It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I don’t like to work. They say, “Get a job doing what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life,” or some bullshit like that, but I like doing absolutely nothing, and nobody’s paying me to do that. Trust me, I’ve tried. If I could get paid for eating, I would do that, but at this point, people should be paying me to stop eating.
I should clarify, it’s not because I’m lazy, or at least it’s not just because I’m lazy. I hate working because I’m actively bad at it.
My first job was at a bank in the suburbs of Chicago, which you might think is an odd place for a sixteen-year-old to work, and I would agree, but my mother’s best friend worked there and I’ve never been above blatant nepotism. Working at a bank when you’re sixteen is just like in the movies where the boy next door works at some cute place like a Dairy Queen and gets cute dollops of ice cream on his nose while he’s dipping cones in melted chocolate, except instead of a Dairy Queen, it was the accounting department that my mom’s friend worked at, and instead of ice cream, it was blotches of charcoal toner from the malfunctioning office printer. Basically the same thing.
It was an old bank, the same one that my mom worked at when she was my age but had to quit because she got knocked up with my brother and chose a life of motherhood instead of a fulfilling career in suburban banking. One of her best friends still oversaw the accounting department, and I politely hinted at a family party that I was finally old enough to legally wear a necktie in public and that perhaps I could use a job that might help pay for my budding necktie collection and that my passion, obviously, was to work in the accounting department of the local branch of my friendly neighborhood bank. Besides, when I was a kid, I used to go to my dad’s office and sit in the corner with one of those receipt machines and type numbers into it wildly as it spit out an ever-winding snake of paper containing my meaningless calculations. It made me feel important, because people with receipt machines are important, and it was possibly the only qualification I had to work at an actual financial institution. My mother’s friend said she would see what she could do, perhaps there were some menial tasks I could help with during the summer. The next day, I was officially an accounting associate.
I wore a button-down dress shirt tucked into khakis and a necktie that my dad tied around my neck for my first day. My mom took a picture of me in the kitchen before I left that morning, and it looks like one of those pictures that terrorists take of people they’ve kidnapped, except sadder.
When I walked into the bank, I was directed to the accounting department: down two flights of stairs, along a long, dark hallway, past the mail room, and beyond the flickering light.
My boss was an oversized woman named Shirley, a professional working mom who wore brightly colored blazers with shoulder pads and gaudy jewelry, and screamed when she sneezed, like an actual scream that you scream when someone is stabbing you with a broken wine bottle. Shirley’s office, with a window covered in those corporate white blinds, overlooked the accounting department cubicles. From her throne, she could watch all of us labor beneath her.
The cubicles were what you’d expect from a typical bank office: overhead fluorescent lighting, creaky black desk chairs in front of computers that only produced pale green text on black screens, and hideous carpeting to muffle all of our screams.
Out in the open cubicles sat my coworkers, six middle-aged women—Linda, Patricia, Cynthia, Maxine, Deborah, and Janice—all of whom had worked in that very office for longer than I’d been alive, each crazier than the last, perhaps because they’d been trapped together in that very same basement since the bank was built above it forty years earlier.
Shirley led me to my desk, or rather, led me to the desk I’d be sharing with Janice. I was to be, in essence, Janice’s protegé. Janice worked only part-time to begin with, and she was slated to leave for a month in the coming weeks, so my job was to learn her tasks so I could perform them while she was away.
It took thirty minutes to discover just how special Janice truly was. She was a small, paper-thin woman, the kind who might blow away in a particularly weak breeze or fall over after a gentle cough. Her eyes looked like they were always asking for your permission, and you just had to be like, “Janice, stop being weird and show me how the copy machine works.” She was constantly crumbling with stress. Every minor problem was a cause for major concern. If we ran out of paper clips, it was a category-five shit storm, and Janice was seconds away from bursting into flames.
We sat side by side at her desk, in front of her whirring computer, and she walked me through her day. First, we looked at all the business checks that needed to be signed by two people and made sure they were actually signed by two people in case a local pizza shop co-owner decided to stage a silent coup in the dead of night and stealthily withdraw all the pizza money from the account he shared with his wife.
As we were flicking through the checks, she stopped me and asked, “Do you have kids?”
My sixteen-year-old self found this question surprising. Yes, in her defense, I was wearing a shirt and tie, which might normally make a person look more mature, but not in my case. Putting a shirt and tie on me was a lot like putting a shirt and tie on a baby, which is to say it made the outside observer even more painfully aware of the fact that what they were looking at was a literal baby in a shirt and tie.
“No,” I said. “I’m sixteen.”
“Oh,” Janice said. “Well. My daughter just turned eighteen and she’s having her second baby.”
“Oh,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“Yeah,” Janice said. “And it’s with a different guy this time.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, that’s . . . nice, I guess.”
I should point out that I have absolutely no judgment of Janice’s daughter. I mean, hell, she’d gotten two more guys to knock her up than I ever had. Good for her. I hope by now she’s had ten other babies with ten other guys and every Christmas she takes a picture with all the kids on Santa’s lap and then she mails the picture to all twelve of her babies’ daddies with a note that says, “Once you pop, the fun don’t stop.” It would be adorable, and I’d be happy for her.
Still, though, how is a sixteen-year-old virgin supposed to respond to that information? Especially when it’s being provided by a woman I’d met literal seconds before this. But this was my first job, and I wasn’t really sure how people were supposed to behave in an office environment. Maybe teen pregnancy was just what grown-ups talked about when they worked.
As the days wore on, it became painfully obvious that I had no idea what I was doing. I was a child playing office with a receipt machine. When it came time for my twenty-minute lunch break, I’d stand outside Shirley’s office and wait for her to get off the phone, like a kid waiting for his mom to get out of the bathroom, just so I could ask her for permission to walk down the hallway to the break room and eat the snack I’d brought from home. I thought I wasn’t allowed to leave the room without her express permission. Some days, I’d spend longer than twenty minutes just waiting to get her attention.
To give you a full picture of just how bad I was at this job, and how ridiculous it was to let a sixteen-year-old boy be in charge of money that didn’t come with a board game, I fucked up one particularly important task.
One of my jobs was to process something called fraud reports. To this day, I don’t entirely understand what those fraud reports were, but they sounded important. Fraud is a bad word in general, and it’s a particularly bad word at a bank where, ya know, people keep their money and jewels. A fraud report, I assume, was something that required a great deal of care. From what I remember, it was a rundown of all sorts of flagged activity, like unusual withdrawals or transfers or weird signatures, like when your credit card company calls you and asks if it’s really you that’s been spending one hundred and fifty dollars a day at the dildo emporium in Queens, and you have to explain that yes, it’s perfectly acceptable for a grown man to visit the dildo emporium at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, as you’ve explained before, so please stop calling this number because the emporium charges are going to continue.
I worked at the central branch of the bank, and my fraud report task was to break down each day’s accounts by branch and fax out a copy of the relevant information to the corresponding locations. Essentially, a little message to say, “Hey, one of your clients is maybe getting robbed, so be on the lookout for that.” Each day, I would make a small pile for each branch—I was nothing if not an organized gay—and, one by one, carry the stacks to the fax machine, because yes, we used fax machines, this was the 2000s and fax machines were the height of telecommunications technology, and I’d send each stack on its merry little way.
For the children who may be unfamiliar, a fax machine was the monstrous bastard child of a phone, a printer, a scanner, a calculator, and the devil, and to wield power over it, one had to smear the blood of one’s firstborn son at the machine’s feet, so as to appease the beast within. I believe, to this day, that no person on earth has ever truly learned all the secrets of a fax machine. Really, you just push a bunch of buttons in rapid succession, and then jam your thumb onto a giant green switch, and pray to God that whatever you’re trying to send happens to make its way to the other side. It’s about 5 percent technology, 95 percent voodoo magic.
I, however, prided myself on my fax machine mastery. Not to be crude, but I made that fax machine my bitch. I owned that shit. Every day, I walked over to that machine, and typed each number like I was slicing open the sternum of a dying patient so I could imbue her with a new beating heart that I’d grown myself from a petri dish. The machine was my instrument, and faxing was my beautiful music.
I was so confident in my work that, after every session, I would take each branch’s stack of fraud reports to the shredder and dump them in, the crunching of the paper acting as my final confirmation of mastery over my domain.
It wasn’t until one day some weeks into my accounting career that I noticed, as I was confidently strumming numbers into the fax machine’s dial pad, that a tiny symbol on the document feeder showed a little piece of paper whose corner was folded to show lines of text on the opposite side—a symbol, in other words, to suggest that documents were to be inserted text side down. I had not been inserting my documents text side down. I had been inserting my documents text side up, which meant that each day, when I’d delicately organized my fraud report piles, carried them one by one to the fax machine, placed them finely into the document feeder, effortlessly typed the numbers into the dial pad, and listened seductively as the music of each digit’s tone rang in my ear and the machine buzzed to life, slurping up my papers and spitting them out, emitting a final climactic beep to indicate the transaction was complete, throughout all this time, I’d been faxing the blank side of the paper out into the world and then shredding the originals. Every day, measly accounting associates in local bank branches around the greater Chicagoland area were wondering why in the hell their fax machines were buzzing awake in the middle of the day to spit out blank stacks of paper, and also why they hadn’t been receiving any fresh fraud reports lately and if perhaps we’d simply eradicated fraud altogether but somehow inherited a fax machine virus. I’d been sowing silent chaos for weeks, and I had no idea.
Because I was never entirely sure how important those fraud reports were, I don’t know how much damage I caused by allowing some six weeks of fraud to go uninvestigated, but I should point out for posterity that the bank in question is no longer in business, and I can’t say that I am solely or even partially responsible for that fact, but I also can’t say that I’m not.
For the sake of owning up to my faults and placing responsibility where it belongs, I’d like to say that I absolutely and completely blame Janice for this mistake. It’s obviously possible that she showed me how to use the fax machine correctly on day one, but let’s be real, she probably didn’t. And for that, Janice can never be forgiven. Obviously she should’ve taken greater care to show a young, helpless child like myself that you have to place your stack of precious documents in the fax machine one way or they may never be seen by a person in the world ever again.
And while we’re accepting blame, I’d also like to blame literally every other person in that office for being such a distraction. Maybe I would’ve faxed those documents correctly had it not been for Cynthia, who got up every ten minutes to smoke a cigarette and on more than one occasion, if my nose was right, drink from a flask of vodka she kept in her blazer pocket. Or for Patricia, who spoke rapid, angry Spanish into her desk phone for hours on end. Or for Deborah, who went to the movie theater with her boyfriend every Friday to see literally every movie released that week, only to come in on Monday and recount each plot in its entirety with absolutely no regard for spoilers. Or, worst of all, were it not for Janice and her aura of darkness.
I don’t want to discredit the obvious stress she was under as a working woman responsible for two grandchildren, but as my days as a full-blown accounting associate continued, so did Janice’s days as the epitome of melancholia.
On one afternoon, the girls and I were talking about vacations we’d been on, presumably to try visualizing some form of escape from the hell we were then laboring under. Maxine had recently been to Denver with her new husband. I was getting ready to go to Michigan with my family. Deborah couldn’t take vacations because she’d miss that week’s newest movies and it would throw off her whole schedule. It was a lovely conversation.
And then, out of nowhere, Janice says, “Well, we like to go camping. But the last time we went, our dog committed suicide.”
There was silence before someone said, “Wait. What?”
Yes, Janice explained, they’d been camping recently and had set up one of those elevated tents, the kind that ties to a few different tree trunks and hangs a couple feet above the ground to make the tent less accessible to bears or other woodland menaces, and when they stepped away, their dog managed to nuzzle the tent flap open and jump out. But he was still wearing his leash and he never made it to the ground.
Now, if your mouth is hanging open, you are not alone. We all sat in silence trying to process what she’d just said, entirely unprompted. Classic Janice.
“Jesus, Janice!” I said. “That’s awful.” Because that’s the only thing you can say to that kind of thing. Even though what you really wanna say is, “I don’t blame him. I would’ve done the same.”
That conversation trailed off into nothing.
But that was hardly the height of Janice’s melodrama.
There was a handful of weeks where Janice left on grand-maternity leave, and I took over her tasks full-time. It was a perfectly fine month, despite the fraud report mess (which, by the way, nobody ever noticed, and you know I kept that shit to myself). I was free to wreak havoc entirely on my own. And yes, in case you’re wondering, I did have access to everybody’s account information—again, no bank should have given a sixteen-year-old this level of clearance—and yes, I did look up all of my friends’ bank accounts. For business.
When Janice finally returned, rather than having her resume the duties she’d been responsible for forever and that I had surreptitiously taken over, Shirley relegated her to a series of menial secretarial tasks that needed dedicated work. Now, far be it from me to point out that it should’ve been the sixteen-year-old pipsqueak who got demoted to bitch work, and not the desolate woman who had worked there for years, but it was Shirley’s decree, and she was bigger and louder than all of us, so we did what she said. It also didn’t help that it was painfully obvious that I’d only gotten this job because my mother’s friend ran the whole place, that I was only a pimply interloper who had come into Janice’s space and declared it my own. But I do as I’m told.
Here was Janice’s task. Sometimes, people get sued. Sometimes they get sued because of money stuff. It’s very complicated, and I would explain it to you, but honestly you wouldn’t understand. Just trust me on this. Sometimes, when people get sued because of money stuff, they have to produce a bunch of documents, like bank statements and cashed checks and pictures of receipts from the dildo emporium, and it’s up to the bank to print all that shit out, except maybe the dildo receipts, but all the rest of it for sure. And this particular summer, there was a case that required every document from one account for basically the past thirty years. Which sounds like a perfectly easy task until you remember that Al Gore didn’t invent the Internet until 1996, and almost all of those documents weren’t on a computer. Instead, images of all of those checks were on tiny rolls of Kodak film that had to be inserted into a tiny machine and scrolled through individually, like a giant version of one of those ghastly red View-Master toys from the 1970s that you held up to your face and clicked through to see pictures of Bambi’s mom getting shot.
The Kodak machine was kept in a dank, windowless closet in a corner of the basement, and whoever was on printing duty (Janice, God bless her feeble soul) had to sit in a tiny chair in front of the film machine and individually turn through and print thousands of checks, one at a time, hour by hour, for days on end. In retrospect, I’m convinced that the film machine was not actually designed by Kodak for printing images, but created as some type of governmental experiment on mind control and torture, devised to reduce its users to their basest forms. By intention, I think, they designed the machine to run out of toner after every twenty-five pages, and you’d have to turn the whole damn thing around, take out its toner feed bag, shake it like you were seasoning a chicken breast, and put it back in the machine in the hopes that your shakes had reinvigorated its will to cooperate. But of course, each time you retrieved the toner bag, the machine would cough out a plume of thick black smoke that would settle on your hands and face and pants and lungs, because the room was the size of a closed oven and there was nowhere you could move to escape the inky cloud. You would emerge from printing duty like a coal miner returning from the shaft. It was the office equivalent of solitary confinement.
It took approximately three days for Janice to break entirely. Before noon on the third day, the machine had already jammed ten times, she’d shaken the toner bag a dozen times more, and smashed the machine to within an inch of its life, and finally, she came stumbling from the room wailing in distress, absolutely covered in charcoal toner dust, her sobs creating clear streaks of tears through the black soot on her cheeks, her hair a nest of ink and blood and tears, her body a shriveled shell of its already shriveled former self, stained, soiled, and defeated.
We all surrounded her like a dog that had just been rescued from a well, patting her on the back and offering her water and food from our hands. Of course, there was nothing else I could do. I volunteered to take Janice’s place, but Shirley was sending her home to recuperate, and the regular work needed to be done.
The next day, Janice returned and Shirley relegated her to some other menial task in a different closet with a different machine folding papers that needed to be stuffed into envelopes, and it took an hour before Janice came sobbing around the corner yet again, and Shirley had to be like, “Goddammit, Janice, get your shit together,” and she got sent home another time and we all kind of silently bowed our heads.
The rest of that summer didn’t get much better. You may be wondering what happened to Janice, and the truth is, I have no idea. I think her only relief was that I eventually went back to school and quit working. I can only assume she died halfway through Deborah’s retelling of Avatar, but nobody can be sure.
But there are three lessons I’d like to point out from this summer as an accounting associate. First, having an office job is basically like working in a coal mine, so we need to stop acting like those are two completely different things, because my lungs are still covered in toner (yes, I had to finish the job that Janice couldn’t). Two, we cannot send our nation’s Janices to the inevitable war against the robots, because we will fail. And three, never trust a child with your community’s finances unless you want an entire banking institution to crumble. You’ve been warned.
• • •
Of course, I’d like to think that working at that bank prepared me for life aboveground, but I left that office less equipped for the world than before.
The next summer, I got a job as a cashier at a department store, and I won’t tell you what department store that was, but I will tell you that this particular department store has way too many fucking coupons. And coupons are a scam, unless you’re one of those people on one of those extreme couponing shows, which doesn’t prove anything except that some people in Middle America have too much time on their hands and also too much room in their houses for five hundred excess packages of paper towels.
Here’s the thing that you learn almost immediately when you work in retail: the customer is absolutely never right. When you get a job at this particular department store, they make you watch an orientation video in a little room behind one of those doors that says “Employees Only,” and the video that tells you things like “don’t sexually harass your coworker Brenda” and also “the customer is always right,” except the problem is, only one of those things is actually true. It’s actually dangerous to be teaching these two things together when one of them is so obviously a lie, because it casts doubt on the whole damn production. We’d all be better off if the presentation just said, “Listen. Don’t sexually harass Brenda and also, the guy who wants 15 percent off that kitchen mixer he found in the sale bin can go fuck himself because it was never in the sale bin and he knows it.”
Retail workers experience the worst of America every single day, and most of the time, we don’t even let them sit while they do it. You just have to stand there behind a cash register for hours while people yell at you, because that’s what retail is: getting yelled at. You’d think, perhaps, that as a working professional I’d have been better at dealing with people, but considering the only other job I’d had was spent working in an office underground, my people skills were generally lacking, and yes, I got yelled at a whole bunch.
There was a man who yelled at me because I refused to accept a one-hundred-dollar bill so he could take a shirt that he hadn’t yet purchased out to his car and compare it to a pair of pants he’d bought somewhere else, which theoretically makes sense, since the shirt was probably worth only six dollars to begin with, but still! You can’t just go around letting people leave the store with stuff they didn’t pay for! I kindly explained that he could purchase the shirt and return it if it didn’t work out, but he definitely couldn’t just walk out of the store with it, so he bought it and brought it back to return it and then I was like, “Sir, you have to take this to customer service because I can’t process your return here,” and then he turned the kind of red that you only see on chickens’ dangly things and he started cursing at me, and honestly, I probably would’ve cursed at me, too, but those are the rules.
There was a guy who tried purchasing a candle that someone had left on the shelf from another store (because it was truly an ugly candle and, I assume, they happened to come to their senses and abandon it then and there). I tried to explain that there was no way I could sell this man the candle because it wasn’t ours to sell (honestly, he could’ve just taken it), but he insisted on paying for it and refused to leave until I could tell him the price.
There was a woman who asked me where the exercise equipment was, and I pointed her to the opposite corner of the store, only for her to return twenty minutes later to scream that she’d said “exercise clothes,” which happened to be directly behind where I was standing all along.
There was a group of teenagers who tried to buy a pair of pants with a bunch of jewelry stuffed in the pockets, and when I pulled it out, they yelled at me for trying to accuse them of youthful thievery.
There was a woman who yelled at me because I refused to accept her coupon because it had expired, and normally we were supposed to accept expired coupons, but her coupon had expired eight years earlier and there are literally new coupons every week. I mean, c’mon. Put in some basic effort, lady.
And finally there was the woman who accused me of trying to ruin her credit score by asking her to sign up for a store credit card, even though all I was doing was trying to save her 15 percent.
But here’s where I need to pause and say, sometimes, the customer has a point. I’m not saying they’re right. I’m just saying, sometimes they have a point.
I hate when cashiers ask me to sign up for a store credit card. Sure, you save 15 percent now, but then you miss one payment and they charge you a bajillion dollars in interest fees and I already recklessly spend enough money without my money costing me even more money, so I’d rather we just avoid that whole mess and I pay with normal money like Jesus intended when he invented department stores in the first place. But of course “no” is never an acceptable answer when 15 percent off your entire purchase is at stake, and there’s an inevitable back-and-forth that always ends with the cashier casting judgment on you for refusing their kind and charitable attempt to save you seven dollars off a pair of pants that you’ll only wear for a month.
Having been on the other side of that transaction, though, I can say that it’s not any better for the cashier either, especially if you’re as terrible at salesmanship as I am. After all, I was hired as a cashier, not a salesperson. My job was to swipe your poor fashion choices over a laser inside a countertop and then tell you how much money you were shitting away. Nothing in my job description called for trying to trick people who shouldn’t have credit cards into signing up for a fucking credit card. Trying to sell people credit cards felt dirty. The first trick: when a customer is ready to check out, ask them, “Will this be going on your store card today?” If they say yes, great, we’ve already got ’em. If they say no, then you’ve got yourself a brand-new target. Congratulations, you’re halfway to being a sleazy credit-card salesman.
Of course, as dirty as it is, there’s a little thing called incentives, and in this case, every time I got someone to fill out an application (“It only takes two minutes! I just need your social security number, a driver’s license, and a urine sample, but the bathroom is right there!”), I’d get two whole dollars. And sure, it seemed like a lot of begging for only two dollars, but when you make eight dollars an hour, an extra two dollars every hour is nothing to piss at. Plus, every time you scored an application, you got to pick up the store intercom phone and announce “Code 4-7,” which was a signal to all the other store employees that you’d gotten a credit card application and were therefore better than them. Besides, you were helping the less fortunate by saving them 15 percent off their entire purchase!
But mixing together competition, credit scores, and adolescent stupidity isn’t the greatest idea in the world. Before long, I got into a daily “Code 4-7” battle with Rose, the jewelry counter cashier who nabbed a few applicants every hour. I couldn’t lose to an old woman hawking 15 percent off tawdry bracelets under the jewelry-counter lights.
The most common refrain from customers was “I don’t think I’d get approved,” which is a perfectly normal and responsible thing to say. If you know your credit score is bad, trying to sign up for a new credit card is probably not the greatest idea. But I found out that we could still give customers the 15 percent discount even if their application wasn’t approved. Which seems like a terrible business decision, but I didn’t question it. After I found that out, I’d start telling customers, “Look. It doesn’t hurt to fill out an application. Even if you don’t get approved, you’ll still get 15 percent off!”
In my defense, I was seventeen, I had never had a credit card, and I didn’t know what the fuck a credit score actually was. To be perfectly honest, I’m still not even sure what a credit score is, and I have no idea what makes it go up or down, besides making monthly sacrifices at the tomb of J. P. Morgan. So seventeen-year-old me, in those tight khakis and that ill-fitting black polo shirt, had no clue I was doing a bad thing, that I was exploiting the terrible financial choices of unsuspecting consumers. I just wanted two extra dollars and the satisfaction of hearing my voice reverberate throughout the store over Jewelry Counter Rose’s cries.
It was all fun and games until one day, when Rose was on a particularly successful streak, I got desperate and pressed a woman who I should’ve known was a clear and obvious “no” if she was absolutely sure she didn’t want to save 15 percent off her gorgeous selection of capri pants and crop tops (“Even if you don’t qualify, you’ll still get the discount off these amazing looks!”) and she snapped and launched into a long (and not at all unwarranted) tirade on why corporations were ruining the middle class, and at some point in her screams, I’m pretty sure she predicted the 2008 financial crisis, but I wasn’t entirely sure because I was crying at the time.
After that incident—and a not-so-gentle reminder from my boss that the point of offering discounts was to try to get approved applications so we could screw people for months and not just one day—I eased off my grind and allowed Rose to take it away. I figured I’d let her have this. Cosmically speaking, letting Rose get ahead was my way of making up for Janice. Even though that clearly wasn’t the case.
• • •
My third and final job as a struggling adolescent (before I graduated college and became a struggling adult) was a desk job at the law school of my undergraduate alma mater. I thought, for a few terrifying months, that perhaps I’d graduate and go to law school. Nothing in my professional history suggested this was a good idea, but I was an asshole and I liked money, so I figured I might be able to give it a shot. Working at a law school would put me right where the action was.
I got an interview and wore my finest shirt and tie, tucked into my finest khakis. It was June, the beginning of the height of summer in Chicago, and ninety degrees outside. I was living at home in the suburbs that summer, and the law school was downtown, right down the street from the famous Chicago water tower, but a full train ride and bus ride away from where I was.
I was not used to taking trains, especially not commuter trains. The only train I’d ever really taken was the train at the zoo that takes you around to all the different animals so you don’t have to walk. Commuter trains are way too intense, mostly because the same people ride them every single morning. That’s the suburban routine, a manifestation of the American dream. You live in a nice family house in the suburbs, and every morning, you kiss your children goodbye, pour a nice big travel mug of coffee, get on a train, and ride it to your fancy office in the city. It’s literally the same people you’re traveling with every morning. They all stand in the same spot on the train platform so they can hop on the same car and get to the same seat, where they read the same newspaper over and over every day until they die. It’s terrifying to witness. One morning that summer, on my birthday no less, my mom called me from home to wish me a happy birthday because she’d been asleep when I left. She barely made it to the second stanza before the woman behind me violently tapped me on the shoulder to scold me for taking a phone call on the “quiet car.” I was quiet car shamed! On my own birthday! Commuter trains are intense.
Of course, the day of my interview was my first day taking the train. I waited on the platform with my messenger bag around my shoulder and across my chest like a true budding cosmopolitan professional. I was already nervous. There was a lot going on at the train platform. A man with a clipboard was going around asking for signatures to support his candidacy for neighborhood council, and I had to tell him no three times before he’d leave me alone. It was all very overstimulating. As the train came into view, though, I started to panic. What if I was on the wrong side of the tracks? What if I got on this train and it took me in the wrong direction? Before I had a chance to ask any of my fellow passengers, the train had arrived, the doors were opening, a conductor was yelling “all aboard,” and I was freaking out. So I stepped onto the train, one foot still on the platform, and tried asking the first person I could find if this was heading into Chicago, but she hesitated, and so did I, and the door started closing while I was still partially on the platform. I managed to get my second foot into the train before the door shut entirely, but my messenger bag, that holy symbol of young budding professionalism, got caught by the doors and trapped outside of the train, still wrapped around my torso, pinning me to the inside of the door with the strap tight against my chest like a car seat belt when you slam on the brakes. It was just slack enough for me to wriggle myself out of it, but the bag was still trapped outside of the doors, dangling out there like a loose button. I tried desperately to pry the doors open, but either I was too weak or they were too strong, because they didn’t budge. There was an emergency brake, but I’m terrible at deciding what amounts to an emergency, most of all when I’m in the middle of an emergency, and I didn’t pull it. I could do nothing but bang on the doors in exasperation and hope there’d be no tight tunnels between this station and the next.
Luckily, just as hope seemed all but lost and I’d kissed all of my prized belongings away, including, most important, my stack of laminated résumés and, less important, my six-year-old laptop computer, a man on the platform—the man with the clipboard no less, at whom I’d scoffed minutes earlier—noticed my bag, and my wildly frightened face in the window, and he started waving his arms wildly at the conductor, and another person closer to the front of the train started waving their arms, and together they managed to get his attention. And just as the train was getting ready to lurch forward, it calmed to a halt and the doors opened.
I’m already prone to sweating, but I’m especially prone to sweating in humid summer heat, and I’m especially prone to sweating when I just got pinned against a train door. When I was in high school, I’d apply two coats of clinical-strength deodorant every morning before school and two again after gym class, and every morning, I’d wear an extra T-shirt underneath my clothes as a sort of buffer cloth to catch the excess moisture. There’s a paradox in a buffer sweat shirt, considering that the extra sweat-catching layer adds another piece of cloth to trap heat, but I did what had to be done to minimize the amount of visible leakage.
When I finally made it downtown, took a bus, and got off at the stop closest to the law school, some four blocks away from the building I was interviewing in, I walked through the humid Chicago heat in blaring sunlight. By the time I reached the building, I’d already sweat through the entirety of my buffer shirt and it was starting to leak through the outer layers. I flicked some water on my face from a water fountain on the first floor and stood with my legs and arms spread apart for a few minutes in an attempt to will away as much of the moisture as I could. But I was already running late.
And to make matters even fucking worse, there was no elevator and the office was on the fourth fucking floor. That’s the thing about these old university buildings. They tell you, “Oh, we’re such a great university, we’ve been teaching law to smart-asses since 1851, but also, our buildings were built before elevators existed so have fun walking up three thousand steps in the blistering heat because also air conditioners didn’t exist when this building was built either.”
When I made it up those four flights of stairs, my legs were shaking, my chest was heaving, and my body was spraying sweat clear across the room every time I turned my head. Call it a combination of nerves, stress, and utter weakness, but I was having some kind of attack, possibly of the heart variety or more likely the panic variety, and it wasn’t pretty.
Jackie, the head of the department I was interviewing for, found me leaning against the wall trying to catch my breath, and offered me a towel—not just a tissue, but a towel—and I said, “No thank you, I brought my own towel,” and eventually we went into her office, and I sat in front of a fan, and everything went just wonderfully after that.
I got the job, obviously—Jackie was no idiot—but I did have to walk up those stairs every morning, and it took a full two months before my entire body stopped convulsing after the entire process. Although the actual office wasn’t any better than the staircase. The only air-conditioning in the reception room where I worked was a spitting window unit that took approximately seventeen hours to start breathing. My first week, there was a wasp nest outside the window, so we couldn’t even open it for relief. And somehow, the wasps would find their way in, and obviously, because I was the biggest and youngest and manliest (i.e., the only man), it was my responsibility to kill them.
But I worked in that shitty jungle office for three entire summers. And it wasn’t in a basement. And there were no goddamn customers. So I’d say I’d moved sufficiently far up in life.