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Man, people are dropping like flies around here.”
    “The guys in the break room can tell you about it. I need to go deal with this.” I hefted the plastic bag over my shoulder.
    “They’re making us take out the garbage now?” Jeff said, outraged. “
God,
I hate this job.”
    “No, it’s . . . never mind.” As I moved past him, he asked me who the other shift Santa would be. I answered, “Rick, I think.”
    “Super Santa? Oh, great. I can’t stand that guy.”
    “I know.”
    Most of the Santas resented Rick to some degree; he was so good at the job and so popular in the role, they felt inadequate by comparison. But I thought Jeff mostly disliked him for
enjoying
the job.
    “Who are Santa’s elves this morning?” Jeff asked. “Am I working with you?”
    “I
was
assigned to Santa,” I said. “But I’ve got to go deal with this costume and then—”
    “Oh,
please
tell me I won’t be working with that Russian chick again.”
    “Um, actually, she’s on the clock now, so she might be your—”
    “Shit.” Jeff stomped off toward the men’s locker room. “Why am
I
always the lucky one?”
    I rolled my eyes and headed toward the staff elevator. Then, recalling Satsy’s experience, I changed my mind and decided to take the stairs.
    Jeff was not a negative person by nature. He was just unhappy these days. Four years ago, shortly after we broke up, he had left New York with high hopes for the original new show he was cast in, but it had died in Boston. (Since it was called
Idi Amin: The Musical
, I thought its fate seemed not entirely unpredictable. But Jeff was very disappointed.) For several years after that, he tried to launch a TV career in Los Angeles, but his efforts didn’t lead to anything.
    Now he was back in New York . . . and so far, since returning to the Big Apple earlier this year, he’d gotten work as a gladiator play-acting with a sword at an uptown store for rich food-fetishists and as Diversity Santa at Fenster & Co. (He blamed me for the latter, since I had introduced him to his job the way Satsy had introduced me to mine.) Jeff was a dedicated actor who increasingly felt his talent was going to waste (and, although I was rarely in the mood to tell him so, I agreed that he deserved much better opportunities than he was getting), and he thought the jobs he was reduced to working were unseemly for a man in his thirties.
    I wasn’t too crazy about some of the jobs I had to take, either—particularly this one. But my stint as Santa’s helper notwithstanding, I’d certainly had a much better year than Jeff. I’d worked in the chorus of
Sorcerer!
, a short-lived Off-Broadway musical. I’d had a plum guest role on
The Dirty Thirty
, a cult hit cable TV series in the
Crime and Punishment
spin-off empire of award-winning police dramas. And I’d spent the autumn as a female lead in a sold-out Off-Broadway adaptation of Dr. John Polidori’s influential nineteenth-century tale,
The Vampyre.
(Though, admittedly, it was only sold-out because hordes of feverish fans flocked to the show to see its leading man, Daemon Ravel, who claimed to
be
a vampire. And thereby hangs a tale . . .)
    I also had a dedicated, hardworking agent who believed in my future (and who shared an additional bond with me, since we’d supported each other through a nasty vampire incident during the limited run of
The Vampyre
). Whereas Jeff’s agent had dumped him last year—something that too many agents tend to do whenever a client’s career requires them to do some actual
work
—and he’d so far been unable to get another. I had introduced him to mine, Thackeray Shackleton (not his real name), but Thack, though he liked Jeff’s audition and suggested some other agents for him to contact, had declined to take him on as a client. Thack had told Jeff candidly that he already had two African-American men of similar age, build, and type on his client list, and there just wasn’t enough work available for