begin one’s day. These are not warm, friendly voices delicately reminding you that your account is just a trifle overdue, but intimidating snarls threatening personal ruin, and while they didn’t precisely say that they were sending Vinnie over and that I might soon have some mobility issues, it was implied. Also, these calls didn’t impress Sylvia much. And so I made another phone call.
“Hi, Dad.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Well, it’s like this—”
“No.”
“It appears that this particular situation might have certain ramifications regarding—”
“I believe at this point you owe me $180,000.”
A gross exaggeration, but effective. It was time, at last, to do something about my income stream, such as, for instance, obtaining one. Like many highly educated people, I didn’t have much in the way of actual skills, with the notable exception of forklift operator, at which I did not excel. My lack of excellence in forklift operations, however, did not prevent the manager of the produce market–plant nursery emporium where I labored after high school from sending me forth onto Rockville Pike, one of the main arteries linking Washington, D.C., with the Maryland suburbs, where technically, forklifts should not be—as I soon learned—because when forklifts take a corner a wee bit too fast they tend to tip, which can lead to hundreds of watermelons rolling across the intersection with Montrose Road, followed by said watermelons being chased by a very embarrassed forklift operator wondering whether this, finally, would be the last straw before he was fired. Other skills included housepainting, which I could no longer continue on account of an accident that had made climbing a ladder an experience too terrifying to contemplate; and waiting tables, which I had done at numerous establishments along the Eastern Seaboard, for numerous years, and I just felt that I could no longer serve the numerous assholes that frequent restaurants in a courteous, efficient, nonhomicidal manner.
While it is true that my grasp of the situation in Macedonia and my familiarity with the Czech Republic’s privatization program could, potentially, have led to a professional job, perhaps even a good professional job, I chose not to pursue employment in the field for which I had spent many years acquiring knowledge because… because, well, I didn’t really have a good reason. It just didn’t seem like the right thing to do, possibly because to obtain a professional job requires much letter writing and phone calling and boot licking, which comes suspiciously close to being a real job in itself and this I was in no mood for. Instead, beset by fiscal realities, I turned to Jenny and Debbie, kind yet firm managers of a temporary employment agency. They interviewed me, quickly discerned that I was not quite bereft of brains (“Put the following states in alphabetical order: Utah, Arkansas, Idaho, and Nebraska”), that my knowledge of software programs was scant (“But it says on your resume that you are proficient in Word, WordPerfect and Excel”), and that despite three typing tests I could never exceed twenty-nine words a minute, which was most unfortunate because the temp agency determined wages based on typing speed. And so after six years of exceedingly expensive, private school tertiary education combined with the amassment of some interesting and potentially job-relevant experiences elsewhere in the world, I became a minimum-wage temp, an experience that need not be recounted with much detail, though I will note that to be a temp is to have all the illusions and conceits of youth shattered, which was useful and necessary though disagreeable.
My temporary job assignments varied, taking me from law firm to trade association and around again, and always I would be led to the ominous file room and told with the patient civility reserved for the learning impaired that I was to make some order of the files. In the few assignments that lasted longer than a week I was offered the opportunity to enhance my skills and I would be taught how to answer the phone while others were on their lunch break, and even how to order office supplies, which I should note is usually very complicated indeed. Occasionally, I lamented my poor typing skills, but I refused Jenny and Debbie’s well-meaning offers to take the typing tutorial offered by the agency, fearing that such a move would lead me inexorably toward a career that depended on my typing speed. Instead, I found myself quietly stagnating, slowly approaching the pathos of self-pity—pathos because I was twenty-six, in the full blossom of youth—until one morning I meandered away from the day’s job, entered a cafe in Georgetown, ordered a large coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, a poppy seed bagel, toasted, with lox and cream cheese, and read a newspaper with the mirth of one who has time to linger over the Home and Garden section. Jenny and Debbie were not pleased. “Not showing up for an assignment makes us look bad,” said Debbie. “I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go.”
It is an unfortunate reality for innate idlers that our modern world requires one to hold a job to maintain a sustainable existence. Idling, I find, is immensely underrated, even vilified by some who see inactivity as the gateway for the Evil One. Personally, I regard idling as a virtue, but civilized society holds otherwise and the fact remained that I still had to get a job. And so I soon found myself involved in the exciting world of publishing. I was an associate editor for a small publishing firm in Washington, where I worked on a reference book that detailed the work of lobbyists. The first half of the book, which was essentially a Yellow Pages for influence peddlers, was comprised of listings of companies and countries and who they retained to purchase favors from the guardians of democracy in the heart of the free world. The second half of the book listed all lobbying firms and lobbyists and their clients, as well as the “government relations” staff of corporations that saw the need to maintain offices in Washington. The job consisted of sending out questionnaires, following up with phone calls, confirming lobbying data at the Justice Department, and plugging in the results into a computer database that crashed twice daily. I amused myself by matching the names of the Washington representatives of the Bosnian Serbs, the Mobutu regime, various Somali warlords, and Nike with the guest list of state dinners at the White House. Remarkably, however, there were some who did not take kindly to having their lobbying activities made public, which led to some coarse language directed my way over the telephone, and I would like to say here that I wish the “government relations” staff of (
While this job included health insurance as a little perk to compensate for its serf-like wages, there was no disguising the fact that I was still treading water in the river of life. I had some notion of wanting to write, though little inclination to actually write, which sometimes led me to believe that I should develop other notions. An obscure literary journal had just published a five-thousand-word essay I had written, and while I was pleased to have something published, the $50 and two free issues in compensation for three months of evening work seemed, somehow, inadequate. I kept sending essays, trifles, queries to national magazines, and while often the editors would respond with a kind, encouraging note, even a phone call, they still, sadly, continued to publish the petty ruminations of windbags long past their prime instead of fresh new voices with interesting things to say. (Not that I’m bitter.)
It was often suggested to me by concerned family members that I should get my foot in the door with a midsized newspaper. I rejected this out of hand. I was familiar enough with journalism to know that were I to cover a news-type event I would rapidly lose all my journalistic-like composure, discard all my faculties of reason, and descend into a stifling murk of uncertainty and fear. I knew this because when I lived in Prague I had been an actual journalist. An English-language weekly newspaper had generously agreed to assign me to real stories based on the masterpiece that was my analysis of the Saudi oil industry, a twenty-page, richly textured, subtly nuanced, carefully crafted display of plagiarism, which earned me a B+ during my junior year of college. These, obviously, were the glory years of the whole westerners-in-Prague era, shortly after the demise of that little experiment in social engineering known as communism, when hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans, Canadians, Australians, and other purveyors of Western ways descended upon the most beautiful city in the world and pretty much did anything they wanted to do. It was great.
My mother is Czech and as a consequence I like to think that I was not merely a seeker of the transcendently hip when I lived in Prague. I was born in the Netherlands and as a child I often traveled to Czechoslovakia to visit my grandfather, who lived in an apartment in Prague overlooking the Vltava River. The faint whiff of burning coal is enough to bring back the indolent river swans, the salty bread and sweet yogurt, the smoke-drenched rooms, my grandfather’s beer glass, and the long wanderings through soot-stained passageways in a city that for a time spoke to me only of the deeds of kings. When I was seven, just after my parents divorced, my mother had my younger sister and me baptized in a small church in South Bohemia. Seven, of course, is the age when the brain is at its most fecund, when every image and experience offers portent, and so when Prague’s many statues of beheaded saints, detongued martyrs, and gargoyles were all helpfully brought to my attention as being relevant in some way to my life and death, I pretty much stopped sleeping for a year, fearing the nightly intrusion of alarming images,
