The Twenty-Ninth of August, dreaded day. Fifty Eight Years Ago. I was coming out from between a woman's legs, my mother's. I know it's forbidden to think of sex and your mother at the same time. Nine months getting out and the rest of your life trying to get back in. None of that now. Disrespectful. I have lain much alone since that initial pounding and wiping. Sex doesn't seem the great engine in my life that it is in other artists lives, pushing them, straining against chains of repression, illuminating nudes with a searchlight quest for pleasure, coloring fiction with smoky blasts of raw passion. Where once it was a prepossession, a steam train thrusting toward ecstasy, sex is now, more and more, a depilated means of relieving tension, prelude to sleep. Womb and tomb confounding. Getting laid and laying down sport equal attractions.

I offered my neighbors a ride to the airport this morning. The two women, lovers for half a decade, span a generation, one my age, the other twenty years younger. Painting a portrait of them would occupy a week of police blotters and a thick file of medical notes.

The older one, Sharon, knows the agony of the feet, and prepares well in advance for arrival of all enemies, including old age. Her brother, a fat couch potato and successful commercial artist in Los Angeles, dropped dead in his bathroom two months ago. He was pleasant, relaxed, confident, funny, secure, affectionate with his three sisters and his girl friend, devoid of symptom, and then dead. Sharon and her sisters yo-yo-ed together in L.A. to distribute his estate for which he had never bothered to write a will. They accepted the will of God, they being Christian Scientists and disease free, buried him, and reeled themselves back to New York, Hong Kong, and San Francisco. Sharon knows the night stalker can arrive without knocking.

Blaine on the other hand has experimented only enough to know that nothing needs advance preparation if she carries adequate aggression in her holster. She nominates the first hammerblow thought as the winning candidate when electing a solution to a problem. While she's impulsive and rash, she is also quick, brilliant, well-educated, and two hundred fifty pounds of muscle with attitude. She's a doctor who searches genetic forests for unicorns. The drug company that employs her talents, regularly requires her attendance at conferences and meetings about bioengineered promises. She does her hair, packs her meeting suit fifteen minutes before she has to leave fifteen minutes after rising without counting money or leaving any messages. She knows where she is in relation to the sun at any moment. That suffices.

"I'm not getting up until seven," she commanded, when I asked what time they had to leave for the airport. "The flight's at 8:30. We leave at 7:30. That's gets us there in plenty of time." No use protesting about rush hour or time to pack the car, Blaine had decided.

"What time do you get up?" she asked me.

"Usually 4:30 AM. I worry about being unemployed and it wakes me up."

"Don't you have... You told me you saved money."

"I do. I did. So I'm not going to starve tonight. But I worry. With all the things I know how to do, nobody wants to pay me to do them anymore. So I worry. Then I get up, study, worry, look for work. That's what I do all day."

"So if you don't need a job right away, don't look for work for six months. It's depressing. The market's terrible now. Don't do it. There."

Sharon sighed in the other room, finishing some report for her job so she could leave for the week's voyage without pissing anybody off.

I didn't argue with Blaine. She doesn't argue. She attacks. It would be like debating an axe murderer in mid-chop. An appeal to pity wouldn't work either. How could I explain to such confidence that not finding work based on a resume filled with thirty years of skill building was like being told no one needed me. I am out. Not needed. We'll call you. Come back in the future when you're retrained, liver spotless, cheap, and have another thirty years of surplus value to offer. Take a long vacation. Get off the planet. Outfit either side of the coffin with female legs and dive in. Drop dead and spit blood.

I promised to arrive at 7:15, a compromise that Sharon silently agreed to while Blaine turned away in the kitchen. No sense her arguing with a madman who arrives too early on a morning that will already start way too soon for her. What use arguing with a senseless worry? Who wants to argue with a loser, anyway, especially one who's offering a free lift?

---

Return to top
Send e-mail to Joseph Woodard

<jwoodard@best.com>

Unemployment Blues copyright © 2002 by Joseph Woodard
is on the web at http://jwoodard.best.vwh.net/loser.html