Temporary Insanity Read online

Tina shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that with your legal aptitude test results. In the word-processing centers, you have to know the correct way to format the documents.”

  “But they look right,” I insisted. Style over substance if absolutely necessary.

  “That may be, but if a document needs to be revised by someone on a subsequent shift, they won’t be able to do it quickly and correctly unless everyone does it the same way.”

  So much for aesthetics and creativity.

  You want to work in law firms. What the hell do you expect?

  “So, where does that leave me?” I asked Tina.

  “I can send you out on interviews for first-shift legal secretarial—simple letters and such—or for first-shift paralegal work, which would translate to a couple of dollars less per hour, but more research and less direct contact with the attorneys.”

  First shift would mean the same day-job hours I was used to. And the lowest pay scale. As the shifts got later, the pay rate increased. I sighed. If I could make a few dollars more per hour than Uncle Scrooge had been coughing up, I suppose I could live with it, so I numbly acquiesced to Tina’s assessment of my talents. After all, beggars can’t be choosers, and within a couple of weeks the landlord would be begging for the monthly rent, twirling his metaphorical mustache and threatening to evict my ancient granny if we didn’t fork over our check forthwith.

  “I’ll be in touch,” Tina assured me. “I’ll line up a couple of interviews and give you a call.” I left Turbo Temps wishing she hadn’t looked like her task was Herculean.

  Chapter 2

  “Your uncle’s a rat bastard,” Gram said, pouring milk into her tea. She squeezed a lemon wedge over her cup and drank the curdled brew, seemingly oblivious to the science experiment she’d created. Gram liked her tea that way. With milk for the English side of the family and lemon for the Russian side.

  “Your mother’s people, they never gave Danny and me a penny when we were starving and living off cat food in that single room above the brothel on Eighth Avenue.”

  Although she always had a flair for the dramatic, which means I probably come by it honestly, Gram did have a point. She’d never completed a formal education, having run away from home in her mid-teens to become a Ziegfeld Follies girl during the waning years of those extravaganzas. She also claimed to have had an affair with the great impresario, “but that was only between his marriages.” Gram always had her scruples, and, for a nonagenarian, most of her marbles.

  The apartment we shared, Gram and I, might have been a monument to vaudeville. She kept every room painted a shade of Florentine red—“bordello red,” she called it with a wink, recalling her humble marital dwelling in Hell’s Kitchen. The numerous framed photos on the walls, sepia-toned and yellowing with their increasing age, bore testament to the remarkable career she and her husband shared, beginning back in the 1930s. Grandpa Danny Finnegan, about ten years Gram’s senior, had at one time been the toast of Broadway, a hoofer who had headlined as “the one, the only Danny Boy” at the Palace Theatre, where Judy Garland, decades later, performed her farewell concerts. To play the Palace—that was the pinnacle of success back then. But Grandpa Danny and, at one time, Gram, had been very fond of their liquor. It was Danny’s love for Kentucky mash which, with his working-class New York accent he pronounced “boy-bun,” that had been his undoing. It destroyed his senses of timing and discipline as a dancer, wrecked his relationships with producers, and rendered him incapable of sustaining the tap dance studio that he and Gram had started when their performing careers began to wane.

  Still, Gram never had a bad word to say about her husband, even after the night that he stumbled boozily down the five flights of stairs onto Eighth Avenue for a cigarette (she wouldn’t let him smoke in the house, especially around their babies), and never returned.

  Despite his transgressions—and they were legion—Grandpa Danny remained a saint. Uncle Erwin, on the other hand—actually it was Gram who’d dubbed the man “Uncle Earwax” back when I was a kid—was a louse. Gram was never too crazy about my mother’s side of the family.

  She offered me a Pepperidge Farm cookie. Gram liked to take the cookies out of the bag, artfully arrange them on one of her flowered Royal Doulton plates, and offer them to guests, insisting they were homemade. She took a Milano from the dish and issued an unladylike snort. “A family takes care of its own. Through thick and thin. What right has that man to call you ‘stupid’?” Her indignation physically manifested itself in an increasingly pink rash below her throat and across her “poitrine,” as she liked to call it. “He’s a Philistine. He wouldn’t know art or beauty or culture if it bit him in the ass.”

  “I’m afraid it has little or nothing to do with any of those three things,” I told her.

  “I know, I know,” Gram sighed into her tea. “He’s just a rat bastard. Like Richard Nixon.”

  Her other pet peeve.

  I turned her teacup around on the saucer and Gram gave me a confused look. “It’s chipped there,” I explained gently. “You could hurt yourself.”

  She ignored me. Or maybe she just didn’t hear my remark. “So tell me about the employment agency. Did they love you?” She held up her hand, indicating I should wait to respond. “Shhh, listen to that,” she said, “can you hear it? Close your eyes; it’s even better that way.”

  I did so and listened as one of the city’s picturesque—and anachronistic—horse-drawn carriages clop-clopped down the street, past our third-story window.

  “That’s my favorite thing about living on this block for all these years,” Gram said dreamily. “Even better than having the crosstown bus at the corner.” She opened her eyes and looked at me. “Now. Did the temp people love you?”

  I swallowed a large gulp of my now-cool tea. “I’m afraid not. I thought my skills were marketable ones, but they’re not good enough to get me placed in the jobs I feel I can stand waking up for, five mornings a week. Although anything would be better than Uncle Earwax at this point. My suspicions were confirmed, though, that seat-of-the-pants training won’t get you very far in those fancy law offices.”

  Gram ran a gnarled finger over my hand. Her pale skin appeared nearly translucent, her knuckles swollen and blue from arthritis. Only her indoor gardening hobby kept her hands pliant. “It’s kind of like show business, isn’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “All these office jobs. I could never type a lick, never learned shorthand, those receptionist jobs with all the cables tangled up like spaghetti terrified me. Your Aunt Edna did that for years. No wonder she suffered a breakdown at forty. But take performing. There’s something we both know. In my day, you didn’t take acting classes. Dancing, of course. Singing, maybe—if you wanted to go for grand opera. But acting? You could either do it or you couldn’t. If a producer liked your looks, he hired you, and if you were really abominable, they’d get you a coach for the part.”

  I wasn’t sure where she was going with all this. “So are you saying I should take lessons so I can get these word processing skills I never learned under my belt?”

  Gram shook her head emphatically. “Nah. Why waste time and money taking lessons for something you don’t really want to be doing with your life? You’re a smart girl, Alice, and you know what you know. And a smart person will see that and offer you a job.”

  I hoped she was right. I told her about the poor woman at the temp agency whose computer had frozen during her typing test, the employment counselor’s reaction, and my going to bat for the lady. Gram beamed and squeezed my hand. “Oooh, you’re such an activist,” she said proudly. “You get that from me! You’re the only one in the family who understands why you have to tilt with windmills from time to time. Even your Grandpa Danny didn’t get it. And,” she added with a sigh, “your mother’s side of the family never did.”

  “You have the wisest grandmother,” my friend Dorian said over a Bud Lite at The Wooden Horse, our favorite Greek diner. I was shoveli
ng in a turkey club. Dorian doesn’t eat. Actually, that’s not true, but he doesn’t pay for meals. Or groceries. Dorian has a master’s degree that he could turn into good money by teaching theater courses, but to do so would be tantamount to admitting defeat as an actor. He also staunchly refuses to get a survival job like I’ve got, or to tend bar or wait tables as do so many New York artists striving for their big break. So he makes ends meet by doing background work on film, commercials, and TV shows that are shot in New York. Perks of on-set employment include all the food you can eat, all day long. When he doesn’t have an “extra” job, Dorian reads The Hollywood Reporter to learn what’s filming around town. He’s got a nose for scoping out their shooting locations and he manages to hang around the “crafts service” food tables long enough to chow down. Since there are hundreds of people involved in making a movie on any given day, no one is likely to question his presence. If anyone ever does, he flips them his valid Screen Actors Guild card and tells them his paperwork is a couple of blocks away, back in the extras holding area, which is usually a large hall, like a high school gym or a church basement where the producers corral the background actors until they’re ready to be brought on set for a shot.

  “You know she offered me tap-dancing lessons. For free,” Dorian said. “But I was afraid to embarrass myself, even in front of your grandmother. I’m hopeless. Can’t sing a note and can’t dance to save my life. I must be the only gay man in New York with no rhythm. What’s the terpsichorean equivalent of tone deafness?”

  When I started to ruminate over it, the words “two left feet” on the very tip of my tongue, Dorian reminded me that his question had been rhetorical.

  “Hiiiii, guys!” Our friend Isabel breezed over to the table, heedless of the waitress she’d almost blindsided with her enormous shoulder bag. “Am I dripping in sweat or what?”

  Dorian looked at her. “What,” he responded, then offered her a sip of his cold longneck. “You look like something the cat dragged in.”

  “Just about,” Izzy said. She relaxed her shoulder and her bag fell to the floor with a thunk that caused my plate to hop an inch or so off the table. “The Public Theater is doing a musical version of Romeo and Juliet. I just got out of the audition, and wouldn’t you know it, nobody on the subway would give me a seat, even though they kept slamming into my bag and then giving me dirty looks. You would think they’d realize that if I had this damn thing sitting on my lap, it would be out of everyone’s way.” She looked at her watch. “Holy shit! I was on line down there for five hours.” She shook her head disgustedly and slid her butt onto the red pleather banquette. “All that for sixteen bars of an uptempo and sixteen bars of a ballad.”

  “There’s already a pretty damn good musical version of R&J,” I said, offering Izzy half my sandwich. She hungrily accepted it.

  “Yeah, I believe it’s called West Side Story,” Dorian added. “And, pardon my asking, but what sort of an uptempo did you sing for an audition for Romeo and Juliet?”

  Izzy grinned, then tried to discreetly slither a slice of tomato back into her mouth before responding. “It’s not called Romeo and Juliet. It’s a rock opera called Starcrossed! Exclamation point. Don’t forget the exclamation point—to make sure you know it’s a musical, like Oklahoma! or Oliver! or Fiorello! Go figure. I didn’t know what else to sing, so I went with ‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’ and then I did one chorus of ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ from Jesus Christ Superstar.” Dorian and I stared at her. “I said I didn’t know what else to do,” she said defensively, spilling tomato seeds from my turkey club down the front of her shirt. “God-damn!” I handed her a paper napkin.

  “Here. Blot. Are they still setting the show in Renaissance Verona? Not that you didn’t knock ’em dead, because I’m sure you did, but you know how narrow-minded casting directors can be. You don’t exactly look classically Italian at the moment,” I said, appraising her spiky blond hair and blue eyes.

  “Yeah, but with a name like Isabel Martinucci, they oughta figure it out.”

  “It shouldn’t matter if you’re really Italian or not,” Dorian added. “Hel-lo! Isn’t that why they call it ‘acting’? Does that mean that because my name is Dorian Mueller I should only play Nazis? Or, in my case, gay Nazis? I wouldn’t even get cast in The Producers, because I can’t sing or dance. I’d barely work a day in my life!”

  “I’ve always wanted to be Italian,” I told them. “When I started acting professionally I thought of changing my name from Alice to Alessandra, but ‘Alessandra Finnegan’ doesn’t exactly do the trick and I owe my Gram too much to insult her by changing my surname.”

  “I like your name,” Dorian said. “It sounds like a name from a good old-fashioned Capra film.” He waved his hand in front of himself as though he were visualizing an image on a giant movie screen. His voice modulated into the timbre and cadences of one of the old Fox Movietone newsreel announcers. “‘Alice Finnegan, the faithful and devoted secretary with a heart of gold, just struggling to afford seamless nylons during the lean years. Loyalty is her middle name.’”

  It was a good opportunity to tell them about my placement interview at Turbo Temps. Obviously, I didn’t have the greatest feeling in the world about the experience, but I needed something to tide me over until I got cast in a show that would pay the bills. Crawling back to Balzer and Price after such a provocative exit line was a non-option, and Gram’s Social Security checks alone didn’t come within a ballfield of paying the rent. Besides, I detested the thought of sponging off of her. I treated our living arrangement as seriously as I would any situation where I was sharing the place with a roommate.

  “Welcome back to temporary hell,” Izzy said.

  Dorian took a slug of beer. “Isn’t that purgatory?”

  Izzy looked at him and snickered. “Yeah, temporary hell is perennial purgatory. You know, sometimes you just have to hold your nose and jump in,” she said. “Look at my bread and butter.” Izzy worked for attorneys too, the kind who specialized in medical malpractice, defending butchers—I mean doctors—who fucked up royally, usually resulting in the patients’ deaths (if the victims were fortunate) or major-league physical deterioration (if they weren’t). “I can’t even take a lunch break when I work for these guys, because I can’t keep the food down anyway. The things I have to type make me gag. If the gory details don’t get to me, my bosses’ cavalier attitudes do. One of these lawyers actually had the balls to dictate into a tape, mind you, ‘with any luck the patient will expire in the next couple of months, thereby avoiding the necessity of a prolonged and protracted trial.’”

  “Whatever happened to getting one’s day in court?” Dorian asked us.

  I finished the last crumb of my sandwich. “That’s the difference between your day jobs and ours,” I told him. “The wheels of justice turn swiftly only on Law & Order.”

  “So why do you girls work for them? Wasn’t it Shakespeare who said, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers’?”

  “Yes, Dorian,” I replied. “Though, unfortunately, the speech is often taken out of context.”

  “It doesn’t change the sentiment, however,” Izzy added.

  When I returned home from The Wooden Horse, Turbo Temps Tina (sort of like Bronx Barbie) had left me a voice mail regarding an interview the following afternoon with Ramona Marlboro, the managing coordinator of legal assistants at Newter & Spade, a conservative “white shoe” law firm in midtown. They handle mostly corporate litigation and white-collar crime, such as insider trading or embezzlement. These days, more than ever, they must be very busy.

  Well, I thought, combing through my closet for something appropriate to wear, preferably something without a plunging neckline or a well-over-the-knee-hem, Ramona Marlboro merits a brand-new pair of pantyhose, fresh out of the cellophane. I tugged them on and opted to go with a simple brown suit that I use for background work on films and TV shows. It does nothing for my coloring, but extras aren’t supposed to stand out; the point is to
look as wren-like as possible most of the time. I once did a film job where the high-powered star was a blonde who insisted that there be no other blondes on set. She had enough clout to get away with it. Izzy was livid when she heard about it and wanted to phone the Screen Actors Guild and start up a discrimination suit. Since my hair is more or less a dirty strawberry blond, I got away with being hired, but Izzy’s shade is usually closer to lemon yellow and working for lawyers for so many years can turn even the most rational human being into a rabidly litigious one. I think Dorian finally talked her out of investigating what it would take to file a class-action suit joined by every blond SAG actress in New York by reminding her that she might end up blacklisted forever over barely a hundred dollars, the take-home pay for a normal day of extra work.

  Back to my boring brown suit. One of the tricks when you go in to these humongous law firms looking for employment is to look as non-threatening as possible. They want to be the threatening ones.

  Oh, and one other bit of advice: Leave your sexuality at home, Alice. Don’t look alluring.

  I’m not doing anything on purpose, I told my mirror image. This is what I look like. Do you want me to look like hell on purpose?

  You’re going to be interviewed by a woman. Trust me, she’ll want to be the best-looking one in the room. You’re just there to do your job so you can leave at a decent hour of the day and pay your rent; you’re not there to meet a husband. Besides, do you really want to marry a lawyer?

  Ummmm…

  Don’t answer that.

  I arrived at the plushy offices of Newter & Spade and was introduced to Ms. Marlboro, the woman in charge of hiring temporary legal assistants. Turbo Temps had already predetermined that I wasn’t going to be able to cut it in the word processing center and I’d begged not to work directly for one of the lawyers as his secretary. The whippet-thin Ramona Marlboro appeared to be in her early thirties with short, dark hair, thinning on top, actually. Yes, thinning. I bit my lip. Her appearance was already a bad sign. My job history is littered with bad luck working for small-boobed, short-haired female superiors. I have nearly scientific data to prove that I get along fine with a boss who’s a woman as long as her hairdo is page-boy length or longer. Ramona was a definite uh-oh. She shook hands with me, then surreptitiously smoothed hers over the jacket of her navy double-breasted suit before offering me a seat.