Mike had become a part of the family since moving to California from New York during his junior year in high school. He spent holidays with us, often sleeping on the couch, and endured endless ribbing from me and my five brothers for his thick Long Island accent and shoulder-length blond hair. He looked like a guitarist in a rock band. I gave him a bad time, but Mike had become a big brother to me, one I looked up to. Mike never treated me like a kid. He taught me how to snow-ski in Tahoe and water-ski in the Foster City lagoons.
“Big Vinny.” He removed the earphones and chuckled at my obvious condition. “Rough night? Little graduation party?”
“Shh,” Bethany said.
I smiled, more interested in the portable cassette player. “Is that a Walkman?”
“I just bought it yesterday,” he said.
A Walkman was two hundred dollars, which was almost the average monthly rent for an apartment in Burlingame, but Mike always had the newest things, clothes, shoes, gadgets. “What are you listening to?”
“Tom Petty,” he said through a mouth full of sandwich. He handed the headphones to me.
I set down my glass of water and slipped the foam pads over my ears. Mike hit the play button and watched me for a reaction. I’d never heard music so clear—like the band was playing in the room.
“Wow,” I said, a few decibels too loud.
“Shh,” Bethany said again and turned up the television volume.
Mike laughed, and I handed back the headphones. “What are you doing here? I thought you were interviewing for jobs.”
“Lunch break. William got me a job working on a remodel just down the hill while I interview. The foreman said they’re still looking for a laborer. You interested?”
I knew William Goodman only tangentially, having watched him and Mike play softball together that spring. They played with a group of East Coast transplants living at the Northpark apartments in Burlingame. The Northpark Yankees.
“How much are they paying?” I asked, which was ballsy, given I was unemployed and had no prospects. I had worked summers since I was fourteen, all the money I earned going into the bank to pay for college. I wanted to go to Stanford and had applied at the behest of my high school counselor without telling my parents, figuring I’d never get in. But I had been accepted. It was a bittersweet moment opening the telegram the admissions office sent to our house. My mother and father, the hardest-working people I knew, simply couldn’t afford four years of Stanford tuition while also paying college and professional school tuition for my four older siblings, and private school tuition for my five younger siblings. It had been too much for me to ask. I was headed to a community college with a journalism program and would reapply to Stanford before my junior year—if we could afford it and I still had the grades to get in.
Mike laughed. “More than you’re making sleeping. Five bucks an hour, under the table.”
That was serious money. Minimum wage was just under three bucks and you had to pay taxes. “Yeah. I’ll do it.”
“Get dressed.”
“Today?” My head pounded.
“They’re looking now. I already talked to Todd about you.”
“Who’s Todd?”
“Your boss if you don’t screw it up.”
I took a cold shower, which made my hangover worse, the cold water reminding my body of the abuse from the prior evening. I threw on a T-shirt and jeans and a pair of scuffed military jungle boots. I had bought the boots at an Army-Navy surplus store in San Mateo when I pumped gas at the Chevron station on the El Camino Real. Gas, I had learned quickly, ruins tennis shoes. Just eats up the rubber. The jungle boots were used, meaning priced within my budget, which was as close to free as possible. Black, with a thick sole, they gave me an inch in height and a foot in attitude. The uppers, pea-green cloth, extended six inches above my ankle.
Mike did not wait for me or leave the address, but he said the remodel was on Castillo Avenue, just three blocks east of Hillside Circle, where Hillside Drive climbed into the Burlingame Hills. “You can’t miss it. You’ll see my car parked in the street.”
Less than two miles from home, the job location would be good for gas consumption and allow me to sleep as long as humanly possible, since I intended to make the most of my summer nights before college.
I jumped into the Pinto and drove down the hill, turning left on Castillo, and parked just past Mike’s MG Midget. The sun burned bright, the temperature hovering around eighty degrees, which was warm in Burlingame for early June. I figured I’d meet Todd, get approved, and start work the following morning. Then I could go home, eat something to settle my stomach, take two more Tylenol, and go back to bed.