Les Enfants
It's a real toaster-oven-burn every time you have to fire someone. There's a few seconds of Bambi squatting over a bomb in their eyes. We don't give pinkslips at work. We offer terminus directives.
"Clean out your desk."
JP Morgan once owned holdings and passed along the legacy of torching desks on our corporate lawn. Unfortunately, the practice has gone flameless since the County Fire Marshall raid of '82. Now we simply dump their drawers into a clear plastic bag. We tell them that the plastic must be clear for security reasons. It's a hell of a thing to see what people keep in their desks.
The thing about a firing -- you want to dispose the person to uselessness; want to really make them feel like their hitting their head against a cliff or the suckering of legal suits will continue into the next quarter. Accountants don't like the company getting sued. Stockholders see every potential loss. And so it is that we must aggravate the assault.
"Look ... You're not a good fit." (Hasn't worked since the early nineties).
The third demerit system offers a patrimonial connection. Lay-offs are for trade-people and we don't deal with trade persons.
"GET THE FUCK OUT," is quite effective. But you have to look like they just molested a family member.
Inevitably, they have no information to tell the Office of Employment Development; inevitably the Bambi on a Bomb wants to save their job. And at the last second you are offered head-jobs, game tickets, and physical threats by people that could not tie the laces on their own corsets. It is a sad lullaby.
Christmas gets me depressed. I have to fire thirty two people just to get a bonus. We used to keep Human Resources on the fifth floor but have lowered it to the first since Oklahoma. Now it's a simple thing to meet our co-workers on their lunch breaks and coffee breaks and last breaks.
"Brad, great to see you... GET THE FUCK OUT."
I have a private exit in the subterranean garage with my ride surrounded by six inch mortar block. The room is soundproof but I never cry.
Thinking of all the men over the years that have cried at my desk would start a career in alcohol tipping. I don't like to tip -- so I don't think about their knuckles in their mouths, the way their neckties shimmer as their bodies silently convulse. We must be stern in the approach and steadfast in our purpose (get the fuck out, please).
We must idle up the car to thirty five hundred Rotations Per Minute in the bomb shelter garage or the security guards will find me out of compliance. There is a certain shake that happens to all known vehicles at 3500 RPM. It's like the metal knows its not all that tempered. That the car was just made of a thousand parts that came from different experiences. I don't tip but try to remember the security guards at Christmas. They watch my bombs.
We are allowed to give and received Kudos. These are not made on paper anymore. We simply type in a few letters of a person's name on the computer. Hash mark a kudo. It gets delivered to the email of the recipient and carbon copied to H.R.. Half of the Human Resource department is now a computer. We are told that the position of Firing Managers are safe from computer competition because people still need the human touch. (Get the....)
Sometimes you want to hold a client. They are co-workers before they get spotted, then they are clients. And one should never hold their client for very long because just like family pets: they all die. We must simply bury our buddies and laugh towards the next hill.
There's no threat I haven't heard, no excuse unsung, no extra data is given to the clients. We do not leave family photos on our wall. Ours is a world of subdued rose, an ideal of pasteurization without the green; a judicious interior designer's view of what people should see in the convalescent hospital. We do not groom, nor nurture, nor pontificate any meanings. It is a simple communication: Leave.
*
Years ago, I had to fire my wife. I was much younger then and had little experience. Gwen tells the people that pry that it was simply beautiful how we met. The truth is we had met on an elevator and there was very little room and her breast glanced my arm and her perfume was something I wanted for dinner.
She kept me grinning for three hours until the door opened at noon.
"We have an appointment?"
Back then we were called Performance Observers and occasionally got to make a big to-do about giving this or that person a promotion. Our lives were genteel and elegant on the fifth floor. We had wallpaper back then.
"Mrs. Glauken..." (sniff sniff)
I had known her smell and touch before her face. And now she corrected that it was "Miss" and the preamble was going to be all scratched up. We used to be allowed to preamble.
"Ms. Glauken, your -- your performance review is in."
How could anyone not want this woman to work in every direction of the sun (above /beside / below them)? It had to be one of them angry dykes from Public Relations that had set her up. Gwendolyn looked absolutely unshaken. I tried a new approach.
"Tell me, what did you want to do as a little girl?"
She told me that she wanted to _do_ Santa and that if I was going to fire her it better be fast. She filed her nails with a tongue suppressor. The nails were cotton candy pink and had lovely spacing about the cuticle.
Verbosity had left the building.
I came around from the six foot wide desk and grabbed a chair and parted her stare as I sat down to the right of the doorway.
She asked if there was a golden handshake or a parachute or 'whatever.' I told her that there was none.
Then she grabbed a handbag and said that it was high time that she looked for a husband and I asked her if she was very good with children. And Ms. Gwendolyn Glauken cocked her head and said that her people had never had a diaper rash in their lives.
But this point was very dear to me: "Will you bottle feed or the other?"
She offered to sue the company for that remark and take my job and my pension and my Volkswagen with a flat tire (and the snotty grin off my face and the sparkle out of my eyes, and the joy for life. And).
"It's all yours for the taking."
And she faltered then as I stumbled to a knee with nothing to present to her for a dowry, device or ring. I gave her a hex stare. And she hesitated -- which would have been very unsexy had there been seconds to doubt -- the blue bubblegum in her mouth ejected from Petrine lips by harp thin fingers. Wrigley's on pointer finger: "You better not be joking..."
Then I saw her start to care in public and it sickened me and the knees pushed me to stature. And my love kicked the testicles with a stiletto heel and instigated Peyronie's; all manner of contact, connection and correction.
"Don't you play with me ... Mr... mr?"
"I'll be Mr. Glauken; I don't care."
And she asked what my mother called me. And I told her Lil Tommy. And she nervously made a comment about sizes. And the brain ignored it. And the fifth floor became a valley clear with two people perched on the mountain. Birds sometimes dive off Half Dome and seem to kiss the sky.
*
Lil Tommy comes home from Hell and mommy has his bottle. Kahlua and cream warmed to eighty five degrees. She slowly unvelcro's his wingtips and ask if baby has had a very bad day. The little man is unable to do anything much more than pout. He is beyond adult words, stuffed down to a place where daddy respects the boss and mommy doesn't offer her cookies to keep a job.
The fire is a Fisher Price plastic mantle with electronic flames; rechargable. There are no forks and knife in the condo; all is for spoon. Mommy is drawing a bath that is only three inches deep. There's an incense burning of lavender and a bust of the woman from the navel hanging on the foyer wall.
She is glowing so radiant. And the little man sees this at last. There's an extra gentleness in the clipping of the safety pin. There is bleach marks on the floor below the lavender. There's a crib in mommy's PLAY ROOM and it is way too small.
And she's nurturing and coddling and clinging to every romance of motherhood. It is a sort of gentle sunsetting that the little man knows all to well. Mother has a preamble coming; comed; competition from the far south of her belly.
And one day all that is right in the world must come to an end.
