The Fantasy Years

BING! THE MORE JENNY THOUGHT ABOUT BILL CLINTON coming on to her, the more she couldn’t help but think of Clinton coming on to her. After all, she wasn’t raised to live the way people like Clinton did. She didn’t think Rick was either otherwise she wouldn’t have married him.

What did the Bible say about forbidden knowledge? That’s what she felt she had—forbidden knowledge—that no woman should have to bear. Even though she’d never met Clinton in real life, just realizing such a world where presidents acted that way with strange women bothered her. It bothered her more that some women “went for” Clinton’s advances.

She could just imagine him looking deeply into the eyes of a woman. That kind of smirky, sad look on his face. Like he was just some innocent kid of a president. She could just imagine how he showed up into people’s sad lives, and he brought his glamour and excitement.

And maybe some woman was in the crowd, just a good woman who knew her place in the world, maybe a woman who took care of her family, who loved her husband, maybe she would go to a political event because she was raised to believe she should – that’s what a good citizen participates in politics.

And maybe the woman believed that you should respect people in the world. You should respect presidents because even if you didn’t agree with them, you respected them.

Maybe that’s what she would have thought, as the next caller opened up on her, “Well, it’s about time! I’ve been on hold fifteen minutes!”

But frustration in the world of work was well distributed across the land in the mid-1990s. “So you see? You see how they are? You see what it’s like? The big fucking raise?” Mike asked, gripping and twisting his pay stub in his hand, when he got home from work.

Kath didn’t even tell him not to swear because Rex was around. Kath didn’t even say so and Mike knew she shared his anger over being lowballed at work.

“Twenty-four dollars a paycheck? I’m busting my ass day after day for this company and this is my raise?”

“Are you sure that’s the full amount?” Kath asked.
“I asked Norman when I opened my paycheck. He said it was the most they could do. 24 dollars?” For once Kath’s silence was an endorsement, Mike felt, not a repudiation of what he said.

“Shhh…There’s money in the house.”
“What?” Ben asked.
“There’s money in the house,” Randy whispered, with his finger held over his lips. Randy was the other guy who worked in IT at Tower Investments. Ben had gotten the job in IT support.

“Why are we whispering?” Ben whispered.
“Because there’s money in the house.” Randy had a glint in his eyes, that fell somewhere mischief and antipathy. Like he was relishing telling Ben to shut up.
“But…”
“We just keep our voices down. You’ll notice the only people allowed to raise their voices are the principals.” The sting of reproach lit up in Ben’s eyes. He couldn’t hide it. “I guess the principals like the silence,” Randy said, soothing and stroking
Ben’s irritation.

Ben nodded.

“Helps them concentrate on their decisions.”

Okay, Ben thought. First week. Just the first week. Things look different than they really are in any new place in the first week. Because if I didn’t know any better, I’d think Tower Investment is one of the weirdest, most hostile places I’d ever stepped foot in.

But Ben chose to apply here, he reasoned. Just like it was his choice to go to college at Pitt and end up $32,945 in debt. He had the choice. He could have chosen to go to Northwestern and ended up in $46,000 of debt like his cousin. Or he could have chosen to go to University of Chicago and ended up $50,000 in the red.

The choices were his. So was the personal responsibility to deal with consequences.

It’s just that morning moments like these didn’t make him feel any better about his past decisions. Sure it was only the first week. Sure, it was. But already Ben found the work tedious. It was like a description he’d read of war somewhere. Agonizing boredom interrupted by moments of sheer terror.

Randy, his co-worker, didn’t like to talk much, either. He was content not getting to know Ben.

Randy spent most of the day playing Neverwinter Nights online while listening to Rush Limbaugh on his small AM radio. In fact, Randy was happy to let Rush do all the talking.

The terror part of the job for Ben came when one of the principals called. As Randy took the trouble to explain, whenever a principal needs something fixed on their computer, they need it “yesterday.”

And so it was Ben alone with Randy in the IT room. Ben and Randy. Rush Limbaugh doing all the talking. Until the end of Rush’s show, when Randy turned to Ben, after digesting three hours of righteous indignation.

There was a glimmer of humor in Randy’s eyes: “You liberals don’t have a real strong sense of justice.”

“Why do you say that?”

“How can you support someone like Bill Clinton?”
“Well, I…”
“Here’s a man who lies to his wife.”
“Yeah, but he—“
“He’s cheats on her.”
“But that doesn’t affect—“
“How can we trust him to be honest with us if he isn’t even honest with his wife?”
“But that’s not politics.”
“Trust is the essence of politics.”
“But that’s not what I mean.”
“But you support Clinton? Don’t you?”
“I don’t think he’s the best guy in the world.”
“But you support him to some degree?”
“To some degree.”
“It’s all relative to you liberals, isn’t it?” Randy said with a smirk and returned his attention to his engrossing game of Neverwinter Nights.