I could not believe that it had actually come to this point. I was talking to a fucking tree. There was no one else to talk to and even if there was, he or she wouldn’t have wanted to hear about it and I wouldn’t have wanted to tell them a goddamned thing. I started this immense whirlpool of a downward spiral without any help, so I could very well stop the spinning on my own – with a little help from a tree.

     "You got me tree?" I screamed into the air and into the city and over the cliff and through the thin walls of the aging buildings before me. The Delaware seemed to swallow my words with ironic satisfaction and wash them away, carrying them with it down towards Philadelphia or the Atlantic.

     "Fuck you," the tree seemed to say back to me – but it didn’t matter because the tree was a dumb mute.

     Actually, the bartender seemed to say the same thing in a round about way without uttering the words out loud. I knew that two-faced, manic depressive bastard was at least thinking the words, though he was saying something else.

     "Wow," the bartender said out loud, "you look like you need an f’in drink."

     "Why do you say that?" I said defensively.

     The bartender, sizing me up and recognizing my frazzled appearance, ignored my question – "What’ll it be? And what happened?"

     I was sitting in a trendy, expensive bar in Easton, PA, amidst a huge mix of the happy hour crowd from Lafayette College. The place was called Porter’s.

     "A Yeungling – bottle. And can you believe it all started two days ago when I decided to hit a two iron from two-hundred twenty yards? Not only did I truly believe that I could carry the water, but I also assumed that I could actually HIT the goddamned club in the first place."

     The bartender could only muster up a cynical smile that barely even feigned interest, so I simply continued, FORCING him to listen:

     "So my caddie tells me to hit the three wood to ‘be safe’, but I ignore him because someone once told me that you should never listen to a caddie unless there is any doubt in your mind – and there was no doubt in my mind that I could clear the water with a two iron. I mean, I don’t remember ever hitting the deuce that well, not intentionally anyway, a couple of times on punch shots when I had to keep it underneath tree limbs or took it out by accident instead of a three iron, but I was fairly certain that this was the club. You should have seen the caddie’s face! He looked at me like I was crazy and then sat back and smirked pleasantly and respectfully as I hit the two iron no more than fourteen inches off the ground directly into the water thirty-seven yards in front of the green."

     The bartender was still listening, but becoming extremely frustrated by this point in the story.

     "So the caddie replaces my divot and we start walking down the fairway and he looks up at me and says: ‘boss, you are da man, I mean, DA man – you good, but why you gotta hit shots that you never gonna make and that only gonna make you real angry?’ And I say, ‘Terrance, what else am I gonna do? Lay up?’

     "And Terrance goes, ‘you’re goddamn right you lay up you fool! The only way for you to go through life makin’ par or better is to lay up most of the time and pick your chances every now and again. And definitely no two iron from 220 yards ain’t gonna help you out none, you trust me on that one’."

     "Listen, guy," the bartender said to me, "do I look like a bartender to you?"

     "All bartenders look different – I couldn’t say if there was one specific ‘bartender look’ – so I don’t know if you actually LOOK like a bartender."

     "Well I don’t know what I look like, but I AM the bartender here and I am QUITE sure that this is not a confessional. I got work to do," the bartender muttered almost incomprehensibly. He was visibly upset with me, but I was visibly deranged and tangled and, as I have already mentioned, frazzled. My khakis, normally only slightly dirty and always ironed, were ripped in eight different places and my nice, button-down Ralph Lauren had air-conditioning because it was split apart in between the shoulders. I was not my normal self, or at least I did not APPEAR to be my normal self. I was waiting for my normal self to appear.

     "Well you asked what happened," I commented, attempting to remind the inattentive and now rude bartender that he had indeed solicited the information.

     "Look – do you think I have all night to listen to your life story?"

     "I said – ‘it started two days ago’."

     "What do two irons have to do with anything?" The bartender wondered almost as an afterthought as many customers were demanding many beers from him.

     "Excuse me," I had to flag him down after he commented on the insignificance of the two iron story and then shot away towards more respectable customers. "Another Yeungling – please? And the two iron story explains how this whole thing began!" I pointed to my clothes and to my bloodshot eyes – I accepted another beer and tipped generously.

     "Hey, do you watch too much ‘Cheers’ or something? Or too many bad movies in which the bartender has all night to talk to some deranged lunatic talking about a two iron?"

     "No."

     "Then why are you still talking to me?"

     "You asked if…"

     "Boody boop – boody – bood – boop." The bartender said as I kept trying to get a word in edgewise. As he said this, I said:

     "But – well – you said – and the two iron – and…"

     "Boop boop BOOP!" The bartender said as he poured beers for underage girls that were quite beautiful and almost worthy of sleeping with. And then the bartender muttered, "I’ll give you a two iron."

     And then the tree wouldn’t even listen to me.

     "Fuck you," said the tree. I wish that bartender had the balls to tell me to fuck off instead of saying ‘boop’ and ‘boody’ over and over again. He needs the balls of a tree. One day he’ll get them and start punching customers like me right in the face on principle.

     I honestly thought that I could hit a two iron; my caddie disagreed. My boss disagreed as well and laughed when my ball rocketed along the ground into the water. It was a decidedly ugly shot – one that I would never want to repeat, especially in front of my boss, who never seemed to slow in his continuous quest for a glimpse of humiliation in his employees. I should never have hit my tee shot so poorly – goddamned three wood has deserted me, as has most everything that used to play well within the course of my life.

     I was one of my boss’s employees, and actually one of his best employees. I was an up-and-comer, poised for the fast track to six figures and success. What I did for my boss was fairly simple, but doing it WELL was extremely complicated – I succeeded every day, and my boss was grateful, as were his bosses and the bosses that nobody was sure even existed.

     In a way, I loved my boss. He showered me with praise and only occasionally attempted to humiliate me. He liked the press releases I wrote and was constantly congratulating me for fitting quirky humor into paragraphs or reports that were essentially supposed to be dry and informative, not witty. I was witty but not witty enough to overcome the fact that the press releases I wrote were boring and filled with lies.

     Of course I somehow speak calmly and within myself even though I can only see red and the balls of my eyes are turning over and over again inside my head and the general feeling I have in my thighs is that of stoned-in solitude and I am quite sure I will never live past the moment in which I now spend my time. And still I somehow speak calmly and try to relate to this world, something I had pretended to give up doing long ago and before I had even known much about this world, and now I was soon to leave it. I never knew you – world.

     Calm and tranquility are two forces that seem to invade me and generate an incredible amount of uncomfortable vibes throughout every part of my various bodily systems. I feel a sense of calm in my penis and immediately I am alarmed that the thing is dead and my reproductive career is over before it has even started. I feel my brain calming down and a lessening of anger and I am shocked to learn that I no longer care about anything or anyone and am resigned to live a life of servitude because I will no longer be able to rebel and choose my own course.

     Calm and tranquility are alien feelings that, when felt, drive me to insanity. I feed off of disaster, horror, and emotional warfare – and I long for conflict that will make me elated, depressed, or even suicidal. I long for that FEELING, when I am no longer complacent and am instead obsessed, or engaged, or absolutely enraptured with any given subject or topic or person.

     It used to be women – but not so much anymore. There is very little time for me to be amazed by women these days, especially considering my horrific work schedule and my intense drinking beer schedule. My time is confined and my mind is in jail – and the girls that loved me or love me suffer the consequences of the more important things in my life.

     I have a girlfriend, but she doesn’t like me, and I don’t particularly like her either, or even enjoy her. She’s nice, in a way, and she’s beautiful, in a hundred different ways, but there are so many other things to worry about in this life and this world which makes it extremely difficult to give a hot damn about your hot girlfriend.

     I believe that my boss was in love with my girlfriend and was secretly hoping to trade his wife with me for my girlfriend. I wouldn’t have it. I didn’t think his wife was pretty or even cute. She was an aging whore who somehow found her way into his office one day on a sales pitch and ended up tricking him into marrying her. He loved her because she allowed him to sleep with other women, and he wanted to sleep with my girlfriend, which was probably why he kept promoting me. If he was on MY good side then he could be on my girlfriend’s good side too.

     He invited the two of us to play golf on Monday and we initially accepted, but my girlfriend had to cancel at the last minute because she had to fly to Milan for a fashion shoot. Easton is not a convenient place for her to live, if only because most of the modeling she does is on the Continent and five hours away, even by the private jet her agency normally provides for her complete with champagne and cocaine. She WANTED to play golf with us that morning but she simply could NOT play golf with us that morning – she was flying to Milan. I was used to this sort of thing by now.

     My girlfriend and I were going through a few ‘problems’. She was in Milan and I was stuck on the golf course with my boss and hit a two iron into the water. The bartender was right – why was that shot so important?

     I’m not even sure what my job was. My boss would give me a pile of reports and other crap and ask me to condense the nonsense into a press release. Why the press would care was beyond me. Normally I sat in my office drinking warm beer and laughing out loud at the reports he sent me. He usually said ‘please’ when he handed me any given report, knowing full-well the incoherent gibberish he was handing me, inevitably over one hundred pages that needed to be condensed into an interesting three paragraphs, was a mess – and I would sip on my beer and grudgingly transform the report into an item that was, as my boss liked to put it, ‘newsworthy’. The news would then be transcribed and put on the Internet by a web geek, which in turn would be read by investors who wanted to feel satisfied that they were informed about the company they were putting their easily earned dollars into –

     My dollars were not hard earned. I kept a log of how many hours a day I spent actually working and it usually worked out to about an hour and a half. I spent about seven hours a day in my office. I was a valuable employee. I was thought to be on the fast track to success. I was going to make six figures; I had no idea what I would do with six figures. Perhaps I would buy my girlfriend a little piece of mind so she would not insist at all hours of every day that I was an alcoholic and my love for her was wasted on sips of Yeungling. That was a high price to pay, and only six figures would do it.

     I like having sex with my girlfriend, but only when she doesn’t seem to want to have sex, if only because it presents more of a challenge. I think I have rape fantasies. I love it when she rapes me when I don’t want to have sex and am quite sure that she likes it too, if only because it presents more of a challenge for her. When you are dating someone exclusively, it is difficult to keep things exciting – my girlfriend and I rape each other. I’m not sure we are having sex exclusively with each other anymore.

     She didn’t want me to accept the promotion that was coming because she insisted that I was a talented writer and that I was needed elsewhere. She had no idea what the promotion would mean. The promotion would mean that I was no longer writing fake synopses of weekly company reports but was instead writing fake speeches for the higher-ups in the company that I had never seen and was not even sure existed. I didn’t even know where these unknown higher-ups made speeches but a promotion for me would mean that I was writing the speeches they made. This was exciting, and my boss told me so on the golf course.

     "You hit another two iron in the water like that and you might not get that promotion to write speeches for the higher-ups," my boss said to me after I hit the two iron in the water.

     "What higher-ups?" I wondered.

     "What – you don’t want to write speeches for them?"

     "No – not that – I just wanted to know who these higher-ups are that everyone talks about all the time."

     "Jesus you’re ambitious!" My boss said as he hit a wedge onto the green on his third shot. He laid up – he would probably make birdie. He had seven feet left even though he was a seventeen handicapper.

     I didn’t really consider myself to be THAT ambitious. I didn’t enjoy working at the company and was looking for a way out. I have a website and write a weekly article that over two thousand readers across the world digest. They love me. They write me and tell me that I am a genius and I write back and tell them that they are idiots. They tell me I should be writing for a living and I tell them that I AM writing for a living. They tell me I am a corporate sell-out and I tell them that I indeed AM a corporate sell-out. They wonder why I agree with them and I wonder how I am able to write such a scathing weekly article about Corporate America when I live and work in Corporate America. Then I remember that it is easier to hate something when you are involved in it – I have all the insider scoops on what goes on in and is terribly wrong with Corporate America. I am Corporate America – I aid in its every dying wish.

     I do it because I can do nothing else. I can do nothing else but write. I try to do it on my own but there is no one to support me. I try to sell something of my own but then I forget to try and sell it. I loathe the publishing world because I do not understand it and am generally a pacifist and will not fight for publication. I do not understand query letters and do not know whether to look for a literary agent or an editor or a publisher. I do not know whether to begin in Hollywood or whether to look in the old school literary/publishing world. I do not have any idea whether I should start marketing my short stories, novels, screenplays, or political rants, and I do not know where to market them. Furthermore, I have no idea which short story, novel, screenplay, or political rant I should market, and I do not even know if any of them are any good. A decent writer is supposed to be his toughest critic, but I don’t even know what to criticize.

     I write too much. My girlfriend always tells me so. My boss doesn’t tell me so because he doesn’t realize that I spend nearly ninety percent of my time in the office writing novels and editing previous attempts at novels. My girlfriend always tells me so because she knows that whenever I write I drink and whenever I am living I am writing and whenever I am writing I am drinking and so she calls me a drunk without any guilt whatsoever. She is a model and when she is with me in our apartment she is always completely sober and pushing guilt my way. When she is away modeling she is probably not sleeping with any other guys but is most definitely enjoying champagne and cocaine and having fun. It is almost as if when she is sober in the apartment in Easton with me she has no fun whatsoever. When she is away from me and working she is having fun and when she is with me and I am drinking and working and hoping to get laid later in the evening (while she is sober) she is chiding me for my excessive drinking.

     I don’t really drink that much. I drink a LOT of beer in the dull office mornings, but other than that I basically am a sober fellow. I never really get drunk, though I guess I must admit that I drink a LOT – which is probably why I have such a high tolerance. Lately I’ve increased my tolerance and come close to the edge.

     I love my girlfriend and am truly amazed at how beautiful she is. I am uninterested in whether or not the rest of the world, or even the modeling world, finds her beautiful, because I am quite sure that there is no woman that I have ever seen that equals her level of beauty. And still I am uninterested in her. She wears long blonde hair halfway down her back and rarely employs a bra, and her melon-sized breasts are usually easy to imagine through her tight shirts (especially for me). She has the face of an angel and accentuates this by wearing a tiny amount of makeup to cover up her beauty. Her nose his small, her eyes almond-shaped and green and quite large, her mouth immense when she smiles and small when she stares in reticent silence, her cheeks long and filled with sun-enhanced brown freckles, and her chin slightly pointy but the perfect finish for a gorgeous face with a gorgeous smile. Whenever she smiles I lose my mind and whenever she frowns I am overcome with devastation. When she smiles at me I feel a warm gust of air on my brow – and when she frowns at me I feel tiny little droplets of sweat overcoming my forehead and dripping down towards my eyes. I hate disappointing her.

     I love her body and am only REALLY happy when I am sleeping with her. I love hugs and am not afraid to say so. I love sleeping and not having sex – I love having sex, too. I love cuddling without sex. I love the sex, but I am only completely enraptured when it is a challenging affair.

     I love her and I love that she is my girlfriend, but I am not entirely sure that we are compatible. I think she hates me. I think she wants to divorce me, even though we aren’t married yet. I fear that if we ever do get married she will want to divorce me right after we say the words ‘I do’. I fear that she doesn’t want to marry me. I fear that she will never accept my marriage proposals. I fear that I will never have the courage or the balls to ask her to marry me. I fear that I have testicular cancer and am dying. I fear cancer and then light another cigarette and look at myself in the mirror because I am quite sure that I am pretty.

     My girlfriend is pretty and she smiles at me and shows off her body occasionally before we either have sex or go to sleep. She is thin and yet buxom and has strong legs that when she hovers over me in sexual tightness quiver with delight and I love to feel her quivering. Especially considering her delightful body and strong, slim legs and flat stomach. She could take me in a second. I could never rape her. I’m too thin – too weak. I love to make her happy.

     "Fuck you – you weak bastard!" The tree says to me as I try to muster up some strength.

     SOMETIMES I think that I was bound to lose control and flip out. I had a seemingly calm life and a decent job where I made good money and worked hardly at all. This, to me, seemed to be the American dream. Do very little work, play a lot of golf, and try every evening to rape your girlfriend, or to have her rape you. But then I remember that I never asked for the American dream, and whoever made it come true for me deserved a swift punch in the face.

     I sat in my office late in the afternoon after playing golf with my boss and topping a two iron on fifteen and was quite sure that I was done for. I was wasted; I was so happy. I had played quite well in the round of golf but I had made a fool of myself. You should not get THAT drunk in front of your boss – I was happy that I was considering my ass fired. I wanted to be fired. I wanted out of Corporate America, but I wanted to be forced out and spared the conscious decision of leaving on my own.

     But that didn’t concern me as I sat in my office and twiddled my thumbs and watched a window, outside of which nothing happened. There were delivery trucks and there was a pond and occasionally people would go outside and have a smoke. There were only two ducks. I was smoking in my office because I was learning that not caring was a definite sign of professional confidence – and arrogance paid off in my line of work. And it was easy because I hated my line of work (I wasn’t entirely sure what my line of work was). Just last week I gained the habit of walking down the hall with a cigarette hanging out of my mouth during my numerous bathroom breaks. I had to take more bathroom breaks than most because I was drinking a hell of a lot of beer as I wrote my press releases. I was thinking of having a kegerator installed in my office.

     When I walked down the hall to the bathroom I had a cigarette hanging out of my mouth and took drags of it as I nodded at people and mumbled ‘fuck you’ through my clenched lips. They couldn’t understand my words – they could not understand me. I was high. I smoked a lot of pot on the golf course and drank a lot of beers afterwards in the men’s grill with my boss. He thought it would be a good idea if we went into work ‘late’ so it did not seem like we were freewheeling. It seemed like he was taking a liking to me but I was still convinced that he wanted my girlfriend. And I knew that we WERE freewheeling.

     I secretly wanted to ask my girlfriend to marry me, but I was still not entirely sure that we were sleeping exclusively with each other. I loved sleeping with her because she was so comfortable to hold and felt wonderful next to me. I secretly wanted to ask her to marry me because I openly wanted her to be forbidden to sleep with anyone else as long as she lived. I was very selfish.

     I was very selfish and I blew smoke into all of my office-mates’ faces as I walked down the hall for frequent bathroom breaks. It’s a good thing I like warm beer, because my office not only lacked a kegerator, it lacked a refrigerator. It was severely lacking in a number of different aspects, especially since it was a corner office with a tiny window and almost no view of the ugly Easton exterior. It is ugly and I don’t LIKE it. My office should be upgraded. It was upgraded from a cubicle to this piece of shit but it is still only a decorated broom closet.

     And the place reeks of smoke.

     "You know, you shouldn’t be smoking in here." My boss peeked his head into the office late Monday afternoon after we were finished with golf and I was finished with about a case of beer. "I think it’s making people around here uneasy."

     "You mean jealous?"

     "I mean uneasy – we DO have a no-smoking policy in this office, after all."

     "What does that mean?" I said defensively, puffing on a cigarette and sipping on a bottle of Yeungling.

     "Actually, it’s not my policy," my boss pointed out, "it’s the building’s policy – the sprinklers could go off at any second with all this smoke."

     "Oh come on, I’m just blowing off some smoke here – it’s been a rough day."

     "A rough day?" My boss said. "You’ve been smoking all over this building and chugging beer all day! You played a relaxing round of golf! How does that constitute a rough day?"

     "Did you see the new report that I have to condense into a comprehensive and witty three paragraph press release?" I looked at my boss seriously and felt that he felt my pain – my pleasure – "if you were me you’d be smoking hash, not cigarettes."

     "I hate hash."

     "You love weed."

     "Yeah but I hate hash, and I wouldn’t be smoking it now if I had to do the most simplistic assignment on the face of the earth."

     "How is turning this gibberish into a derivative of sanity simplistic?"

     "Look – you’re a good fucking writer. Let’s not get into this." My boss closed the door to my broom closet with a miniscule window that showed little of the non-existent world surrounding it. He took a seat without me inviting him too. "You’re above this shit. That’s why I’m trying to get you moving up the ranks. You should be writing speeches" – he picked up the pile of papers on my desk and immediately slammed them down – "not condensing this nonsense."

     He sounded sincere but I knew better. He was a liar and a thief and he wanted more than anything else to have sex with my girlfriend. This made me incredibly angry and I did not respond to him.

     "You played well today," my boss said, changing the subject.

     "I did," I responded, with nothing else to contribute to the conversation. I was searching for the original purpose of the conversation.

     "You smoke too much, especially in the office."

     "Where am I supposed to smoke?"

     My boss was looking at his feet and I’m sure he was wiggling his toes. I felt like I was HIS boss. I was self-assured and he was too scared to reprimand me. How did I come to be in this position? "Not in the office," he said, pretending to be angry. I could tell he was trying to wipe the emerging smile off his own face.

     "What – you want me to go outside with all the others?"

     "Maybe."

     "Do you REALIZE how much I smoke? How useful would I be to this company if I spent eighty percent of my workday sitting on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes? Productivity would nose dive!"

     "You didn’t smoke this much before," my boss pointed out.

     "Yeah and it was fucking killing my health!"

     "Your health?"

     "My mental health…"

     My boss interrupted me – "listen, what if we hire another Press Relations Assistant who DOESN’T smoke and who can do the very same work you’re obviously NOT doing right now?"

     "More power to you – would probably help my mental health even more than this cigarette."

     "You know," he continued, "you’re making this very difficult on me."

     "What the fuck are you talking about?" I asked with a slight bite in my voice that would have sounded harsh had I not just played eighteen with the man.

     "I mean, with the circumstances and all."

     He suddenly became a pitiful and weak human being in my eyes. My girlfriend would never have gone for him, and it showed something about my weakness for jealousy that I would actually fear his prowess over me when it came to her. My ego is so inflated that when a weak man is nice to my hopeful future wife I assume he is attempting to steal her from me because she is too beautiful to resist. MY girlfriend is the MOST beautiful girlfriend – or so you would think considering my behavior, or, at the very least, my thoughts, not to mention my actions. I am such a jealous bastard. Even so – my girlfriend IS the most beautiful girlfriend.

     "Fuck you" – said the tree.

     "FUCK YOU – prick!" I said back to the tree.

     "What circumstances?" I asked my boss.

     "Look," he said, looking at his feet and unable to look me in the eye, shuffling his toes and wondering why he was so uncomfortable in front of me, unstable on his own two feet, again making me feel like I was HIS boss, "I either have to fire you or promote you. That’s it."

     "So fire me," I replied instantaneously. There was no doubt in my mind that the man should fire me. Why should I have hesitated when I knew it was the right thing to do? "What the hell good am I for the company anyway?"

     "The higher-ups seem to think that you’re brilliant," my boss said, shuffling his ankles and playing footsie with himself. "I’m not sure why."

     "Neither am I – they’d have to be crazy to think that."

     "They ARE crazy and they’re getting crazier," my boss reflected quietly and uneasily. "But they DO think that you’re brilliant, and if I don’t promote you then I have to have a reason to fire you."

     "Why can’t I sit here and smoke cigarettes and continue to do very little work that nobody notices anyway?"

     "Because that’s not how it works."

     "Oh wise supervisor of mine, pray-tell, how does it work?"

     "People have to go up or down - upward social mobility and downward social mobility. If there is no movement within the company, then there is no improvement, no modernization, no minimizing of costs and maximizing of outputs, no fight to make the company the most competitive it can possibly be. The company then becomes stagnant."

     "What if the company already IS the most competitive it possibly can be?"

     "It can’t possibly be the most competitive it possibly can be. That’s impossible. There is always room for improvement – even if there isn’t. Demoting and promoting proves this. ‘This guy is better suited for that, and that guy is better suited for this’. If the company rests on its laurels for even a second an ambitious competitor will be promoting and demoting at a much quicker pace than we are, and then we could be finished. This is Corporate America."

     "Are you serious?"

     "That’s what the higher-ups seem to think. I have to fire you or promote you. And if I question the higher-ups, I’ll never be promoted, and might be fired, or demoted, or transferred to a place like South Africa, and who wants to go to South Africa?"

     "Who would you promote to my position? Jane?"

     I knew that my supervisor and boss would not promote Jane to my position, even if he did fire me and not promote me, because he had slept with Jane and now Jane felt superior to him. Jane could claim sexual harassment every time my boss looked at her, and she definitely had the upper hand on him. She was an assistant to both myself and my boss, and she hated cigarette smokers, which meant that it was impossible for me to ever even dream of sleeping with her. Every time I tried to dream of or imagine sleeping with her an image of her frowning at me because I was smoking a cigarette always crept into my head.

     "No, not Jane – she’s not ambitious enough."

     "Then who?" I thought of eight people who could possibly replace me. None of them were worthy; even though I was not worthy, they were worthless. I was at least deemed to be ambitious, even though I wasn’t.

     "Why do you care?" By now my boss was staring me down, attempting laughably to be serious and stern with me. "Do you WANT to be fired?"

     "Yeah – why the hell not? I don’t have that on my resume yet."

     "You’re going around smoking in the office and breaking every rule you possibly can!" Brian paused and looked around my office. "For the love of the slut Mary there are two cases of Yeungling sitting on top of your windowsill! What’s gotten into you?"

     "Huh?" I wondered – wondering if I was still paying attention.

     "Are they warm?"

     "Yes," I said, taking a huge chug out of one of the bottles.

     "What’s gotten into you?"

     "That round of golf triggered something today…"

     "What, you realized that you’re a terrible golfer?"

     "Yeah – and more."

     "That you should be able to smoke in the office if you can smoke on the golf course?"

     "Brian," I said to my boss – his name was Brian DeLancey – "how does that old saying go?"

     "What saying?"

     "‘Whatever you can do on the golf course you should be able to do in your living room’."

     "Is that a saying?"

     "It should be – it would make this world a lot more laid back, not to mention this office."

     "Yeah well I don’t think blowing smoke in everybody’s face necessarily aids in the matter," Brian pointed out. "And besides – this isn’t your living room."

     "But that’s my goal."

     "What?"

     "To be able to blow smoke in everybody’s face."

     "You’re impossible."

     "So fire me."

     "I will."

     "You won’t."

     "I will."

     "You won’t do it," I said with a smile on my face. "You won’t."

     "I won’t what?"

     "Fire me."

     "No, I won’t."

     "I wish you would."

     "But I won’t."

     "Why not?"

     "Because I’m too busy promoting you."

     "You’re promoting me?"

     "Not today."

     "You won’t do it."

     "Not today?"

     "You won’t."

     "Why not?"

     "Because you want to promote Jane. She’s more EXPERIENCED."

     "That’s why I won’t promote her."

     "I know."

     Brian looked at the floor sadly and wondered why he had come into my pitiful office in the first place.

     "You going to stop smoking in the office?"

     "As far as you know."

     "As far as I know what?"

     "As far as you can throw me."

     "What?"

     "You won’t."

     "I won’t what?"

     "Throw me far."

     "Why do you insist on antagonizing me?" Brian asked with a hurt look on his face. I know he was trying for a look of scorn – but he failed.

     "Because I want you to fire me."

     "I won’t."

     "Why not?"

     "I told you, because I I’m too busy promoting you – the higher-ups will love me for it."

     "They don’t even know me."

     "Exactly."

     "Do they know you?"

     "I don’t know."

     I love my girlfriend. I always tell her so and she yells at me for diminishing the meaning of the phrase because I repeat it so often. She could not play golf with us last Monday, but she didn’t miss anything exciting. Nothing happened. I DID hit a two iron into the water and my caddie reprimanded me, but other than that – nothing happened. I smoked some weed with my boss on seventeen in a bunker and we had a few beers afterwards in the men’s grill, but overall it was an uneventful round.

     Now, had my girlfriend been in the office afterwards when I decided that the no-smoking rule did not apply to me she might have really had a good laugh or at least seen something quite eventful.

     She was home when I got home. I did not work late but I stayed in the office late. I left the office at about nine-thirty in the evening. It was late. I was kept late because I was watching the Mets’ game on cable. It was not my fault; Al Leiter was pitching – it was Al Leiter’s fault. I had cable in my office and felt at home there, now that I could smoke and drink – even though I hated my office. I did not feel at home at home. Home was not home and home was away from home even though I loved sleeping with my girlfriend and she was home when I arrived from work. I just did not feel comfortable in my home.

     I felt comfortable with my girlfriend when I was holding her but extremely uncomfortable when we were conversing. It was unnerving to have to speak to her. I loved her madly but was worried that everything I said would alienate her and force her to leave me. I was worried about everything and even more worried about the fact that I was worried about everything. What kind of man goes through life worrying about everything? Why could I not simply be myself around her and not try to be who I thought she wanted me to be. I was not sure who I wanted myself to be, much less who SHE wanted me to be.

     It was impossible to be myself either to her or to others because every single person I met had a different perception of who I was. If they thought of me as somebody else, then they would assume that I was not being myself when I was being myself. They must have been blind and as a result they blinded me – how was I to know who I was when everyone expected me to be somebody else?

     "Why don’t you just be yourself?" My girlfriend asked me sarcastically after I got home late from work. "Make yourself at home."

     "What do you MEAN?"

     "Did you kiss me?"

     "You know full well I didn’t," I replied. I didn’t kiss her when I walked in the door. I didn’t know she was home. I grabbed a beer, lit a cigarette, and sat down in front of the television. I wanted to see the end of the Mets’ game. I left my office because I was drinking too much. It was like leaving a bar. I always left bars if I thought I had had enough so that I could return home and have a few more.

     But this time I WAS being myself, and my girlfriend knew it and did not like it one bit. I didn’t know she was home, which is why I was being myself.

     "Why didn’t you kiss me?"

     "I didn’t know you were home. I thought you were in Milan."

     My girlfriend distracted me. She was too beautiful. Here I was attempting to concentrate on a meaningless baseball game with this striking girl making it impossible to watch the television screen because it was impossible to NOT watch her.

     "It was a two hour shoot. Pop in, pop out. I literally arrived on the jet for the shoot right on time and then left right afterwards."

     "What are YOU doing?" I asked, trying to figure out how she had been being herself while I wasn’t home and she didn’t have to pretend.

     "Reading."

     "Reading what?"

     "Reading a story."

     "Reading what story, Milla?"

     I loved these games because my girlfriend, whose name was Milla and whose family came from the Ukraine, would look so cute as she playfully egged me on and dragged me into her world and very successfully made my world disappear right beneath my eyes. She is a very talented model and an impressive woman. She is a natural actress and she is much smarter than I am. God bless her. God hate her for distracting me by being so intelligent and so beautiful.

     "A story about love," she said, slowly taking off her sweatshirt. "God," she said with just a touch of irony in her voice, "it’s hot in here, isn’t it?"

     "It’s not."

     "No – it’s REALLY hot in here," my girlfriend continued, taking off her blouse. Not even a bra remained.

     "You won’t."

     "I think I need to put on a pair of shorts," Milla said, taking off her pants.

     "Why don’t you make yourself at home? Be yourself?"

     "You won’t," she accused me.

     "I won’t what?"

     She was standing in front of me wearing only a thong with her breasts staring me in the face. I was too stunned to react. I was confronted rudely with female beauty. This was what is known in the business as ‘coming on strong’, only this was my girlfriend. I was supposed to react – this much I knew. I WANTED to react but it was so hard to get up out of my chair. I was stoned – stunned – grounded. I was in love and in a tunnel of passion. I could not see the light.

     I would.

     She was tugging at the edges of her thong, teasing gently and threatening teasingly to pull them off entirely. She was threatening full frontal nudity. She was stretching the thong from her hips with her talented thumbs and swiveling her waist in a sexy sway that was absolutely and absurdly tantalizing.

     Al Leiter could do it on his own.

     I turned off the television and had the thong off before she could take it off herself. It was lucky for the two of us that three months previous we had finally decided to carpet our wooden floors and that our health insurance covered rug burns.

     MY name is Fritz McLaughlin and I was born to answer all sorts of asinine questions.

     "Congratulations on the promotion, Fritz! How does it feel?" was uttered to me over and over again as I walked through the office blowing smoke in everybody’s faces.

     "Fuck you," I mumbled incomprehensibly again and again.

     "Fritz, how happy are YOU today, buddy?" asked another idiotic worker that I hated.

     "Fuck you."

     Apparently Brian had decided to give me a promotion.

     Brian was sitting in my office when I walked in.

     "So nice of you to come in."

     "So nice of you to welcome me," I replied, checking my watch, which falsely read seven-thirty. My watch didn’t work very well and I never looked at it anyway.

     "What – you have professional baseball player hours now?"

     "What time is it?"

     "It’s a quarter to twelve," Brian said with his voice trying to settle on either a sarcastic or scolding tone.

     "Jesus! I can’t believe this! My watch is off by about four and a quarter hours!" I was serious. I threw my watch out the window and almost hit one of the two ducks.

     "It’s a quarter to twelve," Brian repeated – this time with a reprimanding tone to his voice.

     "Nice!" I stated, sitting down at my desk and cracking one of the warm Yeungling’s left over from the day before, "just in time for lunch! Could you ask Jane to order me a large pepperoni pie from Campus? That’d be great right now." I looked at Brian and smiled – "I missed breakfast."

     "I’ll bet you did," Brian said, eyeing me up and down, "how’s Milla?"

     "Milla?"

     "Your girlfriend."

     "Brian, you know she’s my girlfriend – right?" I asked seriously.

     "I JUST said ‘your girlfriend’ didn’t I?"

     "OK, fine. I just don’t want you taking any divots out of my artificial turf – know what I mean, Brian?"

     "Fine," Brian said, "you don’t want to talk about being late and you don’t want to talk about Milla – how’s about we talk about me promoting you?"

     I looked at Brian with trepidation – "Brian, this day started out with such promise, don’t bring me down now."

     "With promoting you?"

     "I like this office, Brian."

     "No, you don’t – you hate this office. You always complain that its view is bullshit."

     "It is bullshit, Brian, but I still don’t want you to bring me down with promoting me on this beautiful day!"

     I couldn’t explain to him that I was afraid of a promotion because it would mean that I was more involved with the company. I had no desire to be more involved with the company – I didn’t even know how involved with myself I wanted to be at this point.

     "We’re talking six figures here Fritz."

     "For what – writing speeches?"

     "Among other things."

     "Will I have to sleep with any of the higher-ups?" I looked at Brian cautiously. "Men – Brian? Will I have to sleep with men?"

     "Only a few."

     "Milla doesn’t like that sort of thing."

     "Milla doesn’t even like you."

     "Stop trying to sleep with her, Brian. I will NOT have you hitting on her anymore!"

     "Come on Fritz – grow up – enough with the bullshit. You’re getting the promotion you want – even if you won’t admit it – and you’re getting it because you’ve done brilliant work in my department. They want you on P/R for the highest levels – they feel like they’re wasting your talents down here."

     "I have talents?"

     "What’s with all this rebel stuff? Smoking all over the place and finishing off cases of Yeungling in your office?"

     "I was thirsty, Brian – and I had a sudden nic-fit."

     "Why are you trying to destroy yourself?"

     "Who else is going to do it?" I wondered aloud. "Milla gave up trying long ago – she figures I don’t need her help."

     "You’re an asshole."

     "So are you – what does that have to do with anything?"

     I am not happy with the promotion I received yesterday. I am not happy with the round of golf I played Monday with Brian. I am also not happy about the new office I received along with the promotion. It is too big and too empty. It makes me feel ridiculous. I recognize the fact that I AM ridiculous but I don’t like to have that fact shoved in my face on a continuous basis. My new office is huge and all that sits in it is a desk, a laptop computer for writing, and an ashtray that I am not supposed to use but cannot seem to keep from overflowing. I don’t have a trashcan. I am not happy with how the previous three years have developed – they were not part of my plan. I never had a plan.

     "Do you think I can dive into the river?" I said to the tree.

     "You couldn’t dive into an ocean you fucking loser!" The tree responded. I hated how the tree spoke back to me. It was as if he had no conscience.

     "AND live?" The tree later said. "If you dove into the river, even if you landed successfully, you would be dead in an instant. Do you want to die?"

     "I don’t want to do anything," I responded – sure that I did not, for once, want to do anything at all which involved doing something.

     I didn’t hear the tree’s response. It was as if I were deaf. I was deaf to the world. Or was the world deaf to me? Neither of us was listening.

     I stood isolated and alone and only with a tree. I wondered how the tree had the nerve to speak back to me so bluntly – so rudely. My life was falling apart because it was becoming so successful. I was promoted for no other reason than that I either had to be promoted or demoted and my boss wanted to promote me.

     WHAT I failed to mention about the two iron shot is that it felt so good. It felt so good to refuse to lay up. I did not hit the safe shot because I did not want to make par – I did not even want to make bogey. I did not want to be playing golf and I did not want to join the Country Club, which the promotion I did not want to receive most certainly would guarantee. I did not know how I had gotten so far integrated into this Corporate American nightmare, nor could I fathom how I had been so dramatically successful. The two iron shot felt incredible because it was the first impulsive action that I had taken in the three years since I had graduated from college.

     "That’s such a STUPID metaphor," the tree said with a mocking and ironic tone to his voice.

     But the two iron shot freed me from the shackles of Corporate America. I started smoking cigarettes in the office and was thinking of installing a kegerator in my new, plain, empty office. I was promoted when I wanted to be fired. I released myself from all of my inhibitions and decided that I would no longer apply to the Board of Conventional Behavior before every action I took. I wanted to be fired and instead I was promoted.

     Milla was incredibly happy that I was being myself. She loathed my new promotion and was proud that I was doing everything in my power to supercede my boss’s desire to not fire me. Unfortunately, she could not have predicted the downside of me being myself, which was undoubtedly that she hated it when I was myself and instead preferred it when I pretended to be someone else other than myself which was still not the person I used to pretend to be at the office. How could she have known? And how could I have known which myself I was supposed to be – or which one was the real one? I was starting to realize that perhaps Milla could not help in the least.

     She would have much preferred ‘me being myself’ meaning a more artistic me (it could have been) that did not necessarily imply a drunken lunatic who blew smoke in everybody’s faces (it couldn’t have been). She wanted me to be more artistic and express myself more freely, but she had no idea that I would implode and take large steps on the path to destroying myself.

     In my own defense, I must say that I truly believed that the only way to exercise the demons of Corporate America, which nibbled at my soul and lived in my brain like parasites, was to completely fly off the handle and rid myself of the horrible corporate disease. The affliction was worse than cancer, and it fed off of money and survived by offering money to its captive – in this case me. And so after releasing myself on the golf course, despite Terrence’s dismay, I was able to release myself in the office, and release myself from any and all restrictions that were previously involved with my life.

     The most amazing factor that came out of my rebellion (rehabilitation) of the past two days had to have been the respect (as well as the loathing) that came my way in response to my newfound demeanor. I was promoted, was looked up to by my officemates who had always wanted to act without thinking about possible repercussions, and by my boss – who is, and will forever remain, an idiot.

     "You’re an idiot," the tree said to me, "who cares about Corporate America when you have a girlfriend like that?"

     THE tree, unfortunately, was right. Milla was a wonderful girlfriend who I never wanted to believe was wonderful because then I would have had to admit that she was wonderful. She was wonderful and she smiled like a Goddess and made love to me with incredible passion and undeserved adoration. We played games and spiced up the sex to make it more exciting (I’m quite sure we are having sex exclusively with each other), but there was nothing short of love between us. And my rebellion at work carried over unnecessarily to my home – I was rebelling at home as well. This was a childish offshoot of my rebellion at work. Were I one smart cookie, I would have rebelled at work and still given Milla the respect she deserved at home. Instead I figured I had to rebel against everything and everyone, which was false. The idea may have been to kill two birds with one stone, but only one bird deserved to die.

     "You fucked that one up mightily!" The tree said.

     "She didn’t leave me!"

     "Not yet."

     "WHAT the fuck happened to you, anyway?" The bartender asked, renewing his interest in me as the bar cleared out and there was no one else to talk to.

     "Oh, now you care?"

     "There’s nobody else here."

     "What difference does that make?"

     "I have time to talk to you now."

     "So?"

     "So what the fuck happened to you, anyway?"

     "I had a fight with a tree," I commented, almost telling the truth but still not sure whether lying was worth it anymore. Lying was exaggerating and exaggerating was putting a spin on the truth but nothing was lying when I had no idea what the truth was in the first place.

     "Yeah, well, the tree fucking kicked your ass!" The bartender exclaimed with a nauseating sense of glee. He was still my enemy. Everyone was my enemy. Everyone was my enemy only because I treated everyone as my enemy, including Milla.

     "I got a promotion."

     "And that upsets you."

     "Pisses me off."

     "I’ll play the role of the concerned friend – why?"

     "Because of my insolence."

     "Insolence?"

     "Yeah – I act very disrespectful to try and get them to fire me and instead they promote me."

     "That’s Corporate America for you. They RESPECT insolence and disrespect," the bartender pointed out.

     "Why is that?"

     "In Corporate America, insolence and disrespect for superiors implies competence, especially if you’re doing a good job – makes them feel inferior and therefore superior once they promote you for your insolence."

     "How do you know?"

     "I worked at Merril in the city for about eight years."

     "How was that?"

     "I wasn’t disrespectful enough – never got promoted."

     "My girlfriend doesn’t like it when I disrespect her."

     "I’ve seen her in here with you before – you guys looked happy."

     I glared at the bartender angrily; insolence and sarcasm were apparent in his comment. "We were – until she encouraged me to be myself."

     "You should be yourself by yourself and on your own time, not with her – she’s beautiful."

     "And loving – and caring."

     "Maybe when you’re being yourself you’re not even being yourself."

     "How so?"

     "Who are you?"

     "I have no idea."

     "So how do you know all this rebellion stuff is really you being true to yourself?"

     "That’s a good question," I said, pondering for a moment, "though, I AM sure that I am against and aghast at Corporate America, and that I don’t want to be a part of it."

     "So why do you have to extend that rebellion to your girlfriend?"

     The bar was now empty – it was just me and the bartender. Two days earlier I had kicked off my rebellion tour by doing something stupid, yet liberating, on the golf course.

     "That’s what I was trying to talk to the tree about."

     "Don’t you think it’s fucking weird that you describe talking to your girlfriend as talking to a tree?"

     "Yeah, but sometimes it’s as if I’m talking to a tree," I reflected calmly. "The park was nice, though."

     "CAN you please smile?" My girlfriend said to me – I no longer thought of her as a tree. Our apartment no longer reeked of smoke.

     "You won’t."

     "I won’t what?" My girlfriend demanded.

     "Make me smile."

     "I won’t?"

     "You won’t."

     "I WILL!"

     "I quit today," I said. And it was true. I quit after a long day of drinking once I realized that my job was turning me into an alcoholic.

     "Why didn’t you tell me that in the park?"

     "I quit," I said to Brian.

     "You won’t."

     "I’m done – and you can have the rest of the warm Yeungling."

     "What are you gonna do?" Jane wondered as I left my new office.

     "Be sane."

     "But I just promoted you!" Brian called after me as my former co-workers gathered to watch my dramatic departure. It was not so dramatic.

     "How are you gonna be sane?" Jane continued; it was as if she was taking notes.

     "By being myself."

     "That’ll only make you MORE insane," my ex-boss Brian pointed out.

     Maybe he was right.

     I smiled at Milla. She had this uncanny ability to make me smile. My apartment was a happy place because I did not have to go into work in the morning and did not have to try to pretend to be myself – I would sleep in and wake up with Milla in my arms. She would show me the way if I trusted her. She had the map to my heart – she knew the way.