Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [80]
One day at Sundance, I got a call from Dad, who had moved from the West Village to Brooklyn a few years earlier, just around the corner from me and Katharine and Henry. He had taken over the apartment that Julia was leaving, because it was a lot cheaper than his place on West Fourth Street. He lived there a short while until he decided to move in with my mother again. I don’t know how they’d cooked up this idea but they had thought it was a winner: he got to save money and she got an “au père” of sorts, a father of her children to take out her garbage and answer the door when the liquor store delivery guy came by. They lasted about six days, until the night Dad went out to get an ink cartridge for his printer and when he came back Mom had bolted the inside lock and wouldn’t let him back in, not even to get his things. That’s when he called me. He came and slept on the blue couch in my living room and for the next few days we were roomies. While at my house, he asked what I was reading, what I was writing, and I lied about both, pretending to be very diligently “on” a play. He told me what he was reading and lied about what he was writing. We talked about day jobs and money problems and joked that jail would be a wonderful place to get some work done, three meals a day served to you, no preparation time, get a lot of reading done, a little exercise to keep the mind sharp, no rent to worry about, no distractions except the occasional visit from a loved one. Then he went to Katharine and Henry’s for a few nights, and then he slept at Eleanor’s until he found a new place in Brooklyn.
This could have been the moment when I said, Wow, do I want to be sleeping on some couch of my kid’s when I’m sixty-seven? I got it good. I gotta hang on to this job thing or it’s back to peeing in sinks for me. But instead, I quit.
I left partly because in a staff meeting one day I couldn’t remember what our actual product was. We were talking about the website routing people to the channel, which routed people to our magazine, which directed viewers to the news show we aired about the shows on the channel, and I thought, I can’t be the only person in this room who can’t keep straight what we sell. When I quit, the reactions from people who’d watched me be broke all my life were quite dramatic. I suppose just because you quit drinking doesn’t mean you know how to do stuff—keep a good job, or do things that make sense. But the way I saw it, I needed to get back to crummy jobs, only this time I would write while working these crummy jobs.
I got a job working at a friend’s high-end modern furniture store and art gallery. I wrote humor pieces and a profile of a former WPA sculptor who hung around the store. I wrote a lot of my own stuff. Then my friend got a permanent employee so I had to find another job. That was September 10, 2001. There was now no work available, crummy or not so crummy. Nothing. Over the next seven months I sent out résumés for hundreds of jobs—receptionist at an animal clinic, where I would have to wear colorful scrubs with kittens on them; a job signing people up for long-distance phone plans at college campuses; part-time nanny; assembler of boxes for shipping art; ESL teacher at a women’s center—knowing I would never get those jobs. There were no jobs for anyone in New York. I was about to get evicted but I was halfway through writing a play. Maybe I did need poverty and instability to write.
It didn’t seem to be a successful recipe for Dad, though. I was watching him make do with less and less, and I didn’t know whom to worry about. My dad, my mom, myself. My dad was offered a full-time permanent job by a law firm as a kind of impeccable