Face Forward

Predator Press

[LOBO]

The last jobs I’ve had segued so smoothly into each other, I can’t even remember the last time I needed to search for one.

I’m totally at a loss. I have no local work history or references -and mooching from relatives during a simultaneous apartment search, I don’t even technically have a fixed address. Half of our disorganized stuff is buried deeply in a tightly-packed storage unit; even mustering up a professional appearance has it’s difficulties.

Still, somehow I need to maintain a What's not to love? veneer over this to prospective employers.

I vaguely remember job-hunting tips from junior high school. The teacher was an exceedingly unhappy gentleman named Mister Brown. He wore a suit and tie to class every day, and was absolutely convinced that The Number One Rule for Getting a Job is having nice, immaculately polished shoes.

“That’s the first thing a smart employer will look at,” he explained. “It communicates your attention to detail.”

Mister Brown also had the dubious distinction of running the ‘Alternative Ed’ program, so I got a much larger dose of him than normally required. Alternative Ed was essentially a human repository for the “troublemakers”; presumably this was to remove us from the general population lest our ideas and general discontent permeate the larger more docile and compliant culled herds of cattle.

I had outgrown making overt scenes and fighting at school, and just stopped going altogether. To me the solution seemed pretty clear: You don’t want me here questioning your verbose theories on the wide-reaching impact of uncomfortable footwear, and I don’t want to be here listening to them.

Not very complicated, right?

But Chicago public schools got paid by the number of butts in the seats. So for what likely amounted to a few hundred bucks a year, my seat for eight hours a day –as was for typically ten to fifteen other ‘hooligans’- was a cracked plastic orange or green one in side-by-side three-walled four-by-four concrete cubicles.

Look I'm wearing out my hyphen key with this description: just picture a bathroom stall with a graffiti-addled ledge for a desk. Okay?

Also worthy of mention is that for Mister Brown rules not about getting a job were a bit more complex than merely appropriate shoes: Face the wall, toward your ledge. No standing. No talking and/or noise. Lunch is served at your cube. The two bathroom breaks a day are tightly regimented, and you take them separately from not only each other, but between class periods so you encounter no other students.

You can do schoolwork –doubtless of which you are hopelessly behind on without the class time- or nothing at all.

All day.

Cheers!

Breaking this excruciating silence upon occasion, Mister Brown’s precious shoes could be heard as he paced authoritatively back and forth behind us.

You know, ensuring compliance to the "Non-Job" Rules.

So utterly devoid of any stimulation whatsoever I would often muse Are those shoes I hear the very shoes that got Mister Brown this job?

At one point, trying to make the best of it, I tackled a book report for English class and cracked open a five-inch thick copy of Dune.

Mister Brown’s shoes soon screeched to a halt audibly behind me.

Book report or no, I could not read Dune in Alternative Ed.

So no book report?

Face forward.

To the crude drawings and phrases rendered on heavily-pored and peeling concrete paint instead?

No talking.

Oooh, look there in the corner! Don't those cracks look almost like those spiff, shiny fucking shoes of yours with your still-smoldering dismembered ankle stumps sticking out of them?

This is for your own good somehow.

Or a few hundred bucks.

-I can't remember anymore.