We were in his beat-up Celica, driving back from San Jose, from a seminar starring his company’s founder, Bill Gouldd. The guy had given himself an extra d based on the advice of a spiritual guru who had deemed his name to be “out of balance.”
When this Bill character had appeared on the stage of the auditorium, the crowd went apeshit, hollering and hooting. Gave him a standing ovation before he even said a word. I might’ve been the only one not on their feet. Double D’s face looked meaty, like he could’ve been a baseball catcher. He began pointing at audience members as if he was at a school rally. He wore two Rolexes, one on each wrist.
I tried not to listen too carefully to what the guy was saying, scared he was some sort of hypnotist. “Who believes they deserve to be happier?” he asked the crowd, and these fools shot their hands up with the quickness, practically leapt out of their seats with the enthusiasm of kindergarteners. Double D had them trained, Pavlovian-style. My brother was sitting on the edge of his seat ready for the next dumbass question.
I’d been suckered here, at least that’s what I wanted my brother to think. He’d offered to pick me up from my girlfriend’s apartment if I came with him to the Equinox meeting. She lived in the Tenderloin, overrun with addicts, and that night Goh Goh might’ve thought I was trying to avoid TL’s pissy sidewalks, but that’s not why I took him up on his offer. I wanted to see his operation, wanted him to attempt to recruit me. I was the type to open the door for Jehovah Witnesses. I liked the attention.
“You can be a manager,” Goh Goh said on the way back home.
“Get your friends on board. Everybody needs water.”
“When you start actually getting paid, I’ll think about it.”
My brother had spent weeks working for Equinox but had yet to turn a profit, though he was flying around the country for seminars that charged fees in the hundreds. He subscribed to magazines for the first time: Men’s Journal, Esquire, GQ. When I asked him what was the point if he never bothered to read them, he explained, “It’s not about reading them. It’s about believing you are the kind of guy who would read them.” During the seminar, I heard this attitude summed up in the Equinox expression: “Fake it till you make it.”
My brother had an office, but he had to rent it from the company. Had to pay for the landline too. And to attain the title of manager, he had to fork over five grand. In return, he received a cut of the commissions earned by his recruits, kind of like a pimp. But in that sense, Goh Goh, who had himself been recruited, was also a hoe. The one at the top pimping them all was Double D.
Besides a smart aleck remark now and then, I didn’t push my pyramid scheme theory on my brother. I told my sister, though. We’d scoff at our brother in private, but we were reluctant to discourage him. Our asshole brother was now Mr. Enthusiastic. He dressed in suits and ties, carried around a leather clipboard, smiling all the damn time, even when he was talking about the poisons in tap water. How could I be mad at my brother for smiling? The dude believed he was on the brink of a fortune. He promised he’d buy our mom her own house. That kind of positivity couldn’t be all bad.
Boxes of products began to pile up in the hallway. Not just water filters, but other Equinox goodies including various bottles of pills, the labels of which all featured an image of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Some pills were for sleeping. Others were diet pills. Then there were a few that seemed to have the same purpose: “Stress,” “Balance,” “Serenity.” One box was filled with bottles of an herbal tonic, and the picture on the bottle was a goofy-looking dragon, the first cross-eyed one I’d ever seen. The name of the tonic, printed in chop-suey font: Emperor’s Chi. I was surprised they didn’t slap on the label some Chinese guy in a rice hat for the full Oriental effect.
Goh Goh had someone lined up to buy a bulk of these products, perhaps one of his recruits, but when the woman balked at the purchase, and he was unable to dump the products on anyone else, my brother finally accepted defeat and put down the clipboard. He tried to sleep away the ensuing months. Moped around in his pj’s twenty-four seven.
I couldn’t stop clowning my brother about his failure. The junk in the hallway made it impossible to forget. My mom was the only one to use anything from the boxes. She’d drink the Emperor’s Chi. Said we all should. She and my brother had in their own way patched things up, which is to say they (we) pretended like nothing had ever happened between them, that I had not called the cops on my brother for punching my mother. I saw the changes, though, at least in my mother. She didn’t put her hands on Goh Goh anymore, not even for a hug.
The only time I remember Goh Goh leaving the house during that time was for me. I’d started taking kung fu classes way out in the avenues, not far from Ocean Beach, and since my brother wasn’t doing shit, my mom would make him pick me up at night.
Martial arts wasn’t something I would’ve done in high school. Neither was track, but my first semester at City, I tried out for it. Only lasted a few practices. The stair workouts on the bleachers kicked my ass. The sports I did play
