The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 2: The Mailroom (Part Two)

Now, some of you may have heard of the Hollywood legend of the mailroom, that it’s the place where many titans of the entertainment industry began their journey to titanic status and it is true the mailrooms of the most prestigious talent agencies are staffed with young go-getters, relatives of the famous, Ivy League graduates and generally the types of people that are going to go places. But this was not the case with the mailroom at Landmark.

Befitting its status as a galactic soulless hegemon of a corporation that moved slowly and promoted even more slowly, there were no future CEOs or power players in the Landmark mailroom. When I entered on my first day it was obvious the place wasn’t a stepping stone of any kind but more an escalator on the way down for those who had given up on Hollywood dreams or never had any to begin with.

This made it all the more odd that the manager of the mailroom, my new boss, didn’t fit this description at all since he had previously achieved quite a high level of success in the industry but now had the misfortune to find himself supervising two dozen dead-enders who were literally doing a job trained monkeys could do in delivering packages and letters from floor to floor to the various officed and cubicled employees who worked in the Landmark Building.

And I bet my new boss was used to working with trained monkeys, or I can only assume he was used to it (perhaps that experience was the reason they hired him to manage the mailroom) because he was a magician in his previous better remunerated life. My new boss was Richard Kay, the famous magician and some-time actor.

You may not know him and I don’t know how he found himself to be working as the manager of the mailroom at Landmark, but he must have hit hard times, maybe an accountant stole all of his money and the acting and magic gigs had dried up, or maybe he just liked working in mailrooms. No matter what had happened, he seemed to take it in stride, Richard took everything in stride, his face and countenance rarely if ever changing from a slightly serious, slightly bemused, very droll impersonation of how I pictured a new age guru would look if they had been raised in Queens or the Bronx. (I have no idea if Richard was raised in either of these places.)

Richard knew things about life that you didn’t but were afraid to ask about and it didn’t matter if you asked him about them or not because he wasn’t going to tell you anyway. I took all of this as a type of benevolent kindness as Richard explained the rules of the mailroom to me on my first day.

“We dress business casual here…” I don’t know if Richard usually starts off with this as his first rule, he may have done this especially for me since I showed up embarrassingly overdressed on my first day in a Calvin Klein suit I had purchased on discount at TJ Maxx the previous year before I knew my life was going to take such drastic changes in such a short amount of time making me wish I had a couple of extra hundred dollars in my pocket instead of a deep navy blue suit I always suspected didn’t fit correctly somehow. (I think the sleeves were too short.)

I was sitting on an empty overturned mail bin in front of Richard’s desk. There were no available chairs so I had to be creative. Richard looked out at my new co-workers as they slotted and re-slotted and de-slotted and counted and sorted and did other mailroom things. The look on his face almost changed from mild amusement to mild discomfort like he had just realized he was living a particularly bad dream he wasn’t going to wake up from anytime soon, but he caught himself before anything really showed and continued giving me the list of rules.

“You get two breaks of five minutes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Lunch is twenty minutes, you can eat in the lunchroom,” he pointed to a storage closet, “there’s vending machines in the hallway with sandwiches and candy bars in them. Don’t under any circumstances ever get the ham & dijon mustard sandwich from the vending machine, it’s always off…”

“Off?”

“Expired. Even when they put in new sandwiches. We lost two workers last month to food poisoning from the ham & dijon.” (It was unclear whether the lost workers had missed several days of work and then returned or whether they were lost permanently and died. Maybe that’s why there was an opening in the mailroom.) “You can’t go out for lunch. You don’t have enough time and there aren’t any restaurants in the area you could afford anyway. You’re a little overdressed today, we don’t have to wear a suit and tie, you work in the mailroom, Benjamin, a nice white shirt and khaki slacks is enough.” (I didn’t have the heart to tell him he had already covered this.)

“What else is there? I’m going to have you train with Paul. Follow him and do what he does. Unless he talks to the employees. When you’re on a mail run do not talk to the employees, ever, unless you are spoken to first. This is important, Benjamin, it is the number one rule of the mailroom. Actually, it’s best not to talk to any of the employees at all even if they ask you a question. Only talk if you absolutely positively can’t avoid it and only then talk about the mail, no non-mail topics can be discussed, do you understand, Benjamin?”

I must have looked uncomfortable because Richard started looking uncomfortable. I’ve never been good at following rules and it must have showed in my forced smile or slouching posture or my ever-adjusting bottom on the turned over mail bin.

“These aren’t my rules, Benjamin, I’m just doing my job, I don’t like enforcing them but I will if I have to, do you understand?”

I nodded and looked to my right, to my future, present coworkers. I tried to find Paul, my trainer, my new friend who was going to show me the ropes at Landmark, who was going to take me under his wing and help me maneuver through the treacherous waters of mailroom etiquette, but I didn’t know what Paul looked like, so I couldn’t find him, so I returned my look to Richard.

“Do you understand?”

I nodded again, my chin reaching my chest and bouncing upward.

“The job isn’t all bad, you can wear headphones and listen to music as you work, but not too loud and not those big earmuff headphones, the small ones that go in your ear, you can wear those like Paul over there is wearing.”

I looked to my right again looking for Paul one more time but over half a dozen of the male workers who could conceivably be named Paul were wearing the tiny earbuds that Richard was talking about.

“Okay?”

“Okay?” I turned back to Richard.

“Okay?” I think he was done with the rules.

“I do have one question, Mr. Kay.”

“Yes.”

“Isn’t all this mail going back and forth in interoffice envelopes a little, I don’t know, obsolete. Everybody here has email, don’t they?”

“Of course they do, Benjamin, but this is a big corporation, there are a lot of documents that need to be signed, countersigned, sent to one department and then back to another… “ Richard stopped himself. Then he chuckled a little. “I don’t know why they have all this paper going back and forth, that’s for them to worry about. You should only worry about delivering it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And remember, no talking to the employees.”

I shadowed Paul for the next two days. He wasn’t going to take me under his wing. We weren’t going to become friends. We journeyed in silence from one cubicle to another cubicle and then to rows of offices and then back to the mailroom where we sorted in silence and then back through all of the floors where we delivered mail from one cubicle to another cubicle and then to rows of offices and then…. I think you get the picture.

Paul was wearing his headphones the entire time. He didn’t speak to me so much as nod or give animated gestures when he wanted to communicate vital information. I went outside to smoke during my afternoon break on the third day, the first day I was on my own, hoping to meet and bond with coworkers either from the mailroom or perhaps from some of the other floors, but there wasn’t anybody else outside in the three-foot smoking zone located near the bike racks in the courtyard by the institutionalized shrubbery. I went back the next day for both my morning and afternoon breaks, still no one showed. When I came back in from the afternoon break I gestured to Paul using his version of sign language. He turned his music down.

“Does anybody here smoke?”

“Marijuana?”

“No. Cigarettes.”

Paul looked at me like I suggested cannibalism. “Man, no one smokes that stuff here, this is California. Get with it, dude. What are we, savages?”

Apparently, my smoking experience was regional, or maybe generational, maybe what was a great way to meet people had become obsolete in only a matter of months, like those pieces of paper we were passing back and forth in our carts. I once knew someone who kept their job at a Fortune 500 company during massive layoffs because she became friends with the CFO as they both stood outside smoking every day. How was I going to make friends with any of these people now?

Nobody in the mailroom talked to each other, half listening to music on headphones, half too shell-shocked from life experience to want to communicate with coworkers. I had no choice. I began to talk to the employees on my route. I started simple. “Hello,” I said to each employee as I dropped the mail into the stacked plastic trays in each cubicle. I didn’t say anything to the overworked jittery slyly dominant alphas who had residence in the offices. I’m not that dumb, or maybe I’m a little classist or something, but I wasn’t going to let Jon Davidson, VP of Bollocking, stop me from talking to the employees before I had a chance to make a few friends, and I knew the overstressed, over-caffeinated becubicled employees were less likely to report my transgression of Landmark rules to Richard.  

On the first day of my new plan, Monday, I got three hellos back. The second day I got the same three hellos and two more. The third day, there were five hellos, two hi’s, one grunt, and one person asked me how I liked my new job. The fourth day I had a conversation with the woman who asked me how I liked my new job, her name was Debi. The fifth day we had another conversation and I stopped saying hello to those that had never responded to me. The sixth day, the next Monday, Debi and I chatted for about five minutes. The seventh day we slept together.

My intention hadn’t been to sleep with her. Not for the first three days. Four days actually. But by the fifth day I was feeling some chemistry there and she was feeling it, too. I think we both thought about each other all weekend, so by the time Monday rolled around there was a lot of flirtation and then on Tuesday I invited her for drinks after work. Well, for me it was after work because I finished at six, for her it was her dinner break from six to seven-thirty before she returned to her cubicle to finish reports or something.

We went to get drinks at the Hotel Figueroa, which was a short walk from the Landmark building. They had (still have?) a beautiful pool/bar area with palm trees and mosaic tiles and wealthy people who don’t have to work for a living and can lounge by a hotel pool all day, and I suppose we both knew why we had chosen a hotel bar instead of a regular bar or McCormack’s where they had (still have?) great happy hour deals and a large loud suited post-work clientele. I suppose all of this is true because it wasn’t long before we left our second round of drinks at our tiki-lit table near the pool (the décor is much nicer and more consistent in theme than I’ve made it sound like, it really is a nice place) and had reserved a room upstairs on the seventh floor (well, Debi reserved the room) and I was on top of her and she was on top of me and we were both on top of the sheets of the bed. It was all very nice. Better than nice. At least it was better than nice until Debi threw up afterwards. But that part wasn’t my fault. It was the morning sickness.

Don’t worry, the baby isn’t mine. Obviously, it isn’t mine. That was the first time we slept together. She was, oh, I don’t know about these things, four, maybe five, months pregnant and she was just starting to show and I guess her husband didn’t find her attractive anymore, he’s a real jerk anyway, and she was feeling a little lonely and unloved and I found her extremely attractive so we had sex. And, no, I don’t have some kind of fetish for pregnant women. I liked her and her only, not pregnant women in general. I’m actually quite particular in who I fall for. And the fact that she was pregnant wasn’t a bonus, it was more a side issue that could be overlooked like bad taste in clothing or a pageboy haircut. (Neither of which Debi had.) Besides, the kid couldn’t be mine, even if we had been having sex with Scandinavian regularity for the last four, five months, because I’m sterile.

What? It’s not that big a deal. Honestly, it’s not. I never even think about it. It’s never bothered me one bit. Never ever ever had any effect on my life. At all. In fact, I had completely forgotten about it until the preceding sentence. I know I sound like I’m protesting too much, but it’s more common than you think, plenty of men have to deal with it. Back when I was in the suburbs living an undead life, my girlfriend and I tried having kids. We thought it would improve our relationship because we had started to live out the lyrics to the Tammy Wynette-George Jones two-story house song without the actual two-story house (it was a condo). And after months and months of trying we finally decided to get checked and it turned out I wasn’t quite the sperm machine I always thought I was. Just think all those years of wearing condoms for no reason. Well, I guess disease but still. (And I don’t want any armchair psychologists suggesting the reason I want to take over the world is because I can’t have kids of my own. You’re better than that. Don’t do it.)

I figured there wasn’t much harm in a sterile guy making love to a pregnant woman. It gave us both something in our lives we wouldn’t have had otherwise. And after that first night, it kind of became a regular occurrence, although at cheaper hotels than the Hotel Figueroa but not as cheap as the motels where Angel plies her trade. Debi’s regular nighttime shift after her dinner break gave us a nice excuse for her husband, Clark. (Did I mention he’s a jerk?) Many nights she wouldn’t return to Landmark for her second shift, she said she never got any work done at that time of night anyway, she was just putting in face time so she would eventually get promoted from Jr. Analyst in whatever division she worked in to Sr. Jr. Analyst, but now that she was pregnant there was no chance of that happening, not unless she gave the kid away after it was born and never saw it again and she wasn’t going to give away her kid even though it is half Clark DNA.

So things were looking up. I had made a good friend, found a job and a lover. Everything was going not quite perfectly, but good, certainly good. A solid B+. And that’s when a rather surprising development occurred.