Entrepreneur in the Human Market

When I was in my first year of high school, one of the girls that hung around my group and

 dated my more attractive and more interesting friends approached me and told me that her older sister had seen our winter formal group picture and had expressed interest in me.

She went on to explain this bizarre statement: "I said to her, 'You like Jeremy? Why? He's like

 the ugly, normal guy.'" I was stung by this, of course, but she did not notice and I was too timid to speak up. 

She continued blithely. "And my sister said she could tell by

 your face that you are going to be really cute someday soon." The girl looked at me oddly, as if waiting for me to verify this improbable prediction and I just shrugged. Shrugging herself, she turned away from me and went back to other conversations and probably didn't look at me again for another six months. But by the time she did notice me again, I was the one of my friends who every girl noticed first.

I was not just cute. I was frighteningly attractive. While still in my sophomore year, I was

 contacted by a modeling agent and quickly landed a job modeling jeans. That was where it started.

After the photo shoot, a representative from the jeans company pulled me aside and asked if I would wear the jeans he had dressed me in, as well as several other of their brands to school. "You seem like a smart kid," he told me. "Try and see which jeans get the most attention." It was an innovative idea for market research, and I jumped on the concept. I took notes, surveyed several boys and girls and wrote up my findings in a concise report.

The jean company rep was ecstatic. He took my report to his bosses and came back with more

 jobs for me. He wanted me to try out different sunglasses and gauge responses. He had me style my hair differently and analyze how each style affected the way people treated me. In this way, I was the first one to point out to the fashion industry that baggy jeans were starting to go out of style. It didn't take long for news of my revolutionary market research to spread, and soon I was the go-to kid for any company hoping to successfully market to young people.

Now days I operate as a professional consultant for roughly 270 companies. I change colognes

 once a week, I wear different shoes each day. Sometimes I have glasses, sometimes I wear tinted contacts to have brown eyes, hazel eyes, yellow eyes. I have gone to hundreds of job interviews for jobs I had no intention of accepting, in order to gauge the most successful professional attire. I was engaged to a woman I had no intention of marrying in order to observe and record her method of choosing decorations. Recently I have found working for prophylactic companies to be astonishingly lucrative, though it is the most exhausting research I've ever done.

I went to my ten-year high school reunion the other day. I found myself talking to the girl whose older sister had, all those years ago, given me the first sense of what my life would become.

"Do you remember when you called me the 'ugly, normal guy?'" I asked her. She giggled and said something coy in response. She told me that she works in marketing, is recently divorced and that she has a baby girl. After a few drinks she said, as if confessing something, "I'm just looking for a nice, normal guy, you know? Someone who can be a daddy to my baby and sweet to me."

She took me back to her parents' place and we slept together in the in-law cottage in the

 backyard. I left at first light without waking her and I drove back to San Francisco. I went to the little cafe where I like to go, and I got to work on my report for Argonaut Condoms, Inc.

"Intercourse with twenty-eight year old woman while wearing Argonaut's new "Elegant" brand polyisoprene condom proved to be a pleasurable experience. While there were some difficulties with unfolding the device at the onset of intercourse, I ejaculated with ease after approximately 12.5 minutes after initial penetration." I typed quickly, planning in my mind to test out the entire Argonaut line on the same subject. A brief flare of vindication went through me at the thought and for a moment I was almost foaming at the mouth with the excitement I felt.

I'll show her! I thought, not for the first time. I'll make her pay!

Objects Found In the Closets of the Houses of Huchiun Street, Oakland

1254 Huchiun Street: Inside of the old traveling chest that once belonged to her grandmother, which Janelle Robeson has not removed from the closet since she moved into the house 30 years earlier, among the old fabrics and the items that were never important and have been divested of the memories they were once imbued with, Janelle keeps an odd shaped brass lamp. If Janelle's husband ever found the lamp, he would be surprised to know that his wife owned it and he would plug it in and try to turn it on. Despite being rather heavy and, as a result, having the illusion of being high-quality, the lamp would fail to turn on and her husband would, most likely given his politely incurious nature, stick it back into the traveling chest and forget about it and never know that the lamp is filled with the human ashes of a young man that Janelle had known once and loved, who had died on the steps of the country building from a brain aneurysm on the beautiful summer day that Janelle had believed was the day she was to be the happiest of all of her life.

345 Huchiun Street: Hanging above the 100 tiny candles of Alma Gonzales' altar and, as a result slowly being darkened by the smoke and heat, is the painting "Virgin Enthroned With Saints and Angels" by Lorenzo Monaco. The painting is priceless and, if any collector thought that it was still in existence, it would surely have been taken from Alma's possession one way or another. She purchased the painting for what she regarded as too high of a price at a swap meet. In fact, she had taken almost two hours to convince herself that she should spend more than the $50 maximum amount that she usually allowed herself to buy the piece of art, which was supposed to have been, according to collectors, lost in the fires that consumed Berlin in the last days of the Second World War. After drifting back to the vendor's stall for the sixth time and bargaining with the man for the sixth and most futile time, Alma decided that her faith was the only acceptable cause for spending over her budget and she resolutely bought the priceless and someday legendary piece of 15th Century art.

6840 Apartment B Huchiun Street, Oakland: There are two closets in Gerald Brooks's apartment, one in the bedroom that he uses for clothing and one in the living room, which he uses to store his vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner fits awkwardly into the small closet, as it has to be crammed against a series of large, rusted metal pipes and old rubber tubes that have long-since deteriorated and rotted, and the broken old face of what looks to be a radio receiver. He and his girlfriend have speculated about what the pipes and tubes and radio must have been used for, but they have never asked the landlord or made an real effort to uncover the mystery components' original purpose. They assume the pipes were used for household amenities in the building before it was divided up into apartments and rented out to people like Gerald, who are too young or too poor to be properly curious. In fact, no tenant has ever asked questions about the bizarre pipes and radios and other deceased electronics that are scattered around the building, and as a result their landlord has never been made to answer to the fact that from 1943 until 1989 he was the most deeply embedded Soviet spy that the rival empire had managed to place into the USA's West Coast.

4398 Huchiun Street: The building will be demolished next year, and no one will ever discover the blouse and matching skirt, along with the shoes and panties and bra that were left in one corner of the hallway closet and which might have been recognized as the outfit that Gertrude Fowler had been wearing the day she disappeared. Among other evidence, never to be found: several torn strips of black leather and the rotted remains of rose petals, scattered among the closet floorboards.

Enoch and the Three Man Monte

Margaret Brenner gathered her father George's death certificate, his birth certificate, the short list of his other Brenner kin, and a brief written history of his life that she had composed the night previous while sitting at her kitchen table, drinking her coffee black despite having never much liked the taste. She went down to the local newspaper and asked to place an obituary.

The receptionist smiled at her. She was a tiny woman who, despite modest efforts to appear otherwise, was decidedly old and tired. "Hold on," the receptionist said, "Let me call our reporter." Margaret was at first startled by her voice and then noticed with sympathy the tiny tracheotomy wound in the woman's neck.

The young man who came out from the back office looked a different sort of tired than the receptionist. He reeked lightly of cigarettes and sweat, and of the vague, strange smell that Margaret decided after a few minutes of polite conversation was the scent of rain. His name was Enoch and he gently took the documents that Margaret had brought in, making an effort to not seem as if he were enacting a routine but failing. Margaret decided that he made her uncomfortable.

"His birth name was Jorge Villarosa?" Enoch asked. He was looking at her father's birth certificate.

"Yes, 'Villarosa' was my biological grandfather's name," she answered. "It's an old German

 name. Our family is originally from Germany. My father took his step-father's name, Brenner, later on."

"German?" Enoch frowned.

"Yes," Margaret was becoming annoyed. She quickly turned the conversation back to the obituary, instructing Enoch with an increased forcefulness what she wanted to see in the piece. Her father had been born in 1908. He had moved to Turlock and found work as a clockmaker in the 1940's, had met and married his wife Julianna and fathered their three children. He was a member of the local old time radio enthusiast club, and he was an accomplished amateur

 magician, excelling at the sleight of hand tricks.

"What did he do before he was a clockmaker?" Enoch asked.

"He lived on his step-father's farm," Margaret answered, ready to leave. "That doesn't matter as much. Just say that he comes from Firebaugh, where his parents are dead and buried."

"And there are no other Villarosa Germans to survive him?" Enoch examined the birth certificate.

"That's correct," Margaret answered with finality, and she left quickly, bothered by the reporter's prying questions and general demeanor. After she left, Enoch went onto the computer and looked up Firebaugh's city records. There were no Brenners from the area who had owned any farmland, but there was 

a large ranch that once belonged to a Villarosa. He went to the phone book and found 110 listings for "Villarosa." Choosing "Jorge Villarosa III" out of all of them, he dialed the number.

"Hello," he said when a man answered. "I'm a reporter doing a story on a man named Jorge Villarosa, and I am trying to find his family. He was born in Firebaugh in 1908."

There was silence on the other end for several moments. Then the dry, heavy voice answered with a light Spanish accent, "My grandfather was born in 1908, and has been missing from us since 1928."

Enoch spent some more time verifying the details of the story. Jorge Villarosa had disappeared one day in the late summer of 1928, and the legend of the family was that he had followed the circus out of town.

"There was a man named Diltz," Jorge the III told Enoch, his voice becoming quicker and more rich, encouraged by Enoch's questions. "A magician with the circus. My grandmother thinks that my grandfather was his friend."

That confirmed the connection in Enoch's mind, George Brenner having been an amateur magician himself. The young reporter had been fired from the paper earlier that very week for just that sort of lack of discipline. His editor, hard pressed to find a replacement, had let Enoch stay on until the end of the month, only hoping that the young writer would not do too much more damage to the reputation of his newspaper in that time. The Brenner obituary debacle would soon prove the editor's hopes futile. Enoch announced to Jorge the III that his grandfather had been found, recently passed away with the assumed name of George Brenner.

By the time Margaret arrived home to cook dinner that evening, she had five messages from Rosalita Villarosa, her father's first wife. After nearly three hours on the phone with Rosalita, every minute of which was spent protesting, Margaret collapsed and said with an exhausted sigh, "Oh daddy. What did you do?"

"He was my husband. He left me so to be with that magician, Diltz," Rosalita repeated for the fortieth time in her quick, sharp old voice.

So the Villarosa kin came to meet their Brenner people. Nearly 250 Villarosas showed up. Enoch wrote the entire messy affair up on the front page, and all but invited everyone in Turlock and the surrounding area to the funeral. Margaret Brenner was morbidly embarrassed, and politely refused to speak to anyone, consuming nearly 50 pounds of the enchiladas that the Villarosas brought. Julianna Brenner, on the other hand, was overjoyed, and spent the afternoon memorizing all of the Villarosa children's names. She had always lamented her own children's failure to give her grandchildren.

Enoch attended the event as well. He cornered Jorge Villarosa III and compelled the man to show him the family albums.

"This is my grandfather." And there he was, George Brenner as a young man. Seeing the pictures in the proper context, Enoch could not understand how Brenner had managed to pass all those years as a caucasian. No one could.

"And here is that magician, Diltz." Jorge the III pointed to a short, strange man in one of the pictures. George had his arm slung over the smaller man's shoulder. Enoch frowned and studied the picture. Diltz could have been a German Jew, or he could have been a Chinese man. He had a large nose and small eyes, dark hair and wide lips...the sort of old world features that called back to some forgotten origin and that were simultaneously and ultimately exclusively new world.

"Huh," Enoch studied the picture. Later that night he spent several hours searching through the newspaper archives, looking for mention of the circuses that passed through Turlock. Finally, very early in the morning he found what he was looking for in a paper from 1936.

The caption read: "The Magical and Mysterious Diltz, pictured above, Performs Exciting Feats of Incredible Transformations!" Enoch read it several times over, and then examined the picture, over and over again. It was indisputable. The picture was ostensibly of the Magician Diltz, performing a card trick for some children. But while the Diltz pictured in 1928 with Jorge Villarosa was a small, strange man, this 1936 Diltz was clearly Jorge Villarosa himself, his dark hair slicked back and his large, farmer's son's frame fitted elegantly into the black coattails of a famous magician.

The Excavation of Him

She left all of the furniture and appliances, removing instead only the items which were most easily replaceable: her lipstick and makeup, a few tabloids she had picked up at the grocery store on a whim, the movies that he had rented from the video rental place around the corner. Everything else was left: most of her clothes, the paintings on the wall, her accumulation of books and CDs.

After she was gone, when Miles was still in the apartment but it no longer felt like a home, he decided to leave all of the blinds open at all times. In the mornings it felt like he was living in a cathedral, when the light poured in and woke him up. And in the evenings he stood in the 

living room and watched his neighbors in the windows and the people wandering on the street, and he felt like the world saw him and approved, or at least let him be and do what he felt he needed to. He would have preferred guidance, but didn't expect it, and he appreciated the feeling he had, watching from his windows, that, in a way, he was understood.

He stopped thinking of the apartment as a home: so it stopped making sense to treat it as if it were a home. When he first got an apartment in the city, back before he met Mary, creating a home of his own had been like a sacred act for him. Back then, the idea of not drawing the blinds at night, or of not locking the bolt when he left the apartment caused an overpowering sensation of nausea. But everything was different now. It was a chore to remember to buy groceries, to do the laundry, to shower, let alone to remember to lock the doors. After a few times coming home and finding the door unlocked, Miles cursed himself and swore that he would be better, that he would get his life back in order. Then he lost the key, and the doors had to remain unlocked at all times.

What could he do? To call the landlord and tell him would require an incredible amount of effort...too much, he thought, considering the awful, condescending way the landlord had when confronted with a tenant's mistake. Miles didn't think he could deal with that. So he left the door unlocked. One day while walking up the stairs of his building, he found a homeless man sleeping in the hallway. Carefully stepping over him, careful to not wake him, Miles entered his apartment and found all of the furniture gone.

It wasn't only the furniture. All of the pipes in the bathroom and the kitchen were gone, torn out with an odd mix of a brutal disregard for the neatly tiled wall and of an almost surgical delicacy to not damage the pipes. Miles wasn't sure what to do. Calling the police struck him as slightly less appealing than the idea of calling his landlord had seemed when he lost his keys. He didn't want to explain anything that was happening to him, or what was going on inside of him. And, maybe more than anything, he didn't want to be treated like a victim of a crime, because he didn't feel that way. It all felt to him as if it were very natural to find the apartment ransacked, and he didn't want anyone to make him feel differently. As he stood inspecting the kitchen, Miles heard footsteps in the living room.

"Hello?" He asked as he walked out to the noise, more out of habit than consideration for the circumstances. One did not typically greet intruders into one's house, Miles thought. It was no use, he realized then: he could not feel upset about the situation.

"Who are you?" A nasally voice intoned as Miles walked into the living room. Two skinny, ragged men stood there, examining him with surprised, yet cold expressions.

"This is my..." Miles gestured around at the room, but trailed off. It didn't matter. "Did you guys take my pipes?"

The two men were silent. They gazed at him sullenly, tiredly. Miles was surprised at that, at how tired they looked. It seemed that the longer he looked at them, the more tired the two men seemed.

"You can have my pipes," Miles told them suddenly. "Do you want anything else? You can have all of it." Miles felt a rush of excitement go through his body, and he relaxed instantly. He hadn't realized he was as tense as he was until he relaxed. It had been weeks, months even since he relaxed. He walked past the two men and went out. When he came back, his front door was missing.

It happened quickly after that. All the furniture disappeared, the books and CDs that Mary had left and all of her clothes, which he had left in three garbage bags in the living room. And then the glass from the windows so that the rain left large, ever widening circles of darkness on the wood floor. A group of homeless people moved in, a rotating cast of haggard, polite people who tore apart his drapes to use as blankets and quietly stole his clothes. At night he listened to them shuffle in, drunk and loud. They urinated on the carpet and fornicated on his sofa. Eventually a group of young neo-Nazis moved in and drove them all out. They were louder, but, like the homeless people, they left Miles alone. They ripped up all of Mary's paintings, which had been left relatively untouched on the wall. They were oil paintings a violets, big, dark purple swaths of color, now in tatters on the floor. Miles gazed at the remains with sadness and forbearance.

The neo-Nazis didn't stop there. They ripped all of the wallpaper off violently, so that the walls were portions of dry wall, with large parts of the wooden frame exposed. They dismantled his closet and tried to set up a meth lab, but instead managed to cause a small fire that put a gaping black hole where the bathroom used to be.

It's almost finished, Miles thought to himself when he came home and saw the hole. We're almost done. He expected a phone call from his landlord any day. The property, though ostensibly a desirable, upscale apartment, was in a bad part of town that was only on the very brink of becoming hip. It made sense that the landlord hadn't driven past the place and noticed the damage immediately, but it wouldn't be long. Miles showered at the YMCA and used the bathroom at the office where he worked, and he waited to see what happened next.

There was a shake-up amongst the neo-Nazis. One of the boy's parents tracked him down to the apartment and took him back home with them. It was a small blow to their organization, since he was only one of many and a particularly small, young neo-Nazi. But morale-wise it was devastating. Miles listened to them exchange stories about their own homes, their own families from the next room. Then he heard their footsteps on the floorboards, leaving.

As soon as he realized what was happening, Miles came out of his room and watched them go out into the clear early spring night from the hole where the bathroom had been. He almost called out to them, to try and bring them back. But it wouldn't have done any good. A drunk man walking down the street noticed him standing there, and yelled up:

"Hey, you better get down from there, boy! It doesn't look safe!"

Miles looked down at him. "You want to see something?"

The man stopped and gazed up. "What?"

Miles kicked a portion of the wall that had been damaged by the fire but not destroyed. It creaked and gave way, slightly. Miles kicked it again and again, until it crumbled and fell into the street, causing the man to jump backwards in surprise.

"Want to see something?" Miles yelled. "Watch!" He tore at the walls with his hands and scattered the last remains of the home onto the street bellow. "Look at this!"

He kept going like that for hours, no one intervened, they let him go at it for half the night,

 until he was too exhausted to stand. They saw him, and it was like they understood.

Roller Coaster Baby

When his mother was seven months pregnant with Shane, his father took her and his brother Philip out to the county fair. It was hot out, being in the summer months, and everything was wondrous to three-year-old Philip, who would later mistake the memory for a dream. As the sun began to set at 8:30 p.m. and the heat finally broke, Philip excitedly asked to go on the miniature carnival roller coaster. He had never expressed an interest in roller coasters before, and his father, inspecting the haphazardous circular metal structure that the grotesque plastic monstrosity, shaped cartoonishly as a dragon, was inclined to say no. His mother, however, felt that it was significant for her small first child to request to do something possibly dangerous and frightening. So she agreed to take her son on the ride, and immediately put down her husband's protests in such a way that he could not argue or insist on going himself on the ride in her place.

"Are you sure? I don't think so," her husband said in such a way as to indicate he was worried about the baby.

"I'm fine," she replied, suddenly angry at her husband all over again for his nervous fawning over her.

She wondered later if her having taken him on the roller coaster was the cause of Shane's quiet, subdued nature, as well as his fear and dislike of loud noises. It was only after he went away to school that he started to slowly open up and display the family charisma and humor. His father had an asocial streak and was prone to becoming solitary and wrapped up in his work to a degree that nothing else existed, while his brother was, to a degree, antisocial and unable to hide his feeling that other people were pathetic or malicious towards him. Shane displayed none of these traits, and maybe for that reason his mother felt, mostly on the subconscious level, that he was her child more than his father's child.

While at school, he met a girl in the art department. She thought he was great, and, though he never told her, or anyone else, how to live life, she began making all manners of changes to her outward personality and appearance out of the idea that she could impress him. She grew her hair out and began to wear dresses. She gave up smoking in public and started to talk about marriage and children, and seemed amused when the people she knew disagreed. This all happened over the course of the three months following the first time she slept with Shane, and it continued up until spring. At that point the girl had begun to worry that Shane didn't take her seriously. She wanted very badly to be taken seriously, and she wondered if she hadn't perceived that attitude in Shane due to her desire to find it. One day they were doing laundry at the Laundromat. They did not live together or share anything that needed to be laundered, and that suddenly bothered the girl. She wished that they had something that they owned together that needed to be laundered. But what that could be, she had no idea. They would have to move in together for anything object that needed to be taken to the Laundromat to become theirs rather than hers or his.

"We should move in together," she remarked in a casual way.

"No," he said.

She was taken aback by his firmness, quiet and unremarkable as usual.

"No, never?" She asked, forcing a laugh to make the jagged answer to her perhaps to intense question less awkward.

"I don't want to move in with you," he said simply, and went back to folding his dry clothes.

Stung by the unnecessary bluntness of this, she began sorely to probe with other questions. Why not? Didn't he take her seriously? Would he ever consider it? But there were no answers he seemed willing to give her. Afterwards, she began to resent everything that he said or did, and at the same time she was no longer able to comfortably be apart from him. Their fights following the scene at the Laundromat were always public displays, while they stood in the front yards of house parties, or while they walked across campus. Shane was the sympathetic one by all accounts, the victim of her unbalanced moods and tempers. Finally one night her friends finally intervened and took her out of a drunken party where she had been screaming and crying, and the relationship ended.

Immediately after that, an important deciding factor in Shane's adult life emerged: women flocked to him.