A hangover is your body's way of telling you that sobriety is overrated.
“Are you fragile this morning?”
“A little.” Fragile is my polite term for being hungover; I'm not sure why I still bother with the distinction. Ten years ago, it made a difference. Hungover meant I wasn't making it to work and farthest I'd move from where ever I ended up sleeping the night before was maybe to the bathroom to hurl. Fragile meant that I pretty much felt like crawling back into bed and dying, but that I'd make it to work anyway. Maude, much to her credit, mostly allows me my little word play... though mostly it's out of habit than out of any agreement about the meaning of things on her part.
“What do you have going on today?”
“The usual. You?”
She sighed instead of articulating an answer. That meant she was in for a long day. I was trying to remember; she'd told me a few days before what she had going on; she'd told me a couple different times, though it was in passing and sometimes mumbled under her breath like a long string of curse words. She'd been in one of those moods where she didn't like her job. I had every hope that the mood would pass, though not out of any attachment I'd developed to Mount Arliss. It was a place, like every other place, and we'd ended up here for the same reasons we ended up in Knoxville, Cincinnati, and Phoenix. A job was our usual excuse. Mostly, we moved because none of the places we lived ever really felt like home. To be fair, I expect that we both have unrealistic expectations of what home should feel like. We both want home to feel the way we think it ought to feel rather than taking it for what really is. Home is the place you never get lost driving around in. Home becomes home not out of some abstract sense of community but out of lethargy. Home is the place you're too lazy to leave and too bored to forget even if you do happen to get out.
The job that brought us to Mount Arliss was hers. Phoenix was my fault, so I told her our next move was on her. I'd landed a job – a full time one, as improbably as that sounds – because I'd been writing for this low circulation arts and culture rag in Cincinnati and one of my articles --- about the visit of a famous author at the University – had gotten someone's attention while they were surfing the internet instead of working. I ended up never getting paid for the article because shortly after its publication the rag closed up and the publisher ran off to find god in some Hindu monastery in India. I got an email from him about a year later – it was a group email and I was one of at least 100 other people that he most likely owed money to – wishing me well and thanking me for helping him on the path to enlightenment.
I tried to email him back to tell him he could thank me by paying my the $45 he owed me. The email failed to send and was bounced back to me three days later. I guess you can say I took that as a sign.
About a week after the article was published and two weeks prior to the rag's unceremonious implosion, I got a call from an arts and culture editor for a small paper in West Phoenix. His name was Carl Berger. Carl, like so many editors with more ambition than talent, had taken the job as editor of a small paper that barely survived in the long shadow cast by The Arizona Republic. Carl was desperate for good talent, he told me, and wanted to know if I'd be interested in coming out and writing for him. He read my article and liked the way I wrote and said I'd make a great addition to The East Valley Bugle. He was honest about it not paying much, which I appreciated. But he added that there were advantages to having a press pass and to moving out to desert on the wave the giant real estate driven economic boom.
“You've LOVE it out here,” he said. He spoke very fast and tried very hard to avoid answering my questions about just how “not great” the pay was.
“How much are they paying you there?” he asked.
“They're not.”
“Well,” he said, “we can definitely pay more than that.”
I talked it over with Maude. We were both wanting to get out of Cincinnati. She was working as a scullery maid for a posh downtown restaurant, scrubbing dishes and throwing away the thrown away food of Cincinnati's upper crust and spending nights and weekends working with local independent theater companies that were too poor to pay and too avante garde to attract more than a small following. I was hiring out my keyboard to anybody who might look like it was possible they would pay. It wasn't going well. We were college educated, debt laden. Her family thought I was a hopeless reprobate who didn't want an honest job. My family thought I was causing my poor wife – who they love, probably more than they love me – endless suffering because I was unwilling to grow up and settle down and get the kind of job that mothers and fathers wish for. Like a lawyer. My mother – a good, honest protestant soul and kindergarten teacher – always wanted me to be a lawyer. Not because she liked them. No. She wanted me to study law because it is in my nature to argue. I argue even when I'm not in the mood for it. I argue in spite of any evidence that I'm wrong. I argue for the sheer pleasure of watching someone else grind their teeth in frustration. And the way she figured it, a person should get paid for doing something that comes naturally.
My dad never voiced an opinion on the subject of my future vocation, except to say that I should choose something reasonable. When I wanted to be a rock star-- and truly my ambitions exceeded my talent, but no one could tell me that – he said nothing and frowned. When I told him I wanted to be a writer – where my ambitions were unreasonable, but I had shown some small skill – he recommended an easy day job so that I could have my nights to write. After college, of course. My old man had been a smart ass kid who dropped out of high school because the principal caught him smoking behind the building and rather than listen my dad told the geezer – he never referred to the principal as a geezer, but I like to think he still thought of him that way, even as he tried to use his own life as an object lesson for his youngest son – to fuck off. Then he joined the Navy and discovered that there was more to being a man than pissing while standing. And when he was finished with the Navy, he joined the Air Force because the food was better and bases were nicer than Army bases. He wanted me to go to college so I would have an easier life than his. My mother, who eventually returned to college to become a kindergarten teacher, wanted me to go to college because she wished she had gone when she was younger.
So I probably became a writer as much because of spite as because of natural aptitude. And when I was offered an actual job – a FULL TIME job – writing, it was a nice way to win the argument I'd been engaged in since the age of 15. An argument that outlasted my dad, my first marriage, and several years of lost, drunken reverie.
As far as I know, my mother still holds out hope that I'll go to law school. But she doesn't talk about it anymore.
So there was every reason to go and not really any to stay. I called Carl back the next day to make arrangements.
“I'll get reimbursed for moving, right?” I asked him several different times in several different ways. “Yeah, man, Yeah,” he said. “It'll be awesome when you're out here! You'll love it!”
I didn't like that I could hear the exclamation marks in his voice. And when we got out there, I found out there was good reason. The editor-in-chief wasn't exactly behind Carl hiring me. The editor-in-chief was a member in good standing of the Maricopa County Republicans, the NRA, and contributed regularly to the campaigns of the jack-booted county sheriff. Art for him was a warbly and out of tune church choir. Culture was something that liberals talked about. It didn't take him long to see that he and I had very little in common. Compared to him, Sam is a goddamn editorial saint, and I try to remind myself of that whenever he cuts up what I send him. The job at the East Valley Bugle was a miserable one and I stuck at it for as long as I could. But eventually the economic wave that brought me there broke. It broke, the paper was broke, Carl ran crying like a burned out hippie to Flagstaff, and I was shit out of luck.
Maude's job landed in her lap serendipitously. We were sitting around talking about getting out of the East Valley and the phone rang. Her friend Ferdinand called because the Managing Director position opened up at a theater company he was the Artistic Director for. It was a perfect job at a perfect time. She applied, interviewed, and was offered the job in less than two weeks. It took us less than that to get ready to go.
The problem was that there is very little to do in Mount Arliss that didn't involve corn, the production of corn, or discussing the future of corn. That corn is in virtually everything doesn't seem to change the fact that corn growers feel abused, neglected, and back stabbed by the entire world. Seriously. Every garbage bag, every car tire, every bottle of diet coke they buy at the corner gas station, they are all made of corn. Corn is in food that should have no business having corn in it. Fruit juice, for fuck's sake. Fruit juice has corn in it. Steak has corn in it because the cow was fed corn. So were the chickens that used to be attached to every drumstick in the refrigerated poultry case.
Of course none of that matters; the farmers still know they're being screwed over. And up to a point, they're not wrong. But the fact is that farmers are just one more segment of the population that gets the shaft. Not to minimize the importance of corn or of the suffering family farmer … but that's one of those myths best left to commercials. The family farmer, I mean. Yes there are still family farms, but mostly the families live in the houses and lease the acreage out to somebody who leases farm land all over the county. I'm talking thousands and thousands of acres, because that's the only way to break even if you're a farmer in America's Breadbasket.
“So what have you got going on today?” Maude usually only asks me questions twice when she thinks I'm too hungover to remember the first time. I have learned not to take this personally. I know that I never look like I'm paying attention, or that I'm thinking, or feeling. Which is funny because I think I'm the most obvious person in the world.
I didn't have much of anything. My trip to the bar the night before netted me nothing except the usual stuff. Nothing new. Nothing that Sam would think was timely enough to put in the paper. Nothing that I could convince myself was worth spending the time on. Nothing. Nada. Nothing worth digging deeper into and turning into something that paid at least $50. That would make for another long and desperate day.