Ernie was about ten years younger than Lisa. When you’ve got that much family, black sheep seem to beget more black sheep. Ernie had an opportunity to choose his color. Most of the family was blue-collar making a life for themselves both legitimately and under the table, but nothing truly criminal. Lisa was one of the few who got to college and was making her way in the white-collar world. She spoke the two languages: office politico and city street braggadocio. She knew the paths her siblings and cousins could take. She knew the subtle difference between hanging out under-age drinking at a garage and what gangs did. Lisa knew where Ernie was sliding. It was in the genes and she was going make it stop.
When the economy was booming in the late 1990s one of her clients was looking to get into selling cars to Latinos, Vietnamese, Portuguese and some of the other minority groups around. He needed a guy who knew cars and could speak Portuguese, especially in Fall River near Rhode Island, a huge untapped market of people who wanted flashy cars. That’s not to say all of the car loans were beneficial to the borrowers, but despite certain business practices it was the perfect spot for Ernie, and he earned some really sizable commissions over the years. It was better than watching a cousin rot on the street.
“Yeah, I’m down there. I’m thinking about moving, though. Things are not good. Rhode Island’s getting’ killed for jobs. Breaks your heart, you know. Between people not able to pay off their loans and guys showing up every day looking to see if we’re hiring. The only job we got is to freakin’ impound more cars. The city’s like breakin’ down too. My neighbor had his house broken into and they stole his copper pipes. What the fuck is that? They’ll snap your antenna right off the car for the aluminum. You remember how bad Dorchester and Roxbury was in the early 1980s? Oh shit, it’s just as bad.”
“So you’re going to move?”
“Yeah, probably up north a bit. Maybe one of the suburbs…but I still love working at the dealership. They really do right by their people. We had to lay off a couple of ‘em. A mechanic and an admin girl, but everybody else is hoping that the economy will switch. Sales are down a lot, but the thing about having no jobs around there is that people have to have cars to go to the far out jobs. Cars break down or cars get stolen. We got cars.”
“You guys should make that your motto,” she said with a squinty smile. It was ironic that Ernie, so untrained in business, viewed lay-offs as nothing, but a business decision done for the greater good, while Lisa took each layoff as a personal affront. She wanted to give him that same fire, but she was already challenged by her colleagues at work.
Chapter 6
-Let’s begin to slice up this pie-
Monday, April 13, 2009
“What’s today’s date?” Kelly made a general query to the lunchroom
“April 13th,” Dennis chimed in.
Kelly was fiddling around with her Blackberry. “I can’t believe it’s already April.”
Lisa pressed, “I can. You know why? Because people keep saying to me ‘you must be busy’ and then they touch me on the shoulder as if I just lost a baby to the ‘Gitis’ or something. And then I let them go on ‘…It’s almost April 15th! Just hang in there.’ Then I say ‘Yup, I can’t wait for the tax season to be over so I can go to Sugar-Candy Mountain and dance around with all the other accountants.’ I had jury duty a couple weeks back and I mentioned to some guy that I was an accountant.”
“You need to stop talking to strange men,” Tim cut in.
“I know. Anyway, he says he was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about how they’re looking at eliminating the income tax in favor of a value added tax like they have in Europe. He says, ‘I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that because it will pr’olly mean your job is eliminated.’ Holy Christ, if he actually knew what he was reading about. I told him that once Obama changed the tax structure we wouldn’t really need the IRS anymore so they’d just do audits…on everybody. Guy’s probably at home polishing his weapons stash. Her voice lowered to a fake grumble – I don’t do taxes. Did you know, Philip, that not all accountants actually do taxes?”
“Yes, but most of them actually do some sort of work during the day.”
“You kill me Philip…Flip…Fa..lip. Hey Chris, how was your doctor’s appointment?”
Chris put down his Reuben sandwich for the attack while wiping his mouth with a napkin.
“Goo-ood,” he spouted in two syllables.
“Did he call you with a prognosis?”
“No, no calls.”
“Is something wrong?” Kelly could see Chris was a little off.
“Chris has a sad penis because his girlfriend is bored. Maybe she has a guy on the side,” Lisa smirked.
“She doesn’t have a guy on the side and there’s nothing wrong,” he said matter-of-factly so that Lisa wouldn’t prick any harder.
Chris wasn’t usually the one to end conversations so Lisa politely jumped back to her rant.
“Did they ever jail those people in New Hampshire that refused to pay their taxes? I thought they got the FBI in there, but I’m not sure if they surrendered or what. If you don’t want to pay your taxes because you’re cheap that’s fine. It’s stupid, but whatever. But don’t try to sell me on this shit that it’s unconstitutional. Slackers.”
Chris was still trying to figure out if he was the only one who didn’t know what Donna was up to. With Jack?
When they were back to the cubes, Chris sent an IM to Lisa. “What did you mean about Donna?”
“Eh, that’s nothing. I was just making shit up. You know, I get a little crazy sometimes.”
He was mostly convinced, but how did Jack know Donna? That didn’t make any sense.
“It’s eight o’clock in the Netherlands, what the hell are they doing?”
“They’re only six hours ahead,” Chris corrected
“OK, well then they’ve got an extra hour to screw around. I don’t know who they’ve got making these payments – the janitor, I guess. Franck keeps sending me emails about how department 7200 is taking an expense for brochures for this big Euro Conference. That’s not even your department, you doofus. That guy’s apartment must look like an episode of “Hoarders” because he never sleeps and he’s always on the freakin’ network. He must not be doing too much housecleaning. Plus in his picture he just looks like that kind of guy.” Lisa spoke while typing “I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR QUESTION. PLEASE CONSIDER AN ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION. I don’t even know what the hell that means, but he’ll be up somebody else’s butt anyway so it doesn’t matter.”
Monday was the first day where everyone was back in the office after quarter end and Easter. There was a productive noisiness.
“Sweet! Cake!” Exclaimed Bill Turpin, a financial planner, as he read his email obviously not busy enough.
“Who’s this one for?” Lisa asked the air.
“Pam Sinausky,” the air responded out of Chris’ cube.
“Who’s that?”
“She’s, um, one of the software trainers, I think.”
“Hold on.” Lisa logged into the internal org chart system.
“How do you spell it? Oh, never mind I got it. Oh yeah, that lady. I talked to her once in the gym. There were these old ladies walking around all naked in the locker room and she said it makes you think about where you’re sitting and I said all of their fluids are trapped by the wrinkles so there’s no worries. I don’t think she got it. I quit the gym and the freakies that show up there. What’d she do?”
“Oh,