5 Reasons Why Grand Stand Should Rehire Deborah Parnell-Jones

Greetings, fellow fiction-lovers!

Today, I’m very excited to bring you one of my favourite writers here on Substack — Kevin LaTorre. Kevin writes A Stylist Submits — a collection of essays and poems that circle literary Christianity. Such is Kevin’s knowledge of literature and his mastery of language, that I make sure to never miss an issue.

Here, Kevin brings us another fascinating short story, this time exploring digital media, addiction, and workplaces of the pandemic. Enjoy!

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M. E. Rothwell

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Image courtesy of Modsy.

5 Reasons Why Grand Stand Should Rehire Deborah Parnell-Jones

Though it pains us to admit it, the online media middleweight Grand Stand should rehire its former opioid-content writer, Deborah Parnell-Jones. Not that her stint here deserves our grace. By turns, DPJ (as her peers discreetly named her) was immovable, combative, and poorly-dressed. Without exception, we have all cleared our twice-cleared throats as DPJ refused to relax her sermons against the American sins of Oxycontin, fentanyl, and equine therapy. But she also brought unlikely gifts to our content team, installing them in our office like malware that somehow doesn’t disable the device. DPJ brought us five gifts that we’re still reluctant to accept. But all five exposed us to more than the declining Bauhaus and Modernist houses we write about, and all five are definite reasons to rehire her.

1. DPJ Has Her Two Reasons

Back when we worked in person, we at Grand Stand preferred a laidback office that kept our employees feeling comfortable, if not completely at home. It helped that three of our formerly four content staff wrote web articles about custom architecture design for high-income readers—even now, Palo Alto sunshine through an industrial window makes for light work, and enlightened attitudes. But DPJ never chose professional lightness. Instead, in her seat two cubicles down, she was a daily thundercloud.

“I dragged my boyfriend to a drive-in on Friday,” someone might tell her, “did you know that they’re back in style? It felt like Grease.”

“The Sackler family only filed for bankruptcy yesterday,” DPJ would reply, “after all this time, and with all that blood on their hands. Can you let me finish this article?”

Not even dogs (trained, groomed, and adorable) could sway DPJ. Bella, Senior Content Writer here, spent three days gathering our support for an “Office Dog Days” initiative before DPJ stopped her with two dagger-thrust objections. “Dogs underfoot would just be a distraction, more than other people already are.” And, while Bella hesitated, “You’ve complained about how your dog, quote, barks like a little crackhead, unquote. That’s harmful to say, and we shouldn’t have to take what you yourself don’t like.”

Office Dog Days stalled right there. Bella complained about how unreasonable it all was (we often would when DPJ wasn’t present, usually standing awkwardly over one another’s cubicles) without much effect. But none of us fought for the initiative, because DPJ had unnerved everyone by opposing literal puppies so forcefully.

One employee, swiveling in her seat two cubicles down, asked DPJ again about dogs in the office. This was a week later, and her question was well-meaning.

“Dogs are features of homes, not offices,” DPJ said. “That makes ‘Office Dog Days’ incoherent. And one more thing, would the hyphen go between ‘office’ and ‘dog,’ or ‘dog’ and ‘days’?” Her anality served her writing, if not our camaraderie, quite well.

DPJ always has two reasons at the ready. They help her dissect friendly conversations and online bullshit alike. When the same woman complimented DPJ on her gray cardigan threaded with rouge twine, DPJ of course explained why she chose loose cardigans and pleated slacks each day: “The sales guys can be creeps, when they take their calls and swivel around to look at all the women here, so baggy is better. Not to mention that I need cardigans whenever the AC is freezing, and that is always.”

Lately, we could use the bite of double-edged reasons, the way that DPJ did. Instead, we schedule video meetings that spin lazily for a half-hour before someone announces that she will start working on what we’ve over-discussed, and then logs off. It’s odd to admit, after so many terse conversations with the woman, that DPJ is like an app of nonstop and shrill notifications that we still need for our own productivity.

2. DPJ Writes With Everything She Has

We write, create videos, and gush social media copy for two online magazines: Into the Interior and Bauhaus Bazaar. Our pieces are vibrant to the eye, easy to read while scrolling down a phone screen, and (most of all, most importantly) SEO-perfect. We’re not crusty enough to create a style guide for editing each another, but those three needs would begin and end such a guide. They are what the internet requires, and they make our writing a thousand times easier for us and our readers.

DPJ, on the other hand, writes like a goddamn journalist. She refuses to write without quoting sources, and her 500-word bit articles regularly became 1,800-word features. And her language, we all used to agree on Tuesdays, is too dense for its own good. Part of her problem was that she wrote medical marketing content for the opioid-addiction doctors at MethaDoctors’ Guide (MDG). She chose word-salads like “those who suffer from opioid addiction” or “ongoing recovery from opioid dependence,” where “addicts” and “rehab” would do nicely. TrimTight, the plug-in that our websites use to catch errors and SAT-reject words, lit up every article DPJ wrote. When editing her work, we substituted lighter words where we could and removed overladen clauses by the dozen. It was basically manual labor.

Reliably, DPJ fought us on these edits. “The terminology matters,” she said every time. “Sure, it’s dense, but it’s also compassionate. Think about it like this: if you were writing about a Bauhaus, you would say ‘ribbon window’ instead of ‘window.’ It’s truer, even if there’s one more word than TrimTight wants.” We’re certain that she returned to her articles and restored the phrases we’d corrected, though we could never catch her at it. Her loss, in the end. Her pieces never ranked for SEO and likely made their readers cry, which is probably why MDG has the smallest traffic at Grand Stand.

But there’s something to admire in how DPJ flouted our best practices for writing. She definitely learned the guidelines, from all the revisions we gave her. But every day DPJ persisted like a stone in water, and she wrote with every ounce of herself.

It was impressive, in the impossible way that DPJ is impressive. “She uses the word ‘buprenorphine’ in every other sentence,” one of us called to her fiancé in their apartment. It was after work, but DPJ’s article had stayed on her mind. “That’s four syllables per use, it’s like she hates the reader.”

Her fiancé didn’t respond from his home office. He likely wasn’t working behind the door, but was instead weighing if he could escape to his hourly smoke break. “Tori,” he called back, “I can’t tell if you hate her or want to be her.”

3. DPJ Would Not Conform

While we’d worked in the physical office, we liked to have long, amorphous lunches when everyone, content and sales, could drop by. We’d begin at quarter to twelve, and maybe end at half past two. Anyone suffering a deadline would bring their laptop to the conference table and pretend to work, while we ate together and manufactured the right water-cooler collegiality. We would miss these lunches most of all once the office closed, even though we sometimes microwaved tilapia or subjected each other to the lists of liquors we could no longer drink after college. They were our way of confirming one another, confirming that we were each a separate entity from our job titles.

DPJ missed these lunches while she worked here, though she surely doesn’t now (it’s alright, she wouldn’t have chuffed at it either). Her slit of time for lunch began at 11:30 and ended at 11:47. But “lunch” is the incorrect word—in that time she would only eat her pesto-salami sandwich. From there, she would space her apple and granola bar between noon and two. The granola crumbs gathered across her keyboard and were not wiped off, though their presence was unseemly. DPJ never joined us for lunch, as though she wrote her articles (which no doctors were reading) under perpetual, strict timelines.

Of course, Grand Stand had never hired her to fit us (just compare the magazines we reveled in to the website where DPJ slaved). But her unswerving, unsaid rejection stung nonetheless, and it festered because we couldn’t just reply in kind—it’s bitchy to pretend we’re not here around you. Saying it would’ve been indelicate. One of us nearly did, once. It was quarter to four, and DPJ was six minutes into her weekly pity-party for addicts.

“Why do you do this?” I asked. We were both at our cubicles, but she didn’t bother getting up and I was standing to look down at her. She swiveled to me.

“I’m from Dayton,” DPJ said, “there’s nothing else that I should do.”

I cleared my throat but she didn’t let the sound stop her.

“I know people caught in this cycle,” she said. “In real terms, I can’t do much for them, not within our relationships. Trying is how loved ones lose contact. Hence, I do this.”

I couldn’t repeat myself and clarify that I’d asked why she thought she was righteous enough to judge us, as though we were uncaring, privileged assholes for doing our jobs. I no longer had a chance. Because, I then learned, she had a personal link to those millions of lives hooked like trout by the opioids whose names I’ve forgotten. Maybe she had watered the grass of an opioid funeral with a sister’s tears, under a nondescript Dayton sky. There was nothing I could say. Addiction would never ensnare my loved ones. DPJ made it impossible for us to just speak as friends, or even colleagues. And she chose to.

Lately, we ourselves haven’t felt linked to the articles blinking (but stalled, always stalled) on our monitors. Modernism Week had to go virtual, which remade it into so many low-resolution videos of the homes we’d wanted to visit and breathe in like oxygen. This disconnect from “pointless materialism” (her literal words) had buoyed DPJ in her own work. Now could be the time for us to benefit from her example, even if it makes us sanctimony itself in an ill-fitting cardigan.

4. DPJ Already Knows All She Needs To

We at Grand Stand share whenever we can. That’s why our magazines exist online, and why we exist as employees: to share the interiors of chic modernist houses with the Internet of our paying subscribers. DPJ, however, didn’t appreciate our way of sharing and made no bones of braying it aloud.

We’ve already mentioned how graciously she took our edits. However, her knowledge lorded beyond just creating the articles; her view of Grand Stand’s content-business model also descended from on high. She disliked that we made money.

“Paywalls are elitist,” she once told two of us. We’d finally gotten her to socialize by the end of a Friday afternoon, and this was how she commented on Into the Interior.

“I mean, Interior shows off houses in Malibu, where no one can afford to live anyway,” one of us said, intending be glib. “It’s all about the total emphasis on horizontal lines, and the ‘visual expression’ of the whole building, and how the industrial materials inside look like machines but also have an aesthetic. Paywalls can’t be more elitist than that shit.”

“They block access,” DPJ said. “The point of the Internet is to share information. Paying anything undercuts that.”

“People paying something pays us,” Lisbeth (Associate Content Writer at Grand Stand) said, but guarded it with laughter. Perhaps it had been another one of us and not Lisbeth—someone like Thomas, the bearded white guy who sells our ad space and subscriptions, and is only seen with Beats headphones in place over his ears. It could’ve been Thomas, in that moment, but Lisbeth is the only one I’ve thought about since we all left the office. She slots easily into this forehead-to-wall conversation with DPJ. “We have to get paid somehow, right?” Lisbeth asked.

“That doesn’t mean paywalls aren’t wrong,” DPJ said.

My forehead had moistened. “The paywalls on our sites pay you, Debbie,” I said.

“No, we sell marketing content directly to doctors.”

“Doctors don’t buy that training, you and the site are a drain. Our magazines don’t lose buckets of money like yours does.” It was more true than it was ugly. It was the whole reason why DPJ was eventually furloughed.

I didn’t usually speak to my coworkers like that. We were civil as an unwritten Grand Stand rule. But DPJ and her unteachability had felt like a cramped, airless room to me right then.

“How does she get to that mindset?” I called to my fiancé that night. “To where she can tell us we’re wrong about our whole business, and about how we make her money. It’s like, what the fuck.”

Back then, he would’ve responded to me. She’s opinionated like anyone else, or something as bland. He’d never been a talker, but I used to find his silence as inviting as an unwritten page. From his home office, he would reply to me, but abstractly, without speaking his part of an actual conversation. He would’ve been trying to work, that was all.

He read audiobooks for an app I don’t use anymore, though he had to begin by reading nonfiction—technical explorations of flight propulsion, or histories of long-dead American cults, or investigations of inept Soviet bureaucracies. At the start he’d wanted to make his career reading only fiction. “The classics,” he’d said, in a rare explanation that I’ve cherished since he gave it to me. “All the books that made me like reading in the first place, Vonnegut, Borges, Beckett. They’re all nuts, but their books helped me see everything at a different angle.” His finger had touched its way up my left hand, stopping atop the ring there. “I don’t know, I just want to keep all the things I like in my life.”

But he’d fallen into a rut by taking one nonfiction book after another. And then everyone everywhere had fallen into a rut, and it was longer and darker than anyone could’ve known. He no longer reads for that app. He speaks only sometimes but never about work or books.

At this moment, he is smoking on our front walkway, and watching the streetlights refuse to waver. Beyond the streetlights, there’s a community center where boys once played shirts-and-skins soccer games at all hours. My fiancé had forgiven all the noise they made, though I hadn’t. He might be missing the sight of them. The rising smog of his cigarette isn’t alluring, or noir. It’s only acrid.

I know its smell intimately, though every time he returns inside to instantly brush his teeth, I sense that there’s more I should be learning about us. Some sneaking suspicion, obvious even while I can’t click on it with my finger.

Every other night, he streams comedy shows where the audience’s canned laughter disturbs me as I try sleeping. At one point, I guess, we had binged and bonded over wily old Carlin videos. I had loved the seven dirty words, and he had loved the offbeat, revolutionary vision of the routine. But every other night he now falls into a drunken sleep on our couch. That’s where I find him the next morning, and he always looks sullied and discarded. I gather the vibrant purple beer cans from the floor before he wakes up, so he won’t have to share my embarrassment. We—me or him, it doesn’t matter anymore—have broken something irreplaceable.

I think of DPJ when my fingers begin crumpling the cans but then stop, so the sound won’t wake my fiancé. She would just reject the unsettlingly true by saying that it was wrong. It’s a naïve way of facing the world, but I’d kill for it. Here’s to you, I’d tell her. Your style can’t solve the problems I face in my own bed, but it deludes me enough to think I could.

5. DPJ Made Us All Decent By Comparison

I—we, the employees of Grand Stand—are adequate people. Our magazines make as little money as is expected for digital publications, our writing is fashionable trim around the photos of three Atherton home renovations per year, our workdays are long enough to feel diligent but short enough to allow human lives in our remaining hours, and we don’t give headaches to the physical and virtual people around us. We’re adequate, given the circumstances. But DPJ once made us decent, by comparison—only decent as employees, especially decent as people. We might never meet another person who does both.

Thomas, the bearded salesman contained in headphones, once quipped that he should take up yoga to improve his job performance. He had once again come to the office at nine-thirty, and added, “I’d be much calmer about being late for work three days a week.”

We would’ve bantered a bit to both mock and validate Thomas, as comfortable office-mates do. Not DPJ, though. The woman had been writing since seven and was once again stalking the Keurig—that day, Thomas irked her sense of duty. “You’d be much calmer if you sold space to researched-backed NIH ads instead of posh pseudo-rehab scam centers,” she said. “Then you’d be receiving money that wasn’t tainted, and thus calmer in your work.” DPJ didn’t intend it as the instruction that it became. Thomas would call his former frisbee-team buddy at the NIH the next afternoon, to then sell him on six months of banner advertisements the following week.

It wasn’t Thomas, I realize, who joked about yoga and was slapped with inspiration. It was Will, another bearded white guy who also sells ad space and subscriptions from under Beats headphones. The two men blend together in my memories of the office. In our monthly meeting with sales, Will and Thomas in their respective windows are like the same video played on two separate screens, only at different speeds and in different filters.

“We’re all discolored, and at half-speed,” I say aloud to my laptop. But of course I’m muted, and I don’t repeat myself so the others might hear it.

When DPJ made us decent people, it was also by accident. Having her black-belt rudeness lurking beside every conversation made us considerate with one another. Bella had to, as senior staff, but it was Lisbeth who practiced anti-DPJ kindness like it was a sport. She smoothed us after DPJ had ruffled us, because she valued her coworkers as the friends she thought them to be. Her chin-up visits were another unwritten Grand Stand protocol.

After Will’s collision with DPJ, Lisbeth knocked on his cubicle wall, partly to ask after an AdWords report but more to encourage him to actually take up yoga, as she had. “There are seven chakras on purpose,” she was saying. “One for every morning of the week, to make it easy on us Westerners.”

Will allowed Lisbeth to expound, because he sensed that she needed to speak about something other than AdWords and DPJ. But it was wasted breath, at least for Will—he and Thomas had their own male mechanism for venting. Will, or Thomas (whomever DPJ happened to rebuke that week), would take the other outside for a stroll through the one-time office park, and they would call that addiction writer “a bitch with zero business acumen.” They never compared notes on how she had belittled them, but just simplified her with that regular phrase or phrases like it. It was an effective, if regressive, solution.

We all could’ve dismissed DPJ like the two salesmen did, but her rejections instead stirred to us to compassion. As we’ve said, Lisbeth was the project manager of morally overcoming our colleague. She gave me the most views, since I sat two cubicles down from DPJ. Lisbeth asked me questions that had nothing to do with Bauhaus home decor, or the opioid epidemic, or unpleasantness; she asked about me. “What do you want to do this year?”

But we would just trade thoughts instead of replying to what the other said. “I want to see a white-sand beach, and day-drink on it, ” Lisbeth said.

“I could definitely use a long mountain retreat, all to myself,” I said.

“Don’t you wish we’d move offices? God, I want floor-to-ceiling windows on a cute main street,” she said.

“I’d take any office where Debbie had her own office behind a heavy door, preferably in the dungeon,” I said.

Lisbeth spoke a lot about what she wanted. I didn’t return the favor. There were risks in exploring what I wanted, because there were risks in admitting what I lack. Those missing things I lack have multiplied since then. Vacations, work spaces; bonuses, surviving romance; future children, maternal leave; I sidestepped Lisbeth then but no longer have to. We don’t talk via phone or virtual meeting, and so Lisbeth no longer explores what she wants all over me. I deleted that question while smoothing palm-sized caulk onto our bedroom wall and noticing my engagement ring.

As an office, we responded to DPJ with different decencies. Lisbeth became compassionate, like a sorority big is compassionate to her little but only for the first semester. Bella became awkwardly coach-like. Will distilled professional success from his insults. Thomas donated a tenth of his income to our local rehab center but didn’t dare tell DPJ. I wrote two killer articles with DPJ’s exactitude, and then I slept sweetly beside my fiancé, while his lungs and mind were blackening. Each day I encouraged his nonfiction readings, because through his office door his voice read gently and with reassurance, the way a parent reads. Every hour I cleared my throat over the squeal of our front door and overlooked his acrid return. We never knew it as a team of Grand Stand coworkers, but I remained decent just when my home needed better conduct.

DPJ, then, did make us all decent by comparison. But I personally would strike this reason from our list. Decent is no longer enough.

Now What?

This last quarter, Grand Stand regained some of the revenue it had lost over the two previous ones. Thomas crowed about our recovery during our virtual meeting, though none of us remembered the exact words he’d said. The good news couldn’t be real, from the disparate islands of our laptops. Even when the recovery meant that our collective pay cuts could now ease, it couldn’t seem true. But, we repeated like audio from a lagging connection, it was good news, just great to hear, really good.

When we remaining employees again receive the pay at which Grand Stand hired us, the company should then rehire Deborah Parnell-Jones. DPJ’s personality in our shared office sometimes proved repellent; her diluted effect while working remotely could instead prove magnetic. At least, we can argue it would. She isn’t unpredictable, but her influence on us can be.

We feel ambivalent about her return, if asked. A pair of us recently admitted in a private Slack that we’ve gotten comfortable after months of not being deemed shallow, materialistic, and harmful each day. DPJ has limited benefits as a coworker.

But as her own odd-duck brand, she practices and inspires things that none of us can. For that much, DPJ is worth something. Even if her only returns are the distraction that her oddness gave us, how it helped us ignore our disintegrating loved ones in the next room or our underserved desires forever elbowed out of our calendars. Hers were scarce ROIs that she didn’t mean to give us, but they were gifts we need, now more desperately than before.

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