Story a Day

It’s true that I was jealous. The magazines had that right. And it’s true that I was humiliated. Those were their two favorite words for me; I was the jealous, humiliated husband.

But there was something in it for me, too.

Here’s how I remember that night. It was summer, and the haze hung so thick over the endless suburbs you could barely see two blocks down the street. I had an evening audition for a Skor bar commercial; I’d gotten a phone call about it that morning. I got home from the office around five. I started the hot water running for a shower. I cracked open a plastic bottle of water and started drinking. Got to coat that throat. Got to hydrate so I don’t sweat or flush.

I remember wondering what the hell a Skor bar was. While the shower ran, I typed “Skor” on Wikipedia. I learned the bar was made by Hershey. It must be their sleeper bar, I thought, because I had never seen one advertised in my life. Skor was toffee. Made to compete with Heath. Hershey owned Heath now, but kept Skor bars around anyway.

So I was auditioning to peddle Hershey’s second-fiddle butter-toffee snack food. At least I knew where I stood.

Also, I learned, skor was Swedish for “shoes.”

I hopped in the shower and washed the summertime skor-sweat off my feet. I scrubbed the smell of toner from my fingers and rubbed my face to remove the bad luck of my telephone headset. In an office with turnover like mine, the telephone headsets were like village bicycles. I always wondered who those gray splotches around the temples and mouthpiece had come from. I scrubbed and shampooed. I toweled and blow dried. I ate an apple and drank a glass of iced tea. I climbed in the car. I checked my mirrors and seatbelt.

I always did the same things before an audition, by the way. I was superstitious. You get that way, when you see success as rarely as I did. You get religious. Hence the apple, hence the iced tea.

So anyway, I got to the building. I parked on the street. A woman wearing a bored expression and curly blond pigtails took a sip of a scarlet smoothie and handed me a single laser-printed page. I sat on a hard plastic chair next to all the other 35-to-50-year-old males. One was Korean. One was black. Two were Latino. There were two white guys. The Korean guy had some salt-and-pepper, but they could be looking for that. One of the white guys had a paunch that I thought would take him out of the running. The black guy had a mustache I wasn’t sure about. The others looked more or less camera-ready. I remember wishing for a mirror. Read the rest of this entry »