TW: Talk of sexual assault
*Characters and situations are heightened or mix-matched or fabricated, yet, based on my own reality*
I’ve had a lot of odd jobs over the years and that hasn’t necessarily been great for me emotionally. My first job was at a call center in an asylum-looking building. It was grey and boxy and sat behind a Mexican restaurant that reeked of old tortillas. Getting off work was weird because the smell would make you feel both sick and hungry at the same time. I got the job through one of my closest friends and to this day she and I still joke about how traumatic of an experience it all was. I know that the sentiment of despair was shared by others because only about a week after being hired I spotted two bullet holes in the cement wall next to the front door. I found out later that afternoon through my crush Janique that someone in the night shift had put them there. The worker had either been written up or chewed out about something pertaining to the scripts we had to read, so, they shot two rounds at the building. I worked at that late-stage capitalism dream factory for over a year. While working there I was moved around quite a bit before they finally found the perfect account for me -- bilingual food stamps services. I was fifteen years old out here just fielding these high-stakes, real-world calls. Every day it was a different, yet, equally morbid scenario to deal with. Some days it was telling some family of 18 living in the middle of bum-fuck-nowhere, Missouri that they only have $10 for the last two weeks of the month. Other days it was figuring out how to deactivate a specific EBT card so that some pesky nephew or niece didn’t trade it for crack on Independence Avenue. Some days it was explaining to some sweet grandma that I have nothing to do with the amount of funds allocated on her card while she quietly weeps about how much her stomach hurts. I was fired from that job with 22.5 points to my name. Points are awarded to employees who are late, don’t follow the script, or leave without notice. I worked on and off as a tutor and I poorly shoveled horse shit at these stables one summer until I found the next more stable job. Unfortunately for me, through another acquaintance, I got that job. It was a job doing parking services for different events in Kansas City. That job rattled me emotionally for two different reasons. First, that parking job inflamed a lot of the substance abuse problems that I had for multiple years not acknowledged. The job was nauseatingly vacant of any real action for long stretches of time and I worked with two drug dealers, so, I naively did drugs more frequently than usual. Second, it was a dangerous job in ways that you wouldn’t at first imagine. Between all the drunk people at the events to moving massive equipment around to driving on the back of the trucks, your livelihood was sort of always at peril. I think I got to realize that pretty well when I heard the impact of some dude getting run over and killed after a football game. I closed that shift alone at 3 AM with no manager in sight. Granted the honor of putting away hundreds of pounds of orange plastic all by myself while I contemplated the sound of fan #1’s hip cracking on that F-150. I did that job for almost two years, then I moved on to two industries that are notorious for having tormented, badly behaved individuals: car sales and serving. They’re honorable jobs and it’s a way to make a living but, for some odd reason, they just turn the people who hold those positions into these ogre-ish court jesters. In contrast to the call center or even the parking place, I feel like I had less self-awareness and emotional control as a car salesman and a server. It’s strange I feel that way since I was younger when I held both those positions. Selling and serving are just such a charade in my mind. I can’t help but sadly laugh when I see a brand new car or a five-star restaurant. It’s hard to even talk about but it’s easier for me to emotionally process in comparison to the call center, the parking company, or the last job I held that really killed me: interpreting. I was and - sort of - still am a certified Spanish interpreter (although I haven’t done it in almost a year now). This meant that I worked in hospitals, courts, schools, nursing homes, parole officer meetings, sporting events, etc. For the most part, the job was straightforward and even easy at times. It wasn’t until this one court-ordered divorce therapy session that I felt like I had been marked for life. I had never done one of those sessions before but it sounded fine when I accepted it. It wasn’t at an actual court or with an officer present, so I thought it would be relaxed. I was wrong. I was not expecting to come face to face with some of the details and conflicts that I was privy to. It was a father, his son, a counselor, and myself all stuffed into a little room on the second floor of a church. The counselor wasted no time getting straight into things. He kicked off the session by asking both parties how they feel about the divorce. The dad didn’t really have much to say. He was calm and unassuming with the way he spoke his brand of Mexican Spanish. He just said that it was sad and that his ex-lover was mentally troubled and that she wasn’t to blame. The son, on the other hand, really laid it all out there. He could speak both English and Spanish but I was told to interpret what he was saying to his father. That was brutal for me because the son started his diatribe by calling his father a coward. He said that his father was just as responsible for the trauma that his mother inflicted on him by being a bystander to it all. The son explained how he was physically and mentally scarred by his mother’s abuse. He said that his mother would be physically violent through whatever recourse she had. She would hit him, pinch him, hit him with a belt, pull him by his hair, anything just to make him know through pain that he was making her unhappy. He added that she also delighted in mental violence. She joked about how fat and feminine his body was, she joked about how mentally weak he was, she laughed at how pathetic it was that he expected anything good to ever come of life, and she constantly threatened to leave the family whenever times got hard. He depicted all the truly horrible things that this woman had done and were just swept under the carpet by the father. The father once again didn’t have much to say. He just said he was sorry and that his son shouldn’t take it so to heart because his mother was mentally ill. He said to reminisce on the warm, loving moments the son did share with his mother. The son just shook his head and cried into his hands. I could barely make out what he was saying, but I was able to piece together the fact that he was molested by his mother’s father and that he could never forgive her or any of the blood within himself. He said he hated himself and that he had no self-esteem and that’s why he loved the pills. The crying started getting louder while he began to stomp on the ground with both feet. The son was 16 or 17, but all of a sudden he had become a toddler in front of all of us. It was all really hectic and happened so suddenly that I lost all air of professionality and forgot to interpret any of it. The counselor looked at me for an explanation and I just kinda stared back at him blankly. We were barely 15 minutes into this session but it felt like we had to wrap that shit up right then and there. The counselor could feel my thoughts but wouldn’t let me off the hook. He motioned with his head to make things right and bring some cohesion to the session. I brought cohesion to the session and proceeded to carry out my labor in the workplace. Then, it was all over and I listened to “Heavenly Father” by Isaiah Rashad as I drove home on I-70.