Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com. Mike Daisey
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Canada: HERE ENDS U.S. ROUTE 1, WHICH BEGINS IN KEY WEST, FLORIDA.
This pronouncement contradicted the idea we were fed in school that roads had no end. Its presence reinforced something that I had always known, even as a child. Growing up between the paper mill and the potato field, it was clear to me that there were places out of which you could not maneuver, places with ends so dead that they defied inhabitants to imagine another way of life. In my eyes that sign had always read: HERE IS THE END OF THE ROAD, AND HERE IS WHERE YOU MUST STAY.
Bragging about how “rural” your upbringing was is like comparing penises—someone else’s tin shack is always further up the mountain. But I usually win, owing to a unique topological irregularity: no matter where you are, Fort Kent is far, far away. These anecdotes sketch some of northern Maine’s character:
a) During winter, gasoline turns to jelly in your tank if you leave your car unheated overnight, so everyone puts a bare light bulb under the hood. My mother goes a step further and puts blankets on the hood, tucking the car in like a baby.
b) My sister and I would get very excited when the family drove to Presque Isle, a town about two hours south, because they had a traffic light. We would chant, “Traffic light traffic light traffic light!” This behavior persisted through adolescence.
c) I spent one half of my waking hours in the winter months (of which there were nine) cutting, lifting, stacking, and throwing wood. I was a dilettante even then: I was not good at cutting, lifting, stacking, or throwing, but I had a passing familiarity with all the wood-heating arts.
When I went off to my hoity-toity microivy college I discovered that all I wanted in life was to dissolve into a mist of intellectualism that would creep around the hills and vales of New England. I would be a professional letter writer. I would be a freelance intellectual. I would study Etruscan vases here, equestrian history there, and simply float about the academic world, never again settling in one place or doing anything real like holding a job or, God forbid, lifting another piece of wood.
By naming my course of independent study “aesthetics” I could take a lot of courses that intrigued me, like acting and writing, ignore the ones I felt would waste my time, and generally subvert the entire point of the well-rounded liberal arts education for which I had taken out huge student loans. Ah, youth! Was there nothing I could not accomplish? A young man escapes his fate in the bleak frozen wastes of Maine to become … I had no idea. All I felt was a vague sense of grand entitlement and a fervent desire never to work an honest day in my life.
In some ways it was the curse of talent; there was a whole list of things in which I showed great promise. But there is a hell of a gap between “talented” and “successful,” and to bridge it you need something called “will.” My teachers begged me to dedicate myself—just a little—and said I would really blossom. I dug in my heels and refused. I feigned scorn and indignation but really I was just too scared to apply myself. I was afraid I would discover my limitations. Better not to know. Better to be free and easy and cultivate an air of smug accomplishment. Nurture my talent. Read another book. Play some more Nintendo.
But I miscalculated. I failed to go to graduate school, and it is difficult to be a wandering scholar without scholarship. So I went to Seattle and became disaffected, instantly. It was automatic in the nineties—if you entered the Seattle city limits and were a white liberal arts graduate with an uncertain future, you automatically became shiftless, distrustful of authority, and disaffected.
We are talking about slackers, an unavoidable element in the cultural landscape of the nineties. Rather than work in fields that grant traditional rewards (money, homes, cars), slackers took up eclectic pursuits (horror-movie collecting, fan-website building, coffee drinking). A true slacker had so many part-time projects, half-baked ideas, and hazy social initiatives that he was too busy to work a forty-hour week. This was not pedestrian laziness or sloth: professional slacking was an art.
Really, though, it was a newer version of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out brought on by economic malaise and social boredom. Boomers ruled everything: they were our parents, our teachers, our landlords, and the gatekeepers to every social or business institution. They talked about Platoon, remembered how great and terrible the sixties were, and refused to yield even a sliver of influence—you could either be a preteen and get marketed to, or you could be thirtysomething. No wonder a popular response among my peers was to check out.
Seattle was ground zero for slackers. The swift rise and fall of the grunge movement brought a wave of glam and celebrity to an otherwise sleepy city, and even after Kurt Cobain blew his head off at the height of his career it was allowed to keep its indie cred. Seattle had always been a boomtown, from the gold rush to Nirvana—the only question was what the next big thing would be.
For now an aura of grunge persisted. The city bulged with rockabilly singers, nouveau artists, and, of course, slackers. Across America the word was out that Seattle was this cool place full of relaxed people who really “got it,” a great spot to be if you liked your arts intimate, your pace medium, didn’t mind gray skies, and weren’t concerned about getting ahead. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how slacking would evolve into an art form there.
Something else was evolving in Seattle too—in a garage, the birthplace of every great and not-so-great grunge band. Amazon was building its first desks from doors.
So Amazon and I started in Seattle at about the same time.
I didn’t have the faintest idea what to do with my life, but no one else seemed to have a plan either, which was comforting. I chose to immerse myself in the scene, writing fitfully and acting in fringe theater. One night, I was standing onstage in an unheated garage performing Jean Genet’s The Balcony as the Bishop, wearing full Catholic regalia, a twelve-pound miter, and Greek cothurni, which are fifteen-inch platform heels. My giant robes were open and I was naked and about to masturbate while delivering a speech about sinning. I had expressed some reservations about this particular bit of business, but the director had told me that it would be “decadently fabulous,” and although I meant to refuse in shock and horror, I had somehow never gotten around to it.
Anyway, there I was, exposed, about to begin the speech, when a family walked in. Mother, father, two little girls—late arrivals. I’ll never know why they thought Genet would make a good family show. One of the little girls, not three feet from my naked Bishopness, stared wide-eyed with horror, but I honestly think I was more scared than she was. And it was at that very moment that I thought of Boylan, my fiction professor in school, telling me: “Daisey, you shouldn’t go to grad school yet. Get out in the real world. You need to do a real job or you’ll have nothing to work with.”
So I took a deep breath and did my real job.
Exposing myself to minors didn’t pay especially well, so I was making the rent by temping, a popular slacker occupation. It all runs together: Seattle, disaffected, temping, like a professional diagnosis, a syndrome. Doctor, Doctor, what’s wrong with him? Why is he so jaded, so cynical, and so goddamn poor? The doctor shines a light, cops a quick feel while making the subject cough, speaks into his microrecorder: Seattle. Disaffected. Temping. Treatment: regular doses of dogma to encourage development of a belief system. Subject is delaying adulthood and responsibility by pretending he is possessed by an unknowable destiny, chosen by fate, et cetera. Subject’s head is currently located very far inside subject’s ass.
I really enjoyed temping; it agreed with me. I was living in a room over a crack den for two hundred dollars a month, which meant I could afford to take months off between assignments and simply drift, directionless and guilt-free. I often had to step over the passed-out junkie who lived across the hall, but I was in love with the way I didn’t obey the corporate clock—at 10:00 A.M. on a Tuesday or 2:00 P.M. on a Thursday you would find me asleep. Sleep! Who knew I had been so starved for it? It was heaven.
The idea of being a permanent employee terrified and perplexed me—those who were looked uniformly unhappy and if you asked them, they would say that yes, indeed, they were miserable. It was hard to imagine how I could