Debra Ryll

 Word Count 1015       

“Um… I had a rich boyfriend,” I shrugged, explaining my threadbare resume and lack of current employment.   

The career counselor across from me—a young, serious blonde close to my age—looked to be a recent graduate in a white polyester blouse, a navy skirt, pantyhose, and low heels. I would not be caught dead in polyester. I never wore heels because I didn’t like to be taller than Nick, and the last time I’d worn pantyhose was when I smuggled hash from Morocco.           

I clasped and unclasped my hands nervously as the counselor studiously reviewed my resume. I left off drug and diamond smuggling, listing just salesclerk, waitress, and the stint in a mental hospital.

“I was an employee, not a patient at the hospital,” I joked.

“Noted,” she said.

I sensed she was new to the job and wanted to be taken very seriously. “Any other skills or experience I should know about?”

I’m a wizard with a triple beam scale?

“I wrote for the high school paper, and I majored in journalism.”

“Oh,” she said, perking up before looking down at the resume. “But I don’t see any college listed…?”

“I dropped out after one semester.”

“Why?

“It was boring, and I wanted to get a job to save enough money to travel.”

“Oh… anything else?”

“Well… yes, I was on the staff of a local newspaper in Hawaii!” I couldn’t believe I had forgotten to include this.

She brightened. “How long did you work there?”

“Um… nine weeks.”

“So, just over two months… why did you leave?”

“The Hare Krishnas started a paper about the same time as ours, but they had free labor, and we had to fold.”

“Were you on salary?”

“I didn’t get paid.”

“Oh… kay,” she said. “Anything else?”

“I ran a restaurant in South Africa,” I said.

“That’s great,” she said, making a note. “How long did you do that?”

“A month,” I said.

She stopped writing and handed me a stubby pencil along with a one-page survey. “Let’s start with this quiz.”

Snapping into good student mode, I filled out the quiz and handed it across her desk, which had a phone, a Rolodex, a pencil cup, a paper clip dispenser, a stapler, an inbox, and an outbox, and a little business card holder. Everything Nick had brainwashed me to abhor.

I watched as she reviewed my answers.

There’s so much she doesn’t know about me. Like the fact that my role model growing up was a glamorous reporter who traveled the world on assignment for The Flash. Sure, Brenda Starr was a comic book character in a four-inch strip of newsprint, but she was the only template for success I had. The glass ceiling hadn’t been named yet, much less cracked. Girls were primed to be homemakers, teachers, nurses, secretaries, or waitresses—lucky to make sixty cents for every dollar a man earned. As far as I knew, unless you were a movie star like Debbie Reynolds or a drug dealer like me, the only way to get rich was to be born with money or marry into it.

The counselor peered at me over tasteful tortoiseshell glasses. “I’d like to give you an assignment for next week’s session. I want you to think of three people who you would willingly trade jobs with.”

That was going to be a challenge. Work was a four-letter word in the world I shared with Nick. And I’d watched my dad go from job to job until he worked his way into bankruptcy. Also, I was aware that jobs generally require people to work five days a week in exchange for one or two weeks off each year. I was aiming for the reverse. Basically, I wanted a line of work that provided the same benefits as dealing drugs: boatloads of cash, no taxes, no boss, and, most importantly, no schedule, so I had plenty of free time to travel and go to the beach.

If I was going to swap jobs with anyone, it better be good. But I was motivated: the grocery bag of cash Nick gave me after we separated wasn’t going to last forever.

I pondered the assignment every day. I thought about it while I swam laps and baked in a lounge chair by the pool. But in the end, I could only come up with two options.

“Good morning,” the counselor said brightly, as I took a seat across from her desk. She had added a small bouquet of daisies, a nice touch in the windowless room.

“What did you come up with?” she said.

“I’d be willing to swap jobs with the editor of MAD magazine or Jane Curtin on Saturday Night Live.”

It took her a moment to realize I wasn’t joking.

“Uh… you’re kid—” she stumbled. “Oh. I, uh…”

She wasn’t looking at the situation from my point of view. Working fifty weeks without a break was like a prison sentence, which, paradoxically, is what I was trying to avoid.

She straightened her papers before addressing me. “I’ve, uh, I’ve never had a client like you,” she said. “I… I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.”

I felt a blast of relief as I exited the office building. I’d actually been nervous that as Editor of MAD I would have had to pull all-nighters and endure endless crushing deadlines. And I much preferred to smoke a joint and watch Jane Curtin perform as a Conehead than to actually be Jane Curtin.

My VW bug was parked in the back near a hedge of yellow forsythia. I opened the ashtray, pulled out a roach, and lit up. Sure, I would joke about the counseling session when I told my friends about it later, but if she couldn’t help me, who could? Was I a round peg in a world of square holes… or a square peg in a world of round holes? Damn, I didn’t even know the right shapes of the pegs and the holes of this world, much less my place in it.

I couldn’t see myself fitting in anywhere.

*

Debra is a TEDx Monterey speaker, the author of two children’s books and Religomania, a musical about two Moms on a mission… to take down organized religion. Her essays have appeared in the Manifest Station and the San Francisco Chronicle, and she has just completed a memoir chronicling her misadventures as a drug and diamond smuggler.