Thanks for the Trouble

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  For Ellen

  MY LOVE, IF I DIE AND YOU DON’T—,

  My love, if you die and I don’t—,

  let’s not give grief an even greater field.

  No expanse is greater than where we live.

  Dust in the wheat, sand in the deserts,

  time, wandering water, the vague wind

  swept us like sailing seeds.

  We might not have found one another in time.

  This meadow where we find ourselves,

  O little infinity! we give it back.

  But Love, this love has not ended:

  just as it never had a birth, it has

  no death: it is like a long river,

  only changing lands, and changing lips.

  —Pablo Neruda

  FRIDAY,

  OCTOBER

  31

  THIRD PERSON FAIL

  THE BOY SAT ON A bench in the lobby of the Palace Hotel. It was about eight thirty in the morning, and he was supposed to be at school. But the boy had always thought it was a load of BS that you were expected to go to school on Halloween, so he’d decided not to. Maybe he’d go later. Maybe not. At this stage, it didn’t really make much of a difference either way.

  The boy noticed he was drawing more attention than he usually did. He’d been to the Palace plenty of times before, but this was the first time he’d shown up on a weekday, and the place wasn’t busy enough for someone like him to go unremarked. He was dressed in dirty jeans and an old black T-shirt, and his hair was long and probably a mess (full disclosure: he hadn’t looked in the mirror before leaving the house that morning). Also, he was Latino, which made him one of the very few Latino people in the building who wasn’t there to bring room service to or clean up the dishes of or mop up the floors for old, rich, white people. To put it bluntly, he looked like he’d come there with some sort of criminal intention, which was racist and judgmental and totally non-PC.

  It was also true.

  That’s not to say that the boy looked like a thug. He was just your average teenager. Or a little above average, actually. Like, you’d probably think he was cute, if you had to weigh in one way or the other. Or not cute, maybe, but not not cute either. Just, like, your normal level of cuteness. A solid seven out of ten. Maybe a B/B+ on a good day, in the right light, taking the most forgiving possible position on his too-thick eyebrows and his weirdly prominent dimples when he smiled and his slight butt chin . . .

  Fuck me. This is turning into a disaster, isn’t it?

  I thought it would be better to write this in the third person, to give myself a little critical perspective. But it feels pretty messed up to write about whether I’m cute while pretending I’m not the one writing about whether I’m cute. It would be like writing your own recommendation letter or something.

  Shit. I just noticed I used the F word up there. Oh, and now I’ve written “shit.” I guess I could go back and delete them, but I’d rather not. I mean, do we really have to play this game, where because I’m who I am and you’re who you are, we pretend that the word “fuck” doesn’t exist, and while we’re at it, that the action that underlies the word doesn’t exist, and I just puke up a bunch of junk about how some teacher changed my life by teaching me how Shakespeare was actually the world’s first rapper, or about the time I was doing community service with a bunch of homeless teenagers dying of cancer or something and felt the deep call of selfless action, or else I pull out all the stops and give you the play-by-play sob story of what happened to my dad, or some other terrible heartbreak of a thing that makes you feel so bummed out you figure, what the hell, we’ve got quotas after all, and this kid’s gotten screwed over enough, so you give me the big old stamp of approval and a fat envelope in the mail come April?

  I say no. I say let’s not play games. You asked me a question—What was the single most important experience of your life?—and I’m going to answer it, even though my answer might be a little longer than five hundred words and might have the F word in it, and even the F action in it, and a whole lot of other stuff I’d have to be crazy to put down on paper and send to you. And then you’ll read my answer, and you’ll make your decision.

  Let’s start over.

  Nice to meet you. I’m Parker Santé. I am medium cute, and bad at writing in the third person. Here is how the most important experience of my life began.

  PERFECT

  THERE IS SUCH A THING as perfect sadness. I know, because I’ve seen it.

  People usually use that word—“perfect”—to talk about good things: a perfect score on a test, or a perfect attendance record, or landing a perfect 1080. But I think it’s a way better word when it’s used to describe something—even a totally shitty something—that’s exactly the thing it’s supposed to be. Perfect morning breath. A perfect hangover. Perfect sadness.

  I was sitting on a bench in the lobby of the Palace Hotel. From there, I could see everything that went on: rich people checking in, rich people checking out, and through the stone arches beyond the reception desk, rich people nibbling and sipping away in the dining room. Have you ever been to the dining room of the Palace? It’s got this crazy-high ceiling, all green metal and frosted glass, ribbed like the dried-out carcass of a big old whale with wrought-iron bones. People sit at these long communal tables that are basically fancier versions of the cafeteria tables we have at school. Each place setting has a collection of different-size forks tucked into napkins—a creepy little fork family sharing a single fork bed. Waiters scurry around like penguin parents who’ve lost their penguin babies.

  “You can leave that. I’m enjoying playing with it.”

  Her voice cut through the background rustle and murmur of the room, as if she were sitting right next to me. My ears got stuck on her, the way your clothes sometimes catch on brambles when you’re picking blackberries, so that you feel you might tear something if you pull away too quickly. I scoured the room for her, but it wasn’t until she spoke again that I found her. She was sitting at the end of one of the communal tables, talking to a waiter.

  “No, I’m not staying at the hotel. I’ll just pay in cash.”

  She reached into her purse and pulled out the fattest stack of hundreds I’d ever seen in real life. I’m talking a hip-hop video kind of wad, thick as a John Grisham paperback. She peeled off one of the bills—(I see you, Mr. Franklin)—and handed it over. “Keep the change,” she said. The waiter nodded a stunned little bobblehead nod, then peeled out before the girl could think better of her generosity, leaving her to tap idly at the top of a soft-boiled egg in an elaborate silver eggcup. I stared at her staring off into space, and counted the many ways in which she was incredible.

  #1: She looked my age, or maybe a tiny bit older. Unless you’re a hotelophile like myself, you’re probably unaware of the fact that there is a direct correlation between the age of a hotel and the age of its average guest. The Palace is the oldest hotel in San Francisco, which means the dining room usually looks like some kind of swanky assisted-living facility. But this teenage girl had come in here to eat breakfast all on her own.

  #2: She was pretty. I couldn’t tell how pretty yet, because I was far away, but far away was still close enough. Certain people just shine.

  #3: She wore a look of perfect sadness on her face.

  #4: Sh
e had silver hair. At first I thought it was just a trick of the light, but then she shook her head, as if trying to shake off a bad memory, and it was like a thousand strands of tinsel shivering in a breeze.

  #5: She had crazy money.

  I stood up and went into the dining room, sitting down a couple of seats away from her at the same table. And yeah, I’d been right: pretty. Maybe even beautiful, though that word kinda makes me wanna throw up. When the waiter came over, I pointed at where it said “coffee” on the menu ($4.50 for a drip, and I’m the one at risk of being arrested for petty theft?).

  “That’s all?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Cream and sugar?”

  I shook my head.

  “Very good. Back in a moment.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I watched the girl continue to mash the top of her egg. It didn’t seem like she was going anywhere anytime soon, and I’d look suspicious just sitting there doing nothing, so I took out my journal and began to make up a story. I was only trying to pass the time until an opportune moment to lift the wad presented itself, but before I knew it, I ended up totally distracted by what I was writing. This happens to me sometimes. Once, I got this really great idea right at the beginning of a geometry class, and the next time I looked up from my notebook, the class had ended. I was the only person left in the room other than the teacher.

  “How’s it coming?” he’d asked.

  I don’t know how long I spent caught up in the story I wrote that day at the Palace, but when I placed the final period at the end of the last sentence and shut the front cover, I realized I hadn’t checked up on the silver-haired girl for a long time. I glanced over at where she’d been sitting and experienced two powerful and contradictory emotions at once.

  Despair, because she was gone.

  And elation, because her purse was not.

  GOOD EGGS AND BAD EGGS

  YOU’D THINK I STARTED HANGING out in hotels because they’re a great place to rip people off, but it actually happened the other way around. I’ve always loved hotels. I love their unapologetic hotel-ness. All hotels looks like all other hotels. All hotels smell like all other hotels. All hotel food tastes like all other hotel food. Someone could show you a picture of a room, anywhere in the world, and you’d immediately know if it was a hotel room or a normal room. There’s a sameness that transcends branding—Ramada or Hilton, Doubletree or Motel 6—as if every hotel were actually the same hotel, connected via wormhole across space and time. They all share the same flowery bedspreads with the crunchy texture of an unwashed gym class T-shirt, the carpeting that is almost (but not quite) dark enough to mask the full extent of its foulness, and art of such insistent and offensive blandness that it makes each guest feel as if he has been committed to a mental institution that believes he poses a danger to himself and must therefore be pacified via watercolor landscape painting.

  If I ever owned a hotel, I think it would be cool to try and make it so that no one could actually tell it was a hotel. I could put a row of busted-up sneakers just inside the door of every room, and a couple of used toothbrushes in a glass above every bathroom sink, and pack every closet full of old coats and boxes and board games missing critical pieces. My guests would wake up thinking they were waking up at a friend’s house, or maybe even their own. Then they’d go downstairs into the kitchen and pour themselves a bowl of cereal from the half-empty box of stale Frosted Mini-Wheats placed there by my staff every morning.

  Of course, a hotel like that wouldn’t be very useful to a kid like me, from a thievery point of view, because people would treat it the same way they treated their homes. And homeowners are always careful. They lock the doors and set the alarms. They’re on the lookout for suspicious activity. They call the cops at the first sign of trouble.

  Guests at upscale hotels are never careful. Otherwise vigilant people are fooled by all that marble and gold leaf into thinking they’re somehow safe from the unwashed 99 percent. It’s practically an invitation, the way they leave their stuff unattended all over the place—in elevators and stairwells, in ballrooms and conference halls, on luggage carts “accidentally” abandoned by undertipped porters, on the pavement right next to their luxury rental cars, and sometimes just stacked up like so much designer firewood outside their rooms. It would be a crime not to swipe something.

  I realize that might sound bad or wrong or whatever, but I’ve given this a lot of thought, and the conclusion I’ve reached is that “rightness” and “wrongness” are slippery concepts. I mean, some things are obviously shitty, and some things are obviously nice or noble or whatever, but between the two goalposts of black and white, between punching a baby in the kidney and donating a kidney to save a baby, there’s a freaking football field’s worth of gray area. (Side note: When I first learned about the Ten Commandments in Sunday school, I thought “covet” was another word for “have sex with,” which made a lot of sense when it came to “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,” but a little bit less when it came to “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s animals,” and not at all when it came to “Thou shalt not covet they neighbor’s house.” Turns out it just means “want to have.” That’s the problem with the Bible—or one of them, anyway—it doesn’t just tell you what to do, it tells you what to want. That’s too much to ask, IMHO.)

  Take stealing, for example. My dad taught me that our society punishes people who only steal a little, but it rewards people who steal a lot. Like the assholes on Wall Street who make you take on all these crazy loans just to get a house or go to college, loans you have to pay back twenty times over with all the interest and shit. Or the assholes in all these countries that just happen to have oil or coal or trees or whatever, making huge profits off natural resources that ought to belong to the whole world. Or the assholes in Washington, DC, always coming up with some new law that taxes the kind of people who clean the toilets at the Palace Hotel more than the kind of people who stay there.

  “Be careful,” my dad used to say. “Pretty much anytime anyone opens his mouth, he’s trying to take something from you.”

  So you tell me, with all these epic klepto atrocities going on behind the scenes, what difference does it make if I take a few bucks out of some high roller’s pocket (or suitcase, or unlocked car)? In fact, isn’t the kind of stealing I do about a million times better than the other kind of stealing? I’m like Robin Hood, really. I steal from the rich and give to the poor. Except in my case, the poor is me.

  I glanced around the room, and when I was sure no one was looking, I reached over and undid the clasp of the silver-haired girl’s little blue handbag. I pushed through a cloud of Kleenex and deep-sea dove into the mysterious mire of femininity until my fingers found the wad. A second later I was up on my feet and out of there.

  THE RETURN OF THE JEDI

  I’D STOLEN PLENTY OF STUFF in my life, and I’d never felt even a little bit bad about it. But as I made my escape across the lobby of the Palace Hotel, riffling that thick stack of bills in my pocket, a huge foaming tsunami of guilt slammed into me. Maybe because it was more money than I’d ever seen at once in my entire life. Maybe because even though the girl was dressed like a rich girl, I couldn’t have said for sure that she was rich, because actual rich people usually keep their cash in banks and bonds and shit, not in a messy wad at the bottom of their purses. Or maybe it was just because I knew there were a lot of ways to make money, but only one perfectly sad silver-haired girl sitting alone in the Palace Hotel.

  And so I made the mistake of looking back.

  When I was little, my parents would read me one fairy tale every night before bed, always from one of the volumes my dad kept over his desk: Grimm, Andersen, those Blue and Red Fairy Books. They wouldn’t skip over the gross or scary stories, the ones with girls who chopped off their heels to fit into shoes, or vengeful demons, or tricksy Death. I couldn’t believe it when I finally heard the weak-sauce, sanitized versions of these stories we got in school; a
“Cinderella” without a bunch of blood-filled shoes is no “Cinderella” at all. And did you know that, in the original “Sleeping Beauty,” there’s no handsome prince who rouses Sleeping Beauty with a gentle kiss? Nope! It’s actually a douche-bag king—one who already has a queen, by the way—and he rapes her. She wakes up pregnant, so the king’s wife tries to kill her, bake her into a pie, and feed her to the king. The happy ending? The king decides to have his wife burned to death so he can raise a family with Sleeping Beauty. Make a friendly animated film out of that shit, Disney.

  Anyway, my parents also read me the Greek myths, which tend to be about gods who come down from Olympus to get it on with hot chicks. My dad’s favorite character was Orpheus, the famous musician who was allowed to bring his dead wife back from Hades, as long as he could make it to the surface without checking to see if she was actually behind him. But he peeked, and ended up losing her forever. I always thought Orpheus got kinda screwed there. I mean, would you trust the Lord of the Underworld not to mess with you? But my dad said it was the most perfect myth ever written, because it represented the most fundamental human error: we all look back.

  When I did, I saw that the silver-haired girl had returned to her seat. In spite of the fact that her purse was open and half its contents had spilled out across the tablecloth, she wasn’t screaming or crying or scrambling around, looking for the culprit. Why, you ask? Because she’d been distracted by something else. By what, you ask? Well, by my journal, of course! I’d left it behind when I tore off with all that money. It had my name in it, and my e-mail address, and an incredibly embarrassing story I’d recently written called “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Kingdom,” which she was now reading.

  STORY #1: THE MOST BEAUTIFUL GIRL IN THE KINGDOM