What We Are (26 page)

I don't know him, sure, but I can tell you that this guy has that simple and stupid image of the world where everything right down to the brushing and flossing of your teeth is a metaphysical matter infinitely bigger than yourself. Whatever molars you lose over the decades, whatever slivers of rotten meat you loosen from your gums, all of it is tied into that larger scheme of the stars above. I haven't even shaken his hand yet and I know it. He's seeping with flustered ambition.

But there's something more to his equation on life and the constellations; I've seen it before on the faces of adolescents in high school hallways, drunkards in university barrooms, shot callers in prison yards: an earthly star awaits the proper recognition of his status. “Astronomers have discovered that between the Pleiades and Orion there is a bright flaming being that they've taken the liberty of christening Chinaski!” He's got fake greatness in his eyes, this guy's under the impression that each step he's taking toward me is the curtain-parting prelude to some big drama in the sky whereby all his cookie-cutter goals will finally be realized.

Trying to be stern-faced as a Nazi commandant, eyes focused on the building, he walks by me, says, “The name's Chuckie. Let's get to work.”

I follow him into the building, and in less than a minute he's telling me everything about his life. The star of the hour. His ex-wife, their three kids, a home in Willow Glen. I don't say a word, just nod, nod, nod. And it turns out that the office is empty of people, a blessing, and not only that: the quad is empty of people. It's beautiful. So my peaceful morning with the crooning birds was facilitated by a struggling region in real estate. Everything's up for rent by Collier's International rep Erin Lagerman (408)247-3780,
www.colliers.lease.space
. Today I'm a desk mover, a file hauler; I'm cheap labor, a sturdy back and healthy legs, Chinaski's little beyotch.

The first minute starts with advice: “Keep your mouth shut and your ears open.”

I tune out and think of the smoothness of vanilla milkshakes for some time, and when I tune in again, belly full of imaginary dairy, I see that two and a half hours have passed.

By God, it works!

Only five and a half more hours to go, four more days of the work-week. I have no recall of what I missed, but by the comfort with which Chinaski is speaking, I know I did well enough to play the hostage audience.

Now I hear: “Your uncle will be the first to tell you that hard work is not enough in this field.” He taps his head, squinting. “You've gotta have it up here, kid.”

I nod once, silently whistling.

“Do what's gotta be done, you do what's gotta be done.”

“Lest you be the one who gets done,” I offer.

“Remember that Rome wasn't built in a day.”

In the spirit of historical cooperation, I say, “Pax Romana.”

“Your uncle knows. I'm gonna keep an eye on you because when the cat's away, the mice will play.”

I smile, try to look mischievous.

Big fish eats medium fish eats little fish: that's Chinaski's cartoon vision of the world, the unavoidable chain of life. And like most homo sapiens I've known, Chinaski now calls this cartoon vision his moral ethic. He has the right, the moral right, to eat me. And there's nothing I can do about it. It's like this amalgamation of natural law and Calvinist dogma:
I shall get eaten, as is predestined
.

But I can see through the formula's flaws. If I can avoid being eaten long enough, then before I know it—and to Chinaski's scorn—I'll grow in status, and we'll see who eats whom.

He looks down at his watch, over his shoulder, says, “Your uncle's gonna be in the Peninsula today, I hear.”

This guy is going nowhere in this company; he can't even last three hours before he's moving on the rump roast of lethargy. Of paid worklessness and worthlessness. If he ain't decadence, I don't know what is. And the dream of Mrs. Garcia returns to me: Chinaski is the kind of person who'd hang Mrs. Garcia not out of justice or heart-felt concern for the kid: he'd do it to use her body as a stepping-stone.

“Lunchtime, good buddy,” he says. “We gotta go socialize with the bigwigs.”

W
E RELAX,
into the Fairmont recliners, Chinaski royally sipping his $13.89 Manhattan, me disroyally chugging my $9.31 pint of Sierra Nevada. I look around the empty ballroom but don't ask where all the business hotshots are. I have a feeling they wouldn't be anywhere near us, be it at a high-end hotel or the local Taco Bell. I take in the chandelier above us that looks, in suspension, like the bottom of a diamond spaceship. I'm not seconds into my appreciation of the cut of the scintillating glass or the bitter tang of the underrated Chico, California, brewery when someone says my name in an intonation I haven't heard in some time, not just my first name but my first and last name both, along with my high school graduation year, and the goddam name of the high school with it. I keep my head tilted back, my eyes focused on the crisscrossing angles of dazzling light.

I hear from one side—Chinaski—“You went to St. Cajetan College Preparatory?” and from the other, “How are you doing these days, Paul?”

“Yes,” I say, and “Just fine,” still eyeballing the roof and its hanging glittering appendage. The voice is a former classmate, a fellow alum of the prep that I vaguely recognize. “You?” I say in his direction. It is a him, I'm sure of that. Despite the blurring of gender lines
this century, only unandrogynous boys are educated at St. Cajetan, a 150-year tradition under constant assault.

“I'm doing just fine,” says the voice of the alum. “Might I be interrupting something?”

There's your cue, Chinaski.

“Not at all,” he says. “Sit down and join us, friend. Chuckie Chinaski.”

“Dong-hoo Choi.”

Good old Who Dong. The first Korean valedictorian of St. Cajetan College Prep. So whitewashed by now he couldn't tell you where Seoul is. So whitewashed by then that each day at lunch he gave away the kimchi his parents packed for him during our freshman year. That was good for me: the more kimchi the better, I say. I've eaten fifty-two different kinds of kimchi in my lifetime, the last experiment being a rather chewy, cartilaginous, pickled manta ray.

Anyway, well before our freshman year ended, old Who Ding got it into his head that we were academic rivals. I always just looked at him as my own personal kimchi supplier: he was my hustle for peppered wonbok cabbage. But all along he was trying to bring me down, this Korean Iago. I think my indifference offended him: in his valedictory speech, I recall, he said that his journey as a varsity cheerleader was so rewarding that he'd come to learn that the success of the football team, from which he'd been cut three years running, was contingent upon his services and not the other around. In other words: If you took the two teams off the field, the fans would not disappear; they'd stick around to watch a group of young men in blue face paint lead them in the school fight song.

No wonder Who Dat was top student at the prep.

Early on I had bought into the mission of the school: an all-boys Jesuit education in the center of the Silicon Valley, that theme taught to starry-eyed freshmen—“... St. Cajetan Prep has been the heart and soul of this region for a century and a half”—in minor variation
during the initial days of brainwashing. The school had a lot of pull, and anyone associated with it knew it.

I had been excited at the promise of intellectual exercise. But now, as a thinker whose logical skills were molded at Prep, sharpened later at Alviso University, and then splattered on the wall in the pen, I suspect that any blessing in life probably lies with the undiscovered thought or even the barren brain, the blessing of the idiot savant. What greater gift might one have in this Age of Information than not having to measure the value of a tidbit?

My freshman year at St. Cajetan College Prep, the world got bigger. Blame it on the reading. On Father Styron, that bald, old-school Germanic Jesuit who never exchanged pleasantries with you until you showed the talent, grit, and commitment to finish his course. Whenever he'd turn on the lights in class, he'd shout, “Lay down the darkness!” and, by God, it would.

One day in the middle of a chill blue fall, he ordered us to pick up our “plebian tushes” and follow him across the campus. We made our way over the slick green fields in silence, London's
The Call of the Wild
tucked under our arms, walking into the next minute of discovery—
all of it was discovery! all of it!
—which was ours for the taking. This was only the beginning. We gathered around Father Styron at the College Park Station, which was a wooden bench plastered with graffiti, four wooden posts supporting a bell-less belltower roof, and a condensed map of San José encased by inch-thick screws on a clear plastic bulletin board. The concrete slides and gravel trucks of Albanese Bros., churning directly across the rocky tracks, disappeared for seconds behind a silver Caltrain flashing by like moving pictures.

The father told us to sit. We dropped our plebian tushes atop our stuffed backpacks, and crossed our newly hairy legs, proud of this oddity. Our heads popped up automatically, like bobbers at the end
of the line. Still, waiting, still silent. He opened his own beaten copy of the book and read aloud from the scene where Buck, Judge Miller's dog, was delivered into the traitor's hands.

“It happened right here,” the father said. We said nothing, though some of us, myself included, let out a big breath of air. He said, “Stand,” and we stood as ordered, followed him back to class, the same quiet path.

I looked back over my shoulder, thinking,
There? Right there?

My God
.

We'd gone through
Inherit the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, Julius Caesar, Catcher in the Rye, The Crucible
. Under heavy bright light interrogation, in my deepest sleep, I could quote lengthy passages, first learned as a form of punishment in J.U.G. (Justice Under God), later as a habit, a self-imposed and acclimated discipline. I privately loved the lines more than I'd ever publicly claimed. Yes, they were all books by dead white men, but back then we didn't start a book with a qualifier. By the time I got to college I chose my own course: Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Wright, García Marquez, Oe, each book the proof of another choice, maybe a hundred choices.

In the classroom, I knew how to reproduce what a teacher wanted. I had an appointment from Congressman Norm Mineta to attend West Point by the end of my junior year. I was ambitious. Back then I had a flattop and a staunchly conservative outlook on life. I lacked compassion. I believed in discipline and country and prayer and envisioned a life with an equally principled woman. I perpetuated order all around me.

But inside I was all bollixed up, as they say in the South, wrapped tight in a straitjacket of what really was my sincere hope in the prescribed program. I was dying to break a rule, a law, someone's skull. But I almost felt that if I could fulfill the school's prophecy of world vision, a big load of future graduates would be free to follow its light
without a moment's thought over what I'd endured for four years, and I'd at least walk away with a story. What vanity: I thought I could be their cashed check on goodness.

I was midway into my journey at St. Cajetan when I joined the speech and debate team. Dong-hoo, hearing of this, joined the next day. We went one and two in the state, he two, I one. I became a natural at the notion of rationalization, prided myself in finding both the strengths and weaknesses of an argument. I could not keep many friends since a friend required picking one side or the other of an issue. I couldn't find a girlfriend who required picking her. The latter problem I'd dismissed as a fairly obvious microproblem of attending an all-boys institution where contact between the sexes was diminished to chance encounters at bus stops, shopping malls, and birthday parties, but the former problem I worked at very hard for a while: I desperately wanted to make friends.

I eventually learned how to handle the preponderance of alone time that being a thinker, or so I'd called myself, necessitated. I identified with Nietzsche's assertion that the deep thinker prides himself on being misunderstood. I, thus, had no interest in leadership that connoted a clear and easily interpreted message to others. Conversely, I had no interest in following anyone my own age. Halfway through high school, my private goal shifted to becoming an avatar of solitude, to taking on Emerson's claim that
the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude
.

And yet the thinking itself seemed shifty, certainly not something to stand on. You cannot float on clouds in the face of the real problems—death, taxes, family—that life presents. Eventually you have to make a decision. The vacuum of the classroom wasn't even close to scale. But the real caveat was one's own self, the inherited I, the created me. I soon suspected quicksand beneath Emerson's claim that
what I must do is all that concerns me
. I tiptoed around the directive of
Trust thyself
. How could I do something as reckless
as that with 150 years of screaming self-reliance momentum? I felt internally like a meteorite blazing a path through the docile sky, gathering energy for the inanimate object about to be taken out. And then: How could I trust anyone else? As easily as I could rationalize into existence a belief (which was just as easy, therefore, to destroy), I could see that the thinking was not something to build a life on. And yet I had a Habitat for Humanity work crew in my brain, fortifying its existence in the bedlam of thought.

No complaints but I simply wonder: At what point does the thinking end? Or rather: At what point is the thinker so satisfied with what's been thought that nothing else need be asked? Or at least that nothing else need be asked of a topic? Or at least that an answer you have gives birth to righteous action?