Doug, Actually

         When I met Doug's train that afternoon at Grand Central he'd just come from an  Actualization seminar wherein he'd been enlightened, presumably, on cutting-edge techniques for bolstering such irritating deficiencies as self-esteem, initiative and assertiveness. The finer points of this transformation may have been obscured by the distraction of the throngs milling about the vast rotunda; half again larger than a Saturday rush-hour might require, this horde, viewed from the Lexington Avenue balcony, was right out of a Capra film as thousands of commuters stood shoulder to shoulder scanning fresh newspapers hawked by newsboys darting in and out amongst the crowd. Everyone had a paper open and I caught fragments of the torrid headlines as I moved toward the stairs. It was November 18, 1978 and, as the new,  Actually assertive Doug stepped from the train, we were all just learning about the hundreds of members of the Peoples' Temple Agricultural Project who had just opted for an entirely different self-improvement plan in Jonestown, Guyana.

   “I guess I got out just in time,” Doug said with that classic deadpan of his. “I can see where you might take these sorts of things too far...” We were heading down to Tribeca to share a sublet for our first post-youth stab at New York City and, if either one of us had had the slightest initiative we might have made better use of those six weeks than sitting on the couch in the perpetual gloom of a Manhattan canyon wondering if our landlady had said to water or not to water her ficus. Keeping an eye on the crusty gentleman who lived in a cardboard box in the alley under our window and stalking Rudy, the cat who came with the place, took up a substantial part of most days. The man in the box – who served as an example of someone with even less ambition than we possessed - was harmless enough, I guess, but Rudy, it turned out, had shown remarkable stick-to-itiveness in absconding with our toothbrushes on a nearly daily basis. After losing half a dozen or so and applying ourselves diligently to the hunt, we'd finally discovered he'd been stuffing them into a hole in the bathroom pipe-riser.

   In a random stab at the listings in the back of the Voice, I applied for one of those sales jobs that promised vast wealth without the burden of experience and found myself in a seminar of my own that was so unfamiliar and creepy that I suffered a panic attack and bailed during the bit where we were to look one another in the eye and practice a firm handshake. 

      

      One day, having exhausted any leads offered up by the bulletin boards at the laundromat and diner, I was wandering aimlessly about mid-town in a cloud of loneliness and dejection when a lovely girl approached me on the corner of Third Avenue and Fifty-Ninth. “You look lost in thought,” she said, with a familiarity that made me wonder if we'd met before. “Would you like to have a coffee and meet some of my friends?” Her eyes literally sparkled as she said this and, though I'd learned to brush off such bizarre approaches in airports and train stations where the Krishnas and Moonies trolled for lost souls, I was completely disarmed and undone by this siren. “We're doing kind of a questionnaire,” she added as we walked together to a nearby set of stairs and down to a basement storefront. “It's kind of a thing my girlfriends and I are doing...Sort of like what people like and don't like. It will only take a few minutes; then we can go grab that coffee.” She held the door open; I would have followed her anywhere. I took my place at a long table amongst half a dozen others and was handed a suspiciously thick batch of sprocket-feed paper and a number two pencil by a scruffy young man in Jesus sandals and a pea-coat. Two hours and two hundred questions later I finally worked up the initiative to walk out on what I'd come to suspect was a personality test given under the auspices of the Church of Scientology. The girl of my dreams had vanished within moments of my arrival and was no doubt back on the streets pimping for Mr Hubbard.

   After six weeks the ficus had expired and Rudy had taken up a position beside the now plugged riser hole where he wailed in despair for hours on end. Doug had come down with an early-onset bout of shingles and the man in the box had vanished altogether. Our resolve and finances depleted, we threw in the towel and went our separate ways.