documentation, it would throw off the productivity curve in the company’s labor distribution study. It would make them look bad. It would make my supervisor look bad; it would make his supervisor look bad. What I was expected to do was equal or improve very slightly upon the output of my predecessor. Period. I was supposed to fit into the preexisting niche created for me and conform to its boundaries. The Peter Principle in action.
Which meant that I had a lot of time to kill.
I learned quickly to follow the lead of those around me, and I discovered many ways to simulate hard work. When Stewart or Banks stopped by the office to check on my progress, there were paper shufflings I could perform, desk straightenings I could do, drawers I could rifle through. I don’t know if Derek ever noticed my little act, but if he did, he didn’t say anything. I suspected that he did the same thing himself, since he too seemed to suddenly become a lot busier when the supervisor or department head came into the office.
I missed going to school, and I seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about it. I’d had fun in college, and though it had been less than half a year since I graduated, emotionally those days seemed a million miles away. I found that I missed being with people my own age, missed just doing nothing and hanging out. I remembered the time I went with Craig Miller to the Erogenous Zone, an “adult” toy store in a seedy mini-mall close to campus. We’d been carpooling at the time, and Craig suggested that we stop by the shop. I’d never been there, was kind of curious and said okay, and we pulled into the small L-shaped parking lot. The second we walked into the store, ringing the small bell above the door, all three cashiers and several customers turned to look at us. “Craig!” they called out in unison. It reminded me of the TV show
At Automated Interface, no one knew my name.
I was still not sure why I’d been hired, particularly since both Stewart and Banks seemed to despise me. Was I some sort of quota hiree? Did I meet some type of criteria or fit into the right age or ethnic group? I had no idea. I only knew that if the hiring had been up to Banks or Stewart, I would not have gotten the job.
I seldom saw Ted Banks, but when I did, when he took his occasional tours of the department, he was rude to me and unnecessarily abrasive. Unprovoked, he made derogatory comments about my hair, my ties, my posture, anything he could think of. I had no idea why he did this, but I tried to ignore it and play it off.
Ron Stewart was a little harder to ignore. He was not as obvious or crude in his dislike as Banks; he was even polite to me in a superficial way, but there was something about him that rubbed me the wrong way. When he spoke, it was always with a slight trace of condescension. His words were pleasant enough, but they were delivered in a manner that made it clear he felt far superior to me in intellect and position and was doing me a great favor by talking to me at all.
The annoying thing was that, when talking to him, I couldn’t help feeling that he
I wondered if I was being paranoid. Maybe Banks and Stewart treated everyone that way.
No. Banks joked with the programmers, was courteous to the secretary and the steno women. Stewart was friendly to all of the other people under him. He even indulged in light conversation with Derek.
I was the sole recipient of their hostility.
It was about a month after I’d been hired that I heard Stewart and Banks talking in the hallway outside of my office. They were speaking loudly, just outside the door, as though they wanted to make sure I heard what they were saying.
I did.
Banks: “How’s he working out?”
“He’s not a team player.” Stewart. “I don’t know that he’ll ever get with the program.”
“We have no room here for slackers.”
My first review was not for another two months. They were just trying to provoke me. I knew that, but still I felt angry, and I could not let such accusations go unchallenged. I stood up, strode around my desk and into the hall. “For your information,” I said, confronting them, “I have completed every assignment given to me, and I have completed them all on time.”
Stewart looked at me mildly. “That’s nice, Jones.”
“I heard what you said about me — ”
Banks smiled indulgently, all innocence. “We weren’t talking about you, Jones. What made you think we were talking about you?”
I looked at him.
“And why were you eavesdropping on our private conversation?”
I had no answer for that, no reply that would not sound like an overly defensive rationalization, so I said nothing but retreated, red-faced, back into the office. Derek, at his desk, was grinning.
“Serves you right,” he said.
Fuck you, I wanted to say. Eat shit and die.
But I ignored him and uncapped my pen and silently went back to work.
That night, when I got home, Jane said she wanted to go somewhere, do something. We had not really been out of the house since I’d gotten the job, and she was feeling cramped and restless and more than a little housebound. I was, too, to be honest, and we both decided that it would be nice to get out for an evening.
We went to Balboa, and we ate dinner at the Crab Cooker, buying individual bowls of clam chowder and eating them on the bench outside the restaurant, watching and commenting upon the passersby. Afterward, we drove down the peninsula to the pier across from the Fun Zone, parking in the small lot next to the pier itself. This had always been “our” spot. The site of many a free date during our poorer days, this was where I had taken Jane on our first night out, and where we had later made out in the car. Throughout the first two years of our relationship, when we could not even afford to go to a movie, we’d come here: walking through the Fun Zone itself; window-shopping in the surf stores and T-shirt shops; watching the kids in the arcades; following the boats on the bay; walking out to Ruby’s, the hamburger stand at the end of the pier.
Afterward, after most of the people had gone and the stores had closed, we usually ended up making love in the backseat of my Buick.
It seemed strange going through the Fun Zone now. For the first time, we could afford to buy T-shirts if we wanted. We could afford to play arcade games. Out of habit, though, we did neither. We walked, hand in hand, through the crowds, passing a gang of leather-jacketed punks lounging against a faded fence near the broken Ferris wheel, past a booth offering nighttime harbor cruises. The air was filled with the smell of junk food — hamburgers, pizza, fries — and under that, more subtly, the fishy scent of the bay.
We went into a shell shop and Jane decided that she wanted a sand dollar, so I bought her one. After that, we took the ferry across the bay to Balboa Island, strolled for an hour around the island’s perimeter, bought frozen bananas from an ice cream stand, and took the ferry back.
Returning to the parking lot and the pier, we heard music and saw a crowd of well-heeled yuppies standing on the sidewalk in front of a small club. The neon sign on the wall between the open door and the darkened windows read STUDIO CAFE, and a makeshift sandwich marquee said NOW APPEARING: SANDY OWEN. We stopped for a moment to listen. The music was amazing — jazz saxophone, alternately bop hot and smooth cool, played over soaring, shimmering piano — and was unlike anything I had ever heard. The overall effect was mesmerizing, and we stood on the sidewalk listening for nearly ten minutes before the press of the crowd compelled us to move on.
Instead of walking back to the car, we continued up the sloping sidewalk to the pier. Ruby’s was little more than a square of light against the darkness of the ocean night, and the pier itself was lined with fishermen, dotted with other strolling couples. We passed a group of dark-haired, dark-skinned, dark-clothed high school girls speaking in Spanish, an old man fly-tying on the worn wooden bench, and an overdressed couple leaning against the railing, making out. The music followed us, ebbing and flowing with the breeze, and for some reason it didn’t feel like we were in Orange County. It seemed as though we were in some other, better place, a movie version of Southern California, where the air was clean and the people were nice and everything was wonderful.
Ruby’s was doing a thriving business, a crowd of would-be diners clustered outside the small building, people
