If I were on a desert island, this is about the point at which the scene would fade out, a number of years would lapse, and I would have gone from the Silly Putty–bodied city slicker who couldn’t catch a tankful of fish with a grenade to a loincloth-wearing, tan-hided savage who could start a fire by refracting the sun off his eyeball.
Did I crave isolation, or was I simply allowing it to control me? Why was I compelled to write endlessly, to create constantly, but with no real compulsion to be seen, no drive to broadcast my work and stand beside it? It was no longer cool to be a hermit writer. The private martyrdoms of Ernest Hemingway and Kurt Cobain seem almost quaint as we watch Charlie Sheen’s slow, tweeting death.
Today, if you are tortured, lonely, and imprisoned by your own psychic inner turmoil, you’re supposed to complain about it in your Facebook status and eHarmony profile so that other people can know that you’re lonely and drape you in their virtual sympathies.
And if you’re super-lonely and you have some disposable income and you can make neither head nor tail of the modern dating scene, you might even consider employing a compositional expert to help you express this deep sense of loneliness.
The following instructions came with an assignment ordered by one such super-lonely soul:
i want write a short message through an online dating site if you could give six short message i think of… not sounding as a plead or a nag. in the hopes of him to respond and ask me out.
i went out on a first date and i was not very comfortable at all and came off like i was in a rush to get away from him, which killed the attraction. the handshake is a good indicator that the attraction was burned out.
four days later after first date… i texted on a thursday at eleven thirty at night saying maybe we can chat over the phone this week or go out this weekend… again the text was ark-ward and i’ve should have called since im not a teenager im in my mid thirties.
I have to stop there and tell you that it went on like this for another page or so.
Basically, she needed somebody to help her fix her Match.com profile and write her correspondences with a potential love interest. It was the first time I realized I was losing my stomach for this line of work.
I couldn’t bring myself to take on the assignment. At that particular time in my life, I had a very profound respect for the concept of loneliness, far greater than my respect for school. Loneliness, love, and desperation of this magnitude are universal.
A few years back, and specifically before Bree forced the true nature of our friendship out into the open, I would have laughed at this customer. But it isn’t funny. I won’t judge you for laughing, but I was creeped out. To me, writing this shit seemed like a greater act of fraud than writing a college application or a dissertation. I guess I hadn’t felt that way even a few months prior.
Work was work, and business was business. But with a few bucks more in my pocket and a little more self-assuredness, I could afford maybe just the smallest shred of principle and maybe even a few weeks off. I was struck by the idea that perhaps I could head my exhaustion sickness off at the pass this time.
So as another year’s finals came to an end, I emerged from my cave, cracked my arthritic fingers, and soaked in the warmth of summer.
I took three weeks without my laptop, enlisting for a free pilgrimage with Birthright Israel. This is a remarkable program through which young Jews from all over the world can apply to go on charity-funded guided tours through the Holy Land, with flight, lodging, and food covered. We had to pay for our own liquor and cigarettes, but other than that, it was pennies from heaven.
Not that this was a religious pilgrimage for me. I was there to cleanse myself of the toxins that generally swirl about the Northeast Corridor and cling to our pulmonary walls. Plus, my job made me feel dirty, and not in a good way.
I met fascinating people in Israel. And I met people who were fascinated with me, with my job, with the very notion that one could make a living in so flagrantly subversive a manner. I hiked, rode on camels, and ate in Arab restaurants. I drank heavily, pitched my best woo, got a desert tan, and came up just a few cans short of a six-pack from eating nothing but cabbage and chickpeas.
I even managed to fit in a paper. I sat in the lobby of a hotel in Eilat, stuffing coins into the pay computer shared among its several dozen guests. With a battalion of irritated Israeli soldiers gathering in a line behind me, I tore out a five-page paper on the global public equities market.
I wrote the entire paper in the body of an e-mail to myself, since Gmail was the only function I could use in English. When several of the young, armed, and combat-trained individuals suggested I step aside to allow for others to use the computer, I calmly explained that I was on a tight deadline several continents away… while dropping a huge terrified load in my pants. They said something derisive about me in an ancient tongue and waited for me to finish.
But really, only two things of great incident occurred on my trip, and both I experienced in relative solitude. One night, when all the formal activities were finished for the day and we had taken up lodging in a comically unpleasant, scum-ridden, and tiny hotel on the coast, a small group of us wandered out to a bar with a platform leading to the beach. Among us were five from the tour group of forty or so, as well as our tour guide, Sergei. Sergei was Israeli by way of Russia and still spoke with a thick, friendly Yakov Smirnoff accent.
We sat by the Mediterranean Sea sipping vodka. After a few drinks, I quietly wandered off the platform and toward the water.
As I approached the water, the burbling conversation on the platform grew quieter until it was washed away altogether. I stopped at the edge and looked out into the swaying darkness, unaware that anybody was watching me.
I kicked off my sandals and heard Sergei calling from the platform: “If this is first time you are going into Mediterranean, you have to make eh wish!”
A week later, with the final night of the trip upon us, we gathered in a grove of trees on our kibbutz just outside of Jerusalem with junk food and music and booze. Hours into the festivities, I was struck by the obvious reality that all of our affections here, however genuine, were temporary. I was truly among strangers, and the loneliness filled me once again. I excused myself rather suddenly from the party and went back to my room.
I got into bed and closed my eyes. I hadn’t smoked weed in weeks, so in addition to having a lot of trouble sleeping, I was having the most intense, surreal, and tangible waking dreams. This time, I could see myself in the cabin. I could see that it was all dark around me, and I could feel that I was sleeping. It was like I was asleep but totally conscious, at rest but fully aware. And there was Sergei, standing in the doorway, urging me like Yakov Smirnoff, “You can do this, man! Just do it!”
I forced myself to wake up fully, to redraw the line between reality and imagination. I shook my body awake and waved my arms at the room like I was swatting through a horde of gnats. I was alone… and I had just dreamed a Nike commercial.
Twenty-four hours of planes, trains, and automobiles later, and I was back at the station in Philly. I dragged my army duffel back to South Street, all at once grateful to be back but immediately reacquainted with that old desperation. It was only a twelve-block walk but long enough to make me feel like I had no home, not a million miles away and not here. Ethan was sort of happy to see me, but he’d also been happy to have the place to himself for a few weeks. We were beginning to reach that age when two grown heterosexual men can no longer successfully live as roommates. We were still buds but also increasingly short-tempered with, cramped by, and resentful toward each other.
So this wasn’t home, and my parents’ house wasn’t home, and the Jewish national homeland wasn’t home, and Rutgers wasn’t home, and my job wasn’t home. I was existentially homeless and, once again, broke to boot. When Bree called and offered to buy me dinner on the Fourth of July, I really had no choice but to go. We had barely spoken in more than a year.
But I had reached a place of new resolve while I was away. I could handle this girl. I could be cool. I could keep it together. I could live with whatever it was that we had built as friends over ten years.
And the minute I saw her, I knew that all of that was bullshit. I did my best to play it cool, as if it was possible that we’d both forgotten everything that we’d said to each other. We had a seafood dinner, then we grabbed a bottle of white from the Liquor Ranch and threw a blanket down by the river. We were surrounded by thousands of South Jersey’s Bud Light cultural elite, gathered here “deown by the wooder” to see fireworks. The stalwart hit-making seventies and eighties band Foreigner was the opening act, and would be far outdone by the sparkly, colorful pyrotechnics set to a prerecorded William Tell Overture.
The aromas of patriotism and Winston Menthols were in the air.
“You look good,” Bree said. “All kinds of tan.”
“Yeah, well, they call you a pussy over there if you use sunblock.”
“Was it crazy hot?”
“It really was. There were points at which I thought I might literally spontaneously combust. And who knew the desert was so dry?”
“Right. So the people were cool?”
“Y’know? They really were. It was a sharp bunch of people in my group, people studying to be oncologists and social workers and one chick who does voices for cartoons.”
“Cool. So you made some friends?”
“Sure.”
“Get any action?”
“Dude. Come on.”
“What? Can’t a friend ask?”
“Don’t be a bitch.”
“So… no?”
“Well, I didn’t say that, did I?”
“So, yes?”
“Sure. Maybe a little.”
“Really?”
“Well, you could try to sound a little less surprised about it.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s not that at all. I just…”
“Forget it. Listen. They’re about to play ‘Juke Box Hero.’ If we miss that, what’s even really the point of being here?” I lay back on the blanket.
“You’re right. I’d never forgive myself.” She tucked herself under my arm, and we were a slice of pure Jack & Diane Americana.
After the fireworks, she drove me back to Philly.
Standing there under the halogen glow of the motion sensors behind the garage, we embraced, then separated and felt a momentous shift.
“Sooo? You have, like, papers to write now or something?”
“Baby, I don’t have to do a thing. I’m my own boss.”
“Ooooh. Tough guy.”
“Yeah… so… you wanna come in?”
She nodded. We went in.
I was home.
We basked in warmth all that summer. We drove to the beach at night and played mini golf and talked baby talk to each other and unleashed ten years’ worth of waiting on each other.
With the approach of autumn came the start of another school year. When I was a kid, commercials for back-to-school sales on clothes and book bags and Trapper Keepers filled me with dread. But in this line of work, summer had become a time of austerity. I was often forced to supplement paper writing with the occasional side job. I would pick up a few bucks putting together local parties and concerts with Damon and Tom W. Donovan Root could always score me a short-term gig editing or writing for one of his mega-companies. I even spent one summer working as an extra on the set of a terrible Mark Wahlberg movie about the Philadelphia Eagles called Invincible. If you pause it, you can actually see me right over Greg Kinnear’s shoulder at one point.
Sometimes, I had to piece it together however I could. So now, I greeted all those back-to-school commercials with excitement. Work would be plentiful again. There would be much to choose from. The leaves of the mighty oak would soon be gently aflutter across the sun-dappled golden campuses of America as students scurried about in mad pursuit of their various ambitions or obligations.
Bree and I moved in together, and she soon became witness to my daily grind. We were living on a charming little side street in the Irish part of town. It was a lot quieter than South Street, and now I had my own office in a spare bedroom upstairs. Ethan and I parted ways as good buddies, like two soldiers who had been through the shit together. We would reunite often to share war stories.
Bree was serving drinks a block away at For Pete’s Sake, a brick-faced pub with a loyal clientele and a Cheers-y familiarity, as if George Wendt could stagger through the door at any moment. She worked until closing on a lot of nights and would return home at two thirty in the morning to find me wired and running low on words.
I was back on the bulletin board system. But this time around, my prejudices were fewer, my resentment less, and my resolve greater. I was going to do this job with all of my faculties intact. College was a faraway thing to me now. Even the industrial cleaning supply company was far away. It was just me, my computer—now upgraded from a Dell to a MacBook Pro—and the sad hapless saps who piled into colleges without a fuck’s clue what to do there.
The poor bastards. I was actually starting to feel a twinge of something for my customers. Not quite pity. Not quite sympathy. Something more personal. Relatability. I could relate. I really could.
I could relate to the sense of desperation. I could relate to the feeling of gasping for air as cinder blocks of debt tugged one below the surf. I could relate to the fear that no greater thing existed ahead than a lifetime of indentured servitude. I could relate to the mounting sense of reality, the eroding cocksureness, and the diminishing right to dreamy illusion that all constituted growing up.
And my greatest handicap was nothing too much more than a bad attitude. Unlike many of my customers, I experienced all of this without a major learning deficiency or a language barrier to overcome.
My heart really does go out to all those immigrant students who are rubber-stamped through our schools. It seems that they are, so many of them, desperately alone.
Now that I was back with my old company, I was picking up all kinds of everything. I was even taking on some legitimate editing assignments, a far less popular service than custom writing but one offered by our company and most online paper-writing companies nonetheless. Editing assignments paid less, and you wound up having to rewrite the whole thing most of the time anyway. Despite my promises to myself not to do it, I couldn’t let those confusing, inarticulate sentences stand.
One Thursday night, I was working on a most infuriating assignment. It was also poker night.
As more and more of my buddies had settled in the area, our little Texas Hold’em game had grown. While life gradually pushed each of us toward things like marriage and procreation, this was a stable context in which to make disturbing off-color jokes and wax angry-poetic about baseball.
Mickey and Damon usually showed up early together so we could listen to tunes, trade sports trivia, and toss the Frisbee.
After that, there was Paulie and Gould and Damon’s brother Jackie. And Harmon never missed a game, even after he had two kids. Our game grew with each arrival of an old friend in the city. There was Boone, the attorney, whom I’d known since I was six, from Hebrew school. And there was Levi, the engineer, whom I knew from camp.
There was Gordon, the banker, and Dweezil, who owned a dog-walking company, and Barney, who didn’t seem to do much of anything for a living but always had loot anyway.
And after just a few years, the poker game had grown into more than just a poker game. While we cursed and stank and spoke with great importance about things that mattered not in the least downstairs, Bree hung out upstairs with the ladies. Gordon’s wife, Courtney; Jackie’s girlfriend, Sugar Magnolia; Minnie the real estate agent; Donovan’s little sister Cass. Poker night was also girls’ night now. On any given Thursday, we might have fifteen of our dearest friends under our roof. One big happy family.
This particular Thursday, the guys were hollering back and forth about this running back’s shredded knees and that umpire’s alleged blindness and this chick’s enormous rack and about getting sucked out on that last hand. It was all a din of sweat sock testosterone in the background as I tried, between hands, to make sense of a foreign accent so dense that it garbled even my client’s typing. My job has put me on the front lines of the global economy. I have gained a sense of how a great many newcomers are faring in America’s educational system.
And I tell you, there are innocent, well-meaning immigrant students who are floundering out there. The passage below is from an assignment that I foolishly attempted to edit while also playing cards. I probably lost as much money as I made that night. The paper’s subject was typography.
That is a most advance of all human’s most developed sense is touching by hand and remember what I told you before, stand point, vanishing point, and vertical lines… In fact the subject is involving a group of relations with management and private organizations large and small. This is why I love this topic, because it was my first when treating me with the people. For these discoveries, which I discovered in my career, scientific and grandmother in this article, of course, in the beginning, I was genuinely fearful of the difficulty so far, but with reading some topics and some of the problems specific to management, Ive found a very simple, some of which we can grasp in our daily lives.
This student’s intentions were genuine and totally honest. He was paying for help with work he had already completed on his own. He had conducted the research. He had written the paper. He had followed all of the instructions provided to him. But this student had completed something that didn’t come anywhere near approximating even a coherent high-school-level paper. He was studying a subject about which he understood not a single thing. I don’t know if it was his major or just an elective. Neither would surprise me, but I do know that this guy was not a cheater. He was not dishonest. He was writing in his second language—and, frankly, about ten times better than I could have in spite of four years of high school French classes. The school he attended had presumably seen his written work before, and should have known that it wasn’t reasonable to expect better from him.
He was also ruining my poker game. But this was how I worked at this point. At all times, I was typing. If I was going to make a living at this, and even eventually have worked enough that I might somehow be done with it (though I couldn’t possibly conceive of how such a thing might happen), I had to know how to write while doing other things; I had to always have one foot in this absurd underworld and the other foot in the world of the sane, honest, and hardworking people in my life.
My work crisscrossed my personal life like Band-Aids across a cutter’s scars. My friends pushed through various stages of employment, unemployment, underemployment, and self-employment, and my customers pushed through various stages of composition, dissertation, and graduation. For every stimulating moment shared with a brilliant friend, there was a deadening moment shared with a disadvantaged client.
The request below was for a fifty-page paper, meaning that this guy had advanced pretty far in the educational system with the linguistic deficiencies demonstrated here.
if you do not understand anything that i try to tell you you can ask me because i don’t want you waste your time by rewrite and rewrite
i know my english is hard to understand but i don’t know how to explain to you if you don’t ask me i hope you understand what i need in this report thank you
This guy above, this guy is a cheater. That’s for sure. But he’s also a net loser in the broken system. It’s globalization, baby! The world is getting smaller. We’re erasing the imaginary borders that separate nations, cultures, and peoples. And that’s awesome if you’re Walmart, McDonald’s, or Lockheed Martin. They can afford translators, cultural-sensitivity training, and… well, they can afford to not give a shit if a bunch of non–English speakers are struggling in their factories and customer service call centers.
We’ve opened our doors to all the ambitious young men and women of the world. And that’s a good thing. But we’ve done nothing to prepare them for the realities facing them. Even if we want to bandy about the old and fading notion that America is the land of opportunity, we must admit that the new arrivals are struggling to seize it.
Ultimately, it makes the product that our schools are manufacturing a lesser one. Cultural diversity should be a boon to our society and our shared body of knowledge. Too many educators treat diversity as an obstacle to be ignored, or perhaps even overcome.
Here’s a typical revision request from a student who hasn’t been given the tools to adapt to globalized education. He’s also kind of a jerk.
I dont like the paper, can yiy do it over again, because my subject is Diversity in Criminal Justice. I want the paper to base on CORRECTION/INCARCERATION/PAROLE/PROBATION.” in simple english
“not Big grammar.
Not Big grammar.
Indeed. This guy here, this guy is going to struggle. He will never achieve a level of proficiency in English sufficient to create a passable résumé, compose a usable cover letter, reach out to a public official, or write to request a refund for his defective blender. And even if he does, he still may not have developed the cultural etiquette to say please, thank you, and so on and so forth. In short, people will treat him like he’s stupid even if he’s not, and people will assume he’s a jerk even if he’s not. Not that I’m discounting either possibility. But according to a study produced by Princeton University in collaboration with the Brookings Institution, as of 2006, half of all surveyed foreign-born adults aged twenty-five or older lacked proficiency in English. One consequence, the study notes, is that as of 2005, the median income of U.S. immigrants was 25 percent lower than that of native-born workers.
Of all the people who we push through our schools, perhaps immigrants are pushed with the least care. And when one considers the portion of the student population comprised by immigrants, this is no marginal oversight. According to a table in the U.S. Census Bureau’s Statistical Abstract titled “Students Who Are Foreign Born or Who Have Foreign-Born Parents,” as of 2009, 9.6 percent of college students and 17 percent of graduate students were foreign born. The census also reports that 22.6 percent of college students and 28.5 percent of graduate students, had at least one foreign-born parent.1 A study published in the journal Developmental Psychology in 2010 reports that because of the dearth of effective support mechanisms for immigrant students’ transition into the American education system, the cultural barriers and language barriers that they face are compounded by the inherent challenges of American formal education and by the relatively limited ability of their parents to assist them in navigating the system. The study authors argue that this produces an “inferior educational experience” for the immigrant student. To support this claim, they report on a five-year longitudinal study examining academic trends among immigrant “newcomers.” The study found that “two-thirds of the participants demonstrated a decline in their academic performance over the 5-year study period.”2
I suspect this describes some of my clients: no longer newcomers but now part of a loud multilingual buzz of unmet expectations. Maybe they’re just trying to finish school and retreat to a country where an American degree is far more valuable.
According to a 2011 article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a fast-growing trend among immigrant students toward using the diversity quotas in our universities as a means of literally transferring knowledge out of the American economy. The Chronicle reports that the average age of Indian immigrants returning from the United States to their home country is thirty. For Chinese immigrants, the age is thirty-three. The article adds that in a Facebook survey conducted by Bloomberg Businessweek, less than 10 percent of Chinese students and 6 percent of Indian students planned to remain in the United States permanently following the completion of their studies.
America is facing a brain drain as the best and brightest immigrant students return home to frame their American degrees and build their developing economies; meanwhile, the lowest-performing and most desperate of them take up residence in our urban slums and attempt simply to read the words on their American degrees.
Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to game the system.
These people, every bit as much as my friends, were my constant companions, my daily relations, the prism through which I saw the world.
And the more time I spent trying to work my way through this one typography paper, the angrier I got. I guess I felt I’d been duped. This was just supposed to be an edit. But in twenty-five pages, I couldn’t find a single sentence that would actually qualify as a sentence.
“Motherfucker,” I said out loud.
“Is that a tell?” Jackie asked.
“Huh? Oh. No. I didn’t even realize I had cards in front of me.”
“Yeah, well, it’s your turn,” said Gordon.
“Right.” I looked at the two cards in front of me. Seven-two off-suit all night long. “I fold.”
“Dude, you haven’t played a hand in forty-five minutes,” Dweezil observed.
“Yeah… well, I forgot I was even here. My brain hurts. This paper is making me dumber.”
“What’s so bad about it?” asked Barney.
“OK. Ready? Here’s the paragraph I’m editing right now: ‘Paper is usually square. When designer die cut the paper, it might not be the square. But we assume that paper is the square, which is a flat square.’”
Disturbed commentary ensued.
“What the fuck does that mean?” Gordon asked.
“What paper is square? Is this an essay about napkins?” said Jackie.
“That’s fucked-up, man,” said Dweezil. “How did that kid get into college?”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said. “He’s not in college. According to his order form, this paper is for a master’s.”
Shit. As I said it, I realized, this kid was well on his way to having more academic credentials than I did.