first job

It was nearly summer, and I needed something to do. Jobs were apparently posted on a cork board in front of the guidance counselor's office in the administrative building, which I entered occasionally to hand forged excuse notes to the unhappy mistress who processed the rolls, and once to attend a twenty minute college counseling session in which a fossil in an unlit room advised that a person like me would do best in a small liberal arts college situated in a 0-10,000 person, no-cinema locustville. I found the job board and copied all three job listings offered to 16+ year-olds onto the back my hand. $5.75/hr moving assistance. $6.15/hr office. $6/hr afterschool tutoring. I called the numbers; only $6.15/hr office answered; I dropped off a list of my grades at the office at the same time that another girl dropped off hers; more of my grades rhymed with "low pay" than hers; the job was mine.

The job was filing papers for an attorney who made a living as a court-appointed representative for kids whose parents were too busy tearing gold fillings out of each others' teeth to act in the best interests of their children. I remember little about my employer except that his clothes were stereotypically crumpled, and that, on the rare occasions that he was not in court or at his desk with one hand holding a phone up to his face and the other hand thrust through his hair, he smiled generously at me from behind a long, gray mustache. But I discovered Frank Zappa that summer, so I may be jumbling him up with a mother of invention.

It's not likely that Peter knew my name. Five years later, I was thumbing through the back pages of an alumni magazine when I saw a notice that his wife, also an alumus of my college, had committed suicide. I couldn't imagine why somebody would want this announcement to be made in the back of an alumni magazine, alongside ads for lecture-cruises along the Baltic corridor and personals websites with awful, self-congratulating addresses like GoodGenes, or All-IvyFamily, so on.

That summer, I spent two hours each morning in an economics class with a kind young teacher named Robin who in July gave me a copy of The Economic Consequences of Peace to read while the other students did worksheets. I failed to read a single page, preferring instead to doodle "Robin" on the far side of the pink line on my binder paper. Then I would go home and reheat leftovers, and then ride my creaking ladies' bicycle to work. My employer shared with several other solo practitioners an office space across the street from the county court in the third largest commercial strip of my suburb. That summer, as every summer that came before, the California sun was high and hot and I would arrive at work dizzied by glare, fatigued by exertion, and sweating like a peasant. After work, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would pick up my girlfriend, drive to a community college for our ceramics class, ruin my clothes with slip, and drive home at 11 p.m.

Peter employed a paralegal named Marilyn. Marilyn's last name was that of a gentle baby barn animal, also that of the ragtime composer whose songs I listened to that summer at hysterical volumes when home alone. She was kind to me, even as I repeatedly flubbed a very simple job. My main task was to direct home the guests that had overstayed a party of papers on the attorney's desk. It was simple, but it nonetheless exhausted the systems-processing part of my sixteen year-old brain. Court papers went into the left fastener of the manila file, all other papers went into the right fastener, but no matter how many times I had been told that words on an attorney's letterhead were not court papers, I could not file them on the right. Once a month or so, I was handed a supplement to a code of regulations and would spend two hours replacing pages 12:34A-26:77A with pages 12:22B-28:83AB or pasting new but equally inscrutable laws against the back covers of three-pound books. In the time I worked there, I didn't see a single person crack any of the hundreds of identically-bound books on the shelves around the office.

After incompetently filing the loose papers into manila folders, I was to return the folders to filing cabinets in alphabetical order. This I could handle just fine. The filing cabinets were stored in a walk-in closet. I was paid $6.15/hr and on most days even performed at the slowest speed my tasks would take no more than a few hours, but I wanted more time and more money, so I would walk into the closet with folders, close the door, file the folders, and lie on the ground and sleep. Sometimes I did squats followed by frog jumps. Sometimes I opened and closed drawers to understand how the automatic locking mechanism worked. Sometimes I brought in a legal pad and drew faces with distended features or fists from different angles. Sometimes I read the files. Who abandoned, abused, neglected who. Who sought sole custody of who. Who was so unfit as guardian for who.

Once in a while, I would be handed a key tied to a stick and asked to retrieve an old file from the archive. The archive was a damp, dark, oddly-shaped closet under the stairway in the parking garage where unsound file boxes were stacked five-high. Let me remind readers that the arachnids of northern California include tarantulas, black widows, brown recluses, wolf spiders, and jumping spiders, most of which inhabit damp, dark, oddly-shaped spaces and prefer the chlorinated flavor of tanned California teens.

Even with all of my dragging on I could only collect a few hours a day and a few days per week of work. My paychecks were often for $35 or less. It was just enough to cover my expenses, which were (1) gas for a car with which I once in a while drove my girlfriend over the hills to a grocery store in a beachside agricultural town that sold artichoke bread made from artichokes lopped off their stems five hundred feet away from the store, and (2) seven dollars once every two weeks for bags of porcelain clay to throw on the potter's wheel.

I did just fine at the wheel -- it was just a matter of believing that your arms, braced against your body, were stronger than the clay -- and I threw pottery of majestic height, but I couldn't be bothered to finish anything I started. The pleasure of overpowering spinning mounds of wet porcelain was more interesting to me than shaving pretty feet or dabbing chromium oxide in floral patterns onto a pot. My hundred and twenty hours at the studio that summer produced twenty-two pots, of which only seven were fired into bisque, four were glazed and completed, and two were loaded into my car and brought home. Neither survived to the following summer, when I quit my job and left for college.