shutters, feathery plastic palms, Barbiesque figures on tiny lounge chairs around a pool whose water was made of blue Saran Wrap. A toy boat was pulled up on a real sand beach.
'Joey,' Zack said at last, 'you got a lousy fucking attitude. I like that in a person. Shows spirit. But you have to make it work for you, not against you. I can train you or I can train the next hard-on down the line. So you want this fucking job, or what?'
Now it was Joey's turn to ponder. He hadn't expected to hear such blithe obscenities from Zack Davidson's well-formed lips. Then again, all of this was new to him, he had no idea what to expect. Stalling for time, he studied the miniature development, the tiny hedges, the teensy people. He found it spooky. Life sometimes seemed small enough without suggesting that you could boil it down, stick it under glass, and take the whole thing in in a single look.
'Yeah,' said Joey, 'I want the job, but I ain't gonna let the job make me crazy.'
'Good answer,' said Zack. 'So what you do, you put your craziness into the job. You see what I'm saying?'
Joey didn't.
'Best OPC we ever had,' Zack continued, 'was a total lunatic. His name was Whistling Freddie. Failed comedian. He'd stand on the corner on a washtub, whistling Mozart. When people stopped to listen, he'd start talking at them like the guy in the Fed Ex commercials. Then he'd go into impersonations, foreign accents, dick jokes. By the time ne got around to selling the tour, people were helpless. People can't say no when they're laughing. Remember when you were a kid, somebody tickled you and it took all your strength away? Same thing. And you know where Whistling Freddie is now? In the Virgin Islands, on top of a hill, on three acres of his very own.'
Zack ended with an emphatic nod, and it very faintly dawned on Joey that he had no idea if he should believe a single word. It was all so neat with Zack. You cursed, he cursed; suddenly you're on the same side. You mention craziness, he jumps in and makes it sound like craziness makes you rich. What if it was all bullshit? Then again, what if it wasn't? What if having a straight job meant that you unleashed your rotten attitude, gave vent to your personality defects, made an ass of yourself in public, and the upshot of all this legitimate embarrassment was that you ended up a substantial property owner with money in the bank?
'Look,' Zack resumed, 'this business is about one thing and one thing only. Human nature. It's all a question of reading people. Who's our best prospective customer? We have two. A dumb guy who thinks he's smart, and a cheapskate who thinks he's a sport. Why? Because the dumb guy who thinks he's smart figures, Hey, why should I spend a hundred fifty bucks a night in a hotel when I can spend thirty thousand on a time-share and save money? The cheap-skate who thinks he's a sport, he wants to let people know he's a player, he's in the market to buy, but the thought of a three-hundred-thousand-dollar house makes his bowels loosen. So O.K., how do we recognize these people?'
Joey just sat. He knew how to recognize a debtor who couldn't meet his vig payments, he knew how to recognize a contractor eager to kiss up to a union. He didn't know how to recognize a likely hostage for a time- share tour.
Zack bounced the eraser end of his pencil against his clipboard. 'I'll give it to you in two dirty words,' he said. 'Social class. What kind of tourist we get down here, Joey? On the one hand, we get a lot of southern, blue- collar, white-trash, flag-waving, Bible- thumping, football-crazy, redneck slobs. No value judgment implied. They drive down in the ol' RV and park near a pier so they don't have to walk too far to sit on a milk crate and go fishing all day. When you see 'em downtown, they always have a lot of writing on their clothes and there's usually something weird about their socks. These are not our people, Joey. This isn't snobbery, you understand. It's just that we want our owners to be happy, and folks like this are never truly content unless they're in a truck.
'At the other extreme,' Zack continued, 'we get a few very rich people down here. New Yorkers. Bostonians. People who own large pieces of downtown Toronto. They've already done St. Barth's, Mustique bores them, now they're slumming closer to home. They wear pastels. They weigh, on average, sixty pounds less than the poor people. The women are flat-chested, the men have no behinds, but they look good in their clothes. These are not our customers either. The rich are squeamish about time-sharing. It nauseates them to think, the week before, someone with less money was sitting on their toilet.
'No,' said Zack, standing up next to the Parrot Beach model and gazing down like a god at a fresh- imagined world, 'our buyer is somewhere in between. We want the guy who's like fifty-five, on his second or third wife. He's a dry cleaner, a sales manager, he's making like sixty, seventy grand, and he thinks he's upper crust because he has expensive golf clubs and a Ralph Lauren shirt. He acts like he doesn't give a shit about the gifts you get for taking the tour, but if you look closely, you can see him toting it up: meal voucher, forty dollars; passes to the Treasure Museum-'
'Treasure Museum?' Joey cut in.
'Yeah, the Clem Sanders Treasure Museum. Clem's a salvor. Fucking rich by now-he's one of the partners in the property. Anyway, the passes are worth twelve bucks, so that makes fifty-two. Tour takes two hours, that works out to twenty-six bucks an hour: Is my time worth more or less than twenty-six bucks an hour? That's our boy, Joey. He's got some money in the bank, he'll go the extra twenty dollars a week to rent a T-Bird instead of a compact, but he can't stop wondering if his life is worth twenty-six bucks an hour. You get it?'
Joey sat there. He was dazed. He wasn't sure if he got it or not. It seemed to him that only when he entered the Parrot Beach office had he truly left Queens. Before that, he was carrying his neighborhood around with him, as if he had taken the little stash of things he knew about and packed it in the car along with his black loafers and alpaca cardigans. Now all of a sudden he'd been plunked down in a vast new borough, the neighborhood of American salesmanship. It was a different place.
'So you gonna, like, try me out?' The question was a little weak, almost as if Joey was hoping Zack would say no.
'No tryout, Joey. You want the job, you got the job. Around here it's sink or swim. You fuck up, we won't have to fire you. You'll make no money, feel like a horse's ass, get disgusted with the whole thing, and stop showing up. Here.' Zack bent down, opened a desk drawer, and threw a pink shirt at Joey. 'This is what you wear.'
He caught the shirt by reflex, but then looked down at it as though it were a thing unclean. It was the color of cotton candy and had the same ribbed cuffs that looked so annoyingly perfect on Zack Davidson's well-tanned and lightly freckled arms. 'Shit,' he said, 'I gotta dress up like some wimpy-looking prissy-ass WASP?' Then it occurred to him that maybe he'd gotten a little too personal. 'No offense.'
'What offense?' said Zack, resuming his chair and leaning it back on its hind legs. 'You think I'm a WASP? That's a crack-up. I'm a Jew, man, Litvak trash from Newark, New Jersey, the lowest of the low. They fucked our name up at Ellis Island. Should've been Davidovich, something like that. But Joey, remember. Social class. Appearances. Reading people. Study up, my friend. It's gonna be the key to your success in this business.'
— 13 -
Getting Sal Giordano on the telephone was not a simple process. He was paranoid about wiretaps and refused to have a phone at his apartment. You could leave a coded message for him at Perretti's luncheonette on Astoria Boulevard, and if you got lucky he might even be there when you called. But he wouldn't actually talk on the old rotary pay phone in the green- painted alcove at the end of Perretti's counter, because that phone could be tapped as well. The most Sal would do was say hello, give a few one-word answers, and arrange a conversation on a different phone. To be safe, however, this other phone had to be away from the immediate neighborhood and couldn't be used too often. This meant there had to be several choices. So Sal had to figure out which phone he wanted to use that day, how long it would take him to reach it, given traffic and weather, and then hope the box hadn't been vandalized by the time he got there. Crime paid, but convenient it was not.
On an afternoon toward the middle of February, after trying morning and evening, from home and from downtown, for several days, Joey finally managed to connect with his old friend. 'Sal!'
'Joey!' said the gruff, familiar voice. 'Where are you, man?'
'Key West, like I said I would be.' For Sal, the question had been first and foremost a part of his routine
