It's All Relative

by Wade Rouse

  But at nine I was still alone. I looked into a few other suites on the floor, and people were indeed answering phones and getting coffee, and businesses were open for, well, business.

  Finally, at about a quarter past nine, the sigher showed up and asked who I was and what I was doing loitering outside her door.

  “I’m Wade, the new hire.”

  “We hired somebody?”

  “I guess you didn’t get the memo?”

  She polished off her cigarette, stamped it out in the fern, and sighed. “Memo? Ha! We’re not real good communicators.”

  “But this is a communications firm?”

  I intended for this to sound casual, like a joke, but it came out desperate, along the lines of yelling, “What do you mean I’ve woken up to find a bomb implanted in my anus?”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” she said, sighing.

  While the secretary sighed her way around the office, starting the coffee, booting up her computer, starting the printer, I stood and waited for her to show me to my office.

  “Where will I be working?” I finally asked.

  “Dunno,” she sighed. “Both offices are filled.”

  Both?

  And then I heard screaming outside. Barney Fife entered, holding a bag of Dunkin Donuts, followed by the president, who was berating him.

  “You idiot! You never open your mouth at a meeting when I’m present, got it? I am the one the client is hiring. I am the firm. Got it?”

  Barney Fife got a cup of coffee, looking around in his shell-shocked sort of way, and headed to his office.

  “Who are you?” the president asked.

  “I’m Wade Rouse. You hired me on Friday and told me to start today.”

  He wagged his big finger at me and I followed him down the hall.

  He flung open a door, flicked on a light switch that triggered a dull fluorescent the strength of a dying bug zapper, and said, “Here you go.”

  And then he walked away.

  My new “office” was a six-by-six storage closet cum office nerve center, a tiny space crammed with boxes of envelopes and stationery and promotional key chains and pens and tons of wires that snaked through the walls and ceiling tiles, as if I was being kept in the reptile house of a zoo.

  Jammed in the corner was a tiny wood desk and chair, the kind a sixth grader might have in his bedroom to do his homework. My only office equipment was an ancient typewriter.

  There was no computer or phone.

  I sat in that storage room, idly, for hours, without anyone coming to check on me or talk to me or tell me what to do. I stacked boxes, rearranged wires, and cleaned off my desk, going so far as to place a fistful of promotional pens in a promotional cup and position it by my typewriter.

  I sat and waited for an assignment.

  I placed two pens in the back of my hair like chopsticks.

  I played drums on empty boxes.

  I cleaned out my wallet.

  Around noon, on the verge of tears, I went to the lobby.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked the sigher.

  “Why do you ask?” she sighed.

  “I’m just sitting in there … you know … alone. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have anything to do.”

  “Consider yourself lucky,” she sighed.

  And then her phone rang.

  I got a cup of water and retreated to my coat closet. And then, as if my desk had a silent alarm system attached to it, the president sprinted down the hall and began screaming, “No drinks on the wood! No water stains! Use a coaster! Jesus Christ! This is a professional office!”

  As he stormed away, I finally realized why Barney Fife had stacked his coffee on a cumulonimbus cloud.

  I was working in a loony bin.

  But just as I started to walk out, I thought: This has to be a joke. I am being tested. This is just like getting hazed in a fraternity; once I pass the test, I’ll be let in on the joke and welcomed into the club.

  And, still in the back of my head, lurked the reality: If you lose this job, you’re moving back in with your parents. Talk about a loony bin.

  Around four P.M., while nodding off in my David Blaine–sized torture box, the president appeared in my doorway, handed me a fifteen-second radio ad for a thirty-minute oil-change company, and asked for my thoughts.

  “Well …” I started.

  “Like I give a shit,” he laughed. “Retype this. Cap every word and double-space every line so it’s easier for the on-air talent to read.”

  “I don’t have a computer,” I said.

  “There’s a typewriter. That should be all you need right now.”

  “Are you pulling my leg?”

  “I’d like to pull your chubby little leg,” he leered, before departing.

  Since, first and foremost, I’m a people pleaser, the type of guy who would pick Kirstie Alley up from food rehab and drive her immediately to a Steak ’n Shake, I typed the memo lickety-split, like I was back in high school finishing my typing final: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”

  I ran the copy back to him.

  While he looked it over, his phone rang. And rang. And rang. He looked at me before gesturing for me to answer it.

  “Mr. X’s office,” I said. “How may I help you? Hold, please.”

  I looked at the big black man in front of me, who was loosening his tie and, I believe, leering at my ass.

  “It’s a Miss Q from the mall,” I said.

  He gestured to me in a highly dramatic writing motion, so I grabbed a pad and pen and took a note.

  “She wants to discuss having a fashion show to showcase their retailers,” I said excitedly after hanging up.

  And then my boss said, “I’m getting a boner.”

  My mouth went dry, my heart raced.

  “What? Excuse me?” I asked.

  “I’ll have to phone her,” he said, laughing at me. “What did you think I said?”

  The president asked me to meet him at the mall the next morning, an assignment that eased my troubling first day.

  A mall.

  A fashion show.

  Models.

  It was a dream.

  However, upon my arrival the next day, the president not only refused to introduce me to the client, but he also didn’t even acknowledge me. Instead he handed me his clipboard and a walkie-talkie. “Listen to every word I say,” he instructed. “And take down pertinent points that we’re discussing with the retailers, got it?”

  I didn’t.

  “Why don’t I come with you?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  “Don’t question me!” he bellowed.

  And then he scurried away with a severe-looking woman who, it seems, had bathed in White Diamonds.

  A walkie-talkie? I thought. Are we in third grade? Are we going to have Jeno’s Pizza Rolls and watch The Goonies later?

  I took a seat on a bench in the middle of the mall, where I quickly noticed I was next to a man in a wheelchair with an affixed oxygen tank. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that his body was directly under a giant plastic birch tree, the lower limbs of which were, literally, resting on his face.

  I heard the walkie-talkie crackle and the president blabbering, but his words were garbled and disconnected, like when I tried to telephone my brother with a tin can when I was six.

  “Gobble-dee-gobblezee-zook, sassamafrass-amatass.”

  This was what I heard on the walkie-talkie. So this was what I wrote.

  I heard coughing and turned to see that there was now a leaf in the wheelchair-bound man’s mouth. He was sort of gumming it, unhappily, and trying to spit it out, like I did when a piece of the plastic liner got trapped in the corn portion of my Hungry Man TV dinner.

  “Are you okay?” I yelled at him, firmly but neighborly. “Can you talk? Do you need help?”

  He didn’t respond.

  And then the old bastard started coughing and choking, which alarmed me, so I got up to push his wheelchair maybe tw
o feet forward, to remove his face from the tree, and the once comatose man suddenly began to wail, screaming in an insane, I’m being attacked by a fat man with a walkie-talkie! sort of way.

  Two women, holding denim vests with embroidered Holly Hobbie gardening girls on the back, sprinted to his aid from a nearby store. “What are you doing?” they yelled at me. “Leave him alone!”

  “What?” I asked.

  “What are you doing? Do we need to call security?”

  “What were you doing?” I yelled. “He was smothering on a birch branch.”

  And, as fate would have it, just at that moment, the president and White Diamonds appeared out of nowhere, me fighting with two Holly Hobbie devotees over an incontinent man, my clipboard miles away.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said to them. “You wouldn’t believe what happened.”

  “Can I see your notepad?” he said to me, while White Diamonds tried to stifle a laugh.

  “Gobble-dee-gobblezee-zook, sassamafrass-amatass,” was pretty much what he read.

  “You have some nerve,” he said to me. “Who do you think you are?”

  I tried to save face and began to introduce myself to the woman. “I’m sorry for the confusion. I’m Wade Rouse. I’m the new junior account executive.”

  “You’re my secretary!” my boss laughed. “And you’re not a very good one at that!”

  The two of them cackled, and the president yelled, “Go back to the office. I’ll deal with you later.”

  For some reason I did, always believing I could turn a situation around, make it better.

  Near the end of the day, the president summoned me to his office.

  “I don’t know what kind of stunt you were pulling, but you humiliated me,” he said, “Man in the Mirror” playing again in the background.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t even know what’s going on here,” I said, my voice rising. “I was hired as a junior account executive, but I have no office or phone or computer or any real idea why I’m here. You’ve yelled and screamed, and treated me very poorly.”

  I wanted to sound James Bond, but it came out all Scarlett O’Hara.

  The president leered at me from head to toe, his right hand crammed deeply in his pants pocket. And then it began moving quickly, back and forth, back and forth.

  He was playing pocket pool.

  I knew. I mean, I’d been an expert in the game ever since seventh grade, when I first saw Tommy Wilkins be skins during basketball in gym class.

  “You’re here to learn from me, be my secretary. I can take you places. It could be a win-win.”

  The president said this softly, throatily. Then he smiled and said, “You know, I like young men with a little meat on their bones. I’m a chub chaser. I bet you’re familiar with that, aren’t you, Wade?”

  I wasn’t. In fact, it didn’t even sound flattering. I wanted to lose all my baggage, not be admired for having it.

  I watched my boss’s hand move more quickly in his pants. It looked like he was trying to start a fire.

  Michael sang in the background: “I’ve been a victim of … a selfish kind of love …”

  The president moved toward me.

  Finally, after two days on the job, I did what I should have done from the very beginning: I ran, as quickly as any self-respecting chub chasee could, out of his office, down the hallway, through the lobby, down the stairs, out of the building, past the Quik Cash, and to my car.

  The last sound I remember hearing—besides my heartbeat—was a sigh.

  On the way home, I turned on the radio (this, mind you, was in the day before cell phones, before I could easily spread the word of my nightmare) and heard a local DJ announce, “Don’t forget, tomorrow is Secretary’s Day. Do something special for that one person who makes your life a little easier every day!”

  And so I did.

  After two full days of employment, I showed up the next morning around seven A.M., long before I knew anyone would arrive, and slipped an envelope under the door.

  The envelope, addressed to the president, didn’t contain an official resignation letter per se, but instead held a Secretary’s Day card I had picked up at an adult novelty shop the evening before, just after I heard the local DJ’s announcement.

  I realized I would never be paid for my tenure, nor use anyone there as a reference, so I wanted to relay a sentiment that summed up my experience.

  While I would never see my boss again, I like to imagine that he smiled when he opened the card, which featured a very obese white woman—her giant breasts flung over a typewriter, half glasses bouncing, taking a memo while she was getting barebacked by a black man in a three-piece suit.

  The message inside?

  “I may be a whore, my darling, but I’ll never be your secretary.”

  ARBOR DAY

  Homo Depot

  A few years back, when Gary and I lived in the city, we went to Homo Depot every Arbor Day to pick out a tree.

  For gardening gays, like Gary, Arbor Day is a major holiday, on par with Christmas and Hanukkah.

  I am not a gardening gay.

  First, I don’t like to get my nails dirty. I don’t like the feel of earth under my hands and feet. That’s why we build houses and sidewalks and have cute shirtless boys mow our yard. Second, I don’t understand the importance of picking out and planting a tree, which will most likely just be cut down in three years when Gary decides he wants to blow out a wall and expand the master bath. And, finally, I don’t get these Go Green urbanites who spend hours in Homo Depot acting all P. Allen Smith when they only have two square feet of deck space on which to pot some basil and oregano.

  And yet every Arbor Day I must go with Gary to nurseries and landscaping centers, kind of like I must force myself to smile when I am presented a baby who looks like W.C. Fields.

  Taking me to Homo Depot is the equivalent of having Michael J. Fox perform your Lasik surgery. I become immobilized as soon as I enter a home-improvement center and typically stop cold by the magazine rack at the entrance to peruse pretty pictures of and nice articles on people who have built water gardens all by themselves, or installed a designer kitchen, feats that simultaneously astound and baffle me, like Kevin Costner’s career.

  Most times, I gander at those magazines that show, in excruciatingly precise, step-by-step detail, how to wire an outdoor light or install a faucet and wonder if they were drawn and written in Mandarin.

  While Gary wanders, I become bored, and I try to count how many gay employees (not counting the lesbians) work at Homo Depot and know absolutely nothing about home improvement. My personal record came at one of our city’s newer stores, where I once counted sixteen and a half (the half being a rather straight-looking young man with a wedding band who, when asked by a customer which refrigerator was best, said, “The pretty one,” and pointed at a stainless model).

  Often I find myself looking around cluelessly in that gigantic aisle that features nothing but lug nuts, the four-mile-long row that has like four hundred thousand bins of bolts and screws, all of which look exactly the same.

  My goal? To see how long it takes an employee to give up or strangle me to death.

  “Can I help you with something, sir?” the screw guy will ask me.

  “I need a bolt.”

  “What kind of bolt, sir?”

  “A metal one.”

  “May I ask what you will be using the bolt for?”

  “To hold something together.”

  “What exactly needs to be held together, sir?”

  “This bolt-free item.”

  When I’m bored with this game, I wander into refrigerators and ovens and tell the appliance salesmen and kitchen designers that I have “an unlimited budget” and “a love affair with stainless and granite.”

  Occasionally I wander into those free seminars Homo Depot offers and stare at the freaks who feel compelled to learn how to spackle or lay tile or, worst of all, sponge paint.

  “Don’t you wan
t to learn how to do it yourself?” a gay man will ask me excitedly as I stand in the back.

  “Not unless it has to do with bronzer,” I will reply.

  I have a defective gene that kicks in during certain situations—like when someone raves about their stay at a La Quinta, or buys things with exact change, or wants to, like right now, learn how to stencil and border their scrapbooking room with windmills or watering cans—which makes me want to grab a straightedge and slice everyone’s throats.

  Gary’s favorite trick, when I’m lost in my own world and away from him too long, is to go to the lesbian who works the PA in customer service—every Homo Depot has one—and have her announce, “We have a lost child in the store. His name is Wade. Wade, would you please locate a man in an orange apron and have him bring you to customer service. Your mommy is looking for you.”

  Lesbians will always play along.

  “What kind of tree should we plant for Arbor Day?” Gary asks after I turn the corner.

  We head outside to the gardening area, a football-stadium-size lot containing every flower, tree, fountain, and paving stone known to man.

  This is usually my time to stop and tan my face.

  Gary drags me to the tree section, where thousands of mini-saplings are flapping in that hair-blasting wind that always seems to whip through Homo Depot garden centers.

  “What do you think?”

  Every tree looks exactly the same to me.

  Twigs in buckets with leaves.

  “How about that one?” I say, looking at its tag. “It looks like it will be pretty one day.”

  “Oh, my God! That’s a Bradford pear. It’s the Calista Flockhart of trees. It’ll snap in two in the slightest storm.”

  “How about this one?” I ask.

  “Are you serious? That’s a cedar. It’s the ugliest tree in the world, and it’ll dwarf our house one day.”

  By this time I have become shell-shocked and fearful of saying anything, like Julia Roberts in that movie where she runs away from her crazy husband but knows he’s found her when all her towels are neatly folded.

  I point at another tree.

  “Sweetie, that’s a sweet gum. Those are the ones that all the straight people in our neighborhood plant that drop those thorny balls that we trip over when we walk the dog.”