by Dan Kennedy
There are little moments when God gives you a sign; gifts, I like to call them. They are these sort of conspiratorial winks from the universe that let you know what you’re doing is getting out into the world; that you’re affecting something in your time here on earth. One of these gifts has just been sent to me here in my little temporary office — my first piece of produced work; a paid advertisement on the cover of Billboard Magazine with a huge picture of Phil Collins’s face and the number “25” next to it. As I stare at the paid-advertisement-disguised-as-magazine-cover with confused pride and confidence, there’s a small team of workmen painting a bigger office down the hall that I’m set to move into on Monday. Which brings this next little strait to navigate: I never really thought about it until today, but the fact is, I don’t have anything to move into my new larger office. Aren’t you supposed to when you land a job like this? At this point in my life, the only nine-to-fives I’ve held briefly rewarded me with a cubicle and, in one instance, a supply closet that was converted into an office. I didn’t take the time to decorate these spaces.
But everyone here has tons of stuff in their offices — pictures, platinum albums, furniture, and just . . . stuff. Stuff, I don’t know, like a Zen tray thing filled with sand and some little polished stones or something — whatever you buy when you’re thirty- or forty-something and you’ve been on track since you graduated college at twenty-two. “They’ll be done with audio and video and painting in there today, so if you want to move your stuff in over the weekend, you can,” this from Vallerie as she passes by my door on a routine flyby.
I call my girlfriend, Maria, at her office and ask her what Vallerie means by this and what your average thirty-five-year-old normal man would be moving into his office, if he were accustomed to having an office.
“I wouldn’t worry about it. She probably just meant you could start working in there now that they’re done painting and stuff.”
I immediately disregard her level-headed input, deciding that clearly she just doesn’t get it; she’s not a winner if she’s not second-guessing everything, she’s not going for the gold, or something. Actually, screw gold; she’s not going for the platinum in this life if she isn’t thinking about this sort of thing. Okay, so maybe ever since the muffin incident at my first marketing meeting, I’ve been nurturing a mildly degenerative paranoia. This thin film of corporate workplace insecurity is a charming personality attribute, to be sure. An attribute found mostly in middle-aged, overdressed, status-insecure folks with sketchy self-esteem who are hoping to climb the proverbial ladder of success, and small-town crystal methamphetamine freaks convinced that little men with walkie-talkies live in the walls and phone. What we share — the middle-aged go-getters and the psychotic meth addicts — is a constantly aggravated, malnourished, and cagey sixth sense that tells us everything means something and that people are noticing even when we think they’re not. And the way we see it, people like my girlfriend simply don’t understand. I decide that this weekend I will make up for lost time and acquire all of the things that normal successful people move into their offices with. I will catch up with them that quickly, these normal on-track people. I will fit in if it kills me, and be a bigger, more well-adjusted version of what I am. Hell, I’ll be bigger and more well-adjusted than them! I look in magazines for photo spreads of successful people’s offices. I watch that movie called The Kid Stays in the Picture, that biography of Robert Evans, and I stare at everything in the background of his office. I think that’s where I picked up the cue that successful people have a lot of framed photos in their office. Which is basically why I’m here in the Home and Office section of Saks Fifth Avenue.
“Excuse me, how much is this one here?”
“The tortoise shell with silver inlay? That’s a wonderful choice. Beautiful.”
“It sure is. It’s . . . a . . . nice . . . picture frame.”
“Let me check for you.”
It feels completely indefensible, being here amongst over-priced decorative items and buying into all of this. I worry about bumping into somebody I know. I move hyperdiscreetly the back way through aisles, like a paranoid high school math teacher visiting a strip club too near to the small town where he lives and works. This place is right down the street from the office and seems to have a total understanding of how to appeal to people plagued with a deep need to be seen as successful. At least I’m dressed for the part, so I probably don’t stand out much, I mean, half of the stuff I’m wearing came from here. I should back up. I’m, well, dressing in gray slacks, black sweaters, and five-hundred-dollar shoes these days. It’s impossible not to notice that all of the guys in charge kind of dress like a slightly more hip J. Peterman catalog — and like a lucky poor kid adopted by the rich in a bad sitcom script, I’ve decided I’ll do anything to fit in, to not get kicked out of this club. I would also like to point out that my sensible navy blue designer windbreaker jacket costs $675, and the salesman at Barney’s tells me it’s great because I can wear it inside at the office when it gets a little cold from the air conditioning.
Nice.
That’s very manly, isn’t it? But it all somehow makes sense to me in this kind of nine-to-five mild codeine high I get from strolling around with a head full of recycled air that’s been filtered through twenty-three floors of stylish nylon executive carpet and assorted veneers and Formica; it’s a high that feels like a thin barrier between me and the real world outside. Out there life is still happening and those poor bastards are dealing with silly little everyday problems like love and death.
Christ, I’ve got a monkey on my back. An office job is like an indefinite five-day-a-week Vicodin and wine binge; it changes you. Speaking of changes, I will only say this about my new hair situation: the highlights were supposed to look much more rock and roll than this. The most awkward thing about the highlights that I let the hairdresser talk me into is that older Puerto Rican women love them. Apparently highlights are a big thing in their community. They’ll come right up to me in a Starbucks or on the subway, stare up at my head and coo, “Ooooh, I low your highlight!” while I stand there in awkward silence. I usually act like I didn’t hear them, but if they keep staring up at my head, I say “Thank you” very quietly.
So, the first picture frame to have caught my eye here at Saks, the one the salesman is checking on, is this huge-ass desktop tortoise-shell number about the size of a manhole cover or storm window. This frame says, “I have a very impressive picture frame and therefore have certainly not, as you might expect, spent the majority of my so-called post-college years self-employed and jamming envelopes of cash in a hole up under my bookshelf, hoping to somehow outfox adulthood with an intoxicating tonic of binge spending and low-stakes tax fraud.”
The salesman’s posture belies the malady of the middle class; an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to body language, a studied focus on hand gestures and policing of the voice’s inflection that hints at a seminar on how to “carry” one’s self — the kind of disciplined spasms and ticks a sort of discount finishing school for the class-insecure might instill. It draws the portrait of a man furiously trying to politely distract others from a long personal history of fair-to-middling winnings in life’s cruelly random lotteries of class, genetics, and fortune. Okay, clearly, I’m projecting. Anyway, he’s finally back with the price.
“Three seventy-five.”
Holy Christ! Three hundred and seventy-five dollars for a picture frame? How much if you take the cocaine and diamonds out of the hollow part in the back of it? Do. Not. Look. Surprised. You are supposed to be very normal and successful, and this is probably how much normal and successful people pay for picture frames. “Oh, good. Yeah, three seventy-five, okay, good . . . I’ll, uh, I’ll take it.”
But you need a lot of these things. So I buy others, too. A tasteful little teak number with lighter tropical wood inlays. One that looks a little bit like a cross between a seashell and a coffin lid, one that looks like . . . bumpy . . .
leather? I split and head across the street to Banana Republic where the frames are much cheaper, it turns out. And I buy even more there, mostly simple and pedestrian stainless-steel frames that will benefit from hanging out next to the Saks frames. The next stop is Takashimya back on Fifth Avenue. The store that has apparently cornered the New York market for small boxes covered in alligator skin, large and stately leather-bound journals, small bowls made of bone or antler or something, and a handful of other important stuff like little trays made out of wood, leather, or stone. I get a nice assortment of all of the above-mentioned accessories. What the hell, I even tell the sales-woman to throw in a long, skinny three-compartment tray made out of some kind of dark tropical wood, teak, maybe, a real nice little number that I might use to casually store bulletin-board pins in or maybe some change from my pocket. I decide against a four-inch silver ball that comes with a little suede bag to put it in, and consider briefly maybe getting the $275 rustic set of two pewter cups (pen holders?). I have spent well over fifteen hundred dollars, and aside from the frames, I couldn’t tell you what you’re supposed to do with any of this stuff. It’s time to go. My plan, so I don’t get caught and ridiculed, is to just drop it off at the office over the weekend.
I have, maybe, twenty frames at this point. I figure if the idea is that I actually went to college and I’ve been out of college for, say, at least twelve years at this point and, say, had offices for the last ten years, then that’s about two frames for every year of my steadily employed, level-headed adulthood. Never mind that I don’t even have twenty friends and loved ones, so I start going through the process of figuring out what the hell I’m going to put in these frames. At home, I dig deep through closets and boxes. There are some snapshots of people I haven’t heard from in ten or fifteen years. I will frame them for my office because it’s all I got. So I haven’t heard from them in a decade, they fit the part. Look at Jeff! It’s before he grew his big hair and his long sideburns and beard and moved to Berkeley. He looks all clean-cut in this photo. He’s wearing a wet suit and holding a big crab, and it looks like maybe I know a clean-cut scuba diver, but really we were super hung over in San Francisco and had rented some wet suits and boogie boards at the beach. And there was this huge dead crab at the edge of the water, and Jeff picked it up to huck at something, but before he did I got a quick snapshot. It looks like he caught it while diving in his fancy wet suit and is inspecting it for eggs or something. Just like a marine biologist would.
I’ve got only sixteen frames left. And I still have the huge tortoise-shell frame. I get a little sad and awkward when my girlfriend tells me that this beast is usually used for something like a couple’s fiftieth anniversary. Yeah? Well, guess what, Maria; I’m out four hundred and twenty bucks with tax and I refuse to wait forty-five more years until I can put a picture of us in here.
It’s Sunday, and I’ve asked Maria to come along with me to the office and give me some input on how I’m setting things up.
“Why are you putting leather coasters on your desk?” She asks.
“So people can, you know, put their drink down when they come into my office. A Diet Coke or whatever.”
She stares at me.
“Would you like something cold to drink?” I ask.
“No . . . thank . . . you,” she replies slowly while watching me figure out where to display my wooden box with alligator skin on the lid.
I know this stuff is all a big dumb lie. I’m starting to think half of what everyone my age does is a lie. But I want to try for once in my life. I want everything to work out; I want to fit in here, and to be regarded as important and intelligent. I want everyone to think I’m a normal and successful man like the others, accustomed to going to his office, then home to his loved ones, and then back to his office again, loved ones, office, loved ones, and so on, and so on.
ANTHEMS FOR A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRL, OR “DURAN, DURAN, AND . . . YOU ARE?”
Monday morning here in my new tastefully decorated normal adult-size office, and at the moment there’s a pop star standing with a big grin in front of my door. Okay, so maybe Simon LeBon was a pop star twenty-three years ago, if you want to get all technical. Okay, fine, so he’s not standing in front of my door because he needs to talk to me so much as he’s standing there having his snapshot taken with the guy who works in the office next to mine. Which, yes, if you want to be a stickler for details, obviously means his being all smiles is just a guess on my part, as he and this other guy’s backs are turned to me, trapping me in my office. I’m sitting there thinking that if any of my teenage efforts at being a drummer or guitarist in a world-famous band would’ve come to fruition, and let’s say I would’ve been the drummer in Duran Duran — this is exactly the view of Simon LeBon I would’ve had nightly for my entire time in the spotlight. So for a minute, in a weird little way, it’s like I’m living the dream. After the snapshot everyone continues along their way, then a couple of bosses walk by and poke their heads into my office on their way to the Duran Duran meeting.
“Hey, quit working so hard and come down to the conference room and say hello.”
To which, in fairness to myself, I have the corporate savvy not to reply, “Oh, I’m just checking out my friend Ben’s Web site that he built for his band and trying to figure out if there’s a guest-book thing you can sign on here.” Instead, I remember that success in a corporate environment means always appearing busy, confident, and outgoing. I remember how my friend Josh recently busted me — told me that I could really no longer fall back on the shy loser shtick that got me through my twenties when it seems I’m doing fine for myself in my thirties. And you know that sort of gay little voice in your head that goes, “Yeah . . . he’s right! I’m going to go down to the conference room and introduce myself to Duran Duran in front of my bosses, because this ‘quiet guy isolated in his office and not taking any risks’ thing is going to stop!” If you don’t have that voice in your head, just try to remember the voice that convinced you that you should try dancing drunk at a wedding or office party. I hear that voice and I get up out of my chair with my goony, doggone-it-I’m-going-to-choose-life confidence.
I walk down to the conference room in my sensible gray sweater, black slacks, and black leather Prada shoes. Everybody is in the conference room already; Ms. Chocolate Chip is looking right at me clearly wondering if I’ve got the balls to walk through the door, so I ignore her as I step in. Suburban Classic Rock Guy is there. Aging Robert Wagner Character From Sales is there. A smattering of vice presidents is in attendance. A gaggle of lesser-paid-and-ironically-more-qualified-than-everyone-in-the-room assistants and product managers stand around looking genuinely happy and effortlessly cooler than everyone in middle and upper management. I’ve got that burning sensation on the back of my neck that comes from making a late entrance to a work thing like this. And apparently it’s the late entrance that comes with the misunderstanding that maybe I’m the guy the band is waiting to meet? I ask because I’m deeply confused when, for no reason that I can discern, Simon LeBon takes the initiative to get up from his seat at the conference table and extend his hand to me, which makes some small gland somewhere inside of me shoot into a spasm resulting in a burning, red-hot shot of adrenaline speeding straight into my bloodstream, which triggers a warning in my head to keep it together and not say something stupid. And so when we shake hands, I just stick to the first very basic thing that pops into my head and say, “I’m Dan Kennedy,” evidently a little too loudly in a way that sounds surprisingly way too confident. I start to panic in my head when I hear the voice boom from my upper chest area, and see three other guys from the band turning toward me when they hear it. I do the only thing you can do, which apparently is to keep repeating a slight variation of what you just said with each new handshake until you think of a way out of this. And so the guitarist puts his hand out and I grab it and repeat, “Dan. Dan Kennedy,” in a tone that my little internal adrenal meth lab has now turned in to a weird mix of l
oud and happy. But it’s a loud and happy that’s mixed with a slightly boisterous, mildly inappropriate confidence; like that of an armed forces recruiter enjoying tempting small-town youth with discipline problems into a reservist program that yields a modest payout to barely cover textbooks and a couple semesters of tuition at the local college after enduring fifty or sixty weekends of vaguely homoerotic torture in a boot camp. I have to quickly think of a way to make sure there is no misunderstanding, especially with my boss in the room. That I’m not delusional enough to think I’m upper management or something and that Duran Duran shouldn’t think so either. So for the bassist, when I reach out and grab his hand, I switch it up and say, “Big fan. Bigfan.” Jesus, somebody mace me. Have the compassion to put me down and get me out of this.
The “big fan” line doesn’t help reverse any of the situation at hand, since now they’re kind of looking at me like, “Well, good thing this guy’s a big fan. Wow, we’re already off to a great start here.” And I’m thinking, “No, I mean, I’m just a fan to you. That’s all I am, just another, everyday, ordinary, one of millions of ordinary fans. Not the booming voice and whatever that implies in a conference room at a record label where you’re talking about a possible deal.” And then there’s a fourth guy, and he’s not reaching his hand out, so I make the effort since my adrenal glands have now apparently tightened into a series of twitches that tell my brain to shove my arm out in front of me. And in a slight variation of my last greeting, I tell him I’m a big fan of his. “Heybigfan. Of you.”
Somebody. Anyone. Slam 60 ccs of Klonopin and Valium into my shoulder with the hard punch of a thick needle like they do to inpatient escapees or discount inbred quarter horses.
So, I’m locked into staring at this guy’s face trying to recognize him. Wait, which one is he? Okay, think about the “Rio” video from ’82 where they’re all on the yacht that’s racing across the ocean. Okay, visualize it . . . the guy on the bow was Simon. I recognize the other two guys. They were sort of standing in the middle section of the yacht. Who is this guy, though? Was he maybe in the boat’s galley fixing lunch or something and you couldn’t see him? I mean, it’s not like I was into them enough to recognize them twenty years later. Although, I did just holler over and over again that I am a big fan. Okay, this is not the time to figure it out, let go of the guy’s hand, it’s been twenty seconds or something. Soon chairs are shuffled, everyone who isn’t upper level brass is asked to leave. The meeting is getting under way, and I recede and fade, walking backward out of the room with a pleasant and vacant look frozen on my face, convinced that the line between today’s anxiety attack and tomorrow’s stroke or unemployed cross-country spree of petty theft committed in a blackout is thinner than ever now that I’m working in an office full time. On my way down the hall, a product manager walks by having just exited the same meeting.
