ESCAPE FROM THE CUBES (OR, LIFE AFTER BANK)

After months of meticulous strategizing, sketching escape routes on the back of a pitchbook, I was finally ready to execute my mission. It was early Monday afternoon, 13:38 hours. Everybody at the Bank was moving at a glacial pace, still struggling with the lingering repercussions of vice-filled weekends.

I unknotted my tie and wrapped it around my forehead. I was going for the Rambo look, but I probably more closely resembled a deranged hobo. I dropped down on my haunches, wriggling around my cubicle partition. I peeked out to the left. To the right. The corridor was suspiciously empty. It was almost too perfect. I contemplated returning to the safety of my spreadsheets, then gritted my teeth in steely determination. It was now or never. I bolted up and sprinted the fifty meters to the elevators. My stumpy legs aren’t built for sprinting, and my heavy footsteps thudded against the synthetic carpeting.

Miraculously, I didn’t attract any attention. I pushed the Down button. As an elevator drew near, I noticed the glaring omission to my plan, the one factor I hadn’t accounted for. The Bank receptionist sat behind the frosted glass, engrossed in her chicken Caesar. She was a heavily made-up Southern Belle from Georgia who had hated me ever since I had given her a box of chocolates for Christmas, sending her into anaphylactic seizures. How was I supposed to know she was deathly allergic to hazelnuts?

Shuffling my foot nervously, I watched as the receptionist looked up from a ranch-soaked piece of lettuce dangling off her plastic fork and blinked at me in confusion. Her reaction time was slow, but when she kicked into high gear, she was a whirlwind of activity. Cries of “Aich-Awwwr!! Aich-Awwwrr!!!” heralded a hailstorm of paperclips flung in my direction.

The elevator had arrived. The receptionist’s torrent of paperclips clanged off the steel doors as they shut in front of me. I squeezed into the packed elevator, my paranoia misinterpreting the unduly prolonged eye contact from the other occupants until I remembered the tie still wrapped around my forehead, which I removed with a meek smile. We arrived at the lobby. I darted across the marble expanse, avoiding a triad of Associates waiting in the Starbucks queue. Whipping through the revolving doors, I was a free man.

A year later, a typical day now goes something like this:

11:13 – Wake up without an alarm clock. I yawn, stretching out my body on luxurious two thousand threadcount sheets. There is a totally random but exquisitely beautiful Estonian woman lying in bed next to me. She’s tracing one of my nipples with her finger and giggling incoherently. When she notices I’m awake, she whips off the bed sheets (“so you don’t have to do laundry after our sex act,” she explains in her charming accent) and leaps on top of me.

11:56 – Svetlana has made two frothy cappuccinos using the machine I was given by my grandmother for Chanukah. I get some froth on my upper lip, and Svetlana licks it off.

12:32 – Another round of sinfully pleasurable sex, and I send Svetlana back to the apartment she shares with three other models.

2:30 – A lunch of pan-fried sea bream accompanied by an heirloom tomato salad at the club. Afterward, a round of squash with Miguel “Pep-Pep” Rodriguez III, another gentleman of leisure. His father is the avocado baron of Chile, or maybe it’s Guam. Pep-Pep, dressed in his unwavering outfit of Capri pants and a fresh-from-the-packet white Polo (he only ever wears them once), invites me on his family yacht for a cruise around Zanzibar in a fortnight. I have a conflicting commitment involving a Spanish princess and a catamaran in Seychelles, but I don’t want to dampen his enthusiasm and tell him I’ll think about it.

3:36 – Svetlana calls, asking if she can bring around her seventeen-year-old Bulgarian roommate for cocktails this evening. I tell her I’ve run out of Belvedere, and will send Mr. Tims, a butler I picked up on a jaunt to Antigua last spring, to fetch a few bottles.

5:02 – Back wax. I’m something of a monkey man, not quite perfectly evolved, but with Svetlana and co. coming over, it has to be done.

6:32 – The Matriarch calls. She’s in desperate need of some tampons. The Matriarch is always in desperate need of some tampons, even after going through menopause two decades ago. I think this is her getting back at me for vomiting over her vintage Chanel dress when I was thirteen weeks (and the real justification for picking up Mr. Tims last spring; I mentally add tampons to his list, below the Belvedere).

All right, maybe the above is a bit of a stretch. I don’t really have a lover named Svetlana. My girlfriend’s name is Kate. She’s at least half a foot shorter than a model-like 5”11, and doesn’t have any seventeen-year-old Bulgarian roommates to play with, but I think she loves me, and I’m thinking I could very well love her too. I do have a friend named Miguel “Pep-Pep” Rodriguez III, no joke, but he’s a UPS driver and part-time artist (he dabbles in non-functional ceramics) and the closest he’ll get to Zanzibar is by flipping through a National Geographic.

The truth of the matter is that I’ve just spent the last month of my life living in a capsule hotel in Tokyo. Do you know what I’m talking about, the hotels with the capsules stacked on top of each other like a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare? I’ve been doing research for this next book I want to write, which is a murder mystery that takes place in the capsules. None of this forensics-based, CSI rubbish; I’m talking an old school Agatha Christie Colonel-Mustard-in-the-kitchen-with-the-cleaver whodunit.

It should be a good one. Keep your eyes open for it.