Lightning Rods (22 page)

Suppose someone offered you the chance to go to Harvard Law School, but you had to do something
really
disgusting for two years. Suppose you had to agree to shovel out a stable all day long for two years. Two years of shoveling horse shit and at the end of it you could go to Harvard Law School. Or what if it was something even more disgusting? Suppose you had to work for two years at a sewage disposal plant. Two years of shoveling human shit and at the end of it you could go to Harvard Law School, no strings attached.

At the end of the day, you’re just talking about pieces of the planet. Your body is a piece of matter on the surface of the planet. The shit is also matter. You use one object on the surface of the planet to move around other stuff on the surface of the planet. And what you buy with moving all that stuff around is the use of your mind.

If you’re a personal assistant, chances are you won’t have to deal with anything that’s physically disgusting. You can leave that to the cleaners. Or at least, you can leave most things to the cleaners. If you’re the type of person that things niggle at, you will probably find yourself cleaning your keyboard with a toothbrush, or noticing that there is some kind of disgusting gunk on the phone that will
have
to come
off
. But by and large the job is not offensive to the senses.

On the other hand, you have to clutter up your mind with a lot of stuff that you might well prefer not to give house room. That’s always going to be part of the job; you are never going to reach a stage where you can clear the decks and focus on major issues. And the fact is, plenty of people who go to law school are no better off. They come out with these loans to pay off, and before you know it they are counting themselves
lucky
to be cluttering up their minds with tax loopholes.

You could argue that a deal that asks you to do something physically disgusting for a limited period, and gives you free use of your own mind in exchange, is actually not such a bad bargain.

You could argue that the type of person who could come up with this kind of argument is wasted outside the law.

Renée stood up suddenly. She had noticed a small pharmacy on the ground floor of the building. She crossed the road again, and in the pharmacy she bought a pair of plastic gloves.

She returned to the park. The turd lay undisturbed in the sweet young grass. She drew on both gloves, and she picked up the turd in her right hand and went back to sit on the bench. She crossed one leg over the other, resting her arm on her knee. Her hand in its plastic glove rested on the cashmere of her skirt; the turd reposed in the plastic-gloved palm of her hand.

She sat looking at it coolly.

If you are fastidious you actually spend a lot more time than other people dealing with things that disgust you. Most people don’t notice their surroundings; they don’t notice a thin film of soap around the bathtub, they don’t notice the streaks of dirt on their windows after it rains, they don’t notice the flecks of grease on their stove or the grime in the cracks at the bottom of their trash can. They don’t have to deal with things that disgust them because hardly anything does. As long as they have a toilet that flushes and a shower that works they think they’re living in a clean environment. But if you’re fastidious you
notice
all this stuff that nobody else sees, and you have to deal with it on a daily basis. Because you know
one
thing for sure. If
you
don’t deal with it, nobody
else
is going to.

At last she stood up. It was as if her body knew what she wanted to do better than she did. It walked to a disposal unit that said “Pet Waste Only” and it lifted the lid and dropped the turd inside. Then it walked to a unit that said “Litter” and it peeled off the plastic gloves and dropped them in. Then it turned and crossed the street and went back into the building.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

“I’ve decided I want the job,” said Renée, sinking gracefully into the chair in front of Joe’s desk.

Joe laced his fingers together on the desk.

“Renée,” he said, in a low, unhurried, thousand-dollar-suit voice. “As I’m sure Lucille explained to you, much as we’d
like
to take on someone with your qualifications we just don’t have the openings. Didn’t Lucille explain that to you?”

“Yes, she did,” said Renée. “She said it wasn’t for most people, and it was for the woman in a thousand who could make a real contribution to the organization and expected to be compensated accordingly. Now, as I’m sure you’re aware, any organization which, by the underemployment of African-American personnel, excludes all African-Americans from this sort of opportunity
regardless of their qualifications
, is in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.”

Joe sighed. For this he had paid Lucille $1,000? He might as well just have gone out and bought another suit for all the good it had done.

“Look, Renée,” he said. “With the best will in the world, what you’re asking is impossible. In the first place, just increasing the number of African-Americans in the workplace is not going to solve the problem. Even if you had an office that was staffed 100% with African-American personnel you
still
wouldn’t be able to guarantee anonymity, for the simple reason that then you’re talking about personnel with a range of pigmentation among themselves, with the result that there would be no way to keep people who made use of the facility from identifying the members of staff who had provided it. I’m sorry, but we’ve got to face facts. And besides, if you think about it, where will it all end? You could just as well say that an office should be 50% Hispanic-American, or 50% Chinese-American, or what have you. I’m sorry to disappoint you, because you’re a pretty exceptional applicant and I hate to see talent go to waste, but you’ve got to be realistic. No single office is going to be able to be that big of a melting pot.”

Renée crossed one leg over the other, and clasped her hands around her knee.

“Joe,” she said. “You seem to be laboring under a misapprehension.”

“Oh really?” said Joe.

“Yes,” said Renée. “You seem to think this is my problem.”

Joe hesitated.

“You seem to think it’s up to
me
to come up with a solution,” said Renée. “But
you’re
the one who’s got I don’t know how many companies into a mess. Thanks to you every single one of your clients is now in flagrant violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act. That’s not
my
problem. It’s
your
problem.”

Wow
, she thought. This is
great
.

Renée had never realized just how satisfying it could be to be confrontational. As a PA you hardly ever get to do this kind of thing. Once in a while you can tell an airline, or a caterer, or a courier, that their level of service is unsatisfactory. You can tell people that your boss is on another line. But how often do you actually get to tell someone that he’s racist and it’s up to him to do something about it? Never, that’s how often.

Joe was thinking
Shit
. He was also thinking that the female of the species is more deadly than the male. Whoever said that was absolutely right.

“Look,” said Joe. “I hear what you’re saying. I’ll tell you what. I’ll have a word with Lucille. I’ll see if she has any ideas.”

Lucille agreed to throw in another visit to the office as part of the original thousand-dollar package.

“Look, Lucille,” said Joe, when Lucille strolled into the office at 5:37. “I don’t know what you said to this gal, but it seems to have had exactly the opposite of the desired effect. She’s got some bee in her bonnet about Harvard Law School.”

“Oh really?” said Lucille.

“Now I’m absolutely the last guy in the world to want to stand in the way of people’s aspirations, but there’s a time and a place for everything. With the best will in the world you know as well as I do that there’s no way we can guarantee that ladies in different colors of skin can be inconspicuous.”

“I see what you’re saying,” said Lucille.

“You can talk about the Equal Employment Opportunities Act until the cows come home, you’re not going to change the basic facts of the situation. For the love of Mike, does she
want
people going around making insinuations and innuendos?”

Lucille sat in the chair in front of the desk and crossed one leg over the other. “Calm down, Joe,” she advised. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. What you’re saying is what? She wants the job, and she says it’s up to you make any necessary arrangements to guarantee anonymity?”

“You got it,” said Joe. “Jesus.”

“Well, she’s got a point,” said Lucille.

“What?” said Joe.

“She’s got a point, said Lucille. “You are in violation of the Equal Employment Opportunities Act.”

“Whose side are you on, anyway?” asked Joe.

“I’m just stating a fact,” said Lucille. “The way I see it is, you’re lucky this came up now. Gives you a chance to do something about it before things get out of hand.”

“But,” said Joe.

“Let me think about this for a minute,” said Lucille. She swung her foot thoughtfully. She was wearing a pair of filmy Hanes pantyhose which made her legs a very pale tan.

Hm.

“Well, I’ve got an idea,” she said when the minute was up. Lucille was a stickler for detail. When she said a minute she meant a minute. Not 59 seconds. Not 61 seconds. A minute.

“OK, shoot,” said Joe.

“Well, the way I see it is, the problem is basically with people seeing bare legs in their natural skin color. I don’t see why you couldn’t just issue some kind of solid colored tights, or maybe something in rubber or PVC, with just a slit at the crotch. Apparently a lot of men find the idea of entering through a hole in a piece of clothing quite stimulating, so my guess is you wouldn’t have any complaints from the customers. And it would solve the whole problem of people with different colors of skin, which when you come down to it is probably relevant to a lot of the people you’ve already got working for you. What happens if someone spends a couple of weeks in the Bahamas? You never really thought it through that far.”

Joe opened his mouth to protest. Then he shut it again. PVC would spoil
everything
, but there was no way he could explain that. He didn’t really like to think about what Lucille might think about how he had happened to have the idea in the first place, so he tried not to think about it. But one thing was for sure, if he said it would spoil it, it would be only too obvious that he thought there was something
to
spoil. Namely, a scenario that derived from the type of fantasy that involved an element of the unexpected. If somebody just happens to be clad in black PVC from the waist down, it is really stretching probability too far to imagine that she isn’t expecting something to happen. It defeats the whole point of the fantasy. The whole thing would be
ruined
, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act had him over a barrel.

The thing that was really unfair was that in his fantasies he had given
plenty
of opportunities to black gals, and for that matter to gals from all
kinds
of ethnic backgrounds. It’s just that there is a difference between reality and fantasy. In a fantasy, nothing ever has any repercussions. In real life, you have to weigh pros and cons, in case someone gets hurt.

Unfortunately there was also no way he could explain this to Lucille, while as for Renée! Something told him that for all her ranting about the Equal Employment Opportunities Act Renée would not appreciate being told that her employer had had black gals, or rather African-American gals, in his game show fantasy. If you’re a salesman you tend to have a sense for these things. He could be wrong. But he sure as hell wasn’t about to go trying to find out.

PVC

For the next couple of days Joe tried to put a brave face on things. He tried not to think about the PVC with a slit in the crotch which the Equal Employment Opportunities Act was going to force him to implement. If he thought about it he was just going to get depressed, and in sales you can’t afford to get depressed. You can’t afford to go around thinking What’s the point? That negative take on the product will communicate itself to the customer, and before you know it all the hard work you put into getting your foot in the door will be down the drain.

Sooner or later, though, we all have to face the facts. So he went home at the end of a long day and forced himself to confront the whole issue of PVC.

Now, whenever you don’t like something you have two alternatives. One alternative is to change the world. The other is to change yourself. In this case, changing the world was not an option. The Equal Employment Opportunities Act was here to stay. Like it or not, PVC, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, was going to be a feature of the lightning rod installation for the foreseeable future. But if you can’t change the world, one thing you
can
try to change is your attitude.