JOBS
Dorothy Parker made her living as a writer, but she had no illusions about the profession– “The writer's way is rough and lonely, and who would choose it while there are vacancies in more gracious professions, such as, say, cleaning out ferryboats?” In this issue, we look at first jobs, hated jobs, loved jobs and last jobs. Everything but hand jobs.
The Devil Rarely Wore Prada
Word Count 805
Whenever I tell people I worked as a writer for Vogue for almost twenty years, they inevitably ask, “What’s Anna like?”
“Great,” I tell them. Meetings were short, decisions were quick and binding. Wintour is smart, disciplined, with good taste and a wide ranging curiosity. Inevitably, they look disappointed because what they really want to know is, how closely does Wintour resemble Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada?
A different question, which requires a different answer. When the book, which was written by a former Vogue assistant came out, Wintour summoned the then managing editor of the magazine to her office. “Who,” she demanded to know, “is she?” She had no memory of the author ever working at the magazine.
Unemployable
Word Count 1254
During my entire childhood, my mother worked. She was a broadcaster, a writer, and a TV morning show contributor. I can remember coming home many times and finding her office door closed. If I bothered to make myself known, she would always say, “I can’t stop, Bex. I can’t stop.” And I would usually slink off to the kitchen to make myself some beans on toast.
At her memorial service, my half-sister, Mercy, who only intermittently lived with us and whose real mother was an actual stay-at-home mum, said growing up that my mother, who she also called mum, was the first and only working mother she knew.
Farm Hand
Word Count 713
In college, I met a blond, blue-eyed, guitar-strumming fellow student who grew up on a working farm. We’d been together six months when he invited me to Sunday Dinner, which punctually began at 1 o’clock. He said we would be staying over for the night so I could meet his parents and admire the property he would one day inherit. It was implied that were we to stay together, I’d be a farmer’s wife. I had no plans to be anybody’s wife and thought that was obvious.
I was gobsmacked by the physical splendor of the family place, situated on a significant elevation poised above the Delaware River. A charming century-old stone-faced farmhouse was the first thing I saw; a short distance up a rolling hill stood an imposing red barn and a view of a lush, emerald-green meadow dotted with grazing ewes and lambs.
The Calling
Word Count 360
All my life, I wanted to be a writer, but had no faith in myself. I thought you had to have deep thoughts, an unusual life, important things to say, and worse, I thought you had to know what you were doing. Finally, when I was forty-eight, I took a chance. I signed up for a writing workshop with the perfect teacher, the writer Bill Roorbach. He began every workshop by quoting from Zen Mind, Beginners' mind. "In the beginner's mind are many possibilities, in the expert's mind are few…"
Mrs. Jessup
Word Count 1734
In 1958, between my sophomore and junior years of college, I got my first real job in a big hospital in North Carolina, part of an investigation into cervical cancer in “indigent” farm women. My task was to collect family and medical histories from the participants, patients in the hospital’s Cancer Ward. My boss had a grant to pay them.
Every morning, I went in with cookies and flowers and, after I got to know them, the twists of chewing tobacco they asked for. The young ones would show me worn snapshots of their children, explaining earnestly how they had to get home to this one because if you didn’t watch her every second, she ran off in woods. Or this little angel? He’d beat up his baby brother.
The older ones talked about their mothers. Their mothers, they said, would have known, as nobody else did, what they were going through. Had they been ill, too? I asked. And wrote down the names so we could check medical records.
I Would Like A Word
Word Count 1868
My job was words. The right words at the right time.
I started on staff at Time, then became a freelancer, and later, a part-time ghost. My clients produced Oprah and Elmo and Martha and Elle, plus Vogue, The New Yorker, and Kermit the Frog. Then a drunk lady stole a truck and compressed a parked car. I was in the car. The good news was I survived. The bad news was brain damage.
My new job was rolling Play-Doh balls, pounding plastic pegs in boards and learning how to walk and talk. I was parked at a table in Outpatient Rehab locked in a life no one would choose with a brain no one would pick. I lost a few million neurons and sometimes it shows on my face. It happens when I have to say something I can’t say or do something I can’t do. Every day was bursting with objects and events and actions and creatures and features I couldn’t say. Like “walk” or “run” or “push” or “pull.” That is called aphasia.
The Walking Men
Word Count 1614
In 1984, I went to work as a reference librarian at the Central Library in Portland, Oregon, a few blocks uptown from the Multnomah Hotel (now the Embassy Suites), where my grandfather used to go every morning to read the Oregonian and visit with his old friends. When I visited, I would drive there with my grandparents down lower Burnside, then as now, skid row. My grandmother always said two things as I gawked at the men waiting on the sidewalk in a breadline or hanging out the windows of the single-room occupancy hotels in their undershirts in the summer: one, “Don’t look” and two, “Poor souls”. “Don’t look” was both the admonition not to stare and her wish to protect me from public drunkenness. “Poor souls” was her own natural compassion, and usually just murmured quietly, like a prayer.
Once I worked at the library, I could no longer look away from those solitary men: they came to the library every day as patrons.
The Writing Life
Word Count 1728
Sometimes I think I became a writer so I wouldn’t have to wear a bra or pantyhose or go into an office every day. I never liked leaving my nest, no matter how dingy or small; my apartment, my desk, my refrigerator, and the loose clothes I wore made me happy. They were ‘home.’
My first novel, written at age six, began: “It was a good day and a bad day. It was a good day because we found buried treasure. It was a bad day because my wife died.” When even my mother couldn’t stop laughing, I realized that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a writer (my teachers agreed) and I put the idea aside for a couple of decades.
In the summer of 1968, I had my first real job. I worked, unpaid, as a teacher’s aide at a Head Start program in Manhattan.
On The Same Wavelength
Word Count 711
When the interview panel of men in suits and a woman from human resources asked, “What language do they speak in Mexico?” I confidently answered, “Mexican”. Not a hint of a smile from any of them. So it wasn’t till I got home and replayed the scene for my husband that I realised that my impeccable logic was, in fact, an enormous blunder.
Still, they offered me the job as assistant to the two engineers who scheduled the transmissions – the transmitters, their power, direction and shortwave frequencies – for broadcasts by the BBC World Service. The engineers figured out the best times for each language, and then out went the programmes to places with evocative names like Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Belarus.
On The Morning Of A Massacre Of American Schoolchildren
Word Count 983
My students and I read Jim Daniels’s poem “American Cheese.” We have been working on distinguishing between what a poem is about (topic) and what it is really about (theme). My junior class of nearly all boys, students in a manufacturing and mechanical engineering program, knows the poem is about more than cheese, but they are having a hard time getting past the seeming triviality of the speaker’s snack preferences.
“You know, they can’t even call it cheese,” one student offers. “They’re called Kraft Singles because it’s not technically cheese,” he says.
“Let’s back up,” I suggest. “What is the poem saying literally?”
Listening In
Word Count 1314
In the end, the German police couldn’t prove that Mika was laundering money. So they ceased the wiretap. But for three months, they recorded all calls he made or received on his cell phone. It was my job to translate his English to German.
Mika was a businessman with an Israeli passport who traveled frequently between Berlin and Los Angeles. Mika phoned Mustafa, a Qatari sheik for whom he’d shipped a Rolls Royce from London to LA, where it was pimped in buttery-soft leather upholstery and a hot pink exterior. Awaiting proof of ownership, US Customs had impounded the car.
The Summer Job
The Bookless Librarian
Word Count 669
The moment the headmaster sat down in my glassed-in office, pointed out toward the stacks, declared the books “toast”, and ordered me to get rid of all 20,000 of them, I knew I had to leave. Over the course of my career as a librarian, I’d changed jobs several times but had never been desperate to escape a work situation before.
In May 2009, Cushing Academy, a tranquil Massachusetts boarding school, burst onto the scholastic scene, thanks to a front-page Boston Globe story about our “bookless library.”
Shop Lifter
Word Count 775
Right after I got a job at the discount clothing store, my boss retired. Suddenly, at 22, I was promoted to manager. The store was in a suburb of Denver, the fastest growing city in the country at the time, and quite a change from my tiny hometown in upstate New York. The store was a cramped 2,500 square foot space, packed with racks of garments and accessories.
Because we were on a shoestring budget, the previous manager had just hung clothes on hangers in the windows, but I used cardboard and foam core to make life-size “paper dolls” that I dressed in the store’s merchandise. I enjoyed giving them different hairstyles and skin tones, and I invented backstories for each of them – young mom, college kid, professional, etc. – posing them in casual groupings tacked onto the display walls.
Duped and Dumped
Word Count 384
My bodybuilder boss asked me to stay late to help him stretch before a crucial competition. Michael intermittently eyed his reflection in the mirror: dark, curly hair, raven eyes, V-shaped torso, tight gum-chewing jaw, and biceps the size of navel oranges.
Three stretches in, he rubbed his erect penis against my thigh. I stomped his metatarsal with my high-heeled shoe.
“Ouch!” he cried. Hobbling away, he screamed, “Not a great move, kid!”