My life is a ratty piece of string stretching out behind me in silly, dull serpentine twists. There are little knots and tangles, those points in my existence I know I should have marked as sacred time, but to be honest they did not seem worth the effort. I suppose it was my natural stubbornness. People said your first is unforgettable, so I remembered them all dutifully, but I cherished nothing. My first sexual encounter had transpired with the town tramp in the backseat of my old man’s Ford Ltd. demo, an awkward and embarrassing piece of business. My first job as a man had been walking out and shaking hands with strangers and trying to convince them to buy one of my cars. My first diploma came at age eighteen, college graduation four years later.
I didn’t even put a robe on for that. I did not know what I wanted. I did not believe in much of anything.
My sole ambition in life, once I understood something about life, was to avoid becoming a man like Tubs.
Everything changed for me on the afternoon I met Molly McBride. Molly was drunk the first time I saw her. It was pouring down rain and she and her crew had landed in the bar I always went to. I remember I almost went home because of the rain that afternoon, but I didn’t keep beer in my apartment in those days.
It had been a tough day in the academy, or so I persuaded myself, and I drove over, intending to pop in for a quick one and see if anyone was around.
I saw her the moment I walked through the door.
She was laughing at something one of the men had said, bringing her glass to her lips at the same time.
Because I had stopped for no other reason than to look at her, the glass froze just as her laughter did. I knew she had caught me staring, and so with some embarrassment I turned toward the booth where I usually sat. None of my crowd was there. To avoid looking at her incessantly I dug around in my backpack for something to read. I heard her calling to me, her voice having just a bit of an edge to it, ‘Everything all right over there?’ There weren’t many people in the bar, so I couldn’t ignore her. I waved my hand and smiled at her. Everything was just fine!
One of the men said something. Molly answered him. I couldn’t make out what they said, but their laughter was all about me, I had no doubt of that. I ordered a pitcher instead of a glass because I was suddenly a lot thirstier than I had imagined. I tried to look at the text swimming before my eyes, but I was a young man and just across the room was the most radiant blonde beauty I had ever seen. After one especially long look by her, I came up out of my pretended reading and caught her at it. She looked away at once, and I called across the room, ‘Everything all right over there?’
Even in the gloomy light of the bar, I could see her smile. One of the men said something, and she laughed, making a gesture with her hand as if to say just a nice fantasy.
And it was. A pretty carpenter on a rainy afternoon.
A bored grad student wondering what he was doing with his life. We caught each other’s eye. Nothing more.
Then Beth Ruby came through the door and trudged over to my booth. She tossed her backpack on the seat and started complaining about the rain.
I looked up from my book. ‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars from my next pay check,’ I said, ‘if you’ll sit somewhere else.’
Beth Ruby looked at me curiously, then around the room. Beth was nobody’s fool. Her eyes settled on Molly. ‘Two hundred,’ she said.
I told her I didn’t have two hundred bucks, but if I had it I’d give it to her. Could she just give me a break? Beth shrugged indifferently and smiled. ‘I could, but I’m not going to. Believe me, you and your dick will thank me later.’
I gave up the dream. I tossed my book on the table and started talking to Beth about her total lack of sensitivity, her failure to understand that someone could fall in love at first sight. Beth and I had sparred a few rounds in the office and quite a few more over beer.
We both figured eventually something was going to happen between us, but we were both too stubborn to make the first move. As a result, we actually had a fairly decent friendship, as that kind of friendship goes.
While I was explaining to Beth that she had ruined my life out of simple greed Molly slipped into our booth. I had not seen her crossing the room, and nearly jumped out of my seat when I saw her across from me. Molly’s smile was so pretty that for a moment all I could do was blink.
‘Is he a total asshole or just the run-of-the-mill kind?’
Molly asked Beth without taking her eyes from my face. I liked her voice. It was strong and confident. I liked the way she was looking at me, too.
‘Total and complete, I’m afraid,’ Beth answered almost sadly.
I started to defend myself, but Molly wasn’t buying the verdict, not entirely anyway. ‘Kind of cute though.’
‘And doesn’t he know it?’
Molly shook her head, still not taking her eyes from me. ‘I hate that in a guy.’
‘Dumb and pretty.’
Molly laughed. ‘Beats dumb and ugly, I guess.’
Molly had practically the same build as now, though she was leaner by a few pounds. That came of being twenty-one and working twelve-to-fifteen-hour days running rooftops. She had short straight blonde hair with neat square bangs. A blush of freckles ran over the ridge of her nose.
‘What are you reading?’ she asked, taking the book up from the table and examining it for some evidence about my character. ‘ Black Spring. What kind of book is that?’
‘I don’t have a clue,’ I said.
‘Amen,’ Beth echoed.
On any other occasion I might have rewarded Beth’s nastiness with a scowl, but I couldn’t take my eyes from Molly.
‘Why not? You were reading it?’
‘I was trying to read it. The truth is I was distracted.’
Beth rolled her eyes and grumbled something about pathetic pickup lines. ‘You two together or something?’
Molly asked.
Beth said yes. I said no.
‘We teach together,’ I said, hoping that explained it.
This, as it happened, was terrible. Being a graduate student was okay, but teaching was a suspect activity in Molly’s view. ‘If you’re going to have your nose up in the air, then at least you ought to have some cash in your pocket.’
‘Better than no money and no class,’ Beth answered testily.
‘Not by much,’ Molly snapped. I liked it that she wasn’t backing down from a pseudo-intellectual.
When she asked me what I taught I said auto mechanics. Beth said I was lying. ‘He teaches English, badly.’
Molly looked at each of us trying to decide who was lying. Then she grabbed my hand and flipped it over. ‘Auto mechanics! I bet you can’t even change a tire!’
‘In theory, I can,’ I said, ‘but usually I just change cars. It’s a hell of a lot easier.’
‘He’s a used car salesman when he’s not in school.’
‘A professional liar!’ Molly laughed at this information, but she didn’t seem especially concerned.
‘I never lie,’ I told her.
Beth scoffed at this. I was famous in the department for my tall tales and constant run of nonsense, but Molly didn’t care. She was trying to read me.
‘You any good at selling things?’
‘I’ve been at it for five summers,’ I said. ‘Every month I’ve worked for the past four, I’ve been the second-best salesman on the lot.’
‘Second-best? Who’s the best? That’s a guy I want to meet.’
‘No you don’t. He’s an evil son of a bitch with the moral fibre of the cockroach.’
‘A liar like you?’
I shook my head. ‘No, but he can use the truth like a stiletto.’
She let me touch the palm of her hand. The skin was rough, but I couldn’t get enough of the feel of her. ‘I don’t care if something’s true or not, as long as it’s plumb.’
Beth Ruby said things were getting too thick, and Molly told her no one was stopping her from leaving.
After that it was just the two of us.
Molly tells me she liked me the first time she saw me. Of course she was three hours into a smash-up and there was no competition in the bar, but I think it was more than just chance. I think she liked the fact that I worked for a living, even if it was only dirty-white-collar work. For my part, the feeling was mutual.
Unlike almost every person I met in those days, Molly knew exactly what she wanted in life and was already pursuing it. She had just had her offer on an old Victorian house accepted, and she was planning on fixing it up and selling it for a profit by spring. And what was she going to do with the profit? I asked.
‘Buy two more. I like the work,’ she said, ‘but I’ll like it a lot better once I’m my own boss.’
I did not know Molly had a daughter or that she had been on her own since she was fifteen. It wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing but that moment mattered.
Molly was different from anyone I had ever known.
She was sexy, smart, straightforward, funny, unencumbered with pretensions, and totally self-reliant.
We left the bar for ‘a demo drive’ in my pickup around ten o’clock that evening and didn’t even get out of the parking lot. In the middle of what was starting to look like the inevitable, the rope I used to disengage the clutch on the truck Tubs had sold me got in Molly’s face. She sat up, swinging at the thing and laughing, more curious than irritated. What was a piece of rope doing hanging down from the roof of my cab? Her breasts were glorious and naked, swinging over my lips. The smell of her sex was intoxicating, and I probably should have pitched a story. Anything would have worked, but the truth would take some time. The truth involved some advice a car salesman had given me that I was naturally too proud to heed.
The night was dark. The rain had stopped. My windows were steamed up. Why did I have to tell her about Tubs?
I think to this day I was at a crossroads and didn’t realize it. As it happened, I decided to tell her about my old man, The Bandit of the Wastelands. And that was it. That was the thing we had in common. Molly had an old man just like him! Only hers peeled noses for conceited rich people. We were kindred souls, spir-itual orphans, alone and angry at the world. The rest did not matter. We were a perfect fit.
We never got back to what we thought we wanted that night. We ended up at her house and talked until dawn. The truth is we never stopped talking until Buddy Elder entered our lives. And I never again felt like I was wandering around just killing time until I figured out what I wanted.
‘For the sake of half-a-hand-job between us,’ I said to Walt that evening, ‘we’ve lost our marriages.’
Ever the philologist, Walt answered me: ‘Full hand, David, half-the-job.’
‘Why would he do that? What does Buddy get by ruining our marriages?’
Walt didn’t believe we were innocent victims. I suppose he needed his guilt, but I kept thinking there had to be some way of figuring out what Buddy really wanted. It couldn’t be just spite! Not with the elaborate set-up he had used to nail me.
I tried different theories on. I played the amateur psychologist, muttering Freudian platitudes, but nothing quite held together.
Walt listened politely, but he knew the reason Buddy had come after us. He had no doubt. We tried to sleep with his girlfriend, one of us actually had, apparently, and he paid us back with interest. ‘He hit us where it hurt.’
‘I didn’t sleep with his girlfriend, Walt.’
‘You wanted to.’
He had me there. Walt studied me in his own peculiar way. He knew I was an inveterate liar. He knew I enjoyed summoning up the ridiculous and offering it as gospel. Still, he was reluctant to call me a liar while I was at low ebb. If I wanted to pretend it was only a fantasy that was fine with him. Fantasy, reality, it didn’t matter. Buddy Elder had not authored our misfortunes. We had.
My friend, my lawyer, my wife: they all asked themselves why Denise Conway would write about an affair that did not actually occur. When there was no logical explanation they could only conclude I was lying, as I was known to do from time to time. It occurred to me that their response was exactly what Buddy Elder had anticipated. He had even arranged matters so that Denise’s complaint against me made no sense until the diary exposed her real motive. No one doubted it because Denise had not even wanted to admit the affair when she had filed her complaint.
Had he staggered his attack on me knowing the evidence would have greater effect if it came after the investigation had gathered some momentum? Was the son of a bitch that smart?
Around midnight it hit me, not the reason, the reason still did not make sense, but the method. The method Buddy Elder had employed came from reading Jinx.
He had confirmed that the first story was a lie by introducing a second story. Because the second story discredited the first, nobody doubted its veracity. I had summarized the principle as Larry the Liar’s mantra: Never tell a lie. Always tell two.
Tubs had never subscribed to Larry the Liar’s method, though he recognized that a great many people thought you had to lie to persuade people to do something. He knew the method worked, but he didn’t believe it worked as well as his own. Tubs said truth was its own reward. As a child, like all children, I had imagined he meant the reward would come in the form of feeling good about myself if I said only the truth.
I didn’t understand that Tubs cut and measured by the dollars and cents of a deal. He meant reward in its most literal and immediate sense.
I finally learned what he meant when I went to work with him. The summer I was out of high school, Tubs made me get what he called ‘a real job’ with the city.
It was mowing and grounds keeping and landscape work, long days of sunshine, heavy lifting, and a whole lot of sweat. And it didn’t pay very well. The next summer, Tubs said I could do anything I wanted. I said I wanted to sell cars with him. He just smiled, like he was proud of me, and muttered, ‘Too lazy to work, too nervous to steal. You must be my son after all, Davey!’
He set one condition for my employment. He said he didn’t care what I did off hours, but when I was on the lot or working a deal, even at midnight over a beer, I was never to lie. Absolutely never. I made the promise and I kept it as long as I wandered around in the wastelands, but I sure didn’t think it sounded like fun.
And it wasn’t. For two weeks I kept bouncing into people and losing them. I talked and I shook hands and I smiled a lot. I was a hell of a nice guy and so honest people even complimented me on it, but they never bought anything. They bought from Tubs. They bought from Larry the Liar. They never bought from me. Then one night, before I had landed even a bad deal, trudging off the lot with the rest of the salespeople and thinking landscaping wasn’t such a bad summer job after all, Tubs called me back. He pointed toward the back lot and said, ‘There!’ I looked, but I couldn’t see anything. ‘A man and woman,’ he said and he had the reverent intensity of a fisherman about to get a strike. ‘They think we’re closed.’ I couldn’t see them, but I knew Tubs was a fisher of men, and he knew when the Big Ones came to feed. ‘Davey,’ he said, and took my shoulder in his big hand like a coach about to send a player in, ‘I want you to go up to them and tell them we’re closed for the evening. Give them your business card and tell them to come back tomorrow and you’ll take care of them. And if you say it like a total prick and walk away without another word, I’ll give you ten bucks.’
I was tired and frustrated. It was easy to be rude.
I figured Tubs knew them, and just wanted to piss them off. I didn’t care. It was more fun than being nice. I heard the woman rumbling behind me as I walked away. She had never! And the man yelled loud enough for me to hear, ‘You just lost yourself a sale, young man!’
Tubs ran into them on the way to his car, the perfect accidental meeting. They were so mad they had to tell someone about the rude young salesman they had just encountered. Tubs wanted to know who it was. When they gave him my business card Tubs admitted a hard truth, because he could not tell a lie. The impertinent young salesman was his son, and he was mighty sorry he had brought me up so poorly.
When Tubs gave me the ten dollar bill the next morning, he handed me back my business card, too.
It was torn into four pieces. He had had both husband and wife rip it once, just to show me what they thought of my salesmanship. He had promised them he would give the thing back to me, and he was, he told me with the straightest of faces, a man who kept his promises. Of course, after the ceremony of the card ripping, it was only natural that the folks had seen just the car they couldn’t live without. And wouldn’t it teach me a lesson I’d never forget if they bought the thing right on the spot!
It was a lesson I never forgot all right.
My brothers hated Tubs because he was such a righteous old fart who couldn’t tell a lie, but I was the baby. I went out summer after summer to be close to the old man and learn his great wisdom. I even practiced his brand of truth on the lot. I never lied out there, but it was the only virtue I respected. I couldn’t wait to put the tie on and be there with him, to beat him just one time, one month! That was all I wanted, and he taught me how to do it, too, though I never quite pulled it off. I was always second to the old man, and Larry the Liar was somewhere back in the pack, imagining we just told a better story. Tubs showed me that at the bottom of it all the rich and the poor all come down to the same thing: when they want something they get small and greedy and full of fear. You get people to want a thing, and there is no folly they won’t commit in the cause of their desire. Their greatest fear, their only fear really, is that you’re lying. You tell them only the truth and convince them that you never lie, no matter what the personal cost, and they will jump into fire to have what they lust for. That was the secret of Tubs’s greatness.
As the summers passed, I lost the passion that comes with the kill. My soul got farther and farther from the wastelands the more I read the poets. The poets and storytellers of this world lied for the beauty of a good story, lied for the sake of a higher truth, and when I finished reading their tall tales I had a better feeling about what it was to be a human being.
Of course, I also knew that even the greatest of them all would just be another sucker on the car lot. John Keats rises from the dead and lands his skinny ass in DeKalb, Illinois. Poet or not, you’ve got to have a car in DeKalb, so he sneaks up at the back of the lot at closing time to avoid the salespeople, and Tubs is there waiting for him like God.
‘…a wordsmith are you, Johnny? My son’s a poet.
It’s a beautiful life and we need more like you to sing its praises. Now, tell me, and be honest with me, what kind of a car does a poet drive?’
Young Johnny Keats grabs for the antique purse he’s tied to his belt, but it’s too late. The strings are already cut.