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Feb. 11th, 2009
Of Hamsters & Teenage Waifs
Feb. 11th, 2009 03:06 pmGatsby is running scared. As Depression 2.0 encroaches nearer, spreads its voluminous petticoats in preparation for hunkering down to take a nice big crap, companies are tightening up those operational expenditures. Many of them are deciding: we don’t need the hamsters! Which means they don’t need the guy who runs the hamsters. Which means Gatsby is faced with losing his extravagant lifestyle. I don’t begrudge Gatsby that lifestyle, by the way: he made all his own money. But he’s really only been a businessman during flash flood times; he doesn’t know how to deal with droughts. His Young Entrepreneurs Club didn’t prepare him for this.
Hamsters themselves are hurting too. They’re a lot less cheeky, they’ve got that nose to the hamster wheel. Used to be that most of hamsters – least the ones I edited – were mystery shopping for kicks. They were getting paid to shop! Never mind that between paying for the gas to drive 40 miles roundtrip and springing for non-reimbursable items shop instructions stipulate must be purchased, the vast majority of them were quite possibly losing money on the assignments. (This time with feeling.) They were getting paid to shop!
Now they’re doing it for money.
I write them little notes about their spelling: Please proofread your reports before submitting them to catch spelling errors. Thanks so much!
They write me back: Thanx for feedback. Hope my report meets your stannards. Do you know when I’ll get paid?
I imagine I’m not long for Hamster World. I’ll miss it. Not the money so much – I’m one of the operational expenses Gatsby has cut way back on. But it’s just so… Dickensian. I feel like I’m two cubicles down from Mr. Guppy at Kenge and Carboy's. Not that my life is lacking in weird you understand, but this is a weird of a different feather, a more anachronistic kind of weird: I thought it was extinct. I’ll miss that.
And because there’s never enough drama… Wells just got kicked out of his living situation. Note how coy I am: “living situation” not “house.” That’s because for the last year and a half he and his mother had been crashing with his grandmother. The grandmother lives in a retirement home with stringent age requirements. Somebody finally figured out that Wells is not over fifty-five.
Wells’ mother herself had just moved out to live with a boyfriend. They’d burned through his meth fast or maybe he punched her. Or maybe she punched him. I dunno. All I know is that the relationship lasted three days and now she's sleeping on the floor of somebody’s apartment in Seaside.
“We’re taking him in,” I told Ben.
“Are you crazy? We can’t –“
“What are his other options?” I asked. “Foster care? Going back to that scuzzball junkie of a mother? He’s not a bad kid. But God, I mean – somebody’s got to reach out a hand to him –“
Compromise reached: I am going to speak to the grandmother tonight. (Mother has been “supposed to call me” for the past three days he’s been staying with us. She hasn’t.) He can stay with us until next week. But then somebody’s got to make some kind of permanent arrangement for the kid.
Waif children always do it to me because, of course. I was one. I still wonder how I managed to make it out of my childhood alive, and in relative possession of my faculties.
Wells is sleeping on the couch. We are eating pasta, rice and beans. He brought over a tiny trove of possessions, stashed them under Robin’s bed. Among them – a rather large switchblade knife, illegal in California.
“You can’t keep that here, Wells,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“And you can’t smoke dope here.”
“I know,” he said. No connection when he meets my eyes but why would there be – I’m an adult, I’m the enemy.
“Did you have a room at your grandmother’s?”
“Oh, no, no” he said. “I slept on the couch there too.”
“No corner to call your own? No place where if you put something down it wouldn’t be touched?”
“No,” he said. He gave that stoner laugh.
“How can you study?”
“I –“ he started to stay. And then stopped.
And I flashed back to the middle school graduation ceremony. Well had received a citation: he’d managed to maintain a 90% grade point average for a whole semester. Robin had never managed to get a 90% grade point average.
Wells is not a stupid kid.
“Wells, you know it’s the only way out. School, I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. I know. It’s just –“ He shrugged. “Anyway I’m lucky there are people like you in the world.” This had the formal of a prepared speech and I was left to wonder who’d prepped him. Not the mother. Definitely not the mother. The grandmother? Could he possibly have come up with it himself?
Hamsters themselves are hurting too. They’re a lot less cheeky, they’ve got that nose to the hamster wheel. Used to be that most of hamsters – least the ones I edited – were mystery shopping for kicks. They were getting paid to shop! Never mind that between paying for the gas to drive 40 miles roundtrip and springing for non-reimbursable items shop instructions stipulate must be purchased, the vast majority of them were quite possibly losing money on the assignments. (This time with feeling.) They were getting paid to shop!
Now they’re doing it for money.
I write them little notes about their spelling: Please proofread your reports before submitting them to catch spelling errors. Thanks so much!
They write me back: Thanx for feedback. Hope my report meets your stannards. Do you know when I’ll get paid?
I imagine I’m not long for Hamster World. I’ll miss it. Not the money so much – I’m one of the operational expenses Gatsby has cut way back on. But it’s just so… Dickensian. I feel like I’m two cubicles down from Mr. Guppy at Kenge and Carboy's. Not that my life is lacking in weird you understand, but this is a weird of a different feather, a more anachronistic kind of weird: I thought it was extinct. I’ll miss that.
And because there’s never enough drama… Wells just got kicked out of his living situation. Note how coy I am: “living situation” not “house.” That’s because for the last year and a half he and his mother had been crashing with his grandmother. The grandmother lives in a retirement home with stringent age requirements. Somebody finally figured out that Wells is not over fifty-five.
Wells’ mother herself had just moved out to live with a boyfriend. They’d burned through his meth fast or maybe he punched her. Or maybe she punched him. I dunno. All I know is that the relationship lasted three days and now she's sleeping on the floor of somebody’s apartment in Seaside.
“We’re taking him in,” I told Ben.
“Are you crazy? We can’t –“
“What are his other options?” I asked. “Foster care? Going back to that scuzzball junkie of a mother? He’s not a bad kid. But God, I mean – somebody’s got to reach out a hand to him –“
Compromise reached: I am going to speak to the grandmother tonight. (Mother has been “supposed to call me” for the past three days he’s been staying with us. She hasn’t.) He can stay with us until next week. But then somebody’s got to make some kind of permanent arrangement for the kid.
Waif children always do it to me because, of course. I was one. I still wonder how I managed to make it out of my childhood alive, and in relative possession of my faculties.
Wells is sleeping on the couch. We are eating pasta, rice and beans. He brought over a tiny trove of possessions, stashed them under Robin’s bed. Among them – a rather large switchblade knife, illegal in California.
“You can’t keep that here, Wells,” I said.
“Okay,” he said.
“And you can’t smoke dope here.”
“I know,” he said. No connection when he meets my eyes but why would there be – I’m an adult, I’m the enemy.
“Did you have a room at your grandmother’s?”
“Oh, no, no” he said. “I slept on the couch there too.”
“No corner to call your own? No place where if you put something down it wouldn’t be touched?”
“No,” he said. He gave that stoner laugh.
“How can you study?”
“I –“ he started to stay. And then stopped.
And I flashed back to the middle school graduation ceremony. Well had received a citation: he’d managed to maintain a 90% grade point average for a whole semester. Robin had never managed to get a 90% grade point average.
Wells is not a stupid kid.
“Wells, you know it’s the only way out. School, I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. I know. It’s just –“ He shrugged. “Anyway I’m lucky there are people like you in the world.” This had the formal of a prepared speech and I was left to wonder who’d prepped him. Not the mother. Definitely not the mother. The grandmother? Could he possibly have come up with it himself?