NEW HAPPY HOUR DEALS AT PLAZA ONE
BASEMENT BAR SPARK COMMUTER DEBATE
Peggy and Jo invited Tech Mike and me to a co-worker gathering, and the four of us were inseparable for an hour until I was introduced to a woman from our HR department, Internal Recruitment her job title was. Her name was unpronounceable and I assumed we hit it off. We were chatting nicely for about two hours, and about every subject imaginable, including fatally my college friends who had settled into Metro NYC. Her motive, as it became apparent when the evening came to a close, was for me to put in a good word with Norm Chivas. She’d really like to get to know him. I didn’t approve of that suggestion, because I had invested time with her and I was positive she’d find Norm hard work, but she insisted, and so I did. It probably went over his head, my outlining to Norm that “there’s a skinny girl who likes you and you like skinny girls, don’t you?” She may have had to call him directly, but I didn’t follow up.
I explained this predicament to MB among others when we met for after work mugs at the Plaza One basement bar. There were ten of us (six men and four women, which is a majority of women adjusted for the times), but he was sitting next to me and therefore I effused to him first and foremost. Moreover, with his Eastern European lineage and last name similar to that of a game show host, he would both understand the impasse and also be intolerant, in a “you’re mistaking me if you think I care” vein. Her name was Snezana, but she pronounced it something like Shnezna, which was impossibly foreign to me. She said her grandparents moved to Michigan from the Balkans, or the Carpathians, or wherever, just before the war, and she was in New York because this was where she was accepted at college. Seven or eight years in the city and she had lost her Mid-Western twang.
‘Romanian women are whores,’ I revealed. ‘Think about it. But not in the way you think.’
‘Come again?’ he asked.
‘Maybe you didn’t hear me,’ I hinted, implying that he clearly did hear me cleanly.
‘There is a lot of noise in the background,’ he agreed.
‘Yeah,’ I granted.
‘It was a simple question,’ he said. ‘Why do you … for what reason do …’ And his voice trailed off.
“They’ll flirt with anyone,’ I began, and lost my train of thought. It was New York noisy behind us. ‘The funny thing is, you can’t harass someone in private, but you can verbally abuse them in public. If I called her a name in private, it would be he said, she said, but the general consensus would believe her and I’d be penalized, maybe ostracized, but if I make a blanket statement about the nationality society might agree or disagree, but no one would cast aspersions on my Third Amendment rights, or is it Second Amendment?’
‘And that makes her a whore, all of them whores? That she flirted with you, in your opinion, but she preferred your friend from the description, from your description of him?’ he questioned.
‘You don’t know what I haven’t told you,’ I asserted. ‘And Norm is high maintenance. There’s a reason his nickname is Normadelica. She wouldn’t like him after a while. And he might not be her type. He might not be interested in two timing Ellen. I’d get blamed by both. He’s my friend, but … he has a fixation for the East Village punk scene and wears Ramones undies to bed, which is why he nicknames Ellen Ramona. Snezana seems conformist in her ways. She’s from the Mid-West …’
‘Shouldn’t they find out for themselves?’ he wondered again.
“Yeah, well maybe I could just ignore them if they blamed me if it didn’t work, when it doesn’t work out,’ I reasoned. ‘Anyway, circling back, I’m the one who made the effort. Why should he get the credit? Her using me to get to him when I deserved a chance, when I deserved the chance, and I didn’t have to tell her about him.’
‘That’s not what I meant before,’ he clarified. ‘I wasn’t disagreeing with you, necessarily. My conclusion is that she seems like a cock tease rather than a whore.’
‘You could be right,’ I conceded, after studying his reasoning for a quarter of a minute.
‘Anyway,’ he interjected brusquely, ‘what’s the big deal about Snezana?’ he asked, pronouncing her name correctly, diphthongs included. ‘She’s just another girl. Isn’t she?
‘Her face is waterproof,’ I indicated without hesitation.
‘Waterproof?’ he asked.
‘Doesn’t need any makeup, whatsoever,’ I explained.
‘Aha, interesting,’ he remarked.
As a lateral opinion you usually could get away with saying anything you wanted about men or womenfolk in general, because unless you referred to their nationality by geography or their name in specific, they wouldn’t recognize the insult in their person. As for criticizing a co-worker in a professional context, standing ground and retaliating against backstabbers and conduct code violators, etc, while maximizing professional and financial development, and minimizing loss, an altruistic business school could be established to scrutinize these knotty topics alone. However, remember two things: It’s just a paycheck, and it is a paycheck.
MB and I nodded in accordance, which signalled the end of this mini-debate. Whore out, cock tease in. This implied pact was inked, was signed in blood, by a clink of glasses and sip apiece.
I suppose the other four were leaning in on our every word, which was necessary as I kept my voice down so that Judy and her svelte and euphonious new friend Darcy would not overhear.
The lexicon and lingo in which we conversed was commonplace for lower Manhattan during the 1980s. If two in a group of six males theorized bad and worse about a woman, the other four would command that pair to share the wealth; that is, the information about who exactly is this cock tease and do we know her? Not when confronted by my rare charms, one of the four, eg Rezav, would indubiously boast. And if the roles were reversed between MB and me, Rezav would propose: “Flip you for her.” And if I had a dollar for each instance I played straight man to Rezav.
NB on MB: He had a buyback one Friday at Plaza One before going out for drinks, and by 8:15 PM was re-enacting Ernest Hemingway’s Groucho Marx impressions at the Sloppy Joe Bar in Key West, pet mechanical monkey Zeke by his side. A night for us to remember and for him to forget, for the next morning his eyelids looked like a rare and aggressive form of leftovers from spaghetti night. This, though, did not tarnish his reputation.
Post script: With his straight ahead persona and ever-maturing gunpowder grey moustache, MB would one day switch gears and become an effective and sought-after lobbyist for the banking industry, toy-cop sunglasses and all, and I daresay the pro-consumer advocates on the Warren Commission rarely landed a blow on him. He sussed at an early stage the art & science of Button Pressing, and is commonly so excited that he just can’t hide it.