Critical theory makes continuity and meaning suspect, but you have trouble interpreting these polite letters as implying anything save fuck you very much and up yours truly.
No one wants you.
Along with your degree, you have an apartment, a car, a fiancée whose father suspects academics on general principles, unemployed academics in particular, and most especially the one unemployed academic who happens to be engaged to his one daughter. You also have no health insurance, which seems increasingly insane each day older than thirty you become. You know every possible way to make macaroni and cheese taste like something else. You know none of them works.
You never wanted to be anything but a scholar, to teach other budding scholars the ineffable difference between différence and différance, to show them that which appears in no text but lurks between the words of all texts. But too many have the same ambition. Too many of them have jobs; none is left for you.
You can’t remember when you first thought about looking for work outside the university. That first time, you shook your head in indignation; such an indignity could never befall you. Your checking account was fuller then, your credit cards less overdrawn. Your landlord made no pointed remarks when you walked past her on the way to the laundry room.
After a while, you see your choice clearly: you can go forth and confront the Other, or you can sit tight, watch your savings slip through your fingers until nothing is left . . . and then go forth and confront the Other.
Put that way, it should be obvious. As a matter of fact, it is obvious. You wait a last week even so, hoping a miracle will happen. God must be busy somewhere else. The five dollars you waste on the lottery is just that, waste, and one more rejection letter adds insult to injury.
Tomorrow, you tell yourself, but you put it off again till the day after.
The last time you looked for work away from a campus was after your senior year of high school. That’s a long time ago now. You wonder how much things have changed—you wonder how much you’ve changed—since then. You’ll find out soon.
When the morning comes, you put on slacks, shirt, tie, the herringbone tweed jacket which irrevocably brands you an academic, the shiny black shoes that always start squeezing your toes after you wear them for fifteen minutes. You throw half a dozen copies of your vita into a manila folder, go downstairs to your car. You hope it starts. It does.
You have your list with you: addresses for three banks, an insurance company, a software outfit that needs someone who can write documentation, and a God-knows-what called Humanoid Systems, Inc., that needs a technical editor. None of them is what you had in mind when you decided to go into the graduate program. Were it happening to someone else, it might be funny in an existential way.
You soon see you won’t get to any of your possibilities very soon. Traffic is a mess; the main street into downtown has only one lane open in each direction. You start, stop, go forward a few more feet, stop again. You watch the temperature needle creep upward and remember the garage man telling you your water pump won’t last forever. Neon-orange diamond-shaped signs seem to hang from every street light and telephone pole: right 2 lanes closed ahead alternates with road deconstruction in progress. You have plenty of time to read them.
You creep forward another couple of blocks. Then, under a deconstruction in progress sign, you see a different one, a small black-and-white rectangle: road crew hiring office, 2 blocks east, complete with an arrow for the directionally challenged.
A nihilistic wind blows through you. If you’re out to confront the Other, why not at its most Otherly? Besides, you’ll break out of this godawful traffic jam. When you get to the corner, you turn right.
A line snakes toward a house with its front door open. You almost make a U-turn in the middle of the street when you see the people who are standing in that line: pick-and-shovel types, every one of them. You’re not desperate enough to want calluses on your hands, not yet. But you’ve come this far. You may as well find out just who’s getting hired. You park your car and walk over to the tail of the line.
With your jacket and tie, you are the Other here. A couple of workbooted musclemen elbow each other in the ribs and point your way. You pretend you don’t notice them. They don’t hassle you, though, for which you thank the God you can’t quite believe in. They need work as badly as you do, and they’ve been in these lines before: they know they’ll get thrown out if they give you a bad time.
The line slithers forward. Men fall into place behind you. Most of the people who come out the front door look glum. A few wear ear-to-ear grins. They’ve found jobs, so they’ll be able to make the next payment on the Harley after all.
You make your slow way up the stairs, across the porch, and into the house. It’s as tacky inside as you expected, maybe worse. Till this minute, you never believed anybody would actually frame a print of those poker-playing dogs and hang it in the living room. Again, you almost turn around and leave.
But by now you’re only three men away from the hiring boss behind the office-style folding table sitting in the middle of the floor. You watch him, listen to him while he questions the guys ahead of you. He is the Other, all right: hard hat, cigar, beer belly with a black T-shirt stretched obscenely tight across it. On the T-shirt is a skeleton in a football helmet. The legend reads, kick ass and take names.
The hiring boss talks as if he’s been chewing rocks for the past couple of hundred years. “Sorry, bud, can’t use you,” he growls to the man in front of you. The fellow’s longshoreman shoulders sag. He turns and shambles out of the house. Now it’s your turn.
The hiring boss looks you over. The way he takes in everything at once makes you realize for the first time that, while he might not be educated, he’s a long way from stupid. The cigar waggles in his mouth. “Well, well,” he says. “What have we here?”
He hasn’t seen anything like you in a while, that’s for certain. If he sounded scornful, you’d walk away. But he doesn’t; he’s just honestly curious. Trying to make your voice somewhere near as deep as his, you answer, “I’m looking for work on your deconstruction crew.”
“Are you?” He looks you over again, in a different kind of way. “Just so you know, kid, we call it a gang, not a crew.” You want to glare; nobody’s called you kid since you were one. But this fellow holds that greatest of all plums, a job, in the palm of his hand. Besides, if you annoy him, you have no doubt he’ll kick your ass around the block now and worry about lawsuits later.
He holds out his hand. You give him a copy of your vita, meanwhile trying to decide which of your original targets you’ll save for another day. The bank that’s been having trouble with the FDIC over too many bad loans, probably. You say, “I’m a recent Ph.D. from—”
He grunts. It’s not a go on grunt; it’s a shut up grunt. He goes through your vita so fast you know he’s not really reading it, then tosses it carelessly onto the table in front of him. “I see more bullshit on this job,” he remarks to no one in particular. When he looks up at you again, cunning lights his narrow eyes. Around the fat cigar, he says, “Awright, kid, you’re so damn smart, tell me something—quick, now—about Paul de Man.”
For a second you just gape, astounded a dinosaur like this ever heard of de Man. Then you remember he bosses deconstruction crews (no, gangs; you’d like to trace the evolution of that text one day). He’d better have some idea of what his hired help is up to.
He’s still watching you; you feel the same almost paralyzing attack of nerves you did in front of the committee for your doctoral exams. As you did then, you fight it down: “One of the things de Man talks about is the figurality that alters the way we perceive what a text means, the mechanism through which any text asserts the opposite of what it appears to say.”
The hiring boss’s heavy features light up in the sort of smile he’d give if he drew four nines to an ace kicker. “Goddamn! You know what you’re talking about!” His handshake crushes your fingers, but you don’t dare
wince any more than you dared glare before. Then he says the magic words: “When do you want to start?”
You haven’t asked about pay yet, or benefits. This was just supposed to be a nihilistic lark. Now all of a sudden it’s serious, so you ask. The answers make you blink: better money than any assistant professor’s job you’ve seen advertised, and much better bennies. You hear yourself say, “If you really need me, I can be here tomorrow morning.”
The hiring boss squashes your hand again. “Kid, you’re okay.” He turns around, grabs a white hard hat from a pile behind him, reaches up and sticks it on your head. You feel as if you’ve just been knighted. He says, “Be right here at half past seven. We’ll do your paperwork then, and I’ll assign you to a gang. See you tomorrow.”
Reality starts to set in as you head back to your car. What have you just done to yourself? When you get in, the first thing you do after you fasten your seat belt is take off the hard hat and throw it onto the mat under the glove compartment. Even if you can’t find an academic job right now, do you want to work the roads?
You look at the manila folder still almost full of vitas, then at your watch. If you hustle, you can still spread your name around today. Then you look at the plastic hard hat. You have a job right there if you want it. What a funny feeling that is!
In the end, you drive back to your apartment instead of downtown. You call up your fiancée. She squeals in your ear when you tell her you found work, then says absolutely nothing after you explain what kind of work it is. You picture her by the phone with her mouth hanging open.
After a long, long pause, she asks, “Are you sure this is what you want to do with your life?” She sounds wary, as if she’s wondering what else the you she thinks she knows has managed to hide for the past three and a half years.
“Of course it’s not what I want to do with my life. But it’s money, and we need that.” When you tell her how much money it is, she inhales sharply: she’s at least as surprised as you were. You say, “And you know what else?”
“No, what?”
“They gave me my very own hard hat, too.”
That does it. You both start cracking up over the phone. She says, “I can’t wait to see you in it. Are you going to start hanging out in cowboy bars, too?”
“Jesus, I hope not.” If that isn’t a fate worse than death, you can’t think of one offhand. “Look, honey, if this turns out to be awful, I’ll quit, that’s all. But the pay is good enough that I ought to see what it’s like.”
“Okay. Dad’ll be glad to hear you’ve gotten hired.” She hesitates a split second too long, then says, “Do you want me to tell him what the job is?”
You can hear she doesn’t want to. You can’t really blame her, either. “No, you don’t need to, not right away. We’ll see how it goes.”
“Okay,” she says again, and yes, she is relieved. But before you can decide whether you’re irked about it, she adds, “I love you, honey.” In the face of that, irk can wait.
You microwave your favorite frozen entrée to celebrate, and wash down the herbed chicken with a glass of cheap white wine. You contemplate a second glass, but virtue triumphs. You’re going to have to be sharp tomorrow. No David Letterman tonight, either.
At half past six, the alarm clock goes off right beside your head, like a car bomb when the timer reaches the hour of doom. You shower in a hurry, put on jeans and a T-shirt with the tweed jacket over it, throw a Pop-Tart into the toaster. You gulp a cup of muddy instant coffee, then head down to your car.
When you pull up in front of the hiring house, you start to get out, then remember the hard hat and plant it on your head. It’s not light like a baseball cap. You wonder how your neck will like wearing it all day.
The hiring boss grins when you walk in. “Ha! You did come back. When I take on a guy out of college, I always wonder if he’ll show up the next morning. Come here. I’m gonna need your signature about sixty thousand times.”
You come. He’s just barely kidding—you sign and you sign and you sign. It’s a government job, after all. Your formal job title, you learn, is deconstructive analyst. You like it. It won’t look half bad on your vita, so long as you’re vague about exactly what it entails.
By the time you write your name for the last time, it doesn’t look like yours any more. You might as well be signing traveler’s checks. “All right,” the hiring boss says when you’re done. “I’m gonna put you on Gang 4; they’ve been a man short for a coupla weeks now. Here—” He points to one of the maps spread out on the table. “They’re at 27th and Durant. You hustle, you’ll be there by 8:45. Ask for Tony. I’ll call him, let him know you’re on your way. He’ll show you where you need to go.” He slaps you on the back. “Good to have you aboard.”
You’re still a long way from sure it’s good to be aboard, but you go back to your car and head for 27th and Durant. The hiring boss knows how traffic works, all right; you get there at 8:43. Fellows in hard hats check you out as you head toward them. You’re wearing yours, too, so you may be one of them, but they’ve never seen you before. You say, “I’m looking for Tony.”
“I’m Tony.” He’s a big black guy, looks like he played defensive end at a medium-good college maybe twenty years ago. His handshake has the gentleness of controlled strength; his smile shows a mouthful of gold. “Hiring boss told me you were coming. Good to have you with us, man. We’ve been understrength too long. Come on, I’ll take you over to the deconstruction gang. Watch where you step.”
It’s no idle warning. You step over boards and small pieces of pipe and tools, walk around other pieces of pipe almost big enough for you to go through them without stooping. Tony negotiates the chaos as effortlessly as a chamois bouncing up an Alp. He leads you to four men in hard hats sitting on dirt-strewn grass beside a trench that looks as if it escaped from World War I.
“Here’s the new fish,” Tony says.
They get up, shake your hand, give you their names: Brian, Louis, Pete, and Jerome. You all talk for a few minutes, getting to know one another. It turns out Brian, Louis, and Jerome are refugee academics like you; Brian, whose hair is gray, has been doing this for fifteen years now. You still find that a chilling thought, even if you’re part of the gang now, too. Pete, who’s almost the size of Tony, picked up deconstruction after he joined the road gang. He’s not as smooth as the other three, but listening to him you can tell he knows enough to do the job.
Names flash back and forth through the chitchat: Derrida and de Man, Levinas and Bataille, Hegel and Heidegger, Melville and Taylor. You never thought you’d have to raise your voice to make them heard over the pounding roar of jackhammers and the diesel snarl of skiploaders. The world has done a lot of things to you that you never thought of till they happened.
Finally, Brian, who’s the gang leader, says, “Enough chatter. Time for us to get busy and earn our day’s pay.”
You sit on the grass with the rest of the deconstruction gang. Everyone is quiet for a while, peering down into the trench. You begin to get a handle on the problem: traffic here has got heavier than the roadbed was designed to handle. You can see how things have shifted, how pipes are bent, how this stretch of Durant is going to be nothing but potholes and cracked asphalt unless you do something about it now. A proper deconstruction job when they first built the road would have saved a lot of trouble, but back then they’d never heard of deconstruction. Now you have to worry about fixing the old blunders.
Brian starts out by getting everybody into the proper frame of mind to do what needs doing. He says, “We are the instruments that change the world. Since we are here, we have to understand what’s in front of us and act to transform the world and ourselves.”
You look admiringly at him: it’s good Hegel, translated into language anybody can understand. Listening to Brian, you start to see how someone like Pete can pick up an abstruse skill like deconstruction just by keeping his ears open and thinking about what he hears.
And it’s Pet
e, in fact, who supports Brian and provides the framework for the heavy deconstruction that will follow: “Error isn’t fatal, so long as it keeps a grasp on the problem at hand. Even when you say the opposite of what you should be saying, you’re still addressing the proper issue.”
The proper issue here, of course, is the roadbed, and the error its weakness. Back when it was built, Durant was a residential street. Now it leads to a big shopping district and an industrial park. There are generally more cars around these days, too.
Brian looks at you next. Your stomach knots; it’s like the first time you’re called on in class. Outside the spoken text, evasive but pervading as Derrida’s différance, a single thought hangs in the air: let’s see what the new guy can do.
You’re ready, too. You’ve been thinking about this ever since you impressed the hiring boss yesterday. Even so, you take a deep breath before you say, “As far as I can see, the best approach to deconstructing this roadbed is to bear in mind that nothing, whether the idea or text or roadway, truly happens in relation to anything else, before, after, or contemporary. Things do not relate to one another; they just are. We have to reintegrate the things that are to suit our purposes, not those of the original road builders.”
Silence for a few seconds. Then Brian reaches out with a closed fist and lightly taps you on your denim-covered knee. You grin. You’ve passed the test. Better—you’ve aced it.
From then on, the work flows smoothly. Your English professors always insisted deconstruction is a universally valid technique. In your undergrad days, you found historians using deconstructive concepts like demystification and privileged ideas. Now you truly involve yourself in the broader application of the technology.
From the framework Brian, Peter, and you have set up, the gang goes on as you thought it would, analyzing the textuality of the roadbed, considering all the implications of the opposition roadway/traveler.
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