Goo Goo Gets the Axe

Billy was outside, shoveling the stairs. I had just gotten the official word.

"Another soldier down, Bubbs. They shitcaned me."

He laughed at first, but then looked at my face, and knew I wasn't joking.

He threw the snow shovel against the stairs. "What the fuck!" he yelled.

Then he took me in his bear arms and we wept as brothers.

*

Throughout the day, the bad news trickled in. There were additional layoffs in Portsmouth, Manchester, and the other branches. People who'd been with the company for years were given the axe. Many had their hours dropped to part-time, including Eddy. He's in his fifties and now has to live off of working thirty-two hours a week. Same time last year he was easily hitting sixty per.

*

The Boss called me in. "I've never really done this before, and don't know what the fuck to do. So, I don't know, if you have any questions, call Donna."

"And that's it?"

The phone rang and he answered after giving me last week's paycheck. I punched out and drove home.

And that's it. The story of the W comes to a close.

*

Here's why I'm nervous. Obviously, I'm a position of uncertainty. I want to put my heart into the novel and into the job search and into the upkeep of the house, all without feeling like a burden to Jess. It's an awkward position. I'm glad I went through it, simply because the process is somewhat different than I imagined, and it's certainly different at this moment in my life. I underestimated the emotional reaction, which, when made official, almost had a physical impact, like a slap or a kick to the shins.

Five years ago? I would have probably been very excited to sit around reading all day and still get the government check. Now, there is the additional pressure of a home and a family. Now, I hear about other layoffs, and the fact that I'm not the only one is a cause for concern. I wish I was alone in all this. I wish I wasn't heading out there with hundreds of other hungry, ambitious, responsible, thoughtful people, all angling for car payments and mortgages and rice and pork tenderloin.

You know how it goes. If I write a book and it gets published and I end up teaching creative writing at a working class state school in middle Massachusetts, then I'll sit there in my hush puppies and think: thank goodness. This was all worth it. Thank goodness I went through it, so I could understand. Thank goodness for all those difficult events that shaped me and helped me realize at least a larger swath of the the human condition than might otherwise have been my lot.

But.

If I'm sitting down by the river, trying to fish for trout with a shoestring wrapped around my bunioned old toe, then maybe it will seem the beginning of the end.

And you think: well, that's not likely. And it isn't. But it's possible. And even if the chances are slim, they still have to be accounted for.

It's not as though new jobs are springing up. It's not as though FDR is chomping on his cigarette holder and smiling as the national intrafructure blossoms like a morning glory.

Angling for spins, positive and negative, is a sort of rude game we have to play under such circumstances.

What I'm most thankful for is this: it happens and I still have the fight in me. That never went away. I could write ten-thousand pages before the bells on the chuch strike midnight. I could wrestle the themes like Jaco and the Angel, all with the cat trying, inexplicably, to stick his asshole in my face. I could call on Muse or Machine and rest assured that at least one will answer. I have enough slight control over my own fate to state that, now and forever.