“Toxic.”
I’ve been called many terrible things throughout the course of my life—and have deserved more than I probably care to admit. But that morning, sitting in my managing editor’s office, was the first time anyone ever used this word to describe me.
Because I am who I am (and will never be anyone else) the first thing I thought of when I heard that word was the guy pictured up above.
I had to then stop myself from thinking about old Lloyd Kaufman movies, so I could listen to what my boss was saying. “From this moment on, you’re not allowed to talk to him and you can’t go into the part of the building he works in. We’re moving you to the spare room next to the kitchen.”
Room? There wasn’t a room next to the kitchen. There was just that closet filled with old boxes and furniture.
Oh.
***
10 minutes later, I found myself moving years worth of holiday decorations and other forgotten office detritus, trying to figure out how I was going to transform this space into a place where I could get work done and move three inches without tripping over something.
The person she was referring to was the first editor I had ever worked with. Our relationship started out fine, but had soured when I eventually realized he would pretty much say and do anything that suited him from moment to moment (including blithely contradicting statements he had made with utter conviction just minutes earlier). That didn’t bother me as much as when he edited my first manuscript and managed to create more errors than he corrected. From that point on we had become less than friendly.
But it didn’t matter, because I was still working from home and only had to deal with him a few times a month. The problem with working from home, though, is that it’s easy to become paranoid about how you’re being perceived back amongst the office folk, especially when your main contact has officially labeled you “difficult”.
I made the decision to start working out of the office when I received an email from him about my book “Urban Legends”, which I was halfway finished. In it he suggested that I—after three months of writing and research—obviously didn’t know what an urban legend was. I reacted badly to this. I actually threw up after I hit “send” on my response, which was as close as you could professionally get to saying, “FUCK YOOOOOOOOOOOOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and not be fired.
The problem was a lack of communication. It had turned out that when they told me to write a book called “Urban Legends” they actually wanted a book of creepy campfire-style stories, while I had mistakenly assumed they wanted a book about urban fucking legends (only a small fraction of which qualify as good campfire material). Maybe if I had been around when they discussed the project, this confusion could have been avoided.
I ended up in the cubicle across from his. For a time it appeared we were going to be able to keep our hostility at bay, but I couldn’t stop my body from tensing whenever he started waxing philosophical about subjects he clearly knew nothing about. It didn’t help that he also insisted on calling all of the male writers he worked with “dawg” with totally unforgiveable Randy Jackson levels of sincerity.
I always did my best to stay silent as he posited his various cultural theories, but sometimes my best wasn’t good enough and I would sometimes let loose with a sarcastic zinger. Ironically, though, the statement that got me kicked out of the office and banned from his presence wasn’t a crack or a put-down, but just my stating a dissenting opinion during an utterly random debate.
He and another writer were discussing the notion of achieving immortality through your actions and he brought up the examples of Misters Gadget and Gizmo, saying, “Those guys live on because their names became words people use everyday.”
“I think you’re wrong about that,” I heard myself saying. “Sure, their names became everyday words, but how many people actually know who they were or that they even existed? You can’t say someone’s immortal if all they are is a sentence in a book about weird word origins.”
Can you spot the word that made him lose his shit and go to our boss? I figured it out a few days later when we were sitting with two writers in a cocktail lounge. We were both screaming at each other after one of them innocently attempted to play the role of peacekeeper and mistakenly urged us to air out our problems.
“WHO ARE YOU to tell ME I’m WRONG?” he demanded to know. “No one in my ENTIRE LIFE has EVER told me I was wrong!”
I had no response to this. Seriously, what can you say to someone who is actually able to say that without the slightest hint of self-awareness?
***
That next morning I was the “toxic” asshole moving boxes in the closet next to the kitchen. I felt sick to my stomach. As someone with natural hermit tendencies I often wondered if it was possible I simply wasn’t able to get along in normal social situations and this seemed to be the proof I never wanted. It wasn’t just that I didn’t fit in, but apparently my presence actually polluted the atmosphere around me. I had to be kept away from everyone else—like the relative who lives in the attic of a gothic mansion and is never, ever discussed.
The good news was that I managed to find a desk hidden underneath the boxes. I cleared a path around it and then went to the “Forbidden Zone”—for apparently the last time—and retrieved my computer, chair and everything else that belonged to me.
I then spent a fruitless few hours trying to cobble together a couple of paragraphs, but the atmosphere was so overwhelmingly existential I felt like a character in a first year English student’s deeply terrible imitation of a Kafka story. I wasn’t going to last long if I didn’t try and do something to improve my situation.
That afternoon at lunch, I ran out of the building, desperate to escape my solitary confinement. Not hungry, I passed the time wandering into random stores down the street. One of them was devoted to collectibles and as I was about to walk out, I noticed a bunch of framed 8X10 photos on the wall.
My eyes were immediately caught by two in the corner, featuring the casts of “The Dukes of Hazzard” and “WKRP in Cincinnati”. “WKRP” was one of my favourite sitcoms of all time and “Dukes” featured one of my first childhood crushes in the form of the cut-off clad Daisy Duke. It occurred to me that every office needed at least one framed photo of people you really cared about, and here I was blessed with the chance to have two. I bought them immediately and placed them both on my desk when I got back.
“Is that Daisy Duke?” I heard someone ask over my shoulder about an hour later. “That show was so awesome!”
I turned and saw someone from the accounting team. I didn’t even know his name. “Yeah,” I answered. “I also picked up these guys,” I told him pointing to the other photo.
“Johnny Fever! I used to watch that show all the time.”
When he left, I turned back and looked at the two photos and then up at the vast expanse of white wall space behind them. If I could get a person’s attention with just two photos on my desk, what could I get if I covered this entire empty canvas?
***
That night I went through my already-vast-for-2003 DVD collection and gathered together a bunch of those small movie poster/chapter index inserts they used to include. First thing the next morning I spent a happy half-hour taping them randomly on the closet’s walls. Less than two minutes after I was finished I heard, “Wow, that looks awesome!” from behind me. Once again it was someone who I had never spoken to before.
From that point on, I did everything I could to turn the closet into the coolest workspace in the building. I brought in interesting toys (my Simpsons’ Stephen Hawking figure was a big hit) and changed up the posters and photos so there was always something new to look at. The result was regular visits from folks who I had never spoke to before my exile. I also discovered I enjoyed a luxury I hadn’t even considered when I first moved in—the privacy allowed by a closable door.
Now, I can definitely understand why many people regard gossip as a pernicious evil that can rot away all that is good in a group faster than the deadliest cancer, but in this instance it proved to be my salvation. By being able to close that door, I was able to listen as my fellow employees dished and vented about what was going on in a way they couldn’t get away with anywhere else inside the building. Rather than being isolated from the group, I now had access I never previously dreamed of. I quickly learned that I was nowhere near as alone as I originally imagined.
The most personally satisfying revelation came when two different co-workers from the “Forbidden Zone” told me that not only did they not consider my presence toxic when I worked beside them, but they didn’t even know my former editor and I didn’t get along. I wasn’t a radioactive mutant after all; I was just a guy who refused to kowtow to someone who couldn’t conceive of any instance in his life where he might have ever been wrong.
And his arrogance and double talk quickly aimed itself in other directions and people started to conclude that maybe I hadn’t been the one with a problem, especially since I got along perfectly with every other editor I worked with after that (well, except for one, but that’s another long story).
***
I was living a classic cliché. What had seemed like a terrible punishment at first, actually turned out to be the best thing that happened to me. Had I somehow managed to stay out of the closet, chances were I never would have been able to form the friendships I still enjoy to this day. I would have just been another writer in a corner, instead of the dude beside the kitchen with all of the cool stuff who you could spend a few minutes bitching with.
Eventually I was able to return to the “Forbidden Zone” when my old editor moved to another city. I liked the idea of being amongst people again and decided the move was worth the sacrifice of losing the door, especially since I was free to move all of my decorations to my cubicle. Since then I’ve had other office jobs and in all those cases I’ve followed the same strategy. I’ve made my workspaces feel like home, because for at least eight hours of the day—that’s exactly what they are.
In my current job, my cubicle is literally the first thing people see when they leave the staff lunchroom. And what they see is a colourful space filled with toys and posters and they smile and sometimes they come up and tell me how much they love what I’ve done with it and how it brightens their day.
And when this happens I remember that first day trapped in the closet and how my decision to refuse to give up is still paying off for me over ten years later.