Get Real

34

STAN DIDN’T LIKE having nothing to do, and so, when he had nothing to do, he did something. Wednesday afternoon, while the others were off taping their debuts with the reality people, Stan subwayed from Canarsie to Manhattan, walked over to Varick Street, took up a position across the way from the Get Real building and up at the next corner, leaned against a light post as inconspicuous as a Russian spy in a fifties movie, folded his arms, and waited.

After a while he saw his own group come out of that building and walk away toward Tiny’s limo around the corner, discussing things. He didn’t join them or call to them or anything because he was working his own gag now, single-o.

A while later another limo arrived and the Get Real people came out of the building, including the German guy he’d seen through the Combined Tool back window, who was now lugging a garment bag and a wheelie suitcase. The limo driver stored his stuff in the trunk while the tunnel traffic struggled around them, and then that group was away, too.

Once they were gone, Stan crossed the street, walked down to that building, and entered it by using the dummy key he’d made the last time he was here. Inside, he switched on the overhead fluorescent lights and looked around.

Vehicles, vehicles everywhere. Big ones, little ones, new ones, old ones, valuable ones, junk. Whistling behind his teeth, Stan wandered among all these wheels and used his cell phone to take pictures of the ones he thought might be of interest. He stopped after he’d chosen six, not wanting to be greedy, then picked for tonight’s transportation a relatively modest black Dodge Caliber, mostly because it was pretty close to the garage door and wouldn’t require shifting too many other vehicles around to get it out of here.

The Caliber had apparently been used one way or another in movie- or television-making, because the passenger floor in front was littered with several random screenplay pages and the entire back area was a foot deep in plastic coffee cups and fast food trays. The glove box contained four different lipsticks, a package of condoms, and a cell phone; people are always leaving their cell phones.

Well, all of this would be somebody else’s problem, farther down the line. Stan merely drove the Caliber out to Varick Street, then left it athwart the sidewalk as he ducked back in to close the garage door.

Satisfied with the day’s work, he steered the Caliber down through the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and thence by many secondary streets across Brooklyn to Canarsie, pausing along the way to pick up from a closed movie rental place a DVD of Pit Stop (1969, Brian Donlevy, with a cameo from George Barris, famous custom car builder) to watch that night with his Mom.

Leaving the Caliber at the curb on a side street a couple blocks from home, he returned to it Thursday morning to find it was still there, so he drove it onto an even more remote area than Canarsie, a neighborhood—if that isn’t too fancy a word—somewhere out there that was in a way Brooklyn, in a way Queens, and very nearly but not quite, Nassau County.

Along a commercial boulevard of quiet desperation, one particular enterprise, Maximillian’s Used Cars, seemed so natural, so inevitable, it might have grown there, from a seed dropped by a passing asteroid. Under flapping three-sided pennants in bright crayon colors huddled a wan fleet of cars that hadn’t known love for a very long time, despite the whitewashed words bellowing from their windshields: !!!CREAMPUFF!!! !!!ULTRASPECIAL!!! !!!TRIPLE-A-ONE!!! And behind this assembly of sad sacks stood the office, a small pink stucco structure that looked vaguely as though it might have been transplanted from some arid part of inland California.

Stan drove the Caliber—a thoroughbred, in this neck of the woods—past the lot and turned in at the anonymous driveway that would go behind the place. He stopped in an area of tall unkempt weeds beside the white clapboard backs of garages, and got out, taking the Caliber’s keys with him. Stepping through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence, he followed a shrubbery-flanked path to the rear of the pink office structure. A back door here opened into a gray-paneled office populated by a thin severe hatchet-faced woman typing rapidly on an off-brand computer with a sound like a cocktail party for crickets. She looked up, but didn’t stop typing as she said, “Hello, Stan. Long time.”

Stan, with some amazement, said, “Harriet, Max bought you a computer?”

“The motor vehicle forms are online now,” she said, still cricketing away. “He hated it, he hated the whole idea of it, but then he worked out my taxi fares all the time to the DMV, and this was cheaper.”

Stan nodded. “That must have been a bitter blow.”

“He got so mad,” she said, “he said he was gonna sell the place and retire. I said, ‘From what?’ and he went into his office to sulk.”

“How long ago?”

“About three weeks.”

Stan looked at the closed connecting door to the front office. “You think he’s over it by now?”

She laughed, a mirthless sound. “He’s in there now,” she said, gesturing with her jaw at the connecting door while continuing to cricket. “Go cheer him up.”

“Well, I’ll say hello, anyway,” Stan said, and crossed to step through to the outer office, closing the door behind himself. The cricket sound disappeared.

This office was dominated by its windows, giving a different but no more lovely view out onto the wares under offer. Within, the office was dominated by Max himself, a big old man with heavy jowls and thin white hair, wearing a dark vest hanging open over a white dress shirt smudged across the chest from his habit of leaning forward against his used cars. There was a time when he had smoked cigars, until the doctor told him the cigars were actually smoking him, so he didn’t do that any more, but still kept all the moves, so that people looking at him kept thinking they were missing something.

At the moment, Max was crouched at his desk like a leopard at a water hole, watching the two or three potential customers wandering the lot, their needs perhaps being attended to by Harriet’s nephew, an eager faun in a three-piece suit. Stan observed for a minute, but then, when Max made no move to acknowledge his presence, he forced the issue: “Whadaya say, Max?”

Max exhaled as noisily as if he still smoked those old cigars, dropped back into his swivel chair, continued to glare outward, and said, “I say I don’t like it, that’s what I say.”

“Don’t like what, Max?”

At last Max looked Stan in the eye, and nodded, though not with much satisfaction. “Morning, Stanley.”

“Good morning. What don’t you like?”

For answer, Max glared again out the window. “Any of those birds look like a television person to you?”

“What, a repairman? I don’t think they have those any more.”

“No, a reporter,” Max said, as though the word were synonymous with “dungheap.” “Ever see any of those people on the air?”

Interested, Stan stepped closer to the windows and considered the candidates. “Not unless it was a perp walk,” he decided. “What’s up, Max?”

“Siddown, Stanley, you’ll give me a crook in my neck.”

So Stan sat in the client’s chair and said, “You’ve had a problem with reporters?”

“No, and I don’t want any. But one of these local channels, busybodies, on their six o’clock news, they been doing a deep investigative thing on customers and the people that sell to customers.”

“Aha.”

“If you ask me,” Max said, “what they’re investigating is people that sell to customers without using their crappy TV station for advertising.”

“That makes sense,” Stan said. “You don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.”

“I wanna bite some hand. They’re goin after all kinds of legitimate businessmen, Stanley. Furniture stores where you don’t pay any money down. That’s a worthy thing, isn’t it?”

“Sounds it.”

“So what if they come to take the stuff back next year and sell it all over again to the next yo-yo? It was never anything but junk anyway.”

“You’re right.”

“And appliance stores, those too,” Max said, “and—you know it—used car dealers.”

Stan nodded. “They been to see you, Max?”

“No, but they hit one in the Bronx, and they hit one in Staten Island, nailed them for perfectly ordinary business practices, but, you know, the stuff that’s difficult to explain to the layman.”

“I know what you mean.”

Max did his best to look pathetic. “Stanley,” he said, “I don’t want to be under scrutiny, you know that.”

“None of us does, Max,” Stan agreed. “It’s like a contagious disease.”

“You know it.”

“Maybe they’ll pick a competitor.”

“Your lips to God’s ear. In fact, I got a couple suggestions, only I’m not about to attract attention.” Max shivered all over, relit his imaginary cigar, and said, “But why should I borrow any trouble? Usually, you come to see me, you got a vehicle, it’s a fine vehicle, only the dog ate the registration.”

“That’s what happens, all right,” Stan agreed.

“Also,” Max said, now smiling on Stan like some son or other close relative in whom he was well pleased, “you understand the ways of the real world, how, when you bring me these orphans, how it costs me out of pocket to bring them back into the world of ordinary commercial trade, which is why there’s gotta be a little discount from book value between us from time to time.”

Stan, who found his cost of raw materials not burdensome, said, “We help each other out, Max, and I appreciate it.”

“So now,” Max said, finished with the emollient of human empathy, “what have you brought me today, Stanley?”

“To begin,” Stan said, “a black Caliber, maybe two years old.”

Max looked at him. “To begin?”

Unpocketing his cell phone, Stan reached it across the desk to show Max the pictures he’d taken. “I can get you,” he said, “one of these a day, as many as you think you like. After that, maybe a few more, who knows?”

Max took the phone and scrolled through the pictures, then frowned at Stan. “What’d you do?” he asked. “Follow them to their nest?”

“Where they are now,” Stan said, “they’re kind of goin to waste. They were used on TV shows, but now they’re just like in storage, like an old costume.”

“TV shows?” Max didn’t like that. “Stanley, I don’t want somebody from television news to come in here and recognize one of these vehicles. Hey, I used to drive that, call the cops.”

“Not that kind of TV,” Stan assured him. “Nothing to do with the news, these are reality people, they don’t come to the outer boroughs.”

“If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure. And these cars, I think they’ll be happier out and about in the world.”

“You’re a very thoughtful boy.” Handing back the phone, he said, “I’ll give a new home to every one of these, you pick the rotation. You want I should run a tab?”

“Oh,” Stan said, carelessly, “I think pay as you go is easier, you know. Less paperwork. We look at each of these when I bring it in, we tell each other what we think it’s worth, we come to an agreement, and then I’ll take the cash. Simple. Friendly.”

“Some do it that way,” Max agreed, as though it didn’t much matter one way or the other. Heaving himself to his feet, he said, “Well, let’s look at your first episode.” But then he stopped, to stare out the window again. In some astonishment, he said, “Look at that.”

Stan looked. The new customer who’d just joined the random molecules slowly crisscrossing the lot was a huge man with a huge black beard and a whole lot of woolly black hair. He was dressed in a kind of muted orange muumuu, so that he looked mostly like the king of the apricots.

“Wow,” Stan said. He meant it as a compliment.

Leaning forward over the desk, hissing toward the window, Max said, “Could he be undercover?”

“As what? A blimp?” Stan shook his head. “Come on, Max, lemme show you the car.”

But Max was still staring out the window. “Look what he’s doing.”

The new arrival had taken a big interest in a Volkswagen Rabbit, not a particularly big car. Stan said, “What’s he gonna do with that?”

The big man opened the Rabbit’s driver-side door. Before Harriet’s nephew could get there to discuss the situation, he’d started to insert himself behind the wheel.

“That’s not gonna work,” Max said.

The man kept squeezing and twisting himself farther and farther into the Rabbit. Stan said, “Is he gonna drive it or wear it?”

“If he can’t take it off,” Max said, “he’s bought it. Let them work it out for themselves, Stanley, come show me what you brought.”

So off they went to have a look at Stan’s ex-Caliber.