A man in full, p.85
A Man in Full, page 85
“Not much, Mr. Croker. But it’ll do for now, and the hours are pretty flexible, so I got plenty of time to look for something that pays better.”
“Well, hell … maybe I could help you,” said Charlie, suddenly excited by the prospect of doing something for the boy.
But then he sighed. His spirits deflated. After laying off 15 percent of the workforce at Croker Global Foods, it wouldn’t be very bright for him to turn around and order them to hire somebody just because he was a nice kid.
“Nawwwww, I don’t think we’re hiring, and it’s a lousy job anyway.” Charlie looked away from the boy as if he had already let him down. Then he turned back toward him. “Tell me something, Connie. Where the hell’d you work to get those arms a yours”—he made a gesture toward the boy—“and those hands?”
That was not a question Conrad had anticipated. His mind spun. The best he could come up with was warehouse work—but he’d change the industry. “For about six months, Mr. Croker, I worked in a wholesale paint warehouse. All day long you’d be lifting cans of paint and drums of spackle and plaster mix that weighed anywhere from ten pounds to eighty pounds. All day long you were giving your hands and your forearms a workout to da max. That was what one of the fellows I used to work with used to say, ‘to da max.’”
“Unh-hunh,” said Charlie. He paused for five or six seconds, then said, “I can tell you one a lot worse than that.”
“One what, sir?” said the boy.
“A warehouse job,” said Charlie, “a warehouse job worse than working in a paint warehouse. I own some warehouses myself, food service warehouses, wholesale food distribution. Maybe you’ve seen one of our trucks. They’re all over the place. Croker Global Foods is what it says on the side of them, white trucks with navy and gold lettering.”
Charlie couldn’t figure out what had happened. The boy was speechless. He stared at Charlie blankly, as if all his lights had gone out.
So Charlie repeated it in the form of a question: “Have you ever seen our trucks?—Croker Global Foods?”
Finally the boy said, “Yes … I have.”
“It would be hard to miss ‘em,” said Charlie. “We’re all over the country. Anyway, seeing as how we’re food distributors, we handle a lot of stuff that’s got to be kept frozen, especially meat. So in every warehouse we have a freezer unit about the size of this house. Maybe not quite that big, but big. And we got people who work in there called ‘freezer pickers.’ They work an eight-hour shift at about zero Fahrenheit, hauling product off these racks, out a these ‘slots’ they call ’em, sixty-, seventy-, eighty-pound frozen cartons …” Charlie averted his eyes again, lying there, and shook his head. Then he looked at the boy once more. “The worst of it is when they come outta the damn things with these icicles coming outta their noses. I’m not kidding!” He tossed one hand up in a gesture of helplessness. “Outta their noses!” Once more he turned away. “Jesus …” He turned back again. Big sigh. “I’d like to sell the whole damn business, but I’ve borrowed more money against the damn thing than it’s worth, if I tried to sell it now … So anyway, you had a job in a paint warehouse. Where was that?”
The boy didn’t say anything for the longest time. Finally he said, “Milwaukee, Mr. Croker.”
“So how’d you happen to come here?”
“I’d read there were a lot of jobs available in Atlanta, and there are a lot of jobs available, but they don’t pay much unless you’re a college graduate.”
The old man said, “So when did you get interested in the Stoics?”
“A few weeks ago. I found this book I showed you in a secondhand store in Chamblee.” He held the book up so the old man could see it.
“The Stoics,” Mr. Croker said once more. “And what was the man’s name again, Eppitetus?”
“E-pic-te-tus.”
“Oh yeah. Well … okay … what does Epictetus have to say about bankruptcy?—or is that something too mundane for a philosopher to think about?”
“Not too mundane for Epictetus, Mr. Croker. One place he says, ‘You are all nervous and you can’t sleep at night for fear you’re going to run out of money. You say, “How will I even get enough to eat?” But what you are really afraid of is not starvation but the prospect of not having a cook or somebody to wait on you at the dinner table or somebody to take care of your clothes and your shoes and the laundry and make up the beds and clean up the house. In other words, you’re afraid you may no longer be able to lead the life of an invalid.’”
“He really said that?” asked Charlie. “About insomnia and leading the life of an invalid and all that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay … What else does he say?”
“He says, ‘Where does your fear of losing your worldly possessions lead you? To death. When Ulysses was shipwrecked and washed up on shore with nothing left, it never broke his spirit. He approached the fix he was in like a hill-bred lion, trusting in his might. He wasn’t depending on his reputation, his money, his official position, but on his own might. What makes you free is what’s inside you.’ That’s what he says, Mr. Croker.”
Charlie’s lame knee wouldn’t allow him to roll over in bed, but he twisted his body as best he could, in order to look the boy squarely in the face, this boy declaiming Stoicism from the downy billows of an easy chair custom-made for one of Serena’s visions of luxury. “What’s he really getting at? This Epictetus?”
“Well—I’m not the final word on this, Mr. Croker, but what he’s saying, it seems to me, he’s saying that the only real possession you’ll ever have is your character and your ‘scheme of life,’ he calls it. Zeus has given every person a spark from his own divinity, and no one can take that away from you, not even Zeus, and from that spark comes your character. Everything else is temporary and worthless in the long run, your body included. You know what he calls your possessions? ‘Trifles.’ You know what he calls the human body? ‘A vessel of clay containing a quart of blood.’ If you understand that, you won’t moan and groan, you won’t complain, you won’t blame other people for your troubles, and you won’t go around flattering people. I think that’s what he’s saying, Mr. Croker.”
Charlie said, “He talked about flattering people?”
That caught his attention. The lies he had agreed to recite about Fareek Fanon were flattery elevated to some sort of ultimate.
“Yes, sir,” said the boy, “that’s what he said. ‘The flatterer debases himself and deceives the object of his fawning.’ ‘Dogs fawn over one another,’ he says, ‘but throw a piece of meat between them, and see how much friendship remains.’”
For a moment Charlie tried to fit the piece of meat into his own relationship with Fareek Fanon, but he couldn’t come up with any real analogy. Then he said to the boy:
“Let me ask you this. What would Epictetus say if a man made a speech praising a prominent public figure—okay?—and he did admire the man’s, uh … power and skill in his line of work—but he didn’t think much of him as a person? Would it be okay to make the speech as long as you stuck pretty much to the man’s professional life when you gave the talk?”
“Is this someone the person giving the talk truly does not like?”
Charlie paused, sighed, let out his breath, and said dejectedly, “Yeah. He can’t stand the sonofabitch.”
“Is the person giving the speech praising this public figure with the idea of gaining something for himself?”
The old man hesitated for a moment, then said, “Yeah. You got it.”
“Not much, then,” said the boy. “Epictetus says that selling out lowers you to the level of a beast, like the wolf or the fox. For some reason he thought that foxes were the lowest of all.”
“He actually says ‘selling out’?”
“Practically,” said the boy. “Lemme see …” He thumbed through the book. “Here it is, Book I, Chapter 2. He says, ‘Of one thing beware, O man. See what is the price at which you sell your will. If you do nothing else, do not sell your will cheap.’”
The old man said, “How do you know whether you’re selling out too cheap or not?”
“If you’re selling out at all, it’s too cheap,” said Conrad, “or at least that’s the way I interpret what he’s saying, Mr. Croker, since the true Stoic makes no compromises. Selling out and compromises are not part of his character.”
“That’s fine,” said Charlie, “but how do you know what your character is? Let’s say there’s a crisis you’ve got to deal with. How do you know what you’re really made of?”
“Epictetus talks about that,” said Conrad. “He says, how does a bull, when a lion’s coming after him, and he has to protect the whole herd—how does he know what powers he’s got? He knows because it has taken him a long time to become powerful. Like the bull, a man doesn’t become heroic all of a sudden, either. Epictetus says, ‘He must train through the winter and make ready.’”
Like a bull!
Jesus Christ, thought Charlie, of all the animals he could’ve chosen, he has to pick out the bull! The old folk song started ricocheting around in his skull so fast, he couldn’t get rid of it:
Charlie Croker was a man in full.
He had a back like a Jersey bull.
Didn’t like okra, didn’t like pears.
He liked a gal that had no hairs.
Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker! Charlie Croker!
Like a Jersey bull! It was as if the boy, this Connie, could read his mind and knew exactly how to prod him, Charlie Croker—he who would compare himself to a Jersey bull!
“This is all very noble,” said Charlie, “in the abstract, all this your man is saying, but what does it have to do with real life? Let’s think about real life for a second. Let’s think about a situation in which you lose everything … you lose everything! You see what I’m saying? You lose everything, the house where you live, your income, your cars—everything. You’re out on the street. You don’t know where your next meal’s coming from. What good do a lot of high-sounding ideals mean then?”
The boy said, “Many of Epictetus’ disciples asked him that exact same thing, and you know what he told them?”
“No, what?”
“Have you ever seen an old beggar?” The kid’s eyes were boring right into him.
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes.”
“Sure I have,” said Charlie, “plenty of them.”
“See? They’ve gotten by,” said the boy. “They’ve managed to get food to eat, 365 days a year, probably. They’re not starving. What makes you think they can all find food, and you wouldn’t be able to?”
“What kinda consolation is that supposed to be? I’d rather die than go around with a cup in my hand.”
The boy smiled, and his eyes brightened. “Epictetus talks about exactly that, Mr. Croker. He says, ‘You’re not afraid of starving, you’re afraid of losing face.’ He says, ‘You don’t have to have some high position before you can be a great man.’ One of the great Stoic philosophers, Cleanthes, hauled water to make a living. He was a day laborer, Mr. Croker. But nobody thought of him as someone who didn’t have a respectable job. Why? Because he radiated the power of the spark of Zeus.”
Charlie closed his eyes and tried to imagine it. He’s out on the street. What street? Blackland Road? All he’d get there would be an occasional puff of BMW fumes or a piece of gravel dislodged from a tire tread. So where? Peachtree Street? Nobody even walks on Peachtree Street, and so who’s going to stop his Mercedes or Infiniti to give Charlie Croker a quarter? Maybe he could take his tin cup into the parking lot at the Lenox Square mall. But they’ve probably got security personnel to chase hooples who come wandering in on foot out of there before they can hunker down on the pavement and set out their cup and a sign saying, “Please help me. Need $28 more so I can get back home to Mobile. No advice, enlightenment, or root-causes conversations, please.” That was a sign Charlie had seen in—where the hell was it? Lenox Square? Downtown near the CNN building? Charlie looked at the boy, Connie, and shook his head and said, “I’ve tried, but I just can’t see it.”
“And yet if it happened,” said the boy, “it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as you think, Mr. Croker. Epictetus would say that you—I’m just saying this for the sake of argument, Mr. Croker—Epictetus would say you’ve given way to your animal impulses and think of yourself as all belly and flesh and animal desire, at the expense of that which Zeus has given you, that spark of the divine.”
There was a knock on the door, and then it opened. It was Serena, with a cross between anger and fear on her face. She wore a plain periwinkleblue sundress that was demure in concept but showed plenty of her bosom. Her thick black hair seemed to be tumbling down in waves, and her eyes were all the more vivid because they matched her dress.
She came toward the bed, saying, “Charlie! Who is this—this man White? He’s—”
Charlie cut her off: “Serena, you remember Connie, don’t you?” It seemed terribly important somehow that she acknowledge the boy’s presence.
She turned her head distractedly toward the boy, who by now had risen to his feet, and she said, “Yes … of course.”
Then she turned back toward Charlie. “This Mr. White, he keeps calling, he keeps saying he wants to ‘reconfirm your decision.’ ‘Reconfirm your decision,’ he keeps saying, and he doesn’t care who he’s talking to, Jarmaine, Nina, anybody. What are we supposed to do about him? What’s this all about?”
Charlie felt terribly embarrassed that she should be bringing all this up in front of Connie. He wanted to put her in her place, but he felt … so tired … so vulnerable … He felt as if he were sinking into the mattress, into the sanctuary of this bed with its thousands of dollars worth of fabric billowing down the four posters, there, there, there … and there … He was living the life of an invalid, just as Epictetus had said. And what was the name of the guy? Cleanthes? He hauled water for a living, just like some wage mule’s work, and he was still a great man, and everybody knew it.
“Well?” said Serena, who now actually had her hands on her hips. Her eyes were blazing. “What do we do about him?”
Charlie pushed himself up by pressing the heels of his hands into the mattress, so that he was at least halfway sitting—and not such an invalid. “You’re right,” he said to Serena. “So far I’ve been a fox, but it’s against my nature. I feel lousy, and my knee hurts like hell, but I’m gonna be a … a … a bull. I’ll deal with it.”
Withering scorn: “What on earth are you talking about, Charlie?—a fox and a bull …”
Charlie realized he certainly didn’t sound like a bull. His voice was barely above the level and vitality of a croak, and nowhere in himself could he find the will to even try to become a bull.
He looked at Serena, looked right into those eyes of hers, and said, “I’ve descended”—he decided not to mention the foxes or the wolves—
“I’ve descended to a certain level, but I’m gonna get back up. I’ll deal with it all.”
Serena, with her hands still on her hips, looked at him as if he were senile and shook her head and spun about and marched out of the room.
No, Charlie was no bull who had grown up with a consciousness of his own powers. He didn’t have a back like a Jersey bull any longer, and his only hope of getting one was in that book in the hands of a boy who stood beside the chair in his nurse’s-aide outfit, that slim boy who, unaccountably, had the forearms and hands of a man twice his size. The boy was like the man he told him about, Cleanthes, who had a job as a day laborer but impressed all who came in contact with him like “a hill-bred lion, trusting in his might,” like Ulysses washed ashore, wherever the hell it was Ulysses was washed ashore, and whoever the hell he was. The name summoned up a flicker of memory, but that was all.
It was humiliating, the way she had talked to him right in front of Connie … He had never let a woman talk to him that way. So why now? Because the source of his strength had always been his money, his reputation, his success in worldly affairs. But the one true source of strength was his own might, his own will, to get or to avoid, his own divine spark of reason, which enabled him to judge which things were in his power and which were beyond it.
Well, Serena wasn’t a rich woman—not without him she wasn’t—they had a prenuptial agreement and all the rest of it—and she wasn’t exactly a despot, but she sure could be a bitch, and there you had that little performance in front of Connie.
Even though the very thought of it made him feel miserable, he said, “Connie, I think I’m gonna get up and take a walk. Gimme a hand. Get me my bathrobe.”
Getting the knee off the bed and upright was a killer, but finally he was out in the hallway clad in his blue robe and supported by his aluminum crutches. The hallway was heavily carpeted, but the crutches went clackclack … clackclack … clackclack … clackclack … all the same. Connie walked beside him.
Clackclack … clackclack … “Connie?” said the old man.
“Yes, sir.”
“Connie, I want you to do me a favor.”
“If I can, Mr. Croker.”
“You’ll be coming back here tomorrow at eight, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, what I want is, I want you to leave the book with me after you finish work today, and I’ll do some reading on my own and give it back to you tomorrow morning.”
The boy’s eyes grew frightened, wary, and startled. He stood there with his mouth open.
He didn’t know what to say. There was no way he could explain to the old man that the book was … alive with the spark of Zeus. Therein were the essential truths that had enabled him to withstand the worst the beasts could throw at him in jail, withstand exile from his own family, alienation from the law, a confrontation with a thug—he could see the sneering face of the greaser at the Gardners’. And in that moment it all came together. He could see it as a foreordained pattern. The Book had arrived, seemingly by accident, at Santa Rita—and introduced him to Zeus, to Epictetus and the truth and the way, and given him the courage to fight and overcome the worst predators in the jail. Then Zeus uprooted the entire jail and cracked it open like a walnut shell so that he could escape. Then he made the Army Reservists’ Jeep available and somehow led him to Kenny and Mai and the “underground airline” and sent him to Atlanta. And why Atlanta? Because in a hopelessly cluttered attic room in a little town he had never heard of in his life, Chamblee, there was a copy of the Book. And why should he have a copy of the Book? To continue the work and testify to the glory of Zeus. And now he had a chance—the very scalp of his head grew hot from the thought—now he had a chance to convert a man of money and power and renown. From the moment he was laid off by Croker Global Foods to this moment, standing beside a crippled Charlie Croker, this—but of course!—this had been the pattern his life had been woven into: not to punish Croker for throwing hundreds of people out of work with a snap of his fingers, but to recruit him and all his resources into the service of Zeus.
