Asshole Read online

  “It’s my birthday,” I said, hoping for mercy.

  They ran for the elevator, dragging me behind them.

  Between the two of them, they outmuscled me, and the sight of me getting yanked around my block by these canines like some demented water-skier probably provided hours of great material to local comedians. If I spoke Spanish, I’d laugh along with them.

  As it was, I was wondering—hurtling through the air, as my personal wolf pack hunted down and cornered a Big Mac wrapper—how it was I’m agreed to walk Misty in the first place. Hola, I understood. She was my wife’s dog, and I lived with my wife, and my wife was unacquainted with the dawn. That I got. But this asshole neighbor’s clawed menace to society? Every day? For free? I remembered Ramón saying something like “You’re going out anyway, right?” and that making some kind of sense … but everything made sense to me. That was the problem. I saw sides to issues that weren’t even there. It was like I lived in an eleven-dimensional universe.

  After I dropped Misty off—Ramón was still on the phone—I fed Hola her million-dollar meal, gave her a little extra water for the day, and got ready. I took a look around my castle. It was dark. Two tiny bedrooms in a co-op so far up on the West Side it wasn’t even Harlem anymore, it was Upstate Manhattan. My goal when I was younger had always been to own an apartment in Manhattan, and so I did, I suppose. I should have been more specific with my dreams.

  Oh, and the building’s elevators, which were designed during the Truman Administration and were apparently outfitted with noisemakers not long after, ran directly past our bedroom. Up and down, 24/7. But it wasn’t so bad—eventually, we’d get so deaf it wouldn’t even bother us.

  I took a deep breath and kissed my wife, Gloria, goodbye. She was a slender sleeping beauty with thick red hair and flawless skin. In my case, my better half certainly is; and there are those, like my mother, who wonder out loud how I got so lucky. I claim that when we met, in the 1990’s, being super-nice was not such a deal-breaker.

  A few months older than I was, she looked much younger, but I didn’t hold this against her. It was better than the alternative. She was known for her tender wit and extremely good nature, which had somehow survived fifteen years in Manhattan intact. As naturally gregarious as I was self-conscious, she made friends so easily it was almost offensive. What she continued to see in me, I was not quite sure.

  “Happy birthday,” she whispered, smiling up at me.

  “I hope so,” I said, and took a deep breath, stood up straight, headed for the door with a can-do attitude, and tripped on one of Hola’s squeaky toys. Hola thought this was very funny.

  “Go get ’em!” said Gloria, who was not, it seemed, too sleepy to do what she does best: lift me up.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Okay.

  The only thing wrong with my neighborhood was that it was where I lived. Other than that I had no complaint. My Dominican neighbors really were very lovely people, with large rambunctious families and little pets that made nice bite-size snacks for Hola, and good attitudes about America. I had almost nothing they had, except love handles, and debt.

  On my way to the No. 1 train that morning, I ran into Ramón coming out of Twin Donut.

  “Hola,” I said.

  He ignored me.

  I dreaded Twin Donut. Every morning at exactly the same moment I appeared with exactly the same order—every morning—and I had yet to receive the same thing twice. If you locked a combinatorial mathematics convention in a room they could not come up with as many variations on a large coffee with no sugar and a corn muffin as I had received in my bag.

  I’d had the same server, every morning, for two solid years. And always the guy looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life. When he looked at me at all.

  “Large no sugar corn muffin,” I said.

  “How many sugars?”

  “No sugar.”

  “Two sugars,” he said, about to ladle them in.

  “No sugar.”

  “Glazed cruller,” he said, sacking one up.

  “Corn muffin.”

  “Two crullers.”

  And this was a good day. Often I would come in and the guy would completely ignore me, holding a kind of tree-worshipping session with his mop. This guy was always multitasking, baking donuts while manning the register while also mopping, which was made more difficult by the fact that his mop had no water in it. It was not a dry mop, just a wet mop in the midst of a dry spell. It’s not like he worked alone, either. There were three other fellows farther down the counter, holding a deep personal discussion about, I think, titties.

  On the train, the coffee always tasted sweet. I suspected he prepared the cup for me ahead of time, howling with laughter.

  I was living in this neighborhood because it was the only place in Manhattan where I could afford to buy an apartment that my wife felt was large enough for her naps.

  I’d moved to Manhattan almost twenty years before, during the era of New Wave, when people still actually got mugged, and were afraid, and when Greenwich Village was full of gay men and Chelsea was kind of seedy and you didn’t need three generations of inherited wealth to be able to buy a one-bedroom somewhere south of Massachusetts.

  As my friends Ben and Brad kept reminding me, as we all bravely marched out of our thirties, at least we had our health. Actually, Ben had a skin rash and Brad looked like a warm bowl of death, but I got their point.

  On the subway I ran into Ramón again, but he was much too important to chat.

  “You,” he said, looking down at his PDA.

  “Hola, again.”

  “Heh.”

  “Had a good walk with Misty this morning.”

  “Not what she tells me.”

  Although we got on at the same stop, at the same moment, he had somehow procured a seat and I was left to stand. I can’t remember ever sitting in the New York City subway system. Maybe once or twice, in the early ’90s, but I might have dreamed it. Ramón had done better than just get a seat: He’d acquired one seat with an option on another one. The option was held by his computer bag and his attitude.

  A half hour later, as we were pulling into Times Square, I glanced at the screen of the PDA he’d been ferociously pounding on during the entire trip—so busy he couldn’t talk—and I saw he had been playing Minesweeper.

  “Adios,” I said to him, and he pushed past me so hard I spilled some of my sweet, cold coffee on my shirt.

  “Shit!”

  An old lady next to me—who’d seen what had happened—smiled at me.

  “Get over it,” she said, kicking me out of her way.

  In those days my days had no highlights, but I did very much look forward to getting off the train. But not today. Why? Because I was going in for my annual bitch slap and plea for atonement. The technical name for this was performance review.

  To postpone this incredible pleasure, I stopped off at Duane Reade to get a box of Kleenex tissues, the kind with aloe vera. It wasn’t for me, but I’ll get there.

  I worked in advertising. My sacred mission in life was to pile more debt onto people who could ill afford it by selling them credit cards they didn’t need. Because most of these people were not quite as stupid as they looked, my job was to pretend we were actually selling them things like “security” and “freedom” when in fact we were more likely driving them to an early grave.

  The joy of my working environment was compounded by the fact that, although I was the lowest possible level of vice president in an office teeming with low-level vice presidents, I was one of the oldest.

  “Hey, chief,” said my office-mate, when I arrived.

  Despite being a vice president, I shared an office. A small one. And though my office-mate was pleasant enough, and quiet, he liked to sit in the dark. “It helps me think,” I believe he told me once. So to facilitate his idea quest we sat in perpetual twilight, with no window.

  Two of my colleagues came in, young women who often
worked for me. I’ll call them Emily and Eleanor because those are their names. They were both attractive, although I was getting to the age when almost any woman under thirty made me feel like a pedophile. I don’t remember young women being that cute ten years ago. My standards had slipped.

  Emily was the taller and more emotional of the two, bone-thin with Bozo-like hair and a pierced tongue. Eleanor was very serious, conservative in all things but politics, chalk white with a blunt-cut blond topiary. She played bass in a band called Sexual Side Effects. Without saying a word, I handed Emily the box of Kleenex. I did this because, as usual, she was crying.

  “Th-thanks,” she sobbed.

  Before I could ask her what was wrong, the phone rang. I knew what it was.

  The bitch slap.

  I gathered up my notebook and pen, and my breath, said goodbye to the girls, and headed off to the boss’s office for my appraisal. But before I got there I passed by a young man I’ll call the Nemesis. He was an extraordinarily bulked-up guy dark-skinned and gorgeous with fierce blue eyes, his thick black hair tied back in a marketing-issue ponytail. Rumor had it he was half-Cherokee, owned a horse ranch out. West, and was ex-Special Forces.

  This charmer Was poking his finger into the chest of a kid who worked for him, saying savagely, “I need you to buy a clue, Todd, ’cause the work you’re doing here blows chunks. Don’t make me take you down.”

  Ch-choking out an apology, the offender—who I knew to be exceptionally smart, and a tireless worker—slunk off.

  The Nemesis turned to me and beamed. “Whassup?”

  “Ah, you know—”

  “That bad, huh? You look kind of down. Like you’re going to your funeral or something, hah hah.”

  “Actually, I am.”

  “Oh,” he said, nodding. “Performance review. Good luck man. From what I hear, you’re gonna need it, hah hah.”

  “You had yours yet?”

  “Oh, yeah. It went super-great. Just radical. They’re talking about—well, I don’t want to jinx it.”

  “What?”

  He lowered his voice, which was outrageously loud to begin with, to a level just below a scream. His version of whispering. “The p-word,” he said.

  “What p-word?” I was thinking: penalty; purgatory; pecker-wood …

  “Promotion.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “‘We can’t make any promises till we’ve done the budgets,’ and blah blah blah—you know, the usual shit that happens every time you get promoted.”

  I wouldn’t know.

  “Anyway, listen—when you’re done, drop by my office, we need to talk. About Lucifer.”

  Lucifer was a potential project I was attached to and the Nemesis was openly trying to pry it out of my cold, dead hands, and I didn’t feel like talking about it with him, not later, not after that, not ever.

  “Sure thing,” I smiled, and headed off to face my fate.

  The Nemesis was an outside consultant, and I’d never been allowed to see his résumé. Maybe it was classified. If you’d asked me what my major problems with the Nemesis were, as I knocked on my boss’s door that morning and said my quiet prayers, I’d have told you there were two big ones.

  First, he was a lying belligerent dickhead who enjoyed berating underlings, especially in front of their peers, and would kick his cousin’s corpse in the street if he thought it would make him a dollar. And second—much, much worse—he was ten years younger than me.

  “Come in,” said my boss.

  “Hiya.”

  “Have a seat. Let’s get this over with.”

  It was just the two of us, and my boss is a friendly sort of woman, so I was surprised to find the air so oddly charged. I felt like security was right outside the door, waiting for the signal.

  “Running late today?” she said. There were pages on the desk in front of her, and she spread them apart. “Where to begin? How are you?”

  “Okay.”

  “You tired? You look tired.”

  “People always say that. I think it’s my diet—”

  “So how do you feel the year went?”

  That was it for the small talk. She was a fabulously tall African-American woman with tight curls and a pair of those bold square-framed glasses they issue along with marketing degrees at prestigious Midwestern universities. She also had a huge warm personality that she was at this moment storing in a box under her desk.

  “Pretty good, I guess. I’ve been working on—”

  “You sure about that? You’re feeling good?”

  “Well … I’ve … I mean—”

  “We’ve got some issues. Let’s get into the substance, okay?”

  I felt something drop. The window behind her back showed me that the sky was dark, and the line of exotic tequila bottles lined up on top of her sparsely populated bookshelf looked like an army of deliverance.

  “Wha—what issues?”

  “Let me tell you a story,” she started. I hated this: people telling stories that started with, “Let me tell you a story.” It was a polite way of saying, “Now shut up.”

  “So,” she started, “when I started out I did a lot of job hopping. Two years here, two years there. Mostly in public relations, yuck. It’s okay—when you’re young, there’s a lot you don’t know about working and there shouldn’t be a stigma to it, right? But at a certain point I found the consulting world, like you did, and then here, at the agency, and I made a move from the kind of work I was doing before—execution type stuff—into what VPs are supposed to do. You know what that is?”

  “I’m … I …”

  “See—that’s interesting.” She picked up a couple of sheets of paper, glanced down at them, put them back on the desk, and all the time she looked sort of disgusted, like her feet were hurting her. I didn’t know where she was going.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Selling. That’s what VPs do, Marty. They’re out there, they hustle, they’re over at the client site, talking to the decision-makers, selling in the work. Keeps the engine going, and it’s what you’re supposed to be doing. Get it?”

  I nodded, and she tapped the papers, which contained the detailed bullet-pointed list of my personal failures, which I would be required to read closely, take into my soul, and sign. But that was later. Right now, she said:

  “There’re two big points in here I got from talking to the people you work with. Number one, you’re the nicest guy in the world—”

  “Thank you—”

  “—let me finish. It’s not all good. See, everybody likes to work with you, but that’s kind of irrelevant, where I sit. If you don’t get that edge, there’s no work for them to work on. See what I mean? You gotta kick butt. Avenue A’s out there, Digitas is out there”—she named some of our top competitors—“and they’re killing on your accounts. They’re eating our brunch. You’re not pushy enough. You gotta get in there, close the deal, understand?”

  I swallowed. My throat was dry.

  “Take”—she named the Nemesis, as I knew she would—“He’s out there every day, taking no prisoners. Digitas is afraid of him. Avenue A sees him coming down the hall, they run for cover.”

  Frankly, I thought, anyone who sees him coming down the hall runs for cover, including his own mother.

  “That’s what we need you to do,” she continued. “Think you can? ’Cause I’m not so sure. It might be this place isn’t right for you. Maybe you’re just too nice for corporate life. Ever thought of that? That’s okay. It’s okay to be who you are. What I’m seeing now is a bad fit. And I’m going to have to make a promotion decision soon. Any thoughts?”

  I focused on breathing, in and out. Among my many flaws was a tendency to be oversensitive, so I was trying not to react in a dramatic way. Say, by bursting into tears. I could deal with this.

  “Well …”

  And then, my life changed. This is how.

  There are times when people say things to us, ordinary things, and
we’re ready to hear them, and we do.

  What my boss said was this:

  “You’ve got two choices here, Marty. I like you—I really do—so it’s okay with me which one you pick. Number one is you can be who you are, and find another job somewhere, maybe working in a library or something, hah hah. And number two is you can be more like [the Nemesis].”

  “People loathe him,” I said.

  “He’s effective. And that,” she said, standing up to indicate this meeting was now over, “is all that really counts.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Bottom line is there’s only budget to promote one of you. It’s him or you.” She let that sentence hang there: It’s him or you. Not much wiggle room there. “Right now we haven’t made up our minds—but you can see the way the wind’s blowing?”

  The wind was apparently blowing right out the Nemesis’s ass at me. I nodded.

  “Okay, then. Now I’ve got to take this—”

  When I got back to my office, incredibly, Emily was still there, still crying. I asked her if I could borrow one of her Kleenex. She took one look at me and handed me the box.

  How did this discussion with my boss change my life?

  It didn’t happen right away. Change is slow. Real change is so slow it seems not to happen at all. And then everything’s different, and you wonder how.

  I had one personal day left, and there were no clients to hit up for work since I was so ineffective, so I left the office and got a double cheeseburger from Kosmo’s Diner and went to my favorite spot at the fence by the Chelsea dog run, and ate my cheeseburger and watched the dogs.

  I thought about what my boss had said. Was she right about me?

  In the park, there was the usual contingent of gorgeous, exotic purebred dogs, like Siberian huskies and chow chows, and their even more exotic owners. Who were these people, who could spend a working day in this manner? What a wonderful life it was, I was seeing: people who lived near here, in the midst of it all, and could treat their furry buddies to a romp, and stand looking around and thinking, “I live near here—the center of it all—wearing a casual wardrobe that drapes very nicely around my large pectoral muscles and/or beautiful breasts. Oh, how I laugh and laugh at that sap at the fence who stares in at me so, like a Victorian child at a toy store window at Christmas, with coal rubbed onto his cheeks, and bad teeth.”