Secrets; I Tried To Keep Us Together, You Were Busy Keeping Secrets

The Gnome

< 3 >

I have to find a job and this one lady named Anika tells me to go to a temp agency because they'll pay you that week, which is exactly what I need, so I have got to get to that temp agency. I don't have money for the train. This is how broke I am. I'm so broke I don't even have money to get on the goddamn train to go and try to get a job from this temp agency. I go up into my brother's room and shovel change off his dresser into my hand. I see some silver and some quarters so I'm thinking I'm in pretty good shape. I ride the F train to Forty-Second Street and get up out the train and look for number Four-hundred and Fifty Madison Avenue, which is actually on Forty-Second Street not Madison Avenue. I go up into this outfit called Quality Temps. I go in the door and there are all kinds of folks sitting in chairs looking as pathetic as myself. The guys have leather jackets over shirts and ties, print sweaters with buttoned down shirts poking out of the collars, worn-looking black shoes, worn-looking brown shoes, the ladies are in dresses, solid muted colors, with half-ass looking hems that are bunched up just over the knees and platform shoes that look torturous on their stocking covered feet. I'm a bit disturbed by the age range of these folks who are out of work. Some of them look to be around my age but then there are folks that look middle-aged and in their forties, and it's just sad, and then there are folks who look to be in their fifties and sixties and that just bothers me and what if I'm like fifty and out of work and I have to go to some sad ass place called Quality Temps to try and find a job, but that's never going to happen because I'm in a band and once we get our record deal I'll be set up for life.

I go to what I think is the front desk and there is a lady behind the desk who talks on the phone and doesn't look at me. She says to whoever she's on the phone with, no you di-in't, and then she says it again an octave higher and then that lady behind the desk says, nu-uh, a couple of times, smacks her gum three times quick, and then swivels her chair and flips one leg up over the other leg and pushes a clip board in my direction without looking at me. This lady has nails that stick two to three inches off the end of her fingers and are a mixture of three gaudy, unmentionable colors and there's sparkly stuff and a little fake heart diamond stud in the middle of her thumbnail. Her hair is slapped across the front of her forehead in either direction and pushed towards the ears and then falls not quite to her shoulders and I bet she pays someone good money for this hairstyle. I bet she gets her hair did once a week to look like this. I bet she coughs up a whole gang of cash to have this done to her hair.

< 4 >

There is a sheet of paper on the clipboard that looks as if it'd been photocopied eight hundred times and I strain my eyes to make sense of it. It has all the usual stuff about name, address, phone number, recent employment and what not, all the stuff that is on my resume, so after a while I began filling in the blank spaces with the words, "see resume". I hand the lot of it back to the lady with the nails who ignored my presence, and she glances at the paper, flips it over and frowns. Then she does the unthinkable and speaks to me. She tells me I need to fill out each section and I try to tell her that the same information in those sections is in my resume but she has already gone back to her phone conversation and swivels her chair away from me. I do what she tells me to do because that's what you do when you're unemployed, you do what you're told to do and you do it with a smile on your face.

II

I'm trying to get a hold of my brother and I can't and this is a terribly messed up situation I'm in and I really need to speak to him. I really need him to bail me out but he's not answering his phone and I can't figure out why. Where could he possibly be? How could he possibly not answer his phone? If I can't get in touch with him I'm screwed.

I'm in a wrinkled blue dress shirt that I found in the back of my brother's closet and grey tie and I'm wearing a v-neck undershirt beneath this shirt and I have pleated khaki's on that are bloused and church socks that make my feet sweat inside these stupid, uncomfortable shoes. I'm in this room by myself and there are no windows.