It's All Relative (14 page)

“Are you okay?” she asked, staring at me. And then she sighed and picked at a cruller with a red nail the size of a surfboard.

This PR office's reception area was decorated with a random assortment of couches, the worn, mismatched kinds my fraternity used to have in its vomit-strewn parlor, and they were all pushed against the walls of the lobby as if a street sweeper went through the middle of the place every night.

Each couch had its own glass end table, smudged with fingerprints, and there was a nearly empty watercooler that burped occasionally, and one of those coffeepots, sitting on a hot plate, that smelled like burning tires.

I flipped through a two-year-old copy of
Ad Age
, the most recent magazine on one of the end tables, and began to worry.

Fifteen minutes later, a nervous older man, a Barney Fife-ish guy, appeared and squirreled me into his office, a tiny interior square without windows. He kept looking around in a crazy-paranoid fashion the entire time.

The most discomforting part, however, and the feature from which I could not unleash my stare was the man's coffee cup, which was perched perilously high on a makeshift mountain of papers and magazines and faxes and binders, almost as if Christo had been commissioned to do the installation.

“Tell me a little about yourself,” he said, having to stand in order to retrieve his coffee cup from high in the clouds.

I was, of course, a “hard worker,” “quick learner,” and “go-getter” who could “get along with anyone,” I said with my freakish smile. “Even Idi Amin,” I added before I could stop myself.

He did not laugh.

“What interests you about our firm?” he asked.

So I lied to him, trying not to sound too desperate, although I was about two weeks away from moving back to the Ozarks and becoming a carny.

“I am adept at all forms of communication, having majored in journalism, but I've had experience and internships in marketing, advertising, radio, and TV. I am simply fascinated with integrated communications. It's the wave of the future.”

These were all lies. I thought “integrated communications” was an asinine buzzword, like “mission-based,” “emerging technologies,” “strategic planning,” and “team player.”

Uttering them made my colon spasm.

I really just wanted to write.

About myself.

Still, Barney Fife seemed intrigued enough to tell me about the firm's major accounts, which ranged from the awful to the pathetic: a small chain of quick-oil-change shops, a hard-rock radio station, a local developer of heinous homogenous subdivisions that featured faux gas lampposts and ranch houses with marbleized columns.

“Oh, and we just got a mall,” he told me. “That's where we need the most help.”

It was here that I finally began to get interested.

Saying “mall” to me was like saying “blow job” to a sex addict. Though I certainly didn't look like it at the time, I loved malls, lived for them, scoured them for skinny clothes, dreaming of the day when I could fit into anything tailored from Banana Republic. And then, depressed, I would hit Orange Julius and Sbarro's in the food court and end up buying something useless from Kirkland's.

“I am
very
interested in helping your company reach its potential, and, with your mentorship, I'm sure you will help me reach my own potential.”

Had I just said this? Out loud?

I hated myself. But I couldn't move back home with my parents. That would be the ultimate failure.

“Okay. Good, good,” he said. “I like what I hear. Let me go ahead and introduce you to the president of our firm. Follow me.”

We walked down a long hallway that seemed akin to a gangplank to a closed office, from behind which was blaring the sounds of Michael Jackson's “Man in the Mirror.”

Barney Fife knocked softly at first, then a touch louder, and, seeing no results, he banged the door with a bit more temerity.

“What?” a high-pitched voice boomed.

Barney peeked his head through a crack in the door and half yelled, “I have a candidate for the junior account position I'd like you to meet.”

“Are you kidding me? I've got a meeting in an hour, and I need to psyche myself up for it. Give me a second.”

“Wait here,” Barney Fife said, his face twitching, before bolting away, simply leaving me to stand there alone.

“Good luck,” he called out as he raced down the darkened hallway, and it was then I could have sworn he added, “You'll need it,” but it was already too late: I was standing paralyzed, listening to a voice from behind the door parrot the high-pitched vocals of
Michael, when suddenly it flung open and I was confronted by a black behemoth wearing a touch of eyeliner, a super shiny suit, and a tiger-striped tie.

“Welcome, welcome, welcome, my little one.”

He introduced himself with a flourish, bending forward, nearly bowing, like I was the queen. My worries, oddly, vanished. I felt flattered. Honored to be treated as the lady I knew I was.

He asked me to sit in a leather chair that fronted his giant desk while he continued to analyze himself in a large dressing mirror that was standing off to one side of his office.

“You have made it to the inner sanctum,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks.”

He talked in a rather feline, feminine voice, and was very delicate with all of his gestures. And yet he was imposing in size, sort of the spawn of Eartha Kitt and Warren Sapp.

Instead of asking about my résumé, the firm's president eyed me over and stated, “Mmmmm, I like a boy with some meat on his bones.”

The hair on my arms tingled.

I felt like that big girl in
Silence of the Lambs
who gets thrown down into the well and has to put on the lotion all the time.

And yet somewhere deep down I was oddly flattered, too. After my last interview debacle, it was nice to know my appearance wouldn't be cause for a never-ending corporate joke.

The president quickly segued, asking about my experience, and it became clear to me that I'd obviously misunderstood him, that he'd probably said, “I like a candidate with some meat on his résumé.”

I talked about my journalism internships, and then he asked if I was creative, so I eagerly showed him my portfolio of writing and design samples.

He then asked if I could work under pressure.

I lied and said yes, omitting the fact that I flipped out if people watched me microwave.

“Can you start Monday?” he purred.

“Yes! Thank you for your confidence in me!”

I walked out into the hallway, the door closed, and Michael again began blaring in the background.

No salary had been discussed, no benefits, no vacation. I didn't even know what time to show up Monday, much less where I would be working.

But it didn't matter.

I had a job.

I arrived at work on Monday at seven fifty
A.M
. sharp, wearing exactly the same outfit I'd worn to all my interviews.

I was raring to get started, to prove my worth, to be a working man in the city.

But the door was locked, and I didn't have a key, so I waited in the hallway.

My watch rotated from eight to eight fifteen, to eight thirty, and still no one had arrived. I peed in a restroom at the end of the hall around eight forty-five and began to panic, standing in the stall, knowing in my heart this wasn't how a normal office operated.

Perhaps, I thought, as I stared at graffiti on the stall wall that disturbingly told me that
CHE GUEVARA IS A FAGGOT!
, working at a creative place, the office opened later in the morning.

But at nine I was still alone. I looked into a few other suites on the floor, and people were indeed answering phones and getting coffee, and businesses were open for, well, business.

Finally, at about a quarter past nine, the sigher showed up and asked who I was and what I was doing loitering outside her door.

“I'm Wade, the new hire.”

“We hired somebody?”

“I guess you didn't get the memo?”

She polished off her cigarette, stamped it out in the fern, and sighed. “
Memo
? Ha! We're not real good communicators.”

“But this is a communications firm?”

I intended for this to sound casual, like a joke, but it came out desperate, along the lines of yelling, “What do you mean I've woken up to find a bomb implanted in my anus?”

“
Mmm-hmmm,
” she said, sighing.

While the secretary sighed her way around the office, starting the coffee, booting up her computer, starting the printer, I stood and waited for her to show me to my office.

“Where will I be working?” I finally asked.

“Dunno,” she sighed. “Both offices are filled.”

Both?

And then I heard screaming outside. Barney Fife entered, holding a bag of Dunkin Donuts, followed by the president, who was berating him.

“You idiot! You never open your mouth at a meeting when I'm present, got it? I am the one the client is hiring. I
am
the firm. Got it?”

Barney Fife got a cup of coffee, looking around in his shell-shocked sort of way, and headed to his office.

“Who are you?” the president asked.

“I'm Wade Rouse. You hired me on Friday and told me to start today.”

He wagged his big finger at me and I followed him down the hall.

He flung open a door, flicked on a light switch that triggered a dull fluorescent the strength of a dying bug zapper, and said, “Here you go.”

And then he walked away.

My new “office” was a six-by-six storage closet cum office nerve center, a tiny space crammed with boxes of envelopes and stationery and promotional key chains and pens and tons of wires that snaked through the walls and ceiling tiles, as if I was being kept in the reptile house of a zoo.

Jammed in the corner was a tiny wood desk and chair, the kind a sixth grader might have in his bedroom to do his homework. My only office equipment was an ancient typewriter.

There was no computer or phone.

I sat in that storage room, idly, for hours, without anyone coming to check on me or talk to me or tell me what to do. I stacked boxes, rearranged wires, and cleaned off my desk, going so far as to place a fistful of promotional pens in a promotional cup and position it by my typewriter.

I sat and waited for an assignment.

I placed two pens in the back of my hair like chopsticks.

I played drums on empty boxes.

I cleaned out my wallet.

Around noon, on the verge of tears, I went to the lobby.

“Is everything okay?” I asked the sigher.

“Why do you ask?” she sighed.

“I'm just sitting in there … you know … alone. I don't know what to do. I don't have anything to do.”

“Consider yourself lucky,” she sighed.

And then her phone rang.

I got a cup of water and retreated to my coat closet. And then, as if my desk had a silent alarm system attached to it, the president sprinted down the hall and began screaming, “No drinks on the wood! No water stains! Use a coaster! Jesus Christ! This is a professional office!”

As he stormed away, I finally realized why Barney Fife had stacked his coffee on a cumulonimbus cloud.

I was working in a loony bin.

But just as I started to walk out, I thought: This has to be a joke. I am being tested. This is just like getting hazed in a fraternity; once I pass the test, I'll be let in on the joke and welcomed into the club.

And, still in the back of my head, lurked the reality: If you lose
this job, you're moving back in with your parents. Talk about a loony bin.

Around four
P.M
., while nodding off in my David Blaine–sized torture box, the president appeared in my doorway, handed me a fifteen-second radio ad for a thirty-minute oil-change company, and asked for my thoughts.

“Well …” I started.

“Like I give a shit,” he laughed. “Retype this. Cap every word and double-space every line so it's easier for the on-air talent to read.”

“I don't have a computer,” I said.

“There's a typewriter. That should be all you need right now.”

“Are you pulling my leg?”

“I'd like to pull your chubby little leg,” he leered, before departing.

Since, first and foremost, I'm a people pleaser, the type of guy who would pick Kirstie Alley up from food rehab and drive her immediately to a Steak 'n Shake, I typed the memo lickety-split, like I was back in high school finishing my typing final: “
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
”

I ran the copy back to him.

While he looked it over, his phone rang. And rang. And rang. He looked at me before gesturing for me to answer it.

“Mr. X's office,” I said. “How may I help you? Hold, please.”

I looked at the big black man in front of me, who was loosening his tie and, I believe, leering at my ass.

“It's a Miss Q from the mall,” I said.

He gestured to me in a highly dramatic writing motion, so I grabbed a pad and pen and took a note.

“She wants to discuss having a fashion show to showcase their retailers,” I said excitedly after hanging up.

And then my boss said, “I'm getting a boner.”

My mouth went dry, my heart raced.

“What? Excuse me?” I asked.

“I'll have to phone her,” he said, laughing at me. “What did you think I said?”

The president asked me to meet him at the mall the next morning, an assignment that eased my troubling first day.

A mall.

A fashion show.

Models.

It was a dream.

However, upon my arrival the next day, the president not only refused to introduce me to the client, but he also didn't even acknowledge me. Instead he handed me his clipboard and a walkie-talkie. “Listen to every word I say,” he instructed. “And take down pertinent points that we're discussing with the retailers, got it?”