workingfortheman.com

There are too many artists in New York City and half of them are stuck in cubicles.

I don't know if I qualify as an artist. I went to school for dramatic writing, but it seems this whole survival thing - food, shelter, and that other one, have taken priority. I love it when people tell me I am learning what I don't want. I thought I already learned that lesson when the temp agency sent me to dress up like Papa Smurf for the Toy Fair on Park Avenue.

You may have heard me whining.

It was the worst and bloodiest year of my life - my dark ages. I slid down the collegiate birth canal right into a basement apartment in Queens and a job across the highway at Sizzler. In between stallion fantasies of men wisping me away and being "discovered" as a brilliant gem among the sorry lot scraping by in Flushing, I had been mass-mailing my resume to publishers and television networks with the intention of finding a job that didn't follow me home at night, so I could write.

After coming home one "rush" Sunday night (the night all the pigs come to play at the salad trough), splattered in ketchup and Malibu sauce like weeping battle wounds, I decided to give in and try temping again.

I waited, resume poised, along with the rest of the desperate cattle, jaded and dry-eyed under the fluorescent anti-grow lamps. We were the bodies with arms that would push the papers, ears that would hear the phone ring, and hands that would sign the passes, but no brain necessary.

"You want something creative in like, entertainment and like, publishing, right?" said the coordinated beige agent from Jersey with a hairdo that looked like a fattening desert. "I think we can find you something." She shuffled through a file. "We might have something at Anne Klein." Her sentences curled up at the ends as if to condescend or mimic the tenuous grip I had on my life, my sanity, my own language. "Great!" I echoed her corporate exuberance.

"Come back tomorrow at like 8 so we can put you on call."

I felt like the wind was knocked out of me. Why do you make me put effort into this? I wanted to throttle her, tell her to get a soul, prove to at least 10 people there that something was horribly wrong with the general structure of our collective produce and consume mentality! And I don't like Anne Klein!

Sleep is precious. Time is precious. Money is precious, and this half-ass endeavor was a threat to it all if it didn't work.

I put on my most acceptable and well-meaning costume. The subway got me there at 9 am. Today she was coordinated blue-gray. "Well, Anne Klein does need somebody, and it's $8 an hour, but it doesn't start 'til 11, so you have time to get coffee or whatever." I set off with a scant job description and an address scrawled on the inside of a candy wrapper that read, ironically, "Sorry try again."

I felt obliged to "get coffee or whatever." The distinction between other peoples' convictions and my own had worn thin with each blow from the sickle of impending unemployment.

Another $1.50 for subway and $3 for coffee and a muffin.

I underestimated the 5 blocks plus elevator time and arrived at 10:30. The receptionist, a temp, told me to sit and wait. An hour later, the office manager enters and tells me I'll have to wait until 1. Her pricked eyebrow commanded me to pretend my whole life was leading up to this moment. I'd LOVE to sit and wait until 1!

After an hour and a half of reading the same paragraph over and over in a People Magazine - Omigod, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow broke up - Omigod, Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow broke up - Omigod - the office manager told me in one too-busy-to-brush breath that I was lunch relief for four different receptionists on four different floors in 2 different buildings. I wanted to get down on my knees and scream "Thank you! Thank you! All my life I have searched for someone to tell me who I am and where to go!" Tempting. Brad Pitt...

I was ushered by a tiny suited twig of a girl to a dark, intimate lobby with a glass table and talk-show couches. I subtly and psychologically asked for her commiseration, but she turned out to be one of those stoic, loyal twigs. The receptionist took a half hour to explain the intricate processes of her phone, her video monitors of the back door, her picture of her husband, and her drawer of instant gratification candy. I ate one of her fireballs and happened to spit it out when the head suit walked by. She returned an hour and fifteen minutes later. Off I went to relieve the next one.

"Okay, you're really late," she informs me and proceeds to rattle off another list of phone extensions, messenger procedures, who is allowed in the glass doors...

Then on to the next receptionist who's even more hungry, who illuminates with even more acerbity on my tardiness, scowling like a mechanical administrative harpy as she obsessively sharpens her pencils. I wanted to pick her up by her metal wind-up prong and sharpen her head. Another explanation of the next outdated answering system rolls off my brain. What lines NOT to answer, what lines to forward....

The final receptionist was aptly named "Matilda." The next mechanical monster revealed itself over the white horizon of Matilda's desk, blinking and beeping like the helm of a space ship complete with headset. "This is the inna-com" she says smooshing the buttons with her brown acrylic talons.

"Push numba fifty-fahv and the park button, then say the person's name in the heid set and then push hol' once, then push the numba that shows up in the li'l screen then hol' agin." I nodded and shrugged in mutual acknowledgment of a lost cause. She told me there was a group of famous and fabulous designers on the floor from Milan and made an ineffectual exit.

In the first ten minutes I hung up on 6 people and transferred 10 to myself. I had Germany talking to California, and thirty blinking lights go off with the flick of a red button. I wanted to go home. Ring. I wanted to be on an island all by myself. Buzz. Money was precious, but my life was not. Click. Then someone said from across the Atlantic with an almost fake sounding British accent, "Well, for Christ sake, will you page him then?"

"One moment." I was caught between reckless stupor and desperate immediacy, tears standing in my eyes. Push pound, no park. A number appeared on the screen. Then what? HOLD! Press PARK! No, the number! Shit! "SHIT!" into the headset. And it echoed miraculously through the entire building. Both buildings? Maybe.

Matilda came running out of a white door somewhere and several Caesar haircuts peaked into the doorways.

I picked up my bag and left. A month later, I received a check for 18 dollars.

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