Mean Rubber

Photo by rollingrck

“25 grand is simply not enough money for me to get shot dead in some ghetto.  I will call ‘em back when they raise the starting salary back to a living wage.”

This is what I told my mother when I was fresh out of college, waiting tables for cash and a 3.30 an hour paycheck at a local greasy spoon and pretending to apply for jobs post-college.  I was twisting in the wind, failing to land publishing positions and uninterested in selling insurance, knives, or the Yellow Pages (yes, people still do that).  I had just taken the NYPD test because I figured it provided an opportunity to ward off my parent’s exhortations that I make a career decision pronto.  I simply wasn’t into it. As far as I was concerned, waiting tables and drinking Negro Modelos on the public beach at 3 o’clock in the afternoon after a day shift was all I needed in life, until I decided to write the next classic American novel. After all, it worked for Kerouac and Thompson.

Anyway, I could never be a cop. Cops get drug tested. Cops wear stupid haircuts. Cops berate kids on the beach just looking to have a good time for drinking a couple of beers and starting a bonfire. Cops are “that guy.” No one wants to be “that guy.”

Fast forward to 2009; I’m a salesman, like every coasting, middle class American male my age who never made a decision. I sling telephone systems and voicemail systems to small and miniature sized businesses in the five boroughs. Because of the recession most of my business has been the latter, and so I carry my demo set wherever it takes me in hopes of convincing customers to buy five to ten phones at a time from me so that I might be able to afford groceries this month.  Five sales a month keeps me in the black, and I’ve got two knocked out for the week, as I proceed with cautious optimism to the grimiest sections of Brooklyn to meet with some non-profits of note that have cash to burn in the immediate future.

Meetings one and two go on without a hitch and I’m soaring in my head. I realize that while the next month may be another one spent eating Chef Boyardee, spaghetti, and peanut butter and jelly, September will be prosperous. I will be able to go out regularly like I did pre-recession without bean counting, and maybe I will even develop a weight problem to worry about as a result. I never thought that would be welcome.  Things are looking up!

I quickly exit the subway station at Rockaway Boulevard and realize I’m not in Kansas anymore.  A short view of the landscape reveals a few crack heads and welfare moms. I am somewhat unphased, because I’m a 6-4, 200 pound man who has taken a beating or two in his lifetime and I carry a large screwdriver that I might use as a weapon should trouble approach. None seems to be approaching. I pull out my iPhone and discreetly begin checking the GPS, and in moments I arrive at my destination.

After a quick survey of job site 1 I begin searching for directions to job site 2 and I find them. I proceed west only to find a structural disconnect between the maps direction and the way the streets flow. I hold my phone up in front of my face and being proceeding like one giant sore thumb towards the intersection.  Somewhere, a “lost white boy” signal must have alerted the neighborhood.  Across the street, two elderly men sitting in front of a garage beckon me. “Say hey whiteboy, don’t be walkin over there, dem brothas is trouble” is what they say, and unfortunately, I continue walking , and what they say doesn’t register until one of the four fine young gentleman across the street screams “ayyo white boy, let me git a look atchyo phone.”

It is in moments like these when the shitpile that is my worthless lower middle class mid 20’s life reveals itself to me.  Here I stood on a corner in Bed-Stuy Brooklyn, outside of Crown Fried Chicken and across from a community garden built where no one felt it worthwhile to erect a building after the last one likely collapsed, demo phone kit in my bag. I am holding up an iPhone that I could never afford were it not gifted to me in celebration of my 27^th year of mediocrity on this planet and might as well be screaming “rob me, please,” and wearing a pink shirt that says “easy mark.” I am quickly, predictably, approached by four “urban youths” in doo rags and team caps whose only occupation seemed to be beating down white stiffs like me. So… I did what any red-blooded, 6-4 200 pound American male with an improvised weapon in his possession would do in the face of such odds…

I sprinted to the subway station 5o yards away and didn’t look back until I was safely seated next to a friendly looking old woman on the C train with the grandma glasses and the white knit sweater over her shoulders.  I called the customer and relayed the afternoon’s events to them. They were not sympathetic. “What kind of a retard stands on a corner in the ghetto sticking his PDA up in the air for all to see?” Needless to say I did not get the sale as a result of my inability to survey “Site 2.” Another wasted opportunity.

You can mock me for my behavior, and you could call me less of a man, and you’d probably be right.  I’ve been kicked around and my life hasn’t turned out the way I wanted. I have a job I hate and bills that I can barely pay, and I visit the bank of mom a little too often for my liking and I can barely afford to take my girlfriend out for ice cream. I haven’t authored the great American novel and I probably never will. This is nothing more than another sad event in what’s been a fairly underwhelming life, and I guess you can say I acted rather predictably; you can say all that, and you’d be right, but in the end, I can hold my head high knowing that I’m a man of principal, because I stood by my pledge:

“There’s just no way I’m getting shot dead in some ghetto for 25,000 a year.”