Pink Slip Party

by Cara Lockwood

  Todd and Kyle insist on taking me directly to the career fair. They know me too well. They know I plan to run home as soon as they leave me.

  The career fair is dingy and depressing, with cardboard booths and a sea of bored-looking human resources people wearing uniforms of beige.

  “I’m leaving,” I say, turning around. Todd and Kyle grab my arms and pull me back to the fair.

  “Let’s explore,” Kyle says, tugging on my arm, taking me in the direction of the Kentucky Fried Chicken booth.

  “Are you interested in management opportunities?” says a man wearing a beige tie.

  “I hate you,” I say to Kyle, who coughs loudly to cover the fact that he is laughing.

  We move along, and I am accosted by a man with his hair parted down the middle and a bushy mustache.

  “You look like you’re someone who knows her mind,” says the man. He’s the only one at the fair not wearing beige. He’s wearing a black business suit and red tie. He’s overdressed. “What’s your background?”

  “Design. Creative work,” I say.

  “We’re looking for people like you,” he says, nodding.

  I don’t think anyone is looking for people like me. I look over at Kyle, who shrugs.

  “We have some great opportunities for people with your skill set.”

  “Really?”

  I am beginning to perk up. People don’t usually refer to my employment experience as a “skill set.”

  “Have you thought about transitioning into finance?”

  Finance? Huh?

  “I’m with AmeriVision,” he says, handing me a card. His name is Andy Organ. I am having a hard time not snickering.

  Kyle is tugging at my arm. He’s trying to pull me away.

  “Why don’t you come to one of our meetings? They’re the first of every month,” Mr. Organ shouts after us, as Kyle drags me to another booth.

  “That’s the best prospect I’ve had all day,” I say, even though it sounds like a cult.

  “It’s a scam,” Kyle tells me. “You might as well join Amway.”

  “I’m thinking more along the lines of Mary Kay.”

  Kyle snorts. I try not to take this personally.

  By the end of it, I have shaken fifteen hands, dropped down twenty resumes, and am more sure than ever that my job search will be hopeless and that I’ll end up working on an assembly line stuffing vacuum bags into plastic wrappers.

  “Cheer up,” Todd says, seeing me look depressed. He gives me a big brother squeeze, a one-armed hug. He’s in an unusually cheerful mood, probably because he’s finally successfully corralled me into doing something constructive in my job search. “You’ll find something.”

  I give him a weak smile.

  The next morning, I decide I am going to do something constructive with my day. I clean. I restack the dishes in my kitchen cabinets, and then I decide to clean my floorboards. And dust. And vacuum. And sweep. After two hours of scrubbing and disinfecting and sorting, I take to the couch to watch the local news and think how everyone else with a real job is commuting home from work.

  When I finish, I notice that my apartment smells funny. It does. There’s something in the air. I check my trash cans, but they’re all empty (I used to be too busy to empty them, and they’d always been overflowing with empty Diet Coke cans and crumpled up paper towels but now, I have all the time in the world). I empty the trash when there are only two things in it. I make four trips to the Dumpster a day. I think of it as added exercise.

  It could be a gas leak. I check my pilot lights, which look OK.

  It takes me four hours to realize that it’s just Pine Sol. My apartment, for once, smells clean.

  There’s a knock on my apartment door. I freeze.

  I creep over to the peephole, and glance through and see Bob, my landlord, wearing his ratty pink terrycloth robe. In a panic, I fling myself on the floor and hope he hasn’t heard me. Rule number one in squatting: Avoid landlords at all cost.

  “JANE, I KNOW YOU IN ZERE, EH? I CAN HEAR YOU BREATHING.”

  Damn my building’s poor insulation and cardboard walls.

  I open the door.

  “Bob! I didn’t realize it was you,” I say. “I thought you might be an ex-boyfriend I’ve put a restraining order on.”

  “I DON’T UNDERSTAND A WORD YOU SAY,” Bob shouts at me, shaking his head. “I’M HERE FOR RENT, EH?”

  “It’s not due until tomorrow,” I say.

  “It was due five days ago,” he says.

  “It was?” I ask innocently.

  “JANEZ, PLEAZ. I HAVE BILLS TOO, YES?”

  “I’m just waiting for my unemployment check to come and then you’ll be the first one I pay,” I tell him.

  “HOW DO YOU SAY, ER, ‘BOOKIE’? I LOST BIG ON THE BLACK HAWKS, YES? I’M GOING TO NEED THIS MONTH’S RENT AND THE DEPOSIT ON YOUR APARTMENT, TOO.”

  “Bob — that’s TWO months’ rent,” I exclaim, and roughly $3,300. “You can’t do that.”

  “LOOK IN LEASE, EH? ZAYS NOTZING ABOUT WAIVING DEPOSIT.”

  “But you told me I didn’t have to pay it,” I say.

  “NOTZING IN WRITING,” Landlord Bob says, playing his trump card.

  Technically, all I have is a verbal agreement. You don’t have to be a tenant law expert to know I probably have no grounds.

  Giving up my apartment is not an option, either. It’s more home to me than my parents’ house is, having outlasted two pets, three boyfriends, and two roommates. The thought of moving makes me feel light-headed.

  “I just don’t have that kind of cash,” I plead.

  “JANEZ, I HATE TO EVICT YOU, YOU KNOW? YOU GOOD TENANT. BUT IF I DON’T HAVE RENT MONEY BY TOMORROW, SAY BYE BYE, OKAYS?” he says, because he thinks “Okay” is plural. “I RENT APARTMENT TO MY COUSIN WHO PAY ME IN ADVANCE.”

  “You’re going to evict me for being four days late with the rent? Bob, come on, I’ve been a good tenant. I’ve never been late before.”

  “JANEZ, NOT MY PROBLEM. I WANT TO KEEP MY LEGS UNBROKEN, YES? RENT IN THREE DAYS, OKAYS?”

  To: jane@coolchick.com

  From: HR@maximumoffice.com

  Subject: Your Old Job

  Date: March 6, 2002, 3:15 P.M.

  Dear Jane,

  We received your request for your old job back, and we are sorry to inform you that it is not within our power to reinstate you into your old position. While it has been several weeks, the company has not made large enough strides financially to begin re-hiring.

  We are very sorry that you are in danger of losing your apartment and becoming, as you put it, “a smelly vagrant,” but there is simply nothing we can do. We are not, as you assume “cold, heartless spawns of the devil” bent on your “personal destruction.” We are just trying to do our jobs. We hope you understand.

  Best of luck,

  Duckett White

  Assistant Human Resources Director

  Maximum Office Supplies

  P.S. We’re afraid we cannot retroactively approve increases in severance packages. And because you are no longer an employee, we cannot offer you an advance on a forthcoming paycheck.

  3

  I spend all morning waiting to speak to a customer service representative at the unemployment office. I need my check. Landlord Bob is going to evict me if I don’t get him his money, and last time I checked, I think I had $300 in my checking account. What I need is $3,300.

  When I finally get a representative on the line, she tells me there’s nothing they can do about advancing me my unemployment check money. “Didn’t you read the brochure? It will take ten business days.”

  “But it’s been more than twelve business days,” I say.

  “Ten business days is the minimum time it could take,” the woman tells me.

  “What’s the maximum?” I ask.

  “Six weeks,” she says.

  “I can’t wait that long. I’m going to lose my apartment,” I say.

  “Ma’am, t
here’s nothing I can do. All I can suggest is that you call back next week,” she says.

  “Next week, I’ll be kicked out of my apartment and won’t have a phone to call you from,” I say.

  “Just try back next week,” she says. “Thank you for calling Social Services. Goodbye.”

  In frustration, I slam down the phone. This calls for a raid on my emergency stash of cigarettes, which I keep in the back of my closet. Technically, I quit smoking eight months ago, but if the unemployment office won’t drive you to nicotine use, I don’t know what will. Besides, smoking will help me think.

  I light up a cigarette and lean out of my bedroom window, blowing smoke into the frigid Chicago air. I haven’t taken two puffs before I see a familiar figure walking along the alley. Ron, my ex-boyfriend from college, looks like a displaced surfer. Bleached blond hair, tightly beaded necklace choker around his neck, a grungy Free Castro shirt, and a fraying jean jacket. He has managed to hold onto some of his boyish charm even though he’s grown a thready goatee and looks a bit like Shaggy with his slouchy, sloped-back walk. He sees me and waves. Tentatively, I wave back, and before I can stop him, he’s climbing up my fire escape.

  Ron comes from an embarrassing time in my romantic history — late college — when my standards for boyfriend material were at an all-time low: if they had moderately scruffy good looks and played an instrument (even poorly), then I was all over them. This is a time that I don’t like to revisit, and every time Ron comes around, I have to remember how I used to loan him money and write his papers for him because I thought he might one day be the new Kurt Cobain. I also have to remember that I slept with him, not once, but repeatedly, even though he is practically a walking warning advertisement for the adverse effects of pot.

  Ron, who has never held a job longer than three months, and still — at thirty-one — plays bass in a struggling cover band, heard about my layoff through a mutual friend. Since then, he’s been plaguing me. He thinks being unemployed has brought us back together. Secretly, I think he’s hoping for a Fuck for Old Time’s Sake. But revisiting a relationship with Ron would be regressing to the point of no return. I’m mature enough now to know that living in the back of a van for a summer is not fun — no matter how much he says it will be.

  “I’m busy, Ron,” I say, as he clambers up my fire escape and in through my bedroom window. He rarely uses doors.

  “You don’t have to put up a front for me, Jane,” Ron says, smiling. He’s chipped another tooth since the last time I saw him. That makes three. He has a habit of getting very stoned and then trying to take out his recycled newspapers down one flight of his narrow, circular, and half-detached fire escape. He always loses his footing and ends up landing on his face. Even if he had money, he says he wouldn’t get them fixed. He doesn’t believe in dentists.

  If I squint hard enough, Ron can look like Brad Pitt in True Romance. If I don’t squint, he still looks like Shaggy.

  “Ron, seriously, I’m busy. I’ve got to think about where I’m going to come up with rent money.”

  “I know what will help,” he says, holding up a fat joint. Ron is always offering me drugs. This lends more credence to the theory that he’s only trying to get me into bed. I refuse it.

  “Come on, you can’t just lie around here like this,” Ron says. “Especially not sober. If you’re going to lie around, at the very least you should be high.”

  “No thanks,” I say. “I’m just saying no to drugs.”

  Ron rolls eyes. Any references to the Reagan Administration annoy him.

  “Do you have anything to eat?” he says, but he’s already on his way to my refrigerator. He opens the door and leans in. He stays so long in that position — his bony butt in the air — that I think he might have fallen asleep. The thought of him drooling on my lettuce makes me shout at him.

  “Ron!”

  “Hmph?” he mumbles. His mouth is already full of something. I hate to even think what. Recently, I found a chunk of cheddar cheese with bite marks in it. Clearly Ron’s doing.

  “Get out of my refrigerator.”

  “Don’t you have anything organic in here?” he shouts from behind the open door.

  “You’ve eaten it all,” I say.

  He straightens, and I see he’s drinking out of my milk carton. He has the decency to finish it off. Ron burps loudly.

  “That milk was past due,” I inform him.

  He shrugs.

  “It’s the hormones that will kill you. Not the bacteria.”

  Ron plops down on my couch, wiping off his milk-mustache with the back of his sleeve.

  “Dude,” he says, tossing me a crumpled flier from one of his cavernous front pockets. “I’ve got a freelance gig for you.”

  “Does it pay?” I ask skeptically, squinting at the moist flier, which is for his band, Sink Gunk.

  “YES,” he says. “I even have a down payment to give you.” Ron slumps on the couch so he can reach down to the bottom corner of his pocket. He retrieves a twenty, balls it up, and arcs it at me.

  “Thanks,” I say. “What’s the job?”

  “Design our CD cover,” he says.

  “You have a CD?” I ask, amazed. Sink Gunk usually only plays lame cover songs for tips at local bars. There was a time, back in college, when I thought even lame cover bands were cool. Back then, I’d relish wearing Sink Gunk T-shirts. Now, they’re just another local band that probably won’t ever make it.

  “Not yet, but Dan’s working on it,” Ron says.

  Dan is Sink Gunk’s “visionary,” the front man who is always claiming he knows someone who knows a record producer, and who can sing on key only when he’s high. Ron is the group’s bassist, and two other guys, Russ and Joe, play guitar and drums, respectively.

  “You don’t happen to have three thousand more where that came from, do you?” I ask.

  Ron scoffs. “I hardly think so,” he says. “Twenty now, three hundred later. All in cash, tax free.”

  “It’s a start,” I say. “And I like the sound of tax free.”

  Freelancers don’t get unemployment benefits. In one of the many ironies of our public benefits systems, it is in my best interest to turn down freelance jobs and not work, rather than risk losing benefits. As far as I can see, the unemployment benefit system, like most welfare, is designed to lower self-esteem and create dependence.

  * * *

  My goodwill toward Ron evaporates almost immediately after he sticks his hand down in the waistband of his pants and lets out a long, low-pitched fart.

  “OK, that’s it, Ron, got to go,” I say. “I’ve got to figure out how I’m going to get my unemployment check.”

  “Wait, are you going to Social Services? I can totally help,” he says.

  “I don’t think so,” I say.

  “Come on, dude, I have connections,” he says, flashing me his chipped-tooth grin.

  As it turns out, Ron is very helpful when it comes to the unemployment office. Even though he’s never held a steady job for as long as I’ve known him, he seems to be intimately acquainted with everyone at the state building. For example, he calls the guard at the door Bob and asks about his kids.

  I take my place in the coiled-rope line behind a man muttering obscenities under his breath and tugging obsessively at his tie.

  “Lucinda!” I hear one of the employees shouting. “LOU-SIN-DAH!” Somebody behind the counter, invisible to the people in line, shouts, “She’s on break.”

  “Oh, she better not have left me with this line,” the woman sniffs.

  “Cheryl, just tend to the people, all right?” Says the buck-toothed manager. His tie is askew, and his hair is oily.

  “Why does she get to take three breaks. I don’t get to take three breaks.” She’s shouting.

  “We’re in the wrong line,” Ron tells me.

  “But this says ‘new beneficiaries’ and that’s me,” I say.

  “Trust me, dude, we have to go upstairs.”

 
Reluctantly, I head to the elevators. Ron trails behind me, his Birkenstocks making loud sucking sounds against the tiled floor.

  On the fifth floor, there is another line, and it is twice as long as the line on the third floor. I am suddenly possessed by an urgent need for a cigarette.

  “Do you have any smokes?” I ask Ron, who digs in his ample pocket and retrieves a joint.

  “Not that kind,” I say, cross. I only abuse legalized substances. I have standards.

  “You know nicotine is terrible for your lungs, right?” Ron scratches his weedy goatee. “You know how many impurities are in cigarettes?”

  “This from a guy with a six-joint a day habit,” I say.

  “At least the pot isn’t laced with arsenic and formaldehyde.” He taps the joint. “This is one hundred percent cannabis, babe.”

  I snort.

  “OK, OK.” He puts the joint back in his pocket. “Hang on a second,” he says, digging down further. Ron is skinny, a trait amplified by the fact that he insists on wearing extraordinarily baggy clothing. He could fit a full roast inside his one of his front jeans pockets. After several long seconds of digging, he pulls out a small piece of folded paper. Inside are two single white pills. E, probably. Ron is a fixture in the clubbing scene.

  “This will make you happy,” he says, smiling his chip-toothed grin. I slap his hand away.

  “Dude, no need for violence,” he says, carefully wrapping up the pills and putting them back in his pocket.

  * * *

  Nearly a half hour passes, and my craving for a cigarette has become nearly unbearable.

  “You need to chill,” Ron tells me as he tries to rub my shoulders in line. I slap at his hands and he withdraws.

  “I was just trying to help,” he says, sullen. “You’re so freakin’ tense.”

  “Next!” barks the woman behind the third window. The man in front of me, who’s been bouncing from one foot to another, as if preparing to sprint, bolts from his stationary spot and nearly collides with the window. He needs adult Ritalin. I need a smoke.