I Loved This Job.
My misery in the backyard did not go unnoticed. My parents occasionally yelled outside “can you please turn down the music” or “we have dinner if you want any” or “it’s midnight! turn it down!” … things like that.
I didn’t feel happy and I didn’t feel free. I’d lost my treasured “independence” when I left Larry. I felt like a prisoner. Again.
I couldn’t drive – since I didn’t have my own car – so I didn’t go anywhere.
My parents suggested that I earn some money and buy a car. As a show of good faith, which I did not deserve, they let me use their car for job interviews.
I’d wanted to be a journalist for years, since I believed “journalist” was the only version of “writer” who could earn enough money to survive. So I applied for jobs with every publication I found in the Post-Gazette classifieds.
Since I’d done no internships and had zero experience, the few callbacks I received were from entry level sales positions that had little to do with publications. I went to some awful group interviews and listened to presentations. Sometimes I got free donuts. But I left wondering what was wrong with me, since those “interviews” took forever and implied that I’d need something called “commission” to do their work.
Finally I got a job at a place called the Pennysaver.
The Pennysaver was a multi-page magazine full of nothing but ads, a Jurassic-era Craigslist. It was something I’d seen every week in my parents’ mailbox. Like the colorful grocery pages announcing “GROUND BEEF $1.40/LB,” the Pennysaver went into the garbage immediately.
We’d never heard of recycling.
My job was in downtown Oakland, so I could take a bus to get to work. Best of all, I worked with people I adored. Kim and Jemma were also new college graduates, and we spent a great deal of time laughing as we did paste-up for the publication.
“Paste-up” meant that we tried to find full-page, quarter-page and eighth-page ads that were jumbled into a huge wall of ads in front of us. We’d find the correct ad, “paste” it onto a giant piece of cardboard, then carry the cardboard to a place where it would be photographed and turned into print. Then we’d take all the ads off the cardboard and put them back on the wall, where we’d find them again for the next slab of cardboard.
It was a fun, collaborative effort. We played music and laughed like we were in college, preparing for a party.
I loved this job with every ounce of my being. Work was great. It was like playing Concentration all night. And it was all night … because it was a night-shift job, three nights a week, from 5 p.m. until the wee hours of the morning when the work was done. We worked more than 40 hours in those three days, but then we had four days off.
I spent those four days lying in the yard, moaning and singing at the sky, wishing I could “be free” and believing I was locked in a cage.
I complained every day about the hellhole that was my warm, safe, comfortable, dry home. I whined about the basement being too cold. I whined about making my own (free) food in the kitchen. I whined about sharing a bathroom. I whined about absolutely everything, feeling miserable and lonely and alone.
So I was thrilled and not the least bit apprehensive when, about a month after I’d left Florida, a visitor showed up on my parents’ doorstep.