Head Case (7 page)

Kristy interviews a girl from Craigslist, Eve, while I'm at work and offers her a room. Eve is no fan of mine, and we can't seem to see eye to eye on much of anything. This is the first time that I've lived on my own outside of the communal environment of the Johnston Center, and I'm going through a phase where I find it freeing to leave my dishes in the sink for a week without having to then sit through a community meeting about the core values of respect in a living and learning environment. This makes me a terrible roommate for anyone but especially for Eve, who spends a great deal of her free time reading alternative Martha Stewart–type blogs on home crafting and trying out recipes for dinners that make great leftovers to bring to work. She seems to have a handle on what it means to be an adult in a manner that I find threatening, since I'm not yet ready to consider that there is room in my bohemian lifestyle for basic hygiene.

My friend Aaron urges us to open up our home to his hometown buddy Dan, a seven-foot-tall punk transplant from Illinois. There is a tender, childlike awkwardness in how Dan struggles to organize his oversize limbs to sit on the futon couch while still straining in his frowning face to be taken very seriously during our impromptu roommate interview. “I liked my last roommates OK. Except they wouldn't let me throw ragers.”

The years after graduation begin stacking up quickly, during which I never seem to manage to hold on to a job. After a couple months' charade, I am inevitably fired from every retail or administrative position I've held for my discrepancies in organization or calculation. Each time that I'm fired, it becomes harder to find a new job. At the time, I understand only that these tendencies of mine have to do with a vague notion of a learning disability that no one has ever properly labeled or medicated. It's like living with an imaginary friend whom my family and I blame everything on.

I refer to the psychiatrist that I start seeing once I move back to Portland as Doogie because although I'm only twenty-four he looks to me like a twelve-year-old with a wedding band. We try different variations of medication for the next three years, which have since blurred into a block of days spent unemployed in my pajamas. I can tell that he favors me because I am young but not too young, and funny but not too funny. It's becoming increasingly difficult for me to reconcile the person who thrived in college with the person who cannot operate a cash register.

As evidence to the contrary begins to dwindle, I become convinced of my own uselessness. Doogie's prescriptions do nothing to dampen the ball of fury I become.

Nothing makes sense. I had been alternately praised and reprimanded in equal measure for my entire education, and now, in the adult world, the only skills that matter are the ones that I don't have. My managers, my irate customers, my bemused coworkers, don't give a shit that I wrote poetry in college, nor do they have any reason to. My job now is to keep the line moving. It's not a hard job, but it proves impossible for me, and the easiest answer is that I'm not trying or I don't care, not that I have a hole in my brain the size of a lemon that nobody knows about yet.

Three years after moving to Portland, this is what my r
é
sum
é
looks like:

COLE COHEN

4725 SE Belmont Ave.       (503) 409-2878

Portland, OR 97215

Professional

October 2006–January 2007

Seasonal Phone Service Representative, Vowel Books

Reading books and drinking coffee between taking phone orders for one of the biggest independent booksellers in the nation. It's lonely solo work strapped to a phone in a cubicle, and during the holidays customers yell a lot, but overall it's a pretty sweet gig. The young manager who trained me nearly bursts a retina going over and over the ordering system with me. I don't understand why I can't seem to focus on the left side of the form that holds most of the order information; we both chalk it up to my inattention.

She taps on the computer screen with a wooden chopstick from her lunch to draw my attention to the blank box where I'm supposed to type in the order information.
Tap, tap, tap
, over and over each time that I get confused. I want to snap that chopstick in two and stick it up her ass, but otherwise most of the people who I work with are funny, sweet, and better read than I will ever be. I have a sneaking suspicion that I messed up more orders than I was ever informed of because I'm asked to leave before my temp position is due to end and I can never get a straight answer as to why.

March–October 2006

Administrative Assistant, Perennial Natural Products

This is my first phone sales job. I really turn on the charm in the interview because I really need to leave my current job as the assistant to a music promoter, which I'm hanging on to by a thread. I get offered the new job a couple of hours after my interview. The title is “administrative assistant,” but really it's taking phone orders for an essential oil factory. We receive phone orders for products on the second floor of the factory, then the first floor fulfills those orders. The entire building reeks heavily of lavender and rose, which gets in your clothes and hair. On my first day, the manager tells me that if you work there long enough you can't smell it anymore.

The form for ordering is all numbers and letters, and we enter in credit card numbers manually. I constantly flip the numbers in people's credit cards, making it impossible for the company to charge them. Every morning, I'm given a list of customers whom I have to call back in order to confirm their credit card numbers. I also flip the numbers that designate each kind of oil, so every order from me is like a surprise free goody bag filled with oils that you never actually ordered. The head of accounting is the seventeen-year-old daughter of the owner of the company. She is convinced that I am the stupidest person she has ever met. I tell my manager that I have a “learning disability,” but that can get you only so far. I don't get fired from Perennial because no one gets fired. Chatting with my coworkers between phone calls is the only way I get through the day as we all search for other work. One is a southern line cook; another is a local roller derby girl. A year later, the building is rented out to Bomb, a skateboard company that replaces the Perennial sign with a giant metal sculpture of a bomb.

September 2005–March 2006

Assistant to Greg Pound at Pound Presents

I call in a favor from a woman I know who writes for the music section of the local alternative paper. I met her when we were both interns; she was hired on for an editorial position, and I was not. In order to be hired from an intern position to a position of more responsibility, you have to show that you can consistently excel at basic administrative tasks (organizing music listings for a calendar, in this case). In my hands, filing and photocopying become a full-time job, so I'm generally not hired on anywhere where I intern in Portland.

Still, despite myself, I manage to make an impression as a friendly person, so when I see the local music promoter Greg Pound's posting on Craigslist for an assistant I ask her to put in a good word for me. I get an interview, during which I volley around band names for half an hour. I'm also at the lowest weight I've ever been in my life, living off nutrition bars and coffee to save money for Pilates classes. With everything moving further out of my grasp with each year since I graduated from college, I'm just looking for something, anything, that I can control.

My position as Pound's assistant grants me a free pass to any show in Portland, but I don't know very many people in town to go to shows with and I'm overwhelmed about how to get to a venue and back on my own.

I know nothing about music promotion except that I love music and believe that there are exciting bands deserving more recognition than they're receiving. I picture myself as a sort of punk-rock Florence Nightingale, aiding bands on the verge of dying out, corralling Portland audiences toward the bands that really matter, in some small and selfless way changing the face of the scene for the better.

I am an absolute holy terror of a personal assistant, and after the first month none of the three men who make up Pound Presents are speaking to me, including the accountant, whom I slept with sometime in the first two or three weeks of my employment, mainly because on my first day of work the junior booker told me, “Whatever you do, don't sleep with Andy.”

“Who's Andy?”

“Exactly.” He gestured with his thumb toward the accountant, the tall skinny guy buried deep in clippings of ads for shows that we've placed in local papers. Andy.

The coffeemaker is kept together with tape, we send out mailings in envelopes from record labels with their company names blacked out and ours scrawled in, but either in spite or because of this, Pound himself is making money. We are all caricatures of our positions. The accountant wears those black-framed nerd glasses, the junior booking agent constantly screams into the phone, I wear 1950s secretary outfits and make endless pots of coffee. The junior booker used to tell me to cover my ears when he screamed “cunt” into the phone; now his favorite antic when begging for a show is to plead, “Greg Pound is here with a gun to my head, and if I don't get this show he is going to shoot me!” I send the posters for the Portland shows to Seattle and vice versa; I incorrectly chart daily ticket sales and send on this erroneous information to agents in California; I reverse the numbers left in an important phone message from one of Pound's long-lost friends and then erase the message, making the number irretrievable. Even though I desperately hate this place ever since the accountant took me out for a beer on the first night and explained the business to me, none of my errors are done out of malice. I am honestly just that bad an assistant. The only thing I do well is writing the weekly email newsletter promoting upcoming shows. I am pretty much frozen out of the company and eventually find the job at the essential oil factory. I still have a stack of the accountant's records rotting in my parent's garage. He still has my copy of
The Joys of Yiddish
.

March 2004–September 2005

Bookseller/Barista, Borders Books

I work in the caf
é
making drinks. I am terrible at the register, mixing up money and charging people incorrectly, and I'm slow at making drinks during the rush. I beg the store manager, and he moves me over to the floor where the books are as a final favor before he leaves to work for Whole Foods. We are then moved across the street to the giant new mall, where we become a two-floor “flagship” store, our sales monitored closely by corporate. I am “shadowed” by managers, who hide behind bookcases to assess my customer service skills and afterward hand me a slip marked with everything I've done wrong.

I spend my off days interning at
Tin House
, a local literary magazine. One afternoon, someone brings in a bright “Happy Birthday” helium balloon for the publisher. I tie the balloon to the thumb of a statue that the publisher had recently purchased and had placed in the center of the office. The thumb falls off.

At Borders, no one ever really buys anything other than cookbooks and self-help books. The other books are just for show. One day I just walk out. The assistant manager is a friend, who still recommends me to other potential employers when they call. A month later, he leaves for Barnes & Noble.

October 2003–March 2004

Sales Associate, Crescent Chocolate Company

A gourmet chocolate shop where truffles about the size of a quarter and shaped like puppies, ice-cream cones, and teacups are sold for two dollars each and “designer” coffee drinks are served. Even when prompted with the correct math by the cash register, I get nervous and give out incorrect change. I put change in the register in all the wrong compartments, slipping fives in with ones and vice versa, which drives my manager crazy. I make mistakes punching in customers' orders, forcing them to wait through a lengthy return process. I finally tell the manager that I have a learning disability, and she sends me home with a Xerox copy of the push-button pad on the register so that I can “practice.” I practice ringing up orders with my family; my sisters pretend to order orange chocolate mochas and chipotle hot chocolates. Nothing changes. Eventually, the manager and a representative from corporate set up a meeting with me at a Starbucks across the street from the shop. They hand me a piece of paper declaring that they have accommodated my disability, summarizing that I can't sue them if I am fired. Taken aback, I sign it. A couple of weeks later, I'm fired due to “scheduling conflicts.”

*   *   *

When someone's universe doesn't match up with everyone else's, we call those people crazy or stupid. My inability to process what's basic to everyone else is taken for a refusal. Not yet having the anatomical evidence to prove anyone wrong, I have to assume that they're right. Literally and figuratively, nothing adds up. I am thrown into the adult world like a match into gasoline. Burning down everything in my path is an organic reaction. The anger that I feel toward myself for not being able to do what comes easily to others is a slick dark fuel pooling with each passing year. Failing in basic customer service positions is the match.

I start jumping out of cars while my parents are driving and just start running. Once, I jump out of the car as we are stopped at a red light by the park that leads to the Willamette River; I take off like a shot and run to the river. My dad pulls the car over, and my mom jumps out and runs after me. Afterward, I don't remember any of it. I tell my parents that I'm hoarding the pills that Doogie prescribed for me, and later I don't remember saying that either. Years later when trying to deduce how bad it really got, I ask my roommate at the time, Kristy, if she remembers any of this. “No,” she says quietly, “but you had plenty of reasons to be desperate back then.”