corner of my period underwear drawer, which tells no tales.
It’s 8 p.m. and I’m having a much-needed mug of chilled red wine, purchased with my Whole Foods employee discount. Today was a weird one. I was back at work for the first time after my suspension and a little nervous Dirty Steve would be mad at me for the tiny but righteous blackmailing episode. However, he seemed to be taking it in stride (though when I tried to grill him about his brush with the law, he gave me a “talk to the hand” gesture).
I’ve barely seen Annie since she moved up to her new job on the fifth floor, where she acts as a griffin guarding the priceless treasure of Whole Foods—its wacky C-suite exec and environmental warrior Topher Doyle. But today she came down on her break and stopped at the deli counter to see me.
“What’cha doing down here with the pleebs?” I asked.
“Buying kombucha. Lavender for me because I need to chill the fuck out. Pomegranate for Topher Doyle because he says it’s a Greek symbol of eternal life and abundance. I do think he’s actually trying to both live forever AND become the most influential corporate environmentalist on earth.”
I used to brew kombucha faithfully, but since I landed in this slump I haven’t bothered. “At least Dirty Steve isn’t shooting for immortality.”
“I like it when you see your glass as half full. Will you come up on your lunch break to check out my new digs?”
I told her I’d be elbow deep in a batch of kung pao tofu but she refused to accept such a bullshit excuse.
“Okay, fine,” I said. “I can’t because I’m too jealous you’ve escaped the confines of the deli case. If I see your admin desk I might swoon with envy.”
She told me to quit whining and meet her at the elevators at 1:05 p.m.
I’d been acting like I was pretending to be jealous. But the truth is I am actually jealous. I’ve been standing behind that deli counter for three years with nary a move except that of keeping myself from being fired last week. (The fact that I consider that a move, dear Everett, shows just how stagnant my life has become.) Annie was my deli pal, sure, yet after only six months she rocketed herself upstairs to the nerve center of a health-food empire.
And so it was that I walked to the elevator at our meeting time, feeling a little sorry for myself. Annie was standing there waiting for me, looking happy and excited. She used her badge to gain us access to the fifth floor. The elevator doors opened and it was like a golden heavenly light shone on us. I was so disoriented by its glow it took me a while to realize it was a combination of sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows and some new age, high-tech lighting system Topher Doyle likely sprung for to prevent himself and the rest of the upper echelon of the company from being exposed to the draining effects of fluorescents. “It’s crazy that when we were born, Whole Foods was still a tiny local chain with just a handful of stores,” I mused. “It was small when we were small.”
“I know. And now that we’re grown, it’s a corporate behemoth.”
“Is it terrible that I think of it as our corporate behemoth?” I asked. And by “our” I meant not just me and Annie, but every other Austin slacker raised on the notion that true success means working a “cool” low-wage job—at a record store, coffee shop, or yes, at the one acceptable corporate giant Whole Foods—that barely supports one’s artistic endeavors (or what the alchemists referred to as one’s Great Work).
“Let me give you a tour,” Annie said. First she took me to the Help Desk room, where a row of staggeringly attractive, tattooed men and women sat wearing headsets, cheerfully talking Whole Foods employees from around the country down from the hysteria of their minor tech disasters. They all smiled and waved at us, gesturing that they were too absorbed in their glorious duties supporting the empire to chat with us. I noticed that two of the men were super-hot identical twins.
Annie then took me to her desk, which sat just to the right of a closed door made of gleaming walnut. A nameplate beside the door read:
TOPHER DOYLE
CHIEF ECOSYSTEM OFFICER, WHOLE FOODS
(This nameplate was made from recycled six-pack rings plucked from the Gulf Coast and thus