Gunmetal Blue Read online

  When I stood in the parking lot trying to get my bearings, something unexpected happened: my legs gave out and I collapsed on the asphalt pavement. I had never before been fired from a job. How was I going to tell my wife? What was I going to tell my daughter? What would I tell myself? That I had been fired? That I was one of the losers in the faltering economy? Only be patient Mr. Topp, the HR personnel told me, and you will find a foothold—a new foothold. You did valuable work for us, Mr. Topp. You were an integral member of our team. If you are patient, I am certain you will go on to be an integral member of someone else’s team.

  HR pushed the cream-colored check forward across the desk. I reached for it. I turned and stepped out the door. Then I collapsed in the parking lot. I thought I was having a heart attack or a brain aneurysm or both. One minute everything was fine. The next moment, the rug was pulled out from under me. I was disoriented by a world spinning faster than I could keep up. Then I collapsed.

  At first, I didn’t have the courage to tell Adeleine I’d lost my job. I felt guilty. I felt like my nuts had been cut off. I felt that I was a lion who no longer was able to go in for the kill. It was a ridiculous analogy because all I was was inventory control, but that’s how I felt. Then there was that image. I couldn’t shake it from my mind. I had collapsed on the asphalt, so my face was pressed in the hot tar and gravel, the world spinning out of control, and there was literally nothing I could do about it for what seemed like an eternity: the hot sun beating down, though I know it was only for a few moments. What caused me to collapse like that? I started to cry compulsively. I couldn’t control it. I cried for the memory of my mother and father whom I tried to do right by. I cried for my wife and my daughter, Meg. Most of all I cried for myself, and when I couldn’t cry any more, I passed out.

  A moment later I was alert again. I shook my leg and pushed myself up off the pavement. I stumbled to my car, unlocked the door, and got in. I found a handkerchief and tried to wipe my face clean; it was smeared black with tar. I fumbled with the keys and when the ignition took, I drove slowly out of the parking lot. I felt my shirt pocket for the cream-colored check. It was still there. I drove around until I found myself in a church parking lot. I slowed the car to a stop and walked across a field to a stand of trees. There was a bend in the Des Plaines River. I walked through the woods and sat on a grass knoll overlooking the river. I sat there for some time just watching the river flow by. I was wondering if I should kill myself. I hardly saw the point of going on. This would be the spot to do it. If only I had my Ruger on me, I could solve this problem.

  Eventually I made my way home, and after showering to clean myself off, I found myself slightly dazed at the dinner table with Adeleine and Meg, eating one of Adeleine’s fabulous home-cooked meals as if nothing at all were amiss. I was dipping the fatty end of a steak into her beef gravy and using the napkin to wipe sweat off my brow.

  How was your day, honey? my wife asked.

  Excellent. How was yours?

  Well…I sold a $2.5 million dollar house today in Bucktown to a wealthy young couple. He’s corporate law at some big firm. She’s high-level management in corporate finance—if that’s what you want to know…

  At that precise moment I should have told her that I’d been canned from the telecom business and therefore I was a nothing and a nobody and she shouldn’t waste any more of her time on me. But I was still in a state of shock, so I passed on the personal commentary and merely forked a bloody piece of steak into my mouth and smiled at her.

  Congratulations! I said. This calls for a bottle of champagne.

  After that, we poured a bit of champagne and toasted her success. That night I fell asleep dreaming of vultures picking my pockets.

  •

  For the next two weeks, I didn’t have the heart to tell Adeleine I had been fired. I didn’t have the heart for any of it: for being fired, for finding a new foothold. I was a naïf. I should have been better at what I did at the telecom business. I see that now, but at the time, I was blind to my own deficiencies. I should have been more proactive. I should have been more adroit at playing office politics. I should have smiled more often. I was a sour puss. I said it like it was. I didn’t sugarcoat the truth. I sat in meetings and spoke my mind regardless of whether or not I made enemies. I was a problem solver. I was hell-bent on solving our company’s problems such as I construed them. Later, I came to see that I had misconstrued what the company’s problems were, and therefore I had spoken my mind contrary to what the real problems in the organization were, which made my bosses look bad.

  Then I became a problem, which became glaringly obvious after the Chapter 11 filing when the HR personnel fired me.

  In the interim period between when I’d been fired and when I told my wife I’d been fired, I left for work every morning as if I still had a job, but rather than going to work, I went to the racetrack with Cal. Or Cal and I went shooting guns at the range. Or I went fishing by myself on the Des Plaines River for carp. I was trying to regain control of something I had lost, but I didn’t know what I had lost. I might say I lost my entire identity. I didn’t know who I was any more, nor did I know what would become of me. I feared what would become of me. I went from a man who was filled with confidence to a failure who was fearful of every little thing. One day, after losing several hundred dollars at the track, I decided it was time to tell my wife what had happened.

  I explained that I had lost my job. I was collateral damage. I used those exact words to explain my situation. I was collateral damage of the collapsing economy. I told her about the cream-colored check, which was a laughably small amount.

  After that money runs out, I said, if I don’t have a new job I don’t know what will happen to me.

  You know we don’t need to worry about money, she said. Take your time, Art. Find a job that you are interested in. Be patient. Now is a wonderful opportunity for you. Now is your time to define for yourself. Go out once and for all and find out who it is you want to be.

  I want to be me, I told her.

  Then be you, Art. Be the best you you can be. Our cash situation is such that there is absolutely no pressure. And if you’re wondering if I still love you…

  Yes…

  I do.

  •

  But there was pressure, because there was nothing I wanted to be. I certainly didn’t want to get fired again from an HR personnel. Nor, for that matter, was I eager to try to win a job from another HR personnel. I took my payout and I filed for and collected unemployment, and I drove around for months looking for new work. I had headhunters working for me.

  Adeleine suggested teaching, and I laughed at her without even giving it a second thought.

  Then one day, I was at an interview at another telecom, and I got into an argument over whether or not I thought I could use the computer programs available to advance the business in the direction to which it needed advancing.

  What direction is that? I asked. I still had a chip on my shoulder, and it showed. North, South, East or West?

  Are you serious, Mr. Topp?

  Yes.

  With that I stood up with both of my fuck-off fingers flung high, and I walked out the door of another HR personnel’s office.

  Then I was driving in my car when I started asking myself serious questions apropos Adeleine’s conversations with me: if I did change my career, what would it be? In fact, it was a friend who had gotten me into the telecom industry. I was always going the path of least resistance. But now, driving in my car, I thought: if I were to take matters into my own hands and be anything I want to be, what would I do? I felt pathetic that I couldn’t come up with an answer. I thought about it for a long time but nothing ever entered my head. Then one thing led to another and I got to thinking about my education.

  I had never had much of an education. You know they say education is wasted on the young. Well to a certain extent I would say this was true for me, and I was feeling lousy that I hadn’t tried to do more
with myself, education-wise. But suddenly there was something that jumped out at me from those days: an almost inane conversation I had had ages ago at Steinmetz high school on the northwest side of Chicago where I had been a student.

  My high school experience at Steinmetz was generally unpleasant, and it didn’t offer much in the way of an education, but I trod on with it best I could. To give you an idea, the famous Las Vegas mobster, Tony “The Ant” Spilotro, had been a student at Steinmetz the generation before me. And he and his brother Michael were beaten in a Bensenville basement by mobsters, then killed and buried six feet under an Indiana cornfield only a few years after I graduated from Steinmetz. In fact, when I attended the school, there were still a bunch of little Tony Spilotro types running around its corridors. Some of these guys were my friends. I lifted weights with them. I slammed my fists into punching bags with them. I shot guns with them. I even terrorized other students with them. As to my studies, like I say, there wasn’t much to it. However, I can vividly recall one day sitting around the lunch table with my friends when a fellow classmate, Terrence MacDonald, told us about his dad. His dad was a detective. He was a private eye. I didn’t think much about Terrance, who we nicknamed alternately ‘Big Mac’ and ‘Had A Farm.’ But Terrance said something about his dad that stuck in my head. He said: My dad likes the detective business because it gives him time to watch the horses and fish.

  So after that interview, I was sitting in my car at a stoplight waiting for the light to turn green. Maybe I was humming that nursery rhyme, Old MacDonald, or maybe I was singing the Big Mac jingle. But that conversation with Terrance from so long ago just drifted up from wherever I had kept it—drifted right into plain view, and there it was. I don’t know why this sentence of Terrence’s stuck in my head, but it did. I honestly never forgot it. It was just something I carried with me. Why not become a detective? I thought. I like to watch the horses and fish. What’s more, there are worse jobs out there. Besides, I’m sure I’m capable of doing it. Then the light turned green, and I drove off to tell Adeleine.

  ¤

  I don’t know what made me think I would be capable of being a private eye. I suppose I just imagined that anyone with half a brain could do it. But I was wrong about this. I never quite figured the business out. I was probably not meant to be a private eye. In fact, I was probably more suited to being a cog in a big organization. But because there was a war between me and HR personnel, I had officially given that up. I was going my own way. Starting fresh. I was going to self-determine who I was going to be from here on out. What do you want to do? I want to be a private eye.

  When I proposed the detective idea to Adeleine as a way to regain my foothold in the economy, she outright laughed at me because she thought I was joking. When I insisted that I wasn’t joking, she grew serious, frowned a little, and said it was a bad idea. She didn’t think I had what it took to succeed in such a business. She knew that I was inclined to laziness, and so I was probably better working in a job with a boss. With a boss telling me what to do, I would be fine, but as a boss, my laziness would get the better of me. But if I didn’t want to go back into something like telecom, she thought my skills—‘Your skills’ is what she said—could be better applied in a career like teaching. What’s more, she said—and this she argued time and time again until I finally earned my detective license and hung my shingle, at which point she stopped arguing with me—what’s more, not only will you be ineffectual as a detective, and as your own boss, but as a result you will find it a dull and uninteresting career change.

  In the end, Adeleine proved correct on every point. After hanging my shingle—and I hung it on my wife’s dime—I knew almost immediately that not only was I not suited for such a job, but that it really wasn’t a very interesting job. Perhaps it was just my disposition that made me think it wasn’t an interesting job. If I had been suited for the work in the first place, I might have felt differently. Indeed I might have found it a fascinating business. However, I did not find it fascinating. It was an albatross around my neck.

  What’s worse, once I took the business on I didn’t know how to back out of it. I didn’t know how to cry uncle. I was in whole-hog as they say, and I was too stubborn to budge out.

  Furthermore, I found that the secondary benefits of being a self-employed detective—the fishing, the horses, the shooting of the guns at the shooting range—were not distracting enough to keep me from worrying that I had made a terrible life choice and that my life, as a result, was being squandered. Going to the horses or fishing only enhanced the sense that I was making a terrible mistake and that wasted time and life was the only outcome I could expect from such foolishness. Yet rain, sleet, snow, or shine: off to the horses I went, or fishing, or shooting my guns at the shooting range with Cal.

  When I did get some business and my wife was killed as a direct result of my work, I realized that becoming a detective had been the most fateful and devastating decision I had ever made, and I never got over the whimsical stupidity of my own thinking.

  •

  The hardest thing, I tell Cal.

  We’re at the horses. Or we’re shooting. Or we’re in the car going hither and thither.

  God damn it, he says, pounding on his horn.

  You’re too aggressive a driver.

  I can’t help it, Cal shouts back at me. These stupid drivers!

  They’re not all stupid. It’s just that…

  It’s just what?

  Like I was saying before you interrupted me. The hardest thing about all this…

  About what?

  About my wife being dead.

  Cal looks across the seat at me with a touch of fear in his eyes. A look that says: Oh shit, he’s going to start talking about his dead wife.

  I have to talk about my dead wife to someone. Who can I go to if not you? I ask Cal.

  Yeah, but you have Rita to spill your heart to. Remember, I’m just some guy you shoot guns with.

  I can’t talk to Rita about this. She doesn’t even know how Adeleine died.

  She doesn’t know? How can she not know?

  I’ve never had the courage to tell her.

  Well you got to tell her, Art, it’s been five years. And how long have you guys been going together?

  Almost as long.

  That’s what I thought. And you haven’t told her?

  No.

  He slams the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and laughs in incredulity.

  How can she not know how your wife died, Art? And I thought I was non-communicative. I thought I had a hard time opening up. Art you have to tell Rita how your wife died.

  You don’t understand, I tell him. She doesn’t want to talk about Adeleine.

  What does she want to talk about?

  Anything but.

  Why would she, I suppose.

  Exactly. Why would she, and to be honest, I don’t blame her.

  I suppose I wouldn’t either.

  I also worry if I told her she’d just think I was feeling sorry for myself.

  Why would she think that?

  I don’t know.

  We drive on.

  Can you slow it down a little? I ask him when the car veers into the gravel around a bend in the road.

  No problem, Art. The thing is. I want to get to the range and start shooting. I promised my mom I’d be home in time to take her shopping.

  What time did you say?

  That I’d be back by seven.

  That gives us forty-five minutes, Cal. Hardly enough time. You may as well turn around.

  Nonsense. Forty-five minutes is plenty of time. No need to turn around now. We’re almost there.

  At the gun range, he pulls his Uzi out of its case and starts unloading it full-auto at a paper target. BLURT. BLURT. BLURT. He shreds the target. I press the electric switch and bring it back and change targets.

  He leans into his gun and his eyes crunch in focus and a small grin hangs in the corner of his mouth as he
lets go again with that damn Uzi. He shoots that thing like he’s one with it, like it’s an extension of him. It’s the only time I see him entirely at ease with himself. His body vibrates and shakes with recoil, but his focus remains unfazed. It’s at moments like this when I feel an almost inexplicable admiration for the man.

  It’s my turn. I step into the lane, unpack my pussy gun, my .22 with the suppressor. I take aim and go: Pop. Pop. Pop. And what I aim at I invariably miss.

  It’s his turn. He steps forward and off he goes again. BLURT. BLURT. BLURT. And again, BLURT. BLURT. BLURT. We put another target out and he shoots it down.

  God that feels good, he says stepping back from position and letting me come forward. What a stress reliever.

  Now my turn: Pop. Pop. Pop.

  You have stress. What kind of stress can you possibly have, Cal?

  I change the target and we fire off another series of rounds.

  My mom stresses me out. Not having a job stresses me out.

  BLURT. BLURT. BLURT.

  But this makes me feel a world better.

  I should have your problems

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  What problems do you have, Art? You’ve got a woman.

  BLURT. BLURT. BLURT.

  Yeah, and what’s your point?

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  Well, it’s more than I ever had. So count your blessings and stop complaining.

  I offer to change the target, but Cal flags me away.

  Not necessary, buddy, he shouts. Then he goes again. BLURT. BLURT. BLURT. Shredding the target this way and that until there is nothing left but a few tattered pieces hanging and a pile of shell casings at his feet.

  Ah, wonderful, he says packing up his Uzi. Nothing like it. I feel a million times better.

  Then we hop in his car and he drives like nuts to get home to his mom by seven.

  He drops me off and smiles. Thanks for coming out old buddy, he says, slapping me on the back. I grab my gun and barely have time to get the door closed before he’s off at full speed to his mom.