It’s 4:29 p.m. on Tuesday and someone is coming towards my desk. It’s
Richardson. He’s laughing his ass off.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Oh my God.”
“What?”
“OK. Can you do me a huge favor?”
“What?”
“OK, OK. You know how everyone in the office has been kind of bummed lately? Well, I need you to—” he cracks up again. He’s literally doubled over my desk laughing. What the hell is going on. “I need you to do something to cheer everyone up.”
“OK.”
“Are you wearing an undershirt under that fleece?”
“Yes.”
“OK. What I need you to do is take that fleece off, and go upstairs and see Sarah because she is going to give you something, and then come back down and see me.”
I go upstairs. Sarah is sitting at her desk. I think she might be playing solitaire.
“Hey,” she says. “What was your name again?”
“Mark,” I say.
She gives me what appears to be a tube of red lipstick, and upon further inspection it is indeed a tube of red lipstick. “What is this for?” I ask.
“Just go see John.”
So I go back downstairs. Fucking Richardson. What does he want me to do?
When I get back to his office he’s still laughing, though it’s kind of petered off into a chuckle now.
“Sweet,” he says, “Did you get it?”
“Yes.”
“OK, now here’s what you need to do. It’s real easy. Go in the bathroom and put on some of that red lipstick.”
“But—.”
“And when you’re in there I want you to tie the bottom part of your undershirt into a knot, so that it exposes your midriff. You know like how you see girls in Texas do or cheerleaders or people like that?”
“Yeah…”
“Yeah, so do that, and then what I want you to do—when you’re all ready to go—is go up to all the writers and stand in front of them and pretend like you’re kind of shaking your boobs and wiggling your ass. You know, distract them. Cheer them up. Take their mind off all the shit that’s been happening. Maybe sing a bit, too.”
“John, with all due resp—.”
“Please! Come on, just do it. It’ll be hilarious. And do Meyers first, OK? He’s been listening to Elliott Smith all afternoon and I’m afraid he might try to hang himself in the bathroom.”
This is not happening, right? Richardson is joking? He senses my reticence.
“Dude, please just do this. If you do, I promise that by the end of your internship we’ll put something you’ve written in print.”
Fuck. He’s got me. I go to the bathroom and then head over to Meyers’s desk at the end of a row of cubicles. He’s sitting there with his face in his hands. It looks like he might’ve recently been crying.
“Hey-yo, one day sale—o—” I have no idea what I’m singing, but it was the first thing that popped into my head. The Bon Marché song?
“Hey-yo, one day sale—o, one day only at the Bon Marché.”
He looks up at me. I have my arms out at my sides and I’m shaking what would be my boobs if I had boobs. My lipstick is smeared everywhere. I look like a homeless guy dressed up for Cirque du Soleil.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asks.
This is not going well. I switch to humming and do a little sashay.
“Please leave,” he says.
I leave and start walking back towards my desk, hoping Richardson will be satisfied. On my way back I see his head peeking out of the door of his office but when he sees me he pulls it back. I decide to stop by Carter’s desk, who’s staring directly at his computer screen. This time I do not do the Bon Marché song. I just do a little Cha Cha and shake it back and forth and swivel my hips a bit, leaning in as if to say, “Hey, big boy.” He flicks me off. He does not even look up from his computer screen.
“Arlight, that’s it,” I say to myself. “Richardson better be fucking happy.”
And he is. I pass by his office and he’s laughing his ass off. He’s literally on the ground crying, holding his stomach and gasping for air.
Anyway, that was one of the “highlights” from my first week at work. I guess some people would call it “hazing,” but I don’t know, it’s not always bad. And usually there’s something in it for me. The other day, for instance, Colby told me he’d give me a copy of the new Blitzen Trapper demo if I ate a bowl of dog food in front of him. I did it. I don’t care. I’m the unpaid intern. Fuck it. That’s what interns do, I guess. Just because there’s no money doesn’t mean I don’t have to pay my dues.
-Wetzler
Note: The Intern Files are a FICTIONALIZED account of my experiences at The Stranger. Some names have been changed.
This entry was written by , posted on January 12, 2009 at 11:05 pm, filed under the intern files and tagged blitzen trapper, dog food, hazing, internship. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.