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.

The Hand of Jesus

Jesus is a maintenance man at my work. Not the messiah, although that Jesus was a carpenter, and would undoubtedly prove skilled at managing the position, but regarding the common Spanish name Jesus (pronounced hey-soose). Jesus is a good guy, an amiable muchacho, but it would not be a stretch to say that he’s not all there. And I don’t mean in a having lost his mind sense (a distinction belonging to a former maintenance man who, in lieu of his assignments, smoked crack cocaine and drank liters of cheap vodka in his shop), but literally, in a having lost some body parts way – most notably, quite a few fingers.

When Jesus shakes my hand, several wiggling stumps burrow into my palm, never failing to give me the heebie-jeebies. My hand swallows the entirety of his, making it feel less like we’re shaking hands and more like I’m grabbing the paw of a golden retriever.

I often wonder what happened to those digits. He’s a maintenance man, so the tendency is to assume some mishap involving an electric saw. Oddly, the fingers have been edited at uneven lengths, suggesting that each one was lost in a separate accident. It’s this theory that causes me to chuckle.

Now, there’s nothing overtly comical about a man who’s lacking fingers, but you have to wonder about someone who keeps losing them. One by one, his fingers disappear. You can understand losing one finger, but after that you would think he’d be a little more careful.

I imagine Jesus, standing over a crimson-dappled table saw, exclaiming, “Oh, for the love of Pedro… I have lopped off another one!”

And then some time passes, and before you know it Jesus is pruning, not paying close attention, and promptly laments, “Dios mio! My third finger in as many weeks! Only two left on this hand…”

By the time he lost his forth finger, the whole ordeal must have seemed old hat for him. I picture Jesus, more exasperated than anything, grumbling, “Oh, great. Just great… another one. Get out of the damn way, fingers! Damn it!” while slamming his hand – or what was left of it – onto the blood-splattered tool bench.

Jesus walks with a bit of a limp, so it is not inconceivable to assume he’s rid himself of a few toes, as well. I guess once you’ve gone through all your fingers, your toes would be the next logical place to start. A protruding nail here, a black widow spider there… an overaggressive sewer rat. You would have had a hard time playing ‘This little piggy’ with Jesus. …this little piggy had none, and this little piggy went wee, wee, wee, all the way into the meat grinder.

Or maybe I have it all wrong. Maybe Jesus got in too deep with a cartel, amassed a debt he couldn’t pay off. He doesn’t seem like the type, but do you ever really know? This hypothesis would explain why none of his missing phalanges were able to be reattached, being that they became sobering, gruesome warnings mailed to other defaulted debtors. Or maybe he had gangrene, or frostbite, or reached out in the misguided attempt to pet a snapping turtle. There is Jesus, howling in pain with a giant turtle locked onto his hand while his family stands around shaking their heads and exchanging bemused, knowing glances. That Jesus! He’s at it again! He is one pathetic hombre, isn’t he… Maybe the answer is all of the above.

Carolina suggested that he might have been born this way, which, though plausible, is not a presumption that I particularly care for. While sparing Jesus considerable pain and embarrassment, hers is a possibility that rules out intrigue. I want to envision the time Jesus went eeling and got a little too adventurous or the party at which he had one too many Coronas and wagered somebody that a blender couldn’t cut through bone – what a terrible bet that would be to lose. There’s no cachet in someone simply entering the world without fingers; it’s much more exciting for that person to have had – and subsequently lost – them in a tragic accident(s).

Whatever the explanation, imagine the consequences of losing your fingers when you’re a handyman. While no one will ever confuse me with somebody at one with manual labor, my thinking is that you needed – for starters – a functional hand for this type of work. Is says so right there in the word: how handy can you be when your mitt consists of a palm with several nubs?

I was reminded of my old barber, a pleasant, soft-spoken Pakistani man named Bob. One winter years ago, Bob abruptly disappeared from the barbershop. Questions naturally arose, and the other barbers were forced to relate the grisly tale that accounted for his absence. Apparently, after a heavy snowfall one day, his snow blower had become jammed, and, well, Bob went about his problem the wrong way. While he eventually returned to duty, his haircuts were never quite the same.

But, despite their limitations, both Bob and Jesus persevered tirelessly in their lines of work without complaint. You had to hand to them.

Rubbing me the wrong way.

For many years I dreamed about a professional massage. Oh, I’ve had a few amateur sessions – lackluster performances, really – reluctantly carried out by girlfriends whom I would badger until they eventually gave in. They’d go through the motions but you could usually tell their hearts weren’t really in it.

When I got married, I figured that a job of one’s wife was to put her hands to good use. Unfortunately, I would learn that this “use” more often than not tended to involve cooking, cleaning, and gesticulating theatrically about the size of the mess I’d left in the kitchen; noble endeavors, you could argue, but not as far as my taut trapezius was concerned. A professional masseuse was what I needed, a person not only skilled in the art of bodily delights but who wouldn’t start complaining after a mere five minutes.

For her birthday, Carolina received a gift certificate to Bella Sante, a spa on Newbury Street, and I immediately invited myself along. Swanky spas on Newbury are neither cheap nor in my comfort zone, but this was my one chance to be rubbed down by an expert and I wasn’t about to miss it. I began my preparation for the big day by diligently harassing Carolina until she agreed to request a woman for my massage. Not necessarily because this is the one circumstance in life in which it’s socially permissible for some lady to douse her hands in oil and then work them all over somebody else’s husband, but because I strenuously object to having beefy man mitts do so. Call me homophobic, but, well, there it is.

The fun started when we stepped in. I was feeling a little on edge, this being my first expedition to a predictably steeped-in-estrogen spa, engendering a feeling not unlike the proverbial bull in a china shop. I was hoping to cling to Carolina for support throughout the ordeal, she being the alpha female you need when navigating unfamiliar terrain. While I like to think of myself as the pants-wearer in our family, it’s totally Carolina. She’s the one who makes all my merchandise returns, wrangles with the Verizon people, deals with our landlord, and, should I mention that the coffee is getting low, has a pound of Starbucks waiting by sundown. Basically, she does most of the crummy jobs I prefer get accomplished without my involvement.

Unfortunately, my plan was shot when we were immediately separated, my wife shown to the women’s locker room while I was escorted by an extremely effeminate male to the men’s room. It was not unlike the first day of kindergarten and I was being pried away from my mom.

“There’s a robe, shorts, and slippers in your locker,” he sort of murmured, then commanded, “Take everything off and then meet me back out in the lobby.”

“Okay… but wait… so I take everything off now?”

“Yeah!”

“And then… meet you in the lobby… out there?”

“Yeah!”

I’m not saying the gentleman was turned on by the idea of me in the nude or anything, but he definitely seemed gung-ho about this whole disrobing business. And yet, I all but begged him not to leave me. Managing myself in a spa is not a condition I am in any way practiced in.

Of course, of course there were no shorts to be found in my locker, or in any of the others that I desperately ransacked, leaving me without a fairly important component of my ensemble. Oh, man... So what did spa etiquette dictate in this little quandary? Was I supposed to sift through the dirty laundry bin and retrieve a soiled pair? Forget about them altogether? Scream for help?

Think, damn it. Think…

Realizing I was taking too long to emerge from the locker room, I simply left my cargo shorts on, donned the robe, and nervously made my way out into the lobby. The attendants at the front desk all had a good laugh and I was sent back into the locker room to remove my cargos.

“But there were no other shorts in there,” I protested.

“Then wear your own,” the womanly guy said.

But I was wearing my own. “But not these ones?” I asked, noticing my voice had become high and flighty.

They all chuckled again, and I felt my face grow hot. I was reminded of Arnold Swarzenegger in Kindergarten Cop when the kids are enamored with the ferret and he says, all stressed out, “We are having fun now.” What exactly was so funny? I had the distinct impression I was missing something intended to be obvious, but what? Did they think I’d brought another pair of shorts just for the occasion?

“You can wear your boxers in you want,” womanly guy told me with a good-natured twinkle in his eye.

If I wanted? What were my alternatives? What I wanted was to tell him that I don’t wear boxers, but that would undoubtedly send the front desk into bellows of laughter and force me to make a beeline for the exit. I wasn’t trying to cause trouble, I just wanted to know what to do. Now they had me pegged as an imbecile.

“It’s nice in here,” I blurted out, as if that would somehow fix things.

Removing the cargo shorts, I wrapped the robe – a silky, kimono-type thing – around me with a triple-knot and timidly proceeded back into the lobby where fully dressed people were milling about. It’s funny the things you think about while parading around among clothed strangers while wearing a small silky robe and not much else. The probability of surviving a leap from the nearest window comes to mind.

Thankfully I was able to rejoin Carolina in the lounge, where a group made up entirely of women quietly sipped organic beverages and listened to New Age music while stealing curious peeks at the big man in the small robe. I kept trying to make conversation with Carolina but apparently banter is frowned upon, as my efforts were repeatedly brushed off.

“But I’m bored and scared,” I whined. “I want to talk.”

She laughed and went back to her magazine; I quietly sulked, feeling beads of sweat trickle down from my armpits and a cool breeze whisk up my kimono. I wondered, not for the first time, if I’d made a terrible, terrible mistake.

After a while our masseur and masseuse emerged – a big bald man and an attractive blonde, respectively. For a brief moment I was terrified that there’d been an oversight, some clerical error, and the strapping bald man would say, “Okay, Marc!” and I, being too non-confrontational to do anything about it, would grudgingly acquiesce to his meaty demands.

So I was immensely relieved when the woman called my name and led me to a small, dimly lit room and instructed me to take off my robe and then climb under the sheet on the massage table while the masseuse, named Maria, waited outside. The dimensions of the small room, long table, and big me coupled with the poor lighting were all but logistically unfeasible, and at one point I lost my balance, bumped into the table and crashed into the door. Idiot. I can’t imagine what Maria must have thought when that thunderous commotion occurred.

Lying facedown on the table, I was finally beginning to relax and enjoy the massage when I smelled something funky. At first I thought it was the massage oil but soon realized it was Maria’s feet.

The objectionable odor, which wafted up through the hole in the headrest, entered directly into my nostrils. In Maria’s defense it was at least 95 degrees on Saturday, but still, the last thing you want piped into your stationary face during a massage is someone’s inescapable foot stench.

Can't... breathe...

When I wasn’t suffocated by smelly feet – or having mine tickled by Maria (I really had to gnash on my lip to keep from giggling and jerking my foot away when she did the foot-tickling) – the massage was pretty good. Nothing transcendent, but top-notch, the kind of thing you could get used to very quickly did it not set you back rent money.

Afterward, back in the locker room, I decided to take a quick shower when I came face-to-face with a brawny black guy who had also just finished with his massage – which was conducted, I had noticed, by a masseur.

“Which way are you going?” he asked, blocking the only shower stall.

“Uh…”

“Did you want to go in the shower?”

Together? I thought nervously. Is this type of behavior standard for post-spa treatments? Instead I urged, “You go ahead.”

A while later, back outside and seated on the patio at Charlie’s, I ignored Maria’s advice to drink lots of water so to flush toxins out of my body and instead uploaded even more by way of the ginger mojito, musing to Carolina between sips, “We should do this more often.”

Stitches

I was raised in a household serviced by basic, commercial broadcast television. It was viewed on an obese, rabbit-eared TV set that loafed in our living room like a curmudgeonly squatter, providing the Mesozoic-era quirk of being made to get up and actually approach the device every time you wished to surf the four channels you had access to. This wasn’t as big a problem as you might think, given that three of them tended not to come in.

At some point we upgraded to basic cable, a watershed moment for our fledging family. Still, without a decent package there were few tangible upgrades but for the remote control and the porn station. While we didn’t actually get the porn, it wasn’t entirely blocked, either; you’d get a scrambled picture of distorted, moving body parts and full erotic audio replete with moans, groans, and pleasure-stricken affirmations that far outdistanced anything on Nickelodeon.

When my father cashed in seven sleepless years of medical school and residency for full time work as an emergency room physician, the rest of his family was finally able to cash in on proper television. Our home no longer plied with standard cable but by the crème de la crème package, including upwards of, at last count, infinity movie channels, one was afforded the great edifying delight of sneaking downstairs once one’s parents were safely in bed and discovering the naughty proceedings of cathouses and the raunchy thrills of unscrambled soft-core porn. We were even furnished with primo add-ons, like Sunday TicketÔ, where you could sponge up every NFL game, 17 weeks a season.

Years later, after I had inadvertently started a family of my own, I would discover the cycle to have reset itself; my last two football seasons after becoming a dad, I am sorry to report, were reduced to channels 4 and 25 broadcasted games only – not even ESPN. Our cable threshold had been pretty much capped at network programming. Last time I checked, having NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox wasn’t called cable, it was called free television. Pardon my French, but what kind of horseshit is that? Incidentally, do we hate the French so much that we associate their entire language with coarseness and vulgarity? But I digress.

That my television viewing became cheapened in fatherhood was a fact that needled me even more during the nine A.M. to four P.M. window. The only thing worse than the mindless excrement that passed for daytime television, in my mind, was the hoard of glazed intellects drinking it in, their afternoons saturated with this claptrap.

Did this viewing demographic honestly have nothing better to do than to sit in their shoddy living rooms every day reviewing the events of Herbert v. Arnold, due to the latter having allegedly shot the plaintiff’s dog in the ass after a dispute over some repair work? Did they really believe Arnold’s tapestry of poorly sewn together, obviously fabricated lies? For one thing, his timeline was a farce. Had he truly feared for his life, would he have gone back to the car to retrieve his gun? Doubtful; he’d have left and kept going, wouldn’t he have? Secondly, if we were to believe that his was a BB gun, why would Arnold have been charged with possession of a firearm by the local police? What, he didn’t mention to them that it was only a BB gun? They couldn’t tell the difference? His story was simply implausible.

Sadly, I know the facts of this case because I found myself increasingly glued to the very poppycock I long disparaged. There’s only so much you can do with a teething 10-month-old baby during Boston’s blustery winter months in a small apartment, and I consequently noticed that my Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday early afternoons were preceded and followed by the erudite events of Judge Alex and his brethren.

(As a brief aside: during this time period, if you were to ask Emma, “Where’s the fan?” she would look upward, smiling, and announce, “Ca!”

She did so one day and I thought to myself, You know, about a year and a half ago you were one of my sperm. Now you’re this little girl who smiles at fans and calls them ‘cas’ and squeals with laughter while I tickle you and who theatrically plops your head on top of your arms when I say “Emma no.”

This is outrageous.)

During one lackluster Thursday after the twentieth consecutive read of a book involving a ridiculous turkey who can’t seems to figure out that his pants don’t belong on his face, we flipped on Judge Alex (he was our favorite), Emma playing by my feet while I lounged on the couch, getting fatter. Presently she turned and raised her hands, the universally accepted sign in Baby-speak meaning “Uppy.” So I scooped her up and plopped her beside me, upside-down. After wrangling to right herself, Miss Fits proceeded to snuggle into the crook of my arm, tilting her head back to offer a happy smile, then rested her little noggin on my chest while the courtroom excitement unfolded. After a few minutes she glanced at me again and, apparently deciding that I was lacking something, removed her treasured binky from her mouth and plunged it into mine.

And it occurred to me then that I could live out the rest of my life never finding a better job, never publishing a word – not even as a two-bit hack mystery writer – never moving in to a spacious Brownstone on Beacon Street or summering anywhere, never driving a $40,000 sports car, never traveling the world or getting back to my fighting weight or owning a plasma television or even signing up for a better cable package, and that would all be fine – quite fine – as long as there was this.

If my past has taught me one lesson, it’s that life isn’t about having the most of everything but making the most of everything. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy those commodities, you understand, but the inherent charm in having what you need – including being able to watch trashy TV with your occasionally mischievous daughter who is willing to share with you her binky (meaning: she loves you like crazy) and having a wife who puts up with you – is what counts. The integral stitches of that elusive happy life.

The rest is gravy.

**JOB APPLICATION**

To whom it may concern:

Hello! My name is Marc and I am seeking gainful employment with a struggling, morally questionable corporation more concerned with the almighty dollar than keeping the client, one that boasts a far-reaching, disingenuous mission statement; a company waste-high in lawsuits that can best utilize my distaste for authority and desire to get “paid more for doing less.” You know the type of job that people say monkeys can do? That. That is what I’m looking for.

I am an exquisitely clever man. Cunning. Crafty. No doubt you will be impressed with the variety of ingenious ways with which I will endeavor to cut corners and sweep problems under the rug!

If you are looking for someone who is self-motivated and persistent, I’m your guy! Like when my dealer is out of town and I shakily ask around on the streets for some blow, or how I keep tabs on my exgirlfriends. Watching… waiting…

Moreover, I am a substantially attractive man (physically) and am not averse to trysts with the client, coworkers, or your cleaning woman Juanita, who I hear puts out if you but dangle the term citizenship (now there’s a fine piece of tail, eh? Mamasita!).

I enjoy creating a relaxed, comfortable environment for all my colleagues. Like how I make ribald racist jokes to keep everyone laughing, or compliment women on their breasts and asses. They love this. (Even when I don’t verbalize the flattery, my lecherous, hungry gazes are usually indication enough!) People show their gratitude by coming up with silly, endearing nicknames for me, like Shyster, Dead Beat, and Jackal, just to show me I am one of them. Ha ha! (ps. Please note these are my nicknames, not to be confused with my aliases.)

You are probably wondering if I can multitask. I am happy to respond in the affirmative… And how! Why, practically every night I find myself juggling my raging alcoholism, crippling methamphetamine habit, and devastating self-hatred, yet still find time to download illicit pornography and verbally abuse my baby’s momma. No small feat!

I am a BIG fan of diversity in the workplace, and I look forward to working with a vast array of people within a variety of races, religions, lifestyles and political affiliations.*

I’m very flexible when it comes to my schedule. Sometimes I might arrive for work on time, while others I might stagger in hours late, barely coherent, wearing the same rumpled clothes that I had on the last time you saw me and emitting a strange odor that will seem to be a cross between cheap perfume, alcohol, and some other, vaguely chemical scent. This will usually be after one of my famed 48-72 hour benders, which fortunately I keep restricted to only the first and third weekends of the month. **

Don’t be alarmed by my absence of relevant job experience (or curious lack of a work history altogether). I can assure you that I have had/pulled many jobs, it’s just that on the advice of counsel it is evidently in my best interest to omit them from this missive. Oh, and please do not contact my references. But if you must, bear in mind that these are outrageously hilarious people who will feign confusion, like they don’t even know me. Kooks!

Obviously, I will expect a salary that is grossly inconsistent with the level of work that I accomplish.

I look forward to hearing from you!

___________________________________________

*Except Jews, blacks, gays, Hispanics, women, Catholics, Poles, Arabs, Asians, republicans, democrats, libertarians, Muslims, Scientologists, lesbians, Baptists, Indians (both real and the tribal ones), senior citizens, agnostics, the disenfranchised, fatties, retards, vegetarians, freaks, Mormons (or is that redundant!), do-gooders, go-getters, depressives, intellectuals, bisexuals, children, extroverts and people who are left-handed.

**And second and fourth.