Erik Anderson
The Hatch was a boozy, surf and turf kind of place, and though it wasn't formally connected to the marina behind it, the restaurant was like the inside of a schooner: dark and musty and wooden. I don't know, now, that I needed to work, but I loved counting the bills I received at the end of the night from the husky-voiced waitresses, all of them flirty and past their prime.
It was 1992. I was thirteen.
I kept the job for a year or more and then, after a short break, found another, and another, and another. In this way I worked into, then through my twenties. During those rare periods when I didn't have a job, usually just weeks, I was looking for one.
The mixed feelings I had about these early jobs appeared to derive from the nature of the work, rather than work in general. And even as I grew tired, say, of throwing away half-eaten steaks, wiping then resetting tables with new sets of knives and blue napkins, I never considered the possibility that the problem wasn't the Hatch.
Years later, in the weeks after 9/11, I took a job delivering auto parts in the Michigan town where I grew up. In the long accounting of shitty jobs I've had, this one stands out as a window onto a life that could never really have been mine, a life to which my advantages had inoculated me. Hundreds of people had applied for a few open positions, my boss told me, but he had been to college and wanted someone he could talk to—a polite way of voicing scorn for people he might have otherwise called trailer trash.
When I quit late the following spring for my first stint of graduate school, my boss told me he'd seen it coming the day he hired me. The others—Russ, Tammy, and Mark—would never amount to anything, he said. This was the best job they'd get. But me, I had a future that wouldn't involve a forklift. My license would expire into anecdote.
I was bad at these sorts of jobs, even the best of them, which was probably shelving books at the Denver Public Library. By "best" I don't mean most remunerative, of course: that was the hedge fund at the top of the Citibank building, where they catered our meals and where our billionaire bosses were discussed in hushed tones, as though they were tempestuous gods we were wary of displeasing.
The library allowed us to listen to our headphones at least, which meant I could usually avoid my co-workers, who over many years and in a variety of jobs had proven themselves to be nearly as bad at working with others as I was. Everyone everywhere was embittered with management, often for good reason. Petty conflicts emerged one after another in a steady stream. Someone wasn't pulling their weight. Someone else was always calling in sick. Another talked too much.
Rolling cart after cart of materials through the stacks was tedious work, but it wasn't hard. It was just boring. A person can only listen to so many episodes of Radiolab, and in time all of The National's songs start sounding even more like all of their other ones. A person can't do a job like that indefinitely, or at least I couldn't. My ceiling was something like nine months.
I was halfway through a second stretch of grad school by then, and for the first time I was beginning to think about a career in teaching. I thought, naïvely, that this wouldn't amount to work in the sense I had known it. The hours would be flexible and the coworkers so congenial they would be called colleagues instead.
But if nails are the only things you know, you'll pretty much always be looking for a hammer. For a long time, that's what I thought a life in teaching would be. And to be clear, I've bought a home. I've found time to write. That wouldn't have happened delivering auto parts. It wouldn't have happened shelving books.
Still, I sometimes wonder what it would mean to revolutionize work, not so that the Russes and Tammys and Marks of the world could become professors, but so that teaching and delivering auto parts were a lot more like each other, and a lot less. What would it mean for work to become something like the labor of rainforest plants, exhaling in the morning the moisture that will pour down in the afternoon as rain, nourishing all manner of life in the canopy and below?
Once, in the back room of the library where I worked, the Schlessman Family Branch, I expressed more pointedly political versions of these questions. I had recently traveled to Mexico, and in a small village called Tlamacazapa, in the state of Guerrero, I had visited with street peddlers who earned about a dollar a day, packed in small, ramshackle huts, living almost unimaginably impoverished lives. One father told us he was building the walls of his house as he could afford them, one cinder block at a time. Such poverty still seems to me the fundamental injustice of the so-called free market, but the end result of talking through it with the other shelvers was a reprimand from our supervisor. One coworker even asked to change shifts.
Nostalgia for samsara, perhaps—what Buddhists call the tendency to embrace our limited lives rather than attempt to transcend them. Meaning: we prefer the devil we know to the devil we don't. Meaning: better to accept inequality as a fact of life than to renounce work as a cycle of suffering.
While there are times when teaching becomes as tedious as folding napkins, most days I love the work I'm paid to do. Most days, I can't imagine doing anything else. That, in the sense I've been developing here, is precisely the problem. I have so identified with my work that its discontinuance would feel like discontinuing myself. That it wouldn't and shouldn't be is the tragedy of work, something few of us escape in any lasting, meaningful way.
For my part, a single episode comes to mind. One night twenty years ago, I found the manager of the Ann Arbor restaurant where I was waiting tables and told him I needed to leave. He thought I was sick, that I needed to go home to recover. No, I explained. I'm not coming back.
It was a good job, more like the hedge fund than the auto parts warehouse, but walking the half-mile to my apartment I felt joy in Zadie Smith's sense: something more like insanity than pleasure. Soon enough I would need another job, but for a few days I was free. It was early summer. I read A Hundred Years of Solitude in the sun.