16 November 2003

The company is selling me-or my hours, more precisely- to another watch management job at DHHS and half time to DIA to work Base Reallocation and Closure issues. By my count that gets to around 120 hours a week of commitment for the next few months and I am not sure I've got it in me. I would just as soon move out west and do one job fairly well. But I take some wily old busnessman's advice to heart that you need to stick with things for a while- don't want to get a reputation as a "butterfly boy" who can't make commitments. At least a year, he said.

I will say that if I had understood the business model better, or opened my eyes to it, I think I would have done this a little differently. But what is done is done, and one has to make the best of it.

The business model in the Philippines was just a blunt, based on exactly the same firm capitalist principles. The hookers out in the bars in Subic City would line up a sailor that had a shore tour there in the Bay and insist on his being "faithful" to her and not got from girl to girl, flitting like a butterfly among the lovely women with their hair dark as night and skin the color of warm rich teak. If a sailor took to playing the field, interfering with the revenue stream to the one-time girl of his dreams, there could be a nightmare consequence. One of the items you could buy from any of the roadside vendors was a cheap little folding knife that worked as slick as a switchblade but had no springs. It was called a butterfly knife because of the way the metal handles folded like the wings of the insect.

And sometimes a sailor got stabbed for his faithlessness. It is not good to be a butterfly.

I woke abruptly at 0353, and I would have preferred it to be in a room where the breeze from the ocean carried the smell of the salt and the cooking odors and jeepney exhaust from the street. It did not. I was right here in Washington, the breeze from the window cold with November. The red digits on the alarm clock glowed balefully at me, a reminder of a sleep pattern I had successfully eluded months ago.

The lists began, the accomplishments as tasks of the day before and the days to come. Michigan had clobbered Northwestern the afternoon before and it had felt good. That was a more welcome return to pattern. Now it was the usual showdown with Ohio State a week hence, the determiner of whether the season would be a success. That clicked through my hyper-alert consciousness.

I was wide, stark brightly alert and knew that I was going to be one sad dog if I acted on the energy and rose. I went to the kitchen and drank some cranberry juice. I looked at the coffee maker where it stood next to the coffee grinder. and decided it was too early. I went back to bed and the lists began to accumulate. Things to do. Go to work, start that white paper due in three weeks. The holiday would be in the middle and steal time.

I thought about bills. The MBNA credit statement had come in. I got it after roller-blading off the Michigan State loss to Wisconsin and as the butterflies were rising over Michigan at Northwestern, flitting their way between chest and gut. I ripped it open as I stood in the kitchen, minding the slow-cooking brisket that would come near to strangling me later. came in yesterday and whatever deal I thought I had with them-9.1% I think- suddenly terminated. That was the one I needed to trump with the unsecured Northwest Federal loan at 4.1%, gradually drawing down the balance.

I glanced down to the fine print and my eyes widened. Shit! The rate had jumped from the 9.1% I had not liked paying and gone to double-digits! The minimum payment alone was nearly $358 bucks and that would not give me any progress at all. Shit! Both my son's tuition bills would be due at the end of the month, and the rent and the mortgage on the place I am trying to make habitable before moving. Jesus, how can you live in a place where you can make $150,000 a year and not make ends meet? I am in a converted efficiency apartment, and the one I am trying to buy is no larger.

It is a challenge, starting over again at mid-life. I do not mind, on the whole. I am meeting my responsibilities to my sons and I am slowly coming out of the hole, though it will take years to get well again. No one screams at me at home anymore, and that is a powerful tonic. But the debt that came with the lawyers on top of two college bills was crushing. I move the bills around from account to account, just like a butterfly between the flowers.

I had been thinking about it earlier, doing the mid-month bills, and sorting the come-ons and receipts from the last two months. I had found a loan vehicle in the stack from Chase that could bring the unsecured balance down on the MBDN account to 3.1% for the life of the loan. This might be a bad situation, but the low prime rate made it possible to restructure the debt without getting in extremis. Thank God.

But still I tossed and turned on that for a while, hoping that I could get down again for a few hours. I was alone in the too-early darkness but presently the lists and tasks went away and a sweet lassitude came over me, and I dreamed a bright and vibrant dream, super-real in big screen images.

I dreamed that I was in a movie, a tale that featured a party-awning were the cast of characters from an old pal's second wedding. The whole crew of the old gang was there, all the friends whose history went back to the days before the Service or adulthood or any of this current lunacy. Then we left the awning and scrambled onto one of those resort eletric carts that carry you around, looking at the attractions, the whole lot of us, on a sightseeing trip, remarkably real.

We were on the road, rows of us, and came to an intersection. A big utility vehicle having problems coming the other way, trying to back up, confused. I could see it under the belly of a big gasoline tank truck, and I thought how vulnerable we were, exposed in the little cart and what the consequences would be if there was a collision and we were all drenched in gas and set alight. Then we were through the intersection and there were fewer of us on the cart, now it was golf cart-sized.

Suddenly I knew this part of the story, as we went up into a parking garage structure, ramp after ramp. There were no cars and the signs of construction became more apparent the higher we got. Raw brickwork and mortar and scattered lumber lay on the ground. We were nearing the top and the tour guide was telling us there was just one stop we had to make. We needed to visit a movie star who rented the penthouse for a fabulous sum. I told him that we didn't need to stop, that we could go home straightaway.

I remembered this part of the movie, though I could not recall if it was a comedy or something else. A comedy of manners, I thought, something from Moliere or Oscar Wilde. The movie star was going out, in tuxedo, with a lovely starlet and I remembered going through the comedy part, acting as though we knew how the parts of the elegant house worked, where the doors were. How they folded elegantly together. The servants were doing a set up, a tableux was blocking the front door and I was opening folding louvers to another passageway that lead somewhere else. re was a set-up of some sort going on with the servants, and I decided we would head out and try to get away in his trail. There was a long structure like the fuselage of a glider that some workmen were carrying. There was something that might have been a person in it and I realized this was not a comedy and we needed to be going. This was a science fiction movie and this was a device for transferring someone or something we did not want to know about.

We escaped from the penthouse, racing down the ramps and found workman's overalls. My friend got out into the sunlight but I was stopped by an Arabic-looking security guard because I had no badges. I broke for it, ducking down an alley and to shed my denims and escape.

I was at a cast reunion of the film then, Robert Duvall was there on a couch with a character who looked like James Coburn. The wood-paneled room was narrow. The promotional poster from the movie lobby was leaning on the mantle, obviously placed there for the reunion, not permanent. It began to lean and I placed my toe against it to keep it from falling. I could not, though, and had to get up and delicately balance it. I needed to cover my embarrassment at the miscue, and I turned and told them I had just seen the movie again after all that time and thought their performances were marvelous. But I was still uncertain what had happened at the end. I posed it as a question to cover my ignorance.

"But what do you think happened after the ending? I said, "it seemed sort of ambiguous." Robert Duval and a woman who looked a little like Lauren Bacall said matter-of-factly, as though it were so obvious. "We were all assimilated."

I nodded. Yeah, I knew that.

Then it was nearly seven o'clock and the sun was up and I felt disoriented, already late for the day. The good news was that I had made the coffee before I dropped off again. Now to the bills, and my thoughts flitted about like a butterfly. Then go to the office to work on the white paper and the resumes I need to talk about at the morning meeting with the Customer at Nebraska Avenue. Then the Redskins game, if I am lucky, and then dinner and bed, hopefully with no dreams. Because in the morning I was going to get assimilated again, fit into the machine. In this business model I work for one company and they sell my time to several others.

Which means that I have to flit from one job to another like a butterfly, not doing any of them particularly well, the customer looking up with dawning resentment. And we know what can happen to butterfly boys.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra