Creative Nonfiction: It’s Only Temporary

By Peter DeMarco

The assistants huddle around the Xerox machine like it’s the monolith in 2001, wondrous, poking at its parts, I think the jam is here, one says, pulling open a sliding tray, no, it’s under that thing, says another, but be careful, it’s hot, other hands coming together to lift, reach inside, I got it, someone else says with confidence, a tiny scrap of paper, enough to disrupt the mechanical flow. The machine makes a series of clacking noises and delivers a collated stack into the output tray. The woman whose document triggered the jam thanks everyone and hurries off, tears in her eyes. 

Someone says it’s only temporary, the machine will jam again. 

This is before e-mail and the internet. 

The floor of the advertising agency is a maze of cubicles occupied by assistants and temps. The temps are actors, musicians, filmmakers, and an assorted mix of people trying to figure their lives out. They sit in spaces filled with artifacts of strangers’ lives, photos, stuffed animals, plastic novelties that look like they’ve been won at a carnival. 

The computers are boxy machines that take up half the desk and greet you with “Good Morning” to whoever’s desk you’re covering, in my case, a young woman named Keira, the screen reading, “Good Morning, Keira.” I’m told she’s out on disability for depression and I’m not sure what to be more surprised at, the fact that you can be out on disability for being depressed, or that human resources revealed to me the cause of her absence. 

In the kitchen I pour coffee and meet another temp who sits in the cubicle next to me.  He’s got the kind of shaggy red hair his mother must’ve had no trouble picking out if he got lost in a mall. He’s dressed different than the others. Flannel shirt, a pack of cigarettes tucked in the front pocket of a jean jacket. Red stubble. Logger boots. Like he’s about to set up camp in the woods. He’s moving to Pennsylvania in a month to get married, where its quiet, he says, so he can write poetry, fix antiques and take long walks. He sounds like a personal ad. 

The hallways are filled with framed ads, some of them award winners. I wonder if there’s subliminal messaging in them, like my high school teacher taught us about. One day he spread a bunch of magazines on the desks and told us to look for sexually suggestive images. I found the word sex written in the tanned wrinkled neck of a man in a deodorant ad. It was etched in an unusual scrawl not meant to be visible unless you made your eye microscopic. Everyone got close, especially the boys, acting like they were about to see their first Playboy magazine. Then it was quiet, like some dark eternal secret had been released and they didn’t know what to think about it.

The creative director gives me storyboards to Xerox and take over to the casting department. A family at dinner. The husband complains of indigestion from the chili he had for lunch. His wife gives him a new antacid. Then an ice cream truck bell rings, it’s dessert time, and the family moves outside. The final frame shows the wife licking an ice cream cone.

It could be a phallic symbol, like we were taught about, a conscious decision by the creative team, a punchline designed for the subconscious, because if it wasn’t, the ad was uninspired, banal. Or maybe the inspiration would come from the lighting, a nostalgic glow, an appeal to a time when dinner was called supper and families ate together, and after, when they watched television, you had to get up to change the channel. 

The Xerox machine cooperates and I deliver the storyboards. An assistant with purple hair sits behind stacks of headshots. Piles and piles of dreams. A dime a dozen, like my aunt used to say. Get a job at the post office instead, she said, when she heard about my acting dream. There’s good benefits there.

The assistant asks how Keira is doing. I think she’s bulimic, she says. I tell her I haven’t heard anything, just that I’d be there indefinitely. She asks if I’m an actor. Yes, I say, but I’m just starting out. I took classes and have a headshot. Come by tomorrow at 11, she says, we’re putting together small groups for an Olive Garden audition. There’s no lines, just pretend you’re having a good time.

 

The creative director asks me to get him a cup of coffee. He says he usually doesn’t ask of that kind of thing but the client is calling any second. 

At 35, I traded in a career as a Senior Book Publicist to work temporary office jobs so I could audition and perform, but getting coffee feels like the kind of subservient task you’d see in old movies where secretaries took dictation. 

I understand, I say. But now I have to ask him how he likes his coffee, which feels even more subservient.

Black.

I’m relived because I don’t have to worry about adding the right amount of milk and sugar.

In the kitchen the red-haired temp eats a sandwich and writes in a small notebook. Getting coffee for the boss, I say. A new low at my age.

He says his boss entertains the staff by putting the phone on speaker and erasing messages from the account people before they get to the point. Then they all yell asshole, he says, and throw Nerf balls at the phone. Like a frat house. 

I’m going to an Olive Garden audition in casting, I say. 

I auditioned in this place when I was a kid, he says. I was a child actor. All because of my red hair. It’s weird being back here.

Wow, I say.  

I was also in Annie Hall.

I’m flabbergasted by his statement.

I was Woody Allen as a kid.

I remember you, I say. Sounding depressed in therapy. I can’t believe it.

It was fun, I guess, he says. The attention. Now I don’t even want to be around people. 

 

In the conference room the creative team laugh about something. I hand the coffee to the director. Someone says I’m not as hot as Keira. They laugh again. 

Like frat boys.

 

At lunchtime the red-haired temp and I eat a hot dog on the street. In the sun his red hair and freckles make him look like a cartoon character. He tells me about being a child actor, the pressure of school and auditions and rejections. An adult actor once advised his mother to not let him get chewed up by the business. 

He smokes a cigarette and looks around. Can’t wait to get out of here, he says. We’re polar opposites, the young actor from an academy award winning movie craving solitude and the early mid-life-crisis temp desperate for the spotlight.

I wasn’t a total neophyte to performing. In 1979, when I was 18, I put a tape recorder next to the television and recorded a stand-up comedy special on HBO, memorized the routines of different comics, then went out and won a Long Island talent show. A female comic in the audience approached me and said she was putting together acts for bars and restaurants hosting comedy nights, something new before the proliferation of comedy clubs, and thought I was the best she’d seen in a long time. I guess she didn’t have HBO.

She booked me at a few places. Nobody recognized the material and one club owner asked if people in the city knew about me because that’s where I should be. I guess he didn’t have HBO either.

One night a comic made a surprise visit to a small comedy club where I was booked. I knew about him. He’d been on Merv Griffin, a famous day-time talk show, and had opened on tour for Rodney Dangerfield. I knew I was in trouble. 

He took the mic after my set and told the audience they’d just heard stolen material. Later, he told me it was dangerous to steal. Before I slinked away I said it was a harmless hobby that got out of hand. But that high of performing was greater than any drug I’d taken.

The red-haired temp and I sit next to a fountain. Let me know if you want to read some of my poetry, he says. My fiancée doesn’t get it. I want to tell him I don’t get it either but I say sure, I’ll take a look, and before we go back into the building I look around at the avenue, covered with a yellow blanket of taxis, two temps eating hot dogs and inhabiting the spaces of strangers who are on vacation, out sick, or just depressed.

Maybe there was a poem in that.  

 

The Xerox machine jams again. A temp tries to fix it and tells me about doing extra work. He said he got wet the other night. Fake rain.

I’ve never been on a movie set, I say. 

It’s a lot of waiting around, he says. Sometimes you get to see someone famous. 

I wonder how the red-haired temp would react to this, indifferent now to all things celebrity while the rest of us beat on, Gatsby-like, boats against the current, trying to defy the odds of making it, while the Woody Allen double casually eats a hot dog and says he can’t wait for seclusion. 

 

For the Olive Garden audition we sit around a table and are directed to laugh and interact. It doesn’t matter what we talk about since they’re looking for physical chemistry. Hair, age, faces, smiles.

The woman next to me is supposed to be my wife. She laughs and touches my arm, which feels intimate because I don’t even have a girlfriend. 

 

You’re the real boss, I say to the Xerox machine, rumbling away.

It controls the moods and emotions of those who depend upon its temperamental nature, which at the slightest malfunction can set off a chain reaction of hell, a seismic level of fury reverberating from supervisor to client to all the big initials: V.P., E.V.P, C.E.O. 

An assistant for a tyrannical account executive always appears on the verge of a nervous breakdown when he’s at the machine, pacing back and forth, looking at his watch, the machine working through its repetitive cycling, stacking and sorting, any unusual judder making him scream, fuck, stepping back, giving the machine room, not wanting to disturb its rhythm, and his interior monologue probably goes something like this, please God, I know I don’t go to church, but please don’t let it jam, I’ll be nicer to people, please God, I’ll call my mother who worries about me living the city, I won’t be mad at her for being overprotective ever again. 

It wouldn’t surprise me if he dropped to his knees and literally prayed. 

 

The child actor says goodbye and leaves me with a poem. I sit in his empty cubicle and stare at the front page of the Daily News he’s left behind on his desk. A picture of 42nd Street looking like a ghost town. The peep shows are boarded up as Times Square prepares for a facelift.

The poem is about caterpillars, how they have two lives, one on the ground, and one in the air, and speculation about which is safer, and I wonder if it’s based on his own temporary brush with celebrity life or just something he was curious about on a nature walk.

I pin the poem to the bulletin board for the next person who occupies the space to reflect on. 

 

A call comes in on Keira’s line from her landlord, who begins to yell at me that she’s behind on the rent and he’s going to change the locks and throw her furniture out, ranting for so long that it begins to feel like I’m the one who owes him money.

 

I spend a cold winter night in Times Square as background noise, the cue for extras on a movie set to begin their fake talking. It’s not very flattering, but it’s my first shoot and exciting to receive a message on my actor’s voicemail to report to a film set.

It’s an Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie. We stand for hours before action is called and Arnold’s character begins his run through the crowd. As a Steadicam operator follows behind he brushes against me. Then it’s ‘cut,’ and he walks back, right alongside me, and I stare at him, for a moment feeling like we’re two professionals doing a job, and I’m more than background noise, I am Hollywood, Clark Gable and King Kong and Cinemascope, but after another two hours of waiting, I am cold, I am exhausted, hungry, with a long commute back to the suburbs on the train, and any delusion that my golden blonde hair, caressed by my dying mother in a morphine delirium, movie star hair, she called it, would appear like a halo in a crowd of background noise and make me famous is ludicrous, and I drift back into insignificance, a dime a dozen, one of hundreds and hundreds of extras and headshots that pile up on desks, each one stuck in a private trap, to quote Norman Bates in Psycho, where we scratch and we claw, never to budge an inch. 

 

On Monday morning people in the office are crying. Keira has died. There is talk of suicide, or perhaps an accidental overdose. 

The computer screen greets me with “Good morning, Keira.” Conceivably, it could acknowledge her for the next hundred years. 

 

Her parents fly in from the mid-west. Human resources brings them by to collect anything she left behind. I move aside. They stare at the chair like it was her coffin. Her mother opens the desk drawers. Nothing but office supplies. And a chattering teeth novelty. Everybody stares at it. A cheap piece of plastic takes on a profound presence. From a birthday party, her mother says.

It’s a strange sorrowful moment and I feel like an intruder. Nobody moves. It’s as if they can’t get on with their lives until the fate of the toy in the drawer is decided. 

 

In a serendipitous twist, I get a call to be an extra in a new Woody Allen movie, a period film set in the 1920s. It’s an assembly line of haircuts and pulling old suits off a rack. At least the shoot is indoors.

They seat us in a Broadway theater, where we’re directed to simulate a response to a play we’re supposed to have just seen. Woody stands in the aisle next to me, inches away, talking with his director of photography. 

I write a monologue in my head, convinced that if he could hear it he would understand my desperation for love and fame and put me in a scene, hey Woody, we both lived on East 14^th Street in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, separated by a couple of avenues, in different decades, and I ate a hot dog with your old movie self, and performed stand-up comedy like you once did but it was only temporary because I was a fraud but the attention was addictive because my parents were dead and I was in psychoanalysis like you and there was this crazy line in a dream I had about them not long ago where they pop up at the kitchen table in the childhood house I still live in and tell me all my ghosts are home. 

In later years I will pause the DVD for a shot that lasted two seconds and see myself at the edge of the frame, my red-haired temp friend and I bonded, immortalized, in movie history.

While we wait for the shot to be lit, Woody sits alone at a table on the stage and eats a sandwich in what looks like the loneliest tableau ever arranged. 

 

The office is subdued after Keria’s death. No frat house joking. 

It is my last day. A new assistant has been hired to replace her. 

I step into the elevator and hold the door for a technician, who wheels the Xerox machine inside.  

These things never last, he says.

 

 

 

 

 

Peter DeMarco is a retired New York City high school English and film teacher. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the stand-up comedy amateur circuit. His writing has appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), New World Writing, trampset, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, Bottle Rocket, BULL, SmokeLong Quarterly, Does It Have Pockets (Best Microfiction nominee). You can follow him on Instagram: @peterdemarco910 and X: @PDMwriter.