Chapter 2

The thought of killing someone due to his own frustrations did follow him down the sidewalk that morning, as a woman’s stare was merely a fleeting announcement that he was at least handsome in some imperceptible way, but by no means a thoroughbred who could ensure her survival. As much as he wanted this pipe dream out of life—the ability to support someone like the girl he had seen, and perhaps a child who would have been the result of their union, just weren’t possible anymore. He had been through it too many times before— the scheming, the strategies, the endless opportunity-seeking. And to think that there was some way out of his own financial hardships to arrive at such an enviable position in life!

His financial ruin had started slowly, and at one point, just a few years after graduating from the town’s high school, he had a good job that paid a decent entry-level wage. It was office work, and his boss, an ex-Marine who used to know his father when he was alive, gave him the job making copies and answering telephones, all under the banner of a small real estate business that capitalized on the great push up from the overcrowded cities into the lands of sagging telephone wires, cell phone towers, strip malls, and trafficky roads that intersected wide highways and networks of dented metal and chipping concrete. “We have a lot of rich people coming in from New York,” his boss used to say to him. “Stick around, kid, and you may be able to afford a house one day.”

The real estate office itself didn’t allow for too much luxury. The desks were made of brown aluminum, scratched and dented, and the phones still had their chords on them. A small Japanese copying machine became his partner in duplicating the deals made between his boss and the few local customers who wandered into the place. Charlie wanted to learn more about the business, but his boss only needed him for computer work and other such gopher-like, run-around tasks. Such was the young person’s labor market, but at least it earned him enough to cover the rent. Every once in a while, though, a young smart woman from the nearby college entered the place looking for a studio just to get away from her parents. The rental business bustled in the town, and there were other agencies as well that competed for the same business. Charlie was responsible for printing out the leases and maintaining the classified ads for the landlords his boss served.

“Start out small,” said the boss to him on a number of occasions. “The most successful creatures on the planet are the ants, roaches, and rats that feed on the jeweled carcass.”

His boss liked to use hunting imagery a lot, but ever since he took the job, his boss had never invited him out to any of his beer-soaked hunting expeditions that he so fondly spoke of. Charlie could tell that his boss made a lot—all of this in spite of his Wal-Mart clothes and populist humor. There was something about being in the trenches of life that excited him, as though the real estate world were a battle that demanded a thick skin and a tolerance for pain and failure. The desks in the office, purchased second-hand, were a testament to this. Even the brown carpeting had old coffee stains on it. There were no windows in the office save for the natural light that came in through the front door and the small opaque glass bricks that surrounded it. The place might as well have been a warehouse or an outhouse on a cargo dock. The plastic light shades hovering above were speckled with dust and dead insects, the computer equipment yellowing with obsolescence. Yet the work was something he could do, and for that Charlie Zero remembered to be grateful for a job that supported him, albeit meagerly.

Every so often, while his boss was out of the office, he would peruse the real estate sites on the Internet and scroll down the list of the homes in the town he would have liked to have lived in. He figured that after five years of doing the grunt work of the agency, he would soon be able to afford a mortgage and perhaps a car to go with it. He never finished college and was quite young to be working, as many young men his age had filled their hearts and minds with the stuff of higher knowledge and intellect. Not so for Charlie, because his path was different. There was no father or mother to rely on and very few family members to help him share the load. They had all been drifters and gypsies who had once been in the military but had now become so overwhelmed by their society’s changes that they really had little choice but to fade away as the old soldier’s dictum had demanded of them. Charlie spared himself military service, but his relatives had always been drafted or served voluntarily.

Back in the 1980s, there was a peace-time draft, so he had the option of either staying or leaving. He stayed put, and with his orphaned status he made what he could and tried to keep on the bright and sunny side as a young man. He still had a few friends from the local high school, but like many of suburbia’s young, they packed up and left the town behind, leaving the likes of him to fill homegrown jobs that were mostly doled out by small business owners who could barely afford their commercial leases. And the local economy didn’t do so well in the early Eighties. But things changed, as Charlie could smell the fumes of some of the old, corrupt castles burning and a new influx of young, hip city-folk infusing the town with their own brand of chic and culture. The people from the city who fled from the crime in their streets had started to crawl in, and the town’s working class had bright ideas of moving out farther into the country, which hoped to bring in the flood of new money that his boss so enthusiastically spoke of. The new money wouldn’t change Charlie’s salary any, but he knew he should stick with the agency, because one day it would go places.

And lately, the thought did occur to him that he should have some sort of competitive advantage over the people who came in. But Charlie was not so concerned about this now. There was something about the need to have what other people had that kept him working. And perhaps he should stay by his boss’ side and follow him until his boss too wore out, as a private in the trenches does. He considered these ideas, and he went to and fro amongst the piles of leases and office papers that were stacked upon his desk in an effort to resume where he was going. An old cup of coffee sat cold and lifeless between his computer printer and the heavy, clunky contraption of a monitor. A job, after all, was merely a stop along the journey, and sure, he would have liked to have stayed and could have grown to become a pillar of the town to whom the young women at the nearby college would often run—yes, the visions he had for himself and the might of those visions—he a more erudite real estate broker catering to the exodus of the city’s dispossessed as they vacated their old turf in droves, because the city is no place to raise a family really. He must stay in the town where he worked, if only to benefit his progeny. The rents would climb through the roof, and he would be a player in all of that. Perhaps he would feel the comfort of a suit on his back and a gold clip holding a silk Chinese tie to his chest. An office boy one minute, and a businessman the next. His fantasy wasn’t too farfetched. From what he understood, most people did it all the time, the social mobility of it all, and the wife who would marry him would be a gem—a jewel fit for his crown.

But these were all considerations that confused him more than they helped him. Dreams often get in the way, and to pursue them recklessly without the lack of the Almighty dollar as a counterweight would be like committing a sin against the self, a form of suicide almost, as it would be the same old sin of dreaming too much, and these dreams often became tiring and confusing. It was a sin that mind-boggled even the purest of us.

Charlie Zero wasn’t so desperate yet, however. Sure he had dreams, but they were totally in line with what his paycheck warranted, which was to work hard and follow what his richer sponsor in the office had told him to do, and maybe he just might make it to older age with a quaint suburban house, a wife, and a couple of well-adjusted kids. He never ventured beyond these limits as he continued to scroll down the list of area properties on the screen, thinking that he could afford a couple of them. But the homes he really wanted were way out of his price range.

His boss returned from lunch not long after he had begun filing away the newly-drawn leases. As usual, his boss was cheerful upon walking into the place.

“Any phone calls, Charlie?” he asked. “No. It’s been pretty quiet.”

“Good. It means that we’ll be pretty busy carving up the entrails by later this afternoon.”

And he was right. As soon as lunch ended, several would-be tenants stumbled into the place looking for cheap efficiency apartments and studios in the neighborhood. The ones looking for studios usually came in alone, and they seemed quite tired and depressed to him. If they were on the older side, it probably meant that they had some falling out with a significant other or had just moved into town from further upstate searching for work of any sort. The younger prospects usually came in directly from the college, as they hoped to avoid that new and irritating roommate the college housing office had stuck them with. Charlie had a hard time making these college-types feel comfortable. He had always envied them from a careful distance, and sometimes his coldness towards them showed in the aloof manner in which he asked them to wait for his boss to finish up with a previous client. He wore his non-collegiate status as armor sometimes, as he tried to find anything to discredit them.

“Sons and daughters of rich kids,” he would sometimes find himself muttering.

It’s not as though he never wanted to finish up college. It was just that the distance that separated his future opportunities and theirs became quite a palpable barrier to wanting to have anything to do with these people. They seemed happier too. They had friends to rely on and all of those parties every weekend, and ultimately they would always land better jobs, even if Charlie outworked them to the ground. He could sense how they were from another class entirely, and this otherness pained the pit of his stomach like an ulcer, and while he was wise enough not to compare his life to the lives of others, he couldn’t help but fuel the flames of his resentments that whispered like the devil in his ears, these ideas that said they would always do much better than he did without really trying very hard at it. It was one of those cruel, sad realities that never lets go of a man, and the fact the Charlie Zero noticed this at his age and not later in life, when one finally gets to figuring out his net worth and calculating all of the money he’s blown on ridiculous things, pointed to some degree of sophistication, but a sophistication that was a direct result of a terrible coldness and cynicism towards these people. That coldness gripped him whenever they walked through the entrance. He also hated how his boss sucked up to them, and even though his boss never treated Charlie as a peon or an underling of any kind, he did notice how his cheap smile warmed to these students when they came in to meet him. It was a worldwide predicament he couldn’t escape—the nature of sucking up to people.

But just when he thought that his resentments and poor attitude had burrowed too deeply into him, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a young woman approaching. He saw her through the window blocks that surrounded the entrance door, as though she were a mirage, and it was hard not to stand above his computer monitor and remain staring in her direction. And to his surprise, she actually entered the office with a bubbly air that warmed Charlie’s insides. He could tell that she was from the college, and he immediately began to think how wrong he had been about resenting these people. She actually smiled and uplifted the room from its usual shroud of dull beige despair, and at the sight of her he could do nothing but stare as though paralyzed at his desk, wondering what on earth he would say to her. She wore a long black coat, and her skin seemed soft and supple, if only he could touch her flushed cheeks. Her dirty blonde hair fell in line with what most gentlemen of his ilk wanted but could never rightfully claim. And if wanting to possess such a creature was wrong, then perhaps Charlie had erred in some imperceptible way, but certainly she was the type of woman whom most men wanted to possess, neither as a plaything nor a trophy, but simply a woman whom he wanted all to himself. He wanted her all wrapped up in his arms on cold nights. If such a closeness were to exist, she would ultimately leave him begging for more of it.

As was usually the case, it was she who possessed him with her thin lips and wide smile, a smile that exuded family wealth and an allegiance to the fake love affairs that mesmerized her on the television and movie screens. Certainly he wanted her attention somehow—an attention that went beyond his polite manner of shaking her hand, her fingers smooth and a bit cold from the wind outside, and if he could possess this woman and keep her all to himself, he would have done so but only within the strict politeness that only a dilapidated real estate office could permit at the moment, as she didn’t allow him to go any further. She simply smiled when she entered and took a seat in front of him in the waiting area.

Charlie knew full well that it would be his boss’ pleasure to assist her by weeding out the apartments that were too shabby or too run down, and maybe Charlie just wished for a moment that he were the one helping her make such decisions by showing her around the local neighborhood or taking her out to dance at the old Irish pub down the street. But these ideations were all but inept fantasies, pure delusion and daydream, considering that this woman outclassed him and treated him too professionally to be so personally involved. Perhaps she acted this way to everyone she met, like a butterfly at a party— introducing her friends to their friends in a suave, svelte, and sedate manner—a manner that said that one shouldn’t ever emote in her own personal space or cross her emotional and personal boundaries at any time, and that anything that resembled anything close to that would be much too uncivil or vulgar an act. Such vulgarities had the habit of working their way into the distinguished lifestyle she was used to, he supposed. And it was Charlie’s idea at the time that he should enter her world somehow. So when he shook her hand, he did so with a gentleness that she was wholly unaccustomed to, as though Charlie personally knew her through a subconscious channel that only women of her kind had access to.

Perhaps this was his first mistake with her, and perhaps it was the same mistake he had been continually making with the opposite sex. Because when he let go of her hand she was more confused by his gentleness than attracted by it. When he tried to connect his eyes with hers in a way, he couldn’t hold the stare for very long and quickly looked away as though he were guilty of something. She also didn’t look too pleased with the overture, as her smile suddenly thinned, and her professional manner, probably the result of her inheritance and upbringing, returned to the chill of the room. Charlie became much like a strange relative who shows up for Thanksgiving dinner after years of delinquent absence.

He couldn’t say if the change in her demeanor was a simple defense that all women had or if she were genuinely offended by the attempt to connect with her. He stared at her in the awkwardness unable to utter simply that she should take a seat and wait for his boss. He had to canvass her face one more time to check if the same twinkle in her eyes and fullness of her lips had really vacated the premises.

“I’m just looking for an apartment to rent,” she said matter-of- factly.

Crestfallen, Charlie asked her to take a seat amongst the manhandled magazines that showcased some the areas finer homes. But Charlie couldn’t stop there. He needed to say something, anything, to keep the dream alive.

“You go to the college nearby?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Wow. It’s a great school. What’s your major?”

“Art History.”

“Wow. That’s a great major. I like paintings too. They’re so filled with color.”

Her only recourse was to pick up one of the tattered magazines as a response to the artlessness of his comment. Charlie had rarely seen paintings in a museum—or paintings anywhere for that matter—and continued his search for something wildly enlightening to say.

“Do you paint yourself?” he asked finally. “No, I don’t.”

“Do you draw pictures or take photographs?”

“Nope,” she said.

He became painfully aware that she really didn’t want to talk to him, and even though he still flipped through his mental Rolodex of things to say to her, he could tell that he might as well have been a piece of office furniture or that annoying paper clip that went annoyingly astray from the pile. He considered it a form of abuse that would one day ease with time. Either this or he had done something inexcusable in his past life to render him incapable of getting anywhere with the opposite sex. Dull, boring, and somewhat annoying were traits that had been handed down to him through the most natural of selections, and while he struggled to unchain himself from what she must have seen in him, he never had much success outrunning his lack of exciting things to say. His eyes were the primary communicant that usually did all of the talking, only that he could look at her only when she looked somewhere else—at the magazine she was reading for now, her slim fingers flipping through the pages delicately and then smoothing out a wrinkle in her skirt, her deep blue eyes pretending to be interested in what she read if only to avoid whatever uninteresting snippets of conversation he tried to conjure up.

His boss soon finished with another client in his office, and he stepped out brazenly to greet her. His bosses energy was infectious apparently, because he extended his hand to her, and her face alighted as though she had seen her perfect man, albeit a bit older and graying at the temples. The contrast in her demeanor when she met his boss only supported Charlie’s inherent belief that life was some cruel cosmic joke. He could do nothing but laugh to himself over this, her eyes twinkling again and her voice turning warm and inviting in its polarity. His boss had a personality that made people comfortable, so it wasn’t too surprising that the woman reacted so pleasantly towards him. His boss, after all, had been a lady’s man in his day, and while he usually acted very fatherly towards Charlie, he could tell that his charm usually found a rest in the beautiful women who came in from the college. He reeled them in with a simplicity that both fascinated and tortured him. Charlie couldn’t say what he did to deserve such a display of his boss’ ease with women. In a way Charlie was chopped liver, sitting at his desk all alone, carefully glancing at the two of them in his boss’ office, still wondering why her neglect of him persisted. He might as well have been kicked in the balls, but it’s important, he figured, not to show the weakness of his desperation, even though he was truly desperate at the moment.

He remembered a friend of his in high school mentioning that women are turned off by this desperation, that they wanted men who were emotionally strong enough not to feel desperate at any time. He guessed men have to be self-satisfied around them as though a man’s world were miraculously secure, their futures certain, and their ability to build and fix things forever present. To deviate beyond this realm did seem like a human right, but one would have to forsake having a woman for the rest of one’s known life unless the deviance could be hedged in and covered up, forcing men like Charlie to pretend and never outwardly express any sort of weakness or past regrets at all. He might as well have been a machine, only that a man must find a way to make the women laugh as well. So he liked to think of her ideal man as a machine with a sense of humor, an entity she could manipulate and control while finding his simplicity, and perhaps his obnoxiousness, all too amusing. But then again, any old vibrator would be a good enough substitute if such a logic prevailed. And while swallowing whatever remained of his pride that afternoon, something that he didn’t find very humorous at all, he also made sure not to think unkindly of the woman despite all of his hang-ups with trying to act like her perfect man. He realized that there were lines of blame he shouldn’t cross, and with women he couldn’t really blame them. Their selection process was bewildering, mysterious, and unsolvable, and he started to think that it would take an act of God to solve it. And God had solved many a riddle for the men that she chose, but the riddle remained firmly rooted and forever pursued by Charlie. He guessed it was this—that the possibility that they would pay at least some attention to him was what usually led him to the pub down the street.

The woman in his bosses’ office almost ran passed him through the hallway without saying anything to him on her way out, and perhaps this was the sign he needed to venture out into the streets after work and go where some of these women congregated. Of course he never had much success in talking to women at the bars, but at least he could be near them and in some closer proximity—if only just to look upon them and have their beauty overwhelm him. His boss even told him that he could leave after the young college student left, and since he had nothing much better to do after work besides go home and prepare his usual meal of canned tomato soup and saltines, he knew the time had come to venture into the areas that were forbidden and risky, seeing that he was a single man and all. The only other alternative would be to stay at home, and a man wasn’t meant to live imprisoned within four walls while being chained to the electric glow of the television set casting its shades of flickering light into his sensitive eyes. A man just wasn’t meant to sit at home alone. It seemed a little pointless to quietly fall asleep, as he starved for the moment when a woman actually moves into the shadows of his confinement and liberates him from his drift into criminality, a criminality just to avoid premature decay. Yes, he figured, he was one of those desperate few who couldn’t be a man without being with a woman, and often times he became lost and fascinated by his desperation. He couldn’t seem to work against his status as a virtual non-entity. He contemplated the possibility of simply fading away without anyone to share his desires, but he would visit the pub first and try just one more time.

He bid good afternoon to his boss who had been talking on the phone, and with a wave that didn’t register, he left the office and walked down a lightly-peopled avenue towards the pub a few blocks away. He passed by dark brownstone apartment buildings weathered by time, their facades stained by years of grime and soot from the motorcars and wobbling buses that passed. High telephone poles with their tangle of electric wires and aluminum sign-posts obscured what was left of a gray, darkening sky that threatened rain. Whatever few trees that lined the avenue had lost their previous springtime luster. The trees now lay rough and bare, their branches trembling against the headwind, the base of their trunks surrounded by swollen trash bags, old sofas, and broken cabinets that had lost their arms and legs. And while the town’s streets weren’t exactly dirty or unkempt, he noticed how the side alleys that kept the more modest homes and apartments hidden and apart from the more cosmopolitan properties cleverly augmented the town’s slow and steady decay. This alerted him to the town’s slow implosion from within—unless, of course, those rich folks his boss so happily mentioned finally left their towers of glass and steel and revived the neighborhood with their new dollars and their new blood. Perhaps a revival would never come, because it seemed to trickle in ever so slowly, the startling elasticity of time making cracks in the hard pavement beneath his feet, some of the shops along the avenue white-washed and available for rent, the cars on the sides of the road hollow husks of dents, scrapes, and rusting paint.

But it wasn’t Charlie’s intention to observe at this point. Certainly there was something, or at least some force, that made sure he was still not a full-time member of the lifelessness he witnessed on his walk to the pub. He didn’t know what that force or energy was, but all he knew was that this external force had designed a special box of cruelty just for him that removed him from the general flow of womankind, and while this troubled him to say the least, he knew that his separation had some reason or purpose to it. No, he couldn’t be as content and happy as the others, and perhaps he should rebel against the force that made this so, but unfortunately, such a rebellion would pit him against that which was all-too generous, all-too kind, and all-too tolerant of his existence. He did not want to hurt anyone, but his incapacity to collide with anything other than himself was a prescription for self- assured annihilation, and he wouldn’t buck the force that separated him from what he truly desired, as this force seemed to confiscate all that was beautiful from him while allowing him to exist at the same time. He allowed for such a trade-off and lived at some predetermined level of being. The game, however, had always been the same: to stay in one’s own particular universe and hope that one can worm one’s way out of one’s predicament without really trying, because it was too risky to try to escape his broken world and actually live in better circumstances. And so he kept shuffling ahead as calmly as his own world dictated, almost like a soldier, if only to rid himself of the sights and sounds of blight.

He saw the local blacks on the street, their eyes speaking to him, and their dark eyes whispering that he shouldn’t go into a bar alone and not go too wayward in one’s actions, but Charlie passed them without reply. There would be people at the pub, and sure, they wouldn’t want to talk to him, but at least he could hear and witness their chatter, look at their smiles and overhear their silly conversations, and drown himself in their beauty just to get along. And sure he had to be at work the next day, as his boss’ good cheer would actually end in sorry disappointment as Charlie, hung-over, beholds this cheerful, graying captain of the local real estate market who absolutely loves his job and loves the fact that he has an office to boot, loves his stunning wife, has an active social life, an active bank account, and a couple of kids to do the same damn things he did, as Charlie announces to him: ‘I can’t handle it any more. I must leave this place.’

His boss’ life seemed so perfect to him, but alas, it was still unattainable. For some reason the truly happy were bred that way. They were tested by time to understand pain and disfigurement, and thereafter they collectively decided they would live simply instead and transform their misery into a feigned happiness until actual happiness took root from all of their loathing, and suddenly what his boss had was a happy goddamned life, pre-groomed by combs of sorrow, all of those fake handshakes, backslaps, and smiles slowly turning real. His were years of happiness and it seemed incredible to Charlie how his boss seemed so fucking happy!

And in his own way, Charlie wanted this same status—to be inevitably happy and in complete bliss, especially when there was nothing much to look forward to besides more work and a little excitement besides that. And work became this thing, this process to avoid at all costs. Yet idleness had its claws out ready for him, as idleness never turned out to be what it promised—and it hardly delivered on its promise of bliss, and yet it was the dream he wanted to work towards, as though work and more work was its own sort of twisted freedom as opposed to the dream of idleness, whereby a week’s salary bought you at least two nights of idleness on the weekends, all except Sunday, which meant that a man had to pay for the sins of idleness he committed on Friday and Saturday night before. It seemed odd and strange, and yet this very routine had purchased world capitols, directed economies, and separated the beautiful from the ugly.

He tried in vain to put these thoughts aside, as he was now thirsty for the bar where he could at least see people, perhaps talk with them, even though he really had nothing much to say to anyone. It seemed a bit silly, really—going to a bar, maybe trying to connect with a woman or two. It was quite ludicrous, actually, why he always chose the bar among other things he could be doing. He wasn’t exactly a regular at these establishments, but he knew he needed the release that came with a few stiff drinks and being in close proximity to flesh that was wholesome and kindly. He could have returned home, but really what was there to do at home besides pace, stare at walls, and entertain delusions of the highest magnitude, otherwise known as future plans, as home was a place where his plans got him into a heap of trouble.