A Working Stiff's Manifesto (2 page)

He has recovered somewhat from that experience and is assistant-directing another small film being shot down in Tribeca, and he needs warm bodies to use as gophers. For a chance to see a real movie being shot, I offer my services.

He has gone down to the shoot at four in the morning, and I take the subway down there at about nine. On the way, I make a mistake and read the script I have been asked to bring, which Corey forgot in his early rush. It is awful. Not just run of the mill awful, but not
Plan Nine From Outer Space
awful either, which would have at least made it interesting. This script just sucks. It seems to have been written by someone who watched a lot of television growing up, and instead of incorporating reality into their adult imagination, this writer just incorporated the clichéd images of 1970s television. The drama scenes are from
Mannix
and the love scenes from
The Love Boat.
I can't imagine how this wretched crap made it to the filming stage.

I get to the shoot and realize that nobody wants to hear my opinion of the script because it's already past nine o'clock and they have to finish shooting by nightfall. Corey has only been able to close off the street for one day, and nothing is being done because the sound man is having all kinds of technical glitches.

Corey, who is usually soft-spoken and calm, is buzzing around and screaming at people. I've never seen him like this before. He comes over to me. “Carry these things upstairs,” he tells me. He points at a pile of heavy objects that look complex and electronic.

I start to pick one up and the sound man screams, “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”

“He told me to …”

“LEAVE MY SHIT ALONE!”

Whoa, Buddy. “Okay,” I say softly. I put the expensive thing down gently and stand there. The sound man turns back to what he was doing, and Corey, who created the whole scene, is off to “organize” something else.

These people like to shriek at each other. Scenes like this are a constant of the film trade, I soon learn. In the next few minutes, I see a different sound man shrieking at his assistant, a stuntman nearly attack two passers-by, and the director make loud, snide remarks to a pretty girl who is holding a clipboard. No one here has any social grace or sense of courtesy. They are artistes. They have no responsibilities to the outside world because it is their job to critique it. How could they perform their invaluable task of providing commentary on society if they burden themselves with its restrictive rules?

The sound man comes over to me and hands me a pole. “Take this upstairs,” he says without looking at me.

Normally I'd have punched this guy by now, but I'm supposed to be helping Corey, and I don't want to create yet another time delay on his set by injuring someone who knows what's going on. I take it upstairs. There the two “stars,” one of whom I actually recognize from a mid 80s sitcom, are going over their dialogue. They look annoyed at my intrusion but don't say anything. I put the pole down and start to leave.

“Hey, bring me up some coffee,” the sitcom guy says.

“Me too,” says the girl.

“Sure thing,” I say. I have no intention of bringing either of them anything because they didn't say “please,” but I'm cleared of responsibility when I get downstairs because the lighting guy gives me a mile of wire to untangle. I sit and untangle wire for a bit, then everybody starts getting wildly excited and screaming, “Quiet, quiet!” We're actually going to start filming now. Everybody is still. Then the actress opens the door and comes outside and closes the door.

“Cut!” screams the director.

That was it. That was the result of four hours of preparation, watching this girl open and close a door. Then she does it six more times to get the shot right. Apparently there's a right and wrong way to open and close a door in Hollywood. This must be what you learn in acting school.

“Hey, you, come here,” says the sound guy when the excitement is over. I just stare at him. I've read the script, these people are wasting their time. This is a shit movie that would be lucky to wind up in the discount bin of a video store in the Philippines. Maybe if we were filming some masterpiece that was going to change the whole world of film, I'd come running, but my commitment to this project is straining. I know the sound guy probably came here a few years ago, dreaming of working on such a film, and this is his dose of reality. He's just happy to be working, playing with his microphones and miles of wire and getting paid for it. This is his Great Compromise. I've made my own, and it doesn't include being spoken to like that.

Corey, the lighting guy, the actors, they've all given up. This crap film is to them what applying for a job at a fish counter is to me. But here, there is some unwritten rule that you can't admit that you've given up. A very strict rule. Rule One: Whatever you do, never stop bullshitting yourself that you're important. Rule One keeps a lot of people sane.

I've had enough of this. I walk past the soundman, down to the coffee shop at the end of the street, buy myself a cup, and only myself, and sit with the crowd, watching the production from the steps.

On my way home, I call my ex-girlfriend to tell her not to bother coming to visit the glamorous world of film. I'd invited her down to the shoot, hoping that she might find a glimpse of filmmaking fascinating enough to reconsider her recent decision to seek a boyfriend elsewhere. My inability to hold a shitty job while working on the Great American Novel was causing strain on our relationship. I'd come home from jobs waiting tables or moving furniture and be too tired to write, and my lack of literary output had her convinced that my writing dream was just a line that I'd used to pick her up in the first place.

“Van Gogh painted when he was broke,” she told me once. “People can do things when they're broke.”

Van Gogh ruined it for the rest of us. Sane people who want a career in the arts want a halfway decent life while they examine the deeper issues. There's no image there, though. It's all about image. Most people who can't name two of Van Gogh's paintings know that he was a starving nutcase. He sat in a corner and poured out art while his food supply ran out and people came to evict him. Now that was an artist. Cut off his ear and mailed it to a woman. Now that's passion. Actually, it's schizophrenia. I'd hoped not to model myself on a schizophrenic self-mutilator who died in obscurity, but any argument of mine was just a rationale for lack of commitment to my trade.

It turns out she wasn't coming anyway. She'd gone to lunch with some guy from the office.

The Market, where I am now employed as a fish cutter, is a grocery store that tries to combine rustic charm with nonrustic prices. It sports a bakery, a kitchen, an espresso stand, even a flower shop. You can buy anything you'll ever need here, providing all you'll ever need is overpriced haute cuisine, espresso, and flowers.

There is a trend afoot among businesses these days to complicate things, then give the product of all their complications a simple name. The Market conjures up images of farmers hawking their produce in a warehouse, with chickens squawking in the background and cornhusks and other vegetable debris littered around a sawdust floor. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Market where I am employed has been meticulously pieced together, every detail the result of careful market research. The bathroom is placed behind the meat counter to discourage users (who wants to see animal guts?) and the quick items, the milk, and the bread, which people might want to just grab and dash out with are conveniently placed all the way at the back of the store. This way, the shopper will have to walk past every item while inhaling the aromas of freshly baked bread and cinnamon-laced cappuccino, increasing the willingness to spend.

As I suspected from the job interview, appearances are key. The general manager, Zoe, comes down to say hello to me as I sift through the introductory paperwork in the break room on my first day. She gives me a quick professional smile and shakes my hand as she nods approvingly at my khaki pants. “Very nice,” she murmurs. Then she looks with consternation at my blue shirt.

“Is that an oxford?”

“What's an oxford?”

“The shirt. Is it an oxford shirt?”

“I don't know. Is it?”

“You need an oxford.”

“Okay.”

She nods approvingly at my pants again. “Very nice,” she says. “But you have to have an oxford.”

I give her the thumbs-up on the oxford issue and a big smile, and she walks off, confident that the next time she sees me I will be wearing an oxford shirt. This is one of her duties, to make sure everyone wears an oxford. Over the years, I've noticed that employers who are sensible in almost every respect often have no flexibility or sense of humor when it comes to uniforms. It could be something they are taught in business courses in college, that the uniform represents the company, that it has to be worn with pride, that a soiled or poor-appearing employee is the first unraveling of a tightly wound organization. I'm not so sure, though. I think that abusing people about their appearance is an easy and convenient way for managers to show off their power.

Think about it. In what other possible situation can one person reasonably say to another that ultimate power comment, “You look like shit.” In the army, I once saw a man forced to do pushups because he had missed a tiny patch of skin when he was shaving, and we understood this was part of the abuse of training. We were expecting abuse and we got it. The working world is no different, except that the comments are phrased slightly differently, and are accompanied by a distant power-smile and a handshake. Of course sometimes, though rarely, uniform comments are necessary. I was an EMT in Philadelphia and I worked with a guy who looked like he slept in his car every night, and he smelled like it too.

But today my blue button-down nonoxford shirt was ironed to perfection and I smelled sweet as summer rain. What Zoe doesn't realize is that the next time she sees me, I'll be wearing this shirt, and the time after that too. Nothing personal, it's just that I can't afford a new shirt until I get paid, and I'm not getting a paycheck for at least a week, perhaps two, and this is the only blue shirt I have. I doubt I'll get fired over it, though it's more likely that I'll get fired for that than for the fact that I'm completely incapable of performing the job I was hired to do.

I got lucky on the khaki pants. I actually owned a pair of nice ones, worth about fifty dollars, and now they're about to get splattered with fish guts.

Zoe is gone. I sit in the employee break room and read propaganda about the company I have just joined. The Market, I learn, has branches wherever there are people with money to burn. Wherever there are people driving up half-mile driveways in sport-utility vehicles, we are there. There are branches in Beverly Hills, Long Island (about five different stores), Grosse Point, the Main Line, and so on. The company headquarters is in Maryland. All sexual harassment complaints and personal disputes must be filed with the Maryland office, and a list of phone numbers for that purpose is provided. It is tossed in the trash. Whatever else they can say about me, I'm not a squealer. Besides, I've only ever known two people to call an 800 number to complain about sexual harassment, and both were fired as troublemakers.

Then I flip through a sixteen-page document entitled “Becoming an Associate,” and am on page three before I realize that associate means employee. The mangling of the English language has become commonplace in the corporate world, and people who work at the Market's lowest-level jobs are all given titles. Thus, I am encouraged to tell my friends about exciting career openings as a chef's assistant (vegetable chopper or dishwasher, depending on the chef's needs at the time), sales records associate (checkout girl), or sanitation maintenance associate (janitor). An enclosed flyer tells me that I will be awarded fifty dollars for each person I can bring to the company. Small print, about a page of it, describes the conditions that have to be met before the check is handed over. The employee must stay ninety days, I must still be employed by the company after the employee's ninety days, the employee must be highly rated, a request for the check must go through headquarters in Maryland, and on and on. Lawyers know that most people would rather sign their rights away than read page after page of small print, and the people who devised this bounty system, as it is called, probably did so with the same mentality. Most of us would rather kiss fifty dollars good-bye than bother with any more legalese. I flip the page and read on.

After ninety days, I am eligible for insurance. That's always a nice one. That the insurance costs twenty-five dollars a week and doesn't really cover anything except lightning bolt strikes is something that only people with the patience to read the aforementioned legalese will ever find out. There is also a profit-sharing program, in which associates get a Christmas bonus of stock in their name every year, provided they have been there one year or longer. The amount of stock increases every year that the associate is with the company. Promises of great wealth for long-term employees are not unusual at businesses with high turnover, where the management knows that little, if any, of the promised wealth will ever have to be distributed. Benefits for short-term employees, things I could actually use now, such as free meals and paid breaks, are never to be found.

John, the fish counter manager, comes into the break room to see how I am doing with the paperwork. “All done?”

I have barely started. There are almost fifty pages of small print to go in the introduction manual alone. I have just started on the chapter about how it can all end, called “Associate Abuses and Termination.” Here I am told that bringing a gun or drugs to work will get me fired, as will stealing, or “any other felony.” Lying is also mentioned as a grounds for dismissal. Apparently, I am not allowed to lie to other associates, which negates one of my hobbies. There are just enough broad-ended generalities in there to indicate that they can fire me if they don't like me. Of course, there's an 800 number to call if I feel that has happened, but I imagine if I do that, I get caught up in a paperwork conspiracy so endless that it would be better to just get another job.