I hate my fucking boss.
Dean Zacharias is one of the lingering legacy hires at Random House. A direct descendant of Frank Nelson Doubleday, the nineteenth-century founder of Doubleday Books, he still brandishes the staunch Roman Catholicism of the Doubleday family like a badge of honor. He’s the guy who gives good Catholics a bad name: gives Opus Dei half his income, thinks women are merely receptacles for his kid-producing man juice, a poor man’s Mel Gibson. Not only is he a raging misogynist, he’s grossly underqualified for his job. He doesn’t read. He thinks all librarians and women writers—save for Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter—are lesbian socialists and that the Crusades were invented by the liberal mainstream media. He’s the worst kind of manager, the type who is so small-minded and unintelligent that the only thing he can do for validation is micromanage menial tasks. His favorite ritual is to bring employees into his office and yell at them about their To Do lists. Never mind the fact that you’ve managed the only imprint under the Random House umbrella to stay in the black every quarter for the last decade; you e-mailed him your To Do list three minutes late, so you’re a lazy, uncommitted employee.
I’m sitting in Dean’s office. Random House flew me in this week with no explanation, other than it was urgent. We’re in the midst of our sixth reorganization in as many years, a bloodletting I’ve managed to avoid by being profitable while most other New York publishers stare down the barrel of a once-in-a-lifetime recession that is shrinking wallets and shuttering bookstores.
“You know what your problem is, Hank?” Dean pretends to read one of my spreadsheets through his reading glasses. He wears the glasses on a chain around his neck, raising them to his eyes and dropping them to his chest intermittently, trying to create the impression that he has so much as an ounce of intellectual curiosity.
“Enlighten me, Dean.”
“You got no clangers.”
“Excuse me?”
Dean stands up. He grabs an unlit cigar out of the ashtray on his desk, sticks it in his mouth. He quit smoking ten years ago, but he still chews through a box of cigars every month. A woman hater with an oral fixation: yeah, like that’s a fucking surprise.
“You got nothing swinging down there between your legs.” Dean points at my midsection. “No fucking clangers!”
“I don’t know what you’re getting at, but I don’t think this is an appropriate conversation to be—”
“What’s with all these books you’re buying?”
“What do you mean?”
Dean grabs a hardcover novel off one of his shelves. He throws it on his desk. “Like this garbage.”
I pick the book up and read the title aloud. “Teaching Yoga in Belize.”
“What the fuck is that?”
“It’s a great memoir. Won a lot of awards.”
“I’m sure it did. I’m sure a bunch of intellectuals got in a room and agreed this book was the next Atlas Shrugged.”
“Dear God, I hope not.”
“See, that right there is what I’m talking about. No fucking clangers.”
Dean’s rant continues. I tune him out, flipping through the first few pages of Teaching Yoga in Belize. I lean my face into the book, smelling the rough-cut pages. This particular copy carries some unusual notes—freshly ground coffee buffeted by something almost familiar and intimate. It reminds me of that oily-haired smell of the inside of my father’s baseball hats. I kept a half dozen of them in a cardboard box in my closet for about four or five years after his death. Every now and then, when I had a day that knocked the wind out of me—and I had a lot of those days after Dad died—I’d take out the hats and bury my nose in them.
As I place the book back on my boss’s desk, I think about that son who just needed to smell his father’s hats. “Dean,” I say.
“Don’t interrupt me, Hank.”
“Oh, that’s okay. I haven’t listened to a word you’ve said for the last five minutes.”
“Now you listen here, you disrespectful son of a—”
“Fuck you, you sanctimonious buffoon. I quit.”
“What?” Dean says. “Now wait just a second.”
“Good luck finding somebody who will keep College Avenue Press in the black for another ten days, let alone another ten years.”
I stand up and make for the door. Dean gives chase. “Calm down, Hank. You’re making a rash decision here.”
“And that’s exactly why I know it’s the right decision.” I open the door to his office, smiling. “There’s just one thing I have left to say, Dean.”
“What’s that?”
“Pope John Paul II is fucking overrated.”