Should I call her by her first name? Tom was thinking as he looked for the Bayliner woman. His social class was the same as hers. An unskilled worker would be expected to address her by her last name, while someone who is white-collar would speak less formally. The way a person announces another name’s may cue social class; addressing a physician as “Bob” instead of “Dr. Martindale” conveys your status as roughly the same as his. Tom wondered whether calling the Bayliner woman Amanda would communicate in a single word, I, too, was once an executive on Easy Street, and you could end up like me amazingly fast. Then she would say something nice about him rather than complain.
But what were the odds that, under any circumstances, a contemporary American would pass on the chance to complain?
There were boxes, pieces of sets and half-completed audiovisual gear in the Bayliner exhibit area. But no Amanda and, sadly for Tom, no models previewing their bikinis. There was one man working alone, whom Tom did not recognize. The man was lying on his back, assembling some stage pieces. He didn’t wear one of the CIA-style photo-and-bar-code IDs found on convention-center personnel.
“Who are you?” Tom asked simply.
The man looked around. “She told me not to let anyone see me,” he said.
He wasn’t trying to take anything—rather, was putting things together. As far as Tom knew, felonious assembly is not a crime.
“Did the Bayliner woman hire you?”
“Yeah. Temp agency sent me and a couple other guys to babysit her fancy boats last night. Gave us these.” He indicated a navy windbreaker, which said EVENT STAFF in big yellow letters on the back. It was designed to resemble an FBI field windbreaker, as if handing these to untrained temps turned them into a security force to be feared. Maybe criminals are afraid of the words “Event Staff.”
So the Bayliner woman hadn’t hired rent-a-cops as she claimed—that did sound pricey. Rather, she brought in minimum-wage guys armed with windbreakers. Tom wondered if she would send the convention center a false invoice claiming a major expense for rent-a-cops.
“When she showed up this morning, she offered me a hundred bucks to assemble this stage and wire the loudspeakers,” the man continued. “She was going off about I shouldn’t let anyone see what I was doing. Why does she care if anybody sees?”
Exhibitors weren’t allowed to bring in their own laborers; everything had to go through channels. There would be a huge dustup if this was noticed. Hours would be spent yelling about a matter that could have been resolved in minutes, if the people in the unaccountable positions weren’t in need of something to get upset about.
“I’ll help you,” Tom said. He grabbed some tools. When Tom had to lean all the way forward to lift a heavy part, compressing his stomach and chest, for a moment he felt without breath.
“Thanks, pal. You’re all right. Kevin.”
“Tom.”
Kevin Parquet hadn’t done a masterful job with his life. In youth leagues, then in high school, he had been a basketball and baseball star, his parents filling much of a den with sports trophies he’d won by age fifteen. Everyone wanted to be his friend. Homework, studying—if you’re good, the college will just change your grades, that’s what somebody told him at a basketball camp. He had been five-foot-ten at age ten but was still five-foot-ten at age eighteen. Early-maturity boys grow up thinking they will be sports stars, but late-maturity boys dominate the top levels of athletics. Nobody tells that to the early-maturity boys, who enjoy a few young years living an illusion of fame to come, and then, if they never studied in high school, can’t get regular admission to college.
“Has he started shaving yet?” is one of the first questions college recruiters ask about teen male prospects. The answer they want to hear is no; that means late maturity, more size and more strength on the way. The equation is different for teen female athletes, since girls develop physically so much faster than boys. At a high-school freshman dance, half the girls will look like they belong in porn videos, while half the boys will look like they should be home playing with LEGOs. The boys who are baby-faced are the ones who will have Greek-god physiques in their early twenties. Kevin started shaving at age fourteen. He was excited, thinking it meant he had loads of testosterone; actually it was a bad sign about his recruiting chances. As a senior he received no college offers, and his GPA made even community college a dicey proposition.
His father had a small contracting firm that replaced roofs on houses. Kevin worked there for a few years, but when his father died, the company folded—the men who went up on the roofs would listen to Kevin’s father, but not to him. Speeding and DUI tickets started Kevin on a cycle of decline: soon a big chunk of his sporadic income went to fines and sky-high auto insurance. Sometimes people become mired in the lower class because much of what they earn arrives already spoken for, to be spent on past mistakes.
Kevin’s first wife fell ill and died young, like women did in nineteenth-century novels. Don’t assume this does not happen anymore. Kevin soon married again, looking to put his life back on course. But it was an impulse union to a woman he barely knew, who got excited when she heard Kevin’s father had owned a company, and from this assumed Kevin had money hidden somewhere. The second wife left for another man and filed a false charge of battery against Kevin, believing that would force Kevin to give her hush money to drop the accusation. His ex began calling him in the middle of the night, drunk, demanding to know where her “settlement” was. Kevin got the impression the ex and her new beau spent a lot of time strategizing about how to wring money from him.
Things went downhill from there: odd jobs, disturbing the peace. His previous night’s work babysitting boats, and now the cash for setting up the exhibit, would put nearly two hundred dollars in Kevin’s pocket, the most that had been there in some time. It would all be gone by midnight.
Tom realized there was alcohol on Kevin’s breath, though it was midmorning. Close-up, he could see aging lines on Kevin’s face—creases that made his skin appear to be a kind of fabric, though he was only in his late thirties. People who went to good colleges and got good jobs groused all the time about stress but seemed to age less than those who didn’t. This seemed likely to continue to be the case as long as the good jobs lasted, anyway.
Chapter 7
June 2009
General Motors enters bankruptcy.
35,000-year-old flute unearthed in a Swabian cave.
National debt: $12 trillion.
Seated at the apartment’s kitchen table, Margo felt confined. The table was too big for the available area: to sit she had to push it away then pull it back, repeating the process to stand. She had papers spread in front of her, the majority of them bills and invoices. The cell phone was open, set to speaker, playing excruciating elevator music: a saccharine version of “She Loves Me” flowed into a worse orchestral of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Margo was speaking into the landline phone while listening for something on the cell phone:
“Then the guidance counselor told me Caroline has not turned in homework for a month. She was watching the mailbox for the warning letter; she ripped it up. I’m at my wit’s end, how will she get into college? She will be up against these brainiac kids with great SATs and awards for attending oboe recitals in Copenhagen. She’ll never get into a good college with a D on her transcript. And her only activity is the pop-star-impersonators club.”
The cell phone made an electronic squelch. Margo said into the regular phone, “Damn, I was just disconnected on the other line. Hold on a second while I redial.”
The townhouse, lost with disturbing speed, seemed a dim memory though they’d left only two months before. They fell behind on the mortgage payments, despite such emergency measures as selling the $5,000 cherry armoire for $380. Behind on the mortgage—that didn’t seem like a huge problem; Washington politicians were practically offering prizes for falling behind on a mortgage. But Tom and Margo had bought into the complex without fully comprehending that the h
omeowners’ association held a lien for dues. Tom skipped the association-dues payment, thinking he’d make it up later, and the homeowners’ association immediately filed for foreclosure. Later he learned the “association,” owned by a Florida investor, had foreclosed on the townhome they purchased, then resold it at a profit, four times in the past two years. Tom was furious at himself for missing such a detail, something he’d never done before—for making the sort of mistake made by people who do their grocery shopping at 7-Eleven.
“Sorry,” Margo said into the landline after redialing the cell. “Twenty-six minutes on hold and now I have to go through the voice prompts all over. I was calling the cable company to disconnect. Press one to go on hold; press two to be disconnected; press three to hear these options again. If you’re buying something they put you right through. If you’re trying to cancel they never pick up and I’m sure the machine is programmed to ‘accidentally’ disconnect. These deals that say ‘cancel at any time,’ you can’t cancel because you can’t get through.”
The apartment building was a set of doors into lives about which Margo knew little. She always hurried through the halls to reach her place and get in before running into other tenants, and noted other tenants seemed to do the same. They did not want to have to get to know the sort of people who would live in the sort of building where they lived. Margo imagined many tenants told themselves, “I don’t belong in a building like this.” If you got to know the other tenants, then it was like you belonged.
The window looked out onto a warehouse parking lot, where bright anticrime lights shined the whole night long. Tom had gotten frustrated trying to hang blinds correctly, and they couldn’t pay a handyman. So for the moment, towels held by pushpin tacks were the solution when it was time to make the apartment dark enough for sleeping. The old house had window treatments selected by a decorating consultant. Margo’s college dorm room had proper blinds. Her girlhood bedroom had blinds, embroidered draperies, and blackout curtains for sleeping late on weekends. This apartment had towels held in place by tacks.
“So the counselor tells me Caroline has been called to the office twice this month for wardrobe. I did not know she was leaving here in one outfit then taking clothes off in the washroom when she got to school. We had a screaming fight about the tank tops and her belly button always showing.” Margo paused to listen. “No she’s not acting out an issue in our marriage!” She listened again. “I don’t understand why they don’t freeze either. In the mall these teen girls have nothing on; the boys are in shorts when it’s snowing. Why aren’t they freezing? Some kind of genetic mutation has made the next generation impervious to cold.”
On the feet of the contemporary teen girls were boots, even in warm weather. Their feet and ankles were the only body parts well covered. At high school and the malls, teen girls showed lots of skin. At parties the girls would come as close to naked as possible—hot pants with tank tops or very short black dresses that barely covered their behinds. Margo wondered how teen boys could stand it—how did boys pumped with hormones function in this environment?
Perhaps it was an unconscious group evolutionary fitness strategy on the part of girls. Since around the time the slut look came into fashion—and began being tolerated by the moms who bought the clothes—girls’ grades and college admission rates had soared while boys’ grades and college admission rates went down. Williams College, a generation ago all-male, now was 53 percent female; the University of Georgia was 62 percent female; two out of three bachelor’s degrees were being awarded to women. Education is the key to future economic power, and girls and young women were significantly outperforming boys and young men in this contest. Keeping the teen boys staring at their legs in class, unable to focus, conferred a selection advantage.
As she talked on the landline, Margo methodically punched buttons on the cell phone to go through the voice prompt, which kept asking different versions of the same questions and for repetition of information already entered. The repetition was intended to get callers irritated so they would hang up. Modern corporate voice-prompt 800 numbers ask your name, address and account number half a dozen times before finally putting on the line an agent whose first question is your name, address and account number. No matter how often you say “agent” or “representative,” the voice prompts drone on, with the same questions over and over. After fifteen minutes or so the voice prompt finally will ask if you want to speak to someone, as if this outcome were an unprecedented surprise. The computer voice prompts are always so chipper—“Hi, I’m Julie, I’m here to help you.” Of course they are not here to help you.
Margo’s landline phone call continued: “And Megan, I never should have given in on ears pierced at twelve, now she wants her tongue pierced. She’s not doing well in school either, and Megan was reading The Grapes of Wrath in fifth grade.” She paused to listen. “What—that’s what she wants the pierced tongue for? Yes, I bet it would increase her popularity! I’m going to have to confront Megan. Just what I need, another confrontation. I considered taking the girls to counseling. But … we are kind of between health plans right now. Changing schools twice in three years cannot have helped.”
They had picked the new apartment because it was in the best school district they could afford. A decent high school, nothing special—at least no metal detectors at the main entrance. Tom was driving an hour each way to his job in order to put them there. Margo had gone back to work. She had not worked as a waitress since the summer of her sophomore year. If you’d told her then she would be waitressing again two decades later, she’d have fainted.
Margo tried to find something in finance. Her qualifications were solid, but as it was the big banks and investment houses were laying off staff even as they awarded their executives multimillion-dollar bonuses that were subsidized by the federal deficit. The payments were justified as “retention” bonuses to prevent the executives from jumping to other jobs. Since there were no other jobs in finance at the moment, this was a transparent ruse. Members of Congress nodded in assent, in return for campaign donations.
Serving men vodka at eleven-thirty in the morning and flirting like mad in the hope they would leave a five-dollar bill—that had not been Margo’s life plan for this point. Maybe, she mused, I should have Caroline pick my outfits, to increase tips. Margo worked the lunch rush, not dinner, so as to finish in time to meet the girls at school. She parked a block away and they walked to her so their friends would not know what car Margo was driving.
“All these years of grooming them to be doctors or university deans,” Margo said into the landline. “Now one behaves like her career aspiration is to be a part-time barista while the other wants to work street corners. It’s the constant message of appearances, the superficiality and cheap sex they are exposed to in the culture. And who’s behind the constant messages of superficiality and cheap sex? Not radical artists. Corporate America: Comcast, Disney, Nike, Fox.”
The cell phone clicked and clunked. “Wait, I have to call you back, I finally just got through.”
Margo rung off the landline, picked up the cell and began to speak. “Hi, I need to cancel my cable. My account number is—fuck!” She slammed down the cell phone. The connection had broken the instant she finally was put through to an agent. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Kevin was in the living room, watching television. When he heard her repeating “fuck” over and over he came to the door arch and asked, “You all right, Mrs. H?”
“Why—yes! Yes of course.” In addition to being angry, Margo was now embarrassed.
“So it’s true about women’s fantasies,” Kevin said.
“Sorry?”
“I was reading the National Enquirer last night at the Burger More,” Kevin replied. “I went in for a Double Mega and a Phake Shake. This story said a famous psychologist had proven modern women constantly fantasize about—”
“Oh!” Margo laughed. “Actually women fantasize about square footage, winning th
e White House … those sorts of things. Sex, too. But mostly about conquering the world.”
A few hours after meeting Kevin at the convention center, Tom had been fired. The Bayliner woman not only complained vociferously, she stormed into the executive office area to complain, despite the secretaries insisting no one could enter without an appointment and of course, appointments never were granted. She got all the way to the office of the Associate Deputy Administrator for Administration—the only high-ranking official actually present that day—before security escorted her back to the convention floor. The Associate Deputy Administrator for Administration was furious about being confronted in his office, where he’d been using his laptop to watch a Bruce Willis movie while filing paperwork for early retirement at age forty-six; his plan was to activate his pension, then return to the same job and double-dip. Half the top figures in the city and county government were double-dipping, the other half awaiting the first possible legal day to do so. Shouting about incompetent Facilitators, the Associate Deputy Administrator for Administration ordered that heads roll.
Eleven government employees with lifetime job security, funded by borrowing, had to sign Tom’s dismissal notice. He supposed the entire executive-suite staff at the convention center, perhaps fifty people, did nothing for an entire day except fire him.
A week later Tom took a job selling fiber-optic Internet and television services from a mall booth. Not even a store—a glorified pushcart in a mall’s foot-traffic flow. The pushcart was decorated with screens that were supposed to simulate high-def images; there were clipboards with contracts for the marks to sign. Tom was fired from the pushcart job after the local sales manager, whose pay was a percentage of each salesperson’s commission, found out Tom helped a young Hispanic couple who didn’t seem to have much money read the details of the offer. He suspected they needed other things a lot more than the “Platinum Package” with twenty-five premium-price channels. Once they understood the terms, the young couple walked. Once the local manager knew that, Tom was cashiered.
The Leading Indicators Page 8