If I had to place myself in the temp hierarchy, I’m that guy who’s too old to be hanging out at high school, but has nothing better going on. I want to leave the windowless rooms and strive for greatness, but I’m complacent. I’m not much different than the drones Bezos plans to use to deliver Skechers to Topeka, Kansas.
Saved by the Unemployment
The uncertainty that comes with unemployment can easily make for an existence that revolves around Netflix binges and afternoon couch naps, a routine I’d fallen into before and then regretted when I finally landed a new contract. I told myself that during my next stint of unemployment I would be more productive.
I kept my promise, and two months after my latest contract expired I was dropping a period at the end of a seventy-five-thousand-word novel I’d tangled into a confusing knot.
Why I chose to make the narrator a married dentist with a daughter still baffles me. I was a temp, with commitment issues and no experience caring for a child. I didn’t even have dental insurance. I wasted an afternoon researching the name of that silver-scraper-thing used to clear the plaque between teeth, only to be disappointed when I learned it was called a dental probe and not something more medical sounding.
I saved the two-hundred-page document and hid it in a folder called Works in Progress. I needed it off my desktop because I couldn’t bear to watch it die, in the same way a killer covers his victim’s eyes to avoid seeing them suffer. I mourned by going for a six-mile run.
After a shower and half a box of mac and cheese, I was still bereaved about the death of my book and not ready to start writing something new. My unemployment benefits weren’t enough to cover luxury expenses, like seeing a movie or having a pint at the bar. All I could think to do was turn on the TV. I wanted the day to pass so I could wake the following morning and start a new project, which featured a character living a life I understood—although not something as cliché as an unemployed, failed novelist.
I watched a string of commercials for trade schools, online GED programs, and malpractice lawyers, until coming across a few familiar faces.
Like the majority of my generation, I watched Saved by the Bell most days after school. I can still quote some of the more memorable lines. “I’m so excited, I’m so … I’m so scared,” Jessie said in a very special episode about the dangers of caffeine-pill abuse. I credit that episode as the reason I’ve never experimented with over-the-counter uppers. Seeing that there was an eight-episode marathon, I put on my no-chance-of-leaving-the-apartment sweatpants and prepared to return to Bayside High after a ten-year absence.
I could understand the conflicts presented in each episode. I related to the insecurity Kelly felt when she got a zit two days before prom. When Lisa’s careless spending put her in credit card debt, I knew exactly what it felt like to suffer from financial anxiety. I didn’t relate to the comfort in knowing that after the final commercial break all problems would be solved and everything would return to normal. I didn’t even know what my normal looked like—was I unemployed or employed? I regularly switched between both, yet neither felt normal. At least any time a situation was approaching normal, it changed, whether it was a job ending or a job beginning. I regularly had to adapt to a new routine.
I had spent every day for two months working on a novel, because I made a commitment to spend unemployment focused on writing.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t good writing. My main character was so flat he’d fit into an episode of Saved by the Bell. He could be the dentist in an episode where Kelly loses a tooth after accidentally biting down on a promise ring Zack hid in a slice of cake. But it didn’t matter that the book would never be read by anyone other than me. Every writer has to complete a bad novel before they can create anything worthwhile. Unemployment granted me that gift. The next morning I opened a new Word document and didn’t turn on the TV for a week.
PART II
11:00 a.m.
Hunger hits at 11:00 a.m., but it’s too early for a break. You hold out as long as possible because you know when your turkey sandwich is gone, the only thing you’ll have left to look forward to is the bus ride home.
Having the freedom to decide when to take lunch is the only thing you like about the job. The second half of the day always moves slower. The later you break, the less time on the clock when you return.
Today is especially slow because you’ve been working in XML and find yourself checking your personal email every time you complete a new schema of code. You can’t help but get distracted. If you didn’t escape the matrix every once in a while, you’d go cross-eyed from staring at endless lines of brackets and slashes.
You feel a quick endorphin drip when you see a “(1)” appear on the Gmail tab at the bottom of the screen. You open the page, and the jolt of pleasure you just got evaporates when you read the subject line—“New features, more control: updated Mobile Banking app.” You delete the message without opening it.
Days are slower when you don’t have someone on the outside who cares how the day is going and wants to arrange dinner plans. There was a time when your inbox was fertile and every email generated an immediate response, but that changed after the breakup. You haven’t fully adapted to single life and have moments when you come across an article you know she would like and think to send her a link, only to stop yourself when you remember she’s gone.
You’ve been working this contract for six months and have yet to eat in the break room. Even when you worked a Saturday, and there were only ten people on the floor, there was still too much risk you’d be forced into small talk during your only moment of contentedness of the day. It’s not that your coworkers are bad people; it’s just that the work drains your ability to be social.
You like the winter because it increases the possibility that the park bench that faces away from your office will be vacant. It’s your favorite. When it’s occupied, you walk the block while eating your sandwich, which is just as enjoyable. Your only real goal for lunch is solitude. It’s the reason you’ve brought a turkey sandwich to work every single day for as long as you can remember. Anything that requires heating up or a utensil would force you into the break room.
You hit play on a podcast and take satisfying bites as you stare across the park. The sandwich tastes especially good because it has lettuce. You’d like to have lettuce every day, but as a bachelor it’s difficult to justify buying a whole head, unless you have plans for using it as more than just a sandwich enhancer.
Last night you had a salad with your frozen pizza and you’re determined to keep up that routine. You like the sense of victory that comes with consuming a whole head of lettuce before it goes bad. It’s a feeling of accomplishment you never get after completing a project at work.
You finish eating, but aren’t ready to go back. You’re waiting for the end of a Moth story about parents. Usually, you finish listening on the trip back to your desk, but hearing Tig Notaro talk about the sudden death of her mother has you close to tears. You’re worried what your coworkers might think if they find you sobbing in the elevator.
It’s strange what makes you cry these days. You didn’t cry after the breakup, but two days later you wept uncontrollably at the end of School of Rock, when the shy girl takes the stage and shows off her amazing singing skills. If you weren’t returning to the office you would have shed a tear with Tig.
You notice the break room is empty and pour a green tea. The people you pass on the way to your desk aren’t interested in sharing more than a head nod of acknowledgement. You place the tea in the ring stain where your coffee usually sits and check your personal email. One message with the subject line “Ready to buy a home?” You hit delete.
A Hippie, a Punk, and a Privileged Boy
Dallas
My fingers reeked like Long John Silver’s taint, even though I’d spent an hour scrubbing them under a burning hot faucet.
“Told you it sucks,” Andy said, sitting on the trunk of his car, parked behind a gas st
ation. Earlier that day I’d worked my first shift at the Fish Market. Like a bunch of my friends, Andy had also worked there a few months before quitting. The shop was notorious for a revolving staff of stoners and dropouts. The work was hard and the money sucked, but it paid under the table, which is why it was attractive to kids who hung out in the back of a gas station—the type of kids who couldn’t work at Subway because of an arrest record.
I couldn’t get a job as a sandwich artist either, but not because of an arrest—those documents were sealed. I didn’t have a green card. My dad’s work visa hadn’t yet extended to the rest of the family and the ten bucks a week allowance he gave me for mowing the lawn and shoveling the driveway wasn’t enough to support my suburban teenage lifestyle. The money would be in my pocket on Monday then spent at the record store on Tuesday.
When I was fourteen, I went to the fish market with a friend to pick up dinner and the guy behind the counter noticed the shiny gold hoop dangling from my ear. “What are you, some kind of faggot?” he said.
I was so shocked I didn’t know how to respond and nervously smiled.
“If my son came home with one of those I’d rip it out of his head.”
Had it not been for that experience, I would have applied for a job their much earlier, but I couldn’t imagine working with someone who acted that way toward a customer.
I gave in when my parents announced they were leaving my brother, sister, and me alone for a week and I wanted extra money for party favors.
It only took a quick phone call to land the job. Employee turnaround was so frequent they offered the position to anyone who expressed interest. I showed up on my first day with matching gauged earrings. I convinced myself I was making a statement by leaving them in, but actually I couldn’t get them out. They’d been sealed shut with pliers.
The guy who two years prior had offered unsolicited advice on my decision to accessorize unsurprisingly didn’t work there anymore, and his replacement, a pale-faced eighteen-year-old named Dallas, didn’t care that I had earrings. By then it was 1996 and times had changed. Harrison Ford rocked a diamond on one lobe. Dallas found other ways to humiliate me.
“Don’t cut yourself, because we’ll have to throw away the fish if there’s blood on it,” he said as I gutted sea bass for the first time in my life.
It was hard to know what repulsed me more, handling fish guts or the way Dallas acted. He blasted Dave Matthews in the morning and spent forty-five minutes every afternoon in the bathroom with a stack of porno mags. His girlfriend favored midriff-exposing tie-dye T-shirts that displayed her beat-up belly button ring. She hung out behind the counter during his shifts. If she felt like I wasn’t working hard enough she would tell me to take out the trash or sweep the front walkway.
One time I gave a customer change for a twenty when she paid with a ten. She was polite enough to point out the mistake, and told me she had done the same thing when she was a cashier at Dairy Queen.
“Dumbass,” Dallas’s girl said under her breath as I thanked the woman for her honesty.
Two days later I was preparing salads to be sold in a glass case in the front of the store. I was tossing the brown lettuce when Dallas grabbed my arm. “We don’t waste.” He pulled a handful of lettuce from the trash and sprinkled it over the caesar I was in the middle of constructing. “Then just put green lettuce over top.”
At the end of the second week my parents left town. My brother and I told my little sister she could have all the ice cream she wanted and play video games in our parents’ bed as long as she stayed out of the backyard, where we got drunk with our friends. I donated twenty dollars from my thirty-dollar paycheck to the keg fund.
I tried my best to hang with my brother and his college friends, but passed out in a lawn chair after puking Ice House into a rosebush. I showed up to work two hours late with a pickled brain that pulsated every time Dallas told me to grab something from the basement. He was pissed because he had to unload the morning delivery on his own. I almost threw up when I had to fillet four-day-old tilapia that was going to be used for seafood ravioli. Luckily, there was nothing in my stomach to puke up, as I’d left it all in my mother’s garden the night before.
I just wanted to go home and lie down. My mouth tasted like the previous night’s beer mixed with acid from all the gags I’d repressed while stuffing ravioli pockets with expired fish. I managed to make it through the day and I was about to clock out when Dallas’s girlfriend called me.
“There’s still fish guts in the sink. Dallas’s not cleaning that shit,” she said.
I acted like I didn’t hear her and continued out the door.
“Hey!”
I kept going.
When I got home and poured myself a beer from the keg, I realized that ten bucks a week wasn’t so bad. I called Dallas and told him I quit.
“Who’s going to help me unload tomorrow’s delivery?”
“Ask your girlfriend.”
“Asshole,” he said, then hung up the phone.
Fat Ramones
Fat Ramones was a twenty-one-year-old fat guy with a Ramones tattoo. We worked together in a high-end wine and spirits shop that carried bottles that cost more than either of us made in a month. His paycheck was much bigger than mine because I only worked part-time after high school, while he was there all day, every day, except Sunday because of Connecticut’s blue laws.
I’d come across a lot of filthy talkers on the job, but he was the filthiest.
“She could use my tongue as a tampon,” he said about a bleached-blonde mother in a sundress picking up a case of Dom Perignon for her son’s graduation party. When Fat Ramones wasn’t describing immoral acts he fantasized about performing on the various women who patronized the store, he talked about music. “There hasn’t been a good punk record since 1983,” he said to me on my first day, as he gave me a tour of the basement where we’d spend most of our time.
Our job was to stock shelves, and first thing every afternoon we put away the daily delivery. We took our time carrying boxes of booze down a rickety staircase since we knew that if we finished stocking too quickly we would be assigned boring tasks like dusting bottles or sweeping the back alley. As long as we were in the basement, the owner, Mike, assumed we were working, but most of the time we were listening to a Dead Kennedys cassette and passing the time with stupid games.
“I’m going with Popov today,” Fat Ramones said as he pulled a plastic bottle of vodka from an opened case. He took a practice swing in the batter’s box we’d outlined on the floor with a red Sharpie.
I grabbed the plastic lime we kept hidden above an air duct and adjusted my crotch. I pretended to spit, then flung the lime between an alley stacked inches from the ceiling with chardonnay and merlot.
The lime connected with the sweet spot of the bottle, sending it blasting back toward my face. I ducked, and it slammed into a case of Moët Brut.
“What the fuck is going on down there?” Mike yelled from the top of the stairs.
“Just putting stuff away,” Fat Ramones said as he stuffed the dented bottle behind a shelf.
“I don’t want to see the whites of your eyes until everything is put away.”
“What an asshole,” Fat Ramones said under his breath. “I deserve a flask of Beam for that remark.”
I never stole anything because I was a product of Catholic school and afraid of burning in hell. But, more than that, because Mike was way scarier than a pit of eternal fire.
One afternoon, I had run out of things to do and was sitting on the floor of the South American section dusting bottles on the bottom shelf. They didn’t need dusting, but it made me look busy enough that Mike left me alone. A woman in a tennis skirt was shopping for a dinner party and had compiled an impressive collection of wines from around the globe at the checkout counter. When she turned down my aisle to browse a row of Chilean carmenères, I looked up and caught an accidental peek at her pink panties. I was pretty sure she didn’t notice, bu
t I got up so she wouldn’t feel uncomfortable. I stood behind the register and thought I was being helpful by boxing up the bottles she had placed on the counter.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Mike whispered in my ear.
I was startled, and I almost dropped a sixty-five-dollar bottle of pinot noir.
“Who told you to box that up?” He put both hands on my shoulders and turned me away from the counter, then pushed.
When she was ready to check out, Mike helped her whittle the fifteen bottles she put on the counter down to twelve that he promised would “delight experienced wine drinkers.” I carried the case to her car and she tipped me two dollars.
“Hey, idiot,” Mike said when I returned.
“Me?”
“Never box up a customer’s order before they’ve decided what they want.”
“My mistake.”
“Can you try not to be such a moron?”
“Sorry. It won’t happen again.”
I retreated out back to give him some time to cool off.
Fat Ramones was sitting on an overturned milk crate sucking a cigarette down to the filter. “Your eyes are red,” he said.
“Allergies.”
He pulled his pack of 100s from his pocket and lit a fresh one.
“Wanna duck hunt?”
“Sure.”
He flicked the cigarette butt in the air, and I watched it spin as I gathered a loogie in the back of my throat. The butt reached its apex, and I fired a glob of spit, catching it in a comet of saliva. The weight of the phlegm forced the butt to the ground, where it splattered on the concrete.
Now for the Disappointing Part Page 7