The phone at the
Post
’s business section picks up after half of one ring. “Business, this is Lyle.”
“Lyle, my friend. Tom Violet from MSW here. Did you get my news release?” I’m surprised at how calm I sound.
“I sure did, Mr. Violet. We got a big kick out of it down here in the bullpen. It’s a joke, right?”
“Interesting choice of words. In actuality, I think it’s the first press release I’ve sent you that
isn’t
a joke. Let’s just say we’re taking our branding in a whole new direction.”
There’s a long pause, and I hear newsroom sounds in the background, typing and chattering. I can imagine Lyle sitting at some cluttered desk, just an underpaid kid with a journalism degree wondering if he’s being put on. “You mean, this is real? You want me to send this up to the editors?”
“Send away, Lyle. You might wanna hustle though. I’ve sent it to a few other places. Fifty-three, to be exact.”
“Whoa. Really?”
“See, you’ve been telling me for months that eventually I’d send you something good enough for the front page. Well, here it is.”
Lyle laughs, but he also sounds a little sad. “I should probably ask you, Mr. Violet. Have you been drinking?”
I look at my watch, which is an act of physical comedy that is completely wasted over the phone. “No, not yet.”
“And, have you recently been fired from MSW?”
“Well, again, not yet. But the day is young.”
“OK then. Well, good luck, Mr. Violet. I think you’re probably gonna need it.”
“I appreciate that. You take care, Lyle.”
I may never see Katie again, and I may have said good-bye to my marriage, but this moment, an awkward parting with a kid I’ve never even seen in real life, has me nearly choking up. I look around my office, suddenly sentimental. It’s how death-row inmates must feel, gazing at their little cells one last time as the clock approaches midnight. I’m saying good-bye to my real life, and my other life, too, and everything else I know in the world. Slowly, in no particular hurry, I start taking Allie’s artwork down from my bulletin board. Pictures of me, Hank, Anna, Curtis, an elephant, a blue pickup truck, Simba, a smiling bear, and a wide-eyed fish. These things, I want to keep. Everything else, as far as I’m concerned, can go straight into the garbage.
M
y press release
, sent to more than fifty trade pubs, business journals, online news sites, and newspapers around the country, went out from my desk just after 11 a.m. EDT. Through the lunch hour and into the early afternoon, as I sat at my desk with my door closed, the industry wires were silent. There are people at MSW whose job it is to monitor these wires and the press in general. This seems like a worse job than mine, trolling random industry blogs and sites and Google alerts, searching for any and all new references to this stupid company. This monotonous task is given to either the interns or the right-out-of-college crowd—usually philosophy and English majors who’ve graduated to find themselves otherwise unemployable.
Then, just after 3 p.m., one of those poor interns heard a beep on his computer. And then another. And then another after that. “Dude, check this out,” he said to another intern.
“Dude. Holy shit.”
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office for more than five minutes can imagine what happened next. At least half of the average work person’s day in corporate America is spent forwarding funny shit to colleagues and friends. Intern number one e-mailed the first media hit, a blurb on
Employee Development Weekly
’s Web site, to a guy upstairs in Receiving who he plays fantasy baseball with. That guy sent it to his buddies in Accounting. They sent it to the girls they’re secretly hooking up with in other departments. And so on.
At 4:20 p.m., when there was a knock at my door, pretty much everyone in the company—even the satellite workers and the ladies on maternity leave and the telecommuters at home watching
Oprah
—knew that the shit had hit the fan in a huge way. I opened the door to find Janice standing there blinking at me, fresh from her
Crisis Management Handbook
, with our two old-timer security guards. She sighed and the men girded themselves for the unknown, wondering how much trouble I was going to be.
“What seems to be the problem, Officers? Was I speeding?”
On my way out, not quite handcuffed, but definitely
escorted
, I invited everyone within earshot to the Front Page Bar and Grill a few blocks away for a happy hour. This seemed like a good thing to say, and by “good” I mean flamboyantly inappropriate.
“I hope it was worth it, Tom,” Janice said to me in the parking garage on our way to my car. “You know, if you just would have kept your mouth shut and played it straight, you could have gotten pretty good severance out of this. You know he was going to fire you eventually. It was inevitable.”
Through my overwhelming, irrational pride, there was a pinch of regret. “How do you do it, Janice?” I asked.
She looked at me, considering whether or not to take my bait. She’s probably a nice woman deep down, and I’m sure she loves her Dalmatian. “Do what, Tom?”
“Sleep at night.”
In the low light, two floors underground, I could see the shell of what Janice once was before becoming a corporate assassin. Maybe, on some level, she respects me. Or, then again, maybe the Dark Side has overwhelmed her, and I’m just a social security number with a cardboard box—a problem that’s been eliminated. “We’ve all got bills to pay, Tom,” she said. “It’s just a game anyway. A game that, I’ve gotta say, you’re not very good at playing.”
Well, as Curtis would say . . . when you’re right, you’re right.
As I sit unemployed and drunk at the Front Page Bar and Grill, I’m pretty sure that it
was
worth it. For the first hour or so, I drank alone, scanning the classic news clippings posted around the bar. Then, slowly, people began to trickle in, and they just kept coming. Some of them I knew, the Tom People, but some of them I didn’t know—people I barely even recognized from elevators and conference rooms.
But they all knew me.
I’ve done something today that everyone dreams about doing. The difference is, I had the balls to do it, and so I am, at least for the moment, their hero, and my money is no good here. Shots and beers and stiff drinks have accumulated in front of me at a rate I haven’t seen since my twenty-first birthday. I take out my cell phone and call home.
“Where are you?” asks Curtis. “Sounds like Paris in the summer.”
“Grabbing a drink with some coworkers. You think you could take care of Allie-Cat tonight? Maybe get her some dinner, make sure she gets to bed OK?”
For a moment, he’s thoughtfully quiet, on the verge of chastising me, but then he realizes that he’s Curtis Violet and lectures on fatherhood probably won’t go over well. “OK, sure. I can do that. But . . . be careful, Tom. You sound like perhaps you might need to be careful.”
I hang up the phone and I’m instantly being hugged by an Asian guy from IT. “You’re fucking awesome,” he says. “You crazy bastard.” We do an Irish Car Bomb together and then he runs off and tackles some other IT guy at the bar. When the doors open, a familiar figure comes in, a woman wearing Jackie O glasses, like a celebrity trying not to be noticed. It’s Lauren, Ian Barksdale’s assistant. She’s a defector from the other side and the bar greets her with good-spirited boos. “Well, if it isn’t the most unpopular man in Washington, D.C.,” she says.
“What, are you kidding?” I say. “Look at me, I’m beloved.”
She nods at the bartender and smiles. “Well, let me tell you who doesn’t love you. Ian was in a meeting with the lawyers when I snuck out. I’ve never seen him so angry. And he’s almost always angry.”
And there it is, anxiety, budding full in my stomach. My fans are energized though, and there’s a round of encouragement and antiestablishment rhetoric. I’m like Nelson Mandela. I’m persecuted— a martyr. I imagine a judge’s sentence being drowned out by the chants of love from the parking lot outside the court house.
Free Tom Violet! Free Tom Violet!
“This is still America, isn’t it?” I ask. “Isn’t comedy protected under the First Amendment?”
“Is that what that was?” asks Lauren. “Comedy?”
“Ooooooo,” say three guys from the mailroom that I kind of know.
Lauren raises a colorful little drink. “To the stupidest guy in town,” she says, and then we knock shot glasses and drink something that burns.
This disparate group here, all united under strange, exciting circumstances, has the mood of New Year’s Eve, and all around me people are declaring that they’re going to start doing things differently, to start letting their own voices be heard at work. Some are even discussing how to make their résumés more attractive—financial crisis be damned—or to start thinking about new careers altogether. Some guy from Product Development gives me a knuckle bump, and a lady I don’t known at all gives me a surprisingly handsy hug. The jukebox, which we’ve commandeered, amazingly, starts playing “9 to 5” by Dolly Parton. I haven’t heard this song in years. No one has. Still, though, we sing along like it’s the 1980s and scream the chorus and hug and commiserate.
SportsCenter
begins and ends on the TVs behind the bar. There are clips of Obama giving a speech, and then Bush, and then McCain, and then some guy from one of the auto companies, and no one notices a thing. A new bartender shows up to replace an old bartender, and then a girl bartender shows up to help him, and they’re pouring drinks and shots and beers. We’re all here because we hate our fucking jobs. Well,
they
hate their fucking jobs, and I hate my old one. Even people from other companies who have no idea who I am start joining in because they hate their fucking jobs, too, and everyone is happy together. Because for these few fleeting hours, at least we’re somewhere other than work.
“Who wants a shot?” I yell.
And everyone does.
Drunkenness, I’ve found, has a way of becoming sadness pretty quickly. Things stop being as funny as they were before, and everything that you thought was good is suddenly spun in the other direction. Tonight, it’s my mother’s voice-over doing the spinning.
These people are laughing and having fun, Thomas,
she says.
But tomorrow they’re going to go about their lives and forget all about you. What are you going to do tomorrow? You have no job. And as far as I can see, dear, your wife is about to leave you. She’s in another city with another man. She’s going to take your daughter, too. That’s how it always goes. And what will you have to show for it? Other than a bitter, hastily written press release, I mean.
I shut my eyes and try to let my mom fall back behind the blaring stereo. And then there’s another voice, and this one isn’t in my head . . . and it sure as hell isn’t my mom.
“I heard you did something really stupid today.”
I open my eyes, and there she is. My insides flutter, and then it feels like I’m falling. Before I got married, I spent as much time as any other guy in bars like this, going from drunk to sad, and in all those lonely nights with my friends, never did someone as beautiful as this even acknowledge me. She is my youth—or, at least, the youth I wish I’d had.
I say her name and we hug, which lasts a moment.
“Are you OK?” I ask.
“I’ve never been fired before,” she says.
“Me neither. I’ve fantasized about it. I thought it’d be more liberating.”
She’s wearing no makeup that I can see, nor is she wearing her corduroy jacket. Instead, she’s in jeans and a simple black shirt. It’s been a hard day for her, but her only tell is her eyes, still a little puffy from crying. A few people see her and give her hugs and high fives and words of encouragement. But then, gradually, they turn their backs or wander away and leave us alone.
“You’re better off, you know,” I say. “The Death Star doesn’t look as good on a résumé as you might think. You’re too good for that place.”
“That’s what my dad said. He said any company you can’t describe in one sentence isn’t worth working for. I still don’t even know what MSW really does. It’s like company in that one movie,
Office Space
, where everything is kept intentionally vague so anyone can identify with it.”
“I think it might actually be one giant money-laundering scheme. Or maybe a Ponzi scheme, whatever that is.”
“I’m gonna send out résumés. I hear the job market is pretty strong, so I should find something right away.” She laughs a sad laugh. “I’ll be standing in an unemployment line in two-hundred-dollar Kenneth Cole heels listening to my iPod Touch.” She points at the five or so drinks currently sitting at the bar in front of me. “Are all of those yours?”
I offer her one, and she selects what appears to be a watered-down vodka soda that a chunky lady named Doris from Research gave me a while ago. She squeezes the lime, takes a long sip, and looks up at me. “So, did you write that press release because of me?”
“I think most people would agree I wrote it because I’m an idiot.”
She rests the palm of her hand on my chest, over my heart. “I didn’t come here to see
most
people. I came here to see you.”
“In that case, yeah, I did write it because of you.”
“Lauren says they’re going to sue you, you know.”
“For what? My Honda? The house that’s in my dad’s name? Maybe they’ll garnish my wages. I’m currently making zero dollars a year.”
“I’m still glad you didn’t take that stupid job.”
I take a sip of whatever is in this glass, something in the tequila family, and I wince. “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Well, the way I see it—if you had taken the job, I probably wouldn’t have gotten ‘let go’ today. So, I’d have a paycheck, which would be nice. But, if you were still my boss, then I wouldn’t be able to flirt with you at this bar right now.
Cosmo
says you should never flirt with your superiors at happy hours. It gives you a bad reputation.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Flirting with me?”
She brushes her hair back from her forehead and her eyes are as vivid as ever. Her face is serious and vulnerable. “What? You can’t tell?”
“Oh yeah. Flirting. I remember what that looks like.”
We both turn back to our drinks for a moment. Then Katie reaches into her purse and tells me to close my eyes and hold out my hand. And I do, and for one thrilling second I have no idea what’s going to happen. And then she sets something against my palm, familiar and practically weightless. When I open my eyes, I see my long-lost squeeze ball, shaped like a heart.
“I wanted you to have it back,” she says.
I take a breath and my eyes are stinging like I might actually cry. “Remember that question you asked me?” I ask.
“When?”
“On the roof yesterday? After we found out about Greg?”
Embarrassed, she twirls a red straw, moving ice around her glass. “Yeah. I remember.”
“The answer is yes. All the time.”