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.