I meet Rob at the airport. Before I’m even at the curb I can see things are different. He’s at least twenty pounds heavier. Not that this is a surprise — it’s logical fruition for a guy who once told me, “Everyone should get rich and then get fat.” I’m skinny and I just turned thirty. I’m wearing the hooded sweatshirt of my alma mater on top of a decade-old Paul Simon concert T-shirt and brown corduroys. Rob’s wearing a dark suit and wraparound shades while carrying a briefcase. The only reason I’m sure this is the man with whom I used to flip baseball cards, drink 44-ounce Big Gulps, bus summer tables and sneak into the racetrack? He’s trading alternate glances at his watch and me, shaking his head and smiling — a hallmark of exaggerated discontent with the less responsible of two childhood friends.
***
We’re driving through San Francisco and I head down Franklin so he gets the nice view of the bay. He asks me why on earth the heat is on full-blast in July and I apologize, saying the car has been running hot and something needs to be fixed but I have to keep it on most of the time to avoid overheating.
He laughs the exact laugh I’ve heard since we were thirteen, the one that lets me know he’s smarter and more successful than me but that he keeps me around because my recklessness and fucked-up sense of humor adds something resembling adventure to his life behind a desk.
I’m expecting at least a minor acknowledgment of the grandeur of his first passage over the Golden Gate Bridge, but he’s glancing at his cell phone most of the way. I figure I better call his attention to it before we’re across, but it’s important not to get too flowery or weird with my appreciation of scenery.
“You know, hundreds of people jump off this bridge every year,” I offer.
“Of course,” he says. “Every bridge anywhere, probably.”
“Yeah, but you won’t find many with a better view than this. Either direction, too. You’ve got the ocean over there and that white city on the other side.”
“The white city?”
“Yeah. Look at it. It’s white.”
“Oooooookay, writer guy,” he says, glancing back at his phone. “’White City’ it is. I would have been fine with ‘City by the Bay,’ but you’re the one who lives here.”
I steer away from the inevitable connotations he’ll make between my being single and male and having lived in the city he calls “Frisco.”
“So … if you were going to kill yourself,” I say, “which way would you jump?”
“Well … down.”
He’s proud of that one, and I serve up a snicker of cooperation.
“No, I mean, on the bridge. Which way? Facing the ocean or facing San Francisco?”
“I don’t know,” he mumbles, looking at the phone again. “Shit!”
“What?”
“Just Pfizer. I’m short long-dated July puts at fifty-three and the stock is at seventy. Vols are rising and margining is fucking me. Not good, hombre. Not … good.”
“One of these days, you’re going to have to explain this options shit to me. You might as well be speaking Swahili.”
“You wouldn’t understand it.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s math. And I’m assuming you’re not very good at that, considering you failed trig twice.”
“I eventually passed it.”
“Oh, OK,” he says, laughing. “Well, I could explain it to you, but it would take a while, and there would be a lot of fractions involved.”
“OK. Maybe some other time.”
“Exactly.”
Silence for a second, and I look back. He’s taking one long look at Alcatraz and the Oakland hills, as I had hoped he would. We’re over the bridge and roll into Marin County.
“Well, I’d jump toward the ocean,” I say. “No sense in turning back if that’s the decision you’ve made.”
“Shit!”
He throws the phone down and it bounces off the worn, velour-covered back seat.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
***
We pull up to my living quarters in Petaluma. It’s a real shithole, and he lets me know, as if I didn’t. It’s a five-bedroom house on a busy street, and the cracking, faded blue paint and dandelion-filled front yard have long removed any charm this early-1900s Victorian once held.
“What a dump,” he says. “You don’t seriously live here.”
I’ve known for the last half-hour — and the rest of the seventeen years we’ve been friends, for that matter — that being offended won’t help.
“I don’t do anything seriously,” I say.
It’s a good time to tell him the full story behind the mysterious abode. As we’re parking in the gravel lot in the back, right next to a discarded, burned-out washer-dryer, I recount the story of the previous tenants of Apartment 3E. The coke-dealing dude who was shacking up with his meth-addicted girlfriend was accosted by a jilted buyer one night. Jilted buyer shot coke-dealing dude to death. Meth-addicted girlfriend began shimmying for escape out the kitchen window, and jilted buyer shot her, too, taking out her eye. It was all over the papers. Once we moved in, we christened it “The Death Pad.”
Prior to moving up here, I had been sleeping in the living room of a one-bedroom unit in ritzy Pacific Heights in San Francisco. There, I was nestled snug behind the bookshelf while my roommate, who found that place and paid a bit more, claimed the bedroom. His job running a nursing home took him to this town, a former farm community sprouting into a suburb. He gave me a good deal: three hundred bucks a month, down from seven hundred in the city. With my salary fixed at 28 grand a year and not going up anytime soon, I jumped at it, the only penalty being a seventy-mile drive to and from the newspaper way out in the East Bay five times a week.
As we climb the stairs to the Death Pad, he smells the cat piss from the other apartments.
“This is disgusting,” he says. “Hurry up so we can get out of here.”
I go in, put on a collared shirt and slacks, grab my golf clubs and meet him back in the corridor. He’s wheezing from allergies and holding his nose closed.
***
“You’re going to love Saul,” he tells me as we drive to Sonoma Golf Club, which costs $150 and I’m hoping he’ll pay for. “He’s killing it out here for the firm. Dude’s 24 and made about $7 million last year. He’s probably up 10 this year. Hilarious. Just no concept of reality of any kind. Banging chicks left and right, getting fucked up all the time, ecstasy, coke, whatever. You’ll see. Pretty classic.”
Saul and Rob are already talking shop on the driving range, spitting out code about gammas and deltas and calls and full-tilt and shipping it and Amazon and Applied Materials and Red Hat and Brocade. I’m hoping I can improve on the 91 I shot a few weeks ago and wondering if my paycheck the following Thursday will arrive in my account quick enough to offset the $150 that I just threw down in the pro shop.
“So,” Saul says, speaking to me for the first time since we were introduced a half-hour ago. “You write about sports, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s awesome.”
“Well, theoretically, it is. I guess I just wish I made a bit more money.”
“Me too.”
***
We’re at the green of the par-four thirteenth hole, and the impromptu, cheap skins game Rob and Saul cobbled together after nine holes is reaching a froth. Rob is about eight feet from the hole after two shots and Saul and I have already tapped in for our pars. It’s simple math, even for me: if Rob makes this birdie, he wins ten bucks from his budding tycoon bud.
I’m peeing on a bush in the rough with my back to the action as Rob sizes up his putt, which I’ve already read as a slight late left-to-right breaker. Saul’s cell phone rings. I turn around to see Saul walk off to take the call as Rob strikes the ball, which breaks too far to the right and skirts three feet by the hole. Rob takes a quick look at Saul’s back before raking the ball back to its original position. Saul hangs up and returns.
Rob backs off the ball and kneels down, holding his putter aloft to line up once again. He nails it and pumps his fist.
***
I’m driving Rob to Napa, where he’ll stay tonight. He and Saul are going wine tasting tomorrow and got suites comped from a broker they’ve been helping out. They’re taking a limo back to the Oakland Airport afterwards, so I won’t see my old pal until the next time he’s in town, probably sometime next year.
“How much money do you make?” he asks me.
“Twenty-eight-grand.”
He laughs.
“Don’t you think you should make more than that?”
“Of course.”
“So what are you going to do about it?
“Nothing. That’s what they pay me.”
“So why do you do it?”
“What else am I going to do?”
“I would think there are other things you could do where you could use your intelligence to make more than twenty-eight thousand dollars a year.”
I pull up to the hotel, where a porter awaits to take Rob’s bags. I pop the trunk.
“Yeah,” I say. “You’re probably right.”
I get out and give him a hug. I tell him to go have fun in the vineyards, to have a good flight, to call me sometime soon.
I start the car back up and begin the drive back to Petaluma, where I’ll hit the luncheonette with the best spinach omelette and coffee in the North Bay.
***
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Great story! Gotta love the Butter and Eggs capital of the world!
I love that story Tom ,a timless classic….btw those guys don’t have an idea what its like to blow off work and play golf everyday…smoke weed and eat 1lb hamburgers at a stockyard. Peace Brother as Jim Rome would say, “RACK ME, I AM OUT!”