Chapter Two

It was the late 1980's. I was the proverbial rising young executive at a world known, but locally based manufacturer, having worked my way up from sweeping floors and loading trailers to two hour lunches of prime rib and scotch, courtesy of the trucking companies. Had I been empowered to actually make a decision of any import, I have no doubt there would have also been hookers between the soup and salad. Meetings were often after work and weather allowing, on the back nine, more duffing than golfing. I was driving a Jeep at the time, so I would later have to take my ratty bag of clubs into the bar with me for my usual bachelor supper of free egg rolls and pizza, washed down with liberal amounts of Budweiser. It was a good life, at least not bad for a History/Poly-Sci major six hours and comps shy of his sheepskin.

As this was before the computer age, everything was on paper. The company had to have a rather large clerical staff. Immense banks of filing cabinets dominated all available wall space, covering the nicotine stained knotty pine paneling. Stacks of forms to be processed covered most horizontal areas. There were ashtrays on almost every desk. Smells of coffee, paper, smoke, ink, doughnuts, and cheap-ass perfumes pervaded the room. The drones of ringing telephones, typewriters, voices, and ten key adding machines were augmented by the staccato slam of the address-o-graph and the grinding of teeth. Customer Service sucks. But when the day was finally over, all in all, I had had a lot of fun. It was here that I was to meet Kathy.

She was hired as data entry clerk, the position for which she had been trained, and was, of course, promptly assigned a ten key and typewriter. Mid management saw the inevitable need for computerization, and trained staff, this was the eighties, after all. They kept her from moving on through promises of new positions opening soon in almost every department and all requiring her skills and, of course, summary pay raises. The old guard, however, knew best, having seen the movies "War Games" and "Colossus" and therefore fought any technological advance that might possibly result in a machine even talking, including voice mail. They kept her right where she was, a recently divorced single mom, under-employed and under-paid, with a limited horizon. When her day was over, she had not had a lot of fun.

I, of course, was ignorant of her plight, or even her existence for the first few months of her employment there, being wrapped up with work and while enjoying partying with my female coworkers on numerous occasions, not really wanting to spend all that much time with them. They were entertaining, but as W.C. Fields put it, "a lot like elephants, fun to look at, but not something you want to own". While I did enjoy the comradery, I had already made that mistake once and had a few other things to do, some of them even almost productive. She, as well, was busy after work, caring for her four year old son, cleaning her parents’ home, where she was forced to return to live, arguing with her drunken ex, and putting up with her brothers.

She started a couple departments over, working for an old timer who believed in total office decorum. Voices were to be kept low. Laughter could be only a scant chuckle. His people were to dress nice even if they had no title. With the pay scale as it was, this was a bit of a hardship for those just getting started in the workplace. He was a personable guy with a good sense of humor with whom I enjoyed swapping stories and lies, but there was no way in hell that I would work for him as rigid as he was with his staff and the pure, grim monotony of this, staplers on the left, pens on the right, and that’s why they call it work department.

The pure pandemonium and relative tolerance of the other room was totally opposite. Emotions ran high, but as long as the customers didn’t find out how pissed off we were, and their requests handled on a somewhat timely basis, a fair amount of latitude was given. This latitude narrowed a little when my supervisor retired and was replaced by a former and therefore rabid anti-smoker with from Purchasing having little experience with this side of the equation but also having one of the preferred last names, as this was a family business. Ties were to be worn, even though most of us already did anyway just in case a customer did happen to stop by the lobby, giving us an excuse to leave our desks. The axe handle I had hung above my desk disappeared. But he was a quick learner and somewhat reasonable, so we all soon got through the growing pains without too much problem.

Breaks were still when you could take them, usually signaled by the lack of ringing phones. A new non-smoking policy was instituted. Oddly, under the new policy, I ended up actually smoking more. Instead of me leaving a cigarette burning and forgotten in the ashtray after a couple puffs, it was now smoked down to the butt quickly and greedily, never leaving my hand as I stood right in the doorway of the break room in order to make it back to my desk to answer the next ring. Somehow, even though she worked in a totally different area, her smoking schedule slowly began to coincide with mine, sporadic as it was. Our paths were to cross more frequently when she was transferred into my department and issued a desk within clear view of my cubicle.

As any newbie would, she was promptly assessed by the staff. But since she came from another department and not off the street, some were particularly harsh in their judgment. Many people just don’t like others to have strong personalities. I am not one of them. I, unlike a few others in the department, preferred to deal with people of beliefs, taste, and humor. I also, unlike a few, rather enjoyed her skin tight dresses and long legs, views of which were enhanced by her decision to remove the lower panel of her desk.

There was bottle of aspirin the size of a mayonnaise jar on my desk right where my ashtray had once sat. It was for anyone’s use but mostly there as a silent protest. They didn’t work that well for stress headaches but did come in handy for the hangovers that seemed to plague the staff most heavily on Mondays and Fridays. They would stop by and help themselves, some as well occasionally asking for the Visine that I kept in my top drawer. She wasn’t in the morning brown bottle flu club, but would still come by during the day to get a couple of them on a regular basis, usually while I was just sitting for a second or two after a long phone call, trying to remember what the hell I was doing before I was interrupted, giving me the opportunity and obligation to watch her walk back to her desk.

Yes, I noticed her, but made no effort to expand our relationship to being any more than that of just coworkers. I did enjoy her flirting, recognizing and appreciating it for what it is, simple flirting, a fine, gentile, and all but lost art in this latter part of the twentieth century. It was a talent for the observant and sharper of wit, and not for most of the rest of the secretarial staff who had the initiative and intelligence of half a glass of water. We got to know each other over the next couple months, seven minutes at a time, in the break room. It turned out that we had many mutual friends and had lived only a few blocks apart for much of our lives. We had attended the same schools only one year apart in grade and had even attended the same parties on different shifts, but had never met. It was odd, but not all that disconcerting.

One day my Jeep had a dead battery. I lived on the strip and had the motor heads parking in my lot almost every night. They had at one time literally whooped and hollered all night until I cocked and pointed a shotgun at their ring leader, loaded, unknown to them with rock salt. The response to the sound of the bolt clicking into place, as I chambered the first round was priceless. A voice from the corner of the lot, "Oh fuck, he has a gun! We’re leaving, sir!" Now, occasionally, they would mess with my Jeep, usually just leaving beer cans and roaches, never anything really too serious, but this time they had turned and left on my headlights. I arranged a ride to work but had no way to get home besides shoe leather, a great start to the week. She offered a ride. I was at first surprised to find that she already knew where I lived, but quickly realized that it was probably not too hard to spot a yellow Jeep parked right off the main drag.

I lived above an old style neighborhood pharmacy. It was huge, as big as the store front beneath, and had a back porch over their storeroom. Heat was provided by a huge boiler in the cellar feeding the radiators both upstairs and down. I had three bedrooms I could mess up and then just move on to the next one, closing the sliding doors behind me. The living room and the bathroom were the only ones I kept somewhat reasonable, as even a slob has some standards.

She wanted a tour and I obliged, having straightened up the place a few days earlier purely on a whim. It had begun to bother even me, I had even washed the two weeks worth of dishes I had picked up at the Salvation Army thrift store filling the three drying racks that I had purchased for just such a rare event as cleaning day.

She had to pick up her son from daycare and was short on time. But, we sat and talked about nothing of any consequence for a few minutes each enjoying a non-hurried cigarette and clean ashtray in a quiet room, without a ringing phone. I had a phone, and service for it as well, at the insistence of my parents, and the need for one sparked by the incident of the shotgun, and a few others, but the phone itself was usually in a drawer, the cord strangling the headset, showing my contempt for that foul instrument. When it was time for her to go, she stood and said, her head down and absently kicking at the old, faded, at one time orange carpet, looking like a schoolgirl asking her grandfather for a pony, " Uh, well, uh, do you want to, uh, like, uh, go out and grab, like a drink or something. A few of us are going out Friday after work." I said, "Sure."

I usually didn’t go out on Fridays, considering it an amateur’s night. I would stop by a happy hour or three but wanted to be well clear by seven, when the huddled masses were set free from their workweek. At one time, I was one of them, I also used to play with toy cars in the sand. Now Friday nights were generally for errands, laundry, parents, groceries, and whatnot.

I wasn’t to meet her until nine, so I went to check on an old friend’s ex-girlfriend. When they broke up I refused to listen to either side. I told them that what happened between them was just that, between them, and I didn’t want to know anything about it. I therefore had remained friends with them both. You can’t have too many friends. There was nothing romantic about it. She was attractive and enchanting, but also a perennial loser who seemed to thrive on having way too much on her plate and took great relish in every crisis, often seeking them out. I had helped her and her ten year old son out a little when she moved back into the area and she wanted to repay me with a home cooked meal. After a delicious dinner and some hasty regrets, I drove the twenty minutes back into town.

Driving a Jeep is a lot of fun in the summer and handy to have in the snow. But on a clear, cold night, it can definitely suck. I was shivering when I pulled into the lot at the appointed hour, ice had already started to form on my moustache. Chilled to the bone, I entered the bar. It was an old pizza joint which had been converted into a discotheque over a decade ago, but now featured the music of the past thirty-some years and off duty cops as the security staff, hardly a drinking establishment I would frequent. My glasses immediately fogged at the front door and had to be removed. One of her friends, another coworker, met me at the door and took my coat. As if on cue, and it was, as I learned later, the music started. Kathy took my arm and escorted me, still shivering and rather disoriented, to the nearest of the three bottom lit dance floors.

It was, thank God, a slow one. While I have been blessed with a fairly good ear, I am also cursed with extremely bad feet. "I’m arrhythmic, I can’t dance a lick." has been my theme song all of my adult life. So we talked, laughed, drank, and smoked during the fast songs, getting to know each other better and deepening our friendship, and then we would dance during the slow ones, me trying desperately not to step on her feet, this task becoming increasingly easier as the backs of our knees were deepening their friendship, as well.

During this evening, I also realized how much I really enjoyed her company. It wasn’t just the prospect of sex with an attractive woman, while that was a major factor as well, it was more her sense of humor, intelligence, and basic demeanor. I could always just try to pick up some mindless piece of meat or even decide to do without, as I had at that time. But there was something else, something I found in her that was so elusive and ineffable that I had given up the search for it, hoping that it would someday find me. It had.

I was having a very, very good time, better than I could have possibly imagined when I agreed to meet her. The night could have ended right there and then and I would have marked it with a red letter, gone home to sleep and remembered it fondly for years to come. I still do. But I would have promptly forgotten the coworkers at the same table we occupied every other song. It wasn’t all that late and I was already growing tired of them. My heart then soared when Kathy, during what to be our last dance there that night, stopped, met my eyes and said, "You know, there is no place I’d rather be tonight, than with you." I felt the same.

She had given a ride to one of the girls that night and had to drop her well liquored ass off before meeting me back at my place. This gave me the time to start an album I hoped she would appreciate and do a quick straightening. I emptied the ashtrays, made sure the toilet was flushed, and installed a new roll of paper while I was at it. I wasn’t sure what the evening had yet in store. I was up for almost anything at that point. Conversation, cards, music, backgammon, or even being stood up were all equal contenders in the realm of possibilities. The latter seemed most likely after the first side of the record ended as well as the next. "Oh well," I thought. Disappointed, but not devastated, I started another album, and pondered whether I should call it a night and just read or go out and try to find some entertainment from the Friday night crowd.

I jumped at the first noise that came from the stairs. I had left the front door unlocked for her, something I never did, given where I lived, and rushed to meet what I was hoping to be her and not some yo-yo off the strip. Neither of us knew quite what to do next, so we talked for quite a while, listened to some jazz, and fenced around the subject at hand. Then nature stepped in and quickly settled that matter once and for all. Compatibility on all fronts was now confirmed.

The next morning, I feared it had been just a one night stand, or worse yet, that I would be used a few times, and then simply crumpled and thrown away like a dixie cup. There is nothing wrong with casual sex between consenting adults. Besides being a lot of fun, it can be one of the best things to do on the planet, ranking right up there with eating and breathing. But, deep down, and I didn’t realize it at the time, I was searching for a mate, not just someone to become friends with and/or diddle. I had no desire to be distracted in this, subconscious endeavor by yet another wild goose chase. When I talked with Kathy later in the day, I found those fears to be groundless.

Other fears, however, arose when she informed me that she was infected with herpes. I understood the malady, having friends who suffer from that particular affliction. She told me she had caught the virus from her ex-husband during an attempted reconciliation, he forcing himself upon her in the process. She was adamant that she was not contagious at the time of our first tryst, and had been nervous about scaring me off. I accepted her explanation and dismissed my misgivings. We became a couple.