We spent the day loading and unloading trucks. When there weren’t any trucks, Joey and I pushed brooms through the stacks of boxes. We talked about movies, or he would tell me about crimes he committed growing up in the Philippines. Before moving to the States, he robbed tourists and broke into cars to support his younger brothers and sisters.
•
We lined up on the side of the bridge farthest from the streetlight. I had to trust Todd that we were above water because all I could see below was darkness. A car drove past and lit up our group. The blonde’s hair had fallen across her face, and she nervously bit down on her thumb.
When the car’s light faded, we hopped over the railing and dangled our feet off the bridge. It was quiet, and as I looked out into the distance, unable to tell where the water and the night sky met, I felt like I was exactly where I should be.
Todd broke the silence with a cheer and leaped off the bridge. There was a splash, and I held my breath until I heard him emerge from the water.
“Who’s next?” he called up to us.
Daniel looked at me as he leaned off the bridge. “See ya on the flip side,” he said as his body spilled into the unknown.
The blonde intermingled her fingers with mine. I assumed she was a classmate of Daniel’s, but I didn’t know. I wondered who she was and what motivated her to get wasted on a Tuesday night. I looked down at her delicate fingers threaded with mine and thought about Ashley.
“I’m nervous too,” I whispered.
“Come on, jerks!” Daniel yelled up to us.
The blonde and I jumped off the bridge. Our fingers slipped from each other’s hands, and I hung in the air long enough to see Daniel and Todd pass the bottle between them.
I crashed into the water. The deeper I sank, the colder I got. I kept expecting to hit bottom, but I never did. I pulled myself back to the surface and heard Daniel and Todd cheering. I swam to the shore with the blonde trailing behind me.
“That was rad,” she said.
We walked back to Daniel’s while dripping wet and passing around the bottle of tequila, now covered in sand and almost empty. The saltwater on my lips made it go down easier than before.
“I’m going to skip my internship tomorrow,” Daniel said. “We should go to Del Mar and play the ponies.”
“I’m in,” I said.
Daniel and I spent the rest of the night drinking beers and listening to music on his porch. The blonde slept on the beanbag and was gone by the time we went inside for scrambled eggs.
Without sleeping or changing our clothes, we jumped in Daniel’s car and drove to the racetrack. We sipped mojitos and made five-dollar show bets that never paid out. We were having too much fun to feel like we were losing money. We picked horses with funny names and cheered them on with over-the-top enthusiasm, even when they were trailing by half a lap.
The next day I walked into work feeling guilty that my absence had caused extra work for Joey, but I didn’t regret my decision to skip. The smaller paycheck was worth the experience, and I was confident Joey had no trouble picking up my slack. He was twice the worker I was because, unlike me, the job was more than money. He was gaining experience that he could take to the next warehouse that hired him, and he believed that hard work eventually resulted in financial stability, which would provide his child opportunities he never had growing up in the Philippines.
Joey and I had been hired as equals, but he took the lead when organizing the best way to load each truck. He wasn’t dominating, and I was happy to take orders. It was obvious he knew more than I did. When I told him I wasn’t comfortable loading boxes with the forklift because I’d never done it before, he taught me.
“Knowing how to drive one of these can add an extra two bucks an hour to your paycheck,” he said as I reversed the forklift out of the truck after successfully loading a pallet weighing over three hundred pounds
“Cool,” I said without mentioning that, once I moved to Seattle, I didn’t plan on working in a warehouse ever again.
Before I had a chance to get to my manager’s office to lie about my absence, Joey stopped me. “Don’t sweat it,” he said and slapped me on the shoulder. “I covered for you.”
“Thanks,” I said.
It was possible that, without Joey’s help, my manager would have given me a strike and I would have been able to keep my job, but I was grateful that he stepped up for me. He was a friend.
Two months later Ashley and I were in my car with the backseat and trunk packed with our stuff. We had donated our dishware and furniture to Goodwill with the intention of buying new stuff in Seattle. We’d replace my chipped plates that had traveled between dorm rooms and studio apartments with something more adult, and buy a coffee table that didn’t have “420” carved into the edge.
We listened to mix CDs loaded with grunge songs that had themes of apathy and angst, which we had created specifically for the trip. Ashley talked about getting a dog once we were settled. I thought about the money I had saved and wondered how long twelve hundred bucks would last in Seattle. We drove through the night, and I kept one hand on the wheel and linked my free hand with hers. “I’m nervous too,” I said while driving deeper into darkness, unsure where the sky and highway met.
“So, you’re just going to be like this forever?”
It was the only job I ever had where I could masturbate on the clock without fear of committing a serious HR violation. My work outfit was a pair of mesh shorts and a tank top. Flannel bottoms and a hoodie on cold days. I made my own coffee and never had to write my name on the half and half I kept in the fridge. My commute was shorter than the average playground hopscotch grid.
I was an off-site content writer for Expedia.com, hired through an agency for a six-month contract with the possibility of an extension based on performance. After a string of office jobs that required no previous skills, I felt like I was finally working a job where my English degree was an asset.
Content writer—a title alone that offered me a sense of pride I had never felt as an office gofer. When I ran into someone from high school and they asked me what I was up to I could say, “I’m a content writer.”
My first day was on-site. I was put in the care of Jane, a senior content writer and my main contact for questions and assignments. A Cartman doll sat on top of her computer monitor, and she had a split keyboard designed to be ergonomic. Having only ever used regular keyboards, I found it intimidating. Jane pointed me to an Excel spreadsheet that had a list of amenities for a Howard Johnson’s in Bakersfield, California, and told me to turn the list into complete sentences.
I pecked at the unfamiliar keyboard and took five minutes to write “Free High-Speed internet.” She pointed out that “Internet” is supposed to be capitalized—a grammar rule I was aware of but chose not to follow. I guess you can argue “The Internet” is a destination, but something about that capital “I” made me uncomfortable. Jane excused herself to get coffee and said she’d return in fifteen minutes to check on my progress.
I crafted an elegant room description about fluffy pillows to rest your head on after a long drive, and towels so soft you’ll want to wear them as pajamas. Jane wasn’t impressed.
“Cut all descriptive words,” she said. “You have no idea if those pillows are fluffy. Stick with the basics. Instead of saying ‘soft towels,’ just say ‘towels.’”
I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to spend my days flipping through a thesaurus looking for different ways to say “comfortable.” At the same time, part of me was disappointed that I wouldn’t have the opportunity for poetry.
I spent the rest of the day at Jane’s desk under the watchful eye of her Cartman doll. Occasionally, she popped her head in to check on my work. She was gracious with her critiques, and by the end of the day, I had the basic skills required to be a content writer for Expedia. She assigned me a laptop, and I was on my way.
When I got home that night Ashley was sitting at the computer working on a paper
for class. She had traded her work clothes for shorts and one of my hoodies. I walked up behind her and moved her blonde hair to the side and kissed her neck.
“I’m a motherfucking content writer,” I said.
She smiled at me like she had twenty-four hours into our first date, when she woke me up wearing my Beatles T-shirt and handed me a mug of coffee. It was the smile I learned to recognize as meaning everything was okay.
The job meant we could move out of our damp-smelling one-bedroom basement apartment with a shower that filled up past our ankles no matter how much Drano we poured down it.
Ashley had been the breadwinner of the relationship. Within two weeks of our arrival in Seattle, she had registered for school and acquired a full-time job at a local hospital. I spent the first two weeks drinking Carlo Rossi and writing Bukowski-inspired poetry. Before moving into the basement apartment, we stayed in our friend Brian’s guest room. While she was at work, Brian and I smoked joints and brainstormed ideas for chapbooks and literary events.
It wasn’t long before Ashley got sick of returning home from a full day of work to find me unshowered and blurry-eyed, with nothing to show for the day except a few scribbled poems written on the inside flap of a beer box.
Brian and I met in a poetry workshop in college and shared postgrad aspirations that focused more on getting our writing out into the world than securing stable employment. We spent whole days in his living room putting together chapbooks with titles like Unemployed College Grads and Unemployed Stoners and Full-Time Drunks.
At night we checked out literary readings around the city and often found them boring, usually leaving early to grab a drink. The audience seemed like it was a chore for them to be there and only attended so the following day they could tell their coworkers they went to a poetry reading, which would make them feel like good art patrons. Brian and I wanted to come up with a reading that people were excited about, instead of a crowd of liberal-leaning capitalists who supported the arts to relieve some of their upper-middle-class guilt.
Ashley only saw it as going out to bars and waking the next day with a hangover. She didn’t believe that what I called “research” was anything more than getting drunk. She doubted I’d ever take initiative to move out of the guest room. It was valid reasoning, because I barely browsed the help-wanted section.
“As soon as I get a job, we’ll look for a place,” I said to her in the middle of the night. Our legs were intertwined, and my ass hung off the twin bed we shared in the guest room. It was rare for us to find comfort at the same time. I never reached full REM until after 6:00 a.m. when she got up to shower before work.
I stared at a poster of Method Man and Red Man with peeling corners that hung above the bed. They were each holding brightly colored bottles of St. Ides and had devious grins, as if they were just about to start one of those nights when the only thing remembered the next morning was that it was fucking fun. It used to hang in Brian’s college apartment, and I remembered staring at it when we’d blow off our biology lab to smoke and listen to underground rap records. When he and his girlfriend moved into the house, she refused to allow it in the living room.
I tried to roll over and accidentally kneed Ashley in the back.
“We have to move,” she said. “I’ll pay deposit and first and last month’s rent.”
We moved into a one-bedroom apartment in Capitol Hill, and I got a job delivering pizza. I liked it because working nights allowed me to write during the day, and business was so slow I spent most of my shift talking hockey with the cook.
Unfortunately, business was so slow it eventually shut down. I might have never quit had I not been forced out.
The fourteen bucks an hour I would earn as a content writer was enough to ease Ashley’s fear that she’d have to support me for the rest of our lives. We celebrated by splitting six taquitos and three margarita pitchers at our favorite Mexican restaurant.
The following morning I woke at 6:30 a.m. to the alarm on Ashley’s side of the bed. She popped up and went into the shower like she’d been doing every morning since we moved in. I fished my slippers off the carpet and put them on while still under the covers. Even though I’d yet to look out the window, I knew it was raining. Ashley put on her works clothes, then donned rain boots and a jacket. She pulled the umbrella from the closet and was out the door. I put on a pair of flannel pajama bottoms and an oversize hoodie.
Jane had already sent me a spreadsheet of the day’s assignments. I had seventy-five hotels that needed descriptions, and when I was finished with those, I was to ask for more. I wrote my first description, then compared it to my notes from the previous day’s training session to make sure I followed the style guide correctly. I clicked spell-check a few times even though no words had been marked with a jagged red underline. I reread the description for a third time and hit publish.
I opened Expedia.com to view my work, my biggest publication to date. I had a few poems published and wrote for my college newspaper, but this had a potential audience of millions.
Wireless Internet access (surcharge) keeps you connected, and satellite channels are offered for your entertainment. Request an in-room massage. Shower/tub combination in the private bathroom, as well as a hair dryer. Air-conditioning, a safe, and a desk are among the conveniences offered. No smoking.
It was a change from the drunken and anxiety-themed prose poetry I usually wrote, but it paid better.
I don’t like one-hour lunch breaks because it’s more time than necessary to consume a turkey sandwich and a bottle of water. I prefer a short break that results in early dismissal. However, when working from home, a free midday hour is an opportunity to take care of errands that feel tedious when squeezed between the valuable hours between the office and home.
It’s always Black Friday at the grocery store after 5:00 p.m., but instead of discount TVs, people are fighting to maximize their time on leave from the office. Midday had a whole different vibe. No one rushed between the beer aisle and the frozen pizza section. People had the patience to squeeze avocados until they found one that was soft, but not too soft, and no one cut in line at the deli counter.
I took my time picking out all the ingredients to bake a lasagna—the only meal I learned to prepare in college that didn’t involve a microwave. It had been a while since I’d made it, because I never had the patience for the line at the cheese counter after a day in the office.
I listened to NPR as I baked the lasagna once, let it cool, then put it in the fridge to bake a second time when Ashley returned home. After years perfecting my recipe, I discovered that lasagna tastes best after a second bake, which was my preferred method, but I rarely had the time.
Ashley returned home wet and exhausted to a warm apartment filled with the smell of roasting garlic and basil. She peeled off of her work clothes and changed into jeans and my hoodie, which had become hers.
“Any wine to go with the meal?” she asked while pulling her hair back into a ponytail.
“No, but I can get some. Feel like drinking?” I asked.
“Duh,” she said and then shook her hips. “It’s been a long day.”
Ashley and I had each fallen in love with alcohol before falling in love with each other, and together we were marathon drinkers. We unconsciously egged the other on so as not to feel insecure about our own overindulgence. I knew she was the one for me after she drank me under the table going shot for shot with Jäger and then washed my sheets the next day because I’d pissed the bed.
My dating history was exclusively drinkers, but she was the only one who also followed the practices of absolving every bender with exercise. We once spent a month in Sydney, Australia, where we stumbled home from the bar every single night and woke every morning to a run around the harbor.
Ashley made exaggerated “mmm” sounds with every bite of the lasagna and was happy that there would be leftovers she could take to work. When we were done eating, we put on Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours instead of tu
rning on the TV, which had become our after-dinner routine over the past few weeks. We opened another bottle of wine, and she sat on my lap as we researched apartments to visit over the weekend.
The following day’s hangover was easy to manage working from home. I drank Gatorade and ate buttered bagels and went for a run on my lunch break. Unlike being hungover at the office, I never once wished for death. I didn’t experience the heart-pounding anxiety that comes when talking to a coworker while knowing I have booze on my breath. And I certainly didn’t miss the nervous sweats that soaked through my shirt while I counted down the hours before I could go home and hide myself in bed.
Once I figured out the formula to writing room descriptions for Expedia, the job felt more like data entry than writing. The difference between a Best Western in Seattle and a Best Western in Miami was so minimal that I could reuse the same description with only minor changes. Most rooms only took a few minutes to write. Sometimes I was assigned a unique room in a bed and breakfast with only a few blurry photos as my guide and spent twenty minutes trying to determine if the bathtub was claw-footed or not. But excluding the occasional problem location, I could complete sixty-five to seventy-five rooms a day, which seemed to satisfy Jane. Days went by when we didn’t speak. She only contacted me when I made a mistake.
Steven, I just got an email from the property manager of the La Quinta Inn in Rochester, New York. He’s upset because you forgot to mention the rooms are equipped with complimentary shampoo and conditioner.
I turned off the talk radio and pasted “complimentary shampoo and conditioner” into fourteen room descriptions.
Jane, so sorry for the mistake. I promise to be more careful. All updates complete!
Knowing what I needed to do to keep Jane happy allowed me to shift from working an hourly schedule to a room-count quota. I didn’t consider it devious—had I been in the office I would have spent at least two hours a day surfing the web or hiding in the bathroom.
Now for the Disappointing Part Page 4