Lawn Boy(32)

It was looking like I had the day off, along with the foreseeable future—as in, the cops put a chain on the door. Hopefully, they cleared out Thing One and Thing Two first, or they could still be in there, not talking and not going to the bathroom. After the roasters dispersed and the squad cars pulled away in a motorcade, I was stuck standing in the parking lot. All I could think about was my last paycheck that I’d never see. Fourteen hundred bucks.

Yes, old Mike Mu?oz was screwed again. Suddenly, a tidal wave of buyer’s remorse crashed down on me. The fishing rod, the breakfast buffets, the Indian tacos, the bottle rockets, and salmon dinners—frivolous, all of it. Who did I think I was spending so thoughtlessly these past months? God, what an idiot I’d been. And now what? Two hundred seventeen bucks from destitution all over again. If only there was something I could do to get all that money back.

It took me a half hour to decide what I should do about Chaz’s BMW. Probably the smart thing would have been just to leave it parked where it was, but Chaz seemed to want me to do something with it, and Chaz had always been a stand-up guy with me, so I felt obliged. Also, I figured the car gave me my best chance of seeing that last paycheck.

I found the key under the mat, activated the blow-and-go, and drove the limit all the way home. I parked it in the driveway, behind the moldering Festiva, where the BMW didn’t take long to attract the attention of the whole neighborhood.

Don’t get the idea that I had any intention of driving that car around town like I owned it. Oh no. That car was staying right where I parked it until such time as Chaz came to claim it or provided me with further instructions.





Standing By, Thinking Big




I stood by, just as Chaz told me to do. I tried to think big, I really did. I worked at it. I even wrote every afternoon for three hours and piled up eleven pages. They were terrible, but they were pages. As long as I didn’t go back and read them, I was making progress. I didn’t buy a single tallboy for at least a week. I went to bed early and sprawled on my air mattress in the shed, lulled by the screeching caterwaul of Dale’s band saw. I tried to imagine my current situation as the minor setback that Chaz assured me that it was. I tried to imagine bigger and better things for Mike Mu?oz. A new job, a new truck, my own place, a real novel with my name on it. But the thing of it is, I don’t really know how to think big. God knows, nobody ever taught me. In fact, I was taught precisely the opposite. I was taught to always expect and prepare for something less, because eight times out of ten, that’s what was coming. To actually expect anything bigger or better was simply beyond my reach.

But just for the sake of argument, supposing I actually did manage to envision some ideal for myself—a Pulitzer Prize, a BMW, a drawer full of matching socks—how was I realistically going to make such a thing happen, given my current circumstances? Yes, there was hard work, to which I was no stranger, but what had my hard work ever achieved? Maybe Chaz was right. Maybe it’s smarter to take the path of least resistance. There was commitment, to which I was also no stranger, but what had my commitments ever done but shackle me to my threadbare reality? And like Chaz said, the more you committed to, the more you had at stake. That left luck and big risks, the very things that Chaz encouraged me to court. But when had Mike Mu?oz ever been lucky?

By ten o’clock, I was biting my nails, tossing fitfully atop the air mattress. I turned on my lamp, and reached for my fourteen-dollar paperback, a “luminous debut” I’d recently picked off the new arrivals table at Liberty Bay Books, written by an MFA grad named Joshua. But it was no use. I couldn’t connect. The writing was overwrought, and the story was lagging. I just couldn’t concentrate. I kept reading the same sentence over and over. The protagonist was eating an apple and walking across a parking lot toward her mother’s car, “her thoughts gleaming with a smoky chiaroscuro of nostalgia.”

All I could think about was the money I’d blown the past few weeks; it had to be four hundred bucks—next month’s rent. Somehow I had to recoup that money.

I’d like to think that I am somewhat self-aware. I’ve got some blind spots, that’s obvious, but all in all, I feel like I’ve got a pretty clear view of reality. More often than not, I know when, and why, I’m making a bad decision. Most of us do—and by us, I mean broke people. Take smoking, for example. If Mom didn’t smoke away ten bucks a day, we never would’ve had to rent out the guest cottage to Freddy in the first place, right? Mom knows that, she’s done the math a million times. But there’s more to consider. For starters, she’s perpetually tired. She’s been working fifty-hour weeks for as long as I can remember. And there’s a good chance she’s clinically depressed. Smoking gets her through that second shift. It relaxes her when the pressure is mounting. It gives her something to look forward to during her break and after work, and before work, and when she wakes up in the morning. It makes her heart beat faster. At ten bucks a day, that’s a bargain.

Then there’s the casino. You won’t find Warren Buffett slumped at a one-armed bandit. Don’t expect to see the CEO of Verizon hooked to a rolling oxygen tank, cigarette dangling from his lip, pumping tokens into a slot machine like an act of faith. No, it’s usually us poor fucks. And yes, the very act of poor people gambling defies reason. Isn’t that the point? All the observable phenomena in our lives, all our personal experience, encourage us to keep our heads down and not expect any windfalls. Hell, not even a fair shake. Your boss won’t give you a break. The bank won’t give you a break. The landlord won’t give you a break. The politicians and the corporations sure won’t give you a break. Even the clerk at the Masi won’t give you a break. Why not give Lady Luck a shot? She’s no crueler or more fickle than any other master. At least you feel like you’ve got a ghost of a chance with her. You know what you’re up against. The rules aren’t always changing like everything else. Gambling fools us into thinking we’re somehow impervious to the odds, that the universe might grant us an exception.