Apathy and Other Small Victories (17 page)

The seven-to-ten
A.M
. happy hour brought in a few drunk ass old men and some guys from the road crews, the ones who stand there all day leaning on the Slow and Stop signs trying not to fall down. They were never young and had never just shaved, and the ones who had hair looked like they were wearing bad toupees. Sometimes women came in, and they looked exactly like the men except their toupees were worse, but usually they didn’t come in.

There was food on the menu but I never saw anyone order any. The condiments were lined up on the bar in case they did though: old half-empty glass bottles of mustard and ketchup with the dried blackened overspill creeping out from under the cap like mold, grimed pepper and saltshakers with pushed-in tin tops. I always sat near them, and when the bartender turned his back I would think about stealing one or maybe two, but then I would not. And that, that is loyalty.

It was a good place to wait out the early mornings, a good way to get used to the idea of another day. The windows were made out of a special, magic glass, like the bottoms of old Coke bottles or the stuff they use in two-way mirrors—there were principles at work that I did not understand—so the windowpanes would glow orange amber and repel the sunlight, keeping the bar dim while still letting you see outside, and you could watch the morning get bright in a garbled, distorted sort of way. It was like sitting in a cave that served beer. It was very primordial. During happy hour pitchers of Miller High Life were only three dollars apiece. And that is probably why I showed up to work piss drunk all those days.

I’d stumble into the office and go straight to the bathroom and pass out. When I woke up an hour or two later I’d still be ragged drunk or in the early stages of a debilitating hangover with permanent nerve damage in both legs. Getting back to my chair was a Greek tragedy of chemical imbalance and full-blown cerebral palsy. I’d stagger past co-workers and fall into cubicle walls and I didn’t even care that I was obviously hammered and reeking of stale cigarettes and alcohol and that there were swarms of fruit flies nesting in my hair. And these people would smile at me and say, “Having fun yet?” or “Is it Friday yet?” or “Time to go home yet?” completely oblivious to my ruination, rhetorically seeking their own better times that wouldn’t ever come, even when they did.

Sometimes you are left with no choice but to manufacture your own fiascos, and alcohol is an easy and legal variable to introduce. I was curious—scientifically, economically, sociologically, morally—as to whether I could function as an alphabetizer for a large insurance company even though I was too drunk to recite the alphabet without singing it. But what if I could? What if I could keep up even as my liver failed and I went blind from alcohol poisoning? What if I could excel? What would this say about capitalism? About the unyielding corporate machine? About the fate of the individual in an increasingly conformist American society? Sometimes the questions are more important than the answers, especially when you do not know what the answers are.

I didn’t give a shit either way. I just couldn’t take working at Panopticon Insurance anymore. Changes had to be made, but I didn’t want to be the one to have to make them. I figured if I was drunk all the time I’d be even more obviously incompetent and they’d have no choice but to fire me. As bad as it was I couldn’t bring myself to quit. Quitting is too proactive, and it reflects poorly on a person’s character. Nobody likes a quitter. I would always rather be a victim of circumstance. And I thought if I got fired I could apply for unemployment, which I know now isn’t fucking true.

But it didn’t happen. Not the way I thought anyway. Nobody even noticed. Or if they did I doubt they associated my stumbling and slurred speech and snoring with raging early-morning Miller High Life binges. They probably thought I had a cold, or was really stressed out from all my alphabetizing. There are a fixed set of explanations most people apply to situations, and if one of those easy explanations doesn’t fit they either push harder to make it fit or they ignore the whole goddamn thing and watch TV. That’s why trial by jury is so terrifying for black men who aren’t famous. That’s why mediocre childhoods are a blank check to be an asshole. That’s why shitty actors on crappy sitcoms are so rich and beloved. That’s why so many unthinkable atrocities continue for as long as they do unchecked. Genocide. Serial incest and inbreeding. My employment at Panopticon Insurance. All so horrible they defy reason or explanation. To sensible people, it just doesn’t make sense. It just can’t be. Sleeping in the bathroom and getting drunk at seven
A.M
.? It hardly even made sense to me. But we still do the things that we do.

And yet unchecked Miller High Life abuse is not without its upside. It is the goddamn champagne of beers after all. And so I was able to stand on the eighteenth floor of the Panopticon Insurance building with my hand on my cubicle wall, my whole body swaying, my knees buckling beneath me, and immediately recognize what was wrong. It was all part of something bigger of course, something so deeply entrenched and terrible and accepted that I was never quite drunk enough to name it. But in that state I could see more of it than most people would normally allow themselves to see. And I even knew how to fix some of it. It was like what Buddhists call satori, and all I had to do was get trashed. I didn’t have to meditate or anything.

The idea of cubicles was bad enough, but making people sit in them all day was just inhuman. They had to go. They were like The Hole in southern prisons or how farmers raise veal. It was like sticking a brick of cocaine up your ass and smuggling it across the border. Things were being crammed into places they were never meant to fit. And what these people did to their cubicles made it even worse. Dressing them up with trinkets and pictures, always trying to make their fabric walls look hospitable and just like home. I understood why they did it, but that didn’t make it right. Lying to other people is fine and usually funny, but lying to yourself is tacky. There’s nothing hospitable about an 8’ × 8’ carpeted holding cell on the eighteenth floor of an insurance building, and it would be wrong to forget that. To pretend otherwise only blurs the line between work life and real life, and that’s a line that needs to be starkly and brutally enforced. Boundaries are fucking important.

And everyone drank too much coffee too, at the wrong times and for the wrong reasons. They drank it when they came in every morning to get going, and then again in the afternoon to keep going. They ran on caffeine fumes all day and never fucking got anywhere. Then they went home spent and empty and crashed in front of the TV every night and slept away the few hours they had for themselves. All these motherfuckers are always talking about the best ways to manage your time. The fact is any time spent at work not sleeping in the bathroom is wasted time, and it’s hard to sleep when you’re pumped full of caffeine. Everyone’s awake for the wrong part of their lives. And by the weekend they’re too exhausted from all the frantic, useless activity to even care, and it’s only fucking two days off anyway. Nobody has the time or the energy to do what they really want, or to even figure out what that is. That’s why everyone’s so pissed off and blowing each other away on the freeway and having sex with prostitutes all the time.

And goddamn Inspiration Alley was so grotesquely misguided it pained me to even have to acknowledge it, even more so because nobody else did. It was the execution-style murder of context. It was history castrated to a sound bite. It was seeing a rainbow in the waves of an oil slick as it seeped across the ocean drowning fish and strangling birds and believing that ecological catastrophes had their own redeeming beauty. A world in which it’s possible for someone to associate Martin Luther King with increased alphabetizing efficiency is a world in which none of us should ever want to live.

Whether knowing these things made me a prophet or a management consultant I wasn’t sure. I think they might be the same thing now anyway. I could have tried to tell someone, tried to make them understand, but I didn’t really want to. It wouldn’t have helped anyway. This was a system so sick, so tainted, no good could ever come from it. Except when they had huge company-wide charity drives and raised a lot of money for the United Way. But that was offset by the humiliation of Jeans Day and having to gather around someone’s cubicle to sing “Happy Birthday” in monotone and all the other ways in which a person was diminished every day until they became so small not even the United Way could save them.

Even something so seemingly right as Bring Your Daughter to Work Day in that environment was horribly, horribly wrong. Marching a sweet, innocent nine year old who likes ponies and dreaming into an 8’ × 8’ cubicle and telling her that if she’s strong and independent she’ll get to spend forty years in there slowly wasting away is an exercise in feminist misogyny. It was like a fucking Scared Straight program, a right-wing Christian conspiracy to create more stay-at-home moms. You grab a little girl by the pigtails and say, “Suzy, this is what hell looks like!” and obviously she’s going to kick off her shoes and get pregnant at fifteen. And she’ll keep on going for as long as the clock runs, anything to stay out of that cubicle.

If I could ovulate that’s where I would’ve been. But I could not. But I could not.

* * *

The bartender at my happy hour bar was also the owner. His name was Sooj. That’s what people called him anyway, what the old men mumbled to get his attention. I never saw an official document from the guy or anything. He looked Lebanese but he was born in Cleveland. His parents though were both from Lebanon.

Sooj obviously didn’t like his deadbeat customers. He served their drinks like he was doing them a favor, which he probably was since he never cut them off. Even when they passed out with their head on the bar he’d let them sleep through it, then serve them again when they woke up. It was touching in a desperate sort of way.

He kept to himself as much as a bartender could. The only thing he liked to talk about was how, if someone broke into your house, you were allowed to kill them.

“It is a question of security! You must protect your family from harm!” he’d rant in his understated Cleveland accent. “It goes back to prehistoric times!”

Sometimes the old men would wake from their comas just long enough to frame the terms of debate: “What if it’s not your house? What if you’re just renting?” “Or house-sitting?” “What if it’s a woman who’s breaking in?” “What if you broke in first and no one was home, then someone else broke in after you? Are you allowed to kill them?” “What if you’re asleep and—ahhh fuck it.”

The result was always the same. Sooj was wise, like Solomon but shorter, and he never lost an argument.

A young guy came in once, greasy and in clothes too tight and too short to realistically be his. He looked like he’d gone to audition for the pickpocket role on
Starsky and Hutch
and then found out that it had been cancelled in the seventies. He got into it with Sooj pretty good and he seemed like he knew what he was talking about, like maybe he’d been in the situation a few times himself. He said that it depended which state you lived in—Texas you could shoot anything that wasn’t already dead, Utah you had to invite them in for tea and then make them your wife, whether you were attracted to the guy or not—and even in some of the vigilante states it wasn’t always justified, depending on the threat the intruder posed and other mitigating circumstances, except he called these other mitigating circumstances “other fucking shit.”

Sooj listened patiently and then had one thing to say to him, one thing only: “Deadly force is authorized!” It was what he went with whenever debate had to be squashed immediately. There was nothing left to say. The pickpocket bummed a cigarette and left. The old men nodded into their drinks and I learned a lesson I had learned a thousand times before: facts and reason are nothing against a good slogan. No one can argue with a bumper sticker. Not when it’s on the bartender’s car.

Sitting on my stool I thought of a bumper sticker: “If Mean People Suck, Why Isn’t My Dick In Your Mouth?” But I did not tell Sooj. I did not tell anyone.

Into this fascist cesspool, one Sunday morning, walked Gwen.

“Oh my god, Shane!” she said, and hit me with an open field tackle of a hug that lifted me off my stool and cracked two of my ribs. I saw her coming at the last second and braced myself. Otherwise I would’ve been paralyzed for life.

“How are you?” she said as she crushed me like a grape.

I could only gasp for air, and pray.

“I’ve been looking all over for you. You didn’t return any of my calls, I hadn’t seen you, I thought, well, anyway, here you… are,” and she looked around at the dim, dirty bar with its fruit flies—who were regarding her with suspicion, just like Sooj—and its Miller High Life, The Champagne of Beers poster that was peeling slowly and inexorably off the wall like the shifting of tectonic plates, and its old man three stools down who was sleeping soundly with his head in the crook of his elbow, passed out on the bar.

“I’m just glad you’re all right,” she said.

“Yeah. How are you?”

“I’m good, I’m good. But it’s been hard. It’s been hard for all of us.”

She seemed very sad and I wasn’t sure what tragedy I’d missed. Maybe a nuclear holocaust. Maybe the special glass had saved me and Sooj and the old man. I thought of all the cockroaches that must be running around, flipping over parked cars with their brand new nuclear-mutated strength, smug and ruthless, at last the dominant species they were always destined to be. I thought of them and I was afraid.

“You just can never be ready for something like that. It took us all by surprise.”

“Yikes,” I said.

“Poor Vern. They were married for twenty-seven years. At least they didn’t have any children.”

“Huh?”

“I heard they’re talking about naming her cube the Martha Wolsey Memorial Cubicle, but it would just be used for storage and remembrances. That would be too creepy and disrespectful if someone else sat there.”