Zodiac

5

BARTHOLOMEW WAS LURKING in his van in front of GEE when I got back. He started leaning on the horn as soon as he spotted me climbing up out of the T. All around the square, defense contractors flocked to their metallized windows to see if their BMWs were being violated, then drifted back, unable to localize the sound. I sauntered on purpose, pretended to ignore him, climbed the stairs to get my bike. I should have known that if I wanted recreation, my roommate would be thinking along the same lines. That is why, despite many kinds of incompatibility, we lived together: our minds ran in parallel ruts.

"Hey, you!" Tricia shouted, as I unlocked my bike. "That ain't yours."

"I'm fuckin' out of here," I said.

"Jim called," she said coyly, so I stepped just barely inside the door." What?"

"They're ready and waiting."

"He found a beachhead?"

"Yeah." Reading from a note, now: "Dutch Marshes State Park, ten miles north of Blue Kills. Take Garden State Parkway south to the Route 88 exit ... well, this goes on for a while. Here you go."

"Don't want it."

"Sangamon," she said in her flirtatious whine, which had been known to put men in the mind of taking their clothes off. "I spent ten minutes taking this down. And I don't like taking dictation."

"I'll never understand why people give out directions, or ask for them. That's what fucking road maps are for."

Outside, Bart blew a few licks on his horn.

"Find it on the map, you can always get to it. Try to follow someone's half-assed directions, and once you lose the trail, you're sunk. I've got maps of that fucking state an inch thick."

"Okay." Tricia was getting into some serious pouting; I bit the inside of my cheek, hard.

"Just tell me what time."

"He didn't say. You know, tomorrow afternoon sometime. Just follow the barbecue smoke."

"Ten-four on that. And now I truly am gone."

"Here's some mail."

"Thanks. But it's all junk."

"Don't I get to kiss the departing warrior?"

"Feels too weird, in a room that's bugged."

Threw my bike into Bartholomew's big black van and we headed west. Before going to work this morning, he'd had enough foresight to stop by our living-room canister and fill a couple of Hefty bags with nitrous, so I moved back behind the curtain and jackhammered my brain. Bart bragged that he could pass out on the stuff, but when that happens you let go of the Hefty and it all escapes.

He turned down the stereo a hair and screamed, "Hey, pop those suckers and we can have another Halloween party."

Last Halloween we had rigged up nitrous and oxygen tanks in one of our rooms, sealed the doors and windows, and created, shall we say, a marvelous party atmosphere. That was the first night I ever slept with a nonprint journalist. But it was an expensive way to seduce someone.

By the time we'd poked through Harvard Square, I was up in the front seat again, watching the colonial houses roll by.

"Yankees," Bart said.

Translation: "The Yankees are playing the Red Sox on TV tonight; let's stay at the Arsenal for the entire duration of the game."

"Can't," I said. "Have to do dinner with this frogman at the Pearl."

"French guy?"

"Frogman. A scuba diver. He's going on the Blue Kills thing. Don't worry, you hold down the fort and I'll ride over on my bike."

"You got a light on that thing?"

I laughed. "Since when are you the type to worry about that?"

"It's dangerous, man. You're invisible."

"I just assume I'm not invisible. I assume I'm wearing fluorescent clothes, and there's a million-dollar bounty going to the first driver who manages to hit me. And I ride on that assumption."

Sometimes it's nice to get away from the East Beirut ethnic atmosphere of the city and hang out in a bar where all the toilets flush on the first try and no one has ever died. We go to a place in Watertown, right across the river from our house, where there's a bar called the Arsenal. Character-free, as you'd expect in a shopping mall. But it's possible for a bar to have too much character, and there were a lot of bars like that in Boston. Right across the mall was a games arcade, which made the Arsenal even better. Into the bar for a beer, across the mall for a few games of ski-ball, back for another beer, and so on. You could eat up a pretty happy, stupid evening that way.

We ate up a couple of hours. I won about three dozen ski-ball tickets. Checked through the junk mail. I get a lot of junk mail because I own stock in hundreds of corporations- usually one share apiece. That puts me on the shareholder mailing lists, which can be useful. It's a hassle; I have to do it under as assumed name, through a P.O. box, paid for with money orders, so people can't ambush me on TV for some kind of conflict of interest.

I leafed through Fotex's annual report; a lot about their shiny new cameras, but nothing at all about toxic waste.

Also picked up some corporate news from a newsletter: it seemed that Dolmacher had a new boss. The founder/ president of Biotronics had "resigned" and been replaced by a transplant from the Basco ranks. There were photos of the founder-young, skinny, facial hair-and the new guy, a Joe Palooka type in yuppie glasses. Typical story. The people who founded Biotronics, bright kids from MIT and B.U., were chucked out to make room for some chip-off-the-old-monolith.

Bartholomew started a long-distance flirtation with some pert little sociology-major type who'd probably driven her Sprint over here from Sweetvale College, looking for Harvard students or chip designers, but that romance died as soon as she noticed he was covered with something that looked remarkably like dirt. Bart worked in a retread business. All day long he picked up tires and flung them onto heaps, and by five o'clock he was vulcanized.

When it was time, I hauled my bike out of Bart's van and crossed the river into Brighton-a kind of small Irish panhandle that sticks way out to the west of Boston proper- then followed back streets and sidewalks due east until I was in Allston, part of the same panhandle, but scruffier and more complicated. For example, here lived many of the Asian persuasion. If you judged from restaurants alone, you'd conclude that the Chinese dominated, that the Thais were catching up fast and that the Vietnamese ran a distant third. But I don't think that's true at all. The Vietnamese are just more discriminating when it comes to starting restaurants. The Chinese and the Thais, and for that matter the Greeks, print up menus automatically as soon as they get into the city limits; it's like a brainstem function. But the Vietnamese tend to be hard-luck cases to begin with, and they have a fastidious, catlike attitude about their chow. Maybe they got it from the French. To them, Chinese is gooey and greasy while Thai is monotonous-all that lemon grass and coconut milk. The Vietnamese cook for keeps.

Hoa's location was awful. In Boston, where landlords are as likely to carry gasoline cans as paint cans, all other buildings like this had long ago been reduced to smoking holes. It was a solo Italianate monster that rose like a tombstone beside the Mass Pike, facing Harvard Street. Parking was no problem, though there was some question as to whether your car would still be there when you got out. The inside was bare and bright as a gymnasium, containing a dozen mismatched tables with orange oilcloth thumbtacked onto them. The decor was beer signs, depressing photographs of old Saigon and framed restaurant reviews from various newspapers, favoring phrases like "this Pearl is a diamond in the rough" and "surprising discovery by the Pike" and "worth the trip out of your way."

For the first couple months I had the feeling I was supporting this place singlehandedly by insisting that we hold large GEE luncheon meetings here. Then, after those reviews came out, it was "discovered" by Harvard Biz hopefuls who came to worship at the shrine of Hoa's entrepreneurial spirit. So I no longer felt like Hoa's kids would go hungry if I didn't eat there three times a week. But when people hemmed and hawed about where to eat, the Pearl was still my choice.

I carried my bike inside the front door, a privilege earned by steady patronage. Hoa and his brother thought it was outlandish that I, a relatively well-to-do American, rode around on a bike. I might as well have insisted on wearing a conical hat and black pajamas. They drove cars exclusively, scabrous beaters that got stolen or burned several times a year.

Once through the vestibule, I checked out my fellow diners. The man in circular glasses, with a one-inch-thick alligator briefcase? No, this was not the GEE frogman. Nor the five Asians, efficiently snarfing down something that wasn't on the menu. The three blue-haired Brighton Irish ladies, still flabbergasted by the lack of handles on the teacups? Not likely. But the mid-thirties unit, seated under a blurry photo of the statue of the marine, hair to his shoulders, Nicaraguan peasant necklace, bicycle helmet on the table, now this was a GEE frogman. Though at the moment he was interrogating Hoa's brother, in half-forgotten Vietnamese, about what kind of tea this was.

"Hey, man," he said when he saw me, "I recognize you from the '60 Minutes', thing. How you doing?"

"Tom Akers, right?" I sat down and moved his bike helmet to the floor.

"Yeah, that's right. Hey, this is a great place. You hang out here?"

"Constantly."

"What's good?"

"All of it. But start with the Imperial Rolls."

"Kind of pricey."

"They're the best. All the other Vietnamese places wrap their rolls in egg-roll dough. So it's just like a Chinese roll. Here they use rice paper."

"Outstanding!"

"It's so delicate that most restaurants won't fuck with it. But Hoa's wife has the touch, man, she can do it with her toes."

"How's their fish stuff? I don't eat red meat."

My recommendation-Ginger Fish-got stuck on the way out. It was a mound of unidentifiable white fish in sauce.

I was ashamed to be thinking this. Hoa, the man who barely broke even on his egg rolls because of the rice paper, wouldn't serve bottom fish to his customers. I am, I reconsidered, an asshole.

"It's all good," I said. "It's all good food."

Tom Akers was a freelance diver, working out of Seattle, who did GEE jobs whenever he had a chance. When I needed some extra scuba divers, the national office got hold of him and flew him out. That's standard practice. We avoid taking volunteers, since anyone who volunteers for a gig is likely to be overzealous. We prefer to send out invitations.

Normally we'd have flown him straight to Jersey, but he wanted to visit some friends in Boston anyway. He'd been hanging out with them for a few days, and tonight he was going to crash at my place so we could get a fast start in the morning.

"Good to see you again," Hoa was saying, having snuck up on me while I was feeling guilty. He moved soundlessly, without displacing any air. He was in his forties, tall for a Vietnamese, but gaunt. His brother was shorter and rounder, but his English was poor and I couldn't pronounce his name. And I can't remember a name I can't pronounce.

"How are you doing, Hoa?"

"You both ride your bike?" He held his hands out and grabbed imaginary handlebars, grinning indulgently, eyeing Tom's helmet. Double disbelief: not one, but two grown Americans riding bicycles.

As it turned out, he wanted to encourage Tom to move his bike inside where it wouldn't get ripped off. There wasn't room in the vestibule so Tom put it around back just inside the kitchen door.

"Lot of activity out in the alley, man."

"Vietnamese?"

"I guess so."

"They're always coming to the back door for steamed rice. Hoa gives it out free, or for whatever they can pay."

"All right!"

We had a five-star meal for about a buck per star. I had a Bud and Tom had a Singha beer from Thailand. I used to do that-order Mexican beers in Mexican places, Asian beers in Asian joints. Then Debbie and Bart and I sat down one hot afternoon and she administered a controlled taste-test of about twelve different imported brands. It was a double-blind test-when we were done, both of us were blind-but we concluded that there wasn't any difference. Cheap beer was cheap beer. No need to pay an extra buck for authenticity. Furthermore, a lot of those cheap importeds got strafed in the taste test. We hated them.

Hoa's brother was our waiter. That was unusual, but Hoa had his hands full babysitting the three biddies. Also, he had to chew out an employee in the back room; fierce twanging Vietnamese cut through the hiss of the dishwashers. Tom liked the food, but got full in a hurry.

"You want doggy bag for that?" Hoa's brother said.

"Aw, sure, why not."

"Good." He eyed us for a minute, fighting with his shyness. "I hate when people come, eat little, then I got throw food in dumpster. Make me very mad. Lot of people could use. Like the blacks. They could use. So I get mad sometime,

you know, and talk to them. Sometime, I talk about Ethiopia."

He left us to be astounded. "Man," Tom said, "that guy's really into it."

The busboy, emerging from the back, had obviously been at the quiet end of Hoa's tantrum. I guessed he'd spent most of his life in this country; he had an openly sullen look on his face, and loped and sauntered and jived between the tables. When he came out of the kitchen, we locked eyes again, for the second time that day. Then he glanced away and his lip curled.

There's a certain look people give me when they've decided I'm just an overanxious duck-squeezer. That was the look. To get through to this guy I'd somehow have to prove my manhood. I'd have to retain my cool in some kind of life-threatening crisis. Unfortunately such events are hard to stage.

We were staging one in Blue Kills, but it wouldn't make the Boston news. That was part of the GEE image: to take chances, to be tough and brave, so that people wouldn't give us the look that Hoa's busboy was giving me.

He didn't know that he was getting fucked coming and going. Basco and a couple of other companies had rained toxic waste on his native land for years. Now, here in America, he was eating the same chemicals, from the same company, off the floor of the Harbor. And Basco was making money on both ends of the deal.

"What're you thinking about?" Tom asked.

"I hate it when people ask me that fucking question," I said. But I said it nicely.

."You look real intense."

"I'm thinking about goddamn Agent Orange," I said.

"Wow," he said, softly. "That's what I was thinking about."

Tom followed me back across Allston-Brighton and home. I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if

you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe-to see you, and to give a fuck-you've already blown it.

Tom mumbled a few things about paranoia, and then I was too far ahead to hear him. We had a nice ride through the darkness. On those bikes we were weak and vulnerable but invisible, elusive, aware of everything within a two-block radius. A couple of environmental extremists in a toxic world, headed for a Hefty bag and a warm berth in the mother ship.