Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the short story for the week - ‘Camaraderie.’ These are fiction but tend to be based fairly closely off my work life.
Happy Thanksgiving!
- Sam
CAMARADERIE
From ‘Exemplary Lives’
There were just a handful of major companies in the field I worked in and when I got to be a viable freelance producer it was a revolving door between them – the image I had was of TV commentators talking about the Washington political class, how that crowd would be in power for four years, then take jobs at think tanks or in the ‘private sector,’ then straight back into power, and that was for me sort of the guiding image of this phase of my career – this was how it always tended to be for me – to learn about something first in the abstract, somewhere far away, then see it applied in my own life like a demonstration of a theorem, and in my sort of professional caste people were constantly ‘failing upwards,’ ‘staircasing,’ doing an ok job on one project, getting wrapped out of that company, and then hopping to one of their rivals – in rare cases, running off to grad school and returning in a couple of years armed with a film studies degree as something else to bring to the negotiating table.
The persona I was developing was about ‘shooting from the hip,’ ‘moving quickly off the line.’ I liked to work the phones, schedule lots of shoots, keep down the costs of frills and excess personnel. It was an image I was pleased with, long-haired, a little ragged but with a certain elegance, constantly in motion, on flights or shoots or working the phones, constantly trying to get ahead of the story. My natural enemy in cultivating this persona was the cottage industry of ‘production management.’ These were people whose loyalty was to the company rather than to the project. They were always in their mid-20s, paid about half of what I was making, there always seemed to be a lot of them, and their chief task seemed to be to bury all actual work in conference calls and insurance estimates and production reports. Their favorite phrase was ‘loop in’ – we’ll loop in so and so, which, to me, was the kiss of death, because whoever they looped in would be some expensive person justifying their salary and the way they would justify their salary would always to be to introduce a lot of pointless questions and ungrounded fears, to throw around a lot of work, which production management would dutifully round up and deliver to me.
Julissa was one of them, at a shaky rung on the inscrutable hierarchy they had among themselves. She was older than most of them but only a coordinator, which I took to be a lowly designation. She was new to New York and took that very seriously. She had Yankees and Mets pennants and bobbleheads all over her desk and when someone pointed out that you couldn’t be a fan of both, she looked at them very fixedly, with a logic that I couldn’t quite follow, said, emphasizing every word, “I am a fan of New York sports teams.”
That was how she was, a bit hard to comprehend. She wore very dark, caked-in eyeliner, with a purpose I couldn’t completely follow – my guess was that she was worried about being old for the office, thought the makeup made her teenage and wide-eyed. And she wore these strangely baggy cargo pants, complete with all the pockets for a tool kit, and if I had to guess about those, it was that she thought she was heavy-set, that her thighs were too big, which, actually was not at all the case, that she was trying to disguise that insecurity under a ‘country look.’
She didn’t fit in there, and it had nothing to do with whatever she was reading in the magazines, Marie Claire and Elle, that she left around her desk, dark enjoinders about ‘thigh gaps’ and ‘summer wear.’ She didn’t fit in because she wasn’t very well educated and she didn’t quite get it. She spent tremendous time filling out documents, the carnet, visa applications, whiting-out bits of handwriting if she thought the receiving bureaucracy would have ‘any trouble reading it,’ and she worked diligently, painstakingly, “I’m just trying to make things absolutely perfect,” she said, without noticing that people were hovering over her desk, other assignments were piling up – slapdash and last-minute came with the territory in our industry. And there were these weird gaffes. We were working away, staying late, for a shoot that was kind of already screwed up, and Julissa, trying to match the mood, suggested that she put on music – which turned out to be the ’80s Spotify station, theme songs from the Rocky movies and workout music, and somehow didn’t notice that just about everybody else was on the phone – and one of the senior producers actually had to go over to her and say, “As much as we all love Duran Duran, would you please turn that down.”
I was at a meeting about something completely different and an executive, who prided himself on being a prick – saw it as his job to keep everybody honest – said at the end of it, when somebody mentioned a delay on the production management side, “I know – I’m taking care of that – I know that that’s a thing.”
I was in a self-improvement phase at that time and after the meeting I sat at my desk for a minute and watched Julissa typing while she jammed along to ’80s music playing through her headphones, and I went over to her desk and squatted to the side and said, “Hey just as a heads-up –” and told her what I’d heard in the meeting and she looked confused as I was talking since I was from the project side, not one of the production managers, and I was a villain in their particular scheme of things, dedicated to spending money and forcing them to do things, and then she put her hand to her mouth and said, “Who said that? That was about me? Are you sure?” And she peppered me with questions about it, defended her work to me, and I got annoyed, answered testily, somehow she wasn’t realizing that it was a big deal what I’d done, betraying the confidence of a higher-up out of some sense of team play.
The reward for what I’d done was an invitation to her karaoke birthday party. This was months later. She’d stayed at the company, maybe she’d pulled it together, maybe she’d just gotten a talking-to, I was the one who left, didn’t get along with my higher-up, was wrapped early, jumped to one of the rivals – to a better job with better pay, those paradoxes just seemed to be in line with this kind of work, every project was always a mess, somehow it always worked out, everybody failed upwards, if they did well – otherwise they burned out and went to grad school.
The party had very few of our old co-workers, very few people I knew – they seemed mostly to be people who worked in catering or food service. A few were roommates, there seemed to be a couple of sets of roommates, all of whom had complicated histories together, had pre-gamed on the same drugs. They were in lines on different benches, arguing with each other about who was getting next rounds, where were other parties, they kept passing cell phones back and forth to one another. Julissa was singing her heart out to pop country music – everybody else seemed to have abandoned the karaoke premise. There was a guy, Cory, from one of the two sets of roommates, who seemed to have appointed himself my caretaker. He kept sliding over from the larger pack to check in on me. He had a sleepy, happy expression, he seemed to be on something very strong, the skin of his face was loose like playdough. “You like this music?” he was asking me. “You’ve got to really listen to it. Every song is a story.” He was from Louisiana, around Shreveport. A few of the group had migrated together, including Julissa. He kept telling me how much better it was down there, telling me about New Orleans rap and the seafood you could get there that you couldn’t get here. It wasn’t much of a conversation. He was taking pity on me. I was regretting having come. I’d say something half-hearted, he’d make me repeat it a couple times, point to the speakers, smile, dance in his private way, which had nothing to do with the music. When he spoke next, globs of spit at the corners of his mouth, he talked about how much he was looking forward to going back. “Prices here,” he was saying, making the money sign with his thumb and fingertips, “if you can kill it, you can kill it, Julissa’s killing it, if you don’t it’s like two, three jobs, and you still can’t live.” He made a waving gesture like he didn’t want to bum himself out, this wasn’t the time for that. “Julissa’s really into this,” he was saying, “Julissa’s really trying to make it happen.” I couldn’t tell whether he and Julissa were really all that close – she and I certainly weren’t – but she was the sole link between us, we had both developed a kind of proprietary attitude towards her. We both made a point of applauding whenever she finished one of her country ballads. She was the example used to settle the questions he’d started posing me in the long silences. Was it fun for me to work on movies? he’d ask – it was for Julissa, she was the only one in their group who’d come home and want to talk about something going on at work. Was I Christian, was I part of a church? He wasn’t really, he’d drifted from that – but it was important for Julissa, maybe that was what kept her going, the prayers she actually did every morning and evening and on her lunch break. “She’s a really big Christian,” he said – “up until drink five and then she’s not.” And we watched together in our proprietary way as Julissa, who was well past that threshold, sat on a bench talking closely to one of the guys from their group, nestling into the arm he’d thrown around her.
It was a stupid party and I wasn’t at all sure what I was doing there – the people I knew, production coordinators and managers whom I wasn’t at all interested in, had left long ago. I waited for Cory to go back to the bar, Julissa making out with her guy, and I slipped away. It was one of these pleasant surprises to be out on the street after a party, and have it not be so dark – there was the Northern Lights feeling around Herald Square, the bright light from all the neon ads, the crowds actually pouring towards the Koreatown karaoke bars. I was out of my personal transformation phase and back into a familiar cynicism. Everything seemed so determined. The crowds pouring into Koreatown after work on Friday night, and my kind of white-collar, mercenary work – not something I’m great at, not something I really want to do, but can’t fail for trying – and these packs from Shreveport trying to get their toehold into the city, their communal apartments in the Bronx or deep Queens. They were a mysterious group to me, I couldn’t figure out the ethnicity of most of them, couldn’t place them culturally – they seemed to be swinging between pop country and New Orleans rap, for their upbringing I pictured megachurches, car stereos, crushed pills. The one thing that was clear to me was they wouldn’t stay in New York very long – just long enough to have an adventure, and then they’d go back, tell their children and grandchildren about how impossible it was to survive there. “Dog eat dog,” they would say, shaking their heads. Except Julissa. She was naïve as anybody, as overmatched, but this wasn’t tourism for her – somehow I was sure of that. The pennants of the Yankees, the Mets, every possible New York sports team; the magazines with their rigorous diets and fashion protocols – she was switching allegiance. There wouldn’t be many more crushed pills, many more makeouts with the homeboys, there was something about this party, the way she was belting out her songs – it felt like a farewell. It didn’t happen very often that people changed their fates, and when it did it looked like how Julissa was doing it, clumsy, uncomfortable, in fits and starts.