Uncommon Type Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2017 by Clavius Base, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  “Alan Bean Plus Four” first appeared in The New Yorker on October 24, 2014.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Hanks, Tom, author.

  Title: Uncommon type : some stories / by Tom Hanks.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017006246 | ISBN 9781101946152 (hardcover) ISBN 9781101946169 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524711313 (open market)

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A71522 A6 2017 | DDC 813/.6—DC23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2017006246

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION

  Hanks, Tom, author

  Uncommon type : some stories / Tom Hanks.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-7352-7383-2 | eBook ISBN 978-0-7352-7385-6

  I. Title.

  PS3608.A5575U53 2017 813’.6 C2017-901561-3

  Ebook ISBN 9781101946169

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover images by FlamingPumpkin/iStock/Getty Images

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  Emoji art on this page supplied by EmojiOne

  v4.1

  a

  For Rita and all the kids.

  Because of Nora.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  THREE EXHAUSTING WEEKS

  CHRISTMAS EVE 1953

  A JUNKET IN THE CITY OF LIGHT

  OUR TOWN TODAY WITH HANK FISET—AN ELEPHANT IN THE PRESSROOM

  WELCOME TO MARS

  A MONTH ON GREENE STREET

  ALAN BEAN PLUS FOUR

  OUR TOWN TODAY WITH HANK FISET—AT LOOSE IN THE BIG APPLE

  WHO’S WHO?

  A SPECIAL WEEKEND

  THESE ARE THE MEDITATIONS OF MY HEART

  OUR TOWN TODAY WITH HANK FISET—BACK FROM BACK IN TIME

  THE PAST IS IMPORTANT TO US

  STAY WITH US

  GO SEE COSTAS

  OUR TOWN TODAY WITH HANK FISET—YOUR EVANGELISTA, ESPERANZA

  STEVE WONG IS PERFECT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Note About the Author

  Three Exhausting Weeks

  DAY 1

  Anna said there was only one place to find a meaningful gift for MDash—the Antique Warehouse, not so much a place for old treasures as a permanent swap meet in what used to be the Lux Theater. Before HBO, Netflix, and the 107 other entertainment outlets bankrupted the Lux, I sat for many hours in that once-splendid cinema palace and watched movies. Now it’s stall after stall of what passes for antiques. Anna and I looked into every one of them.

  MDash was about to become a naturalized U.S. citizen, which was as big a deal for us as it was for him. Steve Wong’s grandparents were naturalized in the forties. My dad had escaped the low-grade thugs that were East European Communists in the 1970s, and, way back when, Anna’s ancestors rowed boats across the North Atlantic, seeking to pillage whatever was pillageable in the New World. The Anna family legend is that they found Martha’s Vineyard.

  Mohammed Dayax-Abdo was soon to be as American as Abdo Pie, so we wanted to get him something vintage, an objet d’patriotic that would carry the heritage and humor of his new country. I thought the old Radio Flyer wagon in the second warehouse stall was perfect. “When he has American kids, he’ll pass that wagon on to them,” I said.

  But Anna was not about to purchase the first antique we came across. So we kept on hunting. I bought a forty-eight-star American flag, from the 1940s. The flag would remind MDash that his adoptive nation is never finished building itself—that good citizens have a place somewhere in her fruited plain just as more stars can fit in the blue field above those red and white stripes. Anna approved, but kept searching, seeking a present that would be far more special. She wanted unique, nothing less than one of a kind. After three hours, she decided the Radio Flyer was a good idea after all.

  Rain started falling just as we were pulling out of the parking lot in my VW Bus. We had to drive slowly back to my house because my wiper blades are so old they left streaks on the windshield. The storm went on well into the evening, so rather than drive home, Anna hung around, played my mother’s old mixtapes (which I’d converted to CDs), cracking up over Mom’s eclectic taste, in the segues from the Pretenders to the O’Jays to Taj Mahal.

  When Iggy Pop’s “Real Wild Child” came on, she asked, “Do you have any music from the last twenty years?”

  I made pulled-pork burritos. She drank wine. I drank beer. She started a fire in my Franklin stove, saying she felt like a pioneer woman on the prairie. We sat on my couch as night fell, the only lights being the fire and the audio levels on my sound system bounding from green to orange and, occasionally, red. Distant sheet lightning flashed in the storm miles and miles away.

  “You know what?” she said to me. “It’s Sunday.”

  “I do know that,” I told her. “I live in the moment.”

  “I admire that about you. Smart. Caring. Easygoing to the point of sloth.”

  “You’ve gone from compliments to insults.”

  “Change sloth to languorousness,” she said, sipping wine. “Point is I like you.”

  “I like you, too.” I wondered if this conversation was going someplace. “Are you flirting with me?”

  “No,” Anna said. “I’m propositioning you. Totally different thing. Flirting is fishing. Maybe you hook up, maybe you don’t. Propositioning is the first step in closing a deal.”

  Understand that Anna and I have known each other since high school (St. Anthony Country Day! Go, Crusaders!). We didn’t date, but hung out in the same crowd, and liked each other. After a few years of college, and a few more of taking care of my mom, I got my license and pretended to make a living in real estate for a while. One day she walked into my office because she needed to rent a space for her graphics business and I was the only agent she could trust because I once dated a friend of hers and was not a jerk when we broke up.

  Anna was still very pretty. She never lost her lean, rope-taut body of a triathlete, which, in fact, she had been. For a day, I showed her some available spaces, none of which she wanted for reasons that made little sense to me. I could tell she was still just as driven, focused, and tightly wound as she had been at SACD. She had too keen an eye for the smallest of details and left no stones unturned, uninspected, unrecorded, or unreplaced if they needed replacing. Adult Anna was exhausting. Adult Anna was no more my type than Teen Anna had been.

  Funny, then, that she and I became such solid friends, much closer than when we were kids. I am one of those lazy-butt loners who can poke my way through a day and never feel a second has been wasted. In fact, as soon as I sold my mom’s house and parked the money in investments, I walked away from my fake business and settled into the Best Life Imaginable. Give me a few loads of laundry to do and a hockey game on the NHL channel and I’m good for an entire afternoon. In the time I spend lollygagging over my whites and colors, Anna will drywall her attic, prepare her taxes, make
her own fresh pasta, and start up a clothing exchange on the Internet. She sleeps in fits and starts from midnight to dawn and has the energy to go full throttle all day. I sleep dead to the world as long as possible and take a nap every day at 2:30 p.m.

  “I am going to kiss you now.” Anna did just as she said.

  We had never done that, other than those pecks on cheeks that go with brief hugs. That night, she was offering a whole new version of herself, and I tensed up, confused.

  “Hey, relax,” she whispered. Her arms were around my neck. She smelled damn good and tasted of wine. “It’s the Sabbath. A day of rest. This is not going to be work.”

  We kissed again, this time with me a collected and invested participant. My arms went around her and pulled her close. We leaned into each other and loosened up. We found each other’s necks and worked our way back to our mouths. I had not kissed a woman like that in close to a year, not since the Evil Girlfriend Mona not only dumped me but stole cash from my billfold (Mona had problems, but kissing? She was fabulous).

  “Atta baby,” Anna sighed.

  “Shabbat shalom,” I sighed back. “We should have done that years ago.”

  “I think we could use some time spent skin on skin,” Anna whispered. “Take off your clothes.”

  I did. When she took off hers, I was a goner.

  DAY 2

  My Monday morning breakfast was buckwheat pancakes, chorizo sausage, a huge bowl of berries, and percolated coffee. Anna opted for some herbal tea I had long ago tucked away in the pantry and a tiny bowl of nuts she chopped up with a cleaver. She counted out eight blueberries to round out her nutritious breakfast. I shouldn’t say that neither of us wore clothes as we ate, as it will make us sound like nudists, but the fact is we tumbled out of bed without the slightest inhibitions.

  As she was getting dressed for work she told me we were signing up for scuba diving lessons.

  “We are?” I asked her.

  “Yep. We are going to get certified,” she said. “And you need to get some workout clothes. Running shoes and sweats. Go to the Foot Locker in the Arden Mall. Meet me for lunch at my office right after. Bring the wagon and the flag for MDash and we’ll wrap them.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ll make dinner at my place tonight, we’ll watch a documentary, then we are going to do in my bed what we spent last night doing in yours.”

  “Okay,” I repeated.

  DAY 3

  Anna ended up taking me to Foot Locker, making me try on five different pairs of shoes (we settled on cross-trainers) and four versions of sweatpants and tops (Nike). Then we bought food and drinks for the party Anna wanted to throw for MDash. She said my house was the only place for such a bash.

  Around noon, MDash was one of sixteen hundred soon-to-be Americans standing on the floor of the Sports Arena, right hands raised as they swore allegiance to America—new citizens who would preserve, protect, and defend what was now their Constitution as much as it was for the President of the United States. Steve Wong, Anna, and I were in the bleachers, witnessing the naturalization of a sea of immigrants, their skins all the different colors of human nature. The sight was glorious and made the three of us emotional—Anna the most. She wept, her face pressed into my chest.

  “It’s…so…beautiful,” she kept sobbing. “God…I love…this country.”

  MDash’s Home Depot co-workers who could get the time off showed up at my place with a lot of cheap American flags, purchased with their employee discounts. Steve Wong set up a karaoke machine and we made MDash sing songs with “America” in the lyrics. “American Woman.” “American Girl.” “Spirit of America” by the Beach Boys is actually about a car, but we made him sing it anyway. We used the Radio Flyer wagon as an ice chest and six of us planted the forty-eight-star flag like we were the Marines on Iwo Jima, MDash being the guy in the very front.

  The party went long, until only the four of us were left watching the moonrise, listening to Old Glory flitter and flap on its pole. I had just opened another beer from the slosh of ice in the wagon when Anna took the can out of my hands.

  “Easy, baby,” she said. “You’re going to need all your capabilities, just as soon as those two go home.”

  An hour later, Steve Wong and MDash headed out, the new American citizen singing “A Horse with No Name” (by the band America). As soon as Steve’s car was out of the driveway, Anna took my hand, leading me to the backyard. She put cushions down on the soft grass and we lay there, kissing, then, well, you know, putting my capabilities to the test.

  DAY 4

  Anna runs whenever she can jam a few miles into forty minutes, a habit she was going to force upon me. She took me to one of her routes, an uphill path that loops around Vista Point and back, and told me to get going. She would zip along ahead of me and meet me coming back down, knowing I’d never keep up with her.

  My exercise is an option-only affair. Occasionally, I’ll ride my old three-speed to Starbucks or play a few rounds of Frisbee golf (I used to belong to a league). This morning I was chuffing up the dirt road, Anna so far ahead I didn’t see her, my feet breaking in my new cross-trainers (note to self: move up a half size). My blood was surging up and down my body in unfamiliar fury, so my shoulders and neck tensed up and my head pounded. When Anna came charging down from Vista Point, she was clapping her hands.

  “Atta baby!” she called out, passing me. “Good first effort!”

  I spun around to follow her. “My thighs are on fire!”

  “They are rebelling,” she called back over her shoulder. “In time they will submit!”

  Anna reorganized my kitchen when I was in the shower. She thought I kept my pans and lids in the wrong cupboards, and why was my flatware drawer so far from the dishwasher? I had no answer. “Let’s get going. Can’t be late for our first scuba lesson.”

  The Scuba School smelled of rubber wet suits and the chlorinated pool. We filled out papers and were given workbooks to study, along with the schedule for our classroom sessions, as well as options for the date of our open water certification. Anna pointed to a Sunday four weeks away and reserved our berths on the boat on the spot.

  We went to the Viva Verde Salad Cafe for a lunch of salads made of salads with salad on the side, after which I wanted to go home for a nap. But Anna said she needed my help moving some stuff around her house, a chore she had been putting off. This was barely true, almost a lie. She actually wanted me to help her rewallpaper her hallway and home office, which meant I had to move her computer, printer, scanners, and graphic equipment, then do her bidding all afternoon.

  I never made it home that evening. We had dinner in—vegetarian lasagna with vegetables on the side—and watched a movie on Netflix about smart women with idiot boyfriends.

  “Look, baby,” Anna said. “This is about us!” Then she cackled and reached into my pants without so much as kissing me. I either was the luckiest man in the world or was being played for a sucker. After Anna let me reach into her pants as well I still wasn’t sure which.

  DAY 5

  Anna had to work at her office. She employs four no-nonsense women and an intern who is an at-risk girl from high school. Last year she landed a contract for doing the graphics for a textbook publisher, steady work but as boring as wallpapering for a living. I told her I was going home.

  “Why?” she asked. “You’ve got nothing to do today.”

  “I’m going to get a run in,” I said, making that up on the spur of the moment.

  “Atta baby,” she told me.

  I went home and did put on the cross-trainers, then jogged around the neighborhood. Mr. Moore, a retired cop whose house shares my back fence, saw me running by and hollered out, “What the fuck got into you?”

  “A woman!” I yelled back, and not only was that true, but I felt good saying it. When a man thinks of a lady and looks forward to telling her that he ran forty minutes, well, partner, he’s living in Girlfriend Territory.

  Yes. I had a
girlfriend. A girlfriend changes a man from the shoes he exercises in right up to how he cuts his hair (which Anna did the very next day, in front of my barber)—alterations I was due. Fooled by the adrenaline of romance, I ran farther than my body could stand.

  Anna called just as I had given up on a nap because my calves were as tight as beer cans. She told me to get over to her acupuncturist; she’d call to arrange an immediate treatment.

  The East Valley Wellness Oasis is in a minimall/professional building with underground parking. Driving my VW Bus, which has no power steering, around and around those descending circular ramps took physical effort. Figuring out the multiple elevators of the facility taxed my brain. When I finally found office 606-W, I filled in five pages of a Wellness questionnaire, sitting beside a fountain that made more noise from its electric pump than from its cascading water element.

  Do you accept the practice of Visualization? Sure, why not? Are you open to Guided Meditation? I don’t see how it could hurt. Explain your reasons for seeking treatment. Please be specific. My girlfriend told me to bring you my tired, my poor, my balled-up leg muscles yearning to be freed.

  I handed in my answers and waited. Eventually, a guy in a white lab coat called my name and took me into a treatment room. As I stripped down to my skivvies he read over my paperwork.

  “Anna says your legs are bothering you?” he asked. He’d been working on Anna for the last three years.

  “Yep,” I said. “My calves, among other muscles in revolt.”

  “According to this,” he said, tapping my paperwork, “Anna’s your girlfriend.”

  “A new development,” I told him.

  “Good luck with that. Lay on your stomach.” When he put the needles in me, my whole body tingled and my calves twitched uncontrollably. Before leaving the room, he hit play on an old CD boom box for my guided meditation. I heard a woman’s voice tell me to clear my mind and think of a river. I sort of did that for half an hour, wanting to fall asleep, but couldn’t because I had needles sticking in me.