Visiting

By David Fitzsimmons

Father comes to town. Father owns a small construction firm. Father wants David to return home, join the enterprise, perhaps one day take it over. David and Father are dissimilar in many ways. Father is broader and heavier and, even at this late date, stronger than David. Father is tougher than David, to be sure: His work requires it.

While Father is by trade a civil engineer, he spends most of his time fighting with real estate developers to get paid, which often involves banging the handset of his telephone against the desk saying things like: “Can you hear me now, motherfucker?” or “Hey, motherfucker, can you hear me?” or just hanging up the telephone and saying “Motherfuckers won’t pay? Well, fuck it. The subcontractors will have to file liens.”

David appreciates and is grateful to Father, but he simply doesn’t have the constitution for that sort of work, not to mention the fact that he has no faculty for business, mathematics, reading building schematics, arriving at complex estimates, submitting bids, and in turn executing on said bids.

Father is, of course, from Brooklyn, New York. He recently turned sixty and friends from his childhood came to visit for a party. They said Father was a tough motherfucker when he was young.

In regular life, it should be stated, Father is sweet and gregarious and likes to tell jokes and laugh a lot – not at all the man he is at work.

Father meets Girlfriend and David for a drink after work. All day he has been wandering around the city, going to museums (he is on his own for this trip). He went to The Phillips and fell asleep. Father carries a pen, his reading glasses, and a foldout map of Washington in the pocket of his shirt. His wallet is heavy as a brick. Girlfriend asks him about his day. He had a nice day. Father orders a Johnnie Walker Black. And then another.

He explains how hard it is running a company these days, how different it is from what it used to be. Things you can’t say, how careful one has to be, how politically correct. In order to illustrate what things were like way back when, Father tells a story about a “big job” (they all are) that a friend of his had been involved in back in New York.

The story is about how after the job was completed, the client wouldn’t pay the builder. Typical! The client owed something like $7 million. A year or two of building, then all the aggravation and negotiating and trying to come to terms to receive payment – “Why wouldn’t they pay?” Girlfriend interjects.

“Because they never fucking pay,” Father says.

Finally, there is a meeting in the city to settle the matter. The principal of the construction firm – a fat, tough old man – he goes into a conference room where the meeting is held with the client. His staff, all the guys who worked on the project, wait outside. And hour goes by. Then another. And another. Finally the old man comes out. He is weary-looking, but satisfied. He announces that they are leaving.

“What happened?” asks a young project assistant.

“We got a check,” says the old man.

“How much?” asks the project assistant.

“A million,” says the old man.

“A million?” exclaims the project assistant. “The job was for seven!”

The old man walks over to the young man, presses his fat belly up against him the way fat men do, and says, “Who the fuck are you?”

The young man says his name – Robert.

“Listen Bob,” says the old man, “we could wait years and never see our $7 million, or I can walk out today with $1 million in cash. A million fucking dollars. Do you know what I would do for a million dollars? I would fuck my mother for a million dollars.”

Father laughs at this. “You can’t talk like that these days,” he says, pulling his drink to his lips. Girlfriend smiles, but she doesn’t laugh.

The following day David takes Father to The National Building Museum and we see an exhibit on Frank Gehry. We go to The Arlington National Cemetery. We go to The Vietnam Memorial. We go to the Mall: from The Washington Monument up to the Capitol. Again, we go out to dinner. A few more drinks.

Sunday arrives and Father returns home.

On the bus on Monday, I speak to my British friend. It’s spring and he’s melancholy. He misses London and his family and friends. I say I understand. He says people in America don’t laugh as much as they do in the U.K. They’re more self-effacing there. Here, they’re ambitious, which is good, but they just don’t laugh as much.

Here, it’s important for a person to know how much it would take for him to fuck his own mother. $1 million? $2 million? $10 million? With the economy in recession and gas prices soaring, it seems a good time to take stock.

Brian Finke, Lily and Azriza, Air Asia, 2006, ClampArt, New York