The Unprofessionals Read online

  Never having been out there in Southern California—because, one, it’s too sunny and, two, I didn’t believe in flying, even before the Event of September—I couldn’t picture the scene. I had seen drug transactions on our front steps in Washington Square and all over Greenwich Village when we lived there as a young and ignorant newlywed couple for ten years. We didn’t understand that there could be a better place to live than New York City.

  I’d seen some intoxicated youths in their vehicles in the supermarket parking lot in Nantucket at one A.M. They were opening cellophane packets of heroin or whatever came in those envelopes. I couldn’t be sure, because I always turned off any television documentary explaining it.

  I knew there was drug use in California because I’d seen a TV program about Hollywood and most of that program had to do with this subject. Next came a crime show about the drug use of movie stars.

  Then one night I noticed that these two shows had been merged, or, quite naturally, had merged themselves into one show called Hollywood Crime. I was tired of this show after a second or two, because I couldn’t see what was interesting about which actors and rock stars used drugs, were arrested, and were in or out of treatment for their use and so-called crimes. Worse than the facts was the loud, energetic shouting out of it all by the emcee during the entire program.

  I couldn’t picture a boy for whom I’d child-sat and cooked dinner and with whom I’d watched reruns of SCTV—this particular boy—purchasing cocaine in Hollywood. I had to face what a dunce I was. I’d taught him how to steam broccoli, and although he didn’t show interest at the time, a year later his cousin told me the boy had asked to have vegetables prepared that way by his mother, who liked to boil things.

  YOGA-BALL NIGHT LAST AUGUST

  OUR FRIENDSHIP was completely wholesome except for the one night, the summer before this particular winter, the night when we stayed on the phone from eleven P.M. to five A.M. We’d been speaking again for only a few weeks, but as usual one thing led to another. I had tried to hang up at twelve, one, two, three—but he kept talking. This was before his father had informed me that the boy was a heroin addict.

  At one point during the conversation I used a foot pump to inflate a yoga ball with the help of the boy’s instructions. This took a long time. During the time of the pumping, he told stories of his life in college in New York.

  I had diagnosed that lying backward on the gigantic ball would stretch out a muscle spasm in my back. On the other hand, the pain went right through to the chest and was possibly a cardiac symptom. Then, on the third hand, I’d had the exact same thing several times before, a few of them accompanied by normal electrocardiograms.

  Either I’d pump up the ball and the exertion would kill me, if the symptom was a heart problem, or I’d pump up the ball and stretch out the muscle and the pain would go away.

  I hadn’t yet read Mind over Back Pain, in which the doctor-author wrote, “narcotics are the best ‘pain killers’ and the most addictive drugs of people without pain. If heroin were legally available in this country, as it is in England, I would use it in the treatment of patients with acute, severe pain, since it would do the job better than any other legally available drug. This often shocks people, since we have such a strong association of heroin with drug addiction. But any drug can be abused; it…happens with heroin so often because the drug is so effective.”

  When I did read the paragraph, I saw that if I’d been a patient of this back specialist, the boy and I could have been using heroin at the same time—yoga ball and all.

  While I pumped up the ball with the foot pump—this by itself was an aerobic workout—I was laughing at a story the boy was telling me about going to buy some groceries at an all-night grocery in New York. His story had to do with the behavior of the cashier.

  “Is this you?” she had asked him about the photo on his driver’s license. We both found this absurd, and laughed like two lunatics. It never occurred to me that the boy might no longer look like his photo ID.

  “What were you buying that you needed ID for?” I asked. I knew he didn’t drink or smoke. “I was paying by check,” he said. It sounded like a lie.

  “She said, ‘It doesn’t look like you. Is that your signature?’” Then he was asked to sign his name four times.

  The security guard, a great big guy, was sitting on top of the ice cream freezer, the boy said with disdain for the low standards of society shown by this behavior. I had seen this style of security and the same sitting-on-freezer behavior in other stores.

  “Buying groceries at four A.M.?” the guard had said. Maybe he had the boy’s number. The clerks had commented on his purchases, which he said were “comprised of soda and ice pops.” Had I known the dietary habits of the addicted, I might have guessed that something was up.

  THE NIGHT of that longest call in August, I asked to be excused in order to change phones a few times. I had to tie up the recycling bags, turn out the lights, put my work in order in case I didn’t wake up ever again. That had been on my mind since childhood. It was the part of the prayer “If I die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take” that had started me thinking.

  Then I had to get back on the regular phone, because I’d heard that the electromagnetic field was more dangerous on the cordless ones.

  The boy had made himself a cup of tea once or twice during the intermissions, or so he said. When I looked back on it, who knew what he was brewing up.

  Maybe it was three or four A.M. when I asked to be excused so I could get ready for bed. I wanted to do all the oral hygiene that went with that. The loud Waterpik—I didn’t want to be doing that on the phone, but the boy kept right on talking. He wanted to talk about Waterpiks and toothbrushes and toothpaste. One of his career goals was to start a publication called Minutiae. I’d encouraged the project but, as usual with his projects, nothing happened.

  Most of the little bit of makeup I’d used had faded or flaked off. I knew how to remove the rest without looking in the mirror, and anyway, I didn’t want to see the face of a person who was participating in this phone conversation.

  A Pakistani Muslim car-service driver had once told me, “It’s good that you don’t wear makeup.” At the time I wondered what business of his that was. “It’s good you wear long skirts,” he’d said on another trip, even though half of the bottom half of my leg was visible, though covered by tights.

  “When you stay at a hotel, do you bring your own pillow?” the Pakistani driver had asked in a discussion of travel plans.

  “Of course,” I said, thinking of my buckwheat-hull pillow and a second, smaller one to put over my ear to keep out noise if the sound-blocking machine wasn’t powerful enough.

  “That’s good!” the driver said. “And do you bring your own sheets?”

  “I stay at hotels where the sheets are clean,” I said. “But I make sure they don’t touch my skin.”

  “Well, you should bring your own sheets, because they don’t wash the sheets in hotels,” he said.

  “But I’m staying at the Ritz-Carlton in Boston,” I said.

  “When you go to a hotel, any hotel, bring everything you can!” he said. “I’m telling you! And bring your own sheets, too!”

  During the last two decades of the twentieth century, I had made a study of Islamic fundamentalism just riding in cabs around New York and Boston. This guy and all the other ones I’d met were always approving or disapproving of everything everyone did.

  One driver said that blowing up the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge would be equal to what we were doing in Iraq, that time—daily bombing. When I tried to report the information to the FBI after the September event, naturally they weren’t interested. The FBI phone operators acted like the telephone information operators who can’t spell or listen. Later, when I reviewed these conversations I’d had with Arab drivers, I began thinking more about the FBI and the CIA.

  When you called for a radio car, you might get one on time and the driver would follow
some kind of rules and procedure. But if any of these guys offered to drive privately, on their days off, anything could happen. They could be an hour or two late. They could tell you their Muslim life stories. They could offer some strong tea they got in a Casablanca-like den of Arabian beverages on a dark and seedy part of MacDougal Street.

  Their past lives all over the Middle East seemed to consist of riding camels to property owned by their landlord parents, having lunch, taking naps, waking up for fruit, snacks, cake, and tea. Those were the Iranians. The Pakistani life stories were not as pleasant. A thirty-year-old man had a fifty-year-old mother who couldn’t read anything except for the Koran. Her whole life was cooking and reading only that book, he said.

  One day, one of these Arabs asked whether I minded if his wife and her aunt rode with us on our trip. He had to take them to the airport and it was right on the way to my destination, where my father lived, or half-lived.

  I’d already met the driver’s wife on another drive to a non-place in Queens, or Long Island City, where he was dropping her off at a school for medical secretaries. The wife was dressed in the style of Arafat’s wife, that unnaturally blond wife with the headband and the speech defect. They were all Europeanized in a style from the past decades—with the Hermès scarves and the Cartier earrings and the puffed and sprayed hair. The Europeanization was never up-to-date with these Arab women.

  But on the second drive his wife’s aunt was sitting in the car and was wearing one of those black-veil getups. I must admit I was shocked to see this. No warning had been given.

  The sight was no more frightening than a nun’s black outfit, other than the association of the black-veiled crowds burning the American flag and screaming curses of death against our country.

  The aunt appeared to be in her early forties, my age at the time. Her overly dolled-up twenty-five-year-old niece sat between her and the driver.

  I was alone in the spacious back of the Lincoln Town Car, so I offered to share the backseat with the wife, who spoke English. It seemed the right thing to do. First they all said no, but then her Westernized mind took over and she hopped out and joined me. Who knew what her aunt and husband were saying in their Arabic language? Perhaps it was simply against some Arab rule.

  Somehow, after we started discussing the day’s weather, she said she was afraid of the outdoors because of bees. I told her I’d heard that bees like perfume, even perfumed shampoo, and I’d read that one should avoid all scents in order to keep bees at a distance.

  “What shampoo do you use?” I asked her. To my surprise she said, “Pantene,” as if Pantene were a mark of status like the other products Arabs acquired when their oil money and educational forays took them to Europe. Pantene, originally the French shampoo and conditioner, in demand in the sixties, soon went out of favor and was overtaken by all the new, natural, pure shampoos.

  “That’s right,” she said. “When I was wearing perfume and skin lotions, the bees were buzzing around and biting me.” She pronounced the word “biting” as if it were the word “bit,” with “-ing” added on. She seemed interested and happy with the information. In addition to bees biting her, at some point she mentioned that she preferred Twinings tea, pronouncing Twinings like “twin,” with “-ings”—I didn’t correct her. That could be against some rule, too. Not that I thought that our country was innocent of wrongdoing, a country fighting for oil, a country based on cars, driving, highways, gasoline, shopping malls, and junk food. Even though I didn’t participate and hadn’t yet been inside a McDonald’s, I was an ignorant American. But America is a democracy, I’d remember. It was at that time.

  This was before they were trying to capture Martha Stewart, who made the right color green available to millions. Just making that color available to the world was an accomplishment, although on some products the green is not quite right, and Martha must have been upset when she saw that.

  The black-veiled aunt, silent in the front—this discussion about shampoo in the back—a clash of the cultures right in one’s lap on the Expressway. Naturally, I was nervous, especially when the driver remembered he had to return to their apartment to get something for the aunt to take back to their country as a gift for one of those landowning relatives. An argument ensued in part English, part Arabic. I would have appreciated the Buñuelesque quality of the experience if I hadn’t been in a hurry to get to my father’s house to defrost frozen soup for his dinner.

  One night, on a long trip from Connecticut to Boston, the Pakistani driver wanted to stop at McDonald’s for coffee. I said I’d wait in the car. Since I had never been inside a McDonald’s, I said, “What’s it like in there?”

  “You know, like all the others,” he said.

  “But I’ve never seen one.”

  “I can’t believe that an American person has never seen McDonald’s!” the driver said.

  I reminded him about the vegetarian issue. He was one, too. Or he was the kind of Pakistani Muslim who wouldn’t eat meat. Then he said, “What about the fries? They are not meat.”

  “They’re cooked in animal fat, I read,” I said.

  “The fries?” he said. “They are potatoes, they are not meat. Fried potatoes. They are potatoes.”

  I knew it was going to be a long explanation. I trimmed it down to a few words he didn’t understand.

  “I’m going to ask them,” he said.

  “They’re just night workers,” I said. “They won’t know.”

  Inside the McDonald’s, a chamber of hospital-operating-room lighting and tiles and signs and each thing made to be as unsightly as possible, some ratty-looking teenagers were ahead of us in line. I saw that their hair and their torn clothing marked them as Rastafarians.

  The driver looked at them with disapproval. “Why do they want to look so dirty?” he said.

  “They’re Rastafarians,” I said.

  “They are punk,” he said, his accent making the word sound funnier.

  “No, they’re Rastafarians,” I said, knowing this could start up another lesson.

  “No, they are punk, they are punk,” he said. “I know it.”

  “Maybe it’s a similar style,” I said.

  WHEN I got into bed and under the thin white blanket, the boy was still talking. That was when I thought there must be something wrong with him.

  But maybe a girlfriend had broken up with him and he was practicing up on conversation for the next one. Or he was out of regular friends who were up late. I didn’t ask about that. I said, “We should go to sleep.”

  I know I said, “It’s four o’clock.” Soon I heard birds start chirping and I said, “It’s five o’clock.” Once or twice he said, “What? I think I fell asleep for a second.”

  “Let’s hang up,” I’d said.

  “Wait, one more thing. Tom’s toothpaste. What do you know about Tom, the person?”

  I told all I knew about Tom. I told about the time we passed through Kennebunkport, Maine, in the seventies, and visited the Tom’s of Maine factory, or cabin. At the time, we saw the chemist at work producing peppermint toothpaste and honeysuckle shampoo. Outside the factory/cabin, a teenage hippie was sitting with an unkempt baby in an old carriage.

  The boy didn’t say anything. Maybe he was sleeping through my telling all this as I was realizing how much time had passed since the 1970s.

  I saw that this was what it was going to be like to be the middle generation—explaining why people wore bell-bottoms in the seventies, although I couldn’t think of the answer to that, and about the origins of Tom’s toothpaste. It was going to be hard for the narcissistic personalities to accept passing out of the young important generation.

  THE BOYHOOD PHONE STORIES

  WHEN HE WAS eleven, he would answer the phone and sometimes it was a friend of his parents, a divorced or single guy, he wasn’t sure which, a guy who wore dark brown gabardine suits with baggy trousers from the forties, the boy said. He wore wide ties with big prints and he wore saddle shoes.

&
nbsp; “Some people think he’s gay,” the boy had said. “But he claims to have had girlfriends. He’s up all night watching infomercials for Ron Popeil products. He goes, ‘You know that fruit and vegetable dehydrator? I sent that to a girl in Vegas,’ or, ‘Did you see that Juicerator? I sent that to a girl in L.A.’

  “He comes to visit my parents and he follows them wherever they go, to a million parties.”

  “How does that go over, hanging around with them?” I asked.

  “He blends in. No one notices.”

  The guy in the saddle shoes would call with a medical problem to ask the boy’s father. Sometimes it was serious. “Like once he set his chest on fire lighting a candelabra,” the boy said. Other times he alluded to his romantic liaisons and had genetic or reproductive schemes to inquire about. “We figure he’s not capable of being married, but he wants to sire an heir,” the boy explained.

  He kept the boy on the phone for hours before asking for either parent. “He calls, I get on the phone with him—it’s the peak of sunshine—I hang up, everyone’s going to bed.”

  I imagined the boy’s family and household, with his parents and siblings doing different things all day while he stayed on the phone with anyone who called.

  But this long yoga-ball call, the summer after college, was different. Because before that summer, the summer of the drug-denial phone call, I hadn’t spoken to him for four years. At the time of that conversation, he had moved out of his college dormitory because kids stayed up dyeing their hair purple late at night. He didn’t care for the student body, which he described as a motley crew. He didn’t like those two new things—multiculturalism and diversity—and had a wish that things were the way they had been in the 1950s. He liked the movie Rear Window because of the clothes the actors wore. When he was twelve, he asked me this question: “In the seventies, did people know how they looked, or did they think it was normal?”