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Shovel 7 | Jul 30 2002

My boss at the time, the Executive Director, would practice talking to the Board in the men’s room. Sometimes he addressed the entire Board, but usually it was just the Executive Committee or individual members of that committee, most often the chairman of the Finance Committee. I could always tell, based on what he was saying, who he was talking to.

It was pitiful. It was pitiful because he sounded as he always sounded (I mean out the men’s room): like person trying and failing to appear natural.

My desk was only twenty feet from the men’s room door. This is how I knew. He would do his business, then stand before the mirror, at least as I imagined it, practicing not only the words but the gestures.

Didn’t it occur to him that I could hear? Had it been me, I would have run the faucet to drown out the sound. This at least.

When I was a child, I would hide behind the television. I’d do this when something painful came on. I didn’t mind violence so much, because I knew it wasn’t real, but I couldn’t bear to see people being humiliated. Whenever it happened, or would appear to begin to happen, I would quickly turn off the sound, pull the set away from the wall (it sat on a thing with wheels; a television stand), and crawl behind it, crouching amid the wires.

This is how I felt whenever my boss’s voice issued, echoing slightly, from the men’s room, like I wanted a goddamn television to hide behind.