I needed a job because I needed money to pay rent, a position most people find themselves in at some point in time. More than that, I wanted to climb on to what I saw as the first rung of adulthood: a career-track job that you got business cards for and had to wear a suit to. I wanted to be taken seriously. I was obsessed with doing what I thought I should do because, up to this point, it’d worked out pretty well for me.
Sitting on a molded plastic chair in the temp agency office, I took the first job they offered me: working in a single-story beige warehouse Monday through Friday from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., preparing documents for digitization. This wasn’t anywhere near what I’d envisioned and I was pretty sure I didn’t need to wear a suit. But I also didn’t want to waste time waiting for someone to call me back about my apparently worthless résumé. If nothing else was going to pan out for me, I figured I might as well earn some money.
It was June 2006 and I was twenty-two years old. I’d graduated with honors from the University of Kansas the month before, feeling flush with accomplishment. Since my freshman year of high school, that’d been my goal, and I’d assumed that was all I needed to do in order to ensure lifelong success. The formula for life, as I understood it, was: you go to college, you get good grades, you graduate, you get a good job, and you live happily ever after, right?!
Somehow, that wasn’t working out. I was a rule follower, a syllabus and spreadsheet lover, but now, I was adrift without a rubric. I’d written what I thought was a very nice résumé and cover letter and sent it in response to no fewer than fifty-three different job openings located all over the country at nonprofits ranging from art museums to soup kitchens, all of which I figured would welcome a liberal arts major like myself with open arms. Not a single one called me back. Or emailed me back. Or even let me know they’d so much as received my application. I was throwing myself against the doors of adulthood, equipped with everything I’d been taught to bring to this stage of life, and no one was answering.
Every day I worked at that beige, one-story warehouse was a carbon copy of the day before: I opened a dusty, green, legal-size file folder, took out the top piece of paper, and pressed it down on the table under my palms, spreading from the center outward, my hands flattening each corner as I went. Next I checked for staples, which I’d remove like unwanted teeth with a sadistic rip from the metal jaws of my staple remover, heedless of the gaping maw left in its wake. I peeled off Post-it notes so old they barely posted anymore, and taped them down on all four sides to a blank piece of paper I’d whisk up with my rubber-covered fingertip from a stack in the center of the table. I’d then pick up the second piece of paper from the folder and begin afresh, as if for the first time, until I’d performed this ritual on every single piece of paper in the folder. Then I’d move on to the next folder in my in-box.
I sat on a metal folding chair at a plastic folding table with two other women in this windowless, cavernous warehouse. I was just five miles from where I’d blissfully spent the past four years double majoring in political science and creative writing, which I’d assumed would somehow alchemize into a profession. I’d never quite identified what that profession might be, but I figured that applying for jobs would be like applying for college: line up all the correct paperwork, check all the right boxes, and get accepted. That’s adulthood, right?!
The warehouse had gray-painted concrete walls and I couldn’t figure out why you’d bother to paint concrete gray, something I had plenty of time to mull over because there was no variation to my days, no additional tasks, nothing to do but get a box of files every morning and sit at my table for eight hours, straightening edges. The two women who worked alongside me were nice enough, and we’d chat as we worked or I’d listen to NPR on my headphones. I was sinking into depression and what I can honestly say was ennui: Was this why I’d gotten a BA? Why I’d pulled all-nighters for four years to eke out a 4.0? I felt like I was spiraling downward into an abyss that would terminate with me living in my parents’ basement, which wasn’t even finished, and babysitting their neighbor’s kids. (See? Ennui.) To me at twenty-two, that sounded like about the worst thing that could happen to a person. I hadn’t even lived at my parents’ house during summers since my freshman year. I wanted, more than anything, to be an independent person. A person who could find a job.
Adding to my embarrassment and frustration over my failure to launch was the fact that my closest confidant, my boyfriend, Nate, was hired for a real job (a job with a salary, that one might list on a résumé, and that one wouldn’t be mortified to admit one did) before we even graduated. I’d been a better student than Nate, with more As and more extracurriculars, so I seethed with jealousy. He had an internship all of our senior year, which he’d spent more time at than he had studying, and then they’d offered him a full-time position. My internship at the city arts center, conversely, had not translated into a job, even though I’d applied for their entry-level administrative assistant position. I’d spent more time studying, a strategy I was starting to question now that I was so raw with envy as I toiled in a warehouse at a plastic folding table. I felt duped. No one had warned me about this postgraduate purgatory of being educated but inexperienced and unqualified to do, well, really anything.
Sitting in my 1990 light blue Toyota Camry station wagon in the parking lot of the document scanning warehouse in late July, I had my cell phone clamped to my ear and I thought I was going to sweat to death. The air conditioning in the car—which I’d paid cash for myself at age sixteen, with money saved up from my babysitting and church receptionist gigs—didn’t work. The only way to stay cool was to run the fan on the highest setting. But the problem was that between the engine and the fan, I couldn’t hear my potential future boss on the line, sitting as she was in her office on the twenty-sixth floor of a building in midtown Manhattan, which I imagined to be sleek, snowy white, and generously air-conditioned. I’d had the car door open to allow in some hot Kansas breeze, but then I could hear my colleagues who were also on break chatting and laughing from the warehouse steps, oblivious to my potentially life-changing phone conversation over here. I waved to them so that if I passed out and didn’t come back into work, someone would find me before I roasted. I wedged a notebook between the steering wheel and my stomach and tried to take notes without smearing the ink with my sweat. I made a mental note to sit on the passenger side for any and all future phone interviews. This was my third call with AmeriCorps, and it sounded like they might be as desperate to hire someone as I was to be hired.
Nate’s job was in Kansas City so I’d started my search there, thinking we could live together. Although in all honesty, I wasn’t thinking we’d just live together; I was thinking we’d get engaged and then live together. I wanted everything adultlike to happen immediately: career, marriage, kids, house, and a dog too, come to think of it. I brought this up with Nate in what I considered a casual, wondering-what-you’re-thinking-about-us-and-marriage sort of way, which always seems to come off as aggressive and gauche when I try to do it. Due to my enduring lack of suavity, Nate knew exactly what I was driving at and flat out told me he didn’t want to get engaged until after we’d had some time in the real world. Some experience beyond our collegiate bubble that provided everything we needed: structure, purpose, a social life, beer. In retaliation for his mature coolheadedness, I veered my job search to the East Coast, since that seemed like a good way to show Nate how miserable his life would be without me.
After two months of fruitless searching I came across AmeriCorps, which didn’t pay a salary per se, but which did provide what seemed like worthy résumé fodder. At the very least, I figured it was several steps up from document-scanning doom in a warehouse in suburban Kansas, which is a pretty low bar to step over. Turns out, AmeriCorps wanted me. Offer letter in hand, I quit my document-scanning gig in what I imagined to be a triumphant flourish (although no one seemed to notice). It was late August and I retreated to my parents’ two-story brick subdivision home in suburban—far suburban—St. Louis, Missouri, to prepare for my decampment to the exotic-sounding New York City.
Later that week, I stood in the fluorescent-lit dressing room of the JCPenney at the West County mall wearing a size four, shoulder-padded, gray plaid skirt suit with pink piping and a pink top peeking out from underneath the jacket. My mom said it looked very professional, and since she and my dad offered to buy me, in her words, “a career wardrobe” as a graduation present, I agreed. This was a job in an office, after all, which I assumed meant wearing a suit and nylons every day. Equipped with five suits and two pairs of the only low heels that fit me—Naturalizer pumps, a brand patronized primarily by women my mother’s age—unengaged, and having never set (long, narrow) foot in New York City before in all my twenty-two years, I got on a plane bound for LaGuardia with the maximum allowable baggage.
As my taxi from the airport pulled up to a rundown, graffiti-covered, three-story walk-up in pre-gentrified Crown Heights, Brooklyn, conveniently located across the street from a blocks-long abandoned warehouse with not a single intact pane in its windows, I asked the driver to double-check the address, because there was no way this was my apartment. But he wasn’t wrong. This was, according to his map and the address I’d written down, where I now lived.
My roommates—two of my friends from college who also had offer letters for New York City–based jobs—had picked this place out, and to be fair, the only requirement I’d given them was “cheap.” I’d gotten on a plane in the suburban, safe, middle-class—I’d previously said “bland,” but bland was sounding pretty good right about now—Midwest and landed in one of the more notorious neighborhoods of urban, intimidating (to me, anyway), working-class Brooklyn.
As I climbed the stairs to my apartment with my suitcases digging into my palms and slamming against my legs, I hoped Nate was missing me in a painful, longing, I-should-have-proposed sort of way, because this had better be worth it. Unpacking didn’t take much time since there was a firm ceiling on how much I could cram into two suitcases and two carry-ons. AmeriCorps would pay me $10,000 for the year, and I had a few hundred dollars in the bank that I’d saved up from my various college jobs as a writing tutor, a money counter at the Six Flags theme park, a hostess at the Olive Garden, a receptionist at a car dealership, and a camp counselor. AmeriCorps tactfully referred to my $10,000, an amount too small to legally be called a salary, as a “service stipend.”
The idea behind AmeriCorps is that youths (like me) work at small nonprofits in impoverished communities for a year and, in return, gain valuable job experience. I would sound much more altruistic if I said I chose AmeriCorps because I wanted to give back—and that was part of it—but more crucially? Nowhere else would hire me. I was determined to live on this $10,000 stipend because I didn’t have any debt whatsoever. My parents helped me pay for college, plus I’d had scholarships, plus I’d worked, plus KU was very cheap, and I wasn’t about to take on debt in this first test of adulthood. Given this budget, there was no way I could afford furniture, so I decided to build it out of cardboard boxes. Not furniture that came packed in cardboard boxes, but out of the cardboard itself. I cut banana boxes, stacked them, and taped them together to make a sort of dresser with open shelves. Next, I turned a box upside-down and put a sheet over it as a tablecloth. Voilà! A bedside table. I rolled out my yoga mat on the floor of my windowless bedroom and covered it with the pillow and blanket I’d stuffed into one of my suitcases. I was triumphant. I felt industrious and independent, like a modern-day Virginia Woolf striking out on my own, unbeholden to parents or boyfriend for funds and able to craft a room of one’s own from cardboard. I figured if I could make my own free furniture, I could probably hack it as an adult. I’ll admit that the yoga-mat-as-bed did get old after a week, so I saved up to buy the cheapest mattress (plus delivery) that I could find at the Atlantic Center Mall in Brooklyn. There were limits to my thriftiness. I bought a “map of the world” shower curtain because I hate wasting time and figured that bathing and brushing teeth could be made into multitasking opportunities to enhance one’s knowledge of geography. That is how I learned that the Seychelles are a thing, so clearly, I needed this map. And with that, I was moved in.
Walking down Franklin Avenue, my new street, I saw the ornate architecture underlying now-derelict buildings. I could tell that these had once been elegant brick-front row houses with curling spirals of wrought iron, expansive front steps, and square, tidy gardens out front. Now, they were chopped into warrenlike apartments fronted by patches of dirt littered with cans, newspapers, broken glass, and cigarette butts. There was an empty lot a block up from my apartment, choked with weeds and bags of garbage. Laundromats, bodegas, an off-brand dollar store, hair salons, storefront churches, and payday loan businesses were what the neighborhood offered. Graffiti coated everything, even the metal grates that shop owners pulled down to protect their glass storefronts every night. There were no restaurants or banks or gyms or coffee shops or clothing stores or grocery stores or doctor’s offices. But there were people everywhere: out on stoops, chatting, calling to one another, laughing, scolding kids who ran around barefoot, seemingly oblivious to the broken glass and trash. People pushed rattling shopping carts full of cans and bottles down the center of the street, destined for the promise of five-cent returns at the neighborhood recycling center.
The Franklin Avenue subway stop, which boasted both the 2/3 and 4/5 trains, was eight blocks from my apartment. I hustled there my first morning of work. I was so tense about messing up my train route that I barely had time to register the nuances of the street I was walking down. Those realizations would come later. After parochially jabbing my subway pass at the turnstile a few times, I stood back, watched the experienced masses streaming past, and tried to mimic the way they slid their cards through the reader. They performed this ceremony so quickly that the mechanics were almost imperceptible. It took me a good three minutes to get through, during which time I thought the throng behind me might pick me up and throw me over the turnstile. My only experience with public transit before that morning was riding on the train that went around our zoo as a kid.
I clutched my handwritten directions (this being the pre-smartphone era) in my sweaty hands, trying to keep track of which stop we were at each time the train lurched into a station. When I first got on, I’d positioned myself so that I was staring at the map above the door, which had Christmas-tree-light-size bulbs that lit up at the appropriate station. But after thirty minutes underground, there were so many people jammed into the car that I couldn’t see the map anymore, and was frantically trying to make out the garbled name the conductor rattled off at each station. Everyone else seemed to know by instinct where we were. I watched it happen over and over again as people, zoning out on headphones, reading books, or flat-out asleep, would animate like wind-up toys and scurry off at their stop. I decided after forty-five minutes that I should be there by now, so I got out and realized that the names of the stations are on the walls outside the train windows, and that I’d gotten off a stop too early.
I jumped on the next train and disembarked at the correct stop this time: Grand Central Terminal in the heart of midtown Manhattan. Since most of the train population emptied out at Grand Central, I was now moving in the center of a pack of people, all shuffling up the stairs. I couldn’t have turned around, or bent down, or scratched my nose without disrupting the herd of humanity I was part of. At the top of the stairs, I was spat out into Grand Central, which was the polar opposite of where I’d started my morning, with its vaulted ceilings, marble columns, and antique clocks. Investment bankers pushed past me wearing Rolex watches, and executives in red-soled Louboutins clicked around me, demonstrably annoyed that I was a stationary beacon in this otherwise constantly flowing crowd, all determined, all in a rush, all giving off a sense of purpose. Between the people and the building, I’d never seen so much wealth on display in one place. I’d also never seen so many exits in one place. From where I was standing, there appeared to be about ten, all going in different directions, with indecipherable indications of where they led. The directions I’d scribbled did not include which exit to take, so I guessed and ended up walking in roughly the direction of my new office. It was 8:40 a.m. and I was supposed to be there by nine, so I thought my timing was perfect because I needed to go into a lobby bathroom and change my shoes, brush my hair, apply lipstick, dab the stress sweat off my blouse, and top up on deodorant. When I got to my office building, however, I learned a universal New York City truth: there are no public restrooms in office buildings. Worse still, my boss, who turned out to be a poised, young, glamorous New Yorker, was standing in the lobby (in heels, without nylons) waiting for me. I walked into my first day of my first real job wearing tennis shoes over nylons, with matted hair, and with sweat dripping down my back underneath my pastel, shoulder-padded suit that would’ve looked perfect on a fifty-year-old midwestern real estate agent trying to sell a suburban split-level with green carpeting and a porch she insisted on referring to as the “lanai.”