The Hardship Bazaar

By Jeremy Resnick

When professional ethicist Jack Waxman goes missing, his elderly father, Donald, takes the case. Donald thinks he’s a hardboiled private detective, but he’s just a retired writer of films and TV shows about hardboiled detectives. Jack’s depressed daughter Samantha joins in the search, mainly to make sure Grandpa Donald doe

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeremy Resnick
• Release date: Feb 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781950879496

Jeremy Resnick

JEREMY RESNICK has written creative nonfiction for McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Texas Review, and The Nervous Breakdown. He lives with his wife and dog in Portland, Oregon.

Book preview

Part I

1

When the kid came in talking about a missing person, Donald was scouring his cabinets for coffee he’d forgotten to buy. He straightened his bathrobe and received a kiss to his cheek. The kid slouched a little, and there was something furtive about the way her dark bangs fell in front of her eyes, the way she brushed them aside with nail-bitten fingers.

Donald gave up on the coffee, poured himself a whisky.

The kid raised a thin brow. A little early, isn’t it?

A little young, aren’t you? To act like my mother?

You’re right, she collapsed onto the couch. Got another glass?

Donald liked her better, found another glass. He compensated for the tremors by pouring quick, large slugs. Ignoring the puddle of spilled whisky on the counter, he handed the less full glass to the kid and took his to the easy chair to enjoy in front of his painting. It was his only prized possession, an unframed, abstract-expressionist explosion, always more interesting than TV.

Now then, he gazed at a speckled middle area that resembled the valley lights at night, who’d you say was missing?

My dad, the kid said. She looked hard at him, seemed to expect some reaction. Jack? Your son?

Right, right. The one who never calls. He raised his glass to her, sipped—and winced at the sudden pain in an upper left molar.

I’m sure he’ll turn up, the kid said. I only mentioned it because I just got off the phone with Cynthia. Anyway, she glanced at the time on her phone, you wanna get dressed? We can get breakfast before the dentist.

Donald had no intention of seeing the dentist. He’d already forgotten about the pain in his tooth, or would as soon as he finished his drink. His eyes lingered on the top left quadrant of the painting, where a series of thick globs looked like the Santa Monica Mountains. If he sat here long enough, the sun’s movement across the window would wash them into blue-orange ripples that looked like the ocean.

But there was work to do. He tore his eyes from the painting and rummaged through the spine-cracked paperbacks piled on the coffee table. Finding his little notebook and pen, he flipped pages until he found blank space under an illegible note to himself.

How long has he been missing?

The kid didn’t answer right away. Then, following a sigh, Since last night.

Donald scribbled. Police won’t be interested until it’s been twenty-four hours. Last person to see him?

I don’t know.

Enemies?

The kid snorted. Just anyone who works for him or with him.

A bastard, Donald nodded. Takes one to find one. Now run through it from the beginning.

The kid—who was not a kid but a thirty-two-year-old woman named Samantha—noted the titles of the books on the coffee table: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, Devil in a Blue Dress. She wondered how far to indulge her grandfather’s fantasies. She didn’t want him or anyone else to waste time looking for her dad. No doubt he’d turn up with a perfectly logical explanation by mid-morning. Probably just had one of his light-bulb moments, holed himself up somewhere to crank out another volume of Jack Waxman on Business Ethics or Version 6.2 of GRREAT® Communication: A Groundbreaking Character-Education Webinar Led by Jack Waxman.

But Donald could be annoyingly insistent for a guy who seemed to forget on which side of his head he parted his remaining hair. Sam gave in, told him what she knew: Cynthia, Jack’s second wife, had called to tell her Jack didn’t come home last night. Sam asked her if anything had happened between them, and Cynthia said no. She’d called his cell phone in the middle of the night and again early this morning, but it just went to voicemail.

And I just tried calling, Sam added. Mailbox is full.

Donald chewed on the end of the pen. "And what’s your relationship with the misper been like recently?"

With the what?

Missing person.

Sam sipped from her glass, tried not to cough. Currently, we’re not on speaking terms. It’s a long story.

Tell it.

I don’t want to get into it. Besides, we need to get moving. And I don’t think you’re supposed to drink before anesthesia.

Well now, that depends on what and how much you have.

What?

What, and how much, do you have?

I’m talking about the dentist.

Forget the dentist! Why aren’t you talking to your father?

Sam sensed she was losing control of the situation. Part of inheriting Donald’s absurd gas guzzler was that she had to drive him wherever he needed to go, which usually wasn’t anywhere. But the man was eighty-three years old. He could decide for himself whether or not he went to the dentist. He could have whisky for breakfast if he wanted. Hell, the rapid clip at which civilization seemed to be collapsing made breakfast whisky seem like a good idea.

And if he wanted to play PI, Sam could roll with it. That was how they’d entertained themselves when he was called in as Babysitter of Last Resort. Back then he wrote detective flicks and TV procedurals under the name Donald West. While her dad negotiated contracts for Lakers, Dodgers, and the odd King, and her mom hosted or attended fundraisers, Sam and Donald solved such whodunits as The Case of the Disappearing Entenmann’s Cake (Dad), The Mysterious Dog Shit on the Lawn (neighbor’s Australian Shepherd), and, in her middle school years, The Mean Girl Who Spread Lies About Her Friends (plot twist: she wasn’t evil, just desperately insecure).

Sam hadn’t thought about those imaginary adventures in years, but she had fond memories of them. Now she was sort of curious to see if she had any imagination left. Also, spending an hour or two playing with her grandfather would allow her to put off her job search in this latest, tightest swirl her life made as it circled the toilet.

Also, breakfast whisky. She took too large a sip and coughed several times.

Quit stalling, kid, Donald said. Why aren’t you talking to your father?

Sam wondered where to begin. Remember when I told you he fired me?

Donald shook his head.

Remember that I used to work for him?

Mm, Donald said without conviction.

Well, I was his copywriter and editor, and I’m not anymore. He was too cowardly to use his platform, so I used it for him, and he fired me.

Remind me of the platform?

The Waxims? His little radio essays? He hardly ever writes new ones—he’s too busy begging for donations—but a few weeks ago, he told me to pitch him some ideas. I thought I could finally get him to speak out against all the fucked-up shit going on.

What fucked-up shit?

Exactly! People aren’t paying attention. Sam explained to Donald, as she’d explained to her dad, the sordid details of the latest NSA scandal. A government contractor had blown the whistle on a program of selective, clandestine web-cam/microphone browsing. Basically, low-level contractors were playing audio/video roulette with any American unfortunate enough to click on a few bad links. One of the links was a porn clip of an absurdly well-endowed man with a beard praising Allah while having his way with a woman dressed as Uncle Sam. The NSA created the video as terrorist bait. To Sam, and a shockingly slim majority of the country, this was a clear case of right and wrong. The government needed to stop spying—and stop employing total morons who degraded women and couldn’t even make a decent porn. And everyone needed to support the courageous whistleblower who did the right thing at great personal cost.

Her dad had said he liked the topic—it was racy, and racy attracted social media attention. But then he went home, wrote, recorded, and uploaded the new Waxim to the shared drive at 4:08 a.m. without getting anyone’s feedback.

Sam arrived at the office that morning to see that the new Waxim, Public Service or Ego Trip? had already played three times on the radio. In it her dad parroted the administration’s claim that the release of classified information disrupted Inteliflow, endangered American operatives in foreign countries, and limited the government’s ability to stop the next terror attack. He claimed that the FISA Court protected innocent Americans from government overreach, and he wanted the whistleblower charged with treason. Then, her dear old dad, Captain Morality himself, actually said, If you’re doing something you don’t want other people to know about, you probably shouldn’t be doing it.

So, Sam explained to Donald, when I got to work I went into his office and yelled at him. He just said we need to protect ourselves against the terrorists, and he pushed me out and shut the door. I was pissed. I was afraid he was turning his listeners into sheep, normalizing this creep toward authoritarianism. So I wrote an essay.

Donald said nothing for a moment. Then, Ah. What was the thesis?

Basically, ‘Jack Waxman is wrong. His centrism is cowardly, and since the country has lurched rightward, he’s centrally right wing. He talks about valuing peace and each and every life, but his knee-jerk Support the troops! jingoism keeps him from even acknowledging that we’re all about endless war, imprisonment without trial, torture, mass surveillance, war on the poor, and murder of civilians all over the world.’

Donald laughed.

"It was a solid argument. My dad worships at the altar of compromise, you know? He never acknowledges that when you compromise with insane people, you’re gonna get some insanity."

Donald just nodded. Sam felt guilty for attacking her dad, and that made her angry. He’s never listened to me. He doesn’t respect me. I don’t even think he read my post. All he could think about was that I tarnished his reputation. And then he told me that my performance was, Sam’s fingers made air quotes, ‘sub-par.’

Then what happened?

He fired me, and I fired him from being my dad, and he called security to escort me out of the building.

Sam set her empty whisky glass on top of a crumbling copy of The Big Midget Murders. That was about three weeks ago. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since.

OK, then, Donald’s pen hovered over his notebook. I’ll just put down ‘strained.’ ‘Relationship: s-t-r-a-i-n-e-d.’ He picked up his glass, drained it. Know of anyone who might have a motive to kidnap him or otherwise make him disappear?

Sam chuckled at the thought. Lots of people think he’s lame, but I can’t think of anyone who’d take it that far. She checked the time on her phone again. A Waxim is starting right now. If it’s a new one, we’ll know he’s OK. If it’s old, the station just pulled it from the contingency folder.

While she went over to Donald’s antique hi-fi and clicked the knob, Donald hauled himself out of the easy chair and went to the bathroom.

Sam turned the dial until the orange line found the nasal earnestness of Jack Waxman’s voice. She turned it up to drown out any bathroom sounds:

…headstrong teen who frequently clashed with her hard-working single mom, June. When Hannah missed her curfew, June grounded her for a month. The next morning, Hannah left early and didn’t return until late at night.

You’re grounded for another month! June proclaimed.

I hate you, I wish you were dead! Hannah shouted.

Old one, Sam said. She went to turn it off, but Donald shouted through the closed door, Leave it on!

…slapped Hannah before she could stop herself. Both were shocked, and both retreated to their bedrooms and slammed their doors. June sobbed, berating herself for giving in to her anger, for not being able to control her daughter. She blamed herself for everything in her life that had gone wrong.

Hannah fell asleep listening to her mother cry in the next room.

In the morning, June was still in bed when Hannah left for school, so Hannah wrote her a note: "I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean what I said. I’m grateful to have you for my mother."

When Hannah got home from school, June was sitting at the kitchen table with the note.

I was going to kill myself today, she said, until I read your note.

Tell your family members you love them. Let them know you appreciate them. You just might save a life.

This is Jack Waxman from the Waxman Ethics Institute. Be GRREAT today!

The segment was followed by a commercial for the Triple-X Fish Taco with Exxxtreme Ranch. A breathy female voice said, "They’re hot and creamy, to the exxxtreme."

Sam turned off the radio and sat back down. What if her dad was really in trouble? What if something terrible had happened and she never saw him again? Her last image of him would be his angry, wounded face framed by the double bird she’d flipped him.

When Donald shuffled back from the bathroom, she said, Pop, that didn’t sound like a suicide note to you, did it?

Fish tacos seems like a slow way to go.

No, the Waxim. All about a mother who feels unappreciated. Maybe that’s how he feels. Maybe he—

I don’t see it. Listen to how bossy he is, how optimistic. He thinks he’s grrr-ate, and you can be grrr-ate too. No, he’s no self-harmer.

I tried to get him to drop that slogan. At least the Kellogg’s lawyers put the kibosh on ‘Trusty, the Be GRREAT Tiger.’

That Jackie, Donald sat back in his chair, smiling. When he was a kid, he was constantly looking for attention, always showing off. Used to stand in front of the TV and recite all of his Hebrew school prayers. And he was constantly begging me to come outside to witness some athletic feat, which he could never replicate in front of me.

Sounds like a normal kid. But I don’t see you being into the prayers.

Donald shrugged. Hebrew school, the bar mitzvah, the high holidays—all that was Sylvia’s doing. He was silent for a moment. Sam pictured a miniature version of him wading through the foggy swamp of his mind, spotting a memory here and there among the bulrushes.

You know, he said, I was just a kid myself when your dad was born. Wasn’t ready to be a father. Spent most of my time hanging out with writers, comedians, musicians. Nightclub people. They were wild, which seemed like the right reaction to the world we lived in. Spending a Shabbat at home with your grandmother and your dad was like being stuck in a waiting room.

Sam picked up her phone, Excuse me for a sec, I just need to text my therapist.

Nah, Donald mumbled, almost to himself, Jack would never disappear willingly.

Apparently forgetting that he was wearing a bathrobe and not a trench coat, Donald stood and scooped his Fedora from the hat rack by the door. Missing since yesterday. Many enemies. He put on the hat and looked at the door as if he could see through it right into the dark, throbbing heart of the city. Where are you, Jackie?

Sam watched him from the couch. On her grandfather’s face, the large Waxman nose was sublime, curving like a crumbling domed basilica with nostril archways, nose hairs sprouting like ferns from the ruins.

You might want to put on some pants first, she suggested. And where do we start?

"We? Sorry, kid. That’s not part of the deal. I work alone."

Sam smiled, remembering this bit from when she was a kid. She had to say, I’m tougher than I look. Then Donald had to think about it for a minute, shrug, and say, Why not? You can help dig the graves, or, Why not? If there’s trouble I can use you as a human shield.

This time he squinted at her flannel shirt and said, Why not? If he’s been kidnapped by militant lesbians, you can infiltrate the gang, report back.

2

First step in your typical misper: scope the spouse.

Somehow the kid knew where to find Donald’s silver ’67 Mustang on the street. She also had the keys, and she approached the driver’s side with the clear intention of driving. Had he loaned it to her and forgotten?

Donald said nothing as he got into the passenger seat, breathing the sweet perfume of old leather, gas, and tobacco. He said nothing because he was beginning to accept these jarring events as a normal part of leaving the house.

One day, a week or a month ago, he’d walked halfway to the college in a state of panic, wondering what he was going to teach, why he hadn’t prepared, why he hadn’t brought any of his students’ screenplays home with him. He passed the former site of his usual diner. Now it was a sleek-lined café, all white and chrome, and he remembered that the change had happened before he retired. He was retired. Felt like he needed to sit down, so why not try the new café? When he ordered a coffee though, the girl with the ball bearing embedded in her dimple asked him which kind and then gave him a menu. Baffled, Donald picked an Ethiopian bean that promised flavors of lemon and caramel with a silky mouthfeel. The girl took way too much of his money, ground some coffee, filled a cone with it, set the cone on top of a mug, grabbed a tea kettle with a long spout, filled that with hot water, and dripped that water agonizingly slowly into the cone. That’s when Donald remembered that the world had gone totally ridiculous and/or he’d outlived his ability to understand it. Whichever, he figured he owed it nothing.

Great car, he finally said as Sam accelerated out of a curve on Bundy. I used to have one just like it. He had to get in at least one shot.

Yeah, DUIs are a bitch.

Ah, yes. The rotten memory surfaced like a corpse: motorcycle cop pulling him over for failing to signal a lane change. Donald said he didn’t signal because there’d been no cars behind him or in the adjacent lane. The cop smelled the whisky on his breath, or maybe he noticed the flask on the passenger seat, and Donald failed the sobriety test despite his repeated insistence that he wasn’t drunk so much as he was old. They booked him, and some internet rag picked the incident up off of the police blotter and ran a story about how Jack Waxman ought to extend some of his vaunted character education to his washed-up screenwriter father. Since then, Jack had refused to speak to him.

Donald shook off these depressing thoughts, considered instead all of the possible whereabouts of the missing man. In very few of them was that man still alive.

While she steered the oversized go-kart into Brentwood, Sam was thinking that Donald, always strange in the best ways, seemed newly, differently strange. Last year, after the DUI, after forgetting to show up to teach a few times, he’d quit altogether. He abandoned the screenplays he’d been tinkering with for years, said he was retired. He stayed home and read his entire library over again. Recently, Sam noticed, he’d begun to complain that business was slow. He talked about putting an ad in the classifieds to drum up some trade. He suspected random waiters, pedestrians, baristas, and Dodger Stadium peanut vendors of lookin’ hinky.

Here we are! Saruman’s castle! Sam said grandly as she pulled to the curb across from her dad’s house. It was a huge, poorly insulated Tudor, filled with the Waxman Family 2.0.

Of all her father’s hypocrisies, his second family bugged Sam the most. The alleged ethicist was responsible for a total of four first-world, upper-middle-class children, a slow-motion explosion of the Waxman carbon footprint. Barring a catastrophe, the explosion would continue for generations, consuming products, pumping greenhouse gases into the air, launching tons of plastic toward the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. When she thought of it, Sam pictured her fallopian tubes tying themselves into knots, or just constricting until there was no possible passage. The only thing that made her OK with driving a car that got ten miles per gallon was that no new carbon junkies were coming out of her.

The Waxman lawn had recently been fertilized, and the fishy-shitty-ammoniac stench was so bad it almost made visible waves in the air. The house next door had recently been fertilized too. This was a rite of autumn in rich L.A., replenishing nutrients the soil didn’t have and the climate didn’t support to grow plants that didn’t belong.

Sam knocked. After a minute, the oversized door heaved open, revealing a new, middle-aged Central American housekeeper in jeans and a t-shirt. The Waxmans went through Central American housekeepers like normal people went through kitchen sponges, and this new housekeeper didn’t know Sam or Donald.

Is Cynthia home? Sam said.

She is not home. I have a green card, the woman said, and shut the door in their faces.

Sam and Donald traded a look, and Sam knocked again. After a moment, the housekeeper opened.

Sam said, I’m Samantha, Mr. Waxman’s oldest daughter. Aren’t there pictures of me around the house?

The housekeeper peered at her. "¡Si, si! Tu eres la diabla."

Sam was insulted until she remembered the framed Halloween photo on one of the shelves in her father’s home office. She was twelve and dressed as a she-devil.

"¿Como se llama? ¿Podemos entrar?" Sam asked, pretty much exhausting her supply of Spanish.

The housekeeper looked them up and down before she fully opened the door and let them in.

Immediately Donald peppered her with questions. When was the last time you saw Mr. Waxman? How long have you worked here? Notice anything strange lately? Mind if we look around?

Slow down, Sam said. I don’t think she speaks—

But the housekeeper said quickly in fluent, slightly accented English, My name is Luz. I last see Mr. Watzman yesterday morning. I work here six months. Everything is strange here. Yes, I mind you look. I don’t know you. Maybe you are addicts, here to steal for drug money.

That’s absurd, Donald said. I’ve never paid for drugs in my life. No, ma’am, we’re here representing a man called, elbowing Sam, Andrew Jackson.

Dude, Sam said, what?

Give her a twenty.

"You give her a twenty."

Donald put his hand in his pocket. Left it there. He breathed deeply and noisily, the wind rustling through the tiny forests of his nose hairs.

Fine! Sam pulled her money wad out of her pocket, handed the housekeeper a twenty.

Luz straightened the bill and held it up. You sure you don’t work for Ben Franklin? She laughed at Sam’s confusion. Go, look. I don’t care. I need to launder. She stuffed the bill into the pocket of her jeans and walked down the hall.

Sam and Donald wandered through the dark living room, which was ripped right from the pages of Landed Gentry magazine. Over the mantel, past the paisley couch and chairs, Sam recognized an Old Master knockoff of some dead birds and vegetables on a table. It had hung on the wall in the pre-divorce house, had probably started her on the road to vegetarianism. Below it, among several framed photos, was one of Cynthia on horseback, expertly jumping a