On Wednesday, I wake a little after ten. This isn’t intentional. It’s not like I set an alarm.
I stumble from the bed to the bathroom to take a long, yellow piss. I brush my teeth—extra well, since my health insurance expired recently, since it doesn’t look like I’ll be seeing the dentist anytime soon.
I check my cell phone. No missed calls.
In the kitchen, I pour cereal into a bowl and fill it to the brim with soy milk. Heart Healthy, the cereal’s called—it comes from the organic grocery store down the street. Setting the kettle on the stove, I spoon coffee into a French press. The press is made of glass and has bright red trim. It even looks a little French, though I know it’s not. I bought it from a cooking store ten minutes from here back when I still had a job.
I haven’t worked in months. Four, to be precise. Four months of checking Craigslist, sending out resumes, refreshing my e-mail. I’ve applied for every job imaginable. Barista, waiter, dishwasher, bartender, pizza delivery man, basketball referee—you name it, I’ve applied.
Nobody ever writes you back. And it’s not like you wanted any of those jobs anyway.
In a previous incarnation I washed dishes in a café. My boss used to stand behind me and alert me to everything I was doing wrong. She was an energetic old bag with an imperceptible heart. I stole pastries to get back at her. After work I’d sit on the curb while pedestrians tromped all around me, trying to summon up the energy to get back on my bike.
That was only part of the week.
The other days I worked the front of the house, making espresso drinks, manning the cash register. Only rarely was I able to conjure the image of a heart or a tree out of the foam but the drinks tasted good and the customers seemed to like me.
I live with my girlfriend in a brick building half a block from a park. The building is old and sturdy-looking, but the rent is cheap because ten years ago there used to be shootings around the corner. Now condos have gone up with matching balconies, barbeques and garages filled with expensive cars. I wish I could complain. But the truth is the yuppies beat us here.
While I putter around the apartment, my girlfriend watches a baby. This is what she does for money: looks after other people’s children so they can continue contributing to society. It’s not a bad gig. She feeds the baby pureed fruit, changes his diaper, rocks him to sleep. While he naps, she reads novels or watches films on the family’s flat-screen TV. Right now she’s catching up on the French New Wave. She likes Truffaut over Godard, prefers The 400 Blows to Breathless. She’s not crazy about the gangster stuff, no matter how meta it might be.
In my free time, which is most of it these days, I write book reviews, essays, stories, poems. Sometimes the reviews get published, but I never get paid. Everyone knows there’s no money in writing these days.
A few months back I had the idea that I could play poker for a living. Years ago, before the arrival of certain climactic events, I took the game very seriously. One spring, when I was 21, I dropped out of college to take a two-month driving tour of the United States. I played poker all over the place. By the end of the trip, the game had lost a lot of its luster. There was a sickness in the card rooms, a sadness, that had begun to infect me. Gradually I gave the game up, going back to school to study writing.
But a few months ago, in the midst of my fruitless job search, I discovered a club here that held daily tournaments. It had bright, wide televisions, leather rolling chairs, a soft-spoken old man in back who served smoked chicken. It all came back—the dazzle of it, the glare, the momentous forward thrust. I played every day for two weeks and found myself $700 ahead. But the game was eating away at me—I got angry when I lost, and had trouble concentrating on anything but the cards. I used to bring a book with me to the tournaments—some serious, literary book—clutching it close to me like a totem. I could never get past the first page. Finally, I stuck the money in a drawer and decided to never go back.
The coffee is ready. I add soy to cool it down. The coffee, the cereal, the soy—all of it bought with food stamps. The government gives us $200 a month, a plastic card that we can swipe. The grocery store is just on the other side of the park. I like the walk, past the scampering dogs and shrieking children, beneath the bare, winter trees.
I don’t know what I’m going to do today. Maybe I’ll shoot hoops at the local community center, or finish reading the novel I started the other day. Later, when my girlfriend gets off work, we’ll experiment with a new recipe. I’m in charge of the preparation. I’m supposed to marinate the chicken.
I walk to the refrigerator and take the breasts out and set them on the counter, unwrapping them from their paper. I transfer the chicken into a Ziploc bag, then combine soy sauce and chopped garlic and chili and stir until it is all mixed evenly. Then I pour the marinade into the bag and shake it a few times, and put the Ziploc back into the fridge.
After dinner, maybe we can watch the Rohmer film I rented from the library.
I’m going to have to find a job soon. The money’s running out and poker makes me mean. In the meantime, this isn’t such a bad place to be.
***
“Man Reading” by John Singer Sargent.
12 responses
i enjoyed this, thanks.
lovely.
Yes. I can relate to this… I hope you will enjoy your job as a caregiver. Good luck Alex.
Nice Alex, thanks.
Reading this makes me feel like I have lived a full day more than I actually have. You should get a job as a time machine. There are not many of those out there.
Yup. Unemployment: The marinade du jour of hopelessness and bland daytime pleasures. Well said. But fa’ Gawd sakes Laddie – stay off Craigslist. The List has become the bottom of the bottom of the barrel. It’s a repository for people who have ZERO ability to research and discover legitimate resources. The world, thanks to Google, is at our fingertips – and guys go to a rag tag community bulletin board that has lonely horny lads posting photos of their manbits next to the job section? Seriously – What sort of employer would want that guy as a problem solver? The jobs posted there are for human furniture. It wears a man’s soul down to read ad after ad of ‘jobs’ posted by Numbnuts asking for advanced degrees, multiple languages, long hours, extensive software knowledge all for 8 smackers an hour. It’s an open bulletin board for people who actively choose to have no resources. Look at it this way…if you wanted to find someone to watch your toddler (as most businesses ARE someone’s ‘baby’), would you hire someone who responded off a bulletin board that has a nude cock, twat and boob hook-up section? Don’t do it. Every time you click on a job link on Craigslist, God kills a kitten.
It was hard to complain about unemployment when I had it. It is much easier to complain about the incredibly low-wage job I finally found.
Now my rent is barely paid, which eases some of the anxiety, but I have so little time to be a better person in the world. Then, I tried crazy gigs, took care of crying friends, ran races.
I was a Camel girl, a part-time admin for a college professor, a cataloger of Sufi poetry recordings. I traveled a lot. Today, I am mostly a grocery clerk, and can’t even find the gas money for a roadtrip two hours North. Enjoy the time while you have it.
Nice article. Do try to enjoy this “enforced sabbatical.” I’ve experienced 2 previous bouts in my long and varied work life, and the the breaks helped energize me for the next job. While you’re relatively young, you can have some confidence that eventually you’ll find a job.
However, now at 60, I’ve now been unemployed nearly 2 years, not counting a brief Census gig last year. This time it’s different, and I wish I could afford to retire, but I can’t. Slipping from the middle class into poverty at this stage of the game is alarming, and I’m thankful that I live a low-cost life and had some savings to help. In addition to taking long walks, spending time with non 9-5 friends, going to museums on free days, etc., I’m volunteering so I can keep my skills up-to-date and feel useful. I spend about 20 hours a week on the job hunt, applying for jobs, networking, etc. I’ve always been able to rebound before.
However, this time, panic is starting to set in as my resources dwindle. The hardest part is not being able to make any plans for the future. I feel fortunate to be in good health, knowing that I’m one health crisis away from living on the street.
Portland is a pretty great city to be unemployed in. I’ve been here for a little over a year and was unemployed for most of it. Now I’m semi-employed, but that only lasts as long as I’m a student.
I feel like you described the apartment building my girlfriend and I currently live in in Portland. “a brick building half a block from a park. The building is old and sturdy-looking”
Yep, but ours is filled with meth addicts and someone who screams “I’ll fucking kill you!” and “It’s raining women hallelujah! It’s raining women hallelujah!” at random intervals throughout the day and night.
This city is gray and wet, but it’s helping me to temper my expectations and goals. I guess that sounds a little depressing, but I look at it as a good thing. At least there are tons of great coffee shops to get hyped up and do nothing in.
Dude, with excellent writing like this, your future looks bright to me. Keep the faith.
I loved this a lot! I have been thinking about writing something (a play? a poem? an opera?!) about the turn my life took 2 years ago, when my husband and I finally separated and THEN I lost my job–and quickly gained a lot of debt.
Debt from the divorce, in which I “got” the house and the kids, but found I couldn’t really afford to pay the mortgage, couldn’t refinance it either (no full-time, “steady” job), couldn’t even sell the house (no market). We three have been living on the longest shoestring the world’s ever known, it seems, waiting out this so-called recession on my part-time, hourly pay. Occasional infusions of cash from sympathetic relatives, social service agencies, free-lance and odd/part-time jobs, and sales of valuables that no longer seem more valuable than food or electricity, lengthen the string just when it feels as though we’re going to reach the end and begin free-falling. Sometimes I get worked up about the situation, frustrated, scared for the kids. Mostly I wonder how things will look in retrospect…whenever that might be.
Your writing is very engaging – thanks for sharing, and good luck.
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