DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF By Anonymous (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (5 page)

             
It was the awful corporate politeness that I found so draining. Little did I know that London’s corporate world is virtually anarchic compared to it’s American counterpart.

             
After a while, I became disenchanted with my business partner in London because I didn't feel he was pulling his weight. I believed myself more talented and I was tired of working with him. We'd been staring at each other across a desk now for four years and I'd resisted diving across and burying my thumbs in his larynx for the last time.

             
We ended amicably. We really did. He ended up with another partner in the same agency. I was approached by a headhunter to go to a really good agency in the States based in St Lacroix. As soon as the headhunter said the company's name, I knew it was the right thing to do. I was due for two weeks holiday in France with some of my AA friends so I said we'd talk when I got back. She was keen that I call from France. So I did.

             
Killallon Fitzpatrick’s creative director was visiting London for a few days, doing interviews.

             
The conversation that started the ball rolling on the events of the following three years took place in the rattling hallway of an old French farm house in the Dordogne with dogs barking and the Mistral shaking the windows trying to get in. I had no idea what he looked like but his voice sounded hilariously American. Like one of my friends had called to take the piss out of me.

             
The smell of cooking surrounded me, and it must have made me feel more homely than I had a right to because I pitched myself to this American as the Irish equivalent of Jimmy Stewart, only half his height and talent. It was what he wanted to hear. He virtually fell in love with me.

             
He apologized for St Lacroix, Minnesota, warning me the city was no London or LA. He said St Lacroix got “pretty cold” in the Winter, but it wasn't as bad as people made off. You can buy a house there next to a lake.

             
He thought I was the right sort of age for the job. I was thirty-four. There were lots of lovely ladies working in the agency. He felt sure I’d be popular. Pimp. At the time, though, I was ripe for it. Of course, I loved London but I was bored. I'd gotten the awards, I'd succeeded. Time for something new.

             
I told him I didn't care if it was cold because all I ever did was work anyway. They had heating, didn’t they?

             
I apologized to him for not being a smoker or a drinker, knowing he'd be thrilled since Americans were nervous about the British Creatives’ reputation for hard drinking. Didn't go down well in corporate America.

             
In addition, I informed him that I was at the age where I was thinking about getting married. There followed a long moment of silence which could be satisfactorily explained by him punching the air in triumph and straightening his clothes before continuing. He began to talk like someone I'd known for years, dropping all use of the conditional tense in favor of the future.

           My future.

The headhunter called on Monday.

             
“Graham warmed to you quite a bit,” she said, then started using words like “visa” and “resign,” which I welcomed. This all took place with my copywriter sitting right in front of me. I had taken to sticking my head, complete with phone, out the window to get some privacy.

             
It wasn't long before I'd resigned and found myself sitting in my London flat, waiting for work permits to be approved. I was to work freelance from the flat until I was official.

             
But I needed to vacate the flat to let it. So I was living in a hotel in London with my own flat only fifteen minutes away with two strangers living in it and the ink not yet dry on a six-month tenancy agreement and me still without any sign of an approved work permit for the United States. This unsettled state was to become the norm for the next five years.

             
If I'd known what was about to unfold, I would have stopped everything and gone home to live with my mother. But I had also just signed a new lease of life thanks to AA and I was determined to use it. After all, what was the point in getting sober if I wasn’t going to do something with it? And there was the newcomer to think of. A crazy bastard like me heading off to the States for a new career gave the new AA member hope. Or so my sponsor said.

             
I did find myself at home in Kilkenny for a few days before flying from Dublin to the States. My parents were excited for me but sad for themselves. Since I'd stopped drinking, they really did like having me around. I bought them a Dictaphone and convinced them and myself that we'd exchange taped messages across the Atlantic. Never happened.

             
My dad had a rather nasty bubbly cough when he was driving me to the railway station. A month into my new job, in my new country, in my new city, in my new house, I got a call from my mother asking the most ridiculous question.

             
“Are you sitting down?”

I knew immediately that my dad was dead. Only, he wasn't. She said he was doing poorly and that I should expect to come back at any moment. My new bosses were very understanding and even helped me book a flight. You only get a cheaper flight if you can prove you have a relative who is seriously ill. You have to give them the hospital phone number. So I flew back and I'm guilty still over the fact that I hoped my father would die within the week I had allotted for my quality time at home.

             
Ever the gentleman, he obliged. He was dusted, dead and buried with a day to spare and, to my shame, I was back at work the Monday after. Well, I was under pressure, wasn't I? I needed to impress my new boss and my old ones in London. I wanted to show them that they'd made a big mistake by not treating me better. Truth is they hadn’t treated me that badly. It just felt convenient to dislike them. The real reason I needed to get away from London was that I hated my creative partner. Obsessively so.

             
I remember one day standing with one of those big long bevelled-edged rulers they use for cutting card with a scalpel. It’s basically a blunt sword. He was standing there to my left. Suddenly, I felt faint. I didn’t fall over or anything. I just checked out for a few seconds. I saw a kind of yellow mist.

             
When I came back, I was terrified that I was going to look down at the ground and see him lying there with his head smashed in. That was the day I stuck my head out the window and called the headhunters. I was afraid of what I might do if I stayed working with him and it was going to be better to leave the country than worry about meeting him in the bitchy streets of London. Or maybe I just needed a change.

             
Newly arrived in my new country, my new city, I wasn't interested in girls. Not in the least. When I think about the chances I missed, I just want to sob. A foreigner like me in the Midwest really stands out. Mind you, I did ask one gorgeous girl out, but she said she was going steady so I thought fuck it if I can't have a beaut, then I'm not playing. The other thing was, of course, that I didn't want to get stranded there with two kids and a dog. I knew from the moment I landed that I'd have to get out.

             
I thought a year would do it. I was wrong. I bought a house, but that was just to convince them I was serious. A house was easy to sell in a buoyant market. And if I played my cards right I'd make some money on the fucker…and anyway when was I ever going to be able to afford a Victorian house with hardwood floors and a cute swing seat on the verandah like the house in The Waltons? The agency talked to the bank to help me get it.

             
The house was great for about a month.

In the meantime, I was getting to know the insides of airports pretty well. In America, taking a flight is like taking a bus in England. You get on a plane for a meeting. Especially if you are based in St Lacroix, Minnesota. The first job they put me on was a huge project overseeing the commercials for the car company BNV link-up with the Shane Pond movie Tomorrow Forever Cries.

             
Their new model, the 9T, was being featured in the movie as was their new motorbike, the T2600 Surfer. They wanted to make three commercials and three print ads to announce this highly attractive association of icons.

             
It was a pain in the arse. You had to feature the car prominently and show clips from the movie. Very difficult task. Very difficult to get a nice clean idea while having to include all those separate elements. Then, on top of that, we had to deal with three different clients, BNV North America, BNV Germany and DGR Pictures. It took nearly nine months and three times as many flights to get the bastard finished.

             
In my office on the thirty-second floor of this green-glass skyscraper looking out on the flatness of the Midwest, which stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction, I might just as well have arrived on the moon.

             
It reminded me of a sci-fi programme on BBC called Space 1999. There were a lot of similarities to the year in which I arrived. The interiors of the moon base were all clean lines and hi-tech and the views out the windows were barren and stark. The inhabitants of the base were all handpicked and highly civilized and, above all, disciplined. This was a big thing at Killallon Fitzpatrick. The ability to smile while under duress. They loved that. They liked you to suffer quietly.

             
And I got pretty good at it. I was five years sober. This was what I stopped drinking for. This was the kind of thing I would never have been able to do. I mean on paper it was great. House. Job. Money. Move to the States. When I was drinking there was no way I would ever have been offered this kind of situation. And I congratulated myself that I hadn't fallen into the trap of having a girlfriend, because I would never have been able to go if I had. I resolved to resist any advances by any girl from anywhere in the Midwestern region. I was no fool. I was not going to let myself get stranded there for the rest of my life with some gorgeous wife and blonde kids as Killallon Fitzpatrick slowly turned up the heat until I cracked like Spring-ice.

             
I got myself hooked up with the local AA groups, which were great. I began to feel better. St Lacroix is the capital of rehab. They have more rehab centres than anywhere else in the States. This was one of the reasons I felt so comfortable about a move there in the first place. In fact, on the grounds of the “Pentagon of Treatment Centres,” better known as Hazleton, there is a bar.

             
Yes, that’s right, a bar that sells alcoholic beverages. In that bar there is a sign on the wall. It says, “AA Chips Exchanged.” For every year you stay sober, you receive a little metallic coin called a chip. This bar offers free booze for one night to any lapsed member of AA willing to spend his chip. The wall behind the bar was covered with chips.

             
As long as I didn't drink and didn't get into a relationship, I'd be able to get back to London and resume life and look back on this whole period as an interesting lapse in concentration. Either way, I was looking out my window after having been flown over and paid quite a bit - I was making $150,000 a year. My ego had been fluffed to the point of ejaculation. My favourite pieces of furniture had been carefully packed and shipped, my mother had been sent a huge bouquet of flowers sympathizing with the loss of her husband, my father. The unspoken, unwritten expectation hung over me.

             
Okay, big shot, let's go.

             
That was pretty freaky, but I didn't mind because I was in a good position. If I fucked up it didn't really matter, I was in a foreign country. If I did well it just meant their trust was well placed. And of course, I'd make sure the "folks back in London, England" knew all about it.

             
So I came home to my big Victorian house in the evenings, after my AA meeting, and I liked the fact that I hardly had any furniture. It appealed to me to be living in a house with just a few bits of furniture. The scarcity reminded me of a Deep Purple album cover I used to have, the one that showed pictures of a huge country house in France, with recording equipment and wires and cool-looking fuckers strewn everywhere. This was the effect I strove for.

             
But no one else appreciated the irony of a mostly empty house owned by a shaven-headed Irishman who didn’t seem responsible enough to have been given a mortgage. This amused me. It would not have seemed unnatural if someone had kicked in my door one day and said, “There’s been a mistake. Get out.” I would have left quietly because I really didn’t think I deserved such good fortune. 

             
This was linked with feelings of guilt and shame over what I had been doing to people when I was drinking. This need to hurt was lessened when I stopped drinking. Maybe it was replaced with a need to hurt myself.

             
My neighbors tried to welcome me, but they didn’t understand that I could never be seen with them voluntarily. It was okay if someone knocked on my door or invited me over for a beer, which quickly became a Coke. Irony could be achieved under these conditions. Fine until I was forced to borrow a lawn mower.