In a Rational World This Job Would Disappear

In collapsing capitalism there is almost no rational work to be had, and in a rational world, almost all our jobs would disappear. KM

September, 1992

Day one, lunch break
I'm sitting by the river. I walked the eight blocks from the office and found a bench facing the water. It looks dense. Like onyx.I long for air to be water, but when I look at water I want to see it solid, or animal. I see a rippling skin. I'm sitting in the dappled shade of a young tree, loving the river. I've got my notebook and my pen and my mind. I want to go home. I'm dying to go home. Today is my first day as a public welfare bureaucrat. Home is my old part time job with my own literacy program, writing our own stories together every day, reading images, reading our minds, making texts and changing ourselves and our lives with the texts. Home is my bedroom, my desk, my own writing, those moments when my mind belongs to me. Home is making art. Home was Ori. Home was holding my baby Machi heart to heart. But there is no Ori now and I've taught myself never to think about him, the way I taught myself not to feel the pain from my Mother's blows. Growing up in Ventura I fantasized the ways I would withstand torture, the ways I would not feel when they pulled out my fingernails or gouged out my eyeballs. I don't think of Ori, or the home he and Machi and I had.

This morning I sat at my new desk and cried, facing the square sooty window and beyond it the identical 11th floor window across the street canyon, crying and longing for the air to be water. When I first moved to the City as young girl I pretended the air was water, the tall buildings, undersea coral canyons. Pretending the air was water made me feel less alone. Air is too thin to hold me. I have no arms to uphold me. In the other building another woman had come in as early as I did and was sitting at her desk, looking down, warehoused like me, alone. She too learned to sit still in school and now makes her living sitting still, chained to a desk for 8 hours. My first day of full time wage slavery. Will I ever make art again?
I'm a single mother now and I have to have health insurance and I can't just have a part time literacy worker job any more. What about making a living as a writer, an artist? I put the pen down so I can swallow, push down nausea. The idea can't stay in my mind for more than a second. Am I not an artist because I have failed, or because artists are oppressed? Maybe it's both. Other artists, even other artists who are working class, raised poor, Latinas, women, make their living as artists. I might have been one of them if I had something to say, or if I knew how to persist.

I came in to work early today so that I could have a few minutes that were mine before I had to give over the mind I've had to sell to make a living.

This morning as I pushed the revolving door into the lobby cavern a woman was revolving out. She was a little taller than I, also Latina, but not Venturan like me. I read her for a City born Islander. She looked down and averted her gaze. Her long black hair was droopy, worn to hide her face. Her long sleeved blouse was faded. Her long denim skirt pentecostal. All this I read in those few seconds we revolved together. What did she see? What made her look away as I stared? Did she see a woman who might mirror her, Latina, long haired, wearing a long sleeved shirt and a long skirt, although my blouse was patterned red and black silk and my skirt was a circle skirt I could secretly dance in.

I'd seen the most depressed woman in the world. Was I looking at my future? Later she turned out to be my office mate, Lucha, a City born Islander who doesn't like uppity Venturans. (It doesn't matter to her that I am part Islander. I was raised in Ventura. Is it internalized colonialism making her resent me because Ventura had a revolution, is sovereign, and the Island is still a colony? We could be each other's allies. We are both here in the City, jodiendonos.) She'd been on her way to a site visit and got back to our shared office almost when I was about to take my lunch. Luckily we agree on keeping the fluorescent lights turned off. We share brain tumor terror. Our work areas are divided by two tall gray file cabinets each one facing one of us. Each of our desks faces a window. Hers is crawling with philodendron vines she's training on some string. She must have been here awhile. The back of my file cabinet faces her half of the room. It has lots of photographs of a skinny teenage girl, stuck on with magnets. The back of her file cabinet, facing me, is covered with campaign stickers. Could my predecessor have supported Mayor Geffen? Not in the literacy department. Who knows where that file cabinet has been? I'll have to ask Lucha.

It's almost time to go back to the cubicle. What am I doing here? I want to go home. I've been wrenched from my real life. Lucha and I get to hear each other's phone calls. Just in the few minute we coincided in the office I found out a lot. She's got a teenage daughter. Lucha looks like she wants to die because her daughter does drugs. Where is my teenage son right now? Does he do drugs? Didn't I when I was his age? I heard Lucha tell her daughter drugs are different now. Please god don't let Machi go the way of Lucha's daughter. My son has politics and that must make him immune to the street. How I miss his childhood. Home is holding Machi in my arms heart to heart, feeling his sleeping baby weight on my chest.

Later my first day
Have I actually lived through this day? I'm still shaking from getting attacked at my first staff meeting this afternoon because I got excited about creating a kind of school with our courses for the literacy teachers. We were all crowded around a table in the middle of the common room where the secretaries sit, Solly, Lucha, Kat, Erna and the new one, me. I was having a good time, playing school, going on about how we could pull our courses together and create a catalogue like a real school. I was excited and laughing a lot. Lucha snapped, “Somebody give this woman lithium.” It was like a joke, but rageful. For a few seconds everyone got very quiet. If she think drugs can fix people maybe that's why her daughter takes them. I didn't say somebody give this woman a drink. She does look hung over come to think of it. I didn't say anything. I'd just been hit and went into silent battered girl mode. Now I'm writing, wasting my mind hating her. Most of my mind I sell and the rest is occupied by invading thoughts I don't welcome but can't make go away. I piss Lucha off. I piss Machi off. I have no insights as to why. I never knew how I pissed my Mother off and other than to go under, try to disappear all of my provocative self, I have no strategies. Lucha scares me the way Anita scared me in grade school and Angelita scared me in high school, because they were not inhibited about showing that I pissed them off. And Machi scares me. Lucha looks like my future. I'm afraid of Machi's future.
Art hasn't saved me. The revolution I was supposed to be making hasn't saved me. Art didn't save me and wage slavery is the instituted disappointment. Home is traveling back in time, loving Machi more, holding him more; unraveling all the way back to the first mistaken choice about work. Home is the place before regret.
After the meeting, back in our office, Lucha showed in every way she could (stomped past me into her side of the room, banged her file drawer, returned calls talking loud)that she had no interest in making up. I'd been cast as her enemy and I didn't know why.

(But I do know why, or think I know why. She hates me from internalized colonialism, and she hates me from internalized classism. Because I postponed full time wage slavery longer than she did she sees me as privileged. She hates that I still have the enthusiasm of someone who remembers the authentic pleasures of work, the ways in which work can be play, the ways in which work is art, work offers the pleasures of solving problems on the way to a goal of one's own choosing.)I remember and Lucha reminds me that I too will soon forget.

Now, at last, she's gone and I'm sitting in my office alone, writing, finally concentrating. I was longing to go home and now I'm afraid to go home to wonder where Machi is, or not know what to say to him if he's there. Even when I'm home I want to go home. It's an unfillable yearning. It's wanting the Mother's love I never got. Lucha's gone, off the phone. She'd been hiss screaming at her daughter, “Jody, I know you're lying.” O my god, what would I do if Machi went ouf of control with drugs?
I guess the first day was for getting put in my place at work, so I don't get any ideas about who owns my mind. First Lucha told me to take lithium and now my new boss (who used to be my colleague,Solly,an admirer of my inventive teaching approach in my old home program; who used to be my friend Solly who hung out in my house on Friday nights eating pizza and watching movies with Machi and me)walked right into my office, stealthily, really only to spy. She came up close behind me and looked over my shoulder, right down on my journal page. I'd lost track of the time reading the stack of work plans and old reports she'd given me to get me familiar with the work of the literacy department. It was maybe an hour after my 4:30 quitting time. She said, “I hope you're not just trying to rack up comp time.” She said it with a smile, but even I who was trained by early beatings to ignore the blows capitalism had in store for me, could tell I was being slapped. So this is our new relationship, Solly's my boss. I wonder how long it's going to be before I look as depressed as Lucha revolving out the front door?
In a rational world this fucking job would disappear.

September,1992
Friday of week one
Lunchtime
Have I survived the week? (Or am I merely the walking wounded?)
I'm dying to go home. I'm always dying to go home but, when I'm home I'm still dying to go home. I swear to god I'll always come outside at lunch and write. I'm on a low wall at the little park close to the falafel vendor I've been getting my daily sandwich from. Today he had persimmons and I just sat here completely lost in the mother's milky sticky bliss of eating an overripe drippy fruit. I hope I make it to the bathroom to wash my face before anybody sees me.
Today my boss Solly brought in the big boss Carla to say hello. I blurted out that I was doing a journal because she was looking right over my shoulder straight into my notebook. Is there no privacy when you've sold your mind? We are part of the apparatus to manage and surveil the poor. No wonder we surveil each other. (Don't I spy on Lucha looking for clues to my future. She must spy on me.)Carla says,"To teach writing you have to actually write." She told me she'd promised herself to keep a journal when she started here but she didn't last more than one week. “The job's momentum swept me away.” Solly, the Boss,and Carla, the Big Boss, popped into my office unannounced. After their spying the BB and the B stood back by the door where they could see both Lucha and me. Lucha had gotten up to hand Solly her site visit reports and was face to face with Carla when the BB said, “Getting Marina here was a two year recruitment job.” I was being flattered by the Deputy Commissioner. I don't think of myself as someone anybody would want to recruit or even want to flatter. Lucha shot me a sideways look, more revealing than her usual bleak expression. Was it resentment, envy, or plain hatred? Now I was scared. Then Carla said, straight to Lucha, “I wanted Marina here so she would keep us honest.” I shuddered at the expectation of Lucha's retaliation for Carla's flattery. Probably making trouble between me and Lucha was the whole point of Carla's words. Maybe she believes in fueling competition. Maybe that's what Carla learned at the overnight retreat the Commissioner had just had for her deputies.

How did I end up a full time wageslave? I'm making a bit less money than I made the last year at my last job. The small agency that ran my program had gotten a huge grant and promotedand me to disseminator of the group story method me and my students made up. I got them to let me work four days so I still had one day to write. Teaching in and running my own little literacy program had been a 20 hour a week job. I had time to make art. I wrote video plays and produced them and directed them and performed in them. How was I to have known those were the good old days? The big grant crushed the little agency, like the woman who wins a mink coat and is ruined buying the clothes to match. Three months ago we were all called in and told by the Chair of the board, “At close of business today this agency will close.” The rumors among the workers were different but had one thing in common, something screwy happened with the money.

How I miss writing with my students all morning, making my video plays in the afternoon, using space at the settlement house to do auditions and rehearse. Bits of stories my students told me ended up in my plays. One student gave me her wedding dress for a costume. Imagine that! Her wedding dress. Another student sewed a red lining into the black and white japanese print top I wear when I do readings. (I used to wear when I did readings. Once I went to 4 days and became a disseminator it got harder to stay out late at night).

My life was good but at the time I couldn't tell. I had three months on unemployment writing every day and then this job came up way too soon. But I'd better pay attention. My life is probably good now and I still can't tell. All I think about is how I had to sell out for health insurance for Machi and for myself. Gone were the good old days before O lost his job and went into business for himself. The good old days before Ori...But I can't let myself think about him.

I don't want to go back upstairs. Just in case Lucha wasn't already hating me enough and wishing I'd take lithium, just before she walked out of our office with Solly, Carla the Big Boss told Lucha she'd read my novel. “I've never seen anyone doing with a book what Marina was doing with her book.”

Lucha walked out without saying good night. I bet she's one of those women with lot of sisters.