FOR THE FIRST time at Zappos, I dare to click onto the customer database and look up Tsai. It turns out there is a great deal more information here than one might imagine. Shoe size and purchase history, obviously, but in addition, a fairly complex profile of the customer. This profile is based, one assumes, on customer histories bought from other online outlets and perhaps government files, as well as the customer’s own browsing history. Jeff Bezos did not become the world’s best billionaire by leaving anything to chance. There is, in addition, a very detailed computer-generated image of Tsai. How they accomplished this, I have not a clue, but it’s impressive. The Tsai figure can be dressed in any clothing or shoes found in her purchase history. Would I like to see Tsai in her black pencil skirt (purchased online from Shopbop)? Click. Pair that with a white crop top (also Shopbop)? Click. Here we go. “Tsai” can also be rotated in virtual space. And given that she can be displayed with clothes, she can also be displayed without them. It is unclear what use this feature is to Zappos, but it is exceedingly clear what use it is to me. In addition, I can also, with a click, place any book Tsai has purchased from Amazon in virtual Tsai’s hand. With two clicks, one has her in a teal romper reading Rimbaud. One is in heaven. The world could not be a better place. That is, until I notice in her returns a pair of red Mary Janes, received at the Nevada warehouse this morning and not yet through inspection, therefore not back in the general population of available shoes. This means that, as an executive, I am able to intercept these shoes mid-process and put them through “executive inspection.” I requisition Tsai’s returned Mary Janes and I am informed they will be delivered to my office by end of business today. No questions asked.
Someone has posted a surreptitiously procured photo of my face on the lunchroom wall. Written on the bottom is “Manischewitz Face,” a reference to my port-wine stain and my inferred Judaism (I am not Jewish), clearly the foul work of Henrietta. My boss rips it down and calls a department meeting. He demands to know who posted it. He says religious intolerance will not be tolerated. Nor will the mocking of anyone’s disfigurement. I say that, for the record, I am not Jewish and do not consider myself disfigured.
“That is not the point,” he says.
“It is in a sense,” I say, “in that the gibes are toothless in my case.”
“Maybe we could sell Jewish shoes,” says Henrietta, which seems to me is showing her hand.
“What would those even be?” asks our boss.
“I don’t know. Yarmulke shoes?”
This makes no sense as a joke or an insult. Henrietta is off whatever small amount of game she had. My boss takes it to be outrageously insulting.
“There will be no yarmulke references in this workplace!” he screams.
Perhaps he doesn’t know what a yarmulke is and thinks it is a derisive word for Jew.
“If and when I find out who posted this photo,” he continues, “heads will roll.”
I don’t understand how he cannot know it was Henrietta.
“Perhaps we could call our Jewish shoes shuls,” I say in an attempt to lighten the mood as well as one-up (or one million-up!) Henrietta.
Everyone laughs. Everyone, except Henrietta.
“Why does he get to say it?” asks Henrietta.
“Because he’s Jewish!” says the boss.
“Mazel Topsiders!” blurts Henrietta, unable to control herself.
Our boss shakes his head.
“Just wait until I find out who did this,” he says and leaves the room.
The box is on my desk when I return from our meeting. I am a child on Christmas morning as I rip open the packaging. The shoes. My God, the shoes. They are a beautiful, smooth, shiny, deep ruby leather. The buckle is silver. The sole is black rubber. I know Tsai returned the shoes because they were a size too small since she has already ordered the exact same shoe in the next size up. The thought of her toes jammed into the toe box of the too-small shoes thrills me in ways I cannot and will not explain. There is no part of the interior of these shoes that has not been rubbed and jammed against Tsai’s naked feet. With little fanfare, I do what I am certain I was put on Earth to do. I hold one of the shoes up to my nose and inhale. I almost pass out, just from the thought of inhaling Tsai’s molecules, but it’s more than that. The scent: Tanned leather, rubber, sweat, foot…it is a heady experience. I type the serial number on this box into the computer. Yes! This pair of shoes has never gone out before Tsai’s purchase. There is Tsai and only Tsai in these shoes. I gently tongue the inside of the shoe. Oh, Tsai. I look up to see Henrietta’s iPhone aimed at me.
I am fired.
KAUFMAN’S NEW FILM is shrouded in stupid secrecy, as if anyone might care, but I have dug around and discovered it to be more maximalist claptrap, this one entitled Dreams of Absent-Minded Transgression. Apparently it explores the lulling of our contemporary world into a semiconscious dream state in which, by degree, we accept an ever-increasing surrealism in our daily lives. The film is said to star Jonah Hill as a young actor named Jonah Hill who discovers there is a factory in China cloning Jonah Hills (Jonahs Hill?) for a series of Asian knock-off Jonah Hill movies. These clones are raised to speak Mandarin. One unnamed source describes it as The Boys from Brazil meets The Seven Little Foys. Whatever it is, it’s certain to be yet another turgid, overhyped foray into Kaufman’s self-referential, self-congratulatory psyche. As I finish rehearsing this lecture (to be presented in case of rain at the Boy Scouts of America Jamboree Rain Day Film Festival in the auxiliary room of the Irving, Texas, Senter Park Recreation Center) on my walk crosstown to my oculist (he has a new shipment of Eyebobs!), I fall into an open manhole. It is shocking, as I had been lost in thought, about to revisit the speech I had presented, three years prior, to the San Antonio chapter of the League of Women Voters. This one was entitled “I Vote with My Feet When It Comes to Kaufman.” The league women were not familiar with Kaufman’s oeuvre, such as it is, so I chose several particularly egregious scenes to illustrate my points, and by the end of the seventy-minute lecture, I had won them over. I think it is safe to say they would not be seeking out any of Kaufman’s movies. “That was just horrible,” I recall one saying after the talk. “Yes, that man’s insane.” One woman voter at a time. Now, as I sit, up to my neck in putrid sewer water, the effluvia of my fellow urban dwellers, I find myself shocked back into the present moment. This is not the first time this has happened.
I test my ankles, knees, wrists—nothing appears to be seriously injured. I shall sue the city, I decide. It would be better, of course, had I been injured. But I don’t ever seem to get injured in these falls. Sometimes I am immersed in feces. Sometimes not. Mostly I am immersed in feces. The city certainly leaves itself open to lawsuits with such negligence. I scramble up the ladder, quickly ducking back down as a taxi passes overhead. Checking again, I climb out, reeking and wet. I am shunned on the street; repulsed looks are shot at me, names are called: “Stinky” and “Smell-boy” and for some reason “Pedo.” In shame, I hurry home, shower, and strap myself into my sleep chair for a good cry. Tomorrow is another day, I say, to console myself. But is it? Or will it be more of the same? Another open manhole? Another foot in dog excrement? Another gaggle of high school girls giggling as they goggle me on the street? I am not a man who believes in God. I am Facebook friends with Richard Dawkins, for Christ’s sake, and some other very crazy people whom I admire greatly, but at times it seems there is some malevolent force taking pleasure in my ongoing humiliation.
Certainly my life has not turned out as I had hoped. I think back to that lonely night as an undergraduate at Harvard University, when I wandered the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, looking for meaning. “What does any of it mean?” I wondered aloud. Suddenly an old homeless man appeared as if from nowhere (from heaven?) and asked me for money. I shook my head, said sorry, kept walking, head down, hands in pockets, continuing to wonder aloud. But this homeless man wouldn’t take no for an answer and began to follow me.
“Any little bit’ll help. I’m an old man, had a hard life.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t got no money” (an attempt to sound poorer).
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Things happen and then everything goes twisty on ya. I was young once, younger than you, even. What are you, nineteen? Fourteen? Well, I was once ten, just like you. You can believe that or no, but it’s true. An’ things happen and ya go all twisty.”
“I’m late for my low-wage job,” I told him and kept walking.
“I once got this idea in my head, see? An idée fixe, they call it. Didn’t know it was called an idée fixe at the time and didn’t know it would become one. Just an idea passing through my head, I thought. But it stayed and stayed. Kinda ruined me for any future ideas. Called an idée fixe. That’s what the French say. Pierre Janet said as much. Don’t know why he has a girl’s name for a last name—never did figure that one out—but he talked about the idée fixe. You ever hear of him? Carl Young was one of his students. You heard of that one, right? College boy, I’m guessin’. That one’s a famous one.”
“It’s Jung,” I said, because I couldn’t help myself.
“Anyhow, what got me twisty was the notion I come up with, like it just came into my brain, like it was deposited there, like a egg or a bug or a seed, something that growed or taked root, the idea of what if I actually come from the future, like I been sent back, an’ I’m really someone else, someone from the future, right? You follow? See, me and my brother Herbert, he’s dead now, we found a creature on a beach down Florida way, like a sea creature, only it weren’t any normal-type creature. It was like God made a mistake and just dumped it there, maybe hoping nobody would find it. But me and Herbert, we did, we surely found it, and I got to thinkin’, maybe it ain’t a accident. Maybe this creature is exactly a mistake version of me and Herbert and that someone else, say a second god, this one malevolent, wanted us to see it. Herbert didn’t understand my idée fixe and he went off and became a salesman of shoes, but me, I studied on it and tried to understand.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I really have to—”
“I even moved up here to the seat of higher education to attend college and learn on it some more, but given that I never even went to the sixth grade, I have been unable to gain acceptance into any collegiate institution. Probably I shoulda sold shoes like Herbert. He was always the more practical of us. Me, I always liked to think about the universe and cogitate. I was always the more inquisitive of us, who were not actual brothers but in a very real way wuz. Anyways, so I got to wonderin’ why this idea popped into my head and wouldn’t leave. Where’d it come from and—”
“I have to go into this movie theater now,” I said. “To see a movie.”
And so I stepped inside the rundown cinema, just to escape this madman, and, huddled alone in the darkened house, I watched Weekend, the 1967 masterpiece by Jean-Luc Godard, and thus my life changed forever. Before that night, I thought it a waste of time to sit and enjoy entertainment. I had every intention of going into the foreign service, perhaps becoming a diplomat or ambassador-at-large or an attaché. I had even already purchased a monogrammed attaché case. So I was ready. But this movie spoke to me as nothing had before, as no one had before. This movie was the lover about whom I had always dreamed. It saw me fully. It undressed me. It lusted after me. To put it crudely, had there been a way to fuck this beautiful film then fall asleep in its arms, I would have done so in a minute. So what recourse did I have but to change my major from international studies to film studies? The film department at Harvard was, of course, the best in the world, headed, at the time, by Warren Beatty and Michael Cimino, or two men who looked very much like them. It was almost impossible to gain entrance, but somehow my gumption, passion, and fifty-page plan to establish an American cinema of ideas, which would also be a cinema of emotion, that would fearlessly probe the human psyche in an attempt, against all odds, to understand the ever-present war between men and women, impressed them and I was accepted.
In my first class, I almost got into a fistfight with Warren Beatty over the ranking of Godard’s Weekend. It was at that point the only film I’d ever seen and, therefore, I put it at number one. Beatty put it at seven because he didn’t understand it. He insisted the film was a critique of fascism, which is about as insightful as saying that Network is a critique of Peter Finch. I told him as much. A shoving match ensued. Beatty is a big man, but his muscles felt oddly gelatinous. I thought maybe he had some sort of condition and I should be gentle with him. However, my passion won out, and I knocked him out with an elbow to his jaw, which left an indentation as if his face had been made out of wet clay. It was an indentation that remained for a week, eventually popping back out during class with a sort of sucking sound. I expected to be expelled at the very least and likely jailed, but when Beatty came to, he seemed a somewhat changed man, at least in regard to Weekend. He said his evaluation of the film had been shallow and admitted he had never really watched it all the way through. And then a miraculous thing happened: He looked me in the eye and said, “Teach me.” And I did.
We went to the cinema and watched Weekend together. I explained what Godard was doing and why. Beatty was an eager student. He admitted he had spent so much time womanizing that his movie-viewing skills had suffered. I said, “Let’s remedy that.” We became close (he will deny we ever met, due to a falling out we had over a young Diane Keaton, but we were very close, even sharing an apartment for three semesters). Cimino was a tougher nut to crack, although we did vacation in Aruba over one spring break and had a grand time. So began my education in film. After all, is not teaching the best way to learn?
My plan at the time was to master the elements of film production: cinematography, editing, sound recording, screenwriting, directing, acting, best boying, et chetera. Then, upon conference of my degree, I would step out into the world, guns blazing, to make my first film, which was to be called Guns Blazing, but rather than the typical cinematic violence fest, there would be nary a pea shooter in my film. The guns of the title would be the guns of human interaction, you see—the violence we do to each other as we attempt communion. A young man and young woman struggling to maintain a healthy relationship. He a brilliant and humble academic studying foreign affairs, she a nubile archaeologist, cynical yet beautiful, of both ample intellect and bosom.