Rock On (15 page)

“Is somebody staying in bed all day today, is that what's happening?” I ask in a rushed, loud whisper with a voice just slightly higher pitched than my natural voice. I am stunned to realize that I'm capable of sounding
exactly
like a middle-aged gay male nurse who's a little upset with a patient.

Still nothing from Sylvia. Either the dog doesn't consider her Burberry bed a “fancy office” and is pretty certain she's not going to “stay in bed all day,” or she's just not in the mood for talking to me.
Jesus, dog. Cut me some slack here. Would it kill you to do something cute that'll make me look good in front of my boss?

I put on a huge forced smile that seems odd to both me
and the dog, judging by the way it's shaking and quivering. I decide to go back to my normal voice. I try to think of what the hell to say.

Through my manic grin, I manage to whisper something like, “Well, hello there. Is it a good . . . day?”

Little Sylvia looks at me clearly nonplussed, totally silent, and does nothing. I stare at her and think,
Fine, dog. You can't say one little bark or run up to me? Two can play that fucking game, pal.

I stand silently staring at it, saying not one word to it, and waiting for Vallerie to get off the phone.

Yeah, tough life for the executive dogs around here. Assistants take them for walks when they need to “do their business” — that is, unless they use a little pad on the floor. Working on the front lines of rock and roll is where I first heard the term
pee-pee pad.
Those are the little white quilted pads that some executives bring in with their little dogs, and they put one down in the corner of the office in case the dog needs to go out and the assistant's not around to take them out. Vallerie doesn't have one in her office, which I respect. But for one inspired second or two, I think about how cool it would be to get my own pee-pee pad and never have to leave my office to take a leak. Better still, I should make a power play for the top and get my own dog. But it's hard to imagine putting three thousand bucks on the table for something smaller than my shoe with a better pedigree than mine, so instead I stand waiting for Vallerie to get off the phone, and I'm daydreaming of what kind of office dog I would get. I think I'd head down to the pound and choose the cagiest, most high-strung, slouching, growling, medium-size passed-over derelict canine of the bunch. Something tortured by the dry itch of
minor skin disorders to the point of lunacy. I would name him Taco. Taco would be too big to sneak in via handbag, so I would sneak him into the office on Thursdays and Fridays in a large duffle bag from the Army-Navy surplus store. I would have to wrestle the writhing duffle bag onto the elevator, occasionally coughing loudly in an attempt to cover up Taco's spasmodic, dry, hoarse growling.

Instead of a designer bed, Taco would prefer to sleep on a few flattened-out Kentucky Fried Chicken boxes that he'd licked clean of tasty grease. And when people would try to come into my office, Taco would freak out and start pulling on his chain, growling, barking, and bearing his aged gums and teeth like a deranged wolf fighting his way out of an errant bear trap. All the while, I'd be sitting there in my gray slacks and one of my sweaters or designer T-shirts saying in a really sensible voice with a smile, “Don't worry. You can put something on my desk, he's not going to bite you. He's just getting used to you.”

As for a collar, Taco would have whatever was still hanging around his neck from the one person he let near him twelve years ago. And instead of trotting around the office and making a round of cute visits to everyone on the twenty-fourth floor, when Taco got off his chain, he would just be found in the employee kitchen chewing up a can of cleanser that he got from under the sink. And someone would have to call me to come get him because he'd have backed himself into a corner with his chewed-up cleanser can, freaking out in a low growl anytime anyone tried to come in and get some coffee, because he'd think they were trying to take his cleanser away.

“Hi. Jewel spot.” She says after hanging up.

I try one last shot at this. “I was just saying hello to your little helper.”

Vallerie looks over at her, doesn't even say a word, and Sylvia comes alive and starts doing little barks and cute little running around. Sylvia looks at me like she knows exactly what she's doing.
What the hell do you have against me, dog?

“Uh, right,” I say, “the Jewel commercial.”

Vallerie starts to look at papers on her desk, the dog continues showing respect by doing cute things even though Vallerie's not even watching. I sort of squint at the dog like a bitter middle child.

Still looking down at her papers and gathering the details, Vallerie gives me the lowdown, “We need a sixty, and also a fifty-five with a blank five-second back end that we can use to tag with sponsors. And you should use ‘Intuition' because that's going to be the first single. And it looks like we should have the finished video in-house by tomorrow.”

Easy enough. What could possibly throw a wrench into that? I make a polite exit from Vallerie's office, straddling my way over the little makeshift doggie gate at her door. Behind me, the sound of a happy little dog playing it up for Vallerie, Senior Vice President of Marketing. I feel like it's going to tell her to fire me.

I walk back into my office and there's this little story in each trade magazine that has been laid on my desk. Someone may be buying the company. Bear in mind that this rumor has been floating around for years. There was even a close call with EMI buying this place along with the other labels that fall under the umbrella of the Warner Music Group, but the deal went south. So, it's not out of the normal range of gossip to hear about rumors that our parent company has still got Warner Music Group on the block. We're still owned by Time Warner at the moment, but the new twist to the rumor of the sale is this: the billionaire grandson of a man who made the family a fortune in booze and industrial chemical dealings might buy this place. Not a bad twist, really. In Hollywood terms I'd say a billionaire grandson with an inheritance is right up there with a great white shark bent on evening the score with humans, or a spirit that refuses to move on to the afterlife. Certainly gets one's attention at the end of a long day. There's a lot to feel insecure about if you work in the record business in this digital age, but what are you gonna do? Personally, I choose to continue doing my work while people way smarter and higher up the ladder hopefully figure it all out. And I deal with the feelings the responsible, adult way: I use Starbucks baked goods to shove the feelings way down into my stomach. Then I pour something called caramel machiatto on them so they can't come back to life, and then it's time to start writing
the script to the Jewel commercial. Then if the script gets approved, I'll check in to an editing studio across town and start cutting footage from her videos into a commercial. But the script isn't going anywhere. It's already been a long day; so the first pass has some problems.

Open on
shot of Jewel from “Intuition” video where she's crossing the street and looking beautiful in evening dress with small handbag, laughing.
Why is she laughing? It's kind of odd, really, isn't it? To just cross the street by yourself all dolled up and laughing, laughing, laughing. It's like a crazy person. That's my favorite kind of crazy person; the ones that are just cracking up, holding something random like a can of frosting and laughing their ass off at you while you walk by. Okay, focus. Let's do this.
After she gets across street, graphic elements from album cover fade up in cross walk, almost like wherever she steps, she leaves an imprint that is a cool graphic.

Are you ready for a revolution?
Holy Christ, reel it in. This is not a revolution.
Are you ready for a new . . . uh . . . CD?
Okay, wait . . . here:

Jewel.
0304.
The new album. A whole new sound that . . . might . . . save us? Since we are trapped here waiting to be fired in a massive bloodletting. And I'm afraid I've become accustomed to the lifestyle of middle management. Please . . . buy the album so I don't have to face the realities of life and
I can continue to eat something called a blueberry bliss bar with something called a caramel macchiato, maintaining a total denial of my days slipping by in this finite life. Okay, it's late. It's been a long day and I'm going home. Jewel.
0304.
The new album . . . in stores now. Good night.

Vallerie stops by first thing to say “good morning” with a huge smile on her face. She's looking at me with eyes that seem to strike that very familiar chord; a chord that you know the second you see it if you grew up with an older sibling. The kind that lies somewhere between kindness, terror, and killing boredom with comedic pastime. She announces a little piece of news the way my sister would announce something like this, as if the choice was between laughing so hard you start crying, and simply talking it through and trying to pull it off so that she could die laughing later.

“Okay, the president of our parent company, AOL – Time Warner” — pauses. Gets it together — “has invited a young lady here from China — because, as you know, AOL has all these ideas about making inroads into China — anyway” — again, hand goes up to eye to wipe away what might be hint of a tear — “Okay, anyway, she's coming to visit for a week and guess who I told him she should spend three days with while she's here!”

“Oh, classic. Awesome. Is she going to hang out with the guy from . . .”

“
You!
”

And then she starts cracking up and at the same time sort of moves closer to me, grabbing my arm in a cross between a gesture designed to comfort me and an effective move to keep me from running. It's at this moment I realize she knows
something. That maybe there's some truth to the new sale rumor. Here's what I think:

1. That after twenty years of working here, and with the threat of mergers hanging over the company during the last two or three years recently refreshed by the rumor of the grandchild of the liquor czar buying this place, and fueled by yet another year of decreased sales, she realizes what is happening to this business.

2. This devilishly euphoric prankster standing in my office is proof that Vallerie has clearly decided that she's not sticking around. I sit there watching her laugh; smile, eyes, teeth, lips, this is it. I've felt this feeling a million times before looking at a smile, eyes, teeth, and lips — she is someone about to be gone.

There's an almost terrifying sense of freedom that comes to somebody who has faced a very finite truth. And it's a sense of freedom that scares the hell out of those of us who haven't had the guts to face a very finite truth yet. Those of us who are still running from it; those of us who are hoping that whatever job we're working at every day of our lives is going to add up to something far brighter than we could ever imagine, even though every single solitary sublime sign and cue points to the exact opposite being true. Yeah, well, good for her. Because none of this changes the fact that somewhere in Shanghai some Chinese chick is packing a suitcase and coming to America to be my shadow.

Christina arrives. Christina. All the way from Shanghai, and her name is Christina? This is already shaping up wrong.
Maybe that's just her “American” name. Dashed are my daydreams of introducing my new friend Huan Lin Yao to my pedestrian peers with boring everyday names like Steve.

Christina . . . Who does she think she's fooling with her little impromptu hotel and airport alias,
I think to myself, for some reason in the voice of that woman on the old television show called
Murder, She Wrote
.

Jesus, I realize in about four seconds that I know nothing about China. I should've at least read up on it on the Internet or something right before she got here. At least I'd be able to impress her by having done some kind of homework. “Hi there,
Christina,
it's sure nice to have a visitor from Shanghai, the city of 6,341 square kilometers with a population of thirteen million. You guys on track to get that twelve to fourteen inches of average annual precipitation? Still got the Brown-Eared Pheasant as the national bird over there? Or is your province's bird the Crested Ibis? It may well be, come to think of it. Well, as the Chinese proverb says, ‘Nothing stands out like a crane amongst a flock of chickens.' Ah, ha ha ha ha . . . yes . . . well . . .” But instead I quietly and kindly offer her a seat when she shows up in my office. Amy brings in a couple bottles of water for us.