I checked my watch, pulled the accounts receivable file from my desk, and reconciled my co-op credits. After that I went through my messages. Karen had phoned twice. I took her messages, along with those from the radio and television reps, local newspapers and magazines, and direct mail houses, and threw them all away. I put the remaining stack of customer complaints under my phone, to be dealt with after my meeting with Brandon.
Fisher emerged from Brandon’s office and shot me a dim glance. He walked in the direction opposite to our desks. As he walked, he stared at his shoes. In the next fifteen minutes the office became strangely quiet. Though I had seen this many times before, I would not have expected to feel so oddly relieved when it happened to me. Nevertheless, the signs were all around me: the walking in and out of closed doors by management, the avoidance of eye contact, and the whispering into phones as word began to spread by interoffice lines.
I called Patti Dawson and a couple of the vendors with whom I had become close. Then I put on my jacket and walked to the receptionist’s desk.
“I’m running out to 7-Eleven,” I said to Marsha. “You want anything?” Her lips were pursed and there were tears in her eyes. She shook her head, unable to speak. I felt worse for her than I did for myself. “I’ll be back by eleven.”
I passed under the Nutty Nathan’s caricature at the foot of the stairs and walked across the parking lot to my car. Then I drove to a hardware store on Sligo Avenue, had a duplicate made of my office key, and returned to headquarters.
At eleven I knocked on the door of Ric Brandon’s office. He waved me in. I closed the door and had a seat. He lowered the volume of the news program on the radio, pulled out the bottom drawer of his desk, and rested the soles of his wing tips on the edge of it.
“Nick,” he said, his delicate hands together and pointed at me as if in prayer, “this is a follow-up to our conversation in this office a week ago. Do you remember the gist of it?”
“Yes.”
“I’d like to reiterate some aspects of it before we continue. In our conversation you basically agreed to play on the management side of the fence in this company, and to work more seriously at your position. This was definitely a fourth down situation, but understand that I allowed you to call the play.”
I had spent many nights, lying awake in bed with fists clenched involuntarily, fantasizing about this moment. Usually the fantasy consisted of me firing off a string of cleverly vulgar obscenities, but on weirdly violent nights it ended with me pulling Brandon over his desk by his Brooks Brothers lapels.
Now, looking at his reddening face and hearing his feet slide nervously off the desk drawer that he had only moments before so coolly placed them on, I only wished he’d hurry up and get this done. I must have been grinning, because his plastic smile faded, leaving his fat upper lip stuck momentarily on one of his big front teeth.
“So it was my call, Ric. How did I blow it?”
“Don’t think for a moment that I don’t wish I was sitting here praising your performance. But when you went to work in our Connecticut Avenue store, you went as a representative of management. And you let us down.”
“How so?”
“A very serious complaint was filed last week. A customer called and claimed that two salesmen, fitting the description of John McGinnes and yourself, were intoxicated during business hours. The customer also reported the smell of marijuana in the store. Can you explain this?”
I looked out of Brandon’s tiny window, across the office and through the larger window on the south wall, at the brilliant blue sky. It was one of the last beautifully sunny days of the year.
“Are you letting me go?”
“I’m afraid so, Nick.” His body relaxed in his chair.
“What about McGinnes?”
“I do only what’s right for this company. McGinnes is an extremely valuable employee. I’m hoping that a very serious conversation with him will straighten things around. He’s the engine that powers that store. Bates and Malone are decent employees, but they’re in that store basically because I need some black faces on my D.C. floor. No, I definitely think McGinnes is salvageable.”
“You didn’t actually take that complaint yourself, did you Ric?”
“Mr. Rosen,” he said unsteadily, “took the call when I was out. He suggested that there was no alternative but to let you go. Frankly, on this point I agreed. The nature of the complaint constituted a firing offense.”
Through the window of the south wall I watched a flock of blackbirds pass across the blue sky. I rose from my chair. “Is that all?” I asked. I stared at him until he looked down at his desk, a little gray in the face but basically unmoved.
“I’ve written up your termination papers, effective immediately,” he said coldly. “You’re eligible for vacation pay, which will come in your final check. I’ll pass this on to personnel.”
I walked out of his office and softly closed the door behind me.
It didn’t take long to clean out my desk. I was quite certain that I was through with retail. I left behind industry related materials, drawing implements, certificates from management seminars, sales awards, and all other evidence of my tenure in the business. Oddly, the things I put into the plastic bag that a tight-jawed Fisher had wordlessly handed me were the most memorable objects of my career at Nutty Nathan’s: a book of matches, on the cover of which was printed “It Pays to Advertise,” which opened up to a pair of paper legs that spread to expose a thick patch of female “wool”; a caricature of me that the office girls had commissioned, with what I thought to be a rather lecherous look in my eyes and with a cigarette hanging trashily out the side of my mouth, circa my smoking days; a set of pencils with erasers shaped as dickheads; and a file of vulgarities that is charitably referred to as Xerox “art.”
All of these things I knew would end up in my apartment’s wastebasket. But on that day, like some sentimental pornographer, I couldn’t bear to leave them in my desk.
I dropped the duplicate key off with the woman in charge at the personnel office, who was busy cutting out clip art for the company newsletter, a waste of paper so heinous that as “editor” she should have been convicted of arboricide. Seaton, the controller who peed with his trousers around his ankles, stopped me in the hall to shake my hand and wish me luck. Though he was wrongfully despised by many employees for the cutbacks he was constantly forced to make, he wato er ss the only one that day with the guts to say good-bye.
A young woman wearing a Redskins jersey was sitting at the switchboard in Marsha’s place. I gave her a questioning look.
“She’s in the bathroom,” she said accusingly, “crying.” She popped her gum and looked me over.
“Tell her I’ll talk to her later,” I said.
“Sure, Nick. Take it easy.”
I turned and walked down the stairs, out the door, and across the parking lot, the plastic bag of novelties (the summation of my career) in my hand, a weird grin on my face. It was only eleven-thirty, and therefore a bit early for a cocktail. A cold beer, however, would do just fine.
I was hammering my second can of Bud at the counter of the Good Times Lunch when I noticed a primered Torino parked on the east side of Georgia Avenue. Two men were in the front seat, and one of them was smoking and staring in my direction. Kim was pulling my lunch out of the deep fryer with a pair of tongs.
“I lost my job today, Kim,” I said. He turned his head, looked at the can in my hand, then into my eyes. “I’m a free man.”
A man seated at the end of the counter wearing an army jacket raised his beer to me in a toast. The radio was playing a half-spoken ballad by a teenage soul singer, barely audible above the jetlike sound of the upright fan.
My lunch was a breaded veal patty with a side of green beans and fries. I ate it quickly, especially rushing through the tastelessness of the veal.
After the lunch crowd had gone, I stayed and had another beer. Once, when Kim walked by, he almost spoke, but passed with
only a nod. The primered Torino was still across the street, its occupants still staring into the Good Times Lunch. The last customer walked out as I finished my fourth.
The two men got out of the Torino. I watched them hustle across the street. They were very dark and wiry. They entered the store and moved quickly in my direction.
“What’s going on?” I asked in a friendly tone, rising instinctively to face them.
The lead man threw a quick, hard right into my belly that dropped me to one knee. I coughed, fought for breath, and spit up a short blast of beer. I saw his foot coming but was unable to block it. The instep of his boot caught me solidly across the bridge of my nose. I felt the cartilage collapse and a needlelike pain as the force of his kick knocked me back into the base of a booth against the wall.
Kim must have made some sort of move. My attacker looked back and said, “Fuck you, Chang. This here is our business,” then turned back to face me. I tasted warm blood pouring down over my lip and into my mouth.
“You can stop all that shit with the boy,” the lead man said. “Understand?” My nose felt as if it were pointing upward, and the man in front of me got blurry and then it was black for a few dead seconds. fon said. height="0em"›‹ div›
When my vision came back, Kim was vaulting over the lunch counter, a black snub-nosed revolver in his hand. Just as his feet hit the floor, he swung the pistol, striking the second man in the temple with the short barrel and dropping him to the floor. Then he quickly pointed the piece towards the stunned face of the man who had smashed my nose.
The guy seemed to contemplate a break but wisely froze. Kim backed him up to the wall, brought the gun to his face, and tapped the steel of the barrel on the man’s front teeth, hard enough so it made a sound.
“You no fuck me,” Kim said evenly. “I fuck you.”
The man, hands up, moved slowly away from the wall with as much pride as he could fake. He helped his partner up and they silently backed out of the store. Kim kept the gun on them until they were gone, then locked the door from the inside.
I thought too late to read their plates. By the time I staggered to the door, their car was a fishtailing blur of smoke and burning rubber. I did notice that the plates were out of state, though all I could make out was a design something like a mushroom cloud.
“No cops,” I said as Kim replaced the gun beneath the register. He nodded and pointed to the back room.
I lay on a cot next to a chest freezer, looking up at a shelf stocked with pickle spears and clam juice, holding a compress to my nose. The bleeding had stopped but the pain intensified.
“Help me up, Kim,” I said as he entered the room. He put a hand behind my back and another around my arm, bringing me to a sitting position. The room caved in from both sides, but soon converged into one picture.
“Okay?” he asked.
“I think so. Thanks, Kim.”
“No trouble in my place,” he said with certainty, then smiled rakishly. “Bad day, Nick.”
“Yeah. Bad day.”
The doctor who worked on me at the Washington Adventist Hospital looked at my paper and asked if I was Italian.
“Greek,” I said.
“Well,” she said cheerfully, “now you’ll have a classic Greek nose to go with your name.”
“Helluva way to legitimize my name. Is it broken?”
“Not badly,” she said, whatever that meant. She wrote out a prescription and handed me the paper. “These will help.”
I took the script. “They usually do. They any good?”
She looked at me sternly. “No alcohol with these, understand?”
“Sure, doc. Thanks a million.”
At my apartment I ate two of the codeines and chased them with a serious shot of Grand-Dad. Then I ran a tub of hot water and lay in it, everything submerged but my head and left hand, which held a cold can of beer.
A couple of hours later I awoke in the tub, now filled with tepid water. The empty can floated near my knee. My cat sat on the radiator and stared at my nose. It was still broken.
I got out of the tu b, toweled dry, brushed my teeth, and switched off the light quickly so that I could not catch my image in the bathroom mirror.
The red light on my answering machine was blinking so I pressed down on the bar. The four calls, in succession, were from Karen, Joe Dane, Fisher, and McGinnes. All of the messages, except Karen’s, were condolences on the loss of my job. Typically, McGinnes’ was the only one with humor and without a trace of awkward sentiment. He ended his pep talk with what I’m sure he considered to be an essential bit of advice: “Don’t let your meat loaf,” he said.
Craving a black sleep, I chewed two more codeines and crawled into the rack.
SEVENTEEN
I first met Karen in a bar in Southeast, a new wave club near the Eastern Market run by an Arab named Haddad whom everyone called HaDaddy-O.
This was late in ’79 or early in 1980, the watershed years that saw the debut release of the Pretenders, Graham Parker’s Squeezing Out Sparks, and Elvis Costello’s Get Happy, three of the finest albums ever produced. That I get nostalgic now when I hear “You Can’t Be Too Strong” or “New Amsterdam,” or when I smell cigarette smoke in a bar or feel sweat drip down my back in a hot club, may seem incredible today-especially to those who get misty-eyed over Sinatra, or even at the first few chords of “Satisfaction”-but I’m talking about my generation.
Because this club was in a potentially rough section of town, it discouraged the closet Billy Joel lovers and frat boys out to pick up “punk chicks.” Mostly the patrons consisted of liberal arts majors, waiters who were aspiring actors and writers, and rummies who fell in off the street.
In that particular year the pin-up girl for our crowd was Chrissie Hynde. When I first saw Karen, leaning against the service bar in jeans, short boots, and a black leather motorcycle jacket, it was the only time that the sight of a woman has literally taken my breath away. With her slightly off-center smile, full lips, and heavy black eyeliner, she had that bitch look that I have always chased.
I felt sharp that night-black workboots, 501 jeans, a blue oxford, skinny black tie, and a charcoal patterned sportcoat-but when I approached her and offered to buy her a drink (hardly original, but I was, after all, in awe), she declined. I cockily explained that she was blowing a good opportunity.
“Then some day,” she said solemnly, “I’ll look back on this moment with deep regret.” And walked away.
But soon after that I caught her checking me out in the barroom mirror.
A few beers later, keeping an eye on what she was doing and what she was drinking, I watched her walk out the back door, alone, to a patio behind the club. Hurrying up to the bar, I ordered her drink (Bombay with a splash of tonic and two limes) and a beer, and followed her outside.
She smiled and accepted the drink and my company. We sat in wrought-iron garden furniture, drinking and smoking cigarettes and some Lebanese hash I kept in the fold of my wallet for special occasions.
As the band grew trashier (a local female rocker who made up for a serious lack of tone by rubbing her crotch throughout the set) and the joint filled up, that time of night came when men were in the ladies’ room pissing in the sink and several minor fights were breaking out. But at this point Karen and I were only concentrating on each other.
Two rounds later we were in the men’s room stall, doing coke off the commode (a half Karen scored from the bartender), laughing because we couldn’t even see the white on white. We dragged each other out of the place and, climbing into another old Chrysler product I was driving at the time, headed across town.
Then we were on the George Washington Parkway, screaming north at eighty miles per, all four windows down, and listening to Madness’s “Night Boat to Cairo” at maximum volume with the radio dead set on 102.3, the old home of the then-ballsy HFS. We were twisted out of our minds and higher than hippies, and Karen had already unzipped my fly and dug in, and I knew it was go
ing to be amazing, that night and maybe longer.
And it was, but only for about six months. By that time I had graduated from college and we had impulse-married and rented a portion of a house on the east side of the Hill. Soon Karen began wearing her hair differently and lost the eye makeup. She diagnosed me (correctly) as a childish romantic, and pushed me to be more assertive at work and “go for” management, which I grudgingly did.
We split up less than a year after we were married. Though it seems as if the explanation for our failed marriage should be more complicated, I know it to be just that simple.
When Karen opened the door of her apartment, located in old Arlington, the look of disappointment was plain upon her face. I had cleaned up early Tuesday morning, keeping the bandages on as an alternative to the damage underneath. But the area below both eyes had begun to swell and discolor.
“Don’t look so happy,” I said. “I thought you wanted to see me.”
“I did, but not like this. What the hell happened to you, Nicky?”
“Can’t I come in?”
“Sure,” she said, waving me forward with her hand. “I’m sorry.”
She had on jeans and an oversized pocket T-shirt, which she dowdily wore outside the jeans. As I followed her into the kitchen, I noticed that her hips and bottom were a little fuller, though she carried it he et well. The wedge cut she was sporting was shaven high and tight on the back of her neck, this year’s stylish but not over-the-top hairstyle for the career woman.
There were many labeled cartons lining the hall but no furniture in the apartment. The kitchen was empty except for a live coffeemaker and one cup. There were no chairs so I sat on the linoleum floor, my back against a base cabinet.
Karen washed out the cup in the sink, then handed it to me, filled with fresh coffee. I took a sip and rested the cup on my knee. She had a seat across from me against the bare white wall, and crossed one leg over the other. She still had a look about her.
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