It’s Sunday morning and I am scanning the classifieds. There are two types of jobs in here—jobs I’m not qualified for and jobs I don’t want. I’m considering both.
There are pages and pages of the first type—jobs I will never get. Must know this, must know that. Must be experienced in this and that, for at least six years, and be fluent in Chinese, and be able to fly a jet through antiaircraft fire, and have SIX YEARS experience in open-heart surgery. Starting salary $32,000. Fax your résumé to Beverly.
Who is Beverly, I wonder, and what does she know that I don’t? She knows she’s getting a paycheck, for starters. She can’t do any of the things required for the job, I’m sure, or she would be doing them, instead of fielding phone calls. If I knew Beverly on a personal level, could I get a job doing something at her company? Is that why they don’t put Beverly’s last name in there, to discourage would-be stalkers like me from schmoozing up to her in a bar? From finding out details of her personal life and bumping into her on the subway, after waiting for four hours, then asking her out for a drink; then, after a night of passionate sex, offhandedly wonder if they were hiring for anything down at her firm? I continue on down the column, learning more and more about skills I don’t have, about training I will never get, about jobs needed in fields I never even knew existed.
Sometimes the Jobs-I-Can’t-Do sections contain a hidden morsel, though. The words “WILL TRAIN” always trigger a Pavlovian slobbering in any qualified bullshit artist. If they’re going to train you, what difference does it make what you used to do? “COMPUTER PROGRAMMER, WILL TRAIN.” I know what a computer is. It’s one of those TV things with a typewriter attached by a cord. If they want to train me to program it, fine. Then I keep reading. This is an ad for a computer school, where they teach you all about computers for $2,500, then get you a job data processing, also known as typing, for nine dollars an hour. I keep looking.
Today, all the WILL TRAINS are for jobs I don’t want. “MOVERS NEEDED, $8/hr. to start. WILL TRAIN. Guaranteed overtime.” This ad is of the second type. Moving furniture isn’t so bad. It’s hard work but it has its perks, one of which is you never need to work out when you’re doing it because your muscles are torn to shit at the end of every day. Eight dollars an hour is low for New York. After taxes that’ll leave about six. Still, I can deal with that. The problem is the guaranteed overtime. They are obviously understaffed and are trying to make it look like keeping me at work for fourteen hours a day will be doing me a favor. They’ll think because I answered this ad that I’m going to be enthusiastic about showing up on Sundays and holidays. “You wanted overtime,” they’ll crow, “isn’t that why you answered the ad?” I move on down the page.
“FISH CUTTERS NEEDED, $12/hr. to start.” This is a combination of both types of jobs—a job I don’t want and a job I can’t do—all wrapped up in one neat little package. I worked for two years as a fish processor in Alaska, so I know a thing or two about fish, but I can’t cut them and I don’t want to. But I can talk fish with just about anybody. I can bullshit my way through an interview no problem, and by the time they realize I can’t cut, I’m already on the payroll. Then they’ll either have to teach me or fire me, and firing me will involve admitting a mistake, so teaching me it will be. Twelve dollars an hour. I’m set. Rent will be paid.
There’s a definite trick to applying for jobs for which you are not qualified. Knowing something is key, even if it is just one little fact that you can throw out. You can usually get these facts by listening to boring people. I once spent five hours on a train down to Florida listening to the guy in the next seat ramble on about the woes of house painting, and two days later I was painting houses in Miami after wowing the interviewer with a verbatim rendition of the speech I had just heard. So, with fish I’m set. Just a few mentions of salmon fishing in Alaska, and I’m in.
Another fact about interviewers is that most interviewers just want to hear themselves talk. In the average job interview, I’m usually lucky if I can get a word in edgewise. Interviewers have a captive audience who want something from them, so they can babble away uninterrupted about their restaurant, their business, their life, their opinion of the president, or any subject on their mind. Who’s going to disagree with them? It’s the perfect dictator’s forum. “No, sir, actually I think the President’s doing a fine job,” and my application is ripped to shreds the minute I’m gone. I’ve sat quietly while interviewers tell me facts about their wives, their careers, their golf handicaps, even their first sexual experiences. And they rarely ask anything about me.
I go down to the fish store and we talk fish. This is a high-end fish store, catering to the eclectic needs of housewives from the best areas of New York, I am told. The manager, John, needs someone with a “good attitude,” who is “presentable.” An ass-kisser with a good haircut. It’s the same thing everyone wants, every business from IBM to the local transmission shop. I happen to have a good haircut, and I am relentlessly polite, at least for the first five minutes I meet someone. He tells me to come back tomorrow for orientation, wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. No questions about fish cutting ability are ever asked.
I have a job. Here we go again.
In the last ten years, I’ve had forty-two jobs in six states. I’ve quit thirty of them, been fired from nine, and as for the other three, the line was a little blurry. Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what happened, you just know it wouldn’t be right for you to show up any more.
I have become, without realizing it, an itinerant worker, a modern-day Tom Joad. There are differences, though. If you asked Tom Joad what he did for a living, he would say, “I’m a farmworker.” Me, I have no idea. The other difference is that Tom Joad didn’t blow $40,000 getting an English degree.
And the more I travel and look around for work, the more I realize that I am not alone. There are thousands of itinerant workers out there, many of them wearing business suits, many doing construction, many waiting tables or cooking in your favorite restaurants. They are the people who were laid off from companies that promised them a lifetime of security and then changed their minds, the people who walked out of commencement with a $40,000 fly swatter in their hands and got rejected from twenty interviews in a row, then gave up. They’re the people who thought, I’ll just take this temporary assignment/bartending job/parking lot attendant position/pizza delivery boy job until something better comes up, but something better never does, and life becomes a daily chore of dragging yourself into work and waiting for a paycheck, which you can barely use to survive. Then you listen in fear for the sound of a cracking in your knee, which means a $5,000 medical bill, or a grinding in your car’s engine, which means a $2,000 mechanic’s bill, and you know then that it’s all over, you lose. New car loans, health insurance, and mortgages are out of the question. Wives and children are unimaginable. It’s surviving, but surviving sounds dramatic, and this life lacks drama. It’s scraping by.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was a plan once, but over the years I’ve forgotten what it was. It involved a house and a beautiful wife and a serviceable car and a fenced-in yard, and later a kid or two. Then I’d sit back and write the Great American Novel. There was an unspoken agreement between me and the Fates that, as I lived in the richest country in the history of the world, and was a fairly hard worker, all these things would just come together eventually. The first dose of reality was the military. I remember a recruiter coming to my house, promising to train me in the marketable skill of my choice, which back then was electronics. I remember the recruiter nodding vigorously and describing all the electronics that the army was currently using. They would train me and train me, he said.
This was my first hands-on experience with an experienced corporate bullshit artist. They trained me and trained me all right. Mostly, they trained me to use a rifle and to interrogate Russian and East German prisoners. These are skills that very few electronics firms are in need of. But surely, speaking Russian and German comes in handy, no? No, actually. Not if your main strengths in the language concern tanks and troop movements. Once we get past “Where is your artillery?”, a phrase that doesn’t come up much in everyday conversation, I’m pretty much lost in either language.
Then there was college. The conventional wisdom is that you are unemployable without a college degree. That you are often unemployable with one is something a lot of people spend a lot of money to discover. An English degree qualifies you for either secretarial work (typing those papers gets your fingers plenty of practice) or teaching English, an irony that seems lost on most English professors I talk to. This is a field that exists to duplicate itself, and, of course, to provide star athletes with legitimate courses they can take on their way to NBA and NFL careers so that they can “attend” college and earn passing grades.
So that’s how I wind up here. No wife, no serviceable car, no fenced-in yard. I’ve obeyed the rules, done my time, and I’m right back where I started—an inch above the poverty line with no hope in sight. Instead of my house and beautiful wife, I’ve got a tiny one-bedroom New York City apartment, which, for financial reasons, I have to share with a roommate who makes a first-year frat boy look like Martha Stewart.
But before I start my new job, I have promised a day’s labor to Corey, my roommate. Corey is in much the same boat as I am, only he had the good sense to drop out of college the minute he became disgusted with it, which was after six weeks. So when the Student Loan people call, it’s usually for me.
After his brief college experience, Corey came to New York to work in the film industry, imagining himself shooting up the glamorous ladder of success to become a director. He did direct a small film, an independent production, and the experience left him so drained that now he barely has the energy or enthusiasm to do carpentry work on other directors’ movie sets. “You wouldn’t believe the bullshit,” he tells me. I’m sure I’d believe every word of it. Most of his time and energy was taken up not with camera angles and script supervision, but with trying to get cops not to tow his car every time he set up on a street corner to shoot a scene. Waiting in line to obtain permits, paying parking tickets, and giving money to homeless people to keep other homeless people from jumping in front of the camera is what filmmaking is really about, he explains.
He has recovered somewhat from that experience and is assistant-directing another small film being shot down in Tribeca, and he needs warm bodies to use as gophers. For a chance to see a real movie being shot, I offer my services.
He has gone down to the shoot at four in the morning, and I take the subway down there at about nine. On the way, I make a mistake and read the script I have been asked to bring, which Corey forgot in his early rush. It is awful. Not just run of the mill awful, but not Plan Nine From Outer Space awful either, which would have at least made it interesting. This script just sucks. It seems to have been written by someone who watched a lot of television growing up, and instead of incorporating reality into their adult imagination, this writer just incorporated the clichéd images of 1970s television. The drama scenes are from Mannix and the love scenes from The Love Boat. I can’t imagine how this wretched crap made it to the filming stage.
I get to the shoot and realize that nobody wants to hear my opinion of the script because it’s already past nine o’clock and they have to finish shooting by nightfall. Corey has only been able to close off the street for one day, and nothing is being done because the sound man is having all kinds of technical glitches.
Corey, who is usually soft-spoken and calm, is buzzing around and screaming at people. I’ve never seen him like this before. He comes over to me. “Carry these things upstairs,” he tells me. He points at a pile of heavy objects that look complex and electronic.
I start to pick one up and the sound man screams, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”
“He told me to …”
“LEAVE MY SHIT ALONE!”
Whoa, Buddy. “Okay,” I say softly. I put the expensive thing down gently and stand there. The sound man turns back to what he was doing, and Corey, who created the whole scene, is off to “organize” something else.
These people like to shriek at each other. Scenes like this are a constant of the film trade, I soon learn. In the next few minutes, I see a different sound man shrieking at his assistant, a stuntman nearly attack two passers-by, and the director make loud, snide remarks to a pretty girl who is holding a clipboard. No one here has any social grace or sense of courtesy. They are artistes. They have no responsibilities to the outside world because it is their job to critique it. How could they perform their invaluable task of providing commentary on society if they burden themselves with its restrictive rules?
The sound man comes over to me and hands me a pole. “Take this upstairs,” he says without looking at me.
Normally I’d have punched this guy by now, but I’m supposed to be helping Corey, and I don’t want to create yet another time delay on his set by injuring someone who knows what’s going on. I take it upstairs. There the two “stars,” one of whom I actually recognize from a mid 80s sitcom, are going over their dialogue. They look annoyed at my intrusion but don’t say anything. I put the pole down and start to leave.
“Hey, bring me up some coffee,” the sitcom guy says.
“Me too,” says the girl.
“Sure thing,” I say. I have no intention of bringing either of them anything because they didn’t say “please,” but I’m cleared of responsibility when I get downstairs because the lighting guy gives me a mile of wire to untangle. I sit and untangle wire for a bit, then everybody starts getting wildly excited and screaming, “Quiet, quiet!” We’re actually going to start filming now. Everybody is still. Then the actress opens the door and comes outside and closes the door.
“Cut!” screams the director.
That was it. That was the result of four hours of preparation, watching this girl open and close a door. Then she does it six more times to get the shot right. Apparently there’s a right and wrong way to open and close a door in Hollywood. This must be what you learn in acting school.
“Hey, you, come here,” says the sound guy when the excitement is over. I just stare at him. I’ve read the script, these people are wasting their time. This is a shit movie that would be lucky to wind up in the discount bin of a video store in the Philippines. Maybe if we were filming some masterpiece that was going to change the whole world of film, I’d come running, but my commitment to this project is straining. I know the sound guy probably came here a few years ago, dreaming of working on such a film, and this is his dose of reality. He’s just happy to be working, playing with his microphones and miles of wire and getting paid for it. This is his Great Compromise. I’ve made my own, and it doesn’t include being spoken to like that.
Corey, the lighting guy, the actors, they’ve all given up. This crap film is to them what applying for a job at a fish counter is to me. But here, there is some unwritten rule that you can’t admit that you’ve given up. A very strict rule. Rule One: Whatever you do, never stop bullshitting yourself that you’re important. Rule One keeps a lot of people sane.
I’ve had enough of this. I walk past the soundman, down to the coffee shop at the end of the street, buy myself a cup, and only myself, and sit with the crowd, watching the production from the steps.
On my way home, I call my ex-girlfriend to tell her not to bother coming to visit the glamorous world of film. I’d invited her down to the shoot, hoping that she might find a glimpse of filmmaking fascinating enough to reconsider her recent decision to seek a boyfriend elsewhere. My inability to hold a shitty job while working on the Great American Novel was causing strain on our relationship. I’d come home from jobs waiting tables or moving furniture and be too tired to write, and my lack of literary output had her convinced that my writing dream was just a line that I’d used to pick her up in the first place.
“Van Gogh painted when he was broke,” she told me once. “People can do things when they’re broke.”
Van Gogh ruined it for the rest of us. Sane people who want a career in the arts want a halfway decent life while they examine the deeper issues. There’s no image there, though. It’s all about image. Most people who can’t name two of Van Gogh’s paintings know that he was a starving nutcase. He sat in a corner and poured out art while his food supply ran out and people came to evict him. Now that was an artist. Cut off his ear and mailed it to a woman. Now that’s passion. Actually, it’s schizophrenia. I’d hoped not to model myself on a schizophrenic self-mutilator who died in obscurity, but any argument of mine was just a rationale for lack of commitment to my trade.
It turns out she wasn’t coming anyway. She’d gone to lunch with some guy from the office.
The Market, where I am now employed as a fish cutter, is a grocery store that tries to combine rustic charm with nonrustic prices. It sports a bakery, a kitchen, an espresso stand, even a flower shop. You can buy anything you’ll ever need here, providing all you’ll ever need is overpriced haute cuisine, espresso, and flowers.
There is a trend afoot among businesses these days to complicate things, then give the product of all their complications a simple name. The Market conjures up images of farmers hawking their produce in a warehouse, with chickens squawking in the background and cornhusks and other vegetable debris littered around a sawdust floor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Market where I am employed has been meticulously pieced together, every detail the result of careful market research. The bathroom is placed behind the meat counter to discourage users (who wants to see animal guts?) and the quick items, the milk, and the bread, which people might want to just grab and dash out with are conveniently placed all the way at the back of the store. This way, the shopper will have to walk past every item while inhaling the aromas of freshly baked bread and cinnamon-laced cappuccino, increasing the willingness to spend.
As I suspected from the job interview, appearances are key. The general manager, Zoe, comes down to say hello to me as I sift through the introductory paperwork in the break room on my first day. She gives me a quick professional smile and shakes my hand as she nods approvingly at my khaki pants. “Very nice,” she murmurs. Then she looks with consternation at my blue shirt.
“Is that an oxford?”
“What’s an oxford?”
“The shirt. Is it an oxford shirt?”
“I don’t know. Is it?”
“You need an oxford.”
“Okay.”
She nods approvingly at my pants again. “Very nice,” she says. “But you have to have an oxford.”
I give her the thumbs-up on the oxford issue and a big smile, and she walks off, confident that the next time she sees me I will be wearing an oxford shirt. This is one of her duties, to make sure everyone wears an oxford. Over the years, I’ve noticed that employers who are sensible in almost every respect often have no flexibility or sense of humor when it comes to uniforms. It could be something they are taught in business courses in college, that the uniform represents the company, that it has to be worn with pride, that a soiled or poor-appearing employee is the first unraveling of a tightly wound organization. I’m not so sure, though. I think that abusing people about their appearance is an easy and convenient way for managers to show off their power.
Think about it. In what other possible situation can one person reasonably say to another that ultimate power comment, “You look like shit.” In the army, I once saw a man forced to do pushups because he had missed a tiny patch of skin when he was shaving, and we understood this was part of the abuse of training. We were expecting abuse and we got it. The working world is no different, except that the comments are phrased slightly differently, and are accompanied by a distant power-smile and a handshake. Of course sometimes, though rarely, uniform comments are necessary. I was an EMT in Philadelphia and I worked with a guy who looked like he slept in his car every night, and he smelled like it too.
But today my blue button-down nonoxford shirt was ironed to perfection and I smelled sweet as summer rain. What Zoe doesn’t realize is that the next time she sees me, I’ll be wearing this shirt, and the time after that too. Nothing personal, it’s just that I can’t afford a new shirt until I get paid, and I’m not getting a paycheck for at least a week, perhaps two, and this is the only blue shirt I have. I doubt I’ll get fired over it, though it’s more likely that I’ll get fired for that than for the fact that I’m completely incapable of performing the job I was hired to do.
I got lucky on the khaki pants. I actually owned a pair of nice ones, worth about fifty dollars, and now they’re about to get splattered with fish guts.
Zoe is gone. I sit in the employee break room and read propaganda about the company I have just joined. The Market, I learn, has branches wherever there are people with money to burn. Wherever there are people driving up half-mile driveways in sport-utility vehicles, we are there. There are branches in Beverly Hills, Long Island (about five different stores), Grosse Point, the Main Line, and so on. The company headquarters is in Maryland. All sexual harassment complaints and personal disputes must be filed with the Maryland office, and a list of phone numbers for that purpose is provided. It is tossed in the trash. Whatever else they can say about me, I’m not a squealer. Besides, I’ve only ever known two people to call an 800 number to complain about sexual harassment, and both were fired as troublemakers.
Then I flip through a sixteen-page document entitled “Becoming an Associate,” and am on page three before I realize that associate means employee. The mangling of the English language has become commonplace in the corporate world, and people who work at the Market’s lowest-level jobs are all given titles. Thus, I am encouraged to tell my friends about exciting career openings as a chef’s assistant (vegetable chopper or dishwasher, depending on the chef’s needs at the time), sales records associate (checkout girl), or sanitation maintenance associate (janitor). An enclosed flyer tells me that I will be awarded fifty dollars for each person I can bring to the company. Small print, about a page of it, describes the conditions that have to be met before the check is handed over. The employee must stay ninety days, I must still be employed by the company after the employee’s ninety days, the employee must be highly rated, a request for the check must go through headquarters in Maryland, and on and on. Lawyers know that most people would rather sign their rights away than read page after page of small print, and the people who devised this bounty system, as it is called, probably did so with the same mentality. Most of us would rather kiss fifty dollars good-bye than bother with any more legalese. I flip the page and read on.
After ninety days, I am eligible for insurance. That’s always a nice one. That the insurance costs twenty-five dollars a week and doesn’t really cover anything except lightning bolt strikes is something that only people with the patience to read the aforementioned legalese will ever find out. There is also a profit-sharing program, in which associates get a Christmas bonus of stock in their name every year, provided they have been there one year or longer. The amount of stock increases every year that the associate is with the company. Promises of great wealth for long-term employees are not unusual at businesses with high turnover, where the management knows that little, if any, of the promised wealth will ever have to be distributed. Benefits for short-term employees, things I could actually use now, such as free meals and paid breaks, are never to be found.
John, the fish counter manager, comes into the break room to see how I am doing with the paperwork. “All done?”
I have barely started. There are almost fifty pages of small print to go in the introduction manual alone. I have just started on the chapter about how it can all end, called “Associate Abuses and Termination.” Here I am told that bringing a gun or drugs to work will get me fired, as will stealing, or “any other felony.” Lying is also mentioned as a grounds for dismissal. Apparently, I am not allowed to lie to other associates, which negates one of my hobbies. There are just enough broad-ended generalities in there to indicate that they can fire me if they don’t like me. Of course, there’s an 800 number to call if I feel that has happened, but I imagine if I do that, I get caught up in a paperwork conspiracy so endless that it would be better to just get another job.
“There’s a lot of paperwork here,” I tell him. “Might be a while.”
“Just fill out the tax stuff and throw the rest away,” he says, then quickly corrects himself. “Or take it home.” He looks at his watch. “We need to get going. We have to unload the truck.”
Unload the truck. Now I see why I got through the interview so easily. I’m over six feet tall and appear to have considerable lifting power. I pull seventy-pound boxes off the refrigerated delivery truck and realize that it might not have been my fine haircut or charm that got me the job. John was sizing me up like a medieval lord looking at a prospective new serf, checking me for labor potential. As I unload the truck, John tells me stories about how hard he has worked, ever since he was a teenager, in the meat and fish industry. He is a few years older than me. When he was twenty-one, he bought the meat and fish store from the man who taught him the business, and ran it up until a year ago, when he came to work for the Market. He is unclear about what happened to his store, or why he found working here preferable. He mentions that he is a type-A personality, a workaholic who just can’t stop himself. He tells me this as he watches me, hands in his pockets, barely looking at the ice-filled Styrofoam boxes of fish he is supposed to be checking for quality. He is more interested in the weather, reminiscing, and the tightly-clad women we can see going into the store’s front entrance. It’s only my first day with him, but he appears to have come to terms with his workaholism.
We go back inside, and I am introduced to the junior manager, an Italian fellow named Ippolito. Ippolito is making the schedule for the fish department. It turns out there are only three people who work the fish counter, and I am the third, which explains my rapid and untested hiring. I thought they were looking for an ass-kisser with a good haircut, and it turns out they wanted someone, anyone. These two chiefs were obviously desperate for an Indian. I become more confident of my status.
As I am putting the crates away in the freezer, I hear pieces of a conversation between Ippolito and John. Ippolito is asking for a raise, I gather, and John is hemming and hawing. I shut the freezer door so they won’t think I’m eavesdropping. I’ve seen this scene before, and I already know how this is going to turn out.
When the fish has been neatly stacked in the freezer, I come outside, and Ippolito is alone, filleting flounder. I watch his hands, trying to pick up silent pointers on fish cutting. No doubt he has done this before. His nimble hands remove the meat from the bones of each fish with a few deft strokes. When I look up, I realize his cheeks are flushed with rage.
“How much you make?” he asks me, still cutting the fish. He has a thick Italian accent but his English is good. “How much they pay you?”
There’s no way around it. It’s a direct question, and I figure he’s a manager, he’s entitled to the information. “Twelve dollars an hour.”
“Motherfucker,” he says. “That motherfucker.”
I nod sympathetically.
“You cut fish good? You better than me?”
“Uh, no.”
“But you cut fish before, right?”
“Sure.” Worst comes to worst, I can always claim a blow to the head or carpal tunnel syndrome to explain my suddenly lost abilities.
“You cut flounder good?”
“Flounder … that’s always been a problem for me.”
“Because they are flat, right? Flat fish are hard.” Ippolito is smiling now, enjoying the brotherhood of us fishcutters, those who know that flat fish are hard. He hands me the knife. “Cut me a flounder.”
It’s go time. I’ve seen him do at least ten of them, and I have a built in excuse—flat fish are hard—so I dive right in. I pull a flounder out of the box, insert the knife under the skin the same way I have seen him do it ten times, and the knife strikes a bone right away. I wriggle it around, but I can’t get the knife away from the bone.
“Here, let me show you.” My secret is out, and Ippolito seems to have expected it. He slowly inserts the knife, makes a few deft movements, and lifts the meat from the bones. Like magic. He hands me another flounder, and again I strike bone.
“You cut fish before?” he asks again.
“Sure. In Alaska. Long time ago.”
“Alaska fish, maybe they are different,” he says, his voice fatherly and kind. A light goes on as I suddenly realize the situation. Ippolito knows damned well Alaskan fish and Atlantic fish are pretty much the same. He’s not a bad guy, I figure. He knows I can’t do the job, but I imagine they’ve been working him to death the last few weeks, especially if he was teamed with Workaholic John, and he just wants some time off. He’s willing to work with me just to keep me here. After all, I’m polite and I have a good haircut. And if I turn out to be a complete fuck-up, hell, he didn’t hire me, John did.
And so I’m in.
Ippolito spends several hours showing me how to cut fish, and he tells me his life story. He’s been cutting fish since he was a kid, growing up in a small fishing village in Italy. He came to America three years ago, married an American girl, and got a job cutting fish here in Scarsdale, New York.
They hired Ippolito at eight dollars an hour, probably because he couldn’t speak English very well back then. Despite the fact that he is now almost fluent, his wages haven’t gone up that much. Two years later, he now makes eleven. Then they hired me for twelve.
Instead of giving him a raise, John then decided to give Ippolito a title, junior manager. The responsibilities consist of making the schedule for one person, me. Basically, his managerial perk is to schedule me whenever he doesn’t want to work, but he is limited because he is still getting an hourly wage. He needs to give himself a decent living, and he can’t give me overtime. The Market is not going to give me eighteen dollars an hour to mangle fish. In fact, they’re not going to give me eighteen dollars an hour for anything, ever. They have some kind of computer system, I am told, where lights and buzzers go off in the payroll office the minute anyone receives overtime, and regional managers and district managers and various other executives fly in from the golf course and start screaming. So Ippolito’s big perk is to schedule me Sunday mornings, which he has been working for the last two years, and now he can finally go to church with his wife.
Ippolito is a loyal, competent, hardworking man and I am an incompetent drifter making more money than he is. The Market will eagerly pay security guards to watch monitors on six-figure security systems to make sure that we don’t steal three-dollar bottles of salad dressing, but they won’t give this man the money he deserves, even when he politely asks for it. To them it is a game. How little can we get him to work for? Poor wop, barely speaks English, let’s crap on his head from a great height. Ah, look, our best employee makes less than that haircut we just hired, let’s make him a manager. And everything is all right. Ippolito ’s wife is pregnant; he’s not going anywhere. I don’t have a wife, and no one else wants my job, so I get anything I want.
I respect Ippolito for knowing he is getting screwed, and I respect him more for mentioning it to me. A lot of people in his situation would abuse me because I got lucky. He could spend all day complaining to John about how incompetent I am, trying to get me fired, but where would that leave him? Working Sunday mornings again. Then the Market would eventually hire someone else, maybe someone who cuts fish as well as he does, and then he’d have to feel threatened about losing his manager position. Me, I’m a nice, easy-going guy, I do what I’m told, I work Sunday mornings, and best of all, I’m incompetent. I’m no threat to anyone. I’m fitting in nicely.
The next few days go by peacefully. By my second day, I am trusted to run the entire fish counter by myself. Ippolito comes in at seven, cuts most of the fish, and leaves at three o’clock. The Market closes at seven, and there is an hour of closing duty, so both of us manage an eight-hour shift. Best of all, I only have to spend the first three hours of my shift with a supervisor. After that, I am on my own.
Like most modern itinerant workers, I’ve waited tables for long enough to be proficient at customer service, and am soon on the fast track to success at the Market. Zoe comes by and notices me chatting amiably with some regulars, who make a point of telling her what a splendid individual I am. She doesn’t even mention that I am still wearing the same shirt she told me to exchange during our first meeting. After nine days, I get my first paycheck, over $400 for a forty-hour week, and rush out and buy an oxford. I’m one of the team.
My regular customers take to me. One of them brings me a pen, an expensive ink pen with elegant designs on it. He owns a company that makes them, he tells me. Later in the day, I am over at the coffee stand and notice that the Market sells those pens. Maybe his company sells them to the Market, or maybe the guy’s just bringing me some of the Market’s stock as a gift. I don’t know. At any rate, it’s the thought that counts.
A few evenings later, I’m minding my own business behind the fish stand. It has been a slow day, a clock-watching day, and I am eating a chocolate bar while doing inventory. Zoe comes back behind the stand.
“Hi,” she says brusquely. “Where’d you get that chocolate bar?”
“I bought it,” I say. I have carefully read the Market policy on eating lunch and taking breaks and cigarette smoking, all of which they’d prefer you didn’t do, but if you must, there are ten pages of guidelines on exactly how. I know them all by heart. I’m a lunch-eating, break-taking, cigarette-smoking machine, seeing as I’m stuck back here in a very unbusy store by myself for eight hours at a time. I know that all items bought from the store by employees during their shift have to be accompanied by a receipt. “I have my receipt right here.”
She nods without looking at it. “Where did you get this pen?”
“A customer gave it to me.”
“He gave it to you?” Her eyes narrow with suspicion.
“He said he owns the factory where they’re made.”
“This is one of our pens.”
“He gave it to me.”
“Do you have a receipt?”
“He didn’t give me one.”
She looks at me as if I am the worst-lying pen-stealer she has ever encountered, and shrugs and walks off.
After that, things go downhill quickly. The next day, we get a rare rush, seven or eight people at the stand at a time. I have everything organized, waiting on people as quickly as I can. They have formed a line, and I get them one at a time. Zoe comes up to the stand.
“Wait on that lady,” she tells me, pointing at an ill-tempered older woman, as I am wrapping an order for the lady in front of her. I assume Zoe will finish wrapping the order, so I put it down and approach the next lady.
“Can I help you?” I ask the ill-tempered one.
“Yes, I’d like two pounds of salmon steak.”
“Hey!” yells the one I was just waiting on. I look around and realize that Zoe has wandered away, but is still watching me. The lady’s unwrapped order is sitting where I left it. I go over and start wrapping again.
“Why did you ask me if you could help me before you were finished with her?” howls the ill-tempered one.
“All I want is my order,” the one waiting for the wrapped package cries out with exaggerated patience. Other ladies at the back of the line start rolling their eyes and wandering off.
After it is quiet again, Zoe comes up to me. “I don’t think you should be alone back here,” she tells me. “You can’t handle it by yourself. I’ll tell Ippolito.” She looks at me a moment. “Is that an oxford?”
I’m not sure exactly what I’ve done to draw her attention, but she’s got her teeth in and she won’t let go. She starts with me on a daily basis.
“You’d better get back there,” she tells me one day when I’m going out to smoke. “We’ve got customers coming in.”
I’ve been back there for five hours and sold one piece of fish. I have already asked one of the butchers to watch my stand for a few minutes. We take turns. When I come back, he goes.
“Rocker’s back there,” I say.
“I’d feel more comfortable if you were back there too.”
I go back. Smokers are always fair game. Rocker smokes his cigarette in the freezer with all the meat. I still care, just enough, to decide this is unsanitary. It’s also freezing.
Rocker the butcher has been putting up with Zoe for over a year, and he doesn’t care about anything anymore. He is a lifetime butcher who recently lost his own business to bankruptcy, and Zoe has been trying to get him fired since John hired him. He doesn’t say “Have a nice day” enough and never wears an oxford.
That night, Rocker and I start closing the displays down at ten to eight. Zoe comes over and screams, “Eight o’clock! That’s when we close! Eight o’clock! Refill the ice tubs!”
I have already emptied two ten-gallon ice tubs, and she wants me to refill them for the final ten minutes of the shift. This involves going downstairs to the ice machine, a process that takes ten minutes. By the time I’m done, it will be eight o’clock.
I shrug and go downstairs and refill the ice tubs and throw the ice away as soon as I have returned to the fish stand.
“Good,” she says.
“It’s just going to get worse,” Rocker says, while he takes a wrapped pork loin, slides it down his pants, and winks at me.
And so I learn to steal stuff.
I’ve been there long enough to know where the cameras are, and I devise a system. One of my jobs is to use leftover fish to make free samples of various dishes, which I leave out for the customers to give them ideas on how the fish can be prepared. This job requires that I wander around the store and take items off the shelves, sauces and marinades, and take them back behind the counter, away from the cameras, to use in the preparation of the dish.
I wander around the store and grab anything I can get my hands on. I grab soy sauce, bags of coffee beans, yogurt, chocolate bars, more pens, and stockpile them in the back at the end of each shift. I grab tape, staples, even fish knives.
Most of all, I grab fish. I wrap one-pound chunks of Chilean sea bass up in three layers of plastic and stuff it down my pants every night on my way out the door. Rule one is nothing ever goes in my duffel bag. Management reserves the right to search the duffel bag at any time. Everything goes down the pants.
Before long, Corey and I are eating sixteen-dollar-a-pound sea bass and salmon like it’s a bag of Doritos. We have langostinos in cream sauce, lobster tails on a bed of saffron rice, Pacific red salmon and Alaskan king crab legs mixed with jumbo Maryland scallops, a gigantic seafood extravaganza served on a nightly basis. Soon my roommate is begging for burgers. So I talk to Rocker and arrange a trade-off at the butcher stand. We go to two-inch-tall cuts of New York strip steak, filet mignon, big wads of hamburger meat, dry-aged rib eye, even a rare cut of Kobe beer-fed beef. Every time Zoe makes a comment to me that I deem to be less than positive, more things go down the pants.
I start noticing how many other Market employees feel the same way. While waiting for the train, I listen to them bitch about their jobs. They’ve all been made to read one directive too many, about oxfords and hair length and “Have a nice day.” They are all getting paid a different wage for the same job, and there’s no reasoning behind it. People are promoted based on nothing. A sweet nineteen-year-old girl is promoted to head cashier after two weeks, leaving the others seething. I wonder if they all have pants stuffed with stolen groceries.
Ippolito, I notice, starts giving me the cold shoulder. Obviously, Sue is riding him about me, and he takes to snapping at me. A customer calls and orders poached salmon, and I get the water boiling, and Ippolito comes in and starts screaming.
“I cook the salmon,” he tells me. “I cook all special orders.”
“Knock yourself out.”
“From now on, I cook all the orders.”
“Fine.”
Later that day, just before Ippolito leaves, I start getting scrap fish together for a soy and sesame display I have planned. Cooking fish is one of the things I’m good at. Most of the customers like my samples.
“I’ll do it,” he says. He takes the scraps without looking at me. “From now on, I do the cooking.”
“Do it up.” He stays around an extra half hour, waiting for his samples to come out of the oven. Even then he doesn’t leave.
Zoe apparently has instructed him to keep an eye on me. I am getting twelve dollars an hour to stare into space.
After he has left, I am sitting at the desk behind the fish counter, and I open a drawer looking for tape to date the scallops. I see the next schedule. I am not on it. A guy named Roberto is.
The next day is the last day of the scheduled week. Usually, they have posted the schedule by now. I spend most of my shift wandering around the store, looking for expensive stuff. I find a thirteen-dollar can opener, the cutting edge of can openers, with round black rubber grips. I take two of them, pop them down my pants, and go out to smoke a cigarette. I throw them into a bush.
I grab more can openers, smoke again. I grab chocolate bars, expensive German chocolate, duck back behind the fish counter and load my socks with it, then go and smoke. Into the bush. I double wrap about four pounds of sockeye salmon and smoke again. When I come back inside, John is waiting for me.
“Can I talk to you for a second?”
“Sure.”
“I hired a guy yesterday. Eight dollars an hour. He can cut fish. I don’t think we’re going to have room for you here anymore.”
“Sure.”
“It’s nothing personal.”
“It’s fine.”
“Come with me.” He escorts me to my locker, which I clean out while he watches. Once you’ve been dismissed, there is a Market policy that a manager has to be with you all the time, to prevent theft or unsightly displays of emotion. He escorts me outside.
“I’m going to have to look in your bag,” he says. He takes it from me. I have a book and a t-shirt inside. He hands it back. “You were always an honest guy,” he says. “It’s just a policy.”
“No problem.”
“So long.”
I shake his hand, circle the block, and load up on can openers, fish, and chocolate. The irony is that after three months at the Market, I have become a half-decent fish cutter.
My insurance would have kicked in after ninety days. I have worked there eighty-nine.
“What’re these?” I am emptying my bag onto the kitchen counter, looking at my legacy from the Market. Corey is examining the contents, disappointed. He’d been expecting sea bass.
“Can openers.”
“Where’d you get ’em?”
“A friend gave ’em to me.”
“Why’d he give you nine can openers?”
“Do you want ’em or not?”
“Not really.”
Maybe I’ll sell them. Maybe not. I don’t have a gift for sales.
Back to the classifieds.
Corey has to leave town that night on a shoot, and just minutes after he walks out he gets a phone call from a woman in Scars-dale, which I am lucky enough to intercept.
“I’m desperate,” she tells me. “I need you.”
I’m wondering what she looks like when I remember that, for the last several weeks, Corey has had an ad in the paper for a private bartending service to make extra money. Some months back, he answered an ad for a bartender, which turned out to be a cleverly worded ad for a bartending school, and, too embarrassed to admit his mistake, he’d shelled out $1,000 to learn how to make Golden Cadillacs and Harvey Wallbangers. By the time he’d realized that most of the people who drink these drinks are dead, the check had been cashed. Now he felt obligated to try to get himself some bartending work to recoup the cash.
Her name is Patrice and she is throwing a party at her Scarsdale mansion for a hundred or so of her influential friends, and she has had a last minute falling-out with her caterer. I feel her pain. I hate when that happens. Anyway, Patrice needs a bartender for tomorrow evening, someone to stand around and pour bottles of Chateau Whatever for her apéritif-sipping friends. I get the feeling there will be little skill and plenty of subservience required. I can do subservience for an evening, especially considering my current employment status.
“Do you have a cummerbund?” she asks. This apparently is a key requirement.
“Of course,” I say. What unemployed guy doesn’t have a cummerbund?
“And a bow tie?”
“Sure.”
She gives me the address and some directions, and we agree on four o’clock the next day.
I go rummaging through Corey’s stuff, figuring that anyone who places a bartending ad is going to have a cummerbund and bow tie handy. If he does, he’s got them well hidden. So I have to go downtown and buy these two things at the only place I can find them, which is a high-end men’s clothing store. The cheapest possible alternatives cost me thirty-six dollars so I figure that I’ll just wear them for that night and then take them back the next day.
“Make sure you’ve got the right ones,” the sales girl tells me. “Absolutely no returns.”
“Sure. No problem.” Fuck. Maybe I can sell them to Corey.
The next day, I take the train out to Scarsdale (three dollars each way) and the cab to her house from the station (eight dollars each way), and I realize as I’m walking up her driveway that I’ve already laid out fifty-eight dollars on this affair. I’m getting fifteen-dollars an hour and am expected to work four hours, so I’m now looking at a two-dollar profit margin for the entire evening. Fuck it. It’ll be easy work, and I’m jobless, so I have nothing else to do. And who knows, maybe I’ll meet a guy who owns a publishing firm or a nymphomaniac heiress whose husband is out of town.
The first person I meet is Patrice. She’s probably okay under normal circumstances, but arranging this party has stressed the normalcy right out of her. She’s running around in circles talking to herself, stopping every now and then to scream at a teenage boy, who, it turns out, is her neighbor’s son. He’s setting up a table to shuck steamed oysters on. She comes over to me.
“You must be Corey,” she says. Corey’s ad had his name in it, and before I can correct her, she starts off with a barrage of instructions. I’m to set up a long card table on the patio, cover it with a table cloth, then arrange dozens of bottles of liquor, wine, and mixers as attractively as possible. Easy enough. While I’m doing this, she comes by every few minutes to micromanage, move a few bottles around, adjust the tablecloth length, but other than that she leaves me alone. I get finished early and help the kid set up the oyster table. He is going to be shucking oysters while I pour wine.
“Getting cold out,” he observes.
I’ve started to notice that myself. Since I left Manhattan, the temperature has dropped about thirty degrees. I get my coat out of my bag and bundle up, thanking God that I brought my coat, which I did only as an afterthought as I was walking out the door, just in case the night turned chilly.
Guests begin to arrive as a light dusting of snow starts to fall, mixing intermittently with freezing rain, which makes the smooth-stoned patio slick and dangerous. The temperature seems to be dropping even more. The first guests open the patio door and slip and slide eagerly over to the bar table, and I crack the tops off a few bottled beers for them. A few want wine, and I use my trusty wine tool (I actually had one of those) to elegantly open some expensive Merlots. The minute they get their drinks, they run inside again to get away from the gradually worsening elements.
Then something unexpected happens. Night falls. This woman, who has obsessed about every detail in preparing for her party, who has carefully arranged bottles of liquor so they look attractive, who has fretted over the lengths of tablecloths, has forgotten that in the wintertime in New York it gets dark around five thirty. And she has no outdoor lights. So now the oyster guy and me are standing on an ice-slicked patio in freezing rain and complete blackness.
Every few minutes, the patio door opens and a few people come out for refills of drinks. They stand and shiver in the dark while my now-frozen hands claw at wine corks and beer caps.
“Aren’t you freezing?” they all ask as they run back inside, not waiting for the obvious answer. I doubt any publishers or nymphomaniacs are going to want to chat with me under these conditions. But it could be worse. I could be the oyster-shucker kid. Nobody even visits his table. Waiting for him to shuck the oysters takes too long. He stands as close as he can to the steamer, shivering, shoveling oysters down his throat for warmth.
“Let me have an oyster or two,” I say. He shucks them for me and eyes my table.
“Trade you,” he says.
“What do you need?”
“A-a-anything,” he says through chattering teeth.
I open a can of Coke, dump three quarters of it out, and pour some bourbon into the hole. “Try this.” I like the idea and fix one for myself. I’m not sure it’s legal to be serving alcohol to minors, but I’m also not sure it’s legal to have them work in an ice storm. We are both bundled up like Eskimos now, and I realize that my nonreturnable cummerbund and bow tie cannot even be seen underneath my layers of survival gear.
Every few minutes, the door opens and someone rushes out and grabs a beer, asks us if we’re freezing, and then runs back inside. Most of them are in such a hurry they don’t even want to wait for me to make a drink. They just grab the first thing they feel on the table and dart off. So our being here is essentially pointless, except as a conversation piece: “And out the east window you’ll see the two guys who are being paid to freeze in the dark. Or maybe you won’t see them, but they’re out there.”
One of the wine bottles runs out and I have to open another, which is becoming difficult as I can no longer feel my fingers. When the wine drinkers have ducked back inside, the kid says, “Hey man, I think you cut yourself.”
I look down. In the slivers of light coming through the blinds, I can see blood all over my hands, my coat, my wine tool. I must have stabbed myself earlier while opening a bottle of wine. I get a couple of wine glasses off the table and take them over to the window where there is enough light to check them. There is blood on every one. I check the beer bottles. Yup, blood.
I peer through the blinds at the party-goers, standing around in clusters next to the roaring fireplace, chatting away, with their blood-soaked wineglasses held at elegant angles, pinkies extended. At any second, I expect one of them to notice, and to hear a blood-curdling shriek of horror. Fortunately, most of them are drinking a nice, dark Merlot, so the color is almost indistinguishable.
“Come look at this,” I tell the kid. He comes over. “They’re drinking my blood.”
He finds this funny. Way too funny. He bursts into shrieks of uncontrollable giggling and I realize he is plastered. When he catches his breath, he asks me, way louder than necessary and slurring slightly, if he can have another bourbon and Coke.
“Sure, why not.”
Patrice sticks her head out the door. “You guys can break it down,” she says. The kid thinks this is hilarious too. She looks at him oddly.
“Everything okay out here?” she asks me.
“Wonderful.” Patrice seems a lot more upbeat now that her party is going well, and she’s had a few belts herself, but I don’t know how she’s going to feel about returning the kid to the neighbor’s house covered in his own puke. There’s still the issue of being paid to resolve, so it might be better if I just break down the oyster table for him.
“I’ll take care of this,” I tell him. All it involves is putting all the stuff in the garage. “Why don’t you just go on home.”
“Naw, I’m fine. I’m gonna go talk to Missy.”
“Who’s Missy?”
The kid explains that Patrice has a daughter to whom he has taken a shine, and he plans to go and introduce himself to her after his work here at the oyster table is finished.
“Why don’t you let it go until tomorrow?” I advise. “I’m sure she’s not going anywhere.”
“MISSY!” he screams. He takes another swig of bourbon and Coke and staggers toward the house. I’ve created a fucking monster. He’s going to go charging through the party like Ben Braddock from The Graduate, howling this girl’s name. I intercept him and reason with him for a few minutes, and finally get him to start breaking the oyster table down, keeping a close eye on him. Fortunately, nature intervenes yet again, and a massive snowstorm begins. I now have an excuse to get the hell out of here.
I find Patrice in the kitchen, idly washing some wineglasses while she chats with a guest.
“Hi,” I tell her. “It’s snowing pretty bad out. I’d better be getting back into the city before they close the line.”
“Sure,” she says. She goes to get her purse. She pulls out cash. Stroke of luck. If it had been a check, I’d have had to go through the drawn-out process of telling her my name, revealing the dark secret that I wasn’t Corey after she’d been calling me that all night. “Is Tony all right out there? He seemed odd.”
“Cold was getting to him, I guess.”
“It did get chilly, didn’t it?” She hands me a wad of twenties. We say our good-byes. As I’m walking towards the door, I hear her guest who is holding a wineglass say, “Hey, is this blood?” I start walking faster. Outside, I look for Tony to say good-bye, and see that he is climbing up a drain pipe on the far wall of the house.
“Later, dude,” I tell him.
“Shhhhh,” he says. Then screams, “MISSY’S ROOM IS RIGHT HERE!”
“Yeah … well, have a good night.” I run for the train station.