Note: I wrote and shelved this in 2018, but it makes a lot of sense to me in the upsidedown of COVID, now that we don’t take for granted the alienation of workplaces. It feels like the spell has been a little bit broken! Also, we don’t talk about While You Were Sleeping nearly enough.
I once had a very bad boss who told me he works out in the early morning by lifting cans of vegetables up and down over his head in his kitchen. He was the kind of person who didn't blink enough — then, when it mattered, blinked so much you wanted to flee. He was a crazy-making boss who operated on the principle of constantly changing the ask, keeping everyone reactive, always moving the stacks of paper around on his desk so as to imply work. He was bad for many many reasons, not least of which he made one of his employees take a portrait photo of him in his office and then used it for his online dating profile as an “ethical nonmonogamist.”
The only consolation for any of us was that he was himself a helpless underling. Periodically, a new boss-boss would notice our department existed, and that our very bad boss was in charge. Here his strategy changed. If the new higher-up guy wore polo shirts and jeans every day, our boss would suddenly be arriving at the office in popped collars and loose fit jeans. If the super-manager of the season wore Warby Parkers and Untuck'd shirts, our boss would sidle into meetings in his soundless Cons with new rims and a picnic-print shirt. He would even mimic their conversational style and mannerisms. Watching a six-foot-tall man with evaporating career prospects packing himself down into the frame of a squat, middle-aged man with multiple MBAs was kind of terrifying. I have been told that he once wore velvet in a nod to his manager’s style at the time.
He was a strange dude. Still, I tried to please him. Tried to make sure he understood me, understood the value I brought to the job, the ideas. I had terrible conversations about bands with him in the elevator, he standing there exuding nervous energy in a brand-new fresh-from-the-packet crew-neck tee, his wild, unlubricated eyeballs darting around, and me doing my own form of carbon capture there alongside him, taking in all that negative juju and blaming myself for not being easier to like.
I was in a crowded subway car one morning headed to that job when a man seemed to pass out in front of me. He was big, six feet tall at least, heavy, and elderly, 60 or even 70-something. I twigged that All Was Not Right on the subway as he lurched sideways onto his wife and she tried to push him upright, her little arms gripping his body. The only guess I could make was that he was having a heart attack.
In the movie While You Were Sleeping, a similar situation presents itself to Sandra Bullock, who plays a lonely cashier on Chicago's "L." Her character, Lucy, dresses like a fisherman, and has a crush on a wealthy, scarf-wearing commuter (Peter Gallagher), whose eyebrows are so alpha you can hardly believe it. He is pushed onto the tracks by some thieves(!) one day, and she jumps down to see he is okay and breathing and whatnot, without so much as a thought about the third rail. Right as a train is about to hit the two of them, she rolls the man under a ledge to safety. Lucy follows him to the emergency room, where she is mistaken for his fiancé — that momentary confusion is her in with the man's family, and the cue for Bill Pullman to enter with his Kind Eyes and upset the pumpkin cart. She spends a lot of time falling in love with Bill Pullman (Peter Gallagher’s character’s brother) while supporting characters tell her “how do you get into these messes, Lucy?” and fail to help untangle anything.
Unconscious men do not always look like Peter Gallagher! I did CPR on a man as a first responder on a ski hill. I don’t have a good sense of what he looked like alive, because his eyes were closed the whole time: he was a giant, still CPR mannequin. Though I would go back and refine my actions slightly, it overall went to plan: you are trained for such an event, and all the people did what they were supposed to: the oxygen tanks and defibrillator and paramedics all arrived within minutes. Everyone was on the same page, as my terrible boss might have said. We got his heart going for a bit before it stopped again. The defibrillator experience wasn’t sticky enough. We were on one page, and the man’s heart was on another.
On a busy 4 train shuttling through the underground toward the Atlantic Center, it was different. I saw the man toppling, and yelled, "Make some room! Make some room!" like a bad Les Mis extra. Even as this great tree was collapsing, I could not get people to move for me to get to him. I shoved past the bodies in the way, and helped drag his body, fallen halfway like that photo of the Lenin statue, out onto the floor — you can't do CPR standing up. No one would move, no one would make space. His head was on the floor, his eyes white, rolled all the way back, and I was poking my fingers toward his neck for a pulse, preparing myself to get inside his coat and start compressions, when he blinked and grunted. He was breathing. "Call an ambulance!" I was yelling. The man's wife knelt beside me under swaying handbags and NPR totes crying silently.
Fainting is a form of self-preservation, the body’s way of cutting all non-essential systems and getting the body into a position where the blood can hopefully get back to the head or the heart. However you carve it, lying on the subway floor is intense stuff. The man came to underneath my face, his eyes rolling around, probably wondering if the 4 train is the outer ring of hell (yes?).
When we pulled into the station, I was waiting for paramedics to leap on, but instead, the conductor, opening his door to peer out at us, saw the man was alive, and told us to get off; the train needed to leave. Now, okay, I know how many times the conductor has lied to us about “train traffic” or a “sick passenger” and thought this was astounding; even though this guy actually was sick, the conductor didn’t want to delay. The man wanted to stand up (so did a man I once backboarded who turned out to have a closed-head injury, but it’s hard to argue when you’re headed to your white collar job in denim overalls), so his wife and I helped him up, then supported him out onto the platform. Again, we had to yell at people to FUCKING MOVE so we could get off.
He was shaking, pale, looking like he’d easily shuttlecock face-first onto the tracks if anyone dropped his arm, but once I got him to a seat, his wife and maybe daughter waved me away and waited for a paramedic to show. “Thank you, thank you,” the wife said to me wet-faced, in shock. Was there a blood clot jimmying itself up his aorta? No one in the world seemed to care. I mean I’ve seen dead, and that’s what it had looked like. Regardless, I left him sitting on the wooden bench, with its unfriendly dividers, as if he was waiting for the next 5. The train rattled off, taking with it that contained feeling of madness.
I strolled off to catch the next train to work, wondering if it would matter what time I arrived (no). The whole episode took no time at all. I had not saved someone’s life with no loss of commute time at all, really. I told Noodle Hubs about the episode in a series of progressively stranger texts as I crossed the Manhattan Bridge. “What???!” He wrote back. By the time I got to work, I didn’t really see the point in relaying the story to any of my coworkers. I probably ate a Pret croissant, then attended morning standup, then clicked around my computer for nine hours, then went back home.
I spent a lot of time trying to get my terrible boss to like me. I think this feeling is common among the worker class, and I must have seen four articles all a variation on “Why Burnout Something Something Work Millennial” in the past two weeks, but back then, my alienation felt unique — everyone was united in denying the true nature of work (in the words of Joshua Ferris, who understands white collar malaise better than anyone, “My name is Shaw-NEE! You are captured, Ha! I poopie I poopie I poopie”). I suspected I was just moving at the wrong speed, wearing the wrong thing. But if you can be on a subway car where a man is at best teetering into unconsciousness and nobody even acknowledges it is happening, you are not the crazy person. Everyone else, with their stupid wicker handbags (remember that summer?) and workboots, is out of lockstep with reality, moving through a hipster Metropolis while wishing they worked for Buzzfeed.
It was the same for Lucy. She leapt onto the tracks and saved a guy’s life but no one cared about the rescue itself. No one cared at all until she was a ~fiancé~. She had to go on feeling bonkers until the one person seemingly with a clue in Chicago, the brother, Jack, sees through it and chances to give her a snow globe. Then Peter Gallagher wakes up, and — the chief talent of Peter Gallagher — is somehow too aggressively good-looking to really still be attractive. So it’s onto Jack. His crinkly eyes, glinty over a kind of middle-aged jaw (if we’re honest), are there to tell her she’s not nuts, although everyone else sure is. When Lucy chickens out of marrying Peter on the altar and instead performs the great soliloquy in which all is explained, Jack says to her in the best, most hurt and hopeful line of the whole show, “why didn’t you tell me?” But those eyes, man. He already knew.
This is just how Japhy draws people now
Goodies
This Gary Shteyngart essay on his penis was very relatable, in terms of health anxiety?
Maybe this is too much of a deep cut, but the ‘Idle Australians’ pod episode on Brisbane’s bid for the 1992 Olympics made me laugh out loud while walking around town — the lasers, Freddy Mercury, all just very enjoyable.
Loved this essay on the ways that Maori and Welsh were suppressed in New Zealand and Wales — interesting if you’re a fan of Jemaine Clement, and reminded me that one of the best scenes on The Crown was the one where Charles has a normal dinner with his Welsh professor and the missus in their hovel, and realizes everything he doesn’t have.
Thanks, as always, for reading KAFKA’S BABY! <3 <3 <3
OMG THE (TERRIBLE, HAUNTING) MEMORIES THIS BROUGHT BACK! you have captured chowderhead *EXACTLY* as he was—unblinking, awful, Gumby-ing around awkwardly in plaid velvet pants at the holiday party. also HOW DID I NOT KNOW YOU COULD LITERALLY SAVE A LIFE, YOU ARE AMAZING. Sending lots of love to you and the taters and hoping they are LOVING the big yard!! can't wait to see their halloween costumes this year; I literally show STRANGERS pix of scout as a ham and japhy as a marshmallow <3