substitute

I got out of the house and went to a social event! Woo. Nice time at xtreme_pr0k's house. Good to see maineiac_eric and others I hadn't seen in forever, plus a new and fun girl who punched me in the stomach.

Anyway, it was good to do something other than be at home or at the coffeehouse or, wait, those were the only two.

The cat is punching me in the ankle.

I love this song.

I first heard it while at the Miller's Outpost jeans store on 17th Street in Costa Mesa, California. I was probably shopping for back-to-school jeans or something.

I can still see the whole store in my mind, the shelves full of jeans against the back wall in every color in variety especially. Boot cut, easy fit, black, white, dark and light blue, with that distinctive denim smell.

The terror of knowing what this world is about...

As long as I live, the sight of a long line of eucalyptus with a palm tree or two in the distance will make me feel at home. I'm glad the builders left those.

This war in Georgia terrifies me.

Mitchell Harding was one of the radio voices I would listen to at night in my bed through the earphones, late at night, after my parents were in bed. He was a voice on the legendary Hour 25 science fiction program at KPFK and later a constant voice on KCRW, where he did news programming.

I can hear his fatherly voice in my head even now. He was good to me over the airwaves. Rest in peace, sir.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2007/11/mitchell_harding_la_radio.php

Flat front left tire on the Long Beach Freeway in the beautiful city of Commerce this morning. Inconvenience; grime; noise; moderate danger; expense. Saving graces:

* The useful and free Freeway Service Patrol tow people, who rather than just taking me off the freeway so I could change my tire safely, changed the tire for me with high powered tools in about 90 seconds.

* Modern cars, which can take a front left tire blowout at highway seed without becoming the Grim Reaper's Whirling Gondolas to Hell.

* Working spare.

I went to two doctors today, both for minor reasons. Both at Newport Center.

These doctors' offices are full of very old, tremulously decrepit white men in cheerful retirement clothing. They're in aloha shirts and khaki shorts and running shoes, slowly dying.

The parking lot has a very low clearance. This results in comedy with SUVs. One patient made it in driving a Suburban; another with slightly larger tires did not, providing a condensed symbol of the Californian relationship with cars and a satisfying crunchy noise.

The pharmaceutical rep in the waiting room was qualified as a fashion model: almost six foot, slender, leggy, cheekboned and coiffed. Thieves and murderers always send out the best courtesans.

I did not buy the pigurines in the pharmacy window.

For two years in the mid 1990s I was the manager of a hospital medical records transcription department. It was my first and only full-time management job. I was 30 and inexperienced, but I very much wanted to do the job well; in fact, the reason I took the job was that everyone would probably have been outsourced and fired if I hadn't. That's another story.

The time came when I had to hire a new person. HR put an ad out and I plowed through resumés, and found a few candidates worth interviewing. We had both an interview and a test, so anyone I hired would at a minimum be able to do the job without a doubt.

My first hire was Mary Sue (not her real name). She was a quiet, diffident woman about my age with a good resumé, obviously highly intelligent, and tested nearly perfect. She was eccentric; all medical transcriptionists are eccentric. Everything about her was buttoned-down. She had tasteful, conservative clothing without a button out of place, finely curled permed hair, the exact right amount of makeup, and a precise and muted voice. She played the subservient office lady role the whole way. Everything was an apology or a question, with the head tilted slightly to one side. She was so pale that "white" didn't cover it; I think she was partly transparent.

I seated her in an empty cubicle and she began to silently churn out good work. I congratulated myself on a successful first hire! She always looked worried and hunted, but most of the people I worked with were functional neurotics and I didn't think much of it.

A couple of weeks after she started I was talking to her at the photocopier and she mentioned that she hadn't slept well the night before due to noisy neighbors. I made commiserative noises. "Well, I don't know, it's, worse, worse than that" she said mournfully. "How so?" "Well my neighbor. She is. I think you know, she is a prostitute. So many men coming and going all the time." I paused for a moment. "Really?" I didn't think of West Covina as being a haven of condominium whorehouses. "Oh I'm sure of it. I know. You know, we've had this before. It's like it's taking over." I made some polite gesture and retired to my desk. Whoo, I thought. I've got a sexual paranoid on my hands. This should be entertaining.

A few weeks later Mary Sue showed up at my desk asking for a private conference. I closed both doors and we sat down. "I am having some trouble in the mornings," she offered. "What's up?" "Well, you know, Barry (a subject of a previous profile here). and T. and C., they work that same time. And they talk a lot and they're loud. And it's hard because I can't get things done, and you know they aren't doing anything. And then they're really rude and mean to me. Barry came up to me at my desk and called me a bitch."

I was shocked. First of all, I knew that the morning crew didn't "do nothing". Although I wasn't there early I could see their workflow precisely. They were a bit slower than when I was there, but not more than reasonably. And I knew they were BSing around talking. They'd all known each other for 10 years and worked as a team at another hospital. And I couldn't imagine any circumstance in which Barry would call someone a bitch. Finally, this wasn't the kind of workplace where you couldn't stop and chat for five minutes, either. If you didn't let work pile up or mess with anyone, it was cool. I told Mary Sue that I'd stop in unexpectedly a few times to see what was up, and that if anyone was abusive to her she should log it exactly and I would take appropriate action. She was very grateful and teary and went back to her desk.

I did pop in unexpectedly early a few times over the next month. There were some embarrassing/comic moments when I saw people with their feet up on their desks expounding long stories to each other, but mostly people were just churning along doing their thing and waved a hello to me. "Hey, early guy. There's bagels." There wasn't any loud boorish talking, or any sign of hostility to anyone.

About a month later Mary Sue returned to my desk. She was even more upset this time. Again she told me tales of the other morning employees harassing her, doing no work, and being loud. I mentioned to her that I was puzzled because I'd seen nothing on my surprise visits. She was silent for a minute or so and then said "Well, let me tell you it's happening. They're just like that. Those people are idle, it's their way. I'm sure you know what I mean here. Those people. I knew you would understand." Thunderbolt. I realized that everyone on that shift but Mary Sue was black. Oh crap.

I told her that if she had continued complaints she'd have to file a grievance with HR and/or talk to my boss, because I had nothing to go on based on the information I had. She looked terribly sad and betrayed, and said that she would do that, but that she had hoped I would understand the situation. I looked at her for a long moment and said "I think I do understand the situation, actually."

I managed to call my boss before Mary Sue did. She (boss) shared my reaction. "Oh, SHIT. Barry? I don't think so. Yeah, I'll talk to her. Thanks." I asked what the hell we were going to do; can you fire someone for being an insane racist? "No. But I can quit her."

Over the next couple of weeks things were very tense. Barry came to see me and said "Well, I guess you know why I'm here." "Yeah." "I just wanted to say, I've been here seven years, and there's been no trouble. Nothing. I just want to get my job done. I hope.." I cut him off "Don't worry. It's not going to be me." He smiled and left. The others dropped by and this was repeated. Mary Sue barely spoke to me but occasionally would sit at her desk typing with one giant tear rolling down a powdered cheek.

Mary Sue quit at the end of two weeks. She arrived in my office in a portentous way and delivered a note to my desk, a generic quit note. As I read it, she intoned "I am pursuing other opportunities because both you and the Vice President have made it clear to me that serious problems are not taken seriously here." I took the note and filed it, saying to the wall behind her "I can promise you they are, Mary Sue. Very seriously indeed."

We had a pot luck the day after her last day. I brought the meringue cookies.

Just got back from seeing genericus play with Crack Sunday at the infelicitously named Hogue Barmichael's. This is the bar next to the airport where airline pilots have 8 Cuba Libres, sway across the street into the cockpit, and pass out at the controls on takeoff, augering into the Upper Newport Bay in a 757 full of Disneyland returnees. They also have live music there!

All the elements of the weeknight show at the local venue were there. High school kids in a messed up van with stuff written on it, and a PA through which they mumbled. Grumpy bartender. Decent turnout for a late evening weeknight like this. There was a wacky woman who kept demonstrating her belching technique.

The cast inside the bar was familiar too. Some friends of the band, some fans of the band, some totally random people. There were the two Ghost World girls who danced and had a good time and were fun and nice. It seems that there are two girls like that at every show. There was a very happy backwards-baseball-cap guy with bad teeth who said to me "There's lots of girls here to see these guys. That's good! Hey, maybe only 15 people here but ten are girls!" There was the silent ponytailed sound guy.

The music is prog rock with a lead keyboard, which is very much not my style; I like maybe 10 songs total in this style of which maybe 7 are early Peter Gabriel solo songs. ("White Shadow" and "On the Air" are examples.) Fortunately genericus knows and likes this music better and plays it well. I couldn't hear the guitarist at all. There were a few songs I was able to roll with and enjoy, and I have to say it was because of the bassline more than anything. I have major problems with the singer in this band, and it's been hard for me to get past this previously too. They got better as the night went on, though, as you'd expect from a band that hasn't played live in a while.

At one point the cheesy fog machine vomited out a load of cheesy fog directly over genericus's head and he looked up and was struck down by fear and horror for about 5 seconds; it made me wish I'd brought in the camera.

I left a bit early because I have been working on and off in 4 hour shifts for the last 24 hours and I was burnt.

The television over the bar first gave us a show in which grinning people handed each other gigantic fish. This was followed by sickly yellow salesmen infomershing, and finally by the end of Rain Man.

Jerrold (not his real name) was a coworker at the hospital. He was a trim, slightly built black man in his late forties with thinning hair. He and I were both transcriptionists and later I was his supervisor.

Jerrold clearly had high standards for his own behavior. He was invariably polite and friendly to everyone. If a contentious question arose he would find a way to bow out, and it was hard to drag a critical statement out of him about anyone. A few times someone played a prank on him and he just grinned for about an hour. The only time he was really concerned or upset at work was when we had a crazy prejudiced lady working there who made accusations (that's another story), and when he realized no one was going to listen to her he went back to his phlegmatic self.

He'd gone into the service during the Vietnam War and done a tour overseas with the Air Force. He was in a group that was sent behind enemy lines to retrieve airmen, and it's clear he had a rough war. After he got out of the service he went to work as a police dispatcher, working 12 hour days seven days a week. He then spent ten years as a Los Angeles bus driver. These experiences gave him a lot of stories to relate. Because life as a black man in Los Angeles is also bizarre and stressful, he had some stories like that, and some others about his family, all of which were extremely dramatic. But Jerrold told them in a curiously flat way. He had a kind of Midwestern male reserve that did not allow his voice to raise, or his tone to become excited, or even his adjectives to get terribly descriptive. This made the stories punch harder, because he was so clearly just relating a series of facts. I'll try to recreate a couple of them.

( Stories )

As a child I spent a lot of time in art museums. My parents were culture vultures and we traveled a lot in Europe, including a year in Paris and some summers in Italy, France, and England. From the age of 7 to 14 I tagged along to every church, museum, archaeological site, castle, and concert in the First World.

Despite my strong desire to run in circles and eat sweets, I enjoyed high culture as a child. I could sit staring at a favorite artist's work for a long time, and even if I didn't like the stuff it was a fun game to learn all about it. For an agnostic I know way too much about Catholic saints to this day. There were downsides to this life (my mother would delay lunch way, way too long if the museum was good), but on the whole I was happy.

My favorites were Henri Rousseau's big, colorful, naive paintings; Monet, especially the biggest ones; Arp's shiny sculptures; Caravaggio's paintings; and, although we never visited any of those countries, almost anything from Asia.

I have a particular memory of sitting in front of a large bronze Buddha. The museum atmosphere was sterile and white, and the only sound was that of the hygrometer occasionally ticking in the corner. The gallery was mostly empty. I sat on a wooden bench slightly too high for me, so that my legs swung, and looked up at him. I think this must have been a Nepalese or Indian Buddha, because he had the half-twisted little wry smile I associate with Hindu art. His patina'd hand was held up in the Buddhist benediction sign. I wanted to be that statue, and for an hour or so I thought I almost was, under my own personal Bo tree, unmoved.

That experience is in the library now, and I can go there when I need it. I'll never be a Buddhist, but I can go back to that moment in a forgotten museum and sit on that bench next to Buddha and be still any time it's necessary.