Searching for the Elusive McJob

By JONES PURCELL

(August 1992, Big Shout Magazine)

It begins with a newspaper open to the want ads. Your goal: to find a McJob, i.e. a low-paying, low-stress, probably temporary day job so you can keep the wolf from the door and continue your life as a musician in Delaware — an avocation not unlike being paid $2.50 an hour to bang your head against the nearest wall.

Of course you don’t have a car. You see automobiles as very large and dangerous objects and are constantly amazed that almost anyone can obtain a license, thereby, being free to kill you or themselves or both. Forget the fact that you don’t like to walk 20 blocks to the Acme in the pouring rain or freezing cold. Or, “Hey baby, let’s go out, uh … ummmmm … can you pick me up?”

Yes, not driving is very zen, but I wouldn’t recommend it to those with fallen arches and good-paying jobs more than 10 blocks from the nearest bus stop.

Here we go… let’s see… painter! I can do that … nine years experience. I’ve got the permanent nerve damage to prove it. Uh oh, forget it — “car and phone necessary.” Maybe this … “Wanted telemarketers — must have pleasant voice, must speak English.” This sounds like me… “day shift available on bus route.” Hey this IS me! It says here, “contact Quong Dai Lap.” Hmmmm… a bit of the Third World, how exotic.

Initial contact with aforementioned supervisor reveals that a shirt and tie are needed. Why? Are we using videophones? Who’s gonna know if I have a tie on? Uh oh, smells like corporate bullshit… calm down, boy… at least it’ll keep you in Piels and white bread. Appointment made, confirmed. The wheels are now in motion…

Frantic search for tie reveals a skinny black number left over from a bad ska band 10 years gone. Pretty wrinkled, nothing a hot iron couldn’t fix. Does anyone out there know how to remove melted polyester from the heating surface of my vintage 1950s turquoise yard-sale travel iron bought and placed in dada-esque display on my apartment wall? Where’s that tie I wore to my trial? (I’m innocent, I tell ya!) Oooh yea, I think my last significant other has it… probably still has it tied to her wrist, camouflaged as the latest thing. I wonder what I saw in that trendy bitch anyway.

Subsequent phone call to roadie provides large flaming-red wool tie and actual clean, white shirt necessary to create illusion of stability and respectable corporate virtue.

Dawn on appointment day finds your obedient servant on a ladder 40-feet in the air on a painting job. Said ladder rests in the bed of double-parked pickup truck on Lehigh Ave., just a hop, skip and a jump from beautiful Aromingo Ave. in Philly. Assorted winos, weirdos and very large, ugly mutant family groups wander in circles, talking to themselves and constantly assailing me with advice, pleas for money, cigarettes, and toilet paper of all things!

High noon plus twenty… the ladder stowed, the final banner hung, and the dry heaves over, only the trembling remains. With the heat index hovering around 102 degrees, the need for water ice and cigarettes cannot be ignored (the yen for beer is ignored due to the upcoming false display of sobriety required to secure position).

And so on to the interstate, where traffic is backed up for miles due to an over-turned garbage truck. To our delight and mystification, we thread our way through man-high mounds of what appear to be perfectly good, white styrofoam cups. A little less than a mile further, we come upon more than 50 mattresses and box springs all looking better than the one your humble narrator sleeps upon.

We arrive in the general area of the appointment, and after 10 minutes of circling in a very anonymous unmarked office park, I spy some suspects — two males, wearing ties and disgusted looks and smoking what could be a joint.

I approach and am delighted to find out this is the place. I enter through the back door, my usual mode of egress, into a warren of office stations manned by well-dressed workers of all ages and races, all speaking earnestly into headsets.

Ushered into a room with a large poster advising me of my rights in the workplace, I fill out an unusually-long and detailed application … name your elementary school teacher?!

Application complete, I seek Quon Dai Lap. She waves and motions to me. Just then, a computer terminal explodes with a flash. A flame three-feet high ignites the walls of the blessedly-empty work station. Smoke and screams fill the air as workers stampede for the door. The fire fighters arrive and make short work of the blaze. Ms. Quong pushes through the throng, snatches my application, and shrieks, “You hired! Come in Monday morning! 9:30 sharp!”

No, the story can’t end here, you say. I was born, I lived, I died, so what? Case closed. My editor called: “You must flesh out the end,” he wheedled. He implored. He played with his hair. He tried everything — flattery, threats — but it was when we started talking about money that I got back to work. Editor, I’m an asshole. You knew that when you asked me to write this story. This is life. Life doesn’t have a moral. It’s just a random series of coincidences. Only in Fiction 101 would I be called upon to “flesh it out.”

But you say, “What about the Big Picture? How does it relate to the malaise we all call life here at the end of the 20th century? What of the philosophical ramifications? What’s it all mean?”

Don’t ask me. I don’t know, I just work here.