Suspension of privileges.
“Hard times.” His eyes wandered. He kept folding the slip of paper, making it smaller. “How you getting to work without a car? You go on the bus?”
“He lives at the Avenue,” Wanda said.
“Around the corner.” Ibrahim nodded. “No excuse, then. And how is Mrs. Ivy?”
I said she seemed to be herself. I looked at him. “She has account with us,” he said. “I know her for years. Every time a tenant leaves I rekey the lock, put on a master system.”
“Work history,” Wanda said. The phone went off. She spoke into the little tube, listened, pushed a button. “He’s calling from a bar . . . locked his keys in his car.”
“It’s early to drink in the morning,” Ibrahim said.
“His engine’s running.”
“I hope is not a baby in the car.”
“The baby in the car,” Wanda said, kind of reverently. “Tell him that one.”
“I don’t touch a drop,” he said.
“How many exemptions do you want to claim?” Wanda asked.
“What you’re talking exemptions? I’m not even hire him yet.” Ibrahim looked at me. “Tell me why I should hire you.”
“You’ll hire him.”
“This is not your say, Wadiya.”
“Don’t call me that.” She looked at me. “A-rabs.” She said the A the long way.
“In Syria,” Ibrahim said, “the woman walk ten steps behind the man.”
“In Syria they eat snakes. We don’t play that shit here.”
“Here you walk only five steps behind.”
“Eat pork.”
She told me she needed three references.
“I need a people person,” Ibrahim said. That could be tricky. It wasn’t necessarily that I didn’t like people, I just wasn’t very good with them. They wouldn’t give you your three feet.
“Take your time.”
“When is not busy you can wash the windows, clean the bathroom. Sweep the sidewalk in front.”
“When it’s not busy,” Wanda said. She answered the phone. The door chimed. Ibrahim’s brother came in from a service call and we shook hands. He went back out on another service call and I forgot his name.
“We are a family here,” Ibrahim said. “We are residential. We are commercial, we are safes, we are automotive.”
“Automotive,” Wands said. “That’s Ibrahim’s specialty. He’s the best car man in town.”
“We handle Triple A.”
“What are you going to start him at?”
“We have exclusive account.”
The guy at the bar called again.
“I need someone to organize the keyboard,” Ibrahim said. “To help with dispatch. To count this drawer—once in the morning and once at end of the day.”
There were no sick days, no medical.
“I need someone I can trust,” he said.
“You need to get over there, Ibrahim,” she said. She said his name with no trouble.
“I left five minutes ago.”
“I could smell it through the phone. Maybe he shouldn’t drive.”
Maybe, I said, she was right.
Ibrahim shrugged, winked. “So long as he’s not too drunk to pay.”
“He’ll probably start you at seven,” Wanda told me.
“Minimum wage.” Ibrahim got up. “If,” he said, “I take you on.”
“Please,” she said. “Nobody can live on that.”
“Here we learn to pay ourselves,” he said. Commission. Once he started moving, it was hard to remember him sitting. “He has no experience. Anywhere else you train on your own time, buy your own tools . . .” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. He looked around behind the counter, picked up a cell phone and told me how many free minutes he got. I assumed this was a good thing and nodded.
“Wanda.” He wasn’t done looking for things yet. “Where my keys are, Wanda?”
“Use that thing of yours,” she said. “That thing that does everything.” A small showy smile. Ibrahim pressed something on what looked like his wristwatch. A chirping sound. He made his way to it and picked up his keys.
“Ibrahim’s a gadget freak,” Wanda said. “You should see the van.”
I nodded. He stood there with the cell phone and the thing on his wrist and wore a pager. There were two computers behind the counter. More little boxes with buttons and screens. I was not a gadget freak.
He stood there. “Tell me, he said. “Why I should hire you?”
I could not get interested in trying to convey my worth. I said that he would find out he could trust me. That minimum wage would do till he decided I was worth more.
He smiled. “If you don’t want money, then what do you want?”
“A start.”
“I think about it. Maybe Wanda call you in the morning.”
“I told you he doesn’t have a phone.”
“Then you stop by.” We shook hands and he headed out the back. “Wadiya! Give this man something cold to drink.”
Up front there was a mini-fridge like the one I had. I said water was good.
“I know I can get you six,” Wanda said. “He likes you.” She advised me to forget everything I’d ever heard about A-rabs. Really a very generous man. No benefits but they were a family, he’d give you an advance and sometimes even say forget about it. She’d needed a root canal, pointed to her jaw. “Hurt so bad I couldn’t even talk. What a relief, right? Shut up.” A sideways motion of her hand wiped the slate clean for all time. “Never even took it out of my check.” She gave me a preemptive look. “And I’m not sleeping with him.”
That was how you knew she was. Someone needed to say something then and all I could think of were the scratches on Ibrahim’s neck and arms, but she wasn’t finished. He was just so . . . She groped, looked in the air.
The phone made its sound. A customer came in. They definitely needed someone but I was glad to get out of there. Wanda tore off the sheet of long yellow paper and told me to fill in what was missing, bring it back the next day. She told me what she needed. I thought I might hang on to it until someone insisted, or get creative and take my chances. And Ibrahim might decide against me anyway. There was still the beat-up van. There was still fast food, people gone crazy with choice like they could make up for the options life denied them.
SOMEBODY must have made a mistake. I didn’t say anything. I was supposed to go once a week.
It was a ten-minute bus ride but the summer school kids in the back made it a lot longer. I pulled the cord above my head about six blocks before my stop and if it made a sound you couldn’t hear it. When I stepped off the bus I was already there anyway. The Clinic had gotten bigger and was still expanding—The City Within The City, a sign read, as if there were nothing ominous about it. There was no center, no front door, and I finally stumbled across an emergency entrance and went in that way.
Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.
I’d never been there before but I certainly knew about it. Everybody