Adrian Stumpp
Well, I’m not Mormon—let’s get that out of the way. But I am honest, true, chaste, benevolent, virtuous, and of good report, so long as you don’t call the references on my resume. I’m punctual and hardworking. I pretty much keep to myself unless you want me to be outgoing, professional unless you want me to be casual. My loyalty is the best interest of the company unless you want it to be the customer’s satisfaction. I’m basically a labor whore—I’ll be whatever you want and do whatever you want. Don’t ask what I am. Tell me what you want, and I’ll be that for forty hours a week. What are my goals? I know I’m not getting out of this world alive. I have no material ambition so bonuses won’t entice me to do any more than the bare minimum. What do I expect from an employer? A paycheck. That’s all. I want my bills paid and maybe a little extra to take my girlfriend out on Friday night. I don’t want benefits, discounts, friendship, or a sense of satisfaction with a job well done. I want to show up, do my job, clock out, go home, and actually live my life for a few hours—the one that has to be justified by selling myself to you.
…..I didn’t get the job.
…..I don’t interview well. I’m comfortable with that.
…..I haven’t had a job for three months now. That’s fine. I don’t really want a job. I want to live. I’ve decided these two institutions are diametrically opposed to one another. Greta, my girlfriend, says the problem is I don’t play well with others. She’s getting restless. She says she has anxiety and cannot make love to me with a clear conscience knowing I’m pretty much worthless to society. She says her mother taught her to expect more. She’s a hypochondriac and has been consulting an alternative healing expert who has decided the fact she has sex with a loser is the reason for her chronic urinary tract infections. I am beside myself. I’m essentially committing the spiritual rape of a willing body without even knowing it.
…..Yesterday I had an interview with a multi-media company doing internet tech-support. The unofficial first interview, they say, is appearance. This is very superficial, Greta tells me, which is why it’s so important. I show up clean to show I’ve put time into this event. “Yes,” cleanliness says to the potential employer, “this interview has occupied much more of my time than our appointment. For me, this job isn’t just a job—it’s a lifestyle. I like that Big Brother is watching.” I’m wearing a freshly ironed white shirt with a tie and black slacks. I own clothes that I may or may not wear to church. It’s illegal for my potential employer to ask if I go to church so this is all he has to go by: that I can tie a neck-tie. I answer all the questions. I know all the answers. But my potential employer needs to see me read my lines. He needs to see me commit treason against myself. He needs to know I’m a moral person.
…..And I say, “You are the reason for all suffering, ever. You’re the reason women drown their infants and men beat their wives. Your entire life is dedicated to polishing a politically correct form of bigotry.”
…..I didn’t get the job.
*
Upon reevaluating my strategy I find that I have sabotaged myself. If you live in Utah and want a new job, you can’t have long hair and you can’t have earrings. Greta can’t figure out why no one is hiring me and suggests I wear a CTR ring to my next interview. She says that’s how she got her job. She works for a bill collecting agency. She says she doesn’t feel bad for people who write a bad check for cigarettes—it’s the ones who’re fifty-thousand dollars in debt because they had a heart attack and the insurance company doesn’t see why they should have to provide their clients with insurance—those ones bother her. I tell her about the interview. She admires my idealism and is saddened by my disillusionment. I am grateful for her compassion, so I say I love her. She loves me too, she wants me to know, but makes sure I understand our love will not pay the rent.
…..I wonder if it’s just Utah and consider asking Greta how she’d feel about moving out of state. Then I talk to my friend Matt. He’s a graduate of several certificated technical programs, and a computer genius, he tells me. He recently moved back to Utah from Oregon because the only job he could find was at a sandwich shop. He says in Portland, in order to create more jobs, they’ve started hiring gas pump attendants and made it illegal to pump your own gas.
…..Greta says the bill collecting agency is hiring. This wouldn’t work because I can’t handle outbound telephone jobs. A month ago I worked for one day calling people to manipulate them into buying cellular phones whether they wanted one or not. The trick is not to ask if they want one. You tell them they need one. The reality of it is the cell-phone company needs them to want one. It’s a very laissez-faire philosophy: create a supply and make your demands.
…..“But it’s not really pressure sales,” my supervisor said, turning the CTR ring on his index finger. “We just have a superior product and believe in it strongly. We want our customers to understand what’s available. We rebuttal their reasons for saying ‘no’ because they usually want one, they just need that extra push before they’ll commit.”
…..In the early days of my job hunting I had a very virtuous approach. I wasn’t willing to do anything that wouldn’t let me sleep with a clear conscience, but I didn’t find anything. Where there isn’t a demand, there isn’t a supply. My moral fiber is weakening, though. Now I think of myself as Judas and not Jesus. I wonder how much thirty pieces of silver would be worth in U.S. currency. I sit at the kitchen table drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, reading and rereading my auto insurance statement. It was due today. Tomorrow I will wake up with nowhere to go and look for a job in an uninsured car. Every time I pass a cop, I’ll hold my breath. I’ll drive five miles-per-hour below the speed limit. I can’t afford a violation for driving an uninsured vehicle. I can’t even afford groceries. I have eighty dollars in cash and a credit card that’s been cut off because I haven’t made a payment in four months. I’ve had that money going on three months now because I’m afraid to spend it, that I’ll spend it on the wrong thing. My car’s six months overdue for an oil change and probably a tune-up and I doubt it has another six months left in it. I want a job. I want thirty pieces of silver.
…..Matt tells me his brother just got his Master’s Degree in Psychology. He’s working at DirecTV for six-fifty an hour and his student loans are starting to come due. I tell him I just want to earn a living without hating my life in the process. I tell him I just want Greta to be proud of me. He says human beings shouldn’t have to “earn” their right to live. I wonder if there was ever a difference between democracy and capitalism. Matt thinks our situation is similar to France’s shortly before the revolution. He’s frustrated because he still hasn’t found a job. For the first time since Elementary school, I pray before going to bed—to Kali.
*
Greta wakes up in the middle of the night. She had a nightmare. She says it doesn’t hurt to pee as much as it did last week. We have oral sex and I feel guilty, like I’m getting something I don’t deserve, that I haven’t earned it. Oral sex is still technically illegal in Utah, and I’m thrilled to be getting away with something. I wonder if the founding fathers felt the same way when they declared their independence, what that must’ve been like. I want to declare sovereign of state. I want to be the first American refugee to Cuba. I tell Greta about my revolutionary fantasies and ask if it’s anything I should be concerned with, as if it were a cold or a rash. She says America won’t fall like France; it’ll fall like Rome—it’ll just slowly dissolve. The wonders of apathy. To forget about an entire nation and when you go back for it, it’s gone. I tell her I finally broke down and lied on my resume. I made up a company as my current employer hoping that would improve my chances. I don’t tell her that I broke, though, that I couldn’t play it all the way out. I don’t tell her when the manager asked me to tell him something about myself, I said I was an ethical catastrophe. She says my credit card company called while I was out looking for a job. I ask what her nightmare was about.
…..“Work,” she said.
…..“What happened?”
…..“Nothing, really, it was just a normal day. But I’m there forty hours a week. I don’t want to be there any more than I have to.”
…..Eventually Greta goes back to sleep, pulling a double shift she won’t get paid for. I lie wide awake, terrified I might dream about filling out another job application. Sometime during the night I get up to surf the internet and learn that in Minnesota it is illegal to cross county lines with a duck on your head.
…..The next day my dad says I should go back to school. I tell him about Matt’s brother. My dad dropped out of the eighth grade to work on a farm to help support his mom and four sisters. Today he makes nineteen dollars an hour as a steelworker. My last real job was working with him, out in the industrial park, laying rivets for jet-walks. He made me promise if he got me a job it wouldn’t stop me from going back to school. I had worked there a year when I mentioned to him I’d like to get my CDL so I could learn to operate the forklift. The next day the foreman called me into his office and told me he had to fire me or else my dad would quit. When I asked Dad about it he said he couldn’t stand watching me waste my life at a dead end job. So now I waste my life with no job. Dad says in some ways things are better these days, but in a lot of ways, they’re worse. He’s impressed Greta has sex with me outside of wedlock. Oscar Wilde: democracy is nothing more than the bludgeoning of the people, by the people, for the people. Dad says America is the greatest country in the world. I tell him that’s not enough.
…..I start looking on the internet for revolution stories. The Spanish Revolution, Mexican Revolution, French Revolution, American Revolution. My new heroes are William Wallace and Pancho Villa. I know it doesn’t matter. As soon as I get a job I’ll be contented and won’t think about it anymore.
…..I explain it to Greta like this: I see myself as an invested and productive member of society. I repeatedly ask for employment, and, because of my unseemly honesty, I am repeatedly rejected. I see that society rejects me, and assume an oppressive complex. Undesirable and spurned for it. I perceive the establishment to be against me. I label myself insubordinate and identify with other untouchables. She listens patiently, her arms folded, the electric bill hanging limply from one hand. When I finish she stares back at me appalled, sets her jaw, and takes a deep breath, as if enduring something. “Oh, honey,” is all she can say, no doubt in awe of my deep socio-psychological insight.
…..My days are spent filling out applications at retail shops, department stores, and supply warehouses. None of them are currently hiring. They will keep my application on file and call if any positions open. I am gracious in spite of my despair. At home I overhear Greta speaking to her mother on the telephone. She is crying softly and making up excuses for my disgrace. After hanging up she comes to me for comfort. She begs me to take a job, any job. I tell her I just want a job that won’t make my life a living nightmare. She assures me no such job exists.
…..That night while lying in bed something frightful occurs to me: I love Greta more than dignity. It sweeps over me and my whole inner-landscape is changed as if transmogrified. I have been suffering under a false ethic. I believed that I should be honest, and somewhere an employer would appreciate it and give me a job I could tolerate peaceably. I have been faithful to the wrong ideal, though; it is Greta who loves me even though I am unemployed. It is Greta who stands bravely beside me despite the great violence done to her relationship with her mother. My ideals seem cold, suspect in this new light. My body shakes all over beneath the blankets and I understand as of now, to continue this way will be to take Greta for granted. It is to she, who has never doubted me aloud, that my moral compass aligns.
…..I rock her softly awake. She asks what’s wrong, and I tell her I’m sorry, I’ve been petty, I’ll get a job tomorrow. She throws her arms around me, her love moved by my newly unprincipled spirit to the happy precipice of lust.
…..The next day Matt calls to let me know he got a job, and I should come aboard. He’s delivering pizzas at a franchised pizza parlor for six bucks an hour, plus tips. I go down there and have an interview as soon as I finish the application. It catches me off guard, the quickness of it, so I don’t have a chance to screw up. “You got a car? The job requires a car,” the manager tells me. He’s about five years younger than I am.
…..“Yeah,” I say.
…..“It insured?”
…..“No,” I say and something in me sinks. I feel sick. I think of Greta, the hopeful solidity around her mouth when I come home from an interview and she asks how it went, already knowing. I promise from now on I will never tell the truth again, for Greta’s sake. I remind myself it is Greta who pays all our bills while only I enjoy the luxury of moral dilemma. The manager rolls his shoulders and clears his throat, and I know that was it. I lost because I couldn’t tell one stupid lie.
…..“Well,” he says, “you’ll want to insure it right away. Can you do it fast? Today?”
…..My eyes sting. I want to cry, and I don’t know if it’s out of relief or terror. The poorly lit pizzeria strikes me suddenly as ominous. I am surrounded by greasy teenagers, and the mingling scents of tomato paste and insecticide are so thick I convince myself the starchy film in the back of my throat is the result of their build up. I count the raggedy bills in my wallet. “Yeah, I can do it right now,” I say, and he hires me. He wants me to come in tomorrow to be sized for my uniform. I’ll also have to bring a statement of insurance so they can photocopy it for my file. Greta will be so happy with me. I’m as happy for her as for myself; that she can believe her faith in me wasn’t so foolish, that she can finally justify me to her bitch of a mother. That love counts for something sometimes.
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Adrian Stumpp’sfiction has appeared in Aisthesis (Spring 2008) and Metaphor (Spring 2009). My work has also received honorable mention and second place in the Utah Arts Council’s annual Short Story competition in 2007 and 2008 respectively. In 2009, my short story collection, All the Variables & Other Love Stories, received first place in the book-length category of the same competition.
