Pink Slip Party (20 page)

Outside, Missy puts me into a cab, telling me to make sure they pay me up front, as if she is my pimp.

The cab drops me off in front of the Goldhagen, Haynes, and Keinan law firm, where they need someone to answer phones.

I go through the revolving door once without stopping, and then nearly miss the entrance again as I’m distracted by sunlight glinting on the interior glass. The security guard at the front desk is staring at me strangely.

The office manager, Gail Mindy, is a wide-set woman with bright red hair and pale, almost translucent skin. She shakes my hand with a vicelike grip and proceeds to run through instructions at such a rapid clip that it’s unclear to me whether she’s actually speaking English. She tosses out a few words I understand: “Coffee, Fax, Phones,” pointing to various corners of the office, before sitting me down at the front desk and giving me a headset.

It takes me four tries before I’ve put the thing on correctly, and by then there are already four lights blinking on the oversized phone. I press one and nothing happens.

Another several minutes pass before I realize that my headset is not plugged in. I attach it, and press the button again.

“Law firm,” I say, because holding in my head the names of the firm partners makes my head want to explode.

“Barbara, please,” a man says on the other end of the line.

I am at a loss. I look through the massive bible that is the firm’s directory hoping that Barbara’s last name starts with an
a.

I can’t find it.

“What is Barbara’s last name?” I ask.

The man sighs loudly.

“KEINAN,” he says slowly and with exaggerated care as if I might be deaf. “As in one of the partners in the firm?”

I find Barbara Keinan’s extension, and shortly thereafter realize that I have no idea how to transfer calls. Hit transfer, then the extension, then transfer? Or is it hit hold, then the extension, then transfer? Or is it hold-transfer-extension? Or is it hold-transfer-extension-transfer? Or extension-hold-transfer-transfer?

My head hurts. The lights on the phone are transfixing.

I go with transfer-extension-transfer and the light disappears, as do the other three blinking lights.

Gail the Office Manager materializes at the front desk, eyeing me suspiciously. She has a way of doing that, as if she can magically transport herself from place to place in a cloud of Jean Naté perfume.

“Everything OK, here?” she trills at me.

“Fine,” I say, nodding, and when she turns the corner, I put my head down on my desk because it suddenly feels too heavy to keep up a moment longer.

The phone lights up again, and when I answer, it’s the same man looking for Barbara.

“I got disconnected,” he tells me, sounding accusatory, as if I did it on purpose.

“Please hold,” I say, hitting hold-extension-transfer, and hanging up.

The phone lights up almost immediately. It’s the same man again, this time not bothering to be polite.

“Just give me her extension,” he shouts at me.

I want to tell him that I do have a bachelor’s degree, but I’m not sure that will really help my cause at this point.

Sometime midmorning, a blond paralegal walks by my desk and this reminds me of Caroline. Right. Caroline. Evil Caroline. It’s all coming back to me now.

*   *   *

When Jean Naté goes to lunch, I sneak a call to Todd. I need to know the status of their relationship.

“I got a job,” I say, right off.

“Congratulations.”

“Yeah, it’s temp work, but at least it’s work.”

“See? I knew you could do it. Persistence pays off!” Todd sounds legitimately proud of me. Temporarily, I feel warm and fuzzy inside.

“So?” I say.

“So?”

“So what’s up with Kyle and Caroline?” I sigh, frustrated.

Todd gives a long sigh. Todd and Caroline don’t get along that well. This probably stems from the fact that when Caroline and Kyle were seriously dating, Kyle never had time for Todd, always claiming to be busy doing things for Caroline (like remodeling her kitchen).

“I don’t know, but whatever it is, I hope it’s temporary,” Todd says.

“Do you think it is?” I ask, for the first time hopeful.

“God, I hope so. At this point, I’d be happy to buy her a plane ticket to Australia if it would help things,” Todd says.

Todd hates picking up a bar tab, much less a two thousand dollar plane ticket. This shows how serious he is.

Jean Naté comes back early from lunch and finds me on the phone. “No personal calls,” she barks at me.

When I get home after a long day of hold-number-transfer, my apartment smells like a circus, and there are three more people here than when I left in the morning: Ron’s three muses.

The muses are sitting in a circle, flipping through my old
In-Style
magazines. Ferguson is willingly rubbing Ganesha’s feet. Ron is squeezing Missy’s butt while she makes ham sandwiches, and Steph is sleeping in the spare bedroom, wearing a pink, silk eye mask.

“You’re out of Diet Coke,” one of the muses informs me.

“Oh, and peanut butter,” Heather says.

“Oh, and your landlord came by looking for his rent,” Vishnu says. “What’s his name? Bob? I couldn’t quite understand what he was saying, but he said he’s going to charge you late fees.”

“Why the hell are they here?” I ask Ron.

“The police raided my apartment,” Ron says, matter-of-factly. “The muses and I are homeless.”

“Oh, no,” I say, shaking my head. “Absolutely not. No way. You cannot live here.”

“It’ll only be for a couple of days,” Ron says.

I think my face is turning purple.

“Maybe one day — just one? And Russ and Joe may come by later.”

“Besides, we can help you with that Maximum Office thing,” Ganesha says.

I stop and stare at her, and then at Missy.

“You TOLD them?” I ask Missy, who’s sticking a knife dripping with mustard into my mayonnaise jar.

Missy shrugs.

“She had some good ideas about how to word the emails we’re going to send out,” she says.

*   *   *

I almost hear the veins in my temples popping.

Pop. Pop. POP.

I am tired of pretending that everything’s OK.

Everything is not OK.

Everything is not even remotely OK.

I am losing my shit.

I’m facing financial ruin, and my once pristine apartment has turned into a halfway house for every lazy degenerate within a scope of three miles. Even if a new job came through tomorrow, and they doubled my previous salary, there’s no way I can even cover my minimum credit card payments, not to mention the thousands in back rent I owe Bob the Landlord. Short of winning the lottery or marrying Ted Turner, I see no way of avoiding declaring bankruptcy. My best romantic prospect in years, Kyle, has hooked up with his old girlfriend, and I am losing it.

Oh, sure, I’m not living on the street. I’m not homeless. I’m not in the middle of a campaign of genocide. I’m not a ten-year-old boy going blind weaving rugs in Pakistan. I know there are worse things in the world. I know that in my head. That only makes it worse. Because this is the worst thing that’s happened to me so far in my short life, and I’m not handling it well. I’m not really handling it at all. So what happens when someone dies? When something really bad happens? I’m not the strong, independent person I want to believe I am.

In fact, nothing in my life is what it seems.

Nothing is in my control — not my job, not my love life, not even my own apartment.

*   *   *

“I’m going to my bedroom and then counting to ten,” I say, in a voice that’s shaking as I try to keep it steady. “And when I come out, I want everyone out of my apartment.”

I slam the door, so they all know I’m serious.

“One.”

I can’t believe I’ve let this go so far.

“Two.”

Is it possible for my life to get worse?

“Three.”

What on earth did I do in another lifetime to deserve seven squatters in my own apartment?

There’s a knock at my door.

“I hope whoever that is, you’re coming to tell me goodbye,” I say.

“Jane,” says Steph. “Jane, let me in.”

“Four. I’m not going to, Steph, I’m sorry.”

“Jane, we’re not the people you should be angry with,” Steph adds. “You know who’s to blame in all this, and it’s not Ron, and it’s not Ferguson, and it’s not me.”

“FIVE,” I practically shout.

“It’s Mike, and you know it. Don’t you want to get him back? Don’t you want to imagine the look on his face when he finds out he’s fired?”

“Six,” I say, but softer this time.

“Come on. It’ll be cathartic. You can do this one thing and move on with your life. Don’t you want to move on, Jane?”

I pause. “Seven,” I say.

“Come on. You need closure. You had a bad breakup. You lost your job. You need closure.”

“I’m fine. I don’t need closure. I just need everyone out of my apartment.” I pause. “Eight AND NINE,” I add.

“Come on. You’ve been moping around for months. You’ve been pretending that you were unfairly singled out, when we all were handed bad deals.”

I shake my head.

“You’re not the only one suffering here,” she says. “We’ve all suffered.”

I nod.

“So, are you going to help us or are you going to sit and feel sorry for yourself for the rest of your life?”

I consider this a moment. Either my brain is still muddled by shrooms, or Steph is starting to make sense.

I have been stuck. I do need to move on. It’s more than time for me to be over this.

“You think if we do this one thing, then I’ll have closure, and I’ll be able to move on?”

“Definitely,” Steph says.

I think about this for a second.

I open the door.

Missy has some duct tape in her hand and a baseball bat.

“What are you doing?” I ask her.

“Well, if Steph didn’t convince you, I’m afraid we were going to have to tie you up,” Missy says.

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not joking,” she says.

I stare at her, but she doesn’t blink.

“We’re breaking into Maximum Office tonight,” she adds, after a moment. “Are you in?”

I look at Steph and then back to Missy. Steph’s right. I need to get Maximum Office out of my system.

“I’m in,” I say.

To:
[email protected]
From: Headhunters Central
Date: April 9, 2002, 10:35
A.M.

Dear Jane,

In response to your email, we do not systematically discard resumes of people with art degrees.

We understand that answering phones in a temp job is “destroying your will to live” but we’re afraid we can’t place you in jobs that we don’t have.

Please stop emailing us.

Sincerely,
Lucas Cohen
Headhunters Central

13

I
tell myself that breaking into Maximum Office is a harmless prank. Missy will send out emails to the top management and maybe take down Maximum Office’s Web site. We’ll throw a little toilet paper around, and then we’ll be out of there. In and out. Nobody gets hurt. No felonies take place. And the most they can do to us if they catch us, according to Missy, is charge us with trespassing, since Ferguson is still an active employee (for the time being) and we are technically his guests. Missy, who has gone over our severance agreements with a magnifying glass, says that there’s no clause specifically barring us from the premises of Maximum Office.

The parking lot at Maximum Office is brightly lit by high-wattage fluorescent lights beaming out over the wide expanse of asphalt. There is a security guard circling the parking lot in a mini pickup truck, which looks like a cross between a golf cart and a Jeep. It has a yellow light on top that’s flashing.

Missy and Ron are in the front seat of Ron’s Impala, and Ferguson, Steph, and I are crammed into the backseat. The muses decide to stay home, since they claim to be only good for the planning stages of a project and not the execution.

Missy is cursing.

“You didn’t count on security?” I ask her.

“Shut UP,” she hisses at me, clearly peeved. She spent so long trying to memorize the building floor plan that she didn’t count on how we would actually get in undetected.

“Why can’t we just walk in?” Steph asks, annoyed. “Just pretend to be with Ferguson.”

“That’s a last-resort excuse,” Missy says. “We don’t want to be seen if we don’t have to. Besides, that guy’s got to leave the parking lot sometime.”

We sit in silence, safely hidden behind a large shrub with our engine and lights off, watching the security guard doing donuts in his golf cart in the parking lot.

“He looks like he’s having a lot of fun,” I say.

“Shut up, I mean it,” Missy says.

I’m quiet. I’m beginning to think that perhaps I was a bit hasty in agreeing to this little escapade. I’ve never been one for acts of stupendous courage. I’m more like Kenneth Lay — hiding from Congress for weeks, and then finally showing up only to plead the Fifth.

I look over at Ferguson, who is taking our stealth mission far too seriously. He has painted his face commando-style and is wearing black combat boots and a utility belt, complete with tape measure, knife, flashlight, walkie-talkie, and keys.

“Don’t you think you’re overdoing it a tad?” I ask Ferguson. “I mean, what’s with the commando make-up?”

Ferguson refuses to speak to me unless I speak into a walkie-talkie, even though I’m sitting right next to him in the backseat.

“You’re a dork,” I say into the radio.

“You’re supposed to say, ‘over,’ over,” Ferguson whispers.

“You’re a dork,
over,”
I say.

As we watch, the guard finally stops doing wheelies and pulls around to the other side of the building.

“Now’s our chance,” Missy says, opening her car door.