The next morning my mother's radio was not where I placed it. Without music peeling vegetables was once again a bore. I was a sulking half-hour into it when the chef came down the stairs to check on my progress. I asked him if he knew where my radio was. He told me there had been a burglary during the night. This surprised me. I ask him what else had been stolen. "Nothing else," said the chef. "Just your radio."
At seventeen I white-lied that I was eighteen with a steady work history. It was a Man's world into which I sought entry so I fibbed away on job applications and, when I was lucky, in interviews. The secret I had learned was to tell would be employers exactly what they wanted to hear. On one such occasion I took my place at the end of a long line of applicants. In the next room over I watched a gruff interviewer dispatch one job seeker after another. Nearly an hour passed before it was my turn.
I'd barely gotten comfortable in the seat when he asked the question. "Got any plans for college?" "Yes," I lied, showing him I had ambition. Instantly he raised his two arms together with my application held between his hands. For a brief moment he looked like a surly conductor bringing an orchestra together for a final dramatic chord. He ripped my application in half, lengthwise. "College boys I don't need," he said. He crumpled the two halves of my application together. "What I need," he said, "is men who want to work." He tossed the wadded paper into his waste bin. He had no more to say. The interview was over. I stepped out of his office thinking if there was a lesson to be learned here I wasn't sure what it was.
A few years later four of us were living out a van at Huntington Beach, California, when I got hooked up with a job as a carpenter's helper through the California Department of Labor. I'd fudged the facts by claiming I had experience. I figured how hard could it be? I imagined I'd be like a nurse in an operating room. But instead of handing a surgeon a requested scalpel or sponge I'd be handing a bidding carpenter a hammer or a saw. When I showed up at the job site the first thing the foreman did was ask me where were my tools. When I told him I'd left them in Connecticut, his eyes narrowed. He handed me several dozen L shaped pieces of metal and told me to borrow a hammer and "install these braces in the joists." I thought he said "Joyces" and I asked the guy I'd borrowed the hammer from if he happened to see any Joyces around. He pointed to a support beam over my head. "That's a joist," he said. "Oh, right," I said, as if I'd momentarily forgotten.
I was hammering in around the fourteenth brace on a joist I'd picked at random when the foreman came charging over. "What the fuck are you doing?" he barked. Apparently each joist only required four braces. If he hadn't stopped me there was no telling how many braces I would have pounded into that joist. "Gimme the hammer," he said. I was demoted to sweeping and fetching lumber. At the end of the day he fired me and I was once again unemployed albeit in the golden land of opportunity.
Two years after that I was driving along in my brother's Dodge Dart looking for work and listening to the Sex Pistols as loud as his stereo would go when I saw a sign: Help wanted. I pulled into the parking lot and stepped inside. After I made quick work of the application the manager came bounding out of his office and shook my hand with vigor while laying his other hand on my shoulder. "Come on. Let me show you the plant," he said, giving my shoulder a squeeze.
When he pushed the two gray swinging doors open I saw up on a raised metal platform a half-dozen women of color in pink uniforms and hair-nets who all turned to gaze our way. And in that moment that lasted perhaps a fraction of a second it seemed to me that each one of those women had a look in her eyes that said,"Please rescue me." In a flash the look was gone.They returned to the work at hand, processing chickens. "Not to worry," said the manager. "We provide you with hip booths." He'd been talking about the job non stop since he'd laid his hand on my shoulder but this was the first thing he said that made an impression: Did I hear him right? This is a job that requires hip boots? I gazed up at a slow moving conveyor of chain with hooks from which chickens dangled in various stages of postmortem, some with feathers, others without. "Don't worry," said the manager, describing one of the rooms in which I would be working. "You'll get used to the smell." A red alert went off in my head. It flashed, "No fuckin' way will you ever get used to the smell." "So," said the manager. "Are you ready to start? You can punch in right now and get to work." I feigned a need to go home first. "Alright," he said. "But hurry back."
In the safety of the Dart I mulled it over. I'd been out of work for quite awhile and was nearly destitute. And here was a job being handed to me. But I kept seeing the looks on the faces of those women and hearing the voice of the manager. "You'll get used to the smell." I drove on, giving it serious thought. When at last I'd made up my mind I cranked up the Sex Pistols and sang along, "No future, No future..." I didn't need a job THAT bad.
I was living in Boston, Massachusetts, some years later when I took a job with a temp agency. I was sent to work opening envelopes for a well known radio based evangelist. We worked in a small vault-like room in a bank. There were surveillance cameras overhead and an armed guard in the room at all times. There was no music in the room. Those of us who did not work directly for the evangelist had to roll up our sleeves, don hospital smocks, and sit with our bellies pressed against tables stacked high with various sized envelopes. If we happen to drop anything on the floor we had to announce it to the guard before bending down to pick the item up.
We were not supposed to read any of the written material in the envelopes. Our job was a simple one. We were to open the envelopes and stack the enclosed money governed by denominations, except for Fifties and Hundreds. These we turned directly over to the woman in charge. I could not help myself. I read some of the enclosed material. The appeal letters were varied. One boasted that the Evangelist had had a dream in which the computer generated undersigned had donated a specific amount of money and "All your dreams came true." There was another letter in a large envelope that contained a stiff paper "prayer rug" with two knee indents marked L and R. Another letter contained a piece of fabric that was to be placed under a person's pillow for one night, AND ONE NIGHT ONLY, and then returned in the envelope provided with a donation in a specific amount. There were individual numbers too that were noted as amounts to be tithed. The age that Jesus died, thirty-three, was one number a letter stated boded well as a dollar amount for the bearer to mail in.
Along with money many of the envelopes contained correspondence of desperation and pleas. A number were scribbled on scraps of paper. And because the reverend was paying for the postage and there were those who cared not to hear from him a couple of the envelopes contained heavy weights. Others carried porn and scrawled rants filled with curses and racial slurs. In one envelope was a bullet. In another a sheet of shit smeared toilet paper.
In the waning Clinton years I was working as a banquet server at the Cater Center when President Clinton stepped out of a side room with a small retinue. I was standing aside a buffet table ladened with breakfast baked goods. He and his group were some twenty feet away when the thought took hold. I saw it as clearly as the black and white footage of Ruby gunning down Oswald in Dallas. The President drew nearer. I imagined the heft of a baked good projectile. There were dozens upon dozens at my disposal. A few feet closer. I saw the New York Post headline, Prez Beaned With Biscuit. I looked at the biscuits. The president was ten feet away. I had a clear shot. I could see myself explaining to the world that it was not so much a political act as a bit of irreverent performance art. There he was. Take the shot. Do it, do it. But no. The President and his yes men swept by and I was left in his wake, a disgruntled waiter who was, I like to think, almost a historical footnote.
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