As Luck Would Have It (3 page)

On Monday mornings I would often sneak into the office late with a hangover and more messages on my
desk
than shots of Scotch Joseph and I had consumed over the weekend.  I tended to prefer drinking Scotch, though it took Joseph a long time to develop a taste for fine whisky, so he generally ordered either red wine or his vodka tonics.  We both enjoyed the wine a good deal, but I never could figure out the vodka, which smelled like gasohol and coul
d stick you with a hammer of a headache
if you weren’t careful
.

I have to ask myself, and you may already have as well, why I agreed to go out Sunday night with full knowledge of the train wreck that was certain to unfold in the office the next day.  Joseph dragged me to a place called
Club Sphinx
, an aging but occasionally still glamorous gay bar near downtown Chicago where he liked to hang out.  We’ll just have one drink, OK Clifford?  Sure Joseph, but you’re driving.

Maybe Joseph would have one drink, but if I’m going to hang out in bar with a bunch of middle age and beyond guys shouting you go girl and singing bad karaoke, one drink is about as likely as a Cubs World Series.  Give us two vodka and cranberries, I heard Joseph call out to the bartender, doing his best to be heard over the rather loud but reasonably talented voice of the guy whose turn it was to perform.  Before I could mount any form of protest, the
sweet
red liquid was being sloshed around with the vodka, and the tall happy hour sized glasses were sliding on the bar in front of us, giving off a faint aroma of what seemed to me like rubbing alcohol.  Oh my God, what did you order?  They don’t have Scotch here, Clifford. 
I’m glad I’m not the one driving.

For a period of time, I would not go to any gay bars at all.  I just wasn’t that comfortable with the whole setting, with everyone eyeballing everyone else, making somewhat crude comments about the guys around them that could often be unintentionally or otherwise overheard.  I like to categorize people generally and it seemed to me that gay guys made themselves particularly easy targets for such
characterization
.  What with their butch or queenie getups and their exaggerated stances and overblown drama, well you as the reader, whether gay or straight, enlightened or uninformed, tolerant or narrow-minded, probably understand what I’m talking about.

Although you
might find this attitude to be pompous or even pretentious on my part, this reluctance to hanging out in the gay bars had nothing to do with anyone’s sexual preferences or practices.  I had no interest in concerning myself with who they wanted to have sex with or what they liked or didn’t like to do in their
more
private intimate moments.  That was none of my damn business and I would never be so arrogant as to judge the value of their personal relationships, which by the way had absolutely no effect on mine.  Joseph knew all of this and did not pull me along to the bars, unders
tanding intuitively I’m sure that I would go when I was ready to, which I did eventually because I enjoyed his gay buddies once I spent the time to get to know them.  They were funnier than any straight acquaintances that I knew and had a lot to teach me in terms of both style and presentation.  Despite any preconceived notions that I might have had, I found them for the most part to be interesting and intelligent. And did they ever love to drink.

Now I had to wonder if the price I was goin
g to pay on Monday was worth it. 
Back
then I
was s
till
expected to
generate at least enough production to justify my salary and the attendant cost of keeping my office space and benefits intact. 
But now, the biggest and angriest
demons
to possess the world
that
managers
live in
were
ascending from hell or wherever
they
reside.  The company’s financial auditors, the dreaded fiends of
the world of numbers, were here to spread misery worse than the plagues of Egypt that God, with his outstretched hand brought down on the impertinent
pharaoh, which we
re
re
counted at the Seder
s Joseph liked to host
each spring.

The first Seders I attended were with the Kleins and I loved them. 
They were big affairs with 20 or more guests around one giant table, full of laughter and singing.  I’d read about Passover somewhere, but I had no idea that Jews had celebrations like this, with
the
wine and the stories of Moses and the traditional unleavened bread and bitter herbs. 
Why didn’t
Christians have celebrations like this?  Didn’t they buy into the Old Testament version of the Exodus?

Clearly,
this was Edith Klein’s great moment
;
the matriarch of the Jewish home
and r
uler of the kitchen.  Days were spent in preparation for one meal
.  With the kosher rules rearranged and even more convoluted,
Joseph’s mother
was up for
the challenge
.  She brought forth
the most amazing smells
that spread
through
out the house, as Moses is said to have brought forth the children of Egypt to be spread throughout the land.  I feel compelled to confess to you that I am not big on religion.  But this was damn good
stuff even for a non-believer.

My parents were invited too and they
enjoyed themselves.
  I’m sure they appreciated
Harold
Klein’s patien
t explanations of
the Passover symbols, the biblical interpretations
,
and the significance of the four cups of wine, including pouring out some it in deference to the many Egyptians who no doubt drowned, caught up unwittingly or otherwise in God’s tricky scheme to not only transport the Jews out of
slavery
, but to keep them dry no less.  But wait…four cups of what?  We were only twelve years old for Christ’s sake and we were being served wine?  OK, the children’s glasses were smaller and the younger
ones
had to settle for grape juice, but still! 
As liberal as my parents were, it must have taken some effort for them to just look the other way. 
We
got tipsy and
giggled and spread
matzo
crumbs everywhere
while the adults just chatted away and ate their
charoset
,
which was so delicious that my mother
asked Mrs. Klein for the recipe, who
w
as thrilled that
M
om actually
made it later for dad and me.

Oh, how my mind can wander when I think back to those sweet childhood memories,
not
too long
before my parents died and left me to figure
out
on
my own how I
could
p
ossibly navigate through this perilous life without them.  Why couldn’t they have been more cautious, more wary of the possibility that something so horrible might happen and thereby prevent it in the first place? 
Would my impeccable good luck alone be enough, or had their death signaled something else, that my luck was changing and that I could no longer rely on it
as my protector
?  How would I know what was good
and what was
bad, wh
ich
was safe
and which
hazardous, who was righteous and who was evil? 
How could I
,
being just 14 when they left me?

But it wasn’t springtime now with
warmth and
the promise of life renewed. It was the dead of winter and freezing cold
,
with the
certai
n dread of the upcoming audit
of our department
.  I flipped the switch on the computer and felt a slight wave of nausea,
probably a combination of the doom I felt and the sudden vaporous sensation from the vodka my body was attempting to extricate.
As I waited for the screen to awaken from its own sleepiness, I p
opped the lid
off
my
Starbucks Grande, leaned back in my chair and stared out of my office window.  Before I could let myself drift into further depression, I took a couple of swigs of the hot brewed concoction and began to relax.
  Coffee is an amazing drug,
often
underappreciated
, b
ut
not a subject that I want to stray to right now,
but something
we can return to
a little bit
later on
because it is certainly worthy of the discussion
.  And though I am drinking
it
right now and this would otherwise be an excellent opportunity for me to
expand on the vi
rt
ues of coffee, at
the moment I
really need to focus
on this problem in front me,

Clarity, a welcome side effect of sobriety, was helping me to organize my thoughts.
I had
four associates reporting to me,
none of whom possessed
all that
much in terms of either experience or intellect.  It’s almost funny how they came to be my subordinates.  You, an average reader with at least some
thought
s
of how an office might be run, even if you are in some totally unrelated occupation such as a gardener or a
waiter,
might make the assumption that I,
a
future overseer
of these individuals
,
m
ay
have had some
input or participation in their selection process.  If you mistakenly made that assumption
;
shame on you.  You
should stick to your chosen profession
of tending to the
hydrangeas
or
waiting on
your
customers
.

I’d never met
any of these four people until they appeared
out of nowhere
about a year
before
, fresh out of college and full of both optimism and useless ideas. 
Don’t get me wrong, they are
all nice young men and women, but what were they going to do to get us through this mess?
  Needing to come up with a workable plan, I decided to do what any seasoned manager would do in my predicament; I called a meeting.

Any introduction to management text will
cover
things like group dynamics, meetings, shared responsibilities and delegation of authority.  I enjoyed these subjects in college
and surprisingly, wound up acing my management theory courses.  Believe it or not, some newer organizational economic models present negative moral characterizations of managers.  Again, it might have been both useful and relevant for me to have interviewed
and sought out the views of
precisely those
perspective associates who mig
ht one day be staring me down across the conference
room
table in the middle of a crisis such as the one we were
now
facing. 
One of my four
young
associates, Lucy
Mendelssohn
, would have been effectively screened out of the process after about 1
0
minutes of even the least grueling and most affable sort of interview
that I would have conducted.

As we
have just
seen, the obvious best strategy in this situation is to have a meeting. 
Now, keep in mind that y
ou, as the manager, have the option of
deferring to
someone else in the group t
he
role of leader and allow that person to
structure and
guide
the discussion.  This
, which could easily be seen as a dereliction of the manager’s responsibility,
can
even more easily be explained
away
by referring to it as a development opportunity for the upstart associate.  It works nearly every time because all organizations bestow upon their managers the ultimate responsibility for the development of their employees.  In reality, it’s
l
ikely
not for the benefit of the aspiring newcomer, but rather
a ploy by the manager to get
him
or
her
off the hook when the
y
either don’t want to conduct the meeting, or are totally unprepared to do so. 
The five of us
drifted into the conference room
with our lattés
and our laptops.  Before we get started, I’ve selected Lucy to head up this meeting as an important development opportunity for her today.  Are there any questions?