My screen saver is showing me the Maldives and Bora Bora.
I’m seeing Fiji.
I’m seeing Tahiti.
I’m seeing Cape Town.
I know I’m deep in the muck of my misery when he comes to mind: Bruce. I pull out my cell phone, scroll to—ugh—his name, and smash the call button with such force I’m certain Siri feels assaulted.
“Go!” Bruce shouts. Or maybe “Yo.” I don’t know. I just can’t with him.
“It’s Charlie,” I mumble, unsure if he already knows it’s me, unsure if my name is even worthy of ever having been saved in his cell phone.
“Yeah, yeah,” he says. “Frodo, right?”
“No,” I correct him, listlessly, pointlessly. “Charlie. What’s the latest on the Kathi Kannon job?”
“Dunno, bro,” he says, chewing on something. “I heard your interview was fine, that it happened, you know?”
“That’s it?” I ask. “It happened?”
“You have to wait. We’re on her time now.”
“Can you, like, ask her?”
“Ask Kathi? Are you fucking crazy? No. Not how it’s done. These things—interacting with celebrities—these things are fucking serious. Surgical. Like, you know, don’t spit on the queen and that kind of shit. And who else am I gonna ask, bro? Her maid? Kathi doesn’t have an assistant to ask. That’s the whole point of interviewing you people, right?”
“Right. Okay.”
“If you don’t get this job, maybe another will open up,” Bruce says. “I hope to get promoted soon, and maybe you can apply for my job. Although, I’m an executive assistant, not to be confused with a personal assistant, of course. Executive is better. The executive assistant is like a mountain, like the sturdy mound that protects our boss from wind and invasion and guides him home in a storm. The personal assistant is like the valley. They collect the silt. Right?”
“Do you mean sediment?”
“What?” Bruce asks, putting another forkful of something in his mouth, in my ear.
“Don’t you mean sediment instead of silt?” I ask. “I mean, silt requires flowing water, and sediment is actually critical to the environment and—”
“Huh?” Bruce asks, but I’m too dejected, too exhausted, to even say anything else. And the more he chews in my ear, the less hunger I have for answers, for continuing.
“Gotta jet!” he barks mercifully. “Have a blessed day!” he shouts, a toilet flushing in the background as he hangs up. What the fuck is he doing? God, I hate him.
I’m certain that I’m not going to get the job. This all feels like another in my life’s long list of failures, just like my current employment. I’m a TV news writer because I’m not good enough to be a TV news reporter. I wanted to be seen in this life, to be one of the handsome guys on TV who tells everyone about the world, to be one of the people everyone else has to see the world through, to be a gatekeeper. Was my longing to be a TV newscaster rooted in vanity? Was it rooted in survival—a desperation to be validated, heard? Look at me, the boy with acne, all grown up. Look at me, the fag bullied in the lunchroom, now pontificating about politics, traffic, weather. Was it simple psychology? Was Hannibal Lecter right, we covet what we see? Did I simply covet the newscasters who had my asshole father’s undivided attention every night at five, six, and ten?
My father: I picture him as if he’s in front of me now, heavy and melted into his forest-green fake Microsuede recliner, the fabric on the arms dark and smashed where his thick, oily hands have gripped tightly, nightly, repeatedly, while raging at Tom Brokaw during stories about war and economics and environmentalism. My childhood memories are dog-eared not in photo albums but by news events that drew his ire.
“FUCK THEM!” he would yell about Democrats.
“FUCK THEM, TOO!” he would yell about Republicans.
“FUCK THEM ALL AND FUCK THEM TWICE AGAIN!” he would yell at the kicker—the last story in the newscast. Sometimes it was a waterskiing squirrel. Sometimes it was a dog that saved a family from a fire. Sometimes it was a kid who won a spelling bee. The networks all do it. They end on a positive story so you forget that you can’t pay your mortgage, that tap water is poison, that your kids are brainwashed bisexuals.
“WHO FUCKING CARES ABOUT A SPELLING BEE? QUIT WASTING MY TAX DOLLARS!” he would shout at the TV, as if the news is tax-funded. His yelling, his own personal kicker each night. The bottom right corner of our living room TV screen was eternally clouded after bits of his spittle caked it during a particularly passionate night of news viewing. No one ever cared to clean it.
If ever something captured my father’s imagination, caught his attention to the point of a near medical emergency, it was TV news. Everything else—eating dinner, commercials, me—were all simple distractions from what I suspect he really wanted each night in that recliner: to see the world but not be a part of it, to force his rule upon a kingdom behind glass, to watch with gross fascination a universe he couldn’t really access. All those things he felt from watching TV, all that separation and frustration and longing to be seen, those are all the things I felt about him, sitting behind him, his only son, young and quiet and watching him profoundly interested in, well, not me. And it all got worse after Mom died. When it was finally just him and me, it felt like just him.
I could never get in front of my father, not in our living room and, years later, not from behind the coveted glass of his TV. I never made it as a TV news reporter. Maybe it was bad luck. Maybe I didn’t have the talent or the right look. Maybe it was bad Louisiana genes, after all. The best I could muster was this middle-of-the-night news-writer job. And right here in the newsroom, reporters and anchors milling about, their very presence taunting my failure, I open the Notes app on my phone to compose a suicide note, but I’m too exhausted to finish.
I want to quit this job. To tell my boss to fuck off. I want to stand up and wave my arms and shout that I’m tired of these hours, these depressing news stories about corruption, death, and disease. I want to say I’m leaving for better things. I want to check out. Instead, I clock out.
I get in my trusty old Nissan, its frame bent and breaking but loved anew, appreciated just a little more after sharing in the Kathi Kannon experience with me. My Nissan, it was a witness to my close call, my almost moment into Kathi’s world. I’m thinking, Just get me home.
My phone in hand—Please call me, Kathi Kannon—I’m feeling busted, feeling at one with the steering wheel, with the console, with the check-engine light, burned out because it was on so much, too weary from asking for help, too tired to keep going, too spent from being ignored. In this car, I have to actually hit potholes on purpose to rattle wires to make the radio work. You can’t open the glove compartment without the whole thing coming off in your hand. The horn is dislodged, so when I honk, the speaker blares at me inside the car. I’m only ever honking at myself.
My shit car and my shit job match my shit apartment—three hundred square feet of warm darkness, the sunlight rebuked by my blackout curtains, no AC, my neighbor’s relentless cigarette smoke wafting under the crack in the front door. I needed Kathi, I needed a change, I needed a course correction. Alas.