What with the economic downturn everyone seems to be worrying about losing their jobs but those like me, who've been unemployed for years, have less to stress over. Even so, I do occasionally feel the urge to work and by giving into that urge I open myself up to the kinds of grief that other segments of the population know so well. Thus do I maintain the bonds of kinship between you and me.
My buddy turned me on to a hip law firm with offices just southwest of midtown; he does freelance stuff for them (this and that but mainly the other), and he told me that they might have more traditional work open for me. I called up the office and on the basis of my friend's name was transferred straight to the founding partner, who gave me an appointment for an interview.
Promising stuff, and I didn't want to blow it, so I called my friend to ask for advice; should I wear a suit, was there anything I should lie about, that kind of thing. He told me to just relax, etc., be you-know-who (myself), and when I asked him if he thought business casual would be formal enough he told me that it might even be too formal. This is not a law firm like other law firms; the founding partner is in her early thirties, it's staffed almost entirely by paralegals, and they mainly do hip fun stuff like finagling green cards for foreign artists and performers. The founding partner's name is Vivian; my friend said to me, “The other day I went into the office and Vivian was wearing a shirt with a gun printed on it. During office hours. In front of clients. I would strongly advise against wearing a tie.”
A good thing, since I've again forgotten how to tie a tie. I went to the appointment wearing a knit shirt and thin, worn slacks ($4, Salvation Army). To fill out my brainy-and-cultured-but-not-into-all-that-bullcrap-image-stuff image, I popped the paperback of La Nausee into my back pocket, which I'm reading in the original French (obviously, or else I would have called it Nausea). Sort of with the title just poking out, so that everyone could see it, and see how I just sort of carried it nonchalantly like that, like how a working-class man would carry a book if working-class people read.
So I showed up to the appointment, only twenty minutes late or so (because I thought the office was on 37th instead of 39th (I don't know why I thought that)). I rode the elevator up to the seventh floor and when the doors opened I saw that people were wearing ties and that everyone was in business casual, at least. The women weren't wearing ties, of course, except that some of them were. They were that fashionable, that they were wearing neckties. (In my provincial youth I thought that that was the most fashionable thing a woman could do, since they never did it in the provinces but they did it all the time in eighties movies shot in New York.) The elevator opened directly onto a large open space with white walls and desks set along the walls, and good-looking well-dressed young people looking curiously at me. The offices—Vivian's, presumably, and another one beside it—were separated from the open floor by glass walls only.
I sucked in my gut and walked up to the amused and gorgeous secretary of indeterminate race draped in a glorious sari (she was draped in it, not me or her race) and told her my name. Meanwhile I'd noticed that some of the good-looking clients talking seriously with the very passable-looking lawyers or paralegals or whatever sounded French, and so in order to hide La Nausee I nonchalantly tugged down at the back of my knit shirt like a fifth-grader trying to cover up his poopie pants, since I'd only planned to have to impress fellow Americans and had not counted on bumping into any actual French people who might try to speak French to me and expect me to be able to answer. I should have said like a second-grader, not like a fifth-grader, I never shat my pants as late as the fifth grade.
Vivian came out to meet me, very competent and beautiful so that I immediately fell in love with her, she was not wearing a picture of a gun. She grinned and took my hand; “Hi!” she said, very Americanishly, “are you The Silver Maker?”
“Yes,” I said, “pleased to meet you, Terrence has told me so much about you.” Terrence is that freelance guy I mentioned.
“He does great work,” she gushed as she led me back to her glass-walled office, “we just all love him.”
In the office I sit down in a hip and elegant chair, kind of like a lawn chair, two orange strips of material on a wire frame. Very spare, with a dash of humor from the orange. A guy I used to work with used to refer to the knit shirt I had on as the “lentil shirt,” because . . . well, regardless. Vivian pointed out the view she had from her office—which I had to twist my neck around to see—and then pointed through the glass wall to the neighboring office. “That's Glenn,” she said, “my fellow founder.”
Glenn was not much older than I, his premature baldness more than made up for by the whole prosperous glow thing. He was wearing high-end business casual. Seeing us looking at him, he pantomimed a mime feeling his way along an invisible wall, except that of course he was feeling his way along the real, albeit transparent, wall. He pulled a face, a mime's distressed grimace. Then he and Vivian both laughed and made throwing gestures at each other, a sort of deeply affectionate “oh, you.” Then Vivian turned her attention back to me.
She explained the purpose of the law firm, which, you know, I just explained to you a second ago, so I won't repeat it now. Then, after an awkward few moments during which it became clear that I wasn't going to volunteer the information, she asked me about my recent work experience. I recounted it in the most aggrandized way possible (retail work, part-time arts admin, freelance gigs scoured from Craig's List, a kind of mild fluffy pink poverty).
“You're a writer,” she said. “That's good. Any experience in legal writing?”
“I think I could totally get the hang of it.”
“Uh-huh. On your resume it said that you know French and Japanese. We've got a lot of French and Japanese clients. You think you might be able to help us to communicate with them?”
“Well, to be honest with you—because I don't want to lie—to be honest with you, yes, I do know some Japanese and some French. But the odds are that your clients have better English than I do Japanese and French.”
“Uh-huh. That's cool.”
“Yeah.”
“It also says something on your resume about Spanish?”
“Oh, yeah, but I just started taking lessons. Or, well, I mean, I've been studying it for a few years. But I've only recently started to really bear down.”
“Okay.”
“Uh-huh.” At this point I think I made a joke, I don't remember what it was.
“All right!” she said brightly, grinned, handed me a card. Her business cards were miniature passports that opened up to reveal her photo and contact info. “Why don't you just take that, and I'll—we have your email address, right?”
“Yeah, it's on my resume,” I said, trying to remember if I'd remembered to include my email address in my resume.
“Awesome, well, why don't you just go home, and I'll look around if we have any trial writing assignments for you, and if we do, uh. . . .”
“Awesome, thanks,” I said, and stood up with a burst of nervous energy. La Nausee had wormed halfway out of my back pocket while I'd been sitting there, and it caught against the orange material that had been supporting my back. I was shoving down on the armrests as I stood, so the chair stayed put, and I kept rising, so what gave was my pants, the seat of them ripping out with a big noise. La Nausee fell all the way out of the now-ruined pocket and I bent over to pick it up, mooning Vivian in the process (the seat of my pants was hanging in a strip almost down to the back of my knee). I was wearing my red bikini-cut briefs. An ex bought them for me because she thought they looked sexy. I only wear them when I'm not expecting anyone to see me getting undressed.
“What happened?” she said, not smiling, but not frowning either.
I waved my hand oh-shucksishly, rolled my eyes, chuckled. “Oh, you know.”
I held La Nausee in my hands for a moment, very self-conscious because of how conspicuous it suddenly seemed, and also worried in my bibliophilic way about the damage my hyper-sweaty palms must be doing to its fifty-year-old yellowed paper cover. Finally I just stuck it into my left back pocket, although it took a moment's squirming before I could manage to stuff it in there beside my wallet. “Okay,” I said to Vivian.
“Okay,” she said.
I sidled out of the office. It seemed to me that all the occupants of the room were either staring at the seat of my pants or else pointedly not staring at it. In Japanese the seat of the pants is “shiri;” or, rather, “shiri” has a range of meanings, including “the buttocks, backside; the base; the rear.” “Trousers” are “zubon,” so “seat of the pants” should be “zubon no shiri.” The way to describe the situation I've just recounted would be, in Japanese, “Zubon no shiri ga yaburete hazukashikatta.”
Um, okay, well. I'm not immediately sure how to transfer that into a novel, film, or comic book. So that'll be the next installment, I guess.
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