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were either unwilling or unable to carpe the diem when
opportunity knocked ... so screw 'em.
    'Til clean a
couple of them up," I promised.
    "This I
gotta see."
    Me, too, I
thought. I tried something else.
    "Why in
God's name did you put Meyerson and Del Fuego on the same floor? Wasn't that
just asking for trouble?"
    "They
insisted, goddammit. So worried that one was
    going to have
something the other one didn't have. One more room. One more chair. Christ. The
fourteenth floor has the only two identical suites."
    I changed the
subject. "Have you got cameras on all the floors?"
    "That’s
proprietarial information."
    "Well, in
the event that you do, turn on fourteen and eight."
    "They're
only on the private floors. Fourteen through eighteen." "Why only the
private floors?"
    "Same
reason as everything else—the suits won't pay for it."
    "Well,
fire up fourteen, then."
    "What I'd
like to be able to fire up is nine, so I could keep an eye on you. I hear
you're going to be our guest."
    As we walked, I
reached over and tapped him on the chest. "That's right, and remember,
Marty, a guest is a jewel that rests upon a pillow of hospitality."
    "My
ass."
    "There's
an idea 1 hadn't thought of." "What?"
    "You could
tell the brass he broke his thumb pulling it out of your ass."
    "Har,
har," he hacked at my back.
    I stepped onto
the escalator and started down. Marty stood at the top and watched my descent.
He looked sad, like a hound dog caught with its nose in the kitchen garbage.
From my lowered perspective, the bags under his eyes seemed to nearly reach his
ears. I waved bye-bye.
    Five
minutes
and fifteen dollars later, the Fiat magically reappeared in the
circular drive.
The front of the little car scraped slightly as I bounced out onto
University Avenue and gunned it up the hill toward the freeway.
    I don't care
what the poet said; around here, September is the crudest month. Just about the
time the kiddies are headed back to school, when the resorts are closing up for
the season and those of us still propelled by the agrarian calendar feel a need
to buckle down in preparation'for a long, rainy winter, the weather has this
annoying propensity to get nice and to stay that way.
    The digital
readout on the Safeco Building alternated between eleven-fifteen A.M. and
seventy-nine degrees as I pushed the Fiat north toward home, getting off at
Forty-fifth, winding my way down under the bridge, heading west toward Fremont.
    Fremont is a neighborhood for people who don't
have to commute. One of those bohemian pockets of urbanity to which there is,
quite literally, no quick or easy route. On a bad day, covering the few miles
from the freeway to Fremont can take thirty minutes. Today was a bad day.
Still, I was going to miss the place.
    You want
Guatemalan Expressionist art, we got it. You want a giant concrete sculpture of
a troll eating a VW, we got that, too. What about an intact Cold War rocket,
repainted and mounted atop a building?
    Say
no more.
And That’s not the best of it. Lenin is the best of it. Directly across
North Tlurty-fifth Street stands a sixteen-foot, seven-ton, bronze
statue of Vladimir Lenin,
striding out with his greatcoat open to the breeze and his thick boots
threatening to shatter the pavement beneath his feet.
    A
local
entrepreneur named Lew Carpenter found the statue in the newly
liberated Poprad, Slovakia, where it lay as a toppled symbol of
Communism's fall. The rest is, as
they say, history. Lenin now stands with his back to The Fremont Hemp
Company,
striding directly toward The Rocket. Two defanged symbols of the Cold
War,
forever reaching out, but like Keats's lovers, never quite making
contact. Art,
once again, outlives politics. Dude.
    It was
eleven-forty when I kicked the paper through the open front door. I stood in
the doorway, watching it slide across the hardwood floor and bump into the
nearest card-board box. One of about forty such boxes into which my gross
lifetime product was presently stored.
    Moving is