Sandra

About Sandra, then.

First thing, I've worked in offices. I'm a regular office rat. I know the customs: the morning coffee, the telephones ringing and the invariable ritual greeting (if I simply listed the greetings I have brightly mouthed into the phones at the million and one companies I worked at, it would be Whitman, yes) as you answer them, the calls one sneaks in, more or less, more as the day goes forward, the exchange about what you are going to do tonight, this weekend, on vacation, and if the bosses aren't in earshot maybe words about mood, or some irritating order, or that they are children, big babies, you know, or they expect me to do all this work, I can't do this much fucking work all the time, or what's gotten in to him lately, or I am definitely looking for another job, anything, or god, if I win the lottery one of these days. Or what you are going to do. The weekend, tv, dinner. Talk. I know the spaces, too: the desks with little framed pictures of smiling love objects (husbands, wives, children, pets) (the pets of course not smiling, and looking, as animals do in the moment of the flash, like they have just been fried). I know, just as Prufrock knew the woman with the light brown hair, the intimacy of desk drawers: pennies, old sticks of gum among the paper clips, medusa haired tangles of rubber bands, checks and check stubs, scraps of yellow stick em paper with phone numbers scrawled on them that at one time meant something and who knows, "sign here" tape and, way back, one of those pocket day calendars, never used, from 1995. And hardly used things, the bottle of red ink to refresh the date stamper, a stray bottle of clear glue that if you tried to use it you'd find it was all dried up. Always, too, arranged somewhere on the desk, a few pharmaceuticals: aspirin, Ibuprofin, and maybe some prescription drug in its little amber cylinder.

If I am introducing Sandra by way of her desk, that's because this desk (my home from 2:30 to 5:30 in the afternoon) is how I know her. This is unusual. Usually I get to be friends with my fellow office workers. But Sandra and I, although friendly, are by no means friends. I have more of an idea of her life from the pictures of her two chubby boys, Joseph and Jeff, that are taped on the wall. There is also a page torn from a coloring book which must have been there for a year, and on the top in crayon it says, "To momi fr Jeff." The image, which is of a bear cub in a sweater, isn't completely colored in. Jeff was satisfied to accentuate, with bold strokes, the green of the bear's sweater, and then some browns jaggedly slash across the background, as if the bear had lost its color to the surrounding environment. Thepictures and pages are taped up on the wall beside a reproduction of Starry Starry Night, into which we can stare and stare and forget it is there. Truly, I remember looking up one day, sitting at the desk, and realizing it was there. It had been there all the time, but it was simply a placeholder for a blank. It could have been a donut hole for all the life it gave to the room. Such a shame, about art. Actually, the coloring book pages have more life. But it is a life I am averse to approach to any too intimate nearness.

Yes, Sandra and I have an odd relationship.

This is my problem, I guess - I don't trust Sandra. Sometimes it is like that. I don't trust her not to tell on me if I fuck up. I know, rather, that she will.

Sandra's hispanic. Which is one of those liberal tea party labels, and doesn't really get to the rich Tex Mex mixture, going beyond the Meditteranean, the Meso-american heartland. The cultural fact, quite apart from the political one, is that Laredo and Monterrey and San Antonio and Austin, that Texas in general, lie in the giant cultural umbra of Mexico. Mexico is like some incredibly close Moon, it is the satellite which looms gigantic just over the horizon, with all the pull of its probably more enduring culture, and we all feel it. Or at least in Texas, during those moments when the American exuberance is stripped off, we feel like we can't last, we Americans. That our time was nasty, short, and brutish, and now we are leaving. Such promise! Maybe in a century, but I don't know if I give us that long. Leaving behind our cherokee jeeps and our computers. So sad.

I, rattus rattus, am, unlike Sandra, white. Don't say you knew! I have white fur, and a pinkish nose and tail, and clear claws which go clip clip clip on the floor. I am that white, that experimental rat white.

What is interesting is that when a mistake is made (let's make it passive - lets just say it emerges, like a wrinkle, from the fabric of events) and there is a moment when we have to find out who made it, who is at fault, her face becomes amazingly young. I feel we've entered that long ago culture of the classroom, and a hand is up to the teacher's question, who burped? Who wrote these things on the wall? Who threw that? The face goes with that moment - remember? Hand straining in the air, face straining to be seen, beeming with innocence. An innocence that is about to rat, and the more innocent for that intention. For really, what could be more innocent than knowing and telling? It is the exact shade of innocence that is awarded "a's in conduct, until the conduct grade peters out. No more on the report card. Eventually, even, no more report cards.

I always did it. Burped, threw the spit wad, pulled the pig tail. I was doomed from the start.

I still don't feel like writing about Ronn. So let me throw in a minimal sketch of the third person in this little office entre-act, Barry. Then we will go to Ronn. Then, I promise, we will swim out into the depths - that is, if you can find depths in a gutter, in mere run-off.