A strange time (Pt. 1)

I’m going back to another one of those strange times in my past, a period when I was in complete limbo and found myself in a job which was so hideously boring and mind-bendingly vacuous that I thought at times I was going to lose it completely.

It was the fall of 1984, and I had just returned from my first around-the-country road trip, having spent the summer of that year as a temp in a law firm in Seattle trying to earn enough money to return to New Orleans. The drive from Seattle to New Orleans in August was so wonderful and grand an experience that I was completely diverted from the messy realities that awaited me back in New Orleans, namely, no job and no place to live other than with my brother.

When I came back, I tried to settle into a room in the rear apartment on Louisiana Avenue where my brother and his roommate lived and where they generously agreed to let me stay for awhile.

For the first few weeks, I was still off on that trip somewhere, crossing the high plains of eastern Colorado, following mountain rivers past historic sites and natural wonders, in awe over the vast, open-sky world of the West. I spent days typing the journal entries from the trip on my battered Smith-Corona typewriter, oblivious to whatever cares and anxieties were soon to beset me.

A short time later, I was starting work at a large downtown law firm, a paralegal job obtained through the connections of my attorney father, which were many and powerful in that city. I didn’t want to do it, and I didn’t like the idea of being set up in something, but I felt I had no choice. I had no idea what to do otherwise, and I had just spent the summer summarizing depositions at another large law firm across the country. Needless to say, people tend to want to know how you come upon a job such as that on such short notice, and, being naturally suspicious and resentful, some of them set out to either ignore me or make life difficult for me, or humiliate me, which happened auspiciously during the first week. And my father happened to see the perpetration of that noxious little stunt. I’m not a person who hates, but I came close with that one individual at that law firm. I never had any more trouble from him, however.

Here I was, two careers behind me in newspaper work and teaching, shuffling papers and given busy work that seemed to me further punishment for my having had so many weeks of carefree travel and road adventures. It was like some leavening force sent to flatten me into submission, into the knowledge that I could not get away with such things as freedom from responsibility, jobs, rent, obligations, etc., even if for a short time.

I remember a temp worker who had it worse than I did, and she went about her tasks uncomplainingly. I can see her now, a middle-aged woman, from a typical New Orleans neighborhood, stuck in a small, windowless storage room in that high-rise, with a photo-copy machine, and surrounded by dozens of boxes of documents from the discovery proceedings of a large and seemingly endless litigation involving big oil companies, towing companies and the like. And this brave woman, in order to make her $3.75 an hour, had to systematically take those documents apart for eight hours a day and make copies of them. It was staggering to me. I just couldn’t imagine having the coping skills to do that day in and day out, with no break in the routine.

My co-workers were several other paralegals, all in their early to mid-twenties, so I was the elder of the group at 33. One of them was a truly obnoxious person, not long out of college, in her first big job and full of every conceit to which a person of her uptown and privileged background was susceptible. I couldn’t believe that I was working with her. It was almost unbearable, but the whole place was almost unbearable — joyless, souless lawyers driven by the fierce need to obtain billable hours. My state of mind did not exactly endear me to them, but I was so completely out of place there that it didn’t really matter. It is painful to this day to even think about the whole situation.

I had one acquaintance there I’d occasionally go to lunch with, a young man in his mid-twenties, impeccably dressed compared to my more casual style, and very serious and intent about making some kind of mark in that very epitome of an establishment law firm. We’d occasonally eat poboy sandwiches and French fries at some restaurant on St. Charles Ave. or in the French Quarter, a few blocks over from where we worked.

But most of the time I had lunch by myself, walking around the downtown area and absorbing the sights, sounds, and shocks of that frenetic city at lunch hour.

Most often I’d walk down Canal Street to a huge B. Dalton Bookstore (I don’t know if it’s still there), and spend the remainder of my lunch hour browsing among all the titles, stretching out time as much as I could before heading back to that dreaded office.

This was in the dead center of the most turbulent, confused and utterly directionless decade of my life. I had drifted away from whatever moorings I had in the Catholic Church, intermittently attending services, but sensing I could not stay much longer. I was just aimless, there is no other word to describe it. In the prime of life. A castaway marooned in some spiritual desert. I kept trying to understand why I couldn’t settle down, why my previous teaching career had come apart, why, why, why?

(Continued)