Spencer Lund

Figurative Onanism

Consider a Job at Barnes & Noble

Rather than stay on the train headed back to the dilapidated apartment he called home, the late 20’s man decided at the last minute to wade through the mass of people blocking the train door—and in the process hitting a stranger on the nose with his thumb* for which he profusely apologized—and head into the B & N that stood as a testament to the slightly less-than midcult gentrification of Union Square on 14th St.

While casually strolling past the park where he was once cited for trespassing while attempting to have sex with a young marketing rep he’d met while tending bar** on G_____r’s roof deck, he noticed all the people. It was overflowing with people reading books, walking dogs, casually draped over benches or hurriedly walking somewhere. The man wondered if all of these people were in dire financial circumstances like he was. True, it was past five on a Thursday, but he always wondered where people found the time to be outside during the work week. Every park he’d been at throughout the city and surrounding boroughs had held hundreds if not thousands of these unnamed persons during the normal 9-5 Monday through Friday. Were they all living off the spoils of their parents, collecting unemployment, going to school, or did everyone work nights?

Shaking the thought from his muddled mind, the man entered the B & N. His normal feelings (which—on reflection—smacked of intellectual insecurity) of Lilliputian insignificance in the face of so much he hadn’t read, were missing.  Instead, he wondered about Housing Works, and the Strand bookstore nearby, and felt slightly guilty, since Housing Works didn’t pay (one of the cool things about HW was their reliance on volunteerism exclusively), and the Strand seemed like the type of place that only hired MFA students, or people who did exceedingly well while receiving BA’s in philosophy from Ivy League institutions.

So, he walked into the bookstore and stopped at the precipice of the first level unsure of his next step. Where did he ask about an application? He considered the register, but that seemed wrong, so he sloughed over to the Customer Service Desk trying to forget the embarrassment that currently provided his mind’s cocoon. After waiting for a minute, he asked a thin white man, with stubble on his face, where he could get an application.

The man returned a puzzled expression, and so he added “an employment application.”  This triggered some recognition (mainly of pity), and so the employee looked in a couple drawers and finally handed him a generic application. The man took the application and turned around. He was embarrassed and confused about whether he should leave this hellhole or stay. He wondered why he was doing this again, then remembered it was less than two weeks before rent was due, and his bank account registered in the double digits.

His squeamishness with the B & N’s clientele almost led him to walk out, but instead he took the escalator up to the third floor. He was determined to just get this over with.

The third floor was dominated by the cafe in the corner surrounded by a rather wide and cacophonous cafeteria area. It was not a Brooklyn library, and who wanted to hire for a library job anyway. His connection*** at B & N had said there were no editorial job openings, and he had resisted the urge to email the connection back asking for janitorial work.

He waited in line, hoping a cup of coffee lent him an air of impartiality w.r.t the application. When he got to the register, he ordered the usual American drivel known as the Caramel Macchiato, and said caramel twice, once pronounced “kár- mal” and once “kare-a-mel” then laughed to himself for his inability to pronounce words correctly the first time.

He spied the bespectacled woman behind the register eying his generic B & N employment application, and swiftly moved down to where he was to collect his coffee. The coffee had cost him more than $3, which made him feel wasteful since he didn’t want any coffee, and he was hungry.

He got lost in thoughts of thoughts mainly having to do with the diction of words like “rococo” and “masticatory” in DFW essays, and didn’t realize his coffee had been ready for a while. He took the coffee and immediately left the midcult white-wash of B & N. He was eager to leave the clinical appreciation of “the right books,” that always annoyed him in school. “Who gets to decide the right books?” he asked the air in front of him. Rather than actually get it over with, he left with his coffee. Down $3 and even more confidence.

On the train home, he debated the initial question on the application, which he remembered from similar applications he filled out in high school. Being of modest means, he had worked as a dishwasher/sometime server when he wasn’t too stoned, basketball referee, candy shop stock-boy, and UPS Store employee in the years during and after high school. UPS Store had helped pay for college, which was ironic now since he’d gladly take a UPS Store job. He didn’t dare take the application out on the judgmental L train where anything save New York Magazine, The New Yorker, a hard cover classic, or a kindle was considered a faux pas on par with a Grisham paperback from La Guardia.

What position WAS he applying for? A register job? Would he even get the position? What entitled him to that job over other people? A middling liberal arts degree from a second tier Washington DC school? His skin pigment certainly helped him fit in at the chain bookstore, but he was so depressed at the thought of standing all day in front of a register scanning copy after copy of Malcolm Gladwell hardcovers for barely sentient 20-30 somethings with jobs in marketing and communications, he almost vomited before he got to his stop. He would have killed for one of those jobs, and so he internally mocked their silly, and largely superficial existence.

When he finally arrived back in Brooklyn, the lack of sustenance save cigarettes and coffee curdled his shrinking stomach, and he decided to lie down rather than stave off the nausea that always accompanied another endlessly joyless perusal of Craigslist and Mediabistro.

Where were the jobs for the passably intelligent writers with little no published writing and zero references with any clout, but with plenty of references that could attest to his lack of punctuality with posts or edits or even basic understandings of headlines or leads (not ledes). Where were the middle-of-the-road blogging positions he longed for. The types of companies that would gladly pay 50K or more with health insurance for a few twitter updates, 2-3 blog posts with 200-300 word counts and barely legible syntax? Then he thought of taking the GRE and going into more debt. Then CUNY schools entered his mind, and he fell into a blissful nap punctuated with interstitial jackhammering from the construction crews outside his window.

Freelancing wasn’t going to cut it. He considered a job at B & N again, and lay prostate on his cot in Brooklyn, hopelessly feeling sorry for himself. It was Thursday.   

*If he’d not been the type who cut his nails often, he would have surely drawn blood.

**served free wine and beer and tried to look cute enough to tip.

***A friend’s girlfriend’s sales client, so “contact” is used here in a very loose sense.

  1. itsthemusicpeople reblogged this from spencerlund and added:
    brilliant. don’t hate me for sharing, sir.
  2. spencerlund posted this