I was unbroken at this point. Newly arrived to the metropolis, putting in my first week at my first career-track job at the pseudo-prestigious Foundation Center on Fifth Avenue, I still imagined myself free, autonomous, a gentleman capable of a wide range of actions. So when my friend arrived from Central America where he was working as a stringer, I got very drunk, stayed out late, and no-called/no-showed at work the next day. I had no idea that I was committing the ultimate worklife transgression. I would soon learn otherwise. This letter, number eight taken from a collection of letters composed from late 1988 to early 1990, chronicles that educable moment.
Several years later I got to be a witness of what a no-call/no-show looks like from the inside. A young accountant, really a decent guy, Simon was his name, didn't show up for work one day at the insurance company where I was toiling at the time. It was the day after the Fourth of July. The holiday had fallen on a Monday, which meant that if you were a drinker who wanted to stay up and celebrate with fireworks you were going to pay a price come Tuesday morn. Well, Tuesday morn turned into Tuesday afternoon and there was no word from Simon. He was AWOL. And it sent the monkeys in the office cage chattering. It was as if one of the monkeys had escaped from the zoo and the monkeys who remained behind were freaked out. It was something to behold. There was electricity in the air. One of us had made a break for it. When a wary and hushed Simon returned to the cage on Wednesday it turned out that he had, like I describe my own situation in the epistle below, got drunk and decided to say, "Fuck it." -- For a young man, proof of life.
Autumn 1988
-- My first week at work was punctuated by a Thursday no-show, which I was amply admonished for (much to my surprise). I had been drinking the night before, and feeling particularly Bukowskian I had decided to fuck waking up. I had read the poem about leaving the bar for a job, on the bus, getting out and finding a warehouse with dirt floors and moving containers of molten steel (probably a foundry). It was the East Village once again, and subways on the way home, already feeling crummy. I woke up at 1 o'clock PM and there was a message on the machine from this asshole who called himself my boss; his voice was dripping with the kind of petty candy-ass croquet shit that could coat a beehive. I pick up the receiver and dial him up. He answers and inmediately shoots into the bitch of 4th-of-July routine. I blurt out baldly that an old friend (Colum in from Guatemala) had put in to port and I had spent the night guzzling brews. His effete dick jaw drops right through the line. He gives me the KGB inquisition, asking me if I've ever had a "full-time" job before, if I've read my employee manual, if I've sniffed his bunghole. I respond too candidly, too Californian (too calm), too assertively, too much -- as I would fancy -- like a Minutemen album. He is taken aback, confused, which prolongs his attempt to be powerful. Finally, I say, "Stan, listen: 'Mea culpa, mea culpa.' Okay? That's it; that's all there is." He says, I'll see you tomorrow; I say, very good. What a fucking asshole; how easy for him to be cool in that situation, and say, okay Mike, you fucked up, but no big deal, next time just make sure you call me up -- 'nuff said. But he had to have his moment on the silver screen, he had to try to stick his dick in my mouth. Needless to say I was a chicken sandwich away from calling him up and saying goodbye; saying, fuck off, asshole. But the chicken sandwich peacefully filled my belly and intervened. So I turned the other cheek, became Christ, picked out the best cross on Calvary, and went back to work the following day.
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