Part 4: Heaven

Audrick’s boss Gianna had a Mercedes too but hers was a model I’d never seen before, matte-black like the Batmobile. Gianna wore tight jeans and lots of make-up and jewelry, perfect hair. A decade earlier she could have starred in Barbie. When she walked across the parking garage her heels clicked and echoed off the walls. When she started her car it sounded like a jet taking off. She said her husband had gotten it from a convicted drug dealer in Miami Beach. She was funny and quirky and cool, and I liked her. There was a lot beneath the surface.

Standing by the car with her keys out she offered me a new job. She was moving to a different sales group and said I could come with her. But I declined. I was looking to make a move myself, now that my contract was almost up. I’d gotten a taste of the dark side of contracting at Microsoft and had enough.

I’d been talking with a consulting firm my old client Jackie introduced me to and they’d offered me a job managing a team of junior consultants, writing sales and marketing.

Jackie contracted with this firm because the consultants were good but often quite young, so she’d expect me to keep an eye on them. It was a strange arrangement but not unusual. Vendors got thrown together in a patchwork of teams where everyone owned their little sliver.

This is how it was several months earlier in my contract, when Jackie brought me to Washington, D.C. to manage a partner conference meeting with Microsoft’s CEO and a dozen partner CEOs. I was to act like a concierge, an executive handler, a logistics person, her right-hand man.

I’d never been to these conferences but heard they could get out of hand. Any time you combine tens of thousands of people, mostly men, in the same place with alcohol there’s a chance it will go badly. Tech people from all around the world flooded the hot streets of D.C. with their lanyards and laptops, moving like cattle between keynotes, breakout sessions and team dinners. Everywhere large digital signs announced “Microsoft.”

Jackie didn’t drink, or wasn’t supposed to drink, but did drink that first night in D.C. And while that was a terrible idea for a bunch of reasons, I don’t blame her. We had been working on that project for months, all year, and it had gone beautifully. For all the BS we’d endured from her boss Audrick, his game playing and politics, he’d pulled off quite the stunt by making that meeting happen.

I got the feeling that like the Germans at Oktoberfest, these Microsoft people really needed an excuse to let their hair down. Jackie had a long list of private happy hours and wanted to hit every one. It was like a bougie pub crawl with a corporate wrapper, potentially awesome but immediately not. Different Microsoft partner companies or teams of employees from say Holland or Qatar competed to throw the most outlandish parties, the party everyone wanted to get into or talked about the next day.

By this point in our relationship Jackie and I had become real friends. She’d invited me to her house to meet her husband and kids, she knew about my family and personal life, and I honestly felt like we were close. That’s probably dangerous for a number of reasons but I didn’t know any better at the time.

So when she started to get drunk I got nervous and immediately sober. I worried more for myself than I did for her, that I might be seen in public with my drunk client and people would talk about that. We were in the lobby bar of the hotel where hundreds of coworkers were also staying. My wife was there too, in another room, on another contract. She messaged me around 2 or 3 asking, where are you? So I asked a younger consultant from my soon-to-be new consulting firm if she’d watch over Jackie. And then I said goodnight, get some rest.

We had more big meetings the next day, meetings with executives where everything had to go just so. I texted Jackie in the morning to check in on her and she was sick, needed a bagel and a coffee from Starbucks, had specific asks for how they should be prepared. I stood waiting outside the meeting worried she’d be late, then saw her appear in a crowd of conference goers slowly ascending the escalator, ashen colored, worn down like a river rock. After the meeting she went back to her room and stayed there for the rest of the day, so I took myself out to lunch.

It was there at a diner I met the consulting firm’s CEO Roly, who was also dining solo, and asked if he could join me. Sitting in that crowded restaurant with the warm light coming through and the radio playing a Talking Heads song I felt transported, like one of those times you feel like you’re in a dream.

I thought about David Byrne and the band writing that song, “Heaven,” how all these people sitting here were now a part of that same song and living it too, how as an artist you could touch people’s lives without ever knowing it. I wanted that too. To be connected like that. I knew I had come to the right place, at last.

Categories: Memoir, writing

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir