Temporary Employment in Red Cross Time
Rob Cook Hackettstown, New Jersey. 11:30 a.m. A late and nervous autumn. The unmarked brown building easy to find. Mostly empty, rent-by-the-month offices. More like a situation of boxes than a building. The ones hiring me sat days and years deep in their chain smoking. The room was small and held together with a long table, three phones, and three folding chairs that looked stolen from a church fellowship hall. No windows. No evidence of an outside world anywhere. Two men and one woman worked there, and they attacked their ashtrays as if the ashtrays demanded to be fed and would not leave them alone; they represented the Red Cross and were up from North Carolina. But only for five days. And only one of them had a name. Eric Everham, with his confidence-shadowed eyes and scarecrow hairline hired me, after one phone call—the first response from the Blairstown Press classifieds—to collect donations from otherwise shipwrecked businesses. He didn’t know a thing about me. His only interview question: “Do you want to make some money, or what?” Working their slow rotary phones, the man and woman paid no attention, the dense cigarette smoke distorting their obese, graying bodies. I was given a list of businesses and the amounts of money expected and a stack of cheaply-printed local business directories shining with the bloodless Red Cross logo. Everham stressed the importance of the Essroc Cement Company in Phillipsburg. “That’s a five hundred dollar donation. Make sure you hit that one. No matter what. I don’t care if you have to crawl there,” he said. I went back out into the world with my cracked, poisonous eyesight, my keratoconus, and pulled away in my Ford station wagon. It was already halfway between noon and 12:30, and Everham told me to be back no later than 4 pm. 4 pm was when they disappeared. He spoke in a manner that suggested this limited time frame was not only adequate, but generous. And so I went as neatly as I could into the resistance of the early afternoon, but with no map. And no knowledge of the roads though I lived there through thirty years of transportation. I stopped first at Bob Pimentel’s Auto Repair and asked for Bob Pimentel. And there was no Bob Pimentel. I asked for the money that belonged to the Red Cross. And there was no money for the Red Cross. The man at the register who wasn’t a man but seemed clearly flummoxed by what he was learning after the blind years of high school said he couldn’t help me. Trying to see through my keratoconus, my return-to-sender eyes that chopped every lit thing into forests of high beam shards, even during the daytime, I could not fathom the existence of Phillipsburg. Separating the road from its traffic presented enough of a challenge. Phillipsburg was nowhere near my money-making anxiety. I had no map to the place inside my head where Everham planted Phillipsburg. I was born in Phillipsburg. The Delaware River was not born in Phillipsburg, though it sneaks past it at night and also during the day and it can be shot at and easily wounded—they call the wounds “fish” in these parts—during those large hours when I’m both driving and looking for my destinations. The money stayed silent in my head the way it always has. And so I continued to the next name on my list, the Chung Chow Chinese Buffet in the flunked acorn town of Washington. Crossing the parking lot, I had to zip up my pants, because they were always unzipped. A woman driving by yelled, “Stop playing with yourself!” It was a day of bland sky and little oxygen. The Chinese Buffet suffocating between Shoes for Shirley and Bagels, Incorporated. Instead of asking for the money, I ordered pepper steak and a dark soda. I asked also for a straw. The restaurant empty, I sat at the table farthest from the kitchen. I kept thinking about my inability to recognize the scams of reality, which I thought about so often it was almost a celebration. The food arrived without a face, and without a voice, but the strips of meat were so wet they looked like they were crying. Soon everything on the plate disappeared and it was time to go back to work and not think about what made me less conscious than others. I paid my bill and said I was from the Red Cross, and asked for the fifty dollars the man may or may not have promised, and tried tempting him with the little striptease book of one and two-man businesses. He looked at me as if I were someone who would never eat his food. With less than one syllable he told me to wait. Phone calls were made in the language of some hurried sodium country. Fifteen minutes, at least. The day was crookedly approaching 4pm. The man, who looked a little shorter now, a little more like part of a drowned sea, handed me an envelope and told me to leave. And with an hour and a half left in Red Cross time, and less dumbness in my stomach now that I’d planted some food and some napkins to soak up its hunger, I found the four small businesses that donated ten, twenty dollars each. Some difficulty, though. Driving up and down the same street for too long, too many quickly-written radio songs. Parking the car, confused, failing to locate the correct destinations. Maybe someone laughing at me from an open window, or just trees moving the wind along. And then finding the right place and not being welcomed. Being told to sit and wait, and always by someone who’d accomplished fewer years than I. Glancing through the magazines stacked in a pile of weak glare, magazines meant for waiting and not much else, I saw nothing but extinction, supermodels and halfmodels, both female blouse models and male shoe models, smiling for their survival. And at each business the exchange of money for a soon-to-be discarded booklet was completed with a nod of fatigue and a moment when everything is forgotten. People who devoted their lives to the paid work of defending their establishments against the invading sleep. Three stops in over an hour, and all of them less than a mile apart. I loaded my too-thin body once again into my driver’s seat and set out for Curves, a fitness establishment for people who will never have curves of their own. This particular establishment, according to a life-sized poster at the entrance, boasted the presence of a Public Figure. “Matt Willard, who lost 250 pounds, visited us once and he now ‘Swears by the Curve.’” In fact, that is exactly what the poster said: MATT WILLARD, PUBLIC FIGURE, SWEARS BY THE CURVE. Matt Willard looked attractive enough, though dishonest in that way typical to men who sold, if not muscles, then maps to building muscles. His smile seemed to follow me to the check-in desk, making me aware of my flaws. “You’re from the Red Cross?” a trainer asked, obviously a missing person, her body the size of a man’s leg and her eyes crowded with insipid night club music. And from her expression, it wasn’t clear how I was supposed to look at her, or which words would cause her to rescind the donation. But it was the only uncomplicated money that day. A check for seven dollars and seventy-five cents. I thanked her and she fogged up with disdain beneath the fake and blaring rhymes and picked up a clipboard, waiting for the music to inform her what needed to be written and shared with her kind, which did not include Eric Everham or the cloudy directory I offered her, where no one had money. The largest donation, $500, from Essroc Cement in Phillipsburg, I was saving for last. But by the time I realized my mistake in the rationed minutes, it was quarter to four. No time. And when I arrived back at the village of brown office shacks, the deep pine knots and nicotine atmospheres that comprised Eric Everham yelled at me for not collecting the largest donation first. “You had more than enough time and there was no sun today. Did the overcast sky catch itself in your eyes? Do you understand the difference between five hundred dollars and twenty dollars? Do you know how much work, how many well-proven words it took to get that pledge?” he said through his clenched eyes. He said it was over, they’d never get that kind of money now. He handed me my commission. Ten dollars. “Don’t come back,” he said, “Dwayne here could’ve done this faster than you and he’s not even from around here.” The woman, whose body suggested no name whatsoever, was infiltrated with sleep but muttered something to Dwayne anyway. Finished for the day, the three of them working their cigarettes looked like tumbleweeds someone might have condemned from a year inhabited by nothing but tumbleweed wavelengths and cold unanswered calls and the ten dollars shivering in my hand. “Don’t let Phillipsburg trip you on the way out,” the woman snickered before the cigarette disappeared again between her lips, this time for good. |
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About the Author:
Rob Cook lives in New York City’s East Village. He is the author of six collections, including Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), The Undermining of the Democratic Club (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), and Asking My Liver for Forgiveness (Rain Mountain Press, 2014). Work has appeared or will appear in Sugar House Review, Versal, Bomb, Rhino, Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry Review, Caliban, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Toad Suck Review, Dalhousie Review, Verse, Quiddity, etc.
Rob Cook lives in New York City’s East Village. He is the author of six collections, including Empire in the Shade of a Grass Blade (Bitter Oleander Press, 2013), The Undermining of the Democratic Club (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014), and Asking My Liver for Forgiveness (Rain Mountain Press, 2014). Work has appeared or will appear in Sugar House Review, Versal, Bomb, Rhino, Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry Review, Caliban, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Toad Suck Review, Dalhousie Review, Verse, Quiddity, etc.
