We have no ideology, no agenda, no catechism, no dialectic, no plan for humanity. We have no “vision thing”… All we have is the belief that people should do what people want to do, unless it causes harm to other people.

- The Liberty Manifesto, P.J. O’Rourke (1993)

Mondays… They’re always so chatty on Mondays. In every office I worked, it was always an ironclad rule. Standing in the doorway, stopping you in the hall… cornering you at the goddamn urinals. “So, how was your weekend?” “Do anything exciting over the weekend?” “Wow. I’m still feeling Saturday! How was yours?”
Amazing. In the past forty eight hours, so much incredible happened. And yet somehow, it all remained just close enough to stasis that here I am again, talking to you in the hall, waiting for elevator to take me to 17, so I can take a shit in peace in that hidden executive washroom nobody ever uses… God, how I love this routine.
They’re not really asking anything, or even waiting for an answer. The questions are nothing but openers, so they can tell you everything they did. In the longest, most agonizing detail.
This is fine, of course – part of the Ritual of Monday, of easing back into the grind. Gives you a point of focus other than the tension all around – that endless punching of keys, the ringing of phone after phone and all that incessant babbling… those vital, urgent discussions and critical negotiations, the sudden death decisions of the litigation game. “We need to ask for a sixty day extension, to make sure the judge will at least give us the thirty we need.” “Brilliant. I’ll have an associate make the edits to the motion and proofread it. Then I’ll proof it again and send it to you for final proofing and approval.” All the bodies in the hallways, marching, pacing, fidgeting – heads pressed to cell phones on their shoulders, scanning papers in their hands. “Paragraph thirty-seven, subheading eleven needs a full colon at the end, not a fucking semi-colon!” And hiding in the quiet moments, that ceaseless droning hum… the low pitch terminal tinnitus from the fluorescent bulbs above.
When I worked in a larger office, in those ancient pre-Bush years, I heard a lot of tales on Mondays. Stories that would normally pain you, like listening to someone’s dreams. (“…[A]nd then, then, like, you were there. But it wasn’t you. I mean, it was you in that it looked like you, but it was also kind of like a dolphin. But sort of like Liam Neeson, too, and you spoke to me in a voice sort of like… like you were barking. You were warning me, ‘Careful with that axe, Claudette.’ That’s all you kept saying and then my cat woke me up. It was really freaky.” “Indeed. You don’t have a pistol I could borrow for a second, do you?”) But at the start of a brand new workweek, and specifically in the morning, they serve an important purpose. They buy you time to adjust, to build that veneer of engagement – the “interested” you of the workplace, cloaking your deeper inner thoughts:
If my office were all mirrors and I fired a laser over the top of my doorway at a sixty degree angle, it’d probably bounce back off the wall behind me, right over… there. Then it’d bounce left, and hit the other wall over there, then bounce back over… here, in that corner, then ricochet back toward the door. How many deviations it would take before the room was one big ball of red laser light? Can you even have that? One big ball of laser light made up of a single beam?
I wonder what Greenland’s like. It seems so… big.
You can smile and listen and laugh, thinking of a way to reply when your boss or co-worker ends the story of his weekend with that inevitable polite hook: “So what did you do? Have any adventures?”
What are you going to say? You have to offer something. And it has to fit your image, the character you present… the archetype the listener expects. Everybody thinks he’s unique, of his own singular mold. We fancy ourselves distinctive, and maybe deep down we believe it. But that isn’t what we project. On the surface we act to a type, a kind every person knows, and thinks he understands. You have to do that in an office. Management likes what’s safe, and “predictable” gets a premium. It’s good to be apparent, overt – with your interests worn on the sleeve. Gives the people who hire a set of easy clues, so they can pick up the loyal soldiers, avoid all the mercenaries.

Everybody plays a role, and the tales they tell about their weekends fill out their stock character profiles. The spicy, independent assistant tells you all about the flat she got at Target, how she wound up dropping legalese on the folks at AAA when the tow truck ran late. Reminding you how tough she is, the kind who takes no guff. Her husband made up for the annoyance by taking her to the new French-fusion place downtown. Cost him a minor fortune, but as he knows very well, and you had better, too – she’s worth. every. penny.
The fried guy with five small kids (three more then he can handle)? He coached baseball on Saturday, soccer most of Sunday and somewhere in the midst of it all, in his rare instants of peace, he killed off that case of Molson he keeps in the fridge in the garage. He passed out at five on Sunday watching golf picture-in-pictured as his youngest watched her fortieth screening of Toy Story. His stories are flat and he knows it, but “compelling” was never his aim. The point is he’s dependable. He can’t afford to fail. And if you or any other co-workers are looking for someone to sandbag, or management’s looking for someone to fire, it’s going to hurt him a lot more than the single guys on the floor.
The “Guy’s Guy” caught a Phillies on game on Friday, and gives you that same puzzled look when you explain for the thirtieth time how you’d sooner watch a mosquito lamp than regular season play. He makes up for the lapse by adding a story about the strip club in New York he visited with high school buddies on Saturday, digging the hole deeper.
“It’s not like, like, Scores or anything, but the chicks were fucking smoking. One of them had these ridiculous, like, like, awesome tits and, and she’s like, like, sticking them in buddy’s mouth and–”
Norm… Norm… Let me stop you there, before you stain that suit. Freeze frame for a second, just like in Trainspotting. You know – the scenes where McGregor stops the motion and gives a monologue? ‘Cause while I’m sure this is the hardest-of-hardcore mother of all strip club stories, I have to let you know– Unless there’s a hook… Unless the work ‘donkey’s’ involved or someone’s defying commonly understood notions of modern biology, I’ve got to tell you Norm… The only thing more frustrating than paying chicks hundreds of dollars to grind you to blue balls is hearing a story about it from a Kevin James look alike who sweats when he talks and stutters every time he reaches the word “tits.”
The stories tend to follow a script, half of which is actually unique, based on the speaker’s background. The other half’s intentional, part of their “personal brand,” a subtle, but obvious mimicry of similar people around them. And after a few years of listening – grinning and laughing on cue, feigning the proper amazement in every pregnant pause – you pick up on a bigger pattern. How the acts aren’t mere office put-ons. How even outside our work, in terms of our actual lives, people innately trend clannish, force ourselves into molds… How stereotypes are created, and how accurate they can be.
You’re tempted to attack the tales, reduce them to what they are. So, Ed, now that you’re a junior partner, I can assume we’re going to be hearing about is this new interest in golf, and your sudden affinity for Republican politics on a fairly regular basis? I love hearing all about parenthood, Miriam, and the uber-mommy thing’s cute, but you and I both know, you’re a very dirty girl. Then you consider yourself, and that as much as you think you’re special, beyond any “lifestyle plagiarism,” the numbers tell a different story. Of the billions who’ve lived and died, you think you’re the only person in history to have cobbled together the exact mix of values, tastes and mannerisms congealing into “You”? No, you’re derivative too, just like all the rest.
The only questions are How? Of What, Where and Whom? When you think back over the stories of all your lost weekends – the ones you’d tell on Monday if you told those Monday stories – what does it all betray? What kind of man, monster or fool does the stuff of your loose hours describe?
“…[I] got a lap dance from this redhead. Holy Fucking Shit. She was skinny, but she had like, like, perfect b-cups and her ass was fucking amazing… These chicks were so fucking hot. We were in a private room and I– I don’t even want to know what I spent–”
“Norm’s” tale is easy to place, falls under “chronic male bonding.” And if I asked him some follow up questions on any of his other weekends – of the past month or year, or years and years back – I’d hear a lot of the same, riffs on the essential themes. Single. Sexed. Paid. La Vida Loca Loca. There, in that consistent consistency, I’d label him one of a tribe, living to a mantra of many. Big school frat guy bachelor, long past sell-by date. And that’s where I’d get to thinking, “Where do I belong?” If I cut off Norm’s story right here and told him about my last epic trip to New York, what label would form in his head? What Tribe would he put me in?
Sit back, Norm. This’ll take a little while.
. . .
The story didn’t start in New York, but two hundred miles to the South, in glorious Wilmington, Delaware, Jewel of the First State. I was standing in a local bar, tapping a friend on the shoulder.
“It’s three hours to New York. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Lemme juz finish this beer.” Henry leaned back laughing. “My brother bought it for me. Have you met my brother?”
“Twice.” I clipped the words short, to let him I know I was pissed. He promised he’d be ready at three, or I’d have never offered a ride. Wilmington was forty miles South – forty miles further away from New York – extending the trip from Philly by an hour or maybe more. I’d only agreed to drive him after he cried about the cost of the train. “Come on… It’s like a hundred bucks for a ticket to Manhattan. I’ll pick up the gas.” And how did the prick repay me? A message from his roommate when I arrived at his door: “Henry’s at the Logan House. He wanted you to pick him up there.”
“How long’s he been drinking?”
“Henry?”
“Uh… Yes. Henry.”
“Two or three hours.”
This was an ominous start. Henry in his cups was a mess, a drunk from a Donleavy novel. Fearless, loud and sloppy, collapsing from charming to loutish and utterly unaware – thinking the liquor made him slick. This of course was never the case. Henry had natural charisma, but “smoove” the man was not. His presence was just Too Big, the sort you couldn’t miss. If the party was a comedy flick, he was the Belushi or Farley. Not as aggressive or ridiculous, but you knew when Henry was there. The smartass-to-offensive jokes, the deafening backslapping laughs and that constant, insatiable gluttony. Henry was like a shark. If he could drink it, eat it or screw it, he was going try to get it in his mouth (failing often on the latter). He was the only guy I know who’d try to pick up a girl with smoke and drink in one hand, eating a slice of pizza slathered in bleu cheese dressing with other. (“It’s really, really good. That’s why I always order wings and ‘zah together.”) Henry only knew from his appetites. In all else the man was oblivious.
“No. Stay here. I’ll run in and get him.” My buddy Martin, and another college friend, Karen, were along for the ride. “I don’t want him taking shotgun.”
The plan was nothing special, just another New York outing. Pre-drink with buddies at my friend Bennett’s apartment, then out to hit the bars – a regular weekend event. When Martin and I graduated from college, half of our classmates headed to the city to work on Wall Street. Philly was fine, amusing, but the town’s mostly for locals, not a place kids move to right out of school. If we wanted to see all of our friends collected in a single place – and I mean literally just about everyone Martin and I hung out with in college all in one small area – we had to head to New York.
You do this a lot at that age – cling to that hardened group of friends who’ll always feel like family. It’s probably simple instinct, a knee-jerk response to the shock of working life… the need to connect with people through something deeper than professional networking. That and the nature of your school. When you go to small university hundreds of miles from anything, your friends are almost like blood. When you leave and everyone scatters, there’s an orphaning of sorts that occurs. It’s not that you miss the debauchery. That’s old hat by then. It’s the loss of a crowd of people you innately understand, and who understand you. The only thing you can do is replicate the scene. Keep all the old friends close and collect some kindred miscreants. Which is how you wind up adding eighty miles to a trip to pick up people like Henry, your buddy Martin’s best friend from high school.
“How many drinks have you had?”
“Hey hey! You made it!” Henry almost fell off his stool turning to answer my question.
“You’re fucked.”
“I’m-mmm fine. You met my brother, Pete?”
I leaned in and introduced myself. “How many’s he had?”
“Henry?”
What the fuck is with this town?
“I got it under control.” Henry leaned his head back and chugged the pint glass of ale on the bar. “I got a secret weapon.”
“Piss here, before we head out. We aren’t stop–”
“You’re it, Peter!” He ignored me, stuck his brother with the tab and darted for the door.
“Get in the back.” I wasn’t even giving him a chance to argue for the shotgun slot.
“The ‘way back?’” It was an old Ford Explorer, a four door model, with ten or so square feet of cargo space in the rear.
“Yes, the way back. Disregard the empty seat in the middle.”
“I’d kind of like to stretch out. I been sitting a lot lately.”
“No shit?” I opened the trunk and a pile of fast food wrappers, compact disc covers, crumpled cans and spent nitrous cylinders fell to the ground. “Well, clear a space for yourself.”
We were an hour and change out of town when the controversies started. “Henry!” Karen started snapping from the back seat. “That’s disgusting.”
“What? It’s natural. I had a few beers–”
“What’s going on back there?” I turned down the stereo.
“He’s urinating in a soda can.” I turned on the interior light in the back and confirmed her story. There was Henry, hunched over, fiddling with something near his waist.
“I told you to piss before we left.”
“I’d still have to piss now, just less.”
I had to concede that point. There’s no complaint more unfounded or contemptuous of common physiology than the suggestion you can pre-empt a future piss with an earlier forced expulsion. Still, it wasn’t happening here, not in my truck. It was a tired, filth-ridden war wagon, filled with crumpled cans, fast-food wrappers, empty cigarette packs and mildewing months-old laundry. But one thing it was not, and one thing it’d never be, was urinal cake on wheels. “You are not pissing in cans back there.”
“Not if you keep shifting lanes. I’m pissing all over the windows.”
I had a half a mind to slam on the brakes, throw him onto his back, pecker hanging out of his boxers, lying in the pile of trash around him. The problem was I couldn’t see what he was doing. The bastard was facing away from me, and one thing I knew of Henry was, comfort trumped all. If he’d managed to fish out his dick, there was a good chance he was already urinating. Knocking him off his balance would only make it worse – turn him into a fountain, spraying on the windows and seats and carpeting, soaking everything around him.
“Just hold it until we reach the next rest stop.”
“You’re stopping?”
Is it me? Have I lost the ability to express myself coherently?
Things didn’t improve at the rest stop. Henry wanted a sandwich, a certain distinctive kind. The market didn’t carry its fixings – a grave, damning predicament.
“Hey, get me these.” He darted up to me in line at the mini-market, shoving a turkey sandwich, Gatorade and bag of Doritos in my hands. “I have to find something.”
“I’m already paying.” He’d totally skipped the line, aggravating the people waiting to my right.
“That too?” An older Indian woman behind the counter pointed at the newly found bounty in my hands.
“Do you have cranberry sauce?”
“Pardon me?” She’d heard Henry’s question, but it clearly didn’t register.
“Cran-berry sauce.”
I fished through my pockets for bills, to pay and get out of the way. The line was long and growing, and I could see where the exchange was heading. Henry was a fan of this disgusting submarine sandwich, the “Thanksgiving Special,” made at a local deli near his home. A hideous concoction of all the assorted pieces of a Thanksgiving dinner – turkey, stuffing and cranberry sauce – all smashed into a French roll slathered with gravy. I’d seen him inhale one before – a nauseating display, like watching the special-ed kids eat in the school cafeteria… mixing all the courses together and shoveling the slop in their faces. Call me a finicky prick, but the turkey and gravy and cranberry sauce? These aren’t things to be mixed one on top of another. And yet here was this beer-soaked boor, trying to do it with a “turkey loaf” sandwich from the microwave burrito cooler.
“We have many condiments… over there.” The woman tried her best to respond, seemingly truly confused.
“It’s not a condiment.”
“We have the mustard there, too.” Damnit, woman. Stop indulging him. Ignore the fool. Move on to the next customer. Oh, that’s right… You can’t. I haven’t paid you yet, as I can’t find my money. I ran my hands through every pocket of my jacket, but it was clear I’d left in the car. “And Miracle Whip, the mayonnaise spread.”
“No, no, you got it all wrong here. I’m not looking for a sauce. They call it cranberry sauce, but isn’t a sauce at all. It comes in a can. Not that sauces don’t come in cans, but this isn’t a sauce. More like a solid, like a pudding or Jello–” He was babbling, jabbering and flailing – scanning the shelves behind her to find some easy example. And it was all so clearly hopeless. Even if she understood, they’d never carry the stuff. Still, on and on he plead, like he was driven by desperation, that it was a matter of grievous principle and he had to connect with the woman. Explain his position fully, so she’d always understand. “You know… ‘gelatin’? That slimy stuff around Spam.”
The woman didn’t say a word. Just stared at me, waiting to see the money, and the line seething to my right – the crowd of people in a hurry, stopping to buy a beverage, perhaps some candy or gum, and waiting, waiting, waiting, as this loaded, rambling imbecile talked processed meat with a Hindu.
Finally the silence broke. “Do you want relish?”
“Relish? Relish is for hot dogs.”
“Pardon my friend. Henry, can I have some money?”
“You take American Express?” He flipped open his wallet.
“American Express ‘Credit Cards’?”
It must be something in the air… an atmospheric anomaly over the East Coast, somehow compromising everybody’s gray matter.
“Yes. They take Amex.” I grabbed his card and handed it to the woman.
“We have jelly. You want jelly?”
“Jelly? You can’t put jelly on a sandwich.”
Go figure… Another myth busted. I thought about correcting his point, but the debate seemed better postponed. A 6’5 trucker with a Billy Gibbons beard and a pair of Luis Guzman look-alikes were staring darts in our direction. The woman handed Henry the receipt and a pen. I shielded my eyes from the line and started for the door.
“This is awful.” Henry threw the sandwich in a trash bin outside.
“Now you’re not going to eat the thing?”
“I’m hungry in theory, like I know I need to eat, but not really…” He pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket and flipped one in his mouth. “Mini-thins. The secret weapon.”
“That’s a bottle of ‘Two-Ways.’”
“‘Whatever. Same sh–”
“‘Two Ways are twice the dose.”
“Two Ways?”
“The pills in your hand? You didn’t know that?”
In the warped ephedrine sub-culture that emerged in the mid-to-late 90s – the newly minted office monkeys who’d lost their campus coke connections, prescription drug abusers who’d known of the substance for years and suburban weekend warriors who couldn’t get anything better… every wretched stripe of closeted speed fanatic lazy enough to score from his local 7Eleven – this was writ large: Know the Depth of the Pill. And beware of the ‘Two-Way.’ It looked just like any old ‘Mini-Thin’ or ‘White Cross’ from dead overhead. Tiny, white and round, less than centimeter wide… But the devil was all in its mass, in its ‘Double-Stuff Oreo’ character. People would gobble them recklessly, thinking the thickness was nothing – just a simple brand distinction – and then, suddenly, BANG. They’re sweating, heaving and bug-eyed, frantically mumbling and stammering. (“My smokes, my smokes, my smokes… Wait. Where’s my drink? I had a drink and now I don’t. Do you have my drink? Where the hell’s my drink? Fuck. I just had it and– Do you have any cigarettes?”)
“How many of those did you eat?”
“Beats me.” It’s a tired old saying, but true: If you know how many you’ve had, you haven’t had that many. And the thing about an arch-consumer, a first rate glutton like Henry, is they never have a clue. It might have been three or five, seven of close to a dozen. The only thing that’s certain is the answer isn’t One.
“More than four?”
“A handful – that’s all I know.”
He’d need to drink and fast, in Bukowskian volume. I’m nobody’s medical doctor, but this I can offer as fact. The only route down from Way Too Up is a heavy diet of liquor. Some will say this is reckless, that it can throw the heart out of rhythm or lead to a whiskey coma. These aren’t men of science, or simple engineering. They fail to grasp the nature of a chemically-corrupted mind – that its only form of stasis is a constant gas/brake duel… And that as risky as it sounds on paper, in those speeding, frenzied moments when the mind and heart are red-lined and it feels like the slightest disturbance would drive you to a shattering breakdown, alcohol is Jesus. The only way Back.
“Bennett? Yeah, we’re on the road… Soon enough. I need favor. Get another bottle of bourbon, one of those plastic travelers, and a couple more six packs. Right, I know. And I don’t care. Just do it.” I hung up the phone and pointed the truck down the ramp. Off we shot into traffic, toward another Saturday night… Just some wholesome suburban kids, out for kicks in the city.
To be continued…

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