This is my second story for Advanced Fiction Writing. In lieu of writing anything else today, I'm posting it in its entirity. Comments appreciated.
Leaning out over the roadway can be dangerous: side mirrors are a hazard mounted at exactly my arm level. Getting hit with one leaves a bruise that lasts for weeks.
I wish that people would reach out a little more towards me?it's a bad habit that I've found seems to plague the drivers of the more expensive cars more than others. So when the driver of the black BMW 325i sedan pulled up next to me, I sighed, and reached out as far as I could, forgetting the danger just enough to enable me to collect the asshole's two dollars.
It was raining: beads of water streaked into chaotic paths on top of the glossy finish of the hood. His hand didn't reach an inch outside of his car, probably instinctively fearing getting wet. I knew better. For some reason people never want to acknowledge the toll collector: just one more barricade on their journey to wherever the hell they were going.
I remember the family road trip to Florida in the family's blue, four-door, Chevy Celebrity. I was crammed in the backseat with my sister for a thousand miles going, and a thousand miles coming back. There was no air conditioning, just open windows and bugs flying in at every mile. Orlando was a paradise when we got there.
As I reached my hand out of the booth and into the car, I could practically grab the guy's steering wheel. A blast of heat came in as I felt both the climate-controlled interior of the vehicle and heard this self-important demagogue talking on his cell phone.
"Lenny, I need those M46-54's here next week," he said, sounding pissed. He was dressed in a suit, although I don't remember the specifics. It was all a flash of black and white added to the thousands who had passed through before.
Entirely self-absorbed, he continued, "You're full of crap telling me that they're back ordered!"
I took his money - two pieces currency so creased and ancient that they must have been folded into paper cranes by Alexander Hamilton himself - straightened it out, and put it in my drawer, hitting the green "2AX - CASH" button on the keyboard in front of me. The button changed the traffic signal on the end of my lane from red to green and recorded the car for posterity in my till.
As he pulled through the lane, I could hear him still yelling at Lenny.
I wanted to give him the finger as he pulled away. He would see it in his rearview mirror, making him wonder for the rest of the day whether or not he had actually seen me do it.
I would have too, if I hadn't remembered my suspension from six months earlier when my supervisor happened to pull my drawer at exactly the wrong time.
* * *
I am a part-time toll collector, and a full time college student.
I make nine dollars an hour, with no benefits.
I'm doing this to pay for school, my financial aid having been cut last year when I changed majors from biology to English: the state not wanting to fund another "artist."
I needed that money; therefore I need this money.
Unfortunately, as with too many people, my job has taken to defining what little life I lead outside of it: People only see me as the toll collector, a strange guy in a strange job.
I'm a hit at parties. People always seem to see the job as fascinating, wondering about the interesting people one meets, seeing the exotic cars, and doing something so easy for such great pay. I try and tell them about my desire to write, but all they care about is this aberration in their midst, a toll collector from the NJ Turnpike, a road that most of them travel on a daily basis.
I have to explain to them the truth. Being exposed to the elements, whatever the weather. The huge gaping hole that is the window that I work through pretty much defeats the fan on my desk in the summer or the heater at my feet in the winter. The job is easy, I admit, but the ease borders on mindlessness. One of those plastic drinking birds could do my job if they could somehow put the money in the cash drawer: bobbing up and down, up and down, hitting the same key over and over again.
The toughest physical part of this job would probably be the exhaust though. In the beginning, my eyes would tear and tear. Friends would look at my red swollen eyes in class the next day and finger me for an addict.
I can remember being dragged to bingo with my grandmother when I was six years old. She had been keeping me for the night, but didn't want to miss her weekly game in the church basement. I remember seeing the little old ladies, sitting at their brown folding tables with troll dolls with neon spiked hair and other lucky charms in front of them, chain smoking. A gray-blue cloud hovered over the entire affair, the collected addiction of the huddled masses. My eyes burned and burned that night as I watched my grandmother cover number after number.
It got better as I got used to it, but the beginnings of this job were like that. The exhaust exits the tailpipe and collects under the roof covering the road, where it expands, and with my luck, becomes more toxic and dangerous.
Coupled with a 90-degree sunny day, the cloud becomes enough to fell a man. One or two fall into a faint during their first summers.
Then of course, in an entirely different column are the "customers." It seems most days I'm scheduled, I see the dregs of humanity in their cars on their way to Somewhere Else. People yell for not getting their change fast enough - yeah, sure, I can break your fifty dollar bill, beg spender. People yell for hurrying them through, as they root through their ashtray for exact change. People yell for the inconvenience of having to sit through the traffic.
Because All Of That Is My Fault.
When I've finished explaining the excrement I live through, the standard answer is a definitive "ah" and a nod. They usually then excuse themselves from my presence, and continue mingling with those around me, having confronted the strangeness in their collective.
* * *
The worst I've ever had to deal with on the job was a brown paneled station wagon that looked like someone had plucked it right out of the seventies and put it right smack dab in my lane.
It was a clear, cold day. I was working the afternoon shift, and the sun that managed to get under the roof into my booth filtered through the frost in the air that every breath I took made. I had managed to sneak a small transistor radio into the booth and had it tuned into an Oldies station?the only reception I could get.
I had managed to pass the time pretty effectively, lost in song. I murmured barely audible lyrics as I dispensed change and poked the button. "Tears on My Pillow" came on, and I sung along feigning that I actually did know what Little Anthony and the Imperials were talking about.
The brown paneled station wagon pulled up. Its one of the few cars that I remember every detail of the interior: green, thick upholstery covering bucket seats in the front and a bench seat in back. Papers were strewn along the floor, along with greasy, semi-translucent food wrappers from Burger King and McDonalds. There was an empty children's car seat strapped in the back.
I remember my mother pulling through the McDonalds drive-through by our house. I must be only five years old, but I remember her handing me a French fry. It is still exceptionally hot, and it burns, and I drop it to the floor of the car. I lick the salt off of my fingers, and reach down to retrieve the fry, moving papers to get it. It still tastes fine.
A hand reached out of the window and handed me a stack of quarters. It was a man in his mid-forties: dark curly hair, wearing a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. He was dressed in a red flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. He looked angry with me as he reached over to give me the change.
Suddenly, without warning, the guy spit in my face and gunned the engine. It caught me off guard, but I began screaming and yelling at him as he drove off.
And that's the one time I resorted to the middle finger: reaching out as far as I could into the lane, with both hands, as spit dripped from my face onto the oil and exhaust stained concrete below. "Tears on My Pillow" ended, and "Here Comes the Sun" came on the radio.
I got suspended for a week for that, despite what the jerk had done.
I never understood why he did it. He even underpaid by a quarter, which I was forced to chip in at the end of my shift.
* * *
This girl at a party once asked what my ideal shift would be like.
She was cute and kind of tipsy. I wanted to impress her, so I came up with two answers.
The first was a shift on a day in May, before the summer heat hits. It would have to be a day when the temperature was in the low seventies - just warm enough that everyone was wearing shorts outside. It would start at noon and last until nine, and there would be no cars.
I want an entire shift with no cars and beautiful weather.
There would be no exhaust. There would be no spit, and no annoying questions about how to get to the airport or to Philadelphia or what road to take to Six Flags.
I would leave my booth and stand on the concrete embankment in front and just sun myself, enjoying the fact that I was getting paid to do so.
I remember being at senior week at the shore after graduating high school. Night was spent walking the boardwalk, looking for girls or playing the games on the piers or riding the rides. It was a week spent without a care in the world.
The other shift was a little bit more grisly. I wanted to work the toll on a bridge that had collapsed; only nobody knew that it had collapsed. The shift length was variable: all that mattered was that all of the people who had annoyed me went through my toll one last time.
I would wave them on, of course. No toll today - just a gorge where the bridge once was.
Cute girl looked at me for a few more seconds gave me a fake smile and walked off.
She did ask.
* * *
Surprisingly, the spit story significantly expanded and with the title of "My Job" was my first success as a writer.
Professor Karty, the pompous instructor assigned to the introductory creative writing class thought the story had merit. Karty had always seemed to be a strange man: his black hair was always neatly cut, but never in any discernable style. He would wear a metal studded belt to class that seemed to mock the class into trying to pin a description on his life.
Still though, he passed it along to the literary magazine, of which he was moderator. With little more fanfare than a word-processed form letter stating "Congratulations!" the story was published that spring.
I remember going to my mailbox and picking up the letter. It was behind an ad for a local theatre company, Imagination Productions, and a bill for thirty-four dollars and eight cents from Comcast. A single piece of tape sealed the envelope. I opened it in the mailroom, and scared the clerk at the mail window when I jumped three feet in the air and let out a loud whoop.
In retrospect, I don't know why I was so excited. The magazine was free to students, and I didn't make a dime off of my words. Most of my friends hated the magazine and its primary colored covers that sat in the Union lobby collecting dust for months after they were published. The quality of the work usually amused us to no end: the usual drivel from privileged undergrads, who had never worked a day in their lives, had no idea how the world ran and were too full of their own teenage angst to every try and write anything meaningful to anyone besides themselves.
I guess seeing my name in print changed our collective opinion exponentially.
Karty later convinced me to change majors at pre-registration time, after reviewing my grades in bio and inflating my ego as a potential writer. Having realized the horrors of medical school from the upperclassmen I knew that had been studying for the MCAT exams, I signed the form he provided.
* * *
It's a Sunday afternoon. I spent yesterday in the campus library, writing a story for my advanced creative writing class this semester. That's the only reason that I stick with this job, I realize: it pays too well and lets me schedule when I want to.
A car pulls up. Exact change. Push the button. Drives on.
I guess in a way, the job makes me kind of special in a way. I'm different from most of the people I know with their on-campus jobs, filing day in and day out while taking phone calls and running errands.
A car pulls up. Five-dollar bill. Three dollars change. Push the button. Drives on.
It's kind of nice being outside, too. The weather is starting to turn towards spring, right at the time when it's just wonderful to be able to stand outside. I could see pink and green buds on the trees this moning on the drive in. The beach traffic is going to start soon.
A car pulls up. Twenty-dollar bill. Eighteen dollars change. Push the button. Drives on.
I got ten pages done yesterday during my work in the library. It still surprises me how much I'm able to write when I put my mind to it.
I remember running around playing tag on the playground on the first day we were allowed to go outside the winter storms. I was in the eighth grade and we played wall ball until the bell rang. I remember getting pegged with the blue handball and being bruised for the next week. I ran to hit the wall and kept playing.
A car pulls up. Exact change. Push the button. Drives on.
It's a story about the BMW-guy, some guy named Lenny, and a drug shipment coming next week.
A car pulls up. Throws change at me. Drives on.
Posted by Matthew at April 10, 2003 05:00 PM