The Dodo (Excerpt #1)

We awoke to Sandy's unthinkable devastation, to now-iconic images of watery waste. Weeks later, two photos still haunt me: the submerged glass carousel in Brooklyn, and the Seasides Heights roller coaster washed into the Atlantic. Both photos are devoid of people.

Even though I stayed up most of that Monday night, worried about my friends and family without power, anxiously following Twitter hashtags like #ConeyIslandGone, it was the people-less aftermath that shocked me. After the storm surge subsided and Jim Cantore wrung out his superhydrophobic pants in the hotel tub, after millions surveyed the debris, those of us outside the Northeast were left with snippets and sound bites of cataclysm. My heart was heavy for the homeless in Breezy Point and Staten Island. But the images that winded me, the unshakeable shots that I cried over, were of apocalyptic non-existence.

I asked my husband what this says about my level of empathy.

"I'm maybe not so nice a person," I announced. This was the Saturday after the storm. I was trying to casually lean against the doorway of his office while he played Diablo III on mute. Slain demons fell in flashes.

"You ate my leftover stir-fry."

"No," I said.

"You forgot to pay the gas bill again."

"No. But shit, yeah."

"Seriously?"
 
"When I saw those babies being evacuated from NYU I couldn't cry."

"Wait, were you trying?"

"No. But I cried when I saw Jane's merry-go-round underwater."

"Aren't you on your way to the Red Cross? Terrible people don't give blood. "

"Yes, but that's beside the point. PREMIE BABIES, Dan. Maybe I just don't like people! Maybe I'm a misanthrope! Don't you agree that my solipsistic concern over my own unresponsiveness to tragedy rather than the tragedy itself is proof that I lack empathy?"

"Pay the gas bill before you go."

At the Red Cross center, an RN prodded my arm to find a rich-enough vein. Her fingers moved in rhythm to a televised collegiate football cheer.

"The Sandy devastation is terrible," I said.

"Unbelievable," she said.

"The photos," I said.

"I know," she said.

"Have you seen the one of the roller coaster? In the Atlantic?" I said.

"Maybe," she said. "God, all of those people. Am I hurting you?"

"No," I said.

"Keep squeezing," she said.

While recovering at the Keebler cookie station, I thought about my job as a travel agent, about the calls I'd fielded from clients inconvenienced by the storm. The most reprehensible was from a professor stranded in a midtown luxury hotel. She couldn't believe she'd be missing a dinner party in Atlanta. "I'm hosting" she'd spat out, and I steadied myself by envisioning a scene that could have been lifted from a Meatloaf video: a mile-long oaken table lined with candelabra, pissed-off windblown guests sitting down to non-perishables like Spam and maraschino cherries, and in the center of each of their plates, a cloth napkin folded in the shape of a plane.

Maybe I'm a misanthrope.

As a kid, I had an easier time connecting to nature or inanimate objects. I wrote this off as an extension of shyness. I practically fetishized a shard of pottery I found washed up in a brackish Outer Banks sound, convinced it was an artifact from the Croatan. I carried it around in my pocket for weeks and whenever I touched it, was reminded of the smallpox epidemic and the arrogance of imperialism. I felt pangs of sympathy -- actual pangs, because sometimes a sharp corner cut into my leg when I sat down too fast -- for my Native American forbearers. Meanwhile, in a YMCA Indian Princess meeting, outfitted in a bear claw necklace and feathered headdress, I couldn't really muster any sympathy for my fellow tribe member Meryll, who only days before had been bitten on the ankle by a snake while raking leaves. I sort of felt it was her fault. She demonstrated the snake's fangs coming at her with the middle and index fingers of both hands, so that when she told us "it stung so bad," it looked like she was doing air quotes.

I didn't grow up inventing imaginary friends; I grew up inventing imaginary stuffed animals. This meant that Sausage, a gift from my grandmother, a gingham dog with a head three times the size of his body and only two stumpy paws, was regularly invited to high tea by Diana, the invisible plush calico. Diana, named after Royalty, would start each tea service by criticizing Sausage for having brown stains on his torso (I had thrown up VERY REAL  vomit which hadn't quite come out), but they got along fine once Sausage inevitably fell over.

In second grade, obsessed with the 1950's TV show Lassie, I wrote a fan letter. To Lassie. Requesting an autograph. I rationalized that Santa always wrote back, oblivious to two important differences: Santa wasn't dead and Santa had opposable thumbs. I taped the letter to the outside of my bedroom window because a famous dog hailing from the past would naturally arrive by sky. I also set out a bowl of water. To my parents' credit, they didn't peg me as developmentally disabled, but rather signed Lassie's name in cursive at the bottom. In a nod to realism, they added a poorly sketched paw print. The water was also gone.

And yet: was it borderline to have such a connection to a dead border collie? Why, when given the chance to dream up a whole band of friends, did I choose again and again to imagine the inanimate? That day when Meryll lifted up her pants leg to show me her swollen puncture wound, why did I silently worry the relic in my pocket? I look again at the photos of the carousel and roller coaster. My breath catches. 

In 2008, Adam Savage, host of Myth Busters, delivered a TED Talk about his obsession with objects and their embedded narratives. As a collector of curios, both original and self-made, he became fixated on a New Yorker photo of a Dodo skeleton. This skeleton, the first of its kind, was assembled from the bones of a single Dodo discovered in a pit on the isle of Mauritius. Adam admits:

I became obsessed with the object, not just the beautiful photograph itself, the color, the shallow depth of field, the detail that's visible, the wire you can see on the beak there that the conservator used to put the skeleton together. There's an entire story here.

Something in this photo affects me, too. There's a kind of staid surge, like an ossified wave. The elongated neck could be the climb of a coaster.  The hollowed out center, where the heart would be, could house a carousel.  Fearlessness led to the Dodo's extinction. Living in isolation, unable to fly, it was easy prey for sailors who slaughtered thousands for meat. After the fact of Sandy, I'm left with a jumble of other facts: That New York City is an island. That the polar ice caps are melting. That water levels are rising, an increase of two to five feet by 2080. That as a New Yorker, I too was fearless.    

Writing Process

In the past month, two of my former students have reached out to me for advice on writing. They want to know the details of my process, specifically how I motivate.

I was trying to type up a response, trying to come up with a spot-on metaphor to describe what it feels like to set out to write, when our cat Snickers edged himself over to my keyboard and began hacking up a hairball. And that was it exactly: starting is a painful but necessary expulsion. Sometimes I cough and nothing comes, and like Snickers, I give up and halfheartedly hunt the ceiling fan. But mostly I produce a netted mess of me -- a result of obsessive thought-licking -- and can breath again, unburdened of accretion. I am always, always surprised by the hairball. This is gross but accurate.

So, by way of encouragement, I told one student about words-as-vomit, and another that writing isn't so much pulling teeth as being pulled by teeth, or rather one tooth, as if a giant pulpy molar has you hogtied by the thinnest of floss and is dragging you down a road paved with periodontal scalers. Sometimes, if getting started is especially torturous, the big tooth has positioned little dental mirrors all along the road like lamp posts and is forcing you to take stock of your idle reflection.

A typical afternoon of writing looks like this for me:

Open up a blank word document, make coffee. Read news headlines. Stare at blank word document. Walk to fridge, take out peanut butter, stick finger in peanut butter. Take out jar of jelly and stick another finger in jelly (the same finger would be unsanitary). Lick fingers. Pour coffee. Sit down at computer. Google search grade school classmates/ex-boyfriends/child stars. Change Facebook profile pick. Stare at blank word document. Write down two words -- diamante and  stroboscopic -- that you have committed to using somewhere, anywhere, in the piece. Look up their definitions because you keep forgetting what they mean. Google image search "Kirk Cameron stroboscopic." Turn on television. Turn off television. Hate-read a successful mommy blogger. Google search a birthing term that scares you -- effacement, maybe -- then experience an increased pressure to write, a whooshing claustrophobia, because in the not so distance future you'll want to start a family and then there will be even less time for your terrible writing and look at all the time you have now for your terrible writing! Scroll through your online wedding album which is testament to your happiness. Wonder if you can't write because you're happy. Briefly resent your husband. Drink more coffee. Stretch in anticipation of a procrastination run (you hate to run but you hate to write more). Check work email. A client in Jamaica says you're the best travel agent ever (love the sea view)! A client in Belize insinuates your reprehensibility (these macaws, which we were not informed of, are very, very loud). Google search "Macawly Culkin" to see if maybe somebody has superimposed his face on a parrot. When you discover that they haven't, consider doing this yourself, until you realize you don't know how. Google search "how to put a person's face on an animal body." Amend it slightly: "how to put a person's face on an animal body when you don't own photoshop."

Miraculously, if I just sit there long enough, if I can cut through the jabber and fog, if I can re-center myself in the first person and focus enough to unfocus (a marriage of mental acuity and subconscious abandon), decent writing happens. It's the starting that feels impossible. 

In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice Flaherty explores the relationship between brain changes and writing. After losing twins shortly after their birth, she was seized by such a manic boon of creativity that she couldn't stop writing, regardless of its quality, and craved even the physical sensation of pen on paper. She asserts that changes to the temporal lobe, or mood disorders like manic depression, can lead to a pathological need to write (or, as was the case with James Joyce, to hide in cupboards during thunderstorms). Conversely, writer's block can be partly attributed to chemical cocktail. I've always been envious of authors who suffer from hypergraphia. I knew a guy in NYC who used to feverishly compose poems on his calves. (Of course, he also chewed wine labels during party lulls.)  While I can relate to a mounting need to write, I've always been too irresolute, too fastidious, to get it all down quick in public. There are the calves and calves-not, and I am firmly a member of the latter.

Pathologizing my writing process actually complicates the issue -- because even though I am slow, and prone to real-time revision, and easily distracted by crime solving forums and costumed cats, I suspect that this same deficient attention permits me wildly inventive associations. Flaherty herself even admits the same: "I wrote better when I was at least a little bit ill."  It has been rewarding for me to learn to move daily through the persistent radio noise and emerge on the other end with a handful of grain. That's what it amounts to -- a daily handful of grain, no more than 600 words, no less than 300 -- that I then put away for later. I like to think of all of these words accumulating in an essay silo. So I guess my blog is aptly named. 

Anne Lamott has this great paragraph in Bird by Bird that I return to often:

"If you don't believe in God, it may help to remember this great line of Geneen Roth's: that awareness is learning to keep yourself company. And then learn to be more compassionate company, as if you were somebody you are fond of and wish to encourage."

Aside from her advice to just write a little each day -- to instill the habit, to approach longer work through the window of a manageable one-inch picture frame -- this injunction to be kind to the self has transformed my writing the most. I have the tendency to abuse my inner worker bee. I think back to the way groups of Brazilian teenage boys treated me the summer I was a food service employee at Disney World: heckling me to break large bills, leaning over the cash register to touch my cabelo (Ariel! Ariel!), waving bread sticks in my face to get attention. None of this was encouraging. When I'm dismissive of my process and suspect of my voice, I'm essentially demanding a full refund in Portuguese. I've got my group flag raised in anger, my pushy fingers on the till.   

I abandoned a novel in graduate school because it was taking too long to write. But because I could never shake the need to write, I decided I was really a poet. I now understand that I moved in the direction of poetry because it sanctioned my deliberate, plodding pace. My obsessive brain could tinker with a couplet for hours and that was OK. I could tend to a neat little square of page all afternoon without the pressure to produce anything of length, and freed from that pressure, I wrote more.While I still love poetry, I'm excited about this new-found faith in a long-form non-fiction project. It's difficult to write 300-600 words a day and work a full time job, but it can be done. Hairball by hairball.

Doggy Style Excerpt #3

In the end, I didn't get hired because of my retail experience. I didn't wow the store owner with my interview savvy. To highlight my entrepreneurial initiative, I told her that at the age of ten I won a year's supply of Purina Puppy Chow at a dog show expo, repackaged it in brown paper bags, affixed Print Shop labels of a golden retriever in a neckerchief, and sold it door-to-door for a profit. Hustling neighbors is not a job skill anyone should highlight. No -- the reason I was hired to work Saturdays at Doggy Style, the sole differentiating factor that somehow bespoke my ability to stack biscuits in an eye-pleasing pyramid, was that the owner's dog picked me.

I hadn't even noticed him in the corner -- a big mop of a mutt, a canine President Taft, who had wedged himself between the counter and a box marked "Sports Apparel: Small Dog ONLY" and appeared to be gnawing off his own paw to get out. He was ancient. He wagged his tail at painfully long intervals. He looked like a dessert yule log, uniformly stout and swollen.  I didn't have the typical urge to scratch behind the ears and babble "Whosa good widdle doggie woggie? Who?" Instead, I waved, one curt windshield-wiper wave, and tried to answer a question about customer service.

But this dog was like a divining rod. He squirmed and forked his buttercream body towards me, the underqualified mess lifting up her own legs to better visualize how a terrier might step into a vest, and collapsed expectantly at my heels. "Hello," I said, and it came out with less enthusiasm than I'd hoped, the way you might greet an officer who's just pulled you over.

"Muppet never does that," the owner said. I wasn't sure what the "that" was. Move? Slobber on a hem? I was hired on the spot. $10 an hour, tax-free, under the table.

"Plan to be here at 9AM on Saturday. You'll be working with Rebecca." She paused to consider the doubleness of this. "Rebeccas."

I had a week to picture this other woman and our shared identity. I immediately felt vulnerable, the way I'd felt a few days earlier when I'd shown up in my boyfriend's apartment foyer to serenade him on the violin for his birthday, only to have him ask me if I could play "something more complex." (I then did my best to improvise "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"). I felt fiercely protective. I recognized an unwillingness to divvy up my own name. As shocking as it sounds, I had never met another Rebecca. The world had thrown me together with a handful of Becky's, but this, in its fullness, was different.

I was in college when I first watched Hitchcock's Rebecca, enrolled in a 20th Century American Cinema class, about the same time I was ignoring Gloria Steinem's self-esteem council. I expected to go into the movie identifying with my off-screen namesake, but instead, related wholly to the innominate frightened protagonist, the young girl crippled by inferiority. I even related more to the young girl's father than the matchless, immortalized Rebecca.There's a scene early-on in the film where Maxim and the girl are having breakfast in Monte Carlo, and she admits that she's an artist who sketches, nothing serious, and that her father was an artist as well. She says that he painted the same perfect tree over and over. I remember my stomach knotting up when I heard these lines, how I doodled in my notebook a tree with dozens of fallen pointillism leaves. I also suspected my fledgling creative process to be rooted in obsession, a worry that I could never quite capture life correctly and so could never quite move on.

The second wife of de Winter, the young girl, remains unnamed. She derives her identity solely from her husband and is haunted by the memory of a dead woman. I read Rebecca as a film about female threat and self-doubt. The new bride is shown where to do her correspondence (in Rebecca's morning room); what fashionable and sophisticated dress looks like (Rebecca's fur coat); how to entertain on an impressive grand scale (throw a costume ball, like Rebecca did). For years I was a Rebecca who also lived in the shadow of an unseen Rebecca: I made my own unrealistic standards, fell short of them, and gave myself grief. So when I learned I'd be working alongside a flesh-and-blood doppelganger, a real-life retail counterpart, I felt deficient.

Flight of the Navigator

I'm honored to be today's guest essayist on jdbrecords! Click here to be transported back to 1986.

The Mindy Project

I was all primed to finish another section of the essay I'm working on, but then got distracted by The Mindy Project, Mindy Kaling's new comedy creation in early previews on Hulu. I was prepared to like it for two reasons: one, Kaling is an antic chatterbox with great timing and turn of phrase, and two, the receptionist in the show sports a Banana Republic blouse circa 2006 that I actually own and wear on special occasions (ie, Endless Shrimp at Red Lobster). I felt a real sympathy for the actress playing Betsy. That silk sweats like crazy!

But I didn't like The Mindy Project. I actually had quite the adverse reaction to it. I tried on my unbreathable blouse and picked up my copy of Gloria Steinem's "Revolution from Within," which I'm currently rereading and using as a coaster, and thought about how unfair it is that I can't bring myself to praise and support a show spearheaded by such a funny, talented, frequently subversive female. I've had women's self-esteem on the brain for awhile now. I've been trying to figure out how we can translate female insecurities into comedic fodder without collapsing into desperation. Or if desperation is a necessary part of it.

If an article of clothing can pass through the screen and become tangible, a tether to the familiar, then why not a character? Dr. Mindy Lahiri, played by Mindy Kaling (adding to my confusion of what's real and what isn't), is a 31 year old OB/GYN brainwashed by romantic comedies. She's undertaken a kind of mysterious self-improvement project in response to a painful breakup with a boyfriend. After giving a revenge toast at her ex's wedding, Mindy crashes her bike into a stranger's pool and sinks to the bottom like a drunken mermaid. In a lovely scene shot underwater, we witness her re-birth, the motivational kick in the pants she gets from a drowned Barbie with a sharp tongue:  "You are acting like a fucking idiot."

But the re-prioritizing -- the presumed "project" -- is really just another fairy tale. We see her unprofessionally modeling a date-night outfit by the hospital front desk, eliciting feedback from staff. We see her curled up on the lounge couch, re-watching When Harry Met Sally. The focus on honing in on marriage material, to the exclusion of all other side-plots, feels problematic to me, especially in a show whose lead is both an ethnic minority and prestigiously employed. Danny Castellano, the brusque doctor who finds her to be juvenile yet charming, is spot-on in his frustration with workplace discussions of love and romance : "I'm all for lonely people making connections, but this is the Doctor's lounge, not the wooded area behind the highway rest stop." And yet even in this nugget of levelheadedness is embedded the seed of attraction. We're supposed to root for them to get together. We're conditioned to root for them. But I'm tired of the assumed, the easy, of Zooey Deschanel's manic pixie lack of self-sufficiency.

I want to make my own tomato soup. (Mindy, like Zooey, has clear broth brought to her at the end of the episode).  I want to fight the romantic comedy impulse right down to my scrapbooking core.To me, it feels like that even in making fun of it, Kaling is embracing it.

This pilot preps us for a kind of triage love triangle. These are, as women, our cliche choices of savior: the scallywag Brit who provides sexual affirmation post-rejection, and the assertive man's man whose misogynistic comments are mitigated by attraction. I know this is a comedy -- I consistently laugh at 30 Rock, so I'm not the PC police -- but I was hoping for more complexity and sophistication in navigating the waters of women's self-esteem. Liz Lemon might be self-deprecating, but she's responsible, and not singularly motivated. When Mindy is out on a first date (with guest star Ed Helms), she's reluctant to take an emergency call from the hospital, where she's needed to perform a breech birth. The implication, the punch line, is that she's ruining her chances by leaving before dessert, by excusing herself in service of a highly-skilled job. She later tells her best friend that "she messed up" the date. It doesn't occur to either woman that he might actually want to see her again.

Maybe I'm more critical of The Mindy Project because I just got married, and am thus finally removed from the dating scene. But I did live in New York City for six years. It wasn't until I was 30 that I met my husband, and it wasn't until 35 that we got married. Yes, sometimes my search for lasting love felt hopeless. My self-esteem took a real hit when divorced Barney arrived on his motorcycle for our beer garden blind date and informed me that I "looked thinner online." But I had a job, and I went to it (most of the time), and I didn't make my rotten dates the sole topic of water cooler conversation. I didn't use my lousy love life as a teaching tool to explain medical insurance. I wasn't an obstetrician, by the way. If I had been, I would have excused myself from my plate of sauerkraut and sausage and proudly announced to Barney that I had a baby to deliver.

One Vulture reader said of The Mindy Project that "It's very good. Went by very quickly." I'd like to see the bar set higher. In a seminal election year where my autonomy over my body might be decided by men I've never met, I'd like to have more in common with fictional women than the shirt I'm wearing.

Excerpt #2 from "Doggy Style"

When people find out that my husband Dan is also a poet, they usually ask if we're competitive. There is a not-so-subtle implication that two writers can't co-habitate long-term. That sort of relationship is fine for a summer in a garret, but when you're looking at divvying up chores, figuring out whose turn it is to wipe down the recycling bin, inevitably one party will resort to jabs: "Of course you're good at iambs. Everything is me me me me me!"

When Dan and I were watching the Olympic Women's Gymnastics Trials, and Jordan Wieber failed to qualify, I reconsidered my household standing. I don't see myself as the all-around favorite only marginally outperformed, but rather the long shot with overprotective parents.  When I succeed, it's never assumed. I tread the beam with a hung head. I'm shocked when my poetic feet aren't out of bounds.

"It must be hard when one of you publishes and the other doesn't." This was uttered recently by my co-op South African check-out boy, who allows me to piggyback on my husband's student discount. I like him because he doesn't pass judgement when I forget my eco-friendly tote or stash cheese samples in my purse.

"Well, sometimes it is, but mostly we're supportive." 

"I think I'd go crazy," he said in his hot accent. "I think I'd have a serious case of the can't-dos, 'mate. Is this a leek?" I could listen to him pronounce "leyke" all day. 

The truth of the matter is, it is hard. Dan is more prolific than me, suffers less from an internal censor. In a past life, he was a surrealist hosting automatism parties while I was an archeologist sifting soil and cataloging shards.  I just read about obsessive slowness, a type of OCD categorized by extremely plodding behaviors. Obsessive slowness sufferers can take up to twenty minutes to put on a shoe. They might stare at a Little Debbie snack cake display for an hour, deliberating between Star Crunch and Fudge Rounds. (By the way, it took me forever to finish the article.) It confirmed what I already knew: the root of slowness is self-doubt and perfectionism. I'm too much like the computer at the end of "War Games." The only winning move is not to play.

My Junior Year of college, I heard Gloria Steinem speak. I worked for the student union as an usher, occasionally collecting tickets at the door for big-draw events in the auditorium. By "heard her speak," I mean I could make out the voice of a miked woman with excellent enunciation.  I didn't bother to sit in the auditorium and attend for free. Instead, I plugged away at Oceanography homework in the foyer, waiting for my shift to end. Steinem was a distraction. She would crescendo on words like "feminism!" or "power!", and her mic would pop, and I'd wind up re-reading the same paragraph on plate tectonics.  Later that night, while she was deep in conservation to the left of the stage and I was kicking stray soda bottles further under seats, I looked at her long enough to feel like I'd had a personal encounter with a celebrity. I came to the conclusion that she had nice hair.

It wasn't until after I had graduated, the interim summer before my master's program, that I picked up "Revolution from Within" at a local used bookstore. On the cover was the perfectly-coiffed, softly-modulated Steinem, smiling in front of a sunset. I had come to this bookstore to try and write something. My journal was filled with deprecating chicken scratch off to the sides of poems: ending is terrible and ugh, bad line. Nursing my cup of coffee in front of the self-help section, stymied by yet another stanza, I couldn't stop staring at Steinem. She was placid to the point of "Fuck off." It was rude not to engage. She had the look of someone waiting for a response to a difficult question.

I read most of the book that afternoon. At first I made sure my fingers obscured the banner on the bottom of the cover (A BOOK OF SELF-ESTEEM), but after a couple of hours, it didn't much matter. I was starting to recognize ingrained thought-patterns and behavioral trends that were counter-productive to creativity. I remembered how much I doubted my abilities, how the things I believed I was good at as a kid were always rooted in fantasy as a kind of self-esteem safeguard. For example, I had been certain that if I ever made it to Loch Ness, I could summon the monster just by calling to it. What I questioned was the relevant, the practical, the accessible. Even today. I hear my bag-boy in my head: serious case of the can't-dos.

In "Revolution From Within," -- in a section I highlighted -- Gloria Steinem cites psychologist Alfie Kohn and his research on the link between self-esteem and competition: "Superior performance not only does not require competition; it usually seems to require its absence." He concludes that "we compete to overcome fundamental doubts about our capabilities and, finally, to compensate for low self-esteem." Based on Kohn's evidence, Steinem champions a circular paradigm of self-worth. Rather than focus on upstaging our peers to feel a sense of accomplishment, it's more beneficial to concentrate on bettering ourselves independent of others' successes or failures. We're all self-contained spheres, collaborating and conjoining. Of course, cynical me, I had written Mr Bubble? in the margin. I couldn't help but picture the label: one big, blithe, masterful bubble, floating among a group of faceless, beggarly, run-of-the-mill bubbles. Mr. Bubble's fist isn't raised in solidarity with the pink proletariat. He isn't so much hanging out with the other bubbles as about to throw a grenade at them. "Duck!" he seems to brag.

Excerpt from "Doggy Style"

My first year in NYC, I needed a part-time job to supplement my measly income at the travel agency. I answered an ad on Craigslist for a Saturday sales position at a high-end dog boutique in Soho. The name of the boutique was Doggy Style. Working at Doggy Style appealed to my twenty-five year old self more than, say, manning a front desk or assisting a book keeper, because no one snickers when you announce that you're tired from book keeping. It was rewarding to even let slip that I had an interview at Doggy Style.

My initial email correspondence with the owner was discouraging. She admitted that she'd heard from over 100 applicants, interviewed a quarter of them, and was at the tail end of the process. I asked what type of tail -- docked or bushy? She went "hmpff ha" in a kind of aggravated amusement, then extended me an interview: 7 o'clock that night.

I was still new to the city and terrible at navigating the train. Since I lived in Queens and worked on the Upper West side, I hadn't yet been to Soho. When I emerged from the subway, already running late, it was raining horizontally and I was wearing jelly sandals. They turned into sluices. I couldn't figure how rushing water was making my toes dirtier. At ten past seven, I had to stop and ask directions from a street vendor: "Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Doggie Style?" I was starting to feel like this was the opening scene in a porno version of Sesame Street.

It's commonplace for humor writers to use shit jobs as fodder.  David Sedaris was a self-effacing elf, Sloane Crosley suffered through entry-level publishing. (In an essay about competition, I can't help but compare.) Look: It's a clear sign of privilege to dwell on short-term eccentric employment, to reflect on the quirkiness of woe. I can fully disclose that for twelve years I attended a private school with a name that could have come from a sorting hat. When I confess that Doggie Style was rough, I do so with the understanding that other jobs are much, much rougher, both emotionally and physically. My mother was a private RN. She assisted hospice patients bedside. She would routinely rotate 200 pound women, or find herself crawling around their azalea bushes, pretending to look for a cat that had died in 1971. There's a reason you don't ever read essays published by Nike sweatshop laborers in Indonesia. That kind of grueling, abusive work is soul-crushing, and at the end of the day, there's no time or benefit to putting a lighthearted spin on low manufacturing costs. "Sole-Crushing" will just never get written, nor should it.

I arrived at Doggy Style to find darkened windows and a lowered security grille. Through the aluminum links I could make out canine dummies on display, eyeless and erect and stuffed in a state of half-dress. One had lost a battle with a couture tracksuit. One was just a disembodied head with a collar. I rapped on the window, and the owner -- a woman of indeterminate age bent over a ledger -- signaled that I enter. Her hand movements were fastidious, the perfectly timed gesturing of a conductor. She was an alpha. I sensed that rather than take on the appearance of her dogs, they took on hers.  
 
"I'm so sorry I'm late. I just moved here and the train--"

"Tell me why you want to work at Doggy Style."

"Well," I paused, reaching to wring out my hair and finding nothing but empty space, forgetting that I now looked like Cate Blanchett in Heaven.  The weekend before, I'd volunteered to be a Bumble and Bumble model in exchange for a free professional cut. "I'd like to work at Doggy Style because..." It's never a good sign when you have to repeat the question.

To begin with, I wanted to be able to afford my own hair autonomy: to walk into a salon and not be somebody's teaching tool. I wanted to pay for PBR at Brother Jimmy's in dollars, not dimes. I wanted to steal away to the Adirondacks for a weekend with my improv actor boyfriend and go fly-fishing. I wanted to afford fly-fishing equipment -- the super enticing lures, the ones with with names like "electric prince" and "chernobyl ant." (I subscribed to the Orvis catalog.)

"I'd like work at Doggy Style because I think it's a really exciting opportunity," I lied. "Right now my job during the week is at a travel agency, but my real interest is animals." My eyes darted from biscuits to harnesses, and I rushed to revise. "Specifically dogs. I think it would be a great experience to work with dogs, to dress them in sweaters and such. Although it's kind of warm for that right now." The owner was leaning on the glass counter, but not idly; she was actually polishing the surface with her elbows in tiny concentric circles.

"I'm not interested in having you dress dogs," she announced. "I need someone to stock the store. To order Greenies and make sure the leashes are in exactly the right place. I'm very meticulous about where things go."

I nodded my head in sympathy. "I get that. I totally get that."