“Right,” I said.
“What?” Kitty wheezed and I heard her take a puff of her inhaler followed by a puff of a Marlboro.
“Nothing.”
“What do you want to ask me?”
“Kitty, they just don’t have a good reason to pay by the minute to hear me talk about movies and food. You know?”
Blank silence would always follow my inane confessions. Ten seconds of deep, blank silence.
“Greta, you’re a good kid,” she said. “But this is a real profession. I take it seriously. I’m making a living but I’m also offering an important social service.”
I’d heard this speech before. Kitty had spent her adult life stripping, pole dancing, managing strip clubs, and talking lonely men through sex. She believed she was bringing contentment to men without understanding partners, men who would only do harm if left unattended in a cold, mean world.
“In a few months, any day now, the court will rule in our favor and we’ll open the lines up to full service again. When this happens there will be girls I keep, based on how much of our clientele they’ve helped to maintain. The girls I keep will get a pay increase and a bonus for sticking with us. The girls who can’t handle simple conversation, who can’t give these guys what they need without being obvious about it, are the ones I’ll have to let go. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Do you?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said because I understood. There were more experienced women, like Kitty and her best operator, Nina, who could get a man off while describing a trip to the aquarium. They did it so smoothly no one could accuse them of even trying. Their regulars knew what to expect. These guys kept their actions quiet and returned for ‘chat’ several times a week.
“The sea jellies are translucent and shaped like soft, bulbous bells… Oh, the moon jellies have such long, long tentacles…”
I was doomed. Most of my guys never called a second time and none of them could touch themselves without shrieking. I could see my future career in phone sex dying before it started, thanks to something both Kitty and I knew without admitting it. I might have been able to learn the clumsy art of jacking men off long distance by talking dirty but I was shit on a stick when it came to ordinary conversation.
The worst parts of the day were the extended periods when no one called. As an operator I was required to remain available throughout the shift to be sure I didn’t miss any clients. But a caller wasn’t announced and forwarded. Rather, he wandered into the void and we had to lure him and persuade him to remain, by talking. This was how he knew for sure someone was there. He could check by calling out but most guys wouldn’t do this; presumably it made them feel awkward in what was already an awkward situation. They usually dialed up, heard the silence followed immediately by a friendly voice, answered that voice and let it bring them home. This was why we were told to keep talking even if no one replied. Which sounds easy until you try it for a four-hour shift.
“What a beautiful night,” I might say, for example. And when no one answered, I’d go on. “Nice breeze outside. I think I’ll open a window and put on some music.” Still nothing. “Who likes the Pixies?” Silence. “Well, I sure do!” Dead silence.
This went on for six weeks. For the last three days of my employment no clients would talk to me. If a repeat client checked in looking for Nina or Kitty or another competent gal, and found me on the line, he would hang up. Finally Kitty called to say her husband Fred was on his way to my apartment to pick up the headset and hand over my last paycheck. Thus ended my career as a professional phone friend.
The dregs of summer have ruined the yards up and down this street in Lake City. Here’s a two-bedroom house, the lawn strewn with junk—a punctured inflatable pool; two T-shirts ripped off the back clothesline and torn to ribbons by a neighbor’s dog; a rake; a few CD covers; and a sofa with its stuffing spilling out the back.
You remind me of someone. Family resemblance to an endangered owl, I think. Not only the girth, although you’ve got it, and not the patchy whiskers dangling in loose strands decorated with bread crumbs and bits of boiled egg. Whom do you resemble? Someone I used to work with? Maybe.
You’re disgruntled. No matter where you go these days, you find stray evidence of Californians and New Yorkers sneaking in. Prices are edging up, not much right now but pretty soon everything will skyrocket, and you know who’s to blame. There’s proof in the doubling of traffic on your once-dead street, and proof in the new coats of paint on old houses.
This neighborhood used to be a paradise, you say. This was a street where dogs howled at night and rattled the chain-link fences with their paws, where the doublewide trailer homes of people you knew were robin’s egg blue or pale salmon, old paint flaking onto the ground. Every third or fourth lawn, crowded with yellow weeds, featured a half-gutted sofa. Your sofa remains, defiant, and you like to sit here, ruminating in the twilight.
I find you sitting on the collapsed end with a can of Rainier beer in one hand and a garden hose in the other. Every time you take a swig you put your thumb over the hose and spray another batch of dandelions.
Overhead the clouds break; rain begins to spatter the street; there are no sidewalks to speak of. You go on spraying and drinking, spraying and drinking, and grumbling to the chubby neighbor seated next to you, another Seattleite since birth. Two sons of the city, claiming territorial rights for five generations of lumberjacks and carpenters.
“I don’t mind the junkies living in a halfway house together. I don’t mind what they do in their own house. What I mind is the county trying to build that house right across the street from mine.”
“Uh-huh,” your neighbor replies. “We should’ve gone to the town meeting, Hawley. Put in our two cents and said ‘hell no’ to a junkie house.”
“I wrote two letters!” You take a slug of beer and shift your weight to pass a quiet shaft of gas. “I wrote three letters to the mayor’s office. He’s as crooked as the day he was born.”
“Then you’ve also got your Isle of Lesbos over there,” says your neighbor. He points diagonally to the next house over.
“Well, I don’t mind them playing their music as loud as they want. The trouble is, we’re not talking about Gruntruck or Tad…”
“Aw, jeez, you and Steve were way better than those guys, any hour of the week.”
“Yeah,” you say. “I don’t know. We were all right.”
“You should’ve played the Gorge that time…”
“Fuck you, Jim,” you say. “I wasn’t going to play just for the privilege of playing! Goddamn promoters. They paid Soundgarden, why couldn’t they pay us? Like we ought to be happy for the fucking honor of opening for Eddie Vedder!”
“You and Steve’re better than Pearl Jam any goddamn day.”
“Fuck yeah,” you say. “We played the Comet before those losers ever picked up a guitar!”
“Changed their name from Mookie Blaylock to Pearl Jam because Epic said so.”
“Sell-outs.”
“Sell-outs. I bet the gals across the road don’t even know Green River,” your neighbor says, changing the subject and nodding toward the ‘Isle of Lesbos.’
“Nope. Nope. Nope. They play that luscious stuff, that girly C-note music all day, and I’m about to swing a hammer right through that fucking porcelain Buddha in their yard…”
“You should do that. You should do it. I’d pay a dollar to see that.”
“You know what?” you say.
“What?”
“I think I’ve got a bottle rocket left in the house from last New Year’s.”
“No! Oh, man! Oh, boy! That would be, that would be…”
“Yeah. Let me get that sucker out here and we’ll watch Mr. Buddha do a little dance!”
“Oh shit, man! Do it! Do it!”
You drop the garden hose and it goes on dribbling. The rain has stopped. You don’t notice.
You tiptoe for no reason other than excitement, then shamble indoors and rummage through the hall closet, returning five minutes later with the rocket. You set it up right there on the grass, aim it at the yard across the street, and set it off with a chuckle. Your neighbor chuckles too. He’s holding the hose now. In his excitement he throws his hands up in the air. A splash from the hose knocks the rocket off course and sends it whizzing toward your couch, where it plunges between the cushions and catches fire.
You might be okay if you don’t try to dig the rocket out with your bare hands… But you do.
You burn a thumb to the bone, scorch the cornea of both eyes, and set your pants on fire tossing the rocket from hand to hand while doing a mincing dance step that prompts your neighbor to fall on the ground clutching his gut, laughing. It’s a dance he’ll forever remember and refer to as ‘Buddha Fucked Up.’
Chapter Seven
I leaned against the work counter on the service side, my awful hair yanked into a crooked topknot, my sweat- and food-stained T-shirt stenciled with one tiny word, dead center—‘no.’
“May I see the goldenrod again?” the potato-shaped man asked for the fourth time. And when I say potato-shaped I mean every part of him—his torso, his head, his limbs—all could have grown out of the ground, cultivated by a farmer with blue-ribbon ambitions.
Instead of answering, I reached under the counter for the color sample catalog and slapped it down in front of him. The violence of the movement didn’t faze the guy. He gathered the samples and cradled them in his hands, his blackened fingernails wandering their surface as if they held a secret he needed to decipher blindly.
“Um…”
“Yeah?”
“Um,” he murmured again. “This is goldenrod?”
“Yes,” I said. Pointing a badly manicured finger at every sample as I spoke. “This is goldenrod. This is canary. This is saffron.”
“I see. Hm.”
Beyond the glass storefront night had fallen. I hadn’t noticed. The shoppers, homeless, velvet-caped vampires, and teenagers on Broadway drifted by. I liked to think of the window as an aquarium glass. Mollies and betas and goldfish stuck in a common bowl by mistake. The hour meant nothing to me. The Capitol Hill Copy-Z was open 24 hours a day and I was on the evening shift.
My life had come full circle. The outer setting had changed but it made no difference. For all intents and purposes I might as well have been minding the counter at my first job in my hometown.
“Wait,” said the lumpy potato man. His features quivered in all directions and finally settled on a smile. His hair was golden-brown. “What is this one called?”
I didn’t have to look.
“That one is beige,” I said.
“Is it?”
“Yes. Beige.”
“This is beige,” he said. “It looks yellow.” He raised his eyebrows as if this might urge me to change my mind.
“Maybe it seems yellow but it isn’t.”
“Well,” he said, and began to turn the pages again.
I was leaning against the counter partly to remain upright, to not collapse from boredom and the hangover I’d been nursing all afternoon and evening. It took a lot of energy, babysitting customers who couldn’t tell the difference between yellow and pale brown. There were times when it took an equal amount of energy to control the desire to throw my head back and scream. This was how I earned rent and food. Handholding and listening was half of the job. The other half consisted of running photocopies on those 50-sorter-bin Xerox machines. On a good night I ran between 150,000 and 200,000 copies.
“What color is this?”
“Oatmeal.”
“Oh. No, that won’t do…”
I stared out the window. A girl my age in a black leather jacket and boots walked past. Her hair was thrashed into what could have been the prototype for my hairstyle. On her it was chic and wild. On me it was a quiet mess, an outer expression of the tangled misery in my head.
“Well,” said the potato man with a gentle sigh. He handed the sample pages back to me and pointed. “I guess this is the one, then.”
“The beige?”
“No,” he said. “This one.” He pointed to a sheet of blue paper.
“Cornflower? You want all 1,500 flyers to be cornflower?”
He blinked. His uncertainty, his quavering inability to make a simple decision, had returned. All I had to do was ask him a question and he was lost.
“It’s a good choice,” I lied. If we were ever going to move on, I had to take him by the leash and pull him to the curb. “Eye-catching.” I said this over the deafening clatter of metal hinges as rows of collated pages fell into sorter bins all over the room.
“Do you think so?”
“Oh yeah.” I nodded and grinned as though nobody had ever chosen a better color.
“Well,” he said decisively, like a man buying a new car and not a stack of flyers advertising a sale on used textbooks. “Let’s do it, then.”
To pay rent, I had taken the only job I could find. Walking up Broadway on a Sunday morning, dodging theater people handing out flyers for a show, and the homeless begging for change I didn’t have, I’d spotted a Help Wanted sign in the window of a Copy-Z. At the prospect of applying for a job with another franchise of the same photocopy chain where I’d worked in my hometown, I felt a queasy combination of relief and despair. This particular shop occupied one section of a rambling brick warehouse. The place had long since been gutted and repurposed by an entrepreneur who went bankrupt and sold the property to a Microsoft millionaire. The guy refurbished the whole block (keeping anything still viable as it was), and leased it as retail space.
Here’s something odd I first noticed as I shambled through my stupid job. My face, plain but not ugly, and my demeanor, intelligent but not clever, made a certain number of strangers trust me automatically. I don’t mean trust in a general or theoretical sense, or in a deep, personal sense. I mean people gave me access to stuff. The Copy-Z manager, Desiree, hired me on the spot and handed over a set of company keys and the combination to the safe.
If she had spied on me as Kitty had done, Desiree would have known I wasn’t reliable. I was lazy and disloyal but my face said otherwise and nobody bothered getting to know me. Of course I couldn’t bluff my way into a good job, but I had no trouble getting hired for a lousy one. I knew I could take advantage of the situation but I had to do it carefully, without leaving any traces.
During my third week of employment, a co-worker, Tam, who shared the shift with me and a couple of imbeciles named Lisa and Alisa, complained about not being able to pay her utility bill at the end of the week. Without missing a beat I suggested stealing from the register.
Tam gave me a snorting laugh. When I didn’t smile she got quiet. She gave Lisa and Alisa a glance over her shoulder and then lowered her voice.
“I’d get caught,” she said. “We’d come up short and you know Desiree would blame me right away. She’s dying to be manager of the year. Ignorant slut. She’d go straight to the police and tell them to arrest ‘the Asian girl,’ I guarantee it.”
“What if we didn’t come up short?” I asked, not only because I had a dollar and forty-seven cents to my name and no food in my refrigerator but also because I was bored and I already hated Desiree with her ten-year CD accounts, her investment in a two-bedroom cottage on Eastlake, and her Midwest memories of the grandmother who taught her how to crochet. The woman never stopped talking about her own practical nature and how it was responsible for everything she had.
“Okay, criminal,” said Tam. “How do we do this?”
“The order form Desiree makes us fill out and attach,” I explained. “This is her ingenious double-check system. She makes us set these forms aside after the order is picked up. We ring up the order at the register where it’s recorded on the receipt roll, and we collect payment and put it in the drawer.”
“Yeah
. That’s about it.”
We wandered outside to the alley behind the shop for a smoke while our co-workers Lisa and Alisa ran copies inside. Tam wore a butcher’s apron over her jeans and T-shirt, more of a protective barrier against ‘the shitty mojo’ of our customers than a safeguard for her clothes.
“Well, let’s say a customer pays cash and we don’t ring it up. Okay, so, the order form with their name on it is the only record of a transaction because there’s no receipt. And if we give the customer the order form, unless they’re really paying attention they’ll accept it as a receipt.”
Tam had figured out where I was going before I got there. She exhaled a mighty cloud of smoke and laughed.
“You are a criminal,” she told me. “That’s… Fuck. That’s embezzling. Do you have a record?”
“Only for indecent exposure,” I said and pulled my T-shirt aside to flash my right breast.
“Jesus. If I thought it would work…”
“Let’s test it out,” I said. “Every time you get a customer who offers cash and seems distracted enough not to notice, try substituting the order form for a real receipt, and don’t ring it up at the register. Let’s see how much we have at the end of the shift.”
“What if somebody does notice? What if they insist on a receipt from the register?”
“Then act stupid, apologize, and ring it up. They’ll think it was an honest mistake because you’re a girl and you’re trying to do more than one thing at a time.”
“Wait,” she said and dropped the cigarette butt to the ground. “What do we say to Lisa and Alisa?”
“Don’t say anything. They’re idiots.”
“But what if they notice?” The question was perfunctory. Tam didn’t look especially worried.
“Lisa spends most of her time proving she can run two machines at the same time. Alisa’s afraid of the customers. They won’t care if we handle the counter all night. They’ll both be relieved.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Tam. “Okay, I can see this happening. I can visualize us getting away with this, as long as we’re not greedy. And, listen, if I get caught, for real, I’m blaming you.”
I Wish I Was Like You Page 6