The Job Pirate Page 17

  But even the path to Fuck Yeah had its problems. My savings account had become a part of my tenancy that I referred to as, “That was so October.” I had to find some work; put a little meat on the rent check. I was barely three months into my new life in Seattle, and my $3,800 surplus had become $2,200 in credit card debt. It seemed the past 90-some days of lounge, libation, and security deposits had taken a heavy toll on my finances. But with a plethora of exotic job experience under my belt, I felt confident I could find some kind of decent employment in my new city—once I really applied myself to looking. Luckily, Craigslist had a Seattle page on their website, so I perused the job postings and sent out four #6 Resumes, four #3 Resumes, a couple of #1s, and topped off the day’s search with a wildcard: the new hybrid resume that I had been working on, which briefly highlighted almost all of my various seventy-some jobs.

  A full week of Internet job-hunting passed without any returned calls or emails, so I drafted a few more resumes—tailor-made for the Pacific Northwest—and sent them out. I had always assumed by being a very small fish in a big pond called Los Angeles I would automatically become a relatively medium-sized fish in this midsized pond of Seattle. But this was not the case. Living in a miniature metropolis with two large colleges meant having to compete with wave after wave of recently graduated 23-year-olds. My elaborated marketing and advertising experience was no match for a punk kid who was eager to learn and “excited about the possibility of growing with a company.” I got a few callbacks the next week and landed a couple of interviews, but those resulted in not having enough html-coding experience—a qualification I could not justifiably lie about because I knew the hard way that I would be expected to perform that duty. Times were beginning to get tight by that first week of November. It wasn’t as bad as those dire days of 2002 or 2005, but it was starting to get close. I still had about a thousand dollars of wiggle room left on the Visa; that was at least a solid month’s rent and survival right there. But I was quickly bottoming out, and I had made a solemn vow not to return to Los Angeles with my tail between my legs—for at least a year.

  The malls were just beginning their ambush of holiday music, which prompted two thoughts as I shopped for a decent shirt to wear on interviews: A) I’d have to worry about buying Christmas gifts at some point, and B) The Christmas season meant plenty of retail jobs.

  I was already downtown so I walked west toward the water and stepped into Macy’s department store. And low and behold, along with their own ambush of holiday harmonies, they were just then starting to hire their seasonal-employee sales force. Almost always, any job involving a cash register and customers was one that I would avoid at all costs. But I knew a little something about department stores and their holiday hiring tactics, as well as a simple way to make a solid week’s paycheck without having to do any work. It was a little backdoor trick I developed in my 20s, and it almost always worked at the higher-end department stores, especially about this time of year. But you could use it only once per store nowadays, what with all the computer records and such. But it was simple: Get hired for a temporary Christmas sales position, which is usually pretty easy to do when you hit them right at November; boast of your prior sales experience in men’s clothing or home furnishings, so you’re assured a solid position on the sales floor; attend the paid week of training, which almost always took place in a large casual room with a giant dry-erase board and a dozen other aspiring salespeople; and then you quit at the end of the paid training week—I prefer doing this part over the phone. No suit and tie, no cash registers, no customers, no confrontations—but $340 of cold, hard cash on its way to you in the mail. Next month’s rent would be halfway there just for sitting in a classroom mildly stoned for four and a half days, watching multiple “safety in the workplace” and “proper customer experience” videos on a TV, and pretending to learn all the discount key codes on the cash register. It was just like summer school, only air-conditioned and better dressed.

  But that was that. I got my $340. The December rent fund was looking better, and Macy’s was forever out of the loop. But I still needed to find work. I could probably pull the same scam at Nordstrom, but I couldn’t bullshit the attire. You needed some fancy threads to first get the job at Nordstrom, and all I had were a couple of vintage blazers, a V-neck sweater, and some slacks to a suit that never made it out of Los Angeles. It would cost me more to dress for the part than what I would take home in a week. So I went back to sending out resumes from the “home office” for the next couple of days.

  The gods of employment soon took pity upon me in the form of another seasonal job, but this time for a boutique flower store on the wealthy side of town. It seemed that new hybrid resume I had sent out to a couple of vague “hiring Christmas workers” ads showcased my past floral experience (totally genuine and unadulterated, for the record). I was hired along with twelve other semiqualified ex-flower-store employees to set up floral Christmas decorations inside ritzy hotel lobbies. The pay was decent, the work was occasional, and the job involved working alongside a bunch of older married women who needed some extra money around the holidays—the easiest variety of coworker to keep pace with.

  Thanksgiving at the Consultay Apartments was a drunken blur of neighbors, food, and wine, and just what I imagined Thanksgiving to be like for Ezra Pound, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald during their first expatriated year in Paris. But that was about the last I saw of my neighbors until December rolled around; it seemed every hotel in Seattle wanted their lobbies ready for Christmas during that one week between holiday storms. My new coworkers and I mostly worked late at night, when the hotel guests were up in their rooms or out on the town. It was a nice feeling to be working again, but it was an even nicer feeling to be working in a position that required no critical thinking whatsoever. This decorating gig fell into perfect harmony with my new growing-backwards philosophy. All I had to do was wrap garland over stairwell banisters, hang designer decorations from Christmas tree branches, and find that one broken bulb in every string of lights that prevented the entire thing from lighting up. There were no deadlines, no angry customers or clients, no cash registers, and no early morning commutes. It was just me and the midnight ladies hanging glittery shit from trees.

  December started to get even more interesting after Alex moved into the apartment. Alex—short for Alexandria, but don’t ever call her that—was a tall sexy mess of spiky black hair, Parliament cigarettes, and punk rock. She moved into the unit that overlooked our little patio courtyard, and she climbed down from her window one night and joined us for drinks and introductions. We moved the party up to Bryan’s apartment for the after-dark portion of celebrating Wednesday, and he fired up Rock Band on the Xbox, and proceeded to wrap his customary bandana around his forehead before setting up the drum kit. I had never had an issue before that night being a 37-year-old dude strumming a pretend guitar in front of a room full of younger people I barely knew, but now with Alex there watching it just seemed so much more pathetic.

  “This is kind of gay, man,” I confessed to Bryan as we smoked a joint by the whirling wall fan in the kitchen. “Chicks don’t dig a grown man who plays a plastic musical instrument.”

  “You’re not that old,” he replied. “And you look much younger than you are.”

  “I was talking about you. You’re 31 and you’ve got a bandana on your head, and you’re about to sit down at a pretend drum set. She’s going to see us make complete assholes out of ourselves, tonight, right here in your apartment. Maybe Wii bowling or tennis would be a little more … appropriate for her first visit here.”

  “But …” Bryan pulled a series of quick puffs from the dissipating joint. “But Rock Band is where I shine. She’s fine with it; she’s into it.”

  We burned through a few songs and a few more bottles of wine, both of which flowed easier as the night progressed. Then I laid down my trusty three-quarters-size guitar and sloppily excused myself to run upstairs to my apartment and grab some more pot
; it had been my turn to roll one since Green Day turned into Led Zeppelin and my plastic bass turned into a plastic guitar. As I unlocked my front door, I suddenly noticed Alex standing right beside me. She must have been just inches behind me the entire way up. And she was taller now than back at Bryan’s. She was actually gargantuan, standing almost eye-to-eye with me and I’m six-and-a-half feet tall. She was definitely the tallest and probably the cutest woman I had ever invited into that apartment—actually, she was the only woman I had ever invited into that apartment.

  “It looks like an office in here,” she said after taking a seat on my mattress. There was nowhere else to sit.

  “Big fan of minimalism. I like to go light.”

  “The word ‘Spartan’ comes to mind,” she replied to that. “Works for me, though. You should see my place. At least you have a rug.”

  Over the course of the next 15 minutes, I learned that she had just moved down from Alaska, would be attending school the following semester, and would be turning 23 years old in a couple of months. I’m not entirely sure who instigated the first kiss, but a first kiss on a bed almost always leads to something more. Over the course of the next 15 minutes, I learned that her breasts were extremely large and angelically beautiful; I learned that no kiss, past on up to the time of this writing, would ever compare to the passion and fervor of her lips and tongue; and, finally, I learned that no other bare, pink pussy, again both past or present, could ever taste so much like candy.

  “Dude, she’s 18,” said Seth, the apartment manager, the next day when inquiring about seeing us swaggering down the hall together the night before. “She’s just starting school. She’s not even a freshman yet.”

  “I think you’re mistaken,” I replied, not even recalling seeing him in the hall the night before. “She said she’s going back to school. Look at her! There’s no way she’s a teenager.”

  Seth then took me to his first-floor apartment, where he brought out her tenant application and thereby proved without a doubt that Alex had just turned 18 years old. “Man, you didn’t fuck her did you?”

  She was half my age. She could have been my daughter. I was dropping out of college when she was being born. Had I lived in Alaska, I might have gone to high school with her parents. As all these thoughts ran through my head, I couldn’t help but smile a little. It wasn’t necessarily a proud smile, but more of a grin of recognition. Because my theory was working. I was growing backwards faster than I had anticipated.

  THAT MOTHERFUCKER CARLOS

  JOB #57

  I was finally coming out of a string of bad luck jobs, or so I had thought. My well of easy temp work had ended weeks before that, after management saw the tattoos on my knuckles and promptly removed me from the roster of available office work assignments—which entailed doing mindless filing and data entry for vacationing employees—and instead started giving me all of the manual labor assignments. I had gone from sipping coffee in cubicles and typing dates into spreadsheets to dismantling cubicles and stacking boxes of spreadsheets into storage rooms. It was equally as mindless and paid about the same, but it was manual labor and not something I was wired for.

  It wasn’t until the third box-moving assignment, after I had accumulated enough money to cover the following month’s rent, when I reminded the temporary employment company of my vast experience inside the office. I made it clear that my talents weren’t being utilized due to some “silly and miniscule” tattoos on my fingers that weren’t even noticeable in most office lighting. The woman at the temp company was chewing her lunch as she reviewed my resume on her computer screen, and I could hear the phone rustle against her cheek with every bite. It was calming somehow, almost woodsy—like brush under stepping feet.

  “Yes, you do have quite a bit of office management experience.” She sounded a little shocked. “I wonder why … Oh. Hmmm. What happened at Priority Medical Labs?”

  “Things just didn’t work out.”

  “It says here that you damaged one of their printers. And that you were hostile toward them.”

  “I was not hostile toward them. They sprung a test on me.” I tried explaining. “I wasn’t prepared for a test. It was well over a hundred questions … and all math. Not my strongest trait.”

  “But it was for an accounting position. Passing their math exam is mandatory with Priority Medical. All new recruits have to pass it. How did the printer get damaged?”

  “They wanted me to print the results after I finished. I was in this little room all by myself, with a monitor and printer. I told them I wasn’t prepared. I just wanted to explain things.”

  “And what about the printer?” she asked as the typing keys paused.

  “Well, I didn’t know what to do after I finished the test. I knew I butchered it pretty badly. It was early and I couldn’t think clearly. I didn’t want to give them the printout but I couldn’t say that to them, so I tried to delete my test from the computer and that didn’t work. Then this little clock icon came up on the screen and said if I didn’t push ‘print’ that it was going to do it for me. I had only seconds to react and I freaked out a little. I dismantled the printer before it could print the results. But I did not break it. I just wiggled some things loose.”

  “It says here they were still able to retrieve your test results from a different printer. It says you failed the test. Then they said you stormed out of the office after they showed you the results.”

  “I did. But it wasn’t out of hostility.”

  “They don’t see it that way.”

  “Come on, Dottie, there’s got to be something you have that doesn’t involve moving boxes. I can put makeup on my tattoos. I’m an office kind of guy—a real people person. I have a bad back and no health insurance; there’s only so much manual labor I can do before I hurt myself. Come on, there’s got to be something.”

  I heard her type a few words on her keyboard before telling me about a full-time gig that just opened up in Sherman Oaks. She said it was pretty easy and didn’t involve moving anything. Then she asked if I’d ever seen Fast Times at Ridgemont High, to which I answered, “of course.”

  “Good. You’ll be working at the galleria where most of that movie was shot. So that’s neat.”

  The first thought to pop into my head was Jennifer Jason Leigh’s breasts from the baseball dugout scene, when she loses her virginity. It made the job sound sort of enticing before realizing that gallerias were also full of stores and cash registers and customers.

  “As you can probably see from my resume, my retail sales experience isn’t all that … sparkling,” I reminded her.

  “Oh, it’s not sales. Not sure what this is. But it’s definitely not retail sales.”

  I agreed to the job, thanked her, and showed up at the Sherman Oaks Galleria the next morning at 8:00 a.m. to meet with the manager Samantha. Samantha walked me around the outdoor pavilion of the slumbering galleria, where carts selling sunglasses, novelty hats, and cell-phone plans were just beginning to set up for the day. It was about a 100-foot stretch of concrete and grass that ran from the enormous parking garage to the main entrance of the huge indoor mall, with little café tables and flowerbeds peppering the way. She showed me a small table set up near the front doors, and she straightened three stacks of coupons, flyers, and store catalogs on top of it.

  “Well, here it is,” she said.

  “Do you want me to move this?”

  “No, this is where you’ll be standing. You’ll be greeting customers before they come into the mall, handing out coupons and stuff. A lot of our customers here are older, and they don’t really know their way around. Most are here for Macy’s, which is over on the far side, or Nordstrom, which is on the second floor on the opposite side.” She two-finger pointed to opposite ends of the large mall like a flight stewardess.

  “And I just tell people that?”

  “If they ask,” she answered. “And if they don’t, just say ‘Welcome to the Sherman Oaks Galleria’ and ask if t
hey need help with anything.”

  “Sounds fine. Thank you.”

  “You sure? Have any questions?”

  “No, I’m good. Macy’s over there and Nordstrom on the second floor. And someone will relieve me for lunch?”

  “Mmm … no, not really. Just go grab a bite when you get hungry. I’ll come back around this afternoon. You’re on your own.”

  “Cool. I’m good.”

  I had worn a tie with my button-up and slacks, but as soon as Samantha walked away I pulled it from around my neck and rolled it up into my pocket. Although I wasn’t a big fan of social interaction, this was definitely a nice mindless job that didn’t require one bit of either manual labor or mathematics. I knew that I was on my last legs with the temp company, and this gig was about the best that I was going to get until I proved myself again. The accounting job was a mistake. I should have never agreed to the interview in the first place. I should have never fabricated the experience on my resume, or the bachelor’s degree in the field—there were just certain fake careers better left untouched.