Quixotically Tilting At The Windmill Of Unemployment
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The bus ride down Telegraph took a nightmare of effort
that I felt in my bones would never help me. Simply heading
from the too-tidy streets of Berkeley into the dingy, never-
remodeled, flaking-paint storefronts defining the border of
Oakland sank me deeper into the hopeless feeling of the go-
nowhere towns I had tried to escape. I looked around at
what was written on every face on the bus. None of these
people, who'd lived here all their lives and actually knew one
neighborhood from the next, had a job that didn't make them
wince-- what the fuck was I going to do?
I painstakingly followed Daya's directions east from the
appointed bus stop to the cafe whose ad I would answer,
each step of my feet and each intersection of streets
confusing and pointless, like a punishment I had invented for
myself.
But true despair didn't really settle on me, like bored
picnicking houseflies, until I had a blank application staring
condescendingly back at me. Lacking any convincing or
recent experience, I lied on the dates, and then, gathering
momentum, even the names of my previous food-themed
employments, which made me feel all the more miserable and
hopeless. The very best of my references would probably
say, 'Who's calling? What's he applying to-- a restaurant?
Sure, sure, he can cook.' No good. I handed the application
over the counter, a coerced confession I'd just signed,
grinning a sick approximation of competence or tranquility,
and opened the door onto the jumbled street of faces and
noises and blurred moving cars.
I wandered around in a near convulsion of anxiety and
helplessness, searching among the disgusting fairyland
facades of the Oakland yuppie coffee and dessert boutiques
lining the street. I put in other applications with at least two
other places that actually had help wanted signs posted, and
at each of them I lied reasonably well, but both times I
suspected I had been sniffed out as someone who was
desperate for a paycheck, and did not, in fact, cheerfully look
forward to pampering the effete yahoos who consistently
had money to waste in these places. This particular fact
seemed tattooed on me somewhere I couldn't see.
A day or two later, I did actually call all three places
back, but the managers had wiped themselves with the
counter-people's brains so often, getting a coherent answer
about my prospects was somewhat difficult. When I did hear
some spark of life on the other end of the line, there was the
unmistakable sense that a friend of the counterperson was
going to end up with the job in question.
After much angst, inventive self-torture, worry, doubt,
general misery, and calls to every feasible ad in the local
papers, I finally gritted my teeth and called up the
environmental group.
There are always ads for canvassers to perform door-to-
door fundraising, primarily because this line of work has a
higher turnover rate than even human crash-test dummy.
Canvassing combines the least desirable elements of
telemarketing, evangelism, door-to-door sales, and con
artistry. Since canvassing requires the fervent conviction of
snake-handling and the moral relativism of advertising--
except it doesn't pay as well as either one-- the most
successful canvassers are either totally committed to the
issues and convinced their actions will have some impact on
the future of the world, or shameless pathological liars.
I'd spent a couple of summers doing such work before,
which is something like a century or two in canvasser-years,
and survived as long as I had by combining both strategies. I
approved of the cause, deep down under my cynicism about
its chances, but learned quickly that the prime directive at the
door was to get pen and checkbook together in the minds,
and shortly thereafter, the hands, of Jane Q. Public-- men
being usually too inherently stupid to be interested in their
own fate, much less that of anyone else.
To maintain that success I needed to continually
convince myself, and thereby the person at the door, that
industry executives could ever be coerced into giving a quick
fuck about anyone living next to their shiny corporate
smokestacks and discharge pipes. Most people understand
intuitively the spiteful misanthropy, not to mention myopic
willpower, necessary to blow one's whole life oozing up the
power pyramid at a corporation whose major by-products
are cancer and birth defects.
I canvassed in the same spirit with which you might
approach a wishing well, and give a quarter to an empty-
handed kid peering down into the darkness, or toss one in
yourself to ward off an intricate fatal illness. Some small and
worthless gesture, just in case the dryads were watching
you, or the unborn rug-rats who'd be getting those extra
cases of skin cancer in fifty years.
So now I had a job. Since my state of mind was-- I
would cheerfully admit-- sort of precarious already, doing a
job whose tasks ranged from worming money out of airhead
republican wives who asked, "Well, my husband feeds
plutonium to pre-schoolers for a living-- do you think he'd
mind if I made a five-dollar donation?" to extracting it from
weary democrats who wanted to know, "Is this twenty
dollars going to stop that smokestack down the road?" or
worse, chipper progressives who enthused "I'm so glad
every penny of this thirty bucks is going to help you change
the world," reduced me to just barely resisting the
urge to chew someone's head off and spit it out into their
cute-little-windmill mailbox.
I did manage however, to savor each moment of time I'd
borrowed, long enough, at least, to live and die somewhere
other than where I'd been born, and with the thin man over
one shoulder I sucked each necessary, gorgeous, silent uphill
minute between the houses in the dark exclusive hills of
Marin County.
My co-workers included disheveled hippie college
students, blissfully stoned pot dealers in yellow shades, and speed-freak punk
guitarists moonlighting between shows. My own mental
stability followed the contours of the shadowy hillsides, and I
wondered often whether I was one of the least or most sane
members of the crew.
For comfort, unable to afford even a joint, I indulged in
a ritual few repetitions of 'cortez the killer' and 'pets' every
afternoon on my headphones before I ventured out through
the twisted black-gray trees and trickling stream of the
campus to the waiting neighborhoods, lying wrung-out on the
pale gray carpet of Daya's apartment, my eyes wet,
saturated in the loss we had taken into our mouths like a gift.
