Sunday, December 2, 2012

Ch 7 part 1 – Bastille Day from Enron to Acorn and the House of Sacred Sod

Back to Chapter 6

Chapter Seven – Bastille Day from Enron to Acorn and the House of Sacred Sod part 1

189
Ashley and I rode the less-smoky bus back.  We arrived in an explosion of messages as if the goose was loose squawking around Holland.  Uncles and progeny, Oma and Opa hosted a drink-binge welcome.  I felt like a hero of a foreign war coming home to a country that changed during my estrangement.  Faces were altered as if I was now family instead of some asshole boinking their relative. 

I was now a serious man Ashley could make international calls to her mother about and break out into exuberant remarks.  We had a five-course dinner at De Chinese Muur, in Velden with Peking Rijstta (pineapple duck) and a corkage bottle of champagne Uncle Claus gave us.  We dressed up and undressed.

After a few more nights we went to a German Discothek.  The club played Polish-country-twang hip hop techno beats in four themed rooms of hypnotizing synthesized bomb-drops.  I did not learn a lot about Europe in my short time there, but I did discern a significant portion of the population loved their techno.

Back in the States, Ashley and I came in through Newark and then New Orleans.  Ashley’s entire American family was there.  Not just her parents, but all her American uncles and aunts, her cousins, her brother, everybody.  There was booze, beer and a huffing-yellow congratulations helium orb. 

My family was at home, probably working on the weekday in biblical routine.  I could see a fervent twinge in Lacey’s gaze.  The clockwork-Pandora planning of Ashley’s wedding was unleashed.  Lacey held Ashley’s shoulder in a clutch of thrones as if Lacey was finally getting her shot to ascend upon the cotillion-debutant path of starry-eyed Cinderella glory. 

There were no glass slippers here, but in Lacey’s look I could see Lacey trying to make the bunions fit.  Stoic Hilton was probably repressing the urge to strangle me.  It was my fault he had to miss an afternoon of work to participate in a nonproductive endeavor.

190
Ashley started an unpaid internship at Ernst and Young while finishing her master’s degree in the fall.  The firm milked her enthusiastic free Gen X labor.  I never went back to computing the structural costs of the hotel.  I was set to start at Arthur Andersen in autumn.  I designated the remainder of this apportionment of summer-loving for studying for the certified public accountant’s examination. 

I purchased study-assist software that prompted my progression with red and green lit answers.  The knowledge was rotund with hulking-cyst-type addendums of accounting minutiae and core-piths of understanding that had to be held inside my skull for a forty-eight hour period.  I had to be able to unleash the information like a tsunami whether the questions I knew happened to be selected or not.  This digital software allowed me to learn what, when and how I wanted at my pace.  Why couldn’t school be like this?

The CPA exam was undisclosed and still on paper offered twice a year for everyone in the county on the same day.  Most people failed.  There were no bonus points curved for being one point short or parade for being x number of points over the passing threshold.  The exam was a “just be happy you got out alive son” type of mental war. 

Tim never got his psychology degree.  His day job trumped night school for a degree that may not have even paid for itself.  Tim still clung to his music dreams of being a punk bass-player, but acquiesced to joining the workforce at a camera store, hocking Nikon’s on commission.  Tim got an apartment downtown and skateboarded to work.  Tim had a band on the side. 

Ashley and I were practically, but not actually moved in together.  The span of time was shrinking as my first day at Arthur Andersen approached. 

191
I was trained in the ways of the Andersen risk funnel, Doc-Man-paperless Lotus notes and how to fulfill my cog in the assessment machine.  In between billable excursions I shared a no-name desk with the alternating “some one is always out of the office” pool of staff.  I continued to study.  I was the only first-year sitting for the exam.  I foamed at the mouth for a qualification to evolve me into a capitalist carnivore rather than rabbit.  I wanted to become capable of ripping chucks of my college debt-carcass rather than slink off meekly like a herd-animal.  

In October I went to the Superdome with a string of sophomore and junior level staffers, Andersen seniors and a thousand other want-to-be computational-nerdlings waiting to put everything onto Scantron sheets with number-two pencils.  We etched expensed memories of capital leases, pensions, taxation loopholes, business law and substantive testing procedures.  We were like one hundred methamphetamine-binged “my kid is on honor-roll” sycophants holding our crotches teetering in a hovering stance outside the bathroom door dying to urinate. 

We wanted some administrator to start asking us questions so we could expel the knowledge in our heads onto paper.  The pressure needed to be relieved at risk of aneurism.  The sections stacked like divisions of the armed forces: auditing, financial reporting, business law, and taxation.  After the first day, we got two out of our colons.  The test results took four months to arrive.  I passed.  It was close in spots, but I passed.

192
Around Christmas Michael came in from New York.  We went out to the French Quarter.  Michael had his boyfriend.  I had Ashley.  We went to the homosexual-Mecca rainbow–flagged quadrant of New Orleans and spent time at the Oz and the Clover Grill. 

The bouncer let Ashley enter.  Maybe Mike had pull or the drag-queen M.C. was distracted.  I am not sure if the admission standards have some kind of affirmative action criteria, but it probably has to do with tight jeans and ass like any other night club.  I enjoyed seeing my friend and celebrating our lives freely.

Michael was working at a Blockbuster by day and a Tapas restaurant by night up in NYC, while trying to locate employment to utilize his marketing degree.  Visa and Master Card were his most frequent depositors into his one bedroom room-mate required mailbox.  Payment plan consultants were generational carrion feeders.  One of his friends contracted HIV and shipped up to Canada to get medical care. 

193
For Christmas Ashley gave me a reversible belt and a new chord for my Crow-ring necklace.  I gave Ashley a few poems I read by the light of the spruce tree, a copy of Microsoft Office and the movie Legend.  I was full of pragmatism, emotionalism and an imaginative child at heart.

In the spring I worked sixty to seventy hours a week.  I crunched up to my computer, and conducted inquiries to men twice my age to analyze corporate variances with my golden-delicious face that made the controllers want to puke.  I was the next punk up pissing-out inquiries about quarter-to-quarter financial changes.  As if I could not be conned into accepting whatever the client accounting department veterans told me was gospel.  Anything someone in the client’s position told someone in my neophyte justice league pajamas probably processed without effective retort.

I was specializing in oil and gas companies.  I could discuss derricks, directional drilling, gas loss and boring industry minutia about how money works on dry holes and how we account for Paleozoic-compressed pressurized plant remnants to eject from the Earth’s neither regions.  I sure as fuck was not a rough-neck or an engineer, but I could talk the lingo and write a good work-paper to document why block 252 was having problems.

I came home to meet Ashley for diner at my place.  Ashley brought Earl Gray tea.  I spit the brew out and said, “Earl gray more like Earl Gross.”  But things were good, Ashley was enjoying her unpaid internship questioning why she could not work full time and do graduate school as she was determined to be all things at once.  

194
The wedding planning occurred outside my dominion.  I wanted a simple affair.  Lacey was hijacking Ashley’s brain planning the wedding Lacey never had.  We were set for July 14th, Bastille Day at Mater de La Rosa uptown by father William.  The reception was set at La Pavillion downtown with French flags. 

As part of the Catholic preparation for marriage Ashley and I had sessions with Father William discussing our outlook on being married, love, children, sex, and finances.  We talked about plans designed to make a couple ask, consider and discuss that which if discovered post-sacrament may be detrimental to revisionist thinkers. 

We talked about our fears; Ashley’s under-the-rug attitudes about resolution, my stubborn placated self-absorbed resolves, my kid-fear inadequacies and my failing grades in schoolyard.  We wanted to be there for each other, neither perfect.

For us, marriage was the publicity of an inner love.  Modern marriage is advertised under the umbrella of DeBeers diamond commerce, China soup bowls on digital Macy’s registries and collegiate-debt dowries.  I guess I could not avoid all the marketing, but we did have the love.

Sometimes I left fake parking tickets on Ashley’s car with late-fee fines in the millions.  I left hidden I love you notes in Ashley’s potted porch plants. 

195
We went out for Chinese food.  Ashley was addicted to egg rolls.  I mentioned I would play the drums with the chopsticks if I were a little boy.  Two minutes later a little boy sat next to us and started playing the drums.  

We came home, got naked in the kitchen and stripped pants-on-ankles no-kids relationship lust.  Ashley’s brother Jeffery was in town for a night out and came barging through the front door looking for his sister.  The guy did not even knock as if Nottoway and uptown New Orleans are sibling rodents. 

Maybe it was the horny-flu, but Ashley reverted to her rural roots and failed to dead-bolt the door.  It could have been a crack-head storming the fort coming to piss on the living room couch and swipe our peanut butter.  

I slammed my back to the wooden door separating the shotgun house living room into the kitchen barring Jeffery’s procession into seeing his big sister’s boobies.  Ashley was buttoning up.  I shimmied my khaki’s up my shins.  Ashley was throwing out, “just a minute’s” in response to, “what is going on in there’s.” 

I am sure Jeffery figured it out, but damn it son, ring the door bell.  Why couldn’t we just say, “Hold on a minute we are in the middle of fucking.  Let me find my underwear”?  I guess that would be embarrassing to some people, socially uncouth perhaps.  I think of the home invasion as a happy memory.

196
The months during our engagement were a special stage of preparedness and social vetting, an evaluation without the holsters of police-work.  Time glittered in anticipation and moved too slowly for Ashley.  Ashley wanted to be a stage ahead.  Every day inched like grains on an entire planet covered in sand disobeying the laws of gravity.  Ashley waited as if each step around her was in an hourglass device frozen for a summer day until the sand rose or fell depending on which way her stomach turned.  Gravity was an obstinate criminal.


197
In May we attended a program called “Engaged Encounter” at a retreat center in the swamps of the Westbank of the Mississippi River.  The encounter was a weekend version of our talks with father William, but in groups with session leaders for Catholic marriage.  We kept notebooks.

Ethan –May 12, 2000– My dearest Ashley,

As I lie here thinking of you across the hall, I long for our life where every part of us sleeps the peaceful sleep along side each other for every night of every year. 

I think of this weekend and the untradeable idiosyncratic gems we will uncover.  I feel there are no boulders left to look under, only pebbles.  We can find treasured aspects of the other, vulnerable to cherish accept and understand.  I can be a better partner.  I pray I will always strive to bring you joy, humor and sincerity.  I know twenty-five years from now I will find something I never knew about you and in twenty-five more a new reason to love.

I can give up what is hardest for me and be humble in silence to give you as gift: my patience and love.  My desire is to minimize what is minimal, to set aside what is temporarily gigantic; to budge when I do not need to, to save when I am on solid ground.  These are my husbandly gifts.

My deepest regrets spawn from the pain I have caused you.  In apologies and mistakes, I find progression.  Marriage is a table we will set countless times, for eggs and saucers for only us, for sandwiches, for kids, for grandparents, for different ways to count, but in that number there will always be you.  Love, Ethan

In the morning the leaders handed out worksheets with numbered questions.  

Ashley – 3) Do I go along with you just to avoid an argument (peace at any price)? Explain. 
Dear Ethan,

I know I am not very open in communicating.  When I do agree to talk, I often take the peace-at-any-price route.  I have a fear of conflict from childhood.  My dad would leave.  It was a constant threat.  I am afraid to tell you I think you are wrong at times.  Others I take the other role; like when I throw my ring at you and run. 

I think the rules of arguing can be helpful, especially holding hands.  Even now is difficult for me to do all this talking.  I get so frustrated.   Love, Honey bunches of Oats
P.S. Sometimes I feel like you play the devil’s advocate too much.  I feel like you are arguing.

Ethan – 5) Describe the areas where you are least open with your fiancé and explain why it is difficult to open about them:

When we fight, when you have pushed or punched me, when you have told me you hate me or thrown my ring off in rage, it hurts.  I know you love me.  Part of that is a decision.  Part is you being a big enough person to not fall into the shame of those actions, just like my defensiveness. 

We have hope and this love in each other that we can look at our weakest parts and say, “I will conquer you.  I will be strong.”  I will say, “I love Ashley too much to hurt her by being weak, stubborn and defensive.”

198
At engaged encounter, I tried to shed my expectations except that our love would kindle in truth.  I focused on what I knew Ashley loved about me, my child-like nature, my determination, my creativity, and my small thoughts.

I did not like my stubbornness to admit fault or my self-alienation.  I still preferred healthy-distance from drive-through-lane America.  I was different with age, but not entirely.  I wished I knew how to wield social utensils better like dancing or telling a joke. 

Ashley and I developed a verbal password to squelch arguments called Moo-Q.  Moo-Q was the silly sound of a cow plus a puckered kiss, which equated to the word moo and the letter q.  If Ashley did not want to talk and felt the urge to run or if I was being stubborn, the other could say this phrase. 

The word was corny, but it was ours.  We were a team.  No matter what the world thought or how doubt clawed; we had the defendant of this invincible phrase to return to the moment of love that forged us.

Ashley and I talked about stages.  I was like a train car brake pressing to enjoy passing window views: dating, courtship, engagement and one day marriage, then married with children.  To each there was no return.  Each had its benefits and detriments to savor loves proper architectural construction.  Ashley was affixed on the next passing station.  I was a gentle hand tapping to get Ashley to look up and remember to breathe.

I told Ashley our union meant that nothing we do can be exempt from a consideration of how it affects the other.  Our union precludes the idea of a self that excludes each of us.  We were electing to become a one.  That meant everything to me. 

199
Excerpts from Ashley’s Engaged Encounter notebook -I came here this weekend, first because the church suggests it.  I think we have difficulty being the bigger person. I hope to learn to accept that you love me and will never leave me.  

Encounter with me:  I want people to think that I am perfect.  I often modify my behavior to achieve that goal.  I want to be seen as a hard worker, intelligent and close to God.

Ashley -7) What good qualities do others see in me?

I like that I am good at reading what people want and making them feel comfortable and loved.  I dislike the bad decisions I have made because I try to make everyone happy.  At times, I think I am white trash. (We were poor growing up.  Mom was pregnant before marriage etc.)  I can never be forgiven and therefore loved, because of all my mistakes.  I am really hard on myself when I review my day.

Ethan 9) Because I love you, I will deepen our relationship by,

Each step will be in stride with you, to promise to carry the brunt of this journey not with my two legs alone, but with a self-less compassion for what we must burden our bodies and souls with; the charge of an eternal love.  For it is only in this mutual choice and effort, that anyone can support such a love to its most beautiful fruition. 

Because I love you, I take these steps with you in joyous grip of hand and heart and in humble knowledge that I am not able to take one meaningful pace without you.  Because I love you, I pray to sew the stitches of our engagement in gentle-thought with the grace of God.  So on our wedding day we can proclaim to God’s world absent of taint or regret, that we are one love piloting our path stride for soul, life in life.

200
On the last day, the group formed a circle of couples.  The leaders proposed the question, “What would you do if you found out your spouse cheated on you?”  During the future-husband responses, I was the only one under the presumption of an affair that would not end the marriage. 

Some guys suggested, “That’s her ass.  We’re done.”  I said, “Well we would have to talk.  Jesus calls us to forgive and to be the bigger person.  If your wife confessed this affair and was truly sorry then God calls us to be open to forgive.  An affair could happen for a lot of reasons.  Some have little to do with sex.”

Ashley 11) What specific characteristics do I see in myself that make it more difficult for others to know and love me?

I am difficult to communicate with.  I put everyone before myself.  I am super-understanding of everyone, except my closest loved ones.  There is the whole behind closed doors issue.  I know how much it hurt me and my family when my dad did it. 

Ashley -12) - Letter to Spouse- Dear Ethan

I know that I am hard on myself and the people I love.  I will try to be just as understanding with you as I am with complete strangers!  I will try to see myself as you see me.  Love Ashley P.S. There are a lot of frogs here.

The weekend was a testament to our inner-selves.  The world may pass the smile of a couple, compute the logistics of why we appear to match or not and deserve that reassuring best-wish.  We had found each other willing to look in reflective mirrors.

201
We were preparing to move in together.  I could sense the pressure Ashley felt: mother, weight for a dress, and the swarming definitions of corporate femininity. 

Ashley – June 8, 2000- The wedding is a month away.  I remember a few months after we met, your fish Larz that you had since junior high died.  I was afraid for so long that all of a sudden life would change on our wedding day.  You would move your stuff in and our life could start.  Like always you proved me wrong in a good way. 

We bought a table, moved your aquarium and filled it with wonderful fish; especially Mack the Knife!  I can’t wait until July 14th.  The way things are now, wonderful, makes it a little easier.  I love you.

There was a wedding shower for Ashley in Nottoway.  Our families came together making toilet-paper mock-wedding dresses for bride’s maids.  Ashley’s set of seven-dwarf aunts from her father’s seven sisters: the schizophrenic, the manatee, the anorexic-perfectionist, the can never do enough, the tragedy in a handbag, the don’t ask about the black leather S&M and the appears normal each lined up at the buffet table.  My aunt Audrey brought her friend Sheryl. 

202
We had quite lame bachelor and bachelorette parties down in the quarter.  I never wanted to be that guy gone wild in Vegas partying with a converted-nun stripper in a boot-legged debauchery spree.  I zoned in on the other similar escapades in the Quarter. 

There was a bachelorette lushing around asking for staged make-out sessions.  She had a home-made sculpture sequined and peacock-like on the crown of her head.  The bedazzled Eiffel-tower-replica left little room for conjecture as to the allowances non-standard headgear could grant a woman to act like a public Jerry-Springer-episode.  

We saw a group of guys dressed as golfers completing score cards in drinking golf.  Each bar on Bourbon counts as a watering-hole.  Drinks are assigned scores such as birdie and par based on proof and alcoholic content.  Strokes are swigs.  Water hazards ban restroom facilities.

Ashley’s soon-to-be-less-so friend Beth was a no-show for the bachelorette party.  Beth backed out of being Ashley’s maid of honor two weeks prior to the wedding.  Beth could not stand the thought of partaking in a Catholic mass even as a bystander.  The throw of drama broke Beth’s will.  It shattered Ashley and Beth’s friendship across political lines. 

I asked Michael to be my best man.  The irony was not lost.  A possibly gay priest, a certainly gay best man, a happy couple and Ashley’s fill-in cousin the disowned adopted daughter of the schizophrenic aunt; we were a quintet of normalcy at a Catholic betrothal. 

203
Bastille Day in the Big Easy, Ashley’s father must have sold the family’s fatted calf or been banking big underneath the lean years to now.  Hilton was showing off in a way that with the exception of the mass and the bride was never how I saw my wedding day.  Who needs the groom to have an opinion?

A wedding is just a public recognition of what already exists.  Extravagance gets based on funding and a sense of humor.  Women obsess over lace, chiffon, gabardine, and silk corset pinched into permission to indulge in drenched femininity as “the desired” for a day in the white-hymen purity of the dress.  Thousands of dollars and hours are dreamed for an adornment that will be coffined in an attic.  In the background women mummify a hope that the regalia can be converted into a practical investment if a daughter exists in height and weight proportion without the balls to say, “I want my own dress.”  Why not get the thing dirty?  Ruin the frill, play. 

The all-glaring feeling as though God-was-touching-me moment came the second the rear doors of the church opened.  I saw Ashley step.  My smile redirected its obedience to a new center of gravity.  I exploded the bark of a man, beating in full.  The day had come, the water for the horse at journey’s end, solemn and exuberant that I had one-love magnetic.  Aimless travel was now an impossibility.

The mass had Pamela, the rotund opera Wagner-style church singer from Mater de la Rosa singing Latin hymns.  The Ave Maria echoed.  The photographer shot from the choir loft snaring the frontal dome mural.  The Father looked down, angels circled and our quintet on the altar.  Our parents, family and friends lined left and right, aligned to bride or bridegroom in an iconic snapshot of some older generation. 

We were two kids getting married, sinful and soul-filled, neither wanting to be center stage.  Walking back Ashley’s bouquet got misplaced, but the rings were on.  Outside Ashley’s marine-mammal aunt had a butterfly release ceremony for us to perform for Granny Darling.  Ashley was crying, feeling as if her grandmother was close as the air gusting from under-wing flaps from a butterfly escaping an envelope.

We were now symbolic as a whole.  We were a man, a woman; two free-wills colliding in an amalgamation for the world to ponder.  We paid the priest, signed the governmental form, and headed towards a monogrammed cake.

204
Our reception was epic with a full open bar of drunk binging.  Grandpa Kurt drove the carpool lane to the bartender.  I gifted beer mugs with attached bicycle bells to the groomsmen who could ring-ring for re-fills.  The lead singer of the Sam and Dave-style band failed to show up; drunk, tragedy, scrotum snagged in a zipper who knows. 

The European uncles and grandparents were in the states chanting soccer hymns and giving their children a slice of American pie.  Ashley’s Grandpa Josephus was with his Camilla -crumpet.  Ashley and Lacey planned Chinese-made disbursements of New Orleans Mardi Gras-type throws, Hawaiian leis for Jimmy Buffet, sunglasses for Soul Man and handkerchiefs for Kermit Ruffin’s second-line to sound out our departure to our upstairs love nest. 

There was a butterfly over the top ice sculpture, food for a package we never had time to eat.  Flowers and tuxedos, Tim danced like a gigolo.  Ashley’s crazy great uncle Sidney handed us a stack of silver coins.  Uncle Sidney thought silver was going to sky rocket in value when the economy went to hell.  Uncle Sidney acted like he was giving us a million dollars in a package the size of a roll of Chuck E Cheese tokens.  Tracer’s Nottoway entourage of Clay, Ben, Paul, Buzz, Chad and all these folks I thought I had at least a moment to shake hands with were there. 

Our parent’s seemed happy.  Hilton said he “guessed he likes me,” half-joking on the video.  My father and mother smiled.  Sara dressed in blue.  Lacey was in red, Ashley in white.  I gave my toast to Ashley.

I remember the first week I met Ashley.  We sat in a courtyard across from the business school.  We sat juxtaposed as two eager students with matching enamored smiles.  I learned more about who she was.  As I look back I can see definitive proof of how God’s plan is often strange, but I am pretty sure He knows what He’s doing.

We talked about our families, about college, about high school, about being point guard on her basketball team.  Ashley also told me about tearing her anterior cruciate ligament.  I had to giggle inside.  I reached down and began to roll up my lower left pant leg.  I showed her the scar from my surgery and said, “me too.” I had torn my anterior cruciate ligament playing intramural football.

Ashley and I match in so many ways.  We both love simple things and treasure our family.  We both love to learn, work and be organized.  The words “prototypical accountant” come to mind.  We both have a deep Catholic faith and want to live our life together with God.  But if not for me, if not for matching knee-scars, Ashley would still be the most wonderful woman in the world. 

For I have never met someone with such incomparable kindness, a sweetness, a zest to give of herself for anyone if only to bring them a moment of joy or peace.  In the sacrament of our marriage, Ashley has given me not only a moment, but a lifetime.  For that I give her my life.  To Ashley.

We kissed.  Ashley cried, holding me frail and kindred.  The day delivered.  We honeymooned in Alaska and caught the eagles eyeing the salmon up stream from the cat food plant.  We saw sunny days in Ketchikan and Skagway while mountain biking and kayaking.  I think the otters spotted us making out as the mammals were cracking clams on their bellies.  We even won the “newly not so newly wed” game on the cruise ship.  We were mini celebrities due to the close-circuit television replays. 

205
I moved in.  We shared a counter-less bathroom with one shower, in-kitchen dining, bars on the uptown windows, and drafts in a New Orleans paint-chipped shotgun.  The rented out adjacent college neighbor’s kitchen shared our bedroom wall.  These were times of youth and tolerable compact amenities mixed with novel love nibbling away at our college debt. 

We started grocery shopping.  Ashley was a “pork chop, can of green beans and boxed mashed potatoes” kind of girl.  I was more “learn as I go let’s explore.”  If something tasted good, I wanted to learn how to cook it.  The shotgun apartment had one closet.  I brought an armoire 

Ashley studied for the CPA exam.  Ashley decided to start paid employment at the tax department at Arthur Andersen in the fall.  She passed on her first try. We were living in the same house and working for the same employer.  Although with my out of office schedule as an auditor, we more often than not were incapable of even seeing each other in the workplace.  We had separate ladders to climb.  Any competition of Sotaman’s class would be mitigated by the delineations of tax and audit.

We had monumental available options.  We were young, employed with dual incomes and college debts.  Graduate school was graduated.  No group projects to project.  When overtime was over, we had a couple of us, a glass of wine, a can of beer, chips and salsa, cilantro and red onion crunched laughter sprinkled with a chipotle pinch. 

We made fried catfish nuggets we called smack catfish drenched in pressed lemon and beer batter.  I tried Brennan’s restaurant family recipes with Gulf seafood.  Ashley set the ingredients out in line with the scripted game plan; cups, and exact apportioned measured tablespoons like an older Hermionie Granger wallowing with muggles. 

Ashley lacked the dragon of creativity to breathe fire and flow to cook with all five senses rather than by number.  We were a good team preparation and improvisation.  Ashley liked that I could handle not knowing how things were going to turn out.  

We had a balancing agreement.  Ashley facilitated the multitude of little decisions. I contemplated and processed the big ones.  Utility bills and holiday cards were on Ashley.  Buying a house and emotions were on Ethan. 

206
Ashley was a planner.  I was too, but Ashley put my square to shame.  For Christmas I got Ashley an early generation palm pilot like a pre-iPhone.  Ashley had tabbed files for everything, documented and sequential.  Before I met Ashley when she first moved into that apartment, Ashley put magazine cut-outs taped to the wall where her table and sofa would go.

Her grocery lists were peculiar in repetitive iterations inevitably disrupted by my finds of fancy.  I cooked with spices and herbs: coriander, cumin, dill, rosemary and occasionally saffron.  I emulsified vinaigrettes. 

We rested inside each other on the sofa.  We watched pre-satellite TV.  We had sex in the afternoon.  We stared at the ceiling talking about daydreams and hopes, counting up iterations of family-tree branches.  We named our aquarium fish in my old tank as surrogate children.  Ashley’s cat shed hair like Gretel breadcrumbs on every fabric.

We waded in a calceiform pool that was difficult for Ashley to emancipate her self to take off her slippers and wiggle her toes.  I would tell her, “Enjoy the stage.  There is no going back.  There is just here now.  There is us with kids and we are still an us, but it will never be the same.  Appreciate it now.” 

Balancing that equation was occasionally knotty, but our little life was like aloe, slick-smooth ease.  We were a partnered duo.  Ashley had wanted to be a mother since her younger brother Jeffery was born.  Ashley wanted to be in charge of everyone like her father and take care of everyone like her paternal grandmother. 

Ashley left me a note in my lunch April 8, 2001 – I was thinking of how happy you make me.  How you always make sure to have fun and stay light-hearted.  How you run to meet me at the door when I work late.  How you get that big smile on your face when I tell you what a great chef you are.  Just thought you should know.  I love you.

207
The mob at Arthur Andersen organized a Pulp Fiction dress-up party at a bar downtown one Friday after busy season.  Tarantino’s noir was well represented.  I was Winston Wolf.  Ashley was Raquel the morning-after heir to her daddy’s junkyard storage facility.  I always aspired to be like Harvey Keitel in that dog-eared role; the guy that got shit done.  Give him the details, the facts; Wolf could disseminate the integral from the trivial and solve problems nobody else was capable of solving efficiently and effectively.

The bar was dimly lit in an evening get together with bottles flying down.  Tax manager Vincent Vega’s and a pittance of Jules Winnfield’s looked everywhere for a Marcellus Wallace.  The head partner Tom Casey decided not to dress-up.  I guess his ball-gag was in the dish washer back home.  Hunny Bunny and Pumpkin were dating nice and enjoying the open bar the partners funded.  I did not even have to pull out my wallet. 

The firm had burgers and blueberry pancakes catered with milkshakes and booze.  An audit senior Craig brought his boyfriend dressed as Captain Koons, Christopher Walken’s character, and Craig was Zed.  Craig had a biker outfit.  His friend was in a suit with a big novelty-looking gold watch. 

Arthur Andersen was different from the other firms.  Andersen was the least uptight and the most progressive with the boundaries of where the industry was headed with technology and business.  Andersen was a work-hard, play-hard environment, where making money was good.  Andersen was in eighty countries and the largest American accounting practice, including the largest in New Orleans. 

Gordon Gekko had a place there, but Andersen was not publically traded because it was a partnership, but it self-released financial data.  Andersen employed a lot of well paid brilliant people.  You had to be smart and willing to put in your time.  You could have a family, but balance was more of a conceptual-ideal rather than the reality.  There were only so many shoots in the starting gate at the horse track to move up into each year and everybody knew it.  This was no government employment for life bullshit.  This was, “we know a few of you are going to burn out and quit so we hired twelve of you for eight spots kind of math.” 

Comradery was encouraged, but always oil undercoated with this crude you are in a competition for your livelihoods understanding.  It was Darwin meets Milton Friedman with excel spreadsheets and tax filing software running the evolution. 

208
Ashley was immediately the office mom and everybody’s best friend.  Somehow all the co-workers on my level were female.  I was the only married staff in the scattered-shot of single women.  We all went up to Chicago for a two week training course in September. 

Arthur Andersen bought a college in St. Charles Illinois as a North American training hub for its global operations.  Andersen flew in staff-level ants: bull, velvet, wingless-female wasps, weavers, honey pots and jack jumper drones from across the globe.  We were there to learn the Andersen risk assessment funnel as part of audit operations. We could learn the joy of limiting our work based on the risk of what we could ignore because the chance of that failure happening or affecting anything was low. 

We were in student council workshop-style groups.  The women I came up with were scattered.  We only saw each other at the lunch table, dinner and after classes.  My group had people from California, Caracas, New York, Texas, Belgium, Jackson, and fill in the blank. We had an open forum “ask anything you want” conversation with an equity partner from Germany.  One staffer asked, “How much more do the equity partners make than the non-equity partners?”  The bankrolled Yoda-Kraut buttered out, “about three times.”

Becoming an equity partner at a firm like Andersen was like becoming a made man in the mafia.  Once you had made it through every marine-style tripwire, barbed-wire, and mine inspector drone-fire obstacle to be the last person standing after having sacrificed every measure of personal or family time, which probably involved moving your spouse and offspring from the first city you started in: you could be granted the queen’s sweet sword on the shoulder to be knighted equity partner.  That is the kind of firm Arthur Andersen was, keep the carrot out there and make the carrot fucking gigantic and pulsate out mini golden carrots that just keep spawning and spawning and the cult of focus would remained centered.

About five minutes after Mr. Deutschland departed an American partner came in the door and said, “A plane just hit the World Trade Center in New York.  This is real.”  It was a Tuesday morning.  The model U.N. of the room spun and spoke with eyes and sounds that imitated words.  Humans filed to a lobby area with C.N.N. on a rolled in television.

209
Whatever you saw and felt nineteen men do with box cutters and airliners some version of that was probably shared by somebody in that room.  Northeasterners were cramming cell phones and “my father works there’s” were shot out like flare guns of soon to be informed parentless children.  Mohammed Atta, Khalid al-Mihdhar, Hani Hanjour, Ahmed al-Ghamdi, Ziad Jarrah: became mashed-up consonants of jihadist’s hijackers spelling God damn mother fucker striking bull-run fears through every household in America.  Makeshift patriot flags roped up the poles as asbestos avalanches smoked down in Manhattan.  Phone calls went out like last rites paraphrased from a tale I once heard on NPR.

“Hanna got a call from her husband Jude from the 150th floor of the second tower.  Jude was rejected from a smoke-filled stairwell.  Hanna asked if it hurt for him to breath, after a pause Jude said, “No.”  The couple met at sixteen and was now at fifty-three spending a life together.  Jude spoke and repeated in whispers, “I love you.  I want you to live a long happy life.”  The smoke soup swirled in thicker.” 

“I love you, over and over again until a crack and a detonating avalanche into nothing.  Hanna did not want to go to sleep, because at least it was a day Hanna could say they shared.  Hanna is living for the both of them on the edge of that slippery slope, breathing deeply.”

America began to digest fear.  Bin Laden splayed dead bodies like chalky teeth rumbling uprooted from a mandible to swish in a paper tiger oral cavity.  Carcasses cascaded from cubicles chewed up like indigestible corn kernels for the United States’ churning stomach.  The fetid taste was expelled in human cannonballs flung at Middle Eastern mothers for bursting their loins with such naughty Mohammed’s.  War constipation would take America at least a decade before the satisfaction of a good peaceful shit. 

210
In New Orleans the high-rise the Andersen office and Ashley were in was evacuated.  I could not get in touch with Ashley for a while, but what could we possibly complain about.  In blue-sky America, media-bulimia seventeen-second playbacks were retched over ninety-nine news channels.  Smoke plumes aroused the populace’s boner for war with enough pumps for the shaft.  Sage Francis was predicting the Patriot Act, “Don’t wave your rights with your flags.”

The rest of the week was bizarre.  I was stuck learning all these work-related robotics of paid-in-advance-for-everybody-to-be-there audit training.  Andersen had a bar room set up for the evenings.  I pretended to drink to acclimatize. 

We played Frisbee golf between the New Orleans and the Jackson offices.  By the end of the second week, everybody was antsy about getting on an airplane to fly back to wherever.  Bags were packed.  The NFL took a week off.  I found Ashley in our living room.

Ashley did not like that I was not there with uncertainty swarming.  There was not much we could do about three thousand dead bodies, concrete cluster-fucks and W introducing al-Qaeda to America as the vowel mob that woke up the tiger.  Papers were about to be signed over to Halliburton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Boeing and buy big-ass headhunter missiles to claw out similar-skinned eyeballs.  Shi’ites and Sunni’s destroying each other.  Wrinkled tribal wars rolled out like smeared toilet paper.  That shit just got dipped in oil and lit afire.  Eighteen to twenty-something’s in and around my demo were enlisting like Trojan-horse flies to go feed on the soon-to-be avenged stereotyped-mammalian assailants through pumped up 10-K annual reporting.  
Continue to Chapter 7 part 2 

No comments:

Post a Comment