The American Dissident: Literature, Democracy & Dissidence
Loser: Whistleblower On The Unemployment Line
The following is an excerpt from Loser, a 300-page autobiographical nonfiction novel critical of America.
1. As the Plants Give Way to Winter
J’écris pour m’en sortir. Avec rage. Comme un chien. En mordant les bâtards qui me donnent des coups de pieds avec mépris. Pour couper les paroles à ceux qui, individuellement ou collectivement, nous traitent de vauriens. Eux qui croient valoir quelque chose parce qu’ils ont de l’argent, un habit trois-pièces, la certitude de tout savoir, le petit pouvoir des maîtres et des contremaîtres. J’écris pour ne pas me laisser abattre. Pour ne pas déprimer. Pour me sentir moins impuissant, moins seul. [I write to get out of this mess. With rage. Like a dog. Biting the bastards who kick me with scorn. To silence those who individually or collectively treat us as if we were worthless. Those who think they’re worth something because they have money, three-piece suits, the certainty of knowing everything, the little power of bosses and foremen. I write to prevent myself from being beaten. From being depressed. In order to feel less powerless, less alone.]
—Pierre Falardeau, La Liberté n’est pas une marque de yogourt
Here the trees have probably seen a lot of us come and go. After all, some of them are several hundred years old and a hundred feet tall. At times, when I am alone in the field upon this isolated hill, they look down upon me with the wisdom and benevolence only plants and rocks can truly possess. The stressful thoughts, I suppose, differentiate me, for better or worse. Thought itself has become a fog of insomnia, an awareness of clutter. This turn of the century, age of clutter, indeed, for that is what it is, not the atomic age, computer age, nor age of ethnic diversity, mascara-like euphemisms upon the scars of humanity, the Holocaust, other genocides, the crusades and the great untold stories of hypocrisy in the nation’s ivory towers. My mind has become the century’s turn incarnate, a clutter of things distant from what must surely be the essential, the essence of the universe. I must clean up my house and begin to see...
I—failed employee, not collegially bent, not apt to smile up the chain of command—would like nothing better than to indict the system. At 48, the bleakness of the stars shines upon me once again. I read the old Time magazines waiting with the learned patience of... nothing but out of work, OUT OF ORDER. The Career Center, as they call it today, is but make-up upon the old failed system. Waiting to see an unemployment counselor, I sit in front of paper work and another haggard man. Paper work—the pulp of life gone sour, pulp of windows with majorities of mental duplicates, formed now by all colors and ethnic backgrounds, closing them always, pulp of staleness, bark thrown to the wolves—can ineluctably turn a man into a Blakeian Nabuchodonosor, forever prevented, if not prohibited, from climbing atavisms. Desperation of YOU OUT THERE HEED ME, while the data is taken by a youth in robotic demeanor. Collegially bent, she runs her free retraining-possibilities-if-qualified through me like another sword. My energy has faded like the chrysanthemums. The flower they want is the flower so damn elusive to me. “With your education, sir, they probably won’t have anything for you. But it won’t hurt to try, will it?” she says. If she could only understand that, yes, it probably would hurt. I ask, “how do I find out more about it?” “The training information meetings are held in Conference Room B every Wednesday at 11:00. Now, what happened at the state college?” “Well,” I say, “they didn’t renew my contract.” “Why?” she asks. I tell her, “because the whole goddamn institution is corrupt, that’s why. Uh, excuse me. I get emotional when I think about it.” She looks up at me with the same indifference I’d once seen on the faces of the student-newspaper editors, faculty union representatives and former colleagues. “You’ll be receiving a benefits claim certification form in the mail probably next week. Make sure you fill it out and don’t send it in before the date indicated on top of it.” Beaten but not defeated, I stand up, give the counselor back her ‘sir’ with a “thank you, MAM” and walk out the cubicle, out the building and across the parking lot to my car...
The salmon-colored striations within my reach are still in the golden setting sun. They have not taken that, though at times they have. The howl running through the fireplace and window seams reaches my depths as the hay shuffles outside in the wind, fluffy but less so as the sun dies slowly, leaving a great burnished desert in the sky, smooth and rippled. What calm to be by oneself and the books written by one’s true friends, deadmen, some several centuries ago. The view, around this time of year, can be so much like the desolate northern coast of the Saint Lawrence River probably near the Labrador border. How I could live up there, free from the implacable onslaughts of soft money and canned commercial spots for deodorants and politicians, free from the crushing euphemisms of American society. I can see myself now just sitting upon an aged rocker over-looking the great mouth of that river, as others have surely done. I think how in the reality of tempus fugit, I am what I have written for better or for worse, nothing more, nothing less. What will become of these piling up pages, of this stuff? I often wonder. Will Jeanne keep it? Maybe pass it on to the kid? If it’s lucky (already from ‘I’ to ‘it’), a dusty box may allow it provisory respite in some garage. Will there be someone to open it eventually? In fifty years? Maybe 75? A mover? Perhaps a garbage man? (How slim the likelihood of a poet to open that box!) Will I jump out at him or her in the form of a title, a couple of sentences or just a word? Most likely not in a whole story or poem, for the people of the future too will probably have no time for the unknown. Then perhaps a fire will catch and swirl me around in sheets of charring orange like the sunset into oblivion, another ship finally sinking into the horizon, as the plants give way to winter again...
2. Scroll, Scroll la Galère
Le pôle Nord se trouve quelque part dans notre cerveau. [The North Pole is located somewhere in our minds.]
—Élise Turcotte
The birds are swarming, circling, landing upon the roof top in incredible numbers this morning. I can hear them scurrying, readying for better lands, as I too am readying. The fierce winds have given way to the bright blue stillness of the season’s first freeze. I am not saddened by the passing of summer and in a sense rejoice in this point of time, veritable stretch of the hand, down from dear old Canada. American, I am, but not by choice, and without the love half of the hate relationship so experienced by Henry Miller, perhaps because the press has refused my voice. I feel today perhaps as estranged as an immigrant, for I am still not permitted to enter that building, my former place of employment. What good the 14th Amendment when the press turns its back and the legal profession drools, but only for second homes, Mercedes and Lear jets? I have been violated by fellow countrymen, their Bill of Rights no longer mine, perhaps never was. I dream now of permanency under the borealis. What greater flag than the cosmos? Certainly not ‘Old Glory’! Perhaps the maple leaf might come close. My choice, if given one, must be north, for I can not comprehend the compromises of dense collectivities and consequent collective thought...
Hermine has been calling at least once a day. She’s on the edge, has been for as long as I’ve known her. “Jeanne,” I holler, “it’s Hermine.” I wait until Jeanne grabs the phone downstairs, then hang up. Hermine is a talker; Jeanne, a listener. An hour later, I’m asked a question to which I respond, “how the hell do I know what it feels like? Prozone is for manic-depressives. Hermine’s manic-depressive. I’m not.” I hesitate though and wonder if maybe in fact I am, for I do have my moments. “Weed is like beer,” I say. “Prozone is for heavy depression.” “It’s called Prozac, not Prozone,” she says. “Well, Prozac then. It’s all the same crap.” Jeanne tells me Hermine wants to give up dabbling in star charts and get back on Prozac because the charts didn’t do a damn thing for her. I tell her, “look, Hermine’s 45 and has a history. Maybe she ought to look at it, accept it, learn from it. I’m forty-eight and have a history too. I can’t keep a fucking job. I have to come to grips with that and I’m not going to have Prozac come to it for me.” I give my lectures to Jeanne. Who else would listen? My captive student audiences have vanished. I return to the couch, lie down with the laptop and try continuing a story I’ve been working on, but I can’t even think, let alone create. How can I possibly spend five hours a day trying to write? Hemingway did that, sure. Hell, Bukowski probably did that and more. You always feel better when you’re shit-faced. Well, there. There’s a title. But what comes next? Maybe an anti-suicide commercial: “Hi, I’m Henry. I would have jumped out the window long ago if it weren’t for beer and wine.” I stare at the flying windows that have taken over the computer screen. The kid, Jeanne’s kid, wakes me from hypnotic trance. The windows had taken me over too. He trumpets, as he’s done days and days before: “this old man, he plays five, he plays nick, nack.” How surprising that I can remember the words after so many years. I holler: “CAN’T HE DO THAT WHEN I’M OUT PICKING WEEDS? CHRIST, I’M OUT THERE ENOUGH. NO SIMPSON’S UNLESS HE GETS THAT GODDAMN ROOM OF HIS CLEANED UP. YOU CAN’T EVEN WALK IN THERE.” The trumpet suddenly stops. I hear him gravitate to the second floor where he whispers, “hey mom, why do you have to always do what Henry suggests?” I can’t hear Jeanne’s response, but I can hear him trying to whisper, “but still he doesn’t have to run our life. Fine, I’ll pick up my jacket and be a mommy’s boy. I’m so PO.” Another day goes by...
I am awake observing the sky while lying on the couch, the early morning light slowly turning things into day. I type a few more pieces of my struggle on the laptop in a futile attempt to make meaning out of being. I stand up and stare into the fields in search of animal, but find nothing. They do seem to know better than we: deeper into the forests they’ve gone, for man is not a very good neighbor. I say, Jeffers, Robinson, man is NOT! I fall back asleep for a while and when I awaken, Jeanne’s already gone. She’s a good tip-toer... sometimes. It’s 9:30 a.m.. I make a cup of coffee, read a bit, then step outside, walk the path-of-why on stones, each individually dug out of the ground during laborious spring thaws and summer heat waves. Like the animals I live up here and crouch down upon green tufts, nostrils flaring, sucking in the air, seeking the flow of things. I peer down at the ants run amok, for I too destroy—nests turned into havoc. I peer at them, while others now stand in front of classrooms, dispensing words in institutions where only some words and some thoughts are permitted. My time was up when I was there, though I didn’t want to see it. I was they, and perhaps will be thankful that I am no longer. Change does open the eye, while sameness breeds the immortality of fools. Nevertheless, the days seem to do nothing for me but go by quickly with the depressions, like waves between the red wine. Soon it will be time to search the job lists and perhaps even learn the internet, for my networking skills have always been nil. As long as I can recall, I have rebelled against the very concept, castrator of truth and justice; letters of recommendation, like so many pieces of blackmail used to place iconoclasts forever on the unemployment line. I scroll as if with oars on some midnight galley ship I can not seem to disembark. Scroll, scroll, la galère!