by Peter Mattei
“Do you know where she went? Sabine? We work together and I … um … I’m her boss.”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“One other thing: her bill? Can you tell me if she paid with her own card or was she charged as a part of our production? Or on another card?”
“I wouldn’t have that information,” he says.
“Thank you,” I say, not pressing him. Then I go to my room. I open the blinds and look out the window at the parking lot. I crank the window open a few inches so I can hear the sound of the surf and a guy has some rap-inflected R&B, possibly Frank Ocean, coming from his car down below, which is weird given my view. I then close the window and sit on my bed. We never should have gone swimming. We should have just gone back to sleep and then gotten up late and ordered room-service omelets, with the sprig of rosemary on the plate, and the orange slice, twisted into a mobius-shaped bowtie symbolizing forever, symbolizing us, and if we had done that, if we had stayed in and ordered the omelets, everything would be fine. I think again of calling her to, what, to say what? I love you? I don’t even know if I do. To apologize? For what? Would she even listen? Instead I just compose a note, a long SMS, and stare at it, and recompose it, a few times, making it longer and then shorter, much shorter, adding and subtracting the requisite layers of irony, finally landing on utter neutrality, utter pictographic simplicity tinged with a subtext of bemusement if not helplessness, and after several minutes of consternation I finally hit send:
?
3.23
The next morning I check out early and take a taxi to LAX. There won’t be a seat in first back to New York for a few hours and so I wait in the private lounge till I can get one. I figure I might as well get it over with so I call Barry back in the office. His secretary puts him through.
“Barry, are you firing me?” I ask him outright.
“Why the fuck would I do that? Are you out of your mind?” he says.
“I’m just getting a vibe,” I say, “that’s all. And if you are, I want you to know, it’s exactly what I would do to me if I were you.”
“You’re nuts,” he says. “When you coming back?” I tell him I’m on the next flight but it won’t get me into JFK until after six so he’ll be way up the Saw Mill by that time. Then I tell him how great these spots are going to turn out, how the director really juiced the concept, trying to make it sound like I’m doing my job. He doesn’t seem to care.
“And I got to ask you about Dr. Look,” I say. “Apparently he doesn’t exist.”
“Come see me first thing tomorrow,” is all he says and then hangs up.
I work on the screenplay while I wait in the lounge. The beginning is completely wrong and so I start to write it again. But the flight boards a little early and, although we leave the gate a few minutes late due to some issue with the onboard video system, they manage to make up the time heading east and we land at JFK on time. I have about one tenth of a glass of the worst pinot grigio I have ever tasted in my life and the ricotta-filled pasta shells are equally revolting, but the ice cream is OK. At the baggage claim a heavyset Syrian man named Aki is waiting for me with my name written twice in dry-erase marker on a white plastic board: NYE, Nye. The Syrian drives me home listening to Fox News the whole way, and when I get home, for a millisecond I think that I’m in the wrong apartment.
The next morning I go to the office, that air-conditioned slaughterhouse of the soul, as it has been called, around 8 AM, at least an hour and a half earlier than usual. I go into my space and close the door. No phone calls or e-mail. On a notepad I write down the names of the people I have fired over the last two years so I can try to rectify the nightmare, or at least apologize to them in some way; can you do that on Facebook? It comes to forty-two. For a second I consider setting up a Kickstarter to raise money to give back to the ones I wronged, this would probably get covered by the Times and thereby help my screenwriting presence. Then I call HR at her desk and on her cell and she doesn’t respond. I look out my office and see that my assistant isn’t in yet; this is odd, she drops her kid off and is here by 8:30 most mornings, long before I am. Then I stare out the window at a guy on Tenth Avenue setting up his kebab cart. At around ten I call Barry’s line and tell his person, Agnes, that I want to see him ASAP. She says she was about to call me because, what a coincidence, Barry wants to set up a meeting with me, at 10:30, am I available? Hmm, um, let me look, yes, I say, and she hangs up. I fold and pocket the list of names I wrote up, to show Barry what I’ve been going through, and then I kill some time on the internet and go to the bathroom; now that my permanent chub has somewhat subsided I can pee at a urinal again, yay. Then I go to the elevators and mumble good morning to one of the creatives from the pharma department whose name I never bothered to learn, and then I say I’m really sorry I have jet lag, what’s your name again? “And how’s everything with you?” he asks politely. “This place is fucked,” I say. “Seriously. If anything comes along that looks halfway decent, take it.” Then I ride up to Barry’s floor and walk toward his office, left down the middle hallway and left again toward the corner. When I get there I know immediately how this is going to go because I see HR Lady stepping into Barry’s lair and closing the door; she didn’t see me arrive so for the next I’m guessing twenty seconds I have the upper hand.
Agnes looks up at me and grimaces, says that Barry just took a call from Manchester and he should be ready for me in half a minute. I lean back against a credenza and consider my options. I don’t like waiting for Barry and there’s really no reason I have to go through with this, to have him pull out the photo of me and Sabi naked on the beach, the one the jogger took, and tell me my behavior is unfit for someone of my station, or this venerable firm. I turn to Agnes.
“Give Barry a message for me,” I say. “Tell him to go fuck himself.” And then I turn around and head toward the elevators. When I get there, one of them opens, and off step Damon and Terry, and they head toward Barry’s office; that’s when I realize I’m doing this all wrong. I need to let it happen, just as it happened to the rest of them. So I head back, Agnes sees me as Damon and Terry get there, and Barry’s door opens. HR is standing there, and I go toward her.
“Hi Eric,” she says. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” I say, and go inside. Barry is sitting behind his desk, I take my seat on his couch and notice that the Smoke Eater is off.
“What’s up?” I say. “How’s everybody this morning?”
There’s an uncomfortable pause and then Barry coughs and says, “We’re good, Eric, how are you?”
“I’m here,” I say. “So let’s do it.” I turn to HR Lady, Helen, and look at her one last time. Her eyes are not glistening. But she seems sadder than I’ve ever seen her before.
“I’m very sorry to say this, Eric,” she says, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”
Three minutes later I am heading down Tenth Avenue toward my Chase branch, a free man. I take out my phone thinking that I will be able to enjoy it for probably another minute or two before they shut it down. I call Seth and tell him I will meet him at Balthazar for breakfast and that he should drive there and park in a decent lot. “Don’t worry, I’ll pay for the parking,” I tell him. He’s pissed that I woke him up; in truth he should be pissed about a lot of things, including the shitty way that I treat him in general, all the time, but chiefly he should be pissed at his father for fucking up the family financials so badly, raising Dr. Namaste in a cloud of abject privilege and then day-trading the entire fortune away in less than a year. I go to my bank and then an hour later Seth and I are having café au lait and Bellinis and eggs Benedict together and I am handing the unfortunate shithead an envelope filled with twenty-five one-thousand-dollar bills.
“Twenty-five?” he says. I tell him I just quit my job, it’s the best I can do. He thinks about it. I know what’s going through his head, that since I quit I’m little or no use in terms of getting him into the advertising business, for
the time being at least, so why should he let me screw him on the price of a used Range Rover? On the other hand, this was twenty-five large that he would not have to tell his parents about for quite a while, twenty-five grand worth of artisanal bespoke curated locally sourced cage-free goat cheeses delivered to his shithole apartment, twenty-five grand that would forestall the inevitable realization that he had ruined his life, or his parents had ruined his life, and there was nothing he could do about it now but enjoy the ride. He sighs and looks away and then he tosses his café au lait down a little too hard and the sound makes the girl at the next table turn around and look at us.
“No fucking way,” Seth says to me. “We agreed to thirty.”
“Oh come on, man,” I say to him, “do your brother a solid. I need a vehicle, dude. I need some freedom. I was just sacked.”
“I thought you said you quit?”
“They were about to sack me so I quit in protest,” I answer.
“In protest to what? Your own assholiness?” he says. It’s a pretty funny line but I don’t laugh. “And why do you need a vehicle if you don’t even have a job?” I tell him that not having a job means I can drive around and see shit and he can come with me, we’ll go to Niagara Falls or something.
“You’re such a fucking liar, Eric, you know that?” he says. “You would never go to Niagara Falls and if you did you wouldn’t bring me, you’d bring some twenty-two-year-old barista or something.” Here he goes, I now know this is going to be his gusher; what took him so long? “In fact you’re a fucking pathological liar,” he says. “You need help. You talk this whole radical Occupy the Man line of bullshit but really you’re the fucking enemy, Jack, you’re the one perpetuating the whole systemic materialist ideology you pretend to despise.”
“Duh,” I say. “And that’s why I quit. And furthermore,” I go on, “I know everything you’re about to say about me now, because you bore me off my ass, Seth, you make me want to blow you I’m so bored.” Then I laugh and mock punch him in the shoulder; I’m starting to like him for once. But Seth will not be quieted. He goes on for another five minutes about all the ways in which I am a shit human being with me agreeing wholeheartedly with him and then suddenly he stops and begins to tear up—to cry, right there at Balthazar during the late-breakfast rush. He’s shuddering with big spasms of anger and humiliation and I suppose regret because nothing, nothing that I say, not even when I put a hand on his trembling arm as a sign of emotional support, can quell the sobs. Deep, deep from the bottom of his soul the man-boy Seth spews out his slobbering gasps. I toss a hundy on the table and grab him by the arm. “Come on you fucking idiot,” I say to him and pull him out onto the street.
Once we’re standing on Spring I grab him by the shoulders and mock shake him. “Snap out of it, man,” I say, “wake up.” He says he doesn’t even know what he’s doing, he’s been seriously depressed for weeks, his life is so meaningless, ever since his girlfriend left him, etc., etc.
“But I thought you left her?” I say.
“Technically I did,” he blubbers. “Technically in the sense that I was the one who said the words ‘I’m breaking up with you’ but that was because I thought she was about to leave me for this other guy and I couldn’t bear it, only it turned out she wasn’t even into him but by the time I found out it was too late. I’m a coward and I’m a loser and I have no courage, and without her I’m nothing, the only thing I had was my car and the hope you would get me a job and now I don’t even have my car and you just got fired. Fuck!”
“Come on,” I say, “let’s get a drink.”
We walk a block down the street and go into the Shark Bar. There are always people here, even at 11 AM so we don’t feel too pathetic. We sit at the bar. I look around and am reminded of the story of the arrest of the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, when they confronted him with the horror of his crimes, his response was to be surprised that anyone would care. “There are so many people!” he said. “Look!”
Seth and I start with beer, figuring we’ll have a couple of late-morning pints, no harm in that, and then go sleep it off, but the beers lead to the whiskies, and we just keep going. By five o’clock in the afternoon Seth has told me everything about his sad life and he is begging me to pay twenty thousand dollars for the car, refuses to accept more because he feels guilty for saying all those terrible things about me.
“What right do I have to criticize you, of all people, you’re a functional human being,” he says, “you’re at the top of your game!” Then he confesses that he wrote my Wikipedia bio based on stuff I had drunkenly told him over the years. I laugh and say the whole thing was no big deal, in fact it was pretty funny, and if I still had a job I would hire him on the spot. Then we cook up a plan for him to hack the Wiki entries for all the top creative directors in New York; he’ll make a video of it with his phone and post it to AdRanter and the job offers will come flying in.
Then he starts in again on the depression thing, that maybe he should check himself into a hospital, it’s really bad, he doesn’t know what to do, and he’s massaging the envelope in his jacket pocket that has his money minus the $5K I lightened from it, which I will now need to pay my rent.
“Don’t go to the hospital,” I tell him. “They don’t know how to help anyone.” I then tell him about my two-dot-five days at UCLA but he’s not paying attention. I tell him about the times my mother was in and out for her various mental conditions and look where it got her. He’s thinking faraway thoughts.
“You know how much brown I could score with this right now?” he says, fingering the envelope. Brown is his word for heroin, even though real brown hasn’t been available in New York for a decade now, I read that in Fader once.
“No, how much?” I ask him as if I care. He tells me he knows where he could get enough of the stuff that, once he cuts it with a basic store-bought laxative, he could sell it on the street for ten times as much.
“That’s nearly a quarter mil,” he says. “That makes a pretty sizable down payment on a sweet place in the ’wick, set myself up, do my art, all kinds of shit, dog,” he says.
“Dog!” I say in solidarity. “You’re drunk.”
“Dog!” he says again in a louder voice. “So what? It’s a killer idea.”
He’s really getting worked up about this business plan of his. I’m guessing that he hit bottom these past few hours and will be from now on moving back into a manic phase. I’ve seen this pattern with him several times before. He’s way more fun when manic, if you catch him at the right time, but it doesn’t last long, so you have to just go with it.
“I don’t think you should do it,” I say. “I think you should stop doing drugs.” He just laughs, thinking I’m kidding him. So I half quote one of the speeches from The Fountainhead, about human initiative, about success and the meaning of positive action, about the winner taking all, about going for it no matter what; soon I’m spouting any lame sports-type tagline I can think of just to make him realize he shouldn’t be deciding anything right now. He reaches into his back pocket and takes the title to the Range Rover and signs the back of it.
“What should I say the sale price is?” he asks. I tell him to make it for fifteen; any less might raise a red flag with the tax people. He writes in $15,000 and hands it to me. Then he digs in his pocket and finds the parking garage ticket. We stumble out of the bar and walk a few blocks over to Mott Street to the concrete structure where Seth had stowed the vehicle. I pay the attendant and he hands me the key fob like it’s mine, which now it is. The car is parked not far off, the way they always park the nicer cars on the ground floor, and I get behind the wheel and we tear out into the New York night.
I’m far too drunk to drive but we’re not in an obedient mood, neither of us. Getting fired always is, for a time, a prudence minimizer.
We head south on the Bowery and then Seth directs me east to a place down near the PJs below the Williamsburg Bridge, off Ridge Street. This entails making a left turn on
red and I negotiate it without a problem. Yogi Boy says the big-time deals on the LES are all brokered out of a dry cleaner’s called El Jaguar.
“How do you know this shit?” I ask him and he says that anybody who ever bought drugs in New York knows Jaguar Dry Cleaners, it’s legend.
“You can find a reference to it in like a hundred songs, from the Velvets to Snoop to the Strokes,” he says. His energy is good now, he’s up. Then he tries to sing a line from some track, it could be one of those bands he likes, Bum Bum Dudes or Illiteracy Society, I don’t know.
“May the jaguar run / he goes on the ridge / May the jaguar run / down to the bridge.” I don’t know the song but the lyrics are suitably faux-secretive, the imparting of obscure drug-related insider knowledge one of the chief purposes of popular music throughout the ages. I am exhausted just thinking about all the young people in this city, their collective nonstop effort to be “hip,” which is to say, to conform, to fit in, to Obey; all definitions in time come to mean their opposite. Why are people like this? Is it fear? Of what? Death? When Seth finishes singing we are pulling up in front of the store. He pats the envelope in his pocket and opens the passenger-side door; I search for the right line.
“I don’t think this is a good idea,” I say.
“I know,” he says back to me. He hesitates for a moment before stepping out onto the curb and looking back at me behind the wheel. And then he turns and heads toward the storefront.
“Sethji,” I call out. “Yo.”
He turns back and looks at me, one hand on the door, the other gripping his cash. He’s opened it about two inches and I can tell he doesn’t really want to go inside, he’s having second thoughts, his forearm is trembling almost imperceptibly. “What?” he says.
“I was only kidding,” I am saying to him as seriously as I can.
“About what?”
“Dog, seriously,” I go. “Don’t do this.”
