Two of the people I most enjoy spending my time with are Joe and Amy Smith.
Joe is a salesman; Amy studies social work, currently. They have twin girls and a cat and live in a two-bedroom apartment in my desk drawer.
Like other writers, I have drawers, digital and wooden, loaded with manuscripts, some half-done, most half-baked, a few worthy of more time but for various reasons languishing in the drawer. Among the many characters I’ve locked away, the two I visit most often are Joe and Amy. Years ago, I started writing a story about an average couple with average problems—debt, job stress, and the like. That couple was Joe and Amy. Writing about them came easily. I liked them, so I kept writing about them, daily for a long time. All this writing created problems.
The first problem is that I write about Joe and Amy without any direction. These people have no plot. They have no plan. They were accidents, more or less. I’m not much of a diarist, but not long after I invented them I found myself using them as substitutes for whatever is happening in my life. I don’t write my life verbatim onto theirs; instead, they live a messy existence that runs parallel to mine, drawing on the themes and scenes of my life (or the lives of friends), but always at a higher pitch.
The second problem is that I’ve spent too many words over too many years without a plan for what to do with them all. I have one-and-a-half novels, a pile of stories, and a billion diary-like entries—all of it detailing the banalities and absurdities of daily life.
What do I do with all this?, I sometimes ask myself. (Should I serialize it? Should I redirect my energies to something more productive? Reader: I’m open to advice.)
If I gathered it all up and kept writing, I’d have a sprawling, multi-volume, never-ending epic about nothing. (Not about nothing. One chapter details Joe doing his tax return. Another, richer bit, sees Joe waiting at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription.) Who wants to read that?
One thing I’ve learned: Writing, even if only for an audience of one, begs the question that sits at the center of life: What am I doing?
It’s a question I often ask myself, and in my case, often after the fact.
My drawers are filled with characters I’ve lost interest in, except for two I visit often and who I’d like you to meet in this short-ish bit.
Dick Butkus Pic
“Joe, what is this?” Amy said.
I woke from my Sunday afternoon nap to see my phone shoved under my nose and my wife, who was holding it, scowling at me.
“What?” I said, and backed up enough on the couch to read the screen.
LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU WANT SOME DICK PICS.
It was a text I had sent before my nap.
“Amy,” I said, “that’s a joke.”
“Are you serious?”
“Why are you going through my phone?”
“Did you see this?” She shoved my phone into my hands.
At the top of the screen was the recipient of the text I’d sent: John Brownlee.
John was one of the younger guys at RyAd, the sales agency where I worked. No doubt, he was the cool guy.
Under his name was the text I’d sent him.
LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU WANT SOME DICK PICS.
The short reply woke me up: NO, I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOUR DICK. JOE, YOU’RE A DIGUSTING PERVERT.
Amy must have written the next line in the thread—because I hadn’t.
WHO IS THIS?
The reply: JONI MOORE, YOU SICKO.
Sweat broke across my receding hairline. I scrolled the text up and down furiously. I didn’t understand what was happening.
Joni Moore was one of the girls who worked at RyAd. She worked a couple cubicles over from me. I was nearly twenty years older than her. She was cute. I didn’t like her. Like many of the other youngsters breezing through RyAd on their way to a hipper marketing agency, Joni liked to talk to me, a guy with twenty years of sales experience, like she was a couple floors above me in the hierarchy at RyAd. That was bull. She and I occupied the same floor—the basement.
Dumb, confused, I deflated on the couch, then quickly inflated—expanding like a raging hot universe—and threw my phone at the armchair on the opposite wall. My phone bounced off the pillow, somersaulted across our IKEA carpet, and slid under the IKEA television cabinet, where I would never be able to get it.
“That asshole!” I shouted.
“Joe, what the hell is going on?” Amy said.
“It was a joke!” I said.
Our twin daughters, Connie and Bonnie, stuck their heads out of the room they shared. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and they were indulging in their Sunday afternoon video game screen time while I indulged in a nap—or, was supposed to be indulging in a nap.
“Why are you yelling?” they asked.
“Go back to your room,” Amy said.
“We didn’t leave our room,” Connie said.
“Now!” Amy shouted.
The door slammed.
“I’m tired of their saucy mouths,” I said.
“Who is this Joni?” Amy asked.
“I don’t understand why you’re going through my phone.”
“Joe,” Amy said, and drilled her gaze into mine like only she can, “who is this Joni?”
“She’s nobody. She’s just a girl at work.”
“You’re sending pictures to girls at work?”
“I’m not! It was for John. It was a joke.”
“It’s not a joke, Joe. Are you trying to get fired again?”
I sighed and collapsed onto the couch and shrank—like a dying star, I suppose.
“I need my phone,” I said.
“Are you going to tell me what is going on?”
I got up and went to the front hall closet, pulled my tool box (a shopping bag filled with two hammers, a collection of screw drivers, handfuls of nails and screws, and a few thousand Allen keys), and marched back to the TV cabinet.
“I hate this thing,” Amy said, and pulled herself from the couch.
We had done this twice since installing the IKEA TV cabinet—the first time to get her phone, the second time to clean up cat puke that had pooled under there. Amy picked up the television and put it on the floor. I started unscrewing one of the safety brackets from the wall with an Allen key. Amy grabbed another and attacked another bracket.
“On Friday,” I began, “John and I and Sameer and that shithead Kevin were talking about starting an office hockey pool and I said I’d set it up so I asked for their numbers. John said, ‘Text me and I’ll add you to the group chat I have with these guys.’ He meant Sameer and the others. They’re all friends.”
I pulled the screw out of the safety bracket, got on my knees, opened the cabinet door, and climbed inside (almost) to unscrew the lower safety bracket.
“And earlier in the day,” I said, “John told me about this thing that he and his buddies do. He’s younger so his circle of friends are all marrying off and having kids, so they never have time to talk. So, to stay in touch, or whenever they want to see if one of the other guys is free to chat or whatever, they text each other pictures of dicks. Not dicks, they send pictures of Dicks. Dick Cheney. Dick Van Dyke. Dick Pole.”
“Dick Pole?”
“He was a baseball player.”
Amy got her screws out and we waddled the TV cabinet away from the wall. I grabbed my phone, buried under a riot of dust bunnies.
“I was in a rush to leave the office, so I gave John my phone and he put his number into my contacts. That’s what he said he did. When he gave me my phone back, he said, ‘I want some Dick pics right away, alright, buddy?’ and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll send some Dick pics right away.’ And, honestly, I forgot about the hockey pool until I laid down for my nap, so I sent him that text.”
Amy went to the front hall closet for the broom. We waddled the TV cabinet out some more and she swept the rest of the dust bunnies out.
“Why did you send that message to this girl you work with?” Amy asked.
“I didn’t know I was,” I said. “John put the number in my phone. He put her number in.” My ears burned. “The stupid prick calls me buddy.”
Together, we waddled the TV cabinet back to the wall and started screwing the safety brackets back on. Amy, a frown doubled on her lips—one for the brackets, one for me—tightened the screw too hard. She was going to strip it and then how the hell would we get the TV cabinet off the wall the next time? I didn’t say anything.
“Joe,” Amy said, “you’re not lying to me, are you?”
“No. Honest. Amy, I’m not gay, okay. Maybe sending that message was stupid professionally, but I’m not a creep. I was going to send John a picture of Dick Butkus. It’s in my photos.”
She picked up my phone and opened my photo album.
“See?” I said.
She looked into Butkus’s crazed eyes. “Why didn’t you send it?” she asked.
“I was going to wait until he said he wanted it, I guess. Get his attention first. It’s funny. I don’t know. I was tired. I’m sorry.”
She threw the phone on the couch and sat down, exhausted. I sat down beside her.
“What am I going to do?” I said.
She took a deep breath. “Let me think.” She got up and closed herself in our bedroom. She stayed there for a long time.
Alone on the couch, an idea melted over my brain like butter. It was so smooth. I opened my LinkedIn account and composed a short message to Joni Moore:
Joni, it’s Joe Smith. Sorry. My phone was hacked.
I put my phone down and went back to the couch. Now I needed nap.
I closed my eyes. I thought about work on Monday. I’d arrive early, as usual, to work (to actually work) and John and the other dipshit frat boys would wander in late and wave to me, smiling like a bunch of dipshit frat boys, waiting to see the look on the old man’s face—and then Joni steps into the office and throws hot coffee in my face and I get fired on the spot—and then in another dream security doesn’t even let me into the building and I get a termination letter delivered to me by the intern. That seemed like the most likely scenario.
Why didn’t I just text him Dick Butkus?
The bedroom door opened, and Amy stepped out. She was wearing makeup and her hair was neater than it was.
“Give me your phone,” she said.
“Why?”
“I’m going to FaceTime Joni and fix this.”
“How?”
“Just give me your phone.” She took my phone from me. “I’m going to tell her you’re an idiot but a harmless idiot and tell her that John put her number into your phone instead of his. I’m a woman, I’m your wife, and I’m going to make sure she understands what kind of guy John is. Is she cute?”
“Who?”
“Joni.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I guess. Don’t worry about it. I sent her a message on LinkedIn.”
“Joe!”
“I told her my phone got hacked.”
“Joe, you didn’t!”
“What?”
“Joe, that sounds fake!”
I arrived early to work on Monday. I hadn’t slept, knowing I’d probably be fired, but I promised myself I’d at least be cool about it. Amy had no trouble sleeping. It was as if I hadn’t just nuked my career at RyAd. She read for a little bit, then put down her book, turned off the light, and was soon snoring and gently farting while I listened to traffic racing on Richmond.
As a media sales company, RyAd was exempt from Covid shutdowns. I put on my stupid mask and sanitized my chapped hands once at the building entrance and once at the entrance to our office. The salesfloor was empty. Joni’s chair was empty. The corner where the dipshits slacked off was, like the bus I had taken to the office, empty.
I dropped my bag, logged into my scheduler, and pulled my mask down to sip my coffee. I had a dozen sales calls and a proposal to complete for one of the government agencies dumping money into Covid advertising. My email opened. I had a stack. One had a red flag. I didn’t get a chance to read it. Tim Maloney, one of my managers and the author of the flagged email, came through office door, waved his hand like he was climbing through spiderwebs, and shouted, “Joe, let’s grab a couple chairs in the boardroom.” He zipped into his office. I logged off, picked up my coffee, and put on my mask.
I preferred meeting with Caroline over Tim but I’d rather share the board room with Tim than just about anybody else in management. Tim ran RyAd’s North American accounts, of which I was an integral player. He liked to share memes on the company email and never pressed too hard about anything—except sales quotas, and that’s why I respected him. Just because you’re a manager doesn’t mean you have to be an asshole to your employees. Tim was an asshole, but he wasn’t an asshole to me.
He wore a mask, as did I, so I couldn’t read his face to see if he was angry, annoyed, or confused.
“Yeah, look,” Tim said, “I hate these sorts of meetings.”
I felt my stomach flushing itself down my intestine. I’d been fired before. I knew that funereal tone of regret.
“Tim, I’m sorry. I wasn’t really thinking so well, you know, with this pandemic and everything. I’ve got kids at home, and honestly when I sent it, I thought I was sending it to—”
“I’m not going to fire you.”
“You’re not?”
“We were going to, but Joni asked us not to.”
“She did?”
Tim shrugged.
“She said she regretted reporting that text you sent her and said it wasn’t worth getting you fired, considering the situation we’re all in.”
The flushing sensation in my stomach stopped. My breath came back.
Tim laughed, sort of.
“Why’d you send her that? You’re married, aren’t you?”
“I am. It wasn’t for her, it was for John.”
“Oh.”
“I’m not gay.”
I told him about the hockey pool and giving my phone to John and what I thought might have been a practical joke on the old guy, me—and if it wasn’t a practical joke, then my own enormous stupidity rising up from a swamp of stupid to pull me down into the mud.
“Well, that’s a good story,” Tim said, and looked over his shoulder at the people now entering the RyAd salesfloor. “I don’t like a lot of these younger guys we have here, to be totally honest. If we didn’t need them, I wouldn’t want to see their fucking faces.”
“Me neither.”
“Going forward, how about you focus more on your work and less on impressing the kids around the office.”
I was going to protest that characterization—that I was trying to impress the kids around the office—but I didn’t think Tim wanted to hear it, and in a flash of doubt, I didn’t know if I could mount much of a protest.
“I’ll ignore them.”
“Good. I need you to also write an apology to Joni and send me a copy. I’m going to enroll you in a couple of workshops. Pay attention to them. Attendance is mandatory, okay? There may be some valuable learnings in it for you about sexual harassment. Oh, and I have to put a letter in your file, Joe. It’s better than canning you. I spoke to Caroline, and given how Joni feels about this, and what you’ve told me now, I’ll get Roula to make it a generalized condemnation of your character rather than a detailed summary of what you did.” He winked. “How’s that?”
“Sure. Thanks.”
“Dick jokes,” he chuckled, and slapped the table as he got up. “People are morons, right?”
I smiled a lame smile. He couldn’t see it.
Back at my cubicle, I pulled down my mask and finished my now cold coffee. John and Sameer were at their desks. John saw me and pulled down his mask.
“What about the pool?” he said. “You didn’t text me.”
John smiled, and so did Sameer as they waited for my response. I cycled through many colours of anger and told myself to shut up, just shut up. Maybe it was a prank. Maybe it wasn’t. Didn’t matter.
“I got no time,” I said—nearly shouted—across the distance. “Sorry, I can’t come out and play. I’ve got kids and, you know, with this pandemic and everything….”
John waved, but he didn’t look at me when he did it. He wasn’t even listening.
I finished the written apology Tim had instructed me to write, printed it, and put it in an envelope. I walked over to Joni’s cubicle. She pivoted in her chair. She had lined the floor around her desk with tape indicating a safe, six-foot social distancing radius. I stood a couple feet back from the line for good measure.
“I’m sorry about this mess,” I told her. “I wrote you a little apology.”
“You can put that in my tray, please,” Joni said.
I did, and she said, “Your wife called me.”
“She did?”
She nodded.
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
I thought about when Amy could have called her. We were together the entire afternoon. Then I remembered she had sent me out to get kitty litter. We didn’t need it, but she made me get it anyway.
“What did she say?” I said.
“She said you’re an idiot.”
“I am. Thanks for being so forgiving.”
Joni gave me a look. If she was smiling under her mask, I couldn’t tell.
I went back to my desk, rejuvenated. I took out my phone and texted Amy.
THANK YOU FOR SAVING ME.
DON'T DO IT AGAIN, she wrote.
I WON'T PLAN ON IT, BUT YOU NEVER KNOW. FUNNY HAPPENS.
I DON'T GET GUY JOKES, she wrote.
THAT'S TOO BAD, I replied.
Robert Grant Price is the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories, My Girlfriend, the Hologram.