Twenty-one Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon.com. Mike Daisey
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and 401 (k) plans.
Not so for me—I knew my place. I saw myself as a mercenary of the temping world. It was an ongoing fetish fantasy in which the good folks at Parker Staffing Services were sergeants, barking orders:
“Listen up, you weak-kneed vomit-licking dogs! Hamilton and Fitch needs a receptionist on the forty-second floor. It’s lawyers—it’ll be ugly. Who wants it?”
“Sir! I am trained for all reception duties, including simpering and fawning!”
“Daisey. Brave words. You want to live forever?”
“No, sir! I can also kill a man in three ways with a pencil, sir!”
“You like nine dollars an hour?”
“I like it fine, sir! Whatever it takes to serve those fucking lawyers, sir!”
“Goddamn right. Get on over there, Daisey. Move it!”
I loved the illusion of freedom: this job is terrible, but at least I don’t have to stay like the rest of these poor bastards. This is the linchpin on which temping turns, the idea that you are free to walk at any time. It is an illusion: I never left an assignment early, never really made use of the “flexibility” I had in my grasp. The temping companies encourage you to think of yourself as a “temporary staffing professional” and work at instilling pride and polish into their recruits. Before long you are loyal to the temping company and unwilling to end a contract early.
When Parker called me because I had the gall to request and then take two days off, I was told by my liaison: “At Parker we insist that temping be your first priority.”
“That’s odd.”
“Why?”
“Does anybody make temping their first priority? I mean, are you really flooded with folks who went to college dreaming of the day they would be temps, fiercely loyal to whatever employer wanted them on that one particular day?”
Silence.
“You know what I’m getting at, don’t you?”
Silence.
“I’m pretty certain you didn’t dream, all those years ago over the keg at Beta Phi Epsilon, that you would arrive at this lofty height, a placement officer discussing the ethics of temp work with an aesthetics major. We are not so different, you and I, are we?”
Silence.
“I guess this means that I can’t have this Friday off?”
“You can have every Friday off.”
“Oh? Oh. I see.”
After being expelled from my agency I became very apathetic about the temping industry. I was indignant that I had been let go so abruptly; I felt betrayed, after the years I had spent in loyalish service. I found myself thinking, What do they think I am, their slave? That the question was rhetorical hadn’t dawned on me. Only teenagers, dogs, and dilettantes are capable of this flavor of thinking.
It was summer and so I whiled away the time in a variety of exciting action poses: reading, sleeping, watching television, and a variant form of the reading pose that incorporated eating. My girlfriend and I became obsessed with The Newlywed Game, hosted by the creepy Bob Eubanks. A trained viewer can predict which couple will win within minutes of the show’s opening—the couple with the largest smiles who strike each other while still smiling always wins, just like in real life. We played Super Mario Kart obsessively. We bought a Rocket Chef after the television told us to do that—it was always telling us to do all sorts of things in those days.
I was feeling very Zen and willing to listen to the advice of inanimate objects because I wanted nothing—I was in love. Jean-Michele had just become my live-in girlfriend, and it was the first time I had ever moved in with someone. I left my artistically hip neighborhood for a much more sedate burb that cost a lot more than the crack den, but I didn’t care. We were delirious in love—we spent all day having sex and fighting, both at the same time when we could manage it.
Cross Anaïs Nin with Encyclopedia Brown and you get Jean-Michele—sensual, funny, and possessed by the dark, passionate practicality of the Polish. I learned about Poland quickly: the first time I met her family we sat in the garden drinking and getting to know one another, two activities that are indistinguishable and interchangeable to the Poles.
We were all drunk and laughing when Babcia came up from downstairs. Babcia is Polish for grandmother but with Babcia it had become a capital B: she was the Babcia of Babcias, the woman about whom I had heard a hundred stories, who had delivered her family from the horrors of the Nazi occupation and to America.
Jean-Michele loves her more than life itself, and meeting her for the first time I was amazed at how tiny she was: I was certain I could fit this matriarch inside of my thigh, that I could have smuggled her over the East German border if necessary. Later I would learn that she was also capable of feeding a person so insistently that they could actually die of a creaminduced embolism right at the kitchen table.
My first glimpse of Babcia was not over a bowl of borscht—she had come outside to find out why we were laughing and shouting at the tops of our lungs. Her eyes were bright and disapproving as she surveyed all of us committing the cardinal sin of drinking in the garden. Think of the neighbors! and Be quiet and careful! were artfully knitted into the shawls she gave away at Christmas. Babcia remains the only woman I have ever met who can actually make guilt shimmer like heat waves in summer.
Maybe she was equally unhappy with all of us, but her gaze settled on me—I had obviously brought this laughing into the house. I saw how clearly I was read, judged, and found unworthy. She knew what I did for a living (nothing) and my ambitions (AWOL). Under duress I would have admitted to being a slacker, but beneath her withering gaze I felt I had earned a more emasculating title: bum. Man without job. Dead weight.
She stood for a minute until everyone else noticed her, and when she had the attention of everyone she said in a clear voice: “You’re all laughing now, but you’ll be crying later.” Then she walked back inside the house without another word.
Later that night I stared at the ceiling with Jean-Michele curled beside me, and for the first time I knew with certainty that these days weren’t going to last. I had no idea what Babcia had meant with her factually accurate, yet depressingly Polish pronouncement. Her melodrama had struck a nerve. Mystical Nazi-escaping grandmothers are not to be trifled with.
The lazy indulgences would have to go. I wasn’t playing “find yourself” as my parents had, or fighting a war, or even learning tai chi. I needed to pull my own weight, get things moving, and acquire some direction. So I would find a job. Not more temping, a Real Job™. In the morning, first thing.
I did nothing the next day. Or the next. Rinse, repeat. Every night in bed I would tally the reasons I had to work, think of how we could not afford to live like this, watching the bank account dip and dry up. Rinse, repeat. You can lead a horse to water but that doesn’t mean he’ll go to the office. Rinse, repeat.
My perversity saved me—more specifically my obsession with tooth decay. There was little wrong with my teeth, but I reasoned it was only a matter of time. One of my foremost neuroses is the condition of my teeth. They have tiny cavities, and I’m always afraid that these tiny cavities will become Huge Cavities, which will in turn offer easy access to a Tooth Infection, which will expand into a Gum Infection and then a Jaw Infection, which will finally climb up into my head and become a Brain Infection. Then my brain will swell up inside my skull and I will die, a condition I saw once on St. Elsewhere.
I knew that this was both true and possible because my mother, bless her black heart, had sent me a newspaper article on the phenomenon, which I read and then attached to the fridge with magnets. Once it’s on the fridge it is more real than real: it is fact.
This meant that it was time to get real health insurance, and real health insurance meant getting a Real Job™. Jean-Michele liked the idea. She thought employment would make