Make Me Work (6 page)

He hangs up. “Are you and Rebecca getting along all right, Walter?”

“I don't know, Dwight. I'm drama. She's documentary. It's a constant struggle.”

“I figured you were the real issue. She said I was a negligent husband, a rotten father-to-be, and an example of the Peter Pan syndrome. That just doesn't fit.”

“Well, you have to admit. Belt-sander races. It looks pretty bad.”

“Walter, you, too? You don't trust me?”

“You don't tell me anything, Dwight.”

“You know Veritas Grit is a big deal for Benny's company.”

“Right, I know that.”

“I'm sure it's great sandpaper and everything, but sandpaper's sandpaper, don't you think? You know the real reason it's such a big deal?”

“This must be the part you didn't tell me.”

“Because the guy who named it Veritas Grit is the son of one of the company wigs. Fresh out of B-school, doesn't know a thing, but before long he'll be Benny's boss. He's hot to make his mark. He wants a video that people won't forget when they see it at trade shows. He wants a spot for cable that'll be like MTV for the abrasives world. He's talking about taking this account to an ad agency.”

“The ambitious little snot!”

“Right. I tell Benny we can do all this for a fraction of the price, but it's not gonna be Benny's call. The wig's son is gonna call it. Veritas Grit's his baby. I'm giving birth to a human being, this guy's giving birth to a piece of sandpaper. And the question is: Whose kid's getting that money?”

“Our kid is!”

“You bet. So I'm telling all this to Tempesto a few days ago, and he mentions these belt-sander races he goes to sometimes. And, bingo, it hits me.
Winners use Veritas Grit.”

We arrive at a used-computer store outside Inman Square. Dwight parks, and we step out into the broiler of the world. “I love this place,” he says. “They have everything. All the MIT guys get their iron here.”

This is the third time Tempesto has been kidnapped this summer. The first time probably shouldn't count since he abducted himself—as a publicity stunt for a holographic light show he was projecting on the Hancock building at night without a license to do so. The second time was by a convention of cyberpunk misfits in upstate New York who fed Tempesto magic mushrooms and made him stir-fry hundreds of pounds of chicken in an old satellite dish over a bonfire. This time it looks for real. The counter clerk takes us to a back warehouse room, where Tempesto is seated at a table with three other guys, surrounded by hulking, extinct computers. He seems positively jolly about the whole deal, but that's the way he always seems. “This is one for
The Journal of Irreproducible Results!
” he calls out as we come in, a chubby man with a bushy black beard and sunspot-flares of shiny black hair firing out all around his head. He's in his customary white jumpsuit despite the heat.

“What do you mean ‘irreproducible'?” I say. “You're kidnapped again.”

“I meant my cards,” he says, laying them down. They're playing poker. “My third full house today!”

One of the men has the bearing of the owner, and a beard like the grandfather of Tempesto's beard. He hands Dwight a computer printout and says, “He stays till we settle that.”

The printout appears to be the tab Tempesto has been running at the store. “What have you been doing?” Dwight asks him.

“Art,” Tempesto says. “Life.”

“Your card. Give.” Tempesto extracts his Visa from a jumpsuit breast pocket and flips it through the air, where it flutters like a silver butterfly before alighting on Dwight's outstretched hand. He puts it in his pocket, then hands the clerk his own Visa card.

“Oh, he has a gold one,” says a different poker-playing guy.

“I'm the boss,” Dwight says. He points at the cards. “Are you ahead at least?”

“Yeah, but we're playing for obsolete memory chips. They wouldn't let me play for my bill.”

Out front, Dwight signs the slip and the clerk heaves three identical computer printers onto the counter—big old ones from the dinosaur days of the daisy wheel. Each of us grabs one of the brutish, heavy things and staggers into the parking lot. “Why are we buying these crummy printers?” I ask, on the way to Tempesto's van.

“Because Tempesto has made an amazing discovery,” Dwight says. “This particular old crummy printer happens to contain exactly the right gears—”

“With exactly the right spindles and teeth and ratios,” adds Tempesto.

“For gearing up a Makita electric belt sander. The kind of belt sander we're racing tonight. No other machine known to man contains those gears.”

The most astonishing variety of junk—part electronic, part lumber, part dirty clothes—is tumbled in Tempesto's van. He heaves his printer in with a crash. Dwight and I heave ours in, too.

“I'm starved,” Dwight says. “Anything in the fridge?”

“I've got leftovers you wouldn't believe,” Tempesto says. “Did a big dinner last night. Had a lot of people over. There's a feast waiting for you guys.”

“Tempesto's a great cook, Walter. Wait'll you see.”

“You are, Tempesto? Really? What's your cuisine? Tuscan Transistor?”

For a minute, his incredulity grapples with my incredulity. Then I see that his feelings are hurt. “You never came to my house?” he says. “You never ate my food?”

Tempesto's apartment is basically Tempesto's van on a grander scale, without wheels and with electricity. A lot of electricity. Things are plugged in at Tempesto's place in a way the early electrifiers of America never intended. Power strips are scattered across the floors in every room, not a single empty socket left for one more computer, or television, or synthesizer, or CD player, or oscilloscope, or neon sculpture to take suck, from this address, at Boston Edison's breast.

Copies of
The Journal of Irreproducible Results
are lying on the counter in the kitchen. “I thought you made this up,” I say, leafing through an issue of it.

“I don't make things up,” Tempesto says. “There's too much that's real already.” He's pulling plastic-wrapped dishes out of the fridge and sliding them onto the counter. He calls out their contents as though announcing the guests at a ball. “Roasted eggplant with herbs and garlic. Veal Marsala, sautéed broccoli rabe. Chicken breasts with red peppers. Marinated mushrooms, mozzarella in brine, sun-dried tomatoes in virgin olive oil. Green beans in tomato sauce.” He pulls a big flat bread out of a drawer—“Focaccia,” he says lovingly—flips open the microwave, cranks up the conventional oven, gets a double boiler going on the stove. When everything's warmed up, we leave the kitchen for the living room, where the table is covered with circuit boards and schematic diagrams. Tempesto pushes it all aside, and we sit down with plates of food and big goblets of Corvo table white. He is a great cook. These are the best leftovers I've ever had. They're better than most things I've eaten the first time around.

“Drama factoid for you, Walter,” Tempesto says, raising his glass. “This serviceable
vino
is exactly what Ben Kingsley and Jeremy Irons drink in the lunch scene of the film version of Betrayal.”

“What happens in the lunch scene?” Dwight asks.

“That's where Ben Kingsley has just found out that Jeremy Irons has been sleeping with his wife for, like, years,” I say. “But Jeremy Irons, who's his best friend, doesn't
know
he knows.”

“They drink a load of this wine in that scene,” says Tempesto.

“Whatever happened to free love?” Dwight asks. “I kind of miss it.”

“It was just an introductory offer,” Tempesto says.

“Speaking of cheating,” I say. “Are you guys fixing this race?”

“Cheating?” Dwight says. “Progress is cheating? Early man ties a rock to a stick and he's cheating ‘cause he has a hammer?”

“Did you ever consider the seminary?” Tempesto asks me. “You did, didn't you? You know how I know? I did, too. It's the truth. I was gonna be a priest. I never really escaped it—the red lights, the magic. They may get me yet. I can always spot a brother.”

“I never knew that about you, Walter,” Dwight says. “Maybe you shouldn't be doing corporate video after all.”

“I probably shouldn't. It's probably a place I'm passing through.”

“On your way to the priesthood,” says Tempesto.

Dwight has one rule for eating—stop before it hurts. Failing to observe it, we finish our supper and waddle to Tempesto's workroom. In the middle of his bench is a plastic gallon jug lying on its side, a power cord coming out its spout, machinery dimly visible through its translucence like a ship in a bottle. The words “Veritas Grit” are written along each side in red Magic Marker. Tempesto holds it up for my admiration. The jug's bottom side has been sliced off, and a belt of sandpaper occupies the rectangular opening.

“That's a belt sander? What happened to it?”

“We modified it, Walter,” Dwight says. “This is no longer a street machine.”

It doesn't look anything like a belt sander. The plastic hood hangs around it like a lady's hoopskirt. “Didn't that used to be a jug of milk?”

“Spring water, actually,” Tempesto says merrily. He puts a screwdriver bit in his drill and reverse-engineers one of the old printers until the precious gears are out. Then he removes the sander's pearly housing and puts the gears in there. “Makes it like lightning,” he says. “Except that after a few minutes the teeth start to shear off the gears, which is why we need a steady stream of these printers.” When he's finished, he hooks it up to some kind of tachometer on his bench. I don't know what's normal for a belt sander, but when he revs this one the needle flies right off the scale. “Yow!” he says.

“You're gonna cream those poor guys,” I say. “You're gonna sand their faces off.”

“Yes!” says Dwight.

The sun is going down on the beautiful city. We're heading east on Memorial Drive—me in Dwight's passenger seat, Tempesto in the back with the sander and video gear and two of his famous lasers. Red-gold light suffuses the Bonneville through its rear window. This is Dwight's favorite stretch of road in Boston, especially at this time of day; the sunset has turned the buildings of Back Bay and Government Center into fiery pillars blazing in the air—geometrical solids made of light, pure as Tempesto's holograms or computer graphics. Their painterly twins shimmer in the silver-blue river below. The traffic is thick and fast at MIT, then thick and slow down around Lotus and Lechmere and the optimistic new structures of East Cambridge. It's a scorching Friday in August, and the prosperous people are making their break for the Cape. We escape the throngs by swinging past the Museum of Science, wherein some of Tempesto's creations are displayed, and on into the tattered margins of Somerville.

Our destination is a block-square brick building five stories tall, its entrance shadowed by an elevated piece of Route 93. Dwight carries the video camera and a black plastic garbage bag with the Makita inside. Tempesto has the two lasers. I have the tripods and the cables and the little color TV. We take the freight elevator to the top, where Tempesto's friends are hosting the belt-sander races in their custom-cabinetry shop. The shop is the whole fifth floor of the building, pulsing with loud Chicago blues from the stereo. There must be a hundred people here, but the shop has floor-standing fans and cross-draft from every direction, and the heat's not that bad. Sheets of plywood on sawhorses are covered with bottles of hooch and bowls of punch, dishes of hummus and baba ghanouj, salsa, chips, and wheels of cheese. The worktables have been pushed away, and people are dancing beneath springy cords for power tools which hang like bright-blue pigs' tails from the ceiling. The racetrack runs all the way down one side of this huge warehouse space—a three-foot-wide channel like a boccie court but longer, framed by upright two-by-fours to keep the Sanders inside.

You wouldn't think a two-hundred-pound man in a white jumpsuit with the words
CYBER SWINE
stitched across the back in large red letters could disappear into a crowd, but this is what Tempesto now manages to do. Most of the men here have ponytails and beards, mesh caps advertising lumber-supply houses, big hanks of keys snapped to belt loops of their jeans. I see several guys wearing T-shirts silk-screened with the legend
HIPPIE TRASH
, and more women in attendance than I would have predicted. Unlike the men, they seem to have ventured outside this building since Woodstock days. They have actual haircuts, stylish ones, and color on their faces, glittery earrings and hair clips and slinky legwear, and they all look nice, but the most interesting women in the room are the two over by the stereo, holding drinks and nodding their heads at a large middle-aged man in a gray tropical suit two or three shades lighter than his blow-dried hair.

“Benjamin Silk!” Dwight cries out, and then Benny looks up and sees us, and scoops us toward him with his outstretched arm. I detect that he doesn't know who Rebecca is. And that he'd like to find out, the weasel.

She casts me a piercing look. “We're learning some secrets of corporate life,” she says.

“‘For every back there is a knife'?” I ask.

“That's what I always say,” says Benny.

“Of course it is, Benny. Where else would I have heard it? Who else has been through the wars the way you have?”

“Have you been introduced?” asks Dwight. “This is Walter's sweetheart, Rebecca.”

“No!” Benny says. “I didn't realize that! You and Walter! Well, isn't that wonderful. What's a nice girl like you doing with a bum like this?”

“I've always had a thing about bums,” Rebecca says.

“You think you can save 'em, right? Lots of women think that. Can I give you some advice? Forget it.”