NEWSLETTER

Now it’s become more of a habit than anything; I’m serious when I say that, because I’m not even really into it anymore. Sure, it’s funny when she stumbles on to one—she has moved to four different areas (I’m happy to mention that the coveted window station was taken over by yours truly) but L’Tesha continues to be plagued by this recurring event. I honestly believe that she’s convinced herself that there’s some kind of voodoo going on (you know how those people can be) and she had a family member—older woman with wild hair and these honey-colored eyes—come in and do some sort of religious mumbo-jumbo to her latest desk and chair. I can’t swear that there was chicken blood involved but she did rub some sort of crap all over the place from a little baggie that she pulled out of her purse. I’ll let it go for a few weeks and then every so often, wham! She’ll come in late—this is a habit with her and I’m not saying it as a racial thing because I don’t have a mean bone in my body—and she’ll be juggling a Diet Pepsi and some crappy piece of art that her son did at school and barking out “Good mornings!” to whoever might be willing to listen. That’s what it’s like with her, most days; she’s really not much of a worker and that’s simply a fact, not a slur on her race or creed or color (I get those mixed up but I’m sure you know what I mean). And it’ll be waiting for her, curled up in a side drawer or slopping over the edges of her stapler or wherever the mood strikes me. Another load. It really is kind of funny, you’d have to admit if you saw it even once—I’ll bet they’d play it on one of those America’s Funniest Videos or “You Tube” except for maybe the poop part—and then off we go, the whole 32nd floor, through another round of bonding and holding her and anger and desperate reviews by corporate counselors of our employee files. For added protection, they even installed cameras on our floor which I believe is against the law—I kindly pointed this out one day (through an anonymous note)—but they’re only turned on when the office is empty. At night. Of course what they don’t know, couldn’t really be expected to guess, is that I only do it (a bombing run, as we now call it) on evenings that coordinate with Gary’s schedule so that he can get to the tape in the early AM and erase the ugly truth from the video records. You can practically hear the clack-clack-clack of security footwear as they run down to the vault and desperately check the playback after another incident is reported—and there it is, our humble little office, slumbering away through the night by the collective glow of our inactive monitors. It’s pretty classic.

I don’t really like L’Tesha; I suppose I would agree to that if you were to push me into a corner on the subject—sent me to prison (where I’d no doubt meet a cousin or brother of hers) or put me into one of those secret CIA dungeons and tortured me for a few days—that’s what I’d say. “No, I don’t much care for the lazy, silly, ugly, useless bitch.” That would be the company line, at least, the one I’d go to my grave reciting; and I don’t hold anything against her—not even the way she was hired—and it certainly has nothing (or very, very little) to do with the fact that she obviously has some black mom or dad and God-knows-what-else for a parent. Vietnamese, maybe. I do this, what I’m in the process of doing even at this very moment, because it’s funny and addictive and one of those things that becomes a kind of ritual in your life. And, quite honestly, in some weird way I find that it helps me to understand her—Ms. L’Tesha Jackson, with the one gold tooth and the ratty hair and a penchant for dark purple clothing—and her kind at those moments of crisis when I’m standing there holding her, letting her cry directly onto my Arrow dress shirt. I watch her, as she looks up at me with those big eyes of hers and I can feel the rise and fall of her breasts, breasts that even after two illegitimate children seem to be full and firm and ripe, and with my arms enshrouding her, looking out with my sad face at my surrounding coworkers—who are all nodding and crying in some sort of communal grief—my hands can make out the top, the absolute rise, of what seems to be an astonishingly solid and beautiful ass, just beneath the cheap fabric of a flowered skirt. And at those moments, these few seconds that we spend together once or twice a month now, I feel all the hatred and fear and desperation of black and white and man and woman drop away and we are free, L’Tesha and me, as we clutch one another there on our industrial carpet—as free as the first plantation owner who ever dipped into that well must have felt, holding some young dark-skinned beauty close to his heaving chest. Yes, she and I are merely associates and working our way through a little office tragedy, but in my mind L’Tesha and I are free, drifting freely out the window next to my desk and sailing off into a perfect sky, above the park and the buildings nearby, away toward the glowing ball of yellow sun that sits hovering on the distant horizon…

NEIL LABUTE


Yep. This piece is definitely a bit rich. Obviously you’re creating a character that’s very different from you. Does it take a long time to write in a voice that’s so foreign to your own?

No. It came relatively quickly. It was a matter of days rather than weeks.

Do you do a lot of drafts of one piece?

I’m a tinker. I do a lot of little tweaking, but I don’t think of any of it as vast enough to call it a draft.

It’s funny how I’m still fixated on trying to categorize this piece. Is it a character study? Satire? An attack on the follies of humankind?

Just call it a documentary. It’s something I did a while back and I needed to get it off my chest. [laughs]

That isn’t going to make my job any easier, you know.



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