Flasher Lands a Job

Flasher Lands a Job

New York. 1987.

Suzie and I had arrived from New Zealand six weeks before, to start our new life in America. We had no money. We had no job. We were sleeping on a mattress on the floor of Andrew’s apartment on Seventh Ave.

It had been a rather inauspicious start.

I had been borrowing money from Andrew for weeks and I knew it couldn’t go on forever. He didn’t mind, though, Andrew had plenty of confidence and figured he could always get more money. Easy come, easy go, that was Andrew, but I could tell it was starting to get on Terri’s nerves. Fair enough, I thought, she didn’t know me from the old days like Andrew did, maybe I was just a bum, and besides, it reduced her own standard of living to have her boyfriend giving away his money like that.

Of course I promised to pay it back. 

A promise that to this day I have every intention of keeping.

With no animation work in sight, and desperate for some money, I decided to apply to Empire Messenger Service for a job as a messenger. 

No experience needed, read the flyer taped to a lamppost.

That was good because that’s just what I had. 

The headquarters of Empire Messenger Service was in the Empire State Building, so it was easy to find. They had a special hiring office in the basement. It was very crowded and noisy down there. After filling out a poorly xeroxed, nearly illegible form, I sat on a wooden bench with many others and waited my turn for an interview.

As usual I had a book with me, so the time spent waiting was not time spent wasted. 

Not that I feel every second of one’s life must be put to good use.

Who could possibly do that? 

Just that I like to read whenever a spare moment presents itself.

That day I was reading The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata.*

“After he became the Master, 

the world believed that he could not lose, 

and he had to believe it himself. 

Therein was the tragedy.” 

Ah, Kawabata-san, you magnificent bastard!

“You! Next!”

That meant me, so I rose and walked through the door into the manager’s office, not forgetting to knock first as I’d seen others do. I stepped inside the tiny office and seeing no chair, stood where I was, facing an overweight, balding man sitting behind a messy desk.

“Where’d you get the suntan, buddy?” he said. He was suspicious from the start. 

“Suntan?” I answered. “What suntan, mate? I’ve been freezing my bloody ass off since I landed in this godforsaken city!”

That answer threw him. I didn’t mean to answer that way, it just popped out of my mouth! I really wanted a job. I needed a job. I should have simply explained how I got my suntan… that I was from a land on the other side of the world, a land down under where summer was winter and winter was summer.

I had been in New York for weeks now, hunting for animation work and getting nothing but rejection for my trouble. Oh sure, they liked my work, those that deemed to glance at it, but they couldn’t use me at present. Maybe in the future. Just leave your name with the girl at the front desk and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out! 

Hear me, struggling Artist! You had better love your art and be strong in your love of it, because sometimes it will seem that it is all you have.

“You’re not from around here, huh?” he said. “You speak English? That was English, wasn’t it?” 

“Yeah,” I answered, attempting to gather myself up mentally. “That was English.”

“It says here you’re an artist?”

“Yep. I’m an animator.” 

“Well,” he said magnanimously, “I think we can overlook that.”

“Healthy?” he asked. He looked me up and down, squinting to focus his good eye, presumably assessing my physical ability to do the work. 

“Yes,” I answered. Sure, I was healthy as an ox, unless you counted occasional weakness from hunger and these recurrent dizzy spells, also from hunger. I was feeling a little dizzy as I stood there.

“Criminal record?” he enquired.

“Not in this country, mate,” I joked. “I just got here last month! Haven’t had the time. Hahaha, er, ha?”

He didn’t appear to be getting the joke.

“What?” he said. He looked suspicious again.

My kiwi accent must be throwing him, I said to myself, refusing to accept the possibility that my jest had fallen flat.

Yes, although it shames men of my generation to confess it... I’m rather flat jested.

“So, you do have a record?” he persisted. “I thought so.” He leaned back in his chair, almost bumping his head against the wall behind him, the office was so small. “Felony or misdemeanor?” he enquired. “You don’t look too dangerous, and that’s what counts. The customers don’t like it when you look too scary. Let me see if I can guess.” 

Before I could protest, he held up his hand. “Don’t tell me!” he demanded. “Let me guess!” He looked at me and cocked his head, while his good eye gave me another critical look. 

“Arsonist?” he ventured. “Naw, you’re not an arsonist and you couldn’t be a murderer, either. You’re too goggle-eyed for that.”

“I’m what?” I said. “Goggle-eyed?”

He ignored me, continuing his critical appraisal, “Yeah, and you’re kinda skinny, too. Hustler? Dealer? Second story man? Wait a minute! Don’t tell me!” 

He closed his eyes and thought a moment, trying to match my image with a felonious past from the files in his head. 

I stood there, somewhat fascinated, and said nothing. He had probably encountered, in his daily working life hiring and firing messengers for Empire Messenger Service, an extremely broad range of humanity, mostly from the lower socioeconomic order. And not a few of these would have been fellows with a felonious past. His office was so small I could almost hear the wheels turning inside his head. After a minute, his eyes opened and he leaned forward across his cluttered desk. 

“I’ve got it!” he said in triumph. “Flasher! Yeah, that’s it! I’m never wrong! Flasher, right?”

Again I tried to protest, but he mistook this as a natural desire on my part to keep it quiet. “I never…” I began.

“You never flashed kids, did ya Flasher?”

And another nickname was born.

“Of course not!” I insisted hotly. “Please don’t call me Flasher.”

“Sure! I can see why you’d be sensitive about it. But don’t worry, we’ve got all kinds of perverts working here.”

“But I’ve been trying to tell you I’m not a …”

“Okay, Flasher. Okay. I don’t care what you do on your own time. Just keep it zipped while you’re working for the company, right?”

“Wait a minute!” I protested. 

“It shouldn’t be a problem if you can keep from dropping your pants and waving your ...”

“Hold on!” I said again to get his attention. “Sorry. No criminal record.”

“Oh?” He seemed disappointed. “You’re sure?” He gave me a minute to reconsider, maybe I could come up with something if I thought hard enough.

“Yes,” I said. “I’m sure. Sorry.”

He looked at me and considered.

For about twelve seconds.

“Okay,” he said. “See the girl out front. Ya start tomorrow.”

He handed me a slip of paper and I turned to go, pausing at the door.

“Thank you,” I said. “You won’t regret …”

“Sure pal,” he interrupted. “Good luck. And for god’s sake Flasher keep your dick in your pants! Okay?”

“Okay,” I laughed. “I’ll try.”

I stepped through the door.

“Next!” he yelled past me into the waiting-room.

Then it dawned on me… I had a job!

* Go is a board game for two players. It is said that it takes a few moments to learn, a lifetime to master... but isn't that true of many things?

Goodbye Again

Part 2

   

   Suzie and I stood in Auckland Airport’s Departures lounge, embracing our friends before we left town. We were about to fly to New York City, where we had a Kiwi friend upon whose couch we could crash, to arise and begin a new life in America. 

   It is February, 1987. 

  “Keep in touch, Suzie,” said her old friend Nick, who’d come to see us off. “The place won’t be the same without you.” 

   I could easily believe that. Suzie brought lightness and gaiety wherever she went. I watched her embrace Nick, a smile lighting her face. It was a big smile, beaming out friendliness and confidence and a love of life. Which sort of sums Suzie up in many ways, if I may be so glib. As usual she was dressed impeccably for the occasion, today in hippie style jeans and knitted V-neck top under a ragged little denim jacket all strung together with a long, colorful scarf.

   We’d known each other for many years, Suzie and I, had lived together in many places. Africa, Australia, New Zealand.

   Now, we wanted to try America.

   “What’ve we got to lose?” we said. This was in a way idle boasting, because as artists whose entire possessions fitted into just three suitcases, we really didn’t have much to lose. 

   I was a film animator. Over the years I’d learned all I could in New Zealand about making animated films from my father, himself a former Disney animator, and from the other two New Zealand animators then working, and of course from the mistakes and experiences of the dozens and dozens of short films, mostly TV commercials, that I’d made. So I knew a lot about making animated movies, but I’d gone about as far as I could go in New Zealand.

   It was time to pack up my pencils and my dreams and head to America.

   America! Where the movies were big and anything could happen! 

   My father was proof of that. In the 1950s he had dared to dream and take his chances in life as an artist, and he had accomplished what I now set out to do. He had worked as an animator on feature films for Walt Disney. Then as now, no small achievement. Especially for a poor boy from Texas who’d done two hitches in the US Navy and started a family even before attending art school. From there he was selected to work for Walt Disney. After seven years at Disney, my father (and my mother too, for she and he were partners in many ways) decided to leave California and emigrate with the family to New Zealand.

   My father left America in search of artistic growth in New Zealand.

   (That, and a better life for his family.)

   Now, twenty years later, I was leaving New Zealand in search of artistic growth in America.

   Ha! Ha! How the gods love a laugh! 

   Here I was thinking that I was a true antiauthority bohemian artist, when all the time I was merely following in my father’s footsteps.

   In exactly the opposite direction!

***     

   I was started along in my father’s footsteps as an animator, it may interest you to learn, not by my father or by another person or event, but by a ghost.

   A very real ghost.

   It was 1970, two and a half years after we’d arrived in New Zealand and a year since I’d left school and gotten married. I was married to Ethne, my first great love. Our baby was born in November the year before. He was healthy and fat! And smart too just like his father. Ethne and I and the baby were living in Mairangi Bay and life was good. We even had a car. Sometimes the car worked and sometimes it didn’t. I was still working at Northcote depot for the Ministry of Works, helping to build Auckland’s Northern Motorway. It was a rough and tumble world of working men and earthmoving machines, but I’d made friends and was growing up. I’d been promoted out of the ditches and in with the surveyors over a year before. 

  It was a dreary winter’s day, with squally gusts of rain blowing through. A lot of the men had come back to the depot for smoko; it being payday, they could collect their wages. We’d gathered in the tearoom to play cards and share a few laughs. The weather was miserable and nobody wanted to be outdoors. It being winter, the earthworks machines weren’t running, so the pace around the depot was more relaxed, and smoko breaks were sometimes extended affairs. Just keep a low profile and don’t let Pat, the foreman, catch you goofing off. The card game was breaking up. I was about to leave the tearoom to collect the Thames wagon and be off to Sunset Road with Peter, the chief surveyor, when:

   “Rusty! Hey! You’re wanted on the blower!”

   It was Roy, the office manager, calling down from the landing at the top of the stairs that led to the offices. Apparently, I was wanted on the telephone.

   “What?” I called. “Me? Are you sure?” 

   “It’s probably another cock-up,” muttered Buck seated at the card table, and the gathered workers laughed. Nobody ever got calls, except Pat and the big bosses. Maybe this was another joke? How the men loved a joke, at anybody’s expense! You couldn’t leave your leg unattended for even a second at our depot, someone was always there, ready to pull it for you. I looked around at Pat and Buck and the other workmen in the tearoom, some of whom I knew quite well, but they all appeared innocent enough. You couldn’t tell by appearances, though, for I was still young and a very poor judge of what was in the hearts of men by the looks on their faces.

  “Yeah, you! You’re wanted on the blower!” repeated Roy, who then turned and retired to his office, where the telephone was.

   “Blast it all!” I now said, mimicking Pat’s usual grumble as I trotted up the stairs. Pat was the foreman of the depot, well liked by the men, whom he ruled like a benevolent king. He always grumbled loudly and mightily, as he trotted up the stairs that led to the office to take his telephone calls, about the ineptitude of the big bosses and how they couldn’t get along without him. In this way he reminded us how important he was and how lucky we were to have a foreman as good as he.

   Which is true, he was a good foreman. 

   “Can’t they even wipe their own blasted backsides up there,” I grumbled, mimicking Pat, “without it blasted raining blasted showers of crap on us down here …”

   The men, Pat included, found my joke funny and I enjoyed the sound of their laughter in my ears. “Good one, kid,” they laughed. “Ahaw haw haw!”

   It was no joke, though. It was my sister on the telephone.

   That morning, Mom had collapsed and been rushed to hospital, could I please come right away.

   To be continued…

“Wait Here, Boy.”

   It was my first day of school in New Zealand.

   Mr Hamilton, the assistant headmaster, and I walked to his office. 

   It was my third trip to the assistant headmaster’s office that day, and it was still the first day.. 

   “A school record,” the assistant headmaster had said, “for a new boy on his first day.” 

   “Thank you, sir,” I said, not intending to be cheeky. He took it as cheeky anyway and put me down as a troublemaker. He was very proud of his school and its records, but I don’t think he was very proud of me. We walked in silence, our footsteps on the wooden floorboards echoing in the musty hallways of Avondale College.

   “Wait here, boy,” said he.

   I took my place outside Mr Hamilton’s office as he went inside. I had stood there before, earlier in the day. Then, it had been busy in the hallway with pupils and teachers going past, most of whom had slowed to ogle the new, foreign boy waiting to be caned. I had already been caned twice that day, for disrupting assembly and smoking in the toilets. Neither of which I was guilty of, let me hasten to add. Honest, it wasn’t me. Being the new boy and unsure of how things worked, I had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

   But you know what they say. Justice is blind. 

   And, at Avondale College, it was swift and cruel. 

   Now, late in the afternoon with final classes underway, it was much quieter in the hallways. No one passed by. I stood there and pondered my day so far. 

   It seemed like a century since I had left home that morning wearing the drab, depressing school uniform and dreading my first day of school in this strange new land. 

   “Be yourself, honey,” my mother had said as I stood at the door before leaving for school. She could see into my heart that morning, (as she could anytime) and saw how nervous I was. She had wanted (as she did all the time) to encourage me. 

   Be myself. Where was that boy now, I wondered? Since arriving in New Zealand I wasn’t sure who I was. Everything was so different. At school in California I’d been popular and successful. Here I was the gawky foreigner with the funny accent, a thing to be ridiculed.

   Yes, it was an unjust universe, I said to myself as I awaited my punishment. Why had Wilkens, the school bully who had taunted me, insulted me, beaten me, escaped while I, an innocent bystander caught up in mindless schoolboy malevolence, was to be punished? If there was any justice, Wilkens would be inside Mr Hamilton’s office right now, getting what I was soon to get more of.

   Perhaps this universal justice in which I wanted to believe needed a little more time to catch up with Wilkens. I had always enjoyed Science class, a thousand years ago it seemed back at school in California, and the astronomical concept of infinity had particularly fascinated me. No ending? Going on forever? I found it impossible to comprehend or imagine with conviction. Perhaps my brain wasn’t big enough to think of something so big. 

   I found it easier to imagine a just universe where everything worked out fair, than I did to conceive of an endless, infinite one that went on forever. Yes, I wanted to believe that Wilkens would get his comeuppance eventually, given enough time. 

  Given enough time. What was a little time, even a human being’s lifetime, or a civilization’s lifetime, compared to the one-hundred-thousand year cycle of a photon’s journey from the center of the sun to it’s surface whence it escapes blasted into the solar system as visible light? Or the ghostly, beautiful residue that we see from the exploding death of a supernova two-hundred-million light years away?      

   The door beside me opened and out stepped Mr Hamilton. He stood for a moment and eyed me sternly, then beckoned me inside.