by Mark Salzman
I looked over to the driveway and saw the inert hulk of the TR4. I couldn’t even buy a car that worked! A feeling of rage came over me with such force that I charged at the stupid Triumph, picked up a cinder block and before I knew it I had completely demolished the car. When my arms were too tired to lift the cinder block anymore I aimed a series of hopping side kicks at the doors and fenders, and found that, Michael’s comment to the contrary, I still had enough in my legs to dent metal pretty good. My mother was in the house while I was having my little temper tantrum, and she must have heard it all, but when I went back indoors an hour or so later she didn’t say anything. She hated the Triumph too, so maybe she sensed I was heading in a good direction.
When Dad came home from work and saw the car, however, he had quite a bit to say about it. He looked at me hard across the table and said, “I thought you were supposed to be working to save money for college this year. What happened to that, huh?”
I knew this wasn’t one of those questions I was supposed to answer.
“I’ll tell you what happened. You’ve done a couple of odd jobs, and then you’ve gone out and wasted the money on two fancy-looking pieces of crap that anybody with half a brain could have told you wouldn’t run. You could have bought yourself a reliable car easily, but no, you had to be special. You weren’t going to drive some ordinary car that an ordinary kid would drive. You’re so smart and talented that you had to have a snazzy convertible so everybody would know how different you were from the pack. Then, when they don’t run, you sulk, push them five feet down the driveway and let them rust on my lawn. Now you decide to destroy one. That’s just great, Mark; that’s so smart I don’t know what to say.”
The most terrifying part about this speech was not that he was angry; I expected at least that. The scary thing was that he was being sarcastic. He had never made bitter, sarcastic remarks about any of us kids, ever. It was uncharacteristic of him.
“Now,” Dad continued, “I have a beat-up rusted-out car in my yard, broken glass all over the driveway, and the front hood, I notice, is ten yards away in a drainage ditch. Thanks so much for the landscaping touches. Now, what I want to know is, what’s going to happen when at the end of this year you don’t have enough money to go to Yale? You want to spend another year sitting around on your ass playing that … that bullshit? I certainly hope not, because your mother and I both are getting real sick of hearing those same, repetitive, twiddly-diddly-dwee dee-dwee dee-dwee songs over and over again, and having to climb over you when you’re asleep until noon, and then having to go to bed every night wondering if you’ve crashed the car. Enough is enough. I’ve got news for you, pal, you’re getting a job, and you’re getting it tomorrow. A woman where I work has a husband who’s a lawyer, and his building needs someone in the mail room. You are going to get a haircut first thing tomorrow morning; then you are going to drive Mom’s car to Greenwich and have an interview with that lawyer at three o’clock. Here’s the address.” He handed me a slip of paper, got up and went into the living room to watch the news.
It was horrible having to sit through all this, but I was too tired from smashing the car to act indignant. And anyway, I agreed with him. The next morning I went straight to the first barbershop I could find; it was the first time in about four years that I’d had a haircut, and the first time I’d ever chosen the barbershop myself. The old guy took one look at my hair, which reached down practically to my belt, and started laughing. “Can I help you, miss?” he asked, smiling unpleasantly.
“I have a job interview at a lawyer’s office in like four hours. I need a haircut.”
His face brightened considerably. “You got an interview with a lawyer today? Oh, this is gonna be sweet. Any chair you like, son.”
When I stood up and looked in the mirror ten minutes later I almost passed out; I looked twelve years old. On the other hand, no one would be calling me “miss” anymore.
I drove to Greenwich and found the address. It was a historic but decaying four-story building with an elevator run by a cheerful old Swiss janitor. He showed me where to go for my interview.
I met with the lawyer, Mr. Shaw, and to my intense relief he was friendly and casual. He mentioned what a nice guy my dad was, and how highly his wife always spoke of his work. People always spoke highly of my dad’s work, and apparently none of them knew how much he hated the job. The lawyer told me how excited he was for me that I was going to be going to such a great school, how many good things he and his wife had heard about me, and what a pleasure it would be to have me working for his firm for nine months or so. Maybe I could come back every summer? I realized that he hadn’t heard about my true identity as a total shit. At one point in the interview he cocked his head to one side and said, “Only one thing: I thought I heard you had really long hair. I was expecting hair down to your ankles or something.”
“I got it cut this morning for this interview.”
His face broke up and he struggled to keep from laughing. “You’re kidding! You didn’t have to do that, for heaven’s sake! You’ll be down in the mail room most of the day; you won’t have to impress the little old ladies with blue hair and poodles the way I do! Did your dad make you do that?”
“Yeah.”
“What a guy, that Joe!” He allowed himself a chuckle.
Yeah. What a guy.
I started the next day. Dad woke me up at six, we had some breakfast, then began the freezing-cold drive south to Greenwich. It was exactly an hour each way, and Volkswagen buses have never been much prized for their heating systems.
Fortunately it was a beautiful drive through some of the prettiest scenery in Connecticut and New York State. That first morning we drove past a crystal-clear reservoir that reflected the orange glow in the eastern sky like a mirror. Right in the center of the reservoir, the mirror was disturbed by a single duck paddling across the water, and the ripples it left behind it created a surreal pattern of orange and blue stripes. Dad pulled the car off to the side of the road so he could take a few pictures. This was how he got his ideas for paintings, trying to keep his mind off work by watching the scenery carefully as he drove. When he saw something he might like to use later, he stopped the car, hopped out and took a picture of it.
Although I had been dreading the first silent drive to work with my dad after The Incident, and felt anxious about the new job, I was actually enjoying being up so early in the morning. I felt clearheaded, and at least I wasn’t being caught doing anything bad. As Dad dropped me off at the building, he said, “Good luck.” At least he was speaking to me again.
One other boy and I were to replace the two retired policemen who had run the mail room for about ten years. The two ex-cops made a perfect match; one was the straight guy, the other the joker. When I met the first cop, I noticed he had a terrible wound on his forehead. It looked awful, as if it were either a deep, permanent black bruise or maybe a metal plate just under the skin. Then I met the second cop, and he had an identical wound on his forehead! Maybe they had both gotten shot on the same assignment, which was why they still worked together, I thought. Or maybe they had met in rehab and formed a bond. But on my second day, I noticed to my surprise that both of them had healed completely. I asked someone about it and she told me, “They’re Irish, silly! Yesterday was Ash Wednesday. Haven’t you ever seen a Catholic before? That was ash rubbed on their heads.”
The other boy hired with me, Marty Schiff, was a riot. He could do all the Monty Python skits by heart, with the proper accents; he told great jokes and he made incredibly funny faces. I took to him instantly, but I started to notice on the second day that he seemed distracted all the time and I was forever having to cover his small mistakes. On the third day he left the firm’s mailbox at the post office wide open; I got an anxious call from the post office. They had closed the box right away, but didn’t know how long it had been left open. I ran at full speed all the way down the street to deal with it. The postal worker who had discovered the pro
blem was not amused, and assumed that it was I who had left it open. “Jesus Christ, anybody could have just reached in and pulled out some old lady’s life savings in negotiable bonds! Are you nuts or something? You’re lucky I’m in a good mood today,” he warned, “or you’d be out of a job. What’s your name?”
I told him. “Yeah, well, I’ll be watching you, Mr. Salzman.” God, not this again. I’d had enough of being in trouble.
I took the rap without squealing, but went back to the mail room really angry. When I told my colleague what had happened, he started laughing.
“I guess it’s ’cause I’m tripping!” he announced, his eyes wide and bloodshot, and then he went into another giggling fit.
“What are you tripping on?” I asked.
“The best acid you ever heard of! You want a tab?”
How quickly the tables had turned! Fucking drug addict, I thought. Not in my mail room you don’t. But what was I going to do? I wanted to talk to my dad about it, but given my recent circumstances I didn’t think that would be a good idea. I tossed and turned all weekend. On Monday the fellow showed up an hour late, and when he had to deliver a document he got lost and disappeared for the rest of the morning and I got yelled at for this by the office manager, a lonely woman who came back from lunch every day drunk and who insisted on calling me “Marx.”
It was a horrible situation. No one likes to snitch, but I wasn’t prepared to follow that guy around and worry about taking the rap all the time. But I didn’t want to tell the office manager because I wasn’t sure she was operating on all cylinders; besides, she couldn’t tell the two of us apart. The chances were about even that I would be the one she fired. I took a big risk and went up to see Mr. Shaw, the lawyer who had interviewed me. I didn’t say that my co-worker was an LSD freak, and I didn’t tell him about the open mailbox, but I did mention the smaller mistakes and said that I was worried about Marty’s ability to concentrate. I said I hated being in this position but that I desperately needed this job and didn’t want to be blamed for somebody else’s mistakes and get fired.
Mr. Shaw nodded and said, “We’re already aware that Marty is, shall we say, under the weather. Somebody found him yesterday down in the file basement having a fairly animated conversation with a spiderweb. But you know, once you hire somebody you have to be careful about how you handle things like this. You have to give the person the benefit of the doubt. He might just be the creative type. I’m sorry you’ve had to worry about this, but let’s be patient. If he settles in and gets the hang of things soon, great, but if not, let me worry about it, not you. You’re doing fine, and I promise that nobody’s going to blame you for anything you haven’t done, just as we won’t rush to any conclusions about Marty.”
What a relief, and how impressed I was by how he handled it. This was one cool head. From then on I relaxed, and before long I realized that I had mastered the simple tasks of the job. To my surprise, I discovered not only that I could do the job well, but that I enjoyed it. In fact, I loved it. The first thing in the morning I went down to the post office, unlocked the firm’s mailbox and filled my canvas sack with all the mail, making sure to wave confidently at the postal worker who had his eye on me.
Back at the firm I sorted all the correspondence into a floor-to-ceiling rack, then put it all in order in a tray and made my first rounds, starting at the fourth floor and working my way down. Each attorney had at least one secretary, and most of my contact was with them. I would hand each of them a little pile of mail and take whatever they had for me to send out. I liked it when they had emergencies and needed something hand-delivered immediately because it broke up the routine. I took it as a challenge to try to run so fast to my destination that no one noticed I had been out.
I also liked timing each routine task to see if I could come up with ways to shave a few seconds off the time it took. Why not? Some people might think it stupid to try to finish a mindless task early because then you’ll get assigned other mindless tasks, but I discovered within a few days that time flies much faster when you are concentrating hard, so as far as I was concerned, give me all the mindless tasks you’ve got. There was a certain irony in this discovery; for years I’d put myself through all kinds of exotic mental and physical training in order ultimately to be able to do even the most menial tasks with an alert mind, and I had failed. Now I was running a mail room in Greenwich and succeeding without any philosophical guidance at all. I did not admit this to my father, however.
Before long I felt as if most of the secretaries in the building were either my older sisters or my aunts, and I enjoyed spending a few minutes at each one’s desk hearing their news and discovering the underrated pleasure of small talk. High on their list was speculating about whether or not the police would ever catch the “Son of Sam” killer, and complaining about the lawyers. If I had extra time on slow days, I liked coming up with little surprises; sometimes I went up the street to the ice-cream shop, where the owner, who got lots of business from those secretaries, would make up a box with thirty tiny cups of ice cream in it at no charge; then I would rush back and try to drop the cups off for everybody before they melted.
Something that I had never imagined when I pictured myself having a job was how bearable drudgery can be when it is shared. Most of the people I dealt with—people who did the filing, secretarial and janitorial work in office buildings, probate buildings, city halls and police stations, along with the people who worked in the restaurants, bars and supply houses that supported those office workers—were surprisingly cheerful. Within a couple of weeks I looked back on my life as a full-time Student of Alternative Reality, spraying my mouth with Binaca all the time, pouring Murine into my eyes and playing the cello badly along with Weather Report albums, and wondered how I could ever have thought that this was the way to live.
Marty, alas, never did get the hang of the job. One Monday morning when I showed up, the office manager introduced me to Ed, my new co-worker, whom I would be training “as of right now. Ed, this is Marx.”
Ed was an older guy, overweight, and diabetes was making him lose his sight. He was in a permanent bad mood, he had permanent bad breath, and he didn’t like being trained by a kid. He especially didn’t like being trained by a kid who enjoyed the challenge of menial tasks; we had deeply conflicting philosophies about work. He liked sitting back in his squeaky chair, scratching his huge balls—which were always on display since he wore cheap, form-fitting doubleknit pants and sat with his legs splayed as wide open as they would go—and saying, “Mark, someday you’ll figure it out. You’ll figure out the secret to life, and to working for people like this. You’re a nice kid, but you’re naive. You’re a fresh-faced, naive kid. You wanna know what the secret is? I’ll save you some time and tell ya.” He would lean forward, stick his face right into mine, and whisper, “Fuck ’em!” then give the finger to all the condescending, rich, white-collar parasites upstairs. This was the secret.
Ed was lazy, but he wasn’t on acid and he could be good company sometimes. God, he was slow, though. I believe that he timed himself during routine tasks to see if he could find ways to add on a few seconds here and there, and whenever someone asked him to make an emergency delivery he would wince and say, “You know, I really hate it when you people act like we’ve got nothing to do down here. You just assume we should just jump up at your beck and command. Why didn’t this come down on the regular mail run? That’s what it’s for, you know. You people put this stuff off until the last minute, then expect us down in the trenches to run off like good little bunnies and fix it for you.” Most of the secretaries didn’t want to get into a confrontation, so they would soothe him with self-deprecatory remarks and promise that in the future they’d try harder to give him advance warning. But it was never the secretary’s fault that there was an emergency; the lawyer had handed her the envelope only minutes before. It usually wasn’t the lawyer’s fault either; he’d probably gotten the call from some distressed client only a
few minutes before that. It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it was the job. It was a law firm, for God’s sake, and lawyers deal with crises.
When the secretary left, Ed would toss the envelope on the desk, wink at me and say, “Fuck ’em!” and when I could stand it no longer I would go make his delivery. He would laugh and say, “See, Mark? There’s always some fresh-faced kid out there who doesn’t know the secret who’ll run around for you. You’ll figure it out someday, fresh-face!”
Ed sometimes got annoyed with me, but he liked me overall and took a sort of paternal interest in my romantic life. When he found out I’d had a steady girlfriend for a year he thought that was silly. “You don’t go out with one girl when you’re seventeen, Mark. You gotta play the field.” He wasn’t at all inhibited by the fact that he hadn’t had a date since World War II. When he heard that I was still a virgin he practically fell over in his chair.
“Jesus!” he yelled, roaring with laughter, “seventeen years old in this day and age and he hasn’t gotten laid yet? Oh, Christ, Mark! If when I was your age I knew what I know now, I’d be getting laid every night with a different girl! I could have any girl I wanted!” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.
Ed never specified exactly what it was that he didn’t know then but did know now beyond saying, “All ya gotta do is know what to say, and when to say it. That’s all ya gotta do, fresh-face.” He even bought me a pack of rubbers to put in my wallet in case I got lucky someday.
Working full-time made me realize that if I wanted to keep up with music I had to be more disciplined about my practice time. I talked with my mother about it, and delighted that I was asking her advice, she suggested that what I needed was a concrete goal to work toward. There was a youth music competition coming up in a month, she said; if I wanted to give it a try, I would have to prepare one required movement of Bach and one piece of my own choice. Since I had not had a formal cello lesson in almost four years, and it wouldn’t be fair to start with a new teacher just for the competition, she would do her best to coach me. I would have to practice at night—every night.
