The Leading Indicators (10 page)

After being laid off from hardware sales, Tom saw an online ad for what seemed like white-collar positions at the convention center. Perhaps a hundred men and women started queuing up at dawn for interviews for a few temporary positions—men in expensive suits and women who'd taken the subway there wearing sneakers but with elegant pumps in their bags. Each held briefcases stuffed with résumés and letters of recommendation. Then there were no interviews. The first five in the line simply were hired and the rest sent away without being spoken to. Tom had arrived while it was still dark, and so was hired.

“Nobody's set up the booth for Bayliner,” Tom told a steward. “That was supposed to be completed two days ago. The boat show opens tomorrow.”

“Yesterday we moved a thousand chairs; that's all I can manage with just forty men,” the steward said. “You want a faster pace, increase hiring.” He smoked indoors, although the center was no-smoking.

“A dozen high-school kids could have moved those chairs and done it in half the time,” Tom said. “The booths should be ready. The customers should get what they pay for.”

“You are creating an unwelcoming workplace environment,” the steward replied, wheeled, and walked away.

The steward was stalling until three
P.M.
, when his crew could begin to collect overtime. Tom had to go mollify Bayliner once again. Three tractor-trailer trucks hauling the company's cuddies and cabin cruisers were parked outside the center, waiting for the retractable wall to open so the cargo could be brought in. The stewards kept saying it was “unsafe” to open the wall unless workers got United Nations Day as a paid holiday.

The annual boat show was going ahead despite the economy, $150,000 cabin cruisers everywhere you looked. This year's star was a $2 million Dominator 64 with three cabins, three heads, a bunk area for crew members and a gas grill for seagoing cookouts. Recreational boats seemed a strange market sector to be promoting at the trough of a recession. But if the boat show were canceled because of the economy, that wouldn't send much of a message. The annual show provided two weeks of work for hundreds of people, including emcees, ushers and models who lounged in swimsuits at the exhibits; bikini models put men in the mood to spend. Almost all fancy boats are purchased by men. Something about the combination of engineering, impracticality, one-upmanship and babe-appeal fantasy made the luxury boat a particularly male space.

Just two generations ago, many families didn't own a car. Now America boasted 14 million registered private recreational boats, many with mast radar.

Tom went to find the woman in charge of the Bayliner exhibit. He knew she'd be steamed; she had to hire rent-a-cops to sit outside overnight with her fancy boats that weren't being allowed in. He'd already gotten an earful from her about how nothing like this ever happened at the Fort Lauderdale or San Diego shows and her firm wouldn't be back. Tom really needed to placate her.

The Facilitator contracts were show-to-show, which meant being ritually fired as each show concluded. Getting fired every couple of weeks—what could be more current? Tom needed the Bayliner woman to say something nice about him so he'd be rehired for the hunting convention coming up the following month. That was expected to be a media event: the sponsors were going to haul in soil and trees, let some deer loose in an enclosure and raffle off the chance to shoot them. If there were too many complaints from the current exhibitors, the politically protected types in the executive suite were sure to blame the Facilitators and bring in new staff who would make learning-experience errors, then be fired.

Should I call her by her first name?
Tom was thinking as he looked for the Bayliner woman. His social class was the same as hers. An unskilled worker would be expected to address her by her last name, while someone who is white-collar would speak less formally. The way a person announces another name's may cue social class; addressing a physician as “Bob” instead of “Dr. Martindale” conveys your status as roughly the same as his. Tom wondered whether calling the Bayliner woman Amanda would communicate in a single word,
I, too, was once an executive on Easy Street, and you could end up like me amazingly fast
. Then she would say something nice about him rather than complain.

But what were the odds that, under any circumstances, a contemporary American would pass on the chance to complain?

There were boxes, pieces of sets and half-completed audiovisual gear in the Bayliner exhibit area. But no Amanda and, sadly for Tom, no models previewing their bikinis. There was one man working alone, whom Tom did not recognize. The man was lying on his back, assembling some stage pieces. He didn't wear one of the CIA-style photo-and-bar-code IDs found on convention-center personnel.

“Who are you?” Tom asked simply.

The man looked around. “She told me not to let anyone see me,” he said.

He wasn't trying to take anything—rather, was putting things together. As far as Tom knew, felonious assembly is not a crime.

“Did the Bayliner woman hire you?”

“Yeah. Temp agency sent me and a couple other guys to babysit her fancy boats last night. Gave us these.” He indicated a navy windbreaker, which said
EVENT STAFF
in big yellow letters on the back. It was designed to resemble an FBI field windbreaker, as if handing these to untrained temps turned them into a security force to be feared. Maybe criminals are afraid of the words “Event Staff.”

So the Bayliner woman hadn't hired rent-a-cops as she claimed—that did sound pricey. Rather, she brought in minimum-wage guys armed with windbreakers. Tom wondered if she would send the convention center a false invoice claiming a major expense for rent-a-cops.

“When she showed up this morning, she offered me a hundred bucks to assemble this stage and wire the loudspeakers,” the man continued. “She was going off about I shouldn't let anyone see what I was doing. Why does she care if anybody sees?”

Exhibitors weren't allowed to bring in their own laborers; everything had to go through channels. There would be a huge dustup if this was noticed. Hours would be spent yelling about a matter that could have been resolved in minutes, if the people in the unaccountable positions weren't in need of something to get upset about.

“I'll help you,” Tom said. He grabbed some tools. When Tom had to lean all the way forward to lift a heavy part, compressing his stomach and chest, for a moment he felt without breath.

“Thanks, pal. You're all right. Kevin.”

“Tom.”

Kevin Parquet hadn't done a masterful job with his life. In youth leagues, then in high school, he had been a basketball and baseball star, his parents filling much of a den with sports trophies he'd won by age fifteen. Everyone wanted to be his friend. Homework, studying—if you're good, the college will just change your grades, that's what somebody told him at a basketball camp. He had been five-foot-ten at age ten but was still five-foot-ten at age eighteen. Early-maturity boys grow up thinking they will be sports stars, but late-maturity boys dominate the top levels of athletics. Nobody tells that to the early-maturity boys, who enjoy a few young years living an illusion of fame to come, and then, if they never studied in high school, can't get regular admission to college.

“Has he started shaving yet?” is one of the first questions college recruiters ask about teen male prospects. The answer they want to hear is no; that means late maturity, more size and more strength on the way. The equation is different for teen female athletes, since girls develop physically so much faster than boys. At a high-school freshman dance, half the girls will look like they belong in porn videos, while half the boys will look like they should be home playing with LEGOs. The boys who are baby-faced are the ones who will have Greek-god physiques in their early twenties. Kevin started shaving at age fourteen. He was excited, thinking it meant he had loads of testosterone; actually it was a bad sign about his recruiting chances. As a senior he received no college offers, and his GPA made even community college a dicey proposition.

His father had a small contracting firm that replaced roofs on houses. Kevin worked there for a few years, but when his father died, the company folded—the men who went up on the roofs would listen to Kevin's father, but not to him. Speeding and DUI tickets started Kevin on a cycle of decline: soon a big chunk of his sporadic income went to fines and sky-high auto insurance. Sometimes people become mired in the lower class because much of what they earn arrives already spoken for, to be spent on past mistakes.

Kevin's first wife fell ill and died young, like women did in nineteenth-century novels. Don't assume this does not happen anymore. Kevin soon married again, looking to put his life back on course. But it was an impulse union to a woman he barely knew, who got excited when she heard Kevin's father had owned a company, and from this assumed Kevin had money hidden somewhere. The second wife left for another man and filed a false charge of battery against Kevin, believing that would force Kevin to give her hush money to drop the accusation. His ex began calling him in the middle of the night, drunk, demanding to know where her “settlement” was. Kevin got the impression the ex and her new beau spent a lot of time strategizing about how to wring money from him.

Things went downhill from there: odd jobs, disturbing the peace. His previous night's work babysitting boats, and now the cash for setting up the exhibit, would put nearly two hundred dollars in Kevin's pocket, the most that had been there in some time. It would all be gone by midnight.

Tom realized there was alcohol on Kevin's breath, though it was midmorning. Close-up, he could see aging lines on Kevin's face—creases that made his skin appear to be a kind of fabric, though he was only in his late thirties. People who went to good colleges and got good jobs groused all the time about stress but seemed to age less than those who didn't. This seemed likely to continue to be the case as long as the good jobs lasted, anyway.

 

Chapter 7

June 2009

General Motors enters bankruptcy.

35,000-year-old flute unearthed in a Swabian cave.

National debt: $12 trillion.

S
eated at the apartment's kitchen table, Margo felt confined. The table was too big for the available area: to sit she had to push it away then pull it back, repeating the process to stand. She had papers spread in front of her, the majority of them bills and invoices. The cell phone was open, set to speaker, playing excruciating elevator music: a saccharine version of “She Loves Me” flowed into a worse orchestral of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Margo was speaking into the landline phone while listening for something on the cell phone:

“Then the guidance counselor told me Caroline has not turned in homework for a month. She was watching the mailbox for the warning letter; she ripped it up. I'm at my wit's end, how will she get into college? She will be up against these brainiac kids with great SATs and awards for attending oboe recitals in Copenhagen. She'll never get into a good college with a D on her transcript. And her only activity is the pop-star-impersonators club.”

The cell phone made an electronic squelch. Margo said into the regular phone, “Damn, I was just disconnected on the other line. Hold on a second while I redial.”

The townhouse, lost with disturbing speed, seemed a dim memory though they'd left only two months before. They fell behind on the mortgage payments, despite such emergency measures as selling the $5,000 cherry armoire for $380. Behind on the mortgage—that didn't seem like a huge problem; Washington politicians were practically offering prizes for falling behind on a mortgage. But Tom and Margo had bought into the complex without fully comprehending that the homeowners' association held a lien for dues. Tom skipped the association-dues payment, thinking he'd make it up later, and the homeowners' association immediately filed for foreclosure. Later he learned the “association,” owned by a Florida investor, had foreclosed on the townhome they purchased, then resold it at a profit, four times in the past two years. Tom was furious at himself for missing such a detail, something he'd never done before—for making the sort of mistake made by people who do their grocery shopping at 7-Eleven.

“Sorry,” Margo said into the landline after redialing the cell. “Twenty-six minutes on hold and now I have to go through the voice prompts all over. I was calling the cable company to disconnect. Press one to go on hold; press two to be disconnected; press three to hear these options again. If you're buying something they put you right through. If you're trying to cancel they never pick up and I'm sure the machine is programmed to ‘accidentally' disconnect. These deals that say ‘cancel at any time,' you can't cancel because you can't get through.”

The apartment building was a set of doors into lives about which Margo knew little. She always hurried through the halls to reach her place and get in before running into other tenants, and noted other tenants seemed to do the same. They did not want to have to get to know the sort of people who would live in the sort of building where they lived. Margo imagined many tenants told themselves, “I don't belong in a building like this.” If you got to know the other tenants, then it was like you belonged.

The window looked out onto a warehouse parking lot, where bright anticrime lights shined the whole night long. Tom had gotten frustrated trying to hang blinds correctly, and they couldn't pay a handyman. So for the moment, towels held by pushpin tacks were the solution when it was time to make the apartment dark enough for sleeping. The old house had window treatments selected by a decorating consultant. Margo's college dorm room had proper blinds. Her girlhood bedroom had blinds, embroidered draperies, and blackout curtains for sleeping late on weekends. This apartment had towels held in place by tacks.