Secret Jobs, Honest Work
Making money, and what that (supposedly) means
I work a freelance job that there’s definitely a phrase for, but it’s a stigmatized phrase, the kind of phrase people hear and assume that they know what it is but they don’t, they really don’t, I didn’t even know what it was until I started working, but, for our purposes here, I’ll use the term counselor, because that’s what it comes down to: people who are mostly men call me, but not me, through a reputable website that protects all my information including and definitely not limited to my real name, and they initiate a nonjudgmental conversation about what we’ll broadly call the topic of their choice. I say they instigate it, but honestly? Men are shyer than culture at large would have you believe. I have to do a lot of coaxing to get them to tell me why they dialed “my” number. Chances are, if they were comfortable with their choice of conversation topics, they wouldn’t call me.
The woman they call, and she is, unlike me, without a doubt a woman, knows what she’s doing. Better than I thought she/I did, really. It’s easy to feel people out on the phone. I raised money over the phone for the Symphony on two different coasts for years, and that necessitated convincing people who did not want to hear from me that actually they did. These people, well, they do want to hear from me. Or, you know, from her. They often seem to forget I’m doing a job. I sometimes forget I’m doing a job. It’s a surreal realm. Literally. People call me up to dream. Having dreamt during typical American work hours for free my entire life, it’s no wonder that I’m good at this (plus I’ve got that Theater background, likely the most transferable set of skills I’ve ever gone into debt for.)
I’ve recently learned via the message boards through which my colleagues and I give advice, ask questions, vent, gush, and support each other that a lot of people who do this job have physical disabilities. Ask any seasoned specialized-counselor who’s made a career of it for years, and you will hear (as I often have, now) “I don’t want a desk job. I couldn’t do one.” People share back problems, chronic pain, and other physical issues that make the unnatural-but-unquestioned physical demands of American capitalism virtually impossible. And so, from home, and only when you feel up for it, you can guide some very interesting people with fascinating imaginations through their dreams. On the whole? A great gig. At least so far.
Interesting, isn’t it, that one of the most stigmatized ways that someone with a good voice can make money is also one of the most convenient and lucrative ways for physically disabled people to bring in some cash. Back in Boston, I stopped into Five Guys (oh god, desperate) on a far-too-short break, and off-handedly mentioned to the girl behind the counter that I didn’t have a lot of time because I have to go back to work. She said, “YOU work?” She was too young to be directly influenced by former President Nixon, but he refused to pass the Americans with Disabilities Act because so much of it had to do with making transportation and office buildings accessible. He’s actually on video making the authoritative declaration that people with disabilities don’t have to go to work. I wish I could blame him fully for this ridiculous assertion, but given the exchange that took place decades later, he was a symptom, not a cause.
I occasionally mention that my life has encompassed a fair amount of financial assistance, because I wasted years of depression believing that this bare fact made me a less worthwhile human being than people who Nixon would’ve looked at and assumed they went to work. Neither one of my hippie parents had the power to override the oppressive message that if you don’t make money in exactly the way that the Old Guard powers that be have deemed valid, you are invalid, and “invalid” is actually an old-school term for disabled people, no accident there. I felt like a worthwhile human being in Austin and Chicago and Seattle, thanks to the protection of the bohemian beacon that sought out the people who shared my values — but Ian had to go and get into grad school in Boston, and that’s where the first Work Crisis hit.
No one in Boston gave a shit about what had previously been recognized as my talents. I had never won a single award that anyone had heard of, my books weren’t published, the publications I had achieved didn’t matter because it wasn’t The New Yorker, my well-produced plays didn’t matter because they were short and produced at small venues, and my absolute befuddlement at what Boston people call “normal” caused such a fog of confusion between me and all Boston natives that, without exception, I could only make lasting social connections with people who had just come to America recently. I met an Argentine musician on the street when I went to work early (I walked past Berklee College of Music on my way to work every day, a perk), and he said he was looking for a place to have coffee and I knew one, and I have time, so we had coffee, as you do, and we became friends after that. (Though, in the manner of most musicians, he was always traveling with assorted people to record last-minute in God-knows-where so it wasn’t exactly easy to make plans). I was normal to him. I made a friend from Turkey on the street as well — I think we smiled at each other at a red light — and I was more or less normal to her, except that she had been to New Orleans and didn’t understand why we love crawfish so much or how we could eat it in such overflowing profusion. (Someday I’ll figure out how to explain it)
Years later, I was talking to a group of community college students in Salinas where, it weirdly turned out, a friend of mine from college had become a professor. It was a Theater class, and I had originally been brought in to talk about adapting stories for the theater, but we ended up talking about all kinds of things. Those motivated kids healed a lot for me without knowing it. To them, I had skills, and they were impressed by how I had used them. There was none of this “If it’s not the Nobel it’s nothing” New England competitiveness that I now remain convinced nearly destroyed my father the way it nearly destroyed me. The family story had always been that he dropped out of Berklee School of Music because he couldn’t read music (a staggering realization to me now that I have an adult conception of the complex songs he played beautifully by heart) and that he more or less refused to sit down to learn. But I walked down one of Boston’s wealthiest streets and felt such a visceral sense of you-do-not-belong-here that I had to stop and reflect on why that was. My upbringing had certainly instilled in me a level of comfort around rich people; why did I feel like I was being implicitly driven out of this neighborhood?
My own voice answered me, but in my grandmother’s accent, one that you’ll hear if you get me enraged enough (or you’re around me when I’ve been around my family for long enough) and it shocked me that I could internally speak in that voice, or that I would innately use this phrase: “This is Yankee wealth.” It’s one of our country’s most abominable and foundational and ultimately irredeemable facts that no historically wealthy white person in the South got that money from working themselves. It’s not that money just appears, far from it. And I definitely spiraled into years-long depression about that, too. Stephane E. Jones-Rogers’ remarkable book, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South, was a vital and emotionally wrenching demand for me to confront history in a way I never had before, and that’s not to say I’m not still figuring out how to. That’s an open thought. No conclusion.
Occassionally, I think about the women I know who’ve made a lucrative career out of making people feel like they’re right there, helping fully-realized fantasies unfold. I don’t think that’s me. When I have the thought, “I love this job,” and dance around the house to some ridiculous song after I’ve proven that, like Daisy Buchanan, my voice sounds like money, I assume that I’m going to wake up tomorrow delighted to clock in. But that’s never the case. I have not found myself able to go to work As Her for two days in a row, because there’s something singularly draining about the tension between the extraordinarily intimate demands of a counselor and the rigidly remote relationship of the client who will never know your name. There now exist people about whom I know something that no one else in their life does. But the only thing they know about me is that I’m okay with it. I am defined by who I am to them, no wait, important correction — she is defined by who she is to them. I am defined by what I have in common with her. Which, in all fairness, is a fair bit: it has to be for me to do this job well. But, while I’m certainly in it for the money, and I’m grateful to make money for participating in some unforgettably interesting discussions, something is missing at the end of that call, at the conclusion of my successful performance.
You know what it is? Applause. Nothing actually stands in for applause.
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