The school principal was tall and broad across the shoulders. His grey-flecked hair tumbled past his collarbones. He wore a bolo tie set off by a blue topaz.
It was July of 2008, and I had arrived for my interview lathered in sweat. My car’s radiator fan was busted and I couldn’t afford to get it repaired. The only way to stop the rad from overheating was to blast the excess hot air through the vents into my face. A crucifix of sweat darkened the front of my dress shirt even as the school’s a/c raised gooseflesh on my forearms.
I’d applied for the position of Lunch Supervisor. I was thirty-two years old. I had prior experience with both lunch, as a consumer of it, and supervision, from an amusement park job where someone had slapped a badge on my chest and paid me an extra quarter an hour, but I had no specific experience in Lunch Supervision per se. According to the job description, the successful applicant would, among other duties, clean up the food prep area following procedures outlined in the Food Services Handbook. I had no specific experience in this either, though I’d washed my fair share of dishes.
What was my background? A variety of odd jobs: tree planter, whale watcher, ESL teacher, house painter, librarian. Prone to wanderlust, I had never worked any job for long. I’d cobbled together one of those whimsical CVs you often read in writers’ biographies: Before taking up writing full-time, Writer X toiled as an itinerant shepherd, a cook at a nudist camp, an apprentice embalmer, an [insert bizarre short-term gig]. Those bios were fun to read on the back flap of a book, but when one of them crossed the desk of a fellow such as this principal … you couldn’t blame him for suspecting he was dealing with a flake. A sweaty flake.
The sweat was one part broken radiator and two parts desperation. I needed this job. I had reached a point in my life where I had begun to apply for gigs willy-nilly, as the ones I may have once competently vied for had been snatched up by more qualified applicants. My bank account—never robust—had dwindled to the point where, upon spying the balance, you might think it belonged to a boy who had cleared a few bucks mowing his neighbours’ lawns. I had begun to look for jobs whose requirements entailed, basically, a pulse. And even then I was coming up empty handed. The week prior I’d applied to be a worm harvester. As I interpreted it, the role of a harvester was to comb through enormous tubs of dirt, plucking up nightcrawlers for sale at bait shops and the like. The supervisor of the worm-harvesting operation had one critical need: that I own rubber boots. I wasn’t wearing any during the interview but assured him I could get a pair. The supervisor seemed dubious—less of my ability to acquire boots, I assumed, than his sense that I did not have the harvester’s je ne sais quoi, me with my pillowy hands and overeducated face. He sent me away. A few steps outside his office the realization dawned: Craig Davidson, you are not worm-harvester material.
“What drew you to this opportunity?” the principal now asked.
My crippling poverty? I thought but did not say.
“Well, let’s see. I get along well with kids.” I smiled and tried a joke: “Plus I’m a huge fan of tater tots.”
The principal gave me the kind of look I imagined he might make if he were to spy a slug in his slipper. What had he expected me to say—that as a teen I’d been the Dishwashing King of Crystal Lake Camp and was itching to get back into my old championship form? He rose and cracked the window. I could hear a custodian banging away on the playground equipment, fixing something; each hammer stroke rang crisply in the afternoon air. The principal ran his eyes over my resume again.
“You worked at a library in your last job. Not for very long by the looks of it.”
“It’s an interesting story,” I said, though I could tell he would not find it remotely interesting. “We had a ficus plant behind the checkout desk. I watered it. There was a plastic watering can right beside it. Anyway, turns out it was another librarian’s job. We all had our little assigned tasks. One was to order golf pencils. Another was to mix juice for storytime. So I watered this plant and it was someone else’s job and that person got ticked and reported me. My supervisor reprimanded me for stepping outside of my bounds and it all felt so stifling and suffocating that I … in a rash moment I … well, I quit.”
He eyed me evenly. “You quit. Over a ficus.”
No, I didn’t quit over a ficus—not exactly. The whole ficus fandango drove me over the edge. I could have told him I was standing up to a bureaucratic system that doled out demerits for watering plants, but who cared? The library had already hired somebody else to check the books out. Somebody who obeyed the rules and wasn’t a brash firebrand—who buckled down and ordered the goddamn golf pencils, as the task-board clearly stated. So why had I watered that plant? To make an unnecessary and half-assed point. Well, bully for you, Karen Silkwood! Trying to defend myself now would make me look more impulsive, more prone to pique, more … flaky. It would only convince the principal that I was liable to quit this job for no good reason, too.
The truth was, I’d quit the library while riding a minor high. I had sold a piece of writing to a big American magazine. Davidson was on the comeback trail! Find some other stiff to order your golf pencils, I’d crowed inwardly. Stupid, stupid me.
The principal flipped my application facedown on his desk and pinned it under his thumb.
“I want to thank you for coming in.”
I exited the school doors under a metallic sky. Walking back to my car in the crucible of that late summer afternoon, one undeniable fact struck me like a wrecking ball.
Craig Davidson, you are not Lunch Supervisor material.
I started the car. Pebbles of safety glass sparkled on the floormats. Just last week, punks had smashed the driver’s side window to steal the spare change from the cup-holder. I could have used those coins—probably more than those faceless punks did. I drove home beneath scalloped clouds, the day’s swelter made worse by the broiled air pouring from the vents. On the upside, the busted window that I could not afford to fix allowed a semi-cooling zephyr to blow across my face. I knuckled sweat from my eyes and thumped the steering wheel.
“Davidson, you dingbat. You blew it.”
At home I put the kettle on and ripped open a few packets of No Name Instant Oatmeal. The stuff was cheap. It filled you up. As a university student I’d lived for weeks on potatoes. A ten-pound bag of spuds ran you four bucks. Baked, boiled, mashed. That had been nearly fifteen years ago, and I’d never thought I might be back on the potato diet. But it was looming.
The kettle shrieked. I doused the oatmeal and ate with determined bites. Yum, yum, yum. A bumblebee fretted behind the kitchen drapes. The same one, I was sure, that had flown through the unscreened window every day for the past week. It must have left a pheromone trail, thinking there was something tasty in my kitchen. Poor misguided thing.
I covered the bee with a glass and slid a sheet of paper underneath. The bee buzzed hectically, the paper vibrating against my fingers. I took it to the front door and let it fly away. See you tomorrow, little guy!
A sheet of Xeroxed paper was poking out of the mailbox.
Immediate openings for School Bus Drivers! it read.
No experience necessary!
Interesting, interesting.
Will provide quality training!
Well, assumedly.
Must pass background check and drug screening.
No skeletons of that sort rattling around in my closet.
It was your textbook case of mutual desperation: A company eager enough to solicit applicants through leaflet bombing meets a man in dire enough straits to make life-altering decisions based on random papers shoved into his mailbox. There was a number. I called it. When nobody picked up I left a message. Before long a female recruiter called back.
“You left a message?”
“I did.”
She seemed somehow relieved to hear it. An interview was scheduled for the very next day.