I Wish I Was Like You Page 16

  Steve’s secondary job was compiling a column under the pseudonym Dick Dagger. The column was called “Sick Dick” and it was supposed to be satirical. As Charlie recounted to me, for the first couple of months Steve (a failed musician and novelist) had invented his targets—fake socialites and business owners with outrageous names—and reported their embarrassing antics all over the city.

  Maybe it was the pressure of having to fabricate so much fiction every week, or maybe it was Steve’s natural inclination to hate anyone who wasn’t born and raised in his native city. Whatever the reason, he soon decided to aim his criticism at real citizens of Seattle. To accomplish this he wooed and won over individuals who worked at the places run by or frequented by his targets.

  Steve’s mission was to get attention yet avoid trashing anyone who advertised with us. The only power he had was his audacity. With such a small readership Boom City was no threat to anyone. On the other hand, a good bit of reliable gossip might get picked up and printed by real newspapers. Casual readers were only interested in the more outrageous and salacious Sick Dick stories. A few local journalists were beginning to rely on Steve’s tips, most of which came directly from his minions. What was supposed to be Steve’s secondary responsibility became his ace in the hole, his guarantee of a position even if Eve fired him as arts and entertainment editor.

  Steve’s Minions—Charlie mocked them with the title ‘Pike Street Irregulars’ but I preferred the name the rest of the staff used behind their backs—loved to sneak in and out of the office by way of the smokers’ stairwell. This backstreet approach added to the intrigue of their nefarious adventures. The more paranoid among them phoned in tips from home. The more spiteful used breaks at work, and company phones, to call in tidbits about their employers and superiors.

  Steve courted people who were well placed to observe bad behavior but I was pretty sure some of his minions exaggerated or even fabricated stories to curry favor with him. They were paid nothing. Steve was smart enough to offer them VIP treatment when they visited, and they were said to be included in all of the Sunday brunches at Moo’s house.

  One by one, day after day, they emerged from the back stairs at Boom City and navigated the tangle of ratty cubicles to find Steve in the far corner. Along the way they helped themselves to soda, candy, and any baked treats left lying around for staff. They had the stunned arrogance of groupies, the fervent soulless stare of Manson followers. They ignored the rest of us, gliding by in a fog until they reached the final rabbit hole at the end of the row. Then they grew taller and the color came rushing to their cheeks. They greeted Steve like way-back college roomies, open-armed and conspiratorial. In return he offered them the attention and friendly demeanor he denied the rest of us. He beamed at the arrival of each minion. He set aside what he was doing and offered them a seat, a cup of coffee, a chance to vent, a place to be heard and appreciated.

  Although individually they didn’t make a particularly striking impression, some common element was slowly shaping my perception of them as they trudged past the slovenly workspace I shared with Ed John Maynard. Ed replaced the paper’s regular film reviewer after the guy had a meltdown at the Egyptian in the middle of a Hal Hartley retrospective. (“Fuck all the goddamn quirks and kooks and fucking words!” he was heard to scream as a security guard led him outside.)

  During Steve’s birthday party in November I got a chance to view the minions together in one corner, and my lazy intuition came into sharp focus. I saw the tattered edges and fragile egos, in bold relief. I ran my observations by Charlie who, of course, knew the history on most of the minions. I let my imagination fill in the gaps.

  Lorna had been a lingerie model at nineteen. Nagged by her parents, her boyfriend, and her agency to maintain a size two, she had binged on Dunkin’ Donuts and Twinkies and then purged in the bathroom before every photo shoot. A few times she threw up so hard she burst the capillaries around her eyes and had to stop working until the mask of bright pink dots faded.

  When she wasn’t in front of a camera, Lorna flipped through fashion magazines while she ate. She would have been mortified to dine at a good restaurant and risk being seen by friends. She lurked outside fast food joints wearing a wig and sunglasses, and consumed greasy meals behind the wheel of her BMW. Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald’s, Taco Bell… You name it; Lorna put it in her mouth.

  Laid up with a broken leg after a ski trip in Vermont, she stopped vomiting and went on gorging. On her twenty-second birthday she could barely squeeze into a size fourteen.

  Seeing her daughter’s lucrative career slipping away, Lorna’s mother packed her suitcase and sent her to a spa. There she was starved and lectured until her brain seized upon an attitude of self-deprivation to survive. People were so horrible, so pious and mean. They pretended to listen, but as soon as she told them how she felt—how she would quiver with the impulse to reach out and slap another woman on the street; or seeing a baby in a crib or stroller, she reached involuntarily to pinch its cheeks until they bled—her confessors invariably betrayed her.

  The next conversation was invariably about professional counseling and medication, or surgery. In every scenario they dreamed up for her, Lorna was wrong, wrong, wrong. Her body was committing an act so heinous she dared not admit it, dared not glance in a mirror and accept her burgeoning self, or she might call down the hatred and vengeance of the gods.

  All of these layering fears plagued her at night, and scarred her with circles under her eyes and worse—deep waves of flesh loosened by starving herself in compliance with her mother’s wishes, the universal wish for her to be a size four, the universal desire for less of her.

  Back home after a month at the spa, Lorna survived on rice cakes, celery sticks, and water when anyone was watching, or might be watching. In the fine, cool darkness, on the marble floor of her bathroom, she feasted on peanut butter cups, thousands of them, washed down with the pure, zesty, precious flavor of original Coca-Cola.

  By age twenty-five she had given up the cruel precision of zippers and buttons on size eighteen separates. She opted for muumuus, for comfort, until an autumn breeze swept one of her favorite dresses over her head where it caught and wrapped around her ponytail. From then on, Lorna wore only a pair of man-sized long johns beneath farmer’s overalls from the Army Navy Store.

  “If it’s sexy enough for Farmer John, it’s sexy enough for me,” she said to Steve every time he laughed at her outfit. In other words, every time she visited the office. She smiled broadly, dimples adding texture to her face. Her hair was always perfectly brushed and tossed and smelled of expensive product. Her makeup must have taken an hour every morning.

  She would offer a petite curtsy to Steve and hold one finger under her chin, a coy gesture held over from her teen modeling days. It made Steve roar with laughter and put his arm around her shoulder. They stood together giggling for a long time, comrades in the shit factory of life.

  After Lorna left the office, if there were no other minions around Steve would say, sadly, “She lost all of her modeling money. Her mother stole it.” Next time she appeared they would huddle at Steve’s desk and she would show him photo after photo of bygone days, every precious angle of the body she once commanded, while he stroked her hand and sighed. “Look how little you were!” he said. “I could have held you in the palm of one hand!”

  Eventually Lorna starved herself down to a size ten before jumping off a balcony in Belltown at the age of forty-five. ‘The age of no return,’ she used to call it. Her suicide was deemed an accidental death.

  Whitman was fifty in man-years. In his mind, I think he was eternally twelve. His wide-eyed reaction to almost any stimulus wore thin during Steve’s birthday party. I caught a glimpse of his real face when Lorna, dancing barefoot, shimmied past and ordered him to, “Loosen up!” Whitman’s wide eyes narrowed and deepened until they glinted like black ice on a country road.

  It would not have surprised me if Whitman
were suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a serial killer. Every time he appeared he had a new complaint about his father. He made it sound like he had taken in the old man out of pity. Charlie said Whitman lived in the attic of his father’s house in Ballard, the place where he grew up. He had worked most of his life, earned a nice salary but never moved out of his father’s house and never took vacations.

  Whitman’s usefulness stemmed from two decades of employment in the administrative office at a temp agency. He had a wizard memory and was quick to spot unhappy oddballs who had been ‘tried out’ and let go by various clients of the agency, clients targeted by Steve in the cartoonish guise of Dick Dagger. Whitman put the sharpest and angriest of his misfit temps in touch with Steve, to whom they confessed their former employers’ secrets.

  Whose software startup was bankrolled by his mom’s lover’s money from an embezzled pension plan? Who was screwing his children’s nanny, again? Who was concealing her chemotherapy from the board of directors, to prevent a hostile takeover by a rival company? Which Buddhist entrepreneur was secretly making plans to move his manufacturing to China?

  In his role as Dick Dagger, Steve was a miracle worker. He could sit down with a lonely outsider over lunch and within two hours he had enough material for a column that would scare the shit out of a successful hedge fund manager, bank executive, or city councilman. And he did this without offending Carl’s family and their friends, or creating enough heat to attract a lawsuit. By naming certain individuals and keeping other identities secret or giving them fictional names and characteristics, he terrorized half of Seattle’s nouveau riche.

  Whitman was found naked in his father’s house the day after 9/11. He sat upright on a scabby armchair, clutching the urn full of his father’s ashes. Cause of death was unknown because ’sheer misery‘ wasn’t on the coroner’s list of options.

  Becky Shelton was the box office manager at one of the city’s grandest and most acclaimed theater companies. She had trained all of the other employees except the artistic director and had watched while they schmoozed and fucked their way to better, more creative positions. At one time or another the head of publicity, the literary manager, the associate artistic director, and the woman in charge of recruiting volunteers had all reported to Becky. She was known universally as a loyal old dog, ‘Becky in the Box Office,’ shortened over time to ‘BBO.’

  By the time her fortieth birthday rolled by without notice, Becky was repressing enough bile and rage to crush the new theater she’d helped build supervising phone call pledges in a capital campaign. Her salary had been frozen since 1988. Her half-hour lunches were spent eating homemade sandwiches in the break room.

  When the A.D. accidentally left her name off the capital campaign list of ‘angels’ in the season brochure, Becky finally snapped. Her contribution to Sick Dick included a profile of the associate artistic director, a Southwest transplant with a wife and four children who spent late nights drunk in the parking lot at a local dive, fucking various actresses who were later cast in shows he directed.

  Becky also noted how the literary manager had secured her title by giving hand-jobs to the errant A.D. plus a couple of rich patrons of the arts. As a strange bonus, Becky provided Steve with a top-secret letter confirming the A.D. was only hired after he promised to cover any extra costs in his lavish productions by ‘borrowing’ money from his wealthy aunt’s bank account.

  Sick Dick caused a purge of Becky’s company unlike anything the arts community had ever witnessed. All without naming names. The only person still standing when the storm was over was Becky. Afterward she would have done anything Steve asked.

  Apparently Steve didn’t ask Becky to go on living. Her body was found in the trunk of her car a few years later, the circumstances too peculiar to rule out either suicide or foul play.

  Dagwood (not his real name, which was known only to Steve) presented as a helpful, compulsive volunteer. Opera, dance, theater, auctions, charity events, Dagwood volunteered and received a free seat or a free meal, or both. From the week I arrived in Seattle I spotted Dagwood. He was a staple of the arts scene, tearing tickets and handing out programs all over town.

  Here’s what I noticed about handy, helpful Dagwood. The guy had a taciturn manner toward patrons who asked ‘too many questions.’ He prepared two stacks of programs, one with discount coupons inserted, and one with no extras. There was a pattern governing which pile he chose for a given ticketholder. The people he cheated in this petty and meaningless way were not randomly selected; they were people he didn’t like.

  Dagwood was an exquisite example of a local conceit: difficult to describe, amorphous yet instantly recognizable to anyone connected to the artistic hive of a city. Dagwood represented the spite factor, which is a constant. Wave upon wave of hopeful, talented young people land in every big city every year. Many will give up. Others will thrive. Some of the ones who give up linger in a ghost state, a Dagwood state, volunteering and handing out programs, and then mumbling to patrons to ‘bring a map of the neighborhood next time’ if they need directions and snarling that ‘of course there’s no bar in the theater since they have no liquor license as is stated on the sign in the stairwell.’

  Dagwood’s body was found two days before Christmas, in 1999, in the bathroom at a department store. He was on his knees with his head in a urinal, a situation the store manager described as ‘unfortunate.’

  As individuals the minions must have seemed innocuous to the people they met at work, at a bar, on the bus, or on the street. Yet between them, thanks to Steve, they wrecked the careers of at least a dozen employers and colleagues. And all he had to do was make them feel special for a few minutes each day.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I ended the year drunk with Charlie on the floor of the production room at Boom City. As usual my gifts were too few to justify decorating a tree in my apartment—a bottle of champagne and a basket of gourmet goodies from Vaughn, a card and fifty bucks from my mother, a book from Daisy (something by Adrienne Rich), and a cassette tape of In Utero with a gift certificate to Fallout Records from my dad, who overestimated my love of music and underestimated my ability to buy tapes cheap.

  The rest of the staff had taken the week off and most had flown out of town to visit family and friends. Charlie hated his family and my parents didn’t invite me to spend the holidays with them. So we sat on the floor and drank Vaughn’s gift, smoked weed, and sang at the top of our lungs, “I wish I was like you—easily amused!”

  We were supposed to answer the phone. Every time it rang Charlie picked up the receiver and said, in sing-song rhythm, “Have a holly jolly Christmas. It’s the best time of the year. Oh by golly, have a holly jolly Christmas this year! You’ve reached Boom City. May I help you?”

  By this time the caller usually hung up. No matter how many times this happened we fell all over one another laughing. Later we made out, fully intending to fuck. But we fell asleep from the wine and woke up looking like victims of a hurricane.

  “Hey,” I said. I tugged on Charlie’s shirt and he blanched.

  “I’m going down the hall now to be sick or kill myself.”

  “Okay,” I told him.

  While he was gone I slipped into the main office, went to Eve’s cubicle, and rummaged through her desk. I found two drawers full of unopened manuscripts and a Thanksgiving card from somebody named Theresa who stamped a paw print next to her name.

  “Pathetic,” I said.

  “What’s pathetic?” Charlie asked. He stood in the cubicle watching me. His long, dark hair was pulled up in a crooked ponytail and the tail of his linen shirt hung outside his pants. “Who you calling pathetic?”

  “Eve. She’s like a fucking ghost.”

  “Why do you say that?” he asked.

  “She barely exists. She has no friends.”

  “She’s friends with Leslie,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “The gerbils call
her Fucky Face,” he said. (Leslie! Why can’t I remember this?)

  “Look at this stack of manuscripts,” I said. “This one’s postmarked September. So is this one… I think Eve stuck these in a drawer and forgot!”

  “Ooooooooooooo,” Charlie said, holding both hands up to his lips to feign surprise.

  “Don’t you think she’s unprofessional?”

  “What’s your deal with Eve?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You hate her, don’t you?” He sat on her desk and pulled his legs up until he was cross-legged.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “I don’t,” he said. “I don’t hate anybody. Even Carl, and he’s a psychopath.”

  “He’s not that bad.”

  “Sorry? You know where he’s spending his vacation? He’s hunting elk with his dad and their rich friends. They’re staying at a lodge for rich dudes where they pretend to be rustic and grrrr and people wait on them and wash their clothes and clean their rifles and feed them Belgian waffles with whipped crème. Carl’s a piece of shit, a complete, total piece of shit. Yet I do not hate him.”