A Working Stiff's Manifesto Read online

  Copyright © 2002 by Iain Levison

  All rights reserved.

  Published by

  Soho Press Inc.

  853 Broadway

  New York, NY 10003

  eISBN 978-1-56947-920-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  is available in the office of the publisher.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  BECOMING AN ASSOCIATE

  CABLE, A GOD-GIVEN RIGHT

  WOULDN’T WE ALL BE HAPPIER SOMEWHERE ELSE?

  ON THE SLIME LINE

  THE INTERNET-BRAINWASHING DEATH RAY

  VANISHING DEMOGRAPHIC

  For Marion

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank (in alphabetcal order) the following people who gave me either encouragement or beer money during the writing of this book … Andrew Langman, Matt Lewis, Faith Manney, Betty Mizgala, Patti Pelrine, Kate Pennell, Larry Platt, Mark Scepansky, Graham Weddington, and, of course, my mother.

  BECOMING AN ASSOCIATE

  It’s Sunday morning and I am scanning the classifieds. There are two types of jobs in here—jobs I’m not qualified for and jobs I don’t want. I’m considering both.

  There are pages and pages of the first type—jobs I will never get. Must know this, must know that. Must be experienced in this and that, for at least six years, and be fluent in Chinese, and be able to fly a jet through antiaircraft fire, and have SIX YEARS experience in open-heart surgery. Starting salary $32,000. Fax your résumé to Beverly.

  Who is Beverly, I wonder, and what does she know that I don’t? She knows she’s getting a paycheck, for starters. She can’t do any of the things required for the job, I’m sure, or she would be doing them, instead of fielding phone calls. If I knew Beverly on a personal level, could I get a job doing something at her company? Is that why they don’t put Beverly’s last name in there, to discourage would-be stalkers like me from schmoozing up to her in a bar? From finding out details of her personal life and bumping into her on the subway, after waiting for four hours, then asking her out for a drink; then, after a night of passionate sex, offhandedly wonder if they were hiring for anything down at her firm? I continue on down the column, learning more and more about skills I don’t have, about training I will never get, about jobs needed in fields I never even knew existed.

  Sometimes the Jobs-I-Can’t-Do sections contain a hidden morsel, though. The words “WILL TRAIN” always trigger a Pavlovian slobbering in any qualified bullshit artist. If they’re going to train you, what difference does it make what you used to do? “COMPUTER PROGRAMMER, WILL TRAIN.” I know what a computer is. It’s one of those TV things with a typewriter attached by a cord. If they want to train me to program it, fine. Then I keep reading. This is an ad for a computer school, where they teach you all about computers for $2,500, then get you a job data processing, also known as typing, for nine dollars an hour. I keep looking.

  Today, all the WILL TRAINS are for jobs I don’t want. “MOVERS NEEDED, $8/hr. to start. WILL TRAIN. Guaranteed overtime.” This ad is of the second type. Moving furniture isn’t so bad. It’s hard work but it has its perks, one of which is you never need to work out when you’re doing it because your muscles are torn to shit at the end of every day. Eight dollars an hour is low for New York. After taxes that’ll leave about six. Still, I can deal with that. The problem is the guaranteed overtime. They are obviously understaffed and are trying to make it look like keeping me at work for fourteen hours a day will be doing me a favor. They’ll think because I answered this ad that I’m going to be enthusiastic about showing up on Sundays and holidays. “You wanted overtime,” they’ll crow, “isn’t that why you answered the ad?” I move on down the page.

  “FISH CUTTERS NEEDED, $12/hr. to start.” This is a combination of both types of jobs—a job I don’t want and a job I can’t do—all wrapped up in one neat little package. I worked for two years as a fish processor in Alaska, so I know a thing or two about fish, but I can’t cut them and I don’t want to. But I can talk fish with just about anybody. I can bullshit my way through an interview no problem, and by the time they realize I can’t cut, I’m already on the payroll. Then they’ll either have to teach me or fire me, and firing me will involve admitting a mistake, so teaching me it will be. Twelve dollars an hour. I’m set. Rent will be paid.

  There’s a definite trick to applying for jobs for which you are not qualified. Knowing something is key, even if it is just one little fact that you can throw out. You can usually get these facts by listening to boring people. I once spent five hours on a train down to Florida listening to the guy in the next seat ramble on about the woes of house painting, and two days later I was painting houses in Miami after wowing the interviewer with a verbatim rendition of the speech I had just heard. So, with fish I’m set. Just a few mentions of salmon fishing in Alaska, and I’m in.

  Another fact about interviewers is that most interviewers just want to hear themselves talk. In the average job interview, I’m usually lucky if I can get a word in edgewise. Interviewers have a captive audience who want something from them, so they can babble away uninterrupted about their restaurant, their business, their life, their opinion of the president, or any subject on their mind. Who’s going to disagree with them? It’s the perfect dictator’s forum. “No, sir, actually I think the President’s doing a fine job,” and my application is ripped to shreds the minute I’m gone. I’ve sat quietly while interviewers tell me facts about their wives, their careers, their golf handicaps, even their first sexual experiences. And they rarely ask anything about me.

  I go down to the fish store and we talk fish. This is a high-end fish store, catering to the eclectic needs of housewives from the best areas of New York, I am told. The manager, John, needs someone with a “good attitude,” who is “presentable.” An ass-kisser with a good haircut. It’s the same thing everyone wants, every business from IBM to the local transmission shop. I happen to have a good haircut, and I am relentlessly polite, at least for the first five minutes I meet someone. He tells me to come back tomorrow for orientation, wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt. No questions about fish cutting ability are ever asked.

  I have a job. Here we go again.

  In the last ten years, I’ve had forty-two jobs in six states. I’ve quit thirty of them, been fired from nine, and as for the other three, the line was a little blurry. Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what happened, you just know it wouldn’t be right for you to show up any more.

  I have become, without realizing it, an itinerant worker, a modern-day Tom Joad. There are differences, though. If you asked Tom Joad what he did for a living, he would say, “I’m a farmworker.” Me, I have no idea. The other difference is that Tom Joad didn’t blow $40,000 getting an English degree.

  And the more I travel and look around for work, the more I realize that I am not alone. There are thousands of itinerant workers out there, many of them wearing business suits, many doing construction, many waiting tables or cooking in your favorite restaurants. They are the people who were laid off from companies that promised them a lifetime of security and then changed their minds, the people who walked out of commencement with a $40,000 fly swatter in their hands and got rejected from twenty interviews in a row, then gave up. They’re the people who thought, I’ll just take this temporary assignment/bartending job/parking lot attendant position/pizza delivery boy job until something better comes up, but something better never does, and life becomes a daily chore of dragging yourself into work and waiting for a paycheck, which you can barely use to survive. Then you listen in
fear for the sound of a cracking in your knee, which means a $5,000 medical bill, or a grinding in your car’s engine, which means a $2,000 mechanic’s bill, and you know then that it’s all over, you lose. New car loans, health insurance, and mortgages are out of the question. Wives and children are unimaginable. It’s surviving, but surviving sounds dramatic, and this life lacks drama. It’s scraping by.

  It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was a plan once, but over the years I’ve forgotten what it was. It involved a house and a beautiful wife and a serviceable car and a fenced-in yard, and later a kid or two. Then I’d sit back and write the Great American Novel. There was an unspoken agreement between me and the Fates that, as I lived in the richest country in the history of the world, and was a fairly hard worker, all these things would just come together eventually. The first dose of reality was the military. I remember a recruiter coming to my house, promising to train me in the marketable skill of my choice, which back then was electronics. I remember the recruiter nodding vigorously and describing all the electronics that the army was currently using. They would train me and train me, he said.

  This was my first hands-on experience with an experienced corporate bullshit artist. They trained me and trained me all right. Mostly, they trained me to use a rifle and to interrogate Russian and East German prisoners. These are skills that very few electronics firms are in need of. But surely, speaking Russian and German comes in handy, no? No, actually. Not if your main strengths in the language concern tanks and troop movements. Once we get past “Where is your artillery?”, a phrase that doesn’t come up much in everyday conversation, I’m pretty much lost in either language.

  Then there was college. The conventional wisdom is that you are unemployable without a college degree. That you are often unemployable with one is something a lot of people spend a lot of money to discover. An English degree qualifies you for either secretarial work (typing those papers gets your fingers plenty of practice) or teaching English, an irony that seems lost on most English professors I talk to. This is a field that exists to duplicate itself, and, of course, to provide star athletes with legitimate courses they can take on their way to NBA and NFL careers so that they can “attend” college and earn passing grades.

  So that’s how I wind up here. No wife, no serviceable car, no fenced-in yard. I’ve obeyed the rules, done my time, and I’m right back where I started—an inch above the poverty line with no hope in sight. Instead of my house and beautiful wife, I’ve got a tiny one-bedroom New York City apartment, which, for financial reasons, I have to share with a roommate who makes a first-year frat boy look like Martha Stewart.

  But before I start my new job, I have promised a day’s labor to Corey, my roommate. Corey is in much the same boat as I am, only he had the good sense to drop out of college the minute he became disgusted with it, which was after six weeks. So when the Student Loan people call, it’s usually for me.

  After his brief college experience, Corey came to New York to work in the film industry, imagining himself shooting up the glamorous ladder of success to become a director. He did direct a small film, an independent production, and the experience left him so drained that now he barely has the energy or enthusiasm to do carpentry work on other directors’ movie sets. “You wouldn’t believe the bullshit,” he tells me. I’m sure I’d believe every word of it. Most of his time and energy was taken up not with camera angles and script supervision, but with trying to get cops not to tow his car every time he set up on a street corner to shoot a scene. Waiting in line to obtain permits, paying parking tickets, and giving money to homeless people to keep other homeless people from jumping in front of the camera is what filmmaking is really about, he explains.

  He has recovered somewhat from that experience and is assistant-directing another small film being shot down in Tribeca, and he needs warm bodies to use as gophers. For a chance to see a real movie being shot, I offer my services.

  He has gone down to the shoot at four in the morning, and I take the subway down there at about nine. On the way, I make a mistake and read the script I have been asked to bring, which Corey forgot in his early rush. It is awful. Not just run of the mill awful, but not Plan Nine From Outer Space awful either, which would have at least made it interesting. This script just sucks. It seems to have been written by someone who watched a lot of television growing up, and instead of incorporating reality into their adult imagination, this writer just incorporated the clichéd images of 1970s television. The drama scenes are from Mannix and the love scenes from The Love Boat. I can’t imagine how this wretched crap made it to the filming stage.

  I get to the shoot and realize that nobody wants to hear my opinion of the script because it’s already past nine o’clock and they have to finish shooting by nightfall. Corey has only been able to close off the street for one day, and nothing is being done because the sound man is having all kinds of technical glitches.

  Corey, who is usually soft-spoken and calm, is buzzing around and screaming at people. I’ve never seen him like this before. He comes over to me. “Carry these things upstairs,” he tells me. He points at a pile of heavy objects that look complex and electronic.

  I start to pick one up and the sound man screams, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

  “He told me to …”

  “LEAVE MY SHIT ALONE!”

  Whoa, Buddy. “Okay,” I say softly. I put the expensive thing down gently and stand there. The sound man turns back to what he was doing, and Corey, who created the whole scene, is off to “organize” something else.

  These people like to shriek at each other. Scenes like this are a constant of the film trade, I soon learn. In the next few minutes, I see a different sound man shrieking at his assistant, a stuntman nearly attack two passers-by, and the director make loud, snide remarks to a pretty girl who is holding a clipboard. No one here has any social grace or sense of courtesy. They are artistes. They have no responsibilities to the outside world because it is their job to critique it. How could they perform their invaluable task of providing commentary on society if they burden themselves with its restrictive rules?

  The sound man comes over to me and hands me a pole. “Take this upstairs,” he says without looking at me.

  Normally I’d have punched this guy by now, but I’m supposed to be helping Corey, and I don’t want to create yet another time delay on his set by injuring someone who knows what’s going on. I take it upstairs. There the two “stars,” one of whom I actually recognize from a mid 80s sitcom, are going over their dialogue. They look annoyed at my intrusion but don’t say anything. I put the pole down and start to leave.

  “Hey, bring me up some coffee,” the sitcom guy says.

  “Me too,” says the girl.

  “Sure thing,” I say. I have no intention of bringing either of them anything because they didn’t say “please,” but I’m cleared of responsibility when I get downstairs because the lighting guy gives me a mile of wire to untangle. I sit and untangle wire for a bit, then everybody starts getting wildly excited and screaming, “Quiet, quiet!” We’re actually going to start filming now. Everybody is still. Then the actress opens the door and comes outside and closes the door.

  “Cut!” screams the director.

  That was it. That was the result of four hours of preparation, watching this girl open and close a door. Then she does it six more times to get the shot right. Apparently there’s a right and wrong way to open and close a door in Hollywood. This must be what you learn in acting school.

  “Hey, you, come here,” says the sound guy when the excitement is over. I just stare at him. I’ve read the script, these people are wasting their time. This is a shit movie that would be lucky to wind up in the discount bin of a video store in the Philippines. Maybe if we were filming some masterpiece that was going to change the whole world of film, I’d come running, but my commitment to this project is straining. I know the sound guy probably came here a few years ago, dreaming of working on suc
h a film, and this is his dose of reality. He’s just happy to be working, playing with his microphones and miles of wire and getting paid for it. This is his Great Compromise. I’ve made my own, and it doesn’t include being spoken to like that.

  Corey, the lighting guy, the actors, they’ve all given up. This crap film is to them what applying for a job at a fish counter is to me. But here, there is some unwritten rule that you can’t admit that you’ve given up. A very strict rule. Rule One: Whatever you do, never stop bullshitting yourself that you’re important. Rule One keeps a lot of people sane.

  I’ve had enough of this. I walk past the soundman, down to the coffee shop at the end of the street, buy myself a cup, and only myself, and sit with the crowd, watching the production from the steps.

  On my way home, I call my ex-girlfriend to tell her not to bother coming to visit the glamorous world of film. I’d invited her down to the shoot, hoping that she might find a glimpse of filmmaking fascinating enough to reconsider her recent decision to seek a boyfriend elsewhere. My inability to hold a shitty job while working on the Great American Novel was causing strain on our relationship. I’d come home from jobs waiting tables or moving furniture and be too tired to write, and my lack of literary output had her convinced that my writing dream was just a line that I’d used to pick her up in the first place.

  “Van Gogh painted when he was broke,” she told me once. “People can do things when they’re broke.”

  Van Gogh ruined it for the rest of us. Sane people who want a career in the arts want a halfway decent life while they examine the deeper issues. There’s no image there, though. It’s all about image. Most people who can’t name two of Van Gogh’s paintings know that he was a starving nutcase. He sat in a corner and poured out art while his food supply ran out and people came to evict him. Now that was an artist. Cut off his ear and mailed it to a woman. Now that’s passion. Actually, it’s schizophrenia. I’d hoped not to model myself on a schizophrenic self-mutilator who died in obscurity, but any argument of mine was just a rationale for lack of commitment to my trade.