The Unprofessionals by Julie Hecht Read Free Book Online Page B

menu memorized,” the boy said. “So after some conference between him and the assistant, he goes back into his office. The assistant comes out and talks to the office-worker captain. Then she comes over and tells me to go back and get the omitted lunch !
    â€œI tell them, ‘There’s so much traffic, the parking costs so much, it’ll take two hours!’ The assistant hears this and walks over and looks at me. Then he says: ‘Make it happen.’”
    I’d heard the expression, but I hadn’t heard it applied to someone’s lunch. I thought it was for big-time operations, deals and things of that nature.
    The boy had to go back to California Chicken and start all over. Maybe he saw his life going down the drain with that errand and that day and that trip.
    â€œI always thought I’d be in some important position someday and I’d be saying ‘Make it happen,’” he said.
    â€œYou will,” I said. “But the expression will be over by then.”
    â€œIt’s over now,” he said. “Isn’t it?”
    â€œI don’t even know,” I said. “Why don’t you write this all down as a story?”
    â€œYou do it,” he said.
    â€œIt’s your story. You should do it,” I said.
    â€œWe should both do it! In a hundred years scholars can be reading them and trying to put the pieces together.”
    â€œWhy don’t you just tape-record all these stories that you’ve told me since I met you?” I said.
    â€œWe should be taping these conversations!” he said with too much sudden enthusiasm. “But I have to get off the phone. I hear my father’s footsteps.”
    â€œAren’t you allowed to talk to me?” I said.
    â€œThey think you’re a bad influence.”
    â€œI’ve never even smoked marijuana, or even a regular cigarette,” I said.
    â€œIt’s not you. It’s anyone. They don’t want me talking to anyone. They want me to be only with them. It’s unbearable!”
    â€œYour mother used to ask me to call you every night when you were in high school and they went away to conferences.”
    â€œNow they think you’re eccentric and antisocial and don’t do all the middle-class things they do with their circle of the bourgeoisie. That’s actually a compliment. But he’s coming. I have to hang up right this minute. Call me on my cell phone later. You can be mulling it over in the meantime. From an existential point of view.” Then he hung up.
    What I mulled over was why he wasn’t allowed to talk to me. I thought of the song “The Bourgeois Blues” and the line “I don’t want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie,” even though it didn’t apply to this case.
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    ONLY IN retrospect, when weeks passed and I never heard anything from the boy again, not even an addendum to the story he’d told me that night, and later when his father told me that the boy was back in rehab—this time for cocaine he’d bought on the street in Santa Monica—only then did it occur to me that a drug might have generated the energy for the story.
    Never having been out there in Southern California—because, one, it’s too sunny and, two, I didn’t believe in flying, even before the Event of September—I couldn’t picture the scene. I had seen drug transactions on our front steps in Washington Square and all over Greenwich Village when we lived there as a young and ignorant newlywed couple for ten years. We didn’t understand that there could be a better place to live than New York City.
    I’d seen some intoxicated youths in their vehicles in the supermarket parking lot in Nantucket at one A.M. They were opening cellophane packets of heroin or whatever came in those envelopes. I couldn’t be sure, because I always turned off any television documentary explaining it.
    I knew there was drug use in