by Shane Kuhn
“John?”
“That’s me.”
“You’re fifteen minutes late. Not good.”
* * *
Rule #2: Just tell us who shot Mr. Lincoln.
First impressions are everything. How you look and what you say in the first moments of meeting someone will instantly tell them more about you than they would learn if they knew you for a lifetime. Sounds like bullshit, right? Love at first sight is not a romantic notion, it’s an axiom based on the power of first impressions. This is why speed dating is the only dating that’s worth a damn. A dog only has to sniff another dog’s ass to know exactly where he stands. The point is that you have roughly sixty seconds to provoke affection, hatred, or indifference.
Indifference is what we interns are striving for. This is why I recommend speaking from what is called “the top down.” It’s an old journalism thing. The inverted pyramid. And it is the pinnacle—albeit an inverted pinnacle—of objectivity. The journalist top loads the story with the most important facts, so if you only read the first paragraph, you got it. This style is bereft of what they call “editorializing”—a phenomenon wherein the journalist feels that we give a fuck about his opinion and we have to listen to it the entire time he reports the story. Tune into Bill O’Reilly or Anderson Cooper and you’ll see what I mean. Now download some old PBS NewsHour shows with Jim Lehrer. He does not offer opinions. He does not change his delivery the least bit, whether he’s talking about a minor tick down in the market or full-blown ethnic cleansing. This makes the listener focus on the story and not the person delivering it. Ironically, this whole approach came about through assassination. When Lincoln was shot, the telegraph story about his death at the hands of Booth was the first scoop ever for Reuters. “AMERICA. ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.” A smoking gun of objectivity.
What this means to you is that you speak only when spoken to. You do not volunteer opinions, make casual observations, or crack jokes. All of these actions would make you a person that the brains around you would want to analyze. I’m not saying be a mute. When someone else cracks a joke, you smile but do not laugh. Your laugh may sound ridiculous and then you are “that guy or girl with the fucked-up laugh”—a memorable title.
When people offer opinions, you nod or let them know you’re listening. In the end, they’ll think you’re shy—an innocent wallflower that they have no interest in pursuing. Do any of the kids on the playground even look at the shy kid sitting by himself in the sand? Hell no. And when you are asked for your opinion or even just asked a question, you answer like a telegraph journalist. Top-level facts, delivered in an even, relaxed, and emotionless tone. Once they get what they want, they will leave you alone. And the beauty of it is this: they will always remember that someone else gave them the information, someone they like. Our minds are not interested in truth. They are our private twenty-four-hour news cycle putting a constant spin on reality. It’s like The Matrix. Everyone is plugged in to the Bullshit Express.
* * *
“You fucking maggots make me want to puke.”
That’s Hartman, the fifty-something office manager and wannabe drill sergeant in charge of the interns. He wants us to think he’s some kind of ex-military hard case with his flattop and shiny black boots. I’ve seen Cub Scouts with more Oorah. Bob would eat him for breakfast, then eat his own guts, and then ask for seconds. This guy would soil his pants right now if I pulled my ankle piece. It’s a tiny .22 caliber holdout special that looks like a toy, but Hartman would evacuate his bowels at the mere sight of it.
There are twenty-three well-scrubbed spawn of the white power elite, one Asian woman, and me standing in what Hartman calls “the Barracks.” Basically, it’s a small, dank-smelling cafeteria with soda machines and a dorm fridge and it’s reserved for office plankton like us. Hartman strides around it like Patton.
“Twenty-five of you stand before me today—which is a world record for consecutive shit stains.”
He walks along the wall we are all standing in front of like firing squad victims, inspecting the ranks.
“I see there’s still no shortage of lazy white people in the world.”
He stops at the Asian woman.
“Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” she says, too afraid to be pissed off by the racist question.
“Good. Then you’re already ahead of the curve.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Shut up. Here you speak when you are spoken to. You listen and take notes. No one cares about your opinion. No one cares what you think about anything. You are a fly on the wall, and if I hear you buzzing, I will swat you with yesterday’s news.”
He stops and looks at me, sizing me up. I look past him, not down like the others. Looking down means you are feigning subservience, and this guy knows we are all a bunch of egomaniacal assholes. So, I don’t disrespect him by looking him in the eye and I don’t call attention to myself by pretending to be afraid of him.
“Military?”
“No, sir.”
He scowls. Whatever he thought was special about me just flew out the window. His contempt quickly turns to beautiful indifference. In his mind, I am already lower than the wad of gum full of cockroach eggs wedged next to his heel.
“Three of you will actually be interns at Bendini, Lambert and Locke when it’s all said and done. The rest will be cleaned off my shoe by the African American gentleman with the shine box at the end of the block.”
I’m fucked. Either Bob was unaware that intern boot camp was part of the program here or, more realistically, he knew about it and kept his mouth shut to get back at me for my “attitude.” Either way, I’m in deep shit. I know a lot about the law, but these people are Ivy League law school graduates. They are probably smarter than most of the fucking associates already working at the firm. And ambitious? Forget about it. They would sell their parents to a zombie slaughterhouse if they thought it could get them a meeting with Mark Zuckerberg.
For a brief moment, I think about killing them one by one to get my own leg up. But even though HR, Inc. condones “collateral damage” if it ensures a kill, that is something I have worked hard to avoid over the years. How would you like to be going about your business, busting your ass to pay the bills and take your kids to Disney on Ice, and have some dick like me put a bullet in your head? Not cool. Not cool at all. So, I have to suck it up. And that’s exactly what Bob will tell me later when I casually remark that the intel had not included information about me being a character in a Mike Judge remake of Lord of the Flies.
“You will each be randomly assigned to different departments. And you will work like you’ve never worked in your life. You will not sleep. You will barely eat. And don’t be surprised if the gallons of rotgut coffee you drink make you piss blood for a week. I will weed out all nonhackers in my beloved intern corps. Do you understand me, maggots?”
“Yes, sir!” we all bellow.
“Good. Now get to work or I will eat your balls and shit out what family you have left. And if you don’t have balls, you might as well start picking out your Starbucks apron.”
After all of the good assignments are passed out, I get the “let’s put the hick in the basement” assignment. If this were a first-person shooter, I’d be standing buck naked on level one with a ball-peen hammer to defend myself against cyborgs bristling with exotic weaponry. I have to find a way out of this shit detail as soon as humanly fucking possible if I’m going to have a shot at this.
Then light dawns on Marblehead and I remember my latest trip on the Bullshit Express the other night. Over stiff pours of Kentucky’s finest paint thinner I met Alice, an intern who’d been working for the firm for nearly a year. She’s pretty, ambitious (but not annoying), and, like my persona, she’s a boot strapper street fighting her way out of middle-class mediocrity. I didn’t think much of her as an asset at the time, but beggars can’t be choosers, and I need to make a move.
7
* * *
THE RABBIT HO
LE
As I sit in the records morgue, counting the number of massive black mold patches growing on the ceiling, I wait for a fish to bite on the little morsel of bait I sent up to the main office earlier via the mailroom. I paid a guy down there to send the aforementioned Alice a bogus case file request so that she would have to pay me a visit in the morgue. Which reminds me of one of the first rules I learned at HR.
* * *
Rule #3: Go postal.
The mailroom of any corporation is the center of the universe when it comes to access. It is the eye of the hurricane and the central nervous system, all rolled up into one dark, stinking, blue-collar slave ship. And the men and women that make up the flora and fauna of its bowels will do just about anything for a few bucks.
I used the mailroom to complete one of my first assignments. I was sent on what Bob likes to call “a bug fogger.” Of course, you’ll have your share of these as new fish. These are the lower paying, lower profile gigs that Bob likes to take in high volume. Over time, their cumulative pay is bread and butter, and they relieve Bob of the burden of having to think of ways to train you every day.
The reason they’re called bug foggers is because they’re like trying to kill a roach with a can of Raid. The targets are usually reclusive, due to their inability or unwillingness to hire proper security. So you can either blast the place to kingdom come (waste of time) or find a way to strategically fire a kill shot right into the thorax. It’s an excellent aptitude test. If you are an impatient blaster, then you are far more likely to get exterminated yourself than if you wait for your prey to come nibble on your salacious piece of bait.
My assignment, whom I affectionately called “Rosebud,” was the sole heir to a Serbian billionaire. He lived like Howard Hughes in the penthouse of a Midtown office building that looked like it had been built by the legions of hell. It was axle grease black, blazoned with imported Romanian gargoyles, and was rumored to be haunted by the three hundred–odd workers that were crushed and burned when the first fifteen floors collapsed during construction in the early 1920s.
I am not always privy to the “why” of every target, but Bob did mention in passing that the guy’s family wanted him dead due to his “unsavory lifestyle.” The rumor mill, also known as the Post, had printed a lot of far-fetched things about him being a serial killer, a cannibal, and even a vampire. They weren’t far off. His father was an infamous Serbian war criminal, and Rosebud had been his right-hand man. These fuckers were Serbian military brass in the genocide of 1995 and managed to emigrate to the U.S. with an oil tanker full of cash. Daddy fancied himself a player in New York’s Russian mob scene until they found him floating without a face in a bathtub full of rats. Brothers and sisters, you do not fuck with Russians. But Rosebud was just a coked-out shut-in. The whole thing stunk to me of an old money hostile takeover—most likely being perpetrated by someone else in the family who wanted his turn at the trough, now that Daddy was worm food.
But that is neither heir nor there. Back to the whole mailroom center-of-the-universe thing. Around the time of this assignment, some jagoff had “gone postal” and shot up a post office in Chelsea. The Post had printed the headline “DEAD LETTER,” and that gave me an idea. The mailroom in this ancient pillar of greed was still employing the gas tube system of mail delivery. Mailroom jocks would stuff letters, and contraband, into the little plastic mail capsules, shove them into the humming, eager mouth of a long acrylic tube, and the capsule would be sucked off and spat out in some other part of the building. It just so happened that my target had his own tube, exclusive to his penthouse office. One person was assigned to it—a crusty old ex-cop with a huge gut and a mustache full of soup. That fat goldbricker fuck got paid to sit there all day and shove maybe two or three capsules into the penthouse tube.
Remember how I said mailroom workers will do anything for money? I paid one of the younger ones to dissolve a box of Ex-Lax in goldbricker’s favorite beverage—hot cocoa with about a pint of dollar store whiskey. After three or four minutes, you could hear Sherman’s march in his lower intestine. He tried to hold it as long as he could but eventually ran screaming to pay tribute to the nearest porcelain god. That was when I slipped Rosebud a mail tube containing what he thought was his afternoon snack—a gram of uncut cocaine. I found out that part of goldbricker’s charm was his access to drugs, and Rosebud basically lived on a couple of eight balls a week.
My specially modified capsule had been outfitted with a small camera so I was able to see the gaunt, heavily bearded Rosebud cut fat rails of what looked like Bolivian marching powder but was actually a powder form of A-232, the most powerful military-grade nerve agent ever created. He snorted the lines like a sorority girl in Cancun and within seconds he was violently convulsing and hemorrhaging profusely out of every orifice while he thrashed through the stacks of filthy magazines and newspapers he had hoarded over the years. Predictably, the Post headline the next day read “POISON PEN PAL” and the Russian mob took the blame.
* * *
“I got a mailroom order requesting case files for . . . Oh shit.”
Alice is standing outside my cube, looking at me like she might look at some foul insect. This is not the friendly reception I was expecting. As my first-class passenger on the Bullshit Express the other night, she suffered what was probably the only rejection she’s ever experienced, and she still appears to be smarting from it. My bad. I overestimated the charm my playing slightly hard to get would have on her. And now she’s in my dark forest of archive hell on a fool’s errand.
“Hi, Alice.”
I hand her a large stack of useless files.
“So you’re the hick from Peoria everyone’s talking about.”
“That’s me.”
“Still white and uptight?”
She is feeling stung. That means she gives a shit, and I can work with that.
“I’m sorry about what happened at the bar. I hope you don’t take it personally.”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
I laugh alone.
“I’m sure you weren’t all that heartbroken,” I attempt.
“Heartbroken, no. But I felt pretty sorry for you, missing out on my unorthodox, yet devastating sexual technique.”
“Rain check?”
“We’ll see, cowboy.”
“You won’t be turned off by the fact that I’m one of Hartman’s new maggots?”
“Maybe I want to sleep my way to the bottom.”
“You’ve come to the right place. How do you like my office? The decor is new-century dungeon.”
“Pretty sweet. I’ve never seen him put a live human being down here. He must really like you.”
“I’m special.”
“Needs?”
Now we’re both laughing.
“You should quit, you know?” She grins.
“Why?”
“The black mold down here is going to give you a brain tumor.”
“Thanks for the pep talk. This is turning out to be an amazing first day.”
She laughs. Even better.
“So have you made any headway in your vision quest to become a junior associate?” I ask. Women like to know that you remember things.
“I’ll know soon. Word on the street is that it’s down to me and another guy from my intern class.”
“Let me guess, a white frat boy that went to Harvard?”
“Actually, he’s a Yalie douche.”
“Circle Jerk doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Your shoes. You could nail a man to the cross with those.”
“Glad someone noticed,” she says, softening a bit. “These fuckers cost more than my rent.”
“They have ‘hire me or I will firebomb this fucking place’ written all over them.”
Always compliment a woman’s shoes or handbag. It makes you seem slightly metro, which translates to emotionally available. Also, it tells them that you aren’t lookin
g at their body (God forbid), which means you are not as much of a creep as they were automatically assuming you were by even talking to them in the first place. I prioritize shoe compliments over handbags because many women are self-conscious about their feet, and if you sound genuine, you’ll score big points. She takes a seat to relax for a moment, always a good sign.
“I was serious about you getting the hell out of here. You’re going to get lung cancer from the asbestos.”
She removes a shoe and rubs her foot suggestively.
“Yeah, but I prefer that to getting career cancer from being immersed in complete irrelevance.”
“There’s no cure for that. Just slow, painful death.”
“And a lot of terrible self-help books sent by concerned family members.”
We laugh and she puts her shoe on, getting ready to leave. I need to make a move.
“Maybe you can get me on the upper floors so I can beg someone to make me their indentured servant.”
“A favor? We barely know each other,” she says as she looks around my completely blank cube.
“I know, but us maggots need to stick together. You never see just one of us hanging around a rotting corpse do you?”
She looks me in the eye and smiles. This is unexpected. It feels predatory. I look away, cursing myself. Then I look back and find her searching gaze still hanging in the haze of my cubicle.
“I work in Wills and Trusts. Bendini’s turf. I guess I could order a bunch of bullshit files be exhumed from this pit of despair and delivered up there.”
Sounds familiar, I think.
She smiles and the look grows more intense. I’m not sure if she wants to kiss me or eat me. At this point, I might be persuaded to accept either.
“That would give you some face time up in the big show. After that, it’s up to you. Sound good, cowboy?”
We look at each other for a beat. I want so badly to go toe to toe with her, but that is light-years away from how my persona is supposed to be. I swallow a bitter pill of pride and stay in character.
