The Egg Code (15 page)

VIII

P.O.P.

The Seedy Side of
Office Politics

1998

T. Kenneth West hung up the phone. Alone in his office, he brought out a pack of cigarettes, peeled off the cellophane, then—annoyed at himself—put it back. T. Kenneth was a man of many addictions, each pursued with a meticulous dispassion that could be interpreted as a lack of involvement. One cigarette per day. One glass of Scotch. Once a day, whenever his receptionist left the building, he would cross the room and place his cock on her desk. Just long enough to feel the tip brushing up against the ink blotter. A relatively mild iniquity. No jerking off into her makeup bag, none of that. He wasn’t even particularly attracted to her—a rather squat woman with sandy brown hair and a taste for gigantic wooden earrings. Still, his need for this ritual surpassed mere sexual attraction, breaching the darker realms of compulsion and insanity. All afternoon, as the receptionist’s fingers flew from binder to folder to wastepaper basket, T. Kenneth West would stare across the partitions and imagine his phantom cock hovering over the desk, following her hands in a ghostly dance. A secret awareness charged the whole day with risk.

Reaching for a cigarette, he struck a match and brought it trembling to his lips. Bits of tobacco sparked red and turned black. He drew in a mouthful of smoke, held it for a moment, then exhaled slowly, letting the cloud thicken between his lips. Better now. Stubbing it out, he threw on his suitcoat and virtually ran out of the office, pausing only to smile at the secretary on his way past the reception area. My cock was there, he thought, glancing at the neat piles of work on her desk. Just fifteen minutes ago. Right where her hands are now.

Fixing his collar, he grunted at a few interns, then turned left down a narrow corridor. Gray Hollows’s office was a tiny closet at the end of the main hallway, the remnants of an old darkroom. The door swung out into the corridor, leaving a foot-wide gap. T. Kenneth angled his body and squeezed through.

“Christ, why don’t you turn some lights on?” He slapped the switch and the overhead panels flickered to life. Trying to be nice, he smiled cautiously at the young man. Gray was a pain in the ass, a poorly mannered, immature little jerk. But good at his job. After five years, T. Kenneth had grown to appreciate his talent for understanding the underlying crassness at the heart of any new marketing campaign. As a rule, clients detested Gray the person, yet almost always liked the work he turned in, and T. Kenneth certainly couldn’t fire a productive employee just for being a moron.

“Hey, Ken, look, listen to this.”

“No, you listen to this.”

Gray wheeled in his seat, rocking back and forth, making the chair dance on its casters. The chair, it seemed, was a ride. A do-it-yourself roller coaster. He steered across the room, aiming for a stack of blueprint paper.

“No, wait,” he said, out of breath. “This is brilliant, you’ll really dig it. Remember that radio spot I wrote last month for NCC Tech, with the idiotic music going on in the background,
doo-doo-doo
, and then the voice comes up, ‘Techno, it’s not just another dance craze.’ Figured these kids are so fucking stupid, who’d know the difference . . . remember?”

T. Kenneth stopped the chair, blocking a caster with his shoe. “Gray.”

Gray pushed with his heels and the chair shot back a few feet. “Come on, play along with me, pal,” he said.

Peeved, T. Kenneth stared past the man’s head. “Yes. I. Remember.”

Launching into it, Gray sputtered, “Great, I was thinking what we’d do is, we’ll hire some kid out of MU, have him interview his buddies— just interrogate the fuck out of ’em. What do they listen to? What books do they read? Who’s the big shit with the teenyboppers as of September the whatever-the-hell-it-is at one-fifty-eight in the afternoon? Then we make a list of everything these kids have ever cared about in their short and pathetic lives, every real attachment they’ve had, favorite songs, favorite movie stars, who cares, nothing is too important where we can’t use it to sell some idiotic product, and ultimately we get the whole process so refined that every time some poor kid hears something she likes on the radio—boom!—ten seconds later we’re throwing it right back in her face, and eventually she gets to the point where she can’t expend a single emotion before we’re using it to get her to buy lip gloss or a car phone, and she winds up staying in her room all day just totally paralyzed with fear and the sense that there’s nothing she can do or think or feel that can’t ultimately be corrupted and marginalized by consumerism and popular culture, which of course is the straight-up fucking truth and don’t forget it, bitch. HA HA! Isn’t that funny?”

“You’re a . . . you’re just like a spigot, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know that word. I don’t know these fancy words you big people use.”

Hefting a thin manila envelope, T. Kenneth dumped a stack of service requests onto the desk. Gray rifled through the pages and covered his head with the top sheet, making a bonnet.

“Lovely, look.” T. Kenneth swiped the sheet and held it behind his back as Gray clawed at the air, pretending to grab. “I want you to know right off the bat that you weren’t my first choice to work on this project.”

Turning around, Gray manipulated an invisible control and piloted his chair toward the exit. “If you were a car, what kind of a—”

T. Kenneth blinked, shouting it down. “That said, you need to clean up and comb your hair and do all those nice things—”

“I’d want to be a Jeep!”

“—because you’re due up in Vega at three-thirty this afternoon, which is just ninety minutes from now.”

“Ninety minutes,” Gray said, tapping his watch. “That’s, like, two hours, man!”

Giving up, T. Kenneth crumpled the page and left it on the desk. “Just passing on the information,” he muttered, walking away.

“Man, you already told me! This morning you said, ‘Fuck it, I’m gonna call Julian Mason,’ and I said, ‘Julian Mason is so fucking over the hill, he probably can’t even go to the goddamn bathroom by himself,’ and you said, ‘Fuck you!’ and I said, ‘Right now, dude!’ ”

“I’m leaving.”

“And then you started coming after me with this, like, battle ax.”

“You are now officially talking to yourself.”

T. Kenneth West strode out of the office as Gray fake-cheerfully waved farewell, his right arm moving up and down like an automaton at a theme park: “Thank you for visiting
Pirates of the Deep
.” Ah, goodbye, fucker. He grinned and saluted, then put his head down on his desk. Naptime, nyum nyum. Another day wasted. Time was the big problem in Gray’s life. No one cared about his own little ambitions. Lifting his head, he blared out the chorus to a Van Halen song—PA-NA-MA! PA-NA-MA-AA!—but no one came by to investigate, so he stopped singing. This shit
sucked
. The first meeting with a client was always the worst. These fuckwad business types were rarely adept at shaping their own marketing concepts. Their contradictory adjectives smacked of a certain nose-holding schizophrenia. Make it snappy, they always insisted, yet sincere. Oh, sure. Catchy yet dignified. Such naive ideals. Gray could only hope that the board of directors would have the sense to leave the matter in his hands. Grabbing his briefcase, he slunk out of the office and stepped outside. If he hurried, he’d have enough time to scribble a few sentences back at his apartment. With that in mind, he climbed into his car and left work for the day.

When he arrived at the furniture store—not at three-thirty, more like three-forty-five—the parking lot was nearly empty, and he could see bored employees standing under the vinyl awning, smoking and waiting to go back on-shift. The air smelled of diesel fuel and hot upholstery. A bright sign hung over the front door: a red signature scrawled across a blue background.

“You got the right place,” a middle-aged Vietnamese man called out as he walked down a wheelchair-access ramp and pointed up at the sign. “Living Arrangements, you got it, Cam Pee, president, CEO, here we are, you the guy from downtown, you come with me.”

Gray fake-smiled as he shook the man’s hand. Cam Pee was dressed in a slate-colored three-piece suit with narrow sleeves that tightened around his armpits. His constant leer seemed poised on the verge of implosion. Shiny black hair flopped about as he gestured and nodded, leading the way.

Living Arrangements was, so far as Gray could tell, a flea market in disguise, cut-rate crap ferried across the Pacific from Indonesia, the Philippines. Poorly manufactured furniture in wicker and pine leaned over the main aisle—chairs on top of desks on top of dresser drawers, an overabundance of stuff. The cashiers all were young ladies in their late teens and early twenties, each lost in a private void as they stared out the windows at the traffic on the highway. Six executives from the home office formed an anxious row near the main entrance. Dressed in blue suits and mirrored sunglasses, they each blandly reiterated the same basic look of the other five. Gray could see his reflection widen and contract from lens to lens as he followed Cam Pee down the receiving line.

“Last, here, you meet Jim Carroll.” The CEO introduced Gray to a tall man with high, strangely solid hair. “Jim is Visual Merchandiser for—whole zone!” he said, pointing at both men, then crossing his arms, indicating an exchange of some sort. “You two work together—tight!”

The executives laughed; odd, thought Gray—nothing funny there. Suppressing an urge to—oh, lord,
anything
. . . play
air guitar
, complete with windmills and manic fingers on the fretboard—he followed the others past the cash wrap. A hand tugged lightly on his sleeve.

“Hey, mind if I stick my fat neck in here too?”

The team of executives shifted as a new man joined the group. He coughed, smiled, waved hi.

Jim Carroll scratched his forehead, hiding his embarrassment. “Oh, yeah, this is, uhh, Steve, Steve Mould, he’s the—”

“I’m the manager of this store, Steve Mould. Nice to meet you, sir.”

“Yeah. He’s not the manager of . . .
all
the stores.”

“No, of course not.”

“Just this particular one.”

“My little corner of the world. Betcha.”

“Steve has been kind enough to let us borrow his office while we work out our business.”

Steve’s big brown shoes changed clock positions as he wheeled around and pointed at the girls behind the cash wrap. “Yeah. You all just do what you gotta do, and we’ll . . . hold down the fort!”

Gray rubbed his eyes. “Super,” he said, resenting the associations— his life, this man’s enthusiasm.

“We’re all set to go. I’ve got a great staff working for me today, and we’re gonna . . . pump it out!” Steve made a little fist and punched the air.

“Nice, nice.”

“No messing around, man. We’re . . . yeah. Yup.”

Jim Carroll moved between Gray and Steve, blocking the conversation.

“Cam, do we want to take Mr. Hollows into the back now?”

As the executives moved across the sales floor, Steve tripped along, walking backwards, latching onto the CEO’s cufflink. “It’s a real pleasure—and for you especially, Mr. Pee—to have you all here in my store. Or
the
store. The store, my store, whichever the case, uh . . . may be. And I just wanted to say—”

“Steve.” Jim waved his hand in front of the manager’s face. The crowd moved ahead as Steve backed into a display of stacked carafes.

“If you need anything at all, sir—coffee or paper or whatever—you just let us know, because my people are fired up to be here today, and we’re all just set to rock ’n’ roll!”

Jim took Steve’s shoulder and pulled him back a step. “Cam, Frank, Bernie, you go ahead. I’ll be right there. I just got a page from Cathy in auditing. It’ll take me two minutes.” He waited for the others to leave, then pinned Steve against an endcap. “What are you doing here, pal?”

“Just trying to be sociable to the new ad account, Jim.” A bit miffed, Steve fanned out the front of his work apron.

“Yeah, well let me tell you something—you want to be sociable, try being sociable to Cam Pee’s big fat heinie unless you want a fourth-division write-up next performance review. Where do you get off trying to upstage the Big Guy?”

“Oh, Jim,” Steve whispered, feeling pretty slick. “A few words, a little hello, I’m entitled to that much.”

“Steve, do you realize we’ve choreographed this entire affair down to the last maneuver? Every single motion—planned out in advance. I’m breaking the choreography right now, just standing here, giving you this reprimand.”

Steve let go of his apron. “Is that what the heck this is? A reprimand?”

“An
informal
reprimand. Now come on! We picked this site for a reason—because you’re a decent manager and because your cashiers are remotely presentable, compared to those jigaboos we’ve got working downtown. Don’t fuck it up!” Catching himself, he noticed an old woman creeping along the knickknack wall, browsing the keepsakes. He smiled professionally and said, “I think this lady has a question.”

Adjusting his tie, he hurried past the double doors to the backroom. Through the circular windows, Steve could see the executives filing into his office—
his
office!—and so casual about it too, standing in the doorway, blabbing away, the usual chat, all part of the act, a stupid kids’ game, twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old, MBA ballbusters fresh out of school, not one idea to call their own, but they look good and they know the talk, and that’s what it takes, m’friend, that is
it
right there in a nut-shell and it’s too bad but it’s true, American business, wave of the future, leaves the good men out on the sales floor with the batty old ladies and their stupid questions, got nothing better to do, all of her friends are dead so she has to pester sales clerks trying to make a decent living, pushing their meaningless merchandise, keeps you forty-five minutes on a three-buck sale, good God, the same ol’ yaya, yes ma’am, that there is one hundred percent gen-you-wine Southeast Asian lacquer, made and manufactured in Indonesia, special keen, just 4 U.