Awake at eleven into a total communications breakdown. Not the kind you have with your loved ones; my sister and I have great conversations; the love life is percolating happily; Dad and I are on better speaking terms than we have been in years.
No. The cel phone is holding itself hostage until I pay bills I thought it wanted to pay itself. I thought it wanted to have a little romantic dinner with -- no -- that it wanted to cruise by in its dark Cadillac of e-commerce and ask my credit card to turn tricks whenever it, the cel phone, was feeling its oats. The college server is also going down like a two-bit wh0re. Two ISPs I don't use anymore have been picking my pocket for one yuppie food stamp ($20) a month for years and I didn't notice.
Didn't notice?!
Downstairs in the kitchen I stare at the almost empty cabinet and whine to myself that the world is asking me to be a grown up, but I don't have any of the organization skills yet.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs is posted on the wall by the still-compliant blue orb of my iMac. It tells me I should be securing Food and Drink before I worry about Self-Actualization or even Belongingness. I'm in denial that I seem to be developing an allergy to milk and need to change my eating habits and I don't want to go shopping. (I'm saying No a lot.)
I had to pencil in "shelter" on the hierarchy; it had been left off. Today the seventy-year-old guy who is supposed to fix the windows around the house came by to tell me that he was putting the project off, once again, for a few weeks. He wondered why I was home. No job, I snapped. What, the contract fell through? he asked. No contract, I was doing academic piecework. Well, what are you going to do? Are you going to be here over the next month?
How could I explain to him that right before he'd yelled "Anyone home?" up the stairs I had finally gotten excited about something -- that I'd decided next Tuesday I would leave for Washington, DC and live in a squat for three weeks while I helped set up communications systems for the IMF protest at the end of the month? What kind of sense does that make to a man who asks me if I have a contract? Does he know the unemployment rate is rising?
His eyes are blue and wide, like mine. I have called the landlady a hundred times to tell her he still hasn't done a day of work for the thousand dollars she's thrown at him to fix the house. His eyes are filmy, and I can't read any fear in them.
I don't know. I don't know where I'll be. I don't know if I'll have any work. I don't know.
The cel phone says On your knees, b!tch, the waiting time for the next available Sprint PCS operator is half an hour. Outside it gets suddenly dark and rumbles; there is no way I'll make an end run around my food neurosis and get to the supermarket on foot before it rains. There is no way I'll make it downtown in time to get any kind of sensible work done for the ex-hippie who is paying me under the table to do internet research.
I wonder if I will get my money back from the ISPs. I think, There are so many jobs out there which advertise they want someone who can juggle multiple projects. Is there anyone who says, It doesn't matter that much, we'd be happy with someone who tends to get monomaniacal, someone with a one-track mind?
Is there will anyone who will pay me to write, right now?
My editor hasn't called me since Thursday. I have to call this what it is now: not freelancing; I haven't got the courage for the unbearable trapeze act of freelancing, I can't hold out faith every day.
And now there's a bang at the door. The mail always comes at 2:30 and I know that now because I am -- say it -- unemployed.
I put down the cel phone and trudge down the stairs and off to the side from the bills there is a manila envelope, a fat little manila envelope, whose back has been lovingly hand-strapped with cellophane tape and whose front bears the return address I couldn't hold out hope to wait for -- praise god, my query got forwarded straight through the publisher without being stopped by a censorious hand:
2nd MAINE MILITIA
P.O. BOX 100
PARSONFIELD, MAINE 04047
NO PHONE/NO FAX/NO PAVED ROAD
a fat little envelope, a hope of redemption from a total stranger in the state where I was born. I can't even bear to open it. it, like the whole past month, might never become an article.
* * *
p.s.: Carolyn says yes, the place where the Beans lived is, in fact, named after the road where my best friend lived when I was a little baby in Raymond, Maine.
Posted by Gus at September 10, 2001 04:40 PM