GLAD NEWS OF THE NATURAL WORLD by T. R. Pearson

Author:T. R. Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

MARTY

ON

STATEN ISLAND

1

LIKE THE VAST MAJORITY of aimless unindustrious people on earth, Teddy preferred to think himself enterprising. He was evermore floating half-baked schemes for raking riches in, favoring me with impractical business advice and ideas for the sorts of products that routinely held out the promise of inadvertent fatalities. Spring-loaded kitchenware. Battery-operated clothing. Dual-use tools for the handy homeowner (the nail gun / saber saw comes to mind) and a panoply of self-defense items for imperiled urbanites, from exploding wallets to cell phones with taser capabilities.

Once I'd owned up to the pleasure I'd taken from driving fares in Teddy's car, Teddy set about calculating how he could turn the sensation to profit. He preferred to believe that I was a representative American, that my fellow citizens would endorse most anything I liked, so once I'd acquainted Teddy with the soothing spa effect of carrying irate strangers through the city, Teddy decided my fellow citizens might be keen on it as well.

Teddy arrived in time at the notion of a strain of urban dude ranch. He figured if otherwise sensible people would jet out to Montana and pay for a week in a flyblown pasture mucking around with cows, why wouldn't they come to the queen of cities to motor carping civilians about? In retrospect I imagine I oversold the therapeutic value of traveling the avenues and the parkways, negotiating the river crossings with unbridled peevishness wafting from the backseat of the car. I tried to retrench, volunteered provisos, indicated what impressed me as glaring flaws in Teddy's thinking, but Teddy was generally immune to misgivings once he'd embraced an idea.

He hoped to put tourists behind the wheel of a car-service sedan, open up to them the blue-collar / immigrant metropolitan experience which had the benefit of being prickly and spiritually cleansing both at once. Without intending to, I'd succeeded in selling Teddy on the notion of recreational hired-car driving as something like Canyon Ranch on wheels.

I peppered Teddy with tough questions and trotted out calamities. I tried to infect him with my native fear of baleful consequence, and I wondered of him as my trump complaint how he expected out-of-towners to possibly know how to get anywhere they'd been instructed by fares to go.

“Satellites,” Teddy told me. “Right?” he said to Omar who withdrew from his GameBoy the penknife he was using to dissect it so as to shrug and inform me, “Satellites,” as well.

Naturally I assumed that Teddy's enthusiasm would flag. I knew how I was with a personal pledge. I'd yet to master Italian or realize stark abdominal definition, hadn't succeeded at learning the tango or winning back Alice Kay Odom by graduating to TV drama and intoxicating the creature with my chops. I'd set aside my venomous-lizard novel after only a handful of chapters, walked for exercise merely up to the Thai take-out place and back, and when it came to sacred personal oaths and abiding core convictions, I suspected Teddy was probably as unreliable as me.

He certainly seemed to be.

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