by Dave Tomar
According to the BLS, individuals holding a bachelor’s degree or higher in any age bracket experienced a 3.1 percent unemployment rate in 1993, a 1.8 percent rate of unemployment in 2001, and, as recently as 2007, just before the crash of 2008, an unemployment rate hovering just under 2 percent. So if 4.2 percent unemployment doesn’t seem like much, don’t forget that the rate has more than doubled since 2007 and continues to rise. This is closely proportional to the doubling of the national unemployment rate, which the BLS places at 4.7 percent in 2001, 4.8 percent in 2007, and 9.6 percent in 2010.10
This appears to suggest that the average individual who has invested in a bachelor’s degree has been no more protected from the rising scourge of unemployment than the individual without a staggering sum of student loan debt. It seems likely that this is at least one reason for the fact that, according to the New York Times, as of September 2011, student loan default rates had reached the all-time high of 8.8 percent. According to the Wall Street Journal, as of August 2010, Americans shared roughly $826.5 billion in revolving credit debt just as the total amount of student loan debt reached roughly $828.8 billion. As projected, the latter number would exceed $1 trillion by the spring of 2011.11
I know we don’t like to think of our schools as ripping us off. Somehow, the schools are different from the corporations, the investment firms, the banks, the auto manufacturers, the energy companies, the politicians, and the lobby groups. I’d hate to speculate baselessly that the student loan industry is just another suit-wearing pirate trying to board your ship.
Fortunately, I don’t have to. According to the blog Zero Hedge, Education Finance Council president Vince Sampson is so concerned about the plight of recent and upcoming graduates that he told a panel at a global finance and investment conference in Miami in October 2011 “that lenders are no longer pushing loans to people who can’t afford them.”12
Well, that is downright responsible, isn’t it?
Wait. Come again. “No longer pushing loans to people who can’t afford them”?
As in, this seemed like a really good idea three years ago, in the immediate and horrifying shadow of the subprime mortgage crisis, but now, after a couple years of surveying the carnage, it seems like a less good idea? I’m pretty sure this qualifies as admitting that colleges have been girded by a practice of predatory lending for a while now, using to their advantage the ingrained cultural philosophy that without a college degree, you might as well just sell your body to science for research. This is an admission that no small number of students have been hoodwinked into keeping aloft temporarily an economy that will ultimately squash them flat. This is an admission that the schools and the loan agencies are in on the looting of America’s economy too.
Of course, I can’t claim to have known this stuff when I started writing back in 2001. Frankly, when I started my job as a paper writer, there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know how hard it would be to make a living as a writer. I suppose I could have guessed how hard it would get financially: how many checks I would bounce, how bad my credit rating would get, how many times I would default on my loans. But I am fortunate in that I never realize I’ve reached a low point until I’m looking back on it. I had no idea how low my odds were, not just in terms of succeeding in my chosen craft but in terms of simply finding a way to be happy and make a living at the same time. As I would learn in time, neither option was particularly accessible on its own, let alone in simultaneity with the other.
I was hardly alone in this predicament. The Wall Street Journal reports that between 2002 and 2007, hourly wages for men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five with bachelor’s degrees dropped by 4.5 percent; for women in the same demographic, by 4.8 percent.
I’m sure those numbers were much worse for those of us dumb enough to aspire to careers in the arts. Still, at no point did I ever stop believing that I’d be a success—if not a distinguished one, at least one who could eat without food stamps. Even as I began to write according to the terms of a thousand morons, at no point did I ever cease writing on my own terms as well. While a character named Ed Dante was cultivated in the endless pages of academic material that might only hint at my personality, Dave Tomar enjoyed quiet anonymity and some level of prolificacy.
Like any artist, like any musician, like any poet, I was consumed by conflicting impulses of self-doubt and egomania. I e-mailed editors, I subscribed to writing pools, I submitted articles to websites, I mailed away printouts of my best fiction, I connected myself with a few music publications and wrote album and concert reviews. If you think writing term papers sounds like a low-paying gig, you should try being a legitimate writer. At twenty-five dollars a pop for concert reviews, I usually spent half my earnings on parking.
And every morning, I’d roll over and open my eyes with a day at the industrial cleaning supply company staring back at me, like some unwanted thing in my bed that had looked a lot better the night before with a few drinks in me but that now revealed itself as a terrible mistake that I was bound to make every weekday for the rest of my life with no end in sight but the sweet, icy embrace of death. (Or, I suppose, unemployment. But stay with me here.)
And this was after only a year and a half there. Seemed a lot longer at the time.
At least I had a job, right? Sure, there’s that. Scant consolation to a swindled investor. My returns came in the form of a position that did not require a college degree and that I got only because I knew a guy. Otherwise, I would have had to beg for this terrible, degrading job. (On a related note, the New York Times reported in May 2011 that the number of college graduates between twenty-five and thirty-four now working in restaurants, bars, and other food-service areas had risen by 17 percent just between 2008 and 2009. Similar or more pronounced trends had emerged at gas stations, liquor stores, and taxi services.)13
As it turned out, helping students cheat on papers was the only available job for which my college had prepared me. More than that, I was suddenly receiving an education. My god, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me until right then. I had taken this job because it had found me. It had been the one job in my field that had responded to my habitual claim: “I can write anything. Just give me a chance.”
This job had taken me up on my offer, embraced my talents, and found more outlets for them than a normal occupation could possibly have dreamed up. I was learning more stuff in a week than I’d learned in four expensive years of college. It was like kindergarten all over again. Suddenly, I was learning without the hassle of grades, the dictates of dickhole professors, or the looming pressure to declare myself a major and imagine a career therefrom.
I had no obligation to a course of study, no registrar’s office to tell me a class was full, no admissions process to navigate. I was interdisciplinary, unregistered, and unadmitted. And without all the artifices, impositions, and expenses, all the things that made me hate school from the very first rumble of pubescent angst to the day I had packed up my last Yaffa Block, I rediscovered a love for learning that really only travel and psychedelics had satisfied for quite some time.
Suddenly, I was composing my own time line for human history. You cold-stitch together my essays on the Bronze Age, the Mongolian invasion of the Caucasus, the spread of the Black Plague, the French Revolution, mass European immigration to the United States, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Central American autocrats and the women who loved them, and you can trace the evolution of the species to present day.
As I wrote this history, I gave little reflection to the implications of writing it under these conditions, so that those who must know history lest they be doomed to repeat it could go out and get drunk on the weekends instead. Truly, the clientele were a thing about which I thought little in those first years. I really felt the strongest contempt for them, actually. So I put them out of my head and concentrated on my personal education.
I’d go to work grumpy and wordless on the outside, rattling with new ideas on the inside. The con
tradiction finally got to me on a Wednesday afternoon in late August. My boss was in some other country with our new international clients. He’d left me in charge, and I’d quickly found out exactly what it was like to be him.
I was receiving an angry phone call every few hours, from somebody who had been given my name and who insisted on collecting a payment, product, or apology, and specifically from me. Some I had dealt with before. With many, I had even achieved a decent relationship.
Others only knew that my name had been given to them as Crackerjack’s contact in my employer’s absence. One such individual, a creditor, called that afternoon. The secretary buzzed me, and I picked up the phone.
“Where the fuck is my money?!?”
“I’m sorry. Who is this?”
“You know damn well who this is! You told me you sent the check last fucking week! What kind of an asshole do you take me for?”
“I think you’ve got the wrong guy. I’m not sure what you and Mr. Lewis discussed, but I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”
“Is this Dave Tomar?”
“Umm. Yes.”
“Then you’re the guy I’m supposed to talk to. I-want-my-fucking-money!”
“OK. I understand now. I’ll get this taken care of right away. I’ll call you back in ten minutes.”
I phoned the boss at his hotel. I’d been trying his cell phone all week with no luck.
“David! How are you?”
“Not so good, Mr. Lewis.”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong is that you left a big pile of crap for me to deal with here, and you gave my name to a bunch of angry fuckers, and there’s nothing I can tell them.”
“Who’s angry?”
“Well, for one, I got this guy from Trans-Pacific calling me every ten minutes …”
“Fuck that asshole!”
“Well, what should I tell him, then?” I was pissed off, and the insolence of my tone finally hit my boss, so he got angry too.
“I don’t give a fuck what you tell him! Just handle it!”
Click.
Okeydoke. I called the guy back in ten minutes as promised.
“Listen, man, I don’t have your check. Mr. Lewis never sent it out. He just told you that to stall you until he got out of the country. He won’t be back until next week, so you’ll have to wait at least that long for your check, but probably longer. He’s pretty tough to reach, but I think he’s staying at the Hilton. If you don’t get him in his room, I’d have them try the bar in the hotel lobby. Have a great Labor Day.”
So school was a scam, and work was a scam too. It was at this exact moment that I determined unequivocally that my money had been wasted at school; that my nonexistent opportunities did not justify the cost; that the debt I had accrued was for somebody else’s enrichment and not mine; that schools were not innocent victims; that instead schools were part of a deeply entrenched institutionalization of the young predicated on the accumulation of personal debt; and that, sadly, even that institutionalization, with all the promised comforts for which we compromised, was becoming harder to access.
It was at this exact moment that I determined that I really had nothing to lose, that the grading system and the promotion system and the student loan system were all conspiring to make me think I had invested far too much at this point to withdraw myself from the mainstream job market.
It was at this exact moment that I found myself at a crossroads. This was the moment when I was expected to retire the notion of being a writer, a notion that my university and my employer were collaborating to demonstrate was unrealistic. Nothing made it more so than my student loans.
But writing was what I had set out to do, and no alternative would suffice.
Mr. Lewis returned to the office on Monday, at which point I gave him my two-week notice. I didn’t get to use any of the clever or cutting indictments that I had thought of over the weekend in response to his angry questioning. There was no angry questioning. He didn’t want to know why I was leaving, where I was going, or what I would do. I had spent just under two years in his daily employ, and there was no evidence that he gave a crap either way. He simply thanked me, told me he thought I had done a good job, shook my hand, and wished me luck. And suddenly, now that I wasn’t working for him, I didn’t even think he was such a bad guy. I’m not even sure he knew he was doing anything wrong. I wouldn’t have taken a business class with him as my instructor, but outside of the office he was a good husband, an attentive father, and a warm human being. He was just another sign of the times.
And just like that, I was on my own forever.
Now, if I was going to sully my good name, it would be on my own terms.
6
Use Me
Going full-time with the paper mills was the only decision I could have made at the time.
My life changed overnight. The self-esteem that refused to show its face anywhere near the industrial cleaning supply company quietly crept back into my life. Never again would I work for somebody else’s dream. (Unless that dream was turning in a paper without having to write it.)
I was finally producing a commodity with value that couldn’t easily be outsourced to India. In fact, India’s best and brightest were outsourcing to me. And not just India’s but China’s, Korea’s, the Philippines’, Indonesia’s, Saudi Arabia’s … you name it. If you could find an Internet café in your hood, barrio, or wasti, I was at your service.
I was starting to make a little loot. Not much but just enough to buy a buggy Dell laptop. The company I worked for charged customers a rate per page that varied, depending on how tight the deadline was. I could make a bunch of money taking on “rush orders,” which were assignments due in twenty-four hours or less. And I was learning little tricks for working faster, for getting more in, for turning minutes into dollars. Really, though, it wasn’t about the little tricks, like fluffing sentences with unnecessary clauses or adding gratuitous lines summarizing previous claims. These tricks help to shave off seconds as exhaustion begins its gloaming. But really I was improving with practice, getting more efficient with each passing assignment. It was dribbling a basketball for a thousand hours and taking ten million free throws and bounce passing against a cinder block wall until these foundational elements of the game were encoded into muscle memory, until I no longer needed to be completely awake to analyze themes of insanity in Hamlet, until the creation of new intellectual property was truly nothing more than pushing buttons.
And once I reached this point, the idea of protecting my personal copyright seemed ridiculous.
Ethan and I lived the ascetic and meditative life of bachelors. Defrosted burritos for dinner, pitchers of Yuengling at Manny Brown’s for dessert, and hours upon hours spent turning blank pages into cheap intellectual property. The Internet made us brokers of knowledge based on no greater credential than the ability to create supply where we perceived demand. It was pure market science.
It wasn’t always easy to explain my job to people. It relied so heavily on technological and cultural conditions specific to the early twenty-first century that if you weren’t up to speed, it just wouldn’t even seem possible. Lord knows I tried fruitlessly to make sense of it for my grandmother.
During one of our regular visits to her apartment in South Jersey, my sisters and I brought Grandma dinner from the prepped-food aisle at the supermarket. It was just easier than cooking in her kitchen, where she’d constantly pop up, hobble over, and insist upon helping, this in spite of the fact that she hasn’t been able to open a pickle jar since Ed Sullivan last had a show on television.
I brought my laptop, my travel hard drive, and my mobile wireless card from Verizon, which allows me to access the Internet from anywhere, even 1953, which is where my grandmother’s apartment is located.
I usually queue up a list of her favorites on iTunes while we hang out: Frankie Laine, Vaughn Monroe, Perry Como. Nothing with a pulse. I don’t mind it, my sisters tolerate it, and m
y grandmother, who smoked cigarettes through her forties, sings along with every song. Of course, all of this is possible through the magic of the interweb.
My grandma … well, she’s a trip. Everything makes her cry, but not in a sad way. It’s what Jewish seniors call “kvelling.” She wells up, her voice rises three octaves, and she sort of quakes. She does this when she sees us on holidays. She does this when we call her to thank her for the ten-dollar checks that she sends every birthday without fail. She does this when we help her set the VCR to tape her “programs.” She loves COPS.
She’s a cool old lady. She laughs at swear words, and if you say any particular word frequently enough in a short space of time, she’s bound to accidentally say it herself. My grandmother has actually started out sentences by saying, “Fart, I mean … oh, dammit.”
She’s never thrown anything out. She still has every bottle of laundry detergent she ever bought. Her freezer is like a tour through history: “If you look to your left, you’ll notice a loaf of bread that dates back to the second Roosevelt administration. As part of the New Deal, Roosevelt brought food rationing and price controls to the market so that Grandma could purchase this bread at seven cents a loaf.”
That night I was hanging a picture for her, and I asked her for some nails. She produced a yellow cardboard box with an illustration of a little boy hammering. It was in perfect condition and at least fifty years old.
“Grandma,” I said, “these are actually the original nails. This box could be worth something.”