Monday Morning

So it’s Monday morning, the start of a whole new work week. Nothing new there. Been starting new work weeks, just like this one, forever. Alarm rings; I lay there a moment, thinking; lift my legs to the side of the bed; and the day begins…

I’m one of the lucky ones: I have a job I like. But I’ve done some crazy things in my time, let me tell you. Paid my dues in that department. Started babysitting when I was 12. Fifty cents an hour when I sat for my mother’s friends; $1.00 an hour for everyone else. But that job should come with combat pay—and not just because of all those kids; all those meals & clean-up; the first aid. But for the husbands with their lascivious eyes, and their itchy fingers. The coming home early. The rides home after they’d been drinking, me and my new breasts and hips on the front seat beside them. My parents, like the rest of my girlfriends’ parents, oblivious. Smiling and going back to their yard work when he picked me up on his motorcycle. Stabbing the legs of two pink plastic flamingos into our front yard as a 42-year-old man leaned in to buckle the helmet he had brought for their daughter to wear. My whole body trembling, as I lifted one newly elongated leg to position my body behind his on the seat, wrapping my arms around his slightly doughy waist. I could smell the man-ness on the back of his neck. And of course later his wife would find him bent over the couch, just about to kiss me. Me, too polite to say no. Didn’t know how to say no. Maybe didn’t want to say no. And then Jimmy—the tall, lanky husband of a long-haired baby making machine. Five kids under the age of 5, and him looking to make more. Pinning me one evening to the floor, touching. I could smell the whiskey on his breath, could hear his kids sleeping upstairs while I prayed for his wife to pull up the drive. I knew how to say no by then, but he wouldn’t listen…

Oh, the jobs I’ve had—and the people I’ve met. Some crazy ones, I tell you. Like my 4-day stint for a business publication on Wall Street, with the publisher sitting alone in a conference room, dirty dishes around him, his razor and shaving cream right by the fork. He promoted me three times that week amid whispers of a brain tumor by the long-term employees who had been there slightly more than a week. I’m sorry about his brain tumor, I told his faithful and grossly overweight assistant, as I stood by the elevator, waiting to go down. Please just send me my check.

Then the retirement community developer in Austin. Just the two of us in a 2000 square foot office. Headquarters someplace in Vegas. But he couldn’t close the deal—something about an endangered salamander—and Vegas pulled him back, his shot at the “big time” over. And yet headquarters had requested that I stay on, to keep a presence in the area. Him explaining it to me that day, his face crumpled and tired. Me, sympathetic, but with the dawning realization that I was going to be alone in a palatial office, with my employer a thousand miles away. How hard it was not to smile, not to do a jig right there in front of that defeated, corporate man. I stayed on for seven more months, taking naps in the conference room, on top of his desk. No one called. No one ever came by.

Jobs, jobs, jobs. Such a big part of our lives. I got mine, and you got yours. And the crap we’re often willing to put up with just to keep ‘em… Hiding our real selves behind suits, behind desks, behind the protective wall of email. Unless of course you’ve got one of those jobs that no one else wants--and then you’re too worn out to hide. Woolf once said that life is just a series of illusions. Which of course it is, but I’ll take my illusions, thank you, and please stack them really close together. So I don’t fall off into the abyss as I’m stepping along: to my job every Monday morning, singing along with the radio…