Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [57]
“What the fuck did you do THAT for?”
“Well, what was I supposed to do? Let Lauren Hutton go down on me just because we’re in a recession?”
“But, but—”
“Jeanne! It’s the principle! You can’t let people talk to you like that just because you’re a secretary!” Kristina had a lot of principles.
“They’re going to call her and confront her in a minute, so I can’t talk long.”
“They’re what? Oh my God,” I said. “Fuck, Kristina.” She was my new friend. We were having so much fun. “That was me.”
“What was you?”
“On the phone.”
“What are you talking about?”
“That was me pretending to be Lauren Hutton.” I was the worst person in New York.
“What? That was you? Jeanne! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
I flashed to my childhood insistence: “I am not an ID-I-OTE! Do not call me one!”
“I thought it would be . . . funny,” I said.
“Funny? You thought it would be funny? I just told my boss that Lauren Hutton said she wanted to eat my pussy! Do you have any idea how uncomfortable that was? Mr. Mazzola is in his sixties! God. Now I have to go in there and tell him and his wife that it was my friend, my friend who called pretending to be Lauren Hutton wanting to eat my pussy.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Jesus Christ, Jeanne. Why didn’t you tell me it was you?”
“I was going to call you right back but then Marty came over and made me do a bunch of stuff. I . . . I meant to call you right back. I didn’t think, I mean I never thought you’d tell your boss about it.”
“I was really upset! Really upset! Jesus Christ, I told Anthony I’d been sexually harassed, those words, ‘sexually harassed’ by Lauren Hutton!”
“Oh, boy.”
“Yeah. Oh, boy. I gotta go. I gotta go make sure they don’t call her and yell at her. They’re definitely going to fire me.”
My friend was now about to be back out there, eating Tuna Peewiggle every night, looking for work in a terrible economy. All thanks to my unparalleled sense of humor.
They didn’t fire her, but she must have felt like a total asshole for the rest of the time she worked for him. As in, Yes, here I am typing a letter for you, longtime esteemed editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, and here I am wearing appropriate office wear, but when I leave here I’m going to go hang out with my super-sophisticated friends—people who prank-call their friends at work pretending to be celebrities in search of some office carpet.
I, however, did get fired. A few weeks after the Lauren Hutton incident, Marty told me as he was leaving the office that some air-conditioning guys were coming to fix the AC downstairs in the large workshop.
“Don’t let those motherfuckers downstairs alone! They’ll fuck me so hard!”
I didn’t have a chance to ask Marty why they weren’t allowed downstairs, why they would fuck him so hard. I assumed he thought they were going to steal from him—tools from the workshop perhaps. The guy was wasted on Slim-Fast, rushing around and yelling at everyone. Everybody was out to fuck him and always quite hard.
When the AC guys came I was playing cards with Margo and smoking cigs, learning about her fascinating older-lady sex life. I buzzed them in and told them which AC was broken, letting them go downstairs to work on it while I hung with Margo.
Marty came back from his meeting early and walked up to my desk, where I was ordering paper for the fax machine.
“The AC guys are finished?” he barked.
“No, they’re still working,” I said, smiling.
“You fucking crazy woman! You’re trying to kill me, too?” He ran at full speed in his suit to the stairs and I followed. “I told you not to leave them here alone!”
We reached the lower floor, where the guys were working on the big unit, and Marty turned to me and yelled, “You’re trying to kill me!” He picked up an eight-foot-long piece of metal tubing and swung it around his head repeatedly, lasso style.
“I forgot! I forgot!” I said, ducking and weaving away from the metal pipe.
Marty never apologized for trying to decapitate me with a lead pipe. He suspended me and Lois for a week for “moronic behavior during work hours,