Totally Killer Page 7

  “Won’t I be at work?”

  “Oh, they’ll let you out for this. You’ll be meeting with the Director.” He indicated with his thumb the larger office next door. “How does that sound?”

  “That sounds…great. Unbelievably great. Thank you so much, Asher. I don’t think I could handle another day like today. You can only be disappointed so many times, you know? Really—you’re a lifesaver.”

  Asher Krug laughed at this, more heartily than the comment deserved.

  In April of her senior year in high school, Taylor was notified of her admission to Wycliffe by Madame Gaudrault, her favorite teacher, who had been sniffing around the guidance department. Taylor jumped up and down and hugged everyone and then raced home to await an acceptance notification that did not come. That day, or the next. The letter would have made it official, cemented what she already knew, but she didn’t have the document, just hollow assurances from a French teacher. Doubts formed. Yes, guidance departments are alerted of acceptances and rejections, but what if Madame Gaudrault had been wrong? The guidance counselors at her high school—at any high school, let’s be honest—were not exactly paragons of competence. What if she had to tell her mother and Billy Ray and her half sisters and all her friends that in fact Wycliffe had rejected her, just as Yale had? What little sleep she got during those three days of limbo was plagued by nightmares of the all-of-the-sudden-my-clothes-are-gone variety. When the letter (which wasn’t as thick as acceptance letters were purported to be) finally came, Taylor locked herself in the bathroom, fearing the worst. Madame Gaudrault did wind up being right, but still…

  “It was such a letdown, you know? I mean, I should have been riding high, but instead I was so relieved that the guidance department hadn’t fucked up that it spoiled everything.”

  We were at Phoebe’s, a hole-in-the-wall on Cooper Square that had good burgers and even better beer specials (four bucks for a pitcher of Rolling Rock; the good ol’ days), celebrating, on my dime, Taylor’s attainment of gainful employment. Like the Yankees on the TV behind the bar, we were on our second pitcher.

  “What would it take,” I mused, more for my benefit than hers, “to make you happy?”

  Because Taylor was not, had never been, a particularly happy person. Studies have shown, again and again, that prettier people are generally happier than us normal-looking folk. The reason money can’t buy happiness is, money can’t buy good looks. Plastic surgeons can only do so much. If this were true, why was Taylor so downcast most of the time? Why did she have such crippling nightmares almost every night? Why did she drink so much? She was young, and smart, and beautiful. The world was her proverbial oyster. Why, then, the perpetual blues?

  At the time, of course, I didn’t know that she’d stopped taking her Prozac. Nor would I have cared had I known. I was focused on the prize—which meant figuring out how I could capitalize on her doom-and-gloom.

  “Don’t get me wrong. I really want this job. But it’s like, if they had made me an offer…if that Walter guy told me, “You’re the best person for this job, congratulations,” instead of being a total shithead…I’d feel more, I don’t know, appreciated, you know? Like I really deserved it. This almost feels like cheating.” She took a long drag on her Parliament. “Why must everything in life be so disappointing? Why can’t anything be as emotionally fulfilling as I want it to be?”

  “You’re a dope,” I told her. “So what if you’re not as thrilled as you should be? You’re making almost twice what they were originally going to pay you. Two weeks from now, you’ll appreciate that a lot more, believe me.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s just that there’s something, I don’t know, anticlimactic about finding out you have a job through a third party.”

  “If you’re going to be a writer,” I said, “you better learn to trust your agent.”

  “I guess.” Taylor snuffed out the cigarette in an already-overflowing ashtray. Remember ashtrays? You never see them anymore. “The other thing is, I can’t figure out this whole Quid Pro Quo thing. How can it be that they can offer me this job? Even if I wind up paying them, it doesn’t make any sense. The office is, like, totally plush. They obviously have money. Where does it come from? How does it work?”

  “Well, let’s break it down. What do we know? We know that regular employment agencies get about fifteen percent of the starting salary for placing a hire. So if they found you a job at twenty grand, say, they’d make, what, three thousand bucks? The reason it costs so much is, it’s expensive for companies to do their own recruiting, to go through résumés and post jobs and stuff. And it’s expensive to train new employees. Maybe Quid Pro Quo is just better at screening its candidates.”

  “But they didn’t screen me at all. I didn’t take the tests or anything.”

  “Yeah, but who cares about the tests? You can learn Word in a few days, no big deal. People are either competent or they’re not. And you’re competent.”

  “But how do they know that?”

  “I don’t know. How did they find you?”

  “I got their card in the mail.”

  “Well, they must have gotten your name from someplace. And they obviously were not misinformed.”

  “You flatter me. More beer?”

  “Please.”

  She filled our steins, emptying the second pitcher.

  “All I’m saying is,” I told her, “they must have some kind of system in place—a better business model than their competitors’.”

  “But what?”

  I couldn’t have cared less about her employment agency. All I wanted to do at that point was finish the beer so we could go home. There was a good chance that she’d let me give her a back rub—she usually did if she was sufficiently drunk—and sooner or later, the back rub might lead to more intimate activities. Or so I hoped.

  “Maybe they’re like, did you see that SNL sketch about the bank that makes change?” I said. “How do they make their money? One word: volume. Maybe it works like that.”

  “Ha ha. I know this—what is this?”

  A new song had replaced “Things That Make You Go Hmmmm…” on the jukebox.

  “ When I Think About You, I Touch Myself,’” I told her. Not only was that the title of the song—Divinyls, we hardly knew ye!—it also happened to be true.

  CHAPTER 5

  T

  aylor’s first day of work was wrought with the same mixture of hope, nervousness, and bathos that marked her first day of hostessing at Planet Hollywood, her first day of college, her first day of high school—most first days of anything she could recall. Throughout what would become her morning routine, she wondered where she would be sitting, if she would have her own letterhead and business cards, which of her coworkers she would befriend, if there were any cute guys she had overlooked during the interview, whether Walter Bledsoe would make any more passes at her, if she was over- or underdressed (she was wearing a black suit, a recent purchase at the Limited, that looked more Price Waterhouse than Braithwaite Ross), why they had hired her without an interview, if she could handle the job, where she would go for lunch, and a million other details—trivial and otherwise—people fret about on their first day of work. During her commute, she paid attention to places of interest she passed: book stores, record stores, Japanese restaurants. The route took her directly through the Theatre District. In her diary, she mused on how long it would take for the thrill of Times Square to grow old. (Answer: about a week. And that was back when there were still peep shows and prostitutes, before Benito Giuliani turned it into Disney World North. Taylor had a short attention span.) Despite the fact that there was no dress code, it turned out that Taylor was not too formally attired. The entire BR staff was dressed to the nines, the men in too-thin ties and ill-fitting starched shirts, the women in suits that had been in the closet longer than Liberace and were therefore several sizes too small. Angie met her at the front desk, looking ill-at-ease in a fuscia number that was not in style during the heyday
of Miami Vice and was certainly not hip in 1991.

  Taylor asked about the threads.

  “The publisher is stopping by today, so…” Angie’s eyes shifted back and forth, as eyes do in spy movies. “Let me show you your office.”

  They walked down a long hallway—briskly, to avoid making introductions—and stepped into a small, windowless room with a stained imitation-wood desk, a few wood-and-vinyl chairs, a bookcase teeming with BR fare, and the computer St. Paul used to write his letters to the Thessalonians. It made the Commodore 64 look like HAL.

  “This is you.” Angie flipped on the lights, closed the door. “You picked a hell of a day to start. You’ll probably quit, you’ll think we’re so nuts.” She collapsed into one of the chairs, her legs spread in a most unladylike manner. The fuscia was even brighter under the fluorescents that buzzed overhead.

  “We had to dress up today. As you can tell, we’re not used to it. I can’t even remember the last time I wore this thing.”

  Taylor said nothing. The first-day-of-work smile she slapped on with her new suit was taking a coffee break.

  “Mr. Ross,” Angie said, “Averell Ross, owns the company. He’s based in Washington, so he’s not around much. I’ve been here six years and I’ve only seen him twice. Compared to his other business interests, this place is small fry. As long as we’re in the black, which we always are—barely, but always—he leaves us alone. He and Paul went to Yale together, so…”

  Yale again.

  “Paul?”

  “Paul Walldorf. He’s the publisher. Or, he was the publisher. Until this morning.”

  “Ah.” On this particular morning, Taylor was more concerned with the social than the political; she hadn’t been on board long enough to establish ties, and therefore had little reason to fear a new regime. Aimlessly, she flipped on the computer.

  “Averell fired him—no one knows why—and replaced him with his son. Nathan.”

  “Nepotism rears its ugly head.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Angie held up her hand in the stop formation. She didn’t want to go there. “Nathan’s stopping by today to look the place over. That’s why everyone’s dressed up. And nervous.”

  The computer was louder than most Boeing products. It bitched and moaned and filled the gaps in conversation. “What’s he like, Nathan?”

  “No one knows. He has his MFA from Columbia, so he can probably write a little, but he’s got zippo experience. I mean, nada.”

  “What’d he do before?”

  “Nothing. He just graduated. He’s twenty-four years old.”

  “That’s pretty gnarly.”

  “Like I said,” Angie shrugged, “you picked a hell of a day to start. The chatter in this place is straight out of one of our thrillers.”

  “It’s just office politics,” Taylor said. “Everything will work out fine. Besides, you can’t have a thriller without at least one dead body.”

  “At the rate we’re going…” Angie shook her head and rose to her feet. “You want some coffee? The coffee here sucks, but it’s free.”

  After a detour to the break room—the coffee was even worse than Taylor’d expected—Angie gave her the tour and introduced her to her new colleagues, almost all of whom were around her age. (There were more women than men, but curiously, Taylor never mentioned any of the women.)

  Mike moonlighted as a stand-up comic. He was a few years removed from NYU, where he was involved in writing The Plague, a satirical student publication that did things like run photographs of homeless people with the Gap logo in the corner, as if they were print ads. It was damn funny stuff. Mike looked sort of like Ron Darling.

  Brady organized elaborate scavenger hunts around lower Manhattan. Last time there were two hundred people involved, and the Village Voice did a feature about it, which he had laminated and tacked to his cubicle wall. (Headline: Midnight Madness in Manhattan, a reference to an obscure Michael J. Fox movie.) Brady was a dead ringer for the kid from Witness.

  Charles was an obsessive Elvis Costello fan. He produced his own Elvis newsletter—The Silly Champion—and was in the process of establishing an Elvis listserv, whatever that meant. Elvis rarities and B-sides were forever playing on his tape deck. Charles could have passed for MTV’s Alan Hunter.

  And then there was Chris, a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast and SCA member who wore a ponytail and dressed like Black-beard. Despite these obvious shortcomings, Chris managed to be the cutest of the bunch, probably because of his feline eyes—he was like a piratical River Phoenix.

  “It’s a good group,” Angie said. “We go out a lot.”

  There was still a knot in Taylor’s stomach that didn’t abate, even when she noticed that Walter Bledsoe’s office was dark.

  “Where is Mr. Bledsoe?”

  “He’s not in today. He has, like, six weeks of vacation, he’s been here so long. But he doesn’t come in on Wednesdays regardless.”

  Angie deposited the newest BR employee in her office and went back to work. Her belly full of bad coffee, Taylor stared alternately at the slew of tax and benefit forms on her desk and the clock on the wall (whose ticking was only slightly less loud than the computer’s whir). Most of her questions had been answered. By lunchtime, the only mystery left was in the plots of the slush-pile manuscripts.

  At two o’clock, Angie announced that Nathan Ross would not be in for another two weeks; some sort of delay involving a closing on a Georgetown townhouse. The entire staff seemed to exhale in unison. Ties were doffed, heels kicked off, radios switched on, witticisms bandied about.

  All of the guys in the office wandered by at some point to say hello. Taylor wound up giving her number to Chris the Pirate, who offered to take her to Medieval Times, which had opened in February of the previous year near the Meadowlands. Were it not for her fascination with a certain employment agent, she probably would have gone out with Chris, and almost certainly slept with him—and I definitely wouldn’t be writing this. As it was, she only gave out her number to get rid of him; her heart already belonged to Asher Krug.

  CHAPTER 6

  T

  he task of writing Taylor’s story has fallen to me because her own voice—unusually high in register, it was, and breathy, like she’d just sucked on a helium balloon—has been permanently silenced. This is her story, not mine, and it would dishonor her memory to tarry on my own recollections, however pleasant the trip down Memory Lane might be. That said, I think it best to interpose, before we get too far along, and make one thing crystal clear: while she was my roommate and friend—and, as I said before, the nightly muse of my masturbatory fantasies—there was more to my life in the summer of 1991 than Taylor Schmidt. I’d been living in the East Village, the hippest place on earth, for four years. I had more going for me than some Show Me State sexpot taking over Laura’s half of the lease. A lot more.

  There was the acting, of course, which vocation brought me to New York in the first place. I was taking classes, I was studying with some of the best teachers out there, I was auditioning for nonequity jobs. I appeared in a slew of student films. None of them panned out in the long run, but not because of any deficiencies in my abilities. I was a pretty good actor, truth be told. The leading-man looks I lacked, yes—I was no Harrison Ford, no Mel Gibson—but I had a look. I was six-two and somewhat gawky in gait (though thankfully I’ve filled out since), with a wild mop of curly hair, and a wide, crooked nose, courtesy of a barroom brawl my junior year of college (some drunk asshole whacked me with a beer stein). I was twenty-six but could play older. In the student films, I was cast as stooges, stoolies, henchmen, yokels. One time I played a sexually repressed used car salesman, and damn if I didn’t inhabit that role.

  This is not to say I could have made a living as a character actor, had the chips fallen differently—even with the Julia Robertses and Kevin Costners of the world factored in, actors made on the average about six hundred dollars a year in 1991—but I certainly showed promise. Plus I had connection
s. Tenuous connections, but connections. That spring, for example, I participated in a read-through of an early draft of Clerks—I played Dante Hicks, the lead role—and I got along swimmingly with Kevin Smith. Unfortunately, it took three years for him to secure financing; by the time he was ready to shoot, my acting career was effectively kaput. And it’s not like Brian O’Halloran, my replacement, has had much of a career. Would I have succeeded where Brian failed?

  Probably not.

  In Us Magazine’s 1991 Entertainment Yearbook, eight rising stars, virtual unknowns in 1990, were cited as being Ones to Watch. They were, in order: Brad Pitt, John Corbett, C&C Music Factory, John Singleton, Julie Warner, Andrew Strong, Trisha Yearwood, and Chris Rock. If some of them couldn’t even hold serve, with fortune smiling upon them—Andrew Strong never made another movie after The Commitments—how far would I have gone, with my crooked nose and reckless hair? Still, I can’t help but believe that there is an alternate reality in which I am a successful character actor; someone limited, someone with a bag of tricks, but someone whose face you recognize—“Oh, him! He’s been in a million things!”—if not his name. Would that I could click my heels and change places with the Todd Lander in that reality, my starfucking doppelgänger!

  I almost forgot about the screenplay I was writing at the time—I used to work in the back room at Yaffa Café on St. Mark’s, with its rococo-bordello décor—whose working title was The Rat. The plot revolved around a bank robbery gone bad, told from the point of view of the bank robbers, one of whom had turned snitch. Blood, guns, testosterone, and a messy Shakespearean ending where everybody dies these hideous, violent deaths. By no means was The Rat a world-changer, but it was a tight little story, and would have been a fun little movie. Eric Roberts would have been a perfect lead bank robber. Could it have been made? Well, independent film was about to go supernova. And I knew people who knew people who were producers. If Clerks could fly, with its continuity errors and blow-job jokes, why not The Rat?