Intro: This is excerpted from a novel called “My Resume of Playing Hooky.” Rebecca (Becc) and Eric, best friends for years, are now 24 and living together as a couple, but Becc is keeping a secret from Eric that would shatter him. Becc works for a newspaper with a far right-wing editorial page although she’s a Democrat. Eric dropped out of film school, got fired from a reality show called Gold Coast, and is now unemployed.
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Where I should have been | The Orange County Liberty
Where I was | A tiki bar on Newhope Street
They say you can have a great job, a great relationship or a great apartment, but never all three at the same time. It’s not true, though. For exactly one month, I had all three. The 20something trifecta.
Because Eric made my apartment and my job seem great. Nothing bothered me. Not the drunks pissing on the brick wall under my bedroom window every night and not Skip Theobald’s fuming visits to my cubicle to harangue me about what he called his Internet “bullies.” I could sleep through almost anything after hours of sex. When the midnight peeing in the alley did wake me up, it sounded soothing, like a fountain. I rested my cheek against Eric’s warm chest in the soft Hitchcock T-shirt I’d given him and went right back to sleep. I could handle going to work in the morning because when my alarm went off at seven, Eric slept next to me, his face slack as a child’s.
That morning as I shaved my legs, Eric came in to brush his teeth, saronged in a towel. His beige and white shape looked like a mosaic through the ripply shower door. I stepped out of the shower dripping wet, wearing shaving foam on one calf like a white stocking. I tugged him by his towel to the bedroom, not even giving him a chance to wipe the Crest from his lips. I pushed him down on the unmade bed, shaking drops from my soaking wet hair onto him, and he said, smiling, “Is this my shower?”
Afterward I raced up the 405, miraculously accident-free for once, and got the last spot in the parking lot. I pulled my damp hair into an elastic as I speedwalked across the lobby. It was probably written all over me. What I’d been doing 45 minutes before I showed my lanyard badge to Gary, the security guard.
Eric and I were inevitable, lucky, somehow unscathed by our years of near misses.
And the other thing.
It had been five years. Maybe we were stronger because of it. Like how scar tissue makes your skin tougher. I loved him. I hadn’t said it out loud, but I knew.
Even working at The Liberty felt satisfying. Things that used to make me want to quit no longer got to me. At 9:15, Skip came over to lodge his daily grievance, waving printouts from the website. “Can’t you do anything about this?” he said, eyes and veins bulging.
His latest column, “Your Tax Dollars Pay for Their Lifestyle Choices,” had all his anonymous foes typing their dissent onto the website into the wee hours. I didn’t have to look at the comments. I’d memorized them. My favorite, from AlGoreRhythm2, was “Libertarianism is a cult like any other, and Skip Theobald is the sect’s nastier, less-intelligent L. Ron Hubbard.” Mild stuff, really. No death threats.
Normally when Skip waved his stack of copied-and-pasted comments at me I wanted to stuff them down his throat. But my blood pressure hardly budged. I swiveled my ergonomic chair toward Skip and nodded at his monologue. Had he trained his Microsoft Word spellcheck not to autocorrect “Theobald” to “toehold” the way my software always did? The winding vein on his temple resembled a switchbacking section of the River Thames in London. The part they show on the credits of EastEnders.
Skip ran on…“It’s disgusting, that these jerks can just post whatever they want and I’m supposed to take it….isn’t it your job to take this crap down?” An arc of saliva punctuated the end of this speech.
I no longer had to use my 519 mantra. 519 -- my weekly paycheck after taxes, disability and 401(k) deductions. 519, 519. Cinco-Uno-Nueve. Thinking “519” had gotten me through many a workday, before I had thoughts of Eric to keep me sane.
But I didn’t need “519” now.
Mocking Skip’s columns over pinwheel sweet rolls from the Fleur de Lis bakery after a morning of deeply satisfying, pre-tooth-brushing weekend sex had become our Sunday ritual. Eric and I had come up with a nickname for Skip. Skip Theobald, the “paranoid, chauvinistic, racist, elitist, homophobic bible-thumping dinosaur pig.” That Sunday I’d challenged Eric to repeat it three times fast, like a tongue twister, and he’d snorted orange juice out his nose on his attempt. It was so simple. Skip couldn’t stop me from doing some decent reporting. My hatred had melted into generous amusement because I was happy.
When he finished his rant, I answered in a satiny voice. “Skip, I can’t delete posts unless they violate the newspaper’s comment policy. That’s no threats, profanity, harassment or intimidation.”
He humphed, but I continued. The expert mom at the playground, soothing a tantrummy child. “And I do delete that stuff. Every day. But people are allowed to say they disagree. I know it can be hard to take.”
The vein in Skip’s forehead throbbed at me. But he huffed away.
Alice peered over the gray cubicle wall we shared and nodded at my small victory. With Skip off my back, I could call the Parks department about the condemned Crystal Cove beach shacks. The tilting shacks were pastel-covered relics from the days when Crystal Cove had been an artist’s colony. But the state wanted to turn them into condos. People would freak. It was a good story. If I wasn’t racing toward my career dreams, at least I was inching toward them.
But no.
In the time it took me to click on a single email, the job part of my trifecta slipped away.
At 10:18, I got the companywide message in my inbox. Subject: Important News Re: Liberty Inc. Restructuring
It had finally happened.
Eight people had taken buyouts, but it wasn’t nearly enough. That’s the problem when you expect a bunch of liberal arts majors to strategize like game theorists. Now the old-timers who hadn’t taken “packages” would probably get fired and wish they’d chosen Door #1, in the awful Let’s Make a Deal episode our workplace had become.
Sudden crisis sound effects. Someone rushed past my cubicle. Deb shut her door. Alice whispered into her phone. Proper, devoted Alice, who never made personal phone calls on work time.
I slumped down in my chair. I tried to work but my attention was on the perimeter of the building where the big offices were, where people went one by one to learn their fates.
I phoned Eric but got voice mail. He was surely at the Futbal café, nursing a 90-cent coffee for three hours as he emailed resumes for a clerk job at Hollywood Video and ticket-taker position at Knott’s Berry Farm and probably some porn outfits in the Valley -- anything remotely related to the entertainment field. He was trying for jobs outside of his field, too. He’d applied to become one of those people who stand on the corner twirling signs for The Sofa Outlet, but they’d rejected him. Maybe they’d take me.
Skip went into Deb’s office looking meek and came out beaming. The paranoid, chauvinistic, racist, elitist, homophobic bible-thumping dinosaur pig. Of course they’d kept him.
Alice came out of Deb’s office, her cheeks glistening with tears, and signaled a dorky thumbs-down at me, a gesture so out of character for her -- it was like Marian the librarian trying to channel John Madden -- that it made my eyes well up too. They’d fired Alice, who’d been there for 12 years. Alice, who had the Five Cs of Copy Editing taped to her cubicle wall:
Clear/Correct/Concise/Comprehensible/Consistent
When Deb finally buzzed me at 11:49 my palms were so slippery I could barely grip the aluminum knob on her door.
I sat down in a chair facing the bowl of Skittles on her desk. I’d never seen anyone take any.
Mercifully, Deb got right to it. “Becc, we have to cut you to four hours a day.” I let myself breathe again. OK, then. I was luckier than most. I still had a part-time job some journalists would kill for.
But wait, what was she saying? “…And I’m not sure how long that’ll last. Maybe three months. But you’re the only person with less than two years’ employment that we’re keeping on at all, so that’s a testament to your strong work.”
Maybe she was going to cut my Internet nanny tasks and let me just work as a reporter.
“We’re going to have you concentrate on your Web projects,” she said, distracted now, her gray eyes already shifting from me to her computer screen. “It’s where we need you the most.”
“Thanks, Deb.”
I was already standing up when she threw out as an afterthought, “We’ll need you to handle some assistant tasks for Skip. Research, correspondence. An hour a day, maybe two. We’ve let Jax go.”
If Deb was a warmer person, the kind of boss who handed out hugs with bad news and for whom setting out a bowl of Skittles was a natural gesture (instead of something suggested at a leadership conference in Scottsdale), she might have made me cry.
I could only manage a nod. Of course. Because getting cut to half time, with only three months of semi-guaranteed employment, wasn’t bad enough. If I wanted to collect my paychecks, I’d have to kiss Skip’s Mesozoic-Porcine butt.
I walked back to my cube slowly, trying to figure out how to feel. I was supposed to feel humiliated. Worried about money, certainly. Maybe the humiliation was fighting the worry so they canceled each other out.
Alice popped her head up over our wall, raised her eyebrows in a question. I shook my head slightly and she sent me a sympathetic look. I’d have to explain later, once she’d gotten over the shock of her own firing, that I was still employed. For a few months. Maybe.
I could just quit. Rip off the Band-Aid, save my pride. But we’d have to move in with my mom.
I tried to work. But now even setting up a simple Question of the Day poll on Governor Schwarzenegger’s immigration policy seemed impossible.
I wandered downstairs to check out the vibe in the newsroom, trying to focus on good news. 1. I had health insurance, for now. 2. Eric had managed to earn $300 over the last four weeks, subbing one Saturday at ‘Hunks Hauling Junk’ -- a struggling actor from Gold Coast had hooked him up -- and tutoring a couple of kids on their math SATs. 3. If he kept it up, we could just make rent. That could be my new mantra. “We can still make rent. We can still make rent.”
Downstairs, far beneath the publisher and the other suits on the top floor, more doors were open, and people didn’t whisper. Most of the reporters and editors gathered in clusters. Gallows humor and sarcasm ruled. Maybe some wished they’d taken last year’s buyout offer -- six months of pay for fifteen years of service. In this job market, for editors with decades of experience, six months severance was hardly a golden parachute, or even a tin parachute. It was a shit parachute. But now that it was no longer on the table, it probably sounded good.
I went into the breakroom, and while I stirred a spoonful of sugar into my coffee a middle-aged woman from the graphics department heated up her frozen burrito next to me. She had to shout over the roar of the ancient Panasonic microwave. “I guess I picked the wrong time to start two kids at private school,” she said. She shrugged and smiled, but couldn’t hide the sadness in her tired blue eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, picturing her children in their plaid uniforms, pleading. People were hungry, just blocks away. But her worry still trumped my own lame sob story. A mom who’d love for me to move back home. Ivy Leaguer Eric, whose Platinum Card-packing parents would help him out if he made one phone call. Like Frank Halpingham had said, we were brats.
“You can have one of my burritos for lunch any time if you get desperate.” She opened the freezer door to show me her 24-pack of Chicken-and-Cheese Chimichangas, from Price Club. Sweet.
I went back to my cubicle, pulled up my resume and stared at it. I’d tinkered with it every day since the first Liberty Inc. restructuring email. But no wording or font or bullet point could hide the truth. A handful of short, weird jobs with mysterious gaps between them. In Times New Roman or Helvetica, 16-point or 18 point type, Rebecca Ross looked flighty. Or, at best, like damaged goods.
I winced, imagining future interviews, if I was lucky enough to get any. “What exactly do you mean here by ‘Assistant Online Editor: organized real-world community-building events to maximize Web traffic?’”
“See, I invited the most obsessive Web commenters over for breakfast but only two of them showed up, and our columnist was too chicken to come out of his office, so basically I spent $400 of the publisher’s money to stock my freezer with bagels.” Good Lord.
Late that afternoon, a skeleton crew of the still-employed, including Skip, stayed behind to put the paper to bed. The rest of us cut out for an early Happy Hour at Hale Hui Kai two blocks away.
The bar was a misty, cool grotto, with ukulele music and fountains, cracking thunder sound effects. Ten miles away at Disneyland, the Enchanted Tiki Room has basically the same setup, minus the stiff drinks. Before the door had even shut behind me, a features editor named Jill shoved a bamboo-wrapped glass in my hand. There were so many things sticking out of the drink – two umbrellas and a kabob of pineapple and cherry -- that I jabbed my lip when I sipped it. “It’s called a Cobra’s Fang,” said Jill.
“I heard they cut you to half-time. So take this, too.” She put a piece of paper in my left hand.
“Askit.com,” I read. “What’s Askit? Online fortune telling? Like a Magic 8 ball?”
“My girlfriend used to do some work for them,” she said. “We call it ‘The Ass Kit.’”
“Thanks, I guess?” I gulped my Cobra’s Fang.
Jill laughed. “No, it’s not that bad. They do stories on things people type into search engines, like ‘Holistic Cures for Foot Fungus’ and ‘How do I Make a Darth Vader Costume for my Chihuahua?’ I thought you might want the cash. Until they reinstate you to full-time.”
Jill and I both knew I wouldn’t get reinstated, but it was nice of her to pretend. Jill had once walked up three floors to compliment an article I’d written about a former Disneyland Cinderella who’d become a porn star.
“Hey thanks. I’ll check it out.” She clinked her glass against mine.
Everyone was like that. Buying rounds, sharing names. If only I’d worked with all these people back in the heyday. They were so kind and funny.
And surprising. Teetotaling Alice tossed back something in a coconut shell and went straight to the bar for another.
She couldn’t get the bartender’s attention because her bun barely cleared the top of the bar, so I went over to flag him down. Alice’s cheeks were pink from rum and her usually tightly-pulled hair clung to her forehead in sweaty tendrils, softening her face. She looked ten years younger.
“This one’s on me.” I scoured the drinks list. “Two Missionary’s Downfalls.” The bartender nodded at me, thrilled by this windfall of customers. I tried to push a twenty at him but he pushed it back. “Taken care of. Some newsroom in New Orleans phoned to pay the tab.”
So our bad news had already made it to Papercuts.com, a site that tracked newspaper layoffs like they were baseball stats. That was fast, even for the newspaper business. Figuring at least three drinks per person, I calculated that the New Orleans Times-Picayune reporters would have to chip in at least a thousand dollars. Maybe more. They’d get it back, when their layoffs hit, and some other paper paid for them to drown their sorrows. And it would continue, until there was nobody left to pay the tabs.
I drained my Cobra’s Fang as the bartender chopped up mint and peaches for the next round of drinks. Halfway through my Missionary’s Downfall, a soft buzz wrapped around me. Nothing seemed too bad.
A sportswriter who’d been canned after twenty years started a drinking game. He read the press release and we had to drink when we heard the word “outstanding” or “excellent.”
“Despite this reduction, we will be adequately staffed and will publish outstanding products …our excellent tradition of quality journalism…”
I went in the back to call Eric, clutching my drink.
“Hey! Do you want red or cream sauce on your pasta?” Cocktail hour music in the background. Dean Martin, or maybe Englebert Humperdinck.
The words came out more blurred than I expected. I’d only had two drinks. Or three. “You should eat without me.”
“What’s up? You sound weird. What’s all the noise?”
“I’m at a bar. It happened.”
“You lost your job. Bastards.”
“I didn’t lose my job. Yet. It’s just…shrinking.”
“You don’t have to do the tech stuff you hate?”
“I only have to do the tech stuff I hate. And I’m Skip’s new lackey.”
“Shit.”
“But I’m lucky. Don’t you think I’m soooooo lucky?”
Eric said something but I couldn’t hear him over the hoots and speeches.
“What?”
Eric shouted. “I said Damn. I’m sorry, Becc.”
“They fired 46 people. Some have been here forever. They have kids.”
“So they’re sacking anyone who earns more than a pittance?”
“Pretty much.”
“Stay and get as hammered as you want. I’ll come get you.”
“You’re not driving all the way up here. Wait, I mean down here. Up here.” I laughed.
“Oh yes I am.”
Eric walked in the bar an hour later. He was saving money on haircuts so his hair was wild even for him, with a bouncing top layer scaffolded by cowlicks. You couldn’t replicate the look with hair gel if you tried. And his posture was terrible. But it suited him. I wouldn’t change anything. I caught his eye and we smiled across the roomful of drunk, fired reporters.
Eric drank a Coke until we’d finished up. Then he gently helped Alice, who somehow became more serious when lit, into Eric’s truck so we could drive her home. We delivered her to her tidy condo in Fountain Valley, tucking her into bed. She was too drunk to be embarrassed when I pulled her patchwork quilt up to her neck. In the morning she’d be mortified. Alice was alone but I had Eric. It would all be ok.
On the long drive back to L.A., we played KRCW. I reclined my seat all the way back.
“There was something beautiful going on in that bar,” I said.
“It’s called drunk bonding.” Eric grabbed a water bottle from his cupholder and handed it to me. “Drink up.”
I couldn’t find the energy to tilt my seat up so I drank it in my reclined position and most of it spilled down my face. I didn’t wipe it away. The warm breeze through the window felt good on my cheeks, evaporating the water.
“Faced with the worst, people become so much more interesting. Less kitchen.”
“What?” Eric glanced at me.
“Less kitchen. Chicken. Less chicken. Braver.”
He smiled. “Yeah, I know.”
I closed my eyes when one of my favorite songs came on. Wilco doing Woody Guthrie.
I'd like to rest my heavy head tonight
On a bed of California stars
I'd like to lay my weary bones tonight
On a bed of California stars
“This is the perfect song. Because we’re in California and I can’t see any with my eyes closed but there must be stars out and my head is heavy. You always play the perfect song.”
“It’s the radio, Becc…” Then Eric was guiding me through our bedroom, making sure I didn’t bump into my dresser, and settling me in bed.
“Drink lots of water,” he said. “More than you think you can stand.” He put a tumbler of ice water on my nightstand and I drank like a good patient. The clock flashed 12:38.
“That was so nice of you.” I reached over to give him a sloppy hug, almost toppling us both onto the floor.
“Weren’t nothing. Now lie down,” He wafted the light blue sheet over me like my mom used to when I was little. The fabric floated down on a deliciously cool puff of air.
“Were something,” I said, from under the billowing sheet. “You’re a good person.”
“I don’t want the woman I love drinking and driving. Or getting in a car with someone who shouldn’t be driving.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.” I pulled the sheet down and looked him in the eyes.
“I love you too.”
“Is that your multiple umbrella drinks talking, or you?”
“It’s me talking. I love you. I’ll say it in the morning, too.” I closed my eyes.
And when I woke up at 10, my mouth pasty and my head feeling like it had been skewered like the cherry that garnished my Cobra’s Fang, I remembered.
I curled up next to him and said it the second he opened his eyes. “I love you.”
Bio: Amy has written for The Oregonian, Forbes, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Orange County Register, Wired and other publications. She has an M.A. in Journalism from Stanford University and a B.A. in English from U.C. Berkeley.