A Job I Actually Liked

When I was 11, my dad, a persuasively relentless schmoozer, got a Russian immigrant fruiterer to give me a summer job working on the truck he drove around Playa del Rey, the unremarkable southern California beach town from which I hail. It was my job to carry boxes of newly purchased fruit up to its purchasers’ homes. The Russian immigrant called me Muscles, sarcastically, and none of the housewives whose cantaloupes, peaches, and what-have-you I lugged asked me to relax with a cold glass of lemonade while they changed into filmy negligees. I nonetheless adored the job, first because of the glorious smell of the back of the truck, in which I rode (probably illegally), and because the work made me feel for a change like a real boy. I think my salary was $1 per summer, but of course a dollar was worth more then. 

It would be around 40 years before I got another job I liked as much. as a graphic designer at an Oakland-based pyramid scheme that masqueraded first as a vendor of phone cards, and then as a vendor of salad dressings and skin care products (there’s such a difference?), and then was shut down by the state Attorney General. I arrived at work one morning to find the building surrounded by cops, and the company’s sanctimonious born-again Christian management team looking embarrassed. 

My boss, the guy who hired me, was a hyperneurotic little gay fellow who played accordion at the company Xmas party, had one of those allegedly serenity-inducing babbling brook things on his desk, and had gotten it into his head that if he were to pronounce things “way cool,” he himself might be perceived as with-it. At first, I loved him for having given me my first design job, only to realize that he apparently intended to hire everyone in the Bay Area. With more alleged designers (most of them awful) than actual work, we all did lots of thumb-twiddling and snickering at our sanctimonious overseers.

Good thing, then, that I loved more of my fellow employees than at any other job I ever had. Paddy, who looked scarily like Homer Simpson, but with Bart’s personality and the energy of a child whose Ritalin supply had been cut off, was himself a Christian, but the kind who could both take and make a joke. Allison, who hadn’t received the memo about women spelling it with only one l, was a fellow depressive,  with garish yellow hair, haunted eyes, and a job playing bass guitar in a ghastly alternative band. We three made each other laugh uproariously, no easy feat given my and Allison’s depressiveness, and enjoyed the visits of the immensely vivacious and endearingly cynical young intern Kathleen, and the company male sexpot, Handsomeboy (so called, by me, at his request after he heard me address my daughter as Pretty Girl), an intellectual thug whose idea of a grand time was to read Nietzche in the original German or get arrested at Candlestick Park for punching a security guard. He has gone on to become America’s foremost expert on excessive physical exercise. When Way Cool hired a Sri Lankan IT whiz to keep all our computers and software running smoothly even though there was no work, I started answering the office phone as though the office were his alone. “Mr. Abeygunawardena’s office. How many I help?”

Most revelatory of the lot was Dre, a black alleged photographer and perfectly dreadful graphic designer who soon had the born-agains eating out of his hand. He’d smile, and address them as homey, and they’d turn to mush, the thought balloons above their heads reading, “This actual black person from the actual ‘hood  seems to like me!” I’d probably have done the same thing if I’d been he.

Paddy had forgotten more Photoshop than I’ve yet learned, and was a wonderful illustrator, but I came to regard myself as the best of the 750 designers Way Cool had hired — at least until he hired a Taiwanese packaging specialist whose work in Adobe Illustrator far exceeded my own. But my discombobulation was short-lived, as my ill-disguised disdain for Way Cool and sanctimonious hucksters got me fired a few days after his hiring. 

When nearly the whole gang — minus Way Cool — turned out for the surprise birthday party Kathleen threw for me many months later, I was moved to tears. 

The Wicked Allure of Nazi Iconography

I can still remember, because I will never forget, my first night as An Older Man. The Artist Formerly Known as The Kiddo and I had repaired to the infamous Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Blvd, where, in those male-chauvinistic times, salesgirls from Orange County masquerading as groupies got chummy with boxboys from the Valley masquerading as rock stars. It was our hope to meet young women with whom to enjoy a bit of promiscuity. Over the course of the conversation we had with the first two maidens we were able to persuade to share our booth, the fact of my being 27 came out, whereupon they gaped at each other in horror, and…mine gasped, “You’re so…old!” They were both 19.

Within months, First Major (adult, live-together) Girlfriend had pulled the plug on our relationship because I was unbearable, and I went out looking for someone new to whom to be ghastly and unfaithful on an ongoing basis. As luck would have it, lucky winner Jakki Gall was herself 19, blonde and cute and of the Valley. Our first date was to see The Night Porter, which intrigued me because I found fantastically sexy the poster depicting Charlotte Rampling in her opera-length leather gloves and Nazi officer’s cap.

I was a smoker then, but Jakki Gall was a smoker’s smoker, and it was a wonder anyone seated in our vicinity was able to see the film, but all was forgotten when she agreed after the closing credits to come over to my apartment overlooking Sunset Blvd. for a look at my etchings, if you get my drift, and you do.

Within around 72 hours, she had me wrapped around her little 19-year-old finger. First Major Girlfriend had been pretty nervous about sex (and I, of course, impatient, censorious, and the consummate tyrannical asshole male), so Jakki’s being fantastic more than made up for the great unlikelihood of her coming to be viewed as one of our great public intellectuals. I couldn’t get enough of her, though she seemed able to get quite enough of me. I searched for consolation on nights she didn't answer her phone in the arms of an older woman, one of my own superannuation. I'd known that I would never be happy with her, though, from the moment she turned up for our first date in a ghastly maxiskirt that four years before wanted back.

Christmas was coming and I rolled out the heavy artillery, making Jakki a top on which I wrote her name in silver glitter. I tried to make a date to present her with it (among other things), but the joyous season had made her even more elusive than usual. Once having given her so vigorous a bawling out for disappointing me that she said maybe we'd better retrieve the personal items we’d left in each other’s homes, I scraped her name off the top, replaced it with FMG’s, and left it for FMG, as a surprise, in her car, to which I’d retained the key.

She was sufficiently touched to suggest that we meet up. At our meet-up, though, in spite of my trying to be my most charming, she seemed to think better of thinking better of our breakup. She’d never looked more gorgeous than just before the elevator doors closed on her as she left me again.

Annie's Song

I had only a month or two to go before being awarded the bachelor’s degree that would unlock every door and melt every maiden’s heart, but for the time being, I was a boy without a girlfriend. Then I ran into Annie S— on the steps of the big library, and was flabbergasted by her apparent receptivity to the idea of our becoming a romantic pair. I had known (of) her two years before, when we both inhabited a particular residence hall in which she was known for her wonderful huge breasts, and for her oddly named and very territorial boyfriend, who seemed to be everything I was not — handsome, virile, athletic, self-assured. Within a few minutes of ascertaining that she didn’t regard me as a frightful dweeb in spite of my wire-rim glasses and wispy moustache, we were up in one of the library’s cubicles, kissing and, well, petting, with sufficient enthusiasm to annoy the scholars on either side.

She moved in with me, into my grotty, soulless little one-bedroom apartment on Federal Avenue in West Los Angeles. (If ever a street’s name accurately conveyed its charmlessness!) I had an actual…old lady. I felt like a real boy!

I was already reviewing concerts for the Los Angeles Times, and began taking her with me. She was forever marveling at how wonderfully a band’s singer and principal instrumentalist complimented each other. I rarely agreed with her, but her sensitivity to musical sympathy inspired me to listen with particular interest to the newly released first Joe Cocker album, and to note that on one track guest Jimmy Page couldn’t possibly have heard Joe’s vocal before he recorded his guitar solo. Now it can be told: the great man’s resentment predated my disliking the first Led Zeppelin album in the pages of Rolling Stone!

Our sex was lousy in spite of her having a pair of black leather panties that I found quite wonderful. She’d get on top and bounce up and down on me with grim determination that she seemed to intend to be mistaken for lack of inhibition. Nonetheless, the night she didn’t come home from her waitressing job in Venice was one of the worst of my life, and shattered my heart so badly that it was a wonder I managed to take and pass the last final exams of my life. And then it got worse. When she came by to retrieve her stuff, she admitted that she didn’t really feel much beyond remorse. A few years later, I’d work that into my song “Brokenhearted Reggae.” She says it’s too hard. She’d rather discard everything that we’ve built [not, of course, that we’d built much in three weeks, but: poetic license!] When I feel the same, how can she claim all that she feels is guilt?

I ascertained six years later while in the Bay Area on business that she was waitressing at a hip bistro in Marin County, and dropped in on her without warning. I’d repudiated the dweebishness of the last of my college days and entered my rock dreamboat phase since we’d last seen each other, and she very much liked the idea of our getting together that evening, perhaps for some grimly determined coitus. But then she had to excuse herself to attend to one of her tables, and Mr. Dylan’s fervently vindictive “Positively Fourth Street” began to play, and I thought to myself, “They’re playing our song!” My walking out of the restaurant with her imploring me in vain to come back felt somehow true, somehow deserved, though I won’t deny that thoughts of her wonderful breasts and black leather panties inspired some spirited masturbation that lonely night in my Miyako bathtub.

A Slanted Playing Field

I made it until nearly 1 p.m. today without feeling very miserable, but I had help, in the form of one of my tutoring students, who was heartbreakingly downcast today because a senior nurse at his hospital gave him a very hard time over the weekend for his Salvadoran accent. My driving him back and forth to the Beverly Hills Public Library, where he got his own card and checked out two more short novels by his new favorite author, John Steinbeck, noticeably raised his spirits, which in turn cheered me. But by the time I’d dropped him off at his bus stop, come home, and had some lunch, it was too late to head for the beach, so here I am, in midafternoon, gagging on the black dog’s ugly thick fur.

The sun is shining and it isn’t too hot. I look out my 10^th floor windows and imagine everyone in sight — perhaps a fifth of Los Angeles — living a more interesting, more fulfilled life than my own, with meaningful work to perform, places to go, and people to see. Nearly all, I would guess, are very much less lonely, and whom do I have to blame for that other than myself? At this moment I am estranged from everyone on my very, very exclusive personal A-list.

It isn’t, mind you, that I’m incapable of recognizing that many people are sweet, generous, kind, thoughtful, loyal, thrifty, and obedient (a smidgen of humor for Holly!), but that none of that, in and of itself, is enough to make me want to spend time around them. erMost people bore me, and I’ve got enough of a boredom problem without putting myself in situations in which extricating myself from a stultifying conversation, let’s say, would hurt another’s feelings.

On a case by case basis, I don’t feel that I’ve failed to meet halfway any of my tiny inner circle. But when I step back and look at the big picture, I see one whose loneliness is a function of his inability to get along with anyone, someone who’ll probably die soon — social isolation is known to decrease longevity — and alone.

You know with whom I get along really well? Complete strangers (not counting our faithfully LIKEing each other’s posts and sending each other occasional messages of encouragement) who’ve somehow become friends of mine on Facebook. I haven’t spent 30 seconds in their presence, but I feel I can count on them to hear me crying out in the darkness, and to offer consolation. There are days when I can’t imagine what I’d do without them.

There’s something beautiful about that, and something deeply pathetic.  If we were to meet for a frappuccino or something, they’d probably change their minds about me pronto, or I’d get bored and want to hurry home to stare enviously out the window at people living lives more fulfilled than my own. Or, most likely of all, the Groucho Marx Syndrome would kick in, and I’d think to myself, “Do I really want to be seen with anyone so desperate as to allow herself to be seen with me?”

I like to imagine my students all like me a lot, and God knows I love them, but I can’t pretend the playing field’s level. Maybe I’m capable of being likable only when I’m in a position of power.