It's All Relative (15 page)

I didn't.

“Why don't I come with you?” I asked. “Wouldn't that be easier?”

“Don't question me!” he bellowed.

And then he scurried away with a severe-looking woman who, it seems, had bathed in White Diamonds.

A walkie-talkie? I thought. Are we in third grade? Are we going to have Jeno's Pizza Rolls and watch
The Goonies
later?

I took a seat on a bench in the middle of the mall, where I quickly noticed I was next to a man in a wheelchair with an affixed oxygen tank. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that his body was directly under a giant plastic birch tree, the lower limbs of which were, literally, resting on his face.

I heard the walkie-talkie crackle and the president blabbering, but his words were garbled and disconnected, like when I tried to telephone my brother with a tin can when I was six.

“
Gobble-dee-gobblezee-zook, sassamafrass-amatass.
”

This was what I heard on the walkie-talkie. So this was what I wrote.

I heard coughing and turned to see that there was now a leaf in
the wheelchair-bound man's mouth. He was sort of gumming it, unhappily, and trying to spit it out, like I did when a piece of the plastic liner got trapped in the corn portion of my Hungry Man TV dinner.

“Are you okay?” I yelled at him, firmly but neighborly. “Can you talk? Do you need help?”

He didn't respond.

And then the old bastard started coughing and choking, which alarmed me, so I got up to push his wheelchair maybe two feet forward, to remove his face from the tree, and the once comatose man suddenly began to wail, screaming in an insane,
I'm being attacked by a fat man with a walkie-talkie!
sort of way.

Two women, holding denim vests with embroidered Holly Hobbie gardening girls on the back, sprinted to his aid from a nearby store. “What are you doing?” they yelled at me. “Leave him alone!”

“What?” I asked.

“What are you doing? Do we need to call security?”

“What were
you
doing?” I yelled. “He was smothering on a birch branch.”

And, as fate would have it, just at that moment, the president and White Diamonds appeared out of nowhere, me fighting with two Holly Hobbie devotees over an incontinent man, my clipboard miles away.

“I'm so sorry,” I said to them. “You wouldn't believe what happened.”

“Can I see your notepad?” he said to me, while White Diamonds tried to stifle a laugh.

“
Gobble-dee-gobblezee-zook, sassamafrass-amatass,
” was pretty much what he read.

“You have some nerve,” he said to me. “Who do you think you are?”

I tried to save face and began to introduce myself to the woman. “I'm sorry for the confusion. I'm Wade Rouse. I'm the new junior account executive.”

“You're my
secretary
!” my boss laughed. “And you're not a very good one at that!”

The two of them cackled, and the president yelled, “Go back to the office. I'll deal with you later.”

For some reason I did, always believing I could turn a situation around, make it better.

Near the end of the day, the president summoned me to his office.

“I don't know what kind of stunt you were pulling, but you humiliated me,” he said, “Man in the Mirror” playing again in the background.

“I'm sorry, but I don't even know what's going on here,” I said, my voice rising. “I was hired as a junior account executive, but I have no office or phone or computer or any real idea why I'm here. You've yelled and screamed, and treated me very poorly.”

I wanted to sound James Bond, but it came out all Scarlett O'Hara.

The president leered at me from head to toe, his right hand crammed deeply in his pants pocket. And then it began moving quickly, back and forth, back and forth.

He was playing pocket pool.

I knew. I mean, I'd been an expert in the game ever since seventh grade, when I first saw Tommy Wilkins be skins during basketball in gym class.

“You're here to learn from me, be my secretary. I can take you places. It could be a win-win.”

The president said this softly, throatily. Then he smiled and said, “You know, I like young men with a little meat on their bones. I'm a chub chaser. I bet you're familiar with that, aren't you, Wade?”

I wasn't. In fact, it didn't even sound flattering. I wanted to lose all my baggage, not be admired for having it.

I watched my boss's hand move more quickly in his pants. It looked like he was trying to start a fire.

Michael sang in the background: “
I've been a victim of … a selfish kind of love …
”

The president moved toward me.

Finally, after two days on the job, I did what I should have done from the very beginning: I ran, as quickly as any self-respecting chub chasee could, out of his office, down the hallway, through the lobby, down the stairs, out of the building, past the Quik Cash, and to my car.

The last sound I remember hearing—besides my heartbeat—was a sigh.

On the way home, I turned on the radio (this, mind you, was in the day before cell phones, before I could easily spread the word of my nightmare) and heard a local DJ announce, “Don't forget, tomorrow is Secretary's Day. Do something special for that one person who makes your life a little easier every day!”

And so I did.

After two full days of employment, I showed up the next morning around seven
A.M
., long before I knew anyone would arrive, and slipped an envelope under the door.

The envelope, addressed to the president, didn't contain an official resignation letter per se, but instead held a Secretary's Day card I had picked up at an adult novelty shop the evening before, just after I heard the local DJ's announcement.

I realized I would never be paid for my tenure, nor use anyone there as a reference, so I wanted to relay a sentiment that summed up my experience.

While I would never see my boss again, I like to imagine that he smiled when he opened the card, which featured a very obese white woman—her giant breasts flung over a typewriter, half glasses bouncing, taking a memo while she was getting barebacked by a black man in a three-piece suit.

The message inside?

“I may be a whore, my darling, but I'll never be your secretary.”

A
few years back, when Gary and I lived in the city, we went to Homo Depot every Arbor Day to pick out a tree.

For gardening gays, like Gary, Arbor Day is a major holiday, on par with Christmas and Hanukkah.

I am not a gardening gay.

First, I don't like to get my nails dirty. I don't like the feel of earth under my hands and feet. That's why we build houses and sidewalks and have cute shirtless boys mow our yard. Second, I don't understand the importance of picking out and planting a tree, which will most likely just be cut down in three years when Gary decides he wants to blow out a wall and expand the master bath. And, finally, I don't get these Go Green urbanites who spend hours in Homo Depot acting all P. Allen Smith when they only have two square feet of deck space on which to pot some basil and oregano.

And yet every Arbor Day I must go with Gary to nurseries and landscaping centers, kind of like I must force myself to smile when I am presented a baby who looks like W.C. Fields.

Taking me to Homo Depot is the equivalent of having Michael J. Fox perform your Lasik surgery. I become immobilized as soon as I enter a home-improvement center and typically stop cold by the
magazine rack at the entrance to peruse pretty pictures of and nice articles on people who have built water gardens all by themselves, or installed a designer kitchen, feats that simultaneously astound and baffle me, like Kevin Costner's career.

Most times, I gander at those magazines that show, in excruciatingly precise, step-by-step detail, how to wire an outdoor light or install a faucet and wonder if they were drawn and written in Mandarin.

While Gary wanders, I become bored, and I try to count how many gay employees (not counting the lesbians) work at Homo Depot and know absolutely nothing about home improvement. My personal record came at one of our city's newer stores, where I once counted sixteen and a half (the half being a rather straight-looking young man with a wedding band who, when asked by a customer which refrigerator was best, said, “The pretty one,” and pointed at a stainless model).

Often I find myself looking around cluelessly in that gigantic aisle that features nothing but lug nuts, the four-mile-long row that has like four hundred thousand bins of bolts and screws, all of which look exactly the same.

My goal? To see how long it takes an employee to give up or strangle me to death.

“Can I help you with something, sir?” the screw guy will ask me.

“I need a bolt.”

“What kind of bolt, sir?”

“A metal one.”

“May I ask what you will be using the bolt for?”

“To hold something together.”

“What exactly needs to be held together, sir?”

“This bolt-free item.”

When I'm bored with this game, I wander into refrigerators and ovens and tell the appliance salesmen and kitchen designers that I
have “an unlimited budget” and “a love affair with stainless and granite.”

Occasionally I wander into those free seminars Homo Depot offers and stare at the freaks who feel compelled to learn how to spackle or lay tile or, worst of all, sponge paint.

“Don't you want to learn how to do it yourself?” a gay man will ask me excitedly as I stand in the back.

“Not unless it has to do with bronzer,” I will reply.

I have a defective gene that kicks in during certain situations—like when someone raves about their stay at a La Quinta, or buys things with exact change, or wants to, like right now, learn how to stencil and border their scrapbooking room with windmills or watering cans—which makes me want to grab a straightedge and slice everyone's throats.

Gary's favorite trick, when I'm lost in my own world and away from him too long, is to go to the lesbian who works the PA in customer service—every Homo Depot has one—and have her announce, “We have a lost child in the store. His name is Wade. Wade, would you please locate a man in an orange apron and have him bring you to customer service. Your mommy is looking for you.”

Lesbians will always play along.

“What kind of tree should we plant for Arbor Day?” Gary asks after I turn the corner.

We head outside to the gardening area, a football-stadium-size lot containing every flower, tree, fountain, and paving stone known to man.

This is usually my time to stop and tan my face.

Gary drags me to the tree section, where thousands of mini-saplings are flapping in that hair-blasting wind that always seems to whip through Homo Depot garden centers.

“What do you think?”

Every tree looks exactly the same to me.

Twigs in buckets with leaves.

“How about that one?” I say, looking at its tag. “It looks like it will be pretty one day.”

“Oh, my God! That's a Bradford pear. It's the Calista Flockhart of trees. It'll snap in two in the slightest storm.”

“How about this one?” I ask.

“Are you serious? That's a cedar. It's the ugliest tree in the world, and it'll dwarf our house one day.”

By this time I have become shell-shocked and fearful of saying anything, like Julia Roberts in that movie where she runs away from her crazy husband but knows he's found her when all her towels are neatly folded.

I point at another tree.

“Sweetie, that's a sweet gum. Those are the ones that all the straight people in our neighborhood plant that drop those thorny balls that we trip over when we walk the dog.”

I hear laughter, and we turn to find a man who looks like Rupert Everett.

“You have one of
those
, too?” he asks, gesturing toward me with his perfectly formed head.

One of those? What am I, a Weimaraner? And who says that out loud in front of someone? The trick is to belittle people quietly
.

Rupert Everett's partner is a husky, balding man who looks a bit like a cage-fighting walrus. Obviously he's a brain surgeon or criminal attorney who makes tons of money and nabbed his dream man, who now wears the he-capris in the family.

Gary laughs. “Yeah, I have one of those.”

“Hello!” I say. “We're standing right here. Talking in third person doesn't mean we're not here.”

The cage-fighting walrus laughs.

“Are you here for Arbor Day, too?” Rupert Everett asks.

Now, this immediately qualifies as the stupidest conversation I've
ever had in my life. And then I look around and see that Homo Depot is absolutely teeming with fags pushing carts loaded with saplings. Arbor Day is like Gay Pride with mulch instead of drag queens.

“Yeah,” Gary says. “Every year!”

Gary is blinking his big lashes wildly, as if a sparrow just flew into one of his eyes. Gary was born with a double row of lashes, like a supermodel. I was born with albino-colored lashes. If I don't tint them, I look like those cave-dwelling beasts from the movie
Descent
.

Gary blinks again.
Jesus
. I know the signs: He's subconsciously flirting with Rupert.

“I just don't know what tree to plant. It has to be … right, you know?”

“I know!” squeals Rupert. “But
they
don't understand.”

They?

“I'm thinking of a Japanese maple,” Gary says. “I have a little Zen garden in our city backyard, and I think it would add a sense of dramatic tranquility.”

Dramatic tranquility? That doesn't even make sense. That's like saying “peaceful war.
”