You'll Be Fine

A few long years ago, I was working at a small optical shop, selling glasses, scheduling doctor's appointments, throwing out the garbage, and laughing behind the backs of customers with my boss.

Then I got this crazy idea into my head that I was going to become a cop. So I wrote my boss a letter saying that I was going to resign from my $10.55/hr job to enter a municipal police academy as a police officer candidate. I was surprised when he didn't tell me that I was fucking crazy, because that's what my parents told me. He put his hand on my shoulder and said how proud he was of me, which is just what I wanted to hear from my parents about this decision, but didn't. And then he said something that rubbed me the wrong way, even though I think it was meant as a compliment.

"You'll be fine," he said to me.

"Look, you know it doesn't really matter what happens to you in there-- if you make it or if you wash out. You're handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious-- and you're a white male. Opportunities are just going to fall into your lap. I mean, shit: they fell into mine."

And I guess they did, for him. He grew up dirt-poor in a trailer in a shitty part of New Jersey. His father died early and his mother, still living, is a trembling, alcoholic wreck. Miraculously, my boss survived a long-haired, drug-hazed adolescence filled with unprotected sex and behavior of a dubious nature at best. He bummed around life and held a series of odd jobs-- landscaping, construction, house painting, and being a traveling soda vendor. A friend approached him and suggested he ought to stop peddling suds and start peddling sunglasses, and so he became a rep for a recognizable sunglass line. Another friend suggested that he buy an optical shop and, when the opportunity presented itself, as it invariably does to all handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white males, he did.

And, when he saw another handsome, intelligent, well-spoken, ambitious white male at the age of twenty come into his shop with a quick joke and a shaky handshake, well, I guess he decided to return the favor. Well, kind of. He started me at $6.50 an hour, and my first job was to soap, rinse and dust each one of the approximately 2,000 pair of glasses that surrounded the store. It took me the entirety of my first week of work.

I was annoyed by my boss's assumption that things would turn out okay for me because of the color of my skin, or because I knew how to comb my hair or because I used uncommon vocabulary words like "effecacious" and "remuneration" in daily conversation. Were any of these facts sturdy enough to act as a cushion or a safety-net against homelessness, mental illness, depletion of cash, unemployment, accidents, or the hopeless, unstoppable failure that radically alters so many a promising life?

As we all know, my good looks and charming personality were not enough to keep me enrolled in the police academy. I left after two days, forty-eight minutes-- despite an acceptable sit-and-reach score, and a blistering mile-and-a-half run time. I soon learned that my combed hair or my impressive vocabulary was no help when it came time to lift the barbell.

Neither of these elements of who I am stopped me from seven months of unemployment, and they didn't help me the first time I tried to pass the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania's EMT Practical Examination. Fortunately, I passed on the second try, and that lead to a year and seven months on the street with a transport ambulance company, alternately freezing or sweating my ass off for $11.00/hr, transporting spindly, 90-pound cancer sufferers to hospitals and hospice centers, or schlepping around 400-pound gorillas to MRI appointments or up three flights of stairs. Or down. I can't remember which anymore.

Promotions at the ambulance company that seemed like they would be open to someone of my liberal arts qualities-- positions in management or supervision-- were routinely given to others with lower education levels, lower communication skills, and probably lower chromosomal quantities.

So I left.

After two years in my current desk-jockey job, I am emotionally exhausted, burned out and apathetic, and I am, at 29, finding myself once again at a cross-roads in my life where I am wondering if what my old boss once said to me will turn out to be true or false.

"You'll be fine."

I never put much stock into what he said, unless it was funny, and I'm not sure I believe him now. I want to, of course. But I think he might have been prejudiced, and it's hard to believe what tainted people say.

If he is to be believed, though, and if I understand him correctly, some tantalizing plum will kind of just... fall into my lap. I just hope that, if it does, it doesn't break my balls.

You See Yourself

I made the mistake a little while back of doing a favor for my boss.

You, I'm sure, would never commit such an occupational solecism.

My employer informed me that her friend, a published playwright, had written a play and her publishing company asked her to make multiple revisions on it before it could be published. My boss asked me to review this script and make suggestions, revisions, comments, criticisms, & c "as soon as possible."

Actually, before she asked me to do this, she volunteered my services to the playwright.

"Please don't do that again," I said to my boss when I was informed that my services had been volunteered without my knowledge or acquiescence.

"Do what?" she asked innocently, quite possibly resisting the urge to bat her eyelashes.

"You know what," I said flatly. I've known my boss since I was eleven, so I can talk to her this way, rather like the way we churlish boys abuse our mothers.

"I thought you'd love the opportunity to be more creative!" replied my boss, feigning hurt.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't see slaving over someone else's bullshit children's musical and working diligently to further her career as an opportunity to be "more creative" nor do I see it as something I, or anybody else, would "love" to do.

But that's beside the point. I did it, partly because I was already commited to do it, and partly as a favor to my boss.

The musical, by the way, sucks donkeynips. It has all the hallmarks of a musical about high schoolers written by a fifty year-old woman, because that is precisely what it is. There are the stereotypical characters, even referred to in the character list as "The Jock," "The Nerd," "The Cheerleader," and "The Artsy Girl."

I mean, seriously? Shoot me in the teeth.

But I took several hours, on a Saturday, mind you, to review this woman's daft little musical, because her publisher was breathing down her neck to receive the final revisions by Monday. I reviewed and edited the work, even adding monologues and dialogue of my own, and emailed her four pages of notes. Then, I washed my hands of it.

Until she emailed me back not 25 minutes later with 10 more questions about the play, and other character ideas to consider and get feedback on. Now, I should have said, "Sorry, you got your feedback already. If you want more jumpy mattress, you'll have to put another quarter in" but, of course, I didn't. Because I am a slave, a doormat, an assfuck, a limpwimp. More of my weekend got pissed away making changes and suggestions and additions and deletions to this manuscript that I don't give a hoot in Christ's left nip about. I sent her another email, indicating in a very polite way that this was the end of my critique session. She emailed back and was appropriately grateful.

I didn't hear from the playwright until yesterday, when she called up my office.

"Oh, I'm actually glad you picked up the phone," she remarked. Gee, thanks.

She went on to say how helpful the revisions were and how they made the play much stronger, which was nice to hear. She also mentioned that the publishing company was pleased, which was also nice to hear, since nothing I've written has pleased a publishing company since 2001. She then mentioned that she gave me "credit" in the script for my aid, and I won't lie and say that didn't please me either, because it did, though a fee of $1,000 would have pleased me a good deal more. Unfortunately, she did not stop there.

"And I wanted to let you know that I'll be contacting you again in the future to consult on some of my other musicals that I have coming down the pike that need a fresh voice, because I really see you as a dramaturg. Isn't that how you see yourself?"

This is where I ceased being pleased.

From the ever-trusty Wikipedia, for those of you not familiar with the term: "the dramaturg will often conduct research into the historical and social conditions, specific locations, time periods, and/or theatrical styles of plays chosen by the company, to assist the playwright, director and/or design team in their production."

In short order, The Playwright's Bitch.

I think this is what one might call a "back-handed compliment." I have definitely been on the receiving end of such compliments before, and I know distinctly what they feel like when delivered. Now, this playwright may very well think that it's a high honor to be called upon to flush out and finesse her simple and fatuous theatre pieces, but I do not share that opinion.

Proud? Sure I am.

Snob? Probably.

I think, though, I was less offended by her suggestion that I be her own private, in-pocket, free-of-charge dramaturg than I was by her incredibly and outlandishly presumptuous question, "Isn't that how you see yourself?"

Isn't that how I see myself? As what? As chained to your hip, spending my free time reviewing outdated and ridiculous feel-good musicals about pimples and algebra?

No. Most definitely not.

"I see myself as a writer," I said to my boss this morning, recounting the conversation to her in a voice close to breaking, "but I suppose nobody else does," I said as I turned on my heels and walked out the door. On my way to go to Staples. To stand there for half an hour making photocopies. Of one of this woman's stupid plays.

And so maybe I'm just not.

Of course, I'm a blogger-- you know that. But, is that the same thing as being a writer? I vacillate on that point. I perform in amateur G&S operettas-- does that make me an actor? Maybe. Does it make me a singer? No, I'm no singer. Does affiliation with the arts always have to be dependent on whether or not you get paid? I don't necessarily think so, but that is how culture defines you. The insipid, scripted question you hear the most when meeting some painful new schmuck at a party, "So, whaddyoo do?" refers, of course, to what you doo, for money.

I don't know what titles or jobs or hobbies or anything really means anymore. One thing I do know quite clearly is that, at no point in my life will I answer the question, "So, whaddyoo do?" by saying,

"I'm a dramaturg. Nice to meet you."

Because neither of those statements will probably be true, especially if you write children's musicals.