Shot Down, and Hard!

After my little girl was born, and we moved up to the northern California wine country so she wouldn’t have to grow up breathing Los Angeles air pollution, cruel circumstances reduced me to looking for a soul-bruising, non-writing, non-singing, non-dancing day job. I got one, processing words at San Francisco’s biggest (and in many ways ghastliest) law firm, which was primarily in the business of defending a big oil company from environmental suits. 

I wasn’t good at the job, hated the idea of becoming good at the job, and got banished from posting after posting. (The firm had offices on multiple floors in three different Financial Center skyscrapers.) At one posting, I worked with two remarkable women, Kathleen McN— and Karen Nameforgotten. Both of them worked around 90 hours a week, 50 of them overtime, for which they were paid time and a half up to the point at which they started being paid double time. 

Consequently, they were earning around $70K a year (in mid-‘80s dollars), which they delighted in pointing out was more than the young associate attorneys — semiliterate and smug, every one of ‘em! — got. They spent a lot of money on stylish attire which they didn’t have time to wear anywhere but the office. I thought there must be something terribly wrong with them. Were they not American materialism made flesh? They thought there was something terribly wrong with me because I wasn’t good at word processing and had promised myself not to get better.

My first marriage was falling apart around the time I worked with them, and I’d begun looking around for new gals to woo. Karen Nameforgotten wasn’t attractive, and Kathleen and I seemed to be allergic to each other, as in I couldn’t stand her.

Or maybe I’d been mistaken. After I got banished from the group they served, and sent elsewhere, she was always the soul of cordiality when filling in for someone with whom I’d been partnered. I dared imagine she had come to find me a bit of all right, and phoned her on a particularly lonely Friday evening to ask if she might like to come over after work (assuming she wasn’t going to work straight through to Monday morning, and earn herself some megabucks) and help me drink a bottle of pinot grigio I hadn’t actually bought yet, but she didn’t need to know that. 

Her response — disdainful incredulity — reminded me of that of a pair of cutie-pies my friend Chief and I had approached on Santa Monica Beach one sunny summer afternoon around a quarter-century earlier. Said the cutie-pies, on getting a good look at us, scrawny and snide, shy and cynical, twerps. “Why don’t you two go find someone your own age?” It was entirely  possible that we didn’t look our combined 32 years. 

Kathleen McN— knew full well I wasn’t too young for her — I was forever telling her and Karen that I had no intention of turning 40 as an employee of Perfidy, Malfeasance & Sutro, as I remember the firm being called — but that made her no thirstier. It might have been she was planning to see the bit-of-rough taxi driver she was forever rhapsodizing about when not rhapsodizing about the small fortune she’d earned the previous week. 

It dawned on me that Kathleen’s cordiality had been born of the very slight danger that I might speak ill of her at my new postings, and thus make it impossible for her to earn, earn, earn! in every office of the firm’s many floors.

I wound up turning not just 40 at PM&S, but also 41, and wooing and winning the koala keeper from the San Francisco Zoo, who neither made $70K/year nor dressed terribly stylishly, but who looked like Michelle Pfeiffer, and found me sufficiently amusing to share my life for the next 11 years.