A Working Stiff's Manifesto (5 page)

“Why don't you let it go until tomorrow?” I advise. “I'm sure she's not going anywhere.”

“MISSY!” he screams. He takes another swig of bourbon and Coke and staggers toward the house. I've created a fucking monster. He's going to go charging through the party like Ben Braddock from
The Graduate
, howling this girl's name. I intercept him and reason with him for a few minutes, and finally get him to start breaking the oyster table down, keeping a close eye on him. Fortunately, nature intervenes yet again, and a massive snowstorm begins. I now have an excuse to get the hell out of here.

I find Patrice in the kitchen, idly washing some wineglasses while she chats with a guest.

“Hi,” I tell her. “It's snowing pretty bad out. I'd better be getting back into the city before they close the line.”

“Sure,” she says. She goes to get her purse. She pulls out cash. Stroke of luck. If it had been a check, I'd have had to go through the drawn-out process of telling her my name, revealing the dark secret that I wasn't Corey after she'd been calling me that all night. “Is Tony all right out there? He seemed odd.”

“Cold was getting to him, I guess.”

“It did get chilly, didn't it?” She hands me a wad of twenties. We say our good-byes. As I'm walking towards the door, I hear her guest who is holding a wineglass say, “Hey, is this blood?” I start walking faster. Outside, I look for Tony to say good-bye, and see that he is climbing up a drain pipe on the far wall of the house.

“Later, dude,” I tell him.

“Shhhhh,” he says. Then screams, “MISSY'S ROOM IS RIGHT HERE!”

“Yeah … well, have a good night.” I run for the train station.

C
ABLE, A
G
OD-GIVEN
R
IGHT

Today is my
birthday, and I get a nice surprise. I read a classified ad that says “English degree required.” Those are three words you never see together, ever. It's like seeing “Must be a convicted criminal” or “Double amputees wanted.” It just makes you wonder what the hell goes on at the place that ran the ad. This ad goes on to describe a need for someone a lot like me. “Retired colonel looking for full-time help running his new marketing firm. Must have good people skills, English degree required. Ex-military preferred.”

I reach for the phone, imagining how thrilled the old colonel will be to hear from me. Ex-military, English degree, hell, I've got it all. The phone is answered by a stressed-out teenager who has obviously been fielding a flood of calls all day. There are more out-of-work, English-degree-bearing, ex-military types out there than I first thought, and I first thought there were plenty.

“Can I have your name, please” she asks in a monotone.

I tell her. “I'm calling about the ad.”

“Be here tomorrow at nine thirty. Dress professionally.”

“Where's here?”

This exasperates her, but she struggles through the anguish of providing me with the address. I can hear phones ringing in the background, and she is obviously in a hurry to get rid of me and be rude to someone new.

“I'll find it,” I offer helpfully, letting her know that my military skill at map reading will enable me to find the address with no further assistance, but the phone is dead.

The place is a disused warehouse somewhere in Chelsea. I am greeted at the door by a hyperactive young man in a suit and tie who makes sincere eye contact with me as he scans a clipboard for my name. He is like the bouncer at an elite nightclub, making sure only to admit people who have made it through the demanding screening process, which consists of telling them your name. Or not even. Another youngish man, also nicely dressed, walks up behind me and says to the bouncer, “I heard about you guys,” and is waved in.

I mill around in the lobby for a minute, examining the crowd, wondering if I have time to squeeze off one last cigarette before the fun begins. These are my people, the English degree owners, a faraway look in their eyes—the thousand-yard stare of a hundred tedious, underpaying jobs. Yet, I notice some groups are abuzz with positive energy. Off to my right, two women are talking excitedly about “a great opportunity.” One woman, pretty and well-dressed, shakes my hand and introduces herself. Something is wrong. Women never talk to me first unless they're hookers or they need something heavy lifted.

My suspicions deepen. We sit down in folding metal chairs, about thirty of us, and the young man who was checking people in comes up and asks us how we are doing. A few people shout enthusiastically.

“Who here wants to make more money?” he asks.

The same people shout that they do.

“WHO HERE WANTS TO MAKE MORE MONEY?” He is screaming with enthusiasm now, waving his arms like a quarterback trying to get more crowd noise. I am in the wrong place. I meant to come to a job interview, not a Baptist revival. Where's the kindly old colonel?

“What do you do for a living?” he asks one girl, a sweet-looking twenty-something who seems to be uncomfortable in her professional attire.

“I work in a coffee shop.”

“Does that give you the financial freedom you need?”

“No way,” she says. She is ready to be saved. The lady sitting next to her is the one who introduced herself to me, and she gently touches the younger girl's arm, nods at her, smiling. Ohmygod, they've stocked the audience. This is a sales seminar, and they've put salespeople in the audience to make the meeting go smoothly, like B-girls in a New Orleans dive bar. You can't tell the customers from the employees.

I make a sport of it. I look around, trying to figure who's who, and it's too easy. The people who look uncomfortable in their own skin are the customers, the ad-respondents, and they are seated every third person. I look to my left. A kindly older gentleman nods at me enthusiastically. I look to my right. A young man with thinning hair and glasses nods at me enthusiastically. It is masterful. This way, if any cynical or negative comment occurs to me that I feel compelled to share with my neighbor, he will quickly respond to it with corporate blather. It is the sales version of a gang rape.

Each woman has two women on either side of her, each man has two men. Some kind of corporate rule, I figure. That was why they bothered to ask us our names, to figure how many men and women they'd need to snow us. It must be a part of a salesperson's job to go to these meetings posing as an ad-respondent, bubbling with energy. If there are thirty people here and each ad-respondent has a salesperson on each side, that means there are only … let me see … not very many actual respondents.

“Here's Mike,” says the bouncer, and claps. Everybody claps loud and long, and I get the feeling I should know who Mike is. I clap too. There's something contagious about applause.

Mike is a guy who has made a million dollars selling water filters. He doesn't actually mention a million dollars, but he speaks of having achieved “financial freedom.” He breaks out a slide projector and shows us a slide of him standing in front of two Rolls Royces, wearing a Rolex. There is a really nice house in the background. For all I know, Mike might have broken on to the property with a photographer and posed for a few pictures before the owners released the Dobermans. But Mike is a well-dressed and imposing fellow, and he sure does look happy about water filters.

Mike walks over to a tap and pours some tap water into a beaker, then screws on a water filter and pours some more into a different beaker. He takes a syringe full of clear liquid and squeezes two drops of whatever is in the syringe into each beaker. The tap water turns purple. The filter water stays clear.

“THIS IS WHAT YOUR CHILDREN ARE DRINKING!” he thunders. You can't get much more scientific than that. I'm convinced. I don't have kids, but if I did, I wouldn't want them drinking purple water.

“Do you know what Evian is backwards?”

“Naïve!” a young man cries from the front row.

“That's right,
naïve
!” exults Mike. “Because that's what you have to be to pay a dollar for a quart of bottled water! These filters cost only forty dollars, and you can GET TEN THOUSAND GALLONS OF THE SAME QUALITY WATER AT ONLY TWO AND A HALF CENTS A GALLON!”

He's getting much too excited about this. I start shifting uncomfortably in my chair. But I notice one or two of the other real respondents are catching the fever.

“That's incredible!” one says. I wonder if he is a real respondent, or another plant. Maybe I'm the only one here; this is all for my benefit. Maybe I'll come back here tomorrow and this place will be an empty crackhouse, like a scene from
The Sting
, Maybe there's a camera trained on me, and guys up in a booth with headsets and microphones saying, “Bring it down a notch, Mike, we're losing him.”

We watch a video, in which half a dozen ordinary people describe working in shitty jobs until they discovered the exciting world of water filter sales. “Now I have time to spend with my kids,” one mother exults, and they show a full two minutes of her doing exactly that. All right, I get the picture. You've got kids and free time. A young man is shown in front of a pool, sipping a martini. “And I owe it all to the Dealmakers,” he says. A bikini clad babe comes up and puts her arm around him, just in case the video had failed to engage the horny-man demographic. Fadeout.

The Dealmakers, as this marketing firm is called, then spend half an hour explaining how I can achieve financial freedom: by selling water filters to everyone I know. The thing is, everyone I know is like me. If we've got forty extra dollars lying around, it goes for a bag of weed or a one-night drinking binge, not to prevent some paranoid fantasy about purple water.

But Mike knows I'm thinking this. “You need to get your friends and family healthy,” he implores us. “They have no idea what they might be drinking.” Then, he comes to the crux of the matter.

Mike acknowledges that some of us might not be professional salespeople, and that, initially, we're going to need some help. For a cool $500, he can set us up in a seminar with a man even more energetic and enthusiastic than himself. This man, whose name is spoken with reverence, only gives these seminars every six months because his time is in such demand, but it just so happens HE'S IN TOWN RIGHT NOW! We need to scrape together the money, we just must, or we'll be missing out on the greatest opportunity ever to come our way.

Five hundred dollars, Mike tells us, is barely half of what we'll make in our first week. People after my money always have an interesting way of describing it, as if my money was just a pain in my ass. Nobody who wants you to buy something from them reminds you how many days you had to get up early and drag your ass into work, how much humiliation you had to endure from abusive bosses and the eternally irritated public, just so you could earn that money. To them, it is stretching the leather on your wallet. That money is “doing nothing.” Money should be used to earn money, they'll tell you. Even if you don't have a job. Especially if you don't have a job. Only dullards save their money for rent. Dreamers invest in WATER FILTER SALES!!!

The meeting breaks up, and the young man with thinning hair on my left is beaming. “Wow,” he says. “What did you think of that?”

“It was great,” I tell him, mimicking his enthusiasm. “I'm going to step outside and have a quick cigarette.” As I am walking to the door, he starts to follow me, so I turn and say, “You know what, I have to take a shit first.” He backs away.

As I'm walking to the bathroom, I see the coffee shop girl, flanked on both sides by two pretty, well-dressed women who are beaming at her. She is beaming back. As I walk past, I hear her say, “I'm sure I can scrape up the money …”

There is an exit by the men's room that leads out to an alley. I step outside, light the cigarette, and tear off down the street.

There's no colonel. There's no need for military experience, nor an English degree. But if you advertise for people who have English degrees, you're reaching a great demographic: people who are frustrated and gullible, with a proven track record for poor decision-making. The trillion-dollar-industry-that-produces-nothing called “the educational system” got us, so we can be got again.

The next day, I get a phone call from the Dealmakers.

“Iain, we missed you yesterday after the meeting. Wanted to know if we could set you up with a pass for the seminar.”

“Actually, I got another job already.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“Stuffing ravioli.”

“Is that going to give you the financial freedom you need?” I hang up. I've had enough of this, the reading of stock phrases, the audience plants, the little marketing tricks awaiting me at every twist and turn. Why can't they leave me in peace? I'm not rich, the coffee shop girl wasn't rich. But who else is desperate enough to answer ads for fake opportunities? EARN THOUSANDS A WEEK AT HOME! BE YOUR OWN BOSS!!! I once answered an ad that said for fifty dollars I could get a list of companies in MY AREA who would hire me to work at home with a computer. They sent me a copy of the local yellow pages on a disk.

If I could sell even one water filter for them before I gave up in frustration, it would have been worth their while. Ten people a meeting, eight meetings a day, five days a week, that's four hundred water filters sold and $20,000 in seminar cash a week. And four hundred broke, tired slobs who've learned one more life lesson on their way to the grave.

I get a job driving an oil truck.

The pay is eight dollars an hour, but that's okay, because after I fill the oil truck with heating oil in the morning, I don't have to see a supervisor again until I hand him my receipts at the end of the day. I have a two-way radio in the truck, and they can call me from time to time and ask where I am, find out if I'm keeping to my schedule. But that's okay too, the schedule isn't that demanding.