by Cole Cohen
2004
Portland, Oregon
In 2004, after living with my parents for a year—they moved to Portland when my father started teaching philosphy again while I was in college—I have saved enough money to move out on my own.
The city of Portland is laid out in a grid; the streets are in alphabetical order or they are numbered. Neighborhoods are divided neatly into quadrants: Southeast, Northeast, Southwest (downtown), and Northwest. I start my tic-tac-toe game of moving from neighborhood to neighborhood in a run-down house in Southeast Portland. Last year, the inventor of the MRI won a Nobel Prize. It will be three years still until I lie down inside of one.
Out of college for a year and a half, after four years of believing that we are each special enough to merit degrees as individual as snowflakes from the Johnston Center, my college friends and I are all working retail. I work as a barista in the café section of a Borders Books and Music store in the suburbs, where I meet a bookseller who lives with several roommates in a house on Southeast Belmont Street, close to the Fred Meyer supermarket on Hawthorne Street. The house next to hers is empty; she writes her landlord’s phone number on a café napkin for me.
My former college roommate, Miranda, drives up from her parents’ place in southern Oregon to take a look at the house with me. The beige paint is peeling, and the carpeted floor looks like the matted fur of a rabid animal in its final mouth-foaming death throes, but we decide to take it because it’s in walking distance of a grocery store and a coffee shop, and it’s dirt cheap. On moving day Miranda and I sit down together on the crooked front steps. “I can’t live here,” she says. “This place is falling apart.” She agrees to stick it out for the first month until I can find someone to replace her.
Miranda just started the first week of training for a waitressing job at the Applebee’s downtown. To nurture their enthusiasm for corporate dining, she and her fellow trainees play a game where the word apple serves as a prefix in every sentence, the more often the better. I take no small joy in saying, “Miranda, dear, would you please apple-pass me that apple-pen? I must apple-write an eloquently worded apple-letter to your apple-employer thanking them for the margarita where they put olives in it.” This usually gets me Miranda’s classic death-ray look, a look that could grill a rack of chipotle honey-glazed baby back ribs.
Somehow, Miranda and I manage to convince our college friend Kristy to come up from her mom’s place in Sonora and move into our house, sight unseen. This is a testimony both to her loyalty and to her insanity; one hand washes the other. Kristy barely humors the existence of other humans on this planet. She is also the most dedicated friend I have ever known. She manages to find work pretty quickly as a dishwasher at a local café. “Works for me; I don’t have to talk to any customers.” Kristy and I each take downstairs bedrooms; Miranda takes the wide loftlike area upstairs.
We furnish the house with cast-off items from my parents’ garage and thrift-store finds. A month later, when Miranda moves in with her boyfriend into an apartment in Northeast, we manage to replace her with another Johnston alum, known to most as Jolly Clown Boy. Jolly sleeps in the living room, since we ceded the upstairs area to two nattily dressed male members of our next-door neighbor’s church youth group. We’re not really sure how they got here. The house is becoming its own organic being, taking hostages. The house wants what the house wants. It gets bigger and bigger, collecting more people and incorporating them into itself, like a snowball gathering weight and speed just before an avalanche. Months go by in strings of days turned to weeks, and none of us outwardly notice the rate at which our descent from peak to valley is accelerating.
Kristy and I try to keep peace in our home, but the gentlemen upstairs begin to test our patience. As much as we try, they cannot seem to forgive us our sins (Kristy’s: being queer; mine: being Jewish), and I cannot forgive them for dressing like the pro-life love children of Paul Bunyan and Oscar Wilde. “Hipster Christians!” Kristy hisses in whispers in the kitchen as she and I take turns warming our hands over the stove. The damp Portland winter has seeped into the house; we wear our coats inside because the heat is unreliable and if you plug in more than one space heater at a time the electricity goes out. “We are open-minded,” I intone solemnly, like a monk’s chanted prayer.
I change my tune when one of the Hipster Christians is obliged to explain to me that all Jews have money. “Look at this fucking place!” I scream on the front porch. “Do you think I choose to live here out of charity?”
“Well, the Jewish guy who told me this was on the bus with me.”
I cannot speak. No words.
“The bus,” he repeats, for effect. Most of his recent conversations with Kristy have begun with “I’ve got nothing against gay people…”
Not much later, they’re both gone.
Unable to garner the essential employment to fund his insatiable hunger for organic vegetables and marijuana, Jolly soon resorts to openly using everyone else’s shampoo and toothpaste on a rotating system, “for fairness.” At first, we make a pact to return to the communal ethics ingrained in us by the Johnston Center, the “community living and learning environment” that we hail from. Eventually, however, Kristy and I become noticeably worn down by Jolly’s apparent inability to prioritize financially independent self-grooming over whole-wheat take-home pizza dough. Unable to find local employment, he eventually leaves of his own accord, at which point we’re unable to replace him with another alum from our college commune. Ill word must be spreading of our ravaged estate.
Kristy and I struggle to split the rent for a couple of months while hunting for replacement roommates. We take solace in half-price bags of Cool Ranch Doritos from the Fred Meyer on Hawthorne and fuzzy reruns of the medical procedural drama House on a previously abandoned TV set. We find comforting stability in the sameness of each episode. “I have to pee,” I say, and excuse myself from the lumpy futon couch to wipe Doritos dust off my jeans. “Dude, you can’t go now,” Kristy reprimands me. “Five minutes until this guy’s going to go into seizure. Pee during the seizure.” Begrudgingly, I sit back down to await the inevitable fulfillment of her premonition.
Kristy interviews a girl from Craigslist, Eve, while I’m at work and offers her a room. Eve is no fan of mine, and we can’t seem to see eye to eye on much of anything. This is the first time that I’ve lived on my own outside of the communal environment of the Johnston Center, and I’m going through a phase where I find it freeing to leave my dishes in the sink for a week without having to then sit through a community meeting about the core values of respect in a living and learning environment. This makes me a terrible roommate for anyone but especially for Eve, who spends a great deal of her free time reading alternative Martha Stewart–type blogs on home crafting and trying out recipes for dinners that make great leftovers to bring to work. She seems to have a handle on what it means to be an adult in a manner that I find threatening, since I’m not yet ready to consider that there is room in my bohemian lifestyle for basic hygiene.
My friend Aaron urges us to open up our home to his hometown buddy Dan, a seven-foot-tall punk transplant from Illinois. There is a tender, childlike awkwardness in how Dan struggles to organize his oversize limbs to sit on the futon couch while still straining in his frowning face to be taken very seriously during our impromptu roommate interview. “I liked my last roommates OK. Except they wouldn’t let me throw ragers.”
The years after graduation begin stacking up quickly, during which I never seem to manage to hold on to a job. After a couple months’ charade, I am inevitably fired from every retail or administrative position I’ve held for my discrepancies in organization or calculation. Each time that I’m fired, it becomes harder to find a new job. At the time, I understand only that these tendencies of mine have to do with a vague notion of a learning disability that no one has ever properly labeled or medicated. It’s like living with an imaginary friend whom my family and I blame everything on.
I refer to the psychiatrist that I start seeing once I move back to Portland as Doogie because although I’m only twenty-four he looks to me like a twelve-year-old with a wedding band. We try different variations of medication for the next three years, which have since blurred into a block of days spent unemployed in my pajamas. I can tell that he favors me because I am young but not too young, and funny but not too funny. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to reconcile the person who thrived in college with the person who cannot operate a cash register.
As evidence to the contrary begins to dwindle, I become convinced of my own uselessness. Doogie’s prescriptions do nothing to dampen the ball of fury I become.
Nothing makes sense. I had been alternately praised and reprimanded in equal measure for my entire education, and now, in the adult world, the only skills that matter are the ones that I don’t have. My managers, my irate customers, my bemused coworkers, don’t give a shit that I wrote poetry in college, nor do they have any reason to. My job now is to keep the line moving. It’s not a hard job, but it proves impossible for me, and the easiest answer is that I’m not trying or I don’t care, not that I have a hole in my brain the size of a lemon that nobody knows about yet.
Three years after moving to Portland, this is what my résumé looks like:
COLE COHEN
4725 SE Belmont Ave. (503) 409-2878
Portland, OR 97215
Professional
October 2006–January 2007
Seasonal Phone Service Representative, Vowel Books
Reading books and drinking coffee between taking phone orders for one of the biggest independent booksellers in the nation. It’s lonely solo work strapped to a phone in a cubicle, and during the holidays customers yell a lot, but overall it’s a pretty sweet gig. The young manager who trained me nearly bursts a retina going over and over the ordering system with me. I don’t understand why I can’t seem to focus on the left side of the form that holds most of the order information; we both chalk it up to my inattention.
She taps on the computer screen with a wooden chopstick from her lunch to draw my attention to the blank box where I’m supposed to type in the order information. Tap, tap, tap, over and over each time that I get confused. I want to snap that chopstick in two and stick it up her ass, but otherwise most of the people who I work with are funny, sweet, and better read than I will ever be. I have a sneaking suspicion that I messed up more orders than I was ever informed of because I’m asked to leave before my temp position is due to end and I can never get a straight answer as to why.
March–October 2006
Administrative Assistant, Perennial Natural Products
This is my first phone sales job. I really turn on the charm in the interview because I really need to leave my current job as the assistant to a music promoter, which I’m hanging on to by a thread. I get offered the new job a couple of hours after my interview. The title is “administrative assistant,” but really it’s taking phone orders for an essential oil factory. We receive phone orders for products on the second floor of the factory, then the first floor fulfills those orders. The entire building reeks heavily of lavender and rose, which gets in your clothes and hair. On my first day, the manager tells me that if you work there long enough you can’t smell it anymore.
The form for ordering is all numbers and letters, and we enter in credit card numbers manually. I constantly flip the numbers in people’s credit cards, making it impossible for the company to charge them. Every morning, I’m given a list of customers whom I have to call back in order to confirm their credit card numbers. I also flip the numbers that designate each kind of oil, so every order from me is like a surprise free goody bag filled with oils that you never actually ordered. The head of accounting is the seventeen-year-old daughter of the owner of the company. She is convinced that I am the stupidest person she has ever met. I tell my manager that I have a “learning disability,” but that can get you only so far. I don’t get fired from Perennial because no one gets fired. Chatting with my coworkers between phone calls is the only way I get through the day as we all search for other work. One is a southern line cook; another is a local roller derby girl. A year later, the building is rented out to Bomb, a skateboard company that replaces the Perennial sign with a giant metal sculpture of a bomb.
September 2005–March 2006
Assistant to Greg Pound at Pound Presents
I call in a favor from a woman I know who writes for the music section of the local alternative paper. I met her when we were both interns; she was hired on for an editorial position, and I was not. In order to be hired from an intern position to a position of more responsibility, you have to show that you can consistently excel at basic administrative tasks (organizing music listings for a calendar, in this case). In my hands, filing and photocopying become a full-time job, so I’m generally not hired on anywhere where I intern in Portland.
Still, despite myself, I manage to make an impression as a friendly person, so when I see the local music promoter Greg Pound’s posting on Craigslist for an assistant I ask her to put in a good word for me. I get an interview, during which I volley around band names for half an hour. I’m also at the lowest weight I’ve ever been in my life, living off nutrition bars and coffee to save money for Pilates classes. With everything moving further out of my grasp with each year since I graduated from college, I’m just looking for something, anything, that I can control.
My position as Pound’s assistant grants me a free pass to any show in Portland, but I don’t know very many people in town to go to shows with and I’m overwhelmed about how to get to a venue and back on my own.
I know nothing about music promotion except that I love music and believe that there are exciting bands deserving more recognition than they’re receiving. I picture myself as a sort of punk-rock Florence Nightingale, aiding bands on the verge of dying out, corralling Portland audiences toward the bands that really matter, in some small and selfless way changing the face of the scene for the better.
I am an absolute holy terror of a personal assistant, and after the first month none of the three men who make up Pound Presents are speaking to me, including the accountant, whom I slept with sometime in the first two or three weeks of my employment, mainly because on my first day of work the junior booker told me, “Whatever you do, don’t sleep with Andy.”
“Who’s Andy?”
“Exactly.” He gestured with his thumb toward the accountant, the tall skinny guy buried deep in clippings of ads for shows that we’ve placed in local papers. Andy.
The coffeemaker is kept together with tape, we send out mailings in envelopes from record labels with their company names blacked out and ours scrawled in, but either in spite or because of this, Pound himself is making money. We are all caricatures of our positions. The accountant wears those black-framed nerd glasses, the junior booking agent constantly screams into the phone, I wear 1950s secretary outfits and make endless pots of coffee. The junior booker used to tell me to cover my ears when he screamed “cunt” into the phone; now his favorite antic when begging for a show is to plead, “Greg Pound is here with a gun to my head, and if I don’t get this show he is going to shoot me!” I send the posters for the Portland shows to Seattle and vice versa; I incorrectly chart daily ticket sales and send on this erroneous information to agents in California; I reverse the numbers left in an important phone message from one of Pound’s long-lost friends and then erase the message, making the number irretrievable. Even though I desperately hate this place ever since the accountant took me out for a beer on the first night and explained the business to me, none of my errors are done out of malice. I am honestly just that bad an assistant. The only thing I do well is writing the weekly email newsletter promoting upcoming shows. I am pretty much frozen out of the company and eventually find the job at the essential oil factory. I still have a stack of the accountant’s records rotting in my parent’s garage. He still has my copy of The Joys of Yid
dish.
March 2004–September 2005
Bookseller/Barista, Borders Books
I work in the café making drinks. I am terrible at the register, mixing up money and charging people incorrectly, and I’m slow at making drinks during the rush. I beg the store manager, and he moves me over to the floor where the books are as a final favor before he leaves to work for Whole Foods. We are then moved across the street to the giant new mall, where we become a two-floor “flagship” store, our sales monitored closely by corporate. I am “shadowed” by managers, who hide behind bookcases to assess my customer service skills and afterward hand me a slip marked with everything I’ve done wrong.
I spend my off days interning at Tin House, a local literary magazine. One afternoon, someone brings in a bright “Happy Birthday” helium balloon for the publisher. I tie the balloon to the thumb of a statue that the publisher had recently purchased and had placed in the center of the office. The thumb falls off.
At Borders, no one ever really buys anything other than cookbooks and self-help books. The other books are just for show. One day I just walk out. The assistant manager is a friend, who still recommends me to other potential employers when they call. A month later, he leaves for Barnes & Noble.
October 2003–March 2004
Sales Associate, Crescent Chocolate Company
A gourmet chocolate shop where truffles about the size of a quarter and shaped like puppies, ice-cream cones, and teacups are sold for two dollars each and “designer” coffee drinks are served. Even when prompted with the correct math by the cash register, I get nervous and give out incorrect change. I put change in the register in all the wrong compartments, slipping fives in with ones and vice versa, which drives my manager crazy. I make mistakes punching in customers’ orders, forcing them to wait through a lengthy return process. I finally tell the manager that I have a learning disability, and she sends me home with a Xerox copy of the push-button pad on the register so that I can “practice.” I practice ringing up orders with my family; my sisters pretend to order orange chocolate mochas and chipotle hot chocolates. Nothing changes. Eventually, the manager and a representative from corporate set up a meeting with me at a Starbucks across the street from the shop. They hand me a piece of paper declaring that they have accommodated my disability, summarizing that I can’t sue them if I am fired. Taken aback, I sign it. A couple of weeks later, I’m fired due to “scheduling conflicts.”