2. How To Clean Out A Desk
The Year of Paying Attention
I wasn’t looking for a grand quest on that particular work day when my boss, a bean counter but not so bad, summoned me to his office, his walls adorned with golf-related artwork, including actual balls. He looked uncomfortable. “I’m sorry to tell you we’re eliminating your position, Tim.” Now we both looked uncomfortable. He continued speaking, but his voice was drowned out by a squealing din, coming it seemed from everywhere at once — the sound of my career grinding to a halt.
“Maybe this is your job doing for you what you wouldn’t do for yourself,” my girlfriend Sarah said over the phone from our apartment on Roosevelt Island, a sliver of land in the East River, part of Manhattan when you’re voting, sort of in Queens if you’re driving, when I called her a little later, dazed, from the street outside my office. I wanted to agree, to believe this was good news, instead of a crisis wrapped in a disaster, coated with thick, chewy failure.
“This is just a job — I mean, you already dealt with cancer, right?” a friend asked over breakfast the next day. Well, sure, and that had been scary, but everything turned out all right… But — now what? Was I supposed to find new work? Commence ministering to the needy? Become an adjunct professor? Sell bait and cold beer from a shack in the Keys? I don’t even fish — why hadn’t I taken up fishing when I was a lad?
I called my friend Billy, who loves fishing. We’d been friends for years, and had worked together on a few humor books. He’d helped me out when my marriage was ending. “A few years ago, when I didn’t know what I was going to do next, a friend of mine told me it was a fantastic opportunity,” he said, and paused. “Remember when you said that to me?” Billy can be annoying.
I turned in my office keys and company ID, shook hands with my traitorous superiors, and listened as everybody advised me to relax, because now it was time to do — whatever I wanted! The shiny opportunity that rear-ended me came well padded with a severance package, but no other instructions. I’d never spent more than five minutes, sure, nearly every day but rarely more than five minutes, imagining not having to go to work, but going instead, I guess, to... where? The beach? A bookstore? A far off city? A different room in my small apartment? Like I say, I didn’t give it much thought. I was buffaloed.
So I spent the next year rushing around, psychically hyperventilating. I set up a consulting company (Tim Warfield Consulting, catchy!). I hired a transition coach. Actually, it was Billy, in his new career. I talked to employment specialists. I took seminars and workshops. The “R” word burned bitter on my tongue. Wasn’t I too young to be retired?
Kinda. But the TV promotion business, my field of endeavor since the dawn of cable TV, was in disarray, and nobody was going to offer me anything like my last cushy job. Was I financially secure? I had a creeping suspicion that I was. The daughters’ educations were paid off. I had no debt. I owned my apartment.
But it felt wrong to not have a job. In the four decades that ended in the bean counter’s office, I’d been unemployed for a grand total of six weeks. I started working as a kid. I loathe golf to this day, after tender years of hauling impatient, cheap bastards’ heavy bags around the Andover Country Club, pedaling home with a few bucks in my pocket and welts rising on my puny shoulders.
I got working papers so I could spend my fifteenth summer being ignored by stoic immigrants in the former mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. In a Dickensian industrial laundry owned by my mother’s cousin, I ripped open double-bagged loads of soiled hospital sheets tagged CONTAMINATED, and ironed stiff waiters coats on a rotating torso contraption, alternately slipping sleeves on and off of four burning-hot arm-fins. “What is this,” I asked my mother, pointing to a jamboree of red spots on my sunken chest. Heat rash.
I learned to drink coffee in junior high at the Lawn & Garden Center, wrestling cubic yards of loam into customers’ station wagons, and re-wrapping burlap around the sodden root balls of small trees in near-freezing temperatures. The only respite came when I’d creep back inside, slinking past the boss, head-down, to the electric coffee urn behind the register. I took comfort in the smile of the girl cow on the can of evaporated milk.
By the time I finished college in Boston, I had three jobs lined up: the “real” one with a regular paycheck and health insurance, and the good ones, producing public radio jazz shows and freelance writing for long-gone periodicals — anybody remember The Real Paper? Perhaps you’d like to see my crumbling, yellowed clippings. Here’s one about collecting antique audio, and another about professional wrestling, entitled Church of Muscle. Ah, here’s my theater review with a picture of Harvey Fierstein. So young, but even then, so obviously gifted.
The problem was, my “real” jobs kept vaporizing. I was hired by a junior college in Kenmore Square, in the shadow of Fenway Park, to teach newswriting and radio production to clusters of sullen teenagers and a few quiet, serious Vietnam vets, until the school’s owner absconded with the school’s liquid assets. What? No paid summer off?! Next I was hired as the audio producer for a filmstrip company. You don’t even know what a filmstrip is, do you? You never will. I decided to focus on freelance writing and part-time radio work.
When a friend in New York needed somebody to split the rent and sleep in the second bedroom, also known as the dining room, I moved in, then went to his girlfriend’s cousin’s office to interview for a job, which seemed prudent, until the freelance got going. The next thing I knew I was in “affiliate relations” at ABC, whatever that was. I moonlighted a few magazine articles, but was too busy after work with my ABC chums inhaling complimentary mini meatballs and colorful cubes of “cheese,” and guzzling rye, honest to god, what was I thinking, rye whiskey. The freelance writing quickly stalled, then stopped.
For decades, I went to one company office or another, urging suggestible citizens to listen to or watch stations and shows and networks. It turned into a career. I worked day (and night) for WPLJ radio, then the nation’s number one rock radio station (now completely gone), where I launched the Red Zeppelin, an oversized balloon emblazoned with the station logo, to float over the football stadium where The Who were rocking out. Don’t get fooled again, I thought, slumped in the parking lot.
Married with two tiny daughters, I relocated the four of us to Chicago for a dream job working for Oprah! Oprah! Laboring in her wildly successful, breathtakingly dysfunctional organization, I learned a key life lesson — when you’re in hell, leave. I hope I don’t hear from any lawyers. I didn’t sign any non-disclosure agreements, but you never know.
A key development to the rest of this story is — I quit drinking and smoking pot. We’ll get into that, because it’s hideous and hilarious, and it happened just months after a colleague convinced me, at age 40, to help launch an ad agency for TV companies. For the next ten years while I continued to not drink, we made spots our clients liked enough to pay for, until the economy tanked and my friend told me to take a powder. These days I avoid the temptations of schadenfreude, so I take just a little pleasure in what happened not long after, when that company followed the junior college and the filmstrip company into oblivion. Not long after I was kicked out of my own agency, I was hired for the best-paying job of my career, and the most fun if you leave out jazz radio. Eleven years later, the guy with balls on his office wall told me I was done.
By this time I’d done many of the things parents hope a son will do — got jobs, paid bills, got married, had children (hi, Ellen & Lizzie!), got sober; and some things parents don’t hope for — got a divorce, got cancer. Lucky for everybody, my parents were dead for those last two. (Miss you, Mom and Dad!) The cancer’s gone, too. Now 62, I’d been out of work for a year, and hadn’t opened the bait shop, nor launched a surprising new career. I was solvent — a lifetime of fear of financial insecurity had resulted in my saving steadily for this potentially terrifying phase of life. I was healthy, despite missing a little chunk of my right kidney, and I wasn’t taking fistfuls of pills for high blood pressure or cholesterol or diabetes. Only the occasional acetaminophen. I’d been meditating like an abject beginner for twenty years, and I showed up for a weekly Level 1 yoga class (“You know,” Sarah said a couple of times, “you can move up to Level 2 anytime after six months…”). I had (and have) a happy relationship with someone I love, despite the yoga crack.
So this is where I find myself, permanently unemployed which means retired, and working to make peace with it. This year I’m going to investigate how to have the best time I can. I would love to get very good at it. I didn’t begin to learn how to relax and be comfortable in my life until I quit drinking, by which time I had become a master in how to scare myself witless with my thinking; I was a genius at catastrophizing. When things didn’t go the way I wanted them to, I nearly always imagined the worst, actually sketching out multiple scenarios in which I would fail, be humiliated, be found out, and become permanently miserable. None of those scenarios ever came to pass, but the planning for them took the majority of my free time. I could have been learning how to play bridge! I could be a bridge master by now! Oh, the tragedy.
Next week: Have You Seen My Cousin Michael?
