employment

Some days you wake up, and you’re laying there, and the sun is shining and you know that everything is going to work out just fucking fine.

Yesterday afternoon the management at the paper studio sat me down and told me that they could get me enough money for rent, but that was it. They couldn’t take me on, they couldn’t pay me. My boss looks at me with this real frustrated look knowing damn well that I had no idea what I was going to do. His bizarre paper making elf that had just magiked into his shop had to pay bills like everyone else. I told him with eyes lowered, not really believing what has become my personal mantra, that everything will work out. It always does.

Otis has been on hard times before and I always said it was going to work out and it always worked out. But its a hard life always saying that things will work out, always making up for some unbeatable obstacle laying infuriatingly in my way.

I’d said it so many times the words didn’t make sense, they were just the sounds of me accepting the fucked up reality that surrounded my day dreams.

Everything is going to work out.

And then today. Fucking today.

Woke up late and started looking for places to stay knowing that if I didn’t get a place soon I was going to start burning my bridge to The Flower. By two we were smoking a joint outside of a two story house with a furnished room for rent. By two-thirty I was shaking hands with my new roomate.

Already the feeling of having a space of my own was boiling my blood. How many months have I been on the road with only my bag and my banjo to call my home with that constant nagging neurosis: but where will you live? Will you live in your bag forever?

I went to the bank to cash the check that I’d been given for a promise that I would make money for the Book Arts Center. I got nervous because the downtown Kalamazoo bums were eyeball fucking my new wad of money so I asked to speak to a desk person to extend my stay so that some of these mongrels might not patiently wait for me to leave the building to mug me and leave my pretty body all broken up in some bush with no money for an apartment.

So there I was with this brutal, imaginary, and kind of racist scene playing in my head and there is this smiling midwestern woman looking at me from the other side of a desk. She’s looking at my file and she whispers “Otis, Otis, Otis, what are we going to do with you? When are you going to settle down?” like some mystic reading a crystal ball. She knows I’m a no-good.

I ask her what she means and she turns the screen to me to show a history of transactions across the states and, for a few months, across the sea. She flips through my passport, my only form of ID. In this way I had gathered another mother to worry about me. This is probably the skill that comes easiest to me: inspiring the fear and anxiety of mother-hens.

She cleared my debt to the bank because she was the sweetest old lady that could be and sent me skipping happily out of the building.

I was walking in the sun, thinking about how good this day had gotten and then I smelled this smell. It was the smell of shirts cooking in a dryer. It was the smell of a screen printing operation. I walked a few steps onward and then turned around.

I walked into that building and I say I’m looking for a job. I tell the lady I’m a veteran. Then I’m talking to this old guy with a firm handshake and he’s asking me about my experience and I’m telling him about the schools and the paper and the printmaking and the making diy screen printing spaces. I tell him about the Army and how good of a worker I am.

He shook my hand.

An hour later I was on the phone with him and he says he wants me in tomorrow at 9:30.

I know that to have a job and an apartment are normal things and that there is no cause for joy to acquire these two things which modern people just ought to have, but this was something else to me. This was something decidedly more grand than just normal business to me.

Its been two years since I’ve worked and three since I’ve had my name signed on any contract. I’ve been, by choice or laziness or bad economy or by a combination of all of these factors, completely free of contracts and I feared them like a devil or an STD.

It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t be happy, couldn’t be proud, because I was always dependent on someone else’s pocket, someone else’s money. I wanted to be free from money but there is no such thing as free from money. My ideals lead me into a false narrative that I couldn’t escape from and my romantic dalliance with homelessness left me chronically unemployable.

But that has changed now. As of tomorrow I’m a working man of the getting paid variety which is so much more preferable than the kind of working man who does intangible work that is decidedly “good” in nature but which does not pay.

I am a part of your club now. I am like you. I am fulfilling the obligation that one must earn one’s daily bread like my old man taught me.

You don’t know what you have until you lose it is what they always say. Enjoy the comfort of your home and your job. You don’t know how scary it is out here without them.

“Never minded working hard, its who I’m working for” (Gillian Welch)