Rock On (7 page)

There are little moments when God gives you a sign; gifts, I like to call them. They are these sort of conspiratorial winks from the universe that let you know what you're doing is getting out into the world; that you're affecting something in your time here on earth. One of these gifts has just been sent to me here in my little temporary office — my first piece of produced work; a paid advertisement on the cover of Billboard Magazine with a huge picture of Phil Collins's face and the number “25” next to it. As I stare at the paid-advertisement-disguised-as-magazine-cover with confused pride and confidence, there's a small team of workmen painting a bigger office down the hall that I'm set to move into on Monday. Which brings this next little strait to navigate: I never really thought about it until today, but the fact is, I don't have anything to move into my new larger office. Aren't you supposed to when you land a job like this? At this point in my life, the only nine-to-fives I've held briefly rewarded me with a cubicle and, in one instance, a supply closet that was converted into an office. I didn't take the time to decorate these spaces.

But everyone here has tons of stuff in their offices — pictures, platinum albums, furniture, and just . . . stuff. Stuff, I
don't know, like a Zen tray thing filled with sand and some little polished stones or something — whatever you buy when you're thirty- or forty-something and you've been on track since you graduated college at twenty-two. “They'll be done with audio and video and painting in there today, so if you want to move your stuff in over the weekend, you can,” this from Vallerie as she passes by my door on a routine flyby.

I call my girlfriend, Maria, at her office and ask her what Vallerie means by this and what your average thirty-five-year-old normal man would be moving into his office, if he were accustomed to having an office.

“I wouldn't worry about it. She probably just meant you could start working in there now that they're done painting and stuff.”

I immediately disregard her level-headed input, deciding that
clearly
she just doesn't get it; she's not a winner if she's not second-guessing everything, she's not going for the gold, or something. Actually, screw gold; she's not going for the
platinum
in this life if she isn't thinking about this sort of thing. Okay, so maybe ever since the muffin incident at my first marketing meeting, I've been nurturing a mildly degenerative paranoia. This thin film of corporate workplace insecurity is a charming personality attribute, to be sure. An attribute found mostly in middle-aged, overdressed, status-insecure folks with sketchy self-esteem who are hoping to climb the proverbial ladder of success, and small-town crystal methamphetamine freaks convinced that little men with walkie-talkies live in the walls and phone. What we share — the middle-aged go-getters and the psychotic meth addicts — is a constantly aggravated, malnourished, and cagey sixth sense that tells us
everything
means
something
and that people are
noticing
even when we
think
they're not. And the way we see it, people like my girlfriend
simply don't understand
. I decide that this weekend I will make up for lost time and acquire all of the things that normal successful people move into their offices with. I will catch up with them that quickly, these normal on-track people. I will fit in if it kills me, and be a bigger, more well-adjusted version of what I am. Hell, I'll be bigger and more well-adjusted than them! I look in magazines for photo spreads of successful people's offices. I watch that movie called
The Kid Stays in the Picture
, that biography of Robert Evans, and I stare at everything in the background of his office. I think that's where I picked up the cue that successful people have a lot of framed photos in their office. Which is basically why I'm here in the Home and Office section of Saks Fifth Avenue.

“Excuse me, how much is this one here?”

“The tortoise shell with silver inlay? That's a wonderful choice. Beautiful.”

“It sure is. It's . . . a . . . nice . . . picture frame.”

“Let me check for you.”

It feels completely indefensible, being here amongst over-priced decorative items and buying into all of this. I worry about bumping into somebody I know. I move hyperdiscreetly the back way through aisles, like a paranoid high school math teacher visiting a strip club too near to the small town where he lives and works. This place is right down the street from the office and seems to have a total understanding of how to appeal to people plagued with a deep need to be seen as successful. At least I'm dressed for the part, so I probably don't stand out much, I mean, half of the stuff I'm wearing came from here. I should back up. I'm, well, dressing in gray slacks, black
sweaters, and five-hundred-dollar shoes these days. It's impossible not to notice that all of the guys in charge kind of dress like a slightly more hip J. Peterman catalog — and like a lucky poor kid adopted by the rich in a bad sitcom script, I've decided I'll do anything to fit in, to not get kicked out of this club. I would also like to point out that my sensible navy blue designer windbreaker jacket costs $675, and the salesman at Barney's tells me it's great because I can wear it inside at the office when it gets a little cold from the air conditioning.

Nice.

That's very manly, isn't it? But it all somehow makes sense to me in this kind of nine-to-five mild codeine high I get from strolling around with a head full of recycled air that's been filtered through twenty-three floors of stylish nylon executive carpet and assorted veneers and Formica; it's a high that feels like a thin barrier between me and the real world outside. Out there life is still happening and those poor bastards are dealing with silly little everyday problems like love and death.

Christ, I've got a monkey on my back. An office job is like an indefinite five-day-a-week Vicodin and wine binge; it changes you. Speaking of changes, I will only say this about my new hair situation: the highlights were supposed to look much more rock and roll than this. The most awkward thing about the highlights that I let the hairdresser talk me into is that older Puerto Rican women
love
them. Apparently highlights are a big thing in their community. They'll come right up to me in a Starbucks or on the subway, stare up at my head and coo, “Ooooh, I low your highlight!” while I stand there in awkward silence. I usually act like I didn't hear them, but if they keep staring up at my head, I say “Thank you” very quietly.

So, the first picture frame to have caught my eye here at
Saks, the one the salesman is checking on, is this huge-ass desktop tortoise-shell number about the size of a manhole cover or storm window. This frame says, “I have a very impressive picture frame and therefore have certainly not, as you might expect, spent the majority of my so-called post-college years self-employed and jamming envelopes of cash in a hole up under my bookshelf, hoping to somehow outfox adulthood with an intoxicating tonic of binge spending and low-stakes tax fraud.”

The salesman's posture belies the malady of the middle class; an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to body language, a studied focus on hand gestures and policing of the voice's inflection that hints at a seminar on how to “carry” one's self — the kind of disciplined spasms and ticks a sort of discount finishing school for the class-insecure might instill. It draws the portrait of a man furiously trying to politely distract others from a long personal history of fair-to-middling winnings in life's cruelly random lotteries of class, genetics, and fortune. Okay, clearly, I'm projecting. Anyway, he's finally back with the price.

“Three seventy-five.”

Holy Christ! Three hundred and seventy-five dollars for a picture frame? How much if you take the cocaine and diamonds out of the hollow part in the back of it? Do. Not. Look. Surprised. You are supposed to be very normal and successful, and this is probably how much normal and successful people pay for picture frames. “Oh, good. Yeah, three seventy-five, okay, good . . . I'll, uh, I'll take it.”

But you need a lot of these things. So I buy others, too. A tasteful little teak number with lighter tropical wood inlays. One that looks a little bit like a cross between a seashell and a
coffin lid, one that looks like . . . bumpy . . . leather? I split and head across the street to Banana Republic where the frames are much cheaper, it turns out. And I buy even more there, mostly simple and pedestrian stainless-steel frames that will benefit from hanging out next to the Saks frames. The next stop is Takashimya back on Fifth Avenue. The store that has apparently cornered the New York market for small boxes covered in alligator skin, large and stately leather-bound journals, small bowls made of bone or antler or something, and a handful of other important stuff like little trays made out of wood, leather, or stone. I get a nice assortment of all of the above-mentioned accessories. What the hell, I even tell the sales-woman to throw in a long, skinny three-compartment tray made out of some kind of dark tropical wood, teak, maybe, a real nice little number that I might use to casually store bulletin-board pins in or maybe some change from my pocket. I decide against a four-inch silver ball that comes with a little suede bag to put it in, and consider briefly maybe getting the $275 rustic set of two pewter cups (pen holders?). I have spent well over fifteen hundred dollars, and aside from the frames, I couldn't tell you what you're supposed to do with any of this stuff. It's time to go. My plan, so I don't get caught and ridiculed, is to just drop it off at the office over the weekend.

I have, maybe, twenty frames at this point. I figure if the idea is that I actually went to college and I've been out of college for, say, at least twelve years at this point and, say, had offices for the last ten years, then that's about two frames for every year of my steadily employed, level-headed adulthood. Never mind that I don't even have twenty friends and loved ones, so I start going through the process of figuring out what the hell I'm going to put in these frames. At home, I dig deep through closets and boxes. There are some snapshots of people I haven't heard from in ten or fifteen years. I will frame them for my office because it's all I got. So I haven't heard from them in a decade, they fit the part. Look at Jeff! It's before he grew his big hair and his long sideburns and beard and moved to Berkeley. He looks all clean-cut in this photo. He's wearing a wet suit and holding a big crab, and it looks like maybe I know a clean-cut scuba diver, but really we were super hung over in San Francisco and had rented some wet suits and boogie boards at the beach. And there was this huge dead crab at the edge of the water, and Jeff picked it up to huck at something, but before he did I got a quick snapshot. It looks like he caught it while diving in his fancy wet suit and is inspecting it for eggs or something. Just like a marine biologist would.

I've got only sixteen frames left. And I still have the huge tortoise-shell frame. I get a little sad and awkward when my girlfriend tells me that this beast is usually used for something like a couple's fiftieth anniversary. Yeah? Well, guess what, Maria; I'm out four hundred and twenty bucks with tax and I refuse to wait forty-five more years until I can put a picture of us in here.

It's Sunday, and I've asked Maria to come along with me to the office and give me some input on how I'm setting things up.

“Why are you putting leather coasters on your desk?” She asks.

“So people can, you know, put their drink down when they come into my office. A Diet Coke or whatever.”

She stares at me.

“Would you like something cold to drink?” I ask.

“No . . . thank . . . you,” she replies slowly while watching me figure out where to display my wooden box with alligator skin on the lid.

I know this stuff is all a big dumb lie. I'm starting to think half of what everyone my age does is a lie. But I want to try for once in my life. I want everything to work out; I want to fit in here, and to be regarded as important and intelligent. I want everyone to think I'm a normal and successful man like the others, accustomed to going to his office, then home to his loved ones, and then back to his office again, loved ones, office, loved ones, and so on, and so on.

Monday morning here in my new tastefully decorated normal adult-size office, and at the moment there's a pop star standing with a big grin in front of my door. Okay, so maybe Simon LeBon was a pop star twenty-three years ago, if you want to get all technical. Okay, fine, so he's not standing in front of my door because he needs to talk to me so much as he's standing there having his snapshot taken with the guy who works in the office next to mine. Which, yes, if you want to be a stickler for details, obviously means his being all smiles is just a guess on my part, as he and this other guy's backs are turned to me, trapping me in my office. I'm sitting there thinking that if any of my teenage efforts at being a drummer or guitarist in a world-famous band would've come to fruition, and let's say I would've been the drummer in Duran Duran — this is exactly the view of Simon LeBon I would've had nightly for my entire time in the spotlight. So for a minute, in a weird little way, it's like I'm living the dream. After the snapshot everyone continues along their way, then a couple of bosses walk by and poke their heads into my office on their way to the Duran Duran meeting.