Cubicle Savage: Essays

This is an excerpt from one of the Cubicle Savage: Essays manuscript I am currently working on. Eeps!

October 2006, San Diego

My brand new work attaché is securely crossed over the front of my body since I’m a city girl now. I look at my train ticket again to confirm that I am indeed on the Amtrak, headed downtown at 6:42am. Satisfied, I shoot my arm into the air, offering the ticket to the conductor. I’m such a good passenger, I think. And in my excitement, I tell the man, “I’m going to work,” in an over enthusiastic, almost shrill, tone. The man steps back and looks at me, his eyes wide and kind.

“Well, ain’t that something. You go, girl!” He raises his hand and I slap it with my own.

He loves his job and I think I will love my new job, too. Although, now that he is whistling onto the next passenger, telling the woman across the aisle that there is a snack car downstairs but, “They out of fruit cups”, I now suspect that he thinks I may be mentally challenged.

I look out the window, only slightly bothered that this commute isn’t perfect. Being a working woman, I had to shake it off. And now I reached inside the attaché, the one that my friend Kevin got me when I graduated months ago. It is brown and smooth. Kevin told me that I could tell it was real just by smelling it. Just then, I leaned over to bury my nose under the flap. It smelled like real, genuine leather. I looked up to see the conductor watching me, his eyes full of pity and admiration. His eyebrows shoot up excitedly in a peek-a-boo manner at me and he says, “Hi working girl!” How strong I must have seemed to him.

Inside the attaché I have two highlighters, a pen, a yellow Nokia 6280 cell phone, a wallet with identification and cash, my work badge (with a photo of me wearing one-inch bangs), lip gloss, and my house keys. I also have a banana that I probably won’t eat. Working women do lunch, I think now. I might have been overly prepared but I am certain that I will do just fine on my first day. I reach into my coat pocket - there are forty-thousand songs on my iPod. My thumb rotates the smooth, round dial. I embrace the flat, haptic clicking and it gives me a familiar, good feeling as I daydream to the sound of The Killers, and believe that since I am now a career woman, I will move up quickly in this company, secure an executive position, and eventually marry a career man.

By the time the train arrives downtown, I decide to stop calling my brown backpack an attaché. On the walk to the office building, I will have also decided that I do not get paid enough to wear the tight, stylish boots I am wearing. And although I am actually okay with the alley that might be a dumping ground for urinal cakes, I’m certainly on the fence about the homeless man who walks next to me, his neck craned, his red eyes fixed directly on my mouth. The man tells me he will fuck me later and, sheepishly, since it is only my first day, I respond with, “okay” before entering the lobby.

In the weeks to come, I will choose to cross at E Street instead of G Street. I have decided things on my first morning commute as a professional career woman. This, I think, is major.