My Working Life: Jerrold

Jerrold (not his real name) was a coworker at the hospital. He was a trim, slightly built black man in his late forties with thinning hair. He and I were both transcriptionists and later I was his supervisor.

Jerrold clearly had high standards for his own behavior. He was invariably polite and friendly to everyone. If a contentious question arose he would find a way to bow out, and it was hard to drag a critical statement out of him about anyone. A few times someone played a prank on him and he just grinned for about an hour. The only time he was really concerned or upset at work was when we had a crazy prejudiced lady working there who made accusations (that’s another story), and when he realized no one was going to listen to her he went back to his phlegmatic self.

He’d gone into the service during the Vietnam War and done a tour overseas with the Air Force. He was in a group that was sent behind enemy lines to retrieve airmen, and it’s clear he had a rough war. After he got out of the service he went to work as a police dispatcher, working 12 hour days seven days a week. He then spent ten years as a Los Angeles bus driver. These experiences gave him a lot of stories to relate. Because life as a black man in Los Angeles is also bizarre and stressful, he had some stories like that, and some others about his family, all of which were extremely dramatic. But Jerrold told them in a curiously flat way. He had a kind of Midwestern male reserve that did not allow his voice to raise, or his tone to become excited, or even his adjectives to get terribly descriptive. This made the stories punch harder, because he was so clearly just relating a series of facts. I’ll try to recreate a couple of them.

Stories

Workplace stories: The Smoker

P. was a file clerk at the hospital where I was a first a transcriptionist and later the supervisor. I worked with her for almost five years.

She was a short, slight woman in her late fifties. Her greying black hair was cut short and she had thick black-rimmed glasses. Every day she wore the same thing: black jeans or work pants, a t-shirt, and a Pendleton type button down overshirt. She lived in the Valley with her partner, an older woman with several disabilities that kept her at home. She never used the word “lesbian” or referred to sexuality in any way, in fact.

P. was a person of routine. Her job was to file and deliver medical reports. Every day on a strict schedule she would go from place to place in the hospital picking up some and putting others on the chart, and then return to our office to file, mail, staple, and prepare more reports. She was incapable of variation. If one day the anesthesia sheets were later than the radiology dictations she got flustered and misdelivered things. If the need arose for flexibility she collapsed and refused. A new computer system was a life-changing disaster. Kept on her train track, though, she was content, pleasant, and hard-working. She loved the music of the 1950s, television sitcoms and game shows, and rest.

Every day she had a cheese sandwich, plain, from the cafeteria. She would sample just about any food once, but she’d always go back to the sandwich. Precisely at her shift end she would clock out and head home to have dinner and then watch television with her partner. By her report the weekends consisted of more sitting and television. She always worked Christmas and Easter for the overtime. She said it was because she was a Jew, but really it was because she needed the money and never had much to do anyway.

P. was from Chicago. Occasionally she’d wear a bowling shirt completely covered with patches advertising leagues, victories, tournaments from a 25-year career. She had left bowling years ago, mostly because her partner couldn’t participate. She never talked about the Chicago days, or the bowling, or much of anything except current news and weather and a little office politics.

She was obliging and pleasant in conversation. Practically anything anyone said would get a “You got that right, babe” or “Yes ma’am!” If she disagreed or didn’t want to address something she’d just silently shake her bowed head. Any trouble related to work would immediately be brought to me and handed off with a characteristic palms forward gesture: “It’s all yours, boss. I dunno.”

I believe P. smoked more than anyone I’ve known. There was always a pack of Marlboros in the overshirt, and she must have been a three-pack-a-day smoker. Getting to close to her was not recommended due to the intense cigarette smell.

Because she could only do certain things, on a certain schedule, P. was constantly terrified that she’d lose her job. As a result she was a terrible paranoid and office gossip, and went about the floors on her rounds gathering any kind of unreliable information she could about the hospital. During a union fight in the nursing department she wholeheartedly supported management, wearing the anti-union button and arguing with nurses on the floor. When layoffs were announced, she was a fount of detailed misinformation about our imminent doom. She took great delight in bad news and declines and falls. With the same characteristic shake of the bowed head, she’d say over and over “That’s what I’m telling you, yup, yup, that’s how it is, it’s a damn shame” about the day’s crisis or gloomy news story.

Her greatest challenge arrived the day the new anti-smoking regulations went in. Suddenly she couldn’t smoke anywhere near the building, only in certain areas away from entrances. Before that she’d taken lots of unofficial little breaks to suck down a cig, but now that was impossible. And she couldn’t take enough breaks to feed the habit, or other employees would complain and I’d have to ask her to cut down. Several of us tried to help her with smoking cessation information, including the head of pulmonary medicine.

P. had a better solution. She broke up her runs to the floor into smaller chunks, so that she could deliver them more often. Since that still kept her inside hospital walls, though, she had to find a way to get a smoke. Her solution was to avoid the covered walkway between the two buildings and skip the elevator, and instead walk down a long staircase that took her from the top of a hill to the turnaround and main hospital entrance. It was about a thirty foot stairway. She’d light up at the top and inhale the whole way down, stubbing the cigarette out in the ashtray at the bottom. Then back into the hospital to finish her rounds.

So she did learn how to be flexible, after all. I never talked to her about her technique, but I admired her victory over circumstances.

Later that year so many of my staffers complained about the long walk to get outside to smoke that I got them a short cut as a favor from another department. We had a card key that opened into a secure area, from which they could easily step outside into a loading dock.

The secure area was full of dead people, though. Throughout my day, people would come to my desk and say “I need to smoke. Can I have the key to the morgue?”

While I was working there, my father died suddenly. P. came into my office right after I’d told everyone, and stood there for a moment as if pulling together for a confession. “I just wanted to tell you,” she said. “My mother died when I was 25, on Mother’s day. I’ve never got over it. I just wanted to say I’m sorry.” Then she delivered the characteristic head shake and went on another set of rounds.

I wonder if she is still alive? It’s been ten years since I left; I doubt it.

The Still Center of a Turning World

As a child I spent a lot of time in art museums. My parents were culture vultures and we traveled a lot in Europe, including a year in Paris and some summers in Italy, France, and England. From the age of 7 to 14 I tagged along to every church, museum, archaeological site, castle, and concert in the First World.

Despite my strong desire to run in circles and eat sweets, I enjoyed high culture as a child. I could sit staring at a favorite artist’s work for a long time, and even if I didn’t like the stuff it was a fun game to learn all about it. For an agnostic I know way too much about Catholic saints to this day. There were downsides to this life (my mother would delay lunch way, way too long if the museum was good), but on the whole I was happy.

My favorites were Henri Rousseau’s big, colorful, naive paintings; Monet, especially the biggest ones; Arp’s shiny sculptures; Caravaggio’s paintings; and, although we never visited any of those countries, almost anything from Asia.

I have a particular memory of sitting in front of a large bronze Buddha. The museum atmosphere was sterile and white, and the only sound was that of the hygrometer occasionally ticking in the corner. The gallery was mostly empty. I sat on a wooden bench slightly too high for me, so that my legs swung, and looked up at him. I think this must have been a Nepalese or Indian Buddha, because he had the half-twisted little wry smile I associate with Hindu art. His patina’d hand was held up in the Buddhist benediction sign. I wanted to be that statue, and for an hour or so I thought I almost was, under my own personal Bo tree, unmoved.

That experience is in the library now, and I can go there when I need it. I’ll never be a Buddhist, but I can go back to that moment in a forgotten museum and sit on that bench next to Buddha and be still any time it’s necessary.

The con and fimmtiu’s visit

Comic Con was a blast. There were lots of nerds there, including us. I only bought one thing (a bob the angry flower book). fimmtiu and redmaenad and zebulon_y and I went from one end of the nerdiverse to the other many times and saw uncounted mouth-breathers, inappropriate fedoras, Pink Floyd t-shirts, and people dressed as video game characters.

A street hustler had got hold of a pass and was trying a variation on the Gas Station Pitch: “I gotta buy this collectable ITEM upstairs and I am SEVEN DOLLARS SHORT could you spare me a BUCK or TWO?”

One of the seller booths thought it would be smart to offer recent Star Wars material on bootleg DVD for sale. They were last seen with their stuff all tarped over and guys with bad cop hair talking to them.

I got to meet both of Zeb’s brothers and some friends of theirs, and also the famous Nancy[i] and her fiancé, and Zeb’s friend Leora. All of whom were cool people.

It was great seeing fimmtiu again; it had been five years! I stuffed him with Mexican food at Taco Mesa the night he arrived and then we got to horse around all day at the con. Put him on a plane to Salt Lake (ow!) this morning.

I have a cold; pity me. Fortunately I didn’t descend into strep or flu yesterday, probably because I drank from the firehose all day. I also now have the pager for my job for a week, which means no life. But heck, I had a great day off.

When I’m not so exhausted by tiny, tiny creatures eating my throat I’ll write more about the con and the things it made us think about.

My Corporate Anthem

From 1998 until 2000 I worked for a dot-com. kraq, lesboot, and amorpoeta did too; that’s where I met them. It was a pretty damn good job. I learned a lot there, met some people who are friends for life, got paid pretty well. It was unspeakably horrible right at the end but not until then.

Typical for places like this, it went from 25 to 500 people during my tenure there, and odd things happened as a result. Bizarre and incompetent people were hired, including a Business Communication Course Writer who couldn’t find the ampersand on a keyboard and applauded himself after he urinated. Salespeople went into the field to push products that did not and could not exist. One employee sent poems to everyone to encourage us, including a hymn to customer service called “May I Help You?”.

One day it came time to completely reorganize the technology department, which not only made the product but also supported all the other employees’ computer use. Everything was going to be turned upside down, new groups were formed, responsibilities shifted, and most important of all the whole procedure for tech support was to change. My boss prepared a presentation on all of this material.

At the meeting, though, we didn’t go right into that. After the CEO had told us how big and wonderful these changes were, another employee stepped up. This guy was a teacher with a master’s degree who wrote courses for us. He was also a model and actor, and a very …enthusiastic guy. He had with him a guitar. He was wearing a cowboy hat.

At this point a more sensible person would have made cramping motions and fled the room, but I was hypnotized. What the hell is Rob about to do? He introduced himself by saying that we were about to have a lot of changes in our workplace that would be hard to understand and probably annoying, so he was going to help us into it with a song. Strum, strum, grin. And off he went. It started something like:

Come gather around employees
Of this company we share
I’ve got a song to sing to you
Because I know you care

Mike wrote down a policy
Tom and Alec did approve
We’re gonna change Technology
‘Cause the company’s on the mooooove

I think I may have destroyed a ceiling tile with my mind at this point.

Tech support is different now
Everyone’s got to change
We’re going to move together
Together and forever
Just like you and me cowboy
Out.. on.. the.. RAAAAAAANGE

There was a silence that that of the grave when he finished. Then the CEO began clapping and laughing enthusiastically and most of the people in the room did also. I concentrated on keeping my vagus nerve from going into a spasm and stopping my heart.

I should have realized then that it was time to get out of that place. Later on we had horrible power struggles, the departure of the useful and crowning of the incompetent, and then finally a tragic dénouement involving an anti-semitic CFO, his crypto-nazi stooge, sexual and racial harassment, mass resignations, email break-ins, and fraud. The company changed it name and then spectacularly shit the bed a year or so after I left.

That guitar should have been enough, though.

Childhood Tales: The Plants I Hated

Algerian Ivy:
The back of the house and half the front were covered with ivy in about a three foot thickness. It grew at about an inch a day. Dark chambers inside the ivy contained black widow spiders, rats, ants, grass fleas, worms, and probably gigantic poisonous snakes. The ivy secreted ichor that melted paint and stuck to everything. Stuff rolled into the ivy caves and didn’t come back, especially toys. Anything that spent time in the ivy turned into a damp, foul-smelling version of itself. My earliest garden chore was trimming back the ivy and prying the more tenacious bits off the stucco and concrete with a dull table knife. When my father finally decided that the ivy had to go, an army of landscaping guys with power tools, chemicals, and fire spent a week fighting it. To this day the smell of Algerian ivy makes me slightly ill. I noticed last week that our neighbor’s ivy is crawling over our garden shed towards the house. It’s time for chemicals, fire, and power tools.
Bottlebrush:
At one side of the house, looming over the carport driveway, was a gigantic bottlebrush plant. Beautiful red cone-shaped flowers made of a million little hairs stretched out. And oozed some kind of sticky goo that instantly stained any object. When skating into the carport, if I cut it just a little too close I’d sideswipe a bit of bottlebrush and suddenly be coated with Nature’s Pigmented Airplane Glue. It was my job to cut this thing back, and when I did I always got a nice raised rash on my skin everywhere it touched.
Bird of Paradise:
At the corner of the house seven or eight of these tropical jungle plants lived. Their “flowers” looked like the Toucan Sam of the vegetable kingdom, or like an early prototype for the banana: long pelican beak-like boats of leaves with colorful petals protruding. They slowly produced a stinking greasy liquid which dripped down the plant. As the goo dripped, the “flower” rotted from the inside. Flies and ants gathered, and a miasma of South Sea decay rose into the air. I was assigned to hack off these diseased protuberances and heave them into the trash, in the process covering myself with insects and plant spooge.
Bougainvillea:
This is an awfully pretty bush, with shiny spiky leaves. We had several in the back yard and one in front next to the bottlebrush. Bougainvillea has very long, sharp thorns. As the plant grows older, the thorns get longer, and wider, and stronger. Its blooms and leaves obscure the thorns pretty well, so that when you’re in the process of wiping out on a skateboard you can easily forget, in the heat of the moment, which plant you’re about to belly-flop into. It hurts so, so very much to slam into a bougainvillea, or to be heaved into one by another kid. Hey, guess what one of my other tasks was? I learned very early on to borrow Dad’s gloves when I was told to clip this one.

I liked the cherry tomatoes and the basil and mint I grew. I liked the calla lilies and the tangerine trees and the big pine, and the palm that was a bitch to cut back but big and beautiful. And I even liked the cactus, which was spiky and dangerous but honest about it; you couldn’t fault a cactus for stabbing you, it was your own damned fault. But I still hold grudges about those others.

The Theory of the Leisure Suit Class

Living in Newport Beach has always been strange, and has always been getting stranger. Satire fails us, as daily life teems with situations and images that are so outrageously perfect, they seem to have been dreamed up by a particularly unsubtle socialist film maker to hammer in some point. Welcome to Michael Moore’s Real World Newport Beach. Some recent examples:

Driving past one of the local high-class night clubs, I see that among the stretch Hummer limos and AMG Mercedes, someone has backed out his $250,000 Lamborghini and is revving and clutch-popping hopelessly, trying to get his thoroughbred Italian supercar to go into first gear. I stop and watch as our hero wrestles with his prancing bull. Finally he achieves traction and hurtles out onto the boulevard in a cloud of tire smoke.
At a street corner, a cop is handcuffing a middle-aged Mexican man whose bicycle lies on the ground next to him. Behind them, another middle-aged Mexican man is holding up a sign that says INDULGE YOURSELF LUXURY APTS with an arrow on it, and waving the sign at passing cars.
At the local shopping mall, it is Tuesday at 3 pm, and the place is full of young marrieds without employment buying everything that glitters. One thirtyish man in a $2000 suit, sculpted hair and spray-on tan, is saying loudly into his cellphone “Yes. It has to be on a yacht, that’s where we’re making the sale. The presentation is on a yacht, and I don’t know the dress code yet, but you are going to be there.”
At Target. A small, nervous man dressed in a $200 Aloha shirt, cargo shorts, and a very shiny pair of Timberland hiking boots is gazing at a barbecue that is eight feet long and costs as much as a used car. His wife comes up behind him and says “Do the utensils match?” and he says “Of course! OF COURSE!”

My mom is sick. It’s just some digestive bug but when someone is 76 it makes me nervous, plus she never gets these. There’s something about the illness or weakness of parents that’s still very psychologically undermining even in adulthood; it shouldn’t happen.

stomping grounds

The Diedrich coffeehouse with the patio will close down. The building is collapsing. The thing hasn’t made money in forever. It’s big and relaxed and welcoming, and that’s over in this part of the world, killed by high land prices and spreadsheets. There’s a new one a block away that’s small and Starbucksy and all spreadsheet-optimized for profit. Push push push the yuppies through the revolving door. The big wide patio is a relic. I assume that they’ll announce that it’s going to be remodeled, close it, and never reopen it.

This makes me sad, because I’m the kind of person who attaches to places far too strongly. I get terribly emotional about places I’ve been, and not just the pretty ones or the ones where I was happy. I get sort of misty thinking about Kansas City and I only lived there for 9 months on a contract job, fer chrissakes. I imagine myself returning to the site after it’s torn down and morosely standing around looking at the Junta Juice or Yiffy Lube or whatever goes there in a couple years.

Five years ago I knew this guy D., friend of Greg’s. D. was a really nice, smart guy. He was that Alternative Pierced Guy with the weird beard: tall and thin, soft-spoken, deferentially pleasant. He was really into Greg’s band so I saw him a lot, and we’d talk a little about music or art, both of which he knew a lot about. D.’s particular interest was clothing, and he opened a vintage clothing store. He didn’t just have good taste; he was hard-working, understood how to run a store, and totally committed to doing this right. I believe it was in Silverlake; I never went there. He had an eye for that stuff and girls loved his taste, and he was doing well.

Then came the surprise. This scary guy started hanging around the store all the time, and he didn’t fit. He was a hardcore criminal recently released from prison for the latest in a series of violent crimes. He was covered in nonironic tattoos of dire significance and almost always drunk. He’d just show up, 40 in hand, and talk to D. in what was intended as a friendly manner, and scare the shit out of him. The guy was foul-mouthed, racist, misogynist, usually angry, and always in search of money. He scared the girls away. Business went to hell. Any suggestion that he might find somewhere else to hang out enraged him, and threats were made. Even if he left the store itself, he’d always be around within about a block, ready to come back. The last I heard, D. had finally closed the store, almost entirely because of this crappy Cape Fear remake he’d been pushed into.

And why was Mr. Ex Con there at all? Because before D. got that space it had been a crappy liquor store, bars in the cash window and all, where Sideshow Bob here had spent many a happy day in the years before he got that big sentence. When he got out it was time to go back and have him some fun again! There was a new business there, but it was still the same corner. This wasn’t Cape Fear; Poor D. had wandered into the retail version of the hotel in The Shining.

I’ve heard a possibly apocryphal story that in rural Kenya, the trick played on new people in town is to sell them cheap land for their new houses. People are enthused; they get acreage with water access and good soil, and it’s so cheap! A year later they find out they’re on the track of an elephant migration. The elephants come through the same places each year, and they don’t let anything get in their way. There are a lot of them. Things get… …flat.

I wish I was an elephant.

My Hitler

My father once had a dream in which he was staying in a Swiss pension. There was a boarding house group from several countries, and as typical in these places meals were communal, all at one table. Shortly after his arrival he discovered that the elderly German gentleman with the mustache was, in fact, Adolf Hitler. Since dream logic was in effect, the problem was not how to kill Hitler, or call the police or the army, or even berate him for his crimes. The question was: how to address him at dinner?
He couldn’t just be “Mr. Hitler”; the guy was a former head of state. “Herr Führer”, though, would imply approval of the Third Reich and his dictatorship, which can’t be done even at dinner. Finally he figured it out: “Herr Reichskanzler Hitler” [sp?]. Since that was his official elected office, it was the best choice for being introduced or asking the guy to pass the salt.
I once saw a lecture by a psychologist whose field of expertise was the psychology of contagion. This was just a few years into the AIDS epidemic, so it was a topic of current interest. He pointed out that how people think and behave about infection and contagion is related to scientific knowledge, but separate and different. And way stupider. For example, physically handicapped people are treated the way we treat people with an infectious transmittable disease: stay away, don’t touch. The mentally handicapped, too. NIMBY arguments against group homes sometimes boil down to “I’m afraid to have this near me”, as though one could catch mental retardation or multiple sclerosis from the water supply or at the mall.
The most fascinating part of the lecture was the discussion of the contagion of clothing. People were asked a series of questions about clothing that had been worn by others. No one wanted to wear clothing that an AIDS patient had worn, even if it had been thoroughly cleaned. Many people didn’t want to wear clothing that a handicapped person had worn. And finally, the contagion of evil enters the picture when we’re talking about clothing. If some beloved figure like Mother Theresa has worn a sweater, most people responded they’d love to wear it. However, if Adolf Hitler had worn the sweater, no one wanted to wear it. And if the sweater had been worn by Adolf Hitler and then by the Dalai Lama, they still wouldn’t wear it. Some kinds of contagion can’t be purified.

So anyway that’s how I learned that you can turn into Hitler if you sit on the wrong toilet seat, and that you don’t want to stay in a hotel with the guy.