My favorite daydream is of Enrique on his next job interview.
“So, why exactly did you get fired from your last job?” they ask, and he hesitates. “I was named a recurring character in a marijuana blog,” he deadpans.
Enrique believes he is a member of the “other universe.” The one where talented, hardworking people watch incompetent, pretentious pricks breathe different molecules and always come out ahead.
I am Enrique’s boss, and I like to think that we’re a good team, but I’m not sure if I’m the best boss. Like today, I wanted to do magic mushrooms with him, and my husband was really annoyed with that suggestion.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” he asked between meetings. “The kids are home. What are you going to do when they freak out and wonder what’s wrong with mommy?”
“Okay, good point,” I replied in my retelling of the story. (My actual response was, “Please? I know I’ve only done them once, but they had a very minimal effect. And how often do we have mushrooms? Also, I’m familiar with weed! Shrooms are basically the same thing, right?”)
Even as the words came out, I knew I was wrong. No shrooms were ingested today. Instead, Enrique came over for lunch, and then we worked beside each other, like old times, as if a pandemic wasn’t raging and pay cuts hadn’t been announced an hour before and layoffs weren’t looming on the horizon.
After the kids finished Zoom school and headed to my parents, Enrique, Mr. D and I all vaped from a cool, Made-in-China device.
“On the one hand, I’m pissed at China for stealing our intellectual property,” Enrique said. “But I’m happy they made things cheaper.”
We smoked. We discussed our colleagues: The gossipy, self-absorbed, ambiguously gay commander. The cynic with a kind heart and wry wit. The doyenne who should be respected for her knowledge but isn’t. The strategist who steals credit for other people’s ideas while throwing them under the bus. The tool (see also: the douche, the dickbag, the phony, the corny motherfucker who actually high-fived new hires, the six-figure coffee slurper, etc.). The Karen.
I performed a one-act play, entitled, “Karen,” based off a comedically batshit email from our former boss, a textbook Alpha Karen. Later, I mimed Seppuku, or hara kiri, the samurai’s honorable suicide, in which one stabs themselves in the stomach to avoid disgrace. Enrique suggested I perform hara kiri in the middle of a meeting, and we envisioned the fallout, our boss on the phone with HR. “No, no, she’s still alive,” the boss would explain. “She just simulated suicide.”
“Of course, you’ll receive a very sanitized reason for being let go,” Enrique said, imagining the termination letter: Her views on the ritual suicide by disembowelment do not reflect our organization’s recommended methods…
“There are so many fun ways to get fired,” I exclaimed, and we reminisced on the original: An all-staff meeting. Karen waxing poetic on the trials of Karen. Me grabbing the mic and singing Lil Wayne—Hello, motherfucker, hey, hi, how you doin?—and then handing it to Enrique to call everyone out on their bullshit.
Lately, my favorite getting-fired fantasy is to microdose the water cooler. It would be a well-intentioned effort to make my coworkers more collaborative and kind; to tap into the universal soul that exists in us all; to ignite our creative engine and find shared purpose in our mission and work, but Enrique can already picture the headline: “Acid prank goes horribly wrong.”
This is all a long way to say, it’s probably good that we didn’t do shrooms this afternoon.
“I’ve never done them and know nothing about them,” Enrique said, as we pondered layoffs. “I would just think that you wouldn’t want to do mushrooms on days that involve deep, existential trauma.” Then he hit the Chinese vape pen again and said, “Or maybe that’s exactly what we need.”