March 21, 2017
Recently, I was working in my office, drinking a cup of tepid coffee and listening to some Spotify playlist entitled “Six String Peacefulness.” As has become my routine, I skim through headlines, fly down my FB feed, look at the grey sky through my never-washed office building window and proceed to figure out what I have to do that day to help me live in my own skin. On the zoom in, it might sound a bit depressing, but perspective is everything when it comes to a creative lifestyle and so on this day I was feeling good. I had great plans to write something particularly poignant, maybe even lyrical or poetic. Maybe something overtly descriptive or wrapped in a cerebral blanket of coded doublespeak.
Every day is a new day, and every day is a day to define in a new way the newness of that day. And so with one nice long sip of coffee, I decided to get to work.
Tangent: “Six String Peacefulness” reminds me of another passion of mine -- copywriting. I’ve longed to be a copywriter for wine bottles. There is rarely an evening with family or friends when I am not fixated on the word choices of a given table wine’s copy. Most wine copy tends to be as full of itself as its contents are full-bodied, but I’ve rarely read any wine bottles that haven’t amused me on some level. And so I continue year after year, pining for the chance to write some elaborately bloated wine label copy.
Bringing this back home -- wine copy is synonymous to me with “Six String Peacefulness.” Describing a listening station this way is logical, but also smacks of the demise of the music industry and reinforces a “Listening-To-Music-For Dummies” culture. Sure, the songs on this station are played on acoustic guitar. Do they all seem a bit “peaceful?” I guess. But is music just about the packaging? Point is, this music is generally pretty awful. I can dig into it for a while, but my teen self is always on the verge of puking.
One more bit of tangential rambling before I get to the point—I always wonder if others are frequent morning pissers. I tend to piss multiple times before noon and then never again throughout the day. So, after taking down a third cup of coffee and writing a bit, I walked out of my office into the hallway around the corner and heard something altogether peculiar.
Now, keep in mind, my office is in a large building with about five or six different offices per floor. There are 16 flights. It is a big old Art Deco building in midtown, like many others. People with start ups, casting directors, architects, small law firms, modeling agencies, upholstery warehouses and music studios fill the building. It’s a fun mix for the most part, but that day, as I walked down the hall of my office to the bathroom, a ridiculously large bathroom keychain in tow, I heard the sounds of aggressively loud sex.
My hallway is always a ghost town. There is no one ever in it. Periodically, you hear people make their way to the bathroom and back, but generally it remains in a purgatorial state of florescent lighting and elevator “dinging.” So you can imagine my surprise as I walked by and heard a woman moaning and moaning and a man rhythmically grunting, “yeah yeah yeah.” I hastily made my way to the bathroom, looked at myself in the mirror for a beat. [When I was younger, I would spend more time in front of the mirror, but now I’m less transfixed and more “going with it.” ]
On my return, I didn’t hear anything, but I was too curious, so I slowly walked a bit closer to take a look at the sign on the door of the office. All the doors in my building are the same industrial steel doors, and each one has a little tag with a door number and a business name placard. This door had a cryptic design. I was within a few feet of the door, but near enough to the elevator that I could fake it should anyone walk out, when suddenly I heard, “Go again!” I hurried back to my office, fumbling with my mountain of keys, and tucked myself quickly back into the forever tranquil world of “Six String Peacefulness.”
Somehow, the juxtaposition of my syrupy, “peaceful” workspace, replete with guitars hanging on the walls and peppered black and white rock photos, seemed about as dandy and frivolous as the work I was likely to do that day. There were people next door fucking. And they were fucking hard. My mind started racing. They were probably sweating. No! They were likely dripping in sweat. “Jesus, I gotta turn this friggin’ “Clare De Lune” shit off,” I remember thinking. What was I going to write about at that point? Jack shit, that’s what. I glanced at the clock on my computer three times over the course of four minutes. Took a sip of my coffee, but it was empty, and what drops were left were generally nasty at that point.
Fortunately, I knew I’d have to piss again soon. Like clockwork, baby! So upon next totally legit, bonafide and easily excusable trip to the john, I was surprised once again when a large muscle bound bald man without a neck walked out of the office next to me. He had a sort of “Right Said Fred” aesthetic going, and things got awkward the moment I realized we were both going to the bathroom at the same time. His face was very serious. He definitely had the look of a guy who didn’t want to be fucked with. And so we both went about our business quickly.
Tangent: I will say that my natural Costanza-phobia kicked in when I watched him turn the knob of the door and faucets. I was none too thrilled to think about where those hands had been. And a wealth of questions and hypothetical interactions circled my brain while we avoided eyes at the bathroom sink.
So back to work I went. The rest of the day went on as usual, until lunch.
As I walked back into the hallway, heading out for my usual large soup-of-the-day, I turned to see a couple chatting and looking at their phone messages walking out of the office next to mine. And that is when I realized: The office next to me shoots porn! Once I put that together, it didn’t surprise me when Right-Said-Fred walked out carrying a large camera bag and quietly locking the door over some small talk with the jovial couple (not sweating any more, just sayin’).
I’ve continued working in my office for a while since this experience, and it’s never reached that feverish crescendo ever again. There is no doubt in my mind that I, too, could shoot porn in my office. Alas, the notion of a porn shoot seems a bit less “peaceful,” and while it does sound tempting from time to time (when bills are mounting), would it sustain me for years to come (perhaps I could use a better choice of words)? Likely not.
But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t psyched to know that a sizeable pocket of New York grit was lying on the other side of several inches of sheetrock and me.