Reflections on post-college life in New York City.


THIRD-SHIFT PROOFREADING IS FOR FREAKS (LIKE ME)

I arrive to the lobby of a deserted midtown skyscraper just before an August sunset.  It’s my first shift as a part-time legal proofreader. I will be working from eight p.m. to eight a.m. at a firm that prepares Securities and Exchange Commission filings for large public corporations.  Lawyers work round the clock under a deadline, and we read whatever they write.  Over the next twelve hours, I will proof sixty pages of text relating to the acquisition of a golf course in Florida.  The rest is downtime.  The experience is like a youth-group sleepover crossed with an AP English class, only we get name-brand snacks and accidentally watch porn.

First, I have to get past security.  I am squeamish about lying and it weighs on me that I’m entering under false pretenses.  A few weeks prior I took a course listed in Backstage magazine – a rag for actors – next to the ads for experimental cocaine-addiction treatments and laser hair removal.  I handed $235 in cash to a woman in a cat-filled walk-up on Riverside Drive.  She wore a knee-length “Wonderful Puerto Rico” T-shirt and white stirrup pants, her scalp visible beneath thinning, bottle-red hair. She lectured at a gallop for eight hours on the basics of legal proofreading.  She then rattled off the names of a dozen proofreading supervisors at major law firms, instructing us to pad our resumes.  I submitted my C.V. of lies to the Bon Temps employment agency.  Two weeks later, here I am, poised to rack up $24 an hour for being a grammar nerd.

I cross to the building’s security desk and mew, “Hey.”  The two night guards are hunched over the reception desk, chins resting in fists, elbows on the desk, staring out the windows at the last of the day’s light.  They hardly look up as I sign into the guest book (terrorists are evidently incapable of forging signatures) and flash my driver’s license.  I walk to the elevator and press 43.  So far, so good.  Upstairs I’m shown to a conference room and settle in one of the twenty gray Herman Miller Aeron chairs flanking an enormous table made of a gorgeous wood that I'd venture South America misses.  We are not allowed to leave the building for any reason, in case an emergency draft is dumped on us. There is a smoking lounge equipped with low sectional sofas and big-screen TVs.  In the restroom I find a shower, thick, fluffy bath sheets, citrus-scented lotion, and ginger-mint mouthwash.

There is no work yet.  Each of my nine colleagues is doing his own thing.  Mather, our shift leader, is a paunchy, lazy-eyed fortyish guy who speed-reads through an eclectic stack of books: famous chess matches, Lady Chatterly’s Lover, a fitness manual on the Russian practice of steel-bell lifting, though he looks about as likely to break into a sweat as my mom.  Every sixty seconds he palms his static-ridden lemon-yellow hair forcefully against his skull, but doesn’t seem to know he does this.

P.J., a former Broadway chorus girl, age one hundred, sits at the table making jewelry.  An array of rhinestones, beads, and dyed feathers awaits her arthritic touch.  Her hacking cough ensures that the chairs on either side of her are vacant.  I sense that she has tuberculosis and resolve to look up the treatment in case I’m infected.  She tells me she wants to learn theatrical sound design to make extra money.  Mind you, she is 100.  She pays about twelve dollars a month for her rent-controlled one-bedroom.  She has a “boyfriend,” Norman.  She wants to steal Norman’s mother’s reduced-fare Metrocard.  How long have you been with him?  “Eighteen years.”  Oh.  Will you get married, do you think?  “Then I’d have to give up my independent lifestyle.  And what if he stops pleasing me in bed?”  Oh, God!  I try to catch someone’s eye, get corroboration of this lady’s lunacy, but they’re all happily lodged in other universes.  “Don’t you ever have dreams about killing people, people you know?” P.J. asks.  “Sure,” I respond, politely.  “And then I have remorse.”  “Oh, I don’t.  Usually I’m really mad when I do it, and then I’m just worried about getting caught.”  Oh.

Marci, a screenwriter, is certain her screenplay, written with Jennifer Aniston in mind, will sell for “upwards of a half a mil.”  She explains: “Jennifer Aniston is the only female star who is attractive.  Gwyneth Paltrow is hideous.  Jennifer Lopez?  A flash in the pan.”  She keeps talking, but I can’t make sense of it.  My world is violently value-different than hers and I want to jostle her into mine.  Gwyneth Paltrow has a nice look!  And J. Lo – girl, J. Lo is a triple threat who’s been working her ass on for ten years.

Ron.  Big Ron, he calls himself.  What do you do in your spare time, I ask, assuming, like the others, he cultivates provocative hidden talents.  “Proofreading.  Just, proofreading,” he answers, slowed by a nasty grin.  He lives in Jersey City.  “My ex-wife is crazy.  She’s from Korea.  She’s crazy.  Now my girlfriend, she’s crazy.  Met her proofreading, too.  I only work third shifts.”  Talk to you later, Ron.

Torkea.  From Nigeria.  He is paging through the Duane Reade circular, looking for gifts for two of his nieces.  “What size nylon stockings shall I buy for them?” he asks me.  “They are nine and ten.”  He accents the first syllable, Tor’kea, but no one else does.  I copy his way (the right way, right?) to be nice, but it sounds affected, like I’m making fun of him and everyone else.  He smiles stiffly, careful to betray nothing but exuberant enthusiasm for his job.  He has worked doubles for eleven days straight, he says, 8 p.m. to noon each day.  He is signed up with seven temp agencies.  He speaks very heavily accented but flawless English.

I drink four Mountain Dews to stay awake.  My urine becomes that color.  At 2 a.m. we order from Veselka, one of the few all-night restaurants who deliver to midtown.  I feast on borscht, pierogis, two raspberry Haagen-Dazs bars, and three Perriers.  I’m surrounded by grown people whose eyes light up like slot machines at free restaurant food and water with bubbles (I’m one of them).  While eating we fire up the TV.  Awkward silence as Mather, with the remote, clicks through some soft-core porn (it’s now 3 a.m).  We settle on a Mets game.  Then Jeopardy.  Then The Postman Rings Twice.  Still not enough work to go around.  A very slow night, I’m told.  I nod vigorously, knowingly.

Neal, the violinist.  Late twenties, Alaskan, freckled, balding.  A Berklee School of Music grad.  He plays something for us on his violin, a mini concert in the corner of the conference room which is suddenly, overwhelmingly beautiful.  Just, way too beautiful.  We clap and mumble accolades.  We hardly know each other and have to transition back to benignly ignoring each other in silence for another three hours.  I get up and fetch another Perrier.

I shoot pool with Pablo, a young, attractive law school grad.  Why is he here?  He says he hasn’t taken the Bar and is saving to go to Thailand for a few months, which I interpret as code for ‘I have personal problems and my parents are up my ass and I need to buy some time.’  We know the pool table, like everything else, was designed with the lawyers and clients in mind, but as temp-slash-whatevers, we’ll take what we can get.  It feels like we’re hanging out in a cool older brother’s room, admiring his Led Zeppelin posters and three-foot hand-blown rainbow glass bong.  Okay, maybe a more reserved, Model-U.N.-and-varsity-tennis cool older brother.

Dale Day, head supervisor, calls to check on us around nine.  He is between a swim and a run at the Reebok Sports Club.  (Later, during one of many shifts I’ll pass alongside him, he’ll feed us gleeful tidbits about the married men who screw around in the locker room with gym flies like him.)  He calls again at eleven, back at his apartment around the corner from Zabar’s, two martinis later.  Dale Day, my lovely.  Calls a final time at 6 a.m., seated behind a small bowl of shredded wheat, reading the newspaper, planning the day’s activities.  Which scion or socialite’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral should he quietly crash, which walking tour of beloved sixties architecture might he take? 

I thought it was a sort of process of elimination, but the more I think about Dale and Mather and Marci and Ron, and the lawyers, the clients, the security guards, the Veselka delivery guy, and all the rest...well, the less I see myself.  I’m the one being eliminated.  I'm an aspiring actress.  I'm prepared to act like a person.  But while I'm just "aspiring"...what else am I?  The actor’s job is to audition, they say.  This is more like auditing.

Quittin’ time!  On the way out, I collect a couple of free tampons from the bathroom and rub my hands with the yummy citrus lotion.  I am too tired to do my elevator Kegels as the elevator sucks me down to ground level.  Should I move to Los Angeles?  Switch to stoplight Kegels?  I nod goodbye to the catatonic doorman.  I duck into black Lincoln Towncar number 440, hand the driver my voucher, request the Midtown Tunnel instead of the Williamsburg Bridge because it’s the client’s dime, and fall asleep as we dive under the East river.


MOUSE-FLINGING

When I arrive home, Howard, the shorter of my two dude roomies, has a saucepan in his left hand and is frozen in his tracks in the living room.  The mouse we’ve been hearing at night for weeks is parked under the toe of Howard’s overturned sandal; his little tail and haunches are stuck out, trembling.  Howard nods solemnly to me and lumbers toward it with the pot.  I fear the mouse will bolt.  I fear the next time we see the mouse he will be splayed beneath the jaw of our landlord’s trap.  I lunge, squeeze my eyes shut, reach out, and snug my fingers around the base of the mouse’s spaghetti-thin, striated tail.  Howard yelps.  I hoist the mouse into the air and run  tight-lipped through the kitchen and out the front door.  I take the hall stairs two at a time, ululating now and shaking my hand a little to discourage the spasming that is causing the mouse's velvet bottom to brush against my knuckles.  I bolt out of the front gate, run-walk half a block, and hurl the mouse into the East Mets West Chinese restaurant dumpsters, the smelliest place in New York, and, I pray, a comfortable domain for my pretty, little neighbor.  Howard hurrahs.

Back at the apartment, we set out to prolong the air of exhilaration and self-determination.  Howard opens a bottle of cheap white wine, I tune in a TV movie, and we start half-assedly cleaning the apartment, which is in a perpetual state of hipster squalor.  After the movie, Howard cues up “Tea for Two Cha-Chas” on the turntable.  I recall Blood on the Cat’s Neck, a Fassbinder play we did in college where everyone was onstage the whole time and, when not acting in a scene, danced stoic, disconnected Charlestons on an upstage platform.  Watching Howard tip-toe his Charleston to the cha-cha record and projecting onto him a perpetual argyle vest and ascot is still really fun for me.  Back to cleaning.  Howard organizes the food in the refrigerator and I alphabetize CDs; meanwhile the toilet retains its skidmarks and my bare feet crunch crumbs on the hardwood floors.  We’re details people.  I think of writing out a sign for the kitchen: “Your mom doesn’t live here.  Clean up after yourself.”  They never do dishes; I swear it’s them.  Honestly, we all need reminding, and it seems new again to be so banal and domestic.  My mom doesn’t live here!  It’s after college and still we’re playing house.

Howard tells me about something he’s writing, a melodrama about time travel, mostly into great drawing rooms of the past.  On a whim, for short, I call him “Hoo-Hoo.”  He doesn’t object, but it sounds dumb and flaccid hanging out there in the air; I’ll let it die.  Toward midnight, we poop out.  Howard disappears into his room, where I know he will retrieve, from the back of his closet, a book called Wicca for Teens that he claims is a remnant of a high school phase, but which I know remains a special treat he allows himself when feeling particularly warm and fuzzy.  I am happy to have furnished some fuzziness.  He has also read yards of classics.  He says our friend Wren is a "fag," he himself is "gay," someone else we know is "queer."  I wish I could do him the decency of not looking at the night from overhead, not inventorying my life in terms of the gay roomie, the Pinot Grigio, the Masterpiece Theater, the big city (well, as close as we can afford since the expiration of our dorm days – three stops into Brooklyn).  But I know I’m not the only one; Howard is trying on these nights too.  “I thought about quitting smoking, but then I would just be no fun,” he huffs.  He goes out drinking on money he doesn’t have, orders restaurant dinners he can’t afford, and, despite barely making the minimum payments due on his credit cards, plans more of the same, because otherwise, what is the point?  I guess it’s not that bad.  In fact, it's cool!  I feel hideously uncool for registering concern.  But…it’s your credit, right?  Screwing it up is serious, like seven years of honest-to-God, official bad luck.

On the way to my room to get ready for bed, I think – I resolve in mental italics – I’m through with puberty.  This is how tall I am.  This is the brain I have to work with, this is my gait, this is the pitch of my voice.  When I wake I will sweep up the crumbs.  I will present to my roommates a schedule for the periodic and equitable distribution of shitty potty duty.  And I will seek gainful, permanent employment in a challenging and rewarding field.

Which is?


NEAR MISS

Crash.  By the time I get outside to look, the cop is there.  The cops are always close at hand in the ghetto.  I hear throaty, hoarse “fucks,” a woman’s wail.  Silence.  I want to hear more, to piece together the story, to have a handle on it having happened and tuck it away.  But of course, for the sake of the victims, I want it to be over.  I wish a silent “God bless and God speed,” imagining an ambulance deploying from its base somewhere nearby.  Someone says, "She was my best friend’s girl, the girl in the Accord."  I recognize the voice; I’ve heard him talking over the west fence.  More “fuck”s.  Then swelling strings—is this a movie?  It might be from the entertainment system in the hipsters’ apartment upstairs.  It suggests need, like begging, a neighbor somewhere, maybe still in trouble?  A crash, a score, a dream.  Get the story.  I could run and find the cop.  I can’t tell...  I hear a few more “fucks,” a squeal.  Steady strings – Hans Zimmer?  And then silence.

The air is gray, cooling, post-rain, moss-friendly.  I breathe deeply.  A breeze comes up, wafting White Castle brine from across the street.  I look down at my feet on the sidewalk.  The landlord has spray-painted a reminder about where to place the trash on pickup days.  In large yellow block letters in front of my house: “GARBAGE.”  The “R” is iffy; it seems it was on its way to being a “B”, then dove back out at the last moment.  I really wish he hadn’t done that.  The crumbled Accord’s horn moans continuously.

I go back inside and fall asleep in the living room in the rumpled orange chair that Howard’s grandmother gave us.  I am curled up.  Jesse emerges from his room to pee.  He crosses in front of me.  Nudges me, high up on the thigh. He says, “Go to sleep.”  Tight, gray boxer briefs.  No shirt.  Tufts of hair on his chest.  Thick glasses.  It’s dark, my own glasses are missing, and I stare into his chest.  In my nearsightedness I can’t make out his face hovering atop miles of trunk.  I see only the golden, downy chest hairs, straight and soft, somehow finding moonlight.  He’s right above me.  I reach out and touch the hair.  It feels like the tail of a My Little Pony.  I tell him I wasn’t sleeping, I was just waiting.  I hate to be caught.  He says, “Don’t you want to go to bed?”  Silence.  Then I say, meaning it, “I don’t know.”  He goes into the bathroom, pees, and I hear him turn on the water and squish-squish fondle the bar of soap.

I remember sophomore year, our gropings in a stairwell, so perfunctory and, well, sophomoric that the rubric “second base” applies.  But there were a lot of things I did unremarkably in college and upon which, I think, perhaps, in my older, wiser, and frankly more vulnerable state, I can improve.

I get up and go to bed.  He walks into my room.  Garbage, swelling strings.  “Goodnight and God speed.”  A woman’s wail.