Born Slippy Read online

  Frank didn’t want to do it, knowing it would somehow or other come to grief. Everything to do with Dmitry did. An airport cop was making his way toward them to shoo Frank on, and he put the car in gear.

  “I’m trying to see how this could possibly not end me up in legal trouble.”

  “The addresses for statements and the like will be mine; these banks don’t require your social security number, the IRS will never be alerted. And the bonus is you can come and visit. I know you want to see the famed fleshpots of Asia, Franky. I know you better than you pretend to know yourself.”

  Was there any truth to that? He felt himself acquiescing, however slowly, to the request, so maybe there was.

  As the cop approached and waved his nightstick at Frank, Dmitry stepped off the curb, saying, “Do it! OK, old friend?” and walked into the Bradley terminal.

  A month later, Frank’s affair with the journalist was over. He didn’t exactly blame Dmitry for things not working, although his boorishness sure didn’t help. The truth is, if Frank had been reading the signs a little better, he would have seen all along that she had better fish to fry, a woman like that; he was nothing but a little out-of-town fling before she moved, chosen because nothing would get messy, because he didn’t know her friends and they didn’t know him and never would, because he was from a different world in the wilds of Connecticut and manual labor — he had been invited to that party as an exotic, a kind of folk artist, crafting beautiful houses with his bare hands, a freak to display to the owners’ fancy friends. She had dated him because he was disposable, leave-behindable. So what did he do? He followed her across the country and moved into her new town.

  Yes, moved. He knew: what a bonehead.

  While she had been in Seattle he checked out the home-building scene, scouted a few lots, and, for the first time in his life, considered the possibility of life without winter. When he’d met her outside her Times office downtown, where he’d stopped on his way to take Dmitry to the airport, he told her that he thought there were great business opportunities for him in LA. She shrugged and flipped her head slightly to the side and said, “Well, that would be a big move to make on so little information, wouldn’t it?” This he, in his love-addled derangement, saw as encouragement, believe it or not, while she meant it to be the opposite. She gave him a buss on the cheek — she was outside her office after all — and that made him nuts with desire. As Dmitry droned at him on the way to the airport, he was making plans to move to LA immediately. He would soon understand that her kiss the night before had been her real kiss goodbye, the buss on his cheek a sign that, for her, it was over, done, dead. He, heedless, was deaf and blind.

  He got lucky and managed to sell the spec house he had finished in Connecticut right away, packed up his stuff in the back of his truck, put his good tools and favorite books in a U-Haul trailer, leaving the rest with his head carpenter, and moved to California. The journalist, appalled when he told her what he had done, made it very clear that she thought it was a big mistake. She met him for a cup of coffee at a trendy spot called Intelligentsia near her house in Silver Lake. Everyone in the place except the two of them was working on an Airbook.

  “Do you think that, if we actually were a couple of some sort — if we were — that it would be wise to move three thousand miles without consulting me?”

  “Well, no.”

  “And don’t you think, if we’re not a couple, that moving three thousand miles while pretending we are is a tad, oh, let’s not put too fine a point on it, deranged?”

  “I’m kind of clutching to the if in each of those scenarios,” he said, hoping it sounded like a joke when he knew it was unvarnished fact. The shame-heat in his chest was unbearable.

  “Oh, Franky,” she said, sad.

  “Frank.”

  “It’s not too late. Turn around. Go home. Have a good life.”

  She actually patted him on the head as she left. Christ.

  So that was over.

  He wasn’t about to turn around, though, not about to leave California. Even the next morning, instead of waking up feeling like a miserable, lovelorn failure, he woke to the bright desert sun, walked to one of the thousand breakfast places full of beautiful hipsters, sat with some fresh-squeezed orange juice, and thought, I’ve got no girlfriend, I’ve got no job, I’m living in a motel — life is good and I’m home. There’s a reason, goddamit, why they call it a sunny disposition. He was going to buy a convertible and assimilate. He started setting himself up, found a little fixer-upper he could live in, perched on the side of a hill in Echo Park. He applied for a contractor’s license, and around the same time he remembered Dmitry’s request and applied for a passport. When it came back he overnighted it to Hong Kong. Because, why not? Dmitry would do the same for him. Maybe. A few weeks later it was returned, without a note.

  Workwise he was lucky. He bought a teardown in Laurel Canyon and replaced it with a moderate-sized, fiercely-designed spec house, and the market was inflating so fast he could barely believe the profit. It was what Dmitry called Mafia profit. The drummer who bought it asked him if he knew how to soundproof a room, and, as with everything else in his life, he lied a lie he would turn into truth with time, and said sure I do, then ran to the library to figure it out. The drummer owned a little studio in Hollywood, but wanted to be able to play at home without the neighbors calling the police. Frank did the job and the drummer sent him a bunch of other clients. He got very good at soundproofing after that, building and refitting music rehearsal and recording studios and soundstages, that kind of thing. Farcically easy, it turns out. You build extra-wide walls and fill them with sand, then line the inside with acoustic foam.

  He became the go-to guy, building little recording studios in the ten-thousand-square-foot hillside homes of famous rock musicians who wanted to jam in the middle of the night, and then building them for the famous actors who wanted to pretend to be famous rock musicians. These people had so much money, and there were so few contractors for them to turn to, that he soon had more work than he could handle. He would quote people outlandish figures to get rid of them, which they would accept without a qualm. Almost always they would want something else, too: a Zen meditation room, a rotating observation tower, a basketball or squash court, or something really kooky, like a gun closet for sex toys or, his favorite, a half-bath done as an oversized replica of an airplane bathroom, complete with the folding door. For parties, the guy explained.

  He continued to inflate his rates, and over the next couple years took on a business manager and a few excellent guys as full-time employees, subcontracted all the grunt stuff, and started to reach the point where he didn’t have to work all the time. He used to wonder who the hell it was that filled the golf courses every weekday, and all of a sudden he realized that, if he golfed, he could be one of them. He was rich. Not Dmitry rich, not house-staff-of-eight rich, but rich.

  Isa, a young woman he met soon after the journalist dumped him, had moved in a few months later — yes, only a few months, but he felt he had no right to call it precipitous after his own jump. She was tough as an ash plank, with sparkling, intelligent eyes, a big heart, and when she finally let him see it, a body designed by his id. She was working a job in an office downtown and not happy about it, but she was happy with him. When they clicked, he adored her and she adored him, and sex felt like Adam and Eve. She was smart, she was clever, she was kind, she loved him, he loved her.

  He had more or less arrived. He started drawing pictures of his ideal boat and looking into what it would take to build it. The logistics, the special tools, the price of parts, a warehouse space with a big enough bay door to get it out — it seemed less and less likely that it could be a weekend hobby, and he decided he’d have to use a yacht builder. Then, the more research he did, the more he realized that, like sneakers, it no longer paid to build them anywhere but Asia. So he put the how-to books back on the shelves and started shopping the websites and dreaming up voyages, sketc
hing them on his charts for Isa, and she played along. The days slid by. All’s well, he often thought to himself. All’s well.

  2000

  They had lived like gypsies on the lot in Connecticut, building Paul and Margie’s house, sleeping in the tent, washing up in a pond on the far edge of a large city park next door. They worried that people picnicking a couple of football fields away might notice that they were bathing — it would be strange enough to see two grown men half-submerged in the park’s pond, much less lathering up their hair — but they waited until dusk when it was almost always empty, and were far enough away from the underused tennis courts and picnic tables that, in the gloomy evening light, no one could see what they were doing. Frank half-hoped someone would complain, a cop would come and make them stop, and Paul would be forced to get them a motel room. They shaved using a little mirror nailed to a stud in what would become the kitchen and ate out of a mini-fridge.

  In the morning, the sun would force them out of the tent. Like clockwork, Dmitry would start his day with his ritual question as he lumbered off with his roll of toilet paper.

  “Does the pope shit in the woods, Franky? Let’s go see.” That Paul didn’t get a fucking port-a-potty for the site Frank later racked up to neither of them having done a project like this before. Paul knew nothing, Frank not much more, and of course Dmitry less. It was easier to use the woods than come to this most obvious conclusion, one that every other building site since the invention of the port-a-potty had come to. It wouldn’t have surprised Frank if Paul or the even more miserly Margie had thought of it and decided against it to save money. Paul went home every night and took a civilized dump in the morning, so yeah, probably.

  Once you got over the original disgust, and after the balancing act became second nature, it was pleasant enough, like camping. You didn’t want to go wandering off at night if you could help it, in part because some of them (Dmitry) didn’t always bury things as well as they should, but also because they were building on the edge of a ravine, which would, when they were done, give the back windows a terrific view, but for now could make night crapping treacherous.

  Each day they worked until sunset, which meant 9 o’clock or later in the middle of the summer, then shivered into the murky pond and did their ablutions before heading to the local bar. The town was well on its way to becoming a fancy big-house suburb of Hartford, but on Main Street it was still the little hick burg it had always been. Lucille’s, the tavern, a typical, mildly run-down neighborhood dive in the middle of the central block, had a pool table and strippers most nights, dancing without a pole on a tiny low-rent stage with dingy lights, a sign of how working-class the neighborhood had been before the new people started moving in.

  Sometimes Frank felt miserable when they arrived at Lucille’s, felt like they were participating in the degradation of these women in their G-strings, like he was complicit in some complex shaming ritual, and in those first few minutes each night he thought he could see the misery behind the women’s mocking smiles, could see the anguish buried a few layers beneath their practiced good-naturedness, could see the way years of contempt for base male folly had left them despairing that life might ever get better than this. But after a few beers, it all started to seem like a mutual kindness — this brave band of lonely boy-men and the women who watched over their desolation like governesses, this equally brave band of women and the men who pay them with tips and obeisance, who worship literally at their feet. After a couple more beers he ended up feeling like it was the most natural possible arrangement, everything out on the table, open, benevolent, almost quaint.

  At that point he was ready to argue with anyone that Lucille’s was far less sordid than the creepy new Galleria Mall they had built off the highway, with its surveillance cameras and security guards, less sordid than the Stepford invasion transforming the town into some dystopian futurist nightmare. Compared to that, this little mom-and-pop titty bar was pure heartwarming Americana. In another two years they would shut it down and you’d have to go to the Smithsonian to find anything as wholesome and decent. The strippers were good kids, Frank came to see, very down-to-earth, and they saved his life. He could imagine if the same bar had no little stage, how antsy and jumpy he would have become, sucking beers while talking the same shit with the local buffoons just like him night after night. You can spout and listen to great loads of crap if there is a near-naked woman writhing away in your sight line. Otherwise it could have gotten ugly.

  Of course it did, eventually.

  He spent time most nights talking to Cyndy, a Midwestern blonde who was as sweet as a candy-striper, and who needed to complain to him regularly about her asshole of a boyfriend — and he was an asshole, calling her fat, physically abusive sometimes. Frank encouraged her to leave him, but she wouldn’t; she was in love, though she knew it was fucked up. She stopped selling Frank lap dances, and wouldn’t take his tips, said she liked his life tips better. They were friends. When they were talking he forgot, for stretches, that she was naked. He had fantasies of saving her from this life.

  Lucille’s was run by Carmen Vahsen, a short tank of a woman with the square, bitter face of a Mafioso and an inexplicable, improbable, fifteen-inch-high, cylindrical, dyed-black beehive on top of her overlarge — huge, in fact — sixty-year-old head. At some point in the dim past Carmen had been married to the owner, Charlie Vahsen, a man who sometimes sat at the end of the bar looking like Colonel Sanders gone to seed, with a white goatee and a quarter inch of the pink inside his sagging eyelids showing. After they divorced, she had stayed on to manage the place. The split happened some time before Frank was born, and she was still there. Dmitry had a little routine he did with her every night, walking up and bowing.

  “You look enchantingly lovely, this evening, Miss Carmen,” he would say, or some new variation of same. She stood in front of him, one hand on her truck fender of a hip, the other wagging a finger in his face.

  “Don’t give me any of your shit, Dmitry,” she would say.

  “And what, pray tell, do we have on tonight’s bill of entertainment?” he would ask, without fail.

  “Fuck off, Dmitry, and go buy a beer.”

  “Splendid suggestion, Miss Carmen!” he would say, “splendid suggestion, my colleague and I thank and salute you.” Carmen was not a woman anyone ever saw smile — she wore exasperation like a military campaign medal — but these nightly greetings were the closest she ever got to it.

  They’d get a couple of long-neck Budweisers and chalk their names up on the pool board. After a couple of beers, they waxed speculative and philosophical, sometimes during pool games, which meant most of the local guys wrote them off as a couple of weirdoes and left them alone. This in turn made them philosophical.

  “Do you ever feel like you’re a spectator in your own life?” Frank asked one night. “Not a full participant, just a watcher?”

  “No, Franky, but something tells me you do.”

  “Nathaniel Hawthorne has a story called ‘Wakefield’,” he said, lining up a fairly easy shot at the 3 ball. “The guy, Wakefield, is a salesman, and once a month he has to go from Salem to Boston for business. It requires an overnight in Boston.” He blew the shot. He was much better at the hard shots. The easy ones threw him. “And one day, his wife packs his overnight bag as usual and the guy takes it and leaves, but instead of heading to Boston, he goes to the other side of town and rents an apartment.”

  “This new girl — have you noticed her, Franky? — has perhaps the tiniest boobs in the history of exotic dancing.”

  “From then on he watches his wife and family, lurking in the shadows. He watches his wife looking for him to come home. He watches the neighbors go over and talk to her as she gets hysterical because he hasn’t returned for a day, two days, a week. He watches her worry for a month or whatever and then put on widow’s weeds.”

  “Widows, weeds,” Dmitry said to the tip of his cue as he rechalked.

  “Then he watches as
his kids grow up, his wife remarries and grows old.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Yeah, I forget how it ends.”

  “I’ve got it, Franky, I know exactly what this means.”

  “OK, what?”

  “It means you are going to tell me, next, exactly what this story means.”

  “Haha, yes. It’s about how we all, somehow, can stand outside our own lives and watch them go by, unperturbed and yet melancholy observers.”

  “Do you like tiny titties, Franky? You seem to be staring at her as you hold forth, which if we are talking about being inactive yet melancholy observers of life rather than participants, rather seems to fit the bill.”

  “But do you know what I mean? This sense of stepping out of your own life?”

  “Why would anyone do such a thing, Franky?”

  “I don’t know, because life becomes stale? Maybe Wakefield needs to get out of his boring routine, but the boring routine is all there really is. Maybe it’s because we are alienated, like Marx says, and so everything feels distant — Hawthorne wrote the story around the same time Marx started writing — ha! I hadn’t thought of that before. Interesting!” Dmitry lidded his eyes to suggest otherwise. “Or maybe it’s that we’re always faking it, so that if we opt out of pretending life is what it is, we have nothing. I don’t know.”

  Dmitry bent into a bank shot.

  “I think the lack of breasts is erotic because it is different,” he said. “On a man, the lack of breasts is not erotic. The presence of them is. Not fat-guy, old-guy breasts: actual, synthetic ones.”