The Residue Years by Mitchell Jackson Read Free Book Online Page A

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 andRamen, 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