Philadelphia: Everybody is hustlin’

I went to an electronic and experimental music show tonight, free third Friday of every month at the Rotunda in University City. The first group looked good and dirty, not too hip and clean. They were called Sharks With Wings. They snuck up on me with a quiet something, muffled mallets and gently scraping metal on the guitar. But they were going somewhere, to this fantastic climax. And soon, the speakers sound like they’re exploding and, oh hell, someone’s swallowed a mike and there it is chirping and roaring in his throat; the most percussive of the bunch is now hitting the frame instead of the chimes. He’s just wailing on it, and it’s so raw and sparse and the rest sort of fade out until that guy is just beating the frame for his chimes and the soft mallet head has broken off so there’s this huge Thwak Thwak that in spite of the general lack of anything like a beat in the piece, is such a short-lived sound made from such a huge effort, such a steel driving man kind of swing that it can’t help having a rhythm. The wailing told me they were from Philly, even though they didn’t say.

The next act is a girl called “Bubblyfish.” She is from New York. She is clean and beautiful, smart, successful. She tells us that she is used to playing in clubs, so it makes her nervous that we all sit staring at her as she grooves with her gameboy. We are in a venue that feels at least slightly like a church basement. Her audience is forty folks interested in New Music, mainstream Philly apparently not quite ready for her. I don’t know what club would have her, and her visit here only made the Metro daily newspaper because of the gameboy tie-in.

Outside, I joked with a guy who settled here about a year ago that you wouldn’t confuse the Philly group with the New York one. “Yeah, Philadelphia is a city that runs on misery. At least that’s how it seems sometimes coming from outside. . . I really like it. I’ve got friends here; and it’s not just anywhere that you can see something cool like this [gestures to music spot] five nights a week,” and I can’t resist suggesting, “well, how about New York.” He rightly points out that in New York you couldn’t afford it, or at least you couldn’t afford it if you were me or him, working some shitty service job. Maybe in New York you have to really make it, be a Bubblyfish who can play in the clubs and have a face that glows, or you have to get out, move to Philly. Tough motherfucking Philly.

Until yesterday, I worked in a sandwich shop in the Philadelphia airport, five days a week, from six o’clock in the morning until two in the afternoon. I was the only white worker-bee (the managers were predominantly white), and a college student, but curiously found myself this job primarily peopled by folks from the ghetto or Haiti or both. I got the job like this:

First, I walked Center City every day for a week, filling out applications. Isn’t a 22 year-old woman moving to a city supposed to be a waitress? Isn’t that the fall-back for people who are really trying to make it as artists in the Big City? . . . Forget fall-back, you’ve got to struggle to make your way in the restaurant world before you can even think of struggling to make it in the art world. Working at a restaurant for a couple of months in provincial New Hampshire was apparently not enough experience. And besides, no one was hiring. See, look:

Me: I was wondering if you were hiring.
Busboy Serf: You can fill out an application.
Me: I only want to fill out an application if you actually have openings.
Busboy Serf: Let me go ask the manager.
Manager arrives, I am in the process of giving up and leaving.
Manager: You can fill out an application and we’ll see if we need anyone.
Me: Right, but you would know if you needed anyone, and I have been filling out applications all day, and I don’t feel like filling out applications if they will just sit in a pile until they are thrown in the trash.
I am walking away on this guy. He is disgusted by me. What right have I to question the application system? I am the applicant. I am the supplicant. I should beg, but subtly and with good taste-- I wish I didn't sit through the Bukowski movie Factotum, but he hit being a supplicant dead on when the alcoholic hero related how he got work at a bike factory-- “I had to prostrate myself for that one. I said, ‘My job is like a second home.’” I was too exhausted either to suck up for the nonexistant job, or to stun him with my wit and tell him to go to hell, so I just cut and ran.
“But there’s a process,” he shouted after me. He probably paid $5 an hour. Retail seems to pay even less, and they expect you to treat working there like a career decision.

A friend in the city told me that when he first went looking for work in Center City a girl in a retail place actually laughed at him. UPS wouldn’t hire him either because he had a criminal record for J-walking and trespassing. The hippies in town are apparently living off of drug studies. With participation in multiple studies they apparently make around 20K. This according to a friend who lived with them before she got work in her graduate infectious disease lab for (she calculated) about $8 and hour. She was making $10 during undergrad, before budget cuts to the National Science Foundation. Another guy she met made his living by stealing one nice camera every week or so and selling it on eBay.

So when I walked into a sandwhich place and found the first manager who didn’t treat me like he was doing me an enormous favor by deigning to talk to me, I said I’m your man. He said he couldn’t use me there but they needed me in the airport. Apparently many of the people who come in off the street looking for jobs there have a criminal record, which just won’t do given the security restrictions at the airport. He told me they needed more white girls up there.

So, I paid all the start-up costs for my little operation-- $120 for the train passes (three weeks in July and the monthly pass for August), $60 for fingerprinting and a security badge, $30 for a uniform-- black pants and an enormous black shirt, cap for my inappropriately unruly hair. Then, for seven weeks I got up at 4:30 in the morning and went to work. I got paid $8/hr because I had been to three years of university and I guess they figured I would leave if they paid me less, my bonus for being white and well-enough off to go to college. I was cursed with back pain that didn’t affect me at all when I was on my feet at work, but that practically immobilized me once I got home and sat down. I got caught up in all of the petty squabbling and pulling for status that happens among a group of people who spend most of their waking hours in a 4X20 foot space making sandwiches. A former classmate of mine came through the line and I got to feel ashamed for wasting my time, although he didn’t say anything much, and I could never be sure if the shame was all in my head or if he meant for me to feel that way.

I got to quit though. One co-worker had worked in fast food for twenty years, since he turned sixteen. Another had paid her house off working at McDonald’s (at least it could be done ten years ago; not sure about today, but I suspect that sometimes the big dogs are a little better employers than the struggling middle-type sandwich shops). Some of the recent immigrants were working two jobs like this: sixty hours a week at least and not getting any overtime for it because they had two employers.

For me, the worst of this low-wage service work is the management structure. The white man who seems to run the whole airport concession wants to be “Uncle Don” to us. Right. He’s like family to us-- he provides us with food and shelter and we’re all friends, one big happy family helping America to be great. Sounds like the everyday justification for slavery 150 years ago don’t it?

Meanwhile, the business is structured so that there’s always an overseer who is making not-much-more-money-than-you. This keeps people from getting uppity with the big bosses. The store manager is a nice guy. We don’t really want to put out the nice guy manager, and he doesn’t want to stop being a nice guy. If he has a problem with the way you are doing something “She’s putting too much turkey on the sandwiches; only two slices!” then he doesn’t tell you. He tells the person who is barely superior to you to tell you (the gradations of superiority are many). That way if you’re just on the edge of telling someone to go to hell; you are tired and need to rest your legs and there aren’t any customers anyway and besides you are the one making all the sandwiches and you do it and that’s what they pay you for, right (and of course you would be wrong, because they really pay you to look like you are making food fresh for the customer and not just assembling it); the big boss never has to hear it. The big boss doesn’t even have to speak to you unless he’s being cute, unless you are being one of the Uncle Toms or Aunt Jemimas that keep everything running smooth. That man is no uncle of mine.

The power structure puts everyone on the defensive. Everyone corrects each other all the time trying to pull rank and creating community is an uphill battle. It almost makes standing on the street corner selling water seem like a good alternative, or giving “cab rides” in your car from the corner of Lehigh and Broad. I rode the 5:00 AM train every day to work at the airport, in the company of all the morning shift janitors. They are city employees and maybe have it a little better than the likes of the privately employed sandwich folks. Also, they always sound older and wiser than the rest of us-- when they tell they crew that are headed up to Atlantic City, they add contemplatively “you’ve got to enjoy losing and winning, too, because nobody wins all the time.” But their kids are just hustlin’ on the street like everybody else, or sitting at home playing video games; one man wondered why his son hadn’t found a job, or how he can keep standing out on the street in the sun hassling people to buy water. Sounds like his the young man sold a couple of cases real quick, good and cold, and hasn’t found any formal work available to him that makes working seem like a good deal.

Alan Beggerow recently made the news because he didn’t feel like working anymore in an economy where employers treated workers as disposable; because he decided that he could live on a pension and his savings and a loan against his home if he “lived within his means” and stopped buying stuff. He found that, “my free time means a lot to me.” He quit and then he “threw his hat in the ring” and made his quitting into news. He and his wife are heroes. One of my West African co-workers has bought in to exactly the sort of American dream that Beggerow is rejecting now. She worked two jobs all summer since she’ll have to cut back on work when school starts up again. She’s a sophomore in college. Last week, as the summer was winding down, she bought herself a $300 cell phone-- $700 value, if you believe the advertising. “It didn’t seem worth it to work so much if I didn’t buy something for myself,” she told me as she thrilled about checking her email from the bus. My tastes are less expensive-- a pretty suede wallet at a gallery show and really good groceries is enough to hold me-- but I knew how she felt. Angelina worked 60 hours a week for corporate America, and then to make it feel like it wasn’t insane to spend practically all of her waking time working, she bought herself an electronic toy, the expensive kind of toy that is the capitalist world system’s bread and butter. It’s the American Way.

One day, hungry and with a pretty good stretch of time before my break, I took a piece of burnt toast from the morning breakfast run, scraped off the black and made myself a little half sandwich. I was surrounded by bread, but I hate to waste it. Darlene turned to me and said, “I haven’t seen nobody scrape toast since my Mama died.” I take the heels of bread home, too, sometimes. I’m gonna take my cues from the old black women and the Beggerows and the poor white trash of a certain persuasion and era in Kentucky. I’ll scrape toast any day before I work an hour I don’t have to in a job that I don’t love, and I’ll thank my lucky stars that I can go back to university.

The “Wake Up Your Mind” community college billboards on the SEPTA line are well placed to catch us all coming home after the shift is up, although that’s not necessarily a route to a secure and satisfying job (is that too much to ask these days?). The man in the front, a baggage handler, talks to the train conductor about taking on extra shifts and working days off. He sums up before he gets to his stop, “But we’re workin’ hard, so things should get easier for us, shouldn’t they,” and the conductor responds, “I guess so,” but neither of them sound convinced.