The Day I Argued With a Wall

Here’s living proof that you needn’t be psychotic to act completely unhinged.

“Whack job.”

“Batshit loonball.”

“Crazed mutant.”

“Nutcase.” “Loony bird.” “Primitive screwhead.” “Whackadoodle.” “Fruitcake.”

These are but a few of the terms a shocked coworker could’ve – and probably should’ve – attributed to me when he saw the way I was acting one autumn day some 10 years ago.

I was silently conversing with a wall.

However, in fairness, that’s not entirely accurate.

I was silently arguing with a wall.

And that’s exactly what my coworker saw: yours truly, mere inches from a blank wall, gesticulating like a demented conductor leading an invisible orchestra through its final movement.

Detecting motion just within range of my peripheral vision, I turned and saw Patrick, the amiable, ruddy-faced editor of “Southland Golf” magazine, as he slooooooly backed his way into his office and slooooooly closed his door. Given what he’d just witnessed, I wasn’t surprised that his bugged-out expression depicted pure terror … mixed with a tiny dose of befuddled amusement, the kind of look you’d expect from someone who’d spotted, let’s say, an interstellar alien, in top hat and blackface, trying to imitate Al Jolson.

The wall in question, my passive adversary, was painted sky blue, a color designed to calm the mind, which came in handy on days like this one, a monthly high-octane marathon when we shipped the final magazine layouts to the printer. Behind me was a 40-by-40 maze of office cubicles, each populated by an editor or a designer frantically trying to wrap things up before Zero Hour, our inflexible deadline.

However, at the moment, I wasn’t worried about any deadline. I was worried about
Patrick.

He, in turn, surely must’ve been worried about me, given that I appeared to be redefining the term “psychobabble.”

Yes, there’s a back story.

Have you ever been insulted by someone and managed to come up with a terrific verbal counterpunch, but only long after the interaction has taken place? Think of a time when your clever zinger emerged days – hell, sometimes even years – after the insult. You surely wish you’d had that world-class comeback chambered in your revolver the instant you really needed it, right?

On literally hundreds of occasions, I’ve come up with an assortment of snarky retorts – but never in the heat of the moment.

The source of my embarrassing one-way conversation with the wall is rooted in one such incident, which occurred some 30 years earlier. Here’s what happened.

At an office Christmas party back in 1985, Julie, a coworker in the transportation service where I worked, happily skipped around taking photos of the various groups gathered in the Italian restaurant where we’d met to celebrate the Virgin Birth. When Julie got to my group of fellow transportation dispatchers, my boss, Chip, a tubby Bible-thumper with a severely receding chin and the most pronounced Napoleon Complex I’d ever encountered, sidled up to her, faced my little gaggle of coworkers, and said to me, completely out of the blue: “Smile for the camera, Larry. You’re too big.”

Huh? I’m too big?

At the time, I was 6’4” and a stripper pole–shaped 180 pounds. I wasn’t big, I was tall.

And I instantly knew where the 5’6” Chip was coming from.

Thanks to his tendency to put others down in his own soft-spoken manner, I’d long suspected that my boss had been mercilessly bullied as a child. Now, at the holiday party, he’d been given a chance to exact just a teensy-weensy bit of revenge on a subordinate who had the audacity of choosing tall parents.

He said it again. “You’re too big.”

In a perfect world, one in which my brain’s “smart-ass lobe” could kick into high gear when I needed it most, I had several options, each in the form of a wicked comeback:

• Option 1: “Chip, you’d sell off one of your ugly kids to spend a day at 5’11”.
• Option 2: “Maybe if you’d hit the gym and stop worshipping at the Church of the Almighty Twinkie, you wouldn’t be too big.”
• Option 3: (my personal favorite): “I’m too big? Gee, that’s not what your wife kept screaming …”

But since it wasn’t a perfect world, I just sat there, numbed out and smiling like a compliant buffoon, when I really wanted to stride over to him, rip his head off and pour some scrumptious holiday eggnog down his neck hole.

Oh, believe me when I say this: The snarky comebacks to his odd insult eventually did emerge, but only weeks, months and – in the case of my diatribe directed at a wall while at work – decades later.

Regardless of the insults that came my way, and there were dozens through the years, I’d sometimes get into such a frenzied lather while acting out my too-late counterpunches, I’d actually say them out loud. Or I’d silently pantomime them.

Case in point: Long before the advent of cell phones, motorists would occasionally spot me on the L.A. freeways, while driving solo, bickering with my dashboard and gesturing at the speedometer at 65 miles per hour. I’d always see these befuddled drivers out of the corner of my eye, just before they swerved into another lane, likely to get away from someone whose cheese had obviously slid off his cracker.

When things got really heated in the Wonderful World of Larryland, I’d actually stand up, completely adrift from the present moment, engaging in a one-way debate while frantically waving my hands to punctuate whatever point I was directing at my opponent from the past.

Which is exactly what I was doing when Patrick, my editor, saw me.

Embarrassed beyond comprehension, my mental record player’s needle made a ripping sound across a vinyl album. My mind, which only moments before had been as energetic as a coked-up wolverine during mating season, immediately went into “brain-stem-only” mode, in the form of a near-flat EEG.

“Um … uh…,” I expounded aloud in the direction of Patrick’s closed door, followed by “Duuuuh,” the gold-standard clarion call of all low-grade morons.

By the time my neurons had recovered enough so I could upgrade to two whole syllables, waxing poetic with a nice “Oopsie,” I knew it was time to shuffle back to my cubicle and hope that nobody else had seen my heated debate with a painted slab of drywall.

I continued copyediting the article I’d been working on for “Southland Golf” magazine: a scintillating, Pulitzer-worthy piece about how pro golfers laterally rotate their torsos when chipping onto a green.

And, right then, my semi-fried brain made the connection.

Chipping onto a green. Chip shot. Cheap shot.

“Oh, Jesus Christ on a donkey,” I muttered to myself. “Now I get it …”

Chip. The name of my boss back in 1985, he of the receding chin and Napoleon Complex.

To the best of my knowledge – and to his credit – I’m pretty sure Patrick never told any of our coworkers about my embarrassing behavior that day. And if he passed his tale of woe on to anyone in the local mental-health community, nobody ever tried to tackle me and tie me into a straightjacket.

Hell – maybe they should’ve …

Special thanks to Genie Joseph, Brigitte Kratz and Alex Michael for their valuable input while I was creating this certain ticket to the local nut farm essay.