The Lay of the Land Read online

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  A drive across the coastal incline back to Haddam is not at all unusual for me. Despite my last near decade spent happily on the Shore, despite a new wife, new house, a new professional address—Realty-Wise Associates—despite a wholly reframed life, I’ve kept my Haddam affiliations alive and relatively thriving. A town you used to live in signifies something—possibly interesting—about you: what you were once. And what you were always has its private allures and comforts. I still, for instance, keep my Haddam Realty license current and do some referrals and appraisals for United Jersey, where I know most of the officers. For a time, I owned (and expensively maintained) two rental houses, though I sold them in the late-nineties gentrification boom. And for several years, I sat on the Governor’s Board of the Theological Institute—that is, until fanatical Fresh Light Koreans bought the whole damn school, changed the name to the Fresh Light Seminary (salvation through studied acts of discipline) and I was invited to retire. I’ve also kept my human infrastructure (medical-dental) centered in Haddam, where professional standards are indexed to the tax base. And quite frankly, I often just find solace along the leaf-shaded streets, making note of this change or that improvement, what’s been turned into condos, what’s on the market at what astronomical price, where historical streets have been revectored, buildings torn down, dressed up, revisaged, as well as silently viewing (mostly from my car window) the familiar pale faces of neighbors I’ve known since the seventies, grown softened now and re-charactered by time’s passage.

  Of course, at some unpredictable but certain moment, I can also experience a heavy curtain-closing sensation all around me; the air grows thin and dense at once, the ground hardens under my feet, the streets yawn wide, the houses all seem too new, and I get the williwaws. At which instant I turn tail, switch on my warning blinkers and beat it back to Sea-Clift, the ocean, the continent’s end and my chosen new life—happy not to think about Haddam for another six months.

  What is home then, you might wonder? The place you first see daylight, or the place you choose for yourself? Or is it the someplace you just can’t keep from going back to, though the air there’s grown less breathable, the future’s over, where they really don’t want you back, and where you once left on a breeze without a rearward glance? Home? Home’s a musable concept if you’re born to one place, as I was (the syrup-aired southern coast), educated to another (the glaciated mid-continent), come full stop in a third—then spend years finding suitable “homes” for others. Home may only be where you’ve memorized the grid pattern, where you can pay with a check, where someone you’ve already met takes your blood pressure, palpates your liver, slips a digit here and there, measures the angstroms gone off your molars bit by bit—in other words, where your primary care-givers await, their pale gloves already pulled on and snugged.

  My other duty for the morning is to act as ad hoc business adviser and confidant to my realty associate Mike Mahoney, about whom some personal data is noteworthy.

  Mike hails from faraway Gyangze, Tibet (the real Tibet, not the one in Ohio), and is a five-foot-three-inch, forty-three-year-old realty dynamo with the standard Tibetan’s flat, bony-cheeked, beamy Chinaman’s face, gun-slit eyes, abbreviated arm length and, in his case, skint black hair through which his beige scalp glistens. “Mike Mahoney” was the “American” name hung on him by coworkers at his first U.S. job at an industrial-linen company in Carteret—his native name, Lobsang Dhargey, being thought by them to be too much of a word sandwich. I’ve told him that one or the other—Mike Lobsang or Mike Dhargey—could be an interesting fillip for business. But Mike’s view is that after fifteen years in this country he’s adjusted to Mike Mahoney and likes being “Irish.” He has, in fact, become a full-blooded, naturalized American—at the courthouse in Newark with four hundred others. Yet, it’s easy to picture him in a magenta robe and sandals, sporting a yellow horn hat and blowing a ceremonial trumpet off the craggy side of Mount Qomolangma—which is often how I think of him, though he never did it. You’d be right to say I never in a hundred years expected to have a Tibetan as my realty associate, and that New Jersey homebuyers might turn skittish at the idea. But at least about the second of these, what might be true is not. In the year and a half he’s worked for me, since walking through my Realty-Wise door and asking for a job, Mike has turned out to be a virtual lion of revenue generation and business savvy: unceasingly farming listings, showing properties, exhibiting cold-call tenacity while proving artful at coaxing balky offers, wheedling acceptances, schmoozing with buyers, keeping negotiating parties in the dark, fast-tracking loan applications and getting money into our bank account where it belongs.

  Which isn’t to say he’s a usual person to sell real estate alongside of, even though he’s not so different from the real estate seller I’ve become over the years and for some of the same reasons—neither of us minds being around strangers dawn to dusk, and nothing else seems very suitable. Still, I’m aware some of my competitors smirk behind both our backs when they see Mike out planting Realty-Wise signs in front yards. And though occasionally potential buyers may experience a perplexed moment when a voice inside them shouts, “Wait. I’m being shown a beach bungalow by a fucking Tibetan!”—most clients come around soon enough to think of Mike as someone special who’s theirs, and get over his unexpected Asian-ness as I have, to the point they can treat him like any other biped.

  Looked at from a satellite circling the earth, Mike is not very different from most real estate agents, who often turn out to be exotics in their own right: ex-Concorde pilots, ex-NFL linebackers, ex-Jack Kerouac scholars, ex-wives whose husbands ran off with Vietnamese au pairs, then wish to God they could come back, but aren’t allowed to. The real estate seller’s role is, after all, never one you fully occupy, no matter how long you do it. You somehow always think of yourself as “really” something else. Mike started his strange life’s odyssey in the mid-eighties as a telemarketer for a U.S. company in Calcutta, where he learned to talk American by taking orders for digital thermocators and moleskin pants from housewives in Pompton Plaines and Bridgeton. And yet with his short gesturing arms, smiley demeanor and aggressively cheerful outlook, he can seem and act just like a bespectacled little Adam’s-appled math professor at Iowa State. And indeed, in his duties as a residential specialist, he’s comprehended his role as being a “metaphor” for the assimilating, stateless immigrant who’ll always be what he is (particularly if he’s from Tibet) yet who develops into a useful, purposeful citizen who helps strangers like himself find safe haven under a roof (he told me he’s read around in Camus).

  Over the last year and a half, Mike has embraced his new calling with gusto by turning himself into a strangely sharp dresser, by fine-tuning a flat, accentless news-anchor delivery (his voice sometimes seems to come from offstage and not out of him), by sending his two kids to a pricey private school in Rumson, by mortgaging himself to the gizzard, by separating from his nice Tibetan wife, driving a fancy silver Infiniti, never speaking Tibetan (easy enough) and by frequenting—and probably supporting—a girlfriend he hasn’t told me about. All of which is fine. My only real complaint with him is that he’s a Republican. (Officially, he’s a registered Libertarian—fiscal conservative, social moderate, which makes you nothing at all.) But he voted for numbskull Bush and, like many prosperous newcomers, stakes his pennant on the plutocrat’s principle that what’s good for him is probably good for all others—which as a world-view and in spite of his infectious enthusiasm, seems to rob him of a measure of inner animation, a human deficit I usually associate with citizens of the Bay Area, but that he would say is because he’s a Buddhist.

  But as for my role as his business adviser, Mike’s name has gotten around some in our mid-Shore real estate circles—it’s no longer possible for any single human act to stay long out of the public notice—and as of last week
he was contacted by a subdivision developer up in Montmorency County, close to Haddam, with a proposition to enter a partnership. The developer has obtained a purchase option on 150 acres currently planted in Jersey yellow corn, but that lies slap in the middle of the New Jersey wealth belt (bordering the Delaware, bordering Haddam, two hours to Gotham, one from Philly). Houses there—giant mansionettes meant to look like Versailles—go for prices in the troposphere, even with current market wobbles, and anybody with a backhoe, a cell phone and who isn’t already doing hard time can get rich without even getting up in the morning.

  What Mike brings to the table is that he’s a Tibetan and an American and therefore qualifies as a bona fide and highly prized minority. Any housing outfit that makes him its president automatically qualifies for big federal subsidy dollars, after which he and his partner can become jillionaires just by filling out a few government documents and letting a bunch of Mexicans do the work.

  I’ve explained to him that in any regular business situation, a typical American entrepreneurial type might let him act as substitute towel boy at his racket club—but probably not. Mike, however, believes the business climate’s not typical now. Many arrivees to central Jersey, he’s told me, are monied subcontinentals with luxury fever—gastroenterologists, hospital administrators and hedge-fund managers—who’re sick of their kids not getting into Dalton and Spence and are ready to buy the first day they drive down. The thinking is that these beige-skinned purchasers will look favorably on a development fronted by a well-dressed little guy who sorta looks like them. He and I have also discussed the fact that house sales are already leveling and could pancake by New Year’s. Corporate debt’s too high. Mortgage rates are at 8.25 but a year ago were at six. The NASDAQ’s spongy. The election’s going in the toilet (though he doesn’t think so). Plus, it’s the Millennium, and nobody knows what’s happening next, only that something will. I’ve told him now might be a better time to spend his ethnic capital on a touchless car wash on Route 35, or possibly a U-Store-It or a Kinko’s. These businesses are cash cows if you keep an eye on your employees and don’t invest much of your own dough. Mike, of course, reads his tea leaves differently.

  This morning, Mike has offered to drive and at this moment has his hands cautiously at ten and two, his eyes hawking the Toms River traffic. He’s told me he never got enough driving time in Tibet—for obvious reasons—so he enjoys piloting my big Suburban. It may make him feel more American, since many vehicles in the thick holiday traffic on Route 37 are also Suburbans—only most are newer.

  Since we rolled out of Sea-Clift and over the bridge toward the Garden State Parkway, he has spoken little. I’ve noticed in the office that he’s recently exhibited broody, deep-ponder states during which he bites his lower lip, sighs and runs his hand back across his bristly skull, frowning apparently at nothing. These gestures, I assume, are standard ones having to do with being an immigrant or being a Buddhist, or with his new business prospects, or with everything at once. I’ve paid them little attention and am happy to be silently chauffeured today and to take in the scenery while shifting serious thoughts to the outer reaches of my brain—a trick I’ve gotten good at since Sally’s departure last June, and since finding out during the Olympics in August that I’d become host to a slow-growing tumor in my prostate gland. (It is a gland, by the way, unlike your dick, which is often said to be, but isn’t.)

  Route 37, the Toms River Miracle Mile, is already jammed at 9:30 with shopper vehicles moving into and out of every conceivable second-tier factory outlet lot, franchise and big-box store, until we’re mostly stalled in intersection tie-ups under screaming signage and horn cacophony. Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, when merchants hope to inch into the black, is traditionally the retail year’s hallowed day, with squadrons of housewives in housecoats and grannies on walkers shouldering past security personnel at Macy’s and Bradlees to get their hands on discounted electric carving knives and water-filled orthopedic pillows for that special arthritic with the chronically sore C6 and C7. Only this year—due to the mists of economic unease—merchants and their allies, the customers, have designated “gigantic” Black Tuesday and Black Wednesday Sales Days and are flying the banner of EVERYTHING MUST GO!—in case, I guess, the whole country’s gone by Friday.

  Cars are everywhere, heading in every direction. A giant yellow-and-red MasterCard dirigible floats above the buzzing landscape like a deity. Movie complexes are already opened with queues forming for Gladiator and The Little Vampire. Crowds press into Target and International Furniture Liquidator (“If we don’t have it, you don’t want it”). Christmas music’s blaring, though it’s not clear from where, and the traffic’s barely inching. Firemen in asbestos suits and Pilgrim hats are out collecting money in buckets at the mall entrances and stoplights. Ragged groups of people who don’t look like Americans skitter across the wide avenue in groups, as though escaping something, while solitary men in gleaming pickups sit smoking, watching, waiting to have their vehicles detailed at the Pow-R-Brush. At the big Hooper Avenue intersection, a TV crew has set up a command post, with a hard-body, shiny-legged Latina, her stiff little butt turned to the gridlock, shouting out to the 6:00 p.m. viewers up the seaboard what all the fuss is about down here.

  Yet frankly it all thrills me and sets my stomach tingling. Unbridled commerce isn’t generally pretty, but it’s always forward-thinking. And since nowadays with my life out of sync and most things in the culture not affecting me much—politics, news, sports, everything but the weather—it feels good that at least commerce keeps me interested like a scientist. Commerce, after all, is basic to my belief system, even though it’s true, as modern merchandising theory teaches, that when we shop, we no longer really shop for anything. If you’re really looking for that liquid stain remover you once saw in your uncle Beckmer’s basement that could take the spots off a hyena, or you’re seeking a turned brass drawer pull you only need one of to finish refurbishing the armoire you inherited from Aunt Grony, you’ll never find either one. No one who works anyplace knows anything, and everyone’s happy to lie to you. “They don’t make those anymore.” “Those’ve been backordered two years.” “That ballpoint company went out of business, moved to Myanmar and now makes sump pumps…All we have are these.” You have to take what they’ve got even if you don’t want it or never heard of it. It’s hard to call this brand of zero-sum merchandising true commerce. But in its apparent aimlessness, it’s not so different from the real estate business, where often at the end of the day, someone goes away happy.

  We’ve now made it as far as the Toms River western outskirts. Motels are all full here. Used-car lots are Givin’ ’em Away. A bonsai nursery has already moved its tortured little shrubs to the back, and employees are stacking in Christmas trees and wreaths. Flapping flags in many parking lots stand at half-staff—for what reason, I don’t know. Other signs shout Y2K MEMORABILIA SCULPTURE! INVEST IN REAL ESTATE NOT STOCKS! TIGHT BUTTS MAKE ME NUTS! WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS. Yellow traffic cones and a giant blinking yellow arrow are making us merge right into one lane, alongside a deep gash in the freshly opened asphalt, beside which large hard-hatted white men stand staring at other men already down in the hole—putting our tax dollars to work.

  “I really don’t understand that,” Mike says, his chin up alertly, the seat run way forward so his toes can reach the pedals and his hands control the wheel. He eyes me as he navigates through the holiday tumult.

  I, of course, know what’s bothering him. He’s seen the WELCOME SUICIDE SURVIVORS sign on the Quality Court marquee. My having cancer makes him possibly worry about me in this regard, which then makes him fret about his own future. When I was at Mayo last August, I left him in charge of Realty-Wise, and he carried on without a hitch. But on his desk last week I saw a New York Times article he’d downloaded, explaining how half of all bankruptcies are health-related and that from a purely financial perspective, doing away with oneself’s probably a good investment. I’v
e explained to him that one in ten Americans is a cancer survivor, and that my prospects are good (possibly true). But I’m fairly sure that my health is on his mind and has probably brought about today’s sudden test-the-waters probing into suburban land-development. Plus, in exactly a week from today I’m flying to Rochester for my first post-procedure follow-up at Mayo, and he may sense I’m feeling anxious—I may be—and is merely feeling the same himself.

  Buddhists are naturally unbending on the subject of suicide. They’re against it. And even though he’s a free-market, deregulating, Wall Street Journal-reading flat-taxer, Mike has also remained a devotee of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. His screen saver at the office actually shows a beaming color photograph of himself beside the diminutive reincarnate, taken at the Meadowlands last year. He’s also displayed three red-white-and-blue prayer flags on the wall behind his desk, with a small painting of the thousand-armed Chenrezig and beside these a signed glossy of Ronald Reagan—all for our clients to puzzle over as they write out their earnest money checks. In the DL’s view, utilizing a correct, peaceful-compassionate frame of mind will dissolve all impediments, so that karmically speaking we get exactly what we should get because we’re all fathers of ourselves and the world’s the result of our doing, etc., etc., etc. Killing yourself, in other words, shouldn’t be necessary—about which I’m in complete agreement. Apparently, the smiling-though-exiled precious protector and the great communicating Gipper line up well on this, as on many issues. (I knew nothing about Tibet or Buddhists and have had to read up on it at night.)