Lawn Boy(21)

“My mom works there,” I said.

“No way.” He actually sounded mildly impressed.

“Dive bars are cool,” observed one of his friends, with all the passion of a tollbooth operator.

“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”

I lunched with them on the lawn, eating my thirteen-dollar sandwich deliberately and feeling a little self-conscious that I didn’t have a beard. I had to admit, the sandwich was pretty damn good. The three of them kept asking me questions about Suquamish. Was I Indian? Was it crazy on the Fourth of July? I felt like an exchange student. Since they were so interested, I told them how my truck broke down and how I said the hell with it and how I just pried off the VIN and let it get impounded. Why didn’t I just buy another truck, they wanted to know. I told them it was a long story. I told them about the stolen mower, too. Why didn’t I just get a new mower, they wanted to know. Their solution to everything was to get another one, as though such a thing were a given. I guess maybe I didn’t have much in common with those guys.

I feel pretty safe in saying my boss, Chaz, has a bit of a drinking problem. Because after work that day, he had me follow him out to his BMW and breathe into his blow-and-go so the engine would start.

“Get in, I’ll give you a lift,” he said.

“You sure?”

“No problemo, amigo.”

Man, his car was quiet. No tapping or dinging or choking. And boy, could it accelerate. For a guy on DUI probation, a guy who clearly had liquor on his breath, Chaz wasn’t what you’d call a cautious driver. He consistently drove ten over the speed limit, even in school zones.

“Mu?oz, that Mexican?”

“Californian,” I said.

“Ha. Good one. I like that.”

He reached across to the passenger’s side, popped the glove box, and fished out a plastic minibar vodka.

“Sorry, bud, no tequila. You want one of these?”

“Nah, I’m cool.”

With one hand, he unscrewed the cap and tipped the bottle my way. “To free enterprise,” he said.

Tossing back the vodka, he threw the empty bottle out the window and smacked his lips.

“I like your style, Mu?oz. You keep your nose to the grindstone.”

“I do?”

“Sure. But not too much, not like those other two. You don’t want to work too hard in this world, or it’ll make you cynical in no time flat.”

“It will?”

“You’ve got a nose for opportunity.”

“I do?”

“Sure you do. And that’s what it takes to get on in this world.”

Thus began his ten-minute soliloquy on entrepreneurship. Old Chaz had a lot more irons in the fire than just glow-in-the-dark key chains and the like. I could barely keep up. It seemed that Chaz Unlimited Limited was only the flagship. There was Chazy Chaz LLC, Chaz in Charge LLC, and All That Chaz LLC. He admitted to having no liquid assets at the moment but contracts up the yin-yang.

“Smoke and mirrors, smoke and mirrors,” he explained.

The thing about never having any money your whole life is that you have no way of learning about money. It’s like learning to play Yahtzee with no dice. If I understood Chaz right, everything I knew about finance was ass backward. Apparently, you don’t want to pay your bills on time; in fact, you don’t want to pay them until someone puts a gun to your head. If you can avoid paying them at all, that’s the best scenario. And here I’d been worried about late notices all these years. Oh, and it turns out that debt is actually a good thing. You want to owe the bank money.

“If you’ve got the bank’s money, you own the bank, see?”

That was a real eye-opener. I can’t say for certain how scrupulous Chaz is, but he’s paying me more money than I’ve ever made in my life, so I’m willing to listen and learn. Not only that, he hinted at better opportunities.

“I’m cooking up a new venture called Razmachaz. I might need a point man.”

“What’s it about?”

“Import and distribution. We’ll get into the particulars once I get all my ducks in line. Think Mexico. That is, if you’re interested.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sounds good. Go ahead and hang a left here.”

He leaned over to the glove box as he took the turn, groping around for another mini. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t care if Chaz saw where I lived. I guess he didn’t seem like the judgmental type. Plus he was kind of sloppy, anyway, a few days’ unshaven, slacks rumpled. Really not my idea of a successful guy, if you want to know the truth. Take away the BMW, and he could’ve been working at the Masi.

“It’s the gray one up here on the right.” I said.

“Got it.”

“Thanks again for the lift.”

“No problemo, amigo,” he said, coasting up to where the curb should’ve been. “Nice place.”

As he pulled away, he threw the minibottle out the window. It bounced a few times before it rolled into my neighbor Dale’s unruly yard, where it would never be noticed.





The Social Thing Desperate to acquire new friends, I soon started taking lunch regularly with the coffee roasters out on the lawn, even though I hated them. No more thirteen-dollar sandwiches, though. Even if I could afford them now, it was the principle of the thing. The roasters—Dallas, Austin, and Houston—not only ordered overpriced sandwiches, they ordered frilly sides, like saffron deviled eggs and pickled watermelon rind, and they washed it down with three-dollar bubbly water. They looked at my ham sandwich the same way the Mexicans used to look at it, with a sort of thinly veiled contempt.