On Subbin'
As someone pursuing a life in the creative arts, there are plenty of times in my life when I’m doing a whole lot of nothing. You can spend as many hours as you want staring at a blank page; no matter how hard you wish for it, that thing just won’t write itself. So, at certain points (and because, unfortunately, bills exist) you have to venture into the world and get some kind of job. If you’re lucky, it’ll have something to do with the art you want to do, if you’re not, it could be anything. In the past nearly 10 years of my life, I’ve had quite a few jobs of each type and now, well, it’s time to go back to school.
I got an email from my old high school a few months ago. They were reaching out to the alumni to see if anyone was interested in substitute teaching. At the time, I was doing the dumbest part-time job you could imagine (and I’m still doing it for the record): I answer generic interview questions on behalf of sometimes fictional business owners in an attempt to get quoted on various niche websites to drive business. It sucks and it’s weird and it feels like some kind of strange evolution of capitalism where I’m playing pretend as a fake business person answering fake questions to be featured on a fake website… and all of this somehow makes money for someone?
Now, I’m writing this essay from the teachers’ lounge of the school I went to for 6 years and it’s pretty surreal. Walking the halls, pretending to be some kind of authority on anything at all, and watching the kids scurry around, worried about quizzes and homework and who they’ll take to homecoming or whatever, kinda blows my mind.
Being a substitute is funny because most of the time, your job is basically that of a glorified babysitter. You’re not teaching as much as making sure the inmates aren’t running the asylum with too much verve. You sit there and work on whatever you need to as the kids slowly get louder and louder until you look up and make eye contact with one and say, “come on, guys.” And then it’s quiet again…until the cycle starts all over again.
Don’t even get me started on how old this makes me feel though. On my first week of work, one of the kids mentioned a song that came out when I was in 8th grade. Another immediately chimed in, “That song came out the year I was born.” At that moment I knew, officially, I was (as the kids say) washed af.
It’s funny though, for how long it’s been and how much things have changed in the last twelve years, some things are still the same. I can still remember walking onto this campus for the first time as a little 7th grader, I can still remember walking off the campus for the last time as a surly 12th grader. And now, I’m back, and I’m still having nightmares about showing up without my Spanish homework.
What’s been the weirdest job you’ve had, part-time or full-time?
I'm not sure it was the weirdest but it was definitely the worst. My dad had an old friend from high school who specialized in buying distressed or discontinued merchandise and then selling it at discount. He bought up a bunch of a cutting edge product that hadn't quite been perfected yet: It was a portable copy machine from 3M. Great idea, but these were bulky, finicky, and slow, and the copy quality was mediocre. Plus they guzzled toner like Charles Bukowski greeting a bottle of Old Grand Dad. But they were a novelty and he was selling them for $30 each. And he hired my brother and me to drive down to Chicago in the middle of summer and walk the streets of commercial districts trying to unload them. And we got $5 for each we sold. It was hot, muggy and the air was shitty, the samples were heavy, and we weren't getting a lot of "Oh boy, I'll take one!" responses. But I walked into this one place that had a bunch of people sitting at desks talking on phones very animatedly and the guy running the office seemed dazzled by my patter and the vaguely readable copy I was able to demonstrate. He asked how many I had and I said, this demo plus two others in the car a few blocks away. He said he'd take them all. I couldn't believe it. I'd hit the motherlode. If I brought the two from the car he'd have a check for me the next day. I dropped them off and spent the night dreaming of the $15 (with inflation, probably closer to $40-$50 now) that I was going to be rolling in the next day, like Scrooge McDuck in his vault of Roosevelt dimes. I drove to the office the next day and it was completely empty. No desks, no phones. Just a couple broken chairs and some disconnected phone lines on the floor. And me, playing the role of loser Shelley Levene in a production of "Glengarry Glen Ross, who now owed my boss $90.
Excellent Will. Oh you are so right about substitute teaching! Been there. Once I had a job pumping gas and selling moccasins at a lake resort in New Hampshire. Way more fun than sub. teaching but I was 16.