G.J. 麦尔
面试无望。
我一个劲儿地打电话,找门路。当找到一个,把简历寄去的时候,却没有回音。我继而打电话去问。可秘书小姐们,居然能把我甩掉了而我还弄不清楚是怎么回事,还一个劲儿地对着话筒空嚷嚷。
如是者数周,我开始怕了。
一天下午,电话铃响。打电话的男人正是我一直想联系的那位,是拉素·雷诺兹驻亚特兰大办事处的人,名叫路杰·布拉德,专事职业介绍。他正为假日酒店物色一位管公关的副总裁。他看过我的简历,还为此准备了些美词儿。
我该在纽约,还是亚特兰大见他呢？他两边都有办事处。
“听您的,”我说。“我倒倾向于纽约。”
布拉德查看日程表,我便等着。“那么,就星期一在纽约。九点。您先去订房,明天打电话向我秘书落实。”
翌晨,我第一件事就是把航班号码给布拉德的秘书说了,并告诉她我将在星期天傍晚抵达酒店。她给了我拉素·雷诺兹的地址,还提醒我九点到那儿。
抵步时,但见所有的办公室,均如印度大君在伦敦的豪宅般富丽堂皇。墙壁镶饰奢华。喜来登家具,厚地毯,木条镶花地板锃亮。我也锃亮:鞋子、衣领、袖口,无不光锃锃。裤管的烫压痕,笔直得简直可以抽血上来。令我感到欣慰的是,尽管有点紧张,却睡足了七个小时的觉,还在中央公园晨跑了一会儿。
电梯旁有一面镜子,照见一个不似我的我:一个失业的家伙,三年内竟给两家公司逐出门外,如今的心情,与其说迫不及待,毋宁说苦不堪言。
我向接待小姐说我是来见布拉德先生的。她拿带几分揶揄的眼光看了看我,然后回话说布拉德还没来。我便说自己也知道来早了。为了不弄皱身上从千里迢迢之外小心翼翼穿来的西装,我轻轻地、慢慢地躬身,坐在真皮沙发上。我诚惶诚恐地、指不沾油墨地把搁在面前咖啡台上的《华尔街日报》打开,静心等候。
九点钟的时候,接待小姐伸长脖子看了看我,然后拨电话。她声若柔丝地说了一会儿,挂线,重新望着我。
“您当真约了布拉德先生？”
“是的,当真。九点。”
“对不起……不过按布拉德先生的日程表,他今天不在纽约呀。”
当我给亚特兰大打电话时,布拉德的秘书简直和我一样的愕然,这我感觉到。她不明白这是怎么搞的。他们原定下星期一在纽约和我见面。她还以为这已明白无异呢。
在爱德华·孟克的《呐喊》里,画有一人,目无表情,孑然立于路中,双手抱头,张着大口。我希望接下来几个小时走在曼哈顿大街上的我－－看不见,听不到,只等着回拉·瓜地亚－－不是这般模样。但感觉确是这样。回威斯康星州时,我尽管没出声,却一直听见内心在呐喊。
今天是九月十三号星期五,我失业的第九十八日。九十九日以前,我是年销售额逾50亿美元的跨国制造公司凯思公司的通讯副总裁。三年前的我,是麦克道尔·道格拉斯公司(此公司无须介绍)的副总裁。
时至今日已三个多月了,我无须专门要一个闹钟,早上也没有非去不可的地方。
今天下午,为了消磨几个钟头,也为了散散心,以免老想着那响不起来的电话,我打了九个洞的高尔夫球。今年才头一遭,居然找球也这么难。惨白的树叶纷纷散落在球道上,直叫人难以看见白色的小物体。在我被遣散的那天,也就是六月六日,威斯康星州的夏天才开始。我当时预料找工作要好几个月时间,在那段时间里,我可以自由睡懒觉,不结领带,偷得浮生,细细玩味这妩媚之极的北国大地。
如今,秋天伊始,我却依然找不到活儿干,还在一个季度之前那里原地踏步,毫无进展。尽管碰过很多次机会,但次次落空。我再也无缘见路杰·布拉德一面。他告诉我,假日酒店已把其招揽计划压后。
总听到政客们说萧条期已过。想得美。却见越来越多德才兼备的人,平生第一次给人家打发走后,便再也找不到工作。我认识的人多不胜数,干练者有之,老练者有之,大学毕业者有之－－统统失业。一辈子也未见过如此多人失业。我竟说不出一个重新找到工作的。一个也没有。
九十八天了。三个月零一星期。这不算久－－按那条方程式的说法,每拿１万美元的年薪就得找一个月。照此算来,我还早着呐。行政人员“遣散套餐”的通则是:少需者多得。如果兄台的年俸多年来雄踞六位数,且第一位数不再是１的话,则可望获得一年半(说不定更长)全数的薪金及救济金;六位数且第一位为１者,则可拿约一年的,最低为六个月。倘若兄台的工资远远没有六位数,且有按揭和学费之虑,则须小心:您已身陷内部倾轧的边缘,人家正挖空心思,以最省钱的办法把您撵出门外。
在这方面,我属万幸矣。在凯思里,我只做了两年半,找新工作时便获允给予一年的全薪和救济金。等到妻子潘慕撒手不干她那份恶心的工作后,我俩方才知我自己那份已经危危乎。如今她正在保险销售方面奋力求存。我希望她成功。尽管我的遣散套餐不失为定惊灵,可这也是暂时的。教我惊奇不已的是,我们居然已对每月的收支习以为常。钱来钱往,如流水般,来得快去得快:小孩子上学要钱,供房和养车要钱,保险要钱,让国家税务局称心满意也要钱。我不想琢磨这玩意儿要亡我尚需多少时日。
初尝炒鱿鱼的滋味是愕然－－吓得连骨头都在瑟瑟颤抖,方知自己在打工一族中竟然连一席之地都没有;这种感觉还是自小学毕业后到现在的头一遭。鸿运当头了多少个春秋,直教我学会了把运气当成是自己的收获和债务。曾几何时,祸起无定一说于我尚属匪夷所思。走在街上,人仿佛半梦半醒,如置身海底,游离出世,异于常人。我开始做白日梦,梦见自己午间穿过前门时遇见数十人－－旧老板们和旧同事们。正是这些人把我弄至这般田地。他们从家具后跳将出来,大嚷“奇妙！奇妙！”。在我的白日梦里,他们一个个都戴着政党帽子。他们诉说,这纯属试验,万分抱歉,拿我来做试验亦不得已。我赔笑脸道:哦,善始善终呗。
但每至家门,他们却不见踪影。
十三岁那年,我开始干第一份工作,在一间破旧的药房里拖地板,五毛钱一小时。二十年后,我频频换工,直叫双亲难以置信,却拿一份超乎自己想象的收入。我环游世界。我赢得了一定的赞美。我的照片见诸于报章。我乘坐热气球漂浮在诺曼底的田野上空。
到如今,我却突然觉得,要是哪天有谁愿意接我的电话或给我回信,那天就算走运了。
我知道,恐怕在当今美利坚合众国的芸芸众生中没有百分之一,在当今地球球民中没有千分之一,能找到一个堪与我同病相怜的对象。我也知道事实本应如此:试想,替一个境况凄凉到逢星期五要去打高尔夫球的人难过,会是何种感受？试想,替一个给人炒鱿鱼后九十八天还能提取全薪,且尚有数月全薪恭候着他(不管他是否贪恋高枕)的人难过,会是何种感受？
然而我却不断顾影自怜。还想众相识都来可怜我。
我自惭形秽,感慨良多:我怒不可遏,继而凶相毕露;我嫉妒,我害怕－－最大者莫过于自我羞愧。简言之,我羞愧自己失业,羞愧把家弄成这般寒碜,羞愧让自己“行政”了一番后却阵脚大乱。我羞愧自己失败。听到隔壁那家伙早上开小汽车而去的声音,我便羞愧自己还躺在床上。我羞愧周一至周五的下午都耙树叶,因为左邻右里都会知道(好象他们还不知似的)我已无班可上。更惭愧的是,面对这看似有生以来最痛苦的危机,我却软弱无能;而实际上与数以百万计人天天面对的问题相比,这只是区区不便而已。
然而,我妒忌所有仍执我故业的人,妒忌几乎所有有工做的人,我就是妒忌。把我弄到这般田地的人,他们还在支取巨额工资,还在累积巨额退休金,使我眼红,使我愤恨,使我凶相毕露。
我眼红所有不如我多把握机会,而如今却已驶进了无忧港(尽管不诱人)的人。这是我多年前便已扬帆的港:邮局、海军、日报记者。我也眼红那些比我更把握机会的人。他们不愁工资,不愁公司,鸟事不愁。我费尽思量想知道,要是我把握更多的机会,今时今日将是什么样。
如果眼红会致癌的话,那么我活不过星期天。
沉着,我对自己说。别踱方步。找些正经事做。
但我发现我做不了这种事情。
到圣诞节我会是什么样的？
芝加哥一位老兄告诉我,管理咨询公司的巨头“甫斯·雅伦·翰缪敦公司”正物色一位高级公关行政人员。他不知道这事情谁管。我钻到甫斯·雅伦公司在芝加哥办事处的经营伙伴名字,便把简历连随一份详细的说明寄去。我给他们发完传真又寄信。他没有回音。
经深入打探,发现管物色工作的根本不是那经营伙伴,而是甫斯·雅伦公司的副主席,名思乐士·费雷德慕。他的办事处也在芝加哥。我不辞劳苦又修书一封,力使费雷德慕先生视我为才华横溢、久经考验而非末路穷途之人。同样地发完传真又发信,同样地没有回音。
我致电费雷德慕的办公室。他不在城里。我先表明身份,后把寄出的东西描述了一遍,电话另一头的女人则承认东西已收到。我正想弄清楚有否处理时,她却向我明说她没兴趣和我谈下去。
末了,我给费雷德慕发了一封短信,说我某天会在芝加哥,如果他有空见我的话,我可以到他办公室去坐一坐。我说信到他手上须几天时间,其后我会再打电话给他。一想起要再跟那冷冰冰的女人通话,我便如锅上蚂蚁般烦躁不安起来。
他们是何方神圣？他们算老几？曾几何时－－尽管如今有时难以置信－－我自己便是个大忙人。向我汇报的人便有几十个,手头有复杂、庞大的计划要管,不折不扣的危机整天在叫嚷,叫我无法掉以轻心。我要去的地方大把,电话一天响二三十遍－－彻头彻尾的“企业行政人员绮梦”。但从未有人打电话给我而得不到答复的,通常还是蛮迅速的。从未有人给我写信而得不到回复的。一个也没有。从未试过。连臭脾气的人亦然。甚至那些根本亮不出资格证明却坚持要跟我谈这方面工作的人亦然。我那时是不是疯了？
我跟自己讲:疯胜于狂。疯胜于硬心肠。疯与痴胜于思乐士·费雷德慕之流……
这时电话铃响了。电话里的男子自称是纽约的迪克·金瑟。他说他是思乐士·费雷德慕的行政雇员－－思乐士真够朋友！我怎么这么不近人情地看他呢？－－想跟我谈谈甫斯·雅伦公司的工作。他明天要到底特律。我能在机场见他么？
但从我们在机场见面那一刻起, 金瑟的态度便叫人心凉。我们坐在咖啡亭里漫无边际地侃大山时,他也不见得有丝毫的热情。我开始担心他自己没有相中我,这意味着我永远也做不成他献给思乐士·费雷德慕的战利品和礼物.
这会不会造成他把其他人,他自己相中的人选,放在我前头？我是否应先联系他,而不是费雷德慕？当然应该。怎么个联系法？连费雷德慕在用职业“红娘”我都不知道哩。费雷德慕也好,他的秘书也好－－再不然,第一个我想联系的人也好－－他们老早就该告诉我了呀。他们没说,这可不是我的错。
金瑟要我寄一连串介绍信给他在纽约的办事处。完了他又改变主意,说我应该传真才是。未经当事人面试就早早要看介绍信的,在我过往的经历里,实属罕见。金瑟叫我发传真给他一事也叫我愕然。不过,没事儿。说不定说明了他心里面更感兴趣呢,即使他决不会向我索取信用证明。他似乎急于要对我查个水落石出,这倒不会是个坏消息。
底特律之行后数星期,音讯全无。我向介绍信里提及的人打听。都说没接过电话。哪里听过有职业红娘让人家前来应征而不给报销路费的。由于接通知时间短促,我买的机票还贵得离谱。可是要把这钱要回来不容易。我三番四次打电话去问,可就是过不了金瑟秘书那一关,永远得不到一个确切的答复。
到底还是寄来了一个信封,里面没信,却有一张支票。我暗自庆幸没赔了四百块。这便是我收到理查德·金瑟和思乐士·费雷德慕两人的最后音讯。
您要是碰到这种事情的话,我想我都可以说出是什么回事。当一切准备就绪后,他们会首先把您弄出办公室,然后带您到一间房里,让您和人力资源部哪个怪胎在一块儿。
您要是副总裁,那么您的行刑官便也会是副总裁－－说不定还是个高级副总裁。主任对主任,经理对经理,如此类推,几至今时今日还在这美利坚合众国实实在在地为口奔命的蓝领一族。
打您进门那一刻起,便见人资部那怪胎苦形于色。他要叫您明白,他同样是人一个,是良民,他娘亲养大他可不是冲着干这等事儿来的。
(我把这些人唤作“怪胎”是否胡闹？这词儿原指在嘉年华会和卖物会上为图几个钱而做恶心事的人。我倒一点都不觉得胡闹。)
“天哪,” 麦克道尔·道格拉斯公司人力资源部的高级副总裁在炒我之前的十钞钟说道。“我的天,这事情真不好办哪。”他拉长－－应该说是扭曲着脸,坐在椅子上。接着他又晃回我这边来,匆忙埋头做他的工作。
一旦这怪胎发完信息,表演过大慈大悲,便会站起来,绕办公桌兜一圈跑到您跟前来。您便会给他用某种类似磁场的神秘力量吸引住,亦步亦趋。然后你们俩脚尖刺溜刺溜地出了门,穿过大厅,到了一间您很可能从来没有留意过的小办公室。办公室里有一个与您素未谋面的人正等着向您说:不要担心,明天会更好。
有时候,恭候者另有其人,他们就在与您一尺之遥的另外一些小房间里;不过您要是规规矩矩的话,便和他们永不相识。比方说,说不定有公司的律师在场。您是见不到他的,除非您语带不尽善尽美、心有不甘之意。说不定还有保安躲于两旁呢。
在小办公室里恭候您的陌生人,也就是告诉您明天会更好那个,是来自再就业咨询部的怪胎。他是来“指引您顺利过渡”的,薪酬不薄。
这再就业咨询部怪胎准是善类之大乘。此乃他任职的首要原因之一。他会不无惋惜地朝您莞尔一笑。他会说他明白事情来得突然,但他也知道其重要性:很可能这就是更美好人生的开始,于您如此,于您全家尤甚。他自己要是真给人家炒过鱿鱼的话,他便会讲给您听,鼓动您为这种绝妙的结局叫好。要不就把他以前一两个当事人的事情说给您听－－其中一个如何如何成了萨摩亚现今的国王,另一个又如何如何在下周有望获诺贝尔奖提名。他会问您家里一切是否安好,是否觉得难以向尊夫人启齿。您一说不,他就给您一张名片,敦促您稍安毋燥,不过要到他办公室去见他。
“我知道事情到了这种地步一时叫人难以置信,”第一个再就业咨询部来的怪胎对我说道,“不过这千真万确,最终会成为您平生第一快事。”
那怪胎自视为非等闲之辈,是握生杀大权的接生婆,而非善后的从犯。这当然可以理解。把我们带到人世的母亲们,又有多少个替我们作过如此打算的呢。为钱而为之,我们中又有多少个呢。
康涅狄格州有个哥们儿,是我朋友的朋友,告诉我“可棒制品”正要人。我一直等到六点刚过,才给那公司管人力资源的副总裁科第士·马雅士打了个电话。大白天里老早或老晚打电话,不失为上策:那个时候的秘书通常都不上班。今天就奏效: 马雅士自个儿接电话,而且没在我匆忙介绍自己的时候挂机。我说听说他正要一个行政公关。为免再铸成上次与甫斯·雅伦公司打交道的大错,我问能否知道负责物色人选的雇员名字。
“您找斯帝芬·西顿试试看,”他说道。“他在纽约,”随即挂机。在我那本《行政人员招募指南》纽约栏里,有一叫“西顿联营公司”的。老板果然是叫斯帝芬·西顿。当晚,我花了大半夜去写信,写了又改,改了又写。
翌晨,我首先打电话给西顿的办公室要传真号码。然后驱车往“联印”商店把信和简历一起传真过去。接着我把它们一起放进一个牛皮信封里,驱车到邮电局去寄了“急件”。
次晚西顿来电话。我们谈了好长时间。他拿我的简历一行一行核对,问长问短,无所不问。
“这个,”末了他说道,“总的看来印象还是蛮深刻的。表面来说。目前看来是。”
表面来说？难道他以为我是假冒的不成？
他要我形容一下自己的长相。我讷讷而言时,他便问我有多高。我有多重。小胡子还是大胡须。并叫我把照片寄给他。
什么？
我和他说好,将我作品的样品也寄些给他看。
为达至让他觉得我才华横溢、活泼机智而非走投无路的目的,我再次伏案修书至深夜。直至心满意足,我才把信装入信封,连带一摞厚厚的佐证: 公司年报、文章及演辞、之前两份工作的正式材料、领导过的部门图表,以及一份证明一个编辑部由我管了七年后被评为国家一流商业编辑部门的调研报告。我揣着鼓囊囊的黄色信封,早上邮局开门的时候就到了里面。
在接下来那星期初,西顿打电话来说他已收到我的信封,里面的东西大都考查过,觉得“印象非常深刻－－假定经全部核实无误。”
他以为这东西是我捏造出来的?
数日后,我抵家时发现一口信,说西顿要我打电话给他。
“您听我讲,”我找到他后他说道,“我现在在开会,不能讲话。不过您可要知道,您去“可棒”那事我真的很感兴趣。我很快会再联络您的。这次招募绝对(这“绝对”说得特重)没你不成。我会很快再联络您的－－顶多几个小时,不会是几天。您将会再听到我的声音,顶多几个小时,不会是几天。”
冲着西顿这话,我开始看钟。是日,以没第二个电话来告终。次日如此,一周亦然。接下来数周而非数日,亦然。过了好久,我想打电话给他,没找到人,便留下名字和电话号码。
一星期后的一个星期天晚上,潘慕和我抵家时发现电话录音机上有个口信。斯帝芬·西顿在录音里有气没力地说,他现在给我回话来。他留了他家的电话号码,但吩咐我不要在纽约时间十点半(正好就是我听到口信的时间)后打扰他。我苦苦思索一番后,决定:等。
翌晨我打电话去,只留了个口信,一无所获。傍晚时我给他家里打了个电话。他妻子兴高采烈地说他出去一会儿就回,不过很快会给我回电。
他没有回电。再也没有。终于,过了好多个星期之后,他从办公室寄来一封信。信里是一则消息的复印件,称“可棒制品公司”已委任了一名新的通讯部副总裁。
夺魁者是芝加哥人。我认得他的名字。此人正是首先告诉我“可棒”找人那家伙。
世界真细。
结局用不着成其为我生平之第一快事。只要不是大难临头,我便心满意足,感激涕零。只要给我一份新工作聊可屈就,日子不至于过得颠三倒四,妻儿不至于伤心不绝。果真如此－－我敢发誓－－我当跪地谢恩矣。
不过,我再三考虑的,不是那激动人心的新机遇或仍未到来之快事。
我考虑的是博比·乔斯* 。
博比·乔斯住我隔壁时我还小。他在中学里比我高一年级。他是典型的爱尔兰男子:高大英俊,发黑,肤白如雪－－体形健美,为人牛气,说话永远尖酸刻薄。我一说起他,总免不了在脑里浮现他那嘴嚼口香糖,一副狗奴才似的笑容。他给我们示范如何在哪怕穿着黑袍法衣和白袍法衣的场合,都能照样冷若冰霜。我相信他做弥撒助祭时是不嚼口香糖的,只是很容易便这样想他。
中学毕业三十年后,有一次在商业区吃午饭,才发现和我邻桌者原来又是一个老邻居－－占美·莫纳罕。占美比博比·乔斯大几年级,从而也比我大几年级。不过他向来友善,哪怕对我们这些小鬼也一样。我见他时是一家保险公司的广告部经理。只见他形容枯槁,一副不善观察世情的眼睛显露着疲态,活脱脱一个日子过得并不轻松的正经人。午宴毕,我们正朝大门走去的时候,他不知怎的提起了博比·乔斯,说他如何如何潦倒,事情如何如何发生等等。
这我哪能放过,非问不可。博比做了会计,占美说,在同一间公司干了几十年后才失业。找了一年工作不获,博比便自杀了。他是从联合大道高架桥上跳到旧铁路轨上摔死的。那里处于我们区的北边,是我们做学童时在一块儿的地方。
我不知道事情发生在什么季节。但心里觉得是在一个阴冷的冬日,就如《码头工人》上见的镜头那样:衣服领子不管黑的白的全穿成往上翻起。眼前浮现出一个元气耗尽的汉子,翻过高架桥上坚固的栏杆跳下的情景,但无法把他和记忆中的美少年扯在一块儿。
博比·乔斯,孩子们的无冕之王,竟因一年没活干而死去。
要是说再就业咨询部像什么东西的话,那很可能就是炼狱了。您不想去。您也去不了,只要您善良一点儿或聪明一点儿或幸运一点的话。去那儿唯一可取之处是尽一切办法出来。而残酷的事实却叫您瞠目结舌,不敢相信。那便是,您其实已经死去。
您之所以来到再就业咨询部,是因为您的上任老板花了钱要您来。进来这里的代价不薄,标准是阁下一个半月的工资。阁下得到了一块工作空间,有办公台有电话还有一壶咖啡,有文秘和各种办公设备供您差遣,还有少得可怜托辞说图书馆的东西供您使用。您和别人共享接待员的服务。接待员接电话时会说“行政办”,要是阁下运气好来了口信,还会帮您把它记下来。不管中用与否,阁下自己委任的顾问会向您忠告点什么,鼓鼓气,壮壮胆。
您可以每天,每两天,每周或每月去一趟再就业咨询部。这取决于您的决心有多大,或事情有多无奈。如果没别的话,再就业咨询部会给您找个借口,打发您一大早穿上白衬衣,结好领带,开车出门而去,省得您成天穿着睡衣,省得您慢慢地沦为植物人。
要是您动起真格儿要出这炼狱的话,顾问们会告诉您说,你得打电话给所有认识的人－－完了还有一大摞不认识的。
“约翰逊先生吗？约翰逊先生,我叫杰里·麦雅,是威斯康星凯思公司管通讯的副总裁。您的名字是合并并合公司的祖·史密夫告诉我的。大约一星期前我给您写过一封信,我想现在已经到您手上了吧。正如我在信中所说,我的饭碗有点儿那个,我很想从中探出个新道道儿来。不知道您有没有听说过哪儿有门道儿,供我弄个明白。”
从前是凯思的保安部主任,如今成了我在再就业咨询部里最要好的德福,不知从哪儿弄到一份全美所有公司保安主任的名单复印件。他天天翻,时时翻,页页看,条条找,拨号讲话,拨号讲话,渐渐地竟象勘探者掏金似地积累了一大堆线索。这些线索迄今未给他牵成哪怕一次的面试机会。问题呢,我想是他五十早出头了吧。不过他从不气馁。尽管尖酸刻薄的笑话他也说了不少,可就是不发牢骚,甚至从不怠工。
在再就业咨询部里,您要是知道什么合适自己的话,尽管逼自己极力效法德福好了。尽管洗耳恭听顾问们讲述发生在像您这样人身上的奇迹。他们的信写完一封接一封,电话打完一个接一个,却全都白搭。直到有一天－－绝妙之奇迹出现了－－他们梦寐以求的工作竟自个儿向他们投怀送抱来了。最重要的是,要逼自己把名单钻通钻透,然后抠多一些名字出来。如今美国有数百家职业介绍所,成千上万个职业红娘各自为政。再就业咨询部里有一条规矩:要是您半年内没专门给哪个“红娘”专家寄过简历的话,是时候再寄了;要是您六月份寄了一千份,到十二月份还没有工作的话,再寄可也。这足够诸位忙一辈子。至于意义不意义嘛,不就是要还债给……唷,您还有别的事儿做吗？
于是乎您硬着头皮拿起电话来打。但除非鸿运当头或者职业市场大有起色,否则您会发现,可能寄了五百份简历连带五百封定制邮简,却得不到一个实质的答复－－不外乎是预先印在明信片上千篇一律的谢辞。
不消一会儿,您就觉得再想些人的号码来打变得很困难,打第三第四遍更是难上加难。您会发现渐渐地亡友中有些不再经常出现在脑海里。有些则消失得无影无踪,留存在脑海里的是他们讲过的苦涩笑话:要么做了保安员,要么北迁到哪个地方,谁的女婿在那儿打听到有一份工是开车送货什么的。您想知道他们到底出了什么事儿,但骨子里却不想去探过究竟。
您每周都会发现,信心正从回流的人群眼中一点一滴地溜走;不消多久,他们便流露出好像惧怕生活的神色来。您自忖这种变化定会原原本本地再现在自己的眼里。然后就想脚不出门睡衣也不脱。可您就是不敢。
华可乐夫·哈维尔曰:现代社会是靠恐惧－－多半是恐惧失败－－来维系的,我们之所以把事情堆积起来,是为了给自己壮胆:担心大可不必,折衷亦非枉然。哈维尔相信,正是恐惧驱使我们接受腐败和虚假,佯装一个非我。
卒之,我们抛弃了几乎一切重要的东西后,到头来却拿自己拥有的东西来论资排辈。久而久之,我们的幻想力发生蜕变,乃至于靓屋靓车竟成了至高无上、攸关紧要的目标。我们摒弃希望,殊不知,此举我们早已为之。
友人中,有戴劳力士金表,穿克什米尔羊毛休闲外套的。可当您和他们混熟了以后,方知道原来他们自视生命为恐惧、贪婪和失望的孽种。无怪乎,他们这些住避暑山庄,开宝马车的人当中,原来有这么多暗地里望眼欲穿都想退休。我看,他们视退休为返回起步点,回归故我的最后一次机会。然而,往往到了退休时,他们却空虚得再也记不起自己的昔日。他们心目中的成就感早已沦为一星期打六天高尔夫球了。
冬
有朋友今天对我说,他的工作已彻底没戏,正要把房子出售。此公五十未到,手上有一张金漆的简历,曾在两家亿元企业里做过行政副总裁。他有一个工程师学位和一个商业管理硕士学位,是哈佛商科学校“高级管理课程”的毕业生。我与他紧密共事过两年,丝毫不察他有半点平庸或缺陷。如今他已失业一年多,向我诉苦说他的希望似乎一月比一月渺茫。在既无工作机会,又无所事事的情况下,他正寻机会在什么地方买间小公司什么的。他说,总是东家看完看西家,西家不比东家大。
“到底要折腾到什么时候呀？”他一面笑着问。“让我开间麦当劳不成？”
咦,说不定呢。
我把每星期《华尔街日报》上《特许专营绝顶好机会》广告栏的斩获拿来看,却怎么也找不到一点儿东西,打得动我的心去博它一回。多半不是与快餐业和打一枪换一个点的加油站有关,便是与印刷业和复印行业有关。大多数广告干脆直截了当地向被解职的行政人员呼叫:“苦恼？”、“身系金色降落伞正择地而降？”
和好多美国人一样,我也知道有人老早买下了麦当劳的特许专营权,然后发了大财。但我同样知道,有数以百计的人干这行干到血本无归。在全美一片聒耳的特许专营声中,我确信会有那么一两种,能为那么几个精明或者幸运的盲头苍蝇赚一大笔。我同样相信,我的命中率不会比在人行道上玩杯中寻豆的把戏儿,所能找到豆豆的机会高。
但呼声依然,蓦地竟生出道理来:要是没人给您活儿干,就自个儿买一个呗。
我开始向“邮箱服务公司”打听。原来花它个十万八万,您就可以开个店,让人家把东西拿来打包,然后运走。一旦有了这些客人,就可以向他们售卖圆珠笔、贺卡、邮政汇票等,还给他们用您的复印机,收他们的钱。这可是全国发展势头最大的特许专营活动之一呀。
潘慕对此恨之入骨。我问她是否有什么更好的主意。话题一拉开,两人就争得面红耳赤。本地“邮箱服务公司”营业代表给了我一份附近特许专营业主的名单。我开始利用星期六开着车挨店挨户地和业主们洽谈。
在离西北大学一个街口远的商业区伊繁顺,我见到一个生意明显做得正红火的女店主。那店的位置特好:既为庞大的大学住宅区,又是收入不菲的郊区,是做生意的旺地。这般好地方,早在几年前就给人抢得一个不漏。
在惠顿,一个友善的胖男子对我说,是的,开一间?邮箱服务?店保证能让您过上好日子。总有那么一天。要是您甘愿苦干和负债一段日子的话。“当然罗,要是您想赚个三四万一年的话,”他笑口吟吟道。“那恐怕是另一回事喽。”
在一个新市郊,有一排商铺,我遇到了一个开?邮箱服务?的业主。他个子瘦瘦,头光光,独个儿守着空店,忧心忡忡。我把意图给他说了后,他就带我到柜台后面,拿一张椅子给我坐,自己坐在办公桌前。他告诉我如何给曾在那儿当过会计的公司解职,如何另谋职业失败,又如何费了多大的劲,才说服妻子把积攒下来的退休金给他买了一份工作。
我问他,我要是干这个等两年就可以自我维持,这样估计客不客观,他竟扑簌扑簌地落泪－－确切地,已开始泣不成声。他从口袋里拖出一张手帕来擦眼。
“对不起,”他说道,“对不起。马上就好了。”
踏足商界之前,我曾做过许多方面的工作:海军官员、报纸记者、公关顾问等。想回头,这些都不如在阿拉斯加一兽皮公司刮海豹皮“捞油水”那份好。平心而论,那是我所做过的最辛苦的活儿,血淋淋,油乎乎,臭烘烘。五个小时下来,直叫我们当中最硬的也给累垮。那工作还要求我们在一个不毛之岛住上数月。那里的太阳简直永远拨不开云层,而且,没商店,没电影,没电视,没啤酒,没妞儿,甚至连一台录象机也没有。
怃今追昔,我看阿拉斯加那份工的妙处在于:没有屁话。没政治,没惺惺作态。我们的任务是尽快处理完手头上的海豹皮,但不能损其秋毫。海豹皮一到,我们便像凶徒似地干起来,拿钝刀朝顽强组织捅去,直捅至双手流血方休。但干完以后,没人会算计我们会团团转来装忙,或装着很想再要多些来干。
在成年后的头十年光景里,我历经研究生院、海军和越战,以及第一份成年文职工作,渐次惯于打领带和干点儿不光是为两个钱的事儿。但始终连白日做梦都想着的是,自由。直至年逾三十,我还念念不忘着工作是对本应至真至纯的我的干预和非法进入。
久而久之,如秒针无意义地颤动般,一步一步乃至千步万步地,我们屈服了。一点一滴地,我们从顽劣不羁的小雄驹变成了精于世故、温驯听话的辕马。神差鬼使地,我们竟不但接受这挽具而且没有了它不行。一旦失去了,便大为不安,大为害怕。
一想到自己做过的许多工作,少有愉快感和满足感,我便越发觉得奇怪:每晨醒来,悟知自己无班可上,无人恭候,竟痛苦不堪。想到这里我便睁眼,每每教我心如刀割。当年还是小雄驹的我,惊笼头,踢缰绳,万万没有想到此等自由今天竟是何等痛苦。
与朋友闲谈时,我间或会说也许永远都不会另寻公司活儿干。接下来我总会说(希望是妄言)假如果然如此,也真的没什么大不了。这话直至最近还只是狂言而已。这是我无心之说,倒不是真的相信这种事情会发生。如今我信了。如今不但看似可能,而且大有可能。而且我还觉得这非同小可。
我有几个最敬重的朋友已经向我说了,希望我永远不要重返商界。他们的建议是:写作、教书。我总免不了回复说,很可能到头来会照他们说的办。可在做最后决定之前,我又说,我得让自己细看一下一切可取的办法。我说,我也得仔细看看从商的可行性,因为责任使然。
挑来挑去,最后还是挑了“责任”一词,觉得它在这里特好。它似乎暗示了尽管我有许多选择,尽管我知道在学术界或写作界(那里不仅可以任由我与人类分享我的智慧,而且到时还可以穿着轻便鞋和长袖汗衫)里占个份儿不失为正确之举,但我也得记住对妻儿等应尽的义务。
假若不做这点暗示,无异于承认了目前根本没有选择余地,承认了事实上我会抓住第一个牢靠的职业机会不放,而不管其是重司防卫之职,抑或重操代理之事,抑或重返东耶稣会学院。可我似乎不谙这种真诚。我无法承认感到多么赤裸,多么无助,无法承认要是谁给再我一次机会投身这为竞选一掷千金的大款王国,我便会象肌肠辘辘的乞丐扑向一张一元钞票那样,扑将过去。
我给各种有门儿的信建立一套档案。每种所占的页数都不少:从报纸剪下来的广告、正式的工作材料(找到的话)、电话会谈的书面述要、寄给“红娘”们的信件副本和他们的回复(要是有的话)。在最初几个星期里,档案越积越多,我把它们摆在睡房的咖啡台上,排成一列,一个叠一个地让名字排成一栏。
起初还挺气派的:菲利浦·莫利司、DEC、假日酒店、郎甫兰克、亚美利加技术、可棒、伊姆萨勒集团、联合碳化钙。间间都是有钱的大公司。似乎教人难以相信,没可能连一家意思意思都没有。
从那以后, 便如夏叶般凋谢得七零八落,气派不起来了。渐渐地－－要么是有人告诉我,要么是自己琢磨透了不去和人家角逐这份或者那份工－－我把档案搬至地窖底下一个纸箱里。我把这箱子唤作“死信部”。
从那以后,我见到招聘广告上的有合我资格的－－实话实说,超资格到令我啼笑皆非－－就写信应征。如今,活线索的档案果然显出前所未有的鼓囊囊样来了。说到那工种,哼,要是在六、七、八月呀,我才瞧不上眼呢。
我在《圣路易速递》上看到一条广告招聘通讯部经理,公司名叫“全国化肥溶液协会”什么来的。我真去面试了。正好趁机去圣路易看望父母亲,反正也找不到别的借口。左盼右盼,不就是想找一份活儿干,免得到时硬着头皮向他们说自己失业嘛。
我还有一套档案。里面有给“全美律师协会”做杂志编辑的;有无名公司登广告招聘公关主任的(我给这标上“无头档案”,因为无从知晓是什么公司);有三间公关服务公司需要找人填补职位空缺,但该职位和我十六年前离开那个相比望尘莫及的;有地点在“俄亥俄都柏林”,看来是通过某种渠道做天然气生意却又不在广告上明说的;有扎根华盛顿、名为N.R.E.C.A.协会的(我没费神去探究这首字母缩写是什么意思便写信去,足证我兴趣之盎然);有波士顿大学登广告招聘公关主任的;有哥伦比亚大学出版社聘请营业代表,主管由伊利诺斯州至得克萨斯州的一大片区域,有车,年薪不少于三万美金的。
我写信应征这种广告,其中一个动机是图个良好的感觉,看看何种反应能促成面试,何种不能。答案嘛,到目前为止,似乎经过百般努力都没能让我去面试过一次。
当我为写了应聘信却得不到回音而发起牢骚来的时候,潘慕便说我荒唐。她说,像您这样突出的人,人家根本就没打算认真看上一回。我相信她没说错。那好,我该怎么办？坐等人家来电说有份工让我做“值得”不成？那恐怕要等一辈子,说实在的。到其时,我恐怕都成了《伟大前程》里夏惠桑小姐的当代版－－年复一年地坐观蜘蛛在我的电话上大结其网喽。
到了圣路易,我第一件事就是绕了一大圈去了客客晤,我和潘慕住了二十年的市郊。有无名士替我把前门和窗板漆上了新颜色。尽管挺好看,却叫我恶心。
到双亲家时,妈妈一如往常地迎出门来。爸爸则像平时那样,坐在电视机前的椅子上不动。他刚做完一个疗程的辐射治疗。两老已届耋耄之年,残弱之躯看上去跟羊皮纸造的无异。
我下了决心,非告诉他们不可。否则,我怕他们会从“家庭路透社”听到点什么。不管消息从哪儿来,都会把他们吓坏的。这可是两个早年饱尝“大萧条”折磨之苦的人哪。他们住的小屋,几十年前就还清了债项,现靠领取社会救济金和邮政怃恤金,外加每月从“货车联会”拿一点寒酸的补助－－看来,用尽一切办法后,总算平安无事地熬了过来。但我心里明白,发生在我身上的事情,传到他们耳朵里的话,定会给那从未痊愈的、潜伏在心灵深处的旧患以重创。从我这里听到－－姑莫论我以何种方法安抚他们－－总比在与哪位表亲闲聊中得知好。
我从六月份开始一直误导着他们,诚惶诚恐地,像平常那样每一两个星期给他们打一次电话,却佯装是从办公室里打的。父亲看报是很认真的,手上的日报每页都看,巨细无遗,学究得很。他对经济情况的了解比我希望他知道的多得多,偶然会问问我情况怎么样。前不久,我一打电话给他他就问,最近还给我寄来一张关于凯思(他以为我还在那里工作)财政问题日益严重的剪报。文章说该公司损失惨重并大量裁员。“这事儿叫人伤心哪,”他用觳悚的手在信中劈头就写道。这手竟和我记忆中那只美丽的手如此不同。
吃完晚饭后过了半个小时,我走进那曾一度是我睡房的、小之又小的房间－－如今差点儿放不下原有的三张椅子、一台缝纫机和被他们搬来靠墙放着的索尼大电视。两人正在看一出系列单元喜剧。我便坐下来翻报纸。
屋子实在是小,由于浸淫着两人的习性,看上去竟似一个和他们一起长大的贝壳。我记不起当初我们四人是怎么住得进去的。我坐等机会发送一则跟从前不一样的消息。屋子四壁尽是照片。有双亲结婚那天在内祖父母的前院里拍的:两人身上穿的不是白色长裙和晨礼服,倒像是要去什么高级写字楼上班似的。有我和姐姐的:我当时正读大学四年级,紧束一条细长的领带,短发,油亮欲滴;姐姐戴着白帽子,头发拿喷发胶梳得高耸挺直,一副护士学校刚毕业的打扮。还有祖母们和祖父们的,有父母亲的孙子孙女的。相框里绣了些口号。
系列单元喜剧结束,父亲摁了一下手上的遥控器,关掉声音。
“我看报纸说,”我说道,“‘西南贝尔’要临时解雇1500人哪。”
“是呀,”父亲说道,“‘红蓓蕾’还要关掉那个有650个工人的厂呢。这种事情像是天天都有似的。您那儿怎么样？”
“不怎么好,说真的。老实说,生意倒霉得见鬼。”有一阵子,大家都不吱声。双亲直溜溜地看着那无声的汽车广告。“这事情我好久就想跟你们讲了。”
两人转向我,眼睛瞪得老大,一动不动地,像一对公鹿和母鹿突然嗅到美洲豹的味儿似的。
“我是说,我失业了。”两人的眼睛瞪得似乎更大。我打住了,感觉好像刚才招认自己拿斧头砍了人似的。由于没人倒地,我便继续讲下去。我滔滔不绝地讲。我把导致J.I. 凯思公司濒临倒闭的问题一一端了出来:从销售下降后仍拍板让装配线机器隆隆,到损失惨重,到总裁不明所以地离去,到两位行政副总裁突然被解雇,继而越来越多职位乃至整个部门被解除。末了,再讲到我的职位也被列入除名名单之上。
“我当时就知道不对劲,”父亲说道。“才给您寄那篇文章。”
我说我还有工资领,还可领下去相当长一段时间,哪怕到领薪水的支票不来时我还失业,也决不会穷困潦倒。我说起从未说过的、有关钱的事情。不太多,但比往常闭口不谈多得多。我的办法主要是重明轻暗。我只字不提金额。那每月都从我们支票户口流走,年复一年的金额,有时候我也觉得近乎匪夷所思。要是说具体了,他们会觉得我一定是在开玩笑。要不,准叫他们拿冰袋敷头,卧床不起。
他们似乎满意我所说的。注意力又游回到电视上去。万事大吉－－就除了我似乎还如谈话当初那样孤独外。如今双亲知道,这神奇小子尽管失业却不愁应付不来。他们哪里晓得这神奇小子是何种感受。我也不甚了了他们有何担心。
原定要给化肥溶液协会那哥们儿面试的,结果成了两日游。当头的叫吉美·贝洛德,从前是个农夫,为人聪明伶俐,心直口快,一开始便打趣地跟我说他如何如何在八十年代初农业崩溃中砸了锅,又如何如何获委任做了一阵子农业部的官儿,又如何如何最终选择了现今这份职业,回到了密苏里。不过,显然他干得开心,而且在乎这份工。他似乎乐于跟我聊。看来,他真拿我当那么一回事呢。
不幸的是,有我候补份儿那职位,大抵是给一份专为液体化肥服务的杂志做些编写的工作。这主题当然没有什么不光彩的地方;再说,我之前几个月的经历,无疑增加了我对类化肥物的认知。不过,确实有点荒唐的味道。
第一天,贝洛德安排了三人带我出去吃午饭。其中一个主职做广告推销的,向我谈起了他最近求职时如何历尽艰辛。
我去见了该协会主管招募新丁的负责人后,方知他也是那年年头给一家濒临倒闭的黄豆协会解雇的。接着,我见了一个也是初到的员工律师。他五十开外,办公台后面的窗台上放着一家老少的照片。他竟向我讲述了自己投资经营一连串平价汽油站失败的经过－－这种与人说近祸的人,其坦率之情教我不由地惊讶起来。我问(不知是否有权)他是否打算与化肥协会长相厮守下去。大概不会,他说道。“别搞错。这可是块好地方哪。人好哇。可就是给的钱不够我长期用。我之所以没有拒绝,是因为我当时正需要活儿干。需要得不行”。他说的时候笑了笑。
我没向他说我明白这种感受。明摆着,这地方整个儿就是难民大荟萃之地嘛。似乎,我们正朝一个土生难民国进化。
第二天临结束时,贝洛德把我带返办公室,谈最后一次的话。他阐述了杂志对其操作的重要性。万一订数或广告收入严重下降,协会便会整个儿瘫痪。首要问题是杂志要有趣味性,要向靠液体化肥谋生的人传递些真正有价值的东西。这与公司内部的刊物有很大的不同。这是真的。 贝洛德说,他相信我可以给杂志以才气和干练。不过他也有顾虑:我从未办过这类型的刊物,能否办得好,又能否从报到那天做起？学习期呢,他可等不起。
我告诉他我认为从第一天做起没问题,不过没有力争。我尽管喜欢这人,但心里明白,哪怕他给我干,恐怕也不会接受。恐怕不应接受,因为我几乎可以肯定,我到时会有心不在焉的感觉,从而会因减薪而心生怨恨。
几天后的一个早上,他打电话来,说已经找到了一个有多年办杂志经验而且办的杂志与化肥协会的几乎一模一样的应征者。“我觉得没理由不请他,”他说道。我举脚赞成,连忙再次道谢。他要我下一次不管到哪儿干都跟他说一声,我也当场答允。我一挂线,就觉得如释重负。见工不成,意味着我无须面对一份显然给谁干都不合适的工作而不知取舍,大伤脑筋,无须占用了这位好人两天时间后,却要硬着头皮拒绝他的好意。
滑稽的是,吃了人闭门羹心里还美滋滋的。滑稽的是,与贝洛德他们共度了两天,却仿佛觉得没有虚度光阴。
有一回,我差点儿去了读法律。当时,我参加了法律学校入学考试,自己准备了几门政治学课程。我尽管觉得课程没意思,却还是给多家法律学校写信索取申请表。不过,我确实不想做一行,几年后有机会亲眼目睹律师工作时,也没有难过没有做他们这一行。
然而,要是我当初坚持到底的话,如今也许就可以安心执业,不怕给人夺走饭碗。
我之所以没去成读法律,是因为当时获得了一份做英语研究工作的奖学金。结果我半途而废,却花了一年的时间,拿了一个文科硕士学位。因为这似乎比工作或读法律更有意思;再者,有机会看看学术之地是否是我呆的地方(很快就断定不是)。从研究生学校出来之后,为了逃避即时的兵役,我去了当海军,从而进了预备军官学校,随一艘驱逐舰沿越南海岸游弋了一年半,最后一年,则在加利福尼亚州南部一个海军补给站里百无聊赖地度过。
海军出来后的第一份工作挺含糊－－名曰“行政编辑”,事实上既不那么行政也不那么编辑－－任职于得梅因的“美丽德福出版社”。美丽德福是个庞大的兵团,每月发行的《靓屋靓花园》多如牛毛,《大收获》亦不胜其数,还有一系列赚钱的烹饪书和不求人书籍,以及其它形式的零售印刷品。
我于残旧的砖架结构总部大楼深处有一斗室,但无甚可为。这特别叫人气炸,因为我自视终于走出校园,脱下戎装,迈进了职业生涯的门槛。我想马上动手干。我想做点儿事情。受人钱财而无所事事,感觉好像出卖了人家。
美丽德福里的人通通都闷得发疯。渐渐地,我学会了把同僚分成两组。其中一组,也是最大的一组,最热心。一个个死心踏地地要跟着我这位不苟言笑的行政人员,不管阴晴,不分春夏。他们和大家一样无所事事,却偏装出一副不断受到挑战的样子。要认出这些人来不难:就其工作岗位之单调泛味,加以旁敲侧击,调侃揶揄,则表情呆滞且略带几分懊恼者便是。
渐渐地,我在公司里到处结识了一小撮人。他们对美丽德福的看法和我一样,哪怕赔了饭碗也敢说。终于,我们几个形成了一个秘密的小圈子,早午相聚于大厦最底层遥不可望的一块空旷地。那里空荡荡,黑黢黢,堆放着一大卷一大卷屋子般大小的纸,如一列列巨大的褐色断崖。奇怪的是,在深处一个没灯罩的灯泡底下,我们竟发现了一个汽水机和一张野餐用的桌子以及几张椅子。似乎除了我们之外谁也没有用过这些东西。有时候我们一呆便是几个小时,调侃上面办公王国正发生或不正发生的事情,扯扯电影、书籍什么的。似乎从来没人牵挂着我们。
不到一年,我们全都撒手不干了。我是第一个走的,辞工盖因自认成年后的第一份活儿异常倒霉。自揣美丽德福非走火入魔不可,哪儿都能找到更多、更有趣的事做和无须天天麻醉自己上班的人。总的说来,我确实在别处找到了更好的。总的说来,我发现了劳动人民寻找了一个多世纪的东西:大官僚机构, 不管哪里,不管是公司抑或政府部门,不外乎是生命的一种死亡形式罢了。
我,依然是我。巴望上法律学校读书,巴望呆在美丽德福的,是我;多年来洋洋自得要法律学校见鬼去,要美丽德福见鬼去的,还是我－－如今却双手抱头,瑟缩于一角,独自颤抖。
春
首批绿头野鸭和加拿大鹅的身影,经已出现在威斯康星州。工作却比去年夏天更加没有着落。生日已过,于是乎,又老了一年,这块肉在行政市场上又掉价了。手上的专业资格证书,每过一月便少一点儿新鲜味儿。
我可以到货车司机培训学校去学开巨型拖拉大货车呀。可以拉着一大车货,挨着海岸线来回穿梭呀。说不定最后自己还买他一辆柴油车开呢。
又说不定邻居詹姆会给我一份工作,让我在他开的小空气过滤网厂里干呢。他不是成天说找不到一个聊可称职却又信得过的人嘛。我就是聊可称职的呀。一年下来,税后工资大概抵不了我的房屋税多少吧,但总比没活干好哇。还会使我成为本地传奇人物哩:昔日携公文包的,在其人生之旅的最后二十年里,把过滤片A插进B槽,一分钟能插十七次,一周干四十个小时。
照这么说,我还可以到麦当劳到汉堡王到肯德基去站柜台呀。到其时,我就戴顶小纸帽惶惶然随时做好侍候人的准备。
还有一个白日梦就是,干脆工也不找,头也不剪,不去或不做任何可能招来多花五毛钱的地方或事情。决不买新衣,不再做车主,变院子为菜园厨房为罐头厂。慢慢地,我就衍变成威斯康星州丽新市的疯老头,就这当儿,屋子震天价响地往里坍塌下去。等到真的老了,钱也用光了,就拿一支真似的玩具枪,执其持械行劫之业。要是给人抓到了,也一点不悲哀:人家会把我安置于一处有暖床爽铺、每天有免费餐供应的地方。
衣阿华有间叫“先锋高产国际”的公司,乃全世界生产种子之类东西的一流公司,正物色一位和我差不多的人。在该公司“红娘”格列格·葛烙德于芝加哥的办事处,我把例牌十二分赏心悦目、万分怡情养性的生平伟绩呈上。内述一与我同名的人不断进取,旗帜鲜明地迎接了一个又一个的挑战,赢得了一个又一个的胜利。葛烙德则对我说,其当事人正想物色一个球员和一个不折不扣的战略家,诸如此类,尽是公司说的例话,就像按传统仪式表演的土风舞－－一种编完后就早早给人忘掉是谁编的东西。
幸亏在凯思那段日子使我成了一名合格的农活老手。尽管凯思不是种子公司,但它生产农机产品。这便足以让我和衣冠楚楚的都市老油条划清界线了。此外,我曾经在得梅因也就是先锋总部的所在地呆过,这似乎也有点帮助。临走前,葛烙德随口说了一句,说我对口对得“简直离了谱儿”。这犹如写在空中的豪言壮语,使我心头的希望之火,由暗变橙黄。
不久,我得知先锋公司要派遣一个三人代表团来芝加哥与我见面。葛烙德说,我是应征者中论资历论阅历最深、最广、最教人难忘的。他的话儿又一次洒满了空中。星星之火越烧越红,开始翩翩起舞。
显而易见,就算我要了这份工,它也不真见得给我的简历增光。这主任衔头,是我过去苦心经营了十年的平原高地上一个低无可低的起步点。这我倒无所谓,可这无异于是给已经黯然的工作履历抹黑呀。更遭的是,我一旦考虑起来,也难免会给先锋公司本身添麻烦。公司及其“红娘”向来动辄怀疑乐意屈就之人。哪怕在今时今日,于被解散者、被裁掉者以及空前的行政人员失业大军中,人们还是一味纳闷: 那人下台阶啦,出了什么事呀?尽管工资问题没怎么说,恐怕我也得再下一级。好,我又心甘情愿。不过,看样子人家还是要问哪。
我正忙于搜集有关先锋公司的资料时,其它工作却径自找上门来。几个月前寄出的简历,一下子开了花,结了果。一位“红娘”从纽约打来电话,问我有无兴趣研究研究一家名为“第一金融集团”的保险公司副总裁一位的空缺。
我在一则通讯上看到,左右美国天主教政策并以华盛顿为基地的“美国天主教联会”,正物色一位传媒关系部主任。碰巧,我就是对宗教问题感兴趣的天主教徒。给美国天主教联会处理传媒关系,对于我这种人来说是挺有意思的。我想像自己像蜕蛇皮似地把“行政人员”的牌号摘下,去小斗室而不是大办公室上班,身穿格子衬衣,脚著Hush Puppies休闲鞋。我便把简历寄去。
一“红娘”从康涅狄格州打来电话,说他正给纽约市公用电业公司“联合爱迪生”物色一位通讯部主任。不久,他出差到芝加哥,我们便吃早餐见了面。然后他的合伙人顺道经过芝加哥时,我又跟他共进早餐。两人给我的印象均是,我旋即有望被邀与曼赫顿的“联爱”老大会面。
一下子冒出这么多事情,而且件件看来都是实打实的,犹如一张蜘蛛网,问题错综复杂。
和先锋一样,以得梅因为基地的第一金融集团,也是小打小闹的公司,在世上一点也不起眼。还是一家保险公司呢。一个跟保险公司打过好多交道的朋友说,保险公司这行,一言以蔽之:“死脑”是也。
但第一(我赶快点化自己,用了该公司出版物上千篇一律的、毕恭毕敬的做法:把“第一”二字加大加粗。)强壮、健康、老练。据说,一旦受雇,成了那里的人,便终生免炒。这是没得说的。有理由希冀,全家人这么狼狈、折腾了几年后,也许这叫人昏昏欲睡的得梅因正中下怀。
毫无疑问。先锋和第一正是我梦寐以求的东西。
果真如此,又何以见得我真对?联爱?有意思呢？它的总部不单在纽约,而且还在曼赫顿－－猛兽心脏之中心地带呀。它是公用事业公司,会把我卷入无休止的冲突和扯皮之中:什么用电率啦,污染啦,足抵一台铺张扬厉的娱乐盛典。这通通处于普天之下最疯狂的媒介马戏团的中心地带呀。
衣阿华与?联爱?,焉可兼爱？
不费吹灰之力,说实在的,?联爱?可以让我回复昔日的大红大紫－－票子大,员工大,预算大,无所不大。
我过去一向喜欢过大红大紫的日子。要说服自己?联爱?正是我梦寐以求的东西,不成问题。
但如果?联爱?正是梦寐以求的东西,又可以见得我对美国天主教联会有意思呢？
还是不成问题。美国天主教联会也许,我想,会给我干些真值得干的活儿呢。要企业动真格,这可是绝无仅有的呀。当然,回过头说,我准会得到一笔从此不知该怎样活的收入。
那就学呗！不再度身订做西装,或者说不再买任何西装,这我都可接受。我可以想像,自己骑通勤自行车上班,度假决不搞什么异国情调,充其量到大雾山钓鱼拉倒。
这我办得到！如果能换来耳根清净,不闻屁话的话,我理应干得开开心心。
我在一块小纸片上写道:
先锋
美国天主教联会
第一金融集团
联爱。
还有－－我的新欢－－敦百理德街。
我把名单钉在书桌上方的布告板上。无论何时,一抬头便望到。
我对着小名单苦思冥想起来。我告诫自己:不能全赔。万万不能。绝不能都赔上呀。
这就要和先锋公司代表团见面了。我浑身黑黝黝、壮乎乎－－无处不写着有关玉米的事实。
在座落于芝加哥商业区,一幢大厦的二十五楼一间时髦的、白晃晃的房间里,我被安排坐在一张长窄的桌子旁边。房间靠屋角,两堵墙均镶着玻璃,从天花一直落到地下。目光穿过坐于对面桌子的人,我得见一片蔚为大观的摩天楼世界。再往另一窗口望出去,密执根湖横卧于阳光灿烂的地平线上。
这里的一切－－从阔气的设施到熠熠生辉的摆设,从高大的木门到貌似烟囱的厚座玻璃杯,到银做的酒具－－无不价值不菲,高贵典雅。无不在说:钞票！大权！
同桌的有格列格·葛烙德和先锋公司的三名代表。满头银发看似和蔼可亲的那位是个金融专家,高级副总裁,一旦通讯部的新主任走马上任,须向其报到的显贵。他旁边坐了一位刚刚步入中年,皮肤黑黑的俏妇人,看上去也和善。我不甚清楚她的角色是什么,挂个行政衔头什么的,挺暧昧,教我在大家自我介绍完后无法在十秒钟后把它重复一遍。第三个坐我这边,不过在离我远远的一头,也是一个女人,看来很不入伍,背驼,怪气,寡言。
开头两个先锋人发的球难度都不高。我似乎都一一挡了回去。他们问及我的背景、从商经验,和对管理、通讯的看法等,尽是些例话。他们用温良的、衣阿华式的谦恭方法,刺探我是否懂农事。他们问我假如遇到这样或那样的小问题会怎样做。我是否合群？对企业文化的转变有何看法？
在将近一个钟头里,桌子另一头那女人都不吱一声。她有点富态,肥肉直往下巴坠着,胳膊如长条面包似的;穿一袭若灰若白的连衣裙,花里胡哨地饰以花边、丝带、褶边等,与圆乎乎、软乎乎、肉乎乎的她,搭配出一种母性乃至姥姥味道来。只有她的平头装例外。花白的头发剪至几近脑瓜儿两边,顶多还差一寸便到顶的地方。这是一个零部件不配套的女人。
日前葛烙德跟我说过,我要见的人中有一个从前是临床心理医生,如今是先锋公司人力资源部的人。他还说,也许我会觉得她问的问题“很刁”。
我一边回答其他人的问题,一边不时地瞟一眼她,企图让她加入。但每当我这样做的时候,她的腰就弯得更低,同时瞪得我更紧。末了,她的腰弯至教我要是进屋时没见她站着便以为她是畸形的程度。双下巴差一点儿就碰到桌面。她恶狠狠地把圆珠笔攥得紧紧,笔的一端几乎插进了鼻孔。双眼由瞪而*_。
实在教人难以相信,像她这般怪模怪样的人居然是个心理医生,更不用说还派到这般料必非同小可的面试场合来。也许,我正逢考试之劫吧。
但即便是考试也好,我应否依然故我－－像压根儿没发生什么怪事情似的,继续面试下去？或者说,他们会否断定我有什么不妥,要是我对桌子另一头那女人的一举一动视若无睹的话？
我推开思绪,尽力把注意力集中在被问的问题上来。不过,还是走神。
我们的面试进入第二个小时的当儿,剪平头那女人直了一下腰,终于问了一个问题。新问题马上就来了:我听不懂她问什么。她说的话儿我尽管能听到,却费解到我简直一窍不通。我先道歉,然后吞吞吐吐地把她的话儿整理成我能够理解的顺序,反馈给她,再毕恭毕敬地问,是否这就是她的意思。复述至二三遍,得到她的许允,我就编些看似与她想知道的东西相关的话儿说。
“这对题吗？”我问道。她很勉强地点了一下头。接着又弯下腰去做了些笔记,然后重新对我*_眼,其他人则继续发问。
此事一而再,再而三。
那女人一说话便把我难倒。我便再为应试而纳闷。我纳闷是否也许考得一塌糊涂,是因为没对她打烂沙盆璺到底,没有再三重申－－以完美无瑕之技自不待说－－她自己已明白无误。可我当真是想方设法让她明白的呀。照此下去,不越粗鲁之界,我看不出还有什么路可走。
面试已进行了约莫一个小时二十分钟,桌子对面的男人和女人开始收拾他们的文件。听其老调儿,颇有点儿“兜着走”的味道。在此当中,剪平头的女人把盘卷的身体慢慢展开,坐直,双手交叉放于台上,开始发号施令。
“我来问问您,”她说道。“倘若阁下甫到先锋工作,又倘若我们是阁下的员工,此乃我们的首次员工会议,基于刚才之所见,阁下将如何揆度我们？”
我的上帝大老爷呀。
“唔,”我答道。“先让我落实没理解错您的意思。您是要我说说我对你们的看法吧。基于此次面试……”
“没错。以您刚才之所见来判断,您觉得您将会如何管治我们？”
“这个,”我终于说道。“基于这么一次短暂的会谈,我觉得根本无法下什么结论。表面看来,你们不外乎是聪明人,待人和善的能人。当然我还看不出有什么地方要引起特别关注的。自不待说,没有严重问题的迹象。”
“那么,”她说道,“就独问关于我的问题吧。您会－－基于您今天在这里的所见所闻－－怎样说我？对管治我又将意欲何如？”
“先让我确定没把意思搞歪吧,”我说道,施展缓兵之计。“您是要我告诉您,从今天下午的会面来看,我对您有什么特别的看法吧？”
“没错。”她满意地点头。我这才重新记起,她是一位心理医生。我对此没有办法,说实在的。这似乎越来越像是在玩一种游戏,倒不一定是什么高明的游戏,但复杂是无疑的。
“这这这……我想我会说－－基于刚才所见－－您给我的印象是一个明察秋毫的人。”
明察秋毫！好词儿！我这是怎么想出来的？才说出口心里便美滋滋的。我自己都不知道它在这里是什么意思－－几乎一窍不通－－但我看不出有谁会抗拒这明察秋毫的称号。
“阁下如何裁度我和其他两位的关系？”她问道,一边向坐对台的一男一女打手势。两人愣愣地朝我们回看了一眼。“阁下裁度自己将如何处理我和他们间的关系？”
够啦。够啦。你这疯女人。
“我就此无法揣度什么东西,”我说道。“我所看到的还不足以让我对如何处理你们的关系有什么看法,哪怕假定我的结论是正确的,而事实却不一定也好。对不起,我看人没那么快。”
一小时后,我脑海里还在一幕幕地重播着刚才的面试镜头,心里直觉得闷得慌。我得找个阴暗处,躺下来,吮吮拇指。又过了几个小时,沮丧敌不过怨恨,怨恨敌不过愤怒:这是什么面试？哪有人拿这种玩意儿来折腾人家的？哪个鬼公司会派这种人来担此大任？谁会给这种公司打工？
不久,格列格·葛烙德来电,说四个面试者中的三个包括我都表现得不错－－事实上,按银发的高级副总裁说法是:“一个是奔驰,一个是宝马,一个是卡特拉。”我不敢问自己是什么。不过,我确想看看能否打听到一点关于那剪平头装胖女人的什么。我想知道是否有必要不断地为她操心。
“那可是一次非比寻常的面试呀,”我说道。“那个女人,就是那个自个儿坐一边的……是不是她想踢我出局？她是不是在……玩把戏？试我的反应,说不定？”
葛烙德一面琢磨着用词,一面慢吞吞回话。“不。这倒不是。我看我实在不知道怎么说她好。我确实觉得她的意思是……”
哦,原来如此。还有什么复杂得过在此万分严肃－－反正对于我来说是－－的面试中,叫一个怪人来从中作梗,从中破坏的呢。
有分晓了。时间之神除挟着大慈大悲姗姗来迟外,并无带来意外的惊喜。“先锋”没有雇用我或那天在密执根湖上空接受面试的任何一个。他们也没有把它给内部的人。他们不知从哪儿很快就找到了一个深孚他们所望－－管它望什么－－的人,于是雇用了她。
好极了。最遗憾就是我那天下午面试时没有中途退出。
在等先锋方面消息的几天里,我收到了美国天主教联会的一封信。他们遴选了六位选手参加决赛,没我的份儿。看来有好多天主教徒,手持硬梆梆的传媒关系招牌,正渴望得到一份低薪的工作,且他们在处理宗教问题上,干起来比我更加出色。好极了。
“联合爱迪生”一“红娘”来电,说我的申请已不容商榷,?联爱?的“老大”指示他惟黑人是用。果真如此,而非新造些什么有用的借口的话,则太好了。假如在今时今日的职业市场上,黑人能额外获得几个机会的话,我无怨矣。
敦百理德街我也无缘角逐。这里的原因又是一个“秘密”: “老大”已颁令该职位必须归女性所有。果真如此,我心安了。假如女性处处得到格外厚待的话,这似乎未尝不是一种公正,毕竟她们世世代代未尝受过丝毫恩惠。
我办公台上挂着的那一串公司名单,那串不可能老胎死腹中的名单,如今仅剩一个机会: 第一金融集团。
“第一”的“红娘”,名吉姆·韦尔士,纽约人,取道芝加哥时,和我在晚餐上见过面。他说他正广罗应征者,希望能拿出一份有半打左右,分别代表不同背景和技能的人员名单给公司。第二个月他来电说,我经已从他那里晋升,进入公司的决赛名单里。
次月,该公司两名行政人员从得梅因飞到,问了我四个小时的问题。看来,他们是正人君子－－又是衣阿华健康型,和衣阿华拘紧型。谈话中,我既没学到也没认识到多少关于他们的东西,我也看不出他们能认识我多少。不过,我感激他们没带心理医生来。
一个月后,我被安排去得梅因,行程两天,包括和“老大”见面。公司给我送来的机票,是从奥黑尔开出的早班。起程前一天,我跑了一段特长的缓步跑,好在睡觉时得到特别的松弛。当晚十点前,我喝了杯热奶,然后上床,翻开那看了几个星期的睡前读物－－味同嚼蜡的伍德娄·卫亦逊新传,等着照常看了几页便来的瞌睡。
不过,还没打盹,潘慕便跑上楼来。据电视台说, 一场罕见的春季暴风雪横扫了我们南部的伊利诺斯州。奥黑尔已陷于一片混乱－－航班被取消,一筹莫展的人数以百计。我猛地跳下床。足足等了一个小时电话,才搞清楚我那班机的起飞时间已无限期延长,说不定还会取消。我又折腾了半个小时,才重新订了一张从密尔沃基起飞的机票,并和指定的“第一”联系人取得了联系,把变化告诉了他。回到床上时,神经系统已处处亮起于红色警告信号。我极力把心思埋在伍德娄·卫亦逊上,脑子却不听使唤,一个劲儿想着那暴风雪和明天一早能否离开密尔沃基,以及有什么鬼办法应付明儿一整天的面试,要是还不快点入睡的话儿。
我把灯灭了,便去睡,不消一会儿,却发现不是那么回事儿。末了,我蹑手蹑脚地跑至洗手间,难为情地、偷偷地吞了一颗红白色的、小小的(也放了好久的)安眠药。那是有一次医生给我开来应付时差紊乱的。这可是我平生第一次吃安眠药哇;我不知道也不想问药性如何,因为我不想争辩。一小时后,还是安眠不了,我越发心急如焚,便又吞了一颗。不久,我便进入梦乡。到一大早闹钟响时,威斯康星的天已亮了起来。我赶到密尔沃基机场时还有时间剩,航班按时起飞,于是顺利到达了得梅因。
不过,问题来了:到达得梅因那人不像我。我的思想,我的悟力,浑身上下好像－－我简直不晓得怎么说好－－也许给折射了吧。全都略略偏离了中心,分不清东南西北。倒不是这个叫我难受。只是不知怎的,感觉不到自己在这儿。此刻的体验,和往常的大相径庭。体验出来的东西好像不是我的。
那天,我无时无刻不给人领着,办公室去完一个接一个,会面完一个又一个,却感觉不出哪样是完全真的。我好像还懂得老老实实地走、笑、答、问,可每当会面完了,对说过的东西,能记起来的却少得教我心里直慌。晚上亦然。当时行政副总裁带我去吃饭,想了解白天会面的一切和我对所见到的东西有何看法。苦了我要找些事情去告诉他。
那天晚上,我睡好了(没有再借助药物,自不待说)。但尽管自己更觉得是在星期二早上,部分的我,却还处于什么第四或第五度空间里,处于哪个遥远的宇宙里,那里二加二等于三点八或四点一。
次日,一开始便和“老大”会面了好长时间。他也对昨天的会面好生好奇。我呢,又一次设法掩饰自己连见过的人名字都不记得的苦况。“老大”看来是个大好人。似乎也是干、细、枯型。莫非是药物教我这样想的？
我给安排上了一部小汽车,游览得梅因。一直有人自豪地对我说,这城市发展得如何如何快,如何如何热闹。今天,于我来说,即若对这地方真存有美好的回忆,但它似乎是我见过的、这般大小的城镇中最死气沉沉的。那商业区,也就是人称繁华了将近二十年的地方,昏昏欲睡似的。那郊区,正是婕楚德·史泰因在生将会描绘的得梅因郊区:一片不毛的滩涂和护墙板,护墙板和滩涂。别无它物。
我和各人的会面结束。这时,离起飞时间尚早,还有几个小时可供消磨。天气变得潮湿、暖和,我便去散散步。我绕着商业区周游了一圈。站在人行道上看,和先前坐在车上看,同样是空荡荡－－没劲儿,没生气,想找一爿让我喜欢溜一眼的商店也没有。
由于这商业区看来再没什么看头,去机场又太早,我便朝几年前人人都说城中最好的街区进发。那地方叫“南桂廊”,是潘慕和我以及我们大多数朋友心目中达官贵人住的地方。假如我们现在真要搬去得梅因住的话,这便是我们找房子第一个要去的地方。快步走二十分钟路便到了。到了那里,我才发现它丝毫没变。正是我记忆中的那个模样。但不知怎的,尽管旧貌依然无损,却萎缩了。它尽管不出我所料,却也同时教我失望。在这个温暖而潮湿的下午,各种植物都已开始冒出地面。我走在这大街上,所走之处无不叫人想起,也叫我念念不忘的是一个字:霉。
霉？一定是那药还在我脑子里瞎胡闹。
我发觉自己多么渴望一切顺利－－恨不得这些人都喜欢我,被我打动。在相同场合、不同文化的背景下,我大概会在“第一”总部的梯级上祭上一条公羊吧。我大概会在四溅的血泊中,在这据称是芝加哥和太平洋沿岸各州之间最高的建筑物脚下,大行其膜拜之顶礼,祈求神明普渡。 然则,于此雄心壮志中,又跑了一个简单的问题出来:
为啥?
我干嘛为这事情倾尽此生?
因为我需要一份工作,这显而易见。因为假如“第一”不给我工作,我得继续重复这程序,直至有人给为止。或者说,直至我不再获准重复这程序为止,又或者直至无能为力为止。因为我已经身不由己,返魂无术－－除了勾引人家雇我外。
走在这街上,我心里却清楚:我不想住这儿;我并非真的对“第一金融集团”有意思;横看竖看,都看不出在那儿工作有哪儿提得起劲儿的地方,或叫人投入,叫人开心的地方。这回,说话的就不是那药了。
在回家的飞机上,我修书一封,告诉吉姆·韦尔士,说我不想再考虑这职位。我解释道,哪怕参观了两天,我还不明白公司要找的是什么。继而,我说我无法判断会不会喜欢那工作,或者会不会做好它,又或者,久而久之,管理层喜不喜欢我,哪怕自认工作做得不错也好。
晚上,我把信从文字处理机里打出来,用信封装好。第二天早上,我却无法把信寄出。假如我手上稳拿着一份工,而非望眼欲穿地想求得一份的话,这可是要寄的呀。但我怎么向潘慕,向孩子们,向父母,向世人交代呀？说尽管得梅因一试到目前为止顺利得很,而我却要临阵退缩？说尽管该公司牢靠有钱赚,而且领导们分明多多少少地正慎重考虑给我干的可能性,说尽管我走投无路,但却断然叫人就此罢休？这次第,教我如何招架得了？
惟其这么多月来竭尽所能地找工做却一无所获,惟其看到越来越多人失业后运气却和我相差无几,惟其每到一城市,见街上有乞丐行乞,越发觉得习以为常,所以我才不能白白地浪废这次机会。哪怕这份工的吸引人之处,主要在于予人某种逃避之便－－逃避恐惧,逃避不安,逃避羞愧－－但如果拒人于千里之外,实乃匹夫之勇。匹夫之勇,在这些日子是要付出高昂代价的,这我可承受不了。
我对自己说:别孩子气,扣人心弦的戏是演给孩子们看的。他们给不给这份工我,现在还是个未知之数。他们一天没决定我都可以再找。好戏马上就在后头亦非不可能的事。只不过可能性极少而已。
如果人家给我这份工而我又接受了,结果它确如我所料般沉闷,那么就真见鬼,我以前就做过闷活儿呀。就是因为这样人家才叫它“干活”呀。我一觉得闷,便很容易想起:自己有活干,真走运。尽管我不善于天天死板地苦干、猛干、狠干,不善于装着关心自己不感兴趣的东西,但却证明我做得来。
终于,韦尔士来电了,说在众多受考核的应征者中,我是唯一的幸存者。然而,如今有一个内部的,得加以考虑,而这又要费时。一星期后,韦尔士又打电话来。尽管语气有点儿含糊,但暗示了我依然领先,测试表明那内部应征者尚未够火候。不过,又跑了一个外部的进来。一日未见过和考核过这新秀,都不可见分晓。我心有千千结。最大者莫过于:这等人是不是非得穷挖新角,直至最后找到一个不像我那样明让他们操心的人方可罢休？
沉寂了两三个星期后,在一个星期五的下午,韦尔士又打电话来。“第一”的决策者们告诉他,说他们如今已万事俱备,拟于下两个星期作决定。
顶多不超过十个工作日吧。哪怕规规矩矩地按手续办,然后再比预测多两倍时间,我想也不过是二十个工作日嘛。实在不能和我过往的日子相提并论。看来,离和韦尔士初次晚宴有四个月了吧。找工作都找了十个月了。哪怕再犹豫它无关痛痒的二十天又算得了什么,绝对不成问题。怎么能和那相比呢。
在一个星期一的午夜,也就是本星期第一天的终结时分,没戏了,我便从一张黄色的法律文件纸边缘,撕下一狭长的纸条,把一头贴在办公台对面一个相框的底边上。纸条挂着那儿,像彩带似的,像是给自己坚持守完这漫长的一整天的奖品。星期二午夜,我又如是做了一遍。星期三亦然。一周终于结束,挂在相框上的五条纸条,竟似一排荣誉勋章上的彩带,每条代表着二十四小时的苦苦守候。望着它们我便高兴。看来,我在这些日子里的唯一成就,就由它们代表着。
往下那五条彩带,来得更不容易。
足足十个月没活干了。在我给炒鱿鱼那天受精的人卵,如今也成了哭哭啼啼的婴儿了。我那遣散费套餐,也快吃到见底。我别无他望,只等第一金融集团的消息。
夏
屋外,万物披绿,吉姆·韦尔士却打来电话,说“第一”已经有了决定。经过六个多月来的搜罗,包括我被卷进去的四个月,决定谁也不给。
隐士译自The Harper’s Magazine, July 1995
1996年3月11日凌晨12:50第二稿
1996年3月19日晚9:35第三稿
1996年3月28日凌晨1:40,定稿于求索居
By G. J. MEYER
I'm not getting any interviews.
I call and call and call, looking for leads. But when I turn one up and send in my resume, nothing comes back. When I follow up the resumes with phone calls, secretaries get rid of me so smoothly that before I know what's happened I'm talking into a dead line.
This has been going on for weeks, and it's starting to scare me.
Then one afternoon the phone rings and it's a man I've been trying to reach, a headhunter named Roger Bullard in the Atlanta office of Russell Reynolds. He's looking for a P.R. vice president for Holiday Inns; he's seen my resume and he has nice things to say about it.
Would I rather meet him in New York or Atlanta? He has offices in both places.
"Your choice," I say. "I'd vote for New York."
I wait while Bullard checks his calendar. "Monday in New York, then. Nine o'clock. Go ahead and make your reservations, and tomorrow call my secretary to confirm."
First thing the next morning I give Bullard's secretary my flight number, tell her I'll be arriving at my hotel on Sunday evening. She gives me the Russell Reynolds address and reminds me to be there at nine.
The offices, when I arrive, are like something out of the London home of a maharaja. All the walls are paneled the expensive way. Sheraton furniture, thick rugs, gleaming parquet floors. I'm gleaming, too: shoes, collar, cuffs. The crease in my trousers could draw blood, and I'm feeling good about the fact that despite my nervousness I managed seven good hours of sleep and an early jog in Central Park.
A mirror near the elevator indicates that I don't look like what I am: a guy out of work, thrown out of two corporations in the past three years, a little bitter, more than a little overeager.
I tell the receptionist that I'm there to see Mr. Bullard. With a slightly quizzical look she answers that he's not in yet, and I say I know I'm early. Moving delicately, not wanting to wrinkle the suit I've carried so carefully a thousand miles, I lower myself onto a leather sofa. Gingerly, keeping my fingertips clear of the ink, I open the Wall Street Journal on the coffee table in front of me and settle in to wait.
At nine the receptionist looks over at me, dials her phone, has a brief, inaudible conversation, hangs up, and looks at me again.
"You did say you have an appointment with Mr. Bullard?"
"Yes, I did. Nine o'clock."
"I'm sorry ... but Mr. Bullard isn't scheduled to be in New York today."
When I call Atlanta, Bullard's secretary sounds almost as shocked as I feel. She can't understand how this could have happened. They were expecting me in New York next Monday. She thought that was understood.
In Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream," a solitary, empty-eyed figure stands in a roadway clutching its head, mouth open wide. I hope that's not what I look like as I walk the streets of Manhattan during the next several hours, seeing and hearing nothing, waiting for it to be time to return to La Guardia. But that's how I feel. Without making a sound, I scream all the way back to Wisconsin.
Today is Friday, the thirteenth of September, the ninety-eighth day of my unemployment. Ninety-nine days ago I was vice president for communications of the J. I. Case Company, a multinational manufacturing corporation with sales of more than $5 billion a year. Three years before that I was a vice president at McDonnell Douglas Corporation, a firm that needs no introduction.
And for more than three months now I have been a man with no particular need for an alarm clock, no place where I really need to go in the morning.
This afternoon, to kill a few hours and take my mind off a telephone that will not ring, I play nine holes of golf. For the first time this year it is difficult to find the ball. Pale leaves are beginning to clutter the fairways, making small white objects hard to see. On the day I was let go, the sixth of June, the Wisconsin summer was just beginning. I had expected that finding work would take a few months, during which I would be free to sleep late, to stay away from neckties for a while, to savor the sweetest part of the northern year.
Now it's fall that is just beginning, and I'm no closer to finding work than I was a season ago. I've had shots at jobs, but every shot has missed. I never got a second chance to meet with Roger Bullard. Holiday Inns, he told me, has put its search on hold.
I keep hearing politicians say that the recession is over. A nice thought. But what I see, wherever I look, is more and more good people with good credentials being let go for the first time in their lives and not being able to find work. I know an amazing number of capable, experienced, college-educated, unemployed people. Never in my life have I seen so many people lose their jobs. And I can't name one who has found a new job. Not one.
Ninety-eight days. Three months and a week. Not a long time according to the formula that says a job search is likely to last one month for every $10,000 of annual salary. By this formula, my wait has quite a way to go. The general rule for executive "separation packages" is this: the less you need, the more you get. If your annual compensation has been in six digits for years and the first digit isn't a one anymore, you can expect full pay and benefits for a year and a half, possibly even longer. Six-figure salaries starting with one are good for about a year, six months at a minimum. if your salary is well short of six figures and you have worries about the mortgage and tuition bills, watch out: you're down in dog-eat-dog territory, where they try to get you out the door with as little money as possible.
I have been among the immensely fortunate in this regard. At J. I. Case, after only two and a half years of work, I was promised up to a year with full pay and benefits while I looked for a new job. My wife, Pam, quit her own odious job before we knew mine was in danger and is now trying to get herself established in insurance sales. I hope she succeeds. Though my separation package is a wonderful cushion, it's also temporary, and I'm amazed at how much we've grown used to making and spending every month. Rivers of money flow in and just as quickly flow out: money to keep the kids in school, to keep the house and cars going, to keep all of it insured and the IRS satisfied. I don't like to think about how quickly all this could sink us.
The first thing I felt the first time I was fired was surprise-bone-rattling shock at finding myself, for the first time since the week I graduated from grade school, without a place in the world of work. My luck had been so good for so many years that I'd learned to think of it as something I had earned, something I was owed. The idea that it could turn bad so abruptly was, for a while, impossible to absorb. I walked the streets in an almost trancelike state, as if I were on the bottom of the sea, cut off from everything, not like other people anymore. I started to daydream about walking through my front door one afternoon and seeing dozens of people--old bosses, old colleagues, the very people who had done this to me--leap out from behind the furniture and yell "Surprise! Surprise!" In my daydream they're wearing party hats. They explain how the whole thing had been part of some experiment, and how sorry they were to have had to put me through it. Ah well, I say with a smile, all's well that ends well.
But each time I come home, they are not there.
My first job, at age thirteen, was mopping floors in a decrepit drugstore for fifty cents an hour. Twenty years later, I was moving between jobs of a kind my parents could hardly believe, with an income that passed the furthest limits of my imaginings; I've traveled the world, won semi-high honors, had my picture in the papers, floated above the fields of Normandy in a hot-air balloon.
And now, suddenly, I call it a good day if someone will take my phone call or answer my letter.
I know that not one percent of the human beings now alive in the United States of America, not one tenth of one percent of the current inhabitants of Earth, could possibly find me an object worthy of pity. I know too that this is as it should be: imagine feeling sorry for a man whose situation is so tragic that it causes him to play golf on Fridays. Imagine feeling sorry for somebody who is still drawing full pay ninety-eight days after being fired and still has months of full pay ahead of him whether he gets out of bed or not.
And yet I feel sorry for myself constantly. And I want everybody I know to feel sorry for me.
I am ashamed of myself, of all my feelings: murderous rage, envy, fear, and, mostly, shame itself. On a simple level I'm ashamed of myself for being out of work, for getting my family into such a fix, for allowing myself to become an "executive" in the first place and then letting the whole thing go so wrong. I'm ashamed of myself for losing. When I hear the guy next door start his car in the morning and drive away, I'm ashamed to be in bed. I'm ashamed to rake leaves on weekday afternoons, because everybody in the neighborhood will know--as if they didn't already--that I don't have an office to go to anymore. The deeper shame has to do with my weakness in the face of what feels like the most painful crisis of my life but which is, in fact, a mere inconvenience compared with what millions of people face every day. Yet I'm jealous of anybody who still has the kind of job I used to have, of almost anybody who has a job, period. My envy of the people who put me here and are still drawing their giant salaries and piling up their gigantic pension points is as murderous as my resentment.
I envy people who took fewer chances than I did and are now in the safe if charmless harbors that I set sail from years ago: the post office, the Navy, reporting jobs at daily papers. I also envy people who took more chances than I did and broke free of salaries and corporations and bullshit. I spend a lot of time wondering where I might be today if I had taken more chances.
If envy caused cancer, I'd be dead by Sunday. Calm down, I tell myself. Stop pacing. Find something sensible to do.
But I find that I can't do any such thing. What will I be like by Christmas?
A guy in Chicago tells me that Booz, Allen & Hamilton, the giant management-consulting firm, has a search on for a senior P.R. exec. He doesn't know who's handling it. I unearth the name of the managing partner in Booz, Allen's Chicago office and send him my resume and a long cover letter. I send them by fax and by mail. He doesn't answer.
Further digging leads to the discovery that the search isn't being handled by the managing partner after all but by Booz:, Allen's vice chairman, one Cyrus Freidheim. His office is also in Chicago. Again I laboriously compose a letter, trying to make Mr. Freidheim see me as wonderfully talented and experienced, not desperate. This, too, goes off both by fax and by mail, and it, too, receives no answer. I call Freidheim's office. He's out of town. When I identify myself and describe the things I've been sending, the woman at the other end of the line acknowledges that they've been received. I'd like to find out if anything is being done with them, but she makes it very clear that she has no interest in further conversation.
Eventually I send Freidheim a short note saying that I'll be in Chicago on a given day and can arrange to stop in at his office if he will be free to see me. I say I'll give my note a few days to reach him and then follow up by phone. Soon I'm in a nervous lather about the prospect of having to talk once again with the icy-voiced woman.
Who are these people? What kind of people are they? There was a time, though now it sometimes seems hard to believe, when I myself was a busy man. I had dozens of people reporting to me, big and complicated projects to manage, bona fide crises screaming for attention. I had trips to take, a phone that rang twenty or thirty times a day--the whole corporate-executive fantasy. But nobody ever telephoned me without getting a reply of some kind, usually fairly promptly. Nobody ever sent me a letter without getting an answer. Nobody. Not ever. Not even the cranks. Not even the people demanding to talk with me about jobs for which they had no visible qualifications. Was I crazy?
Better crazy than arrogant, I'm telling myself. Better crazy than hard-hearted. Better crazy and a big fool than a Cyrus Freidheim�
But then the phone rings, and on the line is man who identifies himself as Dick Kinser in New York. He says he's Cyrus Freidheim's executive recruiter--Good old Cyrus! How could I have judged him so harshly?--and that he wants to talk with me about the Booz, Allen job. He has to be in Detroit tomorrow. Can I meet him at the airport there?
But from the moment we find each other at the airport, Kinser is coolly distant. He grows no warmer during a long, meandering conversation in a coffee-shop booth. I start worrying about the fact that he didn't discover me himself, meaning I can never be his trophy, his gift to Cyrus Freidheim.
Will this make him want to put other candidates, ones he himself discovered, ahead of me? Should I have contacted him instead of Freidheim? Of course I should have. But how could I? I didn't even know Freidheim was using a headhunter. Freidheim or his secretary--or the first guy I tried to contact, for that matter--could have told me so. It wasn't my fault that they didn't.
Kinser asks me to mail a list of references to his office in New York. Then he changes his mind, says I should fax the list. It's unusual, in my experience, to be asked for references this early, before being interviewed by the client. It also surprises me that Kinser wants me to fax them. But that's okay. Maybe it means he's more interested than he seems, even if he'll never be able to claim credit for me. The fact that he seems to be in a hurry to check me out can't be bad news.
In the weeks after Detroit I hear nothing. I check with the people I've used as references. They haven't been called. I've never heard of a candidate not being repaid the costs of a trip made at a headhunter's request, and the cost of my ticket was outrageous because I was traveling on such short notice. But I'm having trouble getting my money back. I make repeated inquiries by phone, but I never get past Kinser's secretary, never get a straight answer.
When an envelope finally arrives with a check but no note inside, I count myself lucky not to be out four hundred bucks. And that's the last I ever hear of or from Richard Kinser and Cyrus Freidheim.
I think I can tell you how it will happen, if it's going to happen to you. The first thing they'll do, when they've made their preparations, is to get you out of your office and into a room with some geek from Human Resources.
If you're a vice president, your executioner will be a V.P. also--possibly a senior V.P. Directors are done by directors, managers by managers, et cetera, on down almost to the ranks of the blue-collar folks who even today do actual work for a living even in these United States of America.
From the moment you pass through his door, the H.R. geek will appear to be in visible pain. He wants you to understand that he, too, is a human being, a nice guy, and that his mother didn't raise him for this kind of thing.
(Is it flippant of me to call these people "geeks"? Originally the word referred to individuals who did revolting things for money at carnivals and fairs. I don't think I'm being flippant at all.)
"God," said McDonnell Douglas Corporation's senior vice president for Human Resources ten seconds before he fired me. "God, this is going to be hard." He twisted, literally writhed, in his chair. Then he swung back toward me and quickly got down to his work.
Once the geek has delivered his message and demonstrated the depths of his humanity, he'll get up out of his chair and come around, from behind his desk. You'll be drawn up after him by some mysterious force resembling magnetism, and together the two of you will glide out the door and down the hall to some smaller office that you probably never noticed before, where somebody you've never seen is waiting to tell you not to worry, everything is going to be fine.
Sometimes other people are waiting in other little rooms nearby, but if you behave yourself you'll never know about them. There might be a company lawyer, for example. You won't see him unless you say something that indicates a less than perfect willingness to be agreeable. Somebody from security might be hidden in the wings, too.
The stranger awaiting you in the little office, the one telling you that everything is going to be all right, is the outplacement geek. He's been brought in, and will be paid handsomely, to "guide you through your transition."
The assigned outplacement geek will be the nicest of nice guys--one of the main reasons he was called to his profession in the first place. He'll give you a small, slightly rueful smile. He'll say that he understands what a shock this is but that he also knows something important: that it's very likely the start of a better life not just for you but for your whole family. If he was ever fired himself, he'll tell you about it, encouraging you to appreciate how beautifully that worked out in the end. Or he'll tell you about one or two of his past clients--how one of them is now King of Samoa and the other is expected to be nominated for the Nobel Prize next week. He'll ask whether everything will be okay at home, whether you expect to have trouble telling your spouse. When you say no, he'll give you his card and urge you to take things easy for a while, but then to come see him at his office.
"I know it can be hard to believe at a time like this," my first outplacement geek told me, "but it really is true that this could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you."
The outplacement geek wants to think of himself as a useful citizen, a kind of midwife, not as an accessory after the fact. Understandable, of course. Not many of our mothers had anything like this in mind for us when they brought us into the world. Not many of us want to do these things we do for pay.
A guy in Connecticut, a friend of a friend, tells me that Gerber Products has a search on. I wait until just after six and try to call the company's vice president for Human Resources, Curtis Mairs: Calling very early or very late in the day is a good tactic: the secretaries are usually off duty then. Today it works: Mairs picks up his own phone, and he doesn't hang up as I hurriedly introduce myself. I say I've heard he's looking for a P.R. exec. Not wanting to repeat what may have been my big mistake with Booz, Allen, I say I'd like the name of the recruiter handling the search.
"You might try Steven Seiden," he says. "In New York," and hangs up. There's a New York listing for Seiden Associates, Inc., in my Directory of Executive Recruiters. And it is indeed headed by a Steven Seiden. I spend much of the evening writing and rewriting a letter.
First thing the next morning I call Seiden's office and get his fax number. Then I drive to the EconoPrint shop and have my letter and resume transmitted. Next I put both into a manila envelope, drive to the post office, and send them off by Priority Mail.
The next night Seiden calls. We talk for a long time. He goes through my resume line by line, asking for details about everything.
"Well," he says finally, "all of it sounds pretty impressive. On the face of it. As far as it goes." On the face of it? Does he think I'm pretending to be somebody I'm not'?
He asks me to describe my appearance. When I do so, fumblingly, he asks how tall I am. How much I weigh. Whether I have a beard. A mustache. He asks me to send a photo of myself.
What?
We agree that I will also send him samples of my work.
Once again I sit up late composing a letter intended to make me seem brilliant and clever, motivated but not desperate. When I'm satisfied, I put it into an envelope with a fat stack of supporting evidence: corporate annual reports, articles and speeches, official descriptions of my last two jobs, charts of departments I've headed, a survey showing that business editors rated one of those departments among the best in the country after I'd been running it for seven years. Fat yellow envelope in hand, I'm at the post office when it opens in the morning.
Early the following week, Seiden calls to say he's received my envelope, has examined most of the contents, and finds it "very impressive--assuming it all checks out."
Does he think I've forged this stuff'
Days later I arrive home to find a message saying that Seiden wants me to call him.
"Listen," he says when I reach him, "I'm in a meeting and can't talk now. But I want you to know that I really am interested in you for the Gerber thing. I'll be back to you soon. This search is not"--the italics are in his voice-"going to go ahead without you. I'll be back to you soon--in hours, not days. You'll hear from me again in hours, not days."
Taking Seiden at his word, I begin to watch the clock. The day ends without another call. The next day ends the same way, and so does the week. Then it's weeks, not days. After a very long time I try to call him, don't get through, leave my name and number.
More than a week after that Pam and I arrive home one Sunday night and find a message on the machine. The voice of Steven Seiden says, in a bored way, that he's returning my call. He has left his home number but cautions me not to disturb him after ten-thirty New York time--precisely the time I hear the message. After a moment of agonizing I decide to wait.
The next morning I call, leave a message, get nothing back. In the evening I call him at home. His wife says, in a cheery voice that he's gone out briefly but will call me back soon.
He doesn't. He never calls again. Eventually, many weeks later, an envelope arrives from his office. In it is a copy of the news release announcing that a new vice president of communications has been appointed at the Gerber Products Company.
The winner is from Chicago. I recognize his name. He's the guy who told me about the Gerber search in the first place.
Small world.
This doesn't need to turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to me. I'll be satisfied, I'll be grateful, if it turns out to be something less than a disaster. If it ends with me in a new job that's more than barely tolerable, with my life not totally deranged and Pam and the kids not permanently hurt. If it ends that way I will, so help me, get down on my knees in gratitude.
What I keep thinking about, though, is not exciting new opportunities or the delights that are still to come.
What I think about is Bobby Joyce. Bobby Joyce lived in my neighborhood when I was a kid and was a year ahead of me in high school. He was a big, good-looking Irishman of the black-haired, white-skinned, Snow White type--cocky, arrogant, unfailingly sarcastic, athletically brilliant. When I picture him I always see him chewing gum, smiling a kiss-my-ass smile. He showed us how it was possible to be cool even in a cassock and surplice. I'm sure he didn't chew gum while serving Mass, but it isn't hard to picture him that way.
Thirty years out of high school, I found myself seated next to another old-timer from the neighborhood, Jimmy Monahan, at some sort of downtown business lunch. Jimmy had been a few years ahead of Bobby Joyce in school, which put him several years ahead of me. He'd always been the friendly sort, though, even to us little guys. When I ran into him he was the advertising manager for an insurance company. He had the creased face and tired, unjudging eyes of a decent man for whom life has not been a picnic. As the luncheon broke up and we were moving toward the door he somehow mentioned Bobby Joyce-how miserable it was, what had happened to him.
I couldn't let it go; I had to ask. Bobby had become an accountant, Jimmy said, and spent decades with the same company before losing his job. After a year of failing to find a new one, Bobby killed himself. He did it by jumping off the Union Avenue viaduct onto some old railroad tracks at the northern edge of the neighborhood where we'd all been schoolboys together.
I don't know what season it happened in. But in my mind's eye I see it as a raw winter's day, a black-and-white turned-up-collar day like some scene from On the Waterfront. It's hard to draw a connection between the spent man I see pulling himself up onto the viaduct's concrete railing and the beautiful boy I remember.
Bobby Joyce, uncrowned king of the kids, dead of a year without work.
If outplacement resembles anything, it's probably Purgatory. You don't want to be there, you wouldn't be there if you'd been better or smarter or luckier, and the only point in being there is doing what you can to get out. And there's the sheer brutal shock of it, the difficulty of believing that you really are dead.
When you find yourself in outplacement it's because your former employers have paid to get you in. The price of admission is not trivial: a month and a half of your salary is the standard. What you get for this is working space with desk and phone, access to a pot of coffee, the use of a clerical staff and various office equipment and a pitiful excuse for a library. You share in the services of a receptionist who answers the phone by saying "executive offices" and takes any messages you're lucky enough to get. For what it's worth, you get the advice and the pep talks of your assigned counselor.
You can go to outplacement every day or every other day, once a week or once a month. It depends on how determined you are, or how futile the whole thing has started to seem. If nothing else, outplacement can give you a reason to put on a white shirt and tie and get into your car in the morning. You are saved from never getting out of your pajamas, from slowly descending into a vegetative state. The counselors will tell you that if you're serious about getting out of Purgatory, you're going to have to telephone everybody you know--and a great many people you don't.
"Mr. Johnson? Mr. Johnson, my name is Jerry Meyer. I'm the vice president of communications at the J. I. Case Company here in Wisconsin. Joe Smith at Consolidated Amalgamated gave me your name. About a week ago I sent you a letter that I hope has reached you by now. As my letter indicated, I've reached a point in my career where I'm interested in exploring some new options, and I'm wondering if you've heard of any searches it might be worthwhile for me to check out."
Dave, who used to be the head of security at J.I. Case and has become my best friend in outplacement, somehow got a copy of a directory of all the corporate security chiefs in America. Every day, hour after hour, he goes through it page by page, entry by entry, dialing and talking, dialing and talking, gradually accumulating leads like a prospector panning for gold. So far, his leads have not led to a single interview. The problem, I guess, is that he's well past fifty. But he never gives up, and although he makes a lot of sour jokes, he never complains. He never even slows down.
In outplacement, if you know what's good for you, you force yourself to be as much like Dave as you can. You listen attentively to the counselors as they tell miracle stories about people just like you who wrote and wrote and called and called and got absolutely nowhere until one day--wonder of wonders--the job of their dreams fell swooning into their arms. Above all, you force yourself to dig deeper and deeper into the directories and dredge up more and more names. There are hundreds of headhunter firms in the U.S. today, many thousands of individual headhunters. And one of the rules of outplacement is that if you haven't sent your resume to some particular headhunter within the past six months, it's time to do so again. If you send out a thousand resumes in June and are still out of work in December, do it again. There's enough work in this to keep anybody busy for a lifetime. As for whether it actually makes sense, is actually going to pay off ... well, what else are you going to do?
So you pick up that phone and you force yourself to make those calls. But unless you're luckier than most or the job market gets a lot better, you'll discover that it's possible to send off five hundred resumes with five hundred customized cover letters and not get a single reply more substantial than a preprinted postcard saving thanks.
You'll learn that after a while it can become very hard to think of new people to call, harder still to call for the third or the fourth time. You'll find that gradually some of your fellow deceased aren't showing up very often anymore. Some will drift away completely, and you'll remember their dark jokes about becoming a security guard or moving north to where somebody's son-in-law knows about a job driving a delivery truck. You'll wonder what happened to them but won't really want to find out. You'll see how every week a little more confidence has been drained from the eyes of the people who keep coming back, so that after a while they look as if they're afraid of life. You'll reflect that exactly the same change must be taking place in your own eyes. You'll want to stay home and never get out of your pajamas. But you won't dare.
V*clav Havel writes that modern society is held together by fear--fear of loss, mostly; so we accumulate more and more things with which to assure ourselves that it isn't necessary to be afraid and that our compromises haven't been for nothing. It is fear, Havel believes, that drives us to accept corruption and dishonesty, to pretend we are what we aren't.
Ultimately, having given away almost everything that matters, we end up defining ourselves by our possessions. Gradually we become incapable of imagining goals higher or more meaningful than a fine house or a fine car. We abandon hope without even realizing we've done so.
I have friends who wear gold Rolexes and cashmere sports coats, but when you get to know them it turns out that they regard their own lives as misbegotten messes of fear and greed and disappointment. It's no wonder that so many of them--people with summer houses and BMWs--turn out to be quietly desperate for retirement. I think they see retirement as their last chance to go back to being the people they were when they were starting out, back to being themselves. Too often, though, by the time they reach retirement they're so hollowed out they no longer remember who they once were. Their idea of fulfillment has come down to six days of golf a week.
WINTER
A friend told me today that he's without any job prospects at all and is putting his house on the market. This is a man whose resume is cast in gold. He's been executive vice president at two multibillion-dollar corporations, and he's still under fifty. He has an engineering degree and an M.B.A., is a graduate of the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School, and has no disabilities or flaws that I could detect in two years of working closely with him. He's been out of work for more than a year now, and he reports that his prospects seem to be narrowing with every passing month. In the absence of any job opportunities, in the absence of anything to do at all, he's been looking at the possibility of buying some small company somewhere. Each new company he looks at, he says, is smaller than the last.
"Where's it going to end?" he asks, laughing. "With me running a McDonald's?"
Well, maybe.
I look at every week's fresh crop of Wonderful Franchising Opportunity ads in the Wall Street Journal, but I never see anything that makes me want to bet the farm. Most of them involve fast-food places, quickie oil-change joints, and printing and duplicating services. Many of them appeal explicitly to displaced executives: "Frustrated?" "Looking for a good place to land with your golden parachute?"
Like a lot of Americans, I know people who, bought McDonald's franchises early and got very rich. But I know also that hundreds of people have lost their shirts on such things. Among all the new franchise ideas now being pitched across America, I'm certain that one or two are going to make a lot of money for a few shrewd or lucky plungers. I'm equally sure that I have less chance of picking the winner than I'd have of finding the pea in a sidewalk shell game.
But the idea persists, makes sense suddenly: if nobody will give you a job, buy yourself one.
I've started checking out Mail Boxes Etc. For an investment of about a hundred grand you can open a shop where people bring things to be packed and shipped. While you've got them there you can sell them ballpoint pens, greeting cards, money orders, the use of your copying machine. It's one of the fastest-growing franchise operations in the country.
Pam hates the idea. I ask if she has a better one. Whenever the subject comes up, both of us get hot. The local Mail Boxes rep gives me a list of nearby franchisees, and I start using my Saturdays to drive from shop to shop and talk with the owners.
In downtown Evanston, a block from Northwestern University, I meet a woman whose shop is obviously doing well. But the location is exceptional: a big residential university, a high-income suburb, a booming business district. All the locations this good were grabbed up years ago.
In Wheaton, a friendly, big-bellied man tells me that, yes, it definitely is possible to make a good living out of a Mail Boxes store. Eventually. If you're willing to work hard and operate in the red for quite a while. "Of course, if you're expecting to make thirty or forty thousand a year," he says with a smile, "that may be a very different matter."
In a strip mall in a raw new suburb I come upon a Mail Boxes owned and operated by a thin, bald man who looks harried despite the emptiness of his establishment. When I tell him what I want, he takes me behind the counter, offers me a chair, seats himself at his desk. He tells me how he was outplaced by the corporation where he'd been employed as an accountant, failed to find another job, and with great difficulty persuaded his wife that they should take their accumulated retirement money and buy him a job.
I ask him if two years sounds like a realistic estimate of how long I'd have to wait to be able to support myself in this, and the man bursts into tears, actually begins to sob. He pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and starts mopping at his eyes.
"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry. I'll be all right in a minute."
Before entering the corporate world, I had many jobs in many fields: naval officer, newspaper reporter, public relations consultant. Looking back, none of these was better than the one in which I was a "blubberer," scraping sealskins for a fur company in Alaska. Physically, this was the hardest work I've ever done, bloody and greasy and foul. Five hours of it would exhaust the best of us. And it required living for months on a barren island where the sun literally never broke through the clouds, a place without stores, movies, television, beer, girls, or even a record player.
What was wonderful about the Alaska job I can see only in retrospect: it had no bullshit. No politics, no pretense of any kind. Our job was to finish all the skins on hand as quickly as we could without damaging them in the process. When skins came in we worked like brutes, pushing dull knives through resistant tissue until our hands bled. But when we were finished nobody expected us to hang around pretending to be working or pretending to be eager for more.
In my first ten or so years of adulthood, through graduate school and the Navy and Vietnam and my first adult, civilian jobs, I got accustomed to wearing a necktie and to being something rather than simply doing something for pay. But through it all I daydreamed about getting free. Until I was well into my thirties I almost always thought of my jobs as interruptions, intrusions into the parts of life in which I could come closest to being me.
But gradually, by thousands of steps each as insignificant as the twitch of a second hand, we get broken in. By infinitesimal stages we change from rebellious colts to seasoned, stolid wheel-horses. Somehow we come not merely to accept the harness but to need it. To be deeply uneasy, even deeply afraid, without it.
Considering how little I've enjoyed or been satisfied by many of the jobs I've had, it is increasingly strange to me that I now find it so painful to awaken every morning to the realization that I have no work to go to; that no one is expecting me anywhere. I think of this before I open my eyes, and the thought always comes as a sharp stab. Back when I was a colt, shying at the halter and kicking at the traces, I couldn't have imagined all this freedom hurting as much as it does.
At times I've said, in talking with friends, that maybe I'm never going to find another corporate job. I always say next, in what I hope is a cavalier tone, that if that's how things work out it won't really matter much. But until recently this was just bluster. I didn't mean it, didn't really believe that anything of the kind could happen. Now I believe. Now it looks not only possible but likely. And I do think it matters.
Several of the friends I value most have told me that they hope I never go back into a corporation. Write, they advise, teach. I invariably reply that I'll probably end up doing something like what they suggest. But before making a final decision, I add, I owe it to myself to look carefully at all the options. I need to look into the corporate possibilities too, I say, because that's the responsible thing to do.
After some experimentation I settle on the word "responsible" as particularly good in this context. It seems to suggest that although I am, of course, rich in options, and although, of course, I know the right thing for me would be a spot in academia or in the world of authors (someplace where I would be free not only to share my wisdom with the human race but to do so in sneakers and a sweatshirt), I also need to remember my obligations to wife and children and all that.
Declining to suggest these things would involve an admission that I have at present no options at all, that as a matter of hard fact I would grab the first really solid job opportunity that came along, regardless of whether it was back in the defense business or back in the agency business or at East Jesus Community College. But I don't seem to be capable of that kind of truthfulness. I can't admit how naked I feel and how helpless, can't admit that if anyone gave me one more shot at the fat-cat world I'd snatch at it like a hungry beggar snatching at a dollar bill.
I make a file for every job lead that comes my way. Each contains a thin stack of pages: ads clipped from newspapers, formal job descriptions when I can get them, brief handwritten records of phone conversations, copies of letters sent to headhunters, and their replies, if any. In the early weeks of my search, as the files accumulated, I lined them up in a row on a coffee table in the bedroom, overlapping them, so that the names formed a column.
Early on it was a pretty impressive display: Philip Morris, Digital Equipment Corp., Holiday Inn, Rhone Poulenc, Ameritech, Gerber, Imcera Group, Union Carbide. Big, rich corporations. It seemed hard to believe then that at least one of these wouldn't lead to an offer of some kind.
Since then my little display has withered as completely as the leaves of summer. Gradually, as I've been told or have figured out for myself that I'm not in contention for this or that job, I've moved my files to a cardboard box in the basement. I call the box my department of dead letters.
Since then I've been answering ads that describe jobs for which I am--or so I honestly believe--ridiculously overqualified. My active-leads file now is, consequently, as fat as it's ever been. But with jobs I would, have sneered at in June, July, or August.
In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, I found an ad for a communications manager of something called the National Fertilizer Solutions Association. I actually have an interview for this one. If nothing else, it's a good excuse to run down to St. Louis and see my parents. I've been hoping all along that I could land a job before I would be forced to tell them that I'm unemployable.
I also have a file on a magazine-editing job with the American Bar Association; on an unnamed corporation that ran an ad for a public relations director ("Blind," I've labeled this one, since I haven't even been able to find out what company it is); on three public relations agencies trying to fill jobs conspicuously less exalted than the agency job I left sixteen years ago; on a job with a company that appears to be in the natural gas business in some way that its ad doesn't quite make clear in a place called Dublin, Ohio; on a Washington-based association called the N.R.E.C.A. (I answered the ad without taking the trouble to find out what the acronym means--solid proof of the intensity of my interest); on Boston College, which ran an ad for a director of public relations; on the Columbia University Press, which is looking for a sales representative to cover, by automobile, at an annual salary of less than $30,000, a region extending from Illinois to Texas.
One of my motives in answering such ads is to get a better sense of what kind of response will get me an offer of an interview and what won't. The answer, so far, seems to be that almost nothing I do leads to an interview.
When I complain about not getting answers when I respond to ads of this kind, Pam says I'm being ridiculous. People are simply not going to look seriously at someone so obviously overqualified, she says. She's right, I'm sure. But then again, what am I supposed to do? Sit here waiting for someone to call about a job that is "worthy" of me? I could wait forever. Literally. I could become the modem equivalent of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, sitting here year after year watching a canopy of cobwebs form over my telephone.
The first thing I do when I get to St. Louis is take a big sweeping detour out to Kirkwood, the suburb where Pam and I lived for twenty years. Somebody whose name I don't know has painted my front door and shutters a new color. It looks good. I hate it.
When I get to my parents' house, it is my mother, as always, who comes to the door. My father, as usual, stays in his chair in front of the television. He's just finished a course of radiation therapy. Now in their eighties, the two of them are so frail they seem to have been constructed from rolls of parchment.
I've decided that I have to tell them. Otherwise, I'm afraid, they'll hear about it through the family grapevine. However they hear it, the news is going to frighten them. These are two people whose early lives were badly twisted by the Depression. Their little house was paid off decades ago, they're collecting Social Security and a post office pension plus a monthly pittance from the Teamsters, and by any measure they appear to have come through safely after all. But I feel certain that news of what's happened to me is going to be a blow to an inner place where old wounds have never healed. Better that they hear it from me, with whatever reassurances I can offer, than in the course of idle conversation with a cousin.
Since June I've been carefully misleading them, calling every week or two as usual but pretending that I'm calling from my office. Occasionally my father, who reads every page of his daily paper with scholarly care and knows much more about the economy than I wish he did, asks how business is. Lately he's been asking every time I call, and recently he sent me a newspaper clipping about the growing financial problems of J. I. Case, the company he thinks I still work for. The article made reference to huge losses and staff cuts. "This is distressing," he wrote across the top in a tremulous hand; so different from the beautiful one I remember.
Half an hour after supper I join my parents in the minuscule room that was once my bedroom, barely big enough now for the three chairs, the sewing machine, and the big Sony television they've arranged against the walls. They're watching a sitcom. I sit down and start leafing through the newspaper.
This house is so small, so dominated by the habits of these two people, that it's like a shell they've grown together. I have trouble remembering how four of us ever lived in it. I sit watching for my chance to deliver a piece of news unlike any I've ever brought here before. On the walls around us are photos. My parents in my father's parents' front yard on their wedding day, the two of them dressed not in white gown and morning coat but as though they were setting off for work in some upscale office. My sister and me, I in my senior year of college with a tight-knotted narrow tie and oiled-down short hair, she in the white cap and high, sprayed-stiff hair of a new nursing-school graduate. My grandmothers and grandfathers, my parents' grandsons and grand daughters. Embroidered slogans in picture frames.
The sitcom ends and my father jabs at his remote control, killing the sound.
"I see in the paper," I say, "that they're laying off fifteen hundred people at Southwestern Bell."
"Yeah," says my father, "and over in Red Bud they're closing some plant where six hundred and fifty people work. Seems like there's something like that happening every day. How are things at your place?"
"Not so good, really. Actually, business is damned bad." We're all silent for a moment, my parents keeping one eye on a silent automobile commercial. "That's something I've been wanting to talk to you about."
They turn toward me big-eyed, frozen, like a couple of deer that have suddenly smelled mountain lion. "Listen, I've lost my job." Their eyes seem to get bigger. I pause. feeling as if I've just confessed to an axe murder. When nobody falls down dead I go on. I talk for a long time. I go through the problems that brought the J. I. Case Company to the verge of ruin--the decision to keep the assembly lines humming even after sales began to drop, the huge losses rising out of this decision, the unexplained departure of the president, the sudden dismissal of two executive vice presidents, the progressive elimination of more and more jobs and then of whole departments. The addition of my job, finally, to the list of those being eliminated.
"I knew something was wrong," says my father. "I sent you that article."
I tell them I'm still drawing my salary, will continue to do so for a good while longer, and won't be financially desperate even if I'm still out of work when the checks stop coming. I tell them things I've never told them before about money. Not a lot but much more than my usual silence on the subject. What I do, mainly, is color in the bright parts of the picture and ignore the dark parts. I say nothing about the sums--sums that even I still find almost unimaginable at times--that flow through our checking account every month, year after year. If I got specific they'd think I must be joking. Or they'd have to lie down with ice bags on their heads.
They appear to be satisfied with what I've said. Their attention drifts back to the television. Everything is fine--except that I seem to just as alone as I was at the beginning of the conversation. My parents know, now, that the wonder boy is unemployed but coping. They've no idea how the wonder boy is feeling, and it's not clear to me that they care.
What was supposed to be an interview with the guy at Fertilizer Solutions Association turns into a two-day visit. The head man, a bright and bluff ex-farmer named Jim Boillot, starts by entertainingly telling me the story of how he went bust in the agricultural crash of the early Eighties, got a political appointment in the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a while, and finally took the job he has now as a way of getting back to Missouri. It's clear, though, that he enjoys his work and cares about it. He seems to enjoy talking with me. He also seems to be taking me seriously.
The job I'm a candidate for, unfortunately, is mostly a matter of writing and managing a magazine entirely devoted to the subject of liquid fertilizers. This isn't a dishonorable subject, certainly, and the last few months have definitely deepened my experience of thing closely akin to fertilizer. But it does sound faintly ridiculous.
On the first day, Boillot arranges for three of his people to take me out to lunch. One, a man whose main job is selling ads, talks about how he himself recently went through a long and painful search for work.
When I meet with a man whose main responsibility is recruiting new members for association, I learn that he, too, was laid off earlier in the year by a collapsing soybean association. After this I meet the staff lawyer, an other recent arrival, a fiftyish man with photos of his large family on the sill behind his desk. He tells me--I'm amazed by how frank all these people are about their recent catastrophes--how he was an investor in and manager of a string of discount gas stations that went under. I ask, wondering if I have the right to ask, whether he plans to stay with the fertilizer association permanently. Probably not, he says. "Don't get me wrong. It's a good place. Nice people. But it just doesn't pay what I'm going to need in the long term. I took it because at the time I need a job. Needed a job bad." He smiles when he says this.
I don't tell him I know the feeling. This whole place is a collection of refugees, apparently. We seem to be evolving into a nation of native-born refugees.
At the end of the second day, Boillot takes me back into his office for a final talk. He explains how important the magazine is to his operation. If subscriptions or ad revenues fell off severely the entire association would be crippled. It's essential that the magazine be interesting, that it deliver something of real value to people who make their living in the world of liquid fertilizers. This is very different from some corporate house organ. This is real.
He's sure I could bring talent and good experience to the magazine, Boillot says. He has a concern, though: I've never run a publication of this kind. Could I do it well, and do so from the day I reported for work? He can't afford much of a leaning period.
I tell him I think I can do it from the first day, but I don't argue hard. Though I like this man, I know already that if he offers me the job I probably won't accept. Probably shouldn't accept, because almost certainly I'd feel out of place in it and therefore would probably start resenting the cut in pay.
A few mornings later he calls and tells me that he's found a candidate who has spent years running a magazine almost exactly like the fertilizer association's. "I just don't think I can justify not hiring him," he says. I agree effusively and thank him again. He asks me to let him know wherever I go in my next job, and I promise to do so. When I hang up it's with a feeling of relief; not getting an offer means I won't have to agonize over whether to take a job that obviously would be wrong for everyone involved, won't have to turn this good man down after taking up two days of his time.
Funny to be turned down and feel so good about it. Funny how the two days I spent with Boillot and his people feel like time well spent.
I nearly went to law school once. I took the LSAT, took a couple of political science courses to get myself ready, found the courses uninteresting but still wrote to law schools for application forms. I didn't really want to do it, though, and in later years when I had the opportunity to witness lawyers at work I wasn't sorry not to be doing what they were.
Yet if I had gone through with it, I might have a secure practice no one could take from me now.
I didn't go to law school because I won a fellowship for graduate work in English. I went off to spend a year getting an M.A. because it sounded like more fun than going to work or to law school and because it was a chance to find out whether academia was the place for me (I quickly decided it wasn't). Then, coming out of grad school, I joined the Navy to avoid the draft. That led to Officer Candidate School, a year and a half on a destroyer patrolling the coast of Vietnam, and a final, screamingly pointless year at a Navy supply depot in southern California.
My first job after the Navy was a vague one--my title was "administrative editor," reflecting the fact that I wasn't quite an administrator and wasn't quite an editor--with Meredith Publishing Company in Des Moines. Meredith was a gigantic outfit, producing a zillion copies a month of Better Homes and Gardens, nearly that many copies of Successful Farming, and profitable lines of cookbooks and do-it-yourself books and other forms of printed retail merchandise.
I had a cubicle deep inside the company's massive old brickwork headquarters and very little to do. This was especially maddening because I regarded myself, out of school and out of uniform at last, to be on the threshold of a career. I wanted to get started. I wanted to do things. Being hired and then left so idle felt like a betrayal.
Everybody at Meredith was bored half insane, and gradually I learned to separate my associates into two groups. One, by far the largest, was made up of earnest sorts determined to stay in the role of the serious executive under all circumstances; they had as little to do as any of us but insistently pretended to be constantly challenged. It was easy to identify these people: I'd make a glancing, joking reference to the tedium of the place, and they were the ones who gave back a blank stare lightly flecked with annoyance.
Gradually, here and there, I made the acquaintance of a small number of people who saw the place the way I did and were willing, whenever it was minimally safe, to say so. Eventually a few of us formed a kind of secret cell that would meet every morning and afternoon in a remote and cavernous area far down in the lowest level of the building, a dark void where enormous room-size rolls of paper were stacked in great brown palisades. Deep within it, strangely, under a naked lightbulb, we found a soda machine and a picnic table with chairs. Nobody ever seemed to use them but us. Sometimes we'd stay there for hours, joking about what was happening or not happening above ground in Officeland, talking about movies and books and whatnot. Nobody ever seemed to miss us.
We all quit within a year. I was the first to go, and I departed on the assumption that I'd simply been extraordinarily unlucky in my first grownup job. I assumed that Meredith had to be an aberration, that wherever I went I was bound to find more to do and more inter-esting things to do and people who didn't have to stu-pefy themselves to keep coming back every day. And on the whole I did find things better elsewhere. Not as much better as I had hoped but better. On the whole I found what working men and women have been finding for more than a century now: that big bureaucracies are a form of death in life wherever you find them, whether they belong to some corporation or to some branch of the government.
The same part of me that wishes it had gone to law school wishes it had stayed at Meredith. The part that was for so many years proud of having said to hell with law school, to hell with Meredith, is now trembling in a corner, curled up with its hands over its head.
SPRING
The first of the mallards and Canada geese have made their appearance in Wisconsin. I have fewer job prospects than I had last summer. A birthday has passed, so that I'm now one year older and have that much less value on the executive meat market. My professional credentials grow just a little staler with every passing month.
I could go to truck-driver school and learn to operate one of those huge tractor-trailer rigs. I could pull vast loads from coast to coast and back again. Maybe buy my own diesel eventually.
Or maybe my neighbor Jim would give me a job in the little air-filter factory he runs. He's constantly complaining about how impossible it is to find minimally competent and dependable people. I'm minimally competent. A year's take-home pay probably wouldn't cover a lot more than the taxes on my house, but it would be better than no job at all. And it could make me a local legend: the former briefcase carrier who spent the last twenty years of his life inserting tab A into slot B seventeen times a minute, forty hours a week.
For that matter, I could try standing behind the counter at McDonald's or Burger King or Kentucky Fried Chicken. I would wear a little paper hat and dread the thought of having to wait on somebody who knew me when.
In another daydream I simply stop looking for work, stop having my hair cut, stop going anywhere or doing anything that could possibly involve the unnecessary expenditure of fifty cents. I never buy a new piece of clothing, never again own a car, turn my yard into a vegetable garden and my kitchen into a canning factory. Slowly I evolve into the crazy old man of Racine, Wisconsin, as my house falls in around my ears. And when I'm truly old and the last of my money is gone, I use a real-looking toy pistol and enter upon a career of armed robbery. If I'm caught, no tragedy: I'll be put in a place where there's a warm, dry bed and free food every day.
An Iowa company called Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the world's leading producer of seed corn and such, is looking for someone more or less like me. In the Chicago office of the company's headhunter, Greg Carrott, I present the usual highly sanitized and vastly edifying version of my life story, a story in which someone with my name is constantly and purposefully pressing forward from challenge to challenge and triumph to triumph. Carrott in turn tells me the usual things about how his clients are looking for a team player and a real strategist and all the things that all the companies say. It's like performing a ritual folk dance--something choreographed by somebody whose name everybody forgot long, long ago.
My time at J. I. Case has made me, luckily, a certified veteran of the agriculture business. Case isn't a seed company, but it builds farm machinery. That's close enough to separate me from the city slickers, evidently. It also seems to help that I once lived in Des Moines, where Pioneer has its headquarters. As I'm leaving his office Carrott says casually that the fit between me and this job seems "almost too good to be true." The words seem momentous, written on the sky. Inside me the gray coals of hope turn orange.
Soon I get word that Pioneer is sending a delegation of three people to Chicago to meet with me. Carrott says that I'm the candidate with the broadest background and the most impressive experience. Again his words spread out against the sky. Little flames begin to dance on the glowing coals of hope. It's been obvious from the start that if I get this job it won't exactly enhance my resume. It carries the title of director, no small step down from the high plains where I've been feeding these past ten years. I don't much care about this, but there's no denying that it would be a further blotch on my already tarnished job history. What's far worse is that my willingness to consider it could easily prove a problem for Pioneer itself. Corporations and their headhunters are inclined to be suspicious of anyone willing to descend. Even today, amidst the layoffs and the downsizing and unprecedented executive unemployment, they persist in wondering what's wrong with somebody willing to take a downward step. Though little has been said about salary, I'd probably have to move lower on that ladder too. Again I'm perfectly willing, but they're likely to wonder why.
While I collect information about Pioneer, other jobs start popping to the surface. Resumes mailed out months ago suddenly bear fruit. A headhunter calls from New York and asks if I might be interested in looking into the vacant vice presidency of an insurance company called The Principal Financial Group. I read in a newsletter that the U.S. Catholic Conference, the Washington-based policy arm of the Catholic Church in America, is looking for a director of media relations. As it happens, I am the kind of Catholic who takes an interest in religious issues. Handling media relations for the U.S. Catholic Conference could, for someone like me, be interesting. I imagine myself working in a cubicle instead of an office, wearing a checked shirt and hush puppies to work, shedding my "executive" identity like a snakeskin. I put a resume in the mail.
A headhunter calls from Connecticut to say he's looking for a head of communications for Consolidated Edison, New York City's electric utility. Not long afterward, when his travels bring him to Chicago, we have a breakfast meeting. Then his partner passes through Chicago, and I have breakfast with him too. Both men convey the impression that before long I'm likely to be invited to meet with Con Ed's CEO in Manhattan.
So many things popping up suddenly, and every one of them apparently a real possibility. All of them together creating a tangled web of questions.
The Des Moines-based Principal Financial Group is, like Pioneer, a relatively obscure operation, attracting little if any attention in the world at large. And it's an insurance company. A friend who has done a good deal of work with insurance companies says that the operative term for virtually all of them is "brain-dead."
But The Principal (I quickly school myself to capitalize the article in the reverential style used in all the company's publications) is strong and healthy and old-fashioned. Once hired, I'm told, people there are never fired. That's nothing to sneer at. And it's reasonable to hope that the soporific qualities of Des Moines might be exactly what my family needs after the turmoil of these past several years. No doubt about it. Pioneer and The Principal are exactly what I've been looking for. But if that's so, how can I be genuinely interested in Con Ed? Its headquarters aren't merely in New York but in Manhattan--the heart of the heart of the beast. And Con Ed, as a utility, would embroil me in an endless round of conflicts and controversies: electricity rates, pollution, the whole extravaganza. All in the center of the wildest media circus on earth.
How could someone who hungers for Iowa also hunger for that?
Without a trace of difficulty, actually. Con Ed could put me back in the big time--big salary, big staff, big budgets, big everything.
I always liked being in the big time. I have no problem persuading myself that Con Ed is exactly what I've been looking for.
But if Con Ed is exactly what I've been looking for, how could I possibly be interested in the U.S. Catholic Conference?
Again, no problem. The U.S. Catholic Conference could, I think, offer me work that I really would find worth doing. No corporation has ever really done that. In return, of course, I would receive an income that I no longer know how to live on.
But I can learn! I can accept the idea of never again ordering a custom-made suit, of maybe never again buying a suit of any kind. I can imagine myself commuting to work by bicycle, never taking a vacation more exotic than fishing in the Smokies.
I can do that! If what I get in return is liberation from bullshit, I ought to be able to do it quite happily. On a small piece of paper I make a list:
Pioneer.
U.S. Catholic Conference.
Principal Financial Group.
Con Ed.
And--my newest nibble--Dun & Bradstreet.
I pin the list to the bulletin board above my desk. My eyes come to rest on it whenever I look up.
I meditate on my little list. I tell myself that I couldn't possibly lose out on all of these. Couldn't possibly. Not on all of them.
When the time comes for my meeting with the delegation from Pioneer I am tan and fit and brimming with facts about corn.
They've seated me on one side of a long, narrow table in a brilliantly white modern room twenty-five stories above the Chicago Loop. It's a corner room, two of the walls glass from ceiling to floor. Across the table, past the people sitting opposite, I see one of the world's great displays of skyscrapers. Out another window, Lake Michigan extends to the horizon in the sunshine.
Everything here--the plush furnishings and gleaming appointments, the tall wooden doors, the chimney-like thick-bottomed water glasses, the silver decanter--everything is expensive, elegant. Everything says Money. Power.
At the table with me are Greg Carrott and three delegates from Pioneer. One is a silver-haired, seemingly mild and friendly man--a specialist in finance, a senior vice president, the eminence to whom the new director of communications will, once hired, report. At his side is a dark, attractive woman, also seemingly pleasant, of early middle age. I'm not sure what her role is; she has some vague administrative title that I couldn't have repeated ten seconds after we were introduced. The third, on my side of the table, but far down at its end, is another woman who seems not part of the team, hunched, odd, silent.
The first two Pioneer people lob easy questions at me. I seem to hit them back cleanly, one by one. They ask about my background, my business experience, my thinking on management and communications and all the usual stuff. They probe in a gentle, Iowa-polite ways to see if I know anything about agriculture. They ask what I would do if confronted with this or that kind of little problem. Am I a team player? What are my thoughts on corporate cultural change?
For nearly an hour the woman at the end of the table has said nothing. She's plump, with dumpling chins and the arms of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Her dress, a gray-and-white affair extravagantly adorned with laces and ribbons and frills, combines with her spherical, soft flesh to create a maternal, almost grandmotherly, effect. Except for her crew cut. Her graying hair is cut down nearly to the scalp on the sides of her head and is, at most, an inch long at the top. This is a woman whose parts don't fit together.
Carrot had told me days before that one of the people I'd be meeting would be a former clinical psychologist now on Pioneer's human resources staff. He'd gone on to say that I might find her questions "unusual."
While answering the other's, I glance at the woman from time to time, trying to include her. But every time I do so she's a little more hunched over in her chair, staring at me a little more intently. Eventually she's bent over so far that if I hadn't seen her standing when I enter the room I'd suppose her to be deformed. Her chins are nearly touching the table. The end of the ballpoint pen she grips so ferociously is nearly in her nostril. Her stare has become a glare.
It's difficult to believe that someone as peculiar as she appears to be could be a psychologist, let alone be sent out on presumably important interviews. Perhaps I'm being subjected to some sort of test. But even if this is a test, should I do exactly what I am doing-continue with the interview as if nothing odd were going on at all? Or will they decide that there's something wrong with me if I don't seem aware of the behavior of the woman at the end of the table?
I shove all such thoughts aside and try to fix my attention on the questions I'm being asked. It won't stay there, though.
As we get into the second hour of the interview the crew-cut woman straightens a bit and asks a question at last. And immediately a new problem arises: I don't understand what she's asking. I can hear her words, but they're so convoluted that I literally have almost no idea what they mean. I apologize, tentatively feed her words back to her in a new sequence that makes some sense to me, and ask as politely as I can if this is what she means. When she assents to my second or third rephrasing, I spin off some words that seem to be relevant in some way to whatever it is she wants to know.
"Is that responsive to your question?" I ask. She gives a grudging little nod. Then she hunches down again, makes some notes, puts her glare back on me, and the others resume.
This happens again and then again.
Each time the woman speaks, she stumps me. I go back to wondering about a test. I wonder if perhaps I'm flunking badly by not pinning her down, by not being more insistent-with impeccable delicacy, of course-that she make herself clear. But I honestly am trying to get her to be clear. I can see no way to go further in that direction without crossing the borders of rudeness.
Perhaps an hour and twenty minutes after the start of the interview, the man and woman across the table start gathering their papers together. Their words take on the old wrapping-things-up tone. In the midst of this, the crew-cut woman uncoils herself, sits erect with her hands folded on the table in front of her, and takes command.
"Let me ask you something," she says. "Suppose you have just come to work for Pioneer. And suppose we're the members of your staff and this meeting was our first staff meeting. What exactly would you have concluded about us on the basis of what you've seen?"
Jesus H. Christ.
"Um," I reply. "Let me be certain that I understand you here. You want me to tell you what I think of you. On the basis of this interview�"
"That's right. judging from what you've seen, what do you think you'd have to do to manage us?"
"Well," I say finally, "on the basis of one short talk I don't think I can draw many conclusions about you at all. Nothing beyond the fact that you appear to be intelligent, well-intentioned, capable people. I certainly haven't seen anything that would give rise to particular concerns. Nothing, certainly, that would point to serious problems."
"Well then," she says, "let me ask you about me specifically, then. What would you say, on the basis of what you've seen here today, about me? And about what would be involved in managing me?"
"Let me be sure I'm clear on this," I say, stalling. "You want me to tell you what I think of you specifically as a result of this afternoon's meeting."
"That's right." She nods with satisfaction. Again I remember that she's a psychologist of some kind. I don't know what to do with that fact, exactly. But it seems to increase the likelihood that some sort of game--not necessarily a deep game but a complicated one for sure--is being played here.
"Wellll...I guess I would say, on the basis of what I've seen, that you strike me as a very analytical kind of person."
Analytical! Good word! How did I come up with it? As soon as it's out of my mouth I'm delighted. I don't know myself what it means in this context--nearly anything, potentially--but I don't see how anyone could possibly object to being called analytical.
"What does your conclusion suggest to you about me in relation to the others?" she asks and gestures at the man and woman on the other side of the table. They gaze back at us blankly. "What does it suggest about how you might manage my relationship with them?"
Enough. Enough of this crazy woman.
"My conclusion doesn't suggest anything about that," I say. "I haven't seen nearly enough, to get any ideas about how to manage your relationships, even assuming that my conclusion is correct, which it isn't, necessarily. I'm sorry. I just don't judge people that quickly."
An hour later, replaying the interview in my head, I feet myself going glum. What I need is to find a dark place where I can lie down and suck my thumb for a while. After a few more hours depression gives way to resentment, resentment to anger: What kind of interview was that? What kind of people would put me through such a thing? What the hell kind of company would send out such people on such a mission? Who could possibly want to work for such a company?
Before long Greg Carrott calls to tell me that of the four people interviewed, three, including me, had done well--had in fact been described by the silver-haired senior vice president as "a Mercedes, a BMW, and a Cadillac." I don't have the nerve to ask which of these is me. I do, however, want to see if I can learn something about the fat wom