Just out of school, I was angry. I guess a lot of kids are, really. I had always had this Holden Caulfield–ish suspicion that everything was bullshit. I basically figured that the world is filled with frauds, and many of them are so worried about being figured out that they’ll never stop to scrutinize you. I realized I could fake my way through anything.
Such was the nature of the world into which I had been thrust. The Bush administration was a travesty. The wars were a disgrace. The corporate scandals were outrageous. And here I was, like so many students, hurled into adulthood like a screaming, naked infant with a terrible debt-to-income ratio.
I moved back to my parents’ house in South Jersey. This, of course, made me want to kill myself. I didn’t even unpack my stuff from college. I just kept my boxes all stacked up and unlabeled in the garage. I no longer had a car. It was summer in the suburbs, and I was trapped. You couldn’t walk around my neighborhood if you weren’t a middle-aged mother in swooshy nylon jogging pants. A sweaty young man with long hair and a beard wandering the sidewalks of my parents’ neighborhood? You could see anxious suburbanites peering through curtains at you, trying to decide if you warranted pity or a call to the cops.
I couldn’t really go anywhere. I found a folding chair in the garage, brought it up to my room, and worked on my sister’s old, hissing desktop PC. My student loan repayment began immediately. Again, I thought about faking my own death. This time, I got as far as a vaguely formed plan involving a wheat thresher and amannequin that I would steal from Macy’s. I was going to start over again in Canada with a big wooly coat and a brand-new name. Let the plastic shards of mannequin worry about student loan debt.
I told my parents about my plan. My father, rational thinker that he was, suggested that a med school cadaver might be more convincing. I respect my parents. They believe in tough love. They would lend a hand here or there, but my relative desperation was my own problem. They cared enough to let my body occupy the room they aspired to make into an office and storage place for luggage. I had my friends over for marathon weed-smoking sessions just down the hall from them. We would open the windows, towel the door, and turn my bedroom into an Allman Brothers concert.
I would stay out late, come home, accidentally wake the dog, and disrupt the quiet state of the house. There is zero living compatibility between a college graduate and his parents. They had a nice lifestyle to which they were entitled, and I had a seedy lifestyle that could not realistically be pursued under their roof. I had to get out. Problem was, I was the only one of my local friends who had finished school in four years. Some were heading on to graduate school. Some were preparing for super-senior status, awarded to those who needed at least one more year (sometimes two or three) to finish their chosen course of study. Some were still toiling with summer courses and inching toward completion.
All I could do was send out my thin résumé with my worthless degree(s) and my nonsense transcript to anybody who would read it. In the meantime, I was firing out writing of any kind. I was writing album reviews. I was producing humor pieces on relevant cultural issues. I continued to write my weekly political humor column for the Outside World. And for a salary of “exposure,” I gave my writing to anybody who would post it.
I was also turning out as many papers as I could in the dead of summer. Pickings were slim. There are summer courses, schools on trimester schedules, and multi-semester research projects. You might have five to ten assignments to choose from at any one time. Any of the desirable ones, I was learning, go fast during the slow season. Desirable assignments are papers related to organizational theory, human resources, sociological theory, philosophy, history, political science, psychology, or any of those other fields where you can substitute fancy words for research and get away with it. Assignments requiring financial analysis, graphing, computer programming, or comprehensive scientific elaboration tend not to go as fast. So sometimes you simply have to take on a terrible, lengthy, and painful assignment just to keep the bucks coming in.
And it was my only source of income, so I knuckled down and wrote some shit that I was less than qualified to write: stuff about genetic coding, the behavior of certain proteins in the body’s immune system, and euclidean geometric theories; detailed logistical evaluations of health care legislation and deconstructions of the language used in Beowulf. (Just for the record on this last one: Stop making kids learn Beowulf. Beowulf makes me feel like I’m retrieving an account of history as scrawled by twelve different ancient nationalities on a series of crumpled-up cocktail napkins and ATM receipts. I’m not saying it’s culturally irrelevant. I’m saying it’s an exercise in sadism.)
I admit, I took on many bits of work that, in the wee hours of the night, I would come to regret. But there is no way out. Once you’ve taken the assignment, it’s yours and it must be completed. With every piece of work I completed, I squirreled away another few dollars for my eventual escape.
So this was the summer after graduation, filled with all the promise and anticipation of waiting in line to use a public toilet.
It wasn’t until my buddy Mickey finished his summer semester that I finally had a real job prospect. Mickey was a few years younger, not yet graduated and only home for the summer. But his cousin had a stake in a family-owned business called Crackerjack Cleaning Company that specialized in industrial cleaning supplies. His cousin’s partner, Mr. Lewis, was a guy who had spent a year in the can for white-collar crimes. He swore that he had been set up by the government, and quite frankly, I actually believed him, even though he was a habitual bullshitter.
Mickey would pick me up, and we’d drive across the bridge into Pennsylvania, then past Philly, through strip mall country, and into Conshohocken. We packaged products, shipped orders, and fielded angry customer complaints. I used about 1 percent of my brain while I was there, most of it on finishing the daily crossword puzzle during bathroom breaks.
I continued to write papers on the side, often piecing assignments together during the course of a workday, popping onto the computer whenever Mr. Lewis wasn’t looking and punching out a few sentences. Still, I implored my new boss to use my writing skills. I told him that this was truly where my abilities would best be put to use.
He immediately put me to work bottling fluids. We made industrial-power odor neutralizers, designed for use in morgues and crime-scene cleanup. We had a spray that was designed to remove and destroy the most unpleasant odors. We called it “dead people spray,” and we had to bottle and cap it manually in two-ounce containers drawn from a drum about the size of a Chrysler. We used it to cover the smell of weed when we smoked in the car on the weekends.
With respect to writing, my boss did have me edit some of his e-mails. So glad I went to college for that.
I suppose there were other jobs out there. I couldn’t get them. It’s for the best, too. I learned a lot at that little company. I learned a lot about business.
I could come down on my boss, but it wasn’t just him.
I learned that in the mainstream, everybody is dishonest everywhere. The clients we dealt with, the industry we were in, the business that we sustained… all crooked. Every day was a combination of deceptions, little white lies, misrepresentations, slight bendings of the facts, and dramatic distortions of reality. And this was in a business that had no reason, conceptually speaking, to behave unethically.
Still, at Crackerjack we misled our customers as a matter of course. We told them products were shipping out when we hadn’t even received the materials to make them. We hadn’t received the materials because we had defaulted with our creditors. We usually told our creditors stuff like “I sent that payment last week. Let me check the FedEx tracking number and get back to you.”
As for the working conditions, our paychecks got bounced, we were instructed to lie to clients, and the boss even peppered our conversations with the occasional ethnic slur.
It wasn’t all bad, though. As bosses go, he did more damage to his own company than he did to me. I worked with relative freedom. A guy like that doesn’t look over your shoulder while you’re working. He’s way too busy looking over his own shoulder.
He had a lavish lifestyle, ate heartily, drank aggressively, and was actually entertaining company at a party. I admit, outside of the office, I actually liked the guy. So this was the business world.
And then Enron, and WorldCom, Adelphia and Tyco, Martha Stewart and Bernie Madoff, etc., etc., etc. The whole straight world, it seemed to me at the time, was a lot of self-righteous grandstanding. No one was really straight.
I actually felt better about the papers I was writing on the side than I did about the work I was doing on the grid. I didn’t feel especially honest doing it, but then again, I didn’t feel especially honest when I was bottling dead people spray, either.
Still, after three months on the job, I had saved up enough for half a deposit on an apartment. Just as Mickey went back to school for fall semester, my old high school buddy and freshman-year college roommate, Ethan Tabernacle, finished his last summer session. His mother had just moved to Florida, so we bought a bunch of roach traps and went in on a place in South Philly together. I got Ethan a job at the industrial cleaning supply company, and we car-pooled to work.
So now I was working full-time as a fluid bottler and part-time as a hack writer. With respect to my college education, I had graduated with nothing but financial regrets. College had bankrupted me, and every month it came knocking on my door.
Ethan and I lived on South Street, a place that had once fancied itself an East Coast Haight-Ashbury, teeming with hippie boutiques, art galleries, performance venues, and restaurants.
In 1963, Philadelphia natives and proliferators of the dance sensation the Wah-Watusi the Orlons hit number three on the Billboard chart with “South Street,” a place where “all the hippies meet.”
At the height of its popularity, in the sixties and seventies, South Street was a bohemian mecca in a blue-collar town, attracting independent businesses, pedestrian nightlife, and all manner of street busking.
By the time of our arrival there in late 2002, your options were pretty much “Bennie and the Jets” on repeat coming from the speakers in front of Johnny Rockets or a mid-fifties homeless guy playing abominable Jimi Hendrix covers on his Stratocaster knock-off in front of the Subway hoagie shop. Anytime I walked by on my way to Repo Records or the cheesesteak joint under Fat Tuesday’s, he would smile at me and slaughter Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.”
The popular haunts that had once drawn a flourishing nightlife had largely been moved, sold off, dismantled, or abandoned. Empty storefronts and aging For Rent signs pockmarked the main drag between Front and Eighth Streets. Zipperheads was gone. Punks would have to go elsewhere now for their gigantic safety pins. The Book Trader had closed up and relocated to the more fashionable Old City. It had been a cavernous place with staircases, crawl spaces, and piles organized according to precariousness. You could spend a day in there and buy nothing. It was replaced by a baggy-pants store.
Directly across the street from our apartment was a swingers’ club called Karma Sutra. My friend Minnie, who was in the real estate business, had been inside and said there was one big room upstairs filled with mattresses and lord knows what manner of parasites. One of our favorite pastimes was to stand on our second-floor deck stubbing out cigarettes and guessing which people were about to enter Karma Sutra. The smart money was always on a middle-aged couple, he with a Mr. Clean haircut, she with a high leather skirt and exposed cottage cheese thigh. They almost always carried little handbags that we imagined had all kinds of awful gadgets in them.
Eventually, Karma Sutra closed and—I say this in truth and not for cheap laughs—was replaced by a fish restaurant called Bottom of the Sea. To everything there is a season.
Both before our arrival and during our time there, South Street was in a steady decline. By weekday, it was a barren place where you had to walk carefully to avoid stepping in whatever the previous evening’s last-call revelers had expelled onto the sidewalk. By weekend night, it was a playground for roving flash mobs from Camden, New Jersey—often ranked as the most dangerous city in America and just a charming ferry ride away.
South Street was in a sorry state. We fit in like pigs in shit.
We took turns forgetting to pay bills. I’d let the cable get turned off, apologize, and promise to get it switched back on. He’d let the electricity get turned off, apologize, and promise to get it switched back on. It was a good system.
A lot of mornings, we drove in silence to the little one-story facility out by the railroad tracks. The sign near the entrance to the parking lot said Dead End. That isn’t symbolism. That is just literally the last thing you would see before walking into work.
Working at a place like this only intensified my interest in paper writing.
The world was a crooked place, and I was no Boy Scout. There are more evil things that one can do than defraud a university. And at the time, I really felt that it was one of the finest things that I could do. My university had defrauded me.
It had sold me on Walden Pond and given me Walmart instead.
At the time, I didn’t attempt to rationalize what I was doing. I just genuinely felt that I was defrauding an institution that deserved it. Boo-fucking-hoo for the schools. They were still getting paid. They were still cranking out students. And to a certain extent I still believe that they couldn’t have given a steaming pile of shit whether the work was genuine or not.
Besides, I wanted to do something subversive. I didn’t want to be some schmuck in a cubicle, and the way I saw it, that’s all that my college had aspired to prepare me for. I wanted to give a huge middle finger to the system. What’s more, I saw that the system was wounded. I wanted to salt my middle finger, stick it in the wound, and twist it around. I was like the child of a neglectful parent. You’d do anything to get attention from your parent, but you’d really like for it to be negative attention. You’d really like to be able to hold yourself up to them and say, “You see? You see what you made me do?”
I wanted to fuck shit up. I wanted arrogant professors to be undermined. I wanted schools to experience the true consequences of their stagnation. I wanted lazy students to enter life without preparation and always suffer the uncertainty and insecurity that comes with the fear of getting caught. I hoped that all the dishonest slobs who made up the world would give me their money, just a couple of dollars at a time, to gain their education.
And I wanted to learn. I wanted to know things. I wanted to be well-rounded. I wanted to engage in a complex, even revelatory exploration of those things that might help me to better define myself and those things that might be used to improve the life I was leading. I wanted all those things that I’d thought I was paying for when I went to college. I had left school with a need, and for all the pressure that my parents applied to the contrary, I knew that this need would be met neither through graduate school nor through the continuing accumulation of debt. The idea that I could somehow justify taking out more loans for more schooling… well, that just seemed ridiculous to me.
I didn’t always intend to leave my crappy job to start writing papers full-time. I looked for other jobs, sent out writing samples, and interviewed when granted the opportunity. A job did not readily present itself.
I picked up my newspaper one morning. An article professed to offer some advice on how graduating college kids should prepare for the frigid job market. The number-one piece of counsel that the article had to offer was “Lower your expectations.”
One would be better served, the article asserted, working below one’s level of educational attainment. Check.
According to the article, I had no reason to go out and look for another job. What a relief.
This job was unbearable, it was humiliating, and I was getting dumber every day that I spent there. Use it or lose it, as they say. If I hadn’t been writing papers on the side, I would have been making a real good future for myself as a manual bottler of fluids. Not trying to impress you, but I never took any classes to do it.
Bubbling under this layer of discontent, and hiding behind the long brick wall that runs along the whole north side of South Street between Seventh and Eighth, a tiny little business was in its first year of operation. I had referred Ethan to the paper-writing company I had worked with since college. He had never really written before, but he was a sharp guy. He threw together a quick writing sample and got the job. Now the unofficially named South Street Paper Company was a collective of two freelancers, two cats, and a grab bag of trash-picked furniture and twice-moved pieces from Ikea.
In college, a space half the size of our apartment would have been shared among four guys—one of them almost always a deranged psychopath or a person with severe hygiene deficiencies. So the two-floor cookie cutter one flight of stairs off of street level was like a palace to us. And as we had just departed from New Brunswick, Newark’s even less impressive little brother, the beer-can- and pizza-crust-littered thoroughfare of South Street might as well have been a canal in Venice.
We had two bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, a garage whose door didn’t close, and a semifunctional washer-dryer set. As far as we were concerned, this was what the Jeffersons were singing about. We finally got a piece of the pie.
The first floor of our pie slice contained a galley kitchen with a doorway on either side; the space was narrow enough that the stove opened into the adjacent cabinets and short enough that you could enter and exit in the same stride. There was also one big room and one small room. The big room had only one thing in it: a pool table that my friend Donovan Root had no other place to store. We didn’t really have room for it either, but priorities being what they are to a couple of intermittently single men, we broke it down at Donovan’s place in Boston and reconstructed it in Philadelphia.
There was about a foot and a half of space on either side, enough for a nonportly individual to pass through. Eighty percent of shots were short-stick shots.
This left the small side room, probably intended for a credenza and a few folding chairs at most, to serve as our office. We took turns throwing on records, ridiculing our customers, and occasionally glancing over resentfully at one another for making disruptive accidental sounds like throat clearing and sneezing.
Every few hours, a double-decker tour bus would drive by. A person at the front of the bus would stand with microphone in hand telling people where stuff used to be when there was stuff down here to see. It would pass right by our windows, so that we were eye-to-eye with visiting midwesterners and their camera lenses. We kept one of those disposable cameras between our desks so that when they took their invasive pictures of us in our natural habitat, all they got were some dudes taking pictures right back at them.
At four a.m., a thirty-foot semi would park in front of the Domino’s Pizza directly across from our place and leave its engine running, lower its mechanical ramp, roll its clattering skids across the sidewalk and into the store, roll the skids back to the truck, raise the mechanical ramp back up, and then do it all over again. This process usually ended at around five twenty. Fortunately, it only occurred five nights a week. I slept like a baby… in a bowling alley.
This was life at the South Street Paper Company.
The website that we worked for used a “writers’ board” system. Every writer the company hired would select a user ID and password. This would allow the individual access to a bulletin board.
The bulletin board was where all customer orders showed up. Every time somebody’s credit card was approved for the purchase of a nine-page paper on racial profiling or a five-page explanation of yoga’s spiritual implications, the new item would appear on the board. Each item was assigned a corresponding ID number so that the customer, the writer, and the customer service department could keep track of it.
The following is an example of how an assignment that might show up on the board would be presented to a potential writer:
ID: 112123
Subject: Bovine Mating Behaviors
Writing Level: College (4th yr)
Sources: 8
Citation: MLA
Pay: $72
Due Date: Sept. 7
Details: Write a paper detailing bovine mating behaviors, including courtship, gender dynamics, and the actual physical procedures relating to hot cow-on-bull action…
Next to the assignment was a button that said “Write It.” Once a writer clicked the “Write It” button, he or she was committed to completing the assignment by the indicated deadline. An automated e-mail would be sent to the writer containing the selected assignment’s details, including a link to the “source board,” where faxed journal articles, scanned classroom handouts, and pdfs sent by the customer could be downloaded for reference. From this point forward, any correspondence between writer and client would take place through the personal message board provided on the company’s website.
A line item would also appear on the writer’s personal board, starting with the assignment’s ID number. The writer’s personal board would also keep a monthly tally of the number of completed papers, the number of assignments submitted late, and the amount of money earned. When ready to submit a completed assignment, the writer would click on the line item and upload the paper, which would then be sent directly to the customer. The customer’s credit card would be charged, and the writer’s account would be credited for the amount earned. We got paid monthly by way of direct deposit.
Which means that whatever I’d submitted by 11:59 p.m. on the last night of the month, that’s what I would have to live on for the next thirty days. So historically, you could find me, on the thirtieth or the thirty-first of a month, occasionally gasping for air before dunking my head back down and bobbing for more papers.
And my company had an excellent system, so much so that I immediately became addicted to taking on assignments, more than I could handle, really, while also working a nine-to-five. Anytime I finished an assignment, there were two more or five more or ten more on the writers’ board. At most times, aside from in the dead of summer or during winter vacation, there was rarely anything less than forty papers to choose from. During midterms and finals, this number would rise into the eighties and nineties.
I barely looked at deadlines, and I almost never finished reading an assignment’s directions before clicking “Write It.” I looked at the length and the pay and scanned well enough to confirm that the assignment didn’t call for any quantum mathematics. This told me all I needed to know. At this early stage in my career, I always kept five or six assignments waiting for me on the schedule.
Ethan, too, found that he had a penchant for the charms and challenges of life as the perpetual student. In the morning, we would carpool in miserable silence to our day job. In the evening, we would actually apply our college education while those around us simply wrote about it on their résumé.
Ethan tended toward English literature, political science, and philosophy, the last of which he really had a knack for. He had a great sense of humor and carried a tremendously dark place inside of him that was perfectly suited for paying gigs about nihilism and the rationalizations given for acts of institutional evil.
With our backs to each other, Miles Davis bouncing recklessly off the drywall in the little space, a bowl of weed passed constantly and wordlessly between us, burnt coffee and stale fart hanging in the air, we sold away our intellectual property, bits and pieces at a time.