Everything Changes

of an ongoing funeral. You’re twelve years old, and you don’t yet know that you don’t know shit. You’re just determined to be everything your father wasn’t, for them and for yourself, and it takes a while for you to understand that it’s not within your power to undo the damage that Norm did, that the injuries go much deeper. By then, your determination not to emulate him has become something of an obsession, and it’s a point of pride whenever you can point to the ways in which you’re avoiding your progenitor’s defective character.
I’m not like him
becomes your mantra, and while you would never cop to it, it may very well have become your universal philosophy boiled down to its absolute essence.

Chapter 4
    I ride the subway in misery, my thoughts condensed into a chain of four words repeated in an endless loop to the beat of the rhythmic drumming of the subway car.
Blood in my urine–blood in my urine–blood in my urine.
I disembark at Times Square and head east to Sixth Avenue, arriving at work only a half hour late, tense and distracted, the dash of crimson against white porcelain still haunting me. What does it mean?
    I work for the Spandler Corporation. We are a three-hundred-million-dollar business, with offices in twelve states. We have over five hundred employees. We are known throughout the country as a leader in the industry. Our customers rely heavily on us. We produce nothing. We sell nothing. We buy nothing. If we didn’t exist, Kafka would have to invent us.
    We call ourselves supply-chain consultants. We call ourselves outsourcing specialists. But our true vocation can be summed up in one word. We are middlemen.
    We service the world’s largest companies in the overseas manufacturing of their products. We know where to go for everything you need. We have relationships with every possible type of manufacturing facility you can imagine, and many that would never occur to you. We might order ribbons from China, fabric from Italy to be upholstered in Canada on diecut metal from Los Angeles, injected molded plastic tags from Korea, acrylic trays from Taiwan, brushed-aluminum signs from Providence, custom wooden hangers from Slovakia that will be silk-screened in Weehawken, New Jersey. We know who’s reliable and who isn’t, who’s expensive and who’s cheap. We know what to watch out for, the pitfalls to avoid. You can try to do it yourself, but if you want it brought in on time and under budget, you’d be well advised to call us.
    I am a middleman. I hate my job.
    I am the conduit between the client and the vast, stratified world of design and manufacturing. I translate abstract needs into reality, concept into construct. I am the voice of reason and experience. I bring to the vendor much-needed work, and to the client desperately sought product. I get yelled at a lot.
    When you’re a middleman, everything is always your fault.
    My computer monitor tells me that I have fifty-seven new e-mails. I delete the spam and the forwarded jokes from associates with too much free time, and now I’m down to eighteen. I dash off a few quick reports to a handful of my clients, updating them on the progress of their ongoing projects, and then call some vendors to remind them of impending deadlines. At the Spandler Corporation, we spend our days making three kinds of phone calls. We call our vendors to hound them about schedules and late deliveries; we call our clients to reassure them that everything is on schedule or to get blamed because it isn’t; and we call potential clients to kiss the asses of the people who will one day blame us for everything. When you’re a middleman, the only good phone call is no phone call, and there are never no phone calls.
    Craig Hodges, my contact at Nike, has already left me two urgent voice mails. I am manufacturing a quarter of a million acrylic versions of the Nike logo, referred to reverently as the “swoosh,” that will be mounted on the top of a new sneaker rack Nike will be rolling out to shoe stores across the country. Craig had asked to see a preliminary sample before we shipped the order from China, so I had them FedEx him a boxful. According to his messages, something is wrong with the samples.
    “The color is off,” he tells me when I call him back.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean it’s the wrong color,” Craig says testily. “It’s supposed to be blue, and these pieces are purple.” Craig is a few years older than me, tall,