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was doing. “Nothing,” he said, “I got no dreams, no goals, no aspirations…I’m the happiest man alive.”



Curse of Financial Fools
    So now I’m cursed with some kind of property clock, as opposed to the biological type. I can just feel it tick, tick, ticking until I’m old and it’s too late to amass the fortune I always figured it would take to make a down payment. And regarding money, I take after my mother, who spent hers unwisely, as opposed to my father, who didn’t make any at all and also spent my mother’s money unwisely. I started work when I was fourteen, making $1.75 an hour as a trainee at Baskin-Robbins, and spent my entire first paycheck on a puka-shell necklace. A few months later I was fired for being morose. I’d just seen the movie Jaws , which affected me deeply, and I would spend most of my shifts sitting on top of the reach-in freezer wondering aloud what it would feel like to be bit in half by a shark. It didn’t help that my boss, Mrs. Beeson, had an amputated index finger on her right hand. Missing body parts always stoke the fire of an adolescent’s imagination.
    Later, of course, I got that job at the magazine. People who know me now laugh when they hear I used to have an office job, and that I used to share that office, which was the size of a guest bedroom, with three crusty copy editors: one an overbearing sexual pervert and two others who smoked like walking sausage factories. Our hate for one another was so thick it was almost nourishing, but it all ended for me quietly one day after I watched my boss eat a bowl of soup. It was that simple.
    The other magazine employees had normal work schedules, but my department was different. For example, on the day my brother was hospitalized for emergency heart surgery, I was reprimanded for having spent only eight hours at the office before leaving to be with him. “You really need to get back here and help us finish this work,” the senior copy editor said into my answering machine that night. He had big lips and a body like a seven-foot bowling pin. He used to play bongo drums for a defunct sixties band called Big Fat Momma. The time of that message was 10:21 P.M . A month later he sent me an odd but purely obscene e-mail about how he liked to stir chocolate fondue with his schlong. The e-mail’s last word was “creeeeeamy.”
    They liked to tell me my laughter lowered their concentration level, until I said it was a good trade-off since their smoking lowered my life expectancy. My coworker Eugenia was as fond of her cigarettes as was our immediate boss, who would fervently puff away while devoting an entire day investigating whether “corn stick” was one word, two words, or hyphenated. Me, I felt it would be more fun to spend the day ripping out my own kidneys with a rusty crow-bar, so it didn’t take them long to turn on me.
    They were gathering evidence to get me canned while I was gathering momentum to make their lives miserable. But one day I saw my boss sitting at his desk holding a big, shallow bowl of beef vegetable soup. It wasn’t an uncommon sight—for fifteen years I don’t think that man ever left his office for lunch hour—so I don’t know why it affected me so profoundly that day in particular. It justdid. He dipped the spoon into the bowl, slowly scooped away from himself, and then slowly lifted the spoon to his lips. Hunched like he was, the psoriasis scabs on his scalp showed through his thinning hair. I had considered him mean, petty, unforgiving, and unfair—but then I saw him with that soup, and I had to leave.
    I went outside, sat in my car, and sobbed. After a while, a woman from the sales department came up and said something to me through the window. She had misinterpreted my tears and meant to comfort me. “From the first day we saw you in that office,” she said, “we’ve all been saying you don’t fit in.” She meant it as a compliment.
    I’ve had other jobs—coat-check girl on the