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

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 specialistand 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.

Chapter 6
    â€œMom, don’t fret, it’s no big deal…”
—Champ
    Beauty life. A passel of females (grandmas, teenyboppers, twenty-somethings) seated in fluorescent chairs pushed against the walls, women mute and cross-legged and lost in beauty mags or prattling across a center table fixed with a gaudy vase of fresh tulips. A few stylists back in the back, dressed in all-black smocks. One of them painting white slop on a client’s near-to-bald scalp, another sifting through a mess of combs and scissors and curlers, another whacking a grandmother’s gray locks into an atavistic bob. Mom finds the last empty seat and leaves me to hold up a wall. She flips through a style book, shows me a few choices, asks me what I think. Don’t none of them move me, so I tell her to choose whichever she likes most. So much for input, she says. Whose idea was