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.