"Joey," said Zack Davidson, "we gotta talk."
It was nine o'clock on a bright blue morning on Duval Street, and Joey Goldman was not surprised. In fact, the only thing he found surprising about his job these days was that he still had one. If he'd been running Parrot Beach, he'd have fired himself some weeks before.
He followed Zack up the shady pathway to the office. Study up, his colleague had told him at their first meeting. Learn to read people, to recognize the subtle signs by which they identify their peers, their social equals. Learn how to look in order to get the ones who could help you on your side. This was a fundamental requirement of salesmanship, by which Zack Davidson meant survival. So now, as Zack strolled ahead of him, Joey studied his smugly casual khaki shorts and had to acknowledge that in picking out the ones he himself was wearing, he'd overlooked certain details, missed certain nuances. Zack's shorts were of a dull twill with no sheen whatsoever; Joey's were polished in a manner that suggested too much processing. Zack's were not rumpled, exactly, but just mussed enough to create the impression that they had never seen the inside of a closet and spent their off-hours on the back of a bedroom chair; Joey's had a crisp crease that made them look less like shorts, pure and simple, and more like an amputated pair of chinos. So O.K., Joey admitted, he didn't yet have the act down perfectly, but he was getting there, he was learning. He wondered how much of it he'd remember, or what good it could possibly do him, now that he was about to get canned.
Inside, the two men skirted the scale model of the condo complex. Joey glanced at it with a pained fondness, as if it were the shrunken but living embodiment of a memory. The sweet little buildings with their tiny pastel shutters; the plastic windblown palms and the swimming pool whose blue Saran Wrap shimmered like real water; the happy owners, littler than Barbies and Kens, laid out on their lounges or standing at the painted edge of the ocean: these things, for Joey, had come to seem the perfect picture of the easy life of Florida, the life whose private, uneventful, and unspectacular appeal was daily getting through to him, and which was being royally screwed up for him by Gino and the long reach of the old neighborhood. He was almost beyond feeling angry about it. Almost. At least he was not surprised Joey tries to do something on his own; Gino undoes it, basically by declining to notice that it might by some chance matter, and by dwarfing it with something so much bigger, flashier, and more urgent. To a kid brother, a bastard no less, this was not news.
"Siddown," said Zack, motioning Joey into a slatted wooden chair next to his desk. Zack himself plopped down into his rolling, swiveling seat, rocked once so that the tilting back gave a homey squeak, then came forward and put his chin on his interlaced fingers. "Joey," he began, "some jobs, ya know, you do with your brain, right? Other jobs you do with your hands, or your back, or just by getting yourself into a certain land of mood. Those jobs call for parts of you. You see what I'm saying, Joey?
Joey crossed his knees and hugged the top one. He didn't know exactly how to answer. Getting fired, he imagined, had its protocols and customs just like other parts of having a job, and Joey had never been fired before.
"What I'm saying," Zack resumed, "is that this is a job you do with your whole person, every part of yourself. Sizing people up, that's brainwork, right? But standing out there on the hot sidewalk for eight hours a day, that's hard physical labor, no shit. As to how you actually approach people, that has a lot to do with the mood you're in, right? Whether you use humor, push the freebies, go for sympathy, whatever. And how the people respond to you, well, that's beyond mood, that's a mystery, like religious almost. Are you in the zone? In a state of grace? At one? Ya know, there's all different ways of describing that frame of mind where everything just falls right and people can't resist you. You know what I'm saying?"
Joey thought he did, but he found himself increasingly impatient with Zack's analyses of effectiveness in sales and life. When Joey still had his job, he'd thirsted after Zack's advice, thought about it long and hard. But now it no longer seemed worth the effort. "You're saying I've been all fucked up lately, and you're right."
Zack waved the comment away. It was far too negative for him. "No, Joey, no. That's not what I'm saying." He flipped open a manila folder and removed a piece of paper. On it was a week-by-week graph of Joey's performance on the job. The graph went up, up, up, hit a plateau, then came down, down, down, tracing out a pattern not unlike the pyramidal slope of Mount Trashmore.
"Joey, look at this. The first week you were here, you made a hundred twenty dollars. That's not much money for forty hours of busting your butt and having people turn you down all day, but hey, you hung in, you stayed with it. Second week, you doubled. Third week, you jumped to four eighty. Fourth week, four eighty again. Now that's pretty damn good, Joey. For a guy still learning the ropes, that's excellent. But what happens after that? Three twenty. Two eighty. Two hundred even. Joey, these aren't just numbers. These are like a map of what's going on with you. You wanna talk to me, Joey?"
Joey looked out the window, glanced at the Parrot Beach model under its perfect sky of Plexiglas. The graph depressed him. He was no stranger to lack of success, but this was different, this was active failure, failure clearly drawn and pushed in his face, and Joey didn't like it at all. Nor did he enjoy the bitterness that came with losing something he was just barely ready to admit he cared about losing. "Zack, if you're gonna fire me, can't we just please get it over with."
Zack Davidson sat back and ran a hand through his sandy hair; it fell back exactly where it had been. "Who said anything about firing you?"
Joey tried to say something but all that came out was a kind of blubbing sound, a sound from underwater.
The other man spread his arms out wide and hugged the edges of his desk. "Joey, this isn't about firing you. This is about getting you back on the street so you can make some fucking money. Listen to me, Joey. There's some things you oughta know, and apparently you don't. You're very well thought of here. People like you. They like how hard you try, that you don't make excuses. They like that you don't bitch and moan, that you're not a prima donna. They like it that the people you send, they're almost always in a good mood. They don't feel like they've been jerked around. They feel like they've been dealing with a human being. You've got this warmth, Joey, this… I don't know what to call it. Life, call it life. People deal with you, they feel like they're dealing with someone with some blood in his veins and some thoughts in his head, some curiosity. That works for you. So let it work."
To someone unaccustomed to receiving compliments, Zack's words were as intoxicating and unsettling as empty-stomach cocktails. Joey squirmed, as he generally did when wrestling with the question of thankfulness. He knew he should be grateful to Zack for saying what he'd said, but gratitude was a risky matter. As soon as you acknowledged that someone had done something for you, you opened up the chance that you'd look to them again and they could let you down. If they weren't family, if they weren't neighborhood, what assurance did you have? "Zack," he admitted, "I don't know what to say."
"Don't say anything. But Joey, listen, I don't wanna pry, but it's real obvious that some strange shit is going on. Guys like outta the movies climb out of a Lincoln and rough you up on the sidewalk. Your brother comes to town and your commissions take a nosedive. Now this woman I know, she works at Flagler House, tells me there's some weird guy who hasn't been out of his room all week, there's two Lincolns camped in front of the hotel, and for some strange reason the cops won't go near them. Joey, is it me, or does all of this look a little strange?"