Stupid and Contagious Read online

  “Yes,” I said. “Greg, what’s the problem? We were twenty minutes away from a complete train wreck, and I got us out of it in record time. I still haven’t caught my breath.”

  “Well, if you’d set it up properly, that wouldn’t have happened.”

  “I did!” I defended. “This wasn’t my mistake. The manager didn’t even know what day it was.”

  “Heaven, we can’t have this type of thing going on. Not at your level.”

  “What thing? Me saving your ass? You sent—”

  “My ass wasn’t saved. My ass was pretty much chewed off by Tommy’s assistant. I’ll be surprised if he ever works with us again.” Greg looked out the window and clenched his teeth. Then he looked at me again. “I’m afraid there’s no longer a role for you at Schiffman Morton.”

  I was stunned. “Is this a joke?”

  “No,” he said.

  My heart was pounding. This couldn’t be real. I looked at him, waiting for the punch line. Nothing. He couldn’t even look me in the eye. He was serious.

  “Fine. I’ve worked my ass off for you every single day—including today . . . but fine—it’s your name on the door, Greg.” I started to walk out, but stopped short at the door. “What kind of severance package are you giving me?” I turned and asked.

  “Severance packages are for people who are laid off. You are being fired for cause.”

  “What cause?”

  “Gross misconduct.”

  “Misconduct of what?”

  “Abuse of corporate funds. However, due to your previous good service, I’m not going to press charges.”

  “Press charges?” Was he insane?

  “For the books you charged. I’ll let it slide.”

  “How generous of you,” I seethed. “Jesus, Greg!” and I started to storm out. “Press charges. What an ass,” I said just loud enough for him to hear.

  “Heaven?” he called out.

  “What?” I said as I turned back.

  “I hope there are no hard feelings.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.

  “I’m not,” he said. I started on my way again, but he cleared his throat. “And I’ll need you to surrender your corporate card. Now.”

  Brady

  Sitting on a plane doesn’t leave too many options for activity, so I start thinking about things that I’d blocked out for the week of the conference. Like the fact that Sarah’s moving out. Well, that’s not true. I’m moving out of the apartment, but Sarah is moving out of my life. Sarah didn’t want to break up and refused to move out, so I’m the one who’s going. It’s like that Seinfeld where George was trying to break up with the girl and she just wouldn’t let him. Only my efforts didn’t end in half an hour, there was no laugh track, and I’m now being forced to give up the rent-controlled pad I’ve been in for seven years and move into a new apartment. The place that was mine before she got there, and was supposed to be mine long after she left. As they always do. Which is a real fucking drag. Losing the rent control . . . not Sarah.

  You might ask how I can possibly give up rent control and to that I say: You haven’t met Sarah.

  Marc points out what he’s listening to on his iPod. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. This snaps me out of my brief escape from this plane ride from hell. I do not want to be this guy. I am nothing like this guy. But that Ted Leo album is fucking brilliant. Fuck.

  Actions need to be taken. Number one on my list—new headphones. I’ll get a big pair of black Sony Noise Canceling Headphones. That way, nobody will know it’s an iPod I’m listening to. That white cord is a dead giveaway. Well, not anymore. I’m going to fix that fast. I am not going to be one of the pod people, or iPod people, as it were. At least as far as they know. Number two . . .

  I just need to rethink everything. Like, why had I even bothered to go to SXSW in the first place? Did I go to discover Cat Power? To discover Liz Phair’s ass? Actually, that I wouldn’t have minded. But the rest? It’s all bullshit. I went because everyone else was going. I went to see who had the best parties. I went to hang out with the same people I hung out with every other night in New York, but it would be different because we’d be in Austin, Texas. That changed everything.

  Post 9/11, it’s pretty common for me to size up the plane I’m on, just in case any terrorists might be onboard and wanting to start some shit. Usually I look around and pick out my wingman and a few backups. I can tell who would be able to throw down if need be. This plane is a lost cause, though. I am totally on my own. What are these indie-rock geeks going to do if the shit hits the fan? Strike up a conversation with one of them about Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and then bore him to death? Fuck it. If it goes down, I guess I’ll be the one. More important . . . if the plane goes down, who’s gonna review the new Super Furry Animals CD?

  “I saw Joe Levy when I was boarding,” Marc says. So? “I asked him for an autograph.” Is Joe Levy a fucking celebrity now? The scary thing is, he is. This Horshack-looking motherfucker has been on every single VH1 Behind the Music in the last five years. Just because he works at Rolling Stone, we get to watch him opine about Vince Neil killing Razzle and the gut-wrenching reuniting of Leif Garrett and the crippled guy. Or did the baby drown at Vince’s house? No, Vince lost his baby to an illness, and somebody else’s baby drowned at Tommy Lee’s house. But Joe Levy has an opinion on each of these matters for sure. I make a mental note to keep my kids away from any and all members of Mötley Crüe. If I have kids.

  The flight attendant walks over to me and leans in with a plastered-on smile.

  “Did you need something, sir?”

  “No.” Did I mention I also hate being called sir? Can’t she see my Mudhoney T-shirt? I am so not a “sir.”

  “Your call button is pressed.”

  “Sorry. Must have been an accident,” I say apologetically. She turns it off. She hates me. As she walks away Marc puts up his hand to high-five. “What?”

  “Bad skin, but I’d do her.”

  “I’m sure she’d appreciate you overlooking her acne.”

  My iPod goes back on. And remains on. I glance back at the hot chick. She knows she has it going on. Why am I even feeding her ego? Because she’s there. And I’m a guy. Period.

  I’m sure Marc isn’t a bad guy. He’s probably a lot like most of the guys I hang out with. He is most of the guys I hang out with. But for some reason, for the rest of my flight I hate Marc with all of my being. Any other day I’d have made nice, nodded yes, and drunk way too much Grey Goose with the schmuck. But not today. I am not only being confronted with the fact that I am absolutely not unique in any way whatsoever, I am disgusted by my entire existence. Who cares what shows I’ve been to? What electronic gadgets I have? How big my record collection is? If I’ve read the book before anyone else? As I think all of these things, I turn the page of my in-flight magazine and see an ad for a new gadget. A Game Boy Advance SP. And all I can think is, God damn, I want that fucking thing. So much for enlightenment.

  Sitting in the cab on my way home from the airport, I feel a kink in my pocket. I reach my hand in and realize it’s a few crumpled-up business cards. Some of the contacts I made at the convention. A life shrunk down to a 2-by-31/2-inch rectangle of cardstock. I picked up several of these over the past few days, all of which will make their way to the stack of cards I already have on my desk at home. A sad, disheveled little pile of lives whose paths I will never cross again, because I will probably never take the initiative to enter the contact info into my PDA. I know this drill. I’ve got the stacks of cards to prove it. In nearly every case, the person’s contact information outlives the relationship.

  I don’t know if I don’t like throwing them away because this represents an actual person, or if it’s because I just hold on to things longer than I should in general. But the end result is me on some Sunday, or at the beginning of a new year, going through them wondering, Who was X? Who was Y? What is Alberon Sound Concepts? Did I do business with Foam-All Carpet
Cleaning at one time in my life? And what made me think the need for carpet cleaning would be so urgent at some point that I’d need their contact information by my side every waking moment?

  The long-ago, faraway dream of the PDA was for it to be the one family room of my life, or maybe the kitchen—the one place where everyone came together—where we could find anyone with a few keywords or fragments of names. It inherited the mantle of touchstone from a little address book with Alice in Chains and Def Leppard stickers on the cover, which was literally disintegrating before my eyes. The contact information there was like a dwindling population of survivors on a raft, moving closer to the edge, a few disappearing each night or with each big wave—the last few finally leaping to safety into my first . . . Rolodex. Where half now sit, neglected, starving for attention. Totally isolated from their brethren on the PDA.

  In truth, the move to the PDA served only to highlight the many dead ends I’ve come up against in my life. I spent the better part of two weeks after I got it, hour upon hour, pondering who should make the cut. I scanned the names of ex-girlfriends, ex-coworkers, and even ex-family. Well, maybe not ex, but gone. Like Uncle Stu. Insurance adjuster, husband, father, part-time genius.

  Stu Gilbert was my favorite uncle. He was sort of a loner, so I didn’t get to spend that much time with him—but whenever I did, it became an event. Once when I was a kid, we went out for a family dinner at the Wo Hop Chinese restaurant down in Chinatown. I couldn’t quite master the chopsticks and was getting frustrated. Uncle Stu took the chopsticks out of their paper housing, folded the paper into a thick square, placed it between the two chopsticks, and wrapped a rubber band around that spot. The result was an easy-to-use all-in-one pair of chopsticks that didn’t require balance or hand coordination—and hero worship.

  Another time, when I was at Uncle Stu’s house, he took me into his basement bathroom. I can see it now, with the gold-flocking wallpaper—and smell it now, redolent of the urine from a thousand near misses.

  “Go ahead. Change the toilet paper roll,” he said.

  “But it’s not empty,” I said.

  “I know,” he said like a wizened Samurai master.

  I removed it carefully, slid a new roll of paper on the holder, then compressed the ends of the holder between my thumb and index finger and prepared for the pinch. You know the pinch. Virtually impossible to avoid when you replace a roll of toilet paper, no matter how quick and catlike your release.

  “Ha!” he said, seeming to relish my pain. “Now try with this.” And he produced a holder of similar size but perforated with holes, stained with streaks of glue, and stuck through with a bent coat hanger as if it were a shish kebab.

  I looked at it, then at him, wondering how or whether it worked. He took it from me, squeezed part of the coat hanger, deftly slipped on a new roll, and popped the whole contraption into the brackets with ease. I didn’t get it. But this would turn out to be the Cushion Spring Pinch-Proof toilet-paper roll holder.

  He was well on his way to earning his patent and approached a large manufacturer of toilet-paper roll holders about mass-marketing his innovation. Apparently the idea was a little too revolutionary. And rather than watching it undercut sales from their phenomenally successful finger-pinching models, they preferred to simply buy him out and keep his brainchild from ever seeing the light of day. No matter. He got a chunk of change and moved on to his next inspiration.

  And such was the bond between us that five weeks after he died I received a check for thirty thousand dollars and a handwritten note: “Seed money for that scatterbrained music thing you’ve been talking about. Love, Uncle Stu.”

  So removing Stu from my PDA was unthinkable. Though by all counts, there’s not much chance of reaching him at any of the numbers I have for him.

  But many lesser personalities remain with much less justification. It’s not really even that hard to delete people, but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Who knows when one of these people might prove pivotal? Who knows when some neighbor’s dog will barf up a shoe and I’ll have a desperate need to reach out to Foam-All? So now I stare at the SXSW contacts, debating their entry into my Contact Hall of Fame. Some aggravate me. They only suggest to my paranoia that everyone else at the conference is racing along the road to success while I’m stuck in the starting blocks, having forgotten my running shoes. I’m half tempted to chuck the entire lot. I guess what the exercise has taught me is that people come and go. Maybe that’s all right.

  So I begin to look through these cards. And already I’ve forgotten who at least a third of them were. Someone once said, People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime. They forgot one other option: Some people come only to give us their contact information, let us know that we really need to get together sometime, and why don’t we give them a call?

  Heaven

  I spent my first week after being fired getting reacquainted with the soap operas that I watched in college. The second week I vowed to go to the gym every day, but tapered off after day one. The third week I did a budget for myself and realized that I’d already been living above my means and that I needed a new job. Like, yesterday.

  So now I’m a waitress. I work at Temple, which is a French-Vietnamese fusion restaurant, and it’s extremely hip. I’m not even sure why they hired me, because I had zero waitressing experience, but I’ve been here for two months and I’m getting the hang of it. Mostly. The money’s decent, but my bosses are assholes, and the clients aren’t much better. I’ve served Demi and Ashton, Mayor Bloomberg, and Monica Lewinsky. I should probably clarify that the latter two were not at the same table. I should also clarify that the names I’ve singled out are not the assholes I spoke of. In fact, all four were quite polite and good tippers. But on average, people seem to think you are their servant. Granted, you are. But they also must think it’s okay to treat their servants like shit. The jerks I serve pale in comparison to the jerks I work for. I work for a white guy named Bruce who thinks he’s Asian, and a French guy named Jean Paul who thinks he’s Steve McQueen.

  Bruce will use any opportunity to yell at us, and he’ll always make sure it’s in front of customers and the rest of the staff. Jean Paul . . . for the most part, he just smokes cigarettes and sits on his Triumph 650cc, which is prominently parked outside our restaurant at all times. It’s never good to interrupt his “cigaritual,” as I like to call it. Jean Paul takes out a cigarette, packs it on his hand, then places it behind his left ear, walks outside, and cases his motorcycle as if he’s never seen it before. Then he sort of leans on it as he pulls the cigarette out from behind his ear and lights up. He always closes his eyes for his first inhale and always exhales through his nose.

  The restaurant has all these little quirks, you might call them. I really shouldn’t be talking about them this way. If they found out, I’d be fired. But fuck it. I’m okay with that.

  Marco is wearing an eye patch today. Marco is a busboy at the restaurant. He’s been in America for only six months and seems to get into a lot of trouble. He’s absolutely my favorite busboy. He’s about twenty-four years old, with an overgrown bowl haircut. When he first showed up at work he had hair down to his ass, and Jean Paul told him he had to cut it if he wanted the job. So he did, but he hasn’t cut it since. Marco is from Albania and he likes to drink. A lot.

  A few weeks ago he comes into work all smiles and tells everybody about a woman he met over the weekend at some discothèque in his neighborhood. The fact that he was still using the word discothèque in the twenty-first century we’ll leave alone.

  “She was beautiful. And she said she wanted to make sex with me. So I took her home and she gived me a blow job.” His English could still use a little work, but he spends every Sunday in English classes, and he’s getting better. “And then . . . when I took off her underpants . . . she has a penis!” he says, still smiling and laughing at the audacity. We’re all mortified and half wondering if he just saw The Crying Game for the first t
ime. But no. Sadly, for Marco, he missed that one.

  “What did you do?” we all ask simultaneously.

  “What do you think I did? I told her to go home!” None of us laughed at him. I mean, all of us laughed at him, but we felt so bad for him that it wasn’t really malicious laughter. And he’s so unaware that he didn’t really get that this isn’t the kind of story you tell everyone at work on Monday morning. Or any morning, for that matter. You tell your best friend. Maybe. But now everyone knows. God bless him, he’s not ashamed. As far as he’s concerned, it’s just another experience of all that America has to offer.

  “What’s up with the eye patch?” I ask.

  “I lost it.”

  “What do you mean, you lost it?”

  “I had a car accident, and it broke.”

  “What do you mean, it broke?”

  “It broke!” he says, like an eye “breaking” is a common occurrence.

  “Your eye?”

  “It broke. It came out and got broke into a million pieces.” I look at him, but before I can inquire further, a customer waves me over. Later, I found out that Marco has a glass eye. Or had a glass eye. When his face hit the dashboard of the car, his eye popped out and it broke. Apparently they’re like seven thousand dollars and he can’t afford a new one. Apparently I’m the only one who didn’t know he had a glass eye, as well. I heard that once he asked another waiter to hold it, and the other guy took it—not knowing what it was—and then freaked out. I never got the privilege of seeing that. I guess a customer once did, though, and threw up. Which made another customer throw up, and made the majority of the restaurant want to throw up. They had to comp everyone who saw. Jean Paul and Bruce sat Marco down and told him if he ever took out his eye again he’d be fired. This all went down before I got hired. I always miss all the fun.

  So to help Marco’s cause, I take an empty Opus One wine magnum and place a sign on it. It says “Glass Eye for the Bus Guy.” The “Queer Eye” reference is almost mean, considering the blow job, but it’s a tip jar, and I place it prominently on the bar. If helping Marco get a new eye is my mission . . . then I’m gonna do it. Marco is so touched, he sheds a tear out of his one good eye. We hug, and I toss the first dollar into the magnum.