'Whatever' possessed us

As first posted to my historic and long-deleted (though archived) blog, Sub Specie Aeternitatis, July 14, 2005. 

For a template of my gracious way in handling situations like unto that depicted, see my mock-Nockian, lavishly illustrated (with French postcards, even!) and eminently unGoogleable Me-Moeurs of a Superfluid Manhood from June 14, 2012. Speaking of th' Goog', I note that my young benefactress - not antagonist! - from 1991, whose surname, in one of the finest essays in ironic nominative undeterminism in story or song, legend or lore, in all the annals of recorded history, commences with that of the great German poet who passed many a twilit year in Gespräche mit Eckermann, has long since found gainful employment far more meet to her gifts than that of the attempted herding of wayward bulls among the central Virginia temporariat, in the Rochester, NY market making balloon animals, a talent that can only do her proud in the afterlife among those hitherto bereft of hope that it would ever be spring again. Which reminds me of the one thing I wish I had said to her as she bolted out the door and out of my way for good in ways more than one, a preview of the gracious cover note I enclosed with my time sheet from Manpower: "By the way, Nancy, if you ever need a letter of recommendation - on either side of the hereafter - I shall strive to make it as accurate as I can, that our shared devotion to cosmic justice be served unto the last."

"Whatever" possessed us

 

While temping in Charlottesville just before Labor Day Weekend 1991, a weeklong assignment found me clerking at a chem-rehab outfit whose bizarre tribal practices - I swear I'm telling the truth here, cross me 'art - included for some reason the requirement that its inmates as part of their "therapy" piss in full view of a stranger (me, I'd take a fucking bullet before I'd whip it out in front of anyone save for my doctor - he's gorgeous, after all - or my mirror, tho' I was tempted once, during a job interview I aborted within seconds after learning of this same twisted pee fetish on the part of the hapless chap I had until that moment considered hiring as my employer, to satisfy his conditions for a "monitored urine sample" in pissing his curtains instanter while he watched).

 

Midweek approached without incident. My supervisor of record ("Nancy", I'll say, since memory serves quite well and aliases are for cutthroats and pussies) was away when I took a call from a chap not at all pleased not to reach her. I relayed the message, adding

 

DSL.: He sounded kinda peeved...

N [in the world's most precise vocal facsimile of a mother scolding her screaming two-year-old]: Don't say "peeved" - it's unprofessional!

DSL. [eyes blazing with fury, vocal-cord toaster wires glowing hot orange]: All right, then - he sounded "pissed" - Howzat?

 

We quickly resumed our separate routines in the busy small office, as I polished, cleaned, and filled the magazines of every piece in the armory back of my tongue - you never know when being loaded for bear might extend the fun of a verbal jiu-jitsu match, to mix two metaphoric arts martial. She returned before long, saying

 

N: You know, we need to watch what we say around here, voices can carry, so-and-so heard you and -

DSL. [sporting puckish grin]: Yeah, you're right - my mom always accuses me of talking too darn loud...

N: Yeah, well it's not just that - you shouldn't use words like "peeved" or "pissed"...

DSL. [grin recedes before straitjacket-shredding fangs]: There's nothing wrong with "peeved"...

N: Yes there is -

DSL. : Not in my dictionary...

N: You're not using your dictionary...

DSL. [no word in English before or since invested with more cosmic indifference] Whatever...

 

Minutes after her instant disappearance and after a flurry of muffled voices behind closed doors had me (barely) resisting the urge to snicker into my palm, she returned around 3pm:

 

N: Did Manpower give you a time sheet to sign?

DSL. [smile of lifetime returns upon seeing proverbial graffiti on the wall]: No, they only have us bring it in at the end of a week or the end of an assignment - whichever comes first!

N [heading toward door]: Well, your assignment's over today...you don't need to notify [our temp agent back at Manpower HQ] George, I already did - have a great summer!

 

With her gone, the two hours or so remaining flew by amid her workmates and my assigned chores, Already in Progress. One thing, though: she still needed to sign my time sheet after I filled it out in my rented room that evening. But I was also able now to leave town for, not my planned three-day Labor Day weekend in Connecticut with a dear soul-brother - but, "Now with 67% more days, Free!"

 

So, overcome with humblest gratitude, I drafted the following note whose every word is instinct in memory:

 

Dear Nancy:

 

Since I have the unexpected good fortune of being able to start my Labor Day Weekend a couple of days early, I will be out of town immediately and through next Monday, and thus unable to turn in my time-sheet as soon as planned. So I've done the next best thing and included a completed time sheet, along with a handy postpaid envelope for your convenience.

 

Many thanks for an enjoyable assignment - I'm glad we were able to get caught up with our workload so soon. And I'm grateful to you for your largesse with the cafeteria lunches - they were terrific!

 

Thank you for using Manpower.

 

Yours sincerely, &c.

 

Friends on the phone that evening shared my thigh-slapping best of cheer (save for one head-shaking pal, whose worldview in many such matters - galaxies unseen from mine [Not that there's anything 'wrong' with that - Ed.] - found him thus: "Look, the point is to make money, right?"). Flash-forward fourteen years unto the life everpresent, and see this item from The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" openers from 11 July, from which all blades from the "All in a Day's Work" anecdote above flip into locking place: it seems it was my culturally-charged rendering of my final word ("whatever...") wot set me free in angering my jester's straight woman, who I had hired on a mutually at-will basis as my overseer. The story involves actor Russell Crowe's recent heat-of-the-moment contretemps with a Manhattan hotel clerk whose patrician disdain in firing that loaded pistol of a word earned him a sudden aerial shot, as it were, of a telephone flung by the antipodean rough boy:

 

Attempts to justify Russell Crowe’s assault on the night desk clerk at the Mercer Hotel last month came up short around here. Everyone sided with the humble clerk, who had taken a flying telephone to the cheek, and who, as the Times made sure to point out, lived in Brooklyn in a building with a broken buzzer and strips of peeling paint. In the court of public opinion, if not that of the judge, the movie star, with his millions, his quick temper, and his operational doorbell, hardly stood a chance, no matter how aggrieved he may have been. But then, in the Post last week, came a more detailed account. If it is to be believed—and why wouldn’t it be?—a Crowe partisan had cause to take up his case again, and even to advance a gospel of well-directed violence. The story, on Page Six, went like this: Crowe, up late and in his hotel room, was trying to place a call to his wife, back home in Australia. He was having difficulty doing so. He called the desk clerk, who failed to assist him. Crowe became angry. The clerk muttered something. Crowe said, “What’s your name? The clerk said, “Josh.” Crowe said, “Well, Josh, I’m coming down right now to kick your ass.” Crowe proceeded to the lobby, confirmed that the man behind the desk was indeed Josh, hurled a phone and a vase at him, took a bow, then assumed a karate stance, whether in anticipation of retaliation or for Oscar consideration it wasn’t clear. Enter the cops. It might seem, from these particulars, that the villain would still have to be Crowe, but that is only if you ignore (as Crowe could not) what Josh (full name Nestor Estrada) muttered to him on the phone. What Josh said was “Whatever.” Whatever—well, that changes everything. For some time now (at least ten years, since the movie “Clueless” popularized the “whatever” gesture, made with the thumb and forefinger of both hands, to form the letter “W”), “whatever” has been the bane of anyone trying to persuade an adversary or a child of something that this adversary or child would prefer not to be persuaded of. “Whatever” is as incendiary as it is nonchalant; the nonchalance is what makes it incendiary. “Whatever” turns disengagement into something withering and mean. Fogey insurgencies have sprouted up, incited by moralists who regard the routine deployment of “whatever” as the ultimate symptom of indifference in the culture at large. (See “The Road to Whatever: Middle-Class Culture and the Crisis of Adolescence,” by Elliott Currie.) James Carroll, writing recently in the Boston Globe, cited Lynndie England, who, when she was urged to take part in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, replied, “O.K. Whatever.” Carroll declared, “A spirit of ‘whatever’ animates those much further up the US chain of command.” Perhaps. But it’s hard to imagine that these notions crossed Russell Crowe’s mind as he sat in his hotel room at 4 a.m., telephone in hand. Probably he was attempting to come to terms with the knowledge that, on the question of dialling Australia, the young man on the line did not seem to share his sense of urgency. Unrequited sincerity can be hard to bear, even if you’re not prone to violence. For a man with a rough streak, “whatever” means war. “The word immediately exhibits a complete lack of respect for your point of view or situation,” a biochemist named David Gilbert said last week. “It’s basically saying that your point of view is crap.” Gilbert’s expertise on the “whatever” matter arises not from his work with stem cells and DNA, at suny’s Upstate Medical University, in Syracuse, but from his role as the father of a fourteen-year-old girl. “Girls like to roll their eyes and say ‘Whatever,’ ” he said. “It pisses parents off more than anything.” Gilbert, who is forty-five, plays rhythm guitar and harmonica in an amateur blues band called the Residues. (From their Web site: “ ‘Residues’ are the molecular building blocks of larger molecules. . . . But some people think we are talking about bong water.”) Gilbert wrote a song for the Residues called “Whatever.” The verses consist of a father enumerating various pubescent violations—all-nighter, tattoo, pierced tongue—and a daughter’s inevitable response: whatever, whatever, whatever. The chorus goes, “Now I may be absurd, but I hate that word, whatever.” He has long dreamed that his song will one day wind up “in some B-grade teen movie, where Steve Martin is the dad.” Gilbert hadn’t heard about the developments in the Crowe case, but, while he sympathizes with “whatever” victims everywhere, he generally favors a proportionate response. He said, “When it gets physical, of course, we can’t accept that.”
— Nick Paumgarten

 

That about puts paid to any mystery lingering regarding why Nancy and I ended up following the sage counsel of that most inscrutable of holy men, Yogi Berra: "When you come to a fork in the road - take it." And here I thought we two, ignoring bankers' cautions in enacting our agreed "early withdrawal" (no "substantial penalty", though, for either of us - quite the reverse: see why I'll never run out of material for this blog?), had done so because efficiency found us polishing off our buffet of work as premature members of The Clean Plate Club - color me "Clueless"! As for you, Dearest Nance, I have only two things left to say, and with every speck of irony Brilloed off with rolled sleeves:

 

Thank you, and -

You're welcome.

 

P.S. For those in the Peanut Gallery whose accustomed airplane snack above left them with growling stomachs back in Economy, bark like a seal for me, and I'll toss you this wee chunk of canned mackerel:

 

In 1983, while working in the Suggestion Department at Oldsmobile division of General Motors in Lansing, Michigan between my junior and senior years as an Econ major at NYU, I had the instruction of working with a young junior-exec trainee (who I'll call "Laura", kuzzats how she styled hearse elf) about whom you are about to hear all you need to know.

 

I used the word "frivolous" in a sentence, in all innocence, I swear.

 

Laura looked up from her desk and shot me the filthiest of scowls. "What do you do, stay up all night reading the dictionary so you can sound real intellectual even though you're not?"

 

I don't think I had my "Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions" by Al Jaffee of MAD magazine hat on at that point because, to quote Woody Allen's reply to Christopher Walken in Annie Hall, I was due back on Planet Earth. So forgive me my latest repetition of my stock quote from dear old Dwight Macdonald: "Parody is disarmed before such candor."

 

And hey, give her credit, as someone told me: it's a marvel she herself was able to use such a polysyllabic cortex-stumper as intellectual correctly.

 

[Addendum 14 July 2005: One more telling hint of the higher-order cerebration of which she was capable: confronted with my economist's dissent over her tribalist "buy American" dogma, she, with the stricken expression I came to savor, replied "Why don't you just go live in Russia?" (It's 1983 - don't you know there's a Cold War on? - Ed.) What? And say goodbye to the likes of you? No thanks, Laura - when the comic vanity of an entire great nation seems to concentrate itself in one shoulder-padded bitchocrat with a bowtie the size of a loaf of bread before your very eyes, you don't need Lenin's passage To The Finland Station - the borscht belt comes to an office near you. And there's no parody like self-parody like no parody I know...and so to you, too, Laura, without irony: thank you so much. Oh, and one last thing, priceless: when the sextet or so of us lads in the Suggestion Department (Laura was assigned with us briefly as part of the seriatim department-hopping required for her training) had a boy's night out at our chief's golf condo, guess who raised a "feminist" (yeah, right..."whatever") huff at not having been invited? Yeah, we were so sorry to have excluded her from a beery poker game amid a lewd wall poster, a drunken nine holes marked by pissing on the fairway bushes, all marinated in laddish "humor" - and to have denied ourselves the honor of her civilising distaff presence in our raffish corps. Sexism? I don't think so. To adapt a standup line on racial and religious intolerance - "Why should I hate you for your gender when you give me so many personal reasons not to love you?" This was a woman who, chatting with my father, whom she had just met during a standup cocktail mixer, left him like a shot in literal mid-sentence the moment she spied beyond his shoulder one among them better placed to enhance her connections in furthering her career. Months later, in speaking on the phone from back in college in New York to our onetime chief, I learned that her corporate overseers had blasted to bits the production-number magnum-opus report required of her as a summa of her training. I was pleased not least by the fact that I had not attempted myself to strike her down earlier in tongue-fu combat - the sting of the salt-water is all the dagger when its first icy blast rips the snoozing landlubber a new van Winkle. And besides, my specialty is not one-upmanship so much as - one-punmanship. At least that's the lesson I took from my beefy-limbed plaid-shirted forefather of the forest, Ball Punyan - just axe him! In my case, though: From mighty oaks fall acorns too small to see ... still: I'm a lumberjack, and I'm OK ...