Things went well, as long as you’re counting the first five seconds of our working relationship, but after we said hello to each other, they fell apart rather quickly. Especially when Gretchen told me that she had noticed on the way to work, at the diagonal ends of an intersection, a man selling strawberries and another man selling piatas.
And then she grinned oddly, as if she was waiting for me to say something.
“That’s a wonderful slice of Phoenix, isn’t it?” she said from behind her grin.
“I suppose if you’ve got a fruit hankering and a desire to release all of your underlying yet bubbling to the surface aggression by beating on a disfigured papier-mch donkey, sure,” I answered, since I thought she was joking.
“It was so colorful,” she said, looking off into the distance. “That’s what you should be writing about. That’s what your column needs to be. Slices of Phoenix, the flavor of Phoenix.”
I was stunned so badly that I couldn’t even burst out into laughter. “It’s funny you say that since you just moved here,” I told her. “I’ve been here since 1972, and I’ve tasted Phoenix many times. The flavor is called ‘dust.’ Go out there with your mouth open. You’ll taste it, too.”
That’s when Gretchen turned around in her cubicle, began typing something, and pretended that I wasn’t there.
“Gretchen,” I said, but she kept her back turned toward me. “I’m sorry. We’re getting off on the wrong foot, and I really don’t want that.”
Nothing.
I called her a couple more times, but she acted like I had vanished. She completely ignored me.
So I decided that maybe I had been too harsh and that the best way to save my column was to give her hers. I came up with an idea to go and talk to the two vendors on her Slice of Phoenix corner, see if they knew each other, and try to find something humorous about it.
When I approached her cubicle the next day, she waved excitedly when she saw me and seemed nearly jubilant, and that’s when I tried to ignore the fact that she was wearing a man’s necktie and a fedora.
“Hi!” she said, leaning forward t0o give me a half hug.
“Hi!” I said, trying to return the happiness. “I thought about it all night, and I think I know how I can write a flavorful piece about the strawberries and piatas!”
She looked as me as if I had just said, “Bigfoot is in my office with the Loch Ness Monster and the Chupacabra! Wanna see?”
“Why would you do that?” she asked, her brow furrowing. “Who told you to do that?”
“You did,” I replied.
“That is ridiculous!” she stormed. “Why would I want a story about a man selling strawberries? That’s, that’s just ludicrous and how dare you say that I would suggest such a thing, because I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. That is a stupid idea!”
Then she turned around again and pretended I wasn’t there.
I really didn’t know what to do, so I kept writing the same column I always did and submitting it to Gretchen, who would wield her editing skills like a blind, arthritic surgeon. She helped herself to amputating punch lines, rewriting jokes, and eliminating various people in my column, often rendering it senseless and unrelatable to the accompanying illustration. She barely remembered our conversations, often denied that we had agreed on a column idea, and on occasion would call my extension and say, “Who is this?”
Over the next several months, I came to realize that there was a high possibility that Gretchen had tenants. In her body. Now I’m not sure which one the “host Gretchen” was, and I honestly didn’t care, but there were four distinct facets of my editor; there was the Ernest Hemingway Gretchen, who basically came to work dressed for a lion hunt in Kenya minus the gun and who would wax poetic about her observations about the paper towel dispenser in the bathroom or the vending machine in the cafeteria; there was the Annie Hall Gretchen, who came to work in the apparel of James Cagney and overanalyzed every story idea as if she were passing a bill in Congress; then there was Madame-the-Puppet Gretchen, when she would show up to work in what frightfully looked like opera makeup and enabled anyone to lip-read her ranting from an amazing two blocks; but the nastiest Gretchen was Scary, Indigent Gretchen, who would come to the office with stringy hair and a distinct scent reminiscent of a person who hasn’t had access to running water for numerous consecutive days and had a tendency to rant to no one in particular that everyone was trying to attack her. Madame looked like Heidi Klum in comparison.
Honestly, once I figured out that my editor was Sybil, I had some sympathy for her, I really did. But between Scary, Indigent Gretchen moving my column to different sections of the paper every other week, with Annie Hall Gretchen taking a machete to my column and hacking it like a side of pork, and with Ernest Hemingway Gretchen insisting that I needed to write about the ambiguous relationship between the cactus wren and the saguaro or a personal reflection about the perfection of a brown-bubbled tortilla, I was seriously losing my shit. Madame Gretchen wasn’t that mean, she was just uneasy to look at, but it did make spotting Gretchen way across the newsroom in a group of men a piece of cake, and therefore easy to escape from. My job as a columnist had been perfect until now, it had been flawless, and I couldn’t figure out what was happening or how to fix it. While it was too bad that Gretchen was the Three Thousand Faces of Eve, it also wasn’t my case study to solve. I had my own problems in simply dealing with her, and frankly, I was afraid that she was pushing me to the point where I was going to need to develop some of my own auxiliary personalities as a psychological defense mechanism. I was already having nightmares that I had shown up to work in a pith helmet myself, holding a spear and speaking in a British accent.
Then an odd thing happened. Instead of recognizing Gretchen as the feral, unpredictable, easily spooked editor with the Memento-like memory that she was and addressing the problem, the new editor in chief did something else entirely.
He promoted her.
While I was reeling from this news, trying anything to prevent Gretchen from out-and-out ruining my career, another odd thing happened. People on Gretchen’s staff—editors that had been with the paper for fifteen, twenty years, began to quit, asked to be transferred to a different section, applied for other jobs, and just plain refused to work with her.
When Gretchen allegedly e-mailed several editors and threatened to come to their houses and beat them up, she was demoted and given the odd title of “writing coach,” demoted again, given the title of “headline chief,” demoted again, and finally deported to a satellite office somewhere in newspaper Siberia.
A metaphorical house had fallen on her. All of the shortest people in the department got together and danced a symbolic jig. The skies cleared. A rainbow appeared. Things were looking up.
My new editor, Suzzi, who had just returned from maternity leave after giving birth to twins, took over Gretchen’s spot. I was relieved, exhilarated, hopeful. I wanted to hug her. I wanted to love her.
Our first meeting went well, in comparison with my introduction to Gretchen. Suzzi showed me photos of her orange-haired twin girls, who looked . . . “happy,” I said. “They’re so . . . happy!”
“Being a mother of twins has given me a whole new perspective on this department,” she commented. “Being a mother of twins is an exceptional experience. It really opens you up to all intellectual levels. Becoming a parent raises you to a level that people with no children really can’t reach.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I smiled and nodded.
“I haven’t lost the baby weight, but I will, I will,” Suzzi assured me. “I mean, I had twins, you know? Twice the baby, twice the weight!”
I nodded some more, although I wanted to give her a little tip that if she was so concerned about her weight, wearing a tight-fitting, baby-style, size P Abercrombie & Fitch tee wasn’t the best look for her, especially since the hem had rolled upward due to its incapacity to deal with her expanse, and was now informing me what twin-size stretch marks l
ooked like.
“So, I will be editing your column, and I think we can take it in many new and exciting directions,” she said. “You have kids, don’t you? I think that would be a great direction for you.”
“Oh,” I stuttered. “No, no, I don’t have kids.”
“But I thought you were married?” Suzzi said, looking quite confused. On her next exhale, her T-shirt rolled up another inch.
“Well, I am married, but my husband is concentrating on school, I work long hours here, and now isn’t the right time,” I tried to explain. “My first book is coming out in a couple of months, and I’m focusing on that, too.”
“Is there ever a right time?” Suzzi said softly. “I had TWINS. When is there a right time for twins? But I’m a mother of two, and having two gives me twice the awareness than just having one. The awareness is incredible. I’m so much smarter.”
“Well, okay,” I said, trying to draw an unsettling conversation to a close. “I’ll have my new column done tomorrow, and I’ll e-mail it over.”
“Oh, sure,” Suzzi said with a smile.
And I did. It was a piece about a new campaign in Phoenix that was intended to prevent red-light running, although the strategy consisted of placing mammoth signs above the streets that would scream out DON’T!!; the next sign, about a hundred feet farther down the road, would yell RUN!!; the next one RED!!; and the next one LIGHTS!! in a Burma Shave fashion. Now in my opinion, I simply stated, if a campaign was going to be effective, it should emphasize keeping the drivers’ eyes on the road and on traffic signals instead of everywhere but the road, while trying to solve the word puzzle shrieking at them from the sky.
Ten minutes after I e-mailed the column to Suzzi, I received a reply from my new, doubly aware editor who strongly insisted that I mention in my column the number of people killed every year as a result of red-light running.
I took a deep breath, and I felt my face get hot. I had just spent months under the rule of Gretchen, and this situation didn’t have the initial earmarks of anything better. She wanted me to insert the dead into my column. I simply did not know how to pull that off. How do you make tragic deaths fit into a humor column? I couldn’t. Even the Annie Hall Gretchen would have understood that. “I can’t make senseless deaths funny,” I tried to tell Suzzi in my e-mail reply. “Corpses tend to be a bit of a bummer. Throw one into a party, and you’ll see what I mean. Typically, they don’t liven things up, so to speak.”
I wasn’t trying to be snotty—well, maybe a little, I was; actually, yes, I was trying to be very snotty since at that moment I was completely unable to control myself. I wanted to be as snotty as possible, which I will agree was not the mature, appropriate response. But I was trying to make a point, especially since Suzzi had completely missed the one in my column.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Several days later, I had a hint that something bad was coming when another editor told me that Suzzi had said to her, “Would it be the end of the world if we stopped running Laurie’s column?” And sure enough, within twenty-four hours, Suzzi rolled down the hall in another revealing knit shirt and found my office. She parked herself in a chair opposite mine.
“Hi,” she said. “How are you?”
“I think I’m about to find out,” I said, looking at her.
“Last week’s column will be your final one,” she said as she tilted her head. “They don’t really fit what we currently need.”
“Why?” I asked, as suddenly her torso simply produced another fat roll and it popped out like an escalator stair, obviously forced upward by a pair of too tight pants, an experience I knew all too well. No more room in the pen.
“Because,” she simply offered.
“And that’s it?” I said, questioning her. “I don’t get to say good-bye to any of the readers that have been following the column for ten years? You’re just going to pull it? You’re going to kill me off like I was on a soap opera?”
She shrugged and smiled.
“Well, I have to let you know that if you don’t provide me an opportunity for a last column to at least explain, I’ll have to tell my readers another way,” I told her point-blank. “I have an extensive e-mail list.”
“Well, then,” she said in a saccharine voice, “maybe if you start an e-mail campaign, you can get your little column back.”
“That’s fine by me,” I said, looking her straight in the eye. “And you are aware that I have a book coming out in a matter of months?”
“You know,” Suzzi said as she stood up, although her brand-new fat roll just stayed where it was. “if I see you on the Today show, I guess I’ll know that I’ve made a mistake.”
And with that, she walked out of my office and that was it. My column was gone. That’s cool, I thought to myself as I tried really, really hard not to freak out, you have it your way, Suzzi. And I’ll have it mine. What the hell do you know, anyway? You don’t even know that you gave birth to orangutans. Carrot babies. You had carrot babies! And not just one, two!! It was like you popped out a Birds Eye frozen vegetable pack. Honestly, I was tired. I was really, really tired. I was exhausted. I had fought for my column really hard ever since Gretchen showed up. And frankly, I would have rather let my column go than let someone ruin it.
The following Wednesday night, true to my word, I wrote an e-mail to the readers I had received letters from, explaining that my column had been killed, and it wouldn’t be in the paper the next day. I thanked them for sticking by me for so long, and that it had been a great run.
Additionally, I wrote, if they wanted to e-mail someone about the cancellation, they sure could.
And then I put two cherries on my e-mail sundae in the form of the Big Cheese Editor’s and Suzzi’s e-mail addresses.
Send. Click.
I mailed it off.
The next morning, when Suzzi and the Big Cheese editor came to work , sat down at their desks, and checked to see if they had mail, they did indeed.
They had so much mail it clogged their e-mail boxes, and I heard that it took several support techs a while to fix it, because about one thousand messages arrived overnight and they just kept coming throughout that day, the next day, and the next.
After all, Suzzi had challenged me. I just met her on it.
I never got my column back. But I think it was safe to say that one, at the very least, of my needs had been filled.
It’s Alive!!!!!
As I looked at the letter in my hand from the City of Phoenix that I received several weeks ago, my blood began to bubble. It explained that a complaint had been filed against my front yard, claiming that it contained an inordinate amount of trash and overgrown weeds.
With my hands shaking, I wondered out loud if this was a joke. While it’s plainly obvious that my landscape will never appear on the cover of House & Garden, the City of Phoenix had to be kidding. Maybe we didn’t mow as often as we should, but rest assured a small child never got lost in the grass, nor had anyone mistaken it for a cornfield. That was at my old house.
When we bought our house, it had been vacant for two years. The yard was a dirt parking lot, and virtually every one of the sixteen trees on the property were brown, cracked, and dead. Eventually, we pulled most of them out, with the exception of an ancient orange tree that escaped the chain saw. It had one green branch that made my husband insist that the tree was still alive, but it also survived because the ax was stolen before we got to that side of the yard. Since then, I’ve requested a chain saw at every birthday and Christmas to take the tree down, but until I got a note from my old therapist, no one would let me have one.
On a hunch, I sought out all of my neighbors, and discovered, not to my surprise, that we had all received the same letter on the same day. There could be only one culprit, I decided, as I shot an evil eye toward his house. It had to be the Neighborhood Nemesis, or, as he likes to call himself, the president of the neighborhood association—a man who doesn’t even have a yard, only a small
strip of grass as wide as my thigh. I once attended an association meeting, but when Neighborhood Nemesis proudly boasted that he spent the majority of his nights running up and down his street armed with a video camera taping his neighbors, I became too freaked out to go anymore. The letter was plainly the result of his walking up and down my street, writing down what he didn’t like, and then calling the city to rat us out.
I was loading the eggs and a big slingshot into the car when my husband came home from work.
“Look at this!” I yelled as I waved the letter in front of him.
“What are you doing with all of those eggs, honey?” my husband said slowly. “If you bought chickens from our neighbors, I’m going to be mad!”
“No chickens,” I said smugly, handing over the complaint. “I’m gonna catch myself a rat!”
“There’s nothing wrong with our yard!” my husband yelled as he read the letter and then pointed: “That tree is ALIVE!!!” I haven’t seen him that mad since a bartender carded him, laughed, and said, “Does your sister know you have her license?”
We jumped in my car to drive to the Nemesis’s house and launch our attack, but there he was, standing out in his front strip, taping stuff. I stumbled for an insult to yell, but all I managed to say was, “It’s ALIVE!!!!!” Then we went home and had omelets for dinner.
The next day, I was eating an egg salad sandwich when someone knocked on my door, a raggedy man who asked if I needed any yard work done. I smiled as if God had sent him there Himself. It had to be a sign.
I motioned toward the orange tree.
“Fifty bucks,” he said through the gap where his teeth used to be.
“Can you knock it down before my husband comes home?” I asked.
Before I knew it, the man, whose name was Jerry, took a running start and jumped on the tree, breaking off massive branches with his bare hands. I went back inside, too afraid that I’d be called as a witness in a lawsuit against me after Jerry had impaled himself on a twig. With every loud “SNAP!” that I heard from within my office, I got more and more frightened.