The Enthusiast by Charlie Haas

vehicle may have higher clearance than you’re accustomed to.”
    â€œI just need you to initial here and here.”
    â€œI’ll have your contract and all that good stuff in just a minute,” he said. “Don’t you hate that? ‘All that good stuff’? That’s worse than ‘puppy.’ ‘We’ll have this puppy wrapped up by close of business today.’ You want a hand with those boxes?”
    â€œSeriously?”
    â€œOn a Sunday? In Albany? I’m all about helping, big boy. I’m all about helping with the boxes.”
    â€œThat’s great.”
    â€œThat’s another one. ‘I’m all about.’ Fucking horrible.”
    Â 
    M y new apartment was in a three-story building five blocks from the state capitol. I got there on Sunday afternoon, parked the U-Haul van, and waited for Gerald, who came speeding up the street in a two-year-old Lexus, braked hard to stop nose to nose with the van, got out laughing, and embraced me in the gutter. He’d dropped the ex-GI look for a blue blazer, white business shirt, and tropical-weight khakis, and he looked like he’d seen nothing but good luck and health since college.
    He stepped back and assessed the building. “We’ll need to go in that window,” he said. “We can do block and tackle. I hate to bring in the crane unless it’s completely necessary.”
    â€œThe union comes into play,” I said.
    â€œLook at you!” he said. “ Martial Arts World ! They say Henry Bay knows the way of the Shaolin masters. They say he knows the way of fighting that is not fighting.”
    â€œYeah, I’m great at the not fighting.” I opened the back of the U-Haul. Gerald jumped in, hung his blazer on a hook, and picked up the back of a leather armchair I’d bought used in Massachusetts.
    â€œChair like this is indispensable,” he said. “A man subjects himself for ten long hours, he comes home, he needs this chair.‘It’s all going to greater metropolitan Hell out there, honey. I’m not talking about in the streets. That battle is long lost.’”
    â€œâ€˜I’m talking about what at one time was a business ,’” I said, taking the legs.
    â€œâ€˜What we liked to think of as a certain set of standards ,’” he said. “I say that to my woman every night. You need a chair like this to say that in.”
    â€œWho’s your woman?” I said.
    â€œChloe,” he said. “She’s wonderful. You’d love each other. She’d leave me for you like that.” We carried the chair inside. The little lobby was dim and mop-smelling, the brass mailboxes tarnished almost black. “She’s in graduate school. City planning. One man to another? She has the largest student loans of any woman I’ve ever seen.”
    We took the chair upstairs on a groaning lattice-caged elevator. As I unlocked the apartment a guy came out of the one next door and said, “Hello, I’m Robert. Are you fellows moving in?”
    â€œI am,” I said. “I’m Henry Bay.”
    â€œGerald Hauser. I’m just advising.”
    We shook hands with Robert, who was in his seventies, with two thick brown growths on his forehead and his pants up on his stomach under an old cardigan. “Glad to meet you,” he said.
    â€œNow, are you in government?”
    â€œNo, I’m going to be working for a magazine,” I said. “ Martial Arts World .”
    â€œ Martial Arts . No, we never sold that one. I was the concessionaire over here in the capitol building for many years. But that’s the karate.” I nodded. “There were times when I could have used that,” he said.
    Gerald said, “Someone told me that karate means ‘the empty hand.’ It’s from the same root as karaoke . That’s ‘the empty orchestra.’”
    â€œEmpty orchestra,” Robert