Pressing the Flesh
by Presley Acuna
The place was sensationally quiet, as only corporate foyers can be. It had the uncomfortable side effect of amplifying the slightest sounds we made while waiting. The receptionist, wearing a wireless headset, went about her work, popping her wad of chewing gum, like gunshot, at random intervals, causing all of us to twitch. We were helpless.
I looked around the room in search of diversion. I was sitting in the highly veneered yet austerely appointed corporate offices of Hanover Keen Incorporated, a Wall Street leviathan. This was the big time and — most distressingly — this was my third visit.
The clock’s minute hand dryly clicked forward another notch. What the heck am I doing here? I thought to myself, feeling a fresh wash of nervousness course through me.
POP! I snapped out of my reverie, silently thanking Miss Gunshot for her masterful masticating.
The silence of the room took on dimension, as my ears searched for any stimulation. Faintly discernible, several walls away, the ringing of telephone turrets and the rabble of shouted orders could be heard from the Trading Floor.
Just as I was reaching for a thrilling fiduciary periodical, my interviewer appeared from out of a carpeted hallway connecting the foyer to the rest of the HKI offices. He was sharply dressed and well groomed, all creases and stripes.
“Peter Clement?” he asked.
“Right here,” I acknowledged.
“I’m Vince Mako,” he said, offering his hand.
“Hello. Nice to meet you,” I said with as much cheer as I could muster.
He smiled a glassy smile, saying nothing in return, and assessed me while he held my hand captive.
Finally, “Follow me, Peter. Let’s have a chat.”
I marched briskly behind him. Etchings of old bank buildings hung on the walls. Young men and women in smart business attire passed us to and fro at a brisk clip, always nodding a greeting to Mako or offering a smile. The guy exuded power. The place hummed with purpose. I felt like an impersonator of the person that should be at this interview.
We arrived at our destination, a private lounge for informal meetings.
“Come on in, Peter. Have a seat, anywhere you like. Coffee?”
“No thanks, Vince” — always take the bold first step and use that first name. Claim your territory. “I’m fine, thanks.” I realized that was one ‘thanks’ too many.
We sat at right angles to each other in plush leather chairs. It was a comfortable room of fine woods, soft carpeting and muted wallpaper. Tasteful prints on the walls. A big plant in the corner. A whiteboard stood in the opposite corner, festooned with mathematical equations and graphs.
“Okay, let’s get right to business. I’m the Head of Trading Systems here at Hanover. My techs tell me you know your stuff. That’s good. Now I’d like to find out a little more about you.”
Mako perused my resume, then without looking up, “Tell me about your career.”
So I began my standard career discourse. Night School to get my Computer Science degree, a couple of computer operator jobs, finally the jump into programming, then a long stint as a freelancer. After the consulting years, a short adventure running my own business, then the move into full time employment as a Systems Engineer.
The problem was finding a position in a tolerable place of employ; a place that didn’t require your presence every waking hour of your life and didn’t fill you with fear of failure every day. So I was looking.
In fact, I almost had to look. Perversely, in the Financial Industries, if you stayed in one place too long, it actually looked bad. It was a negative. You had to keep hopping from lily pad to lily pad to preserve the image that you were a hot item, in demand. No gold watches on Wall Street. If you did have one, it was a Rolex you bought for yourself on your power trip to Switzerland.
I had been making the rounds when the Hanover Keen job had crossed my sights.
“This is the top of the heap, Peter. This is what you dream about,” had claimed the smooth-talking recruiter.
“But I told you, Hal, I don’t want to work in one of these giant aircraft-carrier type trading companies. Those places are freakin’ lion cages and I’m the Christian. They’re shark tanks.”
“But Peter, Peter, Peter, listen to yourself,” he had gamely replied, “What harm does it do to just try? Don’t you want to know if you rate with the big boys? Wouldn’t it give you some satisfaction to know you did? Furthermore, I know these guys, if they want you — if they decide you are the right stuff — you can really write your own ticket, Peter. Money will be no object to them. And after a year in the place, you can jump again, and now you’ll have Hanover Keen on your resume. See what I mean? Are you with me?”
The son of a gun was persuasive, I had to admit. After too many conversations just like that one, I succumbed and found myself invited to interview at HKI.
And now here I was, mind racing, mouth moving, hands sweating, reciting my personal history to the Mako man. He jotted down notes with his expensive pen every now and then. Occasionally, he would grunt in acknowledgment or nod his head. Mostly he didn’t look at me but instead examined my resume, as if my every word was washing the pages with fresh, new meaning. Now and then he would bite at one of his thumbs, worrying at a loose piece of callus. Probably his golf callus.
“Why do you want to leave your current position, Peter?”
What could I say?
Because I need more money, Mr. Mako. Because it’s lily pad jumping time in the broken calliope game of musical jobs. Because I just want to be able to say, “No, thanks.” when you finally do offer it to me, you capitalist porker. Because my headhunter made me do it. I don’t actually know why, come to think of it. May I leave now?
“I want to diversify my experiences, Vince. I need bigger challenges. I think Hanover Keen can offer that to me,” said my mouth.
He nodded. He bit at his thumb. It came away slightly damp with saliva. He wiped it on his trousers.
“If your colleagues at Smithson Taylor were sitting here instead, what do you think they would say about you?”
Again, I answered. Again he raised his thumb to his lips and began to chew at the callus. I must have been boring him. His interest in his callus was definitely growing, and I wondered if he was hearing a word I said.
“And they would probably say I was nefarious.”
He looked up. “What was that?”
“They would probably say I was gregarious. You know, outgoing, friendly.”
He glared. Then, after a pause, “Yes, yes, go on.”
I kept talking. He went back to the thumb. A little saliva had escaped his mouth and moistened his chin. He stared at my resume and chewed.
After some minutes of sheer fabrication on my part, I stopped. Mako was now deeply involved with his thumb. Some saliva had dripped onto his shirt and his head was bent slightly, trying to get a better angle on that callus. It took him a few seconds to notice I had stopped talking. He looked at me and dropped his thumb to his lap.
I sat there with an idling smile, acting as if nothing was out of the ordinary, waiting for his next question. He sat upright and rustled the resume.
“I see,” he lied. He cleared his throat. He locked eyes with me, as if to challenge me to say anything at all about his little bad habit. I said nothing. We sat in silence. The air conditioning changed gears again. Wind rattled against the glass window.
After a few moments of this, his body unclenched and he continued, full of himself again. “I have a little exercise for you,” he said as he rose to draw on the whiteboard.
I risked a peek at his thumb. It was torn and stained red. A thin rivulet had travelled from his hand to his wrist and had coagulated at that point. He wiped it against his gray flannel trousers as he rose from his chair. It left a dark streak on the fabric. I noticed several similar streaks all along the side of his pants.
“We like to think of teams as consisting of several types of personalities. We like to design them that way. You with me?”
I nodded and smiled: “Sure, Vince. Variety’s the spice of life.”
He examined me closely. I think he suspected sarcasm. “Great. Well, we have a way of classifying the types of people that are in a team. We like to think of them in terms of shapes.”
Vince began to draw a series of shapes in a vertical line on the whiteboard. The thumb had started exuding a little blood again. It left a small mark on the whiteboard. Vince came back to his chair and sat.
“Now let me walk you through the shapes.” He pointed at the first shape, a star, with his good hand.
I stared at the bloodstain, just to the right of the first shape, instead.
“The star represents the fighter pilots of the world. The aces. The take-charge types,” he drawled. “The squares are the meat and potatoes types. Not too flashy but always get the job done. Okay so far?”
“Sure, Vince. I think I get it.”
The bloodstain slowly dried on the whiteboard. Vince continued through his dissertation of the shapes; a well-rehearsed interview machine. When he got to the end, he paused, letting me absorb the definitions for the inevitable next question.
“Which type do you suppose you are?”
And so it went for another thirty minutes. Each time I replied, he returned to that thumb. Soon it was beyond ignoring. The thing was a ripped and torn, an openly bleeding affront to the facade that was our interview. But ignore it I did. And Mako just kept on asking questions as if there was nothing extraordinary about his carnivorous tendencies.
The interview was nearing its the end, and a good thing, too. There was blood dotted on Mako’s lips and chin and his starchy shirt cuff was also stained red. The thumb was unrecognizable. He said nothing about it. His initial embarrassment had long since faded. I realized that he knew I would pretend with him to the bitter end. I would ignore that thumb even if he were to suddenly swoon before me from loss of blood.
“One final question, Clement.”
Clement. That clinched it. He knew I was his thrall.
“Here’s a real world scenario. Suppose it’s Monday morning. You’re sitting at your desk drinking your coffee, reading your e-mail, when suddenly a trader comes racing around the corner, plainly pissed off, and bellows at you, ‘Goddammit, Clement, my workstation is slower than a dead pig in drying cement and the Market is moving! I’m losing ticks! You get that thing fixed right now or I’m gonna want BLOOD!’”
My jaw dropped. He had even yelled the final words at me, revealing his own bloodstained teeth. Is this a test? Am I supposed to laugh? Can I keep this up much longer?
He waited patiently, unblinking.
Just answer the BLOODY question, I told myself. Now he’s got ME doing it.
“Let’s see. I would first log into his machine and check the process queue for runaway jobs...” I began.
He listened intently, gradually relaxing into the correctness of my answer.
I soldiered on: “And once I was sure that I had arrived at the solution, I would give the trader the THUMBS up.” I tried to keep my face impassive. Tit for Tat.
He stopped eating his finger and looked up, his eyeballs like glass orbs reflecting the office fluorescents. We regarded each other. He surrendered a small smile, in response to the faint smirk I now wore.
What the hell, man.
“Very good, Peter. Of course, there’s no single right answer but you seem to have a good methodical approach to problems. I like that.”
So now it was back to Peter. I guess I earned some points on that last one. Somehow I didn’t think it was due to the technical depth of my answer.
“Thanks, Vince. I appreciate the compliment. What’s the next step?”
“You’ll have to come back a couple of more times, I’m afraid. We believe in a large consensus for all our hires. The team philosophy.”
“Right, the shapes.”
“Right.”
He stood up then, and came towards me hand extended. The bloody hand, not the good hand. I stood up as well. We were standing not two feet apart, facing each other eyeball to eyeball, his hand hanging in the air between us, inviting mine into a sticky embrace. Slowly, Mako’s face cleaved into an ear-spanning, lecherous smile. This was the real Vince Mako I was suddenly staring at.
“Put it there,” he insisted. Quite the un-Mako expression. He was telling me something now, I was sure of it. We had had an unspoken interview all throughout the verbal exchange and it had been about that visceral hand of his.
I finally broke the stare and gazed down at the darkness between us, at the extended limb. It trembled slightly. It wanted me. Vince wanted me. Now I knew. Now I was sure of it. But there was a rite of passage, a test of manhood, an acknowledgment that sharks have a taste for blood and that’s it okay to love the stuff. And worse than that, I surmised, this handshake was a supplication to the tremendous facade of normality that was life on Wall Street. This was literally, the clincher.
I grabbed his hand with gusto and pressed back in response to his tightening of his grip. There was a squelching sound between us and our hands slipped and slid against each other as we massaged them together. It was almost erotic. I gave him my most carnal smile.
His nostrils flared. “I hope to see you again, Mr. Clement. It’s been a pleasure.”
“And for me as well, Mr. Mako. Interesting theory about teams. Thanks for the time.”
He opened the door, leaving a palm print on the doorknob, and escorted me to the foyer.
With a wave, I collected my coat and headed straight for the elevators, not bothering to wipe off my baptized hand. This business is really getting to me, I thought to myself as the elevator doors opened at street level and the current of people pushed me out into the maelstrom.
Copyright © 2024 by Presley Acuna
