As Comfortable As a Pair of Pajamas Copyright © 2019 by Ralph Robert Moore.

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Published in Black Static #67, Jan-Feb 2019

High above the city, beautiful cobalt sky. Cheerful yellow sun warming the pointed tops of skyscrapers. Early spring in Dallas, fresh, nostril-filling scent of green flower buds spreading open in the April breezes.

Our car pulled into the parking lot at Parkland Memorial Hospital, rolled down the rows of license plates to an empty slot. Parkland was where President John F. Kennedy was rushed, blue eyes staring straight up at the ambulance's ceiling, after he was shot in the head.

The three of us, having parked, opened the side doors of the car, getting out, stretching after the long drive, bending back into the car to retrieve our paperwork, walking side by side behind the tall hugeness of the hospital to the wide building at its rear. Me, and the salesman for this client, also named Rob, and Karen, the client rep, who would handle the day-to-day communications.

I was the head of the legal department where I worked. I took care of compliance issues on state and federal levels, and negotiated our contracts. Sitting down at a conference table across from the parties representing a prospective client, usually senior vice presidents and attorneys, making sure my company received favorable terms. That was my job. To close the deal.

When I was a teenager in Connecticut back in the Sixties I spent a lot of time up in my second story bedroom in my parents' home, listening to vinyl record albums. 'Father, I want to kill you.' I knew at some point I'd have to get a job, because I wanted to be living in my own apartment, my own peephole and messy kitchen, bathroom where I could leave the door open, and I knew instinctively that I would not be able to support myself by being who I was, a writer. I would have to be something else during the week, then only be myself in the early morning or late evening, the weekend. But I could never imagine myself in a business suit. Ever. I was a long-haired, jeans and t-shirt guy who wanted to rewrite the same sentence ten times. The concept of working in an office just seemed so completely alien to who I was, the in-tray and out-tray of it, surrounded by people walking by my cubicle repeating jokes they heard on TV last night. 'Infiltrated business cesspools, hating through our sleeves.' Yet here I was, decades later, two thousand miles away, in Dallas, where business suits felt as comfortable on me as pajamas.

The client we were visiting was a behavioral health center located behind Parkland Memorial Hospital.

Once we were inside the center, I stopped someone in the main hall who introduced themselves as a nurse, asking them directions to the HR department, where our contract negotiation was going to take place. He pointed down the corridor we were in, his lifted, snaking hand giving left, right directions. Down a third hallway, I smiled at someone who shook my hand, said, 'Dr. Conway' in response to me giving my name, to make sure we were headed in the right direction. She aimed her finger at a door near the end of that corridor.

Finally reaching Human Resources, handshakes in a back conference room with empty chairs, comments about the weather, telling an unusually tall man how we liked our coffee, the woman I would be negotiating with across the table asked if we had any trouble finding their offices. I named the nurse and doctor who directed us here, and she smiled. "Actually, those are some of our mental/nervous patients. They're not severe, so we let them out of their rooms for a few hours each day. They like to pretend they're staff. I suppose so they don't feel embarrassed when they introduce themselves to strangers."

I raised my eyebrows, like we all do when we're about to make a joke. "Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether." Looked around at the different seated parties, papers fanned in front of them, pens poised, anticipating a laugh.

Not one person sitting at that table had any idea what I was referencing.

One of the most enduring tropes of horror is someone we know turning out to be someone we don't know. A substitute. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The Thing. Don Draper. Terry O'Quinn in The Stepfather (1987), turning away from the wall phone: "Wait a minute…Who am I here?"

When I drove three thousand miles across America in the mid-Seventies, once I arrived in California I started eating a lot of oranges, borrowing all of Philip K. Dick's books from the local library, because there was a Rolling Stone magazine article on the stands about him. You know that feeling, don't you? When you discover a writer, and start going through their oeuvre? He was my hero!

Years and years later, decades, after amassing quite the Philip K. Dick collection in my home library in Texas, pale blonde shelves laddering up to the HVAC vents just below the white ceiling of my study, I bought Lawrence Sutin's biography of Dick, 'Divine Invasions'. I was taken by Dick's relationship with Tessa, later in his life. Tessa was significantly younger than Dick, but the two of them seemed to have an idyllic life together, living on love in a Southern California apartment, having to be careful how they spent their limited money, both of them writing, discussing their work with each other, Dick listening to German operas on his beloved stereo system. He seemed to finally be happy, and content. And Tessa, dear dark-haired Tessa, seemed like his perfect partner. But then there's this passage from the biography (page 199 of the Harmony Books first edition): "Unfortunately, Phil did more, at times, than snap his fingers. There were episodes of physical violence that left Tessa bruised and emotionally shaken. Linda Levy, herself the victim of an assault by Phil, writes that, early on in the relationship, 'Tessa showed up at my apartment one day, covered with bruises, crying and very upset. She described a situation in which, she said, Phil locked the front door, turned up the stereo, turned on the air conditioning, and started to beat her.'"

The Philip K. Dick I loved from his writings was not the Philip K. Dick who produced those writings. It turned out I didn't know him at all.

When the Internet first started getting popular, back in the late Nineties, a lot of us created our own websites. I did too. ralphrobertmoore.com. I posted quite a few of my stories on the site. And most of them got thousands of hits. Which was great! But then one day, as I've said before, someone I worked with told me they had found my site, had read some of my stories, many of which were sexually explicit, and was shocked by that side of me. I was fine with anonymous people around the world sending me appreciative emails, but did I want someone I saw every morning at work while we filled our coffee cups knowing about that side of me? I was someone he thought he knew turning out to be someone he didn't know.

And that's the thing about writers. We expose so much of ourselves, if we're any good, but there's ultimately a price to pay. I'm not saying we're better than other people. Or worse than other people. But I am saying we're different than other people. We can pretend to really care about quarterly goals, but we don't. We only care about writing that perfect sentence.

After I made my 'Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether' joke and didn't get any laughs, I realized I don't belong as much as I thought I did. I wasn't a businessman. I was a writer, pretending to be a businessman. Dexter passing out doughnuts.

'I…stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.'

I still wore my business suit every day after that, of course, but it no longer felt like a pair of pajamas.