The sickness first affected his nerves. It masked itself as exhaustion and irritability. He behaved erratically at home. Ordinary details of life he usually ignored—Iris’s insolent backtalk, Becky’s nervous nagging and their chronic lateness—provoked outbursts that made them all miserable.
Home life offered no refuge or relief. When Dane came home evenings, he had time enough to change clothes and eat dinner. Then he washed dishes while Becky helped Iris with homework. Later, Becky fell asleep. Dane sometimes tried rousing her. He had no feeling in his groin but he hoped that her touch and warmth would revive him. After a long day she curled away from him with sleepy protests and Dane stopped trying to awaken her.
To wind down, he played computer games. After his porn experience at UNIHEALTH, it did not take him long to the mature women porn sites on the computer. In the intimacy of the dark bedroom, with his wife close by, this act was more charged.
Once he had done this a few times, he took risks, visited porn sites while Becky and Iris were awake. One evening, Becky came into the bedroom suddenly to ask him a question.
Dane fumbled to shut down the illicit window, found the x, and pressed it repeatedly with his forefinger but the computer balked and he spontaneously stood up to block the screen. Becky had seen enough.
“Dane, are you insane? You’ll be put on a list of people who visit these sites. We’ll get a virus,” Becky said.
“You can’t get STDs from a computer,” he said. “Not yet.”
“You have a ten-year-old daughter. Do you want her to see that? To see her father looking at that?”
“You’re right. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Dane was ashamed but couldn’t stop.
One evening Iris burst into his bedroom with a question.
“Daddy, who invented the telescope?”
She was behind him. Dane could not click fast enough to eliminate the offending windows. He spread his hands over the screen and turned off the monitor.
“What is that, Daddy?” she asked.
“I’m doing homework for my job, Honey,” he replied. “The computer crashed.”
The window finally vanished but Dane was a wreck. Iris had a ten-year-old’s discretion to accept his response and to ask no more. She had not looked at the images. Instinctively perhaps, she knew better than to confront her father’s shame.
“I’m sick,” he thought. “I have to stop.”
Case 4-E
BELONG OR BE GONE
20. THE UNITHON
At the end of that fourth week, Dane secured his family’s health benefits. He attended the procedural orientation and had no further run-ins with Sylvia or Karen. He believed his personal turbulence at UNIHEALTH was behind him.
Then he received more encouraging news, an email from the director of human resources requiring his presence at Unithon, an initiation event for new employees.
“Unithon is important,” Zach Trench told him. “It’s treated like a sacred initiation, when every employee passes from probation to permanent. You can’t get out of it. HR gets nasty when you blow off their events. They screw up your vacations, benefits and all else that makes this job meaningful. Go. It’s a tribal thing. In the end, every new employee says in unison, ‘I am UNIHEALTH.’”
Unithon sounded like the perfect antidote to Dane’s hostile Prostate Team environment. He could meet new employees like himself across the many units of the agency. Everyone described Unithon as the best corporate function with the Christmas party as a distant second.
When Dane informed Karen that he would attend Unithon on Monday, her face screwed in anger. “You can’t. You have to be here. We need you.”
“Why do you need me in the morning?”
“The brochure is in editorial. We need a writer to sign off.”
“But I’ll be here later. Unithon is mandatory. I don’t want to get a bad name with HR.”
“Skip it.”
Dane felt like a 14-year-old boy telling his mother he wanted to go to a party. He viewed participation at Unithon as his right. He looked forward to receiving the agency pin, signifying permanent employee status. Why was Karen so set against his attendance? Was this really about urgent business or did she want to keep him on probation in perpetuity?
Even if Karen’s machinations were real, Dane knew his insistence on attending an unbillable company function was obdurate and immature. If the paycheck was so important, he should put all else aside. Yet, he was sick of being left out and determined not to be deprived of an employee experience. He wanted his UNITHON employment to be official. He wanted to belong.
After a heated discussion, Karen conceded that he could make up his own mind about attending the event. Dane, meanwhile, worked out an internal compromise nobody else knew about or agreed on.
That Monday he woke up early to arrive at the orientation at eight o’clock. He almost collided with a truck as he crossed six lanes to reach the exit and was the first to arrive at the venue. He thought if he attended Unithon early, he could return to the office by late morning, fulfilling his belonging needs without neglecting his professional duties.
Unfortunately, Unithon was not available in Lite. A major event scheduled for a day was too important to squeeze into an hour. By 9:30 only a breakfast had been served and social ice-breaking games were in progress. People declared their happiness to be at UNIHEALTH. They proclaimed how great their teammates and supervisors were.
Dane craved that happiness and wanted to extract some of it vicariously at the Unithon. It was not to be because his supervisors and teammates did not want him there. With each blissful testimonial, his anxiety increased until it eclipsed the event. How could he forget that Karen expected him? It was primary school revisited when his parents fought. In class, he was like other pupils but he knew what awaited him at home.
When the orientation recessed, Dane phoned Bevaqua to cover himself. He related his whereabouts and asked if it was cool.
“Dane, it’s very bad,” Bevaqua said. “You were told to be here.”
“I thought it was okay for me to attend Unithon. Should I come in?”
“Come in right now. There’s work to do.”
If Dane had gone straight to the office that morning, he would have despised himself for cowardice. Instead he defied orders and hated himself for putting his job at risk. By attending orientation and leaving early, he angered Bevaqua and his team but never attained the love and belonging at Unithon or received the UNIHEALTH pin.
“Good, you’re here,” Karen said when she saw him, “But if I were you I’d steer clear of Bevaqua. He’s furious.”
21. EXCLUSION
All morning Dane had nothing to do. The urgent needs he was ordered to the office to address had evidently vaporized. Dane waited for something to happen. He wandered the office and passed Bevaqua in the hall. The creative director said hello and betrayed no anger, which unnerved Dane.
As Dane took stock of his unsettled situation, he received an email from the account director for the prostate franchise, letting him know he would not be needed at the client meeting in two days. This event had been planned for weeks. It was supposed to be Dane’s first face time with the client.
Dane barged into Bevaqua’s cubicle. The creative director was not surprised to see him and told Dane what he wanted to know.
“Your first five weeks have been rocky. If there is no improvement, I’m afraid you will have to find another home,” he said.
After his talk with Bevaqua, Sylvia smiled at Dane from across the corridor and passed by his cubicle. Dane lifted his briefcase. The strap looped around one chair arm and the briefcase smacked Dane in the face. Sylvia laughed. She joked that the briefcase was beating him up.
“Why am I being left out of the client meeting?” Dane asked.
“The meeting is focusing on budget and will probably run long,” Sylvia explained. “We don’t want to distract the client with creative stuff.”
This story
did not square with Bevaqua’s account. That night Dane explained the situation to Becky.
“They’re going to fire you,” she said.
“Why would they go out of their way to be nice to me?”
“They’re toying with you.”
Panic overwhelmed Dane. He felt feverish and sick. He would believe anything to stop his insecurity. He argued with Becky but knew she was right.
22. EXIT STRATEGY
There was one other “private space” in UNIHEALTH and people who entered it looked both ways before entering. The phone room was a hybrid of an old phone booth and a coat closet. It contained a chair, a counter and a phone. It was included in the floor plans in the same spirit as restrooms—as a concession to nature’s call, in this case, a personal call.
Dane skulked down the corridor, stopped at the phone room and ducked into it. As long as he had the phone room, he had a lifeline to the world and the hope of escape. A light switch was on the wall but Dane dialed in darkness. He was in a race to quit before getting fired and needed to run it discreetly to avoid suspicion. He could not see the telephone so he continually misdialed—a take-out, a laundry, an Indian banquet hall, a funeral home and people speaking foreign tongues.
During his second week at UNIHEALTH, while he rode the popularity of “the Acorn Project,” Dane received a call from a Connecticut agency where he had interviewed during his layoff. He never thought he would need to pursue this opportunity. Now, with his job in peril, Dane returned the call, hoping the position and interest in him were still there.
The Connecticut creative director assured Dane that he would add his name to list of applicants for the staff position. He scheduled an interview for the following morning.
If UNIHEALTH suspected that Dane failed to show up for work because he was interviewing for another job, he would be fired summarily, so he planned a hoax. He phoned Karen at 8 AM in a gravely ill voice—weak, coughing and pained. Her voicemail came on, as he predicted, so it would be hard for her to judge his authenticity.
Why did Dane go through this elaborate ruse to cling to a job he believed he would leave anyway? Competitive fire was a factor. He was playing a game of Quit or Be Fired with UNIHEALTH and wanted to win. Pride also played a part. Dane preferred walking away to playing the victim. However, money was the prime motivator. His long layoff had persuaded him that later was always better than sooner when it came to losing income. He was determined to squeeze every dollar he could from UNIHEALTH.
Dane’s interviewer for the new job was a creative director of art. His index finger was in his mouth for much of the interview as he probed a piece of caramel wedged in a molar. Otherwise, he treated Dane with great respect. He reviewed his portfolio with interest and gave his verdict at the end. “Great book!” he said. “You’re what the creative doctor ordered: A fresh voice. I’ve been stuck with writing chores and it’s gotten stale.”
During his drive to UNIHEALTH that afternoon, Dane gave himself dry heaves with his reliable gag-reflex procedure. When he arrived at the cube-world, he was confident he looked like crap. People were surprised to see him as if they were complicit in his conspiracy to leave. He lumbered about the agency to impress everyone that he had showed up sick.
Late the next afternoon, Sylvia handed Dane a project with corrections to incorporate. She demanded that the manuscript be clean by end of day. Emboldened by his interview, Dane told her he would work until no later than 6 PM. When he was ready to leave, he sent her an e-mail reporting that the manuscript was pretty clean.
“Pretty clean doesn’t cut it for our client,” Sylvia wrote. “It has to be perfect.”
“If you wanted perfect, you should have given it to me yesterday when I came in sick or earlier today. I’m not working late on Friday night because you waited until late Friday afternoon to give me the project.”
Sylvia stomped off in a rage and Dane almost laughed. But when Dane heard nothing more about his prospects at the Connecticut agency after the interview, his defiance seemed premature. He went into termination-watch mode.
As Dane walked among the cubicles, his colleagues’ eyes whispered, “Dead man working!”
A week after the interview the Connecticut creative director phoned to offer Dane the job. Dane was so relieved that a salary cut of a few thousand dollars sounded like a raise.
Still, he was compelled to wait for a week while references and human resources paperwork were processed before an offer sheet was faxed. Dane wrote his resignation letter on April Fool’s Day and was eager to submit it. Then he thought, “If I resign today, people will think it’s a practical joke.” So he postponed it.
23. NEGOTIATED RELEASE
Finally on April 2, Dane was ready to resign.
All morning, Dane kept his sights on Bevaqua. He had a pre-resignation edge. It was the discrepancy between his excitement and the blandness around him. He thought everyone sensed his passage, saw the distance in his eyes and the freedom in his walk. The envelope with his resignation letter was warm and crumpled in his back pocket.
After stalking him all morning, Dane tracked down Bevaqua in his cube early that afternoon. Karen was just leaving. Her furtive manner convinced Dane that she was informing on him but he smiled at her because it no longer mattered.
Bevaqua invited Dane in. He had a thick, half-eaten sandwich on his desk.
“I feel like a dentist today,” Bevaqua said. “You know, administering pain to people in a reclining chair.”
“I have something for you,” Dane said with exaggerated formality.
He extracted the warm, wrinkled envelope from his rear pocket and handed it to Bevaqua with a snap of the wrist and a bowed head.
Bevaqua stared at the envelope in his hand and had a moment of jamais vu—he seemed puzzled not by what the envelope contained but by what it was.
“Open it,” Dane said impatiently.
The letter was concise. Bevaqua read and grimaced. Then he let it drift from his hand to the desktop like a dry leaf.
“Do you have questions?” Dane asked.
“I need to write down my thoughts before I ask questions,” Bevaqua said.
“Yes, that is the procedure,” Dane cracked.
“Is something on your mind, Dane-O?” Bevaqua asked with a paternal smile. “I’m here for you!”
“You mean, besides my team going behind my back and your threat to fire me?”
“Yes, moving forward, is there anything else you need off your chest?”
“Besides that my team leader and supervisor mentally abused me, subjected me to public ridicule and trashed my reputation by making me look incompetent?”
“Putting all that aside, is something stuck in your craw?”
“You mean, besides your barring me from my employee initiation?”
“That’s right. Is something really eating at you?”
“No, I’m good. That does it for me. I’m going.”
“Hold on. Don’t be hasty. I had a few thoughts, Dane,” Bevaqua said, rubbing his thick cheeks with his meaty hands. “I have a little theory that you might not want certain internet usage on your record.”
“What?” Dane froze.
“Have a little thing for naked, do we?”
“Are you blackmailing me?”
“Of course not! We’re family here, Dane. We understand.”
“You were about to fire me!”
“I never considered it. We need you, Dane. You bring your own special whatever. I was making constructive use of your fear.”
“Like you’re doing now? It won’t work. I used porn for research.”
“Research? What kind would that be, Dane? Erection research? Eye-popping, drooling research? Female anatomy research? You should be surfing prostates, not naked ladies.”
Dane knew he was caught but would not allow Bevaqua to bulldoze him into staying at UNIHEALTH now so he could fire him later.
“Okay. So I looked at websites. My colleagues saw what I was going th
rough and they gave me the link. I needed it. It was all I had to keep me sane and feeling like a man. When you hired me you never told me honestly what this account was like.”
Bevaqua turned his head askance and appraised Dane with a cold, incredulous eye.
“So you were self-medicating with porn. I like that,” Bevaqua nodded slowly. “But tell me, Dane, did your therapeutic porn come with a fair balance warning? ‘This smut may be harmful to your reputation and may cause lasting damage to your career?”
“No, but I never operated heavy machinery when I was looking at it,” Dane said. He turned to leave.
“Wait!” Bevaqua blurted. “What if I move you to another team?”
“Another team?” Dane asked. It never occurred to him that Bevaqua would reassign him. He wondered if this was a play to keep him or a ploy to stall him. “What about prostates?”
“It’s time to spread your wings. Just think—dialysis, diabetes, allergies.”
Dialysis! Diabetes! Allergies! Dane was exhilarated by the intrigue of these therapeutic areas and by Bevaqua’s extemporaneous effort to keep him. Maybe he had found a real home at UNIHEALTH, after all—a place where people insulted and threatened you, and made you want to leave before they begged you to stay.
“You think a reassignment could be arranged?” Dane asked.
“I can’t guarantee it,” he said. “I’ll have to get back to you in a few days.
“I don’t have a few days,” Dane replied, regaining his resolve. “I’ve accepted another position.”
“So, you’ve made other arrangements,” Bevaqua euphemized. “Good luck. You’ve done good work here.”
The two men shook hands and Bevaqua reiterated his praise for Dane. This final meeting ended like their first interview two months before—as if nothing happened in between.
Dane informed Karen of his resignation while she was in her cubicle, glowering at a MAC G6 monitor as she struggled with a layout. “I’m not surprised,” she responded to his news as she continued to click away. “I told you it was a difficult account. It couldn’t have been pleasant for you. I had fun working with you at times. I hope you find your acorn.”
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