Dog Eats Dog by Iain Levison (Bitter Lemon Press 2008)

Elias was so relieved to see a smile that he felt compelled to offer more information as fast as he could make it up, as if to cement a friendship that was forming between them. Between the guy who said bizarre untrue things about his pistol, and this intractable old bastard of a gun-shop owner.

“It was my father’s gun,” he said. “He just passed away. I just found it in the house. My father was a soldier in World War Two.”

“This gun isn’t military issue,” said the shopkeeper, shaking his head, as if bored with Elias’s lies. “This is chrome-plated. And it was manufactured well after that. If the serial number hadn’t been filed off, I could tell you exactly when, but I figure, oh, about 1950s.” He was looking at Elias now, as if he expected either honesty or silence. He slid a piece of black metal across the counter, then opened the box of bullets. “The war was over by then. You should learn about history,” he said.

Elias was so taken aback by this country bumpkin telling him to learn about history that he almost blurted out that he was a history professor who was about to get tenure and was going to be published in the National Historical Review. Then he remembered, from deceiving Denise, the joy and energy that came from playing dumb. “My dad must have bought it recently, I guess,” he said humbly.

The shopkeeper loaded bullets into the magazine. “This is how you load it,” he said, pressing each bullet down into the clip with a slow, deliberate gesture, looking up at Elias to make sure he was being heeded. “It takes seven slugs.” He slid the magazine into the grip. “This lever here drops the magazine back out of the grip when it’s empty.”

Elias nodded.

“Can you shoot, or do you need lessons?”

How To Rob An Armored Car by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2009)

“I can’t believe it was that easy. Dude, we ought to do this full time.”

Doug shrugged. “Do you want to? I mean, do this instead of robbing the armored car?”

Mitch started his car, mulling the idea over. Today had certainly been easy money but he knew that every day wouldn’t be that easy. They had just gotten lucky. And besides, Doug had all the skill, knowledge, and bargaining ability. Mitch really didn’t bring much to the table.

“Nah,” he said. “I mean, it was impressive and all, but you did everything. All I really did was give you a ride.”

“I could do this full time,” Doug said. “Maybe we should do this instead of robbing the armored car.”

“Are you having doubts?”

“I don’t know. I’m getting kind of scared about the whole thing,” Doug said. “I mean, I just need a little bit to live off. I don’t need to be rich and shit. I don’t need millions of dollars. Money doesn’t buy happiness.”

“Sure it does,” said Mitch cheerfully.

“Look at Kurt Cobain.”

Despite the giddiness of the moment, Mitch felt anger welling up. He hated this logic on which so many people operated, the quaint, pat little platitudes they used to comfort themselves, the bumper stickers and refrigerator magnets that supposedly summed up all their struggles. Money doesn’t buy happiness. God has a plan. It will all work out in the end. It was brainwashing, calculated and perfect, the final bitch-slapping to top off a lifetime of stocking shelves or filing papers or answering phones. If he was going to spend his life making money for someone else, Mitch thought, that was fine. It was inevitable. But don’t insult my intelligence by trying to convince me money is worthless, just so you can keep the whole fucking pile to yourself.

He knew that Doug was a man of simple needs and that he really would be happy with very little. So, for that matter, would Mitch. But it wasn’t all about the money. It was about Accu-mart, about the army, about Doug’s car getting impounded. It was about everything that had ever made him feel small, that had given him the message that he owed someone something, that he had to do more, that his behavior wasn’t good enough.

“Kurt Cobain was a drug addict,” Mitch snapped. “All the people who killed themselves when they got rich were drug addicts. Janis Joplin, Hendrix, Jim Morrison. Money doesn’t buy happiness for drug addicts because they can buy so many drugs all of a sudden that they just freak out.

Then rich people look at that and they say, ‘Money doesn’t buy happiness, fuckers. See what happened to Kurt Cobain? So stop asking for more money, ’cause it ain’t gonna help.’ They just use that bullshit as an excuse to not give us raises. Then they take the money and laugh on the beach in Bermuda. Dude, fuck that. If money doesn’t buy happiness, why do guys guard it with guns?”

He drew a deep breath, then continued his rant while Doug sat in the passenger seat staring at him. “They expect us to eat that shit up. They expect us to say, ‘Wow, money doesn’t buy happiness. Boy, I’m sure glad I don’t have any money. Otherwise, I’d just overdose on all the drugs I could buy. Yessiree, it’s much better if the rich people keep all the money, ’cause if I had any of it I’d just spend all day jamming heroin into my arm.’”

“Wow, dude,” Doug said, taken aback by Mitch’s sudden ferocity.

“Money buys happiness for everyone else. You fucking bet it does. It gives you mental peace, man. You know why? Because if you got money, you stop worrying. And not worrying all the time is happy enough for me.”

“You worry?” Doug asked. He sounded innocent, like a little boy, and Mitch felt a twinge of regret that he had cut short their celebration of the successful drug deal with an outburst of bitterness. But he hated seeing his friend act . . . brainwashed.

“Of course,” Mitch said. “Don’t you?”

“No,” Doug said softly. “I just figure everything will work out in the end.”

Mitch gritted his teeth. “I worry all the fucking time,” he said. “I worry about bills, about the rent, about not being able to ever afford anything. I can’t go anywhere or do anything. Shit, even any of that stuff you see people doing during the commercials in football games: mountain-biking, traveling, going to the beach, concerts, vacations. It’s like there’s this great big fucking world out there full of all this great shit, and man, we’re never gonna be a part of it. We can’t even have a little taste, you know? So, yes, I worry.”

How To Rob An Armored Car by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2009)

Mitch was staring at a case of auto air fresheners.

Really staring at them. He was having some deep thoughts, wondering who came up with the idea of freshening the interior of a car. Mitch’s own car smelled like gas and pot smoke and mold, which was fair enough, because the roof leaked and the carpet was always damp, and he hotboxed a joint out there every day during his lunch break, and the car ran on gas. That was what an old car should smell like. He knew if he put an air freshener in it, it would smell like gas and pot smoke and mold and a chemical approximation of a pine tree, which wouldn’t really be better, just different.

He and Charles had gone out at lunch and fired up a joint and Charles had told him that he had nine brothers and sisters back in Lagos, Nigeria, and two of them had been killed by the secret police. Mitch hadn’t known what to say. In a way he envied Charles for having had a life so shitty that working at Accu-mart was a slice of heaven. He wished he had stories about having come from somewhere merciless and tragic. Instead, he had stories about living with a distant father while attending public school in Queens, and by comparison those stories shrieked of insignificance. Even he found them dull, and because of this, working at Accu-mart was even duller, a mind-numbing slow torture that was turning his brain into lifeless putty. Work, cable TV, smoke a bowl, sleep. Try to hide from suffering in all its many forms and wind up envying people whose families were getting killed by the secret police.

A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember by Iain Levison (Random House 2002)

I have a job. Here we go again.

In the last ten years, I’ve had forty-two jobs in six states. I’ve quit thirty of them, been fired from nine, and as for the other three, the line was a little blurry. Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what happened, you just know it wouldn’t be right for you to show up any more.

I have become, without realizing it, an itinerant worker, a modern-day Tom Joad. There are differences, though. If you asked Tom Joad what he did for a living, he would say, “I’m a farmworker.” Me, I have no idea. The other difference is that Tom Joad didn’t blow $40,000 getting an English degree.

And the more I travel and look around for work, the more I realize that I am not alone. There are thousands of itinerant workers out there, many of them wearing business suits, many doing construction, many waiting tables or cooking in your favorite restaurants. They are the people who were laid off from companies that promised them a lifetime of security and then changed their minds, the people who walked out of commencement with a $40,000 fly swatter in their hands and got rejected from twenty interviews in a row, then gave up. They’re the people who thought, I’ll just take

this temporary assignment/bartending job/parking lot attendant position/pizza delivery boy job until something better comes up, but something better never does, and life becomes a daily chore of dragging yourself into work and waiting for a paycheck, which you can barely use to survive. Then you listen in fear for the sound of a cracking in your knee, which means a $5,000 medical bill, or a grinding in your car’s engine, which means a $2,000 mechanic’s bill, and you know then that it’s all over, you lose. New car loans, health insurance, and mortgages are out of the question. Wives and children are unimaginable. It’s surviving, but surviving sounds dramatic, and this life lacks drama. It’s scraping by.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was a plan once, but over the years I’ve forgotten what it was. It involved a house and a beautiful wife and a serviceable car and a fenced-in yard, and later a kid or two. Then I’d sit back and write the Great American Novel. There was an unspoken agreement between me and the Fates that, as I lived in the richest country in the history of the world, and was a fairly hard worker, all these things would just come together eventually. The first dose of reality was the military. I remember a recruiter coming to my house, promising to train me in the marketable skill of my choice, which back then was electronics. I remember the recruiter nodding vigorously and describing all the electronics that the army was currently using. They would train me and train me, he said.

Since the Layoffs by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2003)

“How much more time have you got left on benefits? Before the government cuts you off?”

I figure now that we’re going somewhere with this. He’s leading up to something, maybe he’s going to ask me to be one of his henchmen. Hell, I could do that. Drop coke and weed off at people’s doors. Maybe he’ll let me drive one of his SUVs. I could cruise around town and listen to CDs and bring people their daily drug shipments, for which they would exchange their unemployment checks. I don’t have a problem with that. Somebody will be doing it whether I say yes or no. My moral refusal won’t suddenly put a halt to this shattered town’s substance abuse problem. Something like that would tide me over, until the new factory opened. They were already talking about a new factory.

“One year and three months.”

“Then what? You going to starve to death in your apartment?”

“The new factory’ll have opened by then.”
Gardocki shakes his head. “There’s not going to be any new factory. Who the hell would want to open a factory here?”

“I heard Scott Paper was looking at the location.” Tommy had called me up and told me he’d read that in the paper. Big businesses were interested, I knew that. There was a pool of skilled workers, a building already set up to produce machine-tooled parts for tractors. Just a few changes, and it would be up and running, producing something else. We all knew that.

Gardocki laughs again. “Scott Paper.” He shakes his head. “That was a heavy metal factory. You think they’re going to turn it into a paper mill? And go through all that union bullshit again? Nobody wants to deal with unions anymore. They want Mexicans. They want people who’ll appreciate seven dollars an hour, not gripe about seventeen. The factory days here are over, Jake.” He leans back in his chair and lights a cigarette. “What happened to that pretty little girl you were going around with?”

“Fuck you.”

Gardocki adopts an expression of surprise. “Is that off limits?”

“You know my cable’s cut off, but you don’t know my girlfriend moved out?”

“She went off with some used car dealer, huh?” Gardocki is looking sympathetic, so as not to rile me more.

“He was a new car dealer.”

After the factory closed, the car dealerships had left town, too. Jobless people don’t buy a lot of new cars. Kelly had gone with him, to Ypsilanti. Before she left there had been a lot of agonizing, when she went through her touching “What should I do?” phase. Kelly never asked herself what she should do when I was making seventeen dollars an hour. After her seven-dollar-an-hour salary as a receptionist at a car dealership made her the top grosser of the household, I noticed she began asking herself these deep philosophical questions. She told me some salesman was asking her to go to Ypsilanti with him, and whatever should she do? I told her to fuck off, and went and placed a bet on Canadian Football. After she moved out, I never picked up the phone, didn’t return the one letter I got from her and didn’t say goodbye. Someone new would come along, once the new factory opened.

“Jake, I want you to kill my wife.”

I laugh. Then I search Gardocki’s face for signs of humor. But I don’t see any. Gardocki isn’t even looking at me. He is looking at a spot on the wall above my head, expressionless. He smokes his cigarette and stares, waiting for it to sink in.

“I’m not going to kill your wife, Ken.”

Dog Eats Dog by Iain Levison (Bitter Lemon Press 2006)

In the next room, which Elias clearly used as a study, there was a computer, a desk and papers scattered everywhere. On top of a pile of bills was a manuscript, perhaps sixty pages, entitled Was Hitler Right? An Analysis of Personal Records From the Second World War. Was Hitler right? What the fuck was this? This was the type of shit the Aryan Brotherhood fuckers would read in the joint, only there'd be bigger print and more pictures.

Then he noticed the words "by Elias White." So Elias was a Nazi. He didn't seem like a Nazi - all the Nazis Dixon had known had shaved heads, muscles and tattoos - but you could never tell. What the hell was a college professor doing writing shit like this? Dixon pulled up the office chair next to the computer, sat down, and began to read the great works of Professor Elias White.

How To Rob An Armored Car by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2009)

Mitchell Alden had been born with a number of gifts, but overshadowing them all was the Curse of Poor Decision Making. It was genetic. He remembered sitting in the kitchen in the house where he grew up in Queens, listening to his father talking to his business partner, who wanted to get out of the indoor air-cleaning business and invest in computers. "Dammit, I don't know how long this computer fad is going to last," he remembered his dad saying, trying to talk his partner into staying with selling Smoke-Eeters. "But as long as I'm alive, people will be smoking in bars in New York City."

These words turned out to be true. Mitch's dad died on the Long Island Expressway, six weeks before the ban on smoking in New York City bars went into effect, because of another error of judgement, this one involving a tractor trailer's stopping distance. Mitch carried on the family tradition by joining the army and getting kicked out six weeks later for failing a drug test, then going to community college and majoring in English.

Since The Layoffs by Iain Levison (Soho Press 2003)

Throughout the night I get customers and I learn things. An overweight woman in her fifties with unwashed, stringy black hair comes in at two in the morning and buys three gallons of whole milk. She hands me what looks like a credit card, but instead of a bank logo, this is plain white and has a faded government seal on it. I look at her suspiciously.

"Run it," she says.

I shrug and swipe it through the credit card machine. Nothing happens. She looks at me, I look at her.

"Are you new?" she asks me. She is wheezing with the effort of carrying the milk to the counter.

"Yeah."

"That's an EFS card. You have to push the EFS button on the machine." She smiles at me patiently.

I figure she's a mental patient, and this card is probably an access card to a parking garage in Iowa. I decide to let her have the milk. She obviously likes milk a lot and we've got plenty.

"It's okay," I tell her. "Just take the milk."

"There's a switch, an EFS switch," she says, getting impatient, or annoyed at being treated like a charity case. Then I see a tiny switch at the bottom of the credit card machine marked "EFS." I click the switch, and I'm amazed when a receipt prints up. She signs a copy and walks off, limping under the weight of three gallons of milk which she appears to be carrying home through the cold. It must be for a family's breakfast. I look at the receipt, and it says, "Electronic Food Stamps, Inc."

Electronic Food Stamps, Incorporated. Not Electronic Food Stamps, but Electronic Food Stamps, Incorporated. This is a business. Somebody's making money designing ways to get government aid to people who have been tossed aside. Some money grubbing software designer has a government contract because we all lost our jobs.

That's the biggest insult of all, that we are being fed off. The destruction of my life, my town, represents a business opportunity to someone else. NIne months ago, this woman walking through the cold was probably a factory employee, or perhaps the wife of one, and her children had health insurance and she had a car and she bought milk in the daytime, with money. I am suddenly filled with the urge to find the fucker who owns the EFS company and shoot him right in the fucking face. I feel that someone owes me an explanation, not a corporate public relations-type explanation, but a down-on-your-knees-begging-for-your-life explanation, which is the only kind worth listening to.

But he's not the only one. From now on, I have to make a list of people who need to be shot in the face. There needs to be a real bloodbath, to equal the financial and emotional one which has just been drawn for all of us.

A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember by Iain Levison (Random House 2002)

The hard part is learning the route. I'm working Philadelphia's Main Line, once again servicing rich people, many of whom have mansions for houses. Families of three or four live in eighteen-bedroom castles, with new sports cars in every driveway. I drive around and wonder what these people do for a living. Where do the rich come from? Do all these houses belong to geniuses, inventors of rocket engines and cures for diseases? Did they have one great idea, like Post-it notes, and capitalize on it? Is there some fascinating story behind this great surplus of money, or have they simply inherited a factory that makes toenail clippers for the armed forces?

One thing's for sure; they believe they deserve it. I don't know many rich people, but I've met enough to know that even the ones who were handed a trust fund think of themselves as special, not lucky. They reinvent the past to include details of their own forbearance and fortitude to anyone who'll listen, and someone always will because they're rich. It's always more entertaining listening to the rich, because there's always a chance you'll be asked along to the Bahamas or given a sports car for the weekend. The fact that they're usually stingier than the people I hang out with takes a while to sink in.

The other great fact about rich people is that their kids are always fuck-ups. Not the kind of lovable fuck-up who works down at the gas station and tells you he can fix your car and then destroys it. No, rich kids are shady. They're the kind that dream up a brilliant illegal plan, just to show their dad a thing or two; then when you all get caught, they beg their dad for a great lawyer and never talk to you again. They were born into money, and they know money will take care of them. This security gives them a whole different value system, one the rest of the world never quite gets.

These half-empty houses, I notice, are mostly dark and quiet, like the set from Citizen Kane. Housewives putter around in the kitchens, and I see their coiffed heads through the window as I hook up my hose to their oil fills. They are usually alone. They never wave. The third great fact about rich people is that they don't talk to the help. Lady Chatterley's Lover was bullshit.