Swell Zine: I'm Just Doing This for the Money

When I was growing up in the Chicago suburbs in the '80s and '90s money was tight. We were, for the most part, working poor, though at times we hovered around lower middle class. At an early age, I watched my parents juggle utility bills with grocery money, spare rent and manage health care. Every evening my family ate dinner at a table my resourceful mother had pulled out of someone's trash. There, my brother and I heard the same lessons over and over: about marriage, about education, about debt, about opportunity, but mostly about work. Because work - hard, honest work - work will set you free.

When I was 11 years old, I got my first paying gig. I was a "mother's helper" for the family next door, which basically meant I played with their kid, Ben, in their yard, building snowmen and trying to keep him from eating yellow snow while his parents locked themselves in the house and did God only knows what. I made $4 an hour and this money was very important to me - it meant a sort of financial independence kids yearn for, the sort that allows one to buy the things that parents would not, or could not.

A few years later my "mother's helper" experience and good referrals helped me become a full-fledged babysitter. It may not be common knowledge, but so much of babysitting is just...lying. They are harmless lies, but lies nonetheless:

When I had enough of sporadic sitting jobs, I decided to go out into the world and seek gainful, regular employment. I wanted a steady paycheck and the confidence of knowing I wouldn't have to deal with any shitty diapers or temper tantrums.

So, when I was 15, a small family-owned suburban hair salon hired me as a shampoo girl. I made $5 an hour to start, plus tips. I worked Tuesdays and Thursdays after school, and all day Saturday. Yes, I was sweeping up piles of dead hair, laundering endless loads of towels, bleaching and/or staining my skin with toxic chemicals, touching the scalps of sometimes filthy children, but I got free hair cuts and was getting paid a base salary plus tips. Which meant all I had to do was stick my perky teenage breasts in the face of every straight man who sat in my chair, and before I knew it, I had a Mazda. It was ten years old, grey and rusty, and had a sunroof that worked occasionally and an AM radio. Over the next four years I shampooed my way into an out-of-state private college.

Once I was away at school in Texas I was too busy with important stuff like studying, marching band and deflowering other horny teenage girls in my dorm room during the school year to have any sort of serious job. But during the summers I worked full time.

The summer after my sophomore year in college I accepted a job as an office intern at a small PR firm in Dallas. My only co-workers were the firm director, Karen Moss, and her assistant, Darlene.

Karen scooted around the office in $500 Prada slides but often wore the same Burberry top three times a week. I knew it was the exact same top because I paid attention to the stains as they accumulated at the bottom of the sleeves - coffee, yogurt, mustard. She drove a white Porsche Boxter with white leather interior. Once, I was sent down to the underground parking lot to fetch some files from her car and I found potato chips mashed into the carpet and McDonald's wrappers heaped in the back seat. I took extra care to grind the greasy potato chips into her floor mats as I scrounged around for the files. I was ticked off at Karen because my own car was parked three blocks away in an unsecured and uncovered, $2-a-day parking lot where my CDs were melting in the Texas summer sun. Just one week earlier, Karen sat in her office, a mere 15 feet from my desk, and called her accountant in Florida. She ordered the accountant to call me and tell me the $5-a-day parking lot right across the street was "just not in our budget." By the time I walked to work every morning my hair was frizzy, my makeup was running, and sweat rings had begun to form on my office casual wear.

Aside from her disdain for doing laundry and trash-hoarding tendencies, there was something really off about Karen Moss I couldn't immediately put my finger on. For starters, there was the shaking. I asked her assistant, Darlene, why Karen shook like a leaf, and Darlene's brilliant answer was, "Well, she just does, honey." Karen shook so much that her handwriting resembled the ink scratches on a polygraph readout and she could not hold a drink that didn't have a lid on it.

Seeing as how "diagnosing" has always been a hobby of mine, I started watching Karen closely. I noticed that she touched her nose a lot - it was an unconscious reflex - she would pinch her nostrils or run a finger along her upper lip as though checking for a trickle of blood, maybe, or mucus. The shaking, the nose-touching, and the fact that Karen had very scratched glass-top desk in her office, led me to the obvious diagnosis - cocaine addiction.

I thought about mentioning my theory to Darlene, but I was not yet sure if Darlene could be trusted, or if she was even firmly anchored in reality. There's a type of down-home, double-wide, big-hair, turn up that Johnny Cash song, drinkin' beer-out-of-a-can, NASCAR-lovin', goin down to the Piggly Wiggly Texan that I imitate from time to time, and Darlene was a big inspiration for that character. She had a big ole bleached-blonde hairdo and sewed a lot of her own clothes. Her pattern was obviously two sizes too small and her girdle was close to giving out because her overall look was that of a leopard-print muffin in a black wrapper.

When Darlene first heard that I was from Chicago, she said "I heard about Chicago. I hear from this truck-driver friend of mine that y'all got restaurants over the highway there like something outta The Jetsons." During my second week on the job, Darlene opened up about her personal life - she showed me her wedding photos, a picture of her little dog on the porch of her double-wide, and a snapshot of her step-grandson. He was about to have surgery on his cleft palate and she told me to keep the little guy in my prayers. "Luckily, he's my husband's grandbaby from his fifth marriage, and they all git along, so we're able to see him through this."

I was blown away. "Fifth marriage?!" I said, unable to help myself. "Well, yeah. He's a bit of a ladies' man. I'm his ninth wife. But he knows I'm a keeper. I take real good care a' him." With that, Darlene first adjusted the gaudy, over-the-top, couldn't-possibly-be-real-diamonds, wedding ring on her left hand, then the ring on her right hand, which was made from a roughly textured sort of gold and shaped like the great state of Texas. The ring had a tiny diamond chip where Dallas was.

I quit my job at Karen Moss and Associates two weeks ahead of schedule. I made up some bullshit excuse about a family emergency and flew back home to Chicago to hang out and get drunk with my friends before the fall semester started. Karen was not pleased with my early departure and called me up a day after I quit to tell me that I was fired. I reminded her that since I had already quit, there was really no point in her firing me. She had some choice words for me, but I reminded myself that coke addicts will say a lot of mean things. I know now that I should not have crossed her - it was another seven months before I received my last paycheck, and only then at the behest of a lawyer that the student government association kept on retainer for us. Well, you know what they say: don't mess with Texas.

Now, please don't use this information to jump to any conclusions. Though it might not seem like it, I am actually a very professional person. I am hard working and responsible, I am outgoing and interested in constantly expanding my skill set.

I like to think that it was my articulate professionalism and staggering intellect that led to my position as a Career Counselor at XY Tech, but when I look back on the whole thing I realize it might have just been my tits.

I started off at one Tech campus as a temp. I had just lost my office job at a car dealership after a drawn out "please fire me before I quit" negotiation that had begun to resemble a game of chicken. I had two choices: I could be a useless lump who stays at home all day eating crispy Cheetos and anxiously watching All My Children for a glimpse of Bianca, Erica Kane's youngest daughter and daytime drama's first lesbian sweetheart. Or I could become a temp until something better came along.

Stephen Elliot captures the magic of this career/desperation option in his poem "Born to Temp":

I waltzed into my assignment at Tech with my fancy education and desktop publishing skills and blew them all away. My ability to make classy job fair posters and cover the front desk while the rest of the office celebrated the registrar's birthday with ice cream and cake soon earned me the level of respect typically reserved for part-time staff member. At least.

My boss, a loud, goofy Greek guy named Nick, tried to make me feel comfortable and welcome by joking and kidding around. Every day he had a new racist or homophobic joke, and that actually made me feel the opposite of comfortable. When I called him out on this, he came back at me with the classic "Geez, don't get so defensive, it's not like you're a spick or a chink or a faggot."

After I told Nick that, no, it was much worse, I was, in fact, a dyke, he toned down the jokes but became much more interested in my personal life. He told me that he'd love to hear all about my romantic escapades, and would be even more interested in watching. At that point, I knew I had a choice. I could cry sexual harassment, or I could just let the truth work for me. I said, "Listen, Nick, I know that you have a certain visualization of my personal life in your head. I bet that you can even picture me with a woman. I want you to think about that picture and listen to what I'm saying. That woman you are picturing me with isn't my type. The real woman I'm with is 5'10", has a buzz cut and plays rugby. And she could kick your ass eight days of the week so you better watch your fuckin' mouth."

Nick's department soon ran out of money. I pointed out to Nick that the school had enough money to pay the Director, who drove a Lexus and owned two homes, and reminded him that at this point in my life, $10 worth of unleaded and a lunch from the 99 cent menu at Wendy's was a fuckin' luxury. Nick made some calls, and the next thing I knew I had a full-time position at the Tech campus on the south side. When he took me out to lunch to celebrate, he said "I want you to know that 80% of the students on this new campus are black males. And I don't mean anything by this, but I just want you to watch yourself with those tops you wear. Because black guys love big hooters, and, well, you know. You got 'em."

My new boss, Lisa, said the words "yeast infection" to me on the very first day. Granted, she was talking about the company pantyhose policy, but still, it was inappropriate. Looking back on my job at the south side Tech campus, "inappropriate" is the perfect word to describe my entire time there. Here's a typical day: A male coworker calls me to ask if I'll come to his office door, bend over real slow and pick up something off the floor...since he'd heard I was wearing "those pants" and he was, you know, having a bad day.

Speaking of inappropriate, Marquita, the woman who sat next to me in our cramped 9 foot long office flossed her teeth, at her desk, twice a day. I was relieved when she quit. Since I ranked the lowest in the department, I was charged with cleaning out her desk and emptying her voice mail after she left. Doing this led me to believe that Marquita was married to the Dumbest Man Alive. Her voice mail box was full of messages from him, and a typical one went like this: "Hey wifey. It's your huuuusband. Jus' callin' to let chu know dat I ate up all a dat leftova turkey dat was up in da fridge. OK, boo. Just wanted to let chu know dat. I see you layta baby. I loves you. Bye now. OK." He called to tell her it was raining or he was up from his nap or he videotaped The People's Court like she asked him. It was at once hysterical and unbelievably pathetic.

By the end of my first and last year at Tech, 7 students, 1 instructor, and 2 staff members had asked me out on dates. All of them were male. The invitations ranged from the frustrated, "Why you playin' me, baby? I know you want it!" to the cautious, "I know you aren't supposed to date students, but I'm graduating in two weeks and I'd really really like to take you out."

My boss, Lisa, said that students felt like they could cross lines with me because I let them call me by my first name. My coworker Angie shook her head in disagreement and pointed - "It's 'cuz a' them titties!"

We all laughed about Angie's theory, but a few weeks later I realized she might be right. I attended a networking event hosted by Chicago Women in Technology in order to meet people in the tech industry and find internships or jobs for our students. As I began to work the room of 100 or so women, 99% of them femme-y and straight looking, my usual networking technique was met with icy stares and dirty looks. I was dumbstruck. If these people would not respond to my Killer Combo - the winking smile and the artfully arranged cleavage - I was fucked.

Up until that point, the Killer Combo had an amazing success rate. In fact, at times I've had to rely on my smile and my breasts exclusively just to make ends meet. I first did it while I was temping. You'll do just about anything when you're a college educated young adult and you find yourself working for $9 an hour, which is on the high end for a temp. I was living without health insurance, had debt coming out of my ears, and was struggling to afford rent, groceries, gas, and especially my anti-depressant, which alone came to $427.56 per month. My phone was regularly cut off and the stress of my lifestyle was causing me to steal paper goods from public places and stop menstruating.

I took a few side jobs cleaning houses. Cleaning up after other people for a lousy $10 an hour is sometimes degrading. When you're on your hands and knees, scrubbing the tile about the base of a toilet that belongs to someone who apparently lacks the ability to aim either their urine or feces, you start to lose your faith in the entire human race. You start to hear a constant loop in your head screaming "When am I ever going to get a fucking break?!"

That's when Drew came into my life. He contacted me and asked me if I would clean his house... wearing only my underwear.

The first time I did it I drove around Drew's block five or six times before I finally screwed my courage to the sticking place and pulled into the driveway. I knew I was walking into the very real possibility that things could get ugly or I could wind up as the inspiration for just another grisly episode of Law and Order. Drew turned out to be a fairly normal guy, though, who liked big asses and didn't want to clean up after himself and had more money than sense. He paid me $100 an hour.

Two and a half hours later, as I backed out of his driveway, three crisp $100 bills in my purse, I smiled to myself. I finally understood what my parents had meant, all those years ago, when they said, "Hard, honest work will set you free."

Jill Craig made her writing debut at the age of 7 with the award-winning illustrated book The Caterpillar's Christmas. Her current work includes creative non-fiction which uses her own experiences as a framework for examining issues of class, mental health, and relationships. She also writes erotica and short stories. Craig is a twenty-something queer femme dyke who currently resides in Chicago.