On jobs, Part Two: Money

A friend of mine in high school had an internship with Merrill Lynch that started at the end of our Junior year. He told me about it while we were sitting in Ms. Sugg’s classroom, the first two people to arrive for AP European History after lunch let out. He had just started, and he was unable to sit still with excitement. “I’m not doing very much right now, but it’s helpful just to see what they do. They said I could keep working for them through college. They’re a really good company, but after a few years I might look for a position with someone else instead.”

I nodded and smiled like I would with anyone speaking a foreign language.

“This is so cool,” he said. “I really want to be in this industry.”

More nods, more smiles. Then I finally said, “who’s Merrill Lynch?”

“You don’t know who Merrill Lynch is?”

“Nope, don’t think so.”

“They’re an investment brokerage.”

Blank stare.

“You’ve probably seen them before. You’d recognize them. They’re the one with the bull.” He reached into his bag to get his wallet. “Actually, yeah, this is it right here,” he said, handing me his spiffy new business card.

I looked at the bull design. I had probably seen it in ads, but I still didn’t know what Merrill Lynch was. “Why is their logo a bull?”

“You know,” he said. “Like bulls and bears on Wall Street.”

He and I had taken U.S. Government and Politics together the year before, and we did in fact learn about those stock market symbols, so I vaguely knew what he was referring to, but something more basic wasn’t clear to me.

“So, but, what’s an investment brokerage?”

I’m sure he explained it very well, not that I followed it at the time. Even if I had, though, what I didn’t get was even more basic.

“You want to work for them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I mean, I want to work in investments in general, and Merrill Lynch is one of the biggest companies in the industry.”

“But…” I was more lost than he seemed to understand. “Why do you want to work in investments?”

“What do you mean? Because you can make a lot of money, and because it’s really exciting!”

“Yeah, okay,” I said. “Yeah, great. That’s really cool.”

What I was thinking, though, was more like, “What a weirdo.” (I’m not particularly good at hiding my emotions, so I’m sure that what I looked like I was thinking, too.) Wall Street? That’s where evil people wearing red power ties rob the rest of us with their arcane arts. And making lots of money? Whatever. The good life would be seeing the country through the window of a bus, exploring unknown cities with friends, eating cheap food and seeing amazing musicians in tiny bars… you know… like Jack Kerouac.

If you haven’t guessed, that was the year I read On the Road.

More accurately, I thought the good life was reading, writing, and learning about the world. In general, I assumed that I would become a writer, and I would make money—somehow—but what was more important was being known. I wanted to be the voice in people’s heads. I wanted to see my author’s photo in bookstores. In my later years, I could tell stories about getting my first agent, or about battling with editors over plot lines.

This all might have made more sense if I had actually been writing.

At any rate, for the first five years of my adult life, I had no real understanding of the need to earn money, let alone any desire to earn it. Spend it, sure—I loved spending it. I spent as much as I could on Magic cards in the 90s, when my income was limited to gifts and my $12 weekly allowance for doing the dishes and cleaning out the kitty litter. In college, my mother gave me access to my parents’ checking account so that I could buy all the books I needed for class (which I felt no compunction about using to also buy all the books I wanted to fill out my knowledge of whatever I was interested in that month, including English poetry, Greek and Roman Classics, and continental philosophy. I also got plenty of pizza down at Mangia on Main Street and, by my sophomore year, cigarettes from 7/11.) Later, I took a year off and moved to Los Angeles. My parents not only paid my rent; they also paid my credit card bills. I wasn’t just buying housewares and food, either. CDs, time at the Internet café, Starbucks coffee, newspapers, restaurant nachos, movie tickets… it all went on that card.

I had jobs during most of this time—I’ll get to this in another post—but they couldn’t begin to pay for what I was spending. My parents brought up my spending with me sometimes, but it was my mother who saw the bills and the bank statements, and let’s just say that she isn’t the most confrontational person in the world. No, let’s also say that she is one of the most generous and loving people in the world.

My mother also paid off my college loans, even after I was otherwise finally providing for myself. It’s only recently that I’ve understood the extent of her help and her lenience. I started out my life with more of a financial cushion than most people without a trust fund.

I haven’t known until now why I remembered my confusion about my friend’s desire to work for Merrill Lynch. Our minds hold on to moments that we don’t understand at the time, so that we can return to them when we’re older and have learned more about that area of life. This happens especially when we’re children. In my case, maybe I remained a child longer than was healthy.

In my next installment, I learn that most people do indeed follow norms, or else they wouldn’t be norms.

On jobs, Part One: Rite of Passage

I was 17 years old the first time I applied for jobs. There wasn't any great need for me to get a job--I had already gotten into college, and my parents had no financial difficulty taking care of me--but my father told me that I should find work for the summer. It's hard now to reconstruct how much agency I had in the decision, but I think I agreed to look. And so for the next couple of weeks, my father drove me around to shopping centers, and then ran errands or just waited around while I dropped off applications. I focused first at stores that I went to anyway, out of the misapprehension that working at them would be more fun than working anywhere else. Blockbuster Video. Borders Books and Music. The movie theater.

I hadn't graduated from High School quite yet, but it was well into the second semester of my senior year, the point at which most teachers have to fight against the prevailing feeling that class is pretty much over. It was that awkward period of life when people start to claim the status of Adult, even though actual adults can tell just how ridiculous that makes them look. I wasn't doing too much of that myself; at most, I was starting to read a bit more expansively, and I went to my first parties with alcohol (which I was still turning down). I was as unsure of who I was as anybody, though

Probably, that's one of the reasons my father wanted me to get a job, why middle-class parents in general encourage their children to get a job before college: because it is one of our society's rites of passage. It certainly felt that way at the time, like a crucial, frightening transformation of my identity and my social role. A lot of people I knew already had jobs, and I don't think it set them apart in my mind as weird or anything, but I had a lot of difficulty accepting that I, too, could be employed. Not as a factual matter, understand--I didn't think I was unemployable. I just couldn't quite imagine myself on the other side of the counter without experiencing an identity crisis.

 After one of my applications was accepted, I said I needed to think about it: could I really be a "Team Member" at KFC, working the cash register, filling orders? The thought was quite dissonant, for a number of reasons. I was an aid for my favorite teacher that semester, Ms. Sugg--I took three classes with her, including AP U.S. Government and Politics as a sophomore--and I remember sitting at a desk in the corner finishing a homework assignment, and staging a conversation in my mind in which I told her, "I'm employed! I'm a productive member of society now!"

I imagined her approval; weirdly, I think I even imagined her esteem. But then she would say, "That's great! Where do you work?"

And then I imagined how hard it would be to bring myself to tell her that I worked at KFC. Is that really productive work? Was that the kind of work I should be doing as an intelligent college-bound kid? It's just above minimum-wage, and it's smelly, and it's hot in that kitchen, and the people I would be working with would probably think I was weird for liking books, and the food is gross anyway, and besides, you have to wear a hat! A floppy hat with a logo on it!

I turned the job down. That may have been stupid, but as it happened, it was also lucky. I got accepted at the next place that I applied, Safeway, which has a union workforce, meaning that they have a higher starting salary, get raises every quarter, and are ensured regular breaks. I had learned about unions from Ms. Sugg--I remembered a picture from the text book that showed strikers being attacked by the National Guard, and another that showed a poster with a hugely muscled man in front of a slogan for the IWW. Okay, this seemed legit, even if I had to wear an apron with a name tag and shave my scraggly beard.

The first week was easy. In fact, it was a lot like high school. All the new employees in the region had to attend a class held in an arcane wing of an office complex, learning company policy and tips for how to memorize the PLU codes. (I still remember the teacher telling us how she remembered that the code for eggplants was 4081: "I hate eggplants. I tried one once, and I'm never eating another again. So you can just remember: Katie ate one, never ate another one.")¹ Once the job itself started, I made friends with some of the other baggers and checkers who were around my age, and even went out with them after work once or twice to play pool. As I had expected, most of them were different from the people I associated with in high school in ways associated with class, but I certainly wasn't ostracized.

Perhaps the biggest change in identity came from interacting with The Public in my new role as service employee. The Public, especially The Suburban Public, will talk to service employees who they have never seen before, even though they would never talk to the same random teenagers in the same way if they were around them somewhere else. Not having gone to religious services, I never talked to the adults of my town aside from my family and my teachers (and, now that I think about it, service employees). Service employee are treated by The Public in an oddly familiar manner, although not quite as a member of the group.

I remember one incident in particular where I helped a woman move about twenty bags from her shopping cart into the trunk of her SUV while she asked me about my plans and told me about her sons. When I was done, she offered me a tip, I think it was a dollar in quarters, and I told her that we weren't allowed to accept tips. "Why not? You said you're trying to save up money before you go to college, right?" When I still refused, she simply smiled in mild amusement at my youthful conscientiousness and reached over to put it in the pocket of my apron. I felt pleased to get the tip, but also slightly violated. I also had a very minor ethical quandary on my hands now, because we were told that if a customer insisted on giving us a tip, we had to tell our supervisor. The reason was probably so they could add it to our reported income on our W2, except I hadn't understood what that meant, and I thought I would have to give the tip up.² Beyond that, it's the first time I remember having a charged interaction with someone I would never see again. That may in fact be one of the most characteristic elements of adulthood in modern society.

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1 It's weird how much I remember from this class. She was a very good teacher. I also recall her asking why we thought people came to Safeway instead of other stores. "It's not because of our products or our prices. If they want a can of Del Monte Green Beans, it's going to be the same can of Del Monte Green Beans anywhere they go, for about the same price. Why do you think they come here?" When no one could come up with anything, she finally answered her own question: "It's because of our service. It's because of you."^↩
2 I kept the dollar, and lost my immortal soul.^↩

I started this blog because a few close friends had personal pages of their own, and they formed a community that functioned rather like contemporary social media--only the things that people wrote were a lot longer on average, and generally had more care put into them than what you see on Facebook.¹ People occasionally write substantive posts on Facebook, of course, but it's certainly not the norm. Anyway, when I started reading my friends' blogs, I felt a pull to join in, an unconscious impulse to participate and be social. It felt nutritious, like I was finally getting vitamins that I had been deprived of for years.

I used to know what to type whenever I sat down with the intention of posting. That's how I remember it, anyway. I treated it like a daily column. I didn't have a defined subject, but usually I wrote about myself and events from my day. I don't know if I stopped updating simply because I grew older, or if it was because my life no longer provided me with regular topics. It would seem to be some mix of both.

At any rate, I have felt the lack of writing in my life quite acutely for a very long time now, but I haven't done much about it. I've kept a personal journal, and tried writing a few short stories and some poetry, but most days have gone by without being recorded. I don't know why, but I feel a need to record my time, to bring my memories to life outside of my head. Since I don't draw well or play an instrument, language is the only medium I know how to do this in. Mostly, however, I've been too depressed to write.

If anybody were to give me a real daily column, that would probably go a long way to curing my depression. For now, my plan is to update this blog a hell of a lot more regularly. Like, once a day rather than once a year. There's no one to give me writing assignments, so I might as well give one to myself.

Well, that last sentence is not exactly true; I do have writing assignments. I should be writing a couple of academic essays for my last semester of graduate school. It turns out that I have no interest in doing that. I have been back in school for three years now, and I think I've known all along that, whether or not I enjoy doing class readings and specialized research, I am simply not a natural student. I never did anything to advance my career, only to satisfy my own curiosity or challenge myself. I didn't want a reputation among academics. I was never afraid to look like I didn't know something. I wasn't interested in contemporary developments in theory, the latest research in a field, or burgeoning new subjects. Even though I made friends, I felt out of place in every class, and nearly every conversation.

I don't know what to do with my life yet. Since I've been in school for this long, I might as well get my Masters Degree before I leave my Ph. D. program, but that's as far ahead as I've planned. When I'm done, I am going to try to move with my girlfriend somewhere cheap--probably Berlin--and see if I can muster up the discipline to write fiction. So far, I haven't done this because every time I've tried, I've been stopped by a huge amount of doubt, a lot of thoughts that can basically be summed up as "what's the point?" I don't know why this is. I love reading fiction, and I even love reading my own fiction when I look back on it after a year or so. It uses parts of my consciousness that are otherwise numb, makes me feel more complete. I feel this when I'm writing, as well--a minor sense of exhilaration, if that's not an oxymoron. Nevertheless, I have always stopped before completing a story, before getting a first draft. I don't see a plot coming together, I don't feel like I have the authority to call something that I'm writing a story, and most of all, I don't see the point of my writing. Maybe the world needs writing, but other people, millions of them, are already handling it quite capably.

I feel somewhat differently about this now. It has helped to have a girlfriend who is a singer/songwriter with amazing honesty and beauty, and who insists that everyone has a need to make some kind of art. I get into a lot of arguments with her about using the word "art" in this sense--it didn't have the meaning of creative work in all the various media until around the Romantic era, and it is not at all clear to me that every culture at every time has had analogous behavior--but regardless, I have to admit that people really do seem to need some creative activity that suits them, that allows them to become their full selves. It's a cliché, really--everybody has a calling of some sort--and I've always resisted believing it, but I can't deny that it accords with my experience. Maybe that's an element of maturity: coming to understand the inexpressible weight behind vacuous-seeming clichés. Whatever the case, I feel a calling to write, and I've been miserable when I haven't done it, so I might as well find out if I feel miserable doing it as well.

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1 For the record, Twitter doesn't interest me much, and I have never tried to make a Tumblr. As I type this, I realize that this may be out of ignorance, although it certainly doesn't look like a verbal medium.^↩

The summer in Brooklyn is not heat or long days, it is a series of noises created by unnatural agents. It is an old sound effects tape amplified through stadium speakers, sound waves bouncing between low-rise apartment buildings. The mundane drama of squeaking car tires. The half-hum, half-roar of a truck as it pulls away after dropping off boxes of toothbrushes at the Walgreen's. The pair of gunshot jolts of a truck's trailer passing over a loose sewer grate. The erratic rattling of a window-mounted air-conditioning unit. The complaining sigh of cars quickly passing by the nearest intersection. The noise of the floorboards in the apartment above, like a slowed-down clown's horn. A voice projected through the call-box speaker at ground level.

I am reminded that when I got engaged seven years ago, my twin brother wanted to know two things. Did I get down on one knee to propose? And, did we ask our parents' permission? He did not ask why I was getting married, or if I was scared, or when the wedding would be.

When my marriage ended this year, my brother gave me the best piece of advice I have ever heard. He said to keep away from bad thoughts as though they were wild dogs after my food.

A poem commemorating an event that never happened

Though everything's changing
Our lives are not over.
Let's walk through the garden
Until you get sober.

The late autumn shadows
Reach out like a lover.
You're reaching for me
Till your senses recover.

I'll just hold your hand
And stay shoulder to shoulder.
Let's walk through the garden
Until you get sober.

You think you love me,
I think it's the liquor.
Your heat's beating fast,
But mine is much quicker.

May this memory slant
Like the sun in October.
Let's walk through the garden
Until you get sober.

I can't follow you down
To your bed for the evening.
When you come back,
I'll find out if I'm dreaming.

Now the moon's in the sky
And the wind's in the clover,
I'll walk through the garden
Until I get sober.

Whenever I have not seen friends for exactly twenty hours, I become miserable and lonely. Like mental clockwork.