28:
sunlight in
an empty room
changes nothing
the mirrors are all blind
the windows slowly melting
and i believe
in the burning girl
i believe in the boy
buried among the redwoods
by his father
these are the myths
my son will inherit
and this is the country
and the politics of fear are not
politics at all
what i call silence
in this house
is actually the sound of
clocks running backwards
what i call sorrow is
actually guilt
despite the fact that i have always
maintained my innocence
and on the day i give up
the last of my teenage heroes
my oldest friend writes
to tell me he won’t be
writing again
a minister’s wife from the
town i grew up in
is found naked and dead on
a stretch of railroad tracks
eighty-five miles to
the north
we are always spending
too much time
measuring distances that
can never be crossed
28:
sufocatingly hot again without
warning
and i spend
too much time in my car
at the edge of this parking lot
reading names from the book of
overdoses
i wake up always in the
memory of a burning house
look around you
the land here has risen up
only to fall back on itself
the roads are lies and i have been
believing them for too long
i can’t explain it any better than
this
i was never promised anything
but still feel cheated when the
blood i taste
is my own
and so i turn against my wife and
son
i walk from room to room in
an empty house
and there is a sound the phone
makes
when it doesn’t ring
and there is no way to measure
silence
there is no way
to lash out against it
it’s a simple mistake equating
nothingness with god
28:
Up, down, sideways. My emotions are all over the place after the terrorist attack. First I’m angry, then depressed, then angry again — this time at something else. One day I’m mad at the terrorists, the next at the FAA, then at our foreign policy, and finally at myself for second-guessing.
Is patriotism the last refuge of scoundrels? Or is it hindsight?
My friend Leonard and I argue each morning on our daily walks. “Nuke ‘em,” Leonard says. “No more land wars in countries where we don’t belong.” Leonard, a Vietnam vet, is suspicious of government policy.
I share his skepticism about our leadership until I read an article I find on the Internet about the major players in our state department and their preparations for a response to the attack.
They seem to know what they are doing, I tell Leonard, and I sketch out an outline of what I have read. Leonard is unimpressed. The article comforts me, though. It’s nice to know we have a plan.
I ask my wife what she thinks of all this, and she replies that she is in denial.
I tell my wife to go shopping. “Shop ’til you drop,” I say. “It’s patriotic.” She goes shopping for things we need. Groceries. I tell her to look for flags, and she does, but she can’t find any.
We borrow a flag from a neighbor. It’s sitting on top of the TV in the den. We haven’t figured out where to display it yet. One of our neighbors has spray-painted God Bless America in red, white, and blue on his garage door. The other neighbors are abuzz because very faintly you can see other words underneath. “Go Home” something. The first two words are all you can read.
Of course the psychiatrists and counselors are thick as flies on the talk shows, talking about what we can do with our anger, but I think instead we should be talking about what we can do.
What can we do? I send money to the Red Cross and other relief agencies, and vow not to join the mental masturbators who are critical of our country’s past policy mistakes. What’s done is done. After that, I draw a blank. What else can I do? Remember, maybe. Remember what it was like during the cold war. Remember what it was like after Pearl Harbor. The Cold War lasted for forty-five years. After Pearl Harbor, it was a year and a half before there was any good news. Day after day we heard on the radio and read in the newspaper how the U.S. was getting its ass kicked. It wasn’t until the battle of Midway that we had anything to cheer about.
Meanwhile, my wife and I get tipsy, figuratively speaking. We grow giddy. We talk about mobilizing the cats in the new war on terrorism. I go outside one morning, and the raccoons have torn up the grass in our front lawn. I claim it was the work of terrorists. We begin assigning each of our animals a job. Simba, an antisocial Maine Coon who lives in our garage at night and roams the property outside by day, is given the title of Minister of Homeland Security. Frank, our smartest cat, is named the new Director of the CIA. (I figure that replacing the old one is no great loss.) Mouse and Turtle, who spend hours on our back porch watching the birds, are made air raid wardens. Pee Wee is put in charge of rounding up terrorist flies and moths. Pee Wee, an adolescent gray tabby, relishes his job. He eats what he catches. Barbaric? Yes, but fight fire with fire.
Spot wants to join Simba in securing the perimeter of our property, but he proves to be unqualified. A muscular tom with the mottled black and white coloring of a Holstein cow, Spot tangles with a stray, a red tabby, whom because of the red hair Spot mistakes for a member of the IRA, and Spot gets his clock cleaned. I tell Spot that he has no sense of history. “Don’t fight old battles,” I say. Spot crawls up into my lap, and when I stroke his head, he purrs.
All of our cats, all nine of them, seem to be needy these days. Spot had never been a lap cat before. And now, when one of them flops on the carpet, begging for attention, two or three more will appear out of nowhere, circling close as we kneel down to administer pats and scratches.
Or perhaps it isn’t the cats’ need but an instinctive recognition of our need that explains the change in behavior. Something is wrong in their world, and they are dealing with it the best way that they can, by radiating a kind of fuzzy love.
27:
I know that you won’t get this until Monday morning, at work. Not until you get through your Monday morning client status meeting. Not until you get your coffee — heavy cream, heavy sugar — and a bran muffin. I think that’s why I’m sitting here right now. I know that Monday morning everything will be different between us. After we meet for brunch tomorrow at Leo’s there will be compromises. There will boundaries. There will not be ambiguous phone calls of formality; “How are you holding up?” Followed by tumbleweeds of silence. There will not be anymore backdoor landings, 3a.m. with a sixer hanging on your hip and six more in your gut. In it of itself, not wrong. I just can’t take much more of this out(law) communication.
Not real sure, not sure why I came all the way home at four in the morning. Why I spent money I don’t have to catch a cab across town to sit at my desk. I have to be on the set in two hours.
No, your little man hasn’t ‘made it’. A woman I met on the set of High Fidelity a few years back gave me a call. She still works for that production firm. She asked if I wanted to make an extra bill or two being her production assistant. The show is called “Show Stoppers.” A bunch of Midwestern teenage corn queens will come to the city ready for they’re big break. They come for their ticket out of St. Louis, Urbana, out of Tulsa. They come to be told that they’re talents are needed elsewhere, in TV. They try out. The whole time we tape their auditions and let the public vote via the show’s web site. They want to be the five mid-season replacement characters on UHF shows. They come to be Bo’s new long lost daughter, to be Moesha’s nemesis, to be syndicated. They do Full House, Ally, ER monologues. It’s exhausting.
But not here in my room, at my desk, at four on Sat. morning. I am tired, drained, but not exhausted. Praise be to the Swiss chemist that found the recipe for dextrin. Been up for almost twenty-four hours and will work for much longer. I shouldn’t have been at that museum fund-raiser tonight; having sparse funds myself. I have strained my eyes looking for you tonight. I thought I saw you a hundred times tonight. Then I saw you, couldn’t talk to you, and got scared. I got scared before I saw you out on the patio. I got scared when I started seeing all of your friends; they saw me back and didn’t blink. They didn’t even look surprised. I got scared.
You should see these girls at the try-outs; they all look scared. They’re scared of me. I watch them as they suddenly disappear into themselves when they hit the lacquered pressboard square in the Hilton conference hall. They leap, bounce with fury on the same ground an apathetic DJ spun “We are Family” hours prior for another group of drunken Gold Coast plastic surgeons and the trixie one of them married. But these kids, you’d love it, I mean they tear into that spot and make it hallow. These girls consecrate the ground when they read. Didn’t you once say you thought about jazz dance at Julliard? You did some modeling ten years ago, I know I still have some of the slides that you gave me and I never developed. Some of these girls even look like you, in a way. Not a strange way, but an earnest driven way. All have that ignition.
God, I wonder if I’ll be able to find a cab around here at this time of morning. Did you know that someone set a cabbie on fire around the corner, on Division last night? Apparently a Patrick Bateman protege slid his money through the window slot along with a lit matchbook, followed it up with a wind of hairspray. Aquanet, I think. The kind the little Cambodian kids that live on the bottom floor huff out of Fanta cans. Anyway, the cabbie catches this little gust of Hell’s breeze straight a way in the face. Lights him up like a kerosene tomato. He leaps screaming from the yellow top, puts his mug out in stagnant gutter soup. The flame-on businessman doesn’t even have the decency to rob the matchstick driver, leaves him crying there. No rationale, no reason. Sorry, I know that you hate gore, but neighborhood gossip is still news. However, reaching into my second sleepless day, I don’t have the patience to be polite.
I am tired of being the bigger man too. For right now at least, tomorrow I’ll be back to my button-down self. Right now I do not feel like being mature. I wanted to find you before you found me. I wanted to sit back and watch you and see if you were having a good time. I wanted to watch you having fun for a change. I think I saw you talking to a few guys. I didn’t recognize any of them. Then I saw Josh standing a few yards away. I didn’t want to talk to him. I wanted to talk to you but didn’t want to make him or you uncomfortable. So I split the difference and made myself uncomfortable. I wish I didn’t do that so much but I do it all the time. I wanted to watch the two of you together, to see how you interacted with each other, and if you looked happy. I don’t know if you saw me, I thought that you might have, then you didn’t come over. I just saw you talking and laughing with other people. It made me think about how many people I kept you away from. I couldn’t stick around for that.
I flew to the film shorts that were being shown in the auditorium. A Barbie doll melted away, rotating, for five minutes in a microwave, that was the first film. The second film; twenty minutes of a pick-up truck dragging a plugged-in guitar down the road while it screamed the whole way. The third film had something to do with two British girls raising an embryo they found in the back yard, growing it into a sex-goddess represented by a blow-up doll, and then leaving it tied to a bar stool, stranded, in a disco. Not the kind of solace I was looking for.
I was jealous still, though you told me I shouldn’t be. I still smoked half a pack of Camels looking for you again. I think you must have left. I wandered around thinking about art and the like. I thought of you and Josh leaving together. I wanted to cry. I did, out in the sculpture garden, right next to that giant round boulder; my head full of images. Then I thought that maybe you might have seen me, got scared yourself. I thought that maybe when you got home — hoping that you went home — that you left me a voice mail telling me that you were scared too. A voice mail yelling at me for not coming over and talking to you. So at four in the morning I got into a cab, rushed home. There was no voice mail. I want to call you. I want to see if you’ll pick up. I want to see if you’re there alone, with Charlie Cat only. And that you want to come over and kiss the bend in my neck. And me likewise.
I know that I am over reacting. I don’t care. I so rarely get to act my age; I am pulling that card right now. I know everything that you told me about you, about Josh. You told me that it helped you get over me. That he just showed up. That you don’t like him all that much. That he has problems. That he doesn’t like Charlie Cat. That it is very casual.
I trust you. But there was a point in our relationship that I stopped believing you. That sounds ugly, sorry. We got into one of our fights. You know the ones typically reserved for late Sunday afternoons? I said something clumsy. I am a clod. It was at the A/X spring runway unveiling; the after-party I think. Where the models served us mini bottles of Dom with a bendy straw. Where the doorman mistook us for important, ushered us out of the line, and winked when he gave us those ‘party favors’ that had me rolling ’til noon the next day. The warehouse was normally packed with fabric rolls and before that it had been stocked with meat that left all those dark brown stains on the floorboards, the spots you refused to stand on. That night though, it was packed with us, trying to look like we belonged in the uber-elite. Trying to believe that Chicago had an uber-elite. I was smashed brilliant halfway through the party; I leaned grinning to your ear and whispered “Your plume is prettier than ninety percent of the birds in this nest.” You hit me with your handbag and yelled at me when we hit the curb. You yelled that you didn’t want to be prettier than ninety percent, for once you wanted to be prettier than everyone, you said it was my job to tell you what you wanted to hear. You stared vacant, said void the cab ride home and forgot the next day. I said nothing.
I used to tell people what they wanted to hear so that I could leave. I didn’t want to do have to do that with you. I go to work in an hour. I’ll spend the day telling girls from all over what they want to hear, “The part we are casting for is actually black/white/asian/latino, I’m sorry. But that was fantastic, though. You should consider contacting an agent.” I will speak this mantra five hundred times today, meaning it none. I never wanted to, but I questioned everything you said to me after that fight. I thought you were telling me what I wanted to hear. I fear that that is your job.
My job will be to tell all but five girls that they are not needed, the cameras will tape their reaction. I will tell the girls that they are not needed in the public eye. That they are still needed in St. Louis, in Urbana, that they’re still needed in Tulsa. I’ll tell them that the JJHS production of the Music Man still needs them. That strip malls with yellow tiled fluorescent food-courts still need them. That back, bucket seats and Camero boyfriends, with hard lumps in their Carharts, still need them. Not something I like as of late — rejection — but learning to work with. Not that I wanted to pass it on to others, unfortunately for the corn queens of the midway, it is really beginning to help.
21:
Monday
These two guys who work in the back of the office make noise up front as I attempt to look busy, striking the keys of my uniform computing machine with blitzkrieg precision and obvious career ambition. My posture suggests I may be lazy but the speed at which I execute the minor details of my job and the attitude which I feign defend me. The cold February draft blowing through the cracks in the window over the river result in shivers and the occasional chatter of teeth, the product of increasingly low company revenues.
I sit here at my desk, cold and dissatisfied with florescent supervision lost in fantastic wanderlust, waiting for the city to thaw. The modem tones heard through the lulls in music alternate between incessant phone rings and fax machines.
“Fucking fax machine,” I bunt with the heel of my palm, watching that god-damned ancient creature crumple my paper and ask for more. The gong sound of another courier’s forehead banging into the glass door requires the receptionist to strategically place plastic plants in the way, so one has to walk around in a circle to get to the door. Any more lawsuits will sink this fucking business.
No amount of advertising in the world could save this god-forsaken publication, awash in slacking talent and declining ethics. Alone in a sea of unworthiness and business motivation, neglecting the basic principles of quality and creative aspiration.
That fucking copy machine down the hall was purchased fifteen years ago, and apparently belonged to the library of a suburban grade school before we purchased it. It has cracks and stains all over it, it doesn’t copy cleanly and it’s very loud. It’s dirty, cumbersome and inefficient. Like everything in this place, it drags every good thing down with it.
There is now less chatter coming from the front of the office, and where I am, in the middle, there is a little action. Phone personas from salespeople and the 5:00 exit of most bearing a salesperson’s smile saying “good night,” “take care,” “see you tomorrow” and so on.
As I exit the building, I notice the hamster-wheel plop-art in front of the building rotating steadily and slowly, reflecting in fanblade consistency the frigid sun above.
Tuesday
As I ease the pencil out of the electric sharpener at the accounts desk and casually glance to either side, I hope someone notices me processing a payment. The quiet buzz of florescent overheads shouldn’t be the biggest distraction in a newspaper office around 11:00 in the morning. Half the office is on an early lunch, and the other half droning soullessly through black office telephones or mindlessly thumbing through the fax machine pile-up ignored by the receptionist. No one notices me.
I work in ad sales. I’m a glorified telemarketer, working part-time while finishing college, employed by a lackluster free local paper, executing nothing except wasted ideas. I took this job initially with the hope of gaining some useful knowledge about the news racket. But since I haven’t learned much, and probably never will, I walk the slow gauntlet of sales responsibility going nowhere, and a future of uncertainty in every direction.
This evil and manipulative career practice incorporates two fundamental iniquities in one — sales (root wd: salacious) and advertising (root wd: adversarial). I’m conscientiously unable to practice either of them. I also don’t know how to manipulate people very well. Withdrawal has always been more effective for me. I’ve been here for nine months and no one really notices me.
I’ve never made any actual choices in this environment. I’ve only reacted suddenly at strange junctions. I live in a state of apathy and fear as part of a crumbling generation in absentia, detached from reason and strategy. We’ve no reach to the reins of purpose because we’ve altered our social chemistry in response to technology and incessant information. My email is always full of newsletters full of bad writing trying to inform me about politics and other news, commercialism and be-debt-free drivel. The fax machine spits out press releases and business listings, ad forms and sales fax informationals. The phones never stop ringing, and the pressure to sell never seems to cease.
Although I’ve never been officially reprimanded for my low sales numbers, I’ve been slipped notes encouraging me to increase them. I haven’t, and they still won’t fire me. I’ve bottomed out, and the only conclusion I’ve come to is that they have no problem paying a 22-year-old sales hack part time and minimum wage.
They must enjoy my company.
Wednesday
Sitting on the stoop smoking, I stare at strange figures forming from the shadows of the hamster wheel. A pack of sales people pass me with portfolios, on their way to a meeting. “Going to see a client.” “Be back later.” Restaurants, bars, galleries, salons, whatever business decides to take the chance of advertising. With us.
Phil from marketing passes with a stupid haircut, as I suck a final waft from my cigarette, and he nods, smiling from the corner of his mouth while making that double click noise through his white teeth.
I see our publisher waddling up the street, coming in from lunch, so I decide to stall momentarily so when I walk in, right in front of him, I can accidently let the door slam behind me, locking him out and giving him a simple obstacle. I’m too focused on my work to notice him shaking the doors desperately behind me. No keys on him. Has to call up.
My manager is sitting at my desk when I return. He wants to know what sort of businesses I’m calling on. I tell him real estate, music, a few diners. He tells me keep up the tenacity. I tell him sure thing. He leaves; I do the crossword.
Filling in the pen doodle lines on my desk blotter with a freshly sharpened pencil attains for me a therapy session. All I can hear is the lead crumbling off onto the paper, shading perfectly within the random lines.
Most of my day consists of trying to find new ways to occupy my time, with the intention of spending as little time as possible on work. So I go to the bathroom with some magazines at 3:00, not emerging until 4:20. My ass is numb from the toilet seat. I walk through the cubes talking quietly to myself, providing the illusion that I’ve got enough on my advertising plate to need to organize my thoughts audibly. It works, because no one talks to me. A furtive glance, and back to whatever it is they do. Their glance could just be a paranoid peek to know it isn’t their boss wondering what they’re up to.
These people, mostly salespeople, fuck off as much as I do, but they’re here all day and actually provide revenue for the company.
The hallway outside the office is lined on one side with floor-to-ceiling windows, overlooking a major intersection with traintracks underneath, running throughout the city. There is a river, as well, running a similar route with the rails. I stand in the hall sometimes, because it’s quiet, and the urban motility outside and below cannot penetrate the sterile office floor, three stories high.
Thursday
I said I was never really rebuked for my low sales numbers. It was true, but things were beginning to get closer to unpleasant. I found a note on my desk today informing me rather unprofessionally that if things didn’t begin to change for the better, I was out on my ass.
So I piss in the coffee grounds, brewing a special pot for my wonderful management. The florescent light directly above my desk flickers like a frying insect. I relieve the guilt by pouring myself a cup. I set it down on my desk. I stand on my desk, I try to tighten the lightbulbs, I kick the cup. It spills, it smells. It smells like coffee and urine, a combination ironic and appropriate for my quandary. I cover it with last week’s issue — go have a cigarette.
A man working on the power lines above the street downstairs drops a wrench of some kind and it lands in the perpetual gears of the wheel. Jamming, it grinds to a cacophonous halt. “Oops” is the look on his five o’clock face, and he resumes his work.
For a moment, my cigarette tasted extraordinarily good. I enjoyed its fumes, thinking about getting fired. I don’t need to get fired, but it may be best. I return, thrashing violently in the elevator to relieve some of the tension I felt I was about to endure. Walk inside, thumb through faxes, stare at a blank sheet of letterhead mumbling to myself that “these numbers don’t look right.” I tell the receptionist she’s fired, and if she had any questions she could take it up with the publisher tomorrow, but that he was too busy to be bothered today. “Go home and take a bath,” I tell her.
Friday
A mysterious toilet bomb blew shit all over the walls Thursday night, in a strange attack more like Belfast than Chicago. I got called in first thing this morning to see whether or not I could have been involved. I did the whole thing, by myself, and I didn’t tell anyone.
They believed me wholeheartedly; how could they not? I’ve never lied to them before.
I decided I was going to leave; I didn’t give any more notice to them than I am now to you. I sat down at my desk, after coming in late, and after sitting through the comical attempt at an interrogation performed by the “administration.” I began sorting through the messes of paper piled upon my desk, throwing away my abundance of business cards, my short stack of invoices, my call sheets, and my drawings. I kept my poems, the ones I wrote between cigarettes and bathroom visits, folding and stuffing them into my coat pockets, and I checked my empty email about 23 times, making sure I didn’t miss any important announcements before my final departure.
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