THE BIG FLAMEOUT
The collective doubts of millions of corporate cogs were swiftly confirmed during Bob Gershon’s retirement party when he summed up his forty-five year career in three words: “Blah. Blah. Blah.”
Up until that point, the party had followed the typical program for a farewell event. About fifty of us gathered in the boardroom mid-afternoon and were treated to a dessert spread fit for a group five times those in attendance. We secretly eyed the truffles with gold leaf and pastel macaroons while pretending to be engrossed in conversations with colleagues, who were also seemingly uninterested in the sweets just an arm’s length away. This dance lasted for a few minutes until one brave soul, under the pretext of “Maybe I’ll just get a piece of cantaloupe,” made the plunge. The flock took her cue and proceeded with methodical efficiency to graze its way from one end of the table to the other. The only survivor left in its path was an untouched tray of melon.
One of the directors moved to the front of the room and called up the man of honor. A slightly stooped figure wearing a suit, tailored when the frame beneath it was a little more filled out, pulled himself from a conversation and made his way through the crowd. The room broke into applause and a few folks patted the old man on the back, and with each encouragement the shoulders stooped ever so slightly more, seemingly uncomfortable with the attention showered on them.
The director read aloud from a framed Honorary Proclamation filled with “hereby” and “whereas” and “thereunto.” His oratory was interspersed with harassment-proof jokes and served marvelously as a textbook for office humor that was both politically correct and consistently unfunny. The final presentation was of a Tiffany box and the room collectively took a step forward in anticipation of the contents which were about to be revealed. It was customary to award associates on their anniversaries with one of those pale, blue boxes. And as the years advanced, so did the quality of its contents — a silver pen at five years, a crystal candy dish at fifteen, and so on. Forty-five year anniversary gifts had a unicorn-like fascination; no one believed they existed but all were very open to being disproved.
“Thank you,” Bob said with the box in his hands. “I will open this later at home,” and the room let out an almost imperceptible moan. Forty-five year Tiffany treasures were not meant for us mortals.
It was a typical Bob move, one that I witnessed him perform for as long as I had been at the firm. My first encounter with the man came early in my career. I found myself in a large meeting on the topic of a benefits program that had gone over-budget and failed to show any semblance of a return on investment. My involvement was as the junior HR man who had a small role in the measurement of the program’s dismal results. It was getting heated in the room with recriminations flying. Bob calmly stood up among the fury and asked me to join him outside the conference room. There was a mini-emergency that needed to be addressed, he told the room. I warily listened to him explain what he needed, but it ended up being some random task that could have been done at any time by one of the secretaries. I resented being sent off on such a trivial errand, but later I realized this was Bob’s way of saving my career.
Back in the room, the fingers were pointing and it was only a matter of time before they landed on the guy standing on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder — me. I never forgot that act of generosity, and when I found myself reporting to him as I had been for the last ten years, I couldn’t have been happier. Now, on his retirement day, I was sad to be losing the only man I considered a mentor.
“So, I did some math,” Bob began in a subdued tone and pulled a folded piece of paper from his coat pocket. Putting on his glasses, he read from the sheet: “My forty-five-year career translates into ninety-three thousand, six hundred and very soon-to-be thirty-six hours of work. In twenty-four hour increments that’s a total of 3,900 days spent right here in this office. Those good at math can already tell you that comes out to ten-and-a-half years. Think about that — ten straight years of twenty-four hour days spent in one building.”
“Sounds like a prison term!” some jokester felt the need to add. And because of the corporate world’s inability to let an obvious joke pass, someone else piled on with, “And two weeks off for good behavior!”
Pausing to let the fake laughter subside, Bob continued. “When I started, we just called it work. There was a lot of work to do and as the years went by, the more work we did.” There were a lot of satisfied looks in the room from those who belonged to the self-selected club of the truly hard-working. “But as time progressed, we started referring to this work as projects. Eventually, even that word wasn’t good enough. It was good enough to build the atom bomb but not sufficient for the kind of work we were doing. Some starry one introduced initiatives and that really took hold. Like a virus, this spawned an inordinate number of new terms, all describing the same thing. Suddenly, we had key dependencies and core deliverables. There was a period where we even lost sense of time as future forward became standard language even though it would take a metaphysics professor to untangle that logic. Someone from a long line of 17th century English surveyors brought us milestone. I really liked that one. I personally have passed enough milestones to have circled the earth.”
Associates chuckled at the harmless inanity of corporate jargon, but I sensed something darker underneath his words and fought the urge to run. There was something in his voice and the way it was leading us to an uncertain, but certainly bleak, ending that I didn’t want to be around to witness.
“Then militarism came back into fashion and everything we did was now a strategy and everyone doing it was a strategic thinker. You really didn’t want to be labeled tactical because that dirty word was relegated to the boys in the trenches who were unable to see five feet in front of them. Soon we had swarms of folks visioning our way forward where synergies and parallel paths would ladder up to some corporate Valhalla.”
The crowd was starting to splinter among the True Believers and the Doubters. The former smiled obliviously while the latter stared at their shoes.
“Leave it to kids to boil it down for you,” Bob continued. “Last week my granddaughter asked me, ‘What do you do?’ That phrase has become the standard form of identification in contemporary life. It’s so ingrained that even children lead with it. Well, I told my granddaughter that I work in Human Resources. But that wasn’t enough because she then innocently asked, ‘But what do you do?’ And I sort of had to think about it for a second.”
Finally, we were at the moment in the speech when Bob, the man with double or triple the experience of almost everyone in the room, would impart his wisdom and provide meaning to the lives we lived. It could go several ways.
I help people reach their true potential.
I make sure we’re in a better place than we were yesterday.
I watch over the lifeblood of any corporation — the people.
Bob Gershon went a different route.
“Folks, I couldn’t answer her. Forty-five years of work, good old-fashioned hard work, and I couldn’t think of a single meaningful thing that I accomplished. I mean, I worked in ‘Human Resources’. It sounds made up, doesn’t it?” He laughed but got no one to join him. “We’ve reached a point where we manufacture roles whose sole purpose is to watch over other roles.”
In just a few short sentences, Bob Gershon invalidated the daily struggles of everyone in the room. But he did it as I knew Bob would — with dignity.
“Last week,” he said, “I came to a startling conclusion. I had a long, successful career but I didn
’t have a job.”
The True Believers bristled at the brazen questioning of their entire belief system. Even the Doubters weren’t prepared for this apocalyptic representation of their existence and slowly started to drift out of the room. And I just grew incredibly morose; not for having had to witness the old man’s public meltdown, but for acknowledging that I shared his thoughts, often dreamt of this day and doing just what he did, but knowing I could never muster the courage to actually pull it off.
“Why didn’t you quit if you hated it so much?” a shrill voice shouted out, but the question seemed directed more at the woman who asked it than at Bob. As if sensing that, Bob waited for her to answer, which she did, internally, and by the resigned look on her face she apparently came to same conclusion that he had.
Like all great flame-outs, this one ended not in a fireball but in a sputter. “I do appreciate all of this. I hope I imparted…something from the heart…,” he said, scanning the room as people left in droves. “Anyway…thank you for coming.”
And then it was just the two of us and the crew there to clean up the dishes. Bob gathered his stuff, including the Tiffany box. I brought him his coat.
“Well, that didn’t go as I thought it would. I was hoping to inspire a few people.” By telling them their lives were meaningless, I thought. The unintentional enormity of his actions hit him at that moment, and I could see it in his eyes. “Walk me out?” he asked, more like a plea.
I did just that, in silence.
We waited for a few moments by the elevator banks, and as the elevator chimed, Bob turned to shake my hand.
“Goodbye, Mr. Restic.”
There were no empty promises of keeping in touch and meeting for lunch down the road because we both knew neither would happen. Bob stepped onto the elevator, but before the doors could close, Bob lunged forward and thrust a purple-veined hand between the sensors. “Chuck!” he called out as he stood in the threshold. I eagerly turned back, waiting too much like a young man at his father’s death bed for some last scrap of advice on the life that awaited him. Bob started to say something, thought better of it, and then shuffled back into the elevator.
The doors noiselessly closed out his career.
YOUR NAME HERE
I didn’t get much of anything done that afternoon. It was hard to concentrate as I replayed in my head the things that Bob had said. It was particularly hard to concentrate with my co-manager Paul Darbin blabbering on about it. Paul was a former hippie who aggressively espoused sustainable living as long as it didn’t interfere with the things he enjoyed. He sentenced us to “all-organic” vending machines but god be damned he give up his addiction to chemically-enhanced energy drinks.
“What a way to go out,” he mused while leaning against the small table in my office. “My big worry is how the group absorbs it. He did, after all, say some pretty poisonous things.”
“I think they can handle it, Paul.”
“Well, maybe it was a blessing in disguise.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, unsure why I even engaged him on the topic. He pounced on my opening and lowered his voice in a conspiratorial tone despite the door being closed to anyone passing by. It felt all along that he wanted to tell me something and was just waiting for the right opening. I initially thought it was to gauge my interest in Bob’s now-empty office with the panoramic view of the San Gabriel Mountains, but Paul had designs on something much grander.
“Let’s be honest, Chuck. The department has been adrift for several years now…” And so the recriminations began while the body was still warm. I wasn’t sure if Bob had even made it out of the parking garage yet. “Don’t get me wrong. Bob was a visionary. He built this group and did some great things over his time here.”
I waited for the “but.” Paul cut right to it.
“But every great leader eventually loses touch with the times. Love him to death, but Bob was not up to the challenges we’re facing. Adaptation is a healthy and necessary quality for any corporate ecosystem to succeed. And if ever there was a group in need of some transformational change, this is it.” Meaningless buzzwords came naturally to Paul. In addition to energy drinks, he was a corporate-management-book junkie.
“I mean, look at what we’ve failed to do on the obesity epidemic.” This topic was a cause célèbre that seemed to attract only Paul’s attention. He had demonstrated a manic pursuit to eradicate obesity from the firm, a request that continually went unheeded by our former boss, which in turn drove Paul harder on his mission. “We’ll end up paying for that miss,” he warned.
“You might be right,” I shrugged.
“But you can see where I am coming from on our group, right?”
“You’ve brought up some interesting points,” I deflected by not directly responding to his question. Paul was on an obvious fishing expedition to gauge my level of interest in the open role as head of the group. There were two clear contenders, assuming the firm didn’t look outside for potential candidates, and they both were in the room at that moment. I had zero interest in taking on the enhanced responsibilities of running the entire group, but I would never tell Paul that. I secretly got pleasure from watching him squirm.
“I wonder what Faber thinks of all this,” he tried again. Pat Faber was the director overseeing all of us.
“Yeah, I wonder.”
“I bet you he sees it our way,” he answered. Apparently we were of one frame of mind.
“You never know,” I told him.
“What do you think?”
“It’s a hard one, Paul.”
“If you had to guess?”
“It could go either way.”
“But if you were forced to answer?”
“I can see both angles.”
This banter played out long past the point where I got amusement out of it. The telephone offered me a convenient excuse to disengage. It was an unknown outside number, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to needle Paul one last time.
“It’s Pat Faber. I should take this.”
“Really? What about?” he sputtered.
I picked up the phone and cupped the mouthpiece. “I guess I’ll find out in a minute,” I answered and gleefully watched Paul tailspin out of the office. “This is Chuck,” I spoke into the phone.
“Mr. Valenti wants to see you,” the voice came back. The hair tingled on the back of my neck. I was told an address in Chinatown and then the caller abruptly hung up.
***
The cab driver stopped a block short of the address on Hill Street. If he went any further, he’d be funneled up the on-ramp to the 110 Freeway which led out to Pasadena. I made the remaining way on foot. The building was literally the last one on the block where the hum of traffic up above washed down between the buildings.
I recognized Valenti’s driver standing on the sidewalk. He wore a black suit with matching tie and moustache. His slicked-back hair, evenly corrugated by the teeth of a plastic comb, was colored with the same black shoe polish as his eyebrows. His grey eyes were the only bit of variation on the ensemble and spoke of his pronounced age. As I approached, I half-expected him to introduce himself as The Great Zoltar and pull a set of plastic flowers out of a cane. Instead, he wordlessly pointed me to a non-descript door propped ajar by a stray brick.
The door led to a dingy emergency stairwell. Over the sounds of traffic above, I heard faint voices and I thought of Valenti. It had been over a year since we last spoke. His actions set off a chain of events that killed four people. One of them was my friend. Valenti had no direct involvement in their deaths. He had no indirect involvement either. But I still blamed him.
Coming out on the roof, I was greeted with the ever-present line of cars on the 110 bending around the hills of Dodger Stadium and descending into downtown Los Angeles. The cars were close enough that I could make eye contact with their drivers. Behind me screeched a high-pitched, slightly-accented voice engaged in a heated discussion.
“You can
’t just create in a vacuum,” said the slender man in expensive jeans and loafers. He wore a tailored white shirt that set off his tortoise shell, bold-framed glasses. “A building must not only be cognizant of its surroundings but it must take its cues from them. What I’ve done is create a sense of space that is true to the cultural and social fabric of this community. It is harmonious with the people who reside here and that is the great accomplishment.”
The old man let him have his speech but no more than that.
“You have two choices,” Valenti said calmly, “Your very noble ideals or this commission.” He left the frustrated architect and walked over towards me by the stairwell. He thanked me for coming and then suggested we go across the street to talk. I had no choice but to follow him like a lackey trailing his master.
We made the short walk over to Chung King Road. This was the chop-suey and fortune cookie part of Chinatown where everything was lit by paper lanterns and where foo dogs outnumbered people two-to-one. We settled in at the empty bar at Hop Louie. It smelled of sweet-and-sour and ammonia. A surly bartender stared at me with an arched eyebrow. Feeling the need to be culturally enlightened, I ordered a Tsingtao with the correct pronunciation. Valenti ordered a ginger ale.
“I never touch alcohol before five,” he told me as I took my first sip of beer. I was certain that, had I ordered a ginger ale, he would have told me that he never trusted a man who didn’t drink before five.
Valenti unfurled the architectural plans on the bar and studied them in silence. It felt like a put-on, like he was waiting to be asked about them. I gave him no such satisfaction and let him pretend to pore over the drawings until even he grew tired of the charade.
“It’s going to be my legacy,” he said flatly.
Why his legacy would reside on a random lot in Chinatown was unclear. He had no cultural connection to this part of the city or the people who lived here. If anything, he was constantly at odds with them. His developments were almost exclusively in the white neighborhoods of Los Angeles or in the pure-white neighborhoods of Orange County.
The Eternal Summer (Chuck Restic Private Investigator Series Book 2) Page 1
