MAMBA FOR MEN
My first and only interaction with Ed Vadaresian was over an excessive cologne complaint. An administrative assistant and mother-to-be on the thirty-second floor was unable to complete her daily functions because of debilitating headaches she suffered throughout the day. She attributed the headaches to a heightened sense of smell brought about by her pregnancy and to the overwhelming scent of Mr. Vadaresian’s cologne. It appeared that his simply walking past her cubicle sent her reeling with sharp pains behind her left eye for which the only respite was a long nap in the darkened back seat of her Subaru.
The complaint was quickly escalated to my desk after an initial review warranted involvement from senior management. The administrative assistant had hit the trifecta for trial lawyers: lesbian, African American, and over forty. Throw in pregnant and she attained a legendary superfecta status which most HR executives never witness in their entire careers.
The administrative assistant was well-known to our department. In her brief four-year career she had lodged a total of seven complaints, including the one against Ed. They ranged from the ludicrous (serving Aunt Jemima syrup at the annual pancake social was a direct assault on her as a woman of color) to the extremely ludicrous (a request to eradicate the phrase “low hanging fruit” from our lexicon as it was offensive to women of a certain age). She also had an issue with tardiness, failed to meet many of her deadlines, and overall was a consistently inconsistent performer. All of this, however, was irrelevant when it came to the complaint lodged against Ed.
Human Resources exists not as a “resource” for associates (the term “employee” was eradicated decades ago from corporate offices) but as a way for corporations to limit exposure to lawsuits. The majority of programs, counseling, and conflict resolution services all worked towards a single goal: avoid getting sued. A decade ago I unveiled a new concept at the company called the “Mother’s Room” (it was renamed “Resting Room” after a complaint by a single-parent dad). This was a dedicated room on every floor where a mom could go to relax, or if she was breast-feeding, to pump milk in private. The rooms contained a small cot, a mini-fridge for the milk, and a phone in case of emergency. Publicly, we wanted to encourage a healthy work/life balance and smooth the difficult transition from having a child to returning to work. Privately, we witnessed an alarming spike in maternity-fueled legal actions and figured the costs of maintaining a seven-by-five room with an Army cot paled in comparison to the cost of attorney fees and cash settlements on unhealthy workplace lawsuits. There is no justice in Corporate America, only the lens of the liability framework.
So when the excessive cologne complaint was lodged by a low-performing associate with a history of mental instability against an associate who had a long, respected track record of adding value to the company, we had no choice but to bring Ed Vadaresian in for some feedback.
“Have a seat, Ed,” I said, leading him to the little, round table in my office. I closed the door to give us some privacy but immediately regretted it. The combination of Bergamot orange and Myrrh with a healthy dash of gasoline was lethal on the nasal cavity. The first thing I noticed was a dull, numbing sensation high up on my nose between my eyes. I got the light-headed swirls of a non-smoker taking his first drag.
“Am I in trouble?” he asked.
“No, you’re not in trouble,” I told him as my eyes began to water. “There’s an issue that’s been brought to our attention that we need to clear the air on.” Literally. But before I could launch into it, he started to cry.
His shoulders heaved as he tried to compose himself. Attempts to breathe sputtered into short gasps for air. It was awkward to see a sturdy man like Ed break down so quickly. Ed was in his early fifties though he looked younger. Like a lot of Armenians he was in that “forever 40” camp of men that age early but reach a form of stasis where they seemingly stop getting older — the premature baldness and wrinkles cease their relentless retreat, leaving salt and pepper hair and crow’s feet. Ed worked in our Office Services division which was a catch-all group that handled everything from mail delivery to ergonomic evaluations. He was a workhorse who still lived by the old adage of hard work and respect for the people who pay you. He hadn’t realized yet that he was more valuable to the company than the company was to him.
“It’s about the mother’s room, isn’t it?” he blurted out. “That nice Chinese lady —”
“Asian American,” I corrected.
“— on thirty-two saw me come out yesterday. I only used the phone once because I left my cell at home.” He rubbed his eyes with one of his thick fingers. “I promise I won’t do it again, Mr. Restic.”
The unnecessary formality of addressing me as “mister” even though I was younger than him punctuated the fear behind the promise. Associates had good reason to distrust Human Resources. A simple word like “issue” could be the death knell of a career. One minute you are chatting about this non-event and two weeks later you have a case built against you. Some Tuesday before noon you receive an unexpected “got a sec?” call and suddenly you are down in HR signing papers that seal your termination. In a job that had few redeeming aspects, this was among the worst.
My co-manager and office neighbor, Paul Darbin, relished it. He’d linger on phrases such as “not meeting expectations” to give them the gravitas of a life sentence. He sometimes paced behind a seated associate like he was a Stasi interrogator. When interviewing associates over a complaint, he’d wait until they finished talking before slowly, and very deliberately, writing a note on his pad which he’d cover with his other hand. One time I snuck a peak at his notebook and discovered he was writing out his grocery list.
“This isn’t about the phone in the mother’s room,” I told him, though the thought of the original complainer stumbling upon Ed as she tried to use the special room was enough to make me think it should be.
“It’s not?”
“No. We’ve received a complaint that I want to talk over with you.”
“What kind of complaint?” he asked with trepidation. “About my work?”
“No, not your work,” I said and realized how incredibly inane this whole thing was. A man who had done nothing wrong now had to be humiliated with all the formality of a federal deposition. Protocol dictated I document everything, including the mother’s room phone admission, but I cast it all aside and just told him the truth.
“Ed, you’re wearing too much cologne.”
He looked legitimately befuddled. “Someone complained about my cologne? Why would they do that?”
“Well, for one it’s an awful scent. Two, the person who complained might be certifiably insane.” The latter comment was reckless and undoubtedly would come back to haunt me but it had been brewing for years. I was starting to verbalize what I had questioned all along — there was so little worth to a life spent avoiding lawsuits.
“You really don’t like it?”
“Ed, I’m telling you that stuff is awful. What’s it called?”
“Mamba for Men,” he answered, and the image of a white-fanged cobra coiled around a twisting bottle sprang to mind. “The young lady at the counter said it was perfect on me.”
“They get paid to lie,” I explained. “How many spritzes do you use in the morning? And be honest.”
“Two,” he laughed, which meant five.
“Okay, make it a half spritz and we should be fine.”
He nodded, but I could see something else was on his mind. “About the phone in the —”
“I didn’t hear anything, Ed,” I said as I led him to the door and welcomed the fresh air from the hallway.
Ed turned to me and shook my hand, ever the professional. “You’re a good man, Mr. Restic.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. “But I’m trying.”
Two weeks later, the man who never called in sick, who several times a year was forced to take time-off when he hit his maximum accrual of vacation days, didn’t show up to work. One unexcused absence turned into two, then a week’s worth and Ed Vadaresian was officially declared a missing person.
THE JEWEL CITY
The disappearance of “the nice man with too much cologne” was the talk of the break room for a few days but was quickly supplanted by the announcement that no alcohol would be served at the annual Summer Social. Citing a poor quarterly earnings report, the company had to make cuts in certain non-essential areas. At least that’s what associates were told. The real reason behind the no-alcohol policy was to limit our liability from associates driving drunk after the party.
Corporations have a regenerative quality that allows them to adapt to any internal disruptions, and as such, Ed’s duties were seamlessly absorbed by other associates with nary a hiccup. Once again the myth that “this place will miss me when I’m gone” was dispelled. Policy dictated that Ed’s unused vacation days were drained before being placed on leave without pay, which was partially subsidized by the State of California. Eventually that ran out and Ed Vadaresian was summarily removed from our books.
When I learned of Ed’s termination, I decided to break from policy and personally deliver his belongings to his family. It seemed unnecessarily callous to mail a trove of his effects to loved ones still searching for answers. But another reason drove me to find something to occupy myself after work. Every Friday afternoon since Claire and I had separated was now filled with a certain dread. Where many associates counted off days like cartoon prisoners — “Three more days till Friday!” — I feared the interminable two days before I could get back to work for another week’s worth of distractions. Driving out to Glendale provided at least a short respite from the inevitable contemplation of a failed marriage.
I grabbed an empty box and headed down to Ed’s floor. Some associates take cubicle decorating to the extreme — goofy doctored images of being crowned Miss America, a fifty-photograph collage of their newborn twins, enough potted bamboo plants to open a kiosk in Chinatown — but not Ed. He had few personal items and those he had lacked anything remotely unique to him. There were fifteen years worth of corporate appreciation — all crystal, all from Tiffany, all engraved with his name and anniversary year. Other than that there was a pile of non-work-related paperwork and an extra brown belt I assumed for those days he forgot to wear one. All of his belongings fit comfortably in a standard file box.
I walked to the elevator lobby with the contents tucked under my arm. I got unnecessarily morose at the thought of carrying the accumulation of a man’s career in such a small box when my co-manager Paul came sauntering into the lobby.
“Hey Chuck, what you got there?”
Paul kept a ponytail but none of the ideals of the counter-culture. Like a lot of other ex-hippies, he seemed more interested in telling everyone else what they were doing wrong than actually living what he preached.
“I’m going to drop Ed Vadaresian’s belongings off to his family,” I told him.
“That’s cool,” he said as the elevator chimed and we stepped in. “Who’s Ed again?”
* * *
Glendale is an incorporated city that sits between the San Fernando Valley and Pasadena. It’s one long, sloping hill from the lowlands of the L.A. River basin to the top of the San Gabriel foothills. Back in the boosterism days of the early twentieth century, towns in Southern California actively pursued investment and immigration (whites from the Midwest only) through expensive marketing campaigns. Glendale advertised itself as The Jewel City in an attempt to one-up rival Pasadena which had recently selected The Crown City as its motto. Of course, the only moniker that actually stood the test of time was that of their big neighbor, The City of Angels.
Once a bastion of white Protestants, Glendale transformed drastically over the course of the last fifty years. The city’s émigrés settled into neat little rows like a cross-section of the earth’s strata exposing millennia of climate change. At the bottom were dark swaths of newly-arrived Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Peruvians. These quickly gave way to soft patches of Filipinos and Persians. As you moved further up the hill you hit a broad stretch of Armenians which was further divided generationally with the newest arrivals crammed into the tiny houses and apartment complexes near the downtown and the older generations residing just north of the freeway. At the very top sat a rarefied stretch in the foothills where the air was thinner and the skin several shades lighter.
I took surface streets out of downtown and avoided the rush hour freeway that was at its usual crawl. Until you learned the shortcuts in Los Angeles, you never felt like you belonged. To get up to Glendale, I sped around Dodger Stadium and through Elysian Park, which eventually dumped me down on the east side of the I-5 Freeway. Traffic was just beginning to break, but I stuck to the local road that ran alongside the L.A. River. This stretch of river was one of the few places in the city where it wasn’t fully encased in concrete. The natural, muddy bottom gave root to alder trees whose limbs bowed downstream from recent storm run-off. Trash that was flushed out upstream from a network of drains made its long journey across the Valley before being hung up in the branches like ornaments as the waters receded.
I crossed over one of the concrete bridges and wound my way into Glendale. The signs in Spanish quickly gave way to the hieroglyphic-like Armenian lettering. It was still a mostly immigrant community where pedestrians outnumbered cars and traditional bakeries had yet to be replaced by red-velvet cupcake shops. I knew this area well. When I came to Los Angeles some twenty years ago, I settled in Glendale for the cheap rent and proximity to my office downtown. Everyone assumed I was Armenian because I lived there. Correcting them was inevitably followed by the question, “why would you live in Glendale if you didn’t have to?”
Ed’s house was on one of the flat, grid-like streets that slashed through the area south of the freeway. The house itself sat in perpetual shadow from the large apartment complex next door. I parked my car among a sea of late-model, luxury sedans that didn’t align with the less-than-modest neighborhood.
There were several Armenian teenagers in overly-designed shirts milling about on the front porch. They all kept their hair closely cropped, making it hard to tell them apart. I grabbed the box of Ed’s belongings out of my trunk and headed up the concrete walk. I scanned the group and tried to figure out which one was Ed’s son. I didn’t have much time to guess because as soon as they saw me approaching they scattered like mercury from a broken thermometer. No one ran — they all just glided away, leaving one person behind who was a thinner, hairier version of Ed who also shared his father’s predilection for too much cologne.
“Are you Rafi?” I asked, extending my hand.
He neither shook my hand nor acknowledged me verbally. For that matter, he remained seated and barely turned in my direction. I was left standing over him, hand extended, staring at the early stages of baldness on the crown of his head.
“I work with your father,” I said, purposely using the present tense. “Your grandfather told me to swing by. I brought some personal items from your father’s desk.”
“That’s nice of you,” he coolly replied, still without looking me in the eye. His anger was palpable and he was going to vent that anger anywhere he could.
“I’m sorry about your father,” I told him. “It caught us totally by surprise.”
“Sounds like it was pretty hard for you guys.”
“I didn’t mean to take anything away from what you and your family are going through,” I said. “It must be incredibly difficult right now.”
“We’ll make do,” he said.
“Well, if there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know.”
“If I can,” I said, wary of what was coming next.
He laughed bitterly, leaned back in his chair, and shut his eyes as if settling in for a late afternoon nap.
“Is your grandfather here?”
“He should be back soon,” he said with his eyes still closed.
I had nowhere to go so I settled in on the railing and studied Ed’s son. The first thing I noticed was how neat his nails were. Fashion and grooming took an unusually high priority among the younger generation of Armenian men. They tended to have an effete obsession with appearance which resulted in entire days spent at the gym, the nail salon, and the mall. His shirt featured a dizzying design of vines, skulls, and celestial bodies that, if you stared hard enough and long enough, would mutate into a fourth image but would also give you a headache. Rafi opened one of his eyes, checking to see if I was still there. I gave him a half smile. He reluctantly pulled himself to his feet and beckoned me to follow him inside.
It was a tight, two-bedroom bungalow with a standard layout. The walls were empty. The furniture was randomly laid out. There were no plants and very few personal items. It felt more accommodation than home, underscored by the fact that the floor in every room was covered in cheap tile and could easily be hosed off with bleach in preparation for the next set of nameless occupants.
“My father probably got a deal on a bulk order,” Rafi said about the tile.
The house lacked any traces of femininity. There had been no mention of a mother and I began to wonder if she existed. Even without her, the simple math of rooms less occupants highlighted a common fact about many immigrant households — rarely did anyone get a room to themselves. The image that Rafi gave off on the outside with the luxury cars and designer clothes and twenty-dollar pedicures didn’t match the reality he wallowed in at home, that old-world tradition where the family sticks together, where one’s thoughts were everyone’s thoughts, and where there was always a line for the bathroom.
Smile Now, Cry Later (Chuck Restic Mystery Book 1) Page 1
