Apples, Wives, and Staring Etiquette

How do you like this apple

“I have an apple for you,” a coworker named Gary told me a few days ago. Gary, an eccentric Russian in his late fifties, is known for his oftentimes unconventional behavior. He’s one of those people who can be fathomlessly entertaining if you’re in the mood for him, but just as annoying if you’re not. He told me, “I picked it.”

“Huh… you say you picked it?” I asked, my spirits lifting. Nothing like a fresh-picked autumnal apple, is there?

“Oh yes! Yes, apple picking,” Gary said, kissing the tips of his fingers the way Italian chefs do when detailing a particularly succulent dish. “Crisp and delicioso.”

“Cool. I actually could go for one.”

“You want it now?” he asked, around a mouthful of his own apple.

“Sure. What kind of apple?”

“From a tree,” Gary said, as if that explained everything.

“You don’t say? I think they usually-”

“In Massachusetts!”

“Massachusetts? You mean like Western Mass?” I asked, puzzled. I’m not sure why I pressed him on it; on the surface everything seemed legit. A picked apple: nothing more, nothing less. And yet I had the vaguely unsettling impression that something was awry. Maybe it stemmed from the brand of apple I was about to enjoy being the kind that came from a tree.

“Here in the city,” Gary cheerfully clarified, reaching into his backpack and producing my apple – a fairly undersized specimen. He added, “Near the bus stop.”

I frowned. “The… bus stop?”

“Yes, yes, where the crazy people live. Try it.”

“Crazy people?”

“Try your delicious apple.”

Examining my delicious apple, I noticed what closely resembled bite marks imprinted upon its skin… most likely left by the mouth of a nutcase: either from the insane asylum or the one standing before me.

Gary looked at me hopefully. “Aren’t you going to eat it?”

“I think I’ll save it for later.”


Do You Remember the Time…

“Guess what’s four weeks from today?” I said to Carolina the other day.

“I don’t know. Thanksgiving?”

“No,” I said with a frustrated sigh, making her count the weeks on our kitchen calendar. “Look!”

She ticked off the weeks while I stood there, brimming with excitement. Eventually she arrived at the day I was indicating. “November ninth,” she said, unimpressed. “Okay… What’s November ninth?”

I looked at her.

I am so not getting Carolina a wedding anniversary present this year.

(Sorry Wife, but you had to know this was going public.)



The Staring Contest

Today someone was staring at me on the subway. A skinny, middle-aged bald guy. It really irritated me. Outwardly, he looked respectable – well-dressed and groomed – not the kind of person you would associate with abnormal social behavior. What was his problem? I hate when people on the T stare.

At first I pretended not to notice, but eventually couldn’t take it anymore and looked back at him. When we made eye contact, rather than glance away, his line of vision continued to bore into mine. It did not waver. I offered an expression of vaguely confused annoyance and averted my gaze. After a minute I glanced back, and this screwball was still staring at me.

What are you doing you unimaginable jackass? Determined to win this brazen challenge, I stared back in what I hoped was a severe, threatening manner. Like maybe I was crazy, or a hoodlum. Not somebody to be messed with. I couldn’t be the one to look away. He was breeching etiquette! Breeching is too soft a word; it was a categorical abomination of etiquette.

Unfortunately, after a while my eyes started to water as our awkward staring contest continued unfettered, and I had to avert them. I felt deeply embarrassed and violated. I stared at my feet for a long while, burning with shame.

When he eventually got up, I noticed he employed one of those walking sticks for blind people.

Driving Me CrAzY

1

It’s curious, the way life unfolds. Take fear. Of my two great terrors in life, the first – going down in a plane crash – seemed a likely outcome one frostbitten January night when an airline jet in which I was a passenger began emitting fiery explosions from its rear as we made our descent into Logan International. Returning to Boston after a week in the Caribbean, my initial thought as fire trucks, ambulances, and other emergency crews swiftly advanced upon our airborne inferno was that at least I’d spent my last week of life in a state of daiquiri-fueled bliss on a tropical island. The comfort was minimal, given the circumstances, but that’s the thought to which I clung in what I’d assumed were my last moments on earth.

My second prevailing terror was sampled during a leisurely dip in the Gulf of Mexico one year with my best friend Tom, when, feet from my tasty flesh, a black fin emerged and sliced through the water with shocking speed. As a ghastly horror overtook my body, I hazily speculated on the odds that the great white would eat Tom first. Turned out the fin belonged to a porpoise, not Jaws, and so while neither of my fears technically came to fruition, that wasn’t the point. As far as I was concerned, they may as well have; what mattered was I’d had a taste of the very things I most dreaded.

During the summer of 2000 I had a job as the assistant account manager of a security staff at a downtown Boston communications college. The work was fairly undemanding, amounting mostly to giving bathroom breaks to the posted guards and filing paperwork. However, one particular aspect of it, as my boss explained on my first day, was that it would be my responsibility to cover a post in the event a shift ended and the incoming guard was late or, as was often the case, simply failed to show up. This wasn’t a big deal to me if I had to cover a desk post – a minor inconvenience, really – but it was with sickening dread that I learned about one other function our crew performed: to run an afterhours escort van. The van began operating after 10 P.M. as a service to students hoping to traverse the downtown campus without the risk of being mugged, raped, stabbed, having to walk past a homeless man, or otherwise imperiled in any way.

At this time in my life I could count the number of miles I’d driven on one hand, and thus the prospect of not only driving, but driving in the city positively terrified me. And if the crotch of my uniform pants wasn’t already damp at that thought, factor in the other peccadillo: driving an escort van that teemed with students. It was enough to send boundless, overwhelming waves of fear crashing upon the very core of my being.

I’d have preferred a rendezvous with a great white.

“You’ll never have to drive, though,” my boss reassured me, seeming to note the distinct look of abject terror that had frozen on my face. “There aren’t many calls during most weeknights, and Darnell – the regular driver – is very reliable. Always on time.”

How she came to this misapprehension, I later learned, was due the previous assistant account manager and Darnell being chums, and thus the former tending to cover for Darnell during the countless occasions when the latter omitted work from his schedule and instead opted to catch up on his sleep.

“Hey, is this Darnell?” I rasped into the phone in a panic-stricken voice. It had taken all of two nights for Darnell to fail to show up for his shift, and I was on deck to drive the shitmobile.

“Mmmm,” he murmured sleepily on the other end.

“Listen, are you on your way in?” I asked tersely. It was an obviously ridiculous question to be asking, seeing as I had called him on his home landline, but there are few ways to berate someone while simultaneously motivating him or her to help you out.

“Be in soon,” he drowsily grumbled. An excruciating hour passed, during which time there was no sign of Darnell. What was more, he stopped answering his phone.

Then the escort requests started coming in.


2

Just don’t answer them, I thought, panicked. Leave and don’t look back! What can they do?! This really crossed my mind as a plausible solution, to just abandon the whole situation; get the hell out of there and let someone else sort it out. Tomorrow I could come up with some sheepish “miscommunication” type excuse, and even if my boss didn’t buy it, what was the worst that could happen? I’d be fired? It wasn’t like I worked in the secret service. I was pretty sure I could land another mediocre security guard job. That was infinitely more desirable than the unthinkable task before me.

In the end, I’m not sure what impelled me into the van. The thought of my conscience being burdened by a would-be passenger who was instead raped and mutilated in the Boston Common, perhaps, or maybe it was simple laziness, not wanting to have to find a new job. Whatever the case, I grudgingly took the keys and climbed into the big, old, dirty van. I slid the key into the ignition and turned, and the vehicle rumbled to life. Shit, here we go, huh? I thought. Maybe it won’t be as bad as I think… Then I backed up and instantly plowed into a light post.

“Oh my God!” I shouted.

This was an absolute nightmare, and I hadn’t even started yet. I shakily got out to assess the extent of the damage. The good news was that the back of the van was pretty dinged up already, so some additional minor damage was likely to go unnoticed. The bad news was that the rear taillight was lying in pieces on the ground. It was that moment of sinking realization when you understand you’ve committed a bad faux pas for which there exists no way to brush it under the rug. How the hell am I going to explain this?

My walkie-talkie squawked to life in the van. It was the dispatcher, wanting to know why I hadn’t picked up the two kids from Brimmer Street yet. And she just received third call from Beacon Hill.

“I’m on my way,” I groaned, feeling overwhelmed and vaguely suicidal.

Take two. The van had a surprising amount of pickup, something I learned as I steered out onto Tremont Street and promptly shot across three lanes of light traffic, accidentally cutting off several cars in my attempt to get over to the right lane. Horns blared, and I felt deeply ashamed of myself.

To make matters worse – if that were possible – it was a muggy summer night, yet I had the van’s heat gusting at full blast. None of the controls seemed to be working. I didn’t understand it; the heat knob was pointed at off. If was OFF, damn it. What the heck was going on? Was there some trick meant to be obvious but that I was stupidly missing? Was it broken? Why was I so confused? Fumbling around with the dashboard climate knobs at a now heavily trafficked intersection was pretty much the last thing I needed to be doing. That is, of course, discounting the circumstance of being in this predicament in the first place.

Sweating profusely, I aimed the vents in the other direction so at least they weren’t blowing directly at me and tried to think how to get to Brimmer Street. Saying that Boston is a very complicated city to navigate gives a bad name both to the words complicated and very. It’s essentially a tangle of winding, one-way roads inhabited by predatory, usually drunk drivers, buses, and at this time of night, street cleaners. There are a few dead-ends thrown in for good measure, as well as some surprise streets where it seems like you’re on a normal backstreet until – surprise! – you get emptied onto a highway; this later scenario being exactly what happened to me.

Having circled the block before heading toward Beacon Hill on Charles Street, I took a left on Beacon Street. I knew I was approaching Brimmer, but with my stress levels and the dark, ended up missing it. “Damn it all,” I moaned with an audible sigh. “Can anything go right?”

Taking my next right, my hope was to circle back around, or at least to make a U-turn and backtrack, but to my unimaginable horror found that, not only could I not turn around, but the street I’d turned onto was a one-way ticket to Storrow Drive – the Boston expressway that runs along the Charles River.

A dismal turn of events this was. “Oh no,” I whispered balefully.

Scared, lost, bathed in sweat from my roasting furnace of an escort van, and suddenly stuck on a busy, unfamiliar parkway, I felt the crushing weight of having been assigned an insurmountable task that was nonetheless essential to complete. It just seemed so inconceivably futile.

I ended up taking an exit that deposited me in the neighborhood of Mass General Hospital, swore out loud, and continued pressing onward. My misguided hope was that I’d turn a corner and miraculously stumble upon Brimmer Street. Unfortunately, I ended up in Government Center, which, if you’re familiar with Boston, you know to be nowhere in the vicinity of Brimmer. This had somehow gone from bad to worse; the students were probably livid by now. Assuming they weren’t too preoccupied being held up at gunpoint and subsequently disemboweled.

I hadn’t cried in quite a few years, but after working my way to the waterfront and getting angrily honked at again, this time for going straight in what was evidently a left turn only lane, a good cry seemed like my only sensible course of action.


3

“Can you smoke in here?”

By a combination of basic city knowledge, determined driving, and dumb luck, I had eventually worked my way back to Charles Street and consequently – finally – found Brimmer. During the time it took me to get there, the number of prospective fares had swelled from two to four; temporarily dropped to zero; then ticked back up to two. My first accounted for charges were Clint and Bobby; respectively a pale, effeminate blond kid and a bearded, self-described pothead.

“No,” I said of Bobby’s query, hearing the snap of his lighter. “The van is school property.”

“The van is a piece of shit,” Bobby said, as though this fact somehow negated the no smoking rule. He took a long drag of his cigarette and exhaled so that a cloud of smoke drifted over the dashboard, ricocheted off the windshield, and eventually found its way into my face. “Dude, it’s like a fucking oven in here. Do you have the heat on? It’s the middle of summer!”

“Took you long enough,” Clint chimed in.

“Oh yeah… sorry, had some… technical difficulties,” I said with a stiff laugh. Now the stakes were raised: there were live spectators aboard my vehicle of annihilation. Though I couldn’t guarantee for how much longer live could be considered an accurate description.

“Yo man, you ever bang a chick who’s a lot older than you?” asked Bobby from the passenger seat. Clint sat sullenly in the back, evidently put out by the wait.

“What?” I asked, waving the smoke from my face while at the same time swerving to avoid a double-parked taxi. Clint yelped.

“An older broad,” Bobby repeated, flicking some cigarette ash out the window. “You ever bang an older broad? I’m not talking about an eighty-year old, bro, just like, a cougar, you know?”
It was clearly the type of question people ask when they’re not genuinely interested in your response but instead trying to create a lead-in for their own story. Bobby waited a beat, and when no reply came, said, “Yo, so get this… I was banging this chick, you know, and she was like a fatty or whatever, right? But I’m all wasted, so I don’t give a fuck, but in the back of my mind I’m goin’, ‘yo, this is fucked up, this honey is like in her forties.’ Like, you know? That’s like my mom’s age and shit.”

“Oh yeah?” I chuckled nervously.

“Hey guy, do you know where you’re going?” This from Clint, who had apparently noticed and taken issue with the seven point turn I was conducting in the middle of a one-way street. It was not an unreasonable question, yet I wasn’t about to have my credentials undermined by McCauley Culkin here.

Having expected such a question, I had my noncommittal response ready. “Hey, I’m the driver,” I barked. “What do you think?”

Bobby went on, seemingly unaware of Clint’s aspersions, “Yeah dude, so this chick was like a beached whale, man, if we had a kid together that’d be-”

It was around that time that the van jumped a curb. We were all jostled hard as it careered up onto the walkway for one wild minute before lurching violently back onto the street, bouncing up and down as if equipped with hydraulics. If this sounds a little like I’m blaming the van, as though it suddenly seized control and drove itself onto the sidewalk, it’s because this was also the impression I was also hoping to give my fares.

“Damn automatic transmission,” I muttered loudly, as if that explained everything. My ears were ringing from Clint having screamed in the back seat.

“Jesus Christ, man, you know how to drive?” Clint asked, clearly shaken. It occurred to me that the screaming was a bit overdone, and so when our eyes met in the rearview mirror I glowered darkly at him, thinking to myself that this would be the last time I ever ferried around someone who majored in theater. Though in retrospect, I supposed I couldn’t really blame him. Here you are, just hoping to get safely back to your dorm room, and the campus escort – after having arrived over an hour late – proceeds to take you on a death-defying hell ride. And then lobs you a toxic glare when you have the audacity to object.

Bobby, clearly having the time of his life as he roared with laughter, clapped his hands together. “This shit’s the bomb, dude.”

Bobby then resumed prattling on with his story, completely oblivious to my manic fixation with the road before me. I’ve never quite understood this. When I’m telling a story, the millisecond that my audience betrays even the slightest clue that I have anything short of rapt attention, I will be instantly both aware and dejected. But then there are people like Bobby, who blather on incessantly no matter how blatantly preoccupied or uninterested you appear to be. I had the sense that my head could detonate right there in the driver’s seat, explode into a million little pieces, and Bobby would continue gabbing to my headless torso.


To be continued…

Wild Fire

Given a list of choices, like the salad dressing inventory in a restaurant, I invariably opt for either the first option or the last, which has nothing to do with the dressing itself and everything to do with those two being the only selections my brain will have managed to retain. When the waiter begins rattling through the choices in rapid-fire monotone, I’ll immediately lock on to the first – the last is recalled because it’s freshest in my mind – but the middle of the set tends to swirl together in a nameless sea of ambiguity. I’ll wind up with something like crème de rhubarb and spend the next 10 minutes choking back bile and fawning over the much better choices of everyone else in my group.

So last night when I ordered my chicken wing flavor, despite there being a half dozen or more appealing options, the two I was left with were wild fire and teriyaki. If this were San Antonio I might have harbored reservations about the wild fire, but in pizza places around Boston hot doesn’t usually get much beyond Tabasco Sauce. So I decided on that.

“Are you sure?” asked the man taking my order over the phone.

I paused. “I… uh, think so…?” I replied cautiously, suddenly not so sure at all. How often do you order food and have the restaurant worker openly question your selection?

“Oookay!” he said in a singsong tone, the way people do while meaning to imply, Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

“Wait, should I not get… that flavor?”

“No, you should.”

“Is it too hot?”

“Not for me.”

“What about for other people?”

“You’d have to ask them.”

“Well that’s not really an option,” I pointed out, trying to be polite but angrily thinking that this was a stupid conversation to be having with someone taking your food order at a pizza joint. Was he being purposely vague?

He told me, “It’s just… not everyone gets it.”

I honestly wasn’t sure if he meant this as, “not everyone orders it” or “not everyone understands it” – like how an elitist friend is always telling me that I might listen to jazz, but I don’t get jazz. The latter seemed sort of silly, seeing that we were talking about chicken wings, but judging from our liaison so far I wasn’t about to put it past him. I asked, “Because it’s too spicy?”

“Well, it is spicy,” he unhelpfully said. I wanted to tell him that I was clued in to at least some spice from its name wild fire. I also sort of wanted to punch him in the face.

I was pretty hungry by the time my wild fire chicken wings arrived. Unwrapping them in the office, I wolfed down two immediately. In retrospect, this was a very bad idea.

It was really only a bit prickly at first, with my mouth heating up little by little. By the time I started in on my third wing, the heat had quickly accelerated to full tilt. My mouth, lips, tongue, and throat ascended into a raging inferno of unbelievably scalding, fiery hell. It felt like I was eating chicken-flavored lava directly from a volcano. My tongue had surely disintegrated. With a yelp I chugged down some diet soda, which turned out to be like attempting to put out a blazing fire with gasoline. Desperate, I began sweating profusely, wiping my tongue with a wad of napkins as tears streamed down my face and I writhed in agony.

Gobs of wild fire sauce splattering my boss’s keyboard, I charged into the bathroom, tripping in the process, and jammed my head beneath the sink faucet. I wrenched the knob and let cold water bathe my blazing tongue. I had to stay like that, because every time I removed my mouth from the faucet, the eighteen-alarm firestorm roared back to life.

No doubt this was my comeuppance from earlier in the night. Thinking it would be funny and extremely mature, I froze a coworker’s sneakers in the freezer. As the clap of his frozen solid feet echoed throughout the hall as he gingerly left work, yours truly howling with laughter, he promised retribution. Turns out karma took care of it for him.

The Case of the Missing Shoes

Arriving at work one otherwise unremarkable day about a week ago, I was greeted with the completely puzzling discovery that my work shoes were gone. They were neither where I had left them nor anywhere else in sight. They just... weren’t there.

Imagine returning home one day after work to discover your house is absent - not destroyed, just missing - and you'll have an idea of my befuddlement. While I periodically change styles, I have left my work shoes in precisely the same place for over seven years without incident. My current pair is – or was – nondescript black and beginning to show the signs of a year’s worth of near daily use. Bought on the cheap at Payless, these were not exactly the pricey, stylish type of footwear that might whet the covetous appetite of some brazen work shoe bandit, yet neither were they so dilapidated that someone would confuse them for junk – not that anyone would single them out in the first place. We all have our shoe storage locations, and everyone adheres to the system. And while my coworkers are a satchel of characters that would likely be rejected as too unbelievable were they ever collectively pitched as a potential TV sitcom cast, I just couldn’t bring myself to consider theft as a plausible explanation.

Being the victim of a prank orchestrated by my friend Alex was another story. I’m always dousing the lights in areas he will subsequently have to traverse in the dark. My preferred location is the vast, intimidating boiler room. Buzzing with the din of machinery and freighted with danger, this area is not one you want to navigate without the benefit of sight. I get a good chuckle after my shift, thinking about Alex inching through the inky blackness with his tentatively outstretched hands, cursing my name while hoping the next thing he touches isn’t 5,000 degrees. You can call it juvenile - and you'll be right - but that’s our brand of humor.

So I began searching the break room, hopeful that I'd imminently find my missing shoes lodged somewhere nearby, have a laugh, and begin plotting my revenge. Yet I became increasingly discouraged by my lack of success.

What the hell…?

Staring blankly at the wall (an activity in which I am well-practiced), I heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and a moment later Floyd appeared. While not exactly my supervisor Floyd does outrank me, both in terms of status and seniority. Fortunately he’s not the kind of person who throws his weight around, but he does brandish the three Bs of intimidation: Blackness, Baldness, and Brawniness.

“Hey Mark,” Floyd greeted me happily, his shaven head gleaming beneath the fluorescent break room lights. We’ve worked together for over seven years, yet Floyd has never learned how to correctly spell my name.

“What’s up Floyd,” I said. “Hey, this is weird, but- well, I can’t find…” I started, my voice trailing off as my eyes dropped to Floyd’s feet, which were positioned squarely in my shoes.

“What…?” he asked, confused.

“Hmm. Do you…” What do you mean, ‘What’? You know ‘what’! “Um… nothing… forget it.”

“Okay.”

Floyd then began talking about this and that as he changed out of his uniform. No explanation or even a mention of the shoes was offered. Instead, I watched with a combination of bewilderment and horror as, one by one, he extracted his big smelly feet from the confines of my shoes. Judging by the sound made when his socks slopped onto the floor, I gathered his feet had been soaking wet.

Saturated, rancid Floyd feet had spent eight hours in my shoes.

Predictably, I was deeply disturbed and on several levels. I’m not the kind of person who hits the ceiling when somebody borrows a clothing item, but I tend to prefer lending out things like sweaters and scarves, maybe a seldom used jacket; not shoes that I wear daily. Also, call me old-fashioned but I do like to be asked first – or at least provided with a justifiable excuse after the fact. Thirdly, there was the obvious atrocity of Floyd’s feet being disgusting.

In the end I decided to put it past him; it wasn’t important enough to cause a big fuss over, just an isolated incident. Probably he needed a pair in a pinch, forgot his own, or something along those lines - I was willing to overlook the fact that my shoes now represented a biohazard zone.

Except that wasn’t the end.

The next day upon my arrival Floyd came to meet me again, and again I was horrified to see he was wearing my shoes! I thought, Jesus, WTF Floyd?! Again no explanation was offered. Nothing other than his maddening nonchalance. Furthermore, when he released my shoes from the horror that was his feet, this time he didn’t even return them to my area... but to his.

So now he’s completed the takeover, I thought. He’s officially stolen them! I was shocked into speechlessness. What could I say? Excuse me… uh Floyd? Yeah, did you just, like, matter-of-factly steal my shoes?

After Floyd left that night, I collected my shoes from his area and moved them back to mine. I hoped – I figured – that this would at least send a message. MUST send a message. Whatever he had been thinking would halt. He would show up for work and see that the shoes he had left for himself would have been claimed by their rightful owner, and he would be embarrassed. He would realize his mistake.

Alas, my hopes went unfulfilled. The next day when I came to work, I was infuriated to see that Floyd had them on again. He rambled on casually while my gaze locked onto his feet. You sick bastard, I thought, you’re not getting away with this.

When Floyd left for home, I once again removed the shoes from his area and once again returned them to mine; but this time I wrote my name in big prominent lettering on two scraps of paper and inserted one into each shoe. Check! Your move, Floyd! Unfortunately, this chapter took place on a Friday night, so I was forced to wait out the weekend before arriving at the exciting conclusion.

The situation plagued my mind all weekend. It became an obsession; I'd be in my kitchen Saturday afternoon spreading cream cheese on a bagel or standing in the shower Sunday morning thinking, What is the meaning of this business with the shoes? What is Floyd's deal? Who does he think he is that he can just seamlessly annex my shoes into his wardrobe? Is it possible he is that obtuse?

When Monday finally rolled around, I arrived for work 15 minutes early and made a beeline for the break room. There was no way he'd have taken out my name tags! It was one thing to wear an article of clothing under the guise of ignorance, but to remove the name tags would have demanded a deliberate action. Either way, I figured, I would have my answer. Either the issue would be resolved, with apologetic Floyd having realized his mistake, or the name tags would have been discarded. There would be no more ignorance, genuine or manufactured.

What I neglected to consider was option C, which was exactly what happened: that Floyd would defy the odds and continue wearing the shoes, only with the name tags in them. It was unbelievable. The shoes were sickeningly parked in Floyd's area, with my name tags - the ink smeared as a consequence of being mashed by something heavy and wet (Floyd's hooves) - against the insole. Motherf-

FLOYD!!!

Having already left the premises, I couldn't confront thieving Floyd, which was my initial inclination. But the more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that I had to beat him at his own game; I had to continue with the charade. It wasn't even about the shoes anymore - I could throw them away, for all they mattered. What concerned me was teaching Floyd a lesson.

Okay, let's take it up a notch! I snatched the shoes, placed them in a bag, and tied the bag. I made a bigger name tag with my name emblazoned in thick black magic marker and affixed it to the bag. And I waited.

To be continued...

Six Feet Under

There’s a porter at my work named Rolando, and every time I feel overworked and cranky I think of him. Rolando works seven days a week. What’s more, he works a double shift every day. Imagine: that's sixteen hours of hard labor every single day, with no days off and no vacations. Month by interminable month, year stacked upon endless year. Just thinking about it completely exhausts me. And this is thankless janitorial work we’re talking about: plunging toilets congested with strangers’ shit; vacuuming vomit and scrubbing the resultant carpet stain with a toothbrush; cleaning the foul public restroom; schlepping countless rancid bags of trash from the buildings; lifting the occasional blood stain, etc., etc. Factoring his commutes, the amount time that Rolando gets to be away from vile filth each day of his life works out to roughly six hours, time he must use for eating, sleeping, and sucking back the occasional Corona.

But what is perhaps crazier than Rolando’s mindboggling workload is the fact that he appears to actually enjoy it. Rolando loves everybody and everybody loves Rolando. He is one of the friendliest people I’ve ever met, never complaining or even allowing himself a disgruntled sigh; to the contrary, he happily fields my complaints, always offering a sympathetic nod when I tell him I’m bushed after my eight-hour shift (on the precipice of my weekend). He tells me that people such as us work hard at our jobs, and I’ll agree, thinking about how I just woke up from my two-hour slumber, and how this conversation is eating into my web surfing time. His English is a work in progress (while my Spanish is downright pathetic), so our dialogue is usually halting and awkward. For this reason I always try to avoid friendly Rolando.

This past Sunday morning I ran into the porter as he was shoveling out the plaza between the two buildings, a light snowfall tumbling from the sky.

“Mucho trabajo,” I told him, apropos of the snow. “Donde esta tu amigos?”

“No friends,” he proudly announced. “Only me!”

“Too much trabajo,” I said of his task, which was apparently to shovel the entire grounds by himself.

“No, it’s okay! ¿Amigo, cuánto nevará?”

I paused, the way you do upon encountering a phrase you cannot comprehend but understand a question is being asked. This was exactly what I hated, these situations. “I-I don’t know… No se…”

“Nevará… how do you say… ah, snow,” he repeated. “Cuánto?”

“Oh, how much snow?” I said, tremendously relieved. “Well, I heard on the news between five and seven – cinco a siete.”

“¿Pies?” he asked with a jovial smile.

“Si. Yes, about six. Seis pies.”

Rolando’s smile abruptly faded. “No… No realmente? No seis pies…” He appeared borderline panicked.

“Yes, yes, I am sure of it,” I repeated. “Six. Seis pies of nieve!” What was so hard to believe about six inches of snow?

Rolando gaped at me, his carefree demeanor gone. It was a look with which I am intimately familiar; the hopeless, desperate countenance of a man suddenly realizing the cosmic weight of what he now understands to be an overwhelming task before him. But I was puzzled as to why he found this so incredulous. Maybe he was hoping for two inches of snow rather than a half dozen, but it wasn’t like a few extra inches should make the difference between doable and insurmountable.

“Seis pies… Dios mio,” he whispered balefully, surveying the quietly falling snow about the premises. “Yo me moriré…”

“Well, good luck!” I chirped, giving Rolando an encouraging slap on the shoulder before continuing on my way, leaving the porter staring into space with a forlorn hopelessness.

It wasn’t until later that I learned my mistake: what I had told Rolando, in all seriousness, was that he would be digging out the entire complex not from under 6 inches but from under 6 feet of snow.

No wonder he looked so distraught.

While he had to have been positively ecstatic when the snowfall finally petered out that afternoon – leaving behind merely those predicted six inches – I couldn’t help but imagine the bleak thoughts that trafficked through poor Rolando’s head during the preceding hours when he was charged with work that, even for him, must have seemed downright backbreaking.

30 Rocks

[note: a couple blogs I posted on MySpace are woven into this, so if a few parts seem familiar, they probably are.]

I’m hiding. Or so I’m told. The person I am hiding with refuses to go into details; has not explained who or what we’re hiding from; the extent of the presumed danger; or how long this charade will last. All I know is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to breath.

Looking askance at my coconspirator, I note her stillness, the vaguely madcap touch to her bright countenance. There’s silence. She glances at me, her gaze animated and intelligent, her mouth partly open in a frozen smile. Our eyes lock.

“Dadda, hiding,” she tells me. Indeed. Suddenly leaping across the bed, I devour her in a torrent of blubbery kisses while she squeals with laughter.

Then, despite Emma’s vigorous protestations, I retreat from the confines of the comforter and head to the kitchen where I put on dinner. Water to boil in two pans, while on the cutting sheet I slice avocado wedges. Into the boiling water goes pasta and fresh broccoli, respectively, and I open a can of corn. While I’ve been told this process hardly qualifies, it’s what I like to refer as slaving over a hot stove.

Luring Miss Emma into her highchair, I speculate about how much of tonight’s dinner will end up in her stomach versus the amount earmarked for the floor, jammed into the crevices of her highchair’s cushioned seat, or smeared into her hair in the manner most people reserved for applying shampoo. Fortunately tonight’s supper turns out to be trouble-free – or as close to trouble-free as can be achieved in the feeding ground that doubles as my apartment – meaning minimal carnage; at some point a wayward broccoli stalk careens into the rear of my head while my back is turned, but aside from that little incident foodstuff journeys mostly to where it’s needed.

“Bahf! Bahf!” Emma begins announcing as dinner winds down. Thankfully this is not a vomit alert stemming from my subpar cooking skills, as I had wondered when she first started doing it – as in barf – it’s merely her way of publicizing bath time. The fact that bath time tends to immediately follow dinner is not coincidental.

My habit while overseeing Emma’s bath is to sit on the toilet and read. She plays and splashes, sending the occasional rubber duck flying onto the bathroom tiles or enjoying a gulp of tub water, but otherwise is well-behaved. Perched there in the bathroom while boning up on my Spanish (¿Quieres jugar una partida de badminton?), it suddenly occurs to me, not for the first time, that the official completion of my thirtieth year is a mere ten weeks away. (¡Alguien ha robado mi juventud!)

Thirty years old…

It’s funny, the march of time. I never actually counted, but according to by best estimation it took somewhere in the neighborhood of a millennium to reach my 18th birthday. Give or take a year. Each childhood year stretched out interminably, agonizingly, punctuated by Christmas and my birthday, but otherwise offered little evidence that the hands of time were even functional. Bogged down in a vast sea of classrooms, teachers, homework assignments, and bus rides, it seemed to me that adulthood was little more than a myth, a fabricated condition existing only in theory, like Mr. Rogers's Land of Make Believe or any of my mother’s promises to take us to McDonald’s next week. Even as an acne-faced pubescent ne’er-do-well, the legal drinking age was a lifetime away – never mind the precipice of thirty.

Eventually I did become a legal adult, a naïve eighteen-year-old on the threshold of college, the world at my feet. Such promising societal models as autonomy, binge drinking, casual sex, and a host of other reckless behaviors still represented ambitions I might aspire to. The whole of my twenties, and subsequently, my entire life waited – stretching before me in an infinite sequence of blank frames. Since that time, nearly forty-four hundred such frames have been filled and filed away, one faceless day ushering in the next, and, like Emma’s sullied bathwater, my youth receded into the void of the bygone. I’m not saying that I’m terribly old, mind you (I can hear the symphony of tiny violins being played by those far older than I) but the passage of time only seems to hasten as your years progress, meaning I could be on the back nine of my life the next time I open my eyes – Emma having gone from darling little covert ops girl to gangly preteen who thinks of her parents as irritating fossils put on earth to scrutinize her every move.
I first noticed the shift when I did reach 18 – a slight but perceptible acceleration in the calendar’s pace as the next few years ticked by a little faster than they always had. And then I hit 21 and something oxidized – kicking life into overdrive – and in the blink of an eye, the rest of the decade rushed past.

You're having drinks with your friends one night after work, blissfully putting the roar in your twenties, and suddenly you wake up and you're married; you find yourself taking your daughter (your insanely adorable daughter, but still, your daughter) to the park, watching her toddle around unsteadily like a little drunk, picking dandelions, worrying rocks, and exhuming crack pipes, and you wonder exactly what happened to those years. They obviously had to have occurred… right?

I met my bartender friend Bill when I was 21 and working at a downtown Boston hotel. He was 31, and at the time manned the role of that older, ostensibly life-savvy friend whose default coolness arises purely from his age and a presumed talent for bar-hopping and seducing women – the twin pillars at the nexus of any red-blooded American male’s early adulthood. Several years went by, and it occurred to me that Bill was kind of old to still be patronizing bars geared toward twenty-somethings and hitting on young women he could conceivably have sired. Bill recently turned forty. Not only is this a worrisome age for someone I associate with on a friend level to have encountered, but means I am now the old Bill. Yikes.

Another startling insight regarding the aging process is evident when you wistfully think back to some of the things you used to do – not in a when you were a kid sense, but in a also as an adult way. Having nostalgia for activities that occurred after your twenty-third birthday is a surefire way to feel the whoosh of years whizzing on past. Not that I’d trade my current life for any of the riffraff that lassoed my early adulthood, but at times it’s tricky not to reminisce about my pre-matrimony misadventures and not feel just a muted twinge of longing: leaving work to meet up with friends – the bar scene set firmly in our crosshairs – ducking into warm pubs on frosty winter nights or lounging on outdoor patios during summer months – debating, discussing, and snickering while a series of cocktails disappeared one by one. At the time this was all routine, completely unremarkable, just that week’s edition of nursing a few brews and taking in the city. Now those times are glazed with a fine coat of melancholy – for the most part vanquished to the recesses of memory. I can't exactly determine whether those nights seem nostalgia-worthy because the lens of time has framed them with some sort of perspective, or simply because I can't partake like I used to.

And what about those partying years, countless nights spent diligently vandalizing my brain until all hours of the night? When is that debt coming up? Oh, it was all fun and blackouts back then, but like the work of a patient creditor skulking in the shadows, there was a balance being accrued; I feel like I should be getting a collections notice from my intellect any day now demanding payment on a past due brain cell charge.

The flipside to that coin being that if you don't move on at some point, you're liable to find yourself destined to live the fairly unrewarding life of a devoted barfly, eventually coming to wonder why you're the only sixty-year-old still bar-hopping. Who wants that? Beside Bill, I mean.

It all sounds depressing, but I don’t see it like that. Memories are fun; helpful even. Enriching, you could argue. What concerns me most isn’t the past, but the future. If the previous decade could evaporate so quickly, there’s no reason to assume that things will slow down in the next. If the pattern I’ve observed so far is any indication, they may in fact speed up, and the very next thing I know I’ll be 80. Then I’ll really be in trouble.

So as Emma splish-splashed and took a bath, all upon that Saturday night, I resolved to be more industrious with my time; use it more productively. If the prime of my life was going to be vacuumed up at warp speed, I at least wanted to have done a few things I could later marvel at, once I’m a cantankerous old coot sipping scotch in the kitchen. I wanted a few more memories I could dredge up and pine for. Moreover, I wanted to be able to identify what those future yearnings would be as they happened, so I could relish them in real-time.

The trouble is, if you were to collect all the new leaves I’ve endeavored to turn over at one time or another in my past, your yield would guarantee a lifetime of raking. I’m forever making and aborting my resolutions, each one invariably lost in an ocean of diaper changes and fantasy football. The only event that managed to evacuate my most deeply entrenched vices was the birth of my daughter. Apparently nothing short of human life itself is enough to significantly motivate me, and I can’t very well go around fathering a child every time I decide to establish a good habit.

What I needed was a clear-cut solution, a focal point. In the not-too-distant past I was talking to an older gent at work, the kind of seasoned gomer you’d expect could proffer some insight on things like elapsed time, and how to use your years judiciously.

“The older I get, the faster time seems to go by,” I told him, hoping to extract a pearl or two of sage advice.

He scratched his head and examined a liver stain on the back of his hand. “Yeah.”

So far his advice really sucked, but I decided to press onward. Prod him a little. I said, “I used to know a coworker who said he regretted not using his years more wisely.”

“That’s terrible,” the gent said, slightly accusatory, as if I myself had had something to do with it. “You don’t want to have regrets.”

“Right.”

“You should learn from your mistakes.”

“Interesting… Mistakes, huh?”

“Sins.”

“Sins…?”

“Son, what’s the role of Jesus Christ in your life?” he asked unexpectedly, signifying the conclusion of our treasured one-on-one.

It wasn’t until much later, watching Emma narrate a gibberish conversation between a rubber duck and a rubber seal in the bath, when it struck me: if I wanted to do something special that I could later look back and marvel at, something worthy of a faraway gaze, one thing I could do was to savor this moment. And not only this one: din din, bath time, and those stakeouts beneath the comforter, too. Painting and jaunts to the park. Playing. These little routine moments with Emma will be the future of my nostalgia, won’t they? Someday I’ll long for my thirties, when Emma was a mischievous little munchkin and the world was a simpler place. So here’s to enjoying the present, and hey; all in all it’s been a pretty entertaining thirty years – I’m looking forward what awaits in the next thirty.

Fortunately for me, absurdity is timeless.