“This is quite a unique situation you have down here,” he said. Understatements were a new hobby of his.
Lucky said, “This is a unique town.” Lucky chuckled and Regina tightened her fingers. They were trying to stick to the script, he gathered.
“I still don’t understand how you came to this point. Don’t think I’ve heard of a law like this before.”
His clients glanced at each other. The mayor cleared her throat again. Lucky said, “The wording of the law itself is a bit Byzantine, but the idea is still, it’s still on the books. It may be from a different time and a bit complicated, but the spirit of the thing is timeless.”
“Why not just have the town vote on it?” he asked. “Get it all done out in the open?”
“There are a lot of complications on that point, but I can assure you that we’re not circumventing. You see it’s the town council that handles the routine matters of law here, and there’s three of us—me, Regina, and Winthrop. When we all come together it’s a beautiful thing, but when we disagree—”
“A vote wouldn’t work in this situation,” Regina broke in, “considering the community these days and their concerns.”
Yes, he was definitely picking up on a little tension. Which one had the better hand, and who was on the verge of folding their cards? The bartender brought the drinks over without making eye contact. The man could hear everything and he wondered what the bartender thought. This citizen.
“We want to be fair,” Lucky said, “is what I think Regina is getting at. We have a lot of longtime residents here, obviously, and they think one way, and then we have a lot of people who have moved here for the business opportunities, they want to raise their families in a nurturing environment.” Lucky took a sip of his Brio, the energy drink that had become the late-night lubrication of choice in Silicon Valley. The beverage was Lucky’s way of saying that he was not so far in the boondocks that he was out of touch.
“The town is changing quickly,” Regina said.
“Right,” he said. Behind her head, the caption of a cartoon went, PIP I DARESAY! PIP!
“Rapidly growing,” Lucky said. “What we have is a kind of stalemate, and we want to be fair. So we called in a consultant.”
And there he sat. He nodded. He wondered, are they seeing the man I want them to see? That devil-may-care consultant of yore? His hand was a fist on the table. He imagined a wooden stick in his fist, and attached to the end of the stick was a mask of his face. He held the mask an inch in front of his face, and the expressions did not match. He said, “I sent an e-mail to someone’s office, I can’t remember who, about the conditions of my employment.”
“Yes, your conditions.”
“That’s what we wanted to talk about.”
“There’s some disagreement about the strict terms, but we’ll work it out.”
“They’re a bit binding.”
“That’s the point,” he said.
They looked at each other. Lucky said, “You see, Albert Winthrop’s unreachable until Wednesday. He has a boat race. But I’m sure we’ll work it out, once the three of us sit down. I think what you’re saying makes perfect sense, if you look at it through the right lens. Perfect sense.”
“Will you be okay until then?” Regina asked. “Your room is nice?” She smiled, by accident it seemed to him.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded eagerly. It wasn’t that bad a smile, as far as smiles go, a rickety ark sailing above her chin.
“I know Winthrop sent up a few books for you to familiarize yourself,” she added.
“And when you meet Winthrop,” Lucky added, “I’m sure he’ll lay a bunch of family history stuff on you.” He chuckled. “He has all this stuff in leather binders.”
“I use Apex all the time,” Regina said, sitting back in her chair. She wiggled a finger for proof. “Burned it on the stove.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Quite an impressive client list you have,” Lucky said. “Had a question about one thing, though, if you don’t mind. It said there you did Luno, but Luno is pretty old, right, it’s been around for a long time.”
“New Luno. I did New Luno. I added the New. They were a bit adrift, demographics-wise.”
“Ah,” Lucky said, considering this. “New Luno. My nephew drinks that by the crate.”
There you have it.
. . . . . . . .
He had a limp from an injury. What happened was he had lost a toe recently. Didn’t lose it really. It was cut off with his consent and put in one of those red hospital biohazard bags. He’d seen such things on television, and what do they do, he wondered in the hospital, burn the waste in incinerators? His toe consumed by flame and wafting like a ghost through the atmosphere. Of course sometimes medical waste washed up on the shores of public beaches and there was a big news thing about it. The derelict waste-removal company. Now and again he pictured unlucky bathers. That thing they thought was a baby fish nuzzling their thighs in the surf? It was his lost little brown toe, roaming the seas in restless search of its joint.
They say you can get used to losing a toe. And he had to agree, it was not up there on the list of truly terrible injuries. Of course his socks looked funny to him. Balance-wise, the toe is not that essential and it had been brought to his attention that his limp was psychosomatic. But there he was limping.
. . . . . . . .
He lingered in the bar after the mayor and the magnate left. They hadn’t yet agreed to his stipulations so he wasn’t officially on the job, and this comforted him. He lingered over his beer. For a time, cobwebby foam in thin tendrils along the inside of the pint glass was entertainment enough. No one else came in. At one point he heard sounds from the registration area, luggage wheels losing the silence of carpet as they hit the wooden floor, and elevator doors opening and closing. Then silence again.
Wednesday, he thought. Two days. He forced himself to admit that he was a bit relieved. It was the first assignment he’d taken since his misfortune and he didn’t know how things would play out once he started working again. He had this suspicion that all he had inside himself now were Frankenstein names, lumbering creatures stitched together from glottal stops and sibilants, angry unspellable misfits suitable only for the monstrous. Names that were now kin.
The bartender ran his cloth across nonexistent stains on glasses, lipstick that had not remained and specks that had not lingered. A streak of gray started at his forehead and fanned out into his Afro in a curly wedge, an ancient and hardwired pattern, in his genes. He watched the man wipe glass, hold up glass to the light to consider his handiwork. The day the bartender discovered that white spray in the mirror, as he was about to perform the daily trimming of his muttonchops, he knew he had become his grandfather, that he was truly his father’s son beyond what the surname said. It was hard not to notice that the bartender had some old-school muttonchops, real daguerreotype shit, something to aspire to. He went up for a refill and the bartender spoke for the first time since Regina and Lucky had left. The bartender said, “You come down here to clean up this mess?”
“I’m here to check things out and lend a hand if I can,” he answered. He sat down on one of the stools.
“What kind of business do you do?”
“Consulting.”
“Con-sulting,” the bartender repeated, as if his customer had added some new perversity to the catalog of known and dependable perversities.
“I’m a nomenclature consultant. I name things, like—”
“Hell kind of job is that?” The bartender put both his palms down on the bar. He looked like he was preparing to vault over it and throttle him.
He fell into his standard explanation without thinking. Just like old times. “I name things like new detergents and medicines and stuff like that so that they sound catchy,” he said. “You have some kind of pill to put people to sleep or make them less depressed so they can accept the world. Well you need a reassuring name that will make them believe in the pill.
Or you have a new diaper. Now who would want to buy a brand of diaper called Barnacle? No one would buy that. So I think up good names for things.”
“People pay you for that shit?”
He was at a loss. He’d kept up a good front for Regina and Lucky, but he couldn’t muster the necessary reserves at that moment. His foot throbbed in phantom pain.
Muttonchops looked him over. Finally, the bartender said, “This is my home.”
“Oh, I know that, people live here. They called me in for a helping hand,” he said. Already this job was different. Time was, you christened something, broke the bottle across the bow, and gave a little good-luck wave as it drifted away. You never saw the passengers. But there were always disgruntled passengers out there, like Muttonchops. It was simple mathematics.
To be challenged like this, in this strange town. Might as well have his boss hovering over him, inspecting his every notion. And he was long past having any use for bosses, even before his misfortune. It was unpleasant. De-escalate, de-escalate, he told himself. A sign behind the bar offered, TRY A REFRESHING WINTHROP COCKTAIL—SPECIAL OF THE HOUSE. He pointed. “Uh, what’s that taste like?”
The bartender gave him a look and started toward the bottles.
“Quiet in here tonight.”
The man behind the bar huffed and said, “People are getting in tomorrow for the conference,” then paused for a moment to glare at his customer as his hands tipped in jiggers. The bartender grabbed bottles of stuff he’d never heard of. The labels were yellowed and peeling, the script on them saloon-ready: the kind of stuff they break on the bar at the start of the brawl in Westerns.
“What’s the conference?”
“More people coming in to talk to Lucky about business opportunities. He’s always bringing people in here,” Muttonchops said. “They’re all over the place now.” Inside the cocktail shaker some sort of process was happening. “That’s what I thought you were here for, until I heard you talking to them.”
“Time of prosperity.”
Muttonchops snorted. “That’s what Regina says. That’s what Lucky says.” The bartender dropped a cherry into the yellow drink. The red reminded him of the time he broke open an egg and saw something inside that might have lived. “Winthrop Cocktail,” the bartender said.
“What do you say?”
“I say, I say I’ve worked here ever since I was a boy. Used to have a shoeshine over in the men’s and that’s where I got my start. Like my father and his father. And then they moved out here, behind this bar. They were bartenders behind this very bar and now I’m here, too. My family goes back to the first settlers.”
“Wow.” He took a sip.
“This was a colored town once,” he said. “Founded by free black men and women, did you know that?”
“No.” One look at the faces on the walls of the room told him that it must have been a long time ago. Minor and major Wigglesworths, and all points in between. “I read something about barbed wire,” he said.
“Barbed wire. That was later. No. This here was founded by free black men. They came from Georgia and set up here and built themselves a new life. It was after that Old Man Winthrop came here with his factory and put it on the map. He came here after.”
He wondered what was in the drink. He’d only had a few sips and his head was already heavy, his neck a little rubbery. He wanted to blame it on jet lag, but he’d only traveled one time zone over. No, he was suffering his usual case of ST. Standard Torpor. This was more human contact than he’d had in months. And also, he had to concede, the Winthrops really had their magic potions down pat.
“You know how old this hotel is?” the bartender asked. In a moment the man’s face had softened. He could no longer say that Muttonchops looked angry, but he couldn’t name the man’s new expression either. “One hundred and thirty-two years old,” the bartender said. “Other places out on the street there, they close. You see them close and some new store opens up in their place. Some of the old-timers, they’ve had that store for years. They can use the money and retire. Wouldn’t sell out for all the money in the world a few years ago but they look up and down the block and they can see what’s coming. So it’s changing. But this place isn’t going anywhere.”
“What do you mean?” For a second he thought the bartender was referring to the hotel, but of course there was something more.
Muttonchops shifted on his feet. “Regina’s a good woman. I voted for her. I’ll vote for her again. Our families, we’re intertwined. But what they’re trying to do. This is Winthrop. Always will be Winthrop. Shit around here never changes. You can change the name but you can’t change the place. It stays the same.”
It all swam.
He had limped in. He staggered out.
. . . . . . . .
He had no purpose, he had no vocation. He had a job, which he lost, and so he answered the ad in the paper. The advertisement did not use the words nomenclature consultant because the big men upstairs knew that the esoteric is often scary. So the ad promised the chance to get in on the ground floor of an exciting new field and left it at that. With the red pen he had stolen on his last day at his last job, he circled the ad. Here’s to new beginnings.
It was a midtown job so he told himself first thing that if he got the job it would only be something to tide him over until he got a more permanent gig. Midtown. Midtown the abstraction was nightmare enough, bat-winged and freaky. To actually set foot in the place was almost too much for his mind to process. He had a certain temperament. But he put on some midtown clothes and showed up at the appointed time.
It was one of those buildings where there was one bank of elevators for one half of the building and another set of elevators for the other half. It was hard to escape the idea that the world of the elevators not taken was better, more glamorous, with butlers and canapés and such. He pushed in glass doors. As he waited in reception, his future colleagues walked past, up and down the halls. They were on the inside and he was not. Where were they going, where did that corridor lead? It was the last time he would experience mystery in that building.
After a while he was taken to the conference room. Abe Appleby, the lowest man on the totem pole, the latest hire, asked him if he knew what a nomenclature consultant was. He told him he didn’t, and Abe shrugged and told him it was a fancy way of saying they thought up names. Then he left him alone with the aptitude test.
The test was odd. On one of the sheets there was a smiling bear flailing its paws on a pyramid and they asked him to name it. There was a nonthreatening androgynous blob with vague limbs and they asked him to name it. A sleek television-type pastel object, a bicycle built for three, a children’s ball that looked like it had a little tumor bulging out of it. A subsection of pills—there was no telling what they did, what ailment they alleviated or cured. He filled in the blank spaces.
There were normal everyday things with pretty much fixed names that they asked him to rename. This is an octagon. What would you call it? More things: stapler, ashtray, tree. The hardest thing was the chair, but he filled in the blank spaces.
Then to reverse it, they gave him a list of product names and asked him to think of what they might be attached to, a fruit drink or a running shoe. It was all pretty obvious stuff. He put in things off the top of his head. When he was finished, he dropped the test in a big pile of other tests on the receptionist’s desk.
He went home. Before the evening news he loosened his tie and drank beer out of a can.
They called him in the next day.
He sat in Roger Tipple’s office for the first time. Roger observed him over the neat divide of the desk. He picked up his aptitude test and nodded. Then he said, “You’re a Quincy man. What year?”
They talked about the old school for the next twenty minutes. Their conversation was facilitated by the fact that the same deathless geezers who had been around during Roger’s time were still wheezing around during his time. As luck would have it. He was a Quincy
man, and it turned out the firm had been founded by Quincy men. The name meant something. He fit right in.
. . . . . . . .
He suspected the Winthrop Cocktail supplied many aliases, but the one he found most compelling was Sleep. This passport led him places. For a time. When he blinked and twitched awake at two in the morning, he knew he’d be up for hours.
Caught in the a.m. in a hired room. He roused the man at the front desk after fourteen rings, hoisting the handlebar receiver to his ear. It was one of those old telephones that was all classy curves, white with brass trim; somebody had probably received news of Lincoln’s assassination through it. The man at the registration desk said he’d send up the only thing he could make at this hour: a cucumber sandwich.
Travel had rumpled his clothes, sleeping in them had left him hamperish. Groggy, paste-mouthed, he imagined he waited for an audience with the king. He carried urgent dispatches for the man in charge. The royal crest was everywhere, on the ashtray, on the brittle ballpoints and the stationery, the sheets and the towels. Upside down on the cover of the Guest Services folder, the gold Winthrop W was the McDonald’s M. Let us summon the graduate students to study the recurring theme of the golden arch in nature.
In college he had lived next to the Winthrop Library, so when he initially heard the name of the town, his first association was of shelves and shelves of the Classics, the histories of the dead, what we needed to read in order to become real citizens of this country. Then came images of mummified white people and their staggering approach, parchment tongues aching to rasp Winthrop. Then: a brand of tooth polish used before World War One, a patent medicine popular before the government cracked down on certain excitatory ingredients. He turned the idea over in his head and decided that if he were to put the name to contemporary use, it would be for a new kind of loofah, a commercial brand, one for institutional use in retirement homes. Scrub that dead skin away.
He let the guy in when he heard the faint double knock. If Muttonchops had started out as a shoeshine boy in the men’s room, this was the man who had screwed the shoeshine stand into the bathroom tile. He had obviously been haunting the hotel for a while. As the white man heaved the cart across the carpet, his bones creaked and cracked so much that they sounded like kindling catching fire. Well, we all have our boulders to push up mountainsides, he thought. The man called him sir, and he tipped him. The sandwich lay autopsied on the plate, crusts excised, cut into triangles, leaking horseradish.