Something Happened (5 page)

I know it’s true, because I worked this whole color wheel out one dull, wet afternoon on one of those organizational charts I am always constructing when I grow bored with my work. I am currently occupied (as one of my private projects) with trying to organize a self-sufficient community out of people in the company whose names are the same as occupations, tools, or natural resources, for we have many Millers, Bakers, Taylors, Carpenters, Fields, Farmers, Hammers,
Nichols (puns are permitted in my Utopia, else how could we get by?), and Butchers listed in the internal telephone directory; possibly we’d be a much better organization if all of us were doing the kind of work our names suggest, although I’m not sure where I’d fit in snugly there, either, because my name means nothing that I know of and I don’t know where it came from.

Digging out valuable information of no importance distracts and amuses me. There are eleven Greens in the company (counting Greenes), eight Whites, four Browns, and four Blacks. There is one Slocum … me. For a while, there were two Slocums; there was a Mary Slocum in our Chicago office, a short, sexy piece just out of secretarial school with a wiggling ass and a nice big bust, but she quit to get married and was soon pregnant and disappeared. Here and there in the company colored men, Negroes, in immaculate white or blue shirts and very firmly knotted ties are starting to appear; none are important yet, and nobody knows positively why they have come here or what they really want. All of us (almost all of us) are ostentatiously polite to them and pretend to see no difference. In private, the salesmen make jokes about them.

(“Know what they said about the first Negro astronaut?”

“What?”

“The jig is up.”)

I am bored with my work very often now. Everything routine that comes in I pass along to somebody else. This makes my boredom worse. It’s a real problem to decide whether it’s more boring to do something boring than to pass along everything boring that comes in to somebody else and then have nothing to do at all.

Actually, I enjoy my work when the assignments are large and urgent and somewhat frightening and will come to the attention of many people. I get scared, and am unable to sleep at night, but I usually perform at my best under this stimulating kind of pressure and enjoy my job the most. I handle all of these important
projects myself, and I rejoice with tremendous pride and vanity in the compliments I receive when I do them well (as I always do). But between such peaks of challenge and elation there is monotony and despair. (And I find, too, that once I’ve succeeded in impressing somebody, I’m not much excited about impressing that same person again; there is a large, emotional letdown after I survive each crisis, a kind of empty, tragic disappointment, and last year’s threat, opportunity, and inspiration are often this year’s inescapable tedium. I frequently feel I’m being taken advantage of merely because I’m asked to do the work I’m paid to do.)

On days when I’m especially melancholy, I begin constructing tables of organization from standpoints of plain malevolence, dividing, subdividing, and classifying people in the company on the basis of envy, hope, fear, ambition, frustration, rivalry, hatred, or disappointment. I call these charts my Happiness Charts. These exercises in malice never fail to boost my spirits—but only for a while. I rank pretty high when the company is analyzed this way, because I’m not envious or disappointed, and I have no expectations. At the very top, of course, are those people, mostly young and without dependents, to whom the company is not yet an institution of any sacred merit (or even an institution especially worth preserving) but still only a place to work, and who regard their present association with it as something temporary. To them, it’s all just a job, from president to porter, and pretty much the same job at that. I put these people at the top because if you asked any one of them if he would choose to spend the rest of his life working for the company, he would give you a resounding
No!,
regardless of what inducements were offered. I was that high once. If you asked me that same question today, I would also give you a resounding
No!
and add:

“I think I’d rather die now.”

But I am making no plans to leave.

I have the feeling now that there is no place left for me to go.

Near the very bottom of my Happiness Charts I put those people who are striving so hard to get to the top. I am better off (or think I am) than they because, first, I have no enemies or rivals (that I know of) and am almost convinced I can hold my job here for as long as I want to and, second, because there is no other job in the company I want that I can realistically hope to get. I wouldn’t want Green’s job; I couldn’t handle it if I had it and would be afraid to take it if it were offered. There is too much to do. I’m glad it won’t be (I’m sure it won’t be).

I am one of those many people, therefore, most of whom are much older than I, who are without ambition already and have no hope, although I do want to continue receiving my raise in salary each year, and a good cash bonus at Christmastime, and I do want very much to be allowed to take my place on the rostrum at the next company convention in Puerto Rico (if it will be Puerto Rico again this year), along with the rest of the managers in Green’s department and make my three-minute report to the company of the work we have done in my department and the projects we are planning for the year ahead.

It was downright humiliating to be the only one of Green’s managers left out. The omission was conspicuous, the rebuff intentionally public, and for the following four days, while others had a great, robust time golfing and boozing it up, I was the object of expressions of pity and solemn, perfunctory commiseration from many people I hate and wanted to hit or scream at. It was jealousy and pure, petty spite that made Green decide abruptly to push me off the schedule after we were already in Puerto Rico and the convention had gotten off to such a promising start, and after I had worked so long and nervously (I even rehearsed at home just about every night—to the wonder and consternation of my family) on my speech for the three-minute segment of the program allotted to me and had prepared a very good and witty demonstration of eighteen color slides.

“Stop sulking,” Green commanded me curtly, wearing that smile of breezy and complacent innocence
he likes to affect when he knows he is cutting deep. “You’re a rotten speaker anyway, and you’ll probably be much happier working the slide machines and movie projectors and seeing that the slides of the others don’t get all mixed up.”

“I want to do it, Jack,” I told him, trying to keep my voice strong and steady. (What I really wanted to do was burst into tears, and I was afraid I would.) “I’ve never made a speech at a convention before.”

“And you aren’t going to make one now.”

“This is a good talk I’ve got here.”

“It’s dull and self-conscious and of no interest to anyone.”

“I’ve prepared some fine slides.”

“You aren’t going to use them,” he told me.

“You did the same thing to me in Florida last year.”

“And I may do it again to you next year.”

“It isn’t fair.”

“It probably isn’t.”

I waited. He added nothing. He is so much better at this sort of ego-baiting than I am. It was my turn to speak, and he had left me nothing to say.

“Well,” I offered, shrugging and looking away.

“I don’t care if it’s fair or not,” he continued then. “We’re discussing an important company convention, not a college commencement exercise. I’ve got to use what little time they give us on the program as effectively as possible.”

“It’s only three minutes,” I begged.

“I can use those three minutes better than you can.” He laughed suddenly, in the friendliest, most inoffensive fashion, as though nothing of consequence had just happened, letting me know in that arrogantly firm and rude manner of his that the argument was over. “You must understand, Bob,” he bantered (while I thought he might actually throw an arm around my shoulder. He never touches me), “that this ambition of yours to make a little speech is nothing more than a shallow, middle-class vanity. I’m as shallow as you are, and as middle class as the best of them. So I’m going to take your three minutes away
from you and cover you and your department in my own speech.”

You bastard, I thought. “You’re the boss,” I said.

“That’s right,” he retorted coldly. “I am. And you’ve already received more than enough attention here for an employee of mine. I want to make certain that nobody in this company gets the idea you’re working for Andy Kagle and not for me. Or that you’re doing a better job in your position than I’m doing in mine. Do you get what I mean?”

I certainly did, then. Green was reasserting his ownership of me publicly by demonstrating his right to treat me with contempt. And in his own long (rather self-conscious and pedantic) speech to the convention, he “covered” me and my department in a single aside:

“And Bob Slocum and his people will help, when you feel you really need them, provided your requests are not unreasonable.”

And that was all, even though the two projects I had prepared for the coming year were the real high spots of the whole convention. Everyone was enthusiastic about them, even executives from other divisions of the company, who were there as guests and observers: several asked to meet me and expressed the wish for work of similar kind and quality in their own areas of the company. I could have had a grand, triumphant time that week if not for Green (Green’s?) kicking me off the schedule. The salesmen, who would have to use these projects in connection with their own work, congratulated me over and over again and never stopped slapping my back as they drank their whiskey in the evening and their Bloody Marys at breakfast in the morning (although some were already implying that they would want to discuss some modifications with me for their own purposes when the convention was over and we were back in New York). And even Arthur Baron, who is boss of us all in this division, drifted over to me on the terrace of the hotel during one of the twilight cocktail parties to tell me that both my projects were the best of their kind he had ever seen and would probably be very useful.

Arthur Baron, who is tactful and soft-spoken, addressed his comments to Green, who was standing beside me on the terrace because he does not like to be seen standing alone. (I was Green’s roosting place for the moment, while he took his bearings; and I knew he would walk from me to someone more important as soon as he spied an opportunity. At crowded social or business gatherings, Green never leaves one person unless he has someone else to move to.) Green laughed quickly and gave all credit for the work to me; then he promptly diminished its importance by declaring he had not even seen any of it until that same afternoon (which was not true, since his criticism and suggestions all through the previous ten weeks had helped enormously, and nothing had been included without his inspection and approval.) Green went on to observe, with another pleasant laugh, that the excellent response to something prepared by me without his knowledge or assistance all went to prove what a superb administrator he was. (All I was able to get in to Arthur Baron was a mumbled:

“Thanks. I’m glad.”)

“The only legitimate goal of a good administrator,” Green continued affably, smiling directly at Arthur Baron and excluding me from his attention entirely, “is to make himself superfluous as quickly as possible, and then have no work of his own to do until he’s promoted to vice-president or retires. Don’t you agree?”

Arthur Baron chuckled softly in reply and said nothing. He turned from Green to me, squeezed my shoulder, and moved away. Green beamed hopefully after him, then turned somber and began to worry (I guessed) that his hint to Arthur Baron about a vice-presidency had been too broad. He was already regretting it. Green knows he often pushes too hard—even at the exact moment he is pushing too hard—but he simply cannot control himself. (He is out of his own control.)

(I am in it.) I am dependent on Green. It was Green who hired and promoted me and Green who recommends me for the generous raises and good cash bonuses I receive each year.

“You were a third-rate assistant when you came to work for me,” he likes to joke when we are getting along comfortably with each other, “and I turned you into a third-rate manager.”

I am grateful to Green for promoting me, even though he makes fun of me often and hurts my feelings.

Green is a clever tactician with long experience at office politics. He is a talented, articulate, intelligent man of fifty-six and has been with the company more than thirty years. He was a young man when he came here; he will soon be old. He has longed from the beginning to become a vice-president and now knows that he will never succeed.

He continues to yearn, and he continues to strive and scheme, sometimes cunningly, other times desperately, abjectly, ineptly, because he can neither admit nor deny to himself for very long that he has already failed. Green fawns compulsively and labors clumsily to curry favor in every contact he has with someone in top management or someone near top management. He knows he does this and is ashamed and remorseful afterward for having demeaned himself in vain; he is willing to demean himself, but not in vain. Often, he will turn perverse afterward and deliberately offend somebody important in order to restore what dignity and self-respect he feels he has lost as a man. He is a baby.

Green is a clever tactician at office politics whose major mistake has always been to overestimate the value of office politics in getting ahead. He has refused to recognize that promotion to high place in the company has invariably been based on certain abilities and accomplishments. He has never really understood why so many people of less intelligence, taste, knowledge, and imagination have gone so much further than he has and
have
become vice-presidents. He does not see that they work hard continuously and that they believe in the company, that they do well and meticulously whatever they are asked to do, that they do
everything
they are asked to do, and that
they do
only
what they are asked to do—and that this is what the company wants. Green will not grant that these people are all luminously well-qualified for the higher positions into which they are moved.