The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 10: The Decision
Previous Chapter: Chapter Nine
He didn’t offer me another mansion. And he wasn’t going to offer me another mansion in the foreseeable future. I gathered this as 2 security guards picked me up out of the chair with the sawed-off legs, knocking a bite-sized 3 Musketeers from my hand, roughly 2 seconds after I had finished uttering the last syllable in the word, “no.”
I was carried out like a masthead on a ship, my arms bent behind me in some kind of pro wrestling move I think they call an “armbar.” My forehead opened the door to Humphrey’s office and my nose pressed the down button for the special elevator. Only one of the security guards was holding me in the air now, the other one was his escort, was my escort. I could still hear screaming as it pulsated from behind the closed door of Humphrey’s office (phrases along the lines of “Fuck this!”, “Little shit!”, and “Motherfucking sonofabitch!”), as the 3 of us stepped into the elevator, my feet 12 inches off the floor.
I tried to turn my head to the security guard behind me, the one that was holding me, but I only made it to our escort. “I think you can put me down now,” I said to the escort even though he wasn’t the one holding me up. Neither of them answered as the pain of the armbar shot into my shoulders and I was ready to tap out.
The elevator doors opened on the first floor and I was paraded through the lobby, still masthead-like, parting the assembled masses who were waiting for their various appointments. There was a revolving door ahead. This was not a promising development. There were normal doors on either side of the revolving door. I prayed we would use one of the normal doors instead of trying to fit the 3 of us in one of the revolving door slots as the force of my face pressing against the glass spun us in a circle.
Only 2 of us made it into the door, our escort stayed behind, it was still a tight fit, my left cheek suction-cupped to the glass turning us slowly at first until my skull engaged with the door, turning it more forcefully at a normal revolving door speed, we then hit the outside air and I was thrown out onto the concrete as the security guard continued his circular motion back into the building without ever stepping outside of (or even slowing down in) the revolving door.
I bounced a couple of times on the pavement more than I knew a human body could bounce on pavement and ended up against a parking meter, which stuck out its hand to save me from tumbling into the busy street. It was the first time in my life I was happy to see a parking meter, so I gave it a hug.
My shirt and pants were torn a little, my cheek was skinned a little, and my ego was bruised a little. Men and women in business uniforms strode passed me as I sat there making sure my body was still intact. One of the more charitable humans in a business uniform threw some change down at me; a dime, 2 quarters and a nickel, the nickel lodging itself in my sleeve cuff, the other three coins rolling around and coming to rest near my feet. I wondered if I was fired.
On the one hand, being picked up and carried and then thrown out of a building with an aggressive physical force might imply I was fired. On the other hand, Humphrey never said those exact words in the string of expletives he leveled at me while I was still within earshot. And the guards, well, they weren’t in any position to fire me and they hadn’t said anything anyway. And the screenplay and all of my interactions with Humphrey technically didn’t have anything to do with my job in the mailroom. Sure, he ran the company, but that didn’t mean he could do anything he wanted to the employees. Okay, it probably did mean he could do anything he wanted to the employees, but Landmark was a public company (with shareholders and all of that) and I’m sure there were some sort of laws or something he had to follow (or at least an HR handbook).
I picked up the 2 quarters (leaving the dime and shaking the nickel from my sleeve cuff) and stood up brushing gravel and the little dirt particles that collect on sidewalks from my clothes. I slowly crept towards the revolving door that was still revolving with passengers as they entered and exited the Landmark building. I peered through the glass of the normal door to the right of the revolving door, my eyes fighting to see through my reflection that the morning sun bounced back at me on the glass of the door. The lobby appeared to be doing normal lobby things for a Monday morning at a big office building. The security guards were gone. No, there were still security guards there, 3 of them, but the 2 Swiss Guards who had picked me up and carried me down 178 floors (in an elevator) and threw me out a set of revolving doors, were gone.
I wondered if they had talked to their first-floor counterparts before returning to the 178th floor. It was hard to believe I could just walk back in, like the scores of strangers who were walking into the building, to the elevators, but I still had my key card, the one that would get me to the mailroom on the second floor. If I didn’t go back to work, Humphrey could say I quit and I didn’t want to quit this job. Rent was coming due once again and I was scheduled to be paid on Friday. I needed the money so I didn’t have any choice. I walked in to the lobby eyeing the 3 security guards who weren’t eyeing me back. Two of them were engaged in conversation about the upcoming Lakers season, the third was attempting (and failing by all appearances) to flirt with one of the first-floor receptionists who handed out visitor passes all day.
But I wasn’t a visitor. I had my own key card to get passed the first sensors. I had my own key card to activate the elevator to the second floor. What were the odds it was already cancelled? How quickly could Human Resources work? In my experience, not very quickly, so I doubted they had cancelled it in the 15 minutes between my saying the word, “no” and the moment I was standing in the front lobby studying my surroundings like I was a secret agent who had just woken up with amnesia, so I didn’t know that I was a secret agent but I did know how to do such things as study my surroundings for threats and take down vaguely Eastern European looking (and sounding) bad guys in 3 swift blows. Two Russian-speaking businessmen were holding their new day pass key cards (it makes it sound like so much fun doesn’t it, like a day pass at an amusement park when the day pass is actually for such non-fun things like negotiating deals, having meetings to plan to negotiate deals, and meeting with lawyers after the negotiated deal fell through and now you need to sue) and walking for the elevators. This allowed me to keep my secret agent fantasy going and to follow them through the first security gate and into the elevator, while trying to hide my face from the lobby cameras by walking a little too closely to them.
I kept my head down when we stepped into the elevator and they pressed their day pass key card that was coded for the 37th floor against the panel because I was now afraid of the elevator cameras. I pressed my key card against the same panel and it still worked. Unlike their day pass key cards and the key cards of almost every employee at Landmark, my key card worked for every floor except the 178th because I worked in the mailroom. This was one of the main sources of friction between Debi and myself because she worked on 52, which meant her key card only worked for 52 (and for 51, where the little kitchenette for her department was), so she could never drop by to see me as I worked on the second floor. It was somewhat exasperating to always have to be the one to go to her cubicle to see her, like a friend in high school who always insists on doing everything at their house and never visits yours, it makes you think there’s a reason they never come over, that maybe they think your family is too poor or that there’s a funny odor to your house because your mother uses strange cleaning agents. Even though I knew the reason Debi couldn’t visit me, the underlying anxieties created by my repeated trips to her home territory caused unneeded irritation on my part. (Although, on the plus side, it probably kept our affair more of a secret from other Landmark employees (and Humphrey) than it would have been otherwise.)
I left the Russian-speaking businessmen as I heard the name Putin and stepped onto the second floor and walked back through the always open doors of the mailroom. Mike was gone, back to VPing or whatever he did for Humphrey. Richard was sipping Chai Tea and talking to Paul and one other mailroom employee I could never remember the name of; Ken, Kevin, Steve, it was one of those names, he was best friends with Paul even though they had never actually spoken a word to each other, only communicating through various songs played through their headphones. They didn’t notice me as I went back to my usual spot and began sorting the mail. Of course, they had no idea what had happened upstairs (and in the revolving door), so why would they be suspicious there was an imposter in their midst. And really I was doing them a favor. They would be short-staffed without me. Paul or Steve or somebody else would have to pull double mail runs (it would be too difficult to spread out my work amongst everyone because of the trying to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity level complexity of the mail distribution system at Landmark) and I didn’t want to add that burden to their lives, at the very least I could work for the rest of the day and get fired the next day.
So I worked and sorted and delivered and picked up and sorted….you get the idea, for the rest of the day, doing all of the types of mail activities and runs I usually do and no one noticed, not even Debi, who was buried in reports trying to meet a deadline for the next morning she was going to need to pull an all-nighter for, so I think she had completely forgotten about my meeting with Humphrey and didn’t ask me about it or even notice I was back to delivering mail and that Mike was now gone when we briefly chatted as I dropped off and picked up her mail. Everything was blissfully back to normal like my week of courtship had been a very lucid dream. I was a loose end Humphrey had forgotten to tie off. I was back to where I was a little over a week ago before I had been summoned to the 178th floor. There could have been worse results for my refusal to sell. There would be worse results for my refusal to sell.