It’s hard to be out in the world and on your own and out of a job for two months running. Jack Egypt knows this well. He walks around town in nice slacks, a wrinkled blue button down shirt, and a pair of red sneakers with a hole over his big toe in the right foot. It makes him smile when someone notices it--he likes to watch their expressions change. It’s not always the same look they give him. Different people have different reactions. That’s what he likes about it. He wonders exactly what they think at that moment. There is no way to tell than to ask and he won’t ask. So he shrugs and keeps on walking.
Jack Egypt has an apartment that he is getting kicked out of. Not because he couldn’t pay rent. He always figures out a way to do that, but because his roommate couldn’t afford to pay rent so they’re kicking out Jack and moving in their big brother so at least the little shit-hole stays in the family. Jack is openly bitter about this because he only recently moved in…because the rent was cheap. Soon he will move into another apartment with a friend of his and pay a good deal more than he was paying in his last apartment, and almost double what it cost him to stay in the cheap apartment that he’s getting kicked out of. He’s worried about money.
It was a bar, where Jack was most recently employed. Some place in Mid-town. He wasn’t entirely fond of the job, but he’d always wanted to be a bartender. He knew a good many drinks, knew what they looked like, knew how they were supposed to taste. He had an affection for booze. Also, he felt that his manager was kind. Gave him good hours and a good wage on top of his tips. So when that manager left for personal reasons, Jack was left with a decision to stay or not. He didn’t know if he wanted to remain a bartender. The lifestyle was fun, but it was running its course on Jack. And he didn’t like the knew manager, or the knew staff that was being hired around him. It was the middle of summer and he quit.
It’s no smart move to quit your job in the middle of summer in Manhattan. It’s hard to find another one. Jack underestimated exactly how tough it would be with his scattered experience and meaningless degree.
He spent a good many hours with friends at night when he was first out of a job. He had a good deal of money saved up and he’d just moved into an apartment where his rent was substantially cheaper. He was not sweating. So he went out drinking with Pete, an old college buddy. He hung-out with Rob, an old high school friend. And he spent a good deal of time with his girlfriend, Florence. Jack didn’t have a care in the world. He bought his friends drinks and took his girlfriend out to nice restaurants and to movies.
Jack went camping with Rob and his girlfriend. Florence had to work--a waitress in a nice restaurant up-town. He traveled to North Carolina to visit his mother, to Pennsylvania to visit his Grandmother, to the Jersey shore too. A month had passed and he still wasn’t sweating it.
Then his roommate told him he had to be out by the end of the month. He saw that the new place, living with Pete, would be more expensive. He noticed how much money he’d been spending on travel and food and cigarettes and booze. He was out of money and moving onto a meager amount of credit he’d earned at his first job out of school two years earlier. It was a desk job, an office job. Filing and faxing and phoning and emailing. He hated that job and it didn’t even pay that much. But it was a job, a steady job with benefits and he’d kept a pang of remorse over loosing it, in his stomach.
Originally, he started looking for another bar job. He found a place through Rob at a seedy down-town beer bar. He knew a good deal about many different kinds of beer and the owner took an immediate liking to Jack. But he encouraged Jack to drink on the job. He was hard to reach and couldn’t decide on the schedule. After about two weeks one of the employees that Jack was hired to replace told some lies about Jack, probably to save his job for a little while longer. The owner called Jack and confronted him. He left plenty of room for Jack to argue. The accusations were ludicrous and false and all Jack had to do to keep that job was to tell the truth of the situation. But Jack didn’t like the way this guy ran his place, hated not being able to get in touch with him about scheduling and the tips were little and the clientele was low and few and Jack told him to go ahead and take him off the non-existent schedule and hung up.
A week or so later, Florence hooked him up with this French place east of Mid-town, a fancy little whole in the wall. At this point Jack was sweating it. He went in to talk to the owner. She was French, so was the hostess and bartender. The guys in the kitchen were either French or from The Ivory Coast. Jack told her straight out that he knew very little French and that he wasn’t French at all. She offered him a job waiting tables. He’d had some experience with waiting tables and wasn’t very fond of it and admittedly not very good at it. The next day he went in anyway. They never called him back.
The last I saw Jack Egypt, he was standing in line at the independent theatre in Lincoln Square waiting to see Factotum. He said he was looking into some office jobs again and conceded that probably that was the best way to go “I fucking hate the service industry,” he said. He also said that he’d devised a plan to get through one more month without a job. I wished him “good luck” and he told me to go fuck myself.
That’s Jack all right, good old Jack Egypt. It hasn’t been too long since I’ve seen him. I ask around about him to people I know, to people who know of him. He stays with Florence a lot and hasn’t been seen out without her. “He has no more money,” someone told me. Florence takes him out for lunch or dinner or they order in or she brings something home from work and that’s how he eats most of the time. She takes him to movies. “He’s still looking for work,” somebody said. I don’t remember if it was Pete or Sal or Vicky. “He’s two months out of work and not a dime in his pocket. He’s surfing on dwindling credit and his girlfriend’s charity.”
“I think it’s sick,” Vicky said it--that I remember. We were sitting around on Pete’s couch smoking his hoocha.
“Why? The guy needs help. It’s not like he’s never done anything for her. Remember when she lost her apartment and stayed with him for three months and his roommates were pissed,” Sal said.
“What about her shoes, he bought her, her favorite pair of running shoes,” Pete said.
I threw in that he also bought her a knew cell-phone when her last one broke. Jack’s not a bum. He’s a little dense and a little proud, but Jack’s not a bum.
I called him up the other day to see how he was. The phone rang a good couple of times before he picked up. He sounded down and told me to call later. I rang him a few days later and he sounded great. He still hadn’t found a job. “Everything is falling through,” he said. “I’m getting jerked around a lot, but I just sent out a ton of resumes. Somebody’s gotta bite.” And that’s just the way the city is beating on Jack at the moment. Sometime in the next couple of weeks he’ll get a job and come out of hiding. We’ll go out and he’ll buy me a drink and laugh and a few more weeks after that he’ll be bitching about how he hates his knew job, but he’ll stick out. I think this time he’ll really stick it out. I hope he finds something good so he can be happy and I’ll buy him a drink because some day my time will come to be out of work and lost and angry and I’m sure anybody wishes me good luck won’t get a response that they’ll like. We all have our good times and bad times. Sometimes we’re out of work or out of love or out of friends or out of luck. Just hope they don’t all hit at once. Hold steady, we’ll make it through.