Speaking In Tongues

April 8, 2006

A friend of Deborah's opened a boutique in Park Slope recently and held a party last night to celebrate. Deborah and I were both having a little trouble getting motivated; however, we wanted to show our support. I didn't want to go, mainly because I had developed a wicked headache that made my eyeballs feel like they were going to explode out of their sockets like eggs from a rocket launcher, while Deborah's reasons were a little more complicated.

"I don't want to see my old boss," she kept saying. Her old boss is a woman who owns a similar boutique on the other side of Park Slope. Deborah worked there for several months, but was fired when the woman found a friend who was willing to work for clothes. Deborah had earned store credit, as well, but was also paid a salary.

Every couple of weeks, after accumulating enough commission actually to afford something, Deborah would cash it in for a shirt or a pair of jeans. She had over a hundred dollars in unused credit at the time she was fired. Not surprisingly, her boss gave her the run around when she tried to collect. When Deborah finally tracked her down, the woman said: "A commission is a gift, and I've decided I don't want to give it to you anymore."

"A gift?" I said. "Bullshit. It's not a bonus, it's a commission. No matter how she chooses to pay you, whether by check, in cash, or clothing, it's part of your salary ."

"Call the Department of Labor," my friend Fee suggested.

"I should," she agreed, but she never did. She wrote the shyster off and hoped never to see her again.

No such luck.

In the doorway to the party, the woman greeted Deborah with a big, "So good to see you," and a phony grin. "You look great," she said.

Deborah nodded.

"Your jewelry looks fabulous."

Deborah nodded again.

After a few minutes of awkwardness, Deborah suggested we walk to the back of the tiny shop and check out the refreshments: Pabst Blue Ribbon and Fluffernutter sandwiches. The free beer was going fast, as free beer tends to do, but the heart-shaped sandwiches were languishing as a funny idea in a sad little pile.

"Do you think I was sufficiently rude to my old boss?" Deborah asked, as I tried to decide if a Pabst Blue Ribbon would either help my headache or make my eyeballs bleed.

"Well," I said. "You were rude enough to make me uncomfortable, if that means anything."

"Good."

The party didn't last long, and after congratulating Deborah's friend and wishing her luck, we headed into Manhattan to meet my friend Reflux for dinner.

The last few times Reflux was in town from San Francisco, we missed each other. Most recently, he was only in New York for a day, and I didn't even know it. Before that, he was here for a bachelor party that turned into a lost weekend. A lost week, more like it, lasting several days and culminating at an after-hours underground Russian strip club. "We'll meet up next time," he promised.

When the subway chugged out of the tunnel and began to climb the Manhattan Bridge, I called Reflux to let him know we were on our way. "Is Deborah with you?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Excellent."

"The train's about to go underground again, I'm going to lose you. Where are you gonna be?"

He gave me the address of a West Village bar, warned me that he'd already had a few, and said to meet him there.

"You look just as lovely as you do in your photographs," Reflux said to Deborah. "I read Jamie's blog all the time," he explained. "I've seen a lot of pictures of you."

"I'm sure you have," she replied, somewhat embarrassed about some of the more "artistic" shots he might've seen.

"I love his blog," said Reflux, then turned to me. "Seriously, yours is the only blog I read, and I read it religiously. Not just because I know you, either, you can really write. The posts are hilarious—"

"Thanks."

"—in an ironic T-shirt kind of way."

"Uh. Thanks?"

"I get mad when you haven't written something new."

"Yeah, I know," I said. "I haven't been posting as frequently as I used to."

He accused Deborah. "It's your fault, isn't it?"

"No. He's been working," she replied.

"C'mon, now, tell the truth, you've been distracting him, haven't you?"

" No."

"That's okay. I'm glad to see him happy," he said, turning it around, and earning extra brownie points by adding, "You're clearly the best thing that's happened to Jamie in years."

"Aww."

Reflux's drinking was starting to catch up with him, and he suggested we grab some dinner. "My treat," he offered.

As religiously as Reflux claims to read this blog, he seemed surprised to learn about Deborah's upbringing by Pentecostal parents on a rural Pennsylvania farm.

"You were raised Pentecostal?" he asked. "With snakes and everything?"

"No," Deborah laughed. "No snakes."

"But holy-rolling, speaking in tongues and all that?"

"Yeah."

"I have to ask you, and I'm not belittling it, or judging it, or anything like that, because I'm truly, genuinely fascinated, but did you ever speak in tongues?"

Deborah sheepishly admitted she had done so when she was about 12 years old. "It's embarrassing," she said.

"That's amazing," said Reflux. "Did you think the holy spirit possessed you?"

"I suppose I did at the time, but not anymore."

"Well, what do you think it was, then?" he asked. "I mean, I kind of think there might be something to it."

"No. It's all bullshit. Everyone just gets caught up in the emotion."

"But don't you think there might be more to it than that? I mean, I've been emotional before, but never to the point where I started speaking in tongues. Have you?" he asked me.

"No," I said. "I speak gibberish all the time, but I've never spoken in tongues."

"I suppose I'm an existentialist," said Reflux. "But a hopeful one. I mean, I have to be, I have two kids. I don't know what to tell them."

"How about, 'It sucks to be you,'" I suggested.

"No one knows anything," said Deborah. "Nobody ever has, and most likely, no one ever will."

"I guess so," said Reflux. "I guess you just teach your children to be good people, to do the right thing, and treat others with respect. What else can you do?"

One thing's for sure, a lot of evil's been done by people taught anything more than that.