I Just Want My Pants Back

by David J. Rosen

  With girls, for me, it was always feast or famine. I was either 007 or the Elephant Man. Nothing nothing nothing, I’ll never touch a girl again, then kapow! I’m kissing one girl and I have a date with a different girl later in the week. The fact that one female was interested in me seemed proof enough to others that I was worthy of fondling. Unfortunately, and more frequently, the reverse held true. So to have any hope of attracting prey, I had to keep blood in the water, like a shark fisherman. It was the Chum Theory; I hoped it would apply again now.

  It was getting late. I hopped up, threw on my jeans, brushed my teeth—did only the things one deems necessary when rushing to get to work. Corners cut included showering, putting on underwear, and eating anything—other than a swallow of mint-flavored toothpaste. As I slipped on my sneakers, I saw that there was no scrap of paper with Jane’s phone number in the most obvious place, on top of the coffee table. I looked around on the floor—nothing. Damn, she must’ve been doing the same thing as me: going out Sunday, simply looking for a little fun. How progressive. I pictured feminists everywhere slow-motion celebrating to “We Are the Champions.”

  “I feel so used,” I joked aloud, smiling. Then the smile faded. Hey, what the fuck? How come that slut didn’t want to marry me? Then I saw it. Her name, number, and e-mail scrawled in the middle of a heart she had drawn on a ripped envelope, hanging on the fridge door. “PS: You need groceries!” Clever girl. Clever, and filthy as all fuck.

  I snatched it and was out the door, onto the beautiful old West Village streets. Almost every building had a historic look, stately brownstones that were painstakingly attended to. Except my building, 99 Perry. It was “painted” a pale shade of yellow, the color resembling a dirty towel that had been long forgotten, and was now covered in soot. The front door’s lock was hit-or-miss, and the stairwells were creaky and peeling. It was one of the last rent-stabilized buildings in a wealthy neighborhood, and the landlord did as little as he could to keep it standing.

  I hustled toward the subway. I was currently employed at a theatrical company, JB Casting. I answered the phone and manned the receptionist area. All of the actors were extra-polite to me, as if I might have pull and be able to help them get parts. It was a little sad, this job, and I had no real interest in it. As my parents might say, I was in the process of finding what I wanted to do with my life. And over the course of the last few months, I had had the epiphany that “casting director” and “receptionist” were two titles I could cross off my list.

  I had graduated with honors from Cornell, but I was an English major who didn’t do all the required reading and owed his diploma to the friendly folks at CliffsNotes. I had even framed the New Testament CliffsNotes that had gotten me through my Literature of Religion class. I hung the piece on my off-campus apartment’s wall, titling it, “For Sinners Only.”

  After a couple of road trips down from Ithaca to see bands, I was sold on moving to the city. I had been a DJ at WBVR at school, and I figured I’d be able to find some kind of job in the music industry here, though I didn’t know what. The career center had helped me get a few interviews at radio stations, but they were all in ad sales, which seemed a lot closer to telemarketing than Telecasters. Soon the rent and Hunan Pan bills were looming, so I just looked for any job to cover them until I figured out what I wanted. Truth was, I hadn’t gotten around to doing a full investigation of the music world yet. I was still settling in, and frankly there were a hell of a lot more fun things to do here in the meantime. In the two and a half years since I’d arrived, I had worked three different jobs. Well, two, really; I had been a bartender at a bar that had changed names during my tenure, so I counted it as two different jobs. My friends from school mostly had found their niches by now. Even the ski bums were back from their year in Aspen serving muffins to Cher and had found entry-level jobs in PR, not that they’d even known what PR was. I traveled through Europe the summer after graduation. But when I came back, I didn’t see the point in shaving every day and working long hours at something I wasn’t sure I wanted to be doing.

  The scary thing was that I was becoming aware that very few people were doing what they wanted to be doing; they just got caught up in whatever they were doing long enough that it became who they were. Or as my dad put it, they had “picked and sticked.” I had not. Which I’m sure ate at my folks, because they were textbook pickers and stickers. My parents still lived in the brick house where I grew up, just outside St. Louis, on a street full of brick houses. My mom had been a secretary for a local real estate attorney, Bob Hoefel, Esq., until political correctness came to town. She still worked for him, but now her title was “administrative assistant.” My dad was just as loyal to his job. He worked at the same hardware store he’d been at since he was a junior at St. Louis University. Although now he was the owner. Strider’s Hardware. The funny thing about that was, he wasn’t remotely handy. He knew the stock like the back of his hand, he could pontificate on the subtleties that separated Benjamin Moore white dove semi-gloss from Benjamin Moore white dove eggshell, but for the love of God you didn’t let the man climb a ladder to clean the gutters without a team of firemen holding out one of those “jumper” nets to catch him. His home-improvement mishaps had becoming a running joke between my mom and me.

  It was pretty clear a career in home improvement wasn’t his dream. But I felt like maybe dream jobs were a more contemporary desire. It seemed like in his day, a “good job” was all one looked for. Then you put a picture of your wife on your desk in the back office, pumped out a kid, managed a Little League team or two, got chubby from drinking beer and rooting for the perennially lousy Cardinals, and went into minor debt sending your wise-ass son to an Ivy League school, when he could’ve gone to Mizzou for close to nothing. (I felt guilty about that one. But Mizzou had scared the crap out of me—it was filled with giant corn-fed heifers of human beings—and like any eighteen-year-old, I felt the urgent need to get the hell out of Dodge.)

  For some reason, my parents thought I might become a lawyer. I was never sure why they envisioned me as a legal eagle, but I supposed they saw how well Mr. Hoefel was doing. “It’s a solid career,” they had told me during winter break of senior year, holding out an LSAT prep book they had borrowed from the Richters next door. Cornell was pretty hard, and the last thing I wanted was more school after school. Hell, I didn’t even know what lawyers did every day, except for what I had gathered watching reruns of Matlock while hung over. I kept picturing his desk covered with boring legal briefs and dandruff flakes.

  Unfortunately New York was the kind of town where the first two questions out of people’s mouths were, “What do you do?” followed by “How much is your rent?” Answering the whole truth to either of those usually wasn’t the best way for me to go, if I was aiming to impress. So frequently I didn’t. And although New Yorkers stayed single or married without kids well into their forties, with cutting-edge European moisturizers or smuggled infant stem cells keeping them young- and fresh-looking, beneath that veneer, they were relentlessly responsible adults. In fact, if adults were some kind of exotic animal species, New York City was their African veldt. People competed for jobs, parking, clothes, apartments, taxis, picnic spots, preschools, brunch reservations, dermatologists, dog-walkers, frozen yogurt, treadmills, Hamptons houses, seats at the movies, you name it. It made me dream about the promise of communism, but I just as soon dismissed it; there were no perfectly taut communist honeys. All those years of sausage and socialism really wreaked hell on a girl.

  Hence my job at JB’s, to which I was once again about to be tardy. I got to the Twelfth Street 1 train entrance and tumbled down the stairs, pulling out my iPod and headphones as I did. I put it on shuffle, clicked PLAY, and hoped for a good subway set.

  I arrived at the office at Thirty-second and Sixth at about ten-fifteen, or in layman’s terms, an hour and fifteen minutes late. John Barry, the JB in JB Casting, was in his office with the door closed, so I figured I was fairly saf
e. It was a small office—just me, JB, another assistant like me named Melinda, and Sara, another agent. The space itself was a loft that consisted of a large reception area where actors would wait until they were called into a separate room, which contained a Polaroid camera and a video camera. There, one of us, usually Melinda, would film them doing whatever the small part required and then send a tape to the director, who would phone his choices in to John or Sara. It was pretty straightforward, and as far from glitzy Hollywood as one could get.

  Melinda was on the phone at the reception desk when I walked in. I sat down beside her, went on the computer we shared, and opened up nytimes.com, my ritual; I figured it was worth seeing whether or not the world was coming to an end imminently before I started working.

  Melinda hung up and pushed a few stray brown hairs behind her ear. She had a slightly round face that always sported a deadpan expression; she looked like a smart girl in Barnes & Noble, ready to say something sarcastic about your book choice.

  “Good morning.” She raised an eyebrow. “Doctor’s appointment, right?”

  Melinda had been at JB’s for two years; she was an aspiring playwright, and like me, was only there for the money. Her salary went toward supporting her craft, whereas mine went toward supporting me. She was pretty funny too—if she didn’t live with her girlfriend I might’ve thought about dating her. I had a feeling we’d probably stay friends after one or both of us eventually left JB’s. Although I had thought that same thing about folks at the bartending jobs, and they had vanished into the ether.

  “Actually, I got laid last night.” I smiled at her and held up my hand, jokingly. “High five?”

  “By a girl?”

  “Yup.” The phone started ringing.

  “Well done.” She motioned toward the phone. “Maybe that’s her now.”

  * * * * *

  Every day Melinda and I went to grab lunch, and every day I hoped and prayed and promised myself that I would find something to eat other than a turkey sandwich. Foiled again, I sat back down at the receptionist desk, opened up Instant Messenger, and took a bite. There was just nothing else to eat, it seemed. Well, at least today I had bought a different flavor of beverage than my normal Diet Coke—an old-school Dr. Brown’s Black Cherry. Like the White Horse’s patron saint, I was raging against the dying of the light.

  On our walk, Melinda reminded me that that night was her last playwriting workshop. They were going to do a “table read” of her play, and then after, it was going to shape-shift into a party; “Jon” from her class had some sort of giant loft in the East Village, perfect for such an event. I was definitely going, I told her.

  I logged into IM and wrote my friend Tina to see if she wanted to join, although odds were she already had plans. Tina was the sort of girl who epitomized the Reggie Jackson moniker, “the straw that stirs the drink.” Somehow she knew everything and everyone, a one-stop shop for social life. Even in college, where we had met, she was that way. She simply loved to party the same way most people loved to breathe—regularly, deeply.

  Now she was a web designer at an Internet ad agency; she made a lot of banner ads for pharmaceutical products, but every once in a while she’d get to build a really cool site for an independent film or something. About two years ago when she started there, we all thought Tina was going to be rich. The firm couldn’t really afford to pay her much, so they gave her all these stock options that promised big money if they got bought out. But of course they didn’t, and there went that. Her firm went from seventy to forty people in about two months. How she kept her job she could only attribute to one thing. Her boobs. She was proud of them; hell, we all were.

  However, I had certainly never touched them. Tina and I had kissed once, early freshman year, but it didn’t take. It wasn’t completely yucky, like Frenching a sibling or accidentally getting slipped the tongue by an overly friendly dog, but something was off, it felt wrong. It was unspoken, but mutual. We were just to be close friends. In fact, we were often each other’s wingman.

  doodyball5:

  arf

  tinadoll:

  flarfell

  doodyball5:

  hllllerghf

  tinadoll:

  liturgical. como estas?

  doodyball5:

  muy bien, finally got laid last night!

  tinadoll:

  you sure? u didn’t wake up with your dick in a glass of ice tea again, did you?

  doodyball5:

  no, it was a real girl. she had tits and a vagina and everything

  tinadoll:

  everything? that code for hermaphrodite?

  doodyball5:

  shut up. it was pretty nuts, i fucked her “in” my fridge, seriously

  tinadoll:

  that happened to me once but the sex was bad so i ate a half a pizza

  doodyball5:

  geez hard to impress a slut like you. what happens later? melinda’s having a reading/party

  tinadoll:

  i’m going to the movies at seven

  doodyball5:

  want to meet after at the party? gonna get there late anyway, have to cover a session

  tinadoll:

  nah. A girl needs a night in now and then

  doodyball5:

  ug

  tinadoll:

  gu

  tinadoll:

  what are u casting for?

  doodyball5:

  it’s called “skinflint.” whatev

  tinadoll:

  oh, stacey has something to tell you later

  doodyball5:

  yeah?

  tinadoll:

  ?

  doodyball5:

  ?

  tinadoll:

  sorry…it’s a secret

  doodyball5:

  secrets are for losers. give it up

  tinadoll:

  my lips are sealed

  tinadoll:

  don’t even say it, pervstein

  doodyball5:

  give me a hint, c’mon. am i in trouble?

  tinadoll:

  hmm, you might be. bye!

  doodyball5:

  just tell me

  tinadoll has signed off.

  doodyball5:

  ugh

  Stacey and her fiancé Eric were old friends of mine and Tina’s from school. It was cool that we all had ended up here; when I moved to the city I felt like I already had a built-in support system. In fact, Eric had helped me find the place at 99 Perry. A guy he knew from med school was moving out, and I attached myself to him like a barnacle to a ship. The guy recommended me to the landlord, who was a very religious Jew. I went to meet him in his basement office wearing a yarmulke, and when he asked if I had any questions, I queried him about the nearest shul. I’m probably going to burn in hell, but I got the apartment.

  The afternoon crawled on at a glacial pace. Melinda left the office at five to help set up for her workshop. I was hoping the reading wouldn’t be over by the time I got there, as I was on video duty for the Skinflint session. I hadn’t even really read the specs yet; I was following a debate in the comments section on stereogum.com, a music blog, about the “greatest modern guitarists.” Someone named Shreds 81 was throwing a hissy fit about the “lack of respect for Slash, you fucking college weenies!” So I was pretty surprised when the first actor arrived and was only about three feet tall.

  “Hi, I’m Leroy Hanson, I’m here for Skinflint,” he said, shaking my hand with his tiny, pudgy palm. I did my best not to flinch but couldn’t be sure that I didn’t show surprise.

  “Right this way, I’m Jason,” I said, walking him back to the video room. I quickly read the specs.

  For the LSD sequence, we need five little people who will wear fruit costumes (banana, strawberry, lime, lemon, pineapple) and dance in the background. We are looking for the littlest people possible, but it is IMPORTANT that they have long, skinny arms and legs, as these must stick out of holes in the costumes. SHORT, PUDGY, OR DISF
IGURED LIMBS ARE NONSTARTERS. Please show CLOSE-UPS of limbs so we can make a judgment. Also, please have all actors dance. We will not see faces, so it does not matter if they are women or men.

  I flicked on the lights and showed Leroy to a tape mark on the floor. I turned on the camera. “Okay, tell me your name, agent, whether or not you are in SAG, and um, your height, please.” Leroy was a pro, and rattled them off. “Okay, I don’t have any music, but can you show me some of your dance moves?”

  Leroy looked straight into the camera. “What kind of dancing are you looking for? Disco? Waltz?”

  “Good question.” I hit PAUSE and re-read the specs, but it didn’t say. “Umm, it doesn’t say, but you’ll be playing a piece of fruit, so dance like a piece of fruit would dance, I guess.”

  “How does a fucking piece of fruit dance?”

  “Uh, I guess, well, just do a bunch of different stuff, that’s probably safest.” My God, Melinda was going to shit when she heard about this. She lived for awkward casting moments, and as I videotaped Leroy doing a surprisingly good “running man” with no sound but the whir of the camera, I couldn’t think of anything more awkward. Oh, wait, yes I could. “Okay Leroy, now I just need to shoot some close-ups of your limbs.”

  * * * * *

  By the time I had finished the session it was eight-thirty. I had videotaped about twenty little people dancing and was completely fascinated and horrified. Who knew there were so many little people in the city? And who knew so many of them could dance? One woman did a flip.