Old Mutton Chops

My first thought on meeting my new boss was the first thought I imagine everyone had on meeting him: “You don’t see mutton chops much these days.”

That was in the early Nineties, a time when men shaved their faces, not their heads. The mustache and the beard defined the outer boundaries of facial hair in an otherwise clean cut world.

But even today, well into the Age of the Goatee and the growing popularity of all sort of exotic facial hair, such as soul patches, billy goats and Elvis burns, not to mention the three day perma-shadow, the very essence of careless carefree modern cool, the mutton chop still stands apart, defining an outer boundary none dare cross.

He was a throwback in other ways, too.

He didn’t use a computer. Instead, he composed his memos and reports in long hand on yellow legal pads, his slanted loopy scrawl the sort I imagine would work well within the limitations of a quill pen, though in a rare concession to modernity he used a ballpoint. If he replied to your email, his secretary would bring you a print-out of your email with his handwritten reply squeezed into the margins. Forget about PowerPoint, he delivered presentations off the cuff, sometimes consulting a 3x5 note card or two, never providing charts or other graphics, so you actually had to listen to him. And ran his numbers the old fashioned way, on the back of the envelope, sometimes deigning to use a calculator but never opening Excel.

For him, office technology was forever defined by the Wang word processor, a tool designed for secretaries, not executives. By the time office technology spilled over into the executive suite, permeating everything everyone did, he was high enough in the organization that he could resist its onslaught, reasoning that the millions we spent on technology was, like the millions we spent on plant equipment, merely an investment in worker productivity, not something that would ever affect what an executive did. I remember his surprise one evening when, his secretary gone for the day, I sat at her station and typed a few revisions to the report we were working on. He often chided me for that, asking me if I could sit in for his secretary while she was at lunch, or, after reviewing something I wrote, saying I had a great future in word processing, his last two words dripping with disdain.

He was a real meat-and-potatoes guy, both figuratively and literally, for he never seemed to eat anything other than meat and potatoes. If the lunchroom didn’t have some form of meat and potatoes on the menu, he’d have his secretary pick up a Bacon Western Cheeseburger and French fries at the Carls, Jr. down the street.

He smoked like a chimney. When I started, no one wanted to sit near his office, the reek of smoke permeating everything, and everyone, within 50 feet. It was like sitting next to a coal-fired power plant. By mid-morning there’d be a mountain of unfiltered cigarette butts in his ashtray, ash scattered over his desk and clothes, some even sticking to his mutton chops, as he chain-smoked his way through the day.

When the city banned smoking in office buildings, he took it personally. Initially, he threatened to move to Virginia or North Carolina, tobacco states that surely encouraged smoking in the workplace. Then he calmed down enough to scour the city’s new regulations, finding not one, but two loopholes. The regulations were primarily designed to protect workers in modern office buildings, those glass boxes with windows that don’t open, so he planned to define himself out of the rules by cutting a ventilation hole in his 40th floor office window. Building management put a stop to his scheme, alerted no doubt by one of the underlings in his hallway forced to inhale his smoke, second-hand.

When that didn’t work, he played his other card, applying for a liquor license for his office. The rules contained an exception for licensed bars located in office buildings, so he planned to turn his office into a bar, joking that he already kept enough alcohol in there (he did, but that’s a different story). He only needed a liquor license and permission from building management for what was certainly a non-conforming use of the premises. Neither the city nor building management took him seriously.

He wasn’t surprised he lost. His ideas were clever, but even he knew they were strained. But he was surprised that no one in the office backed him up. Some had endured years of his smoke, but none had ever asked him to stop. He was just too senior. And too clueless to see why we were silent. It was easier for us to request a transfer.

Perhaps out of hurt, but more likely out of raging nicotine withdrawal, he retreated just outside the lobby, where he spent half the day puffing away twice as fast with a foreign object, some newfangled wireless doohickey the kids were calling a “cellular telephone communication device,” plastered to his ear. Our building got lousy cell reception, especially down on the ground, something he was incapable of appreciating, so a conversation with him would be filled with him saying “huh?” as you dropped in and out and you saying “what?” as he prattled on and on, oblivious to the fact that you were only hearing every third word he said, and then his line would drop and you’d be talking to yourself until his secretary poked her head in your office and asked you to reconnect him to the call.

This was better than the old days, though, when we’d have to do those conference calls in the smokehouse. He liked his speakerphone, calling it “the box,” and he liked his desk chair, a winged leather high-back that reclined almost to the floor, allowing him to lie back, his feet planted on his desk right in front of your face, so close you could count the gum spots and evaluate their freshness when you weren’t staring at the extremely elongated ash precariously protruding from the end of the cigarette bouncing up and down in his lips as he quietly conducted the call. And I mean quietly, his voice a raspy whisper, his windpipe so encrusted with years of accumulated tar that only the smallest bit of air was permitted to escape his open mouth. Sitting across his desk, we could barely hear him. And we were sitting next to “the box,” so chances were the rest of the people on the call couldn’t hear him at all. Lots of “huhs” and “whats” from them, forcing us to repeat his words like simultaneous UN translators. And when they were speaking, and he had something to say, he’d try to interrupt but the speakerphone’s sound detection circuits wouldn’t register the itty-bitty sound waves faintly croaking from his smoke-filled lungs, so they would talk on while he kept trying to get a word in, his frustration growing, until one of us shouted the speaker down and cleared the way for him to speak again.

I remember once he was trying to talk to someone on air phone, his rasp no match for the incessant background drone of the jet engines, so he couldn’t get a word in at all. Rather than pick up his handset, which would allow him to break through more easily, something that never occurred to him, he just shouted and shouted, his voice growing louder than I’d ever heard it, but even that loud wasn’t loud enough, until he pulled his phone out of the wall and threw it against his office window. The phone shattered, but the window didn’t even crack, thereby frustrating one prong of his future anti-anti-smoking campaign.

For all that, I liked him.

He was different, a rare quality in an office environment back in the days before they invented blue shirts, casual Fridays and non-secretarial females. I remember my first week in the office, sitting in a conference room, looking up and down the long table and being blinded by rows of white shirts and clean-shaven white faces until my eyes hit his pink striped shirt and scraggly mutton chops. For some reason, although I too wore a white shirt and have always had a clean-shaven white face, and have never once even considered mutton chops, it comforted me that someone there had.

He was unaffected. Although I never learned why he wears mutton chops, I am certain he was not trying to be different or retro or to get attention. He was just, like his shirts, cut from a different cloth, doing things his own way, seemingly oblivious to what others were doing or what they thought of him or his mutton chops.

He rarely chatted, but sometimes, after a long call, he’d light one up, lean way back, and illustrate a point he’d made on the call with a story, often from the really old days when he first started out. More than the points he made, I remember the details he conveyed, the huge chunks of his early life spent on business trips by train, the more relaxed rhythm of work days before faxes, FedEx and email, the languid feel of an office in the summer without air conditioning, the challenges of working after a three-martini lunch. He straddled two eras, giving me a valuable perspective, the sort some people pick up from their grandparents but I, having none, never did.

He was the only person I ever knew who complained about being paid too much. He feared for the future of a society with values so misplaced that people like him earned so much for doing what they did, while others earned so much less for doing so much more. I’m sure he took the money, but he lived so modestly it isn’t clear what he did with it.

He spoke his mind, something few here do, now that the greatest generation is retired and dying off. I think there’s something about growing up in the crushing poverty of a Depression and then dodging bullets in the Pacific and seeing your buddies blown apart next to you that leaves you no time for BS, compels you to get right to the point, even when no one wants to hear it. He was very smart and highly educated, yet he spoke very plainly, more like a guy in the trenches than an executive in a 40th floor office suite.

But for all his success, he was kind of sad. He lived alone, never marrying. He didn’t seem to have any friends. His only hobby was golfing, and he was a terrible golfer, slashing violently down at the ball, digging a deep trench in the fairway and sending the ball on a low, boring trajectory that either landed 100 yards short of the green or 100 yards over it. He played fast, and always itched to play faster. His impatience with slow weekend golfers forced him to join a country club, albeit the cheapest one in town, a club whose narrow fairways wrapped around a mountain, sending all but the straightest shots into ball eating bushes on the high side or, more often, over the cliff and into oblivion on the other side.

Early in a typical round he’d hit a bad shot and start cursing, retreating inward, ignoring you, his face getting redder and redder as he wheezed his way from hole to hole, all the while silently screaming at himself, the agony of his day only increasing with each bad shot, making you feel guilty for your good shots and leaving you no solace for your bad shots. You’d reach the 18th green only to find that he’d stormed off the course, leaving you to putt out alone. His car would be gone by the time you reached the parking lot.

And then, the next Monday, you’d see him in the office and he’d ask if you were free to play again that weekend. Most of our colleagues made excuses after one or two rounds with him, but for some reason I didn’t, playing maybe 20 rounds over the few years we worked together, each time watching him tortured himself around the course, marveling at his tolerance for self-inflicted pain. I didn’t take pleasure in that pain, but I was oddly drawn to it, perhaps the sane part of me hoping the golf-addled part of me would learn something from this Ghost of Golf Future.

I transferred away from his group after a few years, never working (or golfing) with him again. Soon after, he hit 70 and was forced to retire, and I lost track of him. Today I tried googling him but, not surprisingly, nothing came up on this man who never owned a computer, let alone touched a keyboard. He may be dead, probably should be, what with all the smoke and saturated fat he inhaled over the years, but something tells me Old Mutton Chops is still hacking and cursing his way around a tight course somewhere. I hope he’s happy.