Per Hour — The Conditions

. . . continued from Per Hour — The Eternal Question . . .

     An email arrives headed with a banner picture of five smiling employees &  

“Congratulations! We are pleased to offer you the position conditional upon . . . “  continuing, “There are three steps to this job offer by email:
 
	1. accept or decline this job offer 
	2. schedule a pre-employment drug test  
	3. pass a criminal background check”

	Start with your criminal background. Years of exaggerated employment & one physical address prove you haven't gone anywhere or gotten away with anything. 

The three requested personal references may take time though, as your longest friendships are with people you don't keep in contact with — it's why you're still friends. 

Simply reply to a few unanswered emails from earlier in the year & ask a favor.

Enter. 

	Next, the drug test: easy. The only reason you're looking for work is because you've been too broke to buy weed, so this works out well. Schedule the test at the lab you've been to before, in a strip mall next door to the animal shelter.

Enter.

	Lastly, to “accept or decline” the offer:

Decline comes with acceptance. 

From your entire employment history, beginning early, you have known this when: 

	at 10, throwing rubber-banded newspapers bundled into a double-pocket poncho from a pedal-brake cruiser coasting past weathered-plaster craft houses  

or walking them into the perfumed funeral home where a eulogist persistently mispronounced a great-grandmother’s name during a non-business family visit

or leaving one in the lobby of the motel that was as sketchy then as twenty years later, when you nostalgically checked in with a sketchy future-ex —

	at 11, gathering walnuts in burlap sacks almost as tall as you while a guardian watched in the distance from a corrugated metal barn — 

	at 12, mowing lawns around your neighborhood until moving to a rural town without lawns in time to be talked into summer football training where you lost the greater game of winning & losing to teams within teams —  

	at 13, cleaning an empty summertime elementary school, waxing hallway floors & re-painting basketball backboards with three other janitors: 

a hippy, 

an older man with half of his neck removed from cancer, 

& another, whose off-hours life was guessed in hushed assumptions at the school district office & joked about over backyard wine coolers on hanging, plastic lantern legal holidays —

	at 14, bussing tables at the steak place on the two-lane through town that you lived a few miles from & rode your dirt bike to until pulled over with no license & having to quit after going to court with your father where the judge was also a dick — 

	at 15, picking out rotten fruit in hundred degree heat from a conveyor line after a friend's older brother picked you up at five AM in his rusty Mustang blasting Breaking The Law in the growing dawn to an orchard, itching the peach fuzz sweat, swallowing mosquitoes   

& watching teen-farmer-sons sitting on ice chest tractors, mocking accents past rows of cloth saddlebags working the branches from splintering wooden ladders —

	at 16, now with a driver's license, showing up at The Donut Hole from five until eight, before first-period social studies, 

working alongside a newly-born-again who sang church hymns with gusto & full vibrato as he flipped or glazed, 

but liking the young guy who ran the bakery for his dad & who took you to Sacramento for the New Traditionalists tour where metal kids cruised by taunting new-wavers lined up to get into the concert that peaked with a spudboy spilling into the parting audience asking "Are We Not Men?" & your donut boss getting to say "We are Devo!" into the microphone, then driving the hour home wearing your new red energy dome hats & bouncing in 280Z bucket seats to an under-dash cassette —

	at 17, folding clothes & spacing hangers on the weekends in a mall thirty miles away after unloading a twenty-footer of leaning boxes trucked by a speed freak mullet who pogoed in the loading bay to The Toy Dolls blasting Nellie the Elephant from his cab & smiled as he flirted with the asst. mgr. —

	at 18, cash registering at a record store during the day because music was internal employment with a first-pick stash under the counter 

before night classes at a foothills junior college, mingling for a low grade-point average in a community of part-time electives also pursued by the cheap lure of eventual escape —

	at 19, shoveling snow off of time-share roofs at a mountain resort, slipping one afternoon on an ice sheet & dangling over a cluster of snow-mobiles a few stories below in just one moment from a list of many nearly-missed plummets allowed to take a slow walk to the bottom instead —

	at 20, cashiering at an independent gas station until told to not show up anymore for not ever showing up when you were supposed to because of other interests like your band, your motorcycle & their beer inventory — 

	at 21, wandering a state-line casino hours away from a seaside girlfriend as a slot-machine change attendant, living off apples, peanut butter & bread & staying: 

first, at a residential motel where various chronics went to live out whatever was left or not, 

second, at a hostel of former & future cons where you stuck your head in the open doorway of an acoustic guitar strumming down the hall & were welcomed-in sitting next to an older man who seemed to be in charge & closely mumbled “I'll show you something better than pussy,” but a few days later seeing him fighting a younger man in the parking lot & losing badly in an apparent hostile change of leadership, 

then, with the final weeks spent in a quiet boarding house run by an elderly woman where you found a ripped-up letter in the upper corner of a closet shelf, left by a former resident that, of course, you pieced back together to read that she didn't love him & if he came around she'd call the cops again, 

so you quit & found seasonal work closer to home at a fruit dehydrator, but lasted only a few days when a work injury sent you back to your bikinied wildcard on a worker’s comp beach vacation — 

	at 22, suddenly quitting in record numbers as a midnight dishwasher shift because your own best work is done at night 

or at a pizza chain because you wouldn't wear a straw hat behind an enormous sneeze guard while adding toppings like a dough-tossing window dancer on red light district display, 

& a stint delivering food strapped on a milk crate you'd attached behind your motorcycle seat, but having to sell the bike for money to move to San Francisco — 

	at 23, stocking used books at a Tenderloin shop managed by a friend while the owner was away, 

when you & the manager & other friends would lock the doors & stay late, playing guitars & drinking in a back-stock storeroom 

until you quit & the owner found dozens of empties, telling your manager-friend that he thought they were all from you, drinking alone while at work 

& the friend, beautifully, let that be the story — 

	at 24, taking deposits & cashing checks at a folding bank with another teller who stuffed twenties into her bra when the vault door was closed & drinks that night would be on her — 

	at 25, pulling credit reports from a large, beige, clicking machine in an office on the top floor of a department store, skip-tracing & once in a while quietly zeroing-out accounts of musicians or poets that you admired — 

	at 26, after losing your job at a Chinese book warehouse that got its start selling Mao's Little Red Book to Black Panthers, 

you moved across the country to run the register at another used bookstore, this one opened by your then-manager-drinking-friend/now-owner-drinking-friend where, on your first day, you noticed an empty tall boy on the first edition shelf, left by the owner, & knew immediately that it would be a well-read year to dog-ear & partially recall — 

	at 27, working a string of temp jobs back in San Francisco & playing guitar on the street after work for tips while moving between residential hotels with stairway leaners stare-slurring “whereyouthinkyergoing?” 

past intercontinentals nodding glitter-faced in the hallway to a room replaying sobbing slams & the occasional rumble of a punched shared wall —

	at 28, pecking data in a legally contaminated building with signage that warned of disease upon simply entering until quitting with a doctor's letter allowing you to collect mailbox checks for six months while recuperating by playing an old upright piano & smoking pot under asbestos-wrapped pipes in your basement — 

	at 29, packing & shipping in a mailbox store until tempted by the blunt circuit of due-paying guarantees — 

	at 30, tending afternoon bar near the northern border that let you pay the rent of a cabin west of town, leaving the night clearly reserved for wry yellow label illuminations to keep you slipping

at all times, going on with the on-going, periods of hourly rentals of meat & spirit gristle or traveling contracts of trust, betting with credit to carry-over into the burden of the illusion of art, ultimately leading back to the acceptance of decline.

Enter, then: 

Congratulations. Again, you accept your conditions.