Jess-Chriss and I must have had the same thought: "Am I going to have to explain to this kid's mother how he died?"
TINA: We were climbing Old Rag Mountain in the dark on a weeknight.
MOTHER WUHL: Is this your girlfriend, young man?
JESS-CHRISS: No.
MOTHER WUHL: Were you my son's girlfriend?
TINA: No, ma'am, but he did once tell me that I could be really pretty if I lost weight.
MOTHER WUHL: What the hell were you kids doing up there?!
TINA: Well, I can't speak for Jess-Chriss, but I was hoping for a leisurely night-climb followed by some over-the-jeans action.
JESS-CHRISS: Me, too. But then she was there.
We called frantically to HRW. After a few minutes, he answered. We followed his voice back down the trail and found him. Jess-Chriss climbed out onto the rocks to help HRW over to the trail. He was banged up, but it was somehow decided that we should continue up the mountain. The last half mile or so was not as steep, and we finally made it to the smooth granite top, where we sat down to take in the beautiful dark panorama of the Shenandoah Valley. HRW motioned for me to sit near him, and Chriss-Jess knew instinctively to go sit far away. Tired, dehydrated, and nauseous, I was still ready to try to make this work if there was any funny business to be had. But HRW didn't touch me. Instead he stared wistfully out at the night sky and told me about the last time he'd climbed Old Rag. It was two days prior, during daylight. He had brought his friend Gretchen up here for lunch. He really liked her, he confided in me. Liked her so much that he didn't quite know what to do about it. After they had gotten all the way to the top and had the picnic lunch he'd prepared, he offered her a piece of Trident gum, and Gretchen-he had to stop and smile at the adorableness of this-Gretchen had asked him to tear the piece of Trident in half because it was too big for her. "Can you believe that?" he marveled. A girl so feminine and perfect that half a piece of Trident was the most she could handle.
I tried to process what this meant for my evening.
"So... you and I will not be dry humping, then?"
The way down from Old Rag is a forest road. We found a stream in the woods and finally got a drink of water. We scooped it up with our hands and it was the greatest, most satisfying drink of water I ever had in my life. "Oh the water, / Get it myself from the mountain stream," I sang over and over again in my head. I was listening to a lot of Van Morrison at the time, because I was also very deep.
It was sunrise by the time HRW dropped me off. As weird as the night's events had been, I couldn't help but be excited about the fact that I had climbed a mountain. I never would have thought I could do that. I think someone should design exercise machines that reward people with sex at the end of their workouts, because people will perform superhuman feats for even the faint hope of that.
As I crawled into my bottom bunk, I thought about how I had climbed Old Rag. I thought about Gretchen, the girl who could only accommodate half a piece of gum. "I hope you marry her," I imagined saying to HRW, "and I hope she turns out to have a cavernous vagina."
Young Men's Christian Association
At 5:10 A.M., the el train from the Morse stop in Chicago to the Davis St. stop in Evanston is surprisingly safe for young white women. The only people on the train at that hour are Polish women on their way home from cleaning office buildings all night. They share plastic containers of pale Slavic food that you know is buttery and delicious. It's just potatoes, rice, meat, and cabbage in an endless series of combinations.
My first and only day job (so far) was at the YMCA in Evanston, Illinois. I had moved to Chicago on Halloween of 1992, pulling into Rogers Park with people whipping eggs at my dad's Pontiac in accordance with the holiday.
I had never waited tables, and my attempt to lie about that to the manager of the Skokie, Illinois, Ruby Tuesday was unsuccessful. "Where did you work?" "The Carriage House in Havertown, Pennsylvania." My more worldly friend from home had told me to make up a restaurant and give them her phone number. "Did you do hand service or tray service?" "Tray." My friend from home had told me to say "tray service" because it's easier. "What was your favorite thing about waiting tables?" My friend from home had not anticipated this question. "Um... the children. Waiting on cute kids... It was a family... restaurant." Game over. While "the children" may be a good nonsense answer for a Miss Universe contestant or a gubernatorial candidate, anyone who has ever waited tables-or simply gone to a restaurant with a child-knows that children are the soul-sucking worst. They take all the sugar packets out of the bowl, spill milk all over the place, and their wasted meals only cost five dollars, as compared to a nice booze-drinking adult to whom you might be able to up-sell a crispy onion-and-jalapeno crappetizer. I did not get the waiting job.
I applied for a job as the night box office manager of a small theater company in Boystown. The job paid about five dollars an hour for a four-hour shift, so I was surprised to find that it required a lengthy interview with the artistic director of the theater. I had a degree in drama, I explained. We talked (meaning she talked) about playwrights we (she) liked. It was between me and another girl for the job, and she needed to know what I had to offer the Tiny Pretentious Theater Company because"We like to think of ourselves as the most exciting theater company in Chicago." I tried a joke. "I like to think of myself as the most beautiful woman in the world. But where will that get either of us, really?"The other girl got the job.
My mother arranged for a friend to see me at a downtown lawyer's office for a receptionist job.I wore the electric blue polyester Hillary Clinton power suit that my roommate and I shared for such occasions. The hourlong train ride and scramble to find the exact address had made me late, and by the time I got to the interview I was sweating my roommate's BO out of the suit. The stench of every drink and every cigarette she'd had the last time she wore it filled the high-end office in which I interviewed.Between the suit, its booze cloud, and my thick virgin eyebrows, I was deemed unfit to answer phones in plain view. I was turning out to be college educated and unemployable in even the most basic way.
Thankfully, my electric-blue-suitmate was an uninhibited vagina about town. She hooked up with an early Obama prototype named Marcus who worked at the Evanston YMCA. They were looking for someone to work the front desk from 5:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M. I got the job! Evanston is the diverse suburb just north of Chicago where Northwestern University is. The YMCA there was a great mix of a high-end yuppie fitness facility, a wonderful community resource for families, and an old-school residence for disenfranchised men. It may also have been the epicenter of all human grimness.
There was a resident named Mr. Engler who wore a wig on top of his hair like a hat. He came downstairs once a week to get his Meals on Wheels, which were left with me. I developed a One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest style of professionalism. I've always been a Zelig that way. I'm the jerk who starts to drawl when talking to Southerners and I get very butch very fast when playing organized sports."Here we go! Hands on knees, ladies!" So when it came to the weird residents at the Y, I leaned right into the role of respectful, put-upon caregiver.
"Mr. Engler, your meals are here." He would say nothing and make no eye contact as he slid the containers toward himself with his Howard Hughes fingernails. "You have a good day, sir." I would go back to folding towels with stoic dignity, like Michael Learned on Nurse.
"Sir, may I see your room key?" I'd bark across the lobby like a young Betty Thomas on Hill Street Blues. The residents weren't allowed to have guests up in their rooms, and every now and then a guy would come in with a friend wearing a big coat and a hat and you'd realize it was a woman. These borderline-homeless guys were sneaking women up to their rooms, which only goes to show that women continue to corner the market on low gag reflex.
Not all the residents were catatonic. There was Joe the mail guy. Joe had a big white mustache and a friendly Daffy Duck speech impediment from missing teeth. He straddled the worlds of the residence and the office because he had a part-time job sorting the mail. "Morning, Joe." I'd smile like Marilu Henner in Taxi. "Whath's up, kid?" Joe would fire back. We'd goof on our coworkers and laugh it up at the members who gave us a hard time. All that was missing was the studio audience and an eighty-thousand-dollar-an-episode salary.
Donna worked the phones. A heavyset redheaded gal with no makeup and big fleshy hands, Donna was harder to play opposite. Generally, if she was complaining about some work situation, you could pass the time by agreeing with her, but it had to be done in a specific way. All the complaining had to be done with very few words and no dramatic flair. To rant and rave would be too show-offy. Donna would never "hold court" and you shouldn't either. Her complaints were like little WWII telegrams of bad news.
DONNA: They're making us work on Thanksgiving.
ME: No way. Are you kidding me?
DONNA: Members want to work out.
ME: That sucks. Weren't you gonna go visit your daughter in Indiana?
DONNA: Postponed.
But do not try to get ahead of Donna and initiate the complaining, no matter how sure you are that she'll agree. Because Donna will leave you hanging every time.
ME: Can you believe they're cutting our lunch down to half an hour, lowering our pay by ten percent, taking away our insurance, and making us eat dirt?!
DONNA: I don't go to doctors. I like dirt anyway, so... fine by me.
Donna was an enigma wrapped in bacon wrapped in a crescent roll.
One Monday, Donna came in and said that her husband had had a heart attack over the weekend. And, by the way, she didn't open with this. She slipped it in about twenty minutes into her shift. She said her husband started having chest pains on Saturday. On their way to the ER, he made her stop at Burger King because he knew once he got to the hospital "they'd never let him have that stuff again." She didn't say anything else about it, but I covered the phones for her a couple times that day while she went to the bathroom, presumably to cry.
That's the main thing I learned in that job-how to be a considerate coworker. Cover the phones for someone so they can pee. Punch someone's time card in for them after lunch so they can stop and buy a birthday card. Help people when their register doesn't add up. Don't be a tattletale.
I'm the kind of person who likes to feel like part of a community. I will make strange bedfellows rather than have no bedfellows. In high school I had this friend for a while named Dawn. We were sitting around my house watching MTV one day when a Tina Turner video came on. On the stage behind Tina Turner was a set of giant letters spelling out TINA.
DAWN: Wow. Can you even imagine seeing your name that big?
ME: Yeah, well, that is my name.
DAWN: What? Oh. Yeah.
We could rap like that for hours.
The point is, I liked the YMCA job at first because I wanted so desperately to like it. My day wasn't wall-to-wall grimness. The members of the gym were perfectly nice yuppies and young moms.There was a gorgeous redheaded baby I called Big Head Bob who brightened my day whenever he came in for "Toddler Gym N Stuff N Mommy N Thangs."
The Y had a preschool attached to it, and the parade of little kids coming over to swim was adorable and life affirming. I developed a crush on a shoulderless young preschool teacher named Eli.He was a complete nerd, but he had big brown eyes and he was great with the kids, and remember, when you work in what is basically a cage that you're not allowed to leave, your choices are limited to what strolls by.
Which isn't to say I didn't have any other options. I was "hit on" by a resident once. He was a forty-something white guy who was only there for a week or so. He told us all that he was in town scouting locations for a movie. I don't know what kind of movie would put their locations scout up at a YMCA, but if I had to guess I would say it was not Titanic. Anyway, this guy seemed almost normal until he walked up to me at the front desk, handed me a little cardboard box, said, "Voulez vous couchez avec moi?" and walked away. In the box was a packet of SweeTarts and two used Linda Ronstadt tapes.Needless to say, we married in the spring.
Eli the Preschool Teacher-which is what he'd be called if this were Fiddler on the Roof-was also an aspiring actor, so I invited him to come see a staged reading of a play I was in. He said yes and then showed up with his girlfriend, who was a doctor. She had about as much personality as he had shoulders.
I settled into a daily routine. Wake up at 4:40 A.M., shower, get on the train north by ten after five. Punch in by 5:30. I learned how long a morning can be. If you're at work at 5:30 A.M., five hours go by and it is 10:30 in the morning. (I didn't experience that again until I had a newborn baby. It does make you feel like an asshat for all those college years when you slept until 12:45.) At my lunch break, I'd buy a sandwich from the machine in our vendeteria. Apparently it used to be a real cafeteria with"the greatest fries," but then someone decided that wasn't quite sad enough and it was grim-ovated into a room full of vending machines.