BARON IN VEGAS - PART 1
Illustration by Milano Chow |
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Vice: When did you start writing?
Sam: Well like every other sad-sack teenager, I had a diary. It wasn’t really self-conscious though. It was pretty clinical. But there was an urge there.
Were there other writers in your family?
No. My dad was a painter. Well, he was really a banker, but he had this lost 70s period where he’d get stoned in the attic and paint and read Foreign Affairs.
That’s awesome.
Yeah.
When was the first time you were published?
I got a story in Open City in 2001. I was always quietly working on fiction, but you really have to put in the hours. At the same time, if you don’t have another life—particularly when you’re in your 20s—you won’t have a lot to write about. |
 aron came out of the elevator holding the guitar. There was a white door in a white wall, a small red light with a button underneath. He pressed the button. A camera swiveled an inch above him. A voice asked him who he was.
“Baron,” he said.
The door buzzed.
He stepped into an over-air-conditioned, windowless waiting room. A round-faced woman with green-streaked black hair sat at a desk covered with potted plants. She wore a new and oversize Ramones t-shirt. She glanced up at him with big, sparkling black eyes. “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing toward a white sofa.
Baron sat down with the guitar. He stared at the Billboard magazines fanned out on the glass table. He did not look up again at the girl. He came from brooding, thickset people, and he did not look at women much and when he looked down from seeing a pretty woman he did not usually imagine her image. But the receptionist had tiny, bleached Tic-Tac teeth, teeth like Beth’s. Beth had a pretty, sharp wedge of a face and beady little teeth like peas if peas could be white. She was tall and hard-lined and so white as to seem albino. Escorting people to their tables—her white hair done up in buns on either side of her head, her mouth a thick red slash of lipstick—she had an almost zombie-like disassociation. Initially, he took this to be drollness, but more and more he’d suspected it was dumbness. Her face was so incurious—the only softening a red smear in her cheeks when she’d tire after a rush.
It was only a small kitchen thing. They’d smoked together on breaks, drank at the bar down the block with the others after their shift. Once they’d woken up next to each other, and this had repeated itself a few times and he could not get over how far she could spread her long white legs. She would lay back as he crawled up over her. She would hold his head in both hands, like a barber would, and look right at him. He could not get over this in some fundamental way. He came from ugly people.
There was a buzzing.
He looked up. A frosted Plexiglass door slid open, seemingly of its own volition. There was a hallway, and he heard a voice, but no one came through.
The receptionist did not look up.
Baron took a Billboard and flipped through the photos. Artists in tuxedos or tight shimmering gowns, holding gold records or awards, looking very happy with their careers, with the people in the trade, and he looked down at Tim’s battered black guitar case and saw how lost in time Tim was. Tim on the cover of his one record, his face slanted down with a kind of wincing indifference, sitting on the decrepit wooden steps of an unseen house, dead leaves at his feet.
A man was standing over him. He wore a headset and there was a small black box attached to his belt. He cupped a hand over the salamander-like receiver at his mouth. “I’m immensely sorry about this,” he whispered assuredly, “I know you’ve come a long way, but I’ve got a call I’ve got to stay on right now.”
Baron didn’t say a word, but the man held up a finger, prompting him to stay quiet.
Baron, used to brusqueness in kitchens, stared indifferently.
“Great,” he said, dropping his hand off the receiver and walking away. “OK…”
Baron did not know if the man was still talking to him. They hadn’t actually had a conversation, and he couldn’t tell until the man had disappeared back behind the frosted door.
Baron had sent Beth a postcard about coming here. “Coincidentally…”
He’d left her a few messages. He’d arrived this morning and hadn’t been able to help some kind of looking around. He’d gone to a coffee shop in her neighborhood. Had they run into each other there, he imagined there would be a long, uneasy moment, and he’d had no idea how he’d explain himself out of that moment. But he’d stayed in the coffee shop two hours. Got up and got back in line, ordered a second and then a third coffee. He’d even read USA Today. He’d finally moved to an outside table as a kind of self-negotiated preliminary to leaving. He saw a few pretty girls making their way to and from their cars, tank tops and showy hips out of low-slung jeans, but he’d been insolent about them because he might be seeing Beth.
But there was no sign of her, of course, and the only sign of being in the desert, of being where she lived, was a small green lizard against the silver umbrella pole, its stomach expanding and contracting in some kind of rigor-mortis terror.
He looked down at the black guitar case, flabby with wear and duct-taped along the spine. He gripped the handle. Maybe he shouldn’t be selling his uncle’s guitar. It was all he’d gotten in the will. It was all he possessed of any value. But selling the guitar brought him here, where Beth was. He was selling the guitar for a last-chance excuse of contact, a vain improbability of pressing his fingers one more time down on her stretched-out legs, of pressing on as to what, if anything, was behind Beth’s matter-of-fact and almost naive assumption of this posture.
There was something silvery and fleeting about Beth, impossible to connect to his warm hand on the plump curve of her thigh and the rough-hewn heat of her crotch. He was never able to connect the two. She’d never allowed it.
He went to sleep so many nights with the feel of the softness between the hardness of her knees and the hardness of her hips. He woke up most mornings with the feel of this place. It was troublesome, not least because he was aging. Forty coming and his stomach sandbagging and the state of the stomach was the symbol of aging and capability to so many female eyes. He knew the sharp eyes proximity brings, but Beth’s physical indifference to his messy physique was so rare, another good-looking girl was not close to an immediate possibility.
There was the buzzing again.
“Suze,” the man—headsetless—said from the door, “maybe you could get Tim’s nephew here some coffee. Or tea. Herbal tea, maybe. Would he like some herbal tea?”
“I’ll ask him,” Suze said.
CONTINUED:
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Anonymous, on Nov 16, 2008 wrote:
Baron seems strangely articulate for a cook | | |
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