‘transpontine’ mean?”), strolled with a sheet of paper in hand (so as to make it look like official business) the length and breadth of the complex, killed time in the company library, smoked pack after pack of cigarettes, and watched television in the lounges during the interminable afternoons. Since no one ever showed up with a long-distance invoice, Lars yakked it up on the phone with his girlfriend, Cecilia Swan, who was living down south (they’d met at the University of Georgia some years back), for hours on end. After all, he figured, the telephone company doesn’t bill itself.
As with all meaningless activity, pointless habit soon got theupper hand. Our absurd labors were a river emptying into an ocean of Monday-through-Friday, eight-thirty-until-five-thirty days, during which we rarely glimpsed the light of day….
But the money was rolling in, and just in the nick of time. Within weeks Livy and I made good on many outstanding debts. I was even able to send off a check to Mrs. London for that apocalyptic astrological reading and get her off my back once and for all. For a minute or two, I felt pretty damned good about being flush for the first time in my life. When I sliced open the envelope that held my check, I could hardly believe I was bringing down good money—over $360 a week after taxes—to sit on my ass all day and shoot the shit with Lars.
Corporate America made sense to me now—it was a royal scam, a cushy gig for anybody who could find his way in, the place to be, especially if you wanted to do nothing.
But before long a strange restiveness set in. I was nagged by the thought that I hadn’t actually done anything of any significance whatsoever throughout the long workweeks. I was accomplishing less, in fact, than when I laid around the apartment devouring book after book and occasionally turning out a new tune. And if you weren’t doing something you liked in life, well, what good was the money? What good was all the money in the world if you didn’t want to be where you were? Now that I had a regular wage, I was responsible for a million and one expenses I didn’t have when I was hard up against it. Like the rent on Livy’s apartment, for example, and the gasoline sucked up while traveling back and forth to work (a fifty-mile round trip), and my new wardrobe, and the dry cleaning, and the ten-dollar lunches with Lars. To boot, rather than bother with preparing our own meals, Livy and I found ourselves in a different restaurant damned nearevery night. Before I knew it, I was living paycheck to paycheck all over again, with not a shilling to spare….
Everything in life is money. You can try your damnedest to ignore it, but you’re nothing without it, an untouchable. With it, you’re damned, too, but for different reasons. Like most things on this earth, it’s a no-win situation.
21.
Once you relinquish your dreams—the dreams that bubble up from the deepest wells of your real self—you’re finished, you’re dead; it doesn’t matter how much jack you’re bringing down. We were earning bread, Livy and me, but worms had appeared in the loaf of our success. By the time the dead leaves had broken off the tree branches, I’d been gripped by a depression that had me near paralyzed before I could even make it out of the apartment in the frosty mornings. Because by now I knew for sure that in the process of holding down a regular, respectable job and making money the old-fashioned way, I was trashing my life.
“I’ve been thinking … I have to get back to trying to do something,” I announced to Livy’s naked back as I watched her dress for a morning meeting with the rebbes.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know. What we always planned at the beginning—write, music, travel. All of it. Any of it.”
She shrugged. I kept an eye on her remarkable deltoid muscles, another part of her I always admired.
“Who’s stopping you?”
“Well, with these fucking jobs of
As with all meaningless activity, pointless habit soon got theupper hand. Our absurd labors were a river emptying into an ocean of Monday-through-Friday, eight-thirty-until-five-thirty days, during which we rarely glimpsed the light of day….
But the money was rolling in, and just in the nick of time. Within weeks Livy and I made good on many outstanding debts. I was even able to send off a check to Mrs. London for that apocalyptic astrological reading and get her off my back once and for all. For a minute or two, I felt pretty damned good about being flush for the first time in my life. When I sliced open the envelope that held my check, I could hardly believe I was bringing down good money—over $360 a week after taxes—to sit on my ass all day and shoot the shit with Lars.
Corporate America made sense to me now—it was a royal scam, a cushy gig for anybody who could find his way in, the place to be, especially if you wanted to do nothing.
But before long a strange restiveness set in. I was nagged by the thought that I hadn’t actually done anything of any significance whatsoever throughout the long workweeks. I was accomplishing less, in fact, than when I laid around the apartment devouring book after book and occasionally turning out a new tune. And if you weren’t doing something you liked in life, well, what good was the money? What good was all the money in the world if you didn’t want to be where you were? Now that I had a regular wage, I was responsible for a million and one expenses I didn’t have when I was hard up against it. Like the rent on Livy’s apartment, for example, and the gasoline sucked up while traveling back and forth to work (a fifty-mile round trip), and my new wardrobe, and the dry cleaning, and the ten-dollar lunches with Lars. To boot, rather than bother with preparing our own meals, Livy and I found ourselves in a different restaurant damned nearevery night. Before I knew it, I was living paycheck to paycheck all over again, with not a shilling to spare….
Everything in life is money. You can try your damnedest to ignore it, but you’re nothing without it, an untouchable. With it, you’re damned, too, but for different reasons. Like most things on this earth, it’s a no-win situation.
21.
Once you relinquish your dreams—the dreams that bubble up from the deepest wells of your real self—you’re finished, you’re dead; it doesn’t matter how much jack you’re bringing down. We were earning bread, Livy and me, but worms had appeared in the loaf of our success. By the time the dead leaves had broken off the tree branches, I’d been gripped by a depression that had me near paralyzed before I could even make it out of the apartment in the frosty mornings. Because by now I knew for sure that in the process of holding down a regular, respectable job and making money the old-fashioned way, I was trashing my life.
“I’ve been thinking … I have to get back to trying to do something,” I announced to Livy’s naked back as I watched her dress for a morning meeting with the rebbes.
“What are you talking about?”
“You know. What we always planned at the beginning—write, music, travel. All of it. Any of it.”
She shrugged. I kept an eye on her remarkable deltoid muscles, another part of her I always admired.
“Who’s stopping you?”
“Well, with these fucking jobs of
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