with us while they rebuild their lives.”
“Work at the campus pub,” says Adam. “If you want to work somewhere.”
“What’s wrong with Goldfinger’s?” says Rank.
“Yeah,” says Wade, offended on behalf of his associates.
“Adam is a class snob,” pronounces Kyle. This is a term he’s learned recently from a politically active girlfriend who has spent two summers volunteering in El Salvador. “He thinks you’re better than Goldfinger’s, Rank.”
“Trust me,” says Rank, remembering the Ah feeling when he first walked through the tavern doors. “I’m not.”
Let’s press the pause button here. An omnipotent narrator can do that sort of thing. Let’s just stop and, with the benefit of adult hindsight, compare the opposing influences of Adam and Kyle at this moment — their conflicting versions of obliviousness. Because I think we can agree: just because Adam happened to be right, he wasn’t any less oblivious about what Rank was getting into than Kyle. True, Kyle was wholly oblivious. He was enthusiastically oblivious, even. It did not occur to Kyle for a second that Goldfinger’s could exist as anything other than a joke — that Goldfinger’s was something other than a kind of vaudeville show, a pageant performed for us college kids. On some level, Kyle really believed that Lorna’s bruised upper arms were not in fact bruised upper arms — they were an ironic commentary on bruised upper arms, a parody if you will. Kyle had never experienced the idea of bruised women as anything but a satire of a certain kind of lifestyle, and he couldn’t get his head around the fact that when they stepped into Goldfinger’s, they were face to face with that world itself. He didn’t believe that world existed, really. He believed it was a representation. In Richard’s back office there wasn’t the rug, the weapons, the wet bar, the safe. Not really. There was nothing — that’s what Kyle really believed. It was backstage, and Richard simply stood behind the door, adjusting his airplane collar, combing pomade into his hair, waiting for his cue.
Kyle didn’t know he believed this, but that’s what he believed. Let’s forgive him for it. He was barely twenty.
Now how about Adam?
Adam is a thoughtful guy, we’ll admit, but he’s operating on instinct here. Of all four buddies, he has always been the least enthusiastic about visiting Goldfinger’s, even though he’s certainly shown no aversion to the product Wade acquires there. But unlike the rest of them, he doesn’t care to hang out in the bar. He’ll do it, but he isn’t keen. He has no interest whatsoever in catching a glimpse of Lorna’s teeth. He’ll only listen to Ivor’s elaborate claims about how the first instance of AIDS occurred in Manhattan as opposed to Africa, like most people have been duped into believing (“Monkeys! How you gonna catch it from a monkey?”), for so long. Is this because Adam is smarter than the rest of them? Is Adam’s radar for danger more finely attuned? No. Adam just finds the place distasteful. Simple as that.
Okay, maybe it’s not fair to call him a class snob, as Kyle was so happy to do. If we give Adam the benefit of the doubt — which is only fair — we can explain it like this. Adam, like Kyle, is oblivious to a point, but he is also perceptive. Intuitive. He is a future author, you know. Maybe it’s not appropriate to reveal this out of the blue. Maybe it’s not fair of your humble narrator to jerk you into the future in this way. But, yes. Adam will go on to write novels, or one novel at least, a novel that critics will describe as “devastatingly perceptive.” Let it be said: Adam, even now, barely into his twenties, is a perceptive son of a bitch. He perceives something about Goldfinger’s — something Kyle is missing, something Kyle just doesn’t have enough personal depth to believe in. But Adam does possess that depth. He intuits that behind the joke of Goldfinger’s is the reality of Goldfinger’s. He doesn’t quite grasp what that reality is, but he feels it. He believes in it. Unlike Kyle, on some level he respects it.
Press play.
“You wanna be a bouncer?” says Adam. “At Goldfinger’s? Come on.”
“I dunno,” says Rank, feeling that Adam is being prissy — feeling insulted, somehow. How dare Adam suppose Rank is too good to work at Goldfinger’s? Who does he think he is? “What else am I gonna be?”
“Like, anything,” says Adam. “Pack groceries. Work in the