The woman sitting across from Frank in the HR office: White Chanel suit with black piping, a string of pearls at her neck with matching ear studs. Her stockings make a shhshhing sound every time she crosses and uncrosses her legs. She lifts the pen on her desk, though she is not about to write. She occasionally taps it on the desk for emphasis as she speaks, or wields it in Frank’s direction in rhythm to her admonitions.
“Your clothes…”
“What about my clothes?”
“You come to work like a vagrant.”
“Um…what do you mean?”
Pointing to his feet—“Mismatched socks— the same shirt two days in a row. Wrinkled”
Frank looks down at his feet. Orphans. Those singles whose mates are sucked into the black hole of the dryer.
“Really? Is it really that noticeable? Who looks at my—”
“Stripes with solids?”
Frank had specifically chosen two solids that morning— one black and one brown—to be less conspicuous about his lax laundry practices. It wasn’t like he didn’t notice. He assumed no one else did. No one paid that much attention to him.
“And your ties—what do you have? Two? Three, maybe? Ketchup stains. Mustard. I can tell what you’ve had for lunch by looking at your tie. And besides that, you’ve come in late, on average, two days a week.”
“I’ll try to—“
“This isn’t the first time we’ve had this conversation. Last time you said the same—”
“Yes, well, I thought I’d done better. I thought you—”
“This isn’t some low level public sector organization, Frank. We have standards here. We have a very specific clientele coming in and out of this office. Bottom line, profit margin, we’re not in the business of feeding the homeless or educating the disenfranchised. We have an image to project.”
Frank felt a surge of heat rising up his neck. The way she spoke his name. This mental Neanderthal.
“So, let me get this straight. This company is in quarantine from reality.”

Is this confusion? Exasperation? Fear?—on the face of The Woman Behind The Desk? He hears the shhhshhhing sound again, uncrossing her legs, then re-crossing them, maybe in defense of her female vulnerability.
“Frank—”
“You know—Vicky—I think you have some serious educational gaps in your CV.”
He calls her by her name, emphasizing the advancing recalibration of their relative status.
Her hand trembles holding the pen. She will not cry. She’s endured much worse humiliation in order to sit at this desk. She puts the pen down and leans forward in an attempt to regain her position.
“You don’t seem to get it, Frank. I doubt you care. We’re a team here. Mutual respect. You don’t get it.”
“You’re right! I don’t give a flying fuck!”
The die is cast as he rises from his chair with such force it flies back onto the industrial gray carpet. “You and your brain dead—‘teammates?’”
Hands above his head making air quotes, then— “Termites!—hah!—You’re basically an overpaid personnel secretary feeding off the corporation. You seem to have reached the pinnacle of your pathetic crawl to the top of an organization that doesn’t give two shits about you or your pathetic life. You can all shove your Celebrity Apprentice aspirations up your tight asses! I have better things to occupy myself with than this soul sucking, fluorescent lit wax museum.”
“You need to be out of this office with all your belongings in fifteen minutes.”
His “Frank” coffee mug that his mother gave him is on a shelf in the staff kitchen.
Fuck it.

Running it over and over in your head. At what point did you let yourself be stupid? Ten days ago, before everything got so
fucked. You fucked up.
You order a beer at the bar, a French Bistro on Avenue A where you’ve spent a good deal of your paycheck when you had one but now you don’t, get used to it.
You’ve been playing schmuck-with-a-job, which never requires attention to anything worth remembering except showing up on time, which some might think is an ideal job, but not you. You take an anthropological approach, participant observer, your very presence a bitter clove of weirdness in the sauce. Just so much of that you can abide. So you drop the fucking mask—get too comfortable with your stupid self, climb into your evil twin’s proverbial leather jacket and motorcycle boots. (Like you can carry that off.)

Out of work, paying nine dollars for a Rolling Rock—playing financial chicken with the landlord. An unemployment check, if you hadn’t fucked that up too, would at least have covered most of next month’s rent. On your third nine-dollar beer and you could’ve had ten Egg McMuffins. You could’ve done Happy Hour at the Dead Duck, three-dollar beers, but those giant TV screens make you nervous.
Cutting corners, ok, but not this…this state of…whatever, despite—well not despite—but—what’s left of your dignity. You’re not some trust fund slacker in an ARTFAG t-shirt and black jeans with chains, some schmuck with a low level job that doesn’t require attention to anything worth remembering except showing up on time, which some might think is an ideal job, but not you. Which is the job you had but don’t anymore. Your math skills were your starship in High School, but in real life they are the curse that landed your lazy-ass in a place of soul sucking mediocrity. You and the Dell desktop, delivering numbers to guys in expensive suits, and Friday night cologne, whose idea of economics is discovering the fastest way to increase profits without getting caught. You’re the stuff they strain out of the soup, having transferred your value and given up your flavor, cooked to death, then tossed to the dogs.

When you told your parents you were moving to East 13th, between A and 1st, your father recited the Odyssey of Eddy Meyerowitz. He always wanted to impress you with how he was “Ready Eddy.” Your mother, Trudy taught high school art, while Ed did law school. Job, baby, made partner, money, money, money: sowed whatever, reaped whatever, maybe fucked around a couple of times, whatever, vacations, restaurants, gardeners, life insurance, cars, cigars, titty bars. He cut you off when you told him to go fuck himself at your mother’s funeral.
Fuck their bullshit: You’re supposed to do the do, five years later sitting pretty on the 30th floor in a glassed-in apartment, three-hundred-sixty degree view of all you command, center of all five boroughs—master of the freakin’ universe. You’re a loser if, by twenty-six, you’re not living in a loft the size of an airplane hanger—with a state of the art kitchen that rarely gets used except to wash the dish you eat your takeout sushi on, your refrigerator stocked with champagne and imported beer and some French cider for the girls.
You mostly ate lunch out of a box at that Wall Street office—zapped in a microwave and eaten at your desk. Occasionally, you’d leave that arctic hell, emerge into the ninety-degree heat and suffocating humidity, then plunge into the relief of a brightly lit chain restaurant with the doorknob from the next cubicle so as not to be misconstrued as a social reject eating lunch alone with nothing to look at except a cell phone. You’d stand on line next to him hoping no one you knew showed up at this particular midtown McDonald’s that you otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead in. You’d carry your trays with the usual limp, lukewarm lunch, park yourselves on molded orange seats bolted to the floor, eat soggy burgers and fries, gossip like girls about the lack of respect, the last time you got drunk, the Nets, the shitasses at work, what they must have done to claw their way to the corner office until, ding! your forty-five minutes were up.
The main function of a job is to keep the landlord and the GAP afloat.
After work requirements delivered by the cable company—crucial—pipelining the world as it might be, should be, unfortunately is or isn’t, into your seventy-five-inch flat screen opposite the futon couch, cold beer, online porn, in high definition, larger than life. A couple times a week, on your way home, you’d stop in for a drink with the people at the place. The people called it that—“the place.” Like, See you at the place, or I was over at the place. They came after work to delay the climb up five flights to whatever refurbished tenement apartment with whatever roommates, stuffed with whatever possessions and unwashed laundry, costing two weeks salary a month, earned doing—whatever.
Now it’s breakfast at the coffee table at ten, still in your robe at one, spooning Cherry Garcia into your mouth directly from the container, checking off the already seen episodes of The Wire. At around three-thirty you head over, a little early for Happy Hour. You’ve been getting to the place earlier and earlier.
It’s Frank o’clock. The people haven’t arrived yet. A couple in the corner booth, but only you at the bar. The bartender delivers your third beer with a coaster and swabs the spillage. You insert a napkin to hold your place and close your book, “The Poverty of Abstract Thinking In Xenophobia.” The sound system is pumping techno. One of the employees cranked up the volume to liven up the pre-Happy-Hour lull. The bar is dead as a flat liner, empty as your bank account. You finish your beer. A poem forms, maybe a haiku:
You know it’s time to leave when happy hour isn’t happy any more.
Genius?
Stupid.
You order another beer.
You check your Facebook page. Someone posted a picture of a house in a wide depression in the earth. Behind it is an old, single-engine Piper Cub parked in a field. It’s red and white, rusty patches across one side where the paint chipped off. Somebody must still be using it, you think, left at the ready in case someone needs to fly at a moment’s notice. Or, maybe no one gives a shit about it, left like an old dog, to fend for itself, a fading reminder of better days…of a man who parks it there,…a strung-out drug dealer! The map of an alternate life—bad choices, flimsy safety nets, narrow escapes,—one side of a split screen against the dim window of your life: In unwashed pajamas till four, trying to counterfeit a banana split with a half-full container of ready-to-turn fat-free cottage cheese and a Splenda packet.
You click out of Facebook and check your email. Nothing, except a bunch of spammy ads, the GAP inviting you to a 40% Thanksgiving Day sale, a holiday greeting from a headhunter, long given up on, a reminder to clients to update their CV’s if they’ve managed to find temp work in the six months since their last contact. You delete them. They disappear with a sound like crumpling paper that also reminds you of crackling fire.
You take a selfie, pretending you’re looking at something on the screen rather than documenting yourself holding a beer, alone in an empty bar, pumped up music elevating a mediocre moment into something wild. You’re kind of a celebrity since, now, you’re uploading it to Facebook where, hopefully, it will cash in a bunch of likes and comments, faces frozen in profile pictures on pages you follow— Roman War Strategy Geeks, Twentieth Century Quantum Physics Lectures, Warcraft, NY Jets—Likes adding up like dings in a pinball game. You’ve never met most of them. Some in Santa hats holding their cat, asleep with their dog, girls in soft-porny poses all slutted up, inebriated, with people you don’t know or care about. Maybe you could go back to school, even at this late stage, Get a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies, become a History Professor at Columbia.
You check if anyone liked your selfie.

Some guy, Bobby Blow, you went to the same high school, clicks “like” and writes, Where you at, Homie? Let’s get tanked sometime.
You vaguely remember Bobby. He was two grades ahead when you first met him. Robert Posnowski, Poz to the coach. The guys on the team called him Bobby Blow because of his bad temper on the football field. You’d watch him goofing around between classes, the center of attention, maybe brushed against him in the hall. You haven’t seen him in about twenty years. sure. i’m over at the Flea Market on ave A and 7^th i can wait a little longer if u want to meet here. or? someplace else nearby? pm me with your cell no.
You decide on a bar further east, The Monkey’s Tail on East Fifth and D.