Heat and Light (15 page)

“I quit school,” Mack says suddenly. “A year ago. I live here now.”

“I thought you were on spring break.”

“I was. A year ago.”

“You're kind of a strange person,” says Rena.

“You have no idea,” Mack says.

T
hey're all assholes. It's the first learning of the weekend.

“You're here today because your life doesn't work. You're an asshole because you pretend that it does.” The maestro paces the makeshift stage, silent in his shoes. A young woman hovers at the edge of the stage, waiting to refill his water glass. In each corner of the room stands a burly security guard.

The hotel ballroom is windowless, aggressively air-conditioned. It might be a hundred degrees outside, or ten below; it might be noon or midnight or anytime in between. In fact it is a Saturday afternoon in early spring, San Francisco Bay lost in fog. In the fourth row a surfer kid squirms in his clothes, Dacron dress slacks that make his legs itch.

“Your life doesn't work and YOU. ARE. RESPONSIBLE.” The maestro is lean and preternaturally handsome—a genuine celebrity, a regular on the talk show circuit, a man thanked at awards shows. “In this training you will get that you didn't just happen to be lying there on the tracks when the train came. You are the asshole who put yourself there.”

The assholes fidget in their straight-backed chairs—utilitarian, stackable—and await further insights.

They have paid their three hundred dollars, and made certain agreements. There will be no tape recording or note taking during the training, no eating or drinking or trips to the bathroom.
The agreements are famous. Like the profanity, the dressing-down, they are part of the mythology: the pronouncements delivered with unassailable authority, a stranger's wholesale dismissal of all they are and all they do.

“Most people go through their whole lives standing on the freeway, waving the traffic in the opposite direction to the way it's going.” His tone is thoughtful, conversational—as though his words have been chosen for these particular assholes, and them alone. “Well, I got news for you. Traffic is going where it's going. It doesn't give a shit how you feel about it, and neither does life.”

A man in the front row raises his hand. He wears horn-rimmed glasses like Henry Kissinger. His name tag reads
HAROLD
.
“I'm a physician,” he begins. “And while I certainly
appreciate
this notion of personal responsibility—”

“Harold APPRECIATES it.” The maestro's voice is plump with sarcasm. “Also, Harold wants all of you to know that he went to medical school, he makes more money than you do, and his opinion matters more than any other opinion in this room. All right, Harold. We get it. You may continue.”

Harold blinks furiously behind his glasses. “Can I ask my question?”

“Please.”

Harold clears his throat. “Considering what's happening in the world right now, how does any of this apply? Personal responsibility, fine, but what about those people in Pennsylvania? If they die of radiation poisoning, how are they responsible?”

The maestro frowns as though he doesn't understand the question.

“There's a bubble,” Harold says.

The maestro dismisses this with a wave of his hand. “Don't talk to me about bubbles. Those assholes in Pennsylvania—”

The room inhales sharply. The shock is actually audible.

“Wait,” says Harold. “They're assholes, too?”

The maestro smiles enigmatically.

“Am I getting this right?” Harold looks dumbstruck. “Those downwinders who could die an agonizing death if the core melts, they're responsible for what happens to them?”

“If that's what you get.”

The surfer kid is dazzled. He is nineteen and prone to misplaced compassion. In ways he's just beginning to understand, this has made him a victim and a fool. Recent events have confirmed his congenital gullibility, his vulnerability to manipulation.
If you believe that, you've got a hole in your screen door
. It's what his mother is always telling him, never mind that she's usually the one doing the manipulating. It's the fundamental flaw in his character, serious, possibly fatal. Beggars on the street smell him coming, the stink of patsyhood rising off him, one part credulity and one part embarrassment: a rich boy ashamed of his private-school softness, his stepfather's munificence.

In the front row a fat man raises his hand. “I'll be honest, I'm not thrilled about paying three hundred bucks to be called an asshole.”

The maestro sips his water. “Fabulous,” he says, an all-purpose response. If you call him a sonofabitch, he will answer in one of four ways
. I get it. I hear you. Thank you. Fabulous.

“Also: why do you get to drink water?”

“I get to drink water because I didn't make an agreement not to.” He pronounces it
wooder,
still a Philly street kid despite the hundred-dollar haircut.

DO YOU HAVE A PERSISTENT, NAGGING PROBLEM?
Do you have too many to count? Choose one, then. Bodily sensations are good. Migraines, insomnia, back pain. You fear airplanes or public speaking. Your wife's genitals turn your stomach. Leaving your house gives you panic attacks.

Choose one, asshole. Your pack-a-day habit, your shoplifting.
Your nail biting or freebasing cocaine. Pick a symptom or a troubling emotion. A destructive behavior you can't seem to stop.

Choose one, and call it your item. Sharing is encouraged. Join the other assholes taking turns at the mike. Paolo's item is betrayal. (His wife gave him herpes.) Julie fears abandonment. (She fakes orgasms.) Assholes, remember your agreements: each revelation is to be acknowledged with applause.

The assholes can't stop sharing. For hours on end they take turns at the mike. Time stands still in the hotel ballroom. Civilizations rise and fall. Lifetimes pass.

Gilbert steals his mother's painkillers. Jerry dreams, vividly, of fucking his sister-in-law. Kay's husband likes wearing her clothes.

It is, altogether, a fail-safe antidote to excessive compassion. Spend sixty hours in this room, and you will hate every one of these people. The surfer kid, who has never so much as made a fist in anger, is ready to beat them all senseless.

The maestro quizzes each asshole with rabbinic patience. Can you locate the sensation in your body? What is its shape and color, its provenance? The mother who locked you in a closet; the horny babysitter. Childhood is a minefield, clearly. No one comes out intact.

The surfer kid studies him, mesmerized. Abruptly he gets to his feet. A volunteer rushes in with a mike. “My item is anger,” he begins, surprising himself. He is known for his sunny disposition, his unwavering benevolence.

The maestro interrupts him. “Where's your name tag?”

Almost imperceptibly, the security guards advance.

“I didn't get a nayame tag,” says the kid, hearing his own Texas twang.

The maestro flashes his famous smile. “He didn't get a name tag.”

Another volunteer—a blond girl, stunningly beautiful—rushes in with a Sharpie marker. “What's your name?” she whispers, her breath tickling his ear.

“Kip,” he whispers back.

She writes it in block capitals, large enough to be seen from the stage, and presses the name tag to his chest. Undoubtedly she feels his heart pounding through his shirt.

“Yeah, so—” Kip hesitates. More than anything in life he wants to sit back down, but the blond girl is watching. He feels the ghost of her hand in the vicinity of his heart.

“Last year I got into West Point. I'd be there right now, except that my girlfriend got pregnant. I offered to marry her. For the baby, you know. It seemed like the right thing to do.” His face feels very hot. He is ready to puke or pass out or both.

“So I refused the appointment. I stayed in Houston and went to work for my stepdad, which I swore I would never.” He feels suddenly bone-tired, weak with hunger, exhausted by the effort of explaining himself. “Never mind that part. That part's a whole nother story. Point is, last fall I find out she's seeing this other guy. The baby isn't even mine.”

The maestro stares at him blankly. “So why are you angry?”

“What do you mean, why am I angry? She lied to me. She ruined my life.”

“
Ohhh.
I get it.” The maestro's voice drops to a stage whisper. “That is a colossal load of crap.”

Kip's ears ring loudly, as though a deafening wave is breaking over his head.

“If your life is ruined, you ruined it. You're a failure, and you're pissed at the girl because she stole your excuse.” His stare is perforating. For a moment, Kip is the only asshole in the room.

“She wrecked your chance to be a hero. Out of the goodness of your heart you
offered
to marry her. What, she's supposed to be grateful? Of course she's fucking some other guy. Good for her.” He waves a hand, the girl's deception and treason summarily dismissed.

Kip sinks back into his chair.

“Stand up. I'm not done with you. How long did you want to go to West Point?”

Kip stands. “All my life.” His eyes are burning, the greatest shame imaginable. He'd sooner wet himself than cry in public.

“Bullshit. If you wanted to go, you'd have gone.”

Kip's stomach lurches. His one visit to the Academy sparked recurrent nightmares, a truth he's confided to no one. The dismal corridors, the grim plebes in their gray uniforms, the stern interviewer so like his father. The gruff, belligerent firsties, dead-eyed boys who used to be human.
Huah.
In a single year, they promised, Kip would be similarly transformed.

The packed ballroom awaits his next words. The microphone quivers in his shaking hand.

“I been hearing about that place my whole life,” he tells 250 total strangers. “My dad went. It was the best thing that ever happened to him.” His dad the Colonel calls twice a year, Christmas and Kip's birthday, though he usually gets the date wrong: a month early, two days late. Last Christmas their conversation lasted nine minutes, eight of which involved West Point. This Christmas the Colonel didn't call.

“Fuck him,” says the maestro. “Why should you go to West Point, just because he did?”

Kip's heart swells with unfamiliar emotion. There is nothing else to call it—he realizes this later—but love.

Werner Erhard has already changed his life.

EIGHT MONTHS LATER,
in Houston, the traffic backs up for miles. Late for a meeting, Kip Oliphant leans on his horn.

He can see his destination, a mirrored office tower that nearly blinds him with reflected sunlight: the world headquarters of Darco Energy, his stepfather's company. He can see it; he just can't get there. Fumes rise from the pavement, a dizzying wave of exhaust. Last summer in San Francisco, with gas lines stretching around the
block, drivers cut their engines to conserve fuel. Here, Cadillacs and pickup trucks idle in every lane, huffing hotly, a string of red brake lights as far as he can see.

Finally he pulls into a parking lot and sets out walking, attracting curious glances: a clean-cut young man in a cream-colored Stetson, suit jacket over one arm, his city look. In deference to local custom, he has cut off his ponytail. Still his hair is inches longer than other men's, covering his collar and bleached nearly white at the ends—the last traces of his old life as a stoned surfer bum, the endless months of indolence.

The morning is bright, warm for November. He lopes along at a comfortable pace, easily passing the cars stuck in gridlocked traffic. On Jefferson Street he sees the cause of the commotion, a crowd assembled on the cement plaza outside Dresser Tower. “What's going on?” he asks a man coming out of a doughnut shop.

“That's the Iranian consulate,” the man answers, still chewing his doughnut. “They been out there all week.”

Kip thinks: The what? He wonders briefly what it says about him, and about Houston, that he lived here twenty years not knowing the city possessed such a thing.

The cars crawl along Jefferson Street.

Outside a gas station he spots a phone booth. He digs a dime from his pocket and calls the office. His stepfather, Darby Butters, is not available; predictably, his direct line is busy. For six solid months he's been on the phone. Boom times in Houston, a year of record profits; and the debacle in Iran will only drive prices higher. President Carter's embargo is good news for Darco. Iranian imports have been stopped cold.

“Tell him I'm hung up in traffic,” Kip tells Dar's secretary. “Some kind of a protest, I guess.”

He hangs up and continues down Jefferson Street toward the plaza. The demonstrators are mostly young, mostly male. A few carry makeshift signs.
AMERICAN CARS RUN BETTER ON AMERICAN OIL.
LET'S PLAY COWBOYS AND
IRANIANS!
The image rendered in broad cartoon strokes, a swarthy man in a head scarf, garroted and hanging from a tree.

Suddenly the crowd bursts into applause. Passing motorists honk their horns.

“What happened?” Kip asks no one in particular. Two old men in ten-gallon hats, brothers possibly, stand watching, thumbs hooked identically through their belt loops. There are several women in white uniforms, nurses on their lunch break. St. Joseph Hospital is just a few blocks away.

Kip makes his way through the crowd. He sees, finally, the cause of the commotion: a red, white, and green flag burning hot, as though it's been doused with lighter fluid.

Behind him a boy and girl hoot and holler. They are dressed alike, in blue jeans and western shirts, and old enough that they ought to be in school. Each holds one end of a sign, high over their heads. Puzzlingly, it shows a head shot of John Wayne, blown up bigger than life size.

“Is that the Duke?” Kip asks.

The kids look at him like he's bonkers. “Yessir,” the boy says.

All around him signs are brandished like weapons.

DEPORT TRAITORS NOW

GO TO HELL AND TAKE YOUR OIL

KEEP THE SHAH AND SEND THEM CARTER

At the head of the crowd the nurses begin singing. It's a feeble effort at first, high pitched and warbling. The old men doff their ten-gallon hats and join in for the chorus, in deep, rumbling baritones:
America, America, God shed his grace on thee.