The Colt 45 Chronicle #59

It is appropriate that this installment of "The Colt 45 Chronicle" should be the selection this week, which comes to a close today. It was a rough one at work, the reason for which might have something to do with the return of Daylight Savings, along with some mild, sunny weather. It was as if a bright light was turned on to reveal a life of decomposition, squalor and exhaustion. 

Yesterday I was reminded of a feeling of anxiety that I had experienced on the job toward the end of my residency in the Big Apple, three years after the letter below was written. The feeling was in the form of a visualization that the rest of my life would be spent doing office work; the dreadful, nauseating, vertiginous visualization was one of mirrors looking into mirrors. That is what I thought of -- pointing a mirror, as a kid, into a mirror, and catching an imperfect glimpse of infinity, imperfect because the glass of the mirror was bowed. In any event, that's what I had thought about more than twenty-years ago standing in a computer room looking uptown at the Empire State Building, "I can't do this for decades."

Well, here I am decades later, and I am still doing it. Yesterday brought back that mirror-on-mirror image, that feeling of exhaustion and "No Exit," what Kierkegaard and others call "taedium vitae." 

The letter below captures an early version of this on-the-job ennui ("unhappiness fluorescently lit"). Written to a coworker who had recently liberated himself from our job as proofreaders for a large corporate law firm located in Manhattan's financial district, Craig was older than the rest of us. Craig was probably in his mid-thirties; he was low-key, quiet, kind, and rode a motorcycle. I think he was originally from Utah.

We proofreaders were a tight bunch, even though we were divided into camps of girls vs. boys. Nancy was a Jewish American Princess gone bohemian who was married to a French artist named Norbert. She was a little older than the rest of us, though younger than Craig. Nancy was either 29 or had just turned 30.

Susan was a beautiful, curvy young woman in her early twenties who was trying to make it as a model. 

Richard was a Jamaican guy my age, middle twenties, who loved to play the ponies. He was my buddy. We used to go the OTB (Off Track Betting) parlors together, as well as the bars and cheap restaurants for lunch. I loved that guy. Richard was tough, but he had a heart of gold. He was like a Jamaican leprechaun. It felt to me like he was kin. 

Jeff was a streetwise bantam rooster from the Bronx. A black guy who carried a lot of Native American in his face, Jeff was the same age as Richard and I, but he was the leader of the pack, both officially (he had seniority at the law firm and acted as a lead or router for the proofreaders) and informally (he called the shots on where we went to lunch).

Winter 1990

Craig!

I miss you man. New York is getting colder and colder, and you're out sunning yourself on the Gold Coast. Oh, well, it just goes to show you that some are smart and some aren't. What I mean to say by this is that you had the smarts to know exactly when to break camp and head out across the country. Right after you left things fell to hell. Judy Lauer scooted us over to maximum security Wall Street; and while that was bad, where she has us now is even worse. We're still at 14 Wall but where in this tiny, narrow, classroom-like studio sideroom with about a dozen coders. Judy sits in the front of the room next to the only door and makes sure nobody is talking or moving or happy. -- She's crazy, plain and simple -- very paranoid and nervous. Nancy continues to "fuck the dog" like there's no tomorrow, and for some reason Judy hasn't fired her yet. I guess Nancy doesn't care either way since she and Norbert are heading out for the South Seas come January. Susan is still around and she and Nancy are very tight. They speak French to each other all the time. Needless to say, it's plenty annoying. Richard is still Richard and Jeff is still Jeff, except that he has a larger audience now, and I'm still me, though I keep a helluva lot more to myself. Anyway, the long and short of it is that it's all moil and toil, unhappiness fluorescently lit, and I'm quitting in January.