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  And I dealt with local oceanfront women who hung out at places like Blowfish Aft up in Murrell’s Inlet, sat with elbows propped on a foot-wide bar staring at miniature toy scuba divers, said things like, “I picked out that hammerhead all by myself.” I wasn’t prepared for the remainder of the world that lived and thrived on dry land.

  Mooney Gray stalked the tongue-and-groove boards bending beneath his penny loafers. He jutted his chest and wagged one finger left and right as if to a James Brown song. “You’ve learned to make eye contact. You’ve learned to shake hands with a firm grip. You’ve learned to shake hands and make eye contact before giving your spiel. So what? So what?! I have a dog that shakes hands and makes eye contact.”

  Lorene wore no underwear. I let my right hand fall to the side.

  It wasn’t ten o’clock in the morning yet.

  “Listen,” Mooney Gray said. “Listen, I got a story for y’all. This’ll mean something. This ain’t no trick.”

  Lorene said to me, “He’s going to start this whole thing, and then he’ll call for a break. Don’t get too wrapped up in it.”

  “What happened?” I asked, pointing to her face. “I don’t want to be rude, but I have this problem with needing to know things.”

  “Listen up,” Lorene said. She took my hand and set it on her small lap. “Even a man more worried about fish than anything else might want to know what this is all about.”

  I wasn’t sure if I then underwent my first petit-mal seizure or what, but my middle finger twitched uncontrollably for the first time ever. It went in X’s and O’s, as if I were playing tic-tac-toe on Lorene’s face. I felt the same warmth on my hand that I might have felt if petting a black poodle in the sun.

  Mooney Gray continued. “My daughter joined a gang when she was fifteen years old. We lived in Anaheim, California—you know, right next to Mickey Mouse and Goofy. Gangs don’t emerge out of Never Never Land. That’s what me and the missus thought. Well, my daughter didn’t take much stock in all that. She joined a gang, and as in all good gangs there was an initiation. She didn’t have to go out and kill anybody, thank God. No sir. Don’t get me wrong, but sometimes I think what she had to undergo was even worse. She had to self-mutilate herself.”

  I put my hand back on my own lap. I crossed and re-crossed my legs and pretended to cough. Looking back on it all, I kind of figured things out at about this point.

  Mooney Gray shook his head over and over, then turned his back to the audience. “Living so close to Hollywood, these gang members thought that they should scar up their faces as a protest to—” he turned around and made quotation marks in the air “‘—the beautiful people.’ They got box cutters and sliced open their faces. One girl made an X right across her face. She could’ve been a model before her decision. One girl made like Frankenstein and just put incisions every whichaway.”

  I turned toward Lorene. “This is your father?”

  Mooney Gray pointed at Lorene and said, “My daughter in the back of the room decided that she wanted to stay young forever, and to do so she needed to slice a children’s game on her face.”

  This was Lorene’s cue. She stood up, walked past me, and joined her father on stage. Lorene said, “You would think that I would have no sales ability whatsoever because of my face. Let me tell you that last year I cleared almost a half million. And you know that if I can get clients to buy my product without looking at my face, then you can sell whatever it is you sell.”

  For the first time in my life I thought about how I wished I’d married a woman who taught first grade. I didn’t want to sit around motivational speeches ever again. Somehow I knew that whatever Lorene would say, it would end up with me either buying her product out of pity or feeling a guilt known only to biblical characters.

  Mooney Gray said, “We’re going to take a break for those of y’all who smoke and/or drink coffee. When we reconvene my daughter will tell you everything she knows about selling audiotapes and Braille books to the blind.”

  I KEYED MOONEY Gray’s Lincoln down the driver’s side, from front wheel well to mid-back door. I rounded my own car, got in, and drove straight to a place called the Halibut Inn near Neptune Beach, thirty minutes away, where I’d once sold a wall aquarium to a joint that served mostly bikers. The aquarium kept clown fish only, seeing as they held the same colors as the Harley-Davidson logo.

  Inside, I ordered a draft and said to the barmaid, “I’m the guy who sold y’all the aquarium.” I pointed behind her.

  “That’s not enough to get drinks on the house.” The barmaid had her hair pulled back in a French twist. She wore leggings and a T-shirt that read IF YOU CAN’T LAUGH AT YOURSELF, THEN MAKE FUN OF EVERYONE ELSE.

  “I wasn’t looking for free beer. I got money. I was just saying.”

  She said, “I remember when you came in here a couple years ago.”

  I said, “Drew Gaston,” but didn’t shake her hand or offer her a business card.

  This biker sat down next to me at the bar and said, “Gaston. Gassed on. Son, you must come from a people who got farted on. That’s how last names come about. People named Baker come from people who ran bread shops. Smiths are from horseshoers.”

  “We don’t need no more aquariums,” the barmaid said. “I can’t say that this one does us much good. The owner’s gone crazy and talks to the fish most nights.”

  I looked behind the woman at their hundred-gallon tank—a small one compared with what I’d sold to places like Dale Ray’s Delray Bar and Grill, which only held skates and mantas, or what the locals grouped as devilfish. “I been to some kind of motivational-speaker thing I had to go to. I’m not selling today.”

  I looked at the barmaid’s perfect face and thought, There’s something missing. She placed a glass of beer in front of me. “I’ve seen those people on TV when I get home at three o’clock. In the middle of the night. That what you’re talking?”

  I watched the clown fish, which seemed to be healthy. “I don’t know what I’m talking,” I said. I looked at the biker, who wore an upside-down tattoo on his left arm that looked like a woman’s privates but ended up being the devil’s goateed face.

  He said, “My daddy was a motivational speaker of sorts. He ran the local KKK. Oh, he talked and talked and talked. Then somebody shot him in the eye and killed him. Up in a South Carolina prison.”

  I looked at the barmaid. Her jaw didn’t drop.

  “This man I went to see brought along his goofball daughter as a sidekick. She had scars from here to there.” I zigzagged my hand like Zorro across my face. “I don’t get what people are saying about anything anymore, man. I have no idea what anything has to do with selling what I have to sell. I’m thinking about moving to South Dakota or someplace.”

  Six clown fish wavered toward the biker and me in such a way that made me think of synchronized swimmers. The barmaid stood before us. She said, “My best friend in high school got cut up while diving down in some of those underground caves over near there.” She pointed west. “She was lucky it didn’t snag her oxygen. She got cut up on coral or limestone. She got scraped like she got throwed from a motorbike onto pavement. To this day she looks like she had a bunch of skin grafts that didn’t quite take.”

  The biker waved at one of the clown fish, a tiny wave, as if to a newborn human baby. I looked at the barmaid, stood up, and dropped my pants. I showed her the scaly patches of psoriasis on my upper thighs. “Did it look like this?” I asked her. “Look at me. I’m a goddamn skink, motherfucker.”

  The biker left his beer unfinished and said he needed to rough up someone for money. The barmaid said to me, “Maybe you should lay off beer and drink pure water only. I read something about dehydration one time. And about water that’s ninety-nine percent free of lead and other toxins.”

  I ordered a bourbon and water.

  I CALLED MY voicemail from the car. My boss had left one message for me to get in touch with a woman up in Savannah who owned a basement bar called Carpa
l Tunnel, which was supposed to be geared toward after-fiveo’clock secretaries. “Seeing as ‘carp’ is part of the name, Drew, well, you can figure out how to talk them into an aquarium.” Salty left another message that went, “I didn’t pay all this money for y’all to get motivated properly only to have you drive around town listening to your messages.” That was it.

  I drove back into Jacksonville. I parked at the far end of Mooney Gray’s scarred sedan. Somewhere between the bar and the Ramada I had decided to ask Lorene out for a date that night, maybe take her back to the Halibut Inn. Maybe I’d ask the rest of my sales force colleagues to go there, too, seeing as the Brunswick-to-Fort Pierce section of the Atlantic coast wasn’t their territory.

  I opened the trunk and pulled out an unopened pint of bourbon from beneath some Salty’s Showfish brochures, stuck it in my back pocket, and entered the Azalea Room meeting space just as Mooney Gray said, “I hope y’all had a good lunch. Before we break up into groups I want to tell y’all a little story, seeing as that’s what I get paid to do.”

  I sat in my original chair. Lorene wasn’t around, but there was a piece of folded-over paper on her seat. She’d written FISH GUY on the top. I took it and read, “I hope you don’t think I tricked you or anything. I didn’t intend to trick you. After my father got me to an anti-gang intervention expert one of the first things I had to learn how to do was quit tricking people.” She signed it Sincerely.

  While Mooney Gray went into a long story involving people who die to plan and those who plan to die, I shoved the note in my pocket. I got up and went to the reservation desk and said, “I know there’s a bar in here open somewhere.”

  “Yes sir. Second floor.” The clerk pointed up. “You can either take the elevator and then a right to the end of the hallway or climb those stairs at the end of this hall and it’ll spill you out where you want to be. Whichever’s easiest.”

  I found Lorene at the bar, drinking something that involved a paper umbrella. Most of the Salty’s Showfish sales force sat at a round table at the other end of the room. “Mind if I join you here, lady?” I said, pulling a leatherbacked stool out.

  “You get my note?” In the near-dark Lorene’s scars blended into her face naturally. I wanted to run my hand over her visage, either for security or to make sure Mooney and Lorene hadn’t pulled some kind of makeup job to gain sympathy.

  “Nothing against you and yours, but I can’t take these motivational seminars. The last one I went to involved everybody holding hands and singing, ‘If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands,’ which wasn’t easy, seeing as we were told not to let go of our partners on either side.” I pointed at the draft beer dispenser. The bartender poured a pint and slid it over. From behind me I heard Mike Cobb bragging about an aquarium he’d sold to Dollywood when he was on his vacation, far from his Wilmington-to-Norfolk territory.

  Lorene tipped her glass in a toast. “I don’t travel around with Daddy often. We just happened to be in the same area. There are more than a few blind people in Florida, let me tell you. They want books on tape. They want Braille. I know he’s my father and all, but let me say that Mooney Gray is a moral person. He’s not like us. He genuinely wants people to succeed in what they do, and he believes in what he espouses.”

  I thought, Espouses. I would use that word from then on out. “That’s a true story about the gang? What were you people thinking?”

  Lorene ran her index finger down the alluvial chutes of her face. “I wanted to be queen of the gang, pretty much. Hell, any kind of self-etched disfigurement allowed a girl to join in. Some of my friends only scratched an inch-long crease into their forehead or wherever.” She took the umbrella and straw from her drink. Lorene set them aside on a clean paper napkin. She slugged down the mixture like a shooter. “It’s not easy living in such close proximity to women who can afford perfection long after their looks decline.”

  I turned to my friends. Danny Clement was in the middle of a story about how he went through some picayune town called Forty-Five somewhere in the Carolinas, how he sold two hundred-gallon aquariums to a man who owned the local cotton mill, how the man only stocked them with fishing lures he’d bought over the years at estate sales when his spinners, doffers, and weavers died. Mike Cobb caught my eye and gave a thumbs-up.

  I RETURNED TO the seminar alone. I got in a group of five other men and a woman. Mooney Gray told us to close our eyes and envision anything that might make the world better that didn’t involve money. Mooney Gray said, “You can’t think about turning slums into condos, seeing as that would take too much money. You can’t think about feeding kids in Appalachia or Rwanda, seeing as rice, flour, and wheat cost money. You can’t even think about cleaning up the environment, seeing as it’d cost money to filter out what toxins we pour into the Mississippi and places.”

  I closed my eyes and thought of Lorene’s scars. I tried my best not to think, a world without low self-esteem, a world without women who know that they can’t compete with what advertisers put in magazines and on television so that said women feel as though they need to lose anywhere from ten to a hundred pounds in order to look like an air-brushed woman midway through a two-hundred-page magazine with ten pages of actual text. I tried not to think, If people still had gills.

  “Okay. Now I want everybody to tell their secrets. Y’all vote on which one you think’s best in your group, and then I’ll vote on which one’s best overall. I believe I got another—” Mooney Gray reached into his waistband “—set of complimentary drink tickets for upstairs.”

  My group members stared at each other. One man said, “Well, seeing as you’re in the club, why don’t you start off,” to me.

  “I ain’t in the club. I don’t even know what the club is. I sell fucking aquariums.”

  “I’m in golf balls,” another man said.

  The woman in the group said, “My boss sent me here because I couldn’t talk people into two months’ worth of suntan sessions. We live in St. Augustine, by God! Who needs suntan sessions?”

  I said, “Eeny-meeny-miney-moe,” and went around until it ended with the guy next to me. “You start.”

  It was worthless. Every salesperson said something that would’ve cost money—free cars for every American, free groceries, obligatory armed service. One guy said, “To make the world a better place I’m thinking maybe we could all move to space stations and live above it all.” He sold air purifiers door-to-door.

  I wrote down every suggestion on the lined memo pad provided in each participant’s packet. When it got to my turn I said, “The world would be a different and better place without mandatory motivational speeches to attend.” My team members stared as if I’d piped up about how Jesus was a gay man who couldn’t decide which of the twelve disciples to date seriously.

  “That’s just plain mean-spirited,” said a man who sold a cleansing agent called Scour Power. “Go with the flow, man. Do you know how lucky you are to be able to spend a day not knocking on doors?”

  I stood up and looked at Lorene’s father onstage. I yelled out, “It would be a better world if we wouldn’t have to go to motivational speeches, man. It would be a better world if parents could understand that their children cry out for help in ways unknown to the live-bearing population.” It just came to me. I nodded twice hard, turned, and walked out of the room all slumpy and boneless, as if I wore a pimp’s costume.

  LORENE SAID, “I’M not ragging on your car or anything, but it would be nice to have a convertible right now.” I’d gone back up to the Ramada bar, taken the scarred woman by the hand, and led her outside. We drove to the Halibut Inn.

  “When you first sat down next to me at nine o’clock this morning, did you intentionally show me your crotch? I want to know. It doesn’t matter if you did or didn’t. What I’m thinking is, a person with a, well, blemish of some sort might subconsciously redirect another person’s line of sight. I’m trying to figure some things out about the human condition.”

 
Lorene adjusted the passenger-side mirror in a way that allowed me to see only the roadside ditch clearly. “We couldn’t rob banks when I was in the gang. It was too easy for a witness to give clear descriptions. What we did, though, was hang out down in Beverly Hills and find ways to fuck movie stars. Men or women. I can give you a list of leading men to character actors to sitcom women who will never forget me. I’m etched in their minds, so to speak.”

  I got behind a slow-moving truck with WORLD’S LARGEST ALLIGATOR printed on the tailgate. I didn’t switch lanes and pass it. “What?”

  Lorene studied strip malls. She kept her face turned away from me. “Listen. I met a man who opened a New Age bookstore. He had this big gay-and-lesbian section. He had an entire wall of books on holistic healing, and another on how to garden without using any pesticides or insecticides. This was in New Mexico. You’d think that he’d’ve made a killing. This was in Santa Fe, where all those rich people come buy bad artwork to fill the walls of their new vacation homes up in Taos or wherever.”

  I listened to Lorene, but what I really wanted to know was if the world’s largest alligator was in the back of the pickup truck. It was one of those wide-bed trucks with four tires on back. I wanted the alligator—which certainly had to curl itself in half if it was the world’s largest—to raise its head.

  “He had a slew of those self-help books, from finding your inner child to finding your soul to finding your perfect mate. He had books on how to read tarot cards. You could even buy books on how to read crystal balls. There were books on discovering souls you didn’t even know that you had, like from past lives and whatnot. In the philosophy section he had everything from Plato to Shirley MacLaine.” The world’s-largest-alligator truck turned off Highway 10 toward the Regency Square Mall. I fucking followed it. “I want to see this thing,” I said. The truck pulled into a Citgo gas station.