The other day, for a minor example, when secretly called in by Sal to look over the ledgers for myself, I happened to stub my toe on what I figured was a funky coffee table Eunice had ordered up at full suggested retail but was actually a gross case of five or ten thousand floppy disks, brand-new and still in the shrink-wrap, meant originally for backing up every last trans-action of our business. They now have been superseded of course by compact disks that hold many multiples the data and will be cheaper eventually though not soon enough for us. Predictably I happened upon in the supply room gathering dust the floppy disk drives that were recently changed out, piled forlornly with their cables hanging out and tangled like the viscera you used to see troughs of at the butcher's, though all those sloppy kibbles and bits were turned into something somebody somewhere wanted, and duly got, eventually, whether they knew it or not. All of which makes you sort of worry if our wondrous civilization has evolved to the point that we've somehow abrogated that particular law of thermodynamics concerning the conservation of all energy and matter, as it seems that what we're coming up with now is made so that it can't possibly be used or reintegrated after the initial burn. It's pure by-product from the start, slickly marketed and apotheosized as essential for mass sale to a well-meaning guy like Jack Battle, and finally reposed as mere foot fodder.
I've already detailed the extensive corporate headquarters—
style renovations to our once humble garage, costs that surprisingly were not mortgaged and amortized as they normally should have been but instead (for the purpose of a discount ne-gotiated by Eunice) outlayed in cold hard cash, cold hard cash something the business is quite low on in reserves, so low in fact that our usually cuddly banker at Suffolk National has begun sending chilly missives concerning our insufficient and recently missed payments on the seven-figure note Jack took out shortly after I stepped. down from the helm. Apparently Jack has been attempting to refinance this hefty note (okay, it's $3 million, twice as much as Sal suspected), but even in this age of before-you-even-ask-for-it credit he hasn't yet found any takers, partly because he spent way- too much for a nicely treed four-acre parcel of land directly behind our property (he was itchy for a major expansion right from the get-go), though mostly because the property itself has come under suspicion of being an environmental hazard.
I'd always feared it was our original property that might go afoul certain green regulations and standards, but it seems the previous owner of the new plot had a big-time commercial photofinishing business in Hicksville. For the past twenty-five years he dumped the chemicals and other liquid unsavories from interests he had in a string of instant-lube centers into an old well on the property, which he neatly bulldozed over and sealed and covered with fill and fresh sod. This would be bad enough except that the local homeowners whose properties abut in a ring this new one of ours are now filing a lawsuit claiming health problems (one, of whom not so ironically being that girlfriend of mine from youth, Rose Cahill, who actually lives in that same house now with not one but two supposedly autistic adult sons), their experts and also now county and state and probably soon federal environmental safety inspectors drilling for soil samples and testing surrounding well water for heavy metals and radicalized chemicals and oils, such that our nice big little family business with its surfeit of plant and equipment is now, given the potential liabilities, worth pretty much zilch.
Though Sal, bless his randy old soul, insists this isn't quite as bad as it sounds.
Apparently there are certain protections having to do with declaring bankruptcy that will shield us for a while from legal action and foreclosure, plus we now have our own representa-tion, too, serving notice to both Mr. Mercury Water and our alarmist neighbors, namely (this time), mirabile dictu, Richard Anthony Coniglio, Esq., who was completely gentlemanly when I (ready to grovel, ready to beg) phoned him. Richie instantly conferenced me in on a call to his underlings, scrambling those fast jet associates Kim-ster and Kenton from the deck of the Fortune 50 multinational they've been defending (against the outrageous claims of some greedy supposedly ruined Microne-sian fishing village) and vectored them screaming into our own modest fray.
The key now, of course, is to delay and delay and delay, and delay some more, let everything and everyone stew in the procedural stays that we litigious Americans have perfected into high performance art. Richie has even been so generous as to offer to bill us only for his associates' hours, and not his own, and though it's unclear pro exactly what/whose Bono is inspiring him into such magnanimousness, I would like to think it's a feeling that we're alumni of sorts, brothers from the old neighborhood and even linked via Rita in that way men are when they do all they can to crush each other and only then intimately glimpse the reflection of their own vulnerability; Probably closer to the truth is that we're at the general point in our lives when almost all the heaviest lifting has been done, and you can finally begin to measure yourself not solely by the usual units of accomplishment but by the plain stupid luck of your draw in a macrocosm rigged with absolutely nothing particular about you in mind.
One might be wondering how it is that I've learned about these goings-on, given that I haven't talked at all to Jack since he came by the house last, which is certainly the case, and I could say that Sal has been the mostly disinterested informer and go-between and facilitator, which is also the case; but it should be no surprise to anyone who has been a father or a son, or for that matter born into any kind of real family at all, to hear that Jack and I haven't discussed said huge subject, or endured any lingeringly awkward moments because of it, or even plied each other with subtle, passive aggressions that would steadily accrue on the cellular level until one or both of us up and burst in a cascade of recrimination and vitriol. For all I can see, he's continued to show at work each day at 6 N.M. sharp and gone about addressing Total Dissolution with some help from Sal while making no attempt to hide from me what's been happening, knowing full well that I know full well, and not agoniz-ing (at least publicly) about what any of us might think. Of course, I don't know what's going on in his head, or in his household (though I'm almost certain Eunice has no inkling, as she'd have been all over me with directives from her command-and-control center of a pearlescent white Range Rover); whatever he's thinking or feeling I do have to say, gotta say, that I'm kind of proud of the boy, goddammit, not for fucking everything up of course but for soldiering on as he has, for just trudg-ing ahead with old-fashioned head-down dignity, plowing forward like one of those ice-breaking ships in the Arctic, whose prow is harder than it is sharp.
Too bad that what lies ahead in the visible horizon are just floes and more floes, with ice fields re-forming in his wake, supplies and fuel running dangerously low, and morale undoubtedly dwindling besides (the Discovery Channel, it turns out, does indeed corroborate with life on the ground); and although I've said I'm at a limit as to what I can stand to witness, the first question for yours truly must be why I'm not doing more to bear necessary heat upon this situation. Pop, in my place, would certainly rain fear and misery upon Jack's suppliers, and lay off half the crews and the entire office staff (except Sal, who would have to answer the phones, too), fire-sell anything that couldn't otherwise be used to dig a ditch or lay in brick or fix one of the machines, and then force-feed the Suffolk National guy and his wife double porterhouses and vanilla-y merlot at Ruth's Chris, instead of perching here as I am in my God seat and bemoaning, bemoaning. Truth is, Pop would be referring to this as Our Problem, Our Mutual Assured Destruction, Our Shit Sundae, and he'd be digging in with the same gusto he'd have for my mother's self-admittedly mediocre cooking ("You're welcome to make the sauce"), which he groused about nightly but always accepted seconds of, and even thirds; vis-à-vis Jack, even at his age he would have thundered with disbelief and anger but then stood by him and taken on whatever load needed bearing and generally gotten hopped up on the disaster of it all, because, unlike me, he could never stop believing in the significance of the enterprise, he could never look on that stolid grimy box of a four-bay garage and see anything but the shape of a glorious lifework which the Fratelli Battaglia literally put up one brick at a time.