Forecast from the Retail Desk
Nobody likes a guy who can foretell the future. Let me tell you. A guy with foreknowledge of events. Its like having really bad acne. I had that, too. You’ll need clinical trials probably. The bull market will come to an end, for example. Any idiot will tell you that, and yet a persuasive demonstration of my skills requires that I start small and build to a spectacular conclusion. The Dow, in spite of its reliance on blue chip issues, will chase NASDAQ’s tail down. My own employers will come face to face with some nasty accounting practices that lead straight to a cadre of cocaine-snorting, Lexus-driving tech-fund specialists. Then some really bad international loans will surface. Jesus, make a loan to Canada, or something. My position, here at the retail desk, where I am not well liked, will be one of the first declared obsolete in the merger. They’ll let me know first thing on a Monday, after I’ve been up for three consecutive nights, worrying about my brother’s kid, who has leukemia.
I tell my wife this stuff, she doesn’t believe me.
Here’s a historical account of the first ever public demonstration of my skills: I told Bobby Erlich that he was going to get paralyzed in a motorcycle crash. This was in 1977. Erlich didn’t like motorcycles or mechanical stuff of any kind. He had a tentative approach to the sciences, too, though we were sequestered there, in chemistry, at the pleasure of the New York State Board of Regents. The laboratory tables were always marbleized, always black, swept clean of hazardous accumulations. Songbirds in our town, New Rochelle, sang parochial songs, jingles, light fare. The windows were open. It was late autumn. The chemistry teacher, Miss Rydell, said, Bobby, you work with Everett here. No one else would work with me. Not even the two Hispanic kids. A pairing off had transpired, boys of incredible beauty with girls as perfect as in the Old Masters. What was my crime? Bobby Erlich, that blond, said nothing, accepted a glass beaker from Miss Rydell, shoved past me toward the lab station. At the beginning of the experiment, sodium and water in equal parts, I smiled genially at Bobby, thanked him for working with me, but this was simulated, because, when he still wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t collaborate, kept taking beakers away from me, I had no choice but to deliver his fate, which came to me with a sort of uncanny trembling that you associate with early stages of fever, as if foresight and shingles, or chicken pox, were identical: You’re going to get maimed in a horrible motorcycle accident. It’s really going to hurt, too. The part you can feel, anyway. Just remember we had this chat.
Know what, Bennett? said Erlich, Ialways thought you were a jerk. And I was right.
The exchange in its entirety. Two lines. Had I known what was going to happen I would have feigned illness and taken a city bus home, lugging my ring binder, my unused baseball glove, and the remains of my bag lunch. Why worry about the opinion of Bobby Erlich? I could just as easily have said something polite. Nevertheless, class proceeded without incident, almost like it was supposed to, despite discord between lab partners. Miss Rydell hummed as she circulated from lab station to lab station. We performed the experiment, I balanced the equation in my lab notebook —Erlich didn’t know how to do it —I passed our results to the front of the class. We got an A on the homework, and afterward Bobby avoided me wherever possible, especially in chemistry class. I would see the rear view of him in the cinder-block corridors, a faded red backpack retreating.
Eventually, Erlich turned out to be, well, gay, the preferred colloquialisms in those days being fag, mo, felcher, queer, and so forth. Foreknowledge of his blossoming condition would have been possible among my prognostications, though in truth I had a basis for my surmises, namely that Erlich had repeatedly been beaten and tortured by the lobotomized physical-education students of my school, most of whom are now plumbers with collections of child pornography taped inside their vans, or this seemed to be the implication at our recent twentieth reunion. Anyhow, I didn’t tell Erlich he was gay, I just told him he would be maimed in a motorcycle accident, and the year passed, and I was grateful every time I saw Bobby’s retreating backpack on the way to band practice, where he was first flute, or easing into the Green Room backstage at one of his beloved high-school dramas. (I was property master for several of the shows that year.) I was grateful because Bobby was intact.
Then we were seventeen (along with everyone else in our class except the aforementioned lobotomized physical-education students). An age of promise, an age of adventures, of intoxications, of epiphanies. Bobby Erlich the seventeen-year-old meanwhile seemed to be having an intergenera-tional romance, that was the rumor, and one night he was riding in an Olds Cutlass Supreme beside this off-duty policeman from our town, Officer Meineke, a policeman with a wife and kids who nonetheless had found himself all dizzy over a flute-playing, theater-obsessed boy from the junior class of the local high school. I’m conflating characters and scenes, you understand, in order to spare certain parties bad publicity. It was rainy. It was June. That intersection at Four Corners was, and is still, noted for scofflaws trying to make it to the station before the local train pulled out. Bobby and his policeman were locked in a kiss at a stoplight, a devouring kiss, and I would like to think that in spite of my robust heterosexuality I could render that kiss for you. The instant eclipsed all the years of Bobby’s woeful adolescence. It was interstellar. It was pantheistic. He wanted to see Meineke’s locker, at the police station. He wanted his own dog-eared photo of Meineke as a little boy.
However, as they were sundering themselves from this embrace and preparing for its duplicate, Joey Kaye’s father, who was coming home impaired from a nearby tavern, was trying to catch the tail end of a yellow traffic signal. Joey’s dad: thirty-eight miles per hour on a street zoned for thirty. In a Honda Civic. He struck the passenger side of Meineke’s Olds, and was uninjured, since drunk. Meineke, except for a few hematomas and his reputation, was also intact. Not so Bobby. Lots of witnesses could corroborate this account. Melissa Abdow, for example, was on the corner, eating mint chocolate chip in a sugar cone (it was dripping badly). She told me the next day. In math class. She had a sequence of images lodged in her brain, she said, like evidentiary photos: Bobby in the front seat of the car, smiling, then Bobby curled around the mashed engine of the Olds, which was right up in the front seat of the other car. Then the Jaws of Life.
I didn’t visit him in the hospital, since, like I say, he couldn’t stand me. But I should have visited him, because instead I was spending weeks in my room, gorging on remorse. I lay awake nights, debating with the dead white people of philosophy about my prophecy. Could it be true? Did language, when you petitioned with it, cause such devastations as Bobby’s crash? Did the stuff you mumbled on a bad day in chemistry class despoil a family of a policeman who happened to like boys, but who hadn’t yet told his wife, and was then undeservedly pulled mostly uninjured from the detritus of his car alongside the paralyzed body of an underage flute-player? Did I cause all that? It was supposed to be a joke! And, besides, I said motorcycle crash! If only I had played football, if only I had worn shoulder pads, worn that war paint of football players, if only some hulking alcoholic wife-batterer in the Pop Warner League had cared enough about me to make me feel like I was more than a barnacle at New Rochelle High, then I wouldn’t have had to do what I did; if only I had played football, and had heard, at the line of the scrimmage, the crunch in which my ownneck buckled, in which the ether above me gave way and the songbirds blew the play dead for now and always, if only I had heard the hoarse commands of stretcher-bearers.
Once I told my mother she was going to inherit a lot of money from an aunt in Lithuania. What did my mother know of Lithuania? She was raised in New Jersey and she had an Irish surname. Maybe I was trying to get attention, as guidance counselors had it then. Maybe I had an active imagination. Maybe I was trying to best my charming, handsome brother in the competition for her affections. Maybe it was because my dad had absconded at the first opportunity, back when I was in single digits. Of course, by virtue of my forecasting gift, I rea
lized that my old man had another wife and family elsewhere, in Moline, Illinois, if you’re interested. I could see their shrubs and annuals, Siamese cats, sugary breakfast cereals, it just dawned on me. I had known this just as I knew that the 1974 Mets would win no more than eighty games. Some days in my room, when I had exhausted a stack of pulps and The 4:30 Movie was a romantic comedy not to my tastes, well, I felt I could contact my father, through extrasensory perceptions. Dad, I would say, this is your son Everett calling, would you be willing to accept charges? You have, by my estimation, now missed seven of my birthdays, and I feel, if you’re worrying about it, that you could just go ahead and roll some of those birthday moneys into an, umm, interest-bearing account toward my education at CCNY, which will probably start in about sixteen months. I’d be happy to acknowledge receipt of a cashier’s check or a money order. If you want to know my personal feelings about the fact that you have missed seven of my birthdays, I guess I would say that it’s a little irresponsible,and I wonder if this had to happen to you, if your dad had to blow your childhood environment to smithereens in order to make you the kind of person who could take a seven-year business trip and forget to write. That’s about all I’ve got today, feel free to contact me at your earliest convenience.
My mom never had an aunt from Lithuania or any relatives anywhere besides old Hibernia, and they were mostly dead, and truth is if I lied to her about the inheritance she was going to receive it’s probably because I worried about my mother. When she got home each night from the long-term convalescent home where she was an accountant, she was about as lively as a vinyl footstool. And she had to officiate in the fisticuffs between myself and my brother. Iwanted her to have something to look forward to. She played the lottery, when the lottery became state supported, and I used to see her at the variety store. She’d be counting out the grimy singles that she kept in a drawer in the kitchen. She scrawled out numbers based on sentimental remembrances. Occasionally she took home small purses. The point here is that my prophecy is kind of inexact, and you have to use a sort of metaphoric-analytic schema(it’s in the retail-sales training manual here on my desk) in order to understand exactly how it works its wonders.
A few contemporary forecasts. Cher will contract a grave immune disorder of unknown origins, until she reveals the nature of the voodoo that has so preserved her semblance. I was just making this point to Mrs. Rona Peregrina of Bensonhurst, in fact, while issuing a strong sell recommendation in the e-merchandizing sector. The color yellow will become the one color that everyone has to be seen in. In the Big Apple, Gotham City, below Fourteenth Street, everyone will start to wear it: canary, lemon, mustard, maize, curry, goldenrod, marigold, sunflower, ochre. Entire discotheques, places I’d never go, yellow, inside and out, the yellow of the power tie, the caution signal, the yellow of foul-weather gear, the yellow of hepatitis. What else? Books, apparently useless objects of my childhood, paperweights, shelf decorators, books will get rare. You know that volume of women’s sexual fantasies that you’re embarrassed about, or that science-fiction opus about computer telepathy among Venusians? You’ll throw these out, or give them to the library, and you will never replace these books. Your kids will read screens; their contact lenses will fuse onto their eyes. And the wild language that you used to find in books or upon stones, language of prophecy, like when a guy from Schroon Lake, New York, or Cowan, Tennessee, calls out from his wilderness about how to interpret obscure texts rescued from caves of Egypt, texts that refer to our last end, this language will instead be used to write irate letters to owners of television stations who sell zirconium rings to minimum-wage earners across the land. These letters will never be read on air, if indeed, they are ever read at all. More? Every relationship you ever have, in your entire life, will end in disease. Sound far-fetched? It’s not. Today you eat grilled cheese on seven-grain bread, tomorrow you clutch your gut, locate the tumor. A dog will be crossed with a sheep, because it will make wool less expensive. Most people will accept this rationale. Melvin Cushman, chief executive of that very hot venture capital firm, Vortex Solutions, will, utilizing techniques perfected by American-educated doctors in Lagos, Nigeria, have himself cloned as a gift for his wife, Wilhelmina, thirty years his junior. Ijust love the littlelady here, and I’m not about to let her go just because my pancreas is giving out.
My brother’s kid, the one with leukemia, will get sicker still.
Here’s another story. I met my wife on the subway. I was on my way to a basketball game when Bobby Erlich, the paraplegic, came wheeling into the subway car, displaying his amputated limbs. OK, not really. I would often hear the door at the end of the car open, however, and I would think, Here comes Erlich. Any desperate life form that entered the space, Evening, ladies and gentlemen, sorry to interrupt and I don’t mean no one no harm but I am homeless and trying to get money for my three kids. I’m currently living here on the trains with my family. Any unfortunate was the harbinger of a celestial accounting for yours truly, Let there now be penitence. Know what I mean? That night even worse things came to pass. I had changed for the Seventh Avenue line at Times Square, and by habit I waited near the rear of the train, the empty car; if you’re ever going to know that this visible earth is only a splinter of the mystical action spinning out around you, figure on the last car. I was sitting down on the empty bench at the front end of the last car, with a book, probably something required for a class at Queens College, let’s say Plato’s Apologia, And now, O men who have condemned me, I would fain prophesy to you; for I am about to die, and in the hour of death men are gifted with prophetic power. Besides, nobody on earth messes with you if you’ve reading the classics. Just as I had arranged myself on this bench, and opened my book, I heard this guy coming down the stairs, making a real commotion, Hold the train! Hold the train! Ladies swept aside by his assault. You know those stairs at the end of the platform there? How many femurs have become bone meal on that staircase? How many hips replaced?
Hold the train. I could make out his latecomer’s face, as the doors tintinnabulated and converged. He was smiling. This was the train he needed to catch. This was his quarry. Never mind hindrances that developed, the door being closed, the conductor shuttering his window, the train beginning to move, Hold the train. I wish he’d said something more compelling, such as Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, turneth it upside down, scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof.
I looked up from the Apologia, saw him smiling. I knew right away. I didn’t want to know. But, like I’ve been trying to tell you, my heart was crenelated with scars of foreknowledge. He was making for that spot where the plates of the two cars abutted. A bisection of chains to keep away the foolhardy. The train lurched forward, I saw the smiler disappear out of the region of my peripheral vision, like a bird of air lifting off. He wore a smile, he grabbed for the chain, got one leg up, his shopping bag went under, there was a silence, there was exertion, he fumbled for the bag slipping down between the cars, there was a span of blackness, there was the third rail, and then he was tumbling after his possessions, down there. Between platform and train. Holy God. The Apologia fell out of my hands. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them. Just as I saw him lifting off, as in falconry, out of the margin of my weak eyes, I was up off the bench, the train jumped, and there was that awful hydraulic exhalation that means this conveyance is not going to move for a while, this train has met impediment upon the tracks. The entire system of trains, all the hundreds of miles of it, all Gotham knew at once what it had done; its daily imaginings again included gristle, sinew, marrow, plasma. There had been an incident.
Since I was a strapping young man of well over two hundred pounds, closer to two-fifty, to be honest, I was a kind of missile being propelled forward, when the train stopped, ready to squash just about anything or anyone. I fell across the two-seater there, into the lap of a woman. She was irritated at first, she didn’t know where we were, in the circle of cre
ation reserved for dismemberment and sorrow, the realm of severed limbs, of triage, and she pushed back against my commodious bulk, Move, goddamit. I said, Hey, excuse me, I’m really sorry, hell. Then the woman in whose lap I had parked my large, soft posterior called weakly across the car to an MTA employee who powerlessly inhabited our car, standing nearby, Is someone on the tracks? The older woman stared across the car at the gathering of official presences outside, at the crowd beginning to gather around our train. Iknew he was gonna do it. A small Hispanic boy said, clutching at his mother’s hand, What happened? What happened? What happened? His mother shook her head.