by Jeffrey Yamaguchi
Do you ever order dessert from a restaurant that involves glazed strawberries? Well, according to Ayun Halliday, you should most definitely not do that. What does it mean when a waitress is “In the weeds”? Want to know what a nude model is musing over while the art class sketches away…? Or what the massage therapist is thinking as you say “I was really tight back here, huh?” All of this, and a barrel of laughs to boot, is found in Halliday’s newest story collection — Job Hopper: The Checkered Career of a Down-Market Dilettante.
But more than these juicy, hilarious bits of insider information, Halliday’s stories get to the heart of “career” trajectory, that collection of jobs that heavily marks and intensively impacts the passage of your very life. Where we are today often has something to do with what we learned and experienced on the job. And oh, boy, have there been some jobs, right?
A few other notes about Halliday — she’s one of the most lively readers I’ve ever seen (naturally this interview is posting right about the time that her tour for Job Hopper ends, but if you join her mailing list, you’ll be kept informed about future appearances). She is also the author of The Big Rumpus (about motherhood) and No Touch Monkey (travel adventures). And she has put out 26 issues of her famed zine, The East Village Inky, which endearingly and quite humorously chronicles her family adventures in true zine fashion. The following interview sneaks in some details about all these projects, but the focus is mainly on the new Job Hopper book. So here we go:
Many zines putter out after, well, issue 1. The East Village Inky is still going strong. How have you kept it going? How has your zine impacted your book writing efforts?
It’s been my good fortune that I now have deadlines and publicity-related chores competing for and usually taking over the child-free time formerly allotted to The East Village Inky. The subscribers provide the impetus to keep it going these days – heaven forfend some woman in East Bumblef*ck Idaho should get fleeced for a sixteen dollar two-year subscription ordered in good faith. The subscribers have been very kind. Not only do they send little treats for the kids, they go way beyond the call of duty by buying my books soon after publication, giving them as gifts, and spreading the word about readings in their area. That right there is a reason to keep cranking the damn thing out.
The freedom to go to press w/ run-on sentences several pages long is a close second. As the sole employee, I can greenlight everything from made-up words to handwritten “typos”. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to riding a motorcycle without a helmet. Finally, each issue of East Village Inky serves as a family history, a selectively edited baby book for Inky and Milo and substitute for all the photographs that should have been taken but weren’t.
How did you find writing about your work experiences in Job Hopper? How was it different from writing about motherhood or travel?
The experience was closer to recalling my low-budget travels in No Touch Monkey than eyewitness reporting about life with the kids. The difference is that in writing No Touch Monkey I could mine journals, photos and occasionally my husband Greg for research purposes. I had to bushwhack it more with Job Hopper, because really, who – with the exception of a few disgruntled zine publishers – records the minutiae of their crummy day jobs for posterity?
One thing you mention in the introduction is the freedom found in those first jobs, the jobs you hop from one to the next, when you’re young and sure, the job might suck, but you don’t yet feel trapped and the whole world still feels open to you… Is that what you were getting at?
Sure. Crummy day jobs are but one of many BC (before children) experiences recalled with fondness from the other side. One day I’ll be sentimentalizing the first eight years of motherhood.
The book is full of humor – these are hilarious takes on your work experiences. When you were writing, did you ever start going in another way, perhaps a more negative look, or a more serious tone, at career difficulties or the stress that comes with not being where you want to be career-wise?
Why, thank you! I knew from the get go that this book was going to be played for laughs and having worked with the same butcher, I mean editor (Leslie Miller! She knows I love her.) I had a fairly good idea of what to leave out, which paths not to take. One aspect that I feel is mostly missing from the final manuscript is an examination of the part race played in many of these jobs. Who starts with more advantages than a young, educated, English-speaking white person? When temping, I eventually was classified un-FOA (front office appearance) because I, already slovenly at best, was busted for not wearing pantyhose. But word was there were certain companies where African-American temps were automatically branded un-FOA. Sounds pretty plausible to me… but these sorts of observations were largely cut because the publishers take is that race is an issue too hot to be tossed off the cuff by a jester like me. There are a couple of places where I’m allowed to acknowledge the racial inequities and complexities of the workplace, most notably in the first and last chapters. And loose cannon that I am, I get to sound off about it in interviews!
Of course the Job Hopper jobs paid the bills, and now they provide the basis for your
story collection, but what else did these jobs do for you? How did they shape your view of “career” and the world of work?
Each one was like a journey through a foreign country. You know how the experience of reading a book set in India is enhanced by virtue of the fact that you once traveled in India? Well, I love having backstage knowledge of all these random jobs, knowing the terminology, knowing what goes on in the parts of the service industry the general public never sees. Maybe one day I’ll write a novel drawing on these experiences … I remember reading The Robber Bride and wondering if Margaret Atwood could really know all the stuff her characters seemed to know so convincingly. Maybe I know more than I think. Or maybe Margaret will slip me the secret formula.
I can’t help but think this book is for people who the Job Hopper class serves – people who order that tray of shots from the hottie waitress, who regularly get massages, or perhaps most importantly, those who take art classes that use nude models. It seems to me that they would have the most insight to gain… Who do you see as the reading audience, and what do you think people get out of this book?
I think it’s a book for anyone who’s ever held a crappy job, not to mention an excellent graduation gift for that special theater major in your life. While waiting tables, I often thought I’d like to write a book along the lines of One Hundred Things Your Waitress Wants You To Know (starting with the gratuity) but I question whether that book would find its way into the hands of the intended audience. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
Your stories always recount personal experiences – what is your writing process? Are you surprised with what you recall as you are putting the stories down on paper?
Always. I remember something the playwright Beth Henley said about the process of writing Crimes Of The Heart, how all she had at the beginning was an image of someone all by herself in a room, blowing out a birthday candle on a frosted cake… but that loaded image was the key that allowed her to discover the rest of the play. It’s been my experience that if I can focus in on the appearance of some unremarkable item I used frequently or some aspect of the area that was my domain, a whole cast of characters and memories comes flooding back. I thought I remembered the costume shop pretty well and writing about currying all those disgusting Easter Bunny suits was an excellent gateway, but then I mentioned the break room and suddenly, I could see the faux wood finish of this folding conference table where we ate our dreary lunches and BAM! All of a sudden I remembered this guy who drove the delivery van and swept up all the threads and fabric scraps when there were no deliveries. He was quite a character and he really hated the owner, for whom he’d worked for nearly a decade, who scapegoated him mercilessly. I literally had not thought about this guy since my last day at that job some ten years earlier! He wound up on the cutting room floor, but it’s nice to know that the few brain cells that remain from those days still function with a bit of a tweak.
What’s your favorite story out there about the world of work – could be a movie, a zine, a book?
Gee, it’s hard to pick. I loved Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, even though I have no doubt he’d have torn me a new a-hole, had I ever had the misfortune to wait tables in a restaurant where he was chef. I love 21 Dog Years: Doing Time at Amazon Dot Com by Mike Daisey and all of Harvey Pekar’s stories about clerking in Cleveland’s VA Hospital (I swear I’m not saying this ‘cuz they blurbed the book).
Film-wise, I’ve got a hankering for another viewing of Office Space by Mike Judge, priceless for the scenes of a demoralized Jennifer Anniston lamenting her ‘flare’, the gag buttons she’s forced to wear on her uniform suspenders while working in a TGIFridays type of restaurant. I recently saw Fear And Trembling, a very dark comedy about a Belgian woman who idealistically accepts an entry-level position in a huge corporation in Tokyo only to be disgraced to the point where she’s demoted to towel girl in the men’s washroom. That one had it all: bosses you love to hate, a sympathetic coworker as well as a vindictive one, a pathetic attempt to pull off business attire and travel to boot!
What was your inspiration for Job Hopper?
When No Touch Monkey came out, everyone kept asking how I managed to finance the travels depicted therein, which started me thinking about all the crappy jobs I held in my twenties.
What book/writer/publisher has most influenced your own writing and publishing efforts?
Spalding Gray I admired the most for being a performer and writer who examined his foibles in a way that was enormously entertaining, self-mocking but never self-pitying. A long time ago he told Tricycle Magazine that he started performing his autobiographical monologues because he got “sick of waiting for the big infernal machine to make up its mind” about him. Words for every outside-the-mainstream zine publisher to live by.
Are you ever going to write a book that focuses entirely on your theater adventures? It’s an element of your life that threads through all of your other published work…
Yeah, that’d be a blockbuster. Haven’t you heard that the theater is dead!??!!? (Or so they’ve been hearing for the last twenty-five years.) Actually, I’d love to write something like that, but truth be told, I’d be starting with a fraction of the raw material I had for Job Hopper. Maybe I could leech some of my hotshot husband’s stories.
I know you’ve been doing lots of readings and went on tour for Job Hopper, but how else are you getting the word out about the book?
I drop glaring references to it in The East Village Inky and waste a lot of time on websites devoted to low-budget travel, hoping that some stranger will wonder what “Dare To Be Heinie” means and click on my signature, which leads straight to my website, where I wait, spinnerets at the ready.
When I get a sec, I’d like to post flyers all over the Lower East Side: HEY YOU! STUCK IN A CRAPPY JOB THAT YOU HATE? If so, you’re gonna LOVE this book. When No Touch Monkey came out, I Xeroxed up bookmarks with all the particulars, then visited the Strand and various libraries to slip them into books by Tim Cahill, Bill Bryson and the like. Is that so wrong? Maybe I should do the same for Job Hopper, only this time I’ll target all those advice books penned by financial gurus who’ve devised seven-step formulas for ‘success’. And this just in: I hear Job Hopper is going to be stuffed into this summer’s Siren Music Festival’s goodie bags. I’m all for the publisher lobbing free copies at the public!
Did you ever find out what is reflected in the eyes of the monkey on the cover of No Touch Monkey?
I just realized that our jeweler’s loupe has gone missing. Without it, I stand no chance of getting to the bottom of this mystery. It’s probably a skull smoking a cigarette with the word ‘sex’ figuring prominently somehow.