Firing a Street Magician

My dad worked in one of those boxy modern buildings made of mirrors. Inside I had to take an elevator to his suite, that’s what it was called, a suite. Things don’t get much fancier than a suite when you’re twelve.

My dad had a secretary named Mona and other employees that I didn’t know what they did. Mona had long dark blonde hair and talked to me a lot. When she wasn’t talking to me, she was talking on the phone.

“…Mom knows that what she did was wrong and I know she’s sorry, because she bought me that Gucci jacket. And sure, I appreciate it, but I would rather she just say sorry. But she doesn’t say sorry, she just buys me something she knows I want. It was great when I was a teenager, I had all the nicest things, but it gets a little old when you’re thirty-five.”

I worked there. I’m not sure what I did all the time. I just know I was there a lot and paid something. I do remember laying papers out on the floor to organize them and I remember making copies. And when I wasn’t busy with my office work I typed stories on the typewriter. Everyone else had a computer and I had a typewriter. I was pretty excited about that. Clickety clack!

One Saturday I walked across the street to Mervyn’s where I bought a pair of jeans for $11 with my very own money. I felt so proud walking back to the office with my new jeans in the store bag. I was a working woman buying my own clothes.

A few months later I realized the jeans were hideous and I hated the way they fit, but the point was how momentous it was going to the store myself and buying my own clothes with my own money.

One time I sat in the front of the office waiting for my dad so we could go home. A white-haired man named Jack sat at a desk across from me. I had only ever seen Jack in passing and we never really spoken. But there I was, waiting for my dad and talking to Jack. Let me rephrase that, I did not talk to Jack, Jack talked to me.

Mona talked a lot, but she would have a conversation, Jack just talked into the air between us while facing me. He told lots of jokes. He had the air of a street magician, desperate to entertain and keep your attention at all costs. At the time I enjoyed Jack, but in retrospect, I may have only been laughing because he so desperately wanted me to. When you are twelve and a grown up cares so much about your opinion they seem really great for a moment. And because a moment was all I knew him for, I appreciated Jack. Perhaps if I had known Jack longer his desperation would begin to wear thin and I might have even found him pathetic, but I wasn’t used to grownups wanting my attention, so at the time I thought he was a very nice man.

Days later I asked my dad about Jack and my dad said he fired the fellow. My kind, soft spoken father was capable of firing someone? And firing someone so nice?

“But he was so nice,” I protested. “He was funny.”

“Maybe he should have spent more time making phone calls than making jokes,” my dad said. “He didn’t fill quotas so I had to fire him.”

“So he doesn’t have a job now?”

“I don’t know what he’s doing now. He wasn’t too happy when I let him go.”

“What is he going to do without money?”

“Look, Liesel,” my dad said, leveling his eyes at me. “I don’t enjoy firing people. But it’s part of my job. And when people don’t do their jobs, I have to fire them. It’s not because I don’t like them or because I’m mean, it’s just part of my job.”

It didn’t take long for my dad to shut down that office and work for himself out of a home office. I asked him if he would ever get an office again and he said, “I don’t like working for people and I don’t like people working for me. I’d rather be on my own.”

Maybe firing people bothered him more than he let on.

An Arctic Oasis

“…And he’s like, ‘And I don’t take American Express!’ and then he hung up on me,” Tami said.

“People are so mean,” Brianna agreed. “Good thing it’s just temporary.”

They looked at me. “Want a job?”

A few days later, I started work. This was in 1996 when you walked into a business to fill out a job application instead of doing it online. So I showed up when the boss would be there. It turned out I didn’t even need to fill out an application.

The boss lady saw that I was a human being with a pulse and she handed me a stack of papers to fill out. I was now an employee.

After writing my birth year as 1996 on all the paperwork, I had to go back with whiteout and fix ten pages of information, then at the ripe age of sixteen, I was gainfully employed in my first job ever.

“Do you accept credit cards?” That was basically all I said for eight hours a day. Most people said yes then told me what credit cards they accepted. I marked little bullets on the computer program as the phone automatically dialed the next number.

Despite what my friends said about the job, I was never yelled at, and most people were nice. It seems that most businesses answer that question as par for the course. I don’t know what kind of people they were calling who yelled at them all day, but they were crappier people than the ones I called.

My second day at work Tami and I carpooled. Her mom dropped us off at noon and my mom would pick us up at six.

The small room we worked in had rows of tables lined with computers. Tami sat on one side of me, and Bob, a guy who leaned in a little too close to his computer for six hours, sat on my other side.

“I’m glad this is a temporary job,” Bob said as we met at the candy machine during break. “It’s pretty repetitive.”

I bought a salted nut roll, the same thing I bought every day at break. “I don’t mind repetition,” I said.

Lisa our boss, constantly took hard steps around the tiny space. She breathed like an angry person trying to find the guilty party. “It’s just until we finish these files,” she would say to anyone listening. “About two to four weeks. Just two to four weeks, then the job is over.”

Tami’s mom drove us to work on my third day. “This is just a temporary job,” Tami told me. “About two to four weeks.”

Yeah, I got that message.

“I can’t wait until it’s over. I kind of hate it.” She sighed and laid her head against the window. “Even if it’s not over in four weeks, I’ll probably quit anyway.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, but I really hadn’t thought about it. I was sixteen, I didn’t plan four weeks ahead. I barely knew what I was doing after work.

We got to work and walked inside. The girl sitting behind the pulpit blocked entry to the rest of the building.

We usually approached the pulpit with a big smile, Pulpit Girl would smile back. We would tell her to call Lisa. Lisa would buzz us in. Today Pulpit Girl didn’t smile and she wouldn’t let us in.

“But we work here,” we told her. “You see us every day.”

“I see a lot of people. You can’t expect me to remember everyone.”

“But every day you act like you know us when you let us in.”

“It’s my job to act like I know you.” She shrugged. “If there is no answer, I can’t let you in.”

“Can I use your phone?” I asked.

“Not this phone,” she said. “Use the one on the wall.”

I called Brianna. “The job is over,” she said.

“Over? But how? Are the files all done?”

“I don’t know. I just know it’s over,” she said. “Lisa called me yesterday and told me not to come in today.”

“Why didn’t she call me?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe she did.”

“Tami didn’t get a call either.”

“I just know the job is over. You don’t have to go back. What a relief, huh? Now you don’t have to quit.”

“Well we’re already here.”

“Oh, sorry. But now you have the rest of the summer to have fun instead of working all the time.”

I broke the news to Tami.

“What!?!” Her shout echoed through the small shiny lobby. “That bitch! Lisa didn’t call me because she doesn’t like me. She never liked me. What a whore! Now what do we do?”

“You can’t use that kind of language around here,” Pulpit Girl said. “You need to leave.”

“What about this kind of language?” Tami stuck her middle finger in the air and I followed her out the door.

The blinding desert heat shocked us after being in the building with its false lighting and false chill.

“It’s hot,” Tami complained, “and I’m pissed. What do we do now?”

“My brother works at Arctic Circle up the road. We could walk there and he could give us a ride home.”

“What time does he get off?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I don’t want to walk to Arctic Circle in hundred degree weather, then just wait around for hours until he gets off.”

“What else should we do?”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll walk to Arctic Circle then.”

So we walked. Now that the job was over, I could admit that maybe I really did hate it all this time. Tami talked about how much she hated Lisa and how she was pissed the job was over.

“But you wanted to quit,” I reminded her.

“Not today,” she said, her forehead glistening. She wiped at it. “I’m so sweaty and disgusting. I don’t even have my sunglasses. How far away is this place?”

Well, it was just up the road, but I was not a meteorologist or whatever those people are called who measure distances. And in the melting heat, it felt like traversing the Sahara. It might have been one mile, or seven. I didn’t know.

It took us an hour and a half of walking along asphalted roads with no sidewalks and no shoulders, under a relentlessly blue sky before we reached Arctic Circle. When we opened those doors the air conditioning hit us with a blast of icicle heaven.

I saw my brother in the back and he came out to meet us. “Can you give us a ride home?” I asked.

“I just got here,” he said, “I’ll be off in four hours though. I could take you home then.” Tami made the big scary eyes at me, like she wanted to slam her head on the counter.

“Can we use your phone?” I asked.

I called my mom. “Why did you walk all that way?” she asked. “Why didn’t you call me earlier? I think it’s over one hundred degrees today.”

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing my sunburned neck. “I guess I thought it would be a fun adventure.”

The following January I got my W2 for $.79. A few nights later I was listening to the radio. The DJ’s were at a club. As a promotion they said to bring in your W2 and whoever had the smallest return would win $100. I would probably win, I thought.