"One of the ironies of greed culture is that the people who profit most  from earnings they have not worked to attain are the most eager to insist  that the poor and working classes can only value material resources  attained through hard work"   --bell hooks

San Diego is a hard place to find work with a liberal arts degree.  When I am offered a teaching position at a local community college, two  classes in composition, one on the Navy base, at approximately $750.00 a  month, I feel fortunate.  Private tutoring will add about $240.00 a month,  California Poets in the Schools $3,000 or so more a year.  There is an  E.S.L. gig that was working out well until I complained about being asked  to work through my breaks and lunch hours without pay, but certainly  something else will come around.   The subject of my financial status,  however, causes my mother to hyperventilate and my trust-fund boyfriend to  give ridiculous lectures on responsibility.  So I try one last desperate  measure in my search for steady employment:  I answer a want ad.  For a  bookseller.  In La Jolla.

 The interview, of course, goes fabulously.  I am given a written  test.  Who wrote Gifts From the Sea?  Jane Eyre?  Silas Marner?  I am asked  a series of questions:  Are you looking to become a manager?  Can you  commit through Christmas?  Do you believe that the customer is always  right?  No one asks me why I would want to work for eight dollars an hour  in a record economy when I have a terminal degree.  In fact, I find out  quickly, that about half the staff of the bookstore has master's degrees or  better.  There are two Ph.D.s.   The big draw for me is the benefits  package since I haven't had health insurance for about six years.  No more  bartering poetry lessons for acupuncture.  No more suffering through a  bladder infection until the clinic opens on Monday.  And evenings and  weekends will be mine for writing.  My mother's breathing will become  regulated.  My boyfriend will no longer wag his finger at me or give me  disapproving looks on weekday mornings.  I can start making sack lunches to  eat on the beach.  I will be surrounded by books all day.

 I do notice in my first few hours of work that my co-workers are  all a bit overdiligent in their duties and have a slightly hysterical edge  to their voices.  But La Jolla is the only place in San Diego where  domestics arrive by bus every morning already dressed in their pressed blue  uniforms and where the gyms are full at ten thirty a.m. with hundreds of  women and five or six men in expensive track shoes, where by eleven a.m.  the streets are packed with luxury cars driven by mostly white people who  are either hungry or menopausal or too old to be driving at all.  I expect  a certain amount of weird behavior, but I do not expect this:

         1.  One city council member jumping up and down, screaming at  the top of his lungs, face red, veins popping out of his neck,  because his order had not arrived when he expected it.
         2.  One request for "the new Jemima Kincaid book".
         3.  One book returned because the customer failed to notice before  purchase that the back cover carried an endorsement by a lesbian.
         4.  A seven hundred dollar sale consisting only of books, selected  by height, width and color to decorate a man's study.
         5.  The expectation that I learn all regular customers' last names  and greet them with the proper appellation.
         6.  The expectation that I will be called by my first name or by a  diminutive such as honey or sweetie.
         7.  The expectation that I feed customers' dogs bisquits or clean  up after pets upon request.
         8.  The expectation that I behave in a deferential manner when  encountering "regulars" out in public.
         9.  The expectation that I will not object to being grabbed,  berated, insulted, and that I will remain silent when I  see such actions visited upon my co-workers.
         10. The expectation that I will act on the behalf of the store even  when it is illegal or personally disadventagious for me to do so.

                                     *****

         That such situations were all apparent within the first three  months of my job, begs the question of why a smart, college-educated,  person would stay at such a place. The question is a good one and the  simple answer is that I am desperate.  In a recent Atlantic Monthly article  on the effect of corporate sponsership on higher education, Eyal Press and Jennifer Washburn report:

 "Since the late 1960s the humanities  have been neglected, downgraded, and  forced to retrench, all as other areas of higher education have grown in  numbers, wealth, and influence.... Humanities professors on average earn  substantially less than their counterparts in other fields, and the gap has  widened in the last twenty years....  The New School for Social Research,  in New York City, now hires unemployed Ph.D.s to design online college  courses, pays them a flat fee, and then requires them to sign away a  copyright so that the school can assign the course as they see fit."

 If you want a job in academia you need to be ready to pack up and go  anywhere there is a position.  A cousin of mine teaches in a small  community college in rural Utah.  One open position for full-time faculty  in the English department received over 300 applications from all over the  United States.  In the scope of terrible jobs, working in any independent  bookstore really isn't so bad.  Just scan the want ads under "domestics"  for truly horrendous jobs (The listings are separate from the other want  ads, at least in San Diego).  Or how about this fact--from the Associated  Press, June 24, 1999--that the average life expectancy of a farm worker in  this country is age forty-nine.

 The story I am writing, though, was really supposed to be the  telling of how I got fired (because although I did quit the bookstore job  after a year, I had to go back and pick up some extra hours between  teaching jobs).  The events surrounding my so-called dismissal, however,  aren't really very interesting.  I tell them only at the request of a good  friend and to illustrate a larger point.

 One day a woman came into Pigwicks with an armload of xeroxed  papers, paper bags, and candy, and spread them all over the sales counter.  She asked me for a pair of scissors which I handed to her.  She opened up a  package of red licorice and began stuffing the red ropes into her mouth.  Between chews, she handed me a flyer for a lecture and, pointing to the  title of the lecture, asked me to get her that book.  Then she picked up  the business phone and conducted a loud conversation that lasted about five  minutes.  Since the title of the lecture didn't exist as a book, I did a  little detective work, found the book she was looking for, and placed it in  front of her as she continued her personal conversation in that stage voice  people usually reserve for cell phones.  After she finished using our  phone, she gathered up her belongings, took them over to a chair, looked  through the book, saw that it was in fact the book she wanted, and  reapproached the counter where I was helping another customer with a book.  She waited, shifting her weight and sighing loudly, and when I was through  with the other customer, placed her book in front of me where I manually  typed the international standard book number into the store computer, took  the woman's credit card, ran her card through the machine, had her sign the  credit slip, and handed her back her credit card.  A pretty standard  transaction except that as I began to tape the register receipt to our copy  of her signed credit card receipt, a practice we have developed to assist  the bookkeeper (who often has to field calls from customers wanting to know  what they purchased on a particular date), the customer attempted to grab  our copy of the register receipt from my hands.  There was a short  discussion about which copy was hers during which time I suppose I let my  annoyance show.  "Indifferent" was the word she used to describe my service  skills when complaining to the store owner moments later.

 In the diverse range of human emotion, somewhere between wanting to  kick a complete stranger's ass and wanting to kiss ass, there is a feeling that could roughly be called indifference.  No one claims that I was rude to the woman--although it was was pointed out that I did "fail to say thank  you".  I believe this is the official reason for my dismissal, written  somewhere in my my official file or in the handwritten notes the store  owner read from as she told me she had no choice but to "terminate" me. 

 As you might expect, I am not very sad about losing my job at  Pigwick's.  I hope to relax, do a little writing, and collect unemployment  for a couple of weeks before some other teaching jobs come around.  But  when I think about how virtually any poor person's livelihood--and health  benefits (think about it, the right to health care!)--could lie in the  capricious hands of an insecure matron who just happens to have inherited a  bookstore from her father....  I'm thinking minor feudalism, west coast  style.  I'm thinking things are a little fucked up out there and not just  for me.