Chapter 1-Boxtown

 I drove along the Alaskan Way viaduct below the Seattle skyline—the place I called Boxtown—in my ‘66 Mustang convertible with the top down and the morning sun and sea air. I was free. Until I turned up Seneca Street and the black box of the Seafirst building where I worked loomed above me like a tombstone. As I drove into the cave of the garage beneath the building they called “the box the Space Needle came in” I felt an accustomed jolt hit my solar plexus. Under the artificial and dirty lights of the garage I strapped on my vest, pushed my tie up and put on my wool pin-stripe suit coat. I exhaled and walked toward the elevator.

I was a CPA, a certified public accountant, on my way to another day inside the box. As I rode the elevator to the 27^th floor a familiar slow choking sensation settled in around my neck imprisoned by my buttoned up shirt and tie. The man in front of me in the elevator was twice my age, about 52 and stood facing the door. We did not speak as the little box hurtled us up into space. His neckskin rolled over his collar like a raspberry donut. He jangled the change in his pocket and I could hear his fractured breaths, shallow and quick.

As the door opened to the floor of Ernst and Whinney CPA’s I too felt my breath go shallow. I walked down the rectangular corridors turning right angles to get to my little office with the view of the Smith Tower to the south and the seagulls riding the wind like trapeze artists. Coming down the hallway toward me was Tev Rengstrom. I tried to get my shield up in time to get by him and on to my office

What are you looking at?” came the mocking voice.

“I don’t know what I’m looking at.”

He sneered. Tev Rengstrom was like an Aryan supremacist in a business suit. He was lean with short blond hair and detested anything soft or natural. He wasn’t much older than the younger accountants such as myself, but he took some perverse pleasure in psychologically terrorizing us. He was very good at it. It wasn’t something you wanted to confront him about, that was the very thing he was waiting for; then he could then cut you to pieces with his tongue before you knew what hit you. And for the next few months he would not let up for an instant. Unless of course you went out drinking with him and he deemed you wild enough and tough enough to take it. Some people are just born with a mean streak. And something in me, in spite of his nature, wanted him to like me. I wanted to be on his side, accepted. It was my weakness—wanting everyone to like me, so I could avoid conflict—and he exploited it every chance he could.

“It’s just tough being inside up here on a day like this,” I ventured, trying to act indifferent. 

“Oh and you’re just too good to be in here with the rest of us?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Eat shit,” he said with a smile as we passed.

I heard my name paged over the intercom system. It was Armin McDerdermott, one of the head partners of the firm. I walked into his office, facing West overlooking Elliot Bay. The sun glinted across the water like a stream of diamonds.

“Mr. Serrill,” he said with a kind lilt to his voice. “Sit down, sit down.” Armin was kind. He was a good man. He was the most quintessential accountant I ever met. You got the impression he came out of the womb in a three-piece suit. If Armin ever had a hip thought in his mind his accounting brain would jump on it like an obsessive housecleaner. His wife told me once that he came home one day greatly excited by this little night-light he had found in a catalog. It was attached to a little pad of paper. When Armin woke up in the middle of the night with some accounting solution—how to account for a contingent liability on some company’s long term debt—he could flick on his little night light pad and scribble it down before settling back into some calculated snores for the rest of the night. I’m sure he always slept in his pajamas.

Armin wanted to talk to me about accounting for shipments of inventory in transit for a medical company I was auditing. The issue was how to value a shipment of heart defibrillators that had not reached the company by the end of the year. As I sat in the comfortable chair in front of him, I had to fight back a sleepiness that began to overcome me. Despite the near constant anxiety of a body not made to be in a suit, things conspired to cause an instant drowsiness. The ventilation system around the room hissed with white noise, like a cool flow of water in the distance. The day was bright and clear blue. Armin’s voice was soothing and metronomic. It was all I could do to sit there and respond without completely nodding off. I got up as soon as I could and took the file folder off his desk he wanted me to look at.

Back in the hall a group of four accountants lounged around talking. I stopped in and leaned against the wall to listen in. There was Frank, a good guy with a great sense of humor who played folk guitar, Debbie a woman with a gentle heart, Rachel, one of my supervisors, smart and lovely, who I almost considered a friend and Dave, a guy I graduated from college with, who day by day seemed to grow more callous and buy into the certain kind of mocking humor that pervaded the place. Underlying most of the personal conversation in the box was this motive to be funny; to get other people to laugh, but it always came at someone else’s expense. It was always laughing at people. I remember once when I was in a restaurant and Dave came up behind me grabbed the hamburger on my plate took a big bite out of it and threw it back down laughing like a truck struggling with its gears.

As I stood against the wall the conversation quickly dissolved and a force field seemed to hit the group and disperse them toward their offices like leaves before a wind. It was almost surreal to me, like I was watching some movie where the sound cut out and the figures went into slow motion. I turned to look up the hallway and saw the source of the silent wind. It was Don Slewitt, the new managing partner. The previous partner had been an alcoholic and liked to have a lot of fun. The firm never made any money though and Don had come in to change all of that.

Don walked by with the kind of quiet corporate power only money and authority over other people gives one. I continued to lean against the wall. “Hi Don,” I said. “Hello,” he nodded in a professional and contained way. He seemed to appreciate it that I didn’t flee before him like the others. But as he passed I felt the air behind him falter and go into fetal position.

Back in my office the day’s work was to prepare some financial statements for a large timber company that I had been auditing the past six weeks. Every day I converted the corpses of trees into numbers. This day, like many others, I could not keep my mind on numbers. I kept looking out the window and watching the seagulls, the way they rode the drafts of air high above the city, for no other reason than to fly. One flew close by my window and looked in at me. I saw his black eye rimmed in yellow. He was curious and free. The choked feeling below my neck that had continued to grow since entering the building was now joined with a knot in my midriff. My body wanted out. I felt I was suffocating.

I tried to complete a schedule called a Statement of Changes for the timber company. I was supposed to finish it before the end of the day. It was important to stay “billable” to account for our time so the firm could charge clients ten times what they paid us to do the work. A feeling of panic rose—like a thousand ants had let loose inside me. I heard Armin McDermott call me again over the intercom. Before I knew it I was walking fast down the main hallway out by the elevators to get to the bathroom.

I was relieved no one else was in there. I went immediately into a stall, closed the door and sat down. I blew my breath out and tore the tie from my neck. I sat in there for twenty minutes. I heard the door open from time to time, dark brown or black wingtips walk by, belts tingle, fabric on skin, a few explosions of coffee shits in the stall next to me. I didn’t move. It was something I did often in Boxtown, naked with my anxiety, sitting on the throne. The bathroom stall was a kind of sanctuary for me. It was the one place in the building I felt safe. It was the one place I knew no one else could find me.

That night back home on the small wooden desk in the kitchen I noticed my housemate Grabin had put out some water colors and some large pieces of paper with the logo of a chemical company along the bottom. I found myself sitting down with Jethro Tull music turned up loud and covering this paper with colors. I drew a series of dark brown and black office buildings in the left and center rising to the middle of the page. On the roof of each glowed red warning lights to keep airplanes from crashing into them. To me they served a deeper warning. Those red lights become malevolent eyes looking at me daring me to come closer. And then in one frenzy of color and madness, I drew along the upper right side and towering over the buildings an abundant green forest hillside. And from the top of this plateau of green and lovely life I painted a thunderous waterfall that cascaded down toward Boxtown threatening to obliterate it back to the nature from which it stole itself.

And for some reason I did not understand for many years, almost as an afterthought, I drew two figures at the top of this waterfall looking down on it all. One was a stick figure of a man and at his side this yellow cartoon dog.