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She picked up his walker and brought it next to his chair. “I hope I see you again, real soon.”

Jack looked at her, finally croaking out a sound. “You betcha.”

She stood there, expectant, as he fished around in his pants pocket and pulled out his now soggy money clip. Jack peeled three hundred-dollar bills out of the clip and handed her the clammy currency. She took the money gingerly, holding the bills by a corner.

“Thanks, Mr. Lucey.”

“Thank
you,
Brenda.”

“Barbara.”

“Thank you, Barbara.”

He watched her walk out of the room, flapping the bills in the breeze to dry them.

...

The doorman, an ex-UNLV lineman named Baxter, big and brawny with a shaggy mullet and matching mustache, held the door open as Jack lurched his walker, his body slowly trailing in painful little half steps, out into the parking lot. Jack
looked down and saw a sticky, wet smudge slowly seeping through his pants leg. He turned and smiled at Baxter.

“Beautiful night.”

“You have a good one, Mr. Lucey.”

“Thank you, Baxter.”

Jack hobbled toward his specially built van. In the distance he could see the sun going down behind the strip, the neon lights and big-screen billboards of the casinos coming to life. He inhaled deeply, the dry air tinged with the scent of burning meat from a nearby steakhouse. He loved Las Vegas. It was paradise.

Francis cracked the neck on the tiny bottle of scotch. He watched as the amber liquid coated the ice cubes and slowly rose up the angled sides of the little plastic cup. Fucking terrorists. They'd succeeded, hadn't they? Changed his life forever with their mayhem.

Whatever inspiration their God-demented brains gleaned from the Koran had served them well. All that time on their knees, foreheads planted in the dirt, bowing to the east. All that Allah, Allah, Allah had really paid off. They took on the evil, bloated, and gluttonous West. They gave their lives to it, which, discounting the virgins and rivers of wine in everlasting Heaven, was the ultimate sacrifice. They'd become martyrs, rock stars for the new millennium, and they'd succeeded beyond their wildest fantasies. The world was changed forever. Now, post–terrorist attack, cocktails in first class were served in cheap plastic cups. Like anyone could hijack a jet with a fucking tumbler.

Still, the scotch tasted good. He needed it to taste good. He'd be drinking three or four of these, maybe more, if the little idiot next to him kept yakking away. Francis took another sip and looked over at the young woman like he was
interested in what she was saying. He saw her lips move: flap, flap, flap.

Funny, he'd always thought Japanese women were beautiful—next to Thai women, the most exquisite in the world. But not this one. Short and scrunchy featured with adult acne erupting across her forehead like some kind of bacterial archipelago. Big eared, bad breathed, and completely flat chested.

And, my God, she wouldn't shut up. She even talked over the captain's announcements. Francis would never know what altitude they'd be flying at and what speed, he'd never know the temperature to expect when they arrived. Instead, he was treated to discourse on the benefits, both psychological, physiological, and something to do with some kind of sexual chakras, of belly dancing. Francis nodded and sipped his scotch. He smiled to himself as she blabbed on. Bend over and grab your ankles. I'll open your sex chakra.

The belly dancing turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. There were conga lessons and contact movement improv, whatever that was. There were Pilates classes, self-hypnosis workshops, and afternoons spent passing out free condoms at the local clinic. All at the behest of something called a life coach.

Francis watched as her lips kept moving. She was disappointed that she'd have to put all that self-improvement on hold, but she had to make a living. Francis nodded and wondered why he hadn't read her résumé a little more carefully when he hired her as his production assistant.

Francis cracked open another tiny bottle of scotch. He made a little promise to himself. If she starts talking to me about my drinking, I'm going to set her on fire.

But she didn't. She talked about how excited she was to be working in the film industry. She had studied auteur theory in college and had written several screenplays that her friends said were really good. She couldn't wait to be on the set watching the magic happen—to actually be a part of it, a member of the creative team. She couldn't wait to watch the director work with the actors. She wanted to observe and learn because someday
she
was going to be a director. Not a director of corrupt and soulless Hollywood studio product but a director of important independent films. She had things to say, powerful, important, life-affirming observations of humanity. That's why she was going to Honolulu. She was on her path. She was following her bliss. Her life coach had been a big help.

Francis didn't want to burst her bliss bubble. She'd find out soon enough that the only magic that happened was getting done with the day before midnight. Instead of artistic concerns and aesthetic choices, they would spend hours trying to find, and then get permits for, parking spaces for the giant pop-out trailers that the director and stars demanded. It would break her heart to know that the only work with actors she would see would be filling out time cards, making sure that star A didn't have to work more than eight hours according to his contract and that extras were sent home before any kind of overtime, golden time, or bonus meals had to be paid.

Any insights into human nature would come at the bar, trying to numb your way through another day.

He poured his scotch over the ice and picked up a few barbecued almonds from the little dish. He thought about his boyfriend back in L.A. She asked him if he was allergic to nuts.

Francis wasn't looking forward to being part of the magic. He couldn't care less about magic. He was going because he could work on his tan, drink mai tais, and forget about Chad.

Chad was a producer, a big shot with a studio deal. He and Francis had been living together for almost fifteen years when Francis first learned about the other man—or men. That was just a month ago. The information didn't come out in a big messy talk-show revelation; it dribbled out, one sad confession after another. First it was the dentist after they'd both gone in to get their teeth bleached. Then the guy at the tanning salon. Chad's assistant, Jason, was sprinkled in there somewhere, along with a well-known director, an agent, and the dog walker. And this was just the last year. There were dozens more. Party planners, masseurs, a couple of guys he met at the gym, a postman, a construction worker. . . eventually Chad's confessions started to remind Francis of the Village People. All he needed was an Indian Chief and a Policeman and he could've fucked the whole set.

Having his heart broken was bad enough, but what made Francis angry, really deeply pissed off, were the sacrifices he'd made for Chad. The diets he'd stayed on, the countless hours in the gym with the personal trainer (yes, Chad had fucked him too), the liposuction to get rid of a tiny double chin, all at Chad's insistence, all to make him desirable.

They tried couples therapy, but it seemed to Francis that Chad and the therapist had a thing going, so he stopped.

One morning Francis stood in the bathroom and looked in the mirror. He saw a handsome man in his late forties, his face still slightly boyish with flashing blue eyes and a cute nose. Sure there were some wrinkles around the eyes, but he still
had a full head of hair, a great body, a blinding smile. What was missing was not cosmetic.

Francis realized he needed to get some space, some perspective. He had to get out of town. So he picked up the phone, made a few calls, and took the first job he was offered.

He made a promise to himself. He was going to eat, drink, and adventure with abandon. All those years of holding back, denying himself simple pleasures in the hope of earning his boyfriend's love. What had he been thinking? Now he was going to have that cocktail, snort that line, dance with that cute guy, ride that motorcycle. He was going to eat chocolate. He'd been monogamous for fifteen years, and all he'd gotten out of it was humiliation. He had some catching up to do. He was going to screw the first ukulele player he saw.

The multiple scotches were working wonders, untying the knots in his neck and shoulders better than any deep-tissue massage he ever had, slapping a goofy smile on his face, filling him with a warm and contented feeling he hadn't known in years, putting a song in his heart. A disco song. Francis took two of the empty bottles and, animating them with his hands, pretended they'd just met at the first-class airplane discothèque. The little bottles cruised each other, and then one made a move. Soon they were dancing the hustle on Francis's knee. Yeah. Get down tonight.

The annoying woman interrupted him. What was her name, Yuki? She was saying something about the air quality on the plane. There wasn't enough fresh air in the mix; germs were multiplying in the heat; pestilence was fermenting in the vents. Francis shrugged and watched as she got up and went
to talk to the flight attendant. From behind, her flat ass and slight body looked boyish and attractive. The scotch acted as a conduit to Francis's brain as he watched her. Maybe she wasn't so bad after all, he mused. Maybe if I just flip her over she'd be all right.

Jack looked out his front window. It was an impressive view. His lawn stretched out lush and verdant across a swath of land—interrupted only by the double-wide circular drive made out of pink flagstones from Arizona and a large flagpole where Old Glory snapped back and forth in the swirling desert winds—until it butted up against a high security fence at the end. A quiet residential street edged his property, as straight a line as any urban planner could draw, a sun-smoldered asphalt moat dividing his plush bluegrass from the great nothing on the other side.

You could see the nothing. There was a whole lot of it. Rocks, dirt, tumbleweeds, and bits of paper blown by the wind, a line of telephone poles receding into the vanishing point, and, if you squinted, distant train tracks heading north. A million miles of brown that ended flush with Jack's sprinkler-soaked grass.

He smiled smugly and lit a cigarette. He knew it was bad for him, one of the many culprits that caused his stroke, but, fuck it, he only needed a couple of drags, just to get his bowels moving. One of the good things about always having a hard-on, you wake up ready to take on the world. Jack
wanted to get to the office early this morning. He'd been reading
Daily Variety
and had come up with an idea. He had work to do.

Providing the food and beverage service—it was called production catering—for movie and TV shoots is always an iffy proposition. In the good times, when you were feeding hundreds of cast and crew members at seventeen bucks a head for months at a time and you had three or four trucks rolling out on different shows, you could make a couple million bucks a year. And because of an arrangement with the Teamsters, where most of your cooks are paid hourly as if they were truck drivers, it was almost all profit. In the lean times, when months would go by without as much as a car commercial coming through town, it sucked. You still had to make loan payments and pay insurance on the trucks, and those babies were worth about a quarter million each. Jack knew that the key to success was to keep as many trucks working as possible. It didn't matter if it was a huge star-studded feature film or a crappy commercial for dog food.

Jack had made a habit out of expanding his business into areas without too much competition. There was no way he was going to break into the business in L.A. or the Bay Area. Those markets were supersaturated. He'd had high hopes for Seattle when he moved into that market two years ago. It had been easy to muscle out the little guys there, really just a couple of roach coaches run by some grunge-rock schmos. They didn't have the connections, the guts, or the wherewithal to keep Jack out.

But Seattle wasn't such a hit. Most of the film and TV work went up to Vancouver, where the studios got a 30 percent discount on every dollar they spent, courtesy of the
Canadian government. Seattle, except for a couple of low-budget horror films, had been a loser, a slow bleed on his cash flow. He'd managed to pick up the occasional shoot in Portland, but it wasn't the bonanza he'd hoped for. Then he'd chanced upon an article about the Teamsters in Honolulu.

The islands were hopping with work; they always had been. Dinosaur movies, Vietnam jungle flicks, and then you had the whole
Beach Blanket Bingo
thing with teenagers shouting “Surf's up!” and racing off with big slabs of wood under their arms. Jack had always liked those movies: cute chicks with big hair doing the Watusi in front of tiki torches. Maybe they'd make a comeback. And then there were the TV shows like
Hawaii Five-O,
another of Jack's favorites, and the commercials; dozens of zippy new pickup trucks from Japan were filmed careening through the mud every week on Oahu.

Jack knew he had to move fast. There was only one production catering company on that island. With so little work in the rest of the country, it was only a matter of time before someone else got the same idea.

...

A young man, looking like a slightly haggard Bible salesman, entered the living room. He wore brown slacks and a robin's-egg-blue shirt with a brown-and-red striped tie dangling too short from his neck. Even though he was only twenty-nine he looked decades older. His hair was thinning dramatically—he kept it looking good with a slick comb-over—and he wore reading glasses that made his eyes look gigantic, like some kind of freakish desert insect. Only his shoes betrayed his youth
and his interest in rap music. He liked to wear expensive multicolored basketball shoes.