The Ignored (5 page)

I mentioned this to Jane over dinner one night, and she tried to tell me
that, when you got down to it, most jobs were useless. “What about the people
who work for companies that make foot deodorant or those magnets that look like
sandwiches and Oreo cookies? No one really needs that stuff. Those people’s jobs
aren’t important.”

“Yeah, but people buy those things. People want those things.”

“People want computer things, too.”

“But I don’t even make computer things. I don’t design, produce, market,
or sell—”

“There are people with jobs like yours in every company.”

“That doesn’t make it okay.”

She looked at me. “What do you want to do? Go to Africa and feed
starving children? I don’t think you’re the type.”

“I’m not saying that—”

“What are you saying, then?”

I let it drop. I could not seem to articulate what I was trying to say.
I felt useless and unimportant—guilty, I suppose, for taking home a paycheck
when I wasn’t actually doing or accomplishing anything. It was a strange
feeling, and not one I could easily explain to Jane, but it discomfited me and I
was not able to ignore it.

Although I did not like my job, I did not hate it enough to quit. In the
back of my mind was the idea that this was temporary, something to tide me over
until I found the position I really wanted. I told myself this was a
transitional phase between school and my real occupation.

But I had no idea what my “real” occupation would be.

One thing I quickly learned was that, in a major corporation, as much
time is spent trying to look busy as is spent actually working. The week’s worth
of assignments I was given each Monday I could have easily completed by
Wednesday, but although workers in movies and on TV eagerly complete their
assignments in record time and then ask for more work, impressing those higher
up on the corporate ladder and elevating themselves through the ranks, it was
made clear to me early on that such initiative in real life was not only not
encouraged, it was frowned upon. The people surrounding me in the company
hierarchy had asses to protect. They had, over the years, worked out what was
for them a comfortable ratio of work to nonwork, and if I suddenly started
cranking out 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
Cheers
, when the patrons of the bar would all cry, “Norm!”, and I couldn’t help
laughing. Craig grinned at me sheepishly, and I remembered thinking, in the
words of the song, how nice it was to go to a place where everybody knew your
name.

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
was
superior to me, that he was more intelligent, more
interesting, more sophisticated, more everything. The words we spoke were the
friendly words of equals, but the underlying attitudes that subtly shaped the
subtexts of our conversations told a different story, and I found myself
behaving in a slightly subservient manner, playing the deferential flunky to his
smug overseer, and though I hated myself for it, I couldn’t help it.

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 eating at the chrome tables inside.
Jane and I walked around to the rear of the restaurant and took a spot at the
railing between two fishermen. It was black on the ocean, the night deeper and
darker than it ever got inland, and I stared into the blackness, seeing only the
lone bobbing light of a boat on the water. I put my arm around Jane and turned
around to face the shore, leaning my back against the metal railing. Above
Newport, the sky was orangish, a dome of illumination from the buildings and the
cars that kept the real night away. The sound of the waves was muffled, a
distant breaking.

In the movie
Stardust Memories
, there’s a scene in which Woody
Allen is drinking his Sunday morning coffee and watching his lover, Charlotte
Rampling, read the newspaper on the floor. The Louis Armstrong recording of
“Stardust” is on the turntable, and Woody says in a voice over that at that
moment the sights, the sounds, the smells, everything came together, everything
dovetailed perfectly, and at that instant, for a few brief seconds, he was
happy.

That was how I felt with Jane, on the pier.

Happy.

We stood there for a while, saying nothing, enjoying the night, enjoying
just being together. Along the coast, we could see all the way to Laguna Beach.

“I’d like to live by the beach,” Jane said. “I love the sound of the
water.”

“Which beach?”

“Laguna.”

I nodded. It was a pipe dream—there was no way in hell either of us
would ever earn enough money to buy beachfront property in Southern California—but it was something to strive for.

Jane shivered, drawing closer to me.

“It’s getting cold,” I said, putting an arm around her. “You want to
head back?”

She shook her head. “Let’s just stay here for a while. Like this.”

“Okay.” I pulled her closer, held her tight, and we stared into the
night toward the twinkling lights of Laguna, beckoning to us across the water
and the darkness.

We were still living in our small apartment near UC Brea, but I wanted
to move. We could afford it now, and I didn’t want to deal with the constant
flood of drunken fraternity boys who paraded down our street on their way to or
from this week’s keg party. But Jane said she wanted to stay. She liked our
apartment, and it was convenient for her since it was close to both the campus
and the Little Kiddie Day Care Center, where she worked.