's laughing. The gap from his missing front tooth looks ridiculous. There's no money for a cap, but having nothing, starting again, unhampered, is so much sweeter than standing pat and being mediocre. The greatest thrill for a gambler, he'd told me years before, is losing a fortune and bottoming out. And now he's flat broke, never been this low since he was a child growing up on the outskirts of Edmonton. And he feels content watching her clean their little place and listening to the yammer of her Israeli children, or turning on Frank Sinatra.

She smiles. She loves him. I don't know. Maybe she loves him.

 

3.

When the girl frets or feels idle or homesick, he uses the past like roses and chocolates. Jim has described to her the houses: the last condo he and Phyllis lived in had seven bathrooms, the girl was amused about the bathrooms, never having had more than one herself, and the river of money, for years everything he touched turned to money. She squirms when he talks about high times, his two new Rolls-Royces parked in front of the cavernous modern house Jim had built on a peninsula for his second wife, Ava. There were two smaller houses on the property for the servants. Some called it the finest estate in Canada. In the morning, Jim chose between the white convertible and the silver sedan depending on his mood or whom he was meeting for lunch. He told Mara about the night Tony Bennett crooned from speakers in Jim's Learjet “Fly Me to the Moon” while Jim and Ava screwed face-to-face in his buttery leather recliner, screwed and laughed, and then he pointed to a glowing full moon blasting through the oval window as the plane descended from thirty thousand feet into Vegas. That was when Jim was at the very top. I heard Jim describe the moment at parties in the big condo on Brickell Avenue above the Intracoastal where he often entertained with Phyllis—it was the perfect address for Jim's marketing business.

There was always a subtext to his tales, usually narrated to several eager men standing off from the main group (most nights of the week you would find Jim holding forth at some party or business gathering); more or less, the stories all led to the same happy conclusion: If I can have yachts and planes, gorgeous women, all the thousands I need to play at Caesars, so can you. It's easy. First you have to understand your hot button. What is your hot button? Take a look at yourself. Be honest. What is it that really turns you on? Do you love beautiful young women? Do you love big-game fishing? Fast cars? Cars? Have you seen my new BMW 740? Come on, let's walk outside a moment.