Lunch Hour
Jay sat at his computer like everyone else at the office, keyboard buttons clicking away. He always thought the offices of today were the modern day assembly lines, no different than the heavy, perfectly rhythmic pounding of an old mill's line. Click-click-clicking, his mind wandered....
He had picked up the shoulder-hunch years ago from Sam, one of his youth hockey teammates back in the early '80s. They couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen years old when Jay noticed Sam in the locker room, during a typical post-practice iceball throw-down. See, snow and ice always built up on skate blades so after practice it was just par for the course that young teenage boys, especially hockey players, could simply never resist collecting the snow from their skates and forming it into tiny iceballs for the single purpose of firing it at each other from 6 feet across the always square locker room.
Anyway, the shoulder hunch: Jay wasn't sure if Sam was raising his shoulders up to look more intimidating, but he did remember thinking that it looked bad-ass - the shoulders north of where they should be, as if stuck at the halfway point of shrugging. He did it on the ice, in the locker room, outside the building - everywhere. It seemed no matter what the situation, Sam's shoulders were always in the "up" position.
It was probably common a boy of that age would do whatever he could to look more intimidating - especially with a large set of shoulder pads to enhance the effect. Jay was certain this was the reason for it. Sam had a large personality, too, the kind of personality that seem reserved for only a select few people who automatically were magnetic - not necessarily noble leaders or anything, but they had something - meaning that he was always be the first person the boys would look at during the highs and lows of a game or a coaches post-game tantrum. He was somewhat menacing, too, and occasionally brash with a bit of a mean streak. He was the kind of boy who would stand up in the middle of the locker room and flip the coach the middle finger - right after the coach walked out the door, of course. He also used to wear his sweat pants with the pant-legs pulled up to just under his knees, revealing his striped-at-the-top tube socks, also pulled up to just below the knees. Oh, the '80s.
Realizing he was getting off topic but not really caring, his mind drifted further away as he continued rattling the keyboard, unsure and uncaring of any mistakes he might have been making. Jay remembered how Sam used to bring one of those ridiculous 1980s style silver boom boxes into the locker room and just blast the living hell out of Twisted Sister's "I Wanna Rock." That song would always get Sam all fired up and raring to hit the ice for games. Jay could only laugh at that memory.
Jay liked Twisted Sister just fine, but instead of "I Wanna Rock" he was actually more keen to "The Price," which was the obligatory power-ballad on the album (the album was called "Stay Hungry"). He still liked "The Price," actually. Back then, each heavy metal band had one power-ballad on every album - those type of songs were just coming into vogue at the time, although the true heavy metal power-ballad wouldn't reach its apex until a year or two later when the mothership of power-ballads first hit the airwaves: Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home." That song revoloutionized the heavy metal power ballad. Thinking to himself, even further out in the reaches of his teenage stratosphere...
a) the video for Home Sweet Home was so awesome. It had that moment when guitarist Nikki Sixx was using his forefinger, moving it back-and-forth in slow motion, naturally, to signal "come here" to some young, sweet teenage girl. The next shot in the video was some young, sweet teenage girl, in slow motion, lifting up her shirt just to the point where you could see the beginnings of her boobs and....then the video cut to another part.
b) he should create the Pop-Culture SAT, one of the first questions could easily be:
"Home Sweet Home" is to Heavy Metal Power Ballads as:
0 - Color TV is to the advent of Television.
0 - The microwave is to "re-heating."
0 - Tone-dialing is to telephones.
0 - All of the above.
Getting back to Twisted Sister, though, Jay thought of lead singer Dee Snider's picture on the cover of that "Stay Hungry" album. Snider was sitting in the corner of some run-down room and he had this huge, ridiculous animal bone with stringy, raw meat still stuck to it. He had the bone in his hand and a stupid, contorted "crazy-man" look on his face, as if he were about to devour the bone like those lions on Animal Planet when they finally catch up to the uncoordinated, frightened gazelle.
Jay knew he had grown up an average kid and looking back on his childhood and his adult life, he was mentally weak and easily impressionable. It would never go away. He knew he was so lacking of a distinct personality of his own and spent much of his time closely observing other people, picking up their traits and stealing them for his own use - be it a style of laughter, a saying, a gesture or just a way of talking.
It started back then in the youth hockey days. He would gather other people's traits that he observed from all walks of his life, bundling what he perceived to be the best of those traits into his own "personality." He would try the traits for a while, experiment with them and see what his friends reacted positively to. He would then keep the ones that worked and ditch the ones that didn't. He believed then, and believed now, that he would never be strong, smart, clever or funny enough to be liked or respected by anyone else. He felt he had to enhance himself by being a trait thief.
So Jay stole the shoulder-hunch! Of all the goddamn things to steal, of all the personality traits he picked up and discarded along the way, he had kept the shoulder hunch. For twenty years now, to boot.
Suddenly his real world came back into biting focus. Typing away at the desk of his mindless job, he wondered how in the hell he ended up there and caught himself, shoulders ever-so-slightly up in the air for no reason. They were up in the air because he was thinking about how he acquired that very trait. Fucked up. Jay often wondered if Sam did the shoulder hunch anymore. Probably not, but he did remember catching Sam doing it when they played against each other in high school in the late 1980s. Perhaps he did still do it!
It was certainly a strange mannerism to retain for twenty years running and to this day, at the age of thirty-three, Jay was convinced it was reason why he continued to have this odd tension in his upper back and lower neck area. He had received a free massage once, the first and only of his life so far, on a business trip a few years back. Floating away again, there were two things Jay remembered most about that massage.
One was that he wasn't entirely sure if he should be naked because no one had ever told him the correct massage protocol. At the time, he remembered the disappointment in himself that he wasn't sophisticated enough to know. Before the massage, Jay had sworn he remembered from a conversation with somebody that it was ok to be naked under the robe (while waiting) and then during the massage. He just wasn't sure, so underneath the robe he had elected to wear a pair of short red shorts while waiting. "Better safe than sorry," he had thought, envisioning the absolute horror of taking off the robe and having the masseuse freak out and yell "pervert!" Then he'd have to deal with getting hauled off by hotel security and arrested for lewd behavior. What would people think? He was more frightened by the thought of people laughing at him getting escorted by hotel security and not real cops.
Upon entering the massage room, the masseuse had launched into what Jay suspected was her robotic, pre-scripted routine, telling him to get comfortable on the table and that she would "return in just a moment." Panic then set in. Real, sweaty-palmed style panic. "Do I take off the shorts?" he wondered to himself. Probably so, and off came the shorts. Then he put them back on. Then more panic. "What if I keep them on and she thinks I'm stupid?" Shorts back off. Back on. Back off again. It wasn't necessarily the naked thing, it was what the masseuse would think of him no matter which course he elected to take. Typical. The shorts ended up on.
The second part he remembered the most was the fascination with the masseuse. He had always suspected that the occupation was a bit of sham; that these people probably invented "problem areas" on the subject's body and he always had thought they created their own stupid techniques that fooled people into thinking it was some sort of special treatment. And what about all the touching? Jay just couldn't imagine having to touch people like that every day, people of all shapes and sizes - and having to do that for a living just to put food on the table. No way. No fucking way, fucking Jose. Not to mention having to deal with somebody's shitty attitude or the expectation that maybe, just maybe, the person you're giving the massage to wants a little more, nod nod, wink wink.
The masseuse proved him wrong. Jay had stayed purposefully quiet, he was a little shy anyway, and vowed not to reveal that there had always been this tension in his upper back and lower neck. In particular, this one spot about an inch in diameter, just to the right of his neck where the shoulder begins to slope up. Against the aural backdrop of some crappy, atmospheric bullshit music, though, she had nailed it, verbally pointing out the exact spot he had in his mind. He wanted to yell out, "it's because of the shoulder hunch! I can't fucking get rid of it!"
She worked the spot, tried sculpting it as if she was in ceramics class. Jay briefly remembered the ceramic pottery scene in The Naked Gun with Leslie Neilsen and Priscilla Presly getting all horny while making a ceramic vase - the clay was just flying everywhere.
The masseuse pressed her elbow into the spot, did whatever else a masseuse does. The spot crunched a little like the sound of hardened bread crumbs being crushed. He was sold, even with "Sounds of The Amazon" playing, or whatever that tripe was. He would have much rather preferred to be listening to The Palace Brothers. Damn, that would be great for a massage, he remembered thinking. "Viva Last Blues."
The prodding and probing of the spot had worked for about a week - no tension in that location. But it came right back. The hunch.
His next theft had been trying to steal the laugh of an old friend. He had originally met Tracy through an old job at a dot-com. "Old friend" was probably not the best description for Tracy, Jay thought. Maybe "old co-worker" was better suited, although he had seen her socially quite a few times in the four or five years since Jay had vacated that position. She had a cute laugh, it was a rat-a-tat-tat-tat kind of thing, but not rapid-fire enough where it was completely annoying. He thought immediately of Laura Frankel, an old high school classmate who had the most annoying laugh in the whole wide world - it was loud, obnoxious and if laughs were firearms, hers was a friggin' machine gun. She was nice enough, sure, but if high school had been five years instead of four, Jay thought he very well might have flipped out and killed her. Or maybe just kicked her in the shins. He then wondered what Laura thought of him back then. Or what she thought of him now, if she thought of him at all. Jay wrote it off, picturing Frankel with a banker husband and four kids, all sitting around the dinner table (probably listening with the volume on low to John Mayer or Meyer or whatever his name was), all doing that annoying laugh. What a nightmare. He was never into her much anyway.
The tough part about trying to steal this particular laugh, Jay had thought, or even trying it out was that it somehow had to be converted into a male laugh. There is a difference. The conversion of a higher-pitched laugh into a deeper, male guffaw, but using the same style, was going to take some work. Jay hated his own laugh. Now and then when he showcased it he would just get red with embarrassment, finding it unbelievable that such a pansy sound could emanate from his gut like that. He had heard it too many times in his life by mistake when he accidentally let his own personality out. His own laugh was this short, quick, odd high-pitched tweet, almost like a mini-scream like when those female tennis players grunt when slugging a tennis ball. Oh, the embarrassment. Jay had stolen several laughs in his lifetime, this one might be a toughie.
There would be no covert practicing, either. That's not the way trait-stealing worked. It's not like he would go home after work, eat dinner, then plan to take an hour sitting in his bedroom, referencing diagrams and practicing. He would just trot these things out on occasion. Work was a good place. One always has to be somewhat conversational there. Inevitably someone cracks a joke they think is funny, at which point Jay could unleash his newest laugh project, pretending whatever was said was actually funny. A downsized office always needed some hearty, loud, completely forced, fake laughter. No better place, really. Happened every day.
Jay's office was the kind of office where everyone was polite and conversational, but nobody really listened or gave a single solitary crap about one another. If they could, they'd each have a lockable tarp over their cubicle. Jay thought about the fake office Less Nessman had set up on "WKRP in Cincinnati." He was sure everyone wished they had something like that so they wouldn't have to do that fake communicating.
His stomach rumbling on this otherwise drab Friday afternoon, Jay slumbered down to the basement cafeteria of the office building and started the circular stirring of the large pot of soup. Since it was Friday, they were serving clam chowder and he had to stir it around for thirty seconds because the soup had developed that utterly disgusting film that always forms at the top of soup when someone hasn't scooped any in a while. He couldn't even look at it while he disintegrated the nasty soup film and struggled to come to grips with how he could even bring himself to eat it, knowing that some of that film would end up in his stomach.
Upon dumping the final spoonful of the chowder into the white Styrofoam cup, he looked up and saw a few co-workers approaching.
"Hey," said one of them.
"Hey," Jay retorted, pulling some money out of his wallet.
They walked right past him and over to the sandwich-assembling area. That would be the only interaction with any of them all day. He laughed to himself one more time, thinking about Sam's sweat-pants pulled up, just short of his knees. He stopped laughing when he realized his own shoulders were up again and that spot in his upper back was aching.
Jay paid for his three-dollar chowder with three one-dollar bills and trudged back upstairs, sat down, ate and finished the day. He was half excited that he wouldn't have to be back there tomorrow, but half-dreading the overwhelming, crushing cloud of loneliness that was closing in on him for the next 48 hours.
Jay sat at his computer like everyone else at the office, keyboard buttons clicking away. He always thought the offices of today were the modern day assembly lines, no different than the heavy, perfectly rhythmic pounding of an old mill's line. Click-click-clicking, his mind wandered....
He had picked up the shoulder-hunch years ago from Sam, one of his youth hockey teammates back in the early '80s. They couldn't have been more than twelve or thirteen years old when Jay noticed Sam in the locker room, during a typical post-practice iceball throw-down. See, snow and ice always built up on skate blades so after practice it was just par for the course that young teenage boys, especially hockey players, could simply never resist collecting the snow from their skates and forming it into tiny iceballs for the single purpose of firing it at each other from 6 feet across the always square locker room.
Anyway, the shoulder hunch: Jay wasn't sure if Sam was raising his shoulders up to look more intimidating, but he did remember thinking that it looked bad-ass - the shoulders north of where they should be, as if stuck at the halfway point of shrugging. He did it on the ice, in the locker room, outside the building - everywhere. It seemed no matter what the situation, Sam's shoulders were always in the "up" position.
It was probably common a boy of that age would do whatever he could to look more intimidating - especially with a large set of shoulder pads to enhance the effect. Jay was certain this was the reason for it. Sam had a large personality, too, the kind of personality that seem reserved for only a select few people who automatically were magnetic - not necessarily noble leaders or anything, but they had something - meaning that he was always be the first person the boys would look at during the highs and lows of a game or a coaches post-game tantrum. He was somewhat menacing, too, and occasionally brash with a bit of a mean streak. He was the kind of boy who would stand up in the middle of the locker room and flip the coach the middle finger - right after the coach walked out the door, of course. He also used to wear his sweat pants with the pant-legs pulled up to just under his knees, revealing his striped-at-the-top tube socks, also pulled up to just below the knees. Oh, the '80s.
Realizing he was getting off topic but not really caring, his mind drifted further away as he continued rattling the keyboard, unsure and uncaring of any mistakes he might have been making. Jay remembered how Sam used to bring one of those ridiculous 1980s style silver boom boxes into the locker room and just blast the living hell out of Twisted Sister's "I Wanna Rock." That song would always get Sam all fired up and raring to hit the ice for games. Jay could only laugh at that memory.
Jay liked Twisted Sister just fine, but instead of "I Wanna Rock" he was actually more keen to "The Price," which was the obligatory power-ballad on the album (the album was called "Stay Hungry"). He still liked "The Price," actually. Back then, each heavy metal band had one power-ballad on every album - those type of songs were just coming into vogue at the time, although the true heavy metal power-ballad wouldn't reach its apex until a year or two later when the mothership of power-ballads first hit the airwaves: Motley Crue's "Home Sweet Home." That song revoloutionized the heavy metal power ballad. Thinking to himself, even further out in the reaches of his teenage stratosphere...
a) the video for Home Sweet Home was so awesome. It had that moment when guitarist Nikki Sixx was using his forefinger, moving it back-and-forth in slow motion, naturally, to signal "come here" to some young, sweet teenage girl. The next shot in the video was some young, sweet teenage girl, in slow motion, lifting up her shirt just to the point where you could see the beginnings of her boobs and....then the video cut to another part.
b) he should create the Pop-Culture SAT, one of the first questions could easily be:
"Home Sweet Home" is to Heavy Metal Power Ballads as:
0 - Color TV is to the advent of Television.
0 - The microwave is to "re-heating."
0 - Tone-dialing is to telephones.
0 - All of the above.
Getting back to Twisted Sister, though, Jay thought of lead singer Dee Snider's picture on the cover of that "Stay Hungry" album. Snider was sitting in the corner of some run-down room and he had this huge, ridiculous animal bone with stringy, raw meat still stuck to it. He had the bone in his hand and a stupid, contorted "crazy-man" look on his face, as if he were about to devour the bone like those lions on Animal Planet when they finally catch up to the uncoordinated, frightened gazelle.
Jay knew he had grown up an average kid and looking back on his childhood and his adult life, he was mentally weak and easily impressionable. It would never go away. He knew he was so lacking of a distinct personality of his own and spent much of his time closely observing other people, picking up their traits and stealing them for his own use - be it a style of laughter, a saying, a gesture or just a way of talking.
It started back then in the youth hockey days. He would gather other people's traits that he observed from all walks of his life, bundling what he perceived to be the best of those traits into his own "personality." He would try the traits for a while, experiment with them and see what his friends reacted positively to. He would then keep the ones that worked and ditch the ones that didn't. He believed then, and believed now, that he would never be strong, smart, clever or funny enough to be liked or respected by anyone else. He felt he had to enhance himself by being a trait thief.
So Jay stole the shoulder-hunch! Of all the goddamn things to steal, of all the personality traits he picked up and discarded along the way, he had kept the shoulder hunch. For twenty years now, to boot.
Suddenly his real world came back into biting focus. Typing away at the desk of his mindless job, he wondered how in the hell he ended up there and caught himself, shoulders ever-so-slightly up in the air for no reason. They were up in the air because he was thinking about how he acquired that very trait. Fucked up. Jay often wondered if Sam did the shoulder hunch anymore. Probably not, but he did remember catching Sam doing it when they played against each other in high school in the late 1980s. Perhaps he did still do it!
It was certainly a strange mannerism to retain for twenty years running and to this day, at the age of thirty-three, Jay was convinced it was reason why he continued to have this odd tension in his upper back and lower neck area. He had received a free massage once, the first and only of his life so far, on a business trip a few years back. Floating away again, there were two things Jay remembered most about that massage.
One was that he wasn't entirely sure if he should be naked because no one had ever told him the correct massage protocol. At the time, he remembered the disappointment in himself that he wasn't sophisticated enough to know. Before the massage, Jay had sworn he remembered from a conversation with somebody that it was ok to be naked under the robe (while waiting) and then during the massage. He just wasn't sure, so underneath the robe he had elected to wear a pair of short red shorts while waiting. "Better safe than sorry," he had thought, envisioning the absolute horror of taking off the robe and having the masseuse freak out and yell "pervert!" Then he'd have to deal with getting hauled off by hotel security and arrested for lewd behavior. What would people think? He was more frightened by the thought of people laughing at him getting escorted by hotel security and not real cops.
Upon entering the massage room, the masseuse had launched into what Jay suspected was her robotic, pre-scripted routine, telling him to get comfortable on the table and that she would "return in just a moment." Panic then set in. Real, sweaty-palmed style panic. "Do I take off the shorts?" he wondered to himself. Probably so, and off came the shorts. Then he put them back on. Then more panic. "What if I keep them on and she thinks I'm stupid?" Shorts back off. Back on. Back off again. It wasn't necessarily the naked thing, it was what the masseuse would think of him no matter which course he elected to take. Typical. The shorts ended up on.
The second part he remembered the most was the fascination with the masseuse. He had always suspected that the occupation was a bit of sham; that these people probably invented "problem areas" on the subject's body and he always had thought they created their own stupid techniques that fooled people into thinking it was some sort of special treatment. And what about all the touching? Jay just couldn't imagine having to touch people like that every day, people of all shapes and sizes - and having to do that for a living just to put food on the table. No way. No fucking way, fucking Jose. Not to mention having to deal with somebody's shitty attitude or the expectation that maybe, just maybe, the person you're giving the massage to wants a little more, nod nod, wink wink.
The masseuse proved him wrong. Jay had stayed purposefully quiet, he was a little shy anyway, and vowed not to reveal that there had always been this tension in his upper back and lower neck. In particular, this one spot about an inch in diameter, just to the right of his neck where the shoulder begins to slope up. Against the aural backdrop of some crappy, atmospheric bullshit music, though, she had nailed it, verbally pointing out the exact spot he had in his mind. He wanted to yell out, "it's because of the shoulder hunch! I can't fucking get rid of it!"
She worked the spot, tried sculpting it as if she was in ceramics class. Jay briefly remembered the ceramic pottery scene in The Naked Gun with Leslie Neilsen and Priscilla Presly getting all horny while making a ceramic vase - the clay was just flying everywhere.
The masseuse pressed her elbow into the spot, did whatever else a masseuse does. The spot crunched a little like the sound of hardened bread crumbs being crushed. He was sold, even with "Sounds of The Amazon" playing, or whatever that tripe was. He would have much rather preferred to be listening to The Palace Brothers. Damn, that would be great for a massage, he remembered thinking. "Viva Last Blues."
The prodding and probing of the spot had worked for about a week - no tension in that location. But it came right back. The hunch.
His next theft had been trying to steal the laugh of an old friend. He had originally met Tracy through an old job at a dot-com. "Old friend" was probably not the best description for Tracy, Jay thought. Maybe "old co-worker" was better suited, although he had seen her socially quite a few times in the four or five years since Jay had vacated that position. She had a cute laugh, it was a rat-a-tat-tat-tat kind of thing, but not rapid-fire enough where it was completely annoying. He thought immediately of Laura Frankel, an old high school classmate who had the most annoying laugh in the whole wide world - it was loud, obnoxious and if laughs were firearms, hers was a friggin' machine gun. She was nice enough, sure, but if high school had been five years instead of four, Jay thought he very well might have flipped out and killed her. Or maybe just kicked her in the shins. He then wondered what Laura thought of him back then. Or what she thought of him now, if she thought of him at all. Jay wrote it off, picturing Frankel with a banker husband and four kids, all sitting around the dinner table (probably listening with the volume on low to John Mayer or Meyer or whatever his name was), all doing that annoying laugh. What a nightmare. He was never into her much anyway.
The tough part about trying to steal this particular laugh, Jay had thought, or even trying it out was that it somehow had to be converted into a male laugh. There is a difference. The conversion of a higher-pitched laugh into a deeper, male guffaw, but using the same style, was going to take some work. Jay hated his own laugh. Now and then when he showcased it he would just get red with embarrassment, finding it unbelievable that such a pansy sound could emanate from his gut like that. He had heard it too many times in his life by mistake when he accidentally let his own personality out. His own laugh was this short, quick, odd high-pitched tweet, almost like a mini-scream like when those female tennis players grunt when slugging a tennis ball. Oh, the embarrassment. Jay had stolen several laughs in his lifetime, this one might be a toughie.
There would be no covert practicing, either. That's not the way trait-stealing worked. It's not like he would go home after work, eat dinner, then plan to take an hour sitting in his bedroom, referencing diagrams and practicing. He would just trot these things out on occasion. Work was a good place. One always has to be somewhat conversational there. Inevitably someone cracks a joke they think is funny, at which point Jay could unleash his newest laugh project, pretending whatever was said was actually funny. A downsized office always needed some hearty, loud, completely forced, fake laughter. No better place, really. Happened every day.
Jay's office was the kind of office where everyone was polite and conversational, but nobody really listened or gave a single solitary crap about one another. If they could, they'd each have a lockable tarp over their cubicle. Jay thought about the fake office Less Nessman had set up on "WKRP in Cincinnati." He was sure everyone wished they had something like that so they wouldn't have to do that fake communicating.
His stomach rumbling on this otherwise drab Friday afternoon, Jay slumbered down to the basement cafeteria of the office building and started the circular stirring of the large pot of soup. Since it was Friday, they were serving clam chowder and he had to stir it around for thirty seconds because the soup had developed that utterly disgusting film that always forms at the top of soup when someone hasn't scooped any in a while. He couldn't even look at it while he disintegrated the nasty soup film and struggled to come to grips with how he could even bring himself to eat it, knowing that some of that film would end up in his stomach.
Upon dumping the final spoonful of the chowder into the white Styrofoam cup, he looked up and saw a few co-workers approaching.
"Hey," said one of them.
"Hey," Jay retorted, pulling some money out of his wallet.
They walked right past him and over to the sandwich-assembling area. That would be the only interaction with any of them all day. He laughed to himself one more time, thinking about Sam's sweat-pants pulled up, just short of his knees. He stopped laughing when he realized his own shoulders were up again and that spot in his upper back was aching.
Jay paid for his three-dollar chowder with three one-dollar bills and trudged back upstairs, sat down, ate and finished the day. He was half excited that he wouldn't have to be back there tomorrow, but half-dreading the overwhelming, crushing cloud of loneliness that was closing in on him for the next 48 hours.
