Somehow the alarm clock going off at 5 a.m. is always a horrible revelation to me. It happens every day, but I still wake up as if a newborn blinded by the alien harsh cold of the delivery room. This tragic and endearing naivety fades quickly into the cynical reality of what is happening to me. And, knowing that I am not alone in this morning ritual torture doesn’t help.
I go to work on the train with a bunch of other people who, for the most part, hate their jobs too. Oh, some of them claim they love their position as marketing associate at ACME Corp.. In fact, they may even believe it. Somehow they manage to find finishing the promotion package for the new “line” rewarding; perhaps because, like politicians, they have lived and worked in that vague, spin, double-speak world for so long, they actually believe their own bullshit. They have to, or risk becoming aware of the empty futility of it all, and who am I to judge? But in the metal box propelling us towards the city center, such suspension of disbelief echoes hollow.
Now, as previously stated, I’m a waiter currently (besides my burgeoning comedy career). No, I didn’t play waiter with the other kids when I was little. Nor did I play fireman. I seem to recall playing mad scientist with a chemistry set, but to pursue a career in mad science these days is limited to stem-cell research and bio-weapons production (although I believe nuclear physics has been co-opted into this grouping). In any case, by the time I was a teenager, I had settled into a career as a mad pharmacist, more specifically, Dr. Jekyll, which has lead me here.
It isn’t just that “Work sucks. I wish I was rich.” It’s the quiet desperation most of us seem to accept as status quo. Yes, we have to pay the bills, and homelessness isn’t the bucolic, free-spirited, nomadic existence it appears to be. That myth is quickly overwhelmed by the stench of urine. But, I just can’t settle for this mediocre existence.
I suppose many of us opt to not see the forest for the trees. We do this one task well, take personal pride in it, but don’t step back and look at the giant mindless gear it is a tooth in. People at giant corporations that have fallen into universal disfavor, such as Enron, probably managed to separate their own role from the overall result in this manner. “I filed my paperwork on time every day. I brought donuts on Friday mornings. It’s a shame about the lying, cheating and stealing, but I was a good little worker-bee, and my desk was personalized with endearing knick-knacks.”
We have to do this all the time. If I look at the universe as an infinite conglomeration of energy and mass randomly bumping into itself in an endless chain of action and reaction, I’m gonna have a tough time getting up in the morning. So, I think, “I better get up, so I don’t get fired.”
Who am I to write so knowledgeably about the trials and tribulations of the working class?
Well, in my search for satisfaction in the labor force, I have explored many lines of work. In restaurants, I’ve been a busser, cook and waiter. I’ve picked fruit and avocados in Israel, where I also constructed an automated chicken coup and a gas-proof bomb shelter, sprayed a swamp for mosquitoes, worked at a cannery and as a bartender – all at the age of 17. I’ve worked construction, demolition and water treatment, once wading at the bottom of a raw sewage sludge treatment vat in hip-boots with a squeegee, scraping the snails off the walls, so they didn’t cog the filters.
I was a 1908 Otis Elevator attendant (The elevator was from 1908, not the work schedule) who rose through the ranks to head bellman at a Victorian style hotel. I’ve worked in offices as secretary, marketing writer, on-line futures brokerage computer help desk operator and medical record file clerk, the last being the closest thing to hell on earth I have experienced – yes, worse than the sludge vat. I’ve worked at a discount clothing outlet, putting the clothes nobody puts back on the hangers back on the hangers. I’ve been a golf caddy.
I’ve gotten a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter, photographer and editor; At one small-town newspaper, these were all the same position. I’ve been a Boy Scout camp counselor and a babysitter, pizza delivery driver and Chinese food delivery driver (People are more likely to answer the door naked and stoned to the former.). I was a drug dealer for years, partly to support my habit and partly because my habit made it hard to hold down any other job for long. (This is a bit of a running theme.)
I was web designer and multimedia director for the Chicago Improv Festival for two years, sold tickets at Improv Olympic Theater for one and interned at The Second City Training Center for six months. There were a few paid acting gigs, and I was once offered money for sex but turned it down, a move I regret, as it would make a nice addition to my resume. I had my own lawn-mowing and leaf raking business at age 13 and co-owned and operated a Hawaiian Shave Ice cart in Boulder, Colorado at age 25. I’ve also done some temp work. Well, It’s all been temp work, hasn’t it?
I am a knowledgeable about many things and well-versed in none, but for fuck’s sake, haven’t I done enough?
It’s not that I don’t have a good work ethic. I feel as unproductive and guilt-ridden as the next Puritan on my days off, but can I please not hate my job?
Now, more about the magical dream job that is comedy.
Since writing the previous paragraphs I went down to another part of Brooklyn, Carol Gardens, an affluent neighborhood directly south of Manhattan. I live in Williamsburg, east of Manhattan, an expensive neighborhood filled with people who are not affluent but are pretty sure they can paint. I went to Carol Gardens to perform standup at a bar. I went up after a beat/spoken-word/comedian/poet/actor reciting his work over jazz fusion and before a stripper. And I tanked.
I didn’t tank a little. I tanked a lot. I did the same jokes that killed a week before at a bar one block down the street and have consistently hit at bars around New York, but the crowd that had shown up to see a Burlesque show at the Boudouir Bar wasn’t having it.
Now mind you, this isn’t a strip club, and I’m not Lenny Bruce. It would be easier to spin it that way, and in 40 years, perhaps we can look at it through those rose colored lenses. This is a little bar that fancies itself a French nightclub out of the 1920’s. Burlesque, from my limited understanding involves women stripping out of men’s clothing, or slapstick in your underwear, or World War I era German soldiers in pith spiked helmets sitting in an audience and sipping Liebfraumilch while they pretend to be in on a joke, a joke that is apparently not to be laughed out loud at. I don’t know, but suffice to say it’s goddamned ridiculous. I like eccentric and am somewhat eccentric, but this place is deluded and sad. It’s cute when little kids try to act like adults, but when dumb, uneducated people try to pose as intellectual artists, it’s just pathetic and annoying - though often re-packaged as “kitsch”.
Then, get this. Really, fucking get this. I finish my set and walk off stage to the back, where I hit the stop button on my video camera. I will later be hitting the erase button. I go out and smoke a cigarette and come back in to stare at the floor so I don’t have to become a homosexual, because this could turn me off women forever. Then, when the act ends, the owner comes up to me with some guy who works there, who by-the-way put up a play before this show that we’ve been told is about “freedom”, using burlesque as a metaphor for “freedom” and who has a Bo Derek braid Mohawk and a sparkling sequined sports jacket on. She tells me I need the artist’s permission to videotape. Apparently I’m being accused of videotaping the naked lady.
I’m not sure what’s more offensive, that I’m being called a pervert at a strip show or that the chain-smoking, unhealthy looking 45-year-old woman who just did a poorly realized and overwrought striptease to Joe Cocker’s “Leave Your Hat On” is being called an artist. And let’s face it, while a naked body is nothing to be ashamed of, not every naked body is something to be particularly proud of.
I explain, that I only videotaped my set and stopped the camera after that. I go out and smoke a cigarette. Standing outside is a guy who spent my entire set sitting at the bar talking loudly with his boyfriend. He tells me he missed my set but his friend laughed at one of my jokes. He then proceeds to suggest that perhaps I should leave a little bit more time before my punch-lines, that maybe I’m rushing the joke. From what he caught, it seemed like it, he says.
I stare out down the street, waiting for the bus. I’m not taking the bus home. I don’t ride the buses in New York. It’s not that I have something against busses. I just haven’t figured them out yet. I need a bus though, because I’m going to have to shove this motherfucker in front of it. No bus comes though, so I just nod and walk back in to get my stuff.
Inside the staff are still giving me sidelong glances, obviously still suspicious that I am absconding with a digital recording of this sagging tit trainwreck. The other comic, a good comic, is on stage, fighting the fight. I can see the look in his eyes. As comics, we realize when the battle is lost, but running off stage crying isn’t a good career move, so you just march on, like the Australians at Gallipoli into Turkish gunfire. You switch subject matter a couple times to do a final check that it isn’t just that they’re not fans of subway jokes, perhaps keeping some vague hope in the back of your head that the tide can still turn. But for the most part, you know it’s over. Sometimes, as my friend suffering on stage likely did, you realize it before you even walk on stage.
This is an audience of people who came to see a sex show. They are embarrassed about it. They’re nervous about it. They’re having a hard enough time pretending they know something about the wine they’re drinking, pretending they’re not drinking it too fast, pretending they’re not a combination of disappointed and appalled at a plump girl with a mustache taped to her upper lip slowly removing a stocking from a pasty white calf. They’re not about to call attention to themselves by laughing out loud.
Every time he comes up between acts the poet/host keeps calling the audience “poetry fans”, a categorization none of us is particularly confident about.
I take the F train cuz the G train runs rarely at this hour. This will take me through Manhattan to get back to Brooklyn. One stop before my transfer to the L train, the conductor announces that the train will now run express and takes me two stops passed my stop, so I have to backtrack.
It takes me one-and-a-half hours to get home.
You know, it’s funny. It’s all so fucking funny.
