I mentioned this to Jane over dinner one night, and she tried to tell me that, when you got down to it, most jobs were useless. “What about the people who work for companies that make foot deodorant or those magnets that look like sandwiches and Oreo cookies? No one really needs that stuff. Those people’s jobs aren’t important.”
“Yeah, but people buy those things. People want those things.”
“People want computer things, too.”
“But I don’t even make computer things. I don’t design, produce, market, or sell—”
“There are people with jobs like yours in every company.”
“That doesn’t make it okay.”
She looked at me. “What do you want to do? Go to Africa and feed starving children? I don’t think you’re the type.”
“I’m not saying that—”
“What are you saying, then?”
I let it drop. I could not seem to articulate what I was trying to say. I felt useless and unimportant—guilty, I suppose, for taking home a paycheck when I wasn’t actually doing or accomplishing anything. It was a strange feeling, and not one I could easily explain to Jane, but it discomfited me and I was not able to ignore it.
Although I did not like my job, I did not hate it enough to quit. In the back of my mind was the idea that this was temporary, something to tide me over until I found the position I really wanted. I told myself this was a transitional phase between school and my real occupation.
But I had no idea what my “real” occupation would be.
One thing I quickly learned was that, in a major corporation, as much time is spent trying to look busy as is spent actually working. The week’s worth of assignments I was given each Monday I could have easily completed by Wednesday, but although workers in movies and on TV eagerly complete their assignments in record time and then ask for more work, impressing those higher up on the corporate ladder and elevating themselves through the ranks, it was made clear to me early on that such initiative in real life was not only not encouraged, it was frowned upon. The people surrounding me in the company hierarchy had asses to protect. They had, over the years, worked out what was for them a comfortable ratio of work to nonwork, and if I suddenly started cranking out documentation, it would throw off the productivity curve in the company’s labor distribution study. It would make them look bad. It would make my supervisor look bad; it would make his supervisor look bad. What I was expected to do was equal or improve very slightly upon the output of my predecessor. Period. I was supposed to fit into the preexisting niche created for me and conform to its boundaries. The Peter Principle in action.
Which meant that I had a lot of time to kill.
I learned quickly to follow the lead of those around me, and I discovered many ways to simulate hard work. When Stewart or Banks stopped by the office to check on my progress, there were paper shufflings I could perform, desk straightenings I could do, drawers I could rifle through. I don’t know if Derek ever noticed my little act, but if he did, he didn’t say anything. I suspected that he did the same thing himself, since he too seemed to suddenly become a lot busier when the supervisor or department head came into the office.
I missed going to school, and I seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’d had fun in college, and though it had been less than half a year since I graduated, emotionally those days seemed a million miles away. I found that I missed being with people my own age, missed just doing nothing and hanging out. I remembered the time I went with Craig Miller to the Erogenous Zone, an “adult” toy store in a seedy mini-mall close to campus. We’d been carpooling at the time, and Craig suggested that we stop by the shop. I’d never been there, was kind of curious and said okay, and we pulled into the small L-shaped parking lot. The second we walked into the store, ringing the small bell above the door, all three cashiers and several customers turned to look at us. “Craig!” they called out in unison. It reminded me of the TV show Cheers , when the patrons of the bar would all cry, “Norm!”, and I couldn’t help laughing. Craig grinned at me sheepishly, and I remembered thinking, in the words of the song, how nice it was to go to a place where everybody knew your name.
At Automated Interface, no one knew my name.
I was still not sure why I’d been hired, particularly since both Stewart and Banks seemed to despise me. Was I some sort of quota hiree? Did I meet some type of criteria or fit into the right age or ethnic group? I had no idea. I only knew that if the hiring had been up to Banks or Stewart, I would not have gotten the job.
I seldom saw Ted Banks, but when I did, when he took his occasional tours of the department, he was rude to me and unnecessarily abrasive. Unprovoked, he made derogatory comments about my hair, my ties, my posture, anything he could think of. I had no idea why he did this, but I tried to ignore it and play it off.
Ron Stewart was a little harder to ignore. He was not as obvious or crude in his dislike as Banks; he was even polite to me in a superficial way, but there was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way. When he spoke, it was always with a slight trace of condescension. His words were pleasant enough, but they were delivered in a manner that made it clear he felt far superior to me in intellect and position and was doing me a great favor by talking to me at all.
The annoying thing was that, when talking to him, I couldn’t help feeling that he was superior to me, that he was more intelligent, more interesting, more sophisticated, more everything. The words we spoke were the friendly words of equals, but the underlying attitudes that subtly shaped the subtexts of our conversations told a different story, and I found myself behaving in a slightly subservient manner, playing the deferential flunky to his smug overseer, and though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t help it.
I wondered if I was being paranoid. Maybe Banks and Stewart treated everyone that way.
No. Banks joked with the programmers, was courteous to the secretary and the steno women. Stewart was friendly to all of the other people under him. He even indulged in light conversation with Derek.
I was the sole recipient of their hostility.
It was about a month after I’d been hired that I heard Stewart and Banks talking in the hallway outside of my office. They were speaking loudly, just outside the door, as though they wanted to make sure I heard what they were saying.
I did.
Banks: “How’s he working out?”
“He’s not a team player.” Stewart. “I don’t know that he’ll ever get with the program.”
“We have no room here for slackers.”
My first review was not for another two months. They were just trying to provoke me. I knew that, but still I felt angry, and I could not let such accusations go unchallenged. I stood up, strode around my desk and into the hall. “For your information,” I said, confronting them, “I have completed every assignment given to me, and I have completed them all on time.”
Stewart looked at me mildly. “That’s nice, Jones.”
“I heard what you said about me—”
Banks smiled indulgently, all innocence. “We weren’t talking about you, Jones. What made you think we were talking about you?”
I looked at him.
“And why were you eavesdropping on our private conversation?”
I had no answer for that, no reply that would not sound like an overly defensive rationalization, so I said nothing but retreated, red-faced, back into the office. Derek, at his desk, was grinning.
“Serves you right,” he said.
Fuck you, I wanted to say. Eat shit and die.
But I ignored him and uncapped my pen and silently went back to work.
That night, when I got home, Jane said she wanted to go somewhere, do something. We had not really been out of the house since I’d gotten the job, and she was feeling cramped and restless and more than a little housebound. I was, too, to be honest, and we both decided that it would be nice to get out for an evening.
We went to Balboa, and we ate dinner at
the Crab Cooker, buying individual bowls of clam chowder and eating them on the bench outside the restaurant, watching and commenting upon the passersby. Afterward, we drove down the peninsula to the pier across from the Fun Zone, parking in the small lot next to the pier itself. This had always been “our” spot. The site of many a free date during our poorer days, this was where I had taken Jane on our first night out, and where we had later made out in the car. Throughout the first two years of our relationship, when we could not even afford to go to a movie, we’d come here: walking through the Fun Zone itself; window-shopping in the surf stores and T-shirt shops; watching the kids in the arcades; following the boats on the bay; walking out to Ruby’s, the hamburger stand at the end of the pier.
Afterward, after most of the people had gone and the stores had closed, we usually ended up making love in the backseat of my Buick.
It seemed strange going through the Fun Zone now. For the first time, we could afford to buy T-shirts if we wanted. We could afford to play arcade games. Out of habit, though, we did neither. We walked, hand in hand, through the crowds, passing a gang of leather-jacketed punks lounging against a faded fence near the broken Ferris wheel, past a booth offering nighttime harbor cruises. The air was filled with the smell of junk food—hamburgers, pizza, fries—and under that, more subtly, the fishy scent of the bay.
We went into a shell shop and Jane decided that she wanted a sand dollar, so I bought her one. After that, we took the ferry across the bay to Balboa Island, strolled for an hour around the island’s perimeter, bought frozen bananas from an ice cream stand, and took the ferry back.
Returning to the parking lot and the pier, we heard music and saw a crowd of well-heeled yuppies standing on the sidewalk in front of a small club. The neon sign on the wall between the open door and the darkened windows read STUDIO CAFE, and a makeshift sandwich marquee said NOW APPEARING: SANDY OWEN. We stopped for a moment to listen. The music was amazing—jazz saxophone, alternately bop hot and smooth cool, played over soaring, shimmering piano—and was unlike anything I had ever heard. The overall effect was mesmerizing, and we stood on the sidewalk listening for nearly ten minutes before the press of the crowd compelled us to move on.
Instead of walking back to the car, we continued up the sloping sidewalk to the pier. Ruby’s was little more than a square of light against the darkness of the ocean night, and the pier itself was lined with fishermen, dotted with other strolling couples. We passed a group of dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-clothed high school girls speaking in Spanish, an old man fly-tying on the worn wooden bench, and an overdressed couple leaning against the railing, making out. The music followed us, ebbing and flowing with the breeze, and for some reason it didn’t feel like we were in Orange County. It seemed as though we were in some other, better place, a movie version of Southern California, where the air was clean and the people were nice and everything was wonderful.
Ruby’s was doing a thriving business, a crowd of would-be diners clustered outside the small building, people eating at the chrome tables inside. Jane and I walked around to the rear of the restaurant and took a spot at the railing between two fishermen. It was black on the ocean, the night deeper and darker than it ever got inland, and I stared into the blackness, seeing only the lone bobbing light of a boat on the water. I put my arm around Jane and turned around to face the shore, leaning my back against the metal railing. Above Newport, the sky was orangish, a dome of illumination from the buildings and the cars that kept the real night away. The sound of the waves was muffled, a distant breaking.
In the movie Stardust Memories, there’s a scene in which Woody Allen is drinking his Sunday morning coffee and watching his lover, Charlotte Rampling, read the newspaper on the floor. The Louis Armstrong recording of “Stardust” is on the turntable, and Woody says in a voice over that at that moment the sights, the sounds, the smells, everything came together, everything dovetailed perfectly, and at that instant, for a few brief seconds, he was happy.
That was how I felt with Jane, on the pier.
Happy.
We stood there for a while, saying nothing, enjoying the night, enjoying just being together. Along the coast, we could see all the way to Laguna Beach.
“I’d like to live by the beach,” Jane said. “I love the sound of the water.”
“Which beach?”
“Laguna.”
I nodded. It was a pipe dream—there was no way in hell either of us would ever earn enough money to buy beachfront property in Southern California—but it was something to strive for.
Jane shivered, drawing closer to me.
“It’s getting cold,” I said, putting an arm around her. “You want to head back?”
She shook her head. “Let’s just stay here for a while. Like this.”
“Okay.” I pulled her closer, held her tight, and we stared into the night toward the twinkling lights of Laguna, beckoning to us across the water and the darkness.
FOUR
We were still living in our small apartment near UC Brea, but I wanted to move. We could afford it now, and I didn’t want to deal with the constant flood of drunken fraternity boys who paraded down our street on their way to or from this week’s keg party. But Jane said she wanted to stay. She liked our apartment, and it was convenient for her since it was close to both the campus and the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, where she worked.
“Besides,” she said, “what if you get laid off or something? We could still survive here. I could afford to pay the rent until you found another job.”
That was my opening. That was my chance. I should’ve told her then and there, I should’ve told her that I hated my job, that I’d made a mistake by taking it and wanted to quit and look for another position.
But I didn’t.
I didn’t say anything.
I don’t know why. It wasn’t like she would’ve jumped down my throat. She might have tried to argue me out of it, but ultimately she would’ve understood. I could have walked away clean, no harm, no foul, and everything would have been over and done with.
I couldn’t do it, though. I didn’t have any work-ethic phobia about quitting, I had no loyalty to some abstract ideal, but as much as I despised my job, as unqualified as I seemed to be for my position, as out of place as I felt among my coworkers, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was supposed to do this, that somehow, for some reason, I should be working at Automated Interface.
And I said nothing.
Jane’s mom dropped by to see us on Saturday morning, and I tried to pretend that I was busy when she came over, hiding in the bedroom and tinkering with a broken sewing machine that had been given to Jane by one of her friends. I had never much liked Jane’s mom, and she had never liked me. We hadn’t seen her since I’d gotten my job, although Jane had told her about it, and while she pretended to be happy that I had finally found full-time work, I could tell she was secretly annoyed that there would be one less thing she could criticize me for and harp on Jane about.
Georgia—or George as she liked to be called—was part of a dying breed, one of the last of the martini moms, those hard and hard-drinking women who had been so prevalent in the suburbia of my childhood, those gravel-voiced, raucous women who always seemed to adopt the nicknames of men: Jimmy, Gerry, Willie, Phil. It frightened me a little to know that this was Jane’s mother, because I always thought that, in regard to women, you could tell how a daughter was going to turn out by looking at the mother. And I had to admit that I did see some of George in Jane. But there was no hardness in Jane. She was softer, kinder, prettier than her mother, and the differences between the two were pronounced enough that I knew history would not repeat itself.
I made a lot of noise, working on the sewing machine, purposely trying to drown out words that I knew I would not want to hear, but in between the pounding and scraping, I could still hear George’s alcohol-ravaged voice from the kitchen: “…he’s still a nobody…” and “…gutless nothing…” and “…loser�
��”
I did not come out of the bedroom until she was gone.
“Mom’s real excited about your job,” Jane said, taking my hand.
I nodded. “Yeah. I heard.”
She looked into my eyes, smiled. “Well, I am.”
I kissed her. “That’s good enough for me.”
At work, Stewart’s smug condescension gave way to a more direct disdain. Something had changed. I didn’t know what it was, whether I’d done something to piss him off or whether it was something that had happened in his personal life, but his attitude toward me became markedly different. The surface politeness was gone, and now there was only undisguised hostility.
Instead of calling me into his office each Monday to give me the week’s assignments, Stewart began leaving work on my desk, attaching notes that explained what I was supposed to do. Often, the notes were incomplete or cryptically vague, and though I could usually figure out the gist of the assignment, sometimes I had no idea what he wanted at all.
One morning, I found a batch of ancient computer manuals piled on my desk. As far as I could tell, the manuals explained how to utilize a type of keyboard and terminal that Automated Interface did not possess. Stewart’s Post-It note said only: “Revise.”
I had no idea what I was supposed to revise, so I picked up the top manual and the note and carried them over to Stewart’s office. He was not there, but I could hear his voice and I found him talking with Albert Connor, one of the programmers, about an action movie he’d seen over the weekend. I stood, waiting. Connor kept looking at me, obviously trying to hint to Stewart that I wanted to see him, but Stewart continued to describe the movie, slowly and in detail, purposely ignoring my presence.
Finally, I cleared my throat. It was a soft sound, polite, tentative, quiet, but the supervisor whirled on me as if I had just yelled an obscenity. “Will you stop interrupting me when I’m talking? For Christ’s sake, can’t you see I’m busy?”
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