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A Shaken Head at Solvency’s Door

By Dan McCarthy

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In the slain, hollowed out office-carcass of the 32nd floor, within a midtown steel and glass behemoth, I stood amongst the rubble and felt as one of the many looters surely must have felt in Baghdad after Saddam’s fall. Shopping casually, I rooted around for any pen left behind, a notepad of paper, and perhaps, if lucky, a forgotten female to stuff in my bag along with the rest of the broken boodle. A babbling neurotic was rudely tossing me around, assigning odd jobs; tucked away in some back-office Xanadu, no doubt replete with “Congratulations on the Move!” banners hung sadly in the background. I stood thinking about all the unrealized potential I was squandering in these meaningless endeavors.

For a minute, in such a situation, a dreaming innocent will blast off into another reality and somehow convert whatever is happening at that moment into an optimistic lift-stone of sorts; all this rot leading towards a brighter day, a more substantial greater good. But when some other poor fool approaches you with a hand scratching his crotch, only to immediately thump you on the back asking if this is your first time using the FPU Staffing Agency…the awful reality of where you are in the world cuts and stings like a fresh divorce.

Temping in New York City is a vile and loathsome act for any self-respecting, ill-dressed transplant to endure. Your personal worth is evaluated on the basis of select computer skills and a succession of forced, pained smiles. Bones creak and splinter as you suppress the desire to howl like a wounded hyena when the only work that can be located for you is a 10 dollar an hour job, offing some penny-pinching husband for a trophy wife on the Upper East Side. You do your best to convince yourself that the compromise you’re inflicting upon everything you believe is for a greater, more immediate financial good. “Things can only get better,” you tell yourself.

Worse still, there exists a category of people who earn a steady living this way, and even possess a generally good outlook about it; approaching every assignment with a pressed grin, hoping that perhaps this will be the one where they strike gold. While this may be true for them, it does nothing to quell the fury that others feel when a slop-position opens up, and a call is placed insisting that you accept this new challenge in the spirit of necessary capital gain. Nothing vainglorious this time. Just a day of work flipping switches or sending cadavers up and down bungeed gallows; choices far too close to being a slot on the lower end of the pig’s trough - catching the last of someone else’s slobber supposedly because it’s the only choice left. And a superior choice, one reasons, to cementing foam earplugs in your ear canal in order to suppress the symphony of horns that sleeping on the street so rudely forces you to face. When the options have hit these levels, you know you’re paying for some recent err in judgment, some overlooked sin no longer waiting to be addressed.

Now deep in the labyrinth, the other apes had thinned out and scattered over multiple floors. A lost office reveals a strange and intimidating collection of unused disposable cameras in a broken-sealed moving box, forgotten and abandoned. Horrid thoughts come pouring in. What could these have been intended for? What purpose did they serve for a financial conglomerate with nothing but stained oak and bad art on the walls? Perhaps a sordid gang-herd of rowdy financial executives, drunk off riches’ hooch, thought it a good idea to distribute for documentation a now thwarted in-office stag party until cheap and dismissible things like morality and the common spirit gives way to the sins of the uber-rich. The expiration dates on the individual boxes all read 9/10/2002, over and over. A large stain on the rug suggested either an overturned soda during the move, or that there had been an expiration of another sort long before that dark day ever came.

“How did I get here?”

Earlier in the day, much earlier, I received a call on my way out the door that promised to relieve me of the financial slump. Usually, the staffing agent is cool and collected on the phone, so I should have goddamn guessed why the voice on the other end sounded so frantic; trembling as if cleaning up after a fresh raping. They were getting desperate, and soliciting the same types in order to appease their clients. “Not so bad” they tell you, “merely a day’s work moving all but nothing around. After all, it’s work, right?”

* * *

Trashed furniture and spilled memos littering the halls did little to drown out the smell of spoiled milk and sour attitudes. Even the in-house elevator operator was cruel and unapologetic. His look was the mishmash of every bit part played by z-level actors - plumbers, electricians, sleeping security guards or any other character first killed or easily forgotten in every major Hollywood picture since the advent of the star system. He eyed us with passive contempt, and seemed complacent sitting on that folding chair, staring at the torn elevator walls and winking at a sinister camera peering down from the ceiling above. Sit back and let it all wash over you; his body language clear. What’s left to do after life has produced enough rotten cards, leading you to that chair just counting the minutes until you’re released and turned loose on a local tavern, forgetting the heaps of nothing you accomplished during your waking day?

Long after a scattered collection of dirty temps, leftover suits, and sub-humans later, I’m offered a hard look through a smeared looking glass - the perceived spic-n-span front Park Avenue life presents. Already, small confrontations had erupted with the commoners of the building. Hired ruffians forebode us to use the foot lifts, instead sending us to the emboweled and reeking freight elevators. I made a sarcastic comment in passing to some sort of supervisor toting an obscene walkie-talkie, and was almost trounced by a wall of subordinates, four bodies deep. Our presence obviously wasn’t desired there; mine, now detested. I was attracting attention to myself -- something I wouldn’t advise in such a hostile job environment.

We labored up a ridge,
Rugged, narrow, difficult,
And steeper far than was the last. – Inferno (24: 61)

And temping is simply that. More than a promise of quick and sustentative money, it’s a stamina and litmus test. Enduring this awful and desolate version of the Unquenchable Fire, makes Dante’s descent into the blackness seem like one filled with sweetness and light. As each new week and upcoming assignment comes, a Red Sun sets in the West of work weeks I usually would just as soon forget.

At the end of the day, all that’s seemingly left to do is pick up the pieces with a heavy heart and fill out the requisite time sheet, realizing you’re just another broke punk trying to prove to the world that he’s worth his weight in two-dollar bills and witty observations.

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Dan McCarthy is a writer living in New York City.  He can be contacted here.

© 2004 Me Three