Cold Caller Read online

  “This is ridiculous,” I said, raising my voice. “Do you think I wanted to be late this morning?”

  “It’s not a question of what you wanted or didn’t want –“

  “This is a joke, right? You’re not serious.”

  “I’m afraid I’m very serious,” Mike said. “Maybe you didn’t mean to be late this morning – I mean of course you didn’t mean it – but there’s the fact that you’ve been late two other times this month, and you didn’t call one of those times either.”

  “Do you know how long I’ve been working here?”

  Mike moved the cursor to a new spot on the screen.

  “Twenty-six point five months.”

  “That’s over a year point five longer than you’ve been working here,” I said bitterly, “and I think that entitles me to a few privileges.”

  Mike’s cheeks had turned pink. I could tell he was upset that I wasn’t respecting his authority. Or maybe it was the gay thing coming out again.

  “I don’t care how long you’ve been working here,” he said. “You’re still a telemarketer and you have to go by the same rules that the other telemarketers go by.”

  I stood up.

  “Excuse me, but where do you think you’re going?”

  “Back to work.”

  “I already clocked you out for the day.”

  “You did what?”

  “I’m sending you home, Bill. If you don’t go, I’ll have to do something drastic.”

  “Are you threatening my job now?”

  “I don’t want to threaten your job, but you’re giving me no choice.”

  “I’m going back to work. I’ve already made two appointments today and I plan to make a couple more. In other words, I’m going to continue doing my job.”

  “Bill, you’re making a big mistake.”

  “I want to speak to Ed.”

  “Ed won’t talk to you.”

  I stormed out of Mike’s office and headed across the telemarketing floor. The argument had caused a scene. Almost everyone had stopped making phone calls, and when I passed Greg’s cubicle, I saw he was fighting to hold back his laughter. This made me smile, but I was too furious to laugh.

  Ed was on the phone and motioned for me to sit down. He was the typical guy from Long Island you might see any weekday night in his shirt and tie at a strip club or a sports bar. He was balding and had a bushy mustache and a beer-drinker’s gut. He quit drinking a few years ago, but he was one of those recovering alcoholics who imposed their newfound wisdom on everyone around them. Sometimes people joked and called the company A.A. instead of A.C.A. because Ed ran the Telemarketing Department like it was a Twelve-Step program. He was constantly telling us about “our responsibility to ourselves as telemarketers” and how “what we learn at this job will reflect on the rest of our lives.” He had created a long list of rules and regulations that read like a manifesto. Besides lateness, there were penalties for drinking or eating at the workstations, cursing, making personal phone calls, and violating the dress code. Even laughing was illegal, if it reached “a disturbing volume.” I don’t think I ever saw Ed smile or tell a joke, and he rarely said anything directly to the telemarketers. We said hello when we passed each other in the hallway, but this was the first time I had ever been inside his office. The telemarketers were supposed to air their grievances to Mike because Ed was “too busy” to deal with our problems. To me, it looked like Ed was never busy at all. Sometimes I overheard him talking on the phone and his conversations were always about football or hockey or the size of some woman’s tits.

  Today it sounded like he was talking to his girlfriend, or someone he wanted to be his girlfriend. I was getting impatient listening to him go on and on in that pseudo-nice voice he put on only when he was talking to women – Really? That’s very interesting. I love museums too. Which is your favorite museum in New York? – but at least it gave me a chance to calm down and figure out exactly what I wanted to say. It was comfortable in Ed’s office, a lot more comfortable than where the telemarketers worked. I was sitting in a padded vinyl chair, breathing air that must have been about twenty degrees cooler than on the telemarketing floor.

  Finally, Ed hung up. I was expecting him to be upset that I had barged into his office the way I had, but he was surprisingly cordial.

  “Bill Moss,” he said as though he enjoyed saying my name. “What happened to you this morning?”

  At first I thought he was talking about my lateness, then I remembered the cut on my forehead.

  “It’s actually the reason why I came in here,” I said. “As you can see, I had a little mishap on the subway this morning.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Did you go to a doctor?”

  “I don’t think it’s that bad,” I said. “I’ll take care of it when I get home. Anyway, what I’m here about, I was late this morning – over an hour. It was the third time I was late this month and Mike wants to send me home without pay.”

  Ed was looking at me closer now. He had a dazed, stumped expression. This would be the most complicated decision he made all day, I realized, and he didn’t want to blow it.

  “Let me get this straight,” Ed said. “This was the third time you were late, and the other two infractions were brought to your attention?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but there was an extenuating circumstance.”

  “I get it,” Ed said. “You think you’re entitled to an exemption.”

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “I mean it’s not like I slept through my alarm clock or anything like that. I’ve already made two appointments today and I was telemarketer-of-the-month last month. I think I’m entitled to some sort of break.”

  “But you understood that the rule existed?”

  “Of course,” I said. “But I’ve been working here a long time, and as you can see I had an accident this morning.”

  Ed continued to stare at me, in deep thought, then he stood up.

  “Wait right here.”

  He left the office. Through the windows, I saw him talking to Mike in Mike’s office. Mike did most of the talking and I thought he looked angry and defensive. Ed nodded his head a lot with his arms crossed in front of his chest. Then Ed left and started back toward me with his usual humorless expression.

  “Well, I discussed the situation with Mike,” he said, sitting down at his desk, “and I’ve decided you’re right – he shouldn’t have sent you home without pay.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “However, I’m going to have to back up his decision.”

  “What?” I said.

  “Although I agree with your position,” Ed continued, “Mike is your supervisor and if I let you stay today I’d be showing him up in front of the other employees. If you hadn’t argued with him and made such a scene, maybe we could’ve worked something out.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “You’re sending me home without pay – me, one of the best telemarketers in the office, a guy who’s already made two appointments today. You’re just going to let me walk out of here?”

  “I have no choice,” Ed said. “I have to respect Mike’s decision.”

  “Fine,” I said bitterly. “But if I leave here now, there’s a chance I might not come back tomorrow.”

  “That’s up to you,” Ed said. “Personally, I hope you stay on with us. Obviously, I don’t know you too well, but you seem to have a degree of intelligence, at least more intelligence than most people we hire here, and I’d like to keep you on board. But if you decide to leave, I wish you luck.”

  I left Ed’s office, closing the door hard behind me, but not slamming it. I went to my cubicle and gathered some papers I had in my desk. Greg came up behind me and said in a low voice:

  “I told you, man. The guy’s a motherfucker, ain’t he?”

  “What can I say?” I said. “You were right.”

  “You outta here, man?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “If I don’t see you again
– peace.”

  “Peace,” I said.

  Without saying goodbye to anyone else, I left the office.

  On Eighth Avenue, a beggar in front of a triple-x video store asked me for change, a drug dealer offered me crack, a tourist asked me for directions to Times Square. I ignored everyone. My forehead hurt and the heat was unbearable. It must have been a hundred degrees already and it wasn’t twelve o’clock yet.

  I thought about stopping at a phone booth and calling Julie at work and telling her about my morning, but I figured she’d still be angry at me because of our fight last night. I didn’t feel like making up with her, not yet anyway. I crossed Forty-fourth Street with a crowd of people, wondering what to do with the rest of my life.

  2

  I went to the movies. To be honest, I can’t remember the name of the movie I saw, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. I was so busy thinking about work that I hardly remember being in the theater.

  Work had always been extremely important to me. When I was six years old my father had dropped dead of a heart attack. Two months later, my mother killed herself, overdosing on sleeping pills. My parents weren’t wealthy and they didn’t have insurance policies. I had no brothers or sisters and my grandparents were dead, so I was sent to live with my father’s brother and his wife who also had a house on Bainbridge Island. My new parents didn’t have any children of their own and they always made it very clear to me that after I finished high school I’d have to fend for myself. In junior high and high school I had part-time jobs – delivering newspapers, washing dishes, mowing lawns, walking dogs – and I saved most of my money for my future. I wasn’t one of those kids who dreaded work. I preferred work to playing with my friends, and I tried to work as often and as hard as I could. The more I worked and the more money I earned, the more I felt I was protecting myself from my aloneness in the world. I never considered the possibility of not working.

  It must have been about three or three-thirty when the movie let out. I wandered crosstown, still feeling depressed. August rent was coming up and I only had a few hundred dollars in the bank. I still had about ten thousand dollars in student loans to pay back from grad school and college and the credit card companies had taken away my Visa and American Express cards. I knew I had to find something fast – maybe work at a bookstore or get a job waiting tables – or making next month’s rent would be impossible.

  At Fifty-first, I took the number 6 to Ninety-sixth Street. Julie and I lived on the fifth floor of a renovated walk-up on East Ninety-fourth between First and Second Avenues. Tech­ni­cally, this was the Upper East Side, but the best parts of the neighborhood started five or six blocks downtown or west of Park Avenue. Our block was a mix of tenements and small factories. Some yuppies lived on our block, but there were also a lot of working-class black and Puerto Rican families. I liked the area, but Julie thought it was too dangerous, especially at night, and this had become a major conflict in our relationship. Julie always made comments about how her friends were living in such nice doorman buildings in the Seventies and Eighties, and how nice it would be to live in a place where you don’t have to walk up five flights of stairs every day. Of course I was sensitive to this, because I knew the implication was that we could be living in a better place if only I was making more money. So I would blow up, accuse Julie of resenting me because she had a higher salary, and she would say that she didn’t mean that at all, that she just didn’t feel safe in our neighborhood, and then we’d both start screaming, calling each other names, forgetting of course what the argument was about in the first place.

  Julie and I had met at a laundromat on Columbus Avenue a few months after I’d moved to New York from Seattle. After two dates, we started spending practically every night together. During the first year we lived together, we were even talking about marriage. Then something happened. I guess there are an endless number of reasons why a relationship can turn sour, but with us there was one big reason – I was Catholic and Julie was Jewish. This was never an issue for me, but it was a big issue for her. My aunt and uncle had sent me to Catholic schools, but I hadn’t set foot in a church since college. Julie wasn’t religious either, but her parents were, and I always felt she secretly resented me for being what her father called a shagetz. She didn’t have to say anything specific for me to get offended; sometimes it could just be a subtle comment – “Oh, did I tell you, my friend Lori, she met this great guy Saturday night – he’s Jewish and everything.” She even asked me once if I would consider converting, but I told her that since I was basically agnostic, that would be hypocritical. She gave me one of her looks – she could look right through me – and I knew she wouldn’t bring up the subject again.

  When I got out of the subway it was about five o’clock. I knew Julie wouldn’t be home from work for another hour and, feeling guilty about our fight, I decided to do something nice for her. I stopped at the Korean grocery on the corner and bought a bouquet of pink roses. I couldn’t remember exactly what we had argued about last night, but I knew it was probably my fault. I can be a pretty difficult guy to get along with sometimes, and it was amazing that Julie had the patience to put up with me at all.

  I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I’d walked up the first of the four flights of stairs. Living on the fifth floor was good exercise, I always told Julie, but the truth was I hated it as much as she did. When I got into the apartment, I immediately undressed and put on the air conditioning. The landlord had installed French doors to screen off the space near the windows and this was “the bedroom.” There was another space where we kept the couch and the T.V., and beyond that was a small kitchen and a bathroom big enough for one person at a time. The apartment would’ve been fine for a single person, but for two people, especially two people who weren’t always on the best terms, it was like living in a walk-in closet.

  When Julie came home, I was sitting in front of the T.V. in my underwear, eating some pasta. She was holding a tall bag full of groceries and looked exhausted.

  “My God, what a day,” she said, out of breath from the walk upstairs. She put the groceries down near the door, then went into the bedroom to get undressed. I stayed on the couch. When we first moved in together, I’d get up and give Julie a warm kiss hello whenever she came home from work, but now we were like a married couple who had been together too long to get excited about each other’s comings and goings.

  Julie came out of the bedroom wearing a long T-shirt and started unpacking the groceries. Her hair was dyed blond, but not phony-blond; it looked nice, especially when she blew it dry or wore it up with a clip. She had a small, pretty face and light-brown eyes that looked green in the sunlight. She carried some extra weight on her thighs and her hips, but I thought it was sexy. I usually felt proud to be with her, especially when I saw other guys looking at her on the street. But other times – like now – I saw her as a chubby thirty-two-year-old with wrinkles under her eyes and low self-esteem who hated me for not being Jewish and I wondered what I was still doing with her.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happened to me at work today,” she said. “My boss comes in and he’s like, ‘Did you mail that letter to Mr. Jacobs yesterday?’ I said I didn’t mail it to him personally, I put it in the mail room and Jose was supposed to mail it. So he starts going off on me. He’s like, ‘It’s your responsibility to make sure my mail goes out on time. I told you to mail the letter, not Jose.’ Can you believe that? Like he thinks I’m going to take the letter to the post office for him or something. Jenny told me it’s probably because he’s going through a divorce. But I don’t see why that has to be my responsibility. If he’s angry at his wife, he should take it out on her, not on me. So what do you think? Do you think I – my God, what happened to your face?”

  She sat down next to me on the couch.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a little cut.”

  “It looks terrible. Let mommy see the boo-boo.”

  She peeled back the b
andage and her eyes widened.

  “Bill, that’s awful,” she said in a serious tone. “What happened? Did somebody hit you?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “You have to do something. We have to go to the emergency room.”

  “I’m not going to any emergency room.”

  “You have to. If you don’t do something you’ll get a scar.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, all right?”

  “Fine,” she said angrily.

  She went back to the kitchen and started putting away the groceries. The sports report came on the news. I watched highlights of the Yankees-Mariners game and saw Hundley hit one out for the Mets. I don’t know why I was angry at Julie, I just was. After the announcer read off the other baseball scores, I said:

  “I got some flowers for you over there.”

  “I saw. Thank you.”

  She leaned against the refrigerator, eating a container of fat-free yogurt, while I watched the beginning of Jeopardy. Finally, she said, as if we were in the middle of the conversation:

  “And I don’t understand why I have to deal with this, after I come home from a hard day at work. I’m just trying to help you and you start up again, snapping at me. And then you think it’s no big deal, that you can just give me some flowers and everything’s going to be all right. It’s not fair, Bill. We have to be able to communicate. All the books I’ve read, the shows on t.v., say that’s when a relationship gets in trouble, when you can’t talk to each other anymore. You can’t just sit there watch­ing baseball games on t.v. when I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “They weren’t games.”

  “What?”

  “They weren’t games, they were highlights.”

  “You know what I mean, stop changing the subject. I hate when you do that. It’s like I can’t have a simple conversation with you.”

  “What makes you think my day wasn’t hard?”

  “I have no idea how hard or not hard your day was. You won’t talk to me about it.”