“There’s some cans in the storage closet,” Seth said. “They’re Derrick’s.” This was an untruth, if a harmless one: the spray cans belonged to the store, its quickest remedy for the regulars who kept writing their phone numbers and local meeting places in ballpoint on the walls and seats of the viewing booths. Angela saw Alex register Seth’s words and then turn toward the counter: first the turn, then the onset of forward motion, slow, mechanical. He moved his body like it didn’t belong to him. It was hard to watch.
All the while, she did her best to ignore the many parts of the store that were still exactly as they’d been before Anthony Hawley turned the OPEN sign around for good. She didn’t consider herself a prude, but the more of the interior her peripheral vision picked up, the less she liked it. After the homecoming dance, at the curb in front of her house, her date had tried to show her a glossy European magazine with brief text in French captioning explicit pictures of people having sex: Douce Ma?tresse. It was vile; she was relieved when her father, inside the house, flipped the porch light on to let her know he’d registered their arrival and was marking time. “I had a good time tonight. My father will kill you if he sees that,” she said to her date, opening the passenger-side door before he could lean in for a kiss.
She was a good student; she never skipped class, and she signed up for all the extracurriculars that were supposed to help you get into the universities—debate team, student government. She was hoping to make assistant manager at 7-Eleven before she left for college; she’d been told that colleges loved to see first-year students who arrived trailing a list of credentials. It had made for a lot of tension thus far, trying to make her last year count; two months in, she was feeling the strain.
She looked hard at the entrance through which she’d come after convincing Alex, her hand cupped to the door, that it was really her; she noted the double crossbar now reinforcing it in case somebody breached the dead bolt.
She decided to use broad-tipped permanent markers instead of the spray cans, because she didn’t want to get any paint on her clothes.
HUGH THE FAT
In Hollywood for the weekend, staying at his friend Keith’s rental on North Hayworth, Marc Buckler treated himself and his host to a half gram of cocaine. It was the weekend, and he was on the cusp of what felt like a big step forward. Locally, his property bids kept getting undercut by buyers who could afford short-term losses for the sake of increasing their holdings. He’d tried making moves in places where he couldn’t imagine any real action—Rowland Heights, Baldwin Park, Walnut—but most of the time he came away holding the short straw. He liked to think of himself as a renegade, a little guy trying to knock a few jewels loose from the collars on the big dogs.
Keith did data input for an investment firm and talked a lot about how much action there was in the job. Seated next to Marc on his sofa, occasionally leaning over to snort from a small mirror on a coffee table, he kept telling his friend that the entrepreneur game was “very small-time stuff.” This didn’t agree with Marc’s image of himself, but Keith made a persuasive case.
After a while, Keith got up and went to the kitchen to fix gin and tonics. He spoke rapidly and animatedly as he worked. The plan was to kill time until it felt late enough to hit the bars.
“If you can get rich in property, God bless you,” he said, returning to the sofa and raising his glass. “If I get even the tiniest sliver of my company’s nest egg I’m set for life. For life, you know? Let somebody else assume the risk.”
“OK,” said Marc, returning the toast, “but if I flip two properties in this tiny town nobody’s even ever heard of, I can buy four more. Six more. Whole blocks. OK? Now you tell me. What’s the only investment that never, I mean never, stops increasing in value over time?”
“Real estate,” Keith said, closing his eyes and leaning his head back a little. The gin rush hit, cold and bracing. It was good to feel young, it was good to feel like you were getting a clear view of the bigger picture.
“How much you pay every month for this place?” Marc asked.
“Too much.”
“My point exactly. In other markets it’s even starker. Just incredible, you know? The return on just a little paint and spackle, you wouldn’t believe it. Assuming I can get the price I want for the place I saw last week, I—”
“I’m just saying, job security,” Keith said. “I know there’s no glamour in job security, but there’s no glamour in unrecouped losses, either.”
There aren’t going to be any unrecouped losses, Marc Buckler thought but did not say; in his heart, he worried that his time in the self-made-man lane was growing short. But all his sources told him self-presentation was paramount. What he said instead was: “You have to make your own job security.”
“Better men than me have tried,” Keith countered, while allowing himself a brief vision of his friend Marc as a jet-setting real estate magnate, processing payments from several states every week, renting space in mirrored Century City office buildings for the sole purpose of governing his small empire.
Marc didn’t have access to this vision. He was just hoping to close the deal in Milpitas next week. He imagined it as the start of something big and beautiful.
THAT THE GOSSIPS MIGHT REJOICE
It was on the afternoon of the following day that Derrick beheld the work; he’d come by to tell Seth and Alex that this was it, that their autumn clubhouse was closed, that everybody had to keep moving. They weren’t used to having people in their lives who told them what to do, he knew. Not his problem. As he pedaled to the store from school, he tried out different ways of saying it: he didn’t want to be mean, but he needed to be sure Alex and Seth knew he meant it. Time to go.
The initial shock of entry gave way to total glee as the scope of Seth’s project revealed itself to Derrick’s near-speechless gaze. Hawley had left all the porn behind on purpose: forfeiting his cleaning deposit, money he could have used, for the pleasure of inconveniencing a landlord who’d raised the rent on him four times without any explanation during his brief tenancy. It’s a helpless feeling, paying rent to people like Evelyn Gates. You remember their names for years. But Hawley was beyond her reach now; the interior of the store, a cardboard-and-wire-frame nuisance boasting hundreds of practically useless videotapes and magazines plus seven heavy arcade screens in the back, had been his goodbye note.
This note now had several anonymous cosignatories, whose work both clarified and complicated the message. Think about it: If you owned a property, and you arrived on the premises one day to find that your tenant had just left everything behind, what might your assumption be? That they couldn’t afford to hire a moving company. That they were in a hurry. That they, who had to rent their storefront from somebody who owned dozens like it, lacked the means to clean up after themselves. Arriving at a vacated property to find old dishes still in the cabinets or nonreturnable stock still on the shelves was not unusual for Evelyn Gates; she had a couple of guys who helped her clean up when it happened.
Her guys would have their hands full when they got here. A sort of porn angel oversaw the great hall now, a seraph whose body, made up of disassembled cardboard VHS sleeves stapled together, hung by its hands from the ceiling. Its head slumped down over its chest; Angela had tried to help Seth and Alex find a way of keeping the head upright, but, after three efforts, they decided that the nodding angel had a unique sort of menace of its own. “It looks hurt,” was how Alex had put it.