by Choire Sicha
AT THAT TIME, it wasn’t customary to ask other people for money. That was one reason why credit cards were so successful, so universal. It was considered better to borrow from strangers, at an interest rate, than from friends. But the closer you were to a person, generally, the more acceptable it was to ask someone for a “loan.” If you were very close, sometimes someone would even give you some money, as a present. Plus the laws said that if you died, your money would go to your spouse, and if you didn’t have one, it would go to your closest blood relative.
But to borrow money from friends regularly was definitely frowned upon. Timothy, John’s manager at work, asked people who worked for and with him for money sometimes as often as every two weeks. No one understood where his money went. Bosses were paid more money than nonbosses by the owner of the corporation because of the idea that the further up the supervisory ladder you were, the more money you should make. Although maybe not much? Someone in the office said it was because Timothy put all his money in a retirement account. No one actually knew, and it wasn’t anyone’s business, and some people didn’t mind at all. The people at the company were all close, at least in part because the quarters were close. Some of the people who worked together even loved each other. And they all liked the idea of being able to loan each other money! But, for most of them, money regularly stood a chance of running out, so they weren’t in a position to give or loan too freely. This was a situation of some or even great anxiety: trying to balance one’s goodwill with one’s own self-maintenance.
Little loans of course weren’t a big deal. One night, John was on a random date, and at the end of it, he realized he was totally out of money. He called a nearby friend, at one in the morning, for cab fare home. The friend had just laughed and left twenty dollars downstairs with his building’s doorman. But also the friend thought that this was evidence of something: poor planning, maybe. People believed that having no money reflected on a person’s character, even in little ways.
Almost all companies distributed pay twice a month instead of all at once. If people quit or were fired, the company would obviously be protected from having to recover some of the “unearned” salary. And it would involve too much paperwork, for one thing, to pay employees more often than that.
To run out of money, even for just the two days before “payday,” felt like raw panic, like the end of everything. That time stretched out, and the worst anxiety was then that you had to ask for one of these loans.
To have no money and nowhere to get more meant that it was nearly impossible to focus on anything else. One would feel giddy, or anxious, or sad, or manic, or sleepy, or even exhausted, but one couldn’t avoid the dread of the next thing going wrong. For instance, these shortfalls meant perhaps a shortfall in the payments one owed: less important, for cable TV or water, or more important, for rent. These people couldn’t stop thinking about it, when they maybe saw some food that they wanted to buy, or when they had to walk someplace, or maybe when they were thinking about their future, or even when they were doing something that had no price at all.
EDWARD HAD SLEPT with a lot of people in high school and was glad he did so he could say he had. But he was a little jealous of what he thought of as John’s checkered love life. It wasn’t about the sex, he wasn’t jealous of that. For him sex was somewhat about wanting people to like you, so usually he was happy with someone just conveying interest. When Edward went to bars with John, it was like John was a superhero who had a weird sixth sense, an omniscience. It was like John was viewing the bar from above: That guy was going to the bathroom, but if you could catch him on the way out, he’d go home with you. He could suss out every dynamic in the room and understand everybody’s inner workings and everyone’s rhythms and he was always right. And then he could turn an intensity on a person, like a blinding light in the dark.
Edward was completely unprepared for this kind of attention the night they met. He realized that he was a completely easy mark. Edward could count on one hand the number of times he’d gone home with someone from a bar. John wasn’t his type even. But Edward never dated guys who were his type; his real type was young, skinny, hairless. None of that mattered—he didn’t even know why he was thinking about it! Two people had that pull, that warming reaction; they made something new together by being together, or they didn’t, and if you really did, it was impossible to set aside.
THE MAYOR GAVE a speech about the recent state of things. It was less than six months before the election. The Mayor said that people were spending money again. “In fact I’m reasonably optimistic that we’ve turned the corner,” he said. When asked why, then, the Mayor still thought that he should be allowed a third term, he did not answer the question and in fact called the question asker “a disgrace.”
The week prior, 623,000 people in the country reported being newly unemployed, and the total number of people receiving unemployment insurance payments from the government had hit a record—for the seventeenth straight week in a row.
It was unclear what corner was being turned. While he was the Mayor, the number of poor people in the City had grown as well: 1.6 million people in the City were now considered poor. That was 20.1 percent of everyone who lived in the City.
There was at least one small plan from the Mayor to help change that. He got a number of other rich people to give money, and they paid a group of poor people small amounts of money to do good things, like keep their children in school and see doctors. For instance, if a child passed an annual school exam or improved his score from a previous year, the child’s parents would get 300 dollars. Or if they went for an annual checkup with a doctor, they’d get 200 dollars. If a parent kept a full-time job, she or he would get 150 dollars a month. At the end of this program, an enrolled family had on average some savings—about 575 dollars. Two out of three families said they thought they were better off afterward. And only three out of five of them were still technically poor.
There was also a surprise finding to this experiment. Compared with similar people in the City who were not in this program, more of the single people in this program got married. People said they felt like they could commit to being in a permanent relationship when they felt financially secure.
EDWARD MADE A sudden trip up to the City. He and John planned to meet at Metropolitan. Fred showed up. And Edward brought his friend Jason. John was so excited to see Edward, he didn’t really notice Jason. Jason was handsome, and had no hair, and he was shiny and trim. He gave off a sense of being a pleasing series of little circles, from his glossy scalp to his big eyes to his round cheeks. Then when he smiled all the circles collapsed and he had a squint in his eyes that could cut glass.
He was really smart, really bright, and talked like Edward but was a bit more substantive, John thought. Well: Interested more in the sort of things John was interested in. Jason had a funny way of talking—his voice was sort of deep, but he had a habit of saying things like “Jinxies!” if you said things at the same time or “Drinksies!” if you were going to the bar.
Jason had been coupled-up his whole life; he’d met his first boyfriend at seventeen, and they’d been together until about a year ago, when Jason’s ex just up and moved to the other coast. It was brutal.
So every time Jason went to the bathroom, John and Edward would touch each other and kiss a little. And every time Edward left, John and Jason would kiss and feel each other up. John decided he was going home with one of them and they could choose, or he would go home with both of them.
All the while, Fred was clapping his hands, laughing his head off.
And then Edward announced he was going home to bed. And Jason left with him. So John didn’t go home with either of them.
THE LAST WEEK of work came for John’s boss. He’d become more and more absent, and finally he wasn’t there anymore.
Timothy, who had been basically the number two, would take over the office f
or the owner. Timothy saw his ascension as a way to minimize what he saw as the harm that the owner wanted to do to the office. There was much dramatic strategizing. There was much scheming over drinks. There were hushed conversations outside, and people disappearing into offices, the doors closing slowly.
Timothy said he had to hurt some people to save everyone else. Across the bullpen and even a bit into the offices, people were going to be discarded. Timothy tried to solicit what business people called “buy-in” from the staff. He talked them through it. They sort of believed what he was saying, that if they sacrificed a few, that the office at large would be safe. He was very smart, and incredibly articulate; he was such a talker, and everyone liked him, so the things he said made sense. They tried to prepare themselves to take it “for the team.” This was a projected idea, a way of looking at things that, through force of character, could be made an article of faith. Those that thought they were not going to be “laid off” felt good about this plan, which then made them feel bad for being selfish.
JASON CHATTED AT John. He’d gotten the contact info off Facebook or something. He told John he’d be at Metropolitan later. They met up, they made out. Chad showed up. Chad asked John if he could sleep over instead of schlepping all the way back home. Of course, John said. Forty minutes later, he said, sorry, Chad, no, you can’t, actually.
What do you think? John asked. They were looking at Jason.
Oh, I’d be all over that if I were single, Chad said.
Okay! John said.
He and Jason took a cab back to John’s. Jason even slept over and got brunch the next day.
“So you’re not planning on telling Edward? We can just be friends?” Jason asked.
“Oh thank God, yes,” John said. “Okay, we can be friend-os.”
So they’d hang out at bars. Edward wasn’t around, after all. And when they’d go out, there were a couple nights he was tired and he’d crash at Jason’s place. And he’d sleep in the bed, but they wouldn’t touch each other. They were becoming friends.
Then they went out one night to some trashy bar, with Fred, and John was all revved up and they played Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” And Jason was trying to say something to John, in that late-night-drunk way. “Do you think, I dunno, whatever”—all these false starts. And John said, what are you saying, and Jason said, I don’t know! And then, eventually, he coughed up something: It was that he had a brewing crush on John, maybe, he thought, just a little maybe, it was no big deal, but he had to say something.
John lied to Jason a little. “Of course I have feelings for you too, but things are really complicated right now,” he said. He didn’t know which thing to say: Should he be insulting, to make him go away? Or conciliatory? And what was true anyway? But John said, you know I have a lot of feelings for your best friend, right? And Jason said, I know. And: I wasn’t asking for this or anything.
THEIR BOSS’S GOING-AWAY party was held at the enormous and relatively ancient building of a private club, in the shadows of the tallest part of the City. It was all marble and looked like a mausoleum. Really, it was only about 165 years old. Twenty years ago, the club had been forced to admit women as members. They had not wanted women there, for the simple reason that the members didn’t want to associate with women.
It was a party that felt like a funeral. All the men put on ties. All the women put on high heels. People made speeches and everyone was anxious. The big main ground-floor room of the club absorbed all the people in the room so that, between the murmuring sound of cocktails being made and people talking, it still felt empty and cold and bright.
Also, no one knew who would be fired the next morning.
Some people drank too much, and so in the office the next morning—a Friday, because it had become traditional that groups of people should be fired on a Friday, so that people’s feelings could cool and settle over the weekend—those people felt a bit chafed or unsteady. Some people brought bags with them in case they needed to pack their belongings.
They’d gotten advice from their friends at other companies about how to get fired.
That morning people sat at their desks doing nothing. It was raining miserably outside, if you looked through the windows of the offices.
Eventually people were summoned into their boss’s old office. It still looked like his office—books piled everywhere, a mess, a view of the skyscraper across the way—but it didn’t feel like his office with him gone. Timothy and a representative of the owner, a man with a vampire grin, met with people in the office. They had a stack of folders prepared, one for each person they were going to dismiss. People who came in couldn’t see the other people’s names on the folders—they were careful about that.
They fired the first few people. No one came out crying. Everyone else sat in the bullpen anxiously. One guy, Mark, was cleaning out his desk preemptively. In the bottom of his desk, he found a strange thing left behind from some previous employee who’d used the desk before him. It was a plastic bib, designed to be tied around the neck, that covered one’s shirt while one was eating. This bib was specifically intended for the eating of lobster, a hard-shelled sea creature that you cooked and then broke open, usually with tools. It was once considered something gross that poor people ate but was then an expensive delicacy. The bib had a picture of a lobster on it. It also had the words “Let’s get crackin’ ” written across it. Mark put on the bib and tied it around his neck. It was already midday, the layoffs had been proceeding all morning, and it was finally his turn to be called into the office. He came in. There was a moment of quiet while Timothy and the man in the office considered the bib. Mark just sat there. He had succeeded in not being a good soldier, in making the moment as profoundly uncomfortable and as ludicrous as possible. They gave him his folder. He left the office and put his things in the bag he brought. He wrote some notes to his former coworkers and left them in envelopes. They were supposed to be supportive notes, well-wishing notes, but they were also a bit aggressive, even hostile in a few cases. Timothy offered to call a car for Mark, and Mark declined.
John helped Mark take his bag downstairs, and they waited in the heavy rain for a car for hire. The cabs kept passing by, and those that stopped wouldn’t take him where he wanted to go. Mark yelled at a cabbie. Finally he got one and then he left and was gone forever, and John went back inside all wet to the broken office, where no one was doing any work at all. No one was even sure how many people had been let go. It was at least a dozen, everyone was sure. When people did the math, they knew the company had saved much more than three hundred thousand dollars. It was easily five hundred thousand. It could have been close to a million dollars. The math was all fuzzy and impossible to know. “Let’s get crackin’,” someone said in the bullpen. Eventually, they all just left for the day.
IT WAS FRED’S twenty-eighth birthday party. Chad met John at John’s office, and they took the subway out to a neighborhood they didn’t know well. They had to wait for a while. “There was a burst in the Lincoln Tunnel and traffic was backed up ninety minutes?” said Chad, recounting the news.
“There was a birth in the tunnel?” John asked.
“No, a burst!” Chad said. Chad was wearing shorts and an ungainly, oversize white tank top with strange, deeply scooped armholes.
They got off the train and walked out into the sun and wandered in what they thought was the right direction, up a rundown street with lots of islander BBQ joints and big long older cars, toward the bar where Fred was having his afternoon party. It was hot but pleasant, kind of dreamy.
That morning Fred had gone to the beach and was extra relaxed, which for him was very relaxed indeed. As they were looking for the bar, Fred shuffled through traffic toward them.
“Don’t get hit!” said Chad.
“He’s the kind of guy, Fred, the driver would get out of the car, apologize,
and hand him the keys,” John said to Chad.
Fred led them to the bar. “So are any of your interesting friends going to be there?” John asked.
Yes, the twenty-year-old that Fred was seeing would be there. And? “Tyler Flowers.”
“Oh, he’s very interesting,” John said. John had met this Tyler once before and found him really attractive.
The bar was mostly like a long alley between two buildings, like a beer hall with picnic tables, mostly shady, and its cavernous inside areas were dark and empty.
John ordered a white wine and came back outside. Hardly anyone was there yet. “I had the shakes this morning, I was like Edward smoking,” John said.
Soon enough Tyler showed up. Tyler was very thin, tall, gangly, with brown curly hair. He was in hipster jeans and big white sneakers and a thin faded flannel shirt and a braided belt. He had huge ears and skin like a glass of milk and was pretty. There was also something sort of ugly about him. Not ugly like he was a mean person, just there was something about his nostrils or the slope of his forehead that made him look like somewhat squished and frail. And his skin seemed so pale that you could see into his head a little.
John sprang into action and went to say hello. John was doing that thing where he smoked with his middle finger over on top of the cigarette and with his index finger beneath it. They talked for a while and then others showed up and horned in on Tyler. John gave up on his flirting for a while.
There were more drinks and time passed and a whole bunch of people showed up. Fred knew a lot of people. The main topic of conversation was Fred’s upcoming move out of the country. Fred’s departure had been some time coming, it had already been months since he’d first started talking about going, it was sort of like he had already left. In the way that people, when they know that someone’s going to be leaving, protect themselves from a looming absence, they had already written off Fred. Years before this, all the leases in the City would expire on the same day of the year, and almost everyone would move at the same time. But because there was no Internet yet then, when you moved, you sometimes didn’t see your friends again because they were too far and there were too few ways to keep in contact. So some people changed their friends every year. But at least now when Fred left the City, people could keep in touch with him fairly easily.
