Funhouse Mirror
The sunlight bounced off the glass of the Office Max doors, leaving only a projection of a haloed man in a button down shirt. I was the man in the button down shirt, and I was standing outside of the Office Max at 8:17 am, much earlier than I am sure any other person had ever been to an office supply store. But today was my first day on the job and the store opened at 10, so they told me to arrive at 8:15. I arrived at 8:17.
I was staring into my own projection when the image was shattered by an overly eager employee. It was shattered in a metaphorical sense (I apologize, the term “shattered” is certainly misleading while describing glass) by the door swinging of a rosy cheeked man in his mid-20s, sporting a button down shirt and tie with a single button undone. I could tell immediately that the one undone button was his attempt to remain casual, chill, cool while working a job that I also could tell was neither casual, chill, nor cool. He forced his way through the door and immediately found his face unexpectedly close to my face. Except, he was tall, must’ve been about six foot five. And I am only five foot seven. So I suppose we were less face to face and more chin to forehead. I had to peer up to recognize him.
“Josh Saunders,” hummed Mrs. Kowalski to no response. “Josh Saunders,” she repeated without altering her volume.
Mrs. Kowalski was about to flick her crinkly wrist against the attendance sheet, moving on, when a wiry kid in the back of the class piped up, “Actually, I go by Joshua.”
Oh God, I thought to myself. This miscommunication could only really mean two things. Either a) the boy’s true name (which would show up on the attendance sheet) was Josh, but he preferred to go by Joshua. Blech. Or b) his name was Joshua, but he had previously asked the teacher to cross out the “ua”, leaving only Josh. And now, after a wickedly inexplicable (and uninteresting) change of heart, he had decided that he would prefer to once again go by the far more biblical name, Joshua. I was at a loss in assessing which option bothered me more. “Um, actually, I go by Joshua.” He was timid, but it felt like he was so disappointed with Kowalski’s misinformed nomenclature. Fuck you Joshua, I thought.
“Good to meet ya, the name’s Josh!” bellowed this filled out, paler faced former member of Mrs. Kowalski’s 10th grade English class. He had clearly just glanced at me; he couldn’t recognize the top of my head without his glasses on.
“Oh, hey. Did you go to Mountain View?” I stammered.
“Yeah I did!” he paused. “Oh man, you’re Duncan? Duncan Phillips? Good to see you man! How’re you doing? It’s been a long time!”
“Pretty good, pretty good. Not super busy, do you work here?” I feigned the question, knowing he was wearing the same uniform I would soon be wearing.
“Well I don’t like to think of it as work. But I do play here!” he winked.
Oh God.
“Let’s not waste any more time out in this horrible weather,” he chuckled to himself as he yanked the door open, turning away from me. It was beautiful out. I could see he was starting to lose some of his hair. “Let’s introduce you to everyone!”
We entered the store to find it deserted. Well, it was heavily populated by paper clips and folders and other boring items, but as far as people were concerned, it was empty. Finding Nemo was playing silently on one hundred television sets, like the kaleidoscopic eye of a Pixar housefly.
“Good morning team!!” shouted Josh/Joshua, seemingly to no one. But following his roar, faces started to pop up from doorways around the space. Apparently Office Max was just chock full of closets.
“Good morning Josh!”
“J-man!”
“What’s up boss?”
“Josh-town, what’s up!”
The cacophony of salutations was spiraling out of control when Josh cut it off:
“Hey everyone, I’d like you to meet our newest team member, Duncan.”
“Oh actually, I’ve gone by my middle name for a few years. I go by Chris.” I mumbled. Listen, the irony was not lost on me.
“Duncan and I went to highschool together,” he asserted to his congregating, captivated audience.
After an onslaught of “nice to meet you”s and “oh I bet Josh was the man in high school”s, I found myself one-on-one with Josh in his office.
“Listen, Duncan. Our goal here is to have fun, but we also want to do a good job. Do you think it’s some kind of accident that all of the employees love it here? Don’t answer, I’ll tell you. N-O.”
I was staring at Joshua’s stapler, which had an added sticker slapped on top, reading “Staple-matic” followed by a semicolon and a parenthesis. A winky face.
“But enough about me, how are you doing man? What have you been up to? Weren’t you going to Brown or something?”
I was sitting in my advisor’s office. His name was Leo Grant. He was a professor of English, my major at the time. I liked him a lot. I don’t know if he liked me. His class was the only one I did well in. The walls were plastered with books and photographs of Grant’s family. He was young, but almost every row of books was interrupted once or twice by a picture of his wife, his kids, maybe a niece. He had also gone to Brown, class of ‘02 I believe. I watched him scraping at his cuticles as we spoke.
“Listen Duncan, we all know you’re a smart kid. You know that, I know that. But you know that if you keep getting grades like this, some more drastic steps are going to have to be taken.”
I rubbed my head.
“Is there something else going on? I don’t want to pry, but I know you could be doing better in these courses if you even gave just one iota of effort.”
One iota was too much to ask, I thought to myself. I wanted to be in bed. I felt numb.
“Duncan? Are you listening to me?”
“Yeah, sorry Leo. I’ve just been having a hard time focusing lately,” I offered, and then immediately returned to gazing around the bookshelf. He seemed to have a lot of Dave Eggers novels. “Actually, I’ve got to go. Is that cool? I’m gonna head out.” I didn’t really need to know if it was cool, but I needed to be at home, in bed.
I heard Leo sighing on my way out.
“Oh, yeah. I, um, was there for a year and a half, but it just wasn’t a good fit.”
“Ope, okay. We don’t have to talk about that,” Josh cooed. He smiled, but didn’t patronize. I wanted to hate him as I did in highschool, and as I did at the entrance to this Office Max, and as I did when we entered his office, but I didn’t. In that brief moment, he reminded me of Leo Grant. The connection was so fleeting that I would need a magnifying glass to find it again, but in that one split second, I saw Josh instead of just criticizing. “Let’s just go ahead and get started on your training!”
“Okay.”
I was lying in bed when I got the call from my father. He told me he wouldn’t be paying my tuition anymore. He told me that he could only waste his money for so long. He told me I’d either need to pay for it myself, or drop out. He told me that, maybe if I was fiscally responsible, I would take my classes more seriously. He spit the word, “seriously.”
I had told my dad that, lately, it had been getting harder and harder to get out of bed. But Duncan Phillips Sr. was one of those 1980s, American Psycho types. A product of neoliberal individualism, a term which I always found interesting since it was first thrown at me in my sophomore year high school US History class. I remember when Mr. Carleton flung it at us, and it clicked. He wrote it on the board with an over-simplifying definition. But even in its over-simplification, I could tell that that was my father. But I’ve had trouble reckoning with the fact that these independent “individuals” seemed pretty god damn dependent on Ronald Reagan. Duncan Phillips Sr. was the kind of man who berated me for applying to Brown E.D., because he saw it as a step down from his alma mater. He was the kind of man who wanted me to work consistent jobs throughout high school while still maintaining a 4.0 GPA. He was the kind of father who wanted only to succeed at the job of fathering; he didn’t much care if I liked him. I didn’t.
So when I told Duncan Phillips Sr. about my situation, which I now know to be chronic depression, he told me to “buckle down, find a girlfriend, and get those fucking grades back up.” When I told him I was trying my hardest, but just couldn’t quite engage in class, he told me “you have no reason to be depressed, do better.” When I asked if I could see a therapist, he told me that we “didn’t have the money for that.” He was probably telling me that from the comfort of his brand new BMW. I knew we had the money for it. Duncan Sr. just thought that therapy was a “sign of weakness.” In this retelling I know he sounds like a fabricated emblem of toxic masculinity. A tired trope of the media. But, no. This was truly my father, a man who didn’t want to “waste” part of his incredibly deep bank account on his drowning son’s issues. These problems were, of course, “all in my head.” I tried to tell him that that was the point.
I went to see the school counselor. Her name was Barbara. Or maybe it was Jamie. Either way, she made it very clear that I would not need to remember her name. In fact, the only thing I would need to remember about her was her incredible inability to help me. Although she used very different methods, she—like my father—assured me that my problems were no one’s priority. She simply referred me to other therapists, insisting that that was her job. She could not commit to “long term counseling.” She was a middle man.
I dropped out.
I tried writing for magazines for a few years, but no one wanted to hire a full time staff writer with no degree. So I had been working retail jobs for the past few months. These jobs were binary, either you showed up, or you were fired. They kept me from staying in bed all day.
I still had a few friends from school. This was another contributor to my father’s confusion regarding my mental health. “I don’t get it, you have friends.” I went out with a couple of people once or twice a week, sometimes they came over and we would talk about nothing. They must’ve known I was struggling a bit, but no one really knew the full extent of my situation.
And now I was working at Office Max with Joshua Saunders.
The training was uninteresting, of course. There is only so much pleasure one can derive from learning about literal blank pieces of paper. Stacking paper and staples is not exactly invigorating work. I did, however, realize that Josh was not the Joshua-nemesis of our 16 year old interactions. Sure, he had a multitude of incomprehensible “quirks”. But everyone seemed to really like him around the store, that wasn’t just some kind of act. Even when he wasn’t around, people didn’t complain about the manager like they had at other jobs of mine. They liked the guy. I think maybe I liked him too. “J-man.”
My coworkers provided a whole other potential portal of insecurities for me. No one had explicitly remarked in any capacity, but when you told people you “dropped out” of “Brown,” there was definitely a flicker of disdain. It came in the form of a quick glance away, a droop of the eyes, a minorly furrowed brow. Never in words. But, once again, there was this wall between me and others. I was some privileged asshole who dropped out of college to take jobs away from others. This feels a lot like I am playing some card of privileged victimhood, which I do not intend to do. In actuality, I very much shared their sentiment. When their eyes flickered with disdain, I felt my stomach lurch, as if to say, “I agree. I’m sorry.” But instead, all I could do was glance away in tandem. The day slipped by.
I was about to push the door open at the end of the day when I heard Josh call out, “Hey Chris!”
I turned around to see him standing near the registers, the store was nearly devoid of customers although it was only the mid-afternoon. He lumbered over to me, spinning a pen between his thumb and pointer as he approached.
“You did great today, man. Everyone thought you were great, I think you’re really going to fit in.”
“Oh, cool,” I said, turning around to exit, slumped over.
“Hey, Chris?” his voice bent up an octave on the concluding “iss.”
I craned my neck back, but didn’t shed the energy needed to turn all the way around again.
“Just let me know if you ever want to talk about, y’know, whatever. I’m all ears,” he smiled.
“Thanks Josh, I’ll see you tomorrow.” I wanted to be annoyed at “I’m all ears,” but instead I only felt like crying.