Venus Drive

Probe to the Negative

Lucky for me I get a Larry tonight. Maybe he’s a wandering daddy Larry, all alone in the middle of lonely places somewhere. I run the screens, tug him through his ache. Probe to the negative, that’s what the training guide says. Poll, poll, poll, until you get a no. You’re golden when they don’t say no. You’ve gone to demo heaven. A Larry, though, is someone who is maybe lying. You can feel him through the wire. He wants to qualify. He wants to flee with you, wherever, away.

This Larry, he says, “Yes.”

Says, “Yes, yes, yes.” To work, to daddyhood. It’s a survey about the schools and we need family men, solid citizens, taxpayers, debt-payers, payers in kind. Lucky for me the Larry checks out. Now we can voyage together across the vast spectrum of human experience: Excellent, Fair, Good, Poor, I Don’t Know.

Choose, please.

“Good,” says the Larry, “good, excellent, fair, good.”

He never says, “Poor.”

He never says, “I don’t know.”

“How many kids did you say you have?” I say.

“Kids?” says the Larry.

“This only counts if you have kids.”

“The old lady has them. That’s why I’m out here. It’s me and the trees. My children are the trees, the sky. From where I stand, I can assfuck the moon.”

“Thank you for your time, sir,” I say.

“Thank me for my time! Thank me for my time! You think I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me? You goddamn mothership Jew!”

“You’ve been a real gentleman, sir.”

Here comes Frank the Fink, my monitor, all mission control with his clipboard, his headpiece. Maybe Frank was a decent guy once, but he’s management now. He sits with the other monitors at the edge of the room, eavesdrops, takes notes on our etiquette. Sometimes one of them will come over to your port with a personality tip.

“Start with hello,” they’ll say.

Frank lays off, though. I guess he thinks I would take it the wrong way, but I figure with a job like this, the higher you move up, the more of a tragedy you are.

“Hey,” says Frank. “Forget that nut. You’ll get a complete tonight, I can feel it.”

“Thanks, Frank,” I say.

Fuck off, Fink, I think, which is my thought of the day. I like to have one, it’s almost Buddhist. Yesterday’s thought was how did I get here, thirty-one, thirty-two, just this huge knot of unknowing and losing my hair. Big deal, you say. Male pattern baldness. But that’s the thing. There’s no pattern to it.

My last good thought was weeks ago and it wasn’t even a thought. It was a building I passed on the way to Cups. Limestone, or maybe soapstone, with gargoyle guys on the sills. Homunculi, maybe, if that’s the kind with the smirk. This was a building I knew from when I vaguely lived with a woman in it. She was fresh off the malls upstate, hungry to hurt herself. She wanted to write a history of art. She taught me all about Courbet and in return I went to Cups for both of us. Then she found some sculpture dealer’s dealer, high-end guy, come to your house with a leather bag, a book in German. Now the girl and I, we had nothing in common anymore.

It’s a bittersweet story, I guess. I wish I could remember more of it. She used to shoot too much cocaine and jerk around in her chair. It sounds bad, but if you’d been there it just might have charmed you somehow.

It charmed me. I even made some art of my own when I was with her. I took all the beat bags I’d copped — corn starch, baby powder — and glued them to some Belgian linen. “The Decline of Quality Control,” I called it. The dealer’s dealer dismissed it outright. He said it was an “insufficient interrogation of authenticity.” I said I wasn’t about to waste the real stuff. The point is, I shouldn’t have bothered with that idiot. I had ideas in those days. I had hair.

It was Carla who started calling them that, Lonely Larrys, the ones who stay on the line. We used to share smokes on break. She’s not around much these days. Maybe she’s on a different shift. Maybe something better came along. That would be a shame.

The guy that hired me, he gave me this look when he gave me the job.

“You’re hired,” he said, “but it seems like a waste of a fine college education.”

These days there’s a conspiracy against the overqualified. I told him I was a painter, in the manner of Courbet, Corvette. He seemed appeased.

Tonight, everyone is telling me to go to hell. One guy I call wants my name, my real name.

“Saltine,” I say. “Leonard Saltine.”

He’s going to report me to the bureau of something or other, make a phone call to vent about a phone call. I guess these are the vengeful types. They don’t believe in market research. They are enemies of progress. They want to go back to that dark time when America didn’t care what kind of donut you liked.

“Saltine?” he says. “Bullshit.”

“My name is nobody,” I tell him.

“Yeah, I read that book, too,” he says. “Well, I’ve got two eyes, pal.”

“What book?” I say.

Later, I’m a few screens in with a lady from Duluth. Cough drops. Mentholated. Do they soothe? Do they soothe you to the poor, to the fair, to the good?

“These are dumb questions,” the lady says.

“I didn’t write them, Ma’am. I’m just doing my job.”

I savor the saying of Ma’am. We never got to say it growing up in my town. People would take you for crazy, a peeper, or trying to burn them on school chocolate. Now when I say Ma’am I belong to a great tapestry of Ma’am-sayers stretched across the republic. We’re just doing our job.

I get another guy, Wyoming, I think, one question to go. A country number comes over the line, a song about a jet pilot chasing Jesus through the sky, his heart on target lock. I ask Wyoming to rate the service at his local self-serve salad bar.

“Fair-to-good,” he says.

“I need you to pick one, sir.”

“How’s about good, then? Good’s better for you, right?”

“It’s all the same to me.”

“You pick,” the man says.

“Okay,” I say, “how about good?”

“Good’s good.”

Frank’s up over me, doing his fink looks at my screen.

“Lose him,” says Frank.

“It’s complete,” I say.

“It’s compromised. You fed him a response.”

“Don’t do this to me,” I say.

“Take a break,” says Frank.

“Fuck you, Fink,” I say.

I guess Frank has been briefed in the latest management techniques, because instead of hauling off on me, he smiles, rubs my neck.

“Okay, fuck me,” he says softly. “Fuck me, and take a break.”

The smoke room, it’s just a stock room with no stock. It’s concrete with a window in it. You can see the high floors of a brokerage house across the way. The brokers work late in their cubes, ties down, cuffs rolled, lips quickening against their headset mikes. We are all cold-callers now.

It’s kind of dark in here but I can see her, Carla, her knees up on the heater. She’s got these wide pretty shins gone to stubble. There’s something about that. There’s something about everything. Take her hair, tucked inside her sweater. We could be home somewhere, her legs, her shins, up in my lap. Those stiff little shoots.

We wouldn’t have to tell each other about our days. It would be the same day.

“Hey,” I say. “Got a cigarette?”

“No,” says Carla. “Got any completes?”

“You?”

“No. But I got this one Larry, I couldn’t tell if he was putting me on. Said he used to be a lion tamer. Used to stick his head in lion mouths. He said they always doped the cats, but still, you never knew when, well…”

“I never get a Larry that good,” I say, lay my hand on her shin. I stroke down with the grain.

“This is a very troubling development,” says Carla.

“I love your shins, you know,” I say.

“No, I didn’t know that. I wish I didn’t know that. Now I have to wear pants to work. Don’t ever follow me in here again.”

I clock out early, turn my headset in, flip Frank a secret double bird on the way out the door. I call my friend Gary from the street. He’s got a futon for me nights I need it, nights I sleep.

“This is Gary,” says Gary’s answering machine.

“Gary,” I say, “this is me.”

Down at Cups, the lookout hooks my arm.

“Big man, get me a bag of D, will you? I can’t leave my post.”

Maybe it’s the way he says post that sways me. Now I’m part of an operation, a cause.

They call it Cups because you walk down a hallway of tile shards and wait for paper Dixies to come down on box twine. There’s a kid I know from somewhere waiting ahead of me, but neither of us speaks. What is there to say?

I put money in the cup marked “D” and watch it shimmy up into the dark. It comes back down with one bag in it. Lookout’s out of luck, I guess.

He’s waiting out on the stoop for me.

“Well?” he says.

“Talk to your man,” I say. “He screwed me. I paid for two and he only gave me one.”

“Give them to me,” he says.

“What them?” I say.

“Them is two bags. I gave you twenty bucks.”

“Ten,” I say.

Cups, it appears, also maintains a radical management style. The lookout puts a pistol to my neck and walks me back up through the door.

“Now,” he says, “Why don’t you say that again?”

“Oh, forget it,” I say, “just kill me.”

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Just kill you?” says the lookout. “You make it sound like nothing. What, you coming back? You got roundtrip? Frequent flyer?”

He hits me with the pistol, takes my wallet, leaves me the bag.

“It’s good tonight,” he says.

Justice has always been swift, and just, at Cups.

When I get to Gary’s the girl from the gargoyle building opens the door.

“What are you doing here?” I say.

The girl lets me in, brings gauze for the dent in my head.

“I’m staying here for a few days,” she says. “Gary’s out of town, his aunt, his somebody, died.”

“What happened to your place?”

“Couldn’t make rent.”

The girl and I sit in Gary’s kitchen. She’s got spoons, water, powders, works. It’s like your only cozy memory falling out of the sky for you. I tie her off and hit her clean, the way I always could. She has veins like little tadpoles darting under her skin but I still know which way they’re going. Me, I’ve got this hole in my arm like a great, dark lake. I just have to squirt the stuff in. The girl starts jerking in her chair. I clinch her down around the knees.

“Listen,” I say. “I talked to this guy tonight. He was a lion tamer. Stuck his head in lion mouths.”

“I could never do that,” she says. “I could never tempt fate that way.”

The girl twitches hard, almost out of her seat.

“Yeah, no reason to tempt fate,” I say. “Like tonight, I asked a guy to kill me tonight.”

“I can understand that,” she says. “You can’t do everything yourself.”

When her spell breaks we shoot more of everything and sip something grape. We talk about old times, those nights in her bed behind the stone homunculi.

“What’s wrong with your hair?” she says.

“I’m going bald,” I say.

“That’s not it. It’s something else.”

“What you’re noting,” I say, “is a dearth of pattern.”

I kiss her, slip my hand under her ass and lift. She’s about as heavy as a phone book. I lower her down on the futon and slide up to her hair.

“No,” she says. “I don’t feel like it.”

“How do you know what you feel?” I say.

Now she peels down my fly, starts doing frantic things with her hands, annoyed, severe, like someone who forgot to defrost the meat. I can’t feel anything but the view is exciting. I stick my fingers in her mouth and pry it open.

“Don’t bite,” I say, straddle her head.

“God save the circus,” she says.

When the girl passes into what passes for dreams for people like us, I go down into the din of the avenue. I walk through the lights to the darker places. There’s no moon in the sky to violate, no mothership, no hover of coming dominion. There’s just the city, jerking in its concrete seat. Maybe I’m sorry to leave the girl up there, but if I stay she’ll probably leave me. Then I’ll surely be a Larry. I’ll pace a room with the phone in my hand, eager to please some invisible slave. Good, I will say, excellent, excellent, excellent. I will never say poor. I will never say I don’t know.

Every Larry who wants to live is a liar.