Company Courier

After I quit teaching, I began to think I could use my talent for writing in some way that would pay the bills but wouldn’t be too hard on my conscience—and notice the puzzling way conscience wormed its way into this. There’s no shortage of people who say they wanted to be a great novelist when they were growing up, but realized they didn’t have the talent, so they became brilliant PR flacks or prizewinning ad writers. We don’t necessarily respect that; I couldn’t let myself do that, either. But after carefully weighing the morality of the decision, I eventually let myself become a technical writer, which is how I wound up working for Bob Rayback at Vector Technical, a tech pubs job shop out in Lemon City.

Tech writer isn’t a glamorous job, and Vector Technical wasn’t a glamorous place to work. It mostly puts out manuals in 3-ring binders, but if there was no writing to be done that week I also loaded the trucks. Vector had a deal where they put the equipment in telephone company maintenance trucks. This was an unglamorous phase of my life. I’d had a glamorous girlfriend who’d moved out, and nobody was moving in. 

Eileen was the company courier. She drove around all day fetching and carrying drafts, artwork, finished products, and so forth. She was still cute, if a little long in the tooth, but she drove a beat-up car for a living into every trashy industrial area of LA.

Eileen became a problem between Bob, my boss, and me: as it happened, Bob asked Eileen to be his date for the Society for Technical Communication Christmas party; I simply cannot visualize her at a Christmas party of the Society for Technical Communication.

”Bob is married,” Eileen told me later. “I’ve met his wife, though, and I can sort of see how he might be looking around. But I told him, ‘Gee, Bob, that sounds like something your wife might like to go to,’ and that was the end of it.” 

Instead, Eileen asked me out not long after that. But you shouldn’t impute too much to the idea of going out with Eileen. My "dates" with her consisted mostly of her calling me up, saying she was going to be at a particular bar to watch Monday Night Football, and asking if I wanted to join her. 

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She'd been married I don't know how many times. She'd shot her most recent husband. He recovered; it was an accident, she said. She'd kept the ex-husband's bathrobe with the bullet hole in it. When her boyfriends came to stay overnight, she gave them the bathrobe to wear.

Since I never got to that stage with her, I had to take her word for this. My guess is that I fit into the overall scheme of things by being her Monday night date—that is, when she wanted to have one. It was probably just as well.

But word that we’d gone out inevitably got around, and that drove a wedge between Bob and me. I wound up getting another job. The Monday night “dates” with Eileen continued, but you still shouldn’t impute too much to that. After a while even that trailed off, and I didn’t hear from her, and then I got a postcard from her with a picture of the Trinidad, Colorado Holiday Inn. She’d quit her job at Vector and headed back across the country with a new boyfriend. I guess the card was meant to be a Dear John letter, insofar as I needed one.

The picture of the Holiday Inn showed a very large full moon just above it, something that might have been composed by a bizarro Ansel Adams in some tacky alternate universe. I don’t know if Eileen meant it to amuse me or not.

Things picked up for me after that. It turned out that doing the tech writing I did at Vector, I got in at the start of the tech industry, and my skills turned out to be worth something. Later I told the story about Eileen and the bathrobe to a lady headhunter who'd taken me out to lunch. She was delighted. "I'll bet none of those boyfriends crossed her," she said.

After Vector Technical, the tech writing never troubled my conscience. Over Eileen, it’s normal to wonder how things might have been different, but she was a friend when I needed one, and it’s just as well I didn’t wind up wearing the bathrobe with the bullet hole in it. I wasn’t cut out for the Trinidad Holiday Inn. Maybe that’s the message she was sending. But in the end, a Monday night date is a Monday night date. The one thing the whole episode meant was that you could write things for 3-ring binders without needing to tell lies; none of it pretended to be anything but what it was, and that was Eileen, too: petite, average build, showing some age, no glamour, no pretense, no destiny, just a certain ability to laugh.