Bending the Knee

I'm not giving up. But I did get a job.

So I finally got a job. Never had a job before. Always worked for myself. I work for the Man now, the straight-up government, the public health department of my local county. My retirement plan wasn’t working out, you see. I am 35 years old. By the time I turned 35 I was supposed to be rich and famous. This was mostly delusional, I understand now, but I want you to understand that it wasn’t entirely delusional. For a while, at least. I landed a mega book deal when I was 25. Surely one of the great New York City publishing houses wouldn’t give me this much money, I thought, if they didn’t think I was the next Jack Kerouac.

A year or so into writing that book, I was catching up with one of my old college roommates in Dolores Park. We hadn’t seen each other since graduation. It had been about two years. Since then, I had walked across America, published a radio piece on This American Life, and was on track to become The Voice of My Generation. My buddy, on the other hand, had been grinding in a job he mostly didn’t like, something to do with geographic information systems. “I’m starting to understand that I’m not going to be famous,” I remember he said at one point.

I hear courage in that, now, but I was embarrassed for him at the time. You’re not supposed to admit that you want to be famous, for one, that you’re waiting for the golden goose of celebrity to lift you up and take you gloriously into the sunset of public adoration and financial stability. His honesty disturbed me, the part of me that wouldn’t dare admit my own desire for fame and would dare even less to let it go. Underneath my embarrassment for him, though, I thought this was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. The man was giving up. You can’t just give up, I thought. Poor guy.

Just a few weeks later, the New York City publisher terminated my contract. This was a real nuke to the dream, but the dream scuttled out of the rubble like a cockroach. I would still be famous one day. And rich. It was all going to happen, surely.

And yes, sure enough, another not-as-big-but-still-big-enough-to-keep-dreaming New York City publisher picked up the manuscript.

When the book didn’t take off like I thought it would, the steady stream of speaking invitations was proof, I thought, that I could still make a living doing this. One boarding school paid me five-figures to speak to their students for an hour. Clearly, I’d never have to get a job.

But the gigs ran dry, and my writing wasn’t getting picked up, and a wellness start-up my buddies and I tried to get off the ground for two years never did make it, and I was getting tired of hustling. And then I met Tana, and we both want kids, and suddenly I’m 35 years old and kids need to happen soon if they’re going to happen at all and to have kids you need money and if you haven’t won the celebrity lottery or inherited a bunch of money then you have two options: defect or get a job.

Defection is a real option. People do it. I met a family once, a man and a woman in their late thirties who had five kids. They all lived in a retrofitted school bus full of sheepskins and antlers and altars and a wood-burning stove. I was paying them to build a tipi so I could host Darryl for some community ceremonies. When they invited me in for tea, I was overcome by the smell of their undomesticated truth, the musk of their pack. They traveled around the country, the world, making tipis for people, busking on city streets, and just generally being together. Imagine that, just spending time with your family, all the time. They bent the knee to nothing, to no one, or so it certainly seemed.

That was the dream: To find my woman, to have our children, and to just be together. Ride together. Spend our lives together. What could be more important? We would defect. But we’d have plenty of money from all my book deals and speaking gigs so that’d of course we’d have food and of course we’d stay warm and of course we’d have health insurance and of course we could pay the midwives out-of-pocket no problem since health insurance doesn’t cover home birth, the bastards.

For the birth of their fifth child, that family was parked out in the woods somewhere, far from a hospital, no midwives. The woman gave birth at the base of a big tree, held by her man while their eldest son, aged nine or so at the time, watched the rest of the kids in the bus.

Defection is risky. I was happy to risk it when it was just me, but now that it’s Tana, too, and maybe our kids someday, I understand, suddenly, why people get jobs.

So I got a job. Took a while. Turns out it’s hard to get a job if you’re 35 and have never had one before. I was surprised, at first, to get so many rejections. Insulted. You’re not going to hire me? Fools! Don’t you know who I am? First I was only applying to prestigious fellowships at prestigious universities. I would be their genius scholar-in-residence and teach a class or two each semester, nothing so demanding as to throw off my writing schedule. I could still travel the world as much as necessary (four, maybe five months a year) in order to give my keynotes to the stadiums that surely awaited me.

When those jobs didn’t work out, I settled for teaching positions. Fine. I’d teach English. I didn’t really want to, but I could stretch my way into it. I could be Robin Williams in Dead Poet’s Society. I could get psyched and make it work.

I applied to more than a dozen schools, didn’t get a single interview. Huh. Okaaay. Well, maybe I could be a residential coordinator on a college campus? I could help kids out when they drank too much, talk them through their loneliness. It might actually be kind of cool. Plus it came with free housing. Living on a dorm again as a 35 year old man wouldn’t be that bad. Better than giving birth at the base of a tree in the wilderness somewhere.

Still no luck.

I did receive an offer from a shelter for unhoused youth, a case worker position. $40k a year, pre-tax. Hardly any time off. Rough benefits. And tough, tough work, breaking up fights, navigating traumas, keeping kids alive and out of prison, reams of paperwork. I was too afraid, too selfish, too weak to say yes.

I had one more job application out when I decided to call it quits. If I didn’t get this job, I would take it as a sign from God that I was supposed to double down on the dream of being a writer/speaker/facilitator/consultant/minister/whatever-the-hell-I-am.

Unfortunately, and of course, and thank God, I got the job. I took it. I now have a steady income for the first time in my adult life. Health insurance. Life insurance. A freaking pension. And I have a 45 minute commute, twice a day, four times a week. On those days, I spend nine hours in an office, sitting in front of a computer, not really knowing what I’m doing yet, and entirely unconvinced that I would enjoy what I’m doing even if I did know what I was doing. I am the restorative practice systems specialist for the public health department. I’ll be supporting public schools to help kids when they misbehave, instead of punishing them. I think it could be really cool. It’s just so different than what I’m used to.

What it comes down to is this: I have to go to work. Like, right now. I gotta run. It sucks. It feels good. I don’t like it. I’m so grateful. I’m embarrassed. I’m proud. Thanks for reading. And to all of you who’ve taken jobs to support your families, to have a home for yourselves, a piece of land, a rental apartment, you fathers and mothers who’ve worked to make it work to the point that you only really get to see your kids on the weekends and maybe a glimpse at night…damn. You’re incredible. This is hard. Much harder than walking across America. I never knew. Never really understood. But I’m starting to get it.

Respect.