Ishmael Walker (30:03)
the first National Secretary's Day. At least we consoled ourselves. We were assistants, not secretaries in the world. We were in the world of New York. Publishing these titles meant everything. It's a loathsome distinction, the almost meaningless difference between field and house slavery. After all, we, all of us, secretaries and assistants alike, had much the same duties filing, photocopying, taking dictation, and making reservations for meals we would never get to eat. There was one glaring discrepancy between us and the secretaries specifically. Their salaries dwarfed ours, but our penury came with the promise that we were bound for better things. We would be mentored, promoted, and one day raised to our rightful stations as book editors, our faith in the east coast meritocracy restored. Still, every April when National Secretary's Day rolled around, many of us took sick days, genuinely nauseous with worry that we might be mistook for them. And there on our assistance assistance desks would be the asparagus fern and baby's breath surrounded long stem roses with the heartfelt note from the boss who just couldn't do it without you. Instead of National Secretaries Day, we assistants had our own folk traditions with our own holidays, one of which we celebrated often, almost nightly. In fact, we called it drinking with disturbing regularity. The end of the workday found us at the old Monkey Bar, the Dorset Bar, the Warwick Bar, all of which were attached to serviceable and somewhat down at heel hotels. Midtown Manhattan used to be full of just such comfortably shabby establishments where career waiters with brilliantined combovers and shiny elbow jackets served marvelously cheap, albeit watery drinks along with free snacks, withered celery sticks, unironic faux Asian poo poo platters, pretzel nuggets accompanying a cheese spread of a color that in nature usually signals I am an alluring yet highly poisonous tree frog. Beware. Dinner and forgetfulness, all for $10. Youth is not wasted on the young. It is perpetrated on the young. Hooch, happily, was one luxury we could afford. Our drunkenness was twofold. First there was the liquor, but there was also the intoxication brought on by the self aggrandizing conviction that we happy few, we cheery booze hounds, were the new incarnations of that most mythic bunch of souses, the Algonquin Round Table. This pipe dream sustained not just us, but, I suspect, countless other tables of publishing menials all over town. So desperate were we to assume the mantles of Parker, Benchley and their ilk that we weren't going to let some silly thing like a dearth of wit or the complete absence of a body of work on any of our parts deter us. With enough $4 drinks sloshing through our veins, even the most dunderheaded schoolyard japery qualified as coruscating repartee. What do you want? A riposte might begin. A medal or a chest to pin it on? Oh, touche. We cried merrily as we clutched our martin. That represented the high point of the discourse. Gradually our tongues thickened and our moods darkened unpleasantly as the evenings wore on, a hostile gin scented pole fell over everything and our glittering aphorisms were reduced to the wishful and direct I hope my boss is dead. Right? Paying the bill, we stumbled out into the street and back to our apartments, where we spent the rest of the night jealously reading the manuscripts of those who actually wrote and didn't just drink about it. Rising unrefreshed we would return to the office and, rubbing alcohol and cotton balls in hand, get down to work swabbing leaf by leaf, the potted plants in our boss's office, a vain attempt to stop the outbreak of whitefly that was going around the floor. Impressing the higher ups became our constant purpose. We spent an inordinate amount of time attaching disproportionate significance to our message taking skills, our collating acumen, no small feat from under a hovering cloud of job hatred. How sad to realize from the vantage point of years later that the answer to the question that was perpetually on our minds, what do they think of me? Was they didn't at all. Realistically, we were the help and it was best not to forget it. Holiday the Second Christmas those three weeks or so of midtown Manhattan Christmas are an assistant's dream. No work gets done and all is romanticized melancholy. It was precisely why so many of us had moved to the city, so that we too might gaze misanthropically at the corporate Christmas tree in the lobby, surrounded with gift wrapped empty boxes that fooled nobody, and in the institutional fluorescent lit sadness of it all, feel something approaching depth. The phone's idle. We spent our days going to the movies during lunch, returning hours later to troll the halls of of the office, foraging through the gift baskets like a ravening pack of voles subsisting on Carr's water biscuits, individually red wax dip bowls of baby Gouda, butternut toffee popcorn, Smokehouse almonds, and fancy fruit preserves eaten directly from the jar. A diet that had our faces peppered with blackheads and glistening with oily sebum as unto the shining visages of the the apostles. Our bosses were away with their families at country houses having real lives. We wondered how they might greet the sight of the empty food baskets upon their return. Such anarchy, such transgression. As usual, they never even noticed. We, on the other hand, could not even conceive of a world wherein we did not know the exact quantity and location of our giant cashews. Holiday the third Happy Birthday. After any moment of extreme assistant subjugation, say a morning wherein one might innocently open an unsolicited manuscript only to find that someone had mailed the publishing house a jiffy pack full of human feces. Or one might be sent to the corner to pick up a cappuccino for an author who had just been given a million dollar book advance, a coffee for which I was not reimbursed. After such moments we would make our way to Sheila's cubicle where we could always be guaranteed clear eyed advice and cigarettes. Sheila was our bad girl leader. A poet and writer herself, she despised her job and didn't care who knew it, smoking openly at her desk and standing on ceremony for no one. These would be my pajamas that I slept in last night, she would say, indicating the black long sleeve T shirt and black workout pants she was wearing. And this she would add, fingering a crusted white smear on the hem of the top. This would be spilled food. Nice. Well, they say dress for the job you want, not the job you have, So of course it was immediately to Sheila that I went. When I received my birthday card, it was late November. Opening the envelope, my eyes fell upon it, a reproduction of one of those tinted B movie stills from the 1950s. A woman in a smart worsted business jacket wearing a pair of glasses at which men seldom make passes, and a switchboard operator's headset out of which were shooting tiny lightning bolts, was shown to be thinking someone needs coffee. Above her head in screaming sci fi acid yellow type was the title of this card's purported movie, the Amazing Tale of the Psychic Secretary. I slid the card back into the envelope, walked over and showed it to her. Get your coat, she said, her voice businesslike, her face unreadable. We went to the Warwick Bar. Don't talk for a while, just smoke, she said. And then, as an afterthought, she added, but you knew I was going to say that, didn't you? Psychic Secretary. Across from us in the darkened booth, a couple sat, a man and a woman. They had clearly been there for hours because the woman's head was lolling about on her neck as she alternately whispered lubriciously or laughed too heartily at her companion's jokes. We had a clear view under the table where we could see her rubbing ever higher up his thigh. I knew where this exchange was leading. Psychic. Not long after that evening, I sat in a movie theater packed to the rafters. Just before the lights went down, a woman marched up the aisle, looked at me, and asked, is that seat taken? I was nowhere near the end of the row, but trying to be helpful, I asked, which seat? Looking directly into my eyes, she said, that seat. She pointed. She was pointing to the center of my chest, to my very heart. Well, I'm sitting here, I managed finally, as if I were her college aged daughter who had suddenly announced that I was a vegetarian. She shrugged in a kind of suture self indulgence of my fantasy of existence and moved on. I looked up and down the row for some sort of laughter or some eye rolling commiseration or just plain corroboration that this had just happened. But I got no response. To this day, I cannot explain it. Was this an emissary sent from on high at that time of year not to trumpet the birth of the Son of God, but to proclaim with heavenly proof my complete and utter insignificance? She's right, I thought. This seat isn't taken. It was the perfect moment for that time in my life. I mean that, of course, in the worst way possible. The theater went dark. Up on the screen, the camera zoomed past a huge close up of the Statue of Liberty swooping down to find the Staten Island Ferry scudding along the water, transporting our working girl to her office job where we already knew she would triumph, vanquish the harpy boss and win the love of the man. Sheila taught me a survival technique for getting through seemingly intolerable situations. Interminable lunches, stern lectures on attitude or time management, being trapped by the office bore beside the sheet cake in the conference room and the like. Maintaining eye contact. Keep your face inscrutable and mask like with the faintest hint of a smile. Keep this up as long as you possibly can. And just as you feel you're about to crack and take a letter opener and plunge it into someone's neck, fold your hands in your lap, one nestled inside the other like those of a supplicant in a priory, now, with the index finger of your inner hand right on the palm of the other, very discreetly and undetectably. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you. Over and over again as you pretend to listen, you will find that this brings a spontaneous look of interest and pleased engagement to your countenance. Continue and repeat as necessary. In the dark of the theater, I write my message pressing hard into the flesh of my hand. Although I don't know who I'm writing to, I'm just glad to feel that it hurts. Thank you.
