1
You know what I miss the most? Funny as it sounds, I really miss staying in all those swanky hotels. Unreal, I know. After all the abuse I suffered in those places. Why would I miss something like that?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about the travel. I told you I’ve always hated the traveling and being away from my family. What I miss is the sense of place those hotels always had, a kind of upper crust other worldliness you just can’t get unless you’re willing to pay three or four hundred dollars a night.
I mean, I know it was all phony -- the fake crystal chandeliers, the bellmen in their starched uniforms, the concierge lounges with their carafes of fresh-squeezed orange juice and copies of The Wall Street Journal on their imitation mahogany tables -- it was all calculated by some corporate hack to ensure a certain kind of experience for their guests. I knew that, and could always tell what kind of place I was staying in by how obvious the calculation appeared to be.
Some places didn’t have a clue. Sure, they put chocolates on your pillow every night, but they were old and had long since gone stale; or they provided you with one of those fluffy bathrobes, but they hung it on one of those cheap hotel hangers attached to the closet rod. They were just going through the motions, and didn’t understand that it’s not really about props like bedtime chocolates or white terry cloth bathrobes. The best hotels knew those things were only the means to a larger end, and they used them to seamlessly construct what was ultimately an imaginary place where the harshness of the outside world wasn’t allowed to peek through any nook or cranny.
Think I’m kidding? The kind of hotels I’m talking about are a lot like big Hollywood productions. The amount of thought, time, and money that goes into creating their illusions is staggering, and when they pull it off successfully, their construction is completely hidden from the eyes of the paying guest.
Have you ever seen one of those “behind-the-scenes” specials about one of your favorite movies? Well, that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about. You watch one of those and you begin to appreciate the artistry that goes into the two-hour illusion you just enjoyed. Maybe there was a twenty-second scene in your movie where the actors are standing amidst the ruins of an abandoned city. And you find out only by watching the “behind-the-scenes” special that those buildings in the immediate background -- the ones they used for the close-ups -- were built to specification by hundred-person crews, then artificially aged, weathered, and deteriorated under the guiding hand of building restoration specialists from the National Historical Society. And you discover that for the wide-angle shots they used an enormous matte painting, twelve feet high and thirty-five feet long, worked on by a team of twenty-five artists for eight months and shot with a special lens to heighten the diminishing perspective as your eye retreats into the distance.
I’m telling you the hotels I used to stay in are like those budget-busting Hollywood epics—or better yet some Broadway extravaganza, since they were really more live theater than anything else. And doing what I did for a living, well, that was like having a backstage pass.
I saw it all. Things you wouldn’t believe unless you saw them with your own eyes. They tried to impress me, you see. They knew what kind of business my client represented, and they were only too proud to show me all the details that went into their production. They wanted me to see the magic so I could be their ally in filling their hotel with a bunch of people who had spent their whole lives in front of the curtain, never knowing nor caring how the illusions that defined them were manufactured. And do you know what it all came down to? Do you know the secret that drove their success?
Waste. Those hotels were fundamentally all about waste. It was their primary strategy, the only way they could maintain their competitive advantage. The minute any piece of reality intruded itself on the illusion -- a frayed curtain, a stained bathroom floor, a lukewarm pot of coffee; any actual residue from the thousands of human creatures who breathed, drank, ate, slept, fucked and shat in their magical building -- it was torn out at the root and replaced with something new and beautiful. It required the hotels to constantly remodel themselves, ripping up perfectly good carpeting and junking perfectly good furniture, desperately trying to stay ahead of the changing tastes of fashion.
And that’s nothing compared to the waste associated with their food and beverage. I’ve seen things there that would turn your stomach, make you think there wasn’t a hungry person anywhere on the planet. More day-old pineapple than an army could eat, thrown away because the fresh shipment arrived that morning and the cost was already factored into the price of breakfast.
Why do they do these things? They do them because that’s what their clientele expects. That, more than anything else, is what the client is actually paying for. A mythical place that exists nowhere else, a place where the soft goods are always in fashion and the morning fruit is always fresh.
I knew it was fake, but even I could succumb to the illusion from time to time. Sitting on the balcony of my suite overlooking San Diego harbor, or sipping three hundred dollar wine in the sky lounge amidst the tips of San Francisco skyscrapers, or paying some banquet captain a hundred bucks to set up a private table in the unused balcony while Tony Bennett performed in the New York ballroom below -- stuff like that made it fun in a way it probably never will be again.
But something always shattered the illusion for me. And more often than not, that thing would be kids. I’d see kids staying in these hotels. Kids, sometimes no older than my own, staying in a place they didn’t even know existed, a place they couldn’t even imagine because it was so far removed from anything they had ever been exposed to.
I’d see little boys with slicked-back hair and Ralph Lauren sweaters running up and down the carpeted hallways, and little girls at the concierge with their stick-thin mothers making hair and spa appointments, and I would think to myself, who are these kids? What kind of world are they growing up in? Here they are, swaddled in a cocoon of illusion, and to them it’s all normal, it’s the way the world is.
Stuff like that creates gulfs in our society -- deep chasms between people that can probably never be bridged, and certainly not by kids who grow up not knowing those gulfs are even there.
2
I remember this one place. God, was it a palace. The kind of place where coffee is eight bucks a cup and no one thinks twice about it. I don’t remember where it was -- when you never get out of the hotel, the city you’re in kind of drifts by the wayside.
I was there for one of those VIP shindigs we used to do. The company had clients, you see. But these clients weren’t individuals who had hired a professional services firm, or companies working with an ad agency. Our clients were non-profit organizations, and they paid us to manage them. We collected their dues, we planned their meetings, we published their journals -- we did whatever it took to help them achieve the vision they had defined for themselves. And every client organization had a group of people who formed the upper crust of their leadership. A board of directors. A house of delegates. They went by different names, but they all had the same thing in common. They were all composed of Very Important People who, when they came together on behalf of their organization, made sure it was in one of the best hotels in town. By day, they would sit around polished tables in high-backed leather chairs and make decisions, and by night, they would hold cocktails and pat each other on the back, safe in the knowledge that they were the elite and that things truly ran best when they were in charge.
This one meeting was the first one I had attended after being promoted to deputy account executive. It was just me and my boss, Mary, and about a hundred or so of these decision-makers, and it was funny the way Mary was nervous and pretended to actually take me under her wing. I knew most of the people there already, but now that I had this new role, I had to meet them all over again. Mary had to introduce me because that’s what protocol demanded, and she wanted to watch as they sized me up and decided if I was truly worthy of the honor I had been given.
The biggest fish in the pond back then was this woman named Eleanor Rumford. She was probably in her late fifties, and one of only three or four women in the leadership at that time. She was slated to chair the board of directors the following year, and had led the planning for the meeting we were attending. I had worked with her on a couple of projects prior to this. Her professional achievements had earned her the respect of her mostly male colleagues, but I found her to be meticulous in the extreme -- a real micromanager who tried to control everything she was even remotely involved with. Among many other tasks she had overseen, she had hand-picked the speaker for the dinner program, and I remember her sitting triumphantly enshrined at the VIP table just below the podium as the speaker went through his busy slides and I poked absently at my New York-style cheesecake.
I was there, too, you see. For the first time I was at the VIP table -- a VIP table, mind you, in a room full of a hundred VIPs -- because I had been promoted and, although I was still the hired help, there was some chance I might be needed to respond to some question or run some important errand at the behest of the people who were really in charge. So it was Eleanor Rumford in her hand-tailored business suit and freshly-permed hair with her happy-go-lucky husband sitting on one side and my boss Mary Walton sitting on the other. Mary sat on Eleanor’s right and I sat on Mary’s, the chain of command clearly on display for anyone who would care to take notice.
It was near the end of the Q and A session when this guy got up -- this guy with a pair of worn sneakers and tube socks poking out from beneath the raised cuffs of his dress slacks and a Pink Panther tie lying awkwardly on his round belly. He looked about as out of place as a rotten turnip on the dessert trays the banquet captains were carrying around. A whole group of people had been lined up at the floor microphone in the center of the room to ask the speaker their questions, and the speaker had methodically whittled them down one by one in what had to be the longest Q and A session I had ever been forced to sit through.
And it wasn’t just me who was getting antsy. Every VIP in the room looked like they were about to turn into pumpkins, but this guy gets up and starts to amble his way over, obviously intent on getting in one last burning question. Eleanor saw him coming, and she must have known he was trouble, because she suddenly rose to her feet and, waiting only for the barest of pauses in the on-going interchange between the speaker and the last person at the microphone, she announced in her typically parliamentary way how honored we had all been to have the speaker with us that evening. She then thanked him gratuitously, and then she led us all in a round of appreciative applause.
It was nicely handled. Eleanor, despite her fussiness, was one of those people who could always be relied on to do what was proper in a social situation, and she knew from long experience that the most proper thing of all was to strategically avoid the most awkward of social situations altogether. But old Inspector Clouseau was not to be deterred. Although Eleanor’s calculated actions caused the woman at the microphone to take her seat and the speaker to step away from the podium, the guy in the Pink Panther tie stepped right up to the microphone and began asking his question anyway, his amplified voice carrying loudly and unfortunately subduing the growing ambient noise associated with a crowd of people finally released.
I can’t remember what the guy said or what his question was. I know it was long and rambling and more about him and his own theories than anything the speaker had said in the last two hours. It doesn’t really matter. The guy isn’t important. What’s important is how Eleanor reacted to his boorishness. Obviously unable to stop what she had viewed as an unsatisfactory outcome, Eleanor reseated herself and then not-so-quietly began tsk-tsking about the bad social graces of some, turning alternatively between her husband and Mary, and getting exactly the same kind of puckered-lip commiseration from them both.
At the time I wasn’t sure what to think. I mean, there she was, Eleanor Rumford, hard-nosed champion of her gender, a conquering hen in a room full of conquering roosters, looking exactly like a tittering matron of the Titanic, desperately appealing to her fellow peers of the realm for an explanation that could justify the appearance of this ragamuffin from steerage on their gold-plated decks -- all the while oblivious to their mutual rendezvous with the iceberg.
And there was Mary -- my boss, my leader, the woman who was going to teach me the ropes and whose behavior I had been told to emulate if I wanted any kind of a future in the company -- kissing Eleanor’s ass and telling her that she was right, that some people had no class, that some people didn’t know when to mind their place.
Looking back on it now I can’t help but laugh. The guy was a dope, sure, but it’s not like he came in and took a dump on the vegetable crudite. He was a self-important fuck like all the other self-important fucks in the room -- only with a lot less fashion sense. But he offended Eleanor Rumford, and that meant that he had offended Mary Walton, too. If I had been paying more attention I might have realized the fact that he didn’t offend me or, more importantly, that Eleanor’s offense hadn’t automatically prompted me to feign offense as well, was the first real indication that I had made a mistake accepting that promotion.
3
Okay, before I go any further, I’d better tell you a little bit about Mary Walton. She’s only ten years older than I am, but she owns the company and runs it the only way she knows how. She’s from some little town up north, I don’t know which one, and came down to the big city to find work after getting her accounting degree from the local extension of the state college. Working for the company was her first real job. She was hired to work as some minor lackey in the financial department, keeping track of the money coming in and going out of certain client accounts, writing checks, and filing invoices in those big lateral files.
This was a while before I got there, so I’m not sure who smiled on her and how she rose up through the ranks, but the year before I joined the company the business was sold by the guy who had founded it to a small group of employees who were going to run it as a kind of management team. Mary Walton was one of those employees -- or “partners” as everyone soon came to call them. There were three in total. One guy was good at managing clients, the second guy was good at office operations, and Mary had the financial background they evidently needed to make this “management team” thing a go. She couldn’t have been more than thirty-five at the time, and I think had less than two years of supervisory experience.
Now, there’s two things you need to understand about Mary Walton if you’re going to try and help me make sense of what happened. First, she’s an accountant by training, and that means she’s been programmed to count everything. Dollars spent, hours worked, vacation days taken, coffee cups broken -- you name it and Mary counted it, keeping track of everything on cramped little spreadsheets. That kind of attention-to-detail served her and the company well as long as she was the financial arm of the management team.
But about five years after I got there the partner who was in charge of client relations -- a guy named Ryan Kettridge, someone who had a real talent for the people side of the business -- well, he had some kind of nervous breakdown and wound up moving to New Mexico to chew peyote with the Indians or something. Instead of going out and hiring a real professional to take over his responsibilities, the remaining management team decided it would make more sense to move Mary into the client management role, and nurture one of the rising stars in the financial department to eventually take over her responsibilities there. They even made this rising star a junior partner in the organization. He was a nice enough guy, but like a lot of us, he was young, and wasn’t experienced enough to say no.
I still remember the day it happened. Young as I was, I was a department head back then, reporting directly to Ryan. I was expecting him back from one of his extended overseas trips that day, so I went looking for him in his office to give him a couple of project updates. Needless to say, he wasn’t there, but Mary was, and so was her remaining business partner -- a guy named Don Bascom, who had about as much tact as a stampeding elephant. Mary and Don were huddled together in a hushed conversation over one of the corners of the conference table, a telephone and a scribble-filled legal pad between them. They both looked up at me when I appeared in the doorway, and their faces looked like I had just caught them doing something illegal.
“What is it, Alan?” I remember Don barking at me.
“I’m looking for Ryan,” I said. “Wasn’t he due back today?”
The two of them exchanged a pair of glances and then turned back to me.
“His trip was extended,” Don said curtly. “He’ll be gone for the rest of the week.”
Don was a pretty cool customer, and he had entirely masked whatever trepidation he had been feeling when I first appeared. Mary, however, still looked like someone had just woken her up and shined a flashlight in her face. Something was clearly wrong and I hesitated, lingering a little longer than I apparently should have in the office door. When Don got up and started coming over to me I wasn’t sure what to think. Was he coming to shake my hand? Pat me on the back? Knock me on my ass? With Don you could never be entirely sure. Instead he simply thanked me for stopping by and closed the door, pretty much right in my face.
I stood there for a few moments and heard them muttering to each other, and then they placed a phone call to someone on the speaker phone, but all the voices were too muffled for me to hear anything distinctly.
I found out later that Don and Mary called the leader of every client organization that day, letting them know what had happened to Ryan and telling them about Mary’s new position in the company. I had to rely on the grapevine to find that out, because there was never any official communication from the management team on the transition. There was no announcement, no memo, no staff meeting to let the hundred or so people who worked there know that they were all reporting to somebody new. Mary just started working out of the corner office and making the rounds at client meetings. And the name Ryan Kettridge was never spoken again.
It was an inauspicious beginning, and things never really got much better after that. In retrospect, I think the whole business was doomed from the start. Mary was an accountant. She had always been better with numbers than she had been with people. But now her job was people -- managing them, motivating them, dealing with their ups and downs, getting them to work together for a common goal -- and she was an abject failure at it. She tried, I’ll give her that much, she tried. But her attempts always seemed forced and calculated.
She bonded better with the client leaders than she did with the staff, and it wasn’t long before she started dressing like them and looking down her nose at everything the same way they did. She got along swimmingly with Eleanor, and rather quickly began decking herself out in all the same affectations. Franklin Planners, Mont Blanc pens, Coach briefcases, Ann Taylor business suits -- Mary went out and got them all. But the more she tried to dress herself up for the big city, the more that small town vibe just seemed to shine on through.
4
What’s that? Oh, yeah. The second thing. How could I forget? I don’t know where it came from, but Mary always had this fierce sense of loyalty to the company, even before she purchased a piece of it as part of the management team. Her dedication to the needs of the client organizations seemed to surpass all other obligations. When I arrived on the scene, she had a well-cemented reputation for always being the first in the financial department to arrive and the last to leave, working longer hours than any of her staff.
She guaranteed that her financial statements, tabulated every month for every client organization, were totally error-free. It was a matter of extreme pride with her. She’d pass them out at client board meetings and she’d have this look on her face, a smug and self-satisfied look, like she just ate your dessert while you weren’t looking. It was a look that seemed to say to anyone who would challenge her, “Go ahead. Take out your pathetic little solar-powered calculator and add up every column. Go ahead, you hapless cluck. Add it up. You won’t find even as much as a penny out of place on my spreadsheets.”
And she knew you wouldn’t, because Mary had already checked and double-checked every calculation by hand, not trusting something as notoriously unreliable as Microsoft Excel to do all that heavy lifting for her. Mary was like that. She didn’t trust anyone. If she was going to report financial numbers to a client board of directors, she was going to make damn sure they were right and that she knew them frontwards and backwards, even if that meant coming in early and working late every day for a week.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Bully for her,” right? Like, “Gee whiz, Alan, that Mary sure sounds like a go-getter.” Okay, yeah, I can see why you might think that. But you need to understand, Mary didn’t just come in early and work late for a week before big client meetings. Mary came in early and stayed late every day, whether we were pressed up against a deadline or not. She had this habit of always finding more things to do, some of which needed doing, but most of which just distracted her from the real job. I’m not even sure she realized she was sabotaging her own efforts to keep the clients happy by piling all this meaningless busy work on her plate. She had the most oppressive workload of anyone, no doubt, but it was largely an oppression of her own doing, and she seemed to revel in this manufactured spirit of indispensability, wearing it for everyone to see like sunscreen not rubbed in all the way.
A big part of what drove Mary to these extremes stemmed from her travel schedule, one of the most brutal in the company. When I joined the organization, we had fifteen or so clients, and Mary did the books for them all. Sure, she had people in the financial department to help her with the paperwork, but when it came to keeping track of the money and reporting the results to the client boards -- that was all Mary. Each client had two or three board meetings a year, and Mary went to them all -- no matter where they were located or when they were scheduled. Weekends, holidays, weddings, funerals, total eclipses of the sun -- it didn’t matter. Mary would miss them all if there was a client board meeting scheduled in conflict with it. The woman actually scheduled c-sections for the births of her two kids. Not because they were breach or because her doctor advised it, but because she didn’t want something as unpredictable as going into labor to interfere with her commitments to the client organizations she served. Yeah. I know. You think I’m kidding. I’m not.
And that’s the point I’m trying to get to. It’s not that she didn’t love her family. She had a husband from the same little town she grew up in -- her high school sweetheart for all I know, he certainly was built like the captain of the football team -- and two shy little kids who came to every company picnic with white shorts, fresh haircuts and sallow faces. It’s just that when it came time to make a choice, the company and the clients it served came first every time. This is who Mary Walton is. It’s how she’s wired. And when she moved into that client management position and took over as de facto president of the company, she naturally brought this wiring with her. Suddenly there was an expectation that everyone in the company should be as dedicated to the busywork as she was.
5
It started early on with little things. Things like the timesheets. Everybody in the company had to keep track of the hours they spent working for each client, and at the end of each month, we had to tally up our time, write it down in neat little boxes on our timesheets, and turn them in to the financial department.
When Ryan ran the company, he used this information to negotiate service fees with our clients. He didn’t care how many hours you worked. He wanted to know how many hours you were working so he could make sure the company was billing its clients appropriately, but he didn’t make any value judgments about your performance based on the number of hours you were reporting. He had other benchmarks for that, things connected to your project and development objectives.
But Mary was not Ryan. The things Ryan judged you on were just too fuzzy for a dedicated number-cruncher like Mary. When it came to evaluating people’s performance, Mary wanted something that could be counted, something that could fit precisely on one of her spreadsheets and be analyzed. Something like how many hours you were reporting on your timesheets.
It was amazing how quickly it happened. I remember sitting in the lunch room one day, just a handful of months after the change in leadership. I was with a group of my fellow department heads -- people like me who directed staff and programs in a particular functional area and who, like me, had previously reported to Ryan and were now reporting to Mary. These were all people I would later come to supervise when I got my much-publicized promotion to deputy account executive, but that day they were just peers, on the same level of the corporate ladder as me. People like Gerald Krieger and Bethany Bishop.
Those are just a couple of names to you, I know, a couple of names no different than any others you might pull randomly out of the phone book. I’ll tell you more about them later -- they both actually have a pivotal role to play in the drama that’s about to unfold -- but forgive me if I can’t help but stop here for a moment to reflect on how funny life can be.
You know how sometimes people pass in and out of your life, affecting you profoundly one day and then it seems you hardly think of them the next. Mary, and Gerald, and Bethany -- it’s almost like they’re characters in a book I read a long time ago and usually have trouble remembering. But sitting here talking with you, it’s like I’ve taken that book down off the shelf and I’m starting to page through it again, and I’m remembering not just these characters and their names, but the parts each of them played in the story, and I realize that the story wouldn’t be the story without each of the characters making it so. If I leave any of them out, the story won’t be complete, and I’d have to make up a different ending.
Okay. I suppose that might be a little too heavy on the psychoanalytical bullshit, so let’s just put that aside for now. We’ll have plenty of time for the deep end of that pool later, whether I swim out there myself or you push me in.
The point is we were a bunch of middle managers having lunch together, too high up the ladder to have lunch with anyone else, but not high enough to get away with not eating in the lunchroom. It was a day like any of a hundred others, the table cluttered with our soft-sided thermos lunch bags and microwaveable meal trays, until Bethany asked me how many hours I reported on my timesheet last month.
I looked at her blankly. Even though I had just turned in my time report that morning, I wasn’t sure what she was asking me. The procedure had become so routine, adding up the numbers from my calendar and writing them down in the correct boxes on the paper form, I had come to retain little memory of the exercise itself, much less each set of calculated results. She might as well have asked me how many teeth I had brushed that morning.
“I don’t remember,” I said, distracted, as I often was, not just by her question, but by the odd shape of her nose. Bethany is an attractive woman, don’t get me wrong, at least five years younger than me, but her nose is too wide for her face, with a tip that turns up and twists to one side. I always thought it gave her a sort of backwater beauty queen look, like the prettiest girl at the county pageant who doesn’t stand a chance at the state fair. Eventually, I told her I thought I had reported a hundred and eighty hours.
“Is that it?” I remember Gerald scoffing. He was older than everyone, just a few years away from retirement with an ego larger than his bloated 401(k) account. He’d recently joined the company, recruited specifically for his business world experience to help turn around an ailing department. He always wore this pair of ridiculous designer eyeglasses -- you know, the kind with a row of sparkly white gem stones embedded in each golden ear strut. In meetings he would often lean way back in his chair, his steepled fingers poised in the air before him, and look at the rest of us through those glasses like we were members of an alien species. I remember him saying, “You’re not going to get anywhere in this company reporting numbers like that.”
“How many hours did you work last month?” Bethany asked him.
“Well,” Gerald said evasively, like he always did when he was working one of his angles. “I reported two hundred and forty.”
“No way,” Bethany said. “That’s sixty hours a week. I’ve been putting in extra time and you’re never at the office later than me. You’re not working that much.”
“Hey,” Gerald replied. “It’s not about how many hours you work. It’s about how many hours you write down on your timesheets.”
And, of course, Gerald was right. Long before any of the rest of us realized the game had changed, Gerald had already figured out the new rules and was playing to win. Mary Walton wanted allegiance to the company above all else, and she measured that allegiance simply by the number of hours of your life you were willing to sacrifice to it. Gerald understood that first, but eventually we would all come to understand it -- and we would all react to it in our own ways.
If you ask me, the wiser ones would be like Gerald, adroitly skipping across the surface of Mary’s quagmire, keeping their shoes as dry as possible and looking for the firm ground that lay beyond. The less experienced would be like Bethany, believing the lie that hard work would be rewarded, and diving deep in hopes of finding treasure in the murky depths.
And then there would be the handful like me, who would eventually decide to trek across the swamp and fight the dragon in her own lair.
6
Whenever I tell someone about this stuff, I always have to spend some time talking about the strained relationship that developed between me and my son. I’m not proud of it -- I acted like a real idiot -- but it’s important for me to include it, because it’s one of the things that eventually made me realize something was desperately wrong and something had to change.
He’s a teenager now, my son, but he was four when I was going through this, and I still didn’t know anything about being a father. I mean, I didn’t even know simple stuff. Stuff like you can’t expect four-year-old kids to tell you what they’re thinking. And stuff like they’re unique individuals with their own thoughts and desires. And stuff like the more you try to force them to be who you want them to be, the more you wind up pushing them away.
I remember this one time I took a vacation day so we could make a trip to one of those railroad museums that seem to dot the country. I think just about every state has one, usually located in some weed-choked old train yard. Anyone who’s ever had or ever been a little boy has more than likely visited one and seen their rusty collection of old engines and train cars.
This one had some extra attractions, including a gigantic model railroad display, with lights and switches that the kids could operate by pushing buttons all around the track, a couple of giant train sheds supposedly housing antique rail cars, and outdoor train rides in these dopey-looking open carriages pulled by miniature locomotives. For me, it was nothing special -- certainly not worth the forty-five bucks it cost to get the three of us in the place, nor the twelve-fifty more every time we turned around and wanted to do something. For my son, however, it was like he died and went to heaven, and he went completely apeshit with excitement the whole time we were there.
Now, at this time things were starting to get uncomfortably busy for me at work. We’d already lost one of the department heads, and I was struggling to do both her job and mine while looking for a replacement. So, instead of spending a relaxing day with my family, like a dork I was checking my voicemail every ten minutes and worrying that someone important would find out I was gone and start raising hell. And every time I looked up from the cell phone, it seemed, I would catch my son doing something odd or stupid.
Jacob -- that’s his name -- had this nervous habit. Every time got excited about something he would start jumping up and down and flapping his hands like a scrawny, half-grown bird trying to take its first flight. It was kind of cute the first few times he did it, but he did it so much and for so long that I used to wonder if he would still do it as a teenager -- getting ready to go to prom, perhaps -- or even as an adult, waiting at the altar for his bride to come down the aisle. It sounds silly, I know, but back then he did it so frequently, and in so much disregard for the number of times that I had asked, demanded, or begged that he stop doing it, that I had little trouble imagining him doing it forever, even in his rented tuxedo and overshined shoes.
I think this trip to the train museum was the first time I’d seen him do it in public. We were inside the pre-fabricated building where the model train exhibit was kept. I was on the phone, and had gone off to an ill-frequented area -- a poorly lit and evidently forgotten place where the state’s history of railroading was shown through a series of hand-built and dusty old dioramas -- to listen and respond to a long and rambling message from one of my board members. When I returned to the train exhibit I saw my wife, Jenny, and Jacob, standing amidst a sea of other young boys and their parents around the display, strollers parked like a circle of besieged wagons around the perimeter, and Jacob jumping up and down like a salmon trying to get upstream before all the good mating partners were taken.
Now, I’ve got to be honest. At first I didn’t recognize him. I guess my mind was still back in the office, and I remember wondering in my ignorance who the retarded kid was that couldn’t stand still while the rest of the boys simply watched in thunderstruck admiration. And then, of course, I realized who it was, and I felt such an intense feeling of shame and anxiety that tears actually came to my eyes. Shame that I would think such a dismissive thought about my own son, but more so anxiety over the paranoid worry that maybe there really was something wrong with him -- if not retarded, then hyperactive or autistic or something. Anything that would keep him from being accepted into normal society and living a full life.
First I composed myself, and then I went over and put my arm around my wife’s shoulders.
“Everything all right?” she asked me, referring to the phone call I had just been on.
“Uh huh,” I said weakly, thinking more about Jacob than anything going on back in the office. He was my son, but so unlike me in so many ways. So unlike anything I wanted him to be. He was still jumping up and down in place, hands still flapping on the ends of his wrists like flags on a windy day, oblivious to everything except the source of his own joy. His eyes followed the moving train cars, and noticed neither my return nor the stares he was beginning to draw from some of the other fathers. “He sure likes trains, doesn’t he?”
“He sure does,” Jenny said, her lips initially smiling, but then turning into a frown when she saw how serious I was. “Alan, don’t. Just let him be.”
Back then Jenny always took things more easily than I did, especially wherever Jacob was concerned. We were both somewhat irrational about being parents -- she wanting Jacob to remain a little boy forever and me wanting him to grow up too fast -- and, initially, she managed to get into fewer confrontations with him than I did. Now, she was trying to steer me away from another one.
“Jacob, buddy,” I said, as kindly as I could. “Do you want to go see the big trains?”
Jacob gave no indication he had even heard me, still jumping in place like he was being punished in boot camp. I remember one year at Christmas he jumped so much and for so long we had to wring the sweat out of his clothes before washing them.
“Jacob,” I said again, a little more sternly. “Let’s go see the big trains.”
Still nothing. I looked around nervously and caught the eye of another father, a short and bald guy in an “I Love Trains” t-shirt and a pair of plaid shorts. For a moment he had a sour and disapproving look on his face, but then he turned away the way strangers are supposed to when they’re caught staring. I disengaged my arm from around Jenny’s shoulders and clasped Jacob’s arm as gently as I could. It kept him from jumping to the heights he had been before but he still fought against me like a fish pulling on my line.
“Ow, Daddy! You’re hurting me!”
This was something else Jacob did with a fair amount of regularity -- complaining that he was being injured when he was not. Just like he used to complain the bath water was too hot when I was in it up to both elbows, or still that I’m yelling too loud when I’m not even raising my voice. Back then, Jenny thought he was just sensitive -- and she probably still does. I always suspected he was deliberately manipulating every situation to his own advantage, not like some master strategist, but more like a semi-intelligent ape acting mostly on instinct. I thought he was using the only tools he had at his disposal -- his tears and his shrill voice -- to combat the obstacles keeping him from fulfilling his primal desires. Turns out we were both wrong.
Aware of the eyes upon us and not wanting him to cause a scene by throwing a tantrum in public, I let him go and he went back to full-on jumping, laughing and gurgling in the back of his throat every time a train swept by. Like I hadn’t even interrupted him. Like I was no longer of any concern.
We eventually got him out of there by bribing him with an ice cream treat. Like most new parents we had learned through some difficult trial and error that nothing else had the allure of something sweet on the tongue, and Jacob was an absolute fiend for ice cream.
Later, I did take him out into the train yard to see the old engines and train cars they had on display. I don’t know why I wanted him to see them so badly. I had never been there before so I didn’t know what to expect, but I had seen the tremendous train sheds when we first arrived, and thought they had to have something interesting stashed away inside them. Jenny was tired by then and didn’t want to walk all the way out there, so she started looking at the multi-colored junk in the gift shop, and that was just fine with me.
Ever since I had first attempted to use the “big trains” as a lure to get Jacob out of the public eye, I had somehow fixated on the idea that exploring the train sheds together would be a perfect opportunity for Jacob and me to build some memories. You know, like he would always remember the time his father took him to see the old steam locomotive. Like something out of a picture book -- oiled and shiny in the slanted light of the afternoon sun. I remember even entertaining the idea that maybe he would someday bring his own son here and pass the special memory on to another generation.
Well, the sheds didn’t have any steam engines, only a few old and dirty diesels and a dozen or so decrepit train cars from the golden days of cross-country passenger rail service -- dining cars, Pullman porters, observation cars -- that kind of thing. None of them had been maintained at all. They were all fading paint, cracked housings, and dirty windows on the outside and torn upholstery, exposed wires, and smelly carpet on the inside. The place resembled a graveyard much more than a museum, and I’m not sure we were even supposed to be there. The ends of the sheds were open to the elements, and there weren’t any signs or ropes to keep us out or off the cars, but they were so broken down and full of safety hazards I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to open themselves up to that kind of liability. Despite all the money I saw people shelling out, I remember thinking the museum owners must not have been clearing enough profit to get any decent lawyers to advise them.
But, of course, Jacob didn’t care about any of this. As soon as he saw the train cars huddled together in the gloom of the abandoned shed and realized what they were -- honest to goodness, bonafide, real train cars -- he wanted to go on them, and me, his father -- the adult -- was too wrapped up in the idea of trying to create some honest to goodness, bonafide, real father and son bonding to worry about the likelihood of lacerations, bacterial infections, or rabies shots.
Jacob laughed when I lifted him up into the first car and we started exploring, moving from one train car to the next by hopping hand-in-hand across the two feet of empty space that separated them. Every step was a new adventure for Jacob. He loved hiding behind the musty drapes in the sleeping car, running down the narrow service corridors in the kitchen car, and climbing over the backs of the passenger seats, one after the other for the length of the coach. He wanted to go everywhere I couldn’t fit, giggling and grinning back at me like some kind of fairy creature, proud to show me what he and his little body could do, testing his limits but never straying too far from my approving gaze. We were the only ones there -- another sign that we probably shouldn’t have been doing what we were doing -- and for a while everything else seemed to fade away and the world was just me and my son.
When Jacob got tired we took a rest in one of the dining cars and I sat him at one of the booths behind an old Formica table that was bolted to the floor. It had one of those wavy metal edges on it -- like they have at some twenty-four hour diners -- and it was broken in a couple of places, and the tabletop itself was chipped and stained about six different shades of green. But Jacob was happy as hell, his big ears flushed red and his smile practically cracking his face open like he was some kind of jack-o-lantern with the front teeth missing from its grin.
“Daddy,” he asked me. “Can we go for a ride on this train?”
“No,” I told him, laughing in the back of my throat. “Not on this train, buddy.”
“Why not, Daddy?”
“Because this train doesn’t run any more, Jacob. It’s old.”
Jacob looked around, his eyes wide and full of wonder, and in a strange moment of clarity for me I knew he wasn’t seeing things the way I saw them. He couldn’t have been. I mean, think about it. What did he know? He was four. He’d never been on a train before and, as far as he could tell, this might be the way all of them looked. He had no idea that the carpet beneath his dangling feet wasn’t supposed to be moldy, or that the padding in the torn cushion he sat on wasn’t supposed to be shredded by some nest-building rodent that had long since died or moved on. There was a kind of glassy fascination in his eyes, like everything around him was pure and beautiful.
Looking at him and knowing he was completely blind to the grim reality, I found myself torn in half with conflicting emotions. Some small part of me could actually feel the joy he felt -- could feel it perhaps because it radiated off him so intensely -- and, as sappy as it sounds, it filled my sick old heart with love and pride, and I felt like together Jacob and I could conquer the world. But most of me was too encrusted with well-worn cynicism to be entirely seduced by Jacob’s fantasy. We weren’t really surrounded by anything pure or beautiful, after all, just by things old and used up and forgotten like we’re all destined to be some day.
I don’t know. Jenny jokes in her semi-serious way that I have a habit of throwing myself off the cliffs of happiness, always finding the jagged rocks of despair more alluring, and this was probably one of those times. I guess I was still caught up in my worry that Jacob would grow up into some kind of misfit that I over-interpreted what was happening. The anxiety I had felt before returned, but this time it felt more like panic, and I was overwhelmed by how much there was for Jacob to learn and how far away he seemed from learning it. He was so clueless there on that broken-down train car, clueless and happy the way the disabled sometimes are, I didn’t think he could ever adjust to a world that was moving so quickly around him. I was suddenly convinced it would someday crush him, this big and scary world he would never fully understand, and I, his father, would not be able to help him or stop it from happening.
His wayward eyes returned to me, his face still very much that of a toddler and glowing with the rapture only they can possess. “Daddy? How fast can this train go?”
I thought about his question for a moment. “Not fast enough,” I remember telling him, thinking more about the race no one or nothing ever wins, the one against time, and as he looked at me in his untutored confusion, I pledged to myself then and there that I would help him. God damn right I would -- I needed to, or he wasn’t going to make it. At the time I was utterly convinced that Jacob needed to be more normal, that he needed to be more like everybody else, and that I could somehow make that happen through some strange alchemy of role modeling, incentives, and coercion.
I know. You don’t have to look at me like that. Like I said before, I didn’t know a thing about being a father.
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“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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