In just a few short sentences, Bob Gershon invalidated the daily struggles of everyone in the room. But he did it as I knew Bob would — with dignity.
“Last week,” he said, “I came to a startling conclusion. I had a long, successful career but I didn’t have a job.”
The True Believers bristled at the brazen questioning of their entire belief system. Even the Doubters weren’t prepared for this apocalyptic representation of their existence and slowly started to drift out of the room. And I just grew incredibly morose; not for having had to witness the old man’s public meltdown, but for acknowledging that I shared his thoughts, often dreamt of this day and doing just what he did, but knowing I could never muster the courage to actually pull it off.
“Why didn’t you quit if you hated it so much?” a shrill voice shouted out, but the question seemed directed more at the woman who asked it than at Bob. As if sensing that, Bob waited for her to answer, which she did, internally, and by the resigned look on her face she apparently came to same conclusion that he had.
Like all great flame-outs, this one ended not in a fireball but in a sputter. “I do appreciate all of this. I hope I imparted…something from the heart…,” he said, scanning the room as people left in droves. “Anyway…thank you for coming.”
And then it was just the two of us and the crew there to clean up the dishes. Bob gathered his stuff, including the Tiffany box. I brought him his coat.
“Well, that didn’t go as I thought it would. I was hoping to inspire a few people.” By telling them their lives were meaningless, I thought. The unintentional enormity of his actions hit him at that moment, and I could see it in his eyes. “Walk me out?” he asked, more like a plea.
I did just that, in silence.
We waited for a few moments by the elevator banks, and as the elevator chimed, Bob turned to shake my hand.
“Goodbye, Mr. Restic.”
There were no empty promises of keeping in touch and meeting for lunch down the road because we both knew neither would happen. Bob stepped onto the elevator, but before the doors could close, Bob lunged forward and thrust a purple-veined hand between the sensors. “Chuck!” he called out as he stood in the threshold. I eagerly turned back, waiting too much like a young man at his father’s death bed for some last scrap of advice on the life that awaited him. Bob started to say something, thought better of it, and then shuffled back into the elevator.
The doors noiselessly closed out his career.
YOUR NAME HERE
I didn’t get much of anything done that afternoon. It was hard to concentrate as I replayed in my head the things that Bob had said. It was particularly hard to concentrate with my co-manager Paul Darbin blabbering on about it. Paul was a former hippie who aggressively espoused sustainable living as long as it didn’t interfere with the things he enjoyed. He sentenced us to “all-organic” vending machines but god be damned he give up his addiction to chemically-enhanced energy drinks.
“What a way to go out,” he mused while leaning against the small table in my office. “My big worry is how the group absorbs it. He did, after all, say some pretty poisonous things.”
“I think they can handle it, Paul.”
“Well, maybe it was a blessing in disguise.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, unsure why I even engaged him on the topic. He pounced on my opening and lowered his voice in a conspiratorial tone despite the door being closed to anyone passing by. It felt all along that he wanted to tell me something and was just waiting for the right opening. I initially thought it was to gauge my interest in Bob’s now-empty office with the panoramic view of the San Gabriel Mountains, but Paul had designs on something much grander.
“Let’s be honest, Chuck. The department has been adrift for several years now…” And so the recriminations began while the body was still warm. I wasn’t sure if Bob had even made it out of the parking garage yet. “Don’t get me wrong. Bob was a visionary. He built this group and did some great things over his time here.”
I waited for the “but.” Paul cut right to it.
“But every great leader eventually loses touch with the times. Love him to death, but Bob was not up to the challenges we’re facing. Adaptation is a healthy and necessary quality for any corporate ecosystem to succeed. And if ever there was a group in need of some transformational change, this is it.” Meaningless buzzwords came naturally to Paul. In addition to energy drinks, he was a corporate-management-book junkie.
“I mean, look at what we’ve failed to do on the obesity epidemic.” This topic was a cause célèbre that seemed to attract only Paul’s attention. He had demonstrated a manic pursuit to eradicate obesity from the firm, a request that continually went unheeded by our former boss, which in turn drove Paul harder on his mission. “We’ll end up paying for that miss,” he warned.
“You might be right,” I shrugged.
“But you can see where I am coming from on our group, right?”
“You’ve brought up some interesting points,” I deflected by not directly responding to his question. Paul was on an obvious fishing expedition to gauge my level of interest in the open role as head of the group. There were two clear contenders, assuming the firm didn’t look outside for potential candidates, and they both were in the room at that moment. I had zero interest in taking on the enhanced responsibilities of running the entire group, but I would never tell Paul that. I secretly got pleasure from watching him squirm.
“I wonder what Faber thinks of all this,” he tried again. Pat Faber was the director overseeing all of us.
“Yeah, I wonder.”
“I bet you he sees it our way,” he answered. Apparently we were of one frame of mind.
“You never know,” I told him.
“What do you think?”
“It’s a hard one, Paul.”
“If you had to guess?”
“It could go either way.”
“But if you were forced to answer?”
“I can see both angles.”
This banter played out long past the point where I got amusement out of it. The telephone offered me a convenient excuse to disengage. It was an unknown outside number, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to needle Paul one last time.
“It’s Pat Faber. I should take this.”
“Really? What about?” he sputtered.
I picked up the phone and cupped the mouthpiece. “I guess I’ll find out in a minute,” I answered and gleefully watched Paul tailspin out of the office. “This is Chuck,” I spoke into the phone.
“Mr. Valenti wants to see you,” the voice came back. The hair tingled on the back of my neck. I was told an address in Chinatown and then the caller abruptly hung up.
***
The cab driver stopped a block short of the address on Hill Street. If he went any further, he’d be funneled up the on-ramp to the 110 Freeway which led out to Pasadena. I made the remaining way on foot. The building was literally the last one on the block where the hum of traffic up above washed down between the buildings.
I recognized Valenti’s driver standing on the sidewalk. He wore a black suit with matching tie and moustache. His slicked-back hair, evenly corrugated by the teeth of a plastic comb, was colored with the same black shoe polish as his eyebrows. His grey eyes were the only bit of variation on the ensemble and spoke of his pronounced age. As I approached, I half-expected him to introduce himself as The Great Zoltar and pull a set of plastic flowers out of a cane. Instead, he wordlessly pointed me to a non-descript door propped ajar by a stray brick.
The door led to a dingy emergency stairwell. Over the sounds of traffic above, I heard faint voices and I thought of Valenti. It had been over a year since we last spoke. His actions set off a chain of events that killed four people. One of them was my friend. Valenti had no direct involvement in their deaths. He had no indirect involvement either. But I still blamed him.