Mitchell Jackson - The Residue Years

It’s tough to find comfort here, takes but so long to know no one with sense would choose this for themselves.

A woman calls my name — once, twice; she waits for me to rouse and sidestep bodies to where she stands. Grace Thomas. You are Grace, aren’t you? Come, she says, and hustles down the hall. She tells me her name, that she’s new to the county, that I’ve been reassigned to her load last-minute. She stops at an office that could be the office of any of them — too many papers and too little light — and takes a seat in a padded chair, and thrusts a thin manila file across the desk. This about sums it and isn’t much, she says. Can you catch me up to speed on the rest?

Where to start? I say.

Well, that, she says, you should know.

She straightens her desk. You can’t help but notice she’s got her nails clipped and polished clear, wears a wedding ring sized for show. She opens my file, leafs through the top pages, leaves the folder splayed.

Okay, Ms. Thomas, I’ve got a billion appointments, so let’s make this brief. UAs, we do them by color and yours is blue. You call in the morning. You call weekdays and weekends, and when it’s your color you come in. No excuse. Be warned as well, she says, and please don’t mistake this as an empty threat, that noncompliance carries consequence. Furthermore, you can count on house calls, she says, count on a number of unannounced visits. Now, employment, she says. Per the job search contract you’ve got sixty days to show a pay stub or we mandate job-readiness classes. Meanwhile, we’ll need to see job logs, one entry per lead, she says. And let’s not forget your substance abuse programming. For now it’s NA twice a week and a bi-monthly woman’s group, both of which require the group leader’s signature to count. Well, Ms. Thomas, that’s about it, she says. I believe that about does it for now. We shall see one another soon.

* * *

Daybreak the next day the hunt. You rise and search the cupboards and icebox, hoping to find food heavy enough to last the day, to spare yourself from spending the pennies you have left. You stuff yourself to a paunch and carry a day-old paper to the front room and plop on your scraggy couch and search the want ads for jobs that list a starting pay of no less than triple the state minimum wage: an office manager and a payroll clerk and an executive assistant … You check job after job and stuff the sections in a bag and head into the bathroom and spend more time than anyone should penciling your brows and painting your lips and stroking your weaved locks. You prep in your cracked bathroom mirror and whisk to your room and dress in old pants and a blouse with stained pits and your favorite heels, the half-size-small heels you bought at full price because the salesman convinced you they were the last pair to be found. You dress and rub your neck and wrist with smell-good and high-step outside, prance beneath a beautiful blue sky — a day for movies or postcards or love songs — to a corner stop, where you wait for the first bus of buses you need to reach the first culled hope: an executive assistant job at a sportswear business, its office in a red brick building with a lobby that lets in the sun. You greet the front desk girl cherry, but she eyes you pore by pore and slaps a clipboard of papers on the counter and warns against leaving questions, any one question, blank. You print answers in your best hand and give it back to the girl. You work to keep your feet and hands still while you sit, until a man — he’s got a shaved top lip and blonde strands clipped high around the ears — shuffles out and calls your name and leads you into an office decked with abstract art and a plastic fern. Your smile sags when, all too soon, he prods you over your spotty work life. You answer in truth and, all too soon, he pops out of his seat and offers a mock thank-youfor-time and rushes you right back into the lobby, a room more narrow and dim than it was breaths ago, and under the receptionist’s harsh gaze it dawns on you — these people and their papers, all their papers — to fill out a JOB SEARCH REPORTING LOG: what is the name and address of the company and what is the title of the position and to whom did you speak and what is the name and phone number of a contact and what was the outcome of the visit? You scratch the answers and double-check the scribbles and gather your things and stride out and amble blocks and catch a bus and then the light rail and then another bus to apply as a secretary at a real estate firm, a business that isn’t holding same day interviews, so you leave wondering when and if. You head from there to a warehouse in Southwest, which, as of a day ago, needed a shipping clerk, but just your luck, highway traffic is at a halt, froze so you crawl a few feet in an hour, which means the hours to apply at the next place have come and gone, so what to do but get off at the next stop and cross the street and wait in mist that will soon be rain. You perk when a super-long accordion guzzler arrives, a bus empty save a minor cast of strange sorts: a man who shouts I’m a Vietnam Veteran and homeless, which should be a crime, but here I am , another man with a melon-colored moon-shaped bruise stamped under his eye, a woman with a canal dug in the center of her flaky scalp. You ride the double-bus and then the light rail and then a second grumbling engine to your stop in Northeast. You stop in Big Charles’s store on the way home and buy an Oregonian and a Nickel Ads and stuff them in your bag and, feet aching, dodge puddles. You drag inside — the heels you had to have have shrank to ancient Chinese bindings — and doff your soggy clothes and, too lazy to cook, fix boiled wieners and Ramen, which shouldn’t be a decent meal anyplace. You’re intent on marking the papers before bed, but by the time you eat and let your stomach settle and watch a second or two of what’s flashing across the TV, your eyelids may as well be bricks. Heavy, so you slog into the bedroom and swathe in old sheets and spend half a night chasing sleep or rather a whole night thrashing in and out of sleep till outside your window birds chirp and your alarm clock trills. You wake at daybreak the next day and call the UA line — today’s not your turn — fry almost a whole bag of spuds and a pile of scrambled eggs and bacon that could cause a weak heart to stop. You cook food for a family, though it’s only you, and mark the day’s classifieds and shower till the water runs cool and so slow, so slow, fix your face and your hair and put on your clothes, and, with a man’s steely can’t-stop-won’t-stop untouchable tick in your chest, you stomp out the door in flats — lesson learned — with your oriental heels stuffed in your bag and your head cocked to a gorgeous cloud-specked blue sky. You do it all once, do it all twice, and it’s another week of more of the same: trips to deep in Northeast and Northwest and Southwest and Southeast and Gresham and Clackamas and Troutdale… routes that take on the feeling of sojourns across seas; then one ash-gray morning you call the UA hotline and today’s your turn, so you skip breakfast and dress in a rush and leave, find yourself flitting under a sky made of gauzy white cloth. You reach the office in no time and scratch your name on a list and wait to be called, and, wow, wow, they call you faster than you thought they would. You bop out of the office before noon dead sure you sampled clean with yet another checked-to-death classified stuffed in your bag, listings for a home healthcare aid and a customer service rep and an inside sales rep and an account specialist and a personal assistant and an administrative assistant and a day-care attendant and a telemarketer and a mail clerk and a nurse’s aide and a nail tech trainee — prospects with an hourly pay falling closer and closer to the state’s minimum. You search and search and spark the rare times they invite you into a conference room or office for an on-the-spot interview, though you don’t know why, since they never fail to grill you over your work gaps and conviction and quote the same trite script: we’ll be in touch and thank you very much for your time and the position has been filled and it looks as if you’re under-qualified and it looks as if you’re over-qualified and what happens this week is what happened last week and soon the can’t-stop-won’t-stop tick in your chest blights to should-you-quit-when-will-you-quit, and those evenings especially, you trudge home wary the phone will sit mute a day, a week, a month, a life, that the world is scheming against poor unemployed you; those days you feel trapped on the wrong side of faith until it dawns on you that it could be worse, much, much worse, and that comfort stirs you out of bed the next daybreak. You drone through rote prep and drag out the door — the sky is a sea of heather gray — and catch this and that bus to this and that place to fill out app after app after app and this time who knows; who knows this time what they will say on your nth hunt.