The Unprofessionals

by Julie Hecht

  “The wax is too hot,” I said to the electrologist.

  “It has to be hot or it won’t work,” she said, but I knew better, having had lukewarm wax applied to my legs in a waxing room in Nantucket. The waxer in the better room blew on the waxing spatula before applying the potion behind the knees and ankles, saying, “How’s that, is that good?” over and over in an Irish accent reminiscent of a reading of Ulysses or Under Milk Wood. “There now, that’s not anything, is it? We’ll be done right away,” she said a few times.

  Near my hometown, a hundred miles from New York City, with the wooded yard outside the waxing room where howling beasts were left outside in the cold, I had to save the main complaint for the torture closer at hand, or foot, and put a stop to the burning wax. But the electrologist continued. She had once before insisted that I dip my hand into a bowl of boiling paraffin wax and when I said, “Too hot,” she dipped her hand right into the bowl and said, “It has to be hot.”

  In a subsequent leg waxing trial she asked, “How’s the wax?” and when I said, “Better,” she admitted it was a different kind of wax. The other kind had to be melted at a higher temperature, but the “beauty-supply company” ran out of the one that melted at the lower temperature. Probably a falsification of the facts by the wax company, and in an attempt to save money an inferior wax had been supplied.

  I smelled a cheap-beauty-parlor-perfumed lotion, the kind from the five-and-tens of my childhood, and I asked, “What’s that perfume smell?”

  “It’s just the aloe vera,” she said, pronouncing “the” as in the song title “De Boll Weevil.”

  Then I asked to see it. It was a bright-green plastic bottle of matching green lotion. I knew aloe vera gel to be pure and clear as an icicle. I’d had many experiences with the gel, in addition to the time in Nantucket when my yoga instructor came by with a bottle of aloe vera gel and asked me to put some on her shoulder blades, which she’d accidentally gotten sunburnt.

  I showed her my tube of aloe vera, Lily of the Desert. The label read “99% pure aloe vera.”

  She read aloud the label of her own bottle. “‘Aubrey Organics, one hundred percent aloe vera gel.’ I’ll always go for that extra one percent,” she added, falling forward onto the kitchen table to show the burnt area. She fell onto the table in an exhausted way, acting like Thelma Ritter lying on a bed in an old crime movie when she says to a gangster what I always recalled as, “Go ahead, shoot me. I’m so tired I don’t care.”

  The yoga teacher had never lifted one weight in her life, and she had perfect muscle tone. “Do you walk on your hands three hours a day?” she asked when I commented on her shoulder muscles. The discussion ended in a moment of silent tact.

  For three years we’d been at the beginner stage. I’d never thought about walking on my hands, though I was hoping to stand on my head someday, even though I couldn’t get it out of my mind that in fifth grade a classmate liked to use this expression: “What do you want me to do, stand on my head and spit nickels?”

  When my parents found out about that, in addition to some other things said by the students, our whole family moved to a new town far away and I was transferred to a different school.

  In the new town, still in a public school—my parents didn’t get the big picture, paying little attention to my education and/or social acquaintances—I heard more crude talk from a sixth-grade classmate who liked to quote her family’s housekeeper.

  While we were all in love with Elvis Presley, we heard the creepy and freaky Jerry Lee Lewis in the song “Great Balls of Fire.” The African-American housekeeper, known then as a live-in maid, had said the sentence to my friends explaining the title.

  Since the woman looked like James Brown, I didn’t take it seriously, or I took it too seriously and had to dismiss it as the ravings of a jazzed-up, be-bop, oppressed servant. In those days the housekeepers had things like hidden bottles of bourbon in a cabinet, or a son in prison. We knew this from hanging out with them in the kitchen, the way the girl Frankie did in the book The Member of the Wedding.

  Given the many hours of unsupervised time, without pressure to prepare to attend Smith or Radcliffe, I didn’t understand that those in our generation were ever going to grow up. I felt childhood to be a permanent situation for us. During this period of laissez-faire parental guidance, two girls left on their own ate an entire box of Oreos, unaware that the white part included lard as an ingredient.

  TO TOP off the evening, after the drugstore visit, I drove to the all-night supermarket. I was afraid I’d encounter a new machine inside, a black indoor-floor-waxing truck covered with splashed dirt and wax. The last time I was there the machine, loud as a bomb, followed me everywhere. I was the only customer.

  Outside in the parking lot, I heard an even louder machine. It was a parking-lot-cleaning truck driven in a fast and reckless way in my direction. The drunk or drugged driver was apparently trying to run down anyone he saw.

  The organic romaine lettuce area was hard to get to, with a filthy broom always leaning up against the case in front of the organic produce corner. Why was it there? “Let’s store the broom here,” some employee must have said at an on-location personnel meeting.

  Because upon entering the supermarket’s cigarette-butt-filled doorway, past overflowing square cement and concrete trash containers, there was a confrontation with the sweepings of gigantic brooms from each aisle, all collected together in front of the entranceway, where the department of bloomed-out and dying flowers had been installed. Dust, dirt, plastic wrappers, soda cans, cellophane, and an everlasting plastic bag on the floor—that was the nighttime greeting.

  THE SURPRISE PHONE CALL

  WHEN I RETURNED home from this last activity I had squeezed into the busy evening, I was surprised to see on the caller ID that there was a phone call from my twenty-one-year-old friend the recovering heroin addict. The phone number was from his parents’ house in California.

  I hadn’t heard from him for weeks or months. I’d been informed of the addiction only the summer before. After that I couldn’t keep track of what he was doing, where he was—in rehab or out, going to classes at the university, working at some job—to use a word I never used but heard in an A&E biography of Mackenzie Phillips during her drug-addiction years, the last time she went to rehab, her sister, or half sister, said, “…Okay, whatever.”

  With this friend of mine, this boy, I had learned to figure: whatever. Whenever he called me, I’d drop everything to talk to him. Not in a social-worker mode, but as a lucky audience for anything he had to say. And maybe it could do him some good, too, now that he was isolated from his addict friends and other friends. He was a lost soul.

  I hadn’t seen him since his first year of college, four years earlier, and I pictured him as that boy. I didn’t imagine him as an addict, since no one had told me that he looked like one. He was living with his parents in their house in Beverly Hills as part of his recovery. During the phone calls of the weeks and months before this, he had complained that he was a prisoner, that they were suspicious of everything he did and said.

  I knew his parents. His father was the world-renowned reproductive surgeon Dr. Arnold Loquesto. I’d met the boy ten years before, when I traveled around New England, where they lived at the time, to photograph the eccentric surgeon at his hospital and at home as he ran from place to place shouting out funny sentences.

  I couldn't believe my good fortune that the entertaining boy, now known as a young adult, was calling me to talk. To what did I owe this luck? I’d misplaced the collection of fortune-cookie inserts I’d saved in an old wooden bowl after discarding the cookies, so I was in the dark.

  I found these inserts so entertaining that I saved them and tried to get more to read and add to the bowl. I asked a waiter in a Chinese restaurant where I could get the fortunes without the cookies, but he didn’t understand the question. He and his coworker laughed and said, “Chinatown.” Whatever I was asking about fortune cookies, the an
swer would be “Chinatown.”

  I knew I had to get used to people’s inability to understand English here in America. But so far I was at the level of John Cleese screaming at the waiter in Fawlty Towers. I knew that Americans aren’t permitted the intolerance the English claim as their historical right, and the book Anger Kills hadn’t helped me yet. I thought fondly of the era during which the question “Do you understand English?” was used as an angry reply in disputes, and wasn’t needed for its literal meaning.

  THAT NIGHT of the phone call from out of nowhere, he had called to tell me about something that had happened at his job. I’d accepted the fact that he had a crummy job as part of the road to recovery. I didn’t know what the Hollywood job market was for recovering drug addicts.

  The boy had a job at a company where horror movies were remade. A Hollywood idea—make movies over and ruin whatever was good about them—but we didn’t get into that. It was understood. First came the description of the overweight upper-middle-aged office workers. However low their jobs were, his job was lower. He didn’t really have a job other than waiting around for them to think of something for him to do.

  I interrupted to ask if he’d read the book Something Happened, because of its description of office life. I forgot that he’d never read any book I’d recommended, even A Mother’s Kisses.

  He had led me to believe that his mother was hovering over him all the time and watching his every move for no reason. He didn’t mention that he was still a heroin addict and that she was watching for signs of that. When I spoke to her she didn’t mention it either.

  The boy told me that in his job he tried to look busy with any task so that no one would notice him and give him something worse to do. He didn’t like being interrupted when I told him about the book. He was driven to continue the line of the story. When I looked back on this, I thought that maybe he was actually doing a line of coke as he talked.

  The workers in the office were interested in candy, he said, and a lot of candy eating went on there. One woman loved the candies Jolly Ranchers.

  “Do you know them?” he asked me.

  “I’ve seen them,” I said.

  Later, on an episode of The Larry Sanders Show, I heard Larry’s angry joke writer refer to this candy as a kind his friends would search out after smoking dope. If only I’d had the cable channel back when Larry Sanders was on TV the first round, I would have had this important clue. The boy had made a tape of a few episodes and sent it to me, but when I learned an additional, large VCR-shaped box would be necessary for transmission, that was the end of the desire to get the cable channel.

  I could have had some understanding of lying and cheating and manipulation of people in show business and the entire business world, and this would have helped me in all dealings, since now almost everything in the world is business, other than bird-watching, and this knowledge is a necessity for all transactions.

  “Well, she likes the lemon flavor the best, and she buys packs and packs to get the lemons,” he said. “Kind of strange, right?”

  “Kind of sad,” I said as I envisioned the scene.

  They threw him old scripts to read; he said they sent him on errands “to deliver headphones, to buy wire in Pasadena.” When he said “buy wire in Pasadena” that sounded bad. I could imagine him stopping off to buy drugs when he was out in the wire area of town. It just sounded like it: “buy wire in Pasadena.” It had a hard, cruel, and bleak sound.

  I knew nothing about Pasadena. I thought I remembered hearing it mentioned in some movies from the 1940s—the one where Barbara Stanwyck is waiting in bed on the phone trying to prevent her murder by a hired killer, or the other one, D.O.A., where Edmond O’Brien ingests a poisonous, radioactive drug that dooms him to twenty-four hours of life, during which he tracks down the mystery of the accidental poisoning, then drops dead in the D.A.’s office or somewhere like that—an office with a wooden door with a glass top panel with names painted on the glass.

  Or the other one—Double Indemnity—with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, or in the movie version of I Married a Dead Man, where two women meet on a train, one is an unwed mother-to-be, the other a happy new bride on the way to meet her husband’s aristocratic, wealthy family for the first time. The unwed one—as usual, Barbara Stanwyck—tries on the ring of the lucky wedded one; the train crashes, the newlyweds are killed, Barbara survives with the ring still on her finger and, while unconscious, is presumed by the family to be the new daughter-in-law and is taken in by the mother-in-law, an actress in the style of Ethel Barrymore. She thinks the baby is her new grandchild. Barbara goes along with it.

  If Barbara Stanwyck must be watched, I preferred Christmas in Connecticut. There, at least, she’s in an unrealistically wholesome setup precursing Martha Stewart. That’s what I liked best.

  But the boy’s life was making me think along the path of crime. All these movies came to my mind when he said “Pasadena,” and all the cowboy movies I’d turned off when trying to find something on TV in childhood. I thought I’d heard the name “Pasadena,” though I might have been wrong and didn’t have the will to go out and rent all of them to check. And also I didn’t like touching those rented videos that have been handled by others. I’d heard David Letterman say the same thing, so I figured it must be okay. As all these things flicked around my brain, the boy continued with his story.

  I asked whether the office workers knew how smart he was. Maybe, he said. It wasn’t foremost in their minds. “They don’t have minds as you and I know the mind to be,” he said.

  Did they know what he was doing there? They didn’t care. They cared about the candies and the lunches. The best part of his job was taking the lunch orders. At least that provided interesting material and conversation. Later I thought the real reason might have been that he got out of the office and had the chance to buy some drugs.

  He continued on. One day it was decided that there would be a sidewalk sale of all the old costumes in the warehouse. But they weren’t real costumes; they were polyester garments from the seventies, like thin purple and orange velvet suits with bell-bottom trousers. Also, there weren’t any sidewalks.

  “It’s ridiculous!” he said. “No one lives near us! No one works near us! It’s an abandoned lot with a warehouse over some railroad tracks. There’s a bad supermarket down the road and someone opened an office-supply store near it, thinking customers from the market would go get office supplies, but no one went to the market, so there was no one to go to the office store.”

  Still, they gave him the job of distributing flyers for the costume sale. They told him to leave some at the supermarket.

  “I told them no one goes in there,” he said. “They said, ‘Do it anyway.’”

  At the market, he wasn’t allowed to leave many flyers. “They know they have no customers,” he said.

  I pictured the worst dilapidated markets in vacant neighborhoods I’d gone by in my past. I thought of Key Food stores I’d seen from highways. I felt worse for the boy with this new picture in mind—a square, low, white concrete block with giant red prices on white paper signs in the windows advertising kinds of meat.

  “Then they told me, ‘Go put them under windshield wipers of whatever cars that are parked.’ Don’t you think that this is beneath my skills, meager and unhoned as they may be?” he said.

  “Way beneath,” I said. I wondered whether to interject something about a job I’d had when I was his age. I knew that he didn’t want to be interrupted again, but I thought it might help him. In an art gallery where I’d worked as an assistant, I was given the assignment, when the art business was slow, of taking a small gray eraser and erasing the thick white fabric that had been put up as a wall covering instead of wallpaper or paint.

  “How big was the eraser?” he asked.

  “One inch square.”

  “How big was the gallery?”

  “A great big room,” I said.

  “But at least it was on Madison
Avenue, I bet,” he said.

  “Yes, but the job was erasing the walls. And I never questioned it.”

  “You thought it was a good job?” he said.

  “No, but I didn’t think it was beneath my abilities. The word ‘self-esteem’ wasn’t bandied about at the time.”

  “My theory is that by the time you’re twenty, if you have low self-esteem, you can never get over it,” he said with sudden conviction. “I’ve seen examples of it time and again.”

  It was a blow to me to hear that. I knew he was right. I must have known it all along, but I needed him to point it out. It was the most obvious thing. I had none—I knew that—but now I understood that I would never get any.

  Once, when I described my last attempt at psychotherapy, with an insane psychiatrist, the boy listened, thought for a moment, and said: “He’s a crazy man. And you’re like a battered woman.”

  It was a perfect truth. “You’re right,” I said.

  “You make excuses for him and keep going back for more,” the boy said as a further deeper truth.

  I understood in that instant how I had lost my remaining sliver of soul. I’d seen some news shows about battered women, how they admired the batterers, how they gave up their selves to these batterers. I was just like them.

  “When did you realize that wall erasure was a demeaning task, finally?” he asked.

  “Never. My closest friend came by to visit. She saw me standing at the wall and erasing it with the tiny eraser. She had to tell me. That night she called and said, ‘You have to assert some rights. It’s just common sense that you shouldn’t be standing there and erasing the walls.’”