Personal Days (23 page)

Now I will write my book,
and turned the basement into his book-writing bunker, taping notes to the concrete walls, gradually moving all the relevant texts from the upstairs rooms to the simple plank shelving belowdecks, carefully polishing the Shalimar, that bright brass tank of a typewriter, stocking up on the machine’s peculiar, rose-smelling ribbons, spending what seemed like hours sharpening a quiver of pencils, clearing off his desk in order to concentrate while my mother brought him mugs of tea and one cigarette every two hours, which she’d only let him half-finish; but his day job left him too drained—it wasn’t rocket science, as they say, it was teaching high school French, but he was not the kind of man who could give the lessons by rote, and the additional duties every teacher at this rather fancy school, this school with seemingly baronial ambitions, had to take on—from overseeing a table of students at lunch to monitoring study halls to advising the recalcitrant to coaching sports teams (or in his case,
managing
them, whatever that meant—filling water bottles?)—all had a deleterious effect on his ability to focus on his book, this book about some forgotten friend or half friend or half-hour acquaintance of Baudelaire, this nonentity whose name my father (I remember now) wouldn’t even tell me, as if to protect me from the curse it had placed him under (though I wonder, was she or he perhaps a prostitute?), and I remember in those months after he lost the shoe-selling job, he would say,
I just need to make it to the summer,
meaning he just had to keep working on the book until the long summer break (J—J—A, in Con Ed speak), when he would have the energy to
attack
the project from morning till night, or through the night and into the wee hours, whatever schedule worked best from day to day—but the summer turned out to be the hottest on record, and lethargy set in as the electric fans spun, and by Thanksgiving he had lost all hope; the writing had been going terribly—had barely been going at all; the only thing that he had to show for it was his gaunt face and seething mood, a new potbelly, a consumptive cough; just as bad, or worse, was that the money from teaching alone was being stretched thin—even I could tell that my clothes were looking shabby, and though I knew I shouldn’t complain, I did, first to my mother, then to my father, in a shouting manner that came out of nowhere, completely surprising me and my parents—the shock couldn’t have been greater had I produced a handgun and shot out, one by one, the windows in the house across the street; that Saturday, I went to the basement to say good morning, and to apologize, expecting to see him shuffling his notes and sharpening his pencils, and I noticed there was no paper on the walls, just a neat stack on the desk, about twenty pages trapped under an old brick, a threadbare handkerchief shrouding the typewriter; I didn’t dare read what he’d written, outlandishly imagining it would be a list of my sins and shortcomings; when I emerged upstairs my mother explained that he had gone back to A Sporting Proposition, or rather to the business that had taken over the space—an endlessly aisled, blindingly illuminated drugstore—and had found a job there, a higher-paying one than the shoe-selling gig; at first I had the insane notion that he had secretly been training to be a pharmacist, squeezing in extra classes between teaching and shoe selling and book writing; but alas, he was the janitor, the
janitor,
which meant that he had to work Saturday and Sunday mornings, and on weekdays he’d come home from school and watch the news while he ate dinner and then grade papers for an hour before my mother would drive him to the store at 9, as the last customer was being turned out, and he’d wash the floors and scour the toilets and bag the trash until nearly midnight, when she’d pick him up and bring him home; on that first day he brought me a present from the 99-cent store that inhabited the same plaza with the drugstore: a mug with my name on it—except it wasn’t my name because, he explained, they were all out of
Jonah,
and he knew I didn’t like it when people misspoke or miswrote my name as
John,
so he picked
Joan,
which made me laugh, and I forgot momentarily about his new job, and his new, nauseating smell, a marinade of mop water and sweat, and instead I poured some orange juice into my hilarious new cup and silently vowed, smiling all the while, that I would never follow this path, his path—I would resist all temptation to
help people
or
promote understanding,
I would never teach anyone anything, reject entirely the little sad life my father had carved out for himself, one in which my mother and I were embedded: We would not think of criticizing him, and at the same time we had to bear his agonies, his genteel desperation, and that was something which just had to
stop—
yet still, still, I remember not to yawn, and I never, ever say
I’m sorry,
and it so happens that these ironclad points of conduct
have
served me well (though perhaps I give them too much credit, out of a sentimental need)—this is all a roundabout way of saying that when circumstances dictate, I can be a machine, even a monster—and here we get to the main event, Pru: The day I discovered you’d been fired—that Grime had
deleted
you—I resolved to look deeper, punch lower, rethink everything that had happened in the office over the past year; on my personal days, I wouldn’t stay home but would come in early and sit at my desk, my door shut and my lights off, nursing a flowerpot-size coffee and penciling intricate diagrams, sometimes so hard that the point would break, spending most of the rest of the winter this way; on one of these I’m-here-but-I’m-not-here days, immersed in pointless activity and wasted motion, I shouted to/at myself,
SHAPE UP, JONAH!
and after a deep hum a document opened up on the screen of my computer, and
CHEZ PAJAMA!
materialized in 18-point Times New Roman; it took me a full dumb minute to realize that my craptop was still equipped with an old version of that voice-recognition software, Glottis, which Bernhard (the IT guy right before Big Sal, for about twenty seconds) had installed for me, at the peak of my carpal tunnel distress, back in the daze (sorry,
days
) when my wrists would tighten angrily even before I opened the door to my office, and though I’d never had the patience to “train” it—my words always emerged garbled (
Jonah
was regularly rendered as
Joan, ahh
and
Joaner
and occasionally
sho nuff
)—I never bothered to have the program removed; in my post-Pru haste that morning I must have accidentally tapped one of the mystical “function” buttons at the top of the keyboard, just north of Delete, and activated Glottis, which interpreted my cri de coeur,
SHAPE UP, JONAH!
as the cuddlier
CHEZ PAJAMA!—
this, of course, led to hours of experimentation, a welcome (if too early) respite from my plotting; my vertigo would wax as my statements triggered reams of Dada-ready sentences, leading to all sorts of glum
pensées
about the inadequacy of words, the impossibility of communication, and the like, but I prattled on, talking up a storm, and when I made a remark about someone (well,
you
) having a penchant for
cute clothes,
it must have registered as EXECUTE CLOSE, because a dialogue box popped up and asked, rather smarmily,
Do you want to save the document
“
Chez Pajama
”
?
the document’s default title derived from its first two words—thinking back on it, had I clicked
No,
my life would be different now: After choosing to preserve my file of nonsense, I saw it transform into a little icon inside a vast folder on the server entitled GLOTTIS, to which my laptop was somehow connected and which now lay open on my screen; I proceeded to study its contents, not really sure what I was trying to find—maybe just my earlier, long-forgotten attempts at spoken-word composition, stabs at correspondence that had rapidly derailed—and as I scanned the names of the various files, a strange feeling came over me: Surely I hadn’t written, or dictated,
this
many documents, during my brief Glottis phase; about a third of the names resembled the masking gibberish with which spam salesmen infiltrate your in-box (
django heartbreak liter
and
steakhouse wurlitzer divot
), and the rest were simply dates—dates which didn’t correspond to my previous Glottis usage, nor to Jules’s earlier stint (that is, they were all fairly recent, created within the past three or four months)—and then it hit me: These documents were the work of
Grime,
the only person in the office currently using the voiceware—Big Sal in IT had never bothered to set up a private folder for him, not thinking that anyone else used Glottis; and while I had no moral compunction about reading Grime’s private documents, I worried that Grime might try to access one of his files and learn that it was in use by someone else in the office, so instead I opened up a doc entitled
PERSONAL DAZE
—what I imagined was a draft of Jules’s screenplay, the one he wrote by dictation; but as I double-clicked, it struck me as unlike him to leave any Julesian traces behind (after every lunch he’d make sure all crumbs were neatly swept into a napkin, all spills were sopped up—once I even saw him picking crumbs off the
floor
), and when the document opened it was immediately clear that this was something entirely different, something that didn’t originate from Jules’s hand (or mouth), a massive block of insanity-inducing text that began (I have the first sentence by heart—I wish I could just copy and paste the whole thing for you):
Personal Daze here, in the vinyl face of a Parisian chastened, with everything going accordion too bland—
now what you have to do is read
final phase
for “vinyl face,”
Operation JASON
for “a Parisian chastened,”
according to plan
for “accordion too bland”: this gives you a sense of what I had to go through, decoding pages’ worth of misrecognized words; it was obvious, right from that first sentence, that I wasn’t looking at Jules’s screenplay at all, but a sort of diary in code, a war journal, kept by Grime, our resident Crow; the title of the file came from the first two words,
his real name,
which Glottis misheard as “Personal Daze”—and it was this discovery that shook me: Jules had said, months ago at his restaurant, that he came by his screenplay title,
Personal Daze,
because it was the mangled moniker of someone he knew, which meant—didn’t it?—that he knew Grime, that he had somehow met him before, knew him by another name—as you know, Jules is very difficult to talk to these days, running his various eateries, uttering only the bare minimum of words, but that night I tracked him down at one of his establishments—Demagogue, the politically themed bar, up on Sixty-ninth—and sat him down in the back room, blocking the door with a chair, refusing to let him out until he told me Grime’s real name (how had it transformed into “Personal Daze”?), thrusting a printout of Grime’s Glottis document; Jules didn’t look like he was going to spill the beans, and I worried that we’d be there for hours, staring ferally at each other, and that I’d have to start slapping him with the manila folder that was resting on the table; finally I said, “Jules, come on—this is for Pru,” and after he asked what you were doing (“Maternity wear? You mean she’s a seamstress?”), he began to unfold the story: During his last months at the office, after having been hit with a huge pay cut, Jules looked on that Jobmilla website (remember that weird commercial?) for some extra cash to make ends meet—it was the most depressing thing, he said, because he realized he had no skills beyond typing thirty not-very-reliable words per minute; still, he needed money, and found a gig moonlighting as a restroom attendant at a nightclub, in which role he proved so popular that the owner transferred him, with a big bump in salary, to Vlad’s, an adult-themed space on Eleventh Avenue, where Jules did triple duty as a valet, tout, and (his newfound talent, he supposed) restroom attendant; also a few times a night he peered into the private rooms, where strategic gyrations and heavy petting were part of the menu but more intense contact, in danger of breaking state and local laws, needed to be dispelled by a rap on the jamb, a warning tattoo that had to be instantly recognizable as such—Jules’s rapidly expanding new skill set included a sharp roll of the knuckles that would make the sensation-drunk client pay heed without wrenching him too far from his fantasy world: This was of course not the most pleasant aspect of the job, and in some cases the violator would ignore him, requiring further, louder warning raps and, if noncompliance continued, the quick summoning of one of the beefy security guards, who got pissy if you took them away from their sudoku; every so often chaos, even minor melees, would ensue, but Jules was never in any danger, and after a few weeks began to warm to other aspects of his job: the women were sweet, for the most part; the patrons tipped generously when he handed out towels and mouthwash; as a valet, he got to know some of them well when they came out for their frequent smoking breaks, shooting the breeze as the northbound traffic whizzed past, men of all ages, some of them fresh out of business school, others leathery vets, white-haired wiseguys—and before too long a few of these regulars, over cigarettes, encouraged him to start his own business, and would eventually invest in his first venture, that toaster-oven restaurant (Balustrade? Cellophane? Tenement?)—this was all very interesting, but I needed him to focus: With a big sigh he said,
So this is for Pru,
and went back to telling me about those private pleasure chambers, and what went on there—most of it you can imagine, but every so often
—Well, there was this guy,
middle-aged, who drove a well-maintained but very
close-
smelling SUV, which you got a lungful of when you had to park it, and Jules’s boss (a melancholy barrel-chested man called Duke, who called everyone Ace or Commander), told him,
Keep an eye on this one, Ace—usually he’s fine but sometimes he’s not—