Bad Credit
Part 7.
Tap tap tap tap tap. I walked into the ocean of keyboard noise. I moved down canals of crashing letters, sometimes bumping into the backs of sea life.
I took a place at my terminal, and began the next five hours of my evening. I sat my blue bag down next to me, and pulled out the portable DVD player that played CD-RWs packed full of radio talk shows. I got out my black rubber headphones and plugged the extra-long cord into the player. I squinted at the unnaturally bright blue screen that displayed the menu. I pressed the button that would send Howard Stern’s deep, nasal voice into my eardrums. Finally, I relaxed.
Music had gotten boring by that point. Audiobooks, talk shows, stand up comedy. Those were the only things that held my attention anymore. I didn’t dare allow my mind to wander, to suffer the wrath of my own thoughts.
A foul tone of body odor came from one direction, and the sharp twang of cheap cologne came from the other. Someone coughed that unmistakable diseased cough, staccato with mucus and obviously contagious. From the other side, a sneeze like a gunshot. I never found out who the source was, but they were so loud that I could hear them from the break room.
The place was swimming with disease. Bill had warned me about this; the only reason that he wasn’t working there anymore is precisely because he had become ill. He took too long to recover, and they probably fired him for it.
You could carry Vitamin C lozenges. You could carry Purell hand sanitizer. But it wasn’t going to be enough for you to make it out unharmed. The nature of the building itself was designed to be crowded. No matter where you were in the building, your space would be occupied. Maybe that’s why I liked the bathrooms.
Physically suffocated and mentally alone. That’s the life of a data conversion operator. But who am I to complain? I worked at fucking RGIS, the worst job in the world. If I could suffer life there, I could suffer through anything.
Still, something called for me to stop wasting my nights and start feeling good.
Wait, shit, that wasn’t possible. I had too much homework.
Graduation was close. The school year was winding down. A string of challenges was before me. And the string was wrapped around my neck, ready for a single chair leg to splinter and snap beneath my feet.
Could anyone honestly blame me for needing to go to a funeral? Actually, yes, they could. I had a senior projects class that needed me almost every day. The project called for setting up a database and search engine for a list of past church sermons. These sermons would be distributed freely by the church on audio cassette, CD, or DVD. The church needed some way to organize this system that wasn’t notes scribbled on a piece of paper. For our projects class, we were to use the so-called systems development life cycle, an unnecessarily time-consuming (but simple) method of building and implementing a system of any sort. We spent an entire semester learning about it, now we were doing something real.
I was responsible for setting up the Powerpoint presentations, in which each slide contained a bevy of information that I was unfamiliar with. This information had to come from the other group members, who would often forget about emailing their work to me. So it would really come down to the wire.
The only other person responsible for presentation work was my partner, Robyn. She was a small blonde girl with a life that revolved around McDonald’s. No, she wasn’t morbidly obese. She just worked there as a manager.
I’d try to make small talk with her. I’d ask her open-ended questions. She’d give me closed-ended responses.
I’d ask how her day went. She’d say fine. I’d ask if she did any work on the project. She’d say not really, I haven’t had time.
I’d ask her about her job. Watch out. Oh shi-
Any mention of McDonald’s collapsed the dam structure. Fleeing villagers were washed away screaming, families torn from each other’s arms. Downtown buckled under the ghastly torrent. The mayor acceptingly lit a pipe and smoked tobacco for only a few seconds before the wave desecrated city hall. The water swallowed every building around, first the barber shop, then the drug store, then the apocathary. All was lost.
This girl knew how to rant about McDonalds. About the employees, about the customers. About her schedule. Notably, she often wore her full work uniform to our class. It was a McDonald’s manager complaining about McDonalds. In my head, a little boy wearing an “I Love Dinosaurs” tee shirt was snatched up off the streets and eaten by a ravenous pterodactyl.
Constantly under a state of extreme stress from her job, Robyn was never any help. Even when she did find the time to try, she would work on things that had already been done. And do shitty jobs of them. She knew it, too. Numerous times she wound up crying or furiously bursting out of the classroom. I reacted the only way I knew how, by shaking my head and continuing my work.
Too much to deal with. I had a job, I had schoolwork. I had graduation and summer plans to think about. There wasn’t even time to grieve. Though, maybe that was what I wanted?
As we approached the end of the semester (for us, the end of college), our project wound up in a time crunch. Impulsively, I put the entire weight of the project on my back and likely cut a few years off my life in doing so. Fortunately, my group was more helpful than I thought they’d be. Thinking I would have to write the entire system manual in a couple of days, the group put their heads together and we managed it in a couple of hours.
After several stressful days of late hours and nonstop planning and worrying, it was done. Fucking hell yes. I breezed through every other class I had. No other feeling will ever compare to the sense of accomplishment and relief that came from finishing that semester. I wanted to chug some NyQuil, dive into bed, and sleep for an astronomical amount of time. Regular sleep was not enough, I wanted to be in stasis for months. And I thought I could actually do it.
Eh, well, not for a while. I still had to work. God damn it.
After our sermon distribution system was implemented at the church, the staff stopped using it extremely quickly. The console that would take orders from guests was left ignored. The website search system that would sync with the order-taking database was never even put online. A lot of work for nothing.
Church people. Ungrateful bastards.
-
Later that week, I graduated college. But it didn’t matter.
The ceremony was at the Kansas Coliseum. I was the first of my mother’s children to have made it to the end. She was proud.
I was wearing a black robe. I had three honor cords; red, blue, green. The red one I got for my high GPA. The blue and green were for an honor society I did jack shit for. Look at me, I thought, I have all the colors of a television screen and I really didn’t do anything to deserve it. I began wondering if attending Let’s Just Be Friends University really mattered in the first place. So this is what happens when an above-average student walks into a degree mill…
I walked onstage. My surname, Starbuck, was one of the last on the list to be called. So I had maybe seven people clapping softly for me. Four years of my life.
My mom, dad, brother Mark, and aunt Debbie were there. Amy was there, too. But it didn’t seem to matter. Something felt like it was missing.
Grandma wasn’t there, of course. This was something I’d have to deal with. But there was something else.
Darrel. What mattered was that I had graduated from college and Darrel was not there to see it. He was in the hospital for the large hole that opened up in his arm.
At the end of the ceremony, a couple of graduates started throwing their caps into the air, but, in the end, no one went through with it. They were too afraid to make a spectacle. Good old Friends University.
-
As a graduation present, my mom and aunt got some money together. It was one thousand dollars. A criminally large amount to me.
As a graduation present, Amy’s mother kicked her out of the house. After all the hard work that Amy put into being the first person from a group of four children to not only graduate from high school but to get an almost full ride to an excellent university, it all fell flat on her mother’s head. She had no perspective whatsoever. She only rewarded blind loyalty to the family, whereas her definition of “loyalty” went something like “never leaving the house”.
Her family had a surplus on crazy and I wanted no piece of it.
So, Amy and I set out to find an apartment for the summer. We wanted nothing special, just a little studio thing on the cheap. We scanned the classifieds and the internet in hopes of a simple little living arrangement for a young couple.
First we found a place called the Lodge East. We walked in and had to fill out lots of forms and sign lots of dotted lines. They wanted 25 dollars for an application fee, and 25 dollars for a deposit. Fifty dollars, just to apply and hope. They never called us back. No credit, I suppose. The Lodge East found it too risky to allow us to live in a drywall box for three months.
With some new enemies gained, we hit the classifieds one more time.
We called up Ray, the landlord of Longfellow Apartments. I told him about our situation, and I wasn’t expecting his answer. “Man, I don’t even care about credit. Just pay the rent and you’re fine.” Well what about a lease? Is there a minimum term? “Naw, I can even prorate you for a half month if you need me to. Hell, I can even waive your deposit. Just pay the rent, that’s all I ask.”
Wow.
Ray looked like he spent a good deal of his life on a tropical island, repairing boats and catching sea bass. He was dressed in a Hawaiian flower shirt, cheap neon sunglasses, shorts and sandals. I felt like he was going to hand me a drink that had been poured into a coconut.
Besides this one meeting, contact with Ray was minimal. One day we walked into apartment 301 and found a single key on the counter. Another day we walked in and found a copy of the lease, with his area already signed. Now that’s professionalism.
In a bug-eyed fury, Amy’s mother had insisted she pack and move her eleven years of collected possessions out of her house. She gave her a time limit of fifteen minutes. The only word that I could use to describe the situation was realistic.
With a help of a friend with a truck, the three of us moved Amy’s possessions to the new apartment. It took a few hours, and we ended up completely exhausted. But it was a nice thought; that Amy would not have to deal with her thoroughly insane mother any longer, and, for that matter, neither would I.
Our small one-bedroom apartment had, within a day of rental, turned into a Mayan temple of cardboard and packing tape. Amy had a lot of work ahead of her. She had boxes and boxes of heavy books, childhood toys, magazines. Not so many clothes or furniture, though we did make off with her mother’s bed (which Amy had been borrowing).
Beneath all of the boxes was a cozy little place, three stories off the ground. It had a fridge, oven, and a dishwasher that didn’t work. But it was very nice, very memorable. Amy decorated it with different kinds of Amy-nostalgia, which included colorful soda cans and bottles, feathers, and dried plants. We found an old metal cog that she put on the steps outside. She lined the railing of the stairs with a long garland that looked like a leafy green vine. She also hung up some horribly bent and rusted street signs. To me, the motif was “Mojave desert”. Our apartment looked like a dusty Nevada highway, but it worked.
It took a while to get completely settled in, but it wasn’t long before the apartment felt like home. It was a dreadful feeling to have to leave for work, but it was also glorious to come home to someone beautiful, someone I adored. It would be the summer of love.
Then, not long after moving in, I got a phone call. I couldn’t believe it. It was my ticket out of data entry.
Tap tap tap tap tap. I walked into the ocean of keyboard noise. I moved down canals of crashing letters, sometimes bumping into the backs of sea life.
I took a place at my terminal, and began the next five hours of my evening. I sat my blue bag down next to me, and pulled out the portable DVD player that played CD-RWs packed full of radio talk shows. I got out my black rubber headphones and plugged the extra-long cord into the player. I squinted at the unnaturally bright blue screen that displayed the menu. I pressed the button that would send Howard Stern’s deep, nasal voice into my eardrums. Finally, I relaxed.
Music had gotten boring by that point. Audiobooks, talk shows, stand up comedy. Those were the only things that held my attention anymore. I didn’t dare allow my mind to wander, to suffer the wrath of my own thoughts.
A foul tone of body odor came from one direction, and the sharp twang of cheap cologne came from the other. Someone coughed that unmistakable diseased cough, staccato with mucus and obviously contagious. From the other side, a sneeze like a gunshot. I never found out who the source was, but they were so loud that I could hear them from the break room.
The place was swimming with disease. Bill had warned me about this; the only reason that he wasn’t working there anymore is precisely because he had become ill. He took too long to recover, and they probably fired him for it.
You could carry Vitamin C lozenges. You could carry Purell hand sanitizer. But it wasn’t going to be enough for you to make it out unharmed. The nature of the building itself was designed to be crowded. No matter where you were in the building, your space would be occupied. Maybe that’s why I liked the bathrooms.
Physically suffocated and mentally alone. That’s the life of a data conversion operator. But who am I to complain? I worked at fucking RGIS, the worst job in the world. If I could suffer life there, I could suffer through anything.
Still, something called for me to stop wasting my nights and start feeling good.
Wait, shit, that wasn’t possible. I had too much homework.
Graduation was close. The school year was winding down. A string of challenges was before me. And the string was wrapped around my neck, ready for a single chair leg to splinter and snap beneath my feet.
Could anyone honestly blame me for needing to go to a funeral? Actually, yes, they could. I had a senior projects class that needed me almost every day. The project called for setting up a database and search engine for a list of past church sermons. These sermons would be distributed freely by the church on audio cassette, CD, or DVD. The church needed some way to organize this system that wasn’t notes scribbled on a piece of paper. For our projects class, we were to use the so-called systems development life cycle, an unnecessarily time-consuming (but simple) method of building and implementing a system of any sort. We spent an entire semester learning about it, now we were doing something real.
I was responsible for setting up the Powerpoint presentations, in which each slide contained a bevy of information that I was unfamiliar with. This information had to come from the other group members, who would often forget about emailing their work to me. So it would really come down to the wire.
The only other person responsible for presentation work was my partner, Robyn. She was a small blonde girl with a life that revolved around McDonald’s. No, she wasn’t morbidly obese. She just worked there as a manager.
I’d try to make small talk with her. I’d ask her open-ended questions. She’d give me closed-ended responses.
I’d ask how her day went. She’d say fine. I’d ask if she did any work on the project. She’d say not really, I haven’t had time.
I’d ask her about her job. Watch out. Oh shi-
Any mention of McDonald’s collapsed the dam structure. Fleeing villagers were washed away screaming, families torn from each other’s arms. Downtown buckled under the ghastly torrent. The mayor acceptingly lit a pipe and smoked tobacco for only a few seconds before the wave desecrated city hall. The water swallowed every building around, first the barber shop, then the drug store, then the apocathary. All was lost.
This girl knew how to rant about McDonalds. About the employees, about the customers. About her schedule. Notably, she often wore her full work uniform to our class. It was a McDonald’s manager complaining about McDonalds. In my head, a little boy wearing an “I Love Dinosaurs” tee shirt was snatched up off the streets and eaten by a ravenous pterodactyl.
Constantly under a state of extreme stress from her job, Robyn was never any help. Even when she did find the time to try, she would work on things that had already been done. And do shitty jobs of them. She knew it, too. Numerous times she wound up crying or furiously bursting out of the classroom. I reacted the only way I knew how, by shaking my head and continuing my work.
Too much to deal with. I had a job, I had schoolwork. I had graduation and summer plans to think about. There wasn’t even time to grieve. Though, maybe that was what I wanted?
As we approached the end of the semester (for us, the end of college), our project wound up in a time crunch. Impulsively, I put the entire weight of the project on my back and likely cut a few years off my life in doing so. Fortunately, my group was more helpful than I thought they’d be. Thinking I would have to write the entire system manual in a couple of days, the group put their heads together and we managed it in a couple of hours.
After several stressful days of late hours and nonstop planning and worrying, it was done. Fucking hell yes. I breezed through every other class I had. No other feeling will ever compare to the sense of accomplishment and relief that came from finishing that semester. I wanted to chug some NyQuil, dive into bed, and sleep for an astronomical amount of time. Regular sleep was not enough, I wanted to be in stasis for months. And I thought I could actually do it.
Eh, well, not for a while. I still had to work. God damn it.
After our sermon distribution system was implemented at the church, the staff stopped using it extremely quickly. The console that would take orders from guests was left ignored. The website search system that would sync with the order-taking database was never even put online. A lot of work for nothing.
Church people. Ungrateful bastards.
-
Later that week, I graduated college. But it didn’t matter.
The ceremony was at the Kansas Coliseum. I was the first of my mother’s children to have made it to the end. She was proud.
I was wearing a black robe. I had three honor cords; red, blue, green. The red one I got for my high GPA. The blue and green were for an honor society I did jack shit for. Look at me, I thought, I have all the colors of a television screen and I really didn’t do anything to deserve it. I began wondering if attending Let’s Just Be Friends University really mattered in the first place. So this is what happens when an above-average student walks into a degree mill…
I walked onstage. My surname, Starbuck, was one of the last on the list to be called. So I had maybe seven people clapping softly for me. Four years of my life.
My mom, dad, brother Mark, and aunt Debbie were there. Amy was there, too. But it didn’t seem to matter. Something felt like it was missing.
Grandma wasn’t there, of course. This was something I’d have to deal with. But there was something else.
Darrel. What mattered was that I had graduated from college and Darrel was not there to see it. He was in the hospital for the large hole that opened up in his arm.
At the end of the ceremony, a couple of graduates started throwing their caps into the air, but, in the end, no one went through with it. They were too afraid to make a spectacle. Good old Friends University.
-
As a graduation present, my mom and aunt got some money together. It was one thousand dollars. A criminally large amount to me.
As a graduation present, Amy’s mother kicked her out of the house. After all the hard work that Amy put into being the first person from a group of four children to not only graduate from high school but to get an almost full ride to an excellent university, it all fell flat on her mother’s head. She had no perspective whatsoever. She only rewarded blind loyalty to the family, whereas her definition of “loyalty” went something like “never leaving the house”.
Her family had a surplus on crazy and I wanted no piece of it.
So, Amy and I set out to find an apartment for the summer. We wanted nothing special, just a little studio thing on the cheap. We scanned the classifieds and the internet in hopes of a simple little living arrangement for a young couple.
First we found a place called the Lodge East. We walked in and had to fill out lots of forms and sign lots of dotted lines. They wanted 25 dollars for an application fee, and 25 dollars for a deposit. Fifty dollars, just to apply and hope. They never called us back. No credit, I suppose. The Lodge East found it too risky to allow us to live in a drywall box for three months.
With some new enemies gained, we hit the classifieds one more time.
We called up Ray, the landlord of Longfellow Apartments. I told him about our situation, and I wasn’t expecting his answer. “Man, I don’t even care about credit. Just pay the rent and you’re fine.” Well what about a lease? Is there a minimum term? “Naw, I can even prorate you for a half month if you need me to. Hell, I can even waive your deposit. Just pay the rent, that’s all I ask.”
Wow.
Ray looked like he spent a good deal of his life on a tropical island, repairing boats and catching sea bass. He was dressed in a Hawaiian flower shirt, cheap neon sunglasses, shorts and sandals. I felt like he was going to hand me a drink that had been poured into a coconut.
Besides this one meeting, contact with Ray was minimal. One day we walked into apartment 301 and found a single key on the counter. Another day we walked in and found a copy of the lease, with his area already signed. Now that’s professionalism.
In a bug-eyed fury, Amy’s mother had insisted she pack and move her eleven years of collected possessions out of her house. She gave her a time limit of fifteen minutes. The only word that I could use to describe the situation was realistic.
With a help of a friend with a truck, the three of us moved Amy’s possessions to the new apartment. It took a few hours, and we ended up completely exhausted. But it was a nice thought; that Amy would not have to deal with her thoroughly insane mother any longer, and, for that matter, neither would I.
Our small one-bedroom apartment had, within a day of rental, turned into a Mayan temple of cardboard and packing tape. Amy had a lot of work ahead of her. She had boxes and boxes of heavy books, childhood toys, magazines. Not so many clothes or furniture, though we did make off with her mother’s bed (which Amy had been borrowing).
Beneath all of the boxes was a cozy little place, three stories off the ground. It had a fridge, oven, and a dishwasher that didn’t work. But it was very nice, very memorable. Amy decorated it with different kinds of Amy-nostalgia, which included colorful soda cans and bottles, feathers, and dried plants. We found an old metal cog that she put on the steps outside. She lined the railing of the stairs with a long garland that looked like a leafy green vine. She also hung up some horribly bent and rusted street signs. To me, the motif was “Mojave desert”. Our apartment looked like a dusty Nevada highway, but it worked.
It took a while to get completely settled in, but it wasn’t long before the apartment felt like home. It was a dreadful feeling to have to leave for work, but it was also glorious to come home to someone beautiful, someone I adored. It would be the summer of love.
Then, not long after moving in, I got a phone call. I couldn’t believe it. It was my ticket out of data entry.