Writing Poetry In The Men's Room Stall

I didn't get out unscathed, but at least I got out

We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future. —Marshall McLuhan

To all who celebrate, Happy Thanksgiving.

I’m pretty much spending Thanksgiving in my very normal, non-traditional way.

Sue’s visiting her mom, the kids are grown with their own lives, so I’m having dinner with a close friend I’ve known since college at a local Indian restaurant. Some good conversation, and by evening I’ll be ready for bed and a book.

While my favorite time of day has always been coffee with Sue in the morning, I do appreciate alone time, too.

I spent the other day digging through an old filing cabinet. Throwing out old paperwork from the theaters. Looking through tons of negatives and slides. Pictures. Journals.

Hey, wait! Did you say, journals?

Sue’s memory is amazing. She can remember the most minute details. I like to say my brain takes a more big picture approach, but what I really mean is I can’t remember shit. I write everything down, from grocery lists to my daily life. I’ve been doing it since high school.

I also think there’s nothing better or healthier than a really good repressed memory.

An envelope from 1993 caught my eye. My heart caught.

At the time I was a writer at a computer company. Not just any computer company, but a once high-flying computer company that at the time was going down in the most spectacular way with all four engines on fire.

Kind of like what the United States is going through now.

Double whoa.

I’ve said many times that during my time spent working in high tech in the corporate world that I learned a lot and worked with a lot of really smart, talented, fun people. Amazing people. That is still true.

But this isn’t going to be about those times.

From reading those pages from 1993, do you know what I’m most thankful for on this Thanksgiving Day? That I got out alive. Not necessarily unscathed. But alive.

I know it may be self-protection when I say it wasn’t that bad.

But in the clear light of a thirty-year old journal, it really was that bad—a lot of times. Most of the time, if I want to be truly honest.

Because I wasn’t always working with smart, amazing people. Or fitting in. The majority of the time was the exact opposite. It was spending the day being with people with whom I had nothing in common, and at the same time seeking out the oddballs like myself who you could trust and who knew they didn’t belong there either.

Most of the time it was simply exchanging my life and my artistic talents for money. And that’s not a pretty admission.

Writing poetry in a men's room stall at work

With pants bunched around

shiny black shoes and tie

tucked safely into an open shirt button

so not to piss on it

he sits in the stall

while black oxfords pinstriped

pant-legs swim around him

he peers through cracks to see from whom he's hiding

like a shark cage; safe

if he stays inside.

He writes

secret gold Cross pen poetry

in the business whirlpool

just trying to get it down

on paper before he's

eaten alive. He

hopes and prays.

I used to write poetry when I went to men’s room. (I’ve always been very efficient with my use of time, something I could parlay in the corporate world.) I learned many years later in grad school at BPT that Tennessee Williams did the same thing while working in his father’s shoe factory in St. Louis. It’s always a good, affirming discovery when you find yourself following along the same paths as the greats. It tells you you’re right on course and just keep working.

I don’t think I have to describe the American corporation to anyone, its culture and the people who work there. If you haven’t experienced it IRL, you’ve seen it in popular culture. And just to be clear, many people in corporate America are just trying to pull a paycheck and pay the bills. Not the most exciting, rewarding, or admirable life, but there it is.

And at this particular time, in this particular corporation, for some unknown reason that I still to this day cannot fathom, I got assigned working for this guy who, to say it politely, was struggling. He had been demoted. He used to have a big office—the kind set aside for managers since the size of your office telegraphs your importance—but now he was in an office the size I occupied. A nobody writer.

It was kind of sad; he kind of looked like an adult relegated to the children’s table at a holiday dinner.

He used to have a staff of five, but now he had just me reporting to him. I don’t know if I was assigned to him because I was supposed to help him get back on his feet or we were both being punished or what, but I never saw a bigger mismatch of two people in my entire life.

The Business Meeting

So seductively does time seep

out through your veins

pooling around your wingtips

or you, Ms. Corporate I'm Going Places

be careful of your patent-leather pumpsIt wa

step carefully around the sticky puddles

collecting beneath the conference table

do not soil your white stockings.

Your smile will soon turn to a grimace

as lost opportunity twists your heart

like an old rag, unknowingly you’ll strangle

as the intoxicating sound of your own voice

replaces the importance of your life

with the irrelevance of your action items.

I learned a lot in the corporate world. It’s where I learned the business side of running theaters, how to budget, and market. Believe it or not it’s where I learned how to write an artistic statement. You have to articulate your ideas. Or else.

I also learned a really good lesson about people: If you really want to see what people are made of, put them under pressure.

I don’t want to go too much into detail, but it was miserable, I think for both of us. A lot of pressure.

For example…

I would have loved to see the expression on my face the other day when I read about how we were brainstorming ideas for the annual report. It all came back to me. If it weren’t so sad it would be funny.

I came up with this concept, something like the future being just over the horizon and how our company was going to take you there (or some such nonsense; this is what corporate writers do.) He got all excited and started talking about Conestoga wagons and dressing up the president of the company like a cowboy. Really creative people come up with cockamamie ideas like that all the time, but we then we put them aside. We don’t actually say them, it would be too embarrassing.

Not this guy.

Sigh. This pretty much sums up my experience working in the corporate world as an artist.

With this guy, it was months of being micromanaged, nitpicked, and eight o’clock meetings on Monday morning (for which he was consistently late and even at times a no-show, not giving a damn how it affected my life.) He’d schedule four-thirty meetings on Friday afternoon. I don’t know how many times I’d get, “I need this on my desk first thing Monday morning” and I’d work weekends and then he’d shelve the work.

I missed one of my daughter’s first ever track meets (she was about five at the time) because he had me working late. I wrote about what a natural runner she was, how she just liked to run. But I never saw it. (Just as an addendum, this is the place that professed back then to be so progressively family-friendly, yet also was where a director told this guy I had to “fix” my kids’ day care schedule because on a certain day I had to leave early to pick them up and I’d make up my work that night. Remember: I was a writer, I could really do my work just about anywhere, but that was a concept too radical for those times.)

The Button Down Man

Into his closet

every morning he reaches

and pulls out

a button-down shirt.

Cotton, maybe striped

if he's daring. And a tie

blue or red

or polka-dot.

Always a jacket.

He wouldn't think to go out

without one.

He wouldn't feel complete.

Every thing buttoned,

every thing knotted: collar,

tie, stomach.

Umbrella wrapped tight.

Fingers like tweezers

pick a single strand of lint

from his coat.

Now he is ready.

To work he drives. Parks

in his own spot. Engages

parking brake

just to be sure.

It rained last night

so he picks his way around

worms bloating

in the parking lot.

There are two things that really stuck out amidst all the train wrecks and misery.

My kids’ mom called me at the office one day, and I was so busy I tucked the receiver of the phone in the crook of my neck, half listening while I kept working while she told me that day she had to pull her car over and give our daughter the Heimlich maneuver. It took a minute for that to sink in. She was distraught and my little girl almost died with a butterscotch life saver stuck in her throat while I was busy doing something inane for this jackass, like writing a fifteen-page proposal for an eight-page brochure.

The second thing…?

Before I get to the second thing I have to tell you how I got laid off.

Big corporate-wide layoffs were going on. I had been told by someone who was supposed to know what they were talking about but didn’t (not uncommon in the corporate world) that I wasn’t going to be laid off. So when I was called in and told my position had been “eliminated”, like an idiot I thought, Oh, okay, what you’re saying is, I’ll be doing a different job. The HR rep, like the robot-in-training that she was, kept repeating over and over that my position had been eliminated until it sunk in what she was saying.

(An aside, irony of ironies, this guy was not laid off.)

So now I’m home. Dejected. Feeling worthless. That’s when my daughter was caught stealing a little ornamental tree from her classroom. Who knows what was going on with her. Was she acting out because I just lost my job or what, but she wanted the tree for her dollhouse at home. And…she and I talked about it, and I told her how proud I was that she owned up and it was all right she made a mistake and we worked it out.

And I wrote that if I still was working I probably wouldn’t have had the time or energy to deal with it. But then I did have the time.

When I finally had the guts to go out on my own as a freelancer after another bunch of years in another dysfunctional software company that really was toxic, I made sure I not only made money, but I made time for myself. And my rules were I would only work for organizations I felt were making the world a better place, and only work for people who I respected.

This is what’s called learning from experience.

Look, I don’t want to deny my role in all of this. I take total responsibility. I signed on the bottom line. I was trying to sort out and perform my traditional societal function as the male provider, no matter how treacherous it was to my well-being. Seriously: I was, and still am, better-suited for home schooling and farming than I am for suits and ties and giving a shit that there was gourmet coffee in the kitchen. (I can buy my own damn coffee, thank you very much.)

This was a case of a montrous round peg trying to jam itself into a tiny square hole.

Another lesson I learned in the corporate world is that most people in the United States have compromised their values so often, they don’t even know they’re doing it anymore.

They compromise themselves all the time because they’ve screwed themselves down with double and triple mortgages, car payments, big screen TVs, putting their kids through expensive schools, and God knows what else they’re in hock for. They do things they never thought they’d do when they were young and idealistic. They think they didn’t have a choice, but they did and they do, they just can’t see it.

I hope you’re all as thankful for your life as I am. I’m not being ironic. I mean that sincerely. Through all my experiences, I know to be grateful for my family (love you Sue, Allison, and Kathryn), my few but very dear friends, and my work.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Quicksand, Baby. Atlantic Works Gallery, January 2024; video courtesy of Charlene Liska