Suite 606

It has been four months since my last post. It's not that I gave up. That's for pussies. And I'm really more of a beta male who endures failure and pops back up, on repeat. Here's a tale of a recent letdown I had.

Some background info first: I've got a college degree, and a lot of my peers have made their B.A. in Communications work for them, when it comes to work, work-wise, but not me. Not yet. Wait until I'm past the age of 80, and if I'm still saying things like "Not yet," then OK, fine, shoot holes through my temples with a ray gun.

Only kidding. Make it 81.

So, after hundreds of applications sent over the course of several years, the exasperation mounts. The path towards a legit career has countless sidestreets, obscure dirt roads, and shady alleyways that almost always lead to dead ends. I get emails from the likes of Jobhat, Job Insider, Jobungo--all these knockoff, mutant cousins of Career Builder and Craigslist. And because those proven streets so often lead to dead ends, too, I suppose I just gave in and set aside two hours to apply for a Customer Service/ Sales Rep position for a company whose name I'll change just a little bit to Endless Marketing.

Because to hell with them. And the same goes for Jobhat. Jesus, those two words don't belong scrunched-up together in any reasonable way. "Occupation Beret? Ooh, sounds legit!" To hell with me, too, for veering away from the proven streets during my sad, frustrating journey.

OK, so I got a call from Endless Marketing in Oshkosh the morning after I applied. Red flag! Nobody legit is into me right away, and I've got like a ten-year sample size of adulthood to support this theory. But I don't want to be a janitor forever--or a cook who fried chicken at a convenience store, which I did before as a primary source of income. Thus, I talked to the secretary, a gal who seemed professional enough. I answered some questions, and she said the job would entail recruiting customers for Direct TV. Pay would begin at a little more than what I'm making now, and making sales = commission. Was I interested in an interview? There was a 25% chance this was worthwhile, I had two days to prepare, and I could make it there in less than half an hour. So I said yes.

I shaved my beard. I did a little research on Direct TV. Did you know they offer two year contracts in which the first saves a lot of money for patrons, but then the second year marks a hike in cost that negates the deal you thought you were getting early? It's true. There's a way to look someone in the eyes and spin that truth without feeling bad, if you don't want to be a janitor or a short-order cook with some useless piece of paper anymore.

At about 9:20 a.m., I arrived at the seven-story building in which Endless was located. I like the city of Oshkosh, with its gritty attempt at charm, but much of the city has long become rusted, gutted, industrialized. Ghetto. The lobby of this (long ago) thriving spot in the heart of Main Street looked like the train station from The Untouchables, as though it hadn't been renovated since the Prohibition Era, and I hadn't even drank my morning coffee, but I thought I might have to rescue a baby carriage as it bounded down marble steps in the midst of Tommy Gun fire.

It was desolate in there, actually, eerie and desolate--and my mind wandered, dumbstruck by the clash of 1925 and 2017. 

The elevator was beside the entrance, so I didn't daydream for long. I had to go up to the sixth floor. Those hacks had the gall to call their office suite 606. "Suite" my ass! Let me bust out a homonym to state it another way: Sweet, my ass! (My ass does not taste sweet. And their idea of a suite was what I would call a dingy low-rent shit hole.)

 The elevator trudged upward and I tried to stay positive by not thinking. The lighting was dim in the sixth floor and no better in suite 606. As I passed into view of the open door and locked eyes with the secretary, who stood beside her desk, I got a strange sense of mutual dread. She had hard, chiseled facial features, clouded with excess mascara and lipstick. She was broad-shouldered and stout, and her dress revealed cleavage. We greeted each other. It was 9:25 in the morning and the whole world was echoing hollowly. There was a thud and dust kicking up everywhere. She handed me a paper application and told me to have a seat. George, the hiring manager, would see me soon.

Inside the cramped headquarters, George was down the hall, talking to a new hire, a young woman of 26. I know that because she emphasized certain things about herself, as though she was in a play that I was watching, and the script told her to give some expository details. She sat beside George on one of the three seats they had in the waiting zone at the end of the lone hallway. I took a seat beside George. There were no other seating options. George was a creep.

"Let's go over a few things," he said to her. "Commission kicks in for every four sales you make."

She interrupted, meek as a kitten.

"Really? Well, before someone said it was three sales."

"That's what we told you before, yes," he admitted in a gruff, scratchy voice. "Now that you've made it to the final round and we like you, you get the truth. And do you want to know why it's really four, not three?"

I glanced up from the application and surveyed the scenery. Light was pouring in through an office window, exposing dust that fell in slanted flakes past a plastic table strewn with potato chips and snacks. The garbage bin to my left was filled to the brim. It smelled of damp coffee grounds. Beside the secretary's desk was a decoration, perhaps meant to offset the pallid grimness of the place, but the thing had the opposite effect: It was a clunky, wooden clock on the wall, hung crookedly, the mistake neglected. A Cuckoo might burst out on the hour, for all I knew, but it was an eyesore in a cheap wasteland. Well, back to that application I plunged...

"It's gotta be four," George went on. "Because one out of four times, they'll say yes, then change their minds and chickenshit out of the deal."

Quick note: I think every swear word I've ever heard during a job interview can be attributed to George. There were more. (And I know I've been swearing, but it's still an unprofessional thing to do when hiring stooges.)

"But I'm not getting paid just in commission, right?" the girl wanted to know. "Because I've done that before..."

The vigor inside George started to swell. He had the raspy and authoritative sound and the grizzled, bearded look of the spokesman for The Men's Wear House, a store that sells suits in the Midwest. He was stout, like his secretary. By the way, he hollered at his secretary three times down the hallway to keep it down as she mingled with one or two other employees that emerged from somewhere, like ants from a hole in the carpet.

"Would you guys PLEASE KEEP IT DOWN?!" he bellowed, shushing the girl, giving pause to the movement of my pen. "Jesus. You know, in this hallway, it all echoes."

He glanced at me for confirmation. I tilted my head and nodded. Next I had to fill out past job experience--again, on paper, to go along with what they already had online.

"It pays more than just commission. Oh, sure," he said. "But, you know, it fluctuates. Some weeks, you're gonna go out there and kick some ass, but your paycheck'll be kinda light. Other weeks, you're gonna do shitty, but the paycheck will be the one kicking some fucking ass. And you might go, 'What is this shit?' But you gotta know, it all evens out."

I had a vision of a coke shipment gone awry at a shipyard in Brooklyn, which meant a week of stingy pay, and then I had a vision of a coke shipment that was a success--only the money launderer who turned out to be a snitch got his brains blown out, and there was a new guy to launder the money, but still, that meant it was a good week cash-wise. I have no idea if Endless Marketing is a front for a drug empire, so don't go investigating them on account of my rants.

If swearing during a job interview was a crime, though... cocksucking George would be locked the fuck up forever.

"Another thing," he told the girl. "You're gonna wanna get another Facebook account. Or Twitter, Instagram. Any of the social, computer shit. All that stuff, you gotta separate business and personal. Reminds me...

"HEY TYLER!" the boss shouted. "Did you get two Facebook accounts and everything like I told you?"

Tyler and the secretary chatted by her desk. Their voices had been ascending again. He was groomed and in his mid-20s, looking the part of "guy with office job who secretly has no clue what's happening" in khakis and a dress shirt.

"Uh, no," he said. "I can do that later, though."

The secretary chimed in.

"I did! Yesterday. Right after you gave me the business about those pictures I posted of me--"

"WE ARE NOT DISCUSSING PERSONAL AFFAIRS!" George thundered. "Remember that part? We keep the two separated. Because we don't want trouble. And keep your voices down! This hallway--everything echoes."

I nodded again.

"Echoes," I said to no one in particular.

He turned back to the girl. This fiasco happened shortly after Trump took office, in that tornado of news, the heart-wrenching disarray, and somehow George and the fly he'd caught got on the subject of politics. She wanted him to think she was smart.

"I'm 26, and do you want to know what I think? I think the only good president we've had in my lifetime was president when I was just a baby. I think it was Bill Clinton."

"Obama single-handedly killed the economy," George mourned.

I'd like to note that I wasn't a fan of the Affordable Healthcare Act. It confused me--though it was the right idea, somehow executed poorly, because America sucks at health care, in a bipartisan way that fails to stop greedy parasites who profit from sick people. Anyway, aside from that, the worst recession in my lifetime occurred in 2008, when W. Bush, a Republican, was president. Even then, the economy didn't die. (And I don't want to rant about the reality TV show host with control of nukes. OK, one word: Embarrassment.)

So, I didn't see Obama slit our economy's throat with a hand tied behind his back. But that's how George saw it. The husky man who was like a meaner Men's Wear House spokesman liked what she had to say about Bill Clinton.

"Clinton was pretty good, yeah."

"I find it--oh, funny," she began, with a note of scandal. "That when he was having affairs with women, everyone thought it was such a laugh. But now, God forbid a man cheat on his wife. There was outrage when Trump did all the same things."

George agreed with this young woman half his age, and he swung for the fences.

"If you're the president and you wanna get some head from a woman younger than your wife, go ahead and do it. Whatever helps you relax and do your job. Can you imagine being in that Oval Office? Feeling the power. Anyone would want to do some sexy things in there. Whatever weird shit you're into... So, he got some head in the Oval Office. So what? Didn't make him a shitty president."

Dammit. I shaved my beard for this vile stain of humanity? And George even has a beard! George, I hope you choke the next time you siphon gas. 

I was almost finished with my application, feeling torn. Half of me was despondent, remorseful of the gas money I'd wasted, longing to be in bed, buried beneath blankets in another January in Wisconsin, going nowhere, slowing dying, but comfortable... And the other half wanted to do the interview, just to hear what George would say next. That quotable sleaze-bag I will never work for, will probably never see again, who gave me this rambling story... Inside Endless Marketing's sad, drab shit hole of an office, which they called a "suite." The delusions. The failures. This was an office for outcasts who worshiped the guy from Wolf of Wall Street while they dodged bill collectors. Or lived with their parents, plotting adventures on Quaaludes. I wasn't any better, just different. Call it moral. Call it shy, prone to shame. Call it __ more weeks or months or godforsaken years of being a janitor and a freelance writer.

With my application filled out, I slowly tucked it into my pocket. Maybe George and the young woman moved on to discuss Trump jacking off to hookers pissing on each other in the Lincoln Bedroom. I'll never know.

I walked up to the secretary.

"Sorry about the state of the office," she said. "We just moved in two weeks ago and--"

"I'll be pursuing other opportunities," I said.

With that, I walked out the door. It was odd: While I waited for the elevator to come up, I didn't hear a peep from the suite. It was like they'd vanished. Maybe I could've gone back to see and an empty office space for rent. I would've loved that. That would have made me a believer.

But the elevator dinged and the door slid open. I didn't look back.