He looked surprised. “Really? Why didn’t you go up and collect your prize, then?”
“I did. Here it is.” I picked up the certificate from my desk and waved it at him.
“Oh.” He started writing, then looked up at me. “What’s your first name?” he asked.
This was ridiculous.
“Bob,” I found myself answering.
“Last name?”
“Jones.”
He nodded. “It’ll be in the next issue of the newsletter.”
He went back to his work.
He did not speak to me for the rest of the day.
Jane was not there when I came home. There was a note from her on the refrigerator telling me that she’d gone to the library to find some books on the Montessori method of teaching preschool children. It was just as well. I wasn’t in the mood to either talk or listen to anyone else. I just wanted to be alone and think.
I popped a frozen burrito into the microwave.
After my short conversation with Derek, I had not been able to concentrate on work for the remainder of the afternoon. I had placed papers before me on my desk and, pen in hand, had pretended to read them, but my mind had been on anything but instruction manuals. I kept going over everything Derek had said, searching for something that would indicate he had been joking or playing with me, not willing to believe that he really had not known my name. I kept wishing he had asked for the spelling. That at least would have allowed me a legitimate out. I could have rationalized that he had known my name but had not known the spelling.
But that wasn’t the case.
No matter how much I replayed that conversation in my head, no matter how much I tried to analyze what we both had said, I kept reaching the same conclusion. He had not known my name, though we’d been sharing an office for over two months. He had not seen me win the drawing, though I had stood on the stage in front of him.
I was invisible to him.
Hell, maybe the reason he never talked to me was because he didn’t even notice I was there.
The bell on the microwave rang, and I took out my burrito, dropping it on a plate. I poured myself a glass of milk and walked out to the living room, turning on the TV and sitting down on the couch. I tried to eat and watch the news, tried not to think about what had happened. I blew on my burrito, took a bite. Tom Brokaw was reporting the results of a recent AIDS poll, looking seriously into the camera as a the image of a caduceus flashed on the blue screen behind him, and he said, “According to the latest
The phrase jumped out at me.
The average American.
That was me. That’s what I was. I stared at Brokaw. I felt as though I were sick and my illness had been successfully diagnosed, but there was none of the relief that would have accompanied such a medical breakthrough. The description was true, as far as it went, but it was also too general, too benign. There was reassurance in those three words, the implication of normalcy. And I was not normal. I was ordinary, but I was not just ordinary. I was extra ordinary, ultra ordinary, so damn ordinary that even my friends did not remember me, that even my own coworkers did not notice me.
I had a weird feeling about this. The chill I’d felt when Lois and Virginia had insisted they’d seen me at Stacy’s birthday lunch was back. This whole thing was getting way too freaky. It was one thing to be just an average guy. But it was quite another to be so… so pathologically average. So consistently middle-of-the-road in every way that I was invisible. There was something creepy about it, something frightening and almost supernatural.
On an impulse, I reached over and picked up yesterday’s newspaper off the table. I found the Calendar section and looked at the boxed statistics that showed the top five films of the past weekend.
They were the five films I most wanted to see.
I turned the page to look at the top ten songs of the week.
They were my current favorites, ranked in order of preference.
My heart pounding, I stood and walked across the room to the block-and-plank shelves next to the stereo. I scanned my collection of records and CDs, and I realized that it was a history of the number one albums over the past decade.
This was crazy.
But it made sense.
If I was average, I was average. Not just in appearance and personality, but in everything. Across the board. It explained, perhaps, my adherence to the Golden Mean, my unshakable belief in the rightness of the adage “moderation in all things.” Never in my life had I gone to extremes. In anything. I had never eaten too much or too little. I had never been selfishly greedy or selfishly altruistic. I had never been a radical liberal or a reactionary conservative. I was neither a hedonist nor an ascetic, a drunk nor a teetotaler.
I had never taken a stand on anything.
Intellectually, I knew it was incorrect to think that compromise was always the ideal solution, that truth always existed somewhere in the middle of two opposing passions — there was no happy medium between right and wrong, between good and evil — but the equivocation that rendered me impotent in regard to minor practical decisions afflicted me morally, too, and I inevitably vacillated between differing points of view, stuck squarely in the middle and unable to definitely and unequivocally take a side.
My extraordinary ordinariness was not just an aspect of my personality, it was the very essence of my being. It explained why I alone among my peers had never questioned or complained about the outcome of any election or the winner of any award. I had always been squarely in the mainstream and had never disagreed with anything agreed upon by the majority. It explained why none of my arguments in any of my high school or college classes had made even the slightest dent in the course of a debate.
It explained, as well, my odd attraction to the city of Irvine. Here, where all the streets and houses looked the same, where homeowners’ associations tolerated no individuality in the external appearance of houses or landscaping, I felt comfortable and at home. The homogeneity appealed to me, spoke to me.
But it wasn’t logical to think that the fact that I was average rendered me invisible, caused people to ignore me. Was it? Most people, when you came down to it, were not exceptional. Most people were normal, average. Yet they were not ignored by their coworkers, friends, and acquaintances. It was not only the sublime and the horrific that were noticed, not only the individual and idiosyncratic that had their existences validated by attention.
But I was average.
And I was ignored.
I tried to think of some action or event that would disprove my theory, something I’d done that would prove I was not totally ordinary. I remembered being picked on by bullies when I was in the third grade. I hadn’t been average then, had I? I had been different enough to have been specifically chosen as the object of harassment by the three toughest kids in the school. One time, in fact, they’d caught me on my way home. One of them held me down while the other two took off my pants. They played Keep Away, tossing the pants over my head to each other while I tried vainly to intercept their throws. A crowd gathered, laughing, and there were girls in the crowd, and for some reason I liked the fact that the girls were there. I liked the fact that they saw me in my underwear.
I used to think of that later, when I was a teenager, when I was masturbating. It made me more excited to think of those girls watching me trying to get my pants from the bullies.
That wasn’t normal, was it? That wasn’t average.
But I was grasping at straws. Everyone had little offbeat fantasies and perversities.
And I probably had the average number of them.
Even my out-of-the-ordinary experiences were ordinary. Even my irregularities were regular.
Christ, even my name was average. Bob Jones. Next to John Smith, it was probably the most common name in the phone book.
