October 22, 1999

I work in a strange place. Transvestite hookers looking to place classified ads pass a former Mayor of New York on their way into the building. Hash pipes are compared for style and functionality in the break room. While the flamboyant gossip columnist chats on the phone about who’s gay and who should be, NYU student-interns walk by in bare-midriff cotton Tees sucking seductively on cherry-red lollipops. A half-empty case of beer sits in the open atop my desk, right next to the vibrator a lesbian friend of mine sent me as a gift to use on my next playmate. A picture of George Dubya Bush—white powder superimposed under his nose, and the words "got coke?" over top—is posted next to a map showing the paper’s distribution points in the five boroughs.

It is an office filled with writers and painters and actors and musicians who pay the bills by performing as clerks and sales reps and web designers and editorial assistants during the day.

It is a passionate group and that’s what makes it such a great place to work and that’s what makes the paper such a vibrant, successful one. But there are a few bad apples, and sometimes passions get out of hand.

Yesterday, a guy in my department celebrated his last day on the job by going off on all of us about how none of us appreciated his work and how we were all basically a bunch of jerks. He was right about one thing. We did not appreciate his work because he was a lazy, whining jackass--a poser-playwright who talked all day, surfed the Web, and dumped his work off on other people. All of us have other things going on in our life, but at work, the job comes first. We’ve all learned that as we’ve gotten older and more responsible. He hadn’t, and slowly the tension built within our group. But we never really told him that we thought he was a lazy, whining jackass, so why he decided to make a stink on his last day is anyone’s guess. When he told us two weeks ago that he was leaving, we were prepared to politely say goodbye and—after he was gone—say good riddance. We’d even bought a cake and a bottle of champagne to share with him before he left. We were going to send him off with some class. Disingenuous to be sure, but still with class.

But this guy wanted to pick a fight. And when he started yelling at the girl who sits across from me, I asked him politely to calm down.

"Shut the fuck up, Jim!" he barked. Well, that wasn’t very nice, I thought. In fact, a rage ignited in me the likes of which would make the Devil take a step back.

"Don’t you ever speak to me that way again" I said in a low, steady voice. "Do you understand me?" (I’d learned in the army that to further humiliate or degrade someone, it’s good to ask demeaning questions such as "Do you understand me?" or "Am I making myself clear?")

"Shut the fuck up!" the soon-to-be-bloodied lazy, whining jackass said again.

With the same steady, low-tone, I repeated my warning. "Don’t you ever….EVER…talk to me like that again."

The room around me was completely silent and chilled. Later, a couple of my coworkers told me that they were even scared of me at that moment. ("I was sure you were going to beat his ass right then" one of the web designers told me.)

But I stayed in control and just stared down the lazy, whining jackass.

"What are you going to do Jim?" the dead man taunted. "Do you want…"

Now, I’m going to interrupt right here. What this lazy, whining jackass meant to ask was "Do you want a piece of me?" But what he actually (and accidentally) asked was:

"Do you want a piece of my ass? Do you want a piece of my ass?"

All of us stared at him for a moment to let the reality of what he had just said sink in.

"What?" I asked.

"I mean…" he stumbled, "Fuck it…fuck all of you!"

"Get the hell out of here" I commanded. He obeyed my order.

As a man who hates conflict, I was very shaken by the whole episode. It wasn’t that I felt any fear—(in fact, the perversely sweet sensation of knowing I could inflict maximum pain on this person came over me)—but I would prefer that people were just nice and kind-hearted to each other. To stir things up like that is just mean and selfish.

Abe Lincoln once remarked that every man succumbs at one time or another to "the darker angels of our nature." And scenes like this one in my office reminded me that for all our lofty thoughts and ideals, we’re also just a bunch of squawking animals strutting around the barnyard.

 

Broadway Jim Jenkins