Please Just Disappear by Curt Saltzman

Please Just Disappear


In 1981 I moved to San Francisco, where I stayed in the apartment of a guy I knew in the Richmond. I'd just gotten out of detox and had that trembly, anemic look to me like I'd spent the last decade locked in a broom closet. I signed up with the Kelly Services over on Geary, which found me a job at UCSF typing into a computer terminal.

The head of my department at Parnassus, a young woman named Sherry Wheeler, called me into her office not too long after I'd started
working there. When I went in she was seated casually behind a desk cluttered with the usual papers and clerical paraphernalia. I stood
awkwardly before her, fairly confident I would be let go for one reason or another. But instead Sherry told me what a nice job I'd been doing and that she was giving me a raise.

A few weeks later, though, due to the tedium of the work, I began diverting myself by typing random instructions into the command line
interface. Anything that came into my head which had an informatical ring to it. I had no idea what I was doing but soon got wind of the fact
the IT people were baffled by certain minor glitches that were cropping up here and there. One day Sherry found me out. She sneaked up behind my chair as I sat ostensibly working in my cubicle while some illicit garbage scrolled down my screen. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Nothing," I said. My heart pounded. She'd startled me. Sherry went out but then returned about five minutes later to tell me she wasn't comfortable having me around anymore and that I should leave. I felt embarrassed like I'd been caught committing some solitary act of perversion and exited the building with relief.

It wasn't the first time I'd gotten into this kind of trouble on the job. In Santa Cruz I'd done some data entry work for a DDS. He had an
office set up in his basement. It was during yet another period of self-imposed abstinence. I typed names and addresses into a database of
patients on one of the first IBM PCs. After a while I grew bored and began fooling around recklessly as a mental diversion and the dentist
informed me a day or two later half his database had been deleted. I'm not saying it's your fault, he said, but you're going to have to reenter
all that stuff. He kept green bar paper hardcopies of everything. I guess he'd never heard of digital backups. As he was paying me an hourly
wage for whatever I did it wasn't exactly cruel and unusual punishment. But I fell off the wagon before I could undo the damage I'd done. A job seldom survived one of my drinking sprees and I stopped showing up at the dentist's. I used to ride the bus up there. He had an expensive house in a hilly residential area that looked as if it had sprung out of the earth the day before yesterday. Instead of working I hung out at the mall downtown not feeling that guilty. There were some serious bars in the neighborhood, no-nonsense watering holes that opened early in the morning. I remember one incident, about a week into my bender, it was around 10:00 a.m. I'd already been drinking hard liquor in one of those dives. I stepped outside to take the air. I sat down on a bench under a tree in front of a clothing shop. A blonde was opening the store for business. She was putting out a sign at the front entrance and I said hello. She said hello too and returned inside the store and shortly thereafter two cops pulled up in a black and white cruiser. They had me perform a field sobriety test, which I passed. They asked me to move along anyway. I hitchhiked into Capitola, where I bought a quart of Rainier Ale at the market, which I consumed brown-bagged on the beach.

After Sherry fired me that day in San Francisco I wandered through Golden Gate Park in the direction of the apartment. It was a clear, windy spring morning and I ended up lying in the grass in front of the Botanical Garden absorbing sunlight. But I couldn't enjoy myself and went home. When I got there I paced the floor and began thinking I had the right to a little something to drink under the circumstances. I was lying, of course, but that didn't stop me from going down to an Irish pub nearby and settling in for the duration.

Wheeler came through the door in the early evening. I wouldn't have thought her the kind of woman to frequent this sort of establishment, but then again she seemed no different from any of the other patrons. She was alone. I was way past caring whether she spotted me or not and when she did I only gestured vaguely and looked elsewhere. However she made a beeline for my little table in the back, where by this time I'd drunk about seven or eight Dewar's rocks. She leaned over with her hands on the table and her human breath in my face and said how sorry she was to have had to let me go but that there'd been no way around it. This generous apology risked taking the steam out of my drinking, so I nodded my head and mumbled no problem before staring off blankly into space hoping she'd disappear. Please disappear, I kept saying to myself. Please just disappear.

Curt Saltzman was born and raised in Los Angeles. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Sou'wester,  The Bitter Oleander, Into The Void, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He lives in France.

---