Day 28

Day 28
final day

Woke up early. And it's raining. Dammit. So I go back to sleep, get up 90 minutes later, and head out. And, as I predicted, I finish three and a half hours later. Was about to head home but my nineteen year old boss calls me and sends me a new partially-completed area to canvas. Only about half a dozen addresses remain, and I complete them in twenty minutes or so. Big fancy houses with ugly modern sculptures in the yards.

So I'm done, I guess. Now what?

Day 27

Day 27

I thought I'd finish today but I give up around five in the afternon. I will be done if four hours tomorrow. Everyone seems extra suspicious of me today, like their White Person Sense is tingling. Two women and a rottweiler, sitting on the porch, smiling and asking me what's up—they seem friendly but you can sense a weird dislike for me behind their eyes. “We called the neighborhood watch,” they tell me, “just being careful.” Later I see a rat skeleton on a fresh green lawn. When I got to the end of the street, the last house of the day, the lady was super-nice, offering me soda or water. A nice break from the women with the rottweiler. Will be done tomorrow.

Day 26

Day 26

Left home at 9:30 and started kicking ass. My hand-held computer (or HHC) started acting funky, which is annoying. But alas. I was looking for an address, and in front of a house there were two older dudes (in their 40s?) and a young kid maybe ten years old. I asked the address. “Not sure,” one of the men said. “Do you live here?” I asked the other guy and in unison, indicating the kid, they said “He does.” “What's your address?” one of them asked the kid. Kid: “I don't know no address!” No idea who these two dudes were in relation to the kid, or why the three of them were hanging out and chilling together. When I passed by 90 minutes later the three of them were still there.

Day 25

Day 25

Again with the sort-of-late start. Almost nine in the morning before I left the house. Ah well. Over the weekend I decided fuck it—I'm gonna knock this shit out by Tuesday at the latest. But of course three hours out it started raining like hell. And so I came home. I saw this young kid, maybe ten or eleven, throwing rocks at his teenage brother. Not sure if they were playing or not. I heard him say “you want a war?” I had my ipod on, so I'm not sure, but he might have called me cracker.

Day 24

Day 24

We are basically through with our job. In theory this sucks, but because they didn't pay us our first paycheck for two weeks, I'll get paid through the end of May. Hopefully. I've decided to work five hours a day until I'm done. Even with me dragging ass, I expect this will take three days at most. And then—finally—a vacation.

Day 23

Day 23

Today continues the trend of boring, slow-ass days. I'm listening to lots of talk radio, which I'm pretty sure is giving me some kind of cancer. It's seriously the audible equivalent of chewing on tinfoil. I am almost certain that Sean Hannity is clinically retarded.

Everybody in these shitty, garbage-strewn neighborhoods drives like a crazy person. I see a couple of donks dragracing down a residential street, both of them throwing up huge waves of water in their wakes. There's a man wearing a straw hat drinking out of a paper bag at ten in the morning. A little kid with a rake waks up to me while I'm sitting in my car (something about me sitting in my car seems to attract people like nothing else).

“You got something I can do for five or ten dollars? He asks me.
“Not today. I'm working right now.” He is silent for a moment, and does not leave.
“You got it?”
“Got what?”
“Five or ten dollars?” Seriously?
“No.”
“You got any change?”

Day 22

Day 22

Again, I get up early and head out for work. Less than five minutes from the house it begins raining and so I'm forced to head home. A few hours later I have lunch and then head back out. I'm looking around for some addresses and wind up talking to a very helpful gentleman who points out to me where a couple of homes have been demolished. I thank him and move on up the street. Later I see him out in front of his house doing some kind of weird kung-fu/tai chi moves. Very strange.

Day 21

Day 21

I am beginning to get frustrated at the painfully slow pace we have to keep. We're supposed to be working something like five times slower than we were when we started. This is really hard, because the previous pace we were working at was not extraordinarily fast. Buh.

I go out early in the morning, hoping most of the hoodrats will be asleep, but hey, here they are, cracking open a beer at 8:30 in the morning. It is getting harder and harder to make myself go out and do this. PS happy Cinco de Mayo.

Day 20

Day 20

My first day of hardcore slacking has begun. Before I even start actually working, I do a friend a favor and take their car to get inspected, then drive over to my work area and begin very slowly walking around, doing my job. While I'm standing in front of a house trying to determine if anyone lives there or not, a pickup truck drives through a puddle and throws a gigantic roostertail of cold and filthy water over me. I become insanely angry and almost go home in my rage, but in the end I decide to sit in my car and dry off and plot my revenge. I work another couple of hours then go home for a little while before heading back out again. I get barked at by a dog. So it goes. I work less than six hours total today.

Day 19

Day 19

I meet with my nineteen year old boss and my three remaining crewmembers. We basically sit around a diner and bullshit for a couple of hours (and get paid for it). We agree that we're going to have to radically slow down our productivity, to the point of canvassing something like twelve houses in an hour instead of twelve houses in twelve minutes, which is going to suck. It's always so much harder to look busy than to actually be busy, but I have faith in our abilities. Again, our boss tells us that if we keep at this excruciatingly slow pace we'll be able to drag out the work by two weeks or so and then we'll be able to move on to the next phase, which at this point remains a mysterious enterprise. It may, our boss tells us, involve teams of three to six people going out at two and three o'clock in the morning and counting hobos. We kill some more time and I come home before noon.

Day 18

Day 18

I spend today fucking around in the ghetto. I see a lot of pitbulls and abandoned buildings. I get a phonecall from my nineteen year old boss who tells me that we're out of assigned areas to cover and my options are to either move on to quality control or to stay under his wing, taking it really slowly and being guaranteed a place in the next phase of operations, which according to him might include “counting hobos.” I think you can guess exactly what I told him.

Day 17

Day 17

Calling the area I'm working in The Ghetto is not really fair and to be honest it's a little racist. Despite what a lot of people will tell you, black people and public housing do not a ghetto make. I attribute my attitude toward all the talk radio I've been listening to as I drive around town. It can make you think awful things. Awful things like “I would like to feed Anne Coulter into a woodchipper.” But then, why make the woodchipper suffer?

Day 16

Day 16

I slept late because I figured it would rain today. As it turns out, it's dry as a bone, and so I get up and head out for The Ghetto. All in all a pretty uneventful day. It begins to rain and so I pack it in and head home.

Day 15

Day 15

Today I'm actually in what sort of passes for The Ghetto (I note a watermelon husk in a ditch. Ah, racism), and while I'm parked in front of a church and checking my addresses I'm approached by a woman in a fairly nice business-y pantsuit. Only she's not wearing a shirt—or bra—under the blazer. “Can you give me a ride to get something to eat?” Nope. “Can you give me a dollar to get a piece of chicken?” Nope. Because of a glitch, my pay for working the previous day will go on the next week's paycheck, which on the surface sucks, but it's actually a good thing, because it means I can skip a day of work on this week. This was an odd day. I can't really explain in what way it was odd, but it was.

Day 14

Day 14

Because of all the backtracking I've had to do, I've driven past this little corner store about twenty times, so today I decide to drop in. I was expecting a convenience store but instead find a little deli/restaurant. Since all I wanted was a soda, I pretend that I need to know the address. “What are you doing?” the dried-up old hag behind the counter asks me. The first white person I've seen in days. And so I explain what I'm doing. “Cause you're sitting out there in the car. And everybody knows you're out there. They [by which she means “she”, I'm pretty sure] called the po-lice.” “Okay,” I say. “Well, I'm just doing my job. Thanks.” Apparently it's against the law to drive around in this shitty town.

I keep wondering why, every day, I've seen blind people wandering the streets, often in groups of four or five. It seems like an awful lot. Only today do I realize that I've been driving past a huge brick building with a giant sign reading CENTER FOR THE BLIND.

There's a payday loan business in a portable building behind the public housing complex. How depressing. I find myself feeling much more self-conscious here than back home. The people here seem much more suspicious. Because this is a small, less urban town? Because they see fewer people walking around on the streets? There's not much here in the way of pedestrian walkways, so maybe seeing someone on foot is so strange that it makes them wary.

I'm sitting in the car a couple of hours later checking my map when I'm approached by My Very First Prostitute. She walks up to my open window and leans in: “You need [inaudible] head or pussy?”
“Not today,” I tell her. “Well, can I get a dollar for my birthday?” She's wearing a pink baseball cap, t-shirt, and shorts with a pack of cigarettes sticking out of the ass pocket. Not a terribly attractive lady. I see her later yelling at passing cars.

An altogether awful day. I have a bad headache. The sun is blinding. I walk or drive down dozens of dead-end streets where I catch dark glances from everyone I see. Drive 80 mph all the way home.

Day 13

Day 13

I hope the town I'm working in sinks into the sea. Every street is shaped like an ampersand or a lowercase cursive Q, with about ten dead-end roads branching off. Along the way to this shithole I stop to get gas at a service station. Every appliance, drink cooler, or otherwise available space is covered with stupid signs, ie “NO!! free refills! You will be charged same amount as your cup” and “Please throw 'all' trash into basket!” The cashier is very thin, harsh-looking woman in her mid-30s talking to a heavyset blonde woman regarding a recently fired employee: “I knew she was stealing when my inventory was $3800 short.” Very clever, detective. Other flotsam from this conversation included “Now Tammy's calling Stacey and begging for her job back.”

Later, while I'm canvassing the public housing projects, a barefoot woman in a housedress beckons me over. “Mr Davis?” she asks.
“No, I'm with the census bureau. We're verifying addresses in town.”
“Census bureau? What's that?”
“We're making sure the addresses are correct and sending out a mailing at the end of the year to count the population.”
“I didn't get my check.”
“No, we're not sending out checks, we're just making sure the addresses are right.”
“Oh. I'm number 331, and that's 332.”
“Thanks.”
She walks away and a few minutes later I see her cackling with delight at something the maintenance guy is saying.

Day 12

Day 12

The new town I have to work in, as it turns out, sucks. The entire city is a gnarled clusterfuck of twisted streets, dead ends, and cul-de-sacs, none of which are properly numbered. Almost none of the homes have numbers, but they all have mailboxes. The numbers on the mailboxes, however, are written in either charcoal or crayon, and are all faded beyond legibility. A typical series of houses will be listed thusly: 1121, 1119, 1140, 1402, etc, with odds and evens on the same side of the street, with no attempt at coherence. I see an old black man with a long white beard carving something (folk art?) and my first pair of abandoned mens' underwear—they'd been wadded up and stuffed into a dented mailbox. And I will have to come back tomorrow.

Day 11

Day 11

We are supposed to attend a ninety-minute meeting at midday, but thankfully it's cancelled. I talk to a guy for a few minutes before realizing that he's a local celebrity known for his slide guitar abilities. He's got a dog on a leash and casually mentions that his dog “lives downstairs” from him. He says it in such a weird offhand way, as if it's not weird at all to refer to his dog as if it's his roommate.

Later, as I'm walking by a house, a guy walks out of his house and yells “Happy 4-20!” across the street to his neighbor, who yells back “that's what I'm sayin!” I find this little exchange oddly funny and sort of touching.

I get a phonecall around 2:30. It's my nineteen year old boss, asking me if I want to spend a few days working in a town that's an hour or so east, because they're having some trouble getting their shit together. If I agree, it will mean nearly three hours of dicking around each day and an extra $75 a day or so, and I enthusiastically agree.

Day 10

Day 10

I get an early start, but I'm still dicking off a lot. I see my second pair of wadded-up panties lying on the sidewalk. What a sweet job, I think. My nineteen year old boss calls me up and says that our crew is in second place productivity-wise, and to keep up the good work. I respond to this praise of my professionalism by sitting in my car and reading the comics page for twenty minutes. A little later, I have lunch with my friend Charlotte and we see a coworker of mine, a genuine weirdo who, oddly enough, has had run-ins with a number of other people I know. After lunch I go back to work for another hour or so but am chased away by the rain.

Day 9

Day 9

Operation: Dick Off is officially in high gear. I fudge my time and spend the first half hour of the day doing absolutely nothing. At lunch I head over to Wendy's and while sitting in line at the drive-thru I hear a silver-haired Rotarian-type saying “It has blue tires that make blue smoke and it smells like grapes.”

Day 8

Day 8

I get a call a couple of hours into the job. It is our second in command. She is headed into what she assumes is The Ghetto and wants me to go along with her, which I agree to do. It turns out that my presence is completely unnecessary. The job does take place in a public housing project, but no one gives us any trouble—either because I look so badass or because she is black—and we manage to complete something like three hundred addresses in only a matter of hours. She calls me a couple of hours later to tell me that if we continue on our present pace, we will finish the assignment long before the allotted ten weeks is up. I'm not trying to kick ass at collecting addresses, honestly, but it's just so fucking easy. I've been going at my own pace, but I now know I'll have to slow down. My plan for the next day becomes “do a block of addresses, then read a chapter of Infinite Jest".

Day 7

Day 7

My friend Josh drives by as I'm working, and he stops and the two of us have a chat for awhile. As we're doing so, a black nun—wearing the black and white suit and everything—in a beat-to-shit late 80s Chevy Suburban drives by. She is the first, and thus far the only, nun I have ever seen in real life. I can only assume that she was on her way to adapt some Motown hits into gospel songs.

Day 6

Day 6

We have a team meeting at a restaurant before work. Our nineteen-year-old boss shows up, all ripped jeans and backward baseball cap, wearing a hoodie and constantly checking his cellphone. He also has—no shit—a baby wallaby with him in a sling. He explains that his girlfriend's family, with whom he lives, owns a petting zoo, and they bought some wallabys (wallabies?), but the babies are too young to be left alone, so you have to put them in a sling and carry them around like you're their mother. Or he was full of shit and just wanted to seem like a Cool Weirdo With An Exotic Pet. Either way, he was carrying what amounted to a baby kangaroo around in a bag. We finish whatever the hell we were meeting about and make our way out into the world, where I see an unusal amount of trash scattered through the streets, including at least one bottle of Hennessy. I wonder briefly if I am now in The Ghetto.

Day 5

Day 5

There was a pretty bad storm the night before, and lots of traffic lights are out. It still looks like it might rain at any moment, which means there is a lot of dicking off and working from my car today. I talked to a bum at the gas station, who tried to help me find an address. He tried to do the Cool Black Guy Handshake with me, but I ruined it. We instead did a fist bump to compromise.

I was approaching a house whose address was unclear to me, and just as I was about to walk to the door, I noticed someone in the car parked out front. It was a young woman who was wearing the smallest pair of shorts I think I've ever seen. It was hard not to notice because she was hanging ass-out of the car, digging around in the floorboard looking for something. I asked her if she knew the address, and she told me she didn't live there, but would ask her friend, the owner. She bounced inside, and I walked up to the door, which was opened shortly by another young lady who was wearing an even smaller pair of shorts, or possibly underwear, and a t-shirt. She was very chirpy and friendly. Perhaps I interrupted some kind of bra-and-panty-ticklefight between the two friends? Regardless, I began mentally composing my Penthouse letter, but alas, it was all for naught. She gave me the information I needed, and I moved on along down the line. Next time!

Day 4

Day 4

I have to canvass the Motor Hotel, a huge old building that takes up about half a city block. It no longer functions as a hotel, but there is office space available, as well as a quasi-rundown barber shop and a couple of similarly depressing businesses. The whole day is overcast and windy, very ominous and threatening. The addresses I have to canvass are a confused jumble. I ask a woman who I need to speak to to find out what the correct addresses are. She directs me to a man who is missing most of his right index finger. Whenever you have to get directions from someone with mangled limbs, very little good can come of it. He points with his nub and I head up the elevator, which opens to dark and narrow hallways with every other ceiling fluorescent burned out, unmarked doors with pebbled glass and wire mesh. It is like visiting the offices of a seedy TV detective. There is no sign of human life. Finally, I get some help from an immensely fat dwarfish woman who is so heavyset that she can't bend her knees and instead waddles from side to side. I follow her down this bizarre dreamscape to the office where she works, which is some kind of brightly lit daycare/drug rehab(?) facility. She disappears behind a door and I'm left standing in the middle of what seems like a pediatric waiting room, prancing cartoon characters on the wall and pamphlets about drug addiction fanned out on the end table. I can hear voices from the depths of the office. Finally, she comes to the glassed door and slides a paper with the number of the building's superintendent under the tray. I thank her and make my way out of this David Lynchian nightmare.

Day 3

Day 3

I see a dead parrot in the street. Nothing else of note happens.

Day 2

Day 2

There's a crazy woman standing on the corner in front of her house yelling “here pussy pussy pussy, here pussy pussy pussy” over and over. Despite being a block away, I can quite plainly hear her. Sadly, I have to move toward her as I continue my work. And even though she can see me—a total stranger—approaching her, she continues to yell “here pussy pussy pussy.” And, even though I am standing somewhere in the vicinity of twenty feet from her, she continues to yell. I continue doing my work, and she finally moves toward her door. She opens the door and from inside the yowling of multiple cats can be heard. She yells a bit—presumably at the dozens of cats that are swirling around on the floor of her filthy home—and the door slams shut.

Passing her house, there are a couple of young wigger girls walking down the street. One is wearing pajamas and her friend is dressed as what appears to be a Harlem Globetrotter. As they pass by me, I overhear this conversation:

“Shit is crazy—people be taking pitchers on they phone in lingerie....”

“That girl ain't but fiteen years old. She need to set her ass down.”

Day 1

Day 1

Cardboard princess hat lying on side of the road. If it weren't wet (with rain? urine? both?) I would have taken it with me.

Training

First week, training:

I didn't record the details of our training, but there were a number of highlights. The training basically involved a lot of beating around the bush and mindless hours of going around in circles. There is one lady named Dorothy who insists on asking every single possible combination of scenario about what could befall us in the course of our job. I understand her wanting to be fully prepared, but she is incredibly annoying. I find myself siding with the various sassy black ladies who make hmmpf noises or groan every time Dorothy breaks in to ask some goddamn stupid question. We have two very old senior citizens who are having a really hard time learning how to operate the hand held computer. We had to swear an allegiance to the Constitution and to defend it “against all enemies foreign and domestic.” Very impressive.

Our team leader is nineteen years old and checks his phone literally every few minutes—updating his myspace or something, I'd guess—and anytime anyone asks a question, he tells them he will have to check with his boss. He defers to his second in command, who is an older woman who seems to actually have some idea what she's doing, and sometimes disappears for hours at a time. I find this somewhat worrisome.

A police officer comes around to tell us what to do if we run into some trouble—a lot of my coworkers are very concerned that we might be sent to The Ghetto—and we come away from this talk not really learning much. I make the following note, which encompasses everything I learned:

--everyone is a suspect

--everyone is a victim

--when in doubt, kill dogs

At one point someone actually says, out loud, to the group “there's no 'I' in team” and my immediate thought was “no, but there is a u and I in murder suicide.”

Toward the end of the training, we are given index cards to write our names and addresses on. The second in command team leader asks us to write on the back of the card something, if we had only a month to live, we would do. One of our team members, a dude of about twenty, writes “love on my puppies.” Because he loves his dogs. I find this both really sweet and hilarious.

Two things I overhear during the class:

“Everyone's different because of our generics and stuff.”

“My sister in law broke into my house and stole my baby's ADHD medicine.”

And then we are sent out into the world. This will be a weird job.