Winners (9 page)

Rich bows his head in exaggerated shame. “I wish. I haven’t, it’s been forever. Depressing. At least at Oracle I used to get out at lunch sometimes and run.”

“I remember. That was a beautiful court.”

“The Oracle complex is amazing,” Sloan pitches in. His voice is always too loud, as if permanently tuned for a speaker phone. “You know how much Larry E. sank into that?”

“Shane used to come down to visit Lou, played with me a couple times. You shoulda seen it. He destroyed everyone out there. My boss got so mad at you that day, I thought you were going to get me fired.”

“Glanville played basketball?” Sloan laughs.

“Yeah, can you imagine? Anyway, Shane put him in his place.”

“What did you do?”

“We won, I guess.”

“No, you beat him. You beat him like a dog. And let him know about it.”

“I blocked his shot, said something, you know, part of the game.”

“Not down there it wasn’t. I don’t know what you said, but he looked like you’d slapped him. Glanville says something back to Shane and the next thing Shane scores like five in a row. It was awesome.”

You don’t work here, that’s not how we do things, you don’t belong here, do you. That’s what the guy had said. Shane smiles. He can pretend he doesn’t remember but he remembers every moment. “The dangers of corporate ball.” He used to imagine going back down there with a Firehouse all-star team. Imagine him and his big-mouth brother with Sam and D-One and Alex, just tearing it up on the Oracle court. Jo Jo and Darius, imagine.

“Seems like a long time ago,” Rich says.

“Five years.”

“Five years. A different world. You’re still playing though.”

“I’ve been hurt.”

“Oh, that’s right. It was your knee?”

“Foot.”

Rich nods. How can they not know? How can Lou spend hour after hour and day after day with them and not leak something of their lives? He should know by now that in the halls of Menlo Park, the husband barely exists. Separation of job and home.

“I don’t think I’ve broke a sweat since then. Ridiculous.”

“You guys fucking work too much,” Shane says. Being close to Sloan makes him want to swear.

“Yeah,” Sloan says, smiling. “Work work play work what it’s all about, right now.” He sounds proud. “But not for long.”

A small hand touches Shane’s back. “Hey everybody,” Lou says, eyeing Rich and Sloan with theatrical suspicion. “Tell me you’re not talking about work.” She gives Shane the look now. “Or basketball.”

They all nod together, one big herd of nodding heads. “So where you been?” Sloan grins in anticipation, knowing that Lou will have something for them.

“Oh, chatting with our celebrity friend over there.” The man in question is standing alone near the doorway, waiting to be recognized again. He’s short and blond with lots of chin and lash and brow.

“Ah. How does a writer get on the cover of Wired?”

“Shameless self-promotion,” Lou says. “He is a decent writer. He just writes about stupid things.” Shane examines the man more carefully. Reading and writing are Lou’s domain, and she doesn’t give out “decent” easily. Once she even said it: maybe if things work out, that’s what I’d like to do. He’s pictured her sitting at a desk by the window, scribbling cleverly in a Holstein composition book when he comes home sooty at night.

“Come on, Lou,” Sloan says, “you weren’t nice to him were you?”

“Maybe. Can he help it that he’s so vain and short and has a ridiculous name?”

“Ah, you’re so much more fun when you’re petty.”

“I’m never petty. I’m vindictive and jealous and cruel.”

“Do you think he’s good-looking?”

“Sure. In that yellow Lab mated with a frat boy kinda way. A friend of mine slept with him. Apparently he’s uninteresting in bed.” They all laugh, Lou leading the way, putting her hand on Shane’s arm for support. She likes to touch people when she laughs, and he wonders how many arms she’s already touched tonight. When you hear Lou laugh for the first time you want to make her laugh again. Someone across the room is waving to her, pulling her over with a beckoning hand.

“Speaking of vain and cruel,” Sloan says, “we should go talk to the Quixo mafia.” Lou winces slightly, glancing at Shane.

“Food,” he says, “I’ll catch up.” Lou kisses him quickly and links arms with Sloan and Rich to ford the room. He watches them arrive, joining an attentive crescent of men who lean toward Lou as if trying to catch her scent. Her eyes slide back and forth between her listeners, the fine expressive lines in her forehead forming and disappearing. Her laugh bursts and breaks from her and chases itself around the room, and then the men are laughing too, swept away by her sound. She is their living proof that they’re all having a good time. Shane puts his head down and heads in an opposite direction, moving through the difficult crowd.

It is tough going. He keeps leaning to one side, contorting to make himself fit, but when one of the oncomers doesn’t pay enough attention or adequately compromise, Shane holds his ground and gives the guy a good solid shoulder that spins the slender youth half around. The guy looks as shocked as if someone shoved a pistol in his mouth. He keeps his glass but the drink spills on sleeve and pants.

“Sorry.” Shane shrugs, and looks him in the eye so the guy can say something now if he wants. But whatever the guy sees in Shane’s face shuts him up. Shane nods and tries not to smile as he moves past him through new space to food. How long would these people last in the projects? How long on the wood floors of the Potrero Rec Center court? What a weird fucking day. Food, Shane thinks, and then I’m getting genuinely drunk.

What he thought was a full food table turns out to be covered entirely with cheese, more cheese than he’s ever seen in one place. Each wedge has been laid out carefully on pale pink plates, but most by now have been long gouged and smeared by silver rounded knives. Little folded cardboard headstones sit smug behind the plates, each toting descriptions written carefully in gourmet-shop calligraphy. He reads a little bit. The cheese is global. He tries a piece of Spanish while a well-dressed man beside him bends down and sniffs deeply at a German. The man tastes it, shakes his head, looks at him. “That cheese,” the man says, “that cheese tastes like ass.” He looks at Shane as if they know each other. “And I don’t mean that in a good way.”

“No. I’d guess not.”

There is something familiar about him: a sort of big guy, broad in the shoulders and snug in his pale green short sleeves with a big beautiful gold and lapis lazuli watch weighing down his wrist. The man nods at Shane as if together they’ve come to some serious conclusions.

“That one’s not bad.” Shane points to the Spanish.

“Yeah? I’m not big into cheese. Are you sober?” the man asks.

“Very.”

“You really popped that guy.”

“I guess so.”

The man smiles. A waiter passes nearby with a tray of someone else’s drinks and the cheese sniffer steps into his path and plucks a couple off without a word. The waiter stares at him, opens his mouth as if about to say something but then thinks better of it and disappears. The cheese man hands Shane the drink. It’s clear, at least, and odorless, a likely vodka tonic.

“Right,” the man says. “Do you smoke?” He rubs his hands together slowly.

“Not mostly.”

“Well, shit,” the man says. “Step out with me for a sec.” He slides back from the table and opens a door with a metal sign on it: alarm will sound do not open. Nothing happens. The door gives way to a narrow service alley, and over the blinking sounds of the party Shane hears cars, the street. The man steps out and holds the door, looking at him evenly, almost seriously. It’s that look of action and reaction they give each other on the court when no one has to say anything. Just: here we are, you know what to do.

The alley is one of the cleanest he’s ever been in, the concrete darkened by a recent hosing down. Topped by juiced and empty orange peels, two wheeled and plastic trashbins sit happily overflowing, their square lids propped ajar like the mouth of a hungry baby bird. Down the alley back on Mission Street, he can make out the lively sidewalk with its pedestrians sliced into tiny pieces by a metal lattice gate.

“You were at the gym today,” the man says.

Shane stares at him. “I guess I was.”

“Our gym with the ridiculous name. Yeah, I saw you up front talking with that Media Matrix engineer. You just join?”

Shane remembers the man, now, in the Paragon entryway, slipping sideways between Shane and Mario, the watch sparkling on his wrist. “No. I.” He shakes his head, not knowing what to say. “I play basketball,” he says.

Fulton nods approvingly, as if that explains something. “This place is such a town sometimes.”

“You’ve got a good memory, though.”

“Well,” the man says, smiling slyly, “you went to Cal, right? That’s why I noticed, ’cause I thought I recognized you. Must have been a couple years ahead of you, but I dated a friend of yours, Andrea Ross?”

“Andrea.” He sees a tall athletic girl with short yellow hair. “Sure.”

The man keeps smiling, enjoying Shane’s absolute surprise. “I never forget people,” he explains. “It’s my only talent. There’s a lot of Cal guys down at that gym. What ever happened to Andrea, anyway?”

“I don’t know. I lost touch with everyone.”

“That sounds nice,” the man says. He watches Shane for another moment and then shrugs, removing a loose cigarette from his breast pocket where it has been slightly flattened by the tight fit of the shirt against his chest. “And now we’re in this shit, huh. You want to get high?”

“No. Not really.” Shane can see it’s a joint now, fat and barely wrinkled, twisted snugly at both ends.

“Please.”

“I try to commit my energies to abusing alcohol.”

“Noble.” The man licks his finger and wets the sides of the joint and lights it, the flame glinting off the bright yellow gold of his watch. “Man, you really popped that guy,” he says, smiling in fond recollection. “So great. Little dickhead. Bit more of that, and I’d feel proud of this party.”

“This your party?”

“Not really. Yeah.” He passes the joint to Shane. It is an enormous piece of work. “Please,” he says again, more kindly this time. “If you make me smoke that thing alone, it’s going to swallow my brain like fuckin’ Jonah.”

Shane takes the joint and pulls on it politely, hands it back. It’s been a while.

“Thank you,” the man says.

“Sure.”

“I love dope. It’s nostalgic. Remember the guys who used to sell it at Cal, that guy, you know him, Randy?” He takes another long hit and then closes his eyes, slowly, like a Lewis Carroll bug. “Randy. I thought that was profitable. And now look at all this.” He waves his hand to include everything around them, a wave that penetrates walls, sweeps through the building and the alley, to the streets and the city and the nation beyond. He falls quiet for a moment, assessing his self-proclaimed domain.

“You know, dope dealers could be quite good, actually. Distribution deals, bundling, packaging. Traffic. Job market gets any tighter, that’d be one place to look. Night club promoters too. Nonprofit fund raisers. There’s a whole alternate talent pool that will have to be tapped. The bright-eyed coeds and sell-out journalists and MBAs are running out. And besides, you look at these kids, you know they’re only going to get you so far. Most of them have the imagination of a housefly.”

“I guess.”

“Dead housefly. You know what I’m talking about. You look at all these loaded people, all over the place, and nine out of ten are totally unimaginative cheap wads. They go out and buy their houses or cars or geeky ass tech toys. Design their super sailboats. Expensive bottles of wine, good dinners. But not nearly enough whores.” He shakes his head. “Or explosives. This town should be having firework displays every Friday. Tuesday and Friday. Parades, motorcades. Sword swallowers and naked dancers in the streets. They’re all a bunch of geeks or cheap wads. The most they can think of is some huge new server or an extra wing for their house in Atherton or a tidy little fête like this. People should be flying helicopters to work. Firing guns in the air. Where’s the deep-down carnival? Most these people too scared and empty to do shit.” He looks at Shane carefully. “You’re not in it, are you.”

“The Internet thing?” Shane is starting to float a little bit, feeling happy.

He laughs. “Yes.”

“No.”

He nods. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s damn good. Well I’m with these people all day every day and I just think that if you’re going to be fabulously wealthy you either have to do goody good or despicable bad. Both, preferably. But don’t fuck around in this middle ground. And whatever you do, you can’t be cheap about it. I went out with these guys the other day,” he says, leaning comfortably against the brick wall, “none of them with an excuse, every one of them has real worth. We’re swapping rounds, and getting some weird drinks, you know, something they really got to make, and the bar we’re in, a drink costs eight nine bucks or something. So the rounds are like thirty-something each and these guys are leaving five-dollar tips. I mean, that’s ridiculous. They’re supposed to be starting bizarre philanthropic cults and buying emeralds for their mistresses. It’s like these people don’t even fucking know, it’s Vegas out here, you got to tip your luck. You got to slaughter goats and virgins.” He jabs a finger at the closed alley door, the invisible party beyond. “Got no respect for luck, the right place and time. No, they’re meeting monthly with their personal finance managers and reading cautionary tales about sudden wealth syndrome, planning on writing novels and figure painting or learning to play the lute. And behaving like that’s a normal reasonable thing to be doing at twenty-four, thirty. It’s normal, of course, because they, they are special. They’re special? What a bunch of shit. I mean, you and me go back in there, look around, are we seeing something special? Are these the Keplers and DaVincis in there? No, they have a few ideas, not terribly good ones, they’re willing to work. A college degree, San Francisco area code, who you know, the moment, and luck. They got people in Romania ten times smarter than us driving taxicabs. Engineers, rocket scientists scrubbing toilets, taking out the trash in four languages. It’s fucking embarrassing. So finally I tell one of these guys he’s a sick, cheap, and stupid bastard.”