It's All Relative

by Wade Rouse

  This was a dog that had lived a nightmare of a life and still never whined or howled or cried out of pain or discomfort. You don’t make a sound, I learned from Wonder, when no one ever comes to see how you’re doing.

  So I decided: Gary and I would do everything in our power to give Wonder a few wonderful years. We would install a tether line so he could go to the bathroom and install gates by the stairs so he would be safe, and we would clear paths in the house so he could navigate. He would become part of our family, just like Marge.

  On Monday we dropped Wonder off at the vet, me, for once, the optimist, thinking about what might be: Wonder by my feet, lying in front of the fireplace on cold winter nights; Wonder snuggling against me on the screen porch; Wonder feeling the sand in his paws when we walked him on the beach.

  And then the vet called Gary a few hours later and gave us his report after viewing the dog’s lab work: Wonder’s kidneys were failing, his organs collapsing, his prognosis beyond bleak. He had a few weeks, a couple of months, tops.

  We still considered taking him home for those final weeks, until we were told he was in pain. He may have been silent, but he was screaming inside.

  So we did something we never thought we would: We put an animal to sleep. We took responsibility for someone else’s irresponsibility. But we also gave Wonder a few days of peace, of home, of love. He did not die alone, abandoned.

  When we arrived at the vet’s office, we walked Wonder around outside for a final few minutes of talking, comforting, hugging, kissing, petting, and crying. He smelled the grass that was just coming to life, a few crocuses that signaled spring.

  We reluctantly went back in, still crying, and into a private room with a nurse who asked if we were ready.

  We said no.

  “Do you know this is Prevention to Cruelty of Animals Month?” the nurse asked.

  “I feel bad enough already,” I said.

  “No, no, it’s just so sad that it comes to this. Over one hundred thousand dogs are abused every year in the United States. You didn’t make Wonder this way.”

  Staring at this dying dog, it certainly felt that way, however.

  And then the nurse brought out the needle and eased it into Wonder’s fluffy arm.

  At first Wonder fought the anesthesia, bobbing his head back and forth, “chasing the tennis balls,” the nurse said. And then he closed his eyes. He fell asleep. He stopped breathing.

  It was so quick.

  But much too slow.

  Gary and I kissed Wonder on the snout, crying, convulsing really, and I told him to go find my late brother, and that he would take him fishing, run with him through heaven.

  Before we left Wonder, Gary leaned down and whispered into his ear, “It’s spring, buddy. You’ve been reborn now. You’re finally free. You can finally see again.”

  But really it was me who could.

  SECRETARY’S DAY

  The Quick Brown Fox

  Jumps over the Lazy Dog

  I went through a brief bohemian period after graduate school in Chicago when I considered myself an artist. I was going to be a writer, nine to five be damned. I would not work for the Man or have anything whatsoever to do with the Man.

  And then I got a call from the Man—my father—who explained in no uncertain terms that I wasn’t earning enough to pay my phone bill, much less my rent, car, groceries, and utilities.

  It seemed my job as a “serious writer” (read: freelancer who wrote five-hundred-word advertorials on car wax and home financing and got paid roughly a penny a word) didn’t really qualify as a job.

  So my dad told me in a very authoritative tone that this was a lesson in “trickle-down economics.”

  “The faucet,” he said, “officially shuts off the first of the month. The gravy train is empty.”

  “You’re mixing metaphors, Dad,” I told him.

  “And you’re getting a real job,” he replied. “Metaphors don’t pay shit.”

  My bohemian period was over.

  • • •

  Though I did not want to work for the Man, the Man came calling.

  Thanks to the parents of some friends of mine—parents who knew important people and who, more importantly, had deadbeat children themselves—I was able to snag an interview with a behemoth PR firm, an agency that was termed “the Wall” by the local media because reporters were unable to secure any information about anyone or anything of value until this firm commented or approved first.

  I arrived at my interview to find myself confronted by an army of perfect pod people, petite blondes with tight chignons and tailored navy suits clutching too many pens, and tall, stone-faced anchormen with chiseled jaws, deep, serious voices, and really white eyes and teeth.

  It was like being interviewed by an army of attractive wolverines.

  Now, this was in the days before I was out and proud, when instead I was closeted and fat, so I arrived at my interview wearing the only nice clothes I owned that still fit: a blue blazer with loose gold buttons, a button-down white shirt that was beginning to pill and yellow at the collar, a pair of khakis the pleats of which were rendered invisible by my thighs, a scuffed pair of brown tasseled loafers (I had Scotch-taped the tassels on so they wouldn’t fly off when I walked), and a red tie with yellow dots that looked like one of those 3-D card tricks where the woman looks old until you hold the card at a distance from your face.

  Despite my interviewers’ initial looks of shock at my appearance—“fraternity weight gain,” I told them—I thought the half-day interview was going well: I had a credentialed background, great degrees from top universities, quality writing experience, and I engaged in thoughtful yet snappy repartee that elicited hearty laughs.

  The snafu, it seems, came at lunch, a “required element” of the interview process at this firm, in which you dined on a preselected lunch at a private room near the top of the building. The lunch—which consisted of multiple, tricky-to-eat items such as salad with tiny diced vegetables, soup, and sauce-soaked pasta—was basically a white-collar boot camp that forced newbies to prove their mettle in front of a series of hard-edged scouts.

  Still, I felt highly confident, especially since I had taken an etiquette class, when I was young and lived in the South, from an elderly woman who smelled like mothballs and constantly told our class of little boys and girls that each of us “needed to do all we could for the war effort.”

  As a result, I not only learned who Rommel was but also ascertained which silverware to use with each course, how to wrap my pasta in the big spoon, how to fold my napkin cavalierly on my lap, and how to chew with my mouth closed while smiling and nodding.

  Everything in my interview, I thought, seemed to go swimmingly until lunch ended, I said my good-byes and thank-yous, and was waiting for the elevator. It was then that I noticed a trio of my PR lunch inquisitors—two men who looked like Charlie Sheen from Wall Street and a young woman who looked like a very angry Kate Hudson—doubled over in laughter, looking at me and pointing at their mouths.

  Inside joke, I thought. Blowing off steam before getting back to work.

  But when I returned to my car and pulled down the visor to check my reflection—just to see if I had survived the interview without becoming “too dewy”—it was then that I saw it: A shiny spinach leaf had tightly wrapped its way all around my front right tooth, making it look as if it were simply missing. In fact, I resembled a toothless extra from The Grapes of Wrath, or a fat boxer who couldn’t protect his face.

  I was humiliated, to say the least. I had done everything right—secretly shot spit between my teeth to clear potential peppercorns, rubbed my tongue over my teeth to remove foreign objects—but this single piece of spinach had somehow managed to adhere to my tooth like a bright, green cap, making it impossible to tongue-detect.

  I never heard from the firm again. Not even a rejection letter. Which was the galling part: I realized that if a highly regarded PR agency didn’t even bother with standard etiqu
ette, I was pretty much unemployable, except for jobs that required no human interaction, minimal counting skills, or a series of vaccinations.

  And then while desperately scouring the local paper, just days away from my father shutting off the faucet of gravy, I happened upon an ad for a junior account executive at a small integrated communications firm that did a mix of PR, advertising, and marketing.

  “Great writing skills a must!” the ad proclaimed. “Outstanding opportunity for a hungry young college grad.”

  It seemed a perfect fit.

  I mailed my résumé and list of references (i.e., friends and parents of friends who said they would lie for me) on a Sunday afternoon, and was called midweek by a woman who sighed after nearly every sentence.

  “Are you Mr. Rouse?” Sigh.

  “We received your résumé (sigh), and would be interested in speaking with you about the job (sigh).”

  Although I became severely depressed midway through the call, I arranged an interview for Friday.

  The firm was located in an old brick office building in a decaying section of downtown, one of those streets a few blocks off the main city strip that is lined with Rent-A-Centers and Quik Cash stores, storefront windows decorated with impenetrable steel bars.

  I entered an empty lobby encased in decaying wood. I located the list of companies in the building, mostly small personal-injury-attorney firms, and found the agency.

  I buzzed and heard a sigh.

  An ornate but barely functioning elevator scooted me up to a midlevel floor, where I was dumped into another rotting wood lobby that smelled like floor wax. A huge airplane fern sat in a coppery container, the majority of its limbs picked clean of their leaves, cigarette butts smashed into the soil.

  I opened the door and heard a sigh.

  “Can I help you?” Sigh.

  A middle-aged woman with helicopter-high silvery-blonde hair and one of those poorly drawn cartoon faces that would remain blank even after witnessing an airplane crash in her own backyard stared at me.

  “Yes?” Sigh.

  She was obviously no Angela Lansbury.

  “Hi. I’m Wade Rouse. I’m here for the interview. You just buzzed me up.”

  Sigh.

  She punched a number into her phone, the headset literally in her mouth. “Your nine o’clock is here.” She looked at me and sighed. “You can have a seat.”

  I smiled at her with one of those too-toothy smiles, those big, creepy Garfield kinds of smiles, wondering if she might have been pretty back in the day before massive doses of honey buns and bleach did her in.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, staring at me. And then she sighed and picked at a cruller with a red nail the size of a surfboard.

  This PR office’s reception area was decorated with a random assortment of couches, the worn, mismatched kinds my fraternity used to have in its vomit-strewn parlor, and they were all pushed against the walls of the lobby as if a street sweeper went through the middle of the place every night.

  Each couch had its own glass end table, smudged with fingerprints, and there was a nearly empty watercooler that burped occasionally, and one of those coffeepots, sitting on a hot plate, that smelled like burning tires.

  I flipped through a two-year-old copy of Ad Age, the most recent magazine on one of the end tables, and began to worry.

  Fifteen minutes later, a nervous older man, a Barney Fife-ish guy, appeared and squirreled me into his office, a tiny interior square without windows. He kept looking around in a crazy-paranoid fashion the entire time.

  The most discomforting part, however, and the feature from which I could not unleash my stare was the man’s coffee cup, which was perched perilously high on a makeshift mountain of papers and magazines and faxes and binders, almost as if Christo had been commissioned to do the installation.

  “Tell me a little about yourself,” he said, having to stand in order to retrieve his coffee cup from high in the clouds.

  I was, of course, a “hard worker,” “quick learner,” and “go-getter” who could “get along with anyone,” I said with my freakish smile. “Even Idi Amin,” I added before I could stop myself.

  He did not laugh.

  “What interests you about our firm?” he asked.

  So I lied to him, trying not to sound too desperate, although I was about two weeks away from moving back to the Ozarks and becoming a carny.

  “I am adept at all forms of communication, having majored in journalism, but I’ve had experience and internships in marketing, advertising, radio, and TV. I am simply fascinated with integrated communications. It’s the wave of the future.”

  These were all lies. I thought “integrated communications” was an asinine buzzword, like “mission-based,” “emerging technologies,” “strategic planning,” and “team player.”

  Uttering them made my colon spasm.

  I really just wanted to write.

  About myself.

  Still, Barney Fife seemed intrigued enough to tell me about the firm’s major accounts, which ranged from the awful to the pathetic: a small chain of quick-oil-change shops, a hard-rock radio station, a local developer of heinous homogenous subdivisions that featured faux gas lampposts and ranch houses with marbleized columns.

  “Oh, and we just got a mall,” he told me. “That’s where we need the most help.”

  It was here that I finally began to get interested.

  Saying “mall” to me was like saying “blow job” to a sex addict. Though I certainly didn’t look like it at the time, I loved malls, lived for them, scoured them for skinny clothes, dreaming of the day when I could fit into anything tailored from Banana Republic. And then, depressed, I would hit Orange Julius and Sbarro’s in the food court and end up buying something useless from Kirkland’s.

  “I am very interested in helping your company reach its potential, and, with your mentorship, I’m sure you will help me reach my own potential.”

  Had I just said this? Out loud?

  I hated myself. But I couldn’t move back home with my parents. That would be the ultimate failure.

  “Okay. Good, good,” he said. “I like what I hear. Let me go ahead and introduce you to the president of our firm. Follow me.”

  We walked down a long hallway that seemed akin to a gangplank to a closed office, from behind which was blaring the sounds of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”

  Barney Fife knocked softly at first, then a touch louder, and, seeing no results, he banged the door with a bit more temerity.

  “What?” a high-pitched voice boomed.

  Barney peeked his head through a crack in the door and half yelled, “I have a candidate for the junior account position I’d like you to meet.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’ve got a meeting in an hour, and I need to psyche myself up for it. Give me a second.”

  “Wait here,” Barney Fife said, his face twitching, before bolting away, simply leaving me to stand there alone.

  “Good luck,” he called out as he raced down the darkened hallway, and it was then I could have sworn he added, “You’ll need it,” but it was already too late: I was standing paralyzed, listening to a voice from behind the door parrot the high-pitched vocals of Michael, when suddenly it flung open and I was confronted by a black behemoth wearing a touch of eyeliner, a super shiny suit, and a tiger-striped tie.

  “Welcome, welcome, welcome, my little one.”

  He introduced himself with a flourish, bending forward, nearly bowing, like I was the queen. My worries, oddly, vanished. I felt flattered. Honored to be treated as the lady I knew I was.

  He asked me to sit in a leather chair that fronted his giant desk while he continued to analyze himself in a large dressing mirror that was standing off to one side of his office.

  “You have made it to the inner sanctum,” he said. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.”

  He talked in a rather feline, feminine voice, and was very delicate with all of his gestures.
And yet he was imposing in size, sort of the spawn of Eartha Kitt and Warren Sapp.

  Instead of asking about my résumé, the firm’s president eyed me over and stated, “Mmmmm, I like a boy with some meat on his bones.”

  The hair on my arms tingled.

  I felt like that big girl in Silence of the Lambs who gets thrown down into the well and has to put on the lotion all the time.

  And yet somewhere deep down I was oddly flattered, too. After my last interview debacle, it was nice to know my appearance wouldn’t be cause for a never-ending corporate joke.

  The president quickly segued, asking about my experience, and it became clear to me that I’d obviously misunderstood him, that he’d probably said, “I like a candidate with some meat on his résumé.”

  I talked about my journalism internships, and then he asked if I was creative, so I eagerly showed him my portfolio of writing and design samples.

  He then asked if I could work under pressure.

  I lied and said yes, omitting the fact that I flipped out if people watched me microwave.

  “Can you start Monday?” he purred.

  “Yes! Thank you for your confidence in me!”

  I walked out into the hallway, the door closed, and Michael again began blaring in the background.

  No salary had been discussed, no benefits, no vacation. I didn’t even know what time to show up Monday, much less where I would be working.

  But it didn’t matter.

  I had a job.

  I arrived at work on Monday at seven fifty A.M. sharp, wearing exactly the same outfit I’d worn to all my interviews.

  I was raring to get started, to prove my worth, to be a working man in the city.

  But the door was locked, and I didn’t have a key, so I waited in the hallway.

  My watch rotated from eight to eight fifteen, to eight thirty, and still no one had arrived. I peed in a restroom at the end of the hall around eight forty-five and began to panic, standing in the stall, knowing in my heart this wasn’t how a normal office operated.

  Perhaps, I thought, as I stared at graffiti on the stall wall that disturbingly told me that CHE GUEVARA IS A FAGGOT!, working at a creative place, the office opened later in the morning.