The Enthusiast Read online

  I went in. Every level surface in the house was covered with plastic models: cars, planes, blimps, castles, ad mascots, and Kodiak bears, all in the same half-melted realism, interspersed with piles of styrene, balsa, molding wax, and airbrush nozzles. In the kitchen the models had overrun the stove, but the microwave, with Mary Martin and the firing on Fort Sumter on top of it, still looked functional.

  Dane came in wearing sweatpants, a GLUE KEEPS ME TOGETHER T-shirt, and a BART windbreaker on a walrus body. “Henry,” he said glumly, and picked up a three-foot-long black carrying case. He shook his head and sighed. “I guess we should do this.”

  We went outside. He told Candice he’d be back by six, and they kissed as she handed him some money. When he started to put the model case in the backseat I said, “Can that go in the trunk? We have to pick a couple of guys up.”

  “What guys?”

  I told him about the skateboarders.

  “Oh, God,” he said, “is that really necessary?” He wedged into the front seat with the case standing up between his knees.

  “They’re my wife’s guys,” I said. “I’m helping her out.”

  “I wish you would have given me some kind of warning,” he said. “I hate those kids. They come into a public transit system that people are trying to use, and that’s their playground. They’re told over and over, ‘Carry your skateboard, carry your skateboard,’ so what do they not do? They literally go down the stair railings on them. God, that pisses me off.”

  “No, I can imagine,” I said. “These guys probably don’t use the system that much, though. They get driven as part of their deal.”

  “Oh, that’s a nice deal,” he said. “Not to have to lower yourself down with regular people.”

  We drove in silence to Noe Valley, where I double-parked at Strother’s house and beeped. He came out right away, seventeen and skinny in faded jeans, sky-blue Hindenburg shoes, and a short-sleeve plaid shirt in the L.A. beach style of 1962. His hair was from then too, a pomaded shelf shading his forehead. He tripped down the steps like a gyroscope and landed in the Echo’s backseat with his skateboard on his knees, wheels up. The artwork on the board’s underside was a street scene that leveraged the aesthetics of Japanese schoolgirls, Mexican graffiti taggers, and fifties Futurists. As we pulled out he said, “All right. Patti’s husband.”

  “Yeah, hi. I’m Henry Bay. This is Dane Fredericks.”

  “Dane. That’s a great name. I’m Strother.” He turned to me.

  “So how sick is Patti?”

  “Yeah, she’s great,” I said. Dane looked confused. Don’t worry, I thought, I’m the Switchblade Priest. I can talk to the young.

  “Like in Hong Kong?” Strother said. “These local guys took us to a hotel with these great railings, and the hotel guy instantly comes out and goes, ‘You can’t be here! I only tell you once!’ So Patti goes up to him and says, ‘Hi, what a beautiful structure you have here,’ and she’s saying how the greatest thing the local kids could ever dream of is for us to be there, and she’s like, ‘You could be a hero to all the vast kids of Hong Kong,’ and the kids start cheering for the guy, so he goes, ‘Okay. Ten minutes,’ and Kris ollied this huge railing, so then it actually was the greatest thing for them. But Hong Kong was pretty cool, because Singapore is perverted. You skate where they don’t want you to in Singapore, they whip you. Literally. It’s like pirates. The guy should have a parrot. But Patti, yeah.”

  “I didn’t know you guys went to Singapore,” I said.

  “No, that was orchestra. American Youth Orchestra? I had jet lag and I just got a new oboe. I was pulling notes out of my butt completely. But Singapore was worse than here, and this is pretty bad as far as people getting pissed at you for skating. Not just yelling, but people will literally aim their car at you so they just miss. I swear. But yeah, oboe. Do you play music at all?” I shook my head. “Dane?”

  Dane shook his head, glowering out the window and tapping on his black case. I didn’t know what bothered him most, the skateboard nationalism, the free travel, or the implicit cello girls, with their load-bearing thighs and their journals full of violet-inked entries about Strother.

  Kris Santangelo lived in a condo complex near Stern Grove, where he opened the door wearing nothing but blue bikini underpants. He was trim. He said “Wait a minute” to someone on his cordless phone and “What?” to me. Before I could answer, he saw Strother in the Echo, said, “Oh,” and waved me inside.

  The bedroom blinds were drawn, the bed a mess, and there was a smell of recent sex, like air let out of a beach toy. He continued his phone call, his hair flapping in his eyes. “Yeah, well, now it’s definitely coming to a, you know, a culmination, because the guy is here to take me down there and I don’t know if I’m going. A guy. I don’t know. Hold on. Who are you?”

  “I’m Henry Bay. I’m Patti’s husband.”

  “Oh yeah? You’re getting that?” He grinned in a way that could have meant anything from “Why would she want to sleep with you?” to “Who would want to sleep with either one of you?” to “That’s funny, I was just sleeping with her two weeks ago in the hospitality suite in Austin.” It beat me. I wasn’t the Switchblade Priest.

  “It’s Patti’s husband,” he said on the phone. “I don’t know, but he’s here. Well, yeah, I’m getting in the car if this is resolved. I’m not getting in the car otherwise.” He parted the blinds, looked out at the car again, and saw Dane. “God, look at that guy. Hold on.” He put the phone down and slipped on a coral-colored T-shirt that showed Lucy from Peanuts with her head thrown back in porn-star ecstasy. She was reaching down on herself, her hand just out of the picture and wiggle lines around her wrist. The back of the shirt said, I’M COMING, YOU BLOCKHEAD.

  “No, I did voice it,” he said on the phone. “I voiced it to Patti and she said she was voicing it to you.” He snapped the bikini’s elastic. “Because I’m out there exemplifying you guys’ shoes, and I’m supposed to have X number of stickers that are mine to sell, and—No, no way, because I give of myself out there, and do you see me going around with the thing where they measure your foot? In the shoe store? Because I’m not a shoe salesman, I’m—no, the metal thing, with the—okay, forget that, that’s not the point.” He pointed at a pair of jeans in the closet. I handed them to him. “This has nothing to do with your and my’s sex relationship. I’m trying to keep this separate from that. What? I don’t know.” He put the pants on. “She’s some cunt. I can’t speak for that. I have to go. What? Yeah, no, I’m going. Yeah, the business thing is fine. I don’t care. What? Oh, fuck off.”

  He pushed End and threw the phone on the bed. I followed him out to the parking berms, where he got his skateboard out of a Passport with off-road lights. The artwork on his board showed bleeding hands gripping a crown of thorns. In the car he said to Strother, “She’s torturing me to the fucking death, man. Hey, can we go?”

  They started discussing kick-flips and seemed to be ignoring Dane and me. “The story you’re doing for Pete,” I said to Dane. “Is there something about it that’s kind of stopping you?”

  “The five most common burnishing mistakes?” Dane said.

  “No, I could do that in my sleep. It’s like I said on the phone, there’s this other thing going on.” He glanced at the rearview.

  “I have a club with some guys where we get together and model every week. It’s always at my house, and I always have to get the snacks. It’s supposed to be BYO snacks, but isn’t it just the strangest thing how some people forget? ‘Oh, I remembered to bring my 1:72 Mercury that I keep screwing up the foiling on and I have to ask you to help me, but somehow I can’t remember to bring taco chips.’ Then they enter these things in competition and people go, ‘Wow, that looks good.’ Yeah, I wonder how that happened.

  “So this one guy, Craig Decker. I call him Craig Dicker now. I mean, not to other people, but that’s my name for him. He’s a good modeler. Or in certain ways he’s good. He’s good with brass. So, but
Craig’s big thing now is making his own decals on the computer. He got a printer that does decals. So two weeks ago, everyone’s there, and he holds up these decals and he says, ‘These insignia can go on a life-scale car,’ and they’re city parking stickers. An Area A sticker and an Area C. And these guys are going, ‘Wow, Craig, that’s great.’ And I got”—his voice tightened—“so fucking angry.”

  Kris and Strother had stopped talking, but Dane didn’t notice. He said, “But I didn’t—I just waited for the merriment to die down, and I said, ‘I don’t want that in my house.’ Just calmly, I said, ‘Craig? I don’t want that here.’ And he says, ‘Why, what’s the problem?’ I said, ‘The problem is it’s illegal, A, and it’s selfish, Craig,’ and he goes, ‘Oh, give me a break,’ like I’m being unreasonable. I said, ‘You make those in your computer, and all your friends’ names and phone numbers are in that computer, and when this gets discovered and your computer gets confiscated, everyone here that thinks this is so wonderful is going to have to go down and lose I don’t know how much time off of work, and be fingerprinted, and then you’re permanently in the database, and for all I know you have porno on there,’ and this guy Terry jumps up and goes, ‘Okay, calm down, Dane. Just calm down.’”

  “Nobody should ever tell anybody to calm down,” Kris said. “That’s the worst fucking thing you can say to someone.”

  There was a moment of silence as Dane realized they were listening to him, and then he said, “I didn’t need to be told to calm down. I was making a rational point.”

  “Yeah, but either way,” Kris said. “It’s like, ‘Calm down? Oh, thank you, man. I didn’t know I was, like, showing signs of life there. God, think what could have happened.’”

  “People with cars are out of control,” Strother said.

  “Well, this was like let’s see if we can break the infrastructure completely,” Dane said. “I said, ‘Craig, at least concede to me that it’s unfair to the poor slobs that pay for stickers and you take their parking space because they don’t possess your skills for making decals at the level of Revell in about 1981.’ And everyone goes—” He gasped. “Like ‘What a terrible thing you did!’ Not at Craig, at me.”

  “Yeah, because you broke his shit down,” Kris said.

  “I said, ‘If I had that kit,’ the kit he’s been making, I said, ‘I would have scratch-built everything but the wheels or I wouldn’t have even bothered.’ Because he makes a few brass parts and we’re all supposed to go over there today and say this is the best One-forty-three Jeep of the year? Bullshit.”

  “Go ahead, caller,” Kris said.

  “Some people really are named Dicker, though,” Strother said. “I knew a guy that was named that.”

  Dane said, “So now everybody is saying stuff. Things that have nothing to do with modeling. I said, ‘Everybody out.’”

  “Hell, yes,” Kris said. “It’s your house and your snacks.”

  “So he’s going to be where we’re going now?” Strother said.

  “Craig?”

  “We all have a table together,” Dane said.

  “You think something’s gonna go down?” Kris said.

  “What do you mean?” Dane said.

  “I’m going to go in with Dane,” I said. “I’ll just be a few minutes.”

  “What, we don’t get to go in?” Kris said.

  “We have to get you to your event.”

  “But this is a public thing, though, right?” Kris said.

  “If it’s in a hotel, yeah,” Strother said. “It’s for everyone with the money to get in.”

  “Strother has the money for us both to get in,” Kris said.

  “No,” Strother said.

  “Patti’s husband, come on,” Kris said. “You’re being the guy from the company. You’re like, ‘You guys just shut up and perform.’ You’re like, ‘I just want my thirty pieces of flesh.’ Hey, guy?”

  “Dane,” Strother said.

  “Dane. That’s great,” Kris said. “Dane, do you mind if we go in?”

  “I don’t know. Do you know what the event is?”

  “I know what it should be,” Kris said. “It should be a salute to excellence. To those who have shaken off the false thing of, you know, glue huffing.”

  “The stereotype,” Strother said.

  “The stereotype, and they’ve stepped forth into excellence,” Kris said.

  “The glue thing is such ancient history,” Dane said. “Anyone that would level that at us. That’s not even a consideration.”

  “Dane,” Kris said, “have Strother and myself had some shit leveled at us? I would say we have.”

  We walked down the center aisle of the show, Dane staring straight ahead as if he were integrating a high school, Kris and Strother walking a step behind us like muscle in the movies. We stopped where four guys sat on folding chairs behind a table with a dozen models on it, including a minutely detailed Vietnam-era Jeep.

  The four of them stood up to face the four of us. People nearby grew quieter, as if expecting someone to slap leather. One modeler was consumptively thin, one was fat, one had a thick beard, and one wore a striped short-sleeve business shirt with a tie and no jacket, the Controlled Dynamics look.

  I introduced myself, but no one answered. I said, “This Jeep is great. Who did the Jeep?”

  “I did,” the thin guy said. Kris’s eyes did a Secret Service flicker.

  “I work for the company that publishes the magazine Dane writes for,” I said.

  “Did you know Dane writes for a magazine?” the bearded guy said.

  “No, he never mentioned that,” the fat guy said. There was some dry laughter.

  “Guys, I’d like to display my model so it’s entered,” Dane said.

  “How about these guys?” Craig said. “Would they like to display some things too?”

  “No,” Kris said. “We’re just here to improve on our model-making skills.”

  “You guys aren’t modelers,” Craig said.

  “I wouldn’t be saying that to me,” Kris said. “I made a model of the Stonestown mall out of Fudgsicle sticks and Vaseline. It wasn’t that scale shit, either. Everything in it was a different size. The muffin thing was three times as big as the parking lot. It was great.”

  “Oh, these guys are cute,” the bearded guy said.

  “I don’t think that shirt is cute,” Craig said, pointing at Lucy jerking off. “I think it’s disgusting.” He turned to Dane. “What do you think of that?”

  “What?” Dane said, and focused on the shirt for the first time. Kris obligingly turned around to show him I’M COMING, YOU BLOCKHEAD. They’d done a nice job on the Peanuts font.

  Craig said, “How come that’s okay and what I did isn’t okay?”

  “That’s not okay with me,” Dane said. “I think it’s disgusting too.”

  “No, but wait,” Strother said. “Look at what kids go through. All the time you’re a kid, everyone’s telling you what to do, and then you finally find something that’s yours.”

  “Yeah, and maybe it isn’t baseball,” Kris said. “Maybe it’s your pussy.”

  “This is unbelievable,” the thin guy said.

  “Look,” I said. “Excuse me. I’m just giving these guys a ride, okay? I was giving Dane a ride, and my wife asked me to give these guys a ride as well.”

  “Oh, your wife asked you,” Craig said, waving mock-forgiving hands. “Say no more.”

  “How about if you say no more?” Kris said.

  Craig pointed at the shirt again. “There are kids here today. I can see kids six years old, seven years old, eight years old. That’s going to taint…every time they see Snoopy from now on, that’s going to be tainted for them.”

  “Yeah, you know what?” Kris said to Craig. “I’m offended by your shirt. That’s a polo shirt, right? That’s like the people that fucked over India. They played polo while they fucked the people over. I don’t think that’s appropriate. I’m very sensitive about what they did t
o India.”

  “We toured in India,” Strother said.

  “We have to go,” I said, and my cell phone rang. I said hello and someone said, “Henry?” but the connection was so bad it sounded like he was standing in a high wind.

  I said, “Hold on,” gestured an apology at Dane and the others, went to a concession alcove, and shouted, “Can you hear me?”

  “Hi. Listen, I’ve got a question for you. I’m at Haystack Peak. I’m at the base of the mountain.” It really was wind. “I’m—”

  “You’re where?”

  “Haystack Peak. Boy, it’s snowing like crazy. It’s blowing straight across. I wanted to know, when you were at Ice Climbing, you guys had an article on this area. I’ve got it here. It’s called ‘Winter Wonder Badland.’ It’s—hold on. I’m trying to turn the page but I’ve got these gloves on.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Why are you—?”

  “Here we go. Yeah, the article says to go up the northeast face—”

  “Why are you reading—”

  “—but I’m looking at the west side here and it looks like a cleaner line. There are some huge ice chutes up there. So I’m thinking of going that way, if you don’t know of a reason why not. Do you remember what it looked like?”

  “No. Are you—have you ever climbed anything before?”

  “Not really, but I understand it.”

  “Are you with a guide? Can I talk to—?”

  “No, I’m doing it solo. I’ve got a Quark Ergo axe. The leashless one? It got four icicles on the gear page last month.”

  “I don’t think you should do that. It’s too—”

  “Henry? You’re breaking up. I’ll call you when I get down.”

  “No, wait,” I said, “Barney, wait,” but he was gone.

  I looked around the concession area. I’d been in a million of them, with people eating their $3.75 hot dogs and shouting into their Nokias by the vestigial pay phones, but now I was lost. Barney had never before mentioned reading a magazine I worked for. It had been a few months since our visit to Kansas, but he’d sounded normal when we’d talked on the phone. Was he really in the mountains? My mind filled with slipping ice axes, crumbling toeholds, and avalanches.