by Chris Kenry
It would have been different if I’d been living off of him while I went to school or worked on writing a book, or tried to start a business, but the sad, pathetic truth is that I lived my spongy existence with him for no reason other than that it was easy. I did it so that I could work on building the body of Adonis, so that I could lounge around reading magazine articles about the British royal family, so that I could dabble in the art of French cooking. I did it so that I could exist as a noun and not a verb. I was a beautiful body, a warehouse of trivial information, a hothouse flower.
After toasting Carey’s bright future, it was time for the two of us to open our gifts, which lacked an element of surprise, as we both knew they’d be nearly identical to the gifts we’d received on our previous birthday. From our father, we each got ten shares of stock in his company, and an inspirational book. The year before it had been Dale Carnegie’s How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job. This year it was Grow Up! ... Before It’s Too Late by Sister Melanie. As twins, we usually got something matching, and that year was no exception. Jay and Susan gave us each striped cotton sweaters that were supposed to look nautical but, in truth, looked more like prison garb. Twins were still a novelty to Susan, and she hadn’t realized how stupid it is to give them the same clothes, especially since we only vaguely resemble each other. Nevertheless, the sweaters were an improvement over Jay’s gift last year, which was nothing.
From my mother we each received a card that she’d made herself using coarse, fibrous paper and pressed wildflowers, containing a little coupon, which she’d also made herself, entitling the bearer to One free afternoon of shopping with Mom. In addition to this we each got a small box, which we opened to reveal an odd little video game.
“They are just the cutest little things,” she cried, pulling one of her own (what I’d earlier thought was her compact) from the folds of her clothing.
“Mr. Matsumoto got one for me from his cousin in Japan and I sent away for two more. They just arrived today. Don’t you just love when things work out like that?” She beamed, and then began explaining how they worked.
“It’s just like having a baby in your pocket. Once you activate it, you start the incubation process, and that lasts for about two days. While that’s going on you have to keep it with you all the time to keep it warm.”
“It measures your body temperature?” Carey asked.
“Well, no, but a little beep goes off and if you don’t respond, it lowers the temperature. If the temperature gets too low, it won’t hatch.”
“How interesting,” said Susan, moving in for a closer look.
“Now did you say you ordered this from Japan?” my father asked, his brain analyzing the market potential.
“Yes, from Mr. Matsumoto’s cousin. They’re flying off the shelves over there. He really had to pull some strings to get even one, let alone two,” she said proudly.
“Hmm,” said Carey, returning it to its box. “I don’t know that I’ll have time for this, but what about next Thursday for shopping?”
“Now, careful...” my mother said, looking nervously at Carey’s toy. “I just thought they might be like a pet for you two, since neither of you has one.”
“Yeah”—Carey snorted—“a crying, beeping, baby pet that never gives you a minute’s rest! If I’m going to invest that much time I think I’ll wait for the real thing.”
I myself was intrigued with the gift, but more by my mother’s intentions in giving it to me. I had never really had a pet, or anything to take care of.
“What happens when it hatches?” I asked.
“Well, then you have a little creature.”
She came over next to me and flipped hers open. She pushed a tiny button and a “little creature” materialized on the small screen. It was sort of a hybrid fowl-mammal and, like most things designed to appeal to Japanese girls, it was ridiculously cute, with large eyes and a small mouth that emitted a series of electronic chirps.
“That means it’s hungry,” she said. The whole family was hovering around us now, intent on the toy. She pressed a button, which quieted it, and a small bowl of food appeared on the screen. We watched it eat.
“There’s another beep when it needs water and a different one when it needs its little poopies cleaned up, and even one when it just wants some attention,” she said.
“What happens if you don’t take care of it?” Jay asked.
“Well, I know you lose points, but I don’t know what else. I couldn’t really understand what Mr. Matsumoto was saying, what with his English and all.”
I regarded the little thing thoughtfully.
“This might be good for me to have,” I said, and felt my father’s large hand pat me gently on the back.
5
WORK ETHICS
In three months a lot can and does happen. Three months is the duration of an entire season, it is the gestation period of the Chinese pug, and the amount of time necessary to navigate the Amazon River from beginning to end in a kayak. And yet, in the three months following my twenty-sixth birthday not much progress was made. Three months passed and I was still living with my parents, and not making enough money to change that fact. My creditors had quickly discovered my new address and felt free to call at any hour of the day or night with filthy threats and dire warnings of the harm that would come to my credit record if I failed to pay. My parents were annoyed by all the phone calls, and their suspicions were inevitably aroused. Suspicions that were confirmed one day when my father perused several of the monthly statements that I’d carelessly left lying on the kitchen counter. His reaction was a mixture of rage and disappointment, and for several days following the discovery he rarely spoke, just looked at me and shook his head.
It used to be that people feared sinning against God. Today we fear sinning against TRW or Equifax. The credit report has become the earthly book of Saint Peter, where a meticulous record of all past sins is collected. People still fear Judgment Day, but now it comes far more often than the biblical one, such as when you’re at a restaurant and your card comes back declined, or when you try to get a loan and they pull up a long sheet listing how you made a late payment on your Visa back in 1981.
You may be asking yourself why, if I came from such a well-off family, and had such a wealthy lover, did I even think of gambling with credit cards. I’ll try to explain, but like most stupid things, it doesn’t make sense.
In college I’d had one credit card. “Only for emergencies,” my father had said when he cosigned the form, and with that in mind I had rarely used it, charging a few nights out here, a few tanks of gas there, but not much else. The funny thing about credit cards is that they breed like rabbits, and soon I found I had a wallet full of little Visas and MasterCards and Discovers, and scarcely knew how they’d gotten there. I’d get such genial letters from the companies telling me, that because of my “sterling credit rating” I was now eligible for the gold card with a spending limit of five thousand dollars.
After college, when I lived with Paul, I rarely used my cards. At least in the beginning. We had a joint checking account, which he had packed with money, and I withdrew from that as I needed it. Paul was unaware that the job at the gym paid me no money—a fact that probably would have killed him faster than the light-rail, and one I hid by charging some things on my own. I withdrew about three hundred dollars a week from the joint account to cover living expenses. These “expenses” did not, of course, include rent, utilities, phone bills, car payments, insurance payments, or other mundane bills, which were all taken care of by Paul. No, the three hundred dollars was for shopping and movies and lunches with Andre—the real essentials.
This highly agreeable arrangement went on unquestioned for two years, but then for some reason Paul began to wonder why I never deposited a paycheck into the joint account. Usually I could pooh-pooh his suspicions away with a grin and some nocturnal gymnastics, but later, when he grew more insistent, I explained, with a straight face, that Fred at the gym w
as paying me cash under the table and so I didn’t want to deposit it and leave a paper trail for the IRS to follow. Paul would believe this, I thought, since he, like all rich people, was always seeking new ways to keep his money out of the hands of the tax collector. He gazed at me doubtfully through narrow slits of eyes and said in an icy voice that if that was the case then surely I could cut back on the amount I had been withdrawing, and make do with an allowance, (he actually used the word allowance) of one hundred dollars a week. It was then that I really started to get into trouble. Rather than go out and get a better job, one that actually paid, I kept the one I had and started paying for things with credit. I bought groceries, meals out, books, magazines, CDs, clothing, sent flowers, etc., etc., and the more I charged the more inclined the kind people at Citibank and American Express were to raise my limit, or to send me more cards. When one card would reach its limit, I would transfer the balance to a new card with a slightly lower interest rate and start charging again on the freshly vacated card. I had colossal minimum payments each month, but in a vivid example of the snake feeding on its own tail, I paid these minimum payments with cash advances from the cards themselves!
But why did I do it, you are probably still asking yourself. Greed? Compulsion? Of course they both come into it, but they were fueled more by a skewed desire to fit in. To keep up with the Joneses. I felt different from the people who surrounded me: my superachieving family, my successful lover, our wealthy circle of friends. My charging was an ill-thought-out attempt at legitimacy, an attempt to make myself appear to be an independent person, one who could not only take care of himself but one who could do it with style. I was an impostor! I surrounded myself with all the perks of success: the latest mountain bike, the best ski equipment, the multi-CD car stereo, and oh so many clothes, ignoring the little fact that I had no income.
Honestly, I thought of the whole thing as a small loan that I would surely be able to pay off as soon as I got the vague job (with the high salary) that was surely waiting somewhere off in the gray future. But, as I’ve said, my life with Paul was comfortable and safe and there was little to spur me on to find this job. I was tired of trying to decide what I’d do, so I gave up and decided not to decide, telling myself that the best decision would come to me once I stopped trying to force it.
Shortly after my birthday dinner, my brother’s fiancée offered to find me a temporary position through her firm. Not having any other immediate prospects I went down to her office bright and early one Monday morning, filled out the necessary paperwork, and took a typing and computer test. I then watched as the bemused test-giver looked over my results and my resume. I had neither work experience nor skills, and it was evident I’d be difficult to place. She repeatedly went into Susan’s office and closed the door, returning with a knit brow to dig up some more possibilities on the computer. Finally her face relaxed into a smile.
“I think we’ve got something.”
What we’d got was a job, ironically enough, for a credit card company, doing telephone authorizations. They had recently expanded their operations into Canada, and I got the job because I could speak French (although this was the kind of work they could have hired a French poodle to do). The work involved sitting at a cubicle desk wearing a telephone headset that would answer automatically whenever a call came in from a store or restaurant for an approval code. They have machines to do this now, but then it was still a job for human resources, of which I was one. When the line connected, I’d ask for a four-digit merchant number, which the other party would recite. I’d punch this into the computer and then ask for the card number and the amount of purchase, and then dutifully type them in. The computer would then make a decision (I imagined a tiny bespectacled woman, like Miss Jane from The Beverly Hillbillies, inside the computer poring over credit reports) either to grant an approval number, in which case I recited it to the merchant, or it would tell me in block capitals that the transaction was declined, and would sometimes even ask the merchant to confiscate the card. I felt terrible when either of these last two occurred, having been on the other end so often in the past three months. I envisioned the poor person waiting at the register, or sitting at the dining table, and the embarrassment they were about to be confronted with. But after typing in and spitting out numbers for eight hours, I became less sentimental and found that I barely noticed my responses. Approved, declined, whatever. It was monotonous, boring, mind-numbing work.
As for my coworkers, whom I’d see on breaks, or when they poked their heads around the cubicles during downtime, they were, for the most part, unskilled, uneducated women, late-middle-aged, most of whose husbands had either died or skipped town. There was a despair and a hopelessness about these women. None had ambition, none expected to improve their lot in life with their meager wages, so they pissed away the majority of it on the Home Shopping Network, or on the collector’s plates and dolls advertised in the Sunday supplements. It was my fate to be stuck in a cubicle between two such women.
On my right, I had the craft-obsessed Doris. Her husband had died of cirrhosis of the liver, but before that he managed to gamble away everything they had, which was why she now found herself, at the age of fifty-five, in the basement of an office building doing temp work. She was a large bleached blonde (that particularly false color of blond that is a silvery white) who teased her hair mercilessly into a cap of cotton candy and then attached a girlish bow to the back of it. Her eyebrows were of her own creation and resembled nothing so much as the antennae of a large butterfly. Her upper body, which I could see whenever we leaned back to speak to one another, was very petite, but the first time she got up to go on her break I was shocked to see that her hips ballooned out and her legs had the circumference and solidity of an elephant’s. I say she was craft obsessed because she was forever knitting, with various skeins of pastel yarn, little toilet tank cozies, and Kleenex box covers with dolls’ heads, or attaching rhinestones in an elaborate pattern to some new piece of denim.
On my left was Rhonda, the chronic liar and conspiracy theorist, always certain that someone was out to get her fired or to steal her boyfriend, Rudy, whom none of us had ever met because he probably didn’t exist, but who was, nevertheless, always buying her expensive jewelry or flying her off to Vegas for the weekend. She was sinewy and birdlike, with the gravelly voice of a smoker, and a penchant for vengeance. She loved to take the side of the woman scorned, and for that reason she talked incessantly about the scandals involving wronged celebrities: Princess Diana, Mia Farrow, Hillary Clinton, Whitney Houston, Lorena Bobbitt. All the famous women whose man troubles were regularly paraded across the weekly tabloids. She always sympathized with their plight and loved to comment on how their husbands should “fry” or “have their nuts cut off!” Then, rid of these cads, the women could find some Prince Charming who really loved them. I remember one time she was getting very heated about the plight of poor Sue Ellen she’d seen on a rerun of Dallas and I had to gently remind her, in reassuring terms, that Sue Ellen was a fictional character and surely wasn’t really suffering all the indignities heaped on her by that scoundrel J.R.
At first I enjoyed their banter back and forth, and more often than not I would join in, as I too had been a longtime subscriber to The National Enquirer, and was familiar with the cast of characters. But in time I grew tired of hearing about the latest trailer-park catharsis that had been played out on The Jerry Springer Show (they both taped it), and found it difficult to feign enthusiasm for the new Erica Kane doll. It made me tired and a bit sad because I saw how these women adopted the troubles and triumphs of the stars as a way to fill the emptiness of their personal lives and the tedious monotony of their “professional” lives: heads trapped in cubicle desks, the phones automatically answering in the headsets, the impatient people on the other end spitting out numbers—all for six dollars and ten cents an hour.
Here was Thoreau’s “quiet desperation” in all its pathetic detail, and I was a part of it. I was m
iserable, and I was not even making enough to send the minimum payment on my credit cards, let alone enough to get out of my parents’ house. My supervisor, a woman of twenty-five with four kids and a GED, assured me that if I stuck it out for ten months, I’d go far. They’d hire me on as a real employee, with health benefits and a higher hourly wage. Oh, boy.
In fact, the only thing that didn’t actively depress me about the authorizations department was the one other man working there, Marvin, whom I immediately recognized as a fellow member of the homosexual tribe when I saw the walls of his small cubicle desk, which were plastered over with clippings of dead movie stars. Typical of most everyone working there, Marvin was overweight, and his huge expanse of ass barely fit on the chairs we were given. Although he was large and very masculine-looking, with his bull neck, Roman nose, and his perpetual five o’clock shadow, his feminine nature was betrayed by the nasally lisp of his speech and hands that he never seemed to know what to do with. We would meet on our breaks or lunch and found that we shared the common bond of widowhood, his lover having died the previous year from AIDS.
“That’s terrible!” he said when I told him about Paul’s unfortunate demise. “But you’re lucky it was quick. Roger lingered on for two long years. Of course there was nothing left after that, no money, I mean. So here I am working in hag hovel.”
We became allies in our miserable situation, talking endlessly about old movies and the eccentricities of our coworkers, usually in the privacy of the men’s bathroom. In time, because of our association and our homosexuality, we became known as “the girls” by all the women we worked with.