January 19, 2013
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Nothing gives a man more of a sense of purpose, and there remains nothing more dignified, than hauli
http://www.esquire.com/features/stories-of-unemployment-0312
Work
Nothing gives a man more of a sense of purpose, and there remains nothing more dignified, than hauling yourself out of bed and going to work. But some of those jobs that went away in the recession — some whole professions — are never coming back. That’s what the men in this story are facing. They are men. That we all know. They might even be us.
By Ryan D’Agostino
Published in the March 2012 issue
SCOTT
A plastic room-service tray sits on the floor in the hotel hallway, piled high with a half-eaten bowl of oatmeal hardened into a gray fist, misshapen chunks of slimy cantaloupe, strips of bacon hanging over plate edges like socks, pale pancakes with bites missing, and crumpled napkins soggy with imitation syrup.
Scott Annechino doesn’t notice the tray of rotting breakfast, or pretends not to. He is doing everything he can think of to get a job, and so in the middle of a sunny Thursday a few months ago, Annechino arrives at the Embassy Suites on a commercial road nearthe San Francisco airport. It’s one of those hotels in which the rooms circle a soaring atrium. In the center lobby, travelers with wheeled suitcases drink coffee among koi ponds and palm trees. A glass elevator carries him to the third floor, where the front-desk girl, who knows it’s her job to be cheerful, told him the job fair is supposed to be.
A pasty kid, maybe thirty, in a too-big shirt and a cheap tie, greets him and tells him the companies are set up in rooms along the hall and that he should definitely visit all of them. Annechino, forty-four years old, wearing his best suit and shined black shoes, walks to the first exhibitor: Devcon, a home-security company. The door is closed, no one inside. Annechino looks around for an explanation. “Oh, I just got an e-mail from my contact there saying they wouldn’t be able to make it today,” the pasty kid says, fingering his BlackBerry.
A couple of other potential employers who were supposed to be here didn’t make it, either — Konica Minolta, Santa Clara University. “Yeah …” the kid says. Annechino moves to the next room. State Farm. They’re looking for people who can put up fifty grand to start their own insurance agency. The Art Institute is next, mostly looking for people who might want to go to art school. New York Life. The U. S. Army, where men wearing fatigues and combat boots offer brochures.
That’s it.
Annechino was a social worker for more than twenty years. Child protective services, mostly. Went into schools, went into homes — sometimes with a couple of cops, when they had to remove a child in a bad part of the city. But it got too political — too much infighting, too many lazy people. Wherever he worked, Scott tried to get the place to run more efficiently and more fairly. For example, a state study, he says, recommended a caseload of around twenty per caseworker, and his once hit seventy. Two years ago, he left under messy circumstances. There was a hearing to determine whether he was eligible for unemployment benefits. No one from CPS showed up, but Scott was there — stood in court wearing a suit and made his case, yes, sir, and the judge agreed. He got his unemployment. Ninety-nine weeks, they give you.
That was about ninety-four weeks ago. Ninety-four weeks of looking for work. That’s a lot of mornings to wake up with nowhere to be, no one waiting for you to walk through the door. Those mornings pile up until it feels like you can’t breathe. There is dignity in hauling your ass out of bed every morning and going to work — there is purpose in it. Like it or not, what we do is part of who we are, and when you have nothing to do, you can start to wonder who you are. This can be a good thing — they say some people find themselves when they lose their jobs. But not when you have people depending on you, and not when your particular job loss — a wrenching experience for you, but invisible to most of the world — comes at a time when the jobs you want, or the jobs you need, or even the jobs you’ll take, simply don’t exist. You can’t be who you once were. And the person you want to be? That becomes less clear with each sunrise.
As for Scott Annechino landing another job in social work, forget it — these days they won’t even look at you unless you have a master’s degree, which wasn’t true twenty years ago. But he’s good with people, can talk to anyone. He’s looking at sales or business development, something like that, where he can talk. So he’s online every day — Monster, CareerBuilder, all the sites, uploading his résumé onto the Internet, which is like pinning it to the sky. And he’s here at the Embassy Suites, walking toward the elevator past the cold oatmeal, saying aloud to no one, “This is a joke.”
Tim Soter
Name: Greg
Age: 32
Occupation: Former warehouse supervisor
Greg and Janell didn’t buy each other gifts at Christmas, but they didn’t mind that so much. The girls are five and four, and watching them open up the few presents they could afford was gift enough.GREG
The day they let him go started like any other. It was last fall, about a month before his thirty-second birthday. Janell was still on maternity leave from the bank, where she works full-time as a teller, and she was feeding Greg Jr. in bed. Their room shares a thin plaster wall with the bedroom where his two girls, who are five and four, sleep. They’re allowed to watch cartoons on the small flatscreen in their room when they wake up, but the minute they heard Greg and Janell rustling around, they sprinted in like they always do, jumping on Daddy, asking questions.
The Hantons live on the second floor of a row house on Francis Lewis Boulevard in Hollis, Queens, a few doors down from the house Greg grew up in. He’s known the landlady his whole life — she’s the mom of one of his buddies from growing up. She carved the upstairs into two tiny bedrooms and a kitchen and offered it to Greg for $1,225 a month, utilities included. It’s a nice block — Tudor-style houses, each with a little patio out front and a gate by the sidewalk. His landlady grows tomatoes and strawberries in plastic trays.
A little after one in the afternoon, Hanton drove his 2006 Honda Accord the twenty minutes to the Raymour & Flanigan warehouse on Metropolitan Avenue, where he worked as a supervisor. He liked to get there a little early for his 2:00-to-10:30 shift so he could see how the morning shift went and get things ready for his crew of five laborers.
It was looking like a busy day. Three trailers were due in, which would have to be unloaded and their contents stocked in the proper sections of the warehouse within two hours apiece. The guys had a lunch hour, a half-hour break, and two ten-minute breathers. Hanton knew they would have to work quickly. He divided up the jobs — unload, unwrap, move to the right section — and the crew went to work.
The sun was shining, not that you could see much sky except through the truck bays. Hanton usually spent much of his shift in the windowless back office, making sure each piece of furniture ended up in precisely the right place so that everything was in order for the next shift. There was always the damaged furniture to assign, too — anything wood to Repair 1, sofas to Rep 2, loose parts to Rep 3. Stuff that was just nicked up and could be sold in stores went to V/C, for “back to vendor” or “clearance.” On a busy day, Hanton and his crew handled fifteen hundred pieces of furniture in a single shift.
Hanton had been working about two hours when he saw the operations manager, a good enough guy, come back from lunch. He said hello to Greg, waved. A couple of minutes later, Greg was walking from the warehouse to the office when the operations manager appeared again and asked to talk to him. Sure, Greg said. The man walked past his own office and into the office of the RDO, or regional director of operations. This was unusual. Could he have done something wrong? He had never been in any kind of trouble here.
Hanton sat down. The RDO said that, matter of fact, they knew Hanton had been shorthanded the night before — he had only three men instead of five — but certain areas of the warehouse had been left in unacceptable condition, and they were terminating him immediately.
Tim Soter
LARRY
Larry Stocks was a king.
LeAnn Rimes once stood in his office at eight o’clock in the morning and sang for him while he drank his coffee. Aerosmith played the company party one year, Dolly Parton another. This was the 1990s, when he worked for the Handleman Company, the biggest distributor of CDs, videos, books, and computer software this country had ever known. Handleman was a monster. Billion and a half dollars a year. At one point it controlled most of the media sold at places like Bradlees, Caldor, Walmart, and Kmart — it decided which albums would be sold, how they would be stocked, and how long they would stay on the racks. Then Handleman started buying up content rights — they actually owned the music they were selling to the stores. That’s power. That gets LeAnn Rimes singing in your office at eight in the morning.
Larry’s wife liked the flashy part of his job — the skybox tickets, the celebrities — but that actually didn’t excite him much. Sure, he liked having a company car (including gas), an expense account, and a nice office. But mostly Larry Stocks liked selling. That’s what he does; it’s who he is. Larry Stocks can sell anything — a ketchup Popsicle to an Eskimo, or whatever they say. Selling starts with empathy, and Larry can show empathy like nobody’s business. He’s got the brick-wall build of a high school football coach and a shiny bald head with a fringe of light hair. Dresses smart — slacks, blazers, sometimes a tie clip. His face is round and warm, and his voice is gentle and raspy and makes people feel at ease. His eyes squint friendly. And so when he’s talking to you, all perfect logic and reason, and he says at the end, “Does that make sense to you?” you find yourself nodding. Yeah, Larry, it sure does make sense.
How many thousands of times has he had that same conversation, giving that same friendly squint?
Back in 1979, when he was barely twenty-five years old, Stocks started off with a small rack-jobber out of Hagerstown, Maryland, a sleepy town in the crook of the intersection of I-81 and I-70. A rack-jobber is hired by stores that want to sell certain kinds of merchandise — in the case of the Interstate Group, it was magazines at first. Interstate would buy all the magazines up front, then set up and stock the racks in stores every week, and take back whatever hadn’t sold. Stocks made sure they took care of everything — follow-up is the most important part of customer service, see. It takes time to walk into every store and ask how everything is going, but that’s what Larry did.
Interstate got into music, eventually, and Stocks headed up that part of the business — 45′s and LP’s and eight-tracks at first, then cassettes. When VHS came along, they added those, too — this was at a time when you could sell blank VHS tapes for eighteen or twenty dollars apiece. Nothing on ‘em! When Stocks started at Interstate, it was pulling in $300,000 to $400,000 a year in music sales. By the time Handleman bought Interstate in 1990, Larry Stocks had built it into a $78 million business.
MICHAEL
Name: Michael
Age: 30
Occupation: Business-school graduate
No one in his family ever had trouble finding work until Michael, the youngest, graduated last May with an M.B.A. from Boston College, in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.Henry Lesnik came to the United States from Poland during the Great Depression. He worked in a foundry and eventually made bombs for the Navy during World War II. He worked hard. He raised his son, Thomas, in Queens and taught him to work hard, too. Thomas liked to play ball in the neighborhood, but organized sports were off-limits — he was to study and play the accordion for a little money on the weekends. That was it.
Thomas worked hard like his father. His father’s work had afforded him the opportunity to succeed, and he wasn’t going to squander that. It was the same on his mother’s side: Her father had come over from Poland, too, learned English, and started an ice company, hauling huge blocks around Manhattan by horse-drawn carriage.
Thomas went to St. John’s University in Queens. In three years he earned enough credits to get into medical school but not to actually graduate from the university. So he left, never graduated, and the next fall matriculated at Albany Medical College. He eventually settled in Connecticut and opened his own ear-nose-and-throat practice in 1973. He woke up early and went to bed late so that he could give his five children even better opportunities than he had. A nice home near the water, private school, their mother at home to take care of them while he ran his practice. None of them ever had trouble finding work until the youngest, Michael, graduated last May from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College with an M.B.A., in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.
GREG
It felt strange to be driving at rush hour. Usually Hanton commuted during off-hours, but here he was, bumping along the Grand Central Parkway with all the other cars carrying people home from work, like logs on a river.
He didn’t make a scene when they said that word — terminated. He didn’t protest. He just thanked them for the opportunity, took his lunch from the fridge, and walked out into the sunshine to his car.
He understood what was happening. The man who had hired Greg had been let go, too, and the new guy started cleaning house almost immediately. Wanted his own guys in there, it seemed like. And it wasn’t as if Greg loved the job, either. He and Janell had actually gone to a job fair a few weeks before — her grandmother came over to watch the kids. Cablevision had openings for residential cable installers, and Greg left his résumé. He was also waiting to take the test for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to become a bus driver.
But Raymour was paying him $40,000 a year, with benefits. It was a solid management position on his résumé and the most money he had ever made. He knew his family would never go hungry — between his and Janell’s mothers and grandmothers, and all their friends and neighbors, no one would let that happen. But the girls were growing fast and eating all day, and Greg Jr. needed constant replenishments of diapers and formula. There was the rent, the car payments, car insurance, cell phones, and cable, not to mention clothes, gas, and the Christmas shopping that would have to be done in the next month.
And it wasn’t right, the way they did it. Hanton used to work sick, came in early, always helped in the warehouse to speed things up, even when he was told he could stay in the office. The only day he could remember missing in his eight months on the job was when Greg Jr. had a fever and Greg had to drive him to the ER. If his crew was still unloading at quitting time and wouldn’t have time to clean up — you can imagine the mountains of cardboard and plastic wrap after a truck is unloaded — Hanton did it himself, without even thinking. Lately he was even wearing a boot on one foot because he had strained his Achilles tendon. He was pretty sure he’d done it lifting a dresser out of a truck one day, but he wasn’t about to make a big deal out of it.
The RDO knew all this. Greg just looked at him, asked him to reconsider. Nothing we can do, he said.
Greg drove along, his mind pinballing between anger and resignation. What does a man do when one day his job isn’t there anymore? When he doesn’t have to be there the next day at two o’clock? When he doesn’t really have to be anywhere?
He called Janell.
“Baby, I got fired,” he said.
“Stop playing.” She was lying down with Greg Jr. as he napped.
“I’m serious. I’m coming home.”
A moment passed before Janell said into the phone, “What are we gonna do?”
LARRY
Like a lot of North Carolina boys in the 1930s, Stocks’s father went from the tobacco farm to the army. By the time he had children, years later, he was an aide to Lieutenant General Ridgely Gaither, a three-star general in charge of the U. S. Caribbean Command and a veteran of Korea and World War II. They were stationed on a base in the Panama Canal Zone, which is where Larry lived until he was six. There was a big stone wall around the base, which kept the larger animals out, but Larry remembers watching the sloths, strange-looking, hairy animals that could hang upside down from the trees in the jungle just outside the perimeter of the base. Larry’s father wasn’t overly strict, but he was an army sergeant and liked order and obedience. He was one for getting your hair cut, that sort of thing.
They moved back up to Maryland as his father approached retirement, and Larry was sent to Fork Union Military Academy, in Fluvanna County, Virginia, a rural pocket between Richmond and Charlottesville that sent twelve hundred men to fight for the Confederacy in the Civil War. The school was a football factory, and Larry played well enough to land on the University of Maryland’s team after graduation in 1972. But he suffered a ventral hernia on the field — basically, his stomach muscle was ripped open, and his intestines spilled out. Larry left school, got married, and went looking for work.
It was 1976. He was barely twenty-two years old, and he had a wife and child to support and a future to start.
MICHAEL
Dr. Lesnik had done well for himself. Through hard work and some luck with the real estate market, he owned two waterfront homes, side by side, in Old Lyme, a quiet town on Long Island Sound. Michael could stay in one of the houses while he waited for a job to come through — which he figured would take a few weeks, maybe a month.
Mike got up early each morning and, wearing the T-shirt and gym shorts and fleece socks he had slept in, read the news. Then he sat in front of his computer and scoured the online job boards. He wanted something entrepreneurial, even if it was for a big company — something where he could use his brain to invent some new product or service that no one had ever thought of before but that everyone needs. He wanted every day at work to be thrilling.
Weeks passed. Months. The spring of 2011 became the summer, and then the fall. In the afternoons, he ran. Sometimes on the beach, but mostly through streets lined with summer rentals. He mowed lawns — a twenty-nine-year-old M.B.A. mowing lawns. If the surf was good, he’d drive the twenty minutes across the state line to Rhode Island, where the waves were bigger. He felt guilty when he did this, of course. Told himself he should be at the computer, submitting online applications to companies that would never, ever respond. Told himself he should be thinking of new people to network with — old classmates, friends of his parents, professors, anyone. But how many people have you even met when you’re twenty-nine?
It shouldn’t be this hard, he would think to himself. You work hard, you get into a good school, you do pretty well, you print out all those cover letters and all those résumés — he wondered if maybe he should try bartending, just to tide him over. But then the minute he went out and got a bartending gig, he told himself, his phone would ring with an offer. So it hardly seemed worth it, when the phone was gonna ring any day. Because it had to ring any day. It just had to.
GREG
His mother always figured it out, didn’t she? She ran a Pizza Hut for as long as he could remember. General manager. Supported Greg and his little brother Willie and then David after him. It took her almost an hour to get there each way. But she made it work. It’s like a reminder for Greg, seeing that house just off Francis Lewis every day, the same one his mother woke up in every morning to get him and his brothers ready for school, and came home to every night, exhausted, her feet aching, the stale, sweet smell of tomato sauce and cheese on her clothes. Never a minute to herself.
People still know Greg on this block, on these streets. He walks his girls to that same elementary school every morning, P.S. 134, and now people know them, too: the Hanton sisters. He likes that.
The first step after he lost his job last year was to call the unemployment office and get those payments flowing. But they didn’t call him back and didn’t call him back. Hanton wondered if Raymour was telling the government he wasn’t eligible. Greg knew he could fight that claim easily if it came to that.
Next: a financial plan. He mapped it out, and even if the unemployment checks didn’t start soon, he could survive for two months — until December. After that, he could get a job at the Buffalo Wild Wings franchise over in Long Island, where his uncle worked. That wouldn’t be ideal — he was making forty grand at Raymour, and this would pay twelve dollars an hour. Plus he would be slinging chicken wings. But at least it would get them through Christmas.
SCOTT
Christmas was going to be big last year. Annechino didn’t have much money — his unemployment was just about up — but he really liked this girl. It had been only about six months, but he was already telling his friends she might be the one. So she was a little younger — so she was twenty-five. Whatever. He felt twenty-five. How many forty-four-year-olds love karaoke as much as he did? And this girl, she was a doll. An actress. She did Cat on a Hot Tin Roofa while back, and was going to be the lead in a production of Cabaret. His friends said she was the female version of him.
Christmas would have a theme: old and new. He bought her a cool old hatbox — she loved hats — and a vintage hat for inside. Then he found a brand-new hatbox and put a new hat inside. He found a jewelry box from around 1900 and some antique earrings to put in it, plus a new jewelry box with new earrings.
And then, because he couldn’t resist, a makeup compact that read, IF YOU CALL ME HIGH-MAINTENANCE, I CONSIDER THAT A COMPLIMENT. She’d laugh at that.
It took him forever to wrap it all up for her.
MICHAEL
Everybody has a reason they can’t hire him.
There’s the huge financial-services firm in Hartford that just called him back for the third time. First time, they marched out about nine different people over two days to talk to him. In the end, they told him they had every confidence he could do the job, but they were concerned it wouldn’t be challenging enough for him. He was overqualified.
He drove back to his father’s house on the water. He read the news, he submitted online applications, he ran in the August heat.
They called back. Another position was open. He drove up to Hartford. Same thing. Nine people. Overqualified. But, they said, they liked him, so they were passing him along to another department that did some kind of high-level strategic thinking. Perfect. A week later, he met with the strategy department, and the guy looked Michael in the eye and said, “They’ve taken all our positions away. My secretary left a month ago, and I’m not even allowed to hire a new one.” And this was a senior vice-president.
Then there’s this little consulting firm that Mike’s in love with. It’s a mom-and-pop, but they haveFortune 500 clients. They said they want to hire him, they really do, but they’d have to go out and drum up some more business to balance the cost. Shouldn’t take more than a week or two, they said. That was three months ago. The owner told Mike a story: One of their longtime clients recently dropped them — a multinational corporation whose name we all know. The firm offered to keep the corporation on for free for a while, to keep the relationship going. You don’t understand, the client said: We’re not authorized to spend money on the airfare to come meet with you. We’re not authorized to pay for the postage. We can’t do it.
And that, Mike Lesnik was told, is why we can’t hire you.
LARRY
Larry scrambled around for work after college. He built swimming pools for a few months, mucking around in backyard holes spraying gunite. He worked for a metal finishing company. While he was doing his training for that, he visited a place called Fleetwood Enterprises, in Williamsport, Maryland. Fleetwood manufactured recreational vehicles, travel trailers, mobile homes, and other ways for people to enjoy the uniquely American pastime of bringing your living room along as you travel the country.
Larry joined as an assistant sales manager. It was great, until the late-1970s gas crisis hit. When you’ve got people pushing their cars in line at the gas station all night to wait for their turn to buy a few gallons, it’s not a good time to be in the RV business.
But hell if Stocks didn’t get a taste of what it takes to sell. When he saw an ad in the paper for something called a rack-jobber, selling magazines to retail stores, he called up and got the job. The Interstate Group. That was the company he took from $300,000 in sales a year to $78 million. It was also the company that got swallowed up — Larry included — by the Handleman Company in 1990.
If it were Stocks’s decision, he wouldn’t have sold. Two brothers owned Interstate, but basically Stocks was his own boss. And so while Handleman became a plush gig for nine years, Larry was drifting further from the places where he felt the strongest and the surest: sitting at a wood table in an airless conference room, or standing on the beaten linoleum floor of a department store with the fluorescent glare shining off his glasses, or holding the phone to his ear listening to every lilt and rhythm in the voice on the other end, trying to read the person’s thoughts. Selling. Things. To people.
And so, as the twentieth century approached its end, he left.
Went back to the rack-jobbers.
Small-time. Sandusky, Ohio. Chaska, Minnesota. Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Four companies in thirteen years where he could call the shots. The last one was in Ivyland, Pennsylvania. By the time he took the job in 2004, online downloads of music and movies and video games had long been taking business from the stores where Larry used to haggle under the fluorescent lights. By last summer, most of those stores didn’t exist anymore. And what that meant was, well, Larry’s job didn’t exist anymore.
On his last day, they had a lunch catered at the office, and his boss, a man he had known for years, praised his dedication, his intelligence. A few of them went out to a bar after. And that was it.
MICHAEL
His older brothers used to call him Mikey Tikey. He was always a little guy, didn’t really fill out until college. But Jesus, he could hit a baseball. And throw and run. All three of the Lesnik boys were good athletes, but because Mike was small, his talent surprised other teams. Mike Lesnik was a scrapper. He couldn’t control his size, but he could control how hard he tried, and no one was going to try harder than him.
One day last October he was wearing a trim-fitting pinstripe suit, standing in a line of people in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Farmington, Connecticut. Five months had passed since graduation. The few employment possibilities he had, if you could call them that — the small consulting firm, the big company that kept calling him back — were barely keeping the fuzz of discouragement off his brain. He and his girlfriend talked about moving in together and vaguely about spending their lives together, and it made him anxious, because he couldn’t even afford a sandwich, let alone rent.
No one talked in the line. When Lesnik got to the front, he stood for a moment before entering the banquet hall and collected himself. Behind the tall oak door was a job fair. The ad had said to dress well, bring a lot of résumés, and be ready to talk. He could ace an on-the-spot interview, and he knew it. He walked in.
Immediately, a tall, weird-looking old guy with a ponytail and a backpack bumped into him on his way out. There were folding tables set up around the perimeter, and a few people stood in line at each, waiting their turn to be told they could apply for jobs online. Over in the Aflac line was a kid wearing khakis and a golf shirt, untucked. There was a table in the middle of the room where four or five people just sat, drinking water, thumbing the brochure. What the hell were they doing? Hanging out at a job fair?
Lesnik gripped his leather folder tight — the one that held the multiple copies of his résumé. He exhaled. This felt cruel. Like if you blindfolded a little kid and told him you were taking him to a carnival but instead you drove to an auto-parts store. It was crushing.
So what did Mikey Tikey do? He stayed for an hour and a half, waited patiently at every goddamn booth and listened to the rehearsed lines — Here’s how to apply on our Web site, here’s a brochure.And he told them no, he was looking for something higher up. Did they know of anything higher up? Something where he could use his M.B.A., where he could use his brain?
They looked at him a little funny, and smiled politely.
GREG
Greg and Janell didn’t buy gifts for each other at Christmas — not even a video game for Greg — but they didn’t mind that so much. Watching the girls open the few presents they could afford was gift enough.
He thought he would be working by now. He felt in his heart that he would. He had gone to a few job interviews, but they told him he was overqualified. Hanton is a worker, and he had worked hard to achieve what he had — supervisor, making forty grand, good car, nice little place in the neighborhood, got to take Janell out once in a while. Now he had to think about changing his résumé to make himself look less successful so he wouldn’t have to keep hearing how overqualified he was. This felt strange. He wondered how many men out there were dumbing down their lives to try to get a job.
Not long after Christmas, he sits on his bed, watching Greg Jr. sleep, listening to his soft breaths, watching his tiny chest rise and fall, rise and fall. A few more weeks and the boy will be six months old. Janell is at work, the girls are playing somewhere, and the apartment is quiet. Greg has lived here so long he doesn’t notice the sound of the cars rolling along Francis Lewis outside.
A woman walks by the house. He can just make her out through the window without straining too much — he doesn’t want to wake Greg Jr. The woman walks slowly and carries a handbag at her side. It looks heavy. She might be limping a little. Her form drifts past the bars in Greg’s front gate as if in a dream. She is about his mother’s height, he thinks. She’s walking north up the block, toward his old house. Probably coming home at the end of a shift, like his mother always did, those same footsteps a hundred thousand times on tired, cracked feet.
Greg pulls in a deep breath. He thinks about the furniture warehouse, and the job fairs he’s been to, and his résumé, and about the future, and about his mother. He thinks about the bus-driver job, which would be great. A friend of his told him about a test you can take to work as an armed security guard — armored cars, that kind of thing. That’s a job that doesn’t disappear. He’s going to pursue that. And he looks down at his sleeping boy, and for the first time in a long time without anybody looking, he smiles.
SCOTT
He started collecting coins maybe ten years ago. He has a big colonial collection, defined generally as before 1793. It’s one of the better colonial collections around, he’s been told. He has another collection of coins from the Belgian Congo that may be one of the best in the world.
He’s selling the colonials. It wasn’t the plan, doesn’t make him happy, but there’s no other way. He’s putting it up for auction, where it could sell for $40,000, maybe more. That’s a lot of money, but he has debt, and he has his rent and gas for the car. One thing he might not have much longer is the girlfriend. You know what she got him for Christmas, after all that old-and-new crap he bought her? A plastic tip jar for the nights he hosts karaoke at the bar. Probably cost ten bucks.
Ah, well. What are you gonna do, right? Maybe the age difference was too much. But he still feels like a kid — he just joined a band, singing classic-rock covers. He was very specific in the ad, even naming bands he likes — the Grass Roots, Paul Simon, Seal, Pearl Jam, Bush. These seem like good guys, and they play well enough that they could get some gigs. He lives in his little rented room out by the beach — inconvenient, but nice and cheap.
But what the people at karaoke night and the guys in the band and maybe even the girlfriend don’t know about, don’t see, is the work. The hours spent on CareerBuilder and Indeed.com and all the rest of the sites, clicking through the job postings, tweaking his résumé, uploading his cover letter, trying to stand out. The hours spent driving to job fair after job fair, twenty in two years — putting the suit on, tying the tie, bobbing among the smiling representatives of companies he doesn’t want to work for, driving all the way back out to his small, kitchenless room.
The cold, crusty oatmeal on a tray on the hotel floor. That’s what nobody sees.
A while back, he was driving along thinking about what might come next. All he knew was he wanted to work. It’s nice to sleep late if he wants to, sure. But not forever. He thought about the jobs he had back in high school. There was Al, the kind old drunk who had a subcontractor business cleaning out abandoned buildings. He hired Scott to do the work for him, and soon Scott was loading dumpsters with all kinds of dusty furniture and crap pulled from dark corners. Al gave the kid a raise on his second day, to maybe five bucks an hour, for working so hard.
Then there was the farm. This was in the early eighties in upstate New York, way up near Rochester. Fertile country. Scott loaded bales of hay into wagons out in the fields and then piled them high in the barn. He picked vegetables for hours, bent over — cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, hot peppers.
When he came home at night, he’d blow his nose and it would come out black from all the dust and dirt. But then he’d get his shower, and put some fresh clothes on, and Scott would feel refreshed by the work he had done. He felt restored. That’s what a day’s work will do for you. And that’s the feeling he wants again.
MICHAEL
December. Close to the turn of the calendar, when his B-school graduation would become “last year.” His phone rings.
Just a few days earlier, he had called a start-up company near Springfield, Massachusetts. His father knew about the place — they’re in the business of trying to improve medical billing. For doctors in private practice, billing is one of the most expensive parts of doing business. This company is trying to make it easier and less costly. They had an opening they wanted to talk to him about, and Mike liked the people he met. It’s a start-up, and he loves the idea of helping create something out of nothing. He had taken the big step of moving in with his girlfriend a month ago, before he had ever heard of this company. The rent was low because it was his sister’s place, but it wasn’t free, and in truth, he wasn’t exactly sure how he was going to pay his share if he didn’t find work soon.
His father had told him all along not to settle for something he didn’t like — that’s the luxury Michael inherited from his father’s work as a doctor, and his grandfather’s work as a metalworker, and his great-grandfather’s work as an iceman. Michael had inherited the luxury of finding a job he enjoyed. This company, if it panned out, didn’t feel like settling. On the phone was the woman who ran it, wanting to know if he could start work on Monday.
LARRY
Four a.m. — that’s what time Larry woke up most mornings after he lost his job last year. He was probably the first person in the United States to see the online job postings every day. He’d sit in the little area of the downstairs he was using as a workspace, in the early-morning darkness, and start pecking away, firing résumés off, futzing around with his cover letter so it seemed “personalized.” He tried to make it obvious that he didn’t care about job titles or even salary all that much. A young company could get his decades of experience for cheap. An established firm could plug him into a position and not worry about a thing. But it’s hard to say all that in the little box they give you to write about yourself, or even in a cover letter. How do you tell them that you’re the first person there in the morning and the last person to leave at night? How do you tell them that you’re a worker?
When the sun came up, he drove through office complexes and industrial parks, writing down the names and addresses of companies that sounded interesting. Then he would go home and write a letter to each one, inquiring about any openings they might have.
Larry’s boy was grown and had moved out long ago, did okay for himself. There was just Larry and his wife, Nancy, but now he was having to dig into his savings just to pay the mortgage. His unemployment check barely covered the $1,300 a month in health insurance for the two of them. He had a twenty-eight-foot Sea Ray docked down in Maryland, but he couldn’t use it, not with gas prices the way they were. In fact, pretty soon he wouldn’t be able to make payments on the boat anymore. They’d take it away. Well, that would be too bad, but there are people a lot worse off. Then again, that creates the problem of bad credit, and most employers run a credit check, and suddenly you’ve got bad credit because you couldn’t make your boat payments… because you didn’t have a job.
A few years ago, a man Larry had known for a long time couldn’t find a job, and one day he went out into his garage and shot himself in the head.
It never got that bad for Larry, but still, it was discouraging like you can’t imagine. But Christ, he thought, I have to keep trying.
Sometimes, in the afternoon, when there were no more résumés to send off, Larry and his wife would pack a lunch and go to the park. Or to the river. He would throw a line in the water, she would read her book. That was nice.
Then one day, the phone rang. It was Raymour & Flanigan, the furniture company, asking him to come in for an interview the next afternoon at the store over in Montgomeryville. Larry said okay.
Any good salesman will tell you that the most important part of selling is listening. A guy told Larry many years ago, when you’re talking, the only thing you hear is what you already know. Larry was a good listener.
Raymour & Flanigan called back a couple of days later. And just like that, Larry Stocks was selling again.
No statistics changed — when Stocks went to work on his first day, unemployment was still around 8.5 percent, just as it was the day before. But a man who had been spit out by an economy that told him he didn’t matter anymore, that his services were no longer required, had stared that economy down. He had swung back. He had outlasted it. He had done what men like him, and Greg Hanton, and Mike Lesnik, and Scott Annechino have always done: When there is no place to go every day, no job to haul your ass out of bed and show up for, you haul your ass out of bed anyway. You figure it out.
On Larry’s first day, an older lady came into the store. They talked awhile — she was picking out a bed and a mattress for one of her sons. He was struggling, she said. Out of work. Larry nodded, squinted his eyes at her with warm understanding.
He made the sale — his first sale, after a million sales before that.
As he was finishing up the paperwork, the woman looked up at him. His suit fit him well, from his corporate days, and his shoes were shined. His tie was silk, and tied in a perfect half Windsor. “What did you do before, Larry?”
He looked down, smiled. Told her he ran a company that distributed music and movies. She said, “What happened?”
He said, Well, the company closed down, because people don’t buy that stuff in stores anymore. They download it.
She nodded and stared off at nothing. She was probably just about old enough to remember the Great Depression.
“It’s terrible out there, isn’t it?”
Yes, it was. But I have a job, Larry thought. I’m selling. I’m working.
