On the artist's jobs (part 1)
Re: Ghislane Leung’s job list: part 1 of my job history
Re: Ghislane Leung’s “Jobs”:
I’m at the airport (where I always write)—because there’s nothing to do. I drink coffee. I go to the juice bar where the employees are frantically running back and forth between the counters making smoothies while 160 BPM techno mixes of sped-up pop songs blare over their heads. I can’t imagine working there. There is fruit muck all over the counters; their latex-gloved fingers comb through the pulp picking up more and transferring it to other areas.
Anyway it reminded me of when I worked in a shoe store when I was in my first or second year of art school. We sold different types of shoes, mostly for clubbing, but also Uggs and stuff like that. The big hit that year was gladiator sandals. We had some that laced all the way up to the knee. We had one CD in the store that we were allowed to play. It was a mixtape by someone called ‘Dj Whiz Kid.’ It was club mixes of popular songs. They were sped up and interspersed by sections of Dj Whiz Kid saying stuff like, let’s get it going, or throw your hands up! When I’d try to go to sleep I’d hear one of the songs, which morphed into another and into another, because the songs were continuous, until the entire CD was playing on a loop in my head.
Even on Sundays, it was DJ whiz kid. Even if I was alone, on a rainy Sunday morning, inside the store was the club. The tempo never decreased.
People stole shoes quite often from the store, I’m not sure why. I was told to profile transgender people, who were more likely, according to the management, to steal.
Eventually I was fired for being ‘too slow’ to find sizes. As well, my hands were almost always dirty, because my shift started at 4:30 pm, and I had drawing class until 4 on the days that I worked. I begged them to schedule me at 5, because I didn’t have time to clean up, but they refused. It was a six hour life drawing class with charcoal. After a year of that class, I was sneezing charcoal into a napkin. I never did get better at figure drawing.
The people at the shoe store were known for cruel and unusual punishment, though. They fired another girl because ‘she smelled.’ She did smell, but it was in a punk way, she always wore these cropped wool sweaters. And her body odor didn’t bother me, it was always lightly tinged with patchouli.
I remember I had my first dissociative episode finding out I had gotten fired. I sat on the train and stared out the window and thought, anything could happen. At the next stop I could get off and jump off the tracks. I had never had such a feeling and it terrified me. I realized I was out of control of my own body and mind, and thus, I was terrified.
My next job was flyering on a corner, but that was only a few days.
My next job was working in a tea cafe in a women’s hospital. Next to my dorm on State Street there used to be a cafe, so I went in and asked if they were hiring. They asked if I’d work at any location, and I thought, how many can there be? And said, Sure. Then they sent me to a women’s hospital.
The benefits of the women’s hospital cafe were that it faced the lakefront, and that the building was brand new; and, crucially, we didn’t have to mop the floors, because it was done by the hospital. It was a little semicircle of a stall facing the lakeside. My manager was a football jock who ceaselessly sexually harassed me. He’d come up behind me with a spoon of yogurt and waggle his tongue at me. Every time he passed me by in the cafe he squeezed my waist. I retorted by slowly poisoning the algorithm of our online radio station, which had been programmed by him to play Linkin Park, with Morrissey and Blur. In one meeting, with “corporate,”—the chain had four stores in Chicago and was trying to expand—he sat next to me and slowly squeezed blood out of a wound on his leg. “I got that at football,” he said, squeezing, as the blood seeped through the vagina-shaped wound. He routinely came to work in his filthy football uniform and changed at the lockers.
The clients of the hospital, being a women’s hospital, were either cancer patients or pregnant mothers, or their families. We also had a family of Roma people, who we were told to not give away anything for free. It was hard though, because they’d walk around barefoot in the lobby looking for food. The other customers would either be elated or despondent. One father who had given birth to triplets gave us each a cigar and a 20 dollar tip. Another customer said it was her first time doing chemo. There was no in between. The job was extremes.