My receptionist skills beamed brightest when welcoming guests to our office, although my judgment was perhaps slightly off. I once asked a woman there for a job interview if anybody had ever told her she had a porn star name, because she did. She started, but grinned, and said, “I’ve never been in a law firm with a receptionist as inappropriate as you.” That woman was hired and we ended up becoming friends, but the difficulty was I never knew how my verbal escapades would turn out, and yet, I couldn’t seem to stop myself from experimenting. I’d either make a new friend or get reported to my supervisor.
I learned quickly that the superpower of low-level administrative staff is invisibility. To some, I was so unimportant I would actually disappear, and as a result, they would speak openly, right in front of me, about confidential topics. I would sit staring at my computer screen, clicking with great focus on absolutely nothing, listening to guests talk about employees of the firm as if we weren’t sitting in a tiny lobby together, as if I didn’t know the people I worked with, as if I were not even human. I’d think, They don’t even see me, and I would feel powerful in their underestimation.
Fuckers. Do they even know how much potential they’re looking at?
• • •
“Hey, Janelle, you can’t just say every single thing that comes into your mind.”
I sat in Bea’s office crossing and uncrossing my legs, folding and refolding my hands, getting my first “talking to.” I scanned the blank surface of her immaculate cherry wood desk, looking for a single stray paper clip or wadded up Post-it note. Nothing. Not even dust behind the computer monitor.
Her inbox, empty. Her candy bowl, empty. I visualized my desk with papers strewn in a thousand directions, a little bonsai tree dying from lack of water, and the pictures of Ava and Mac. I made a mental note to clean my shit up.
I had been at the firm for one year, and they had recently promoted me to administrative assistant. There’s a chance they were trying to find me a less visible place than the front office. At any rate, I now had my own cubicle and a raise. I was proud. Unfortunately, the attorney I was supporting was less impressed with my performance.
Brian, the attorney in question, was a perky gentleman whose demeanor masked what seemed to me a deep-seated sense of superiority…for approximately fifteen minutes, at which time I concluded, based on my vast professional experience, that I was dealing with a person who loved nothing more than questionable ideas and the fact that he could make me do them.
Every Monday morning, I was supposed to meet with him and listen, riveted, to his peculiar but incredibly precise requests. Then I was supposed to work hard to implement them, with glee and to the letter, even though I believed them to be absurd and inefficient. But every time I did a task, some horrible new detail popped into his brain, adding another act to our little roadshow.
“Janelle! How was your weekend? How’s Ava?” I would begin to answer, but at mid-sentence, he’d grow bored: “Great, thanks. Would you mind researching Internet providers in my area and making a spreadsheet of what they provide and how much they cost?”
So I did it, and when I showed him my work, he’d say: “Please add a column with Internet speeds and then research what those speeds mean. Translate them for me. You know, layman’s speak.”
He would regularly use terms like “layman’s speak,” which felt as inhumane as the person in the cubicle next to me eating corn nuts. I noticed that Brian ate uniformly healthy food except on Fridays, which I imagined was a plan he had actually created for himself and stuck with. This was so profoundly reasonable and mature I contemplated poisoning his food simply to shake things up a bit. He smiled too much and never failed to say “Good morning!” as he passed each person in the hallway, making sure to use their first names. At least once a day I visualized him making spreadsheets in quicksand.
“Can you also add a column letting me know how long each company has been in business, and whether or not they outsource work in India? Also, I need this color coded, I think. Easier on the eyes.”
“Color coded? Why? Brian, that doesn’t make sense.”
Janelle, you can’t just say every single thing that comes into your mind.
“One more thing: New schedule routine. Let’s try you printing out my daily schedule and highlighting each activity using different colors based on type of activity. For example, internal meetings could be blue. External meetings, green. Lunch meetings, pink! And you know, as long as they’re consistent, go ahead and have fun with it.”
Oh, wow, shit. For sure this sounds fun. This is exactly the kind of activity a person of my mental capacity finds pleasurable. My dream actually is to spend many years highlighting schedules for no apparent reason.
Back in my cubicle, while I worked to find the perfect shade of sea green for the AT&T column, I’d wonder if perhaps I was cut out for slightly more challenging work. I wanted to impress everyone with my administrative assistant skills, but color coded spreadsheets? I’d grow further confused when I’d overhear the managing partners consulting with him on major clients, as if he in fact knew how to do his job quite well and the color coding situation were a mere idiosyncrasy that could be overlooked.
“Janelle, within reason, your job is to do what he asks.” After saying this, Bea held my gaze, registering my expression. She knew what I was thinking. Smiling, she added, “Your job is to be patient with people who aren’t as smart as you.” With this, my ears perked. Now we’re talking, boss.
But she wasn’t talking about Brian. She was talking about my impatience with all those I perceived as having subpar intelligence, which was nearly everyone.
“I try, Bea.” I met her eyes while running my finger along the edge of her desk, still hoping for dust. She raised her eyebrows, knowing I was using the term “try” rather loosely. I laughed, vaguely terrified of her. She embodied all the professionalism I lacked, combined with follow-through. She was fair, consistent, and heartbreakingly organized. And yet, she had lived. She grew up in a goddamn desert, raised her child alone, pulled herself out of poverty. She was a single mother with an immaculate desk.
I tried to do what Brian asked, but I couldn’t wipe the disdain off my face. I kept forgetting. Or it popped onto my brow before I could stop it. The fact that he was so damn friendly while he wasted my time simply confused me. Although, how very capitalist to find yourself getting fucked and yet kind of enjoy it. I even grew to like the man. And yet he wanted me to tape his schedule in his planner in 2003. We have computers, man.
• • •
At our administrative staff meetings, I focused all my energy on making sure I didn’t send my yellow legal pad hurling across the room in a fit of final unbridled rage, or fling my coffee cup at the person who brought up refrigerator soft drink organization again. The worst was when I was supposed to lead one of these discussions, telling all the women and one man how the research on a new coffeemaker was going, or where I had put the masking tape in the copy room, as if we weren’t going to lie in coffins someday with maggots eating our eyeballs. By this time I had been promoted to Slightly Higher Admin Assistant, and I’d sit in the conference room listening to a person born onto earth as good as the next guy talk about parking validation methodology with the vigor of a presidential nominee, thinking, What if I started stabbing myself in the jugular with this Uni-ball pen? Or started banging my manila folder against that lady’s head, right there next to me, over and over again, without a word?
Once again, I feared one of these days I wouldn’t be able to stop my body from carrying out the vision. Meetings with the whole staff were slightly better because I got to gaze at the managing partners and imagine how big their houses must be, but still I wondered what would happen if I stood up, unbuttoned my cardigan, and smashed a scone between my tits in an act of silent resistance.
Janelle, you can’t just say every single thing that comes into your mind.
This includes shit, cunt, bastard, bitch, and any variation of the
word fuck. I also learned that you “can’t wear black bras under white shirts” and low-cut business casual pants that show your underwear are also frowned upon. Further, copy machines have a top-loader where one can load multiple pages at once and they will run right through the copier, the whole pile, like it’s nothing. This particular piece of information smashed me like a brick during the new-copier orientation meeting. I had spent an entire summer after my first year of college working as an intern at an office supply business headquartered in a desolate wasteland called Hayward in the San Francisco Bay Area. For a solid three weeks, my job was to photocopy booklets held together by removable plastic binding. All day, every day, from eight a.m. until five p.m., I stood photocopying page by page, turning the page, opening the copier, laying it on the glass, pressing the “copy” button, opening the top, taking it out, turning the page, and on and on. For three weeks.
Not a single one of those cunt bastards told me I could just take the binding out and put the pages in the top loader. Not a single human noticed that I was wasting hours and hours of my life unnecessarily. Or maybe they did notice and found it funny, thinking, “I wonder how long it will take the idiot intern to realize she can just stick them in the top loader?”
Well the answer is “never.” She will never realize it. Actually, no. She’ll realize it four years later. But as far as you’re concerned, dick, it’s never.
I never would have done that. I would have told the sad new intern how to make her life significantly easier, how to do the job better, how to make her day a little more meaningful. But then again, the people who silently watched me waste my time day after day sold Post-it notes day after day, arguing about pen quality, sitting month after month getting closer to heart disease and death, the highlight of their day being the trip to the sandwich joint around the corner, or the chocolate they’d grab from their boss’s office, or the afternoon soda they’d pick up while in the break room, chatting with their friends and wondering what might happen for dinner.
5
Three a.m. Ideas
It was complicated to think so highly of myself and yet have a life making color coded spreadsheets while wearing size 16 Old Navy slacks and sitting in a cubicle, living in a monochromatic rental with a young husband and baby, years before any of those things are supposed to happen to anyone, let alone a person destined for greatness. I felt myself becoming like the Post-it note sellers in Hayward, but managed to smooth the dissonance of reality by clinging to the year I lived the wonder I thought would last a lifetime.
It had only been three years since I stepped off the plane in Barcelona, arriving in what I was sure must be the “prime of my life.” I was twenty years old, unattached to any human, tan from my summer job lifeguarding, with newly shorn hair. Until my twentieth year, my hair fell long and straight past my waist. This had been my hairstyle since I began growing hair, but it wasn’t really a hairstyle at all. It just grew that way because I didn’t trim it often. But I had it all chopped off at twenty and I felt free and lighter and new. Friends told me I looked like Cameron Diaz. She must have been at the prime of her life, too.
I spent my first month in Barcelona in dorms with exchange students from all over the world, although the Americans seemed to dominate the place, as we often do. We were supposed to engage in intensive language study and find ourselves places to live, but I don’t recall the language study. What I recall is the café across the street and the thick summer air—the feeling of being beautifully lost, of sitting at plastic tables in front of the dorms and feeling alien, but warmly so.
On day five, I gathered the courage to wander into the café I had been staring at every evening since my arrival. I watched the locals and tried to copy them, the way they moved and glanced at each other, but as I walked up to the counter and stared at the chalkboard on the wall, feeling the eyes of the dazzling Spaniards burning into the back of my head, I almost couldn’t speak.
“Café,” I said, thinking it was coffee. “Por favor.” I handed her the pesetas I had counted out in advance and retreated in humiliation. Instead of coffee, I got a tiny something in white ceramic. It was pure espresso. I sat alone at a table in front of the cafe, had a smoke, and drank the espresso black, too scared to add sugar or milk. Soon I would learn that what I wanted was a “café con leche.” I would have hundreds before leaving a year later, and each one would be better than the last.
While sitting in my dorm that first month, a British boy named Francis with brown eyes and wild, wavy brown hair that hung down over his forehead walked by my room, or maybe I walked by his, and we chatted for a few minutes before he said, “I’m taking the train to Madrid tomorrow. Want to come?”
Yes, absolutely, guy-I-just-met. I absolutely want to go to a place I’ve never been with a person I don’t know. There was no voice whispering, “Hey, you don’t know this fella, Janelle. You just arrived in this country, and you barely speak the language.” Francis was the reason I went to Spain. I wanted adventure. I wanted to press my whole body against the boundaries of the world to see how much it could support. I wanted to be Mick Jagger and Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway at the same damn time. Hemingway never would have said “no” to a friendly Brit offering a trip to Madrid. So I, too, said “yes.”
I showed up the next morning at the train station wearing thin, wide-leg cotton pants and a tight spaghetti-strap tank top, without a bra. We drank beer on the train in the smoking car and as I watched the countryside speed by, I thought, I must be in heaven now.
In Madrid, Francis and I met his friends who were summering in Spain and somehow all looked like supermodels. We lounged by the pool and drank beer in the living room until somebody set up rows of cocaine on the glass-topped kitchen table, and I knew I was going to be just fine in this country.
“Yes, please,” I said, ending a two-year streak of cocaine abstinence. I hadn’t abstained for lack of interest, or because I “wanted better for myself;” rather, my college-town acquaintances rarely possessed hard drugs, and I was not yet driven to find them.
But if it had appeared one night, like it did that night in Madrid, I would have said yes, because I always said yes to cocaine. I tried the drug for the first time at seventeen years old in my high school boyfriend’s house. We did a couple of grams with friends, sniffing it off a mirror on the bathroom counter until it was gone, and while everybody else in the house smoked weed and drank to ease the spastic comedown and eventually sleep, I said I had to pee, went back to the bathroom, and snorted lint off the floor, thinking surely some blow had dropped to the ground and I could get one more hit.
After that night, I never found it necessary to complicate cocaine decisions, never thought twice about chasing the soaring light, the electric meaning, no matter what was happening the next day, or who I was with, or how many times I promised myself I’d never do it again. I would handle that later. In the critical moment when I needed my brain to talk some sense into me, I saw only the high at my fingertips. The Technicolor life. Oh, the love we would feel, you and I. The truth we would speak. Let’s watch the boredom burn. Let’s see if we can survive. Let’s do really stupid shit and get away with it.
That night in Madrid we danced at a multilevel open-air club filled with soapsuds and bubbles, and I did bumps in the bathroom with my new friends. When we got back to the apartment, Francis and I began kissing on a bedroom floor, but I was coldly uninterested, participating solely out of a young woman’s sense of obligation to deliver what she was taught men “deserve.” I wished only that we had more coke. I was always the one wishing we had more coke. I was always the one spinning in circles looking for more—in the carpet, the folds of the couch, the crevices of my wallet. When the rest of the party moved on, smoked some hash, took a few shots, accepted the end of the baggie (without a fight, even), I was the one coolly dropping the idea of getting more.
“Hey, just for fun, let’s call the guy to see if he’s still around.” I would smile, reminding myself
that next time I needed to hold “the guy’s” phone number.
The psychopaths around me would shoot my idea down in midair, and my heart would panic to see the amphetamine light die. My blood fumed at the impending return to regular life, and I was crushed under a wave of sadness, of fiery restlessness. So I’d make my way to alcohol, the strongest drug we had left, and I’d drink it fast and hard and smile faintly when they looked my way.
Somebody in the living room made a joke about coming down. I wanted to rip his face into shreds. Or I wanted to be exactly like him, cool and calm when the drugs ran out. I wanted to enjoy making love there in Madrid, but I was spinning in the daylight, wishing the walls of the nightclub would ever expand as they did under the moonlight, when the promise of tomorrow moved through me like God, and I danced with my face against yours, and to the stars.
• • •
After a month in Barcelona, I moved into an apartment full of Spaniards, which I insisted upon because I was strategically avoiding Americans. Most of the other American students rented apartments together, and thought I was foolish, but I couldn’t understand why one would move to another country only to inundate themselves with the culture she just left.
One of my roommates, Santiago, was eighteen and from a Basque village. The second, Marcos, was from Madrid. The name of the third roommate I can’t remember because he was old, perhaps twenty-six, and rarely drank with us. Our landlady, Celli, from Galicia, was also our roommate. She lived in a long, skinny, broom-closet-type room off the front hall, which she almost never left. Celli was excessively concerned with our whereabouts, which I resented, because I did not come to Spain to acquire another well-meaning caregiver. She smelled strongly of garlic, and I had no idea, ever, what the hell she was saying. My room was meant for two, indicated by bunk beds, but I rented it for myself because I needed space and privacy. I was very profound. Because of this, everybody in the house assumed I was wealthy. I never told them otherwise because it was amusing to be seen that way, and I had a tiny lying problem, particularly in Spain, where nobody could fact-check my stories.
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