27/3/98

The Unemployee

After a professional lifetime in everything from skirts to zirts, a jack-of-no-trades finds his calling.

    "You're hired."
    I'd heard that before. I would work a couple of months, or maybe just a couple of days. Then, as sure as spring follows winter, "You're fired."
    When I landed a job at this here Jay Pee 15 years ago this week, I did not boast a very good employment record. Most notable was my steady unemployment record. I'd worked in more than 20 places, once almost surviving as long as two years.
    Fifteen years. By now I get the feeling maybe I can make a career of this.
    They can't fire me, y'know. They're afraid I'll fink. I've got a bestseller just waiting to be written, plump with shmootz on everyone who ever worked here. (Now you see why I never lasted very long anywhere else.)
    But seriously. There's nowhere else I'd rather work. I love the place, love the people -- most of 'em -- and I love the news biz. Grey-collar workers, I call us: we're a special breed.
    If I felt that way about the pleating business, I would not be in a position to write about how wonderful it is.
    I was a professional pleater -- for the record, an assistant pleater -- for as long as I could bear the boredom, which amounted to about six weeks. I was 22, and frankly, I hoped to do better with my life.
    Our motto at Andy's Pleating Company was "Stick your hand up a skirt and get paid for it." Andy's was your basic sweatshop in Montreal's teeming shmatte district. I'm sure the city's fashionable women gave little thought to the shvitzing fellows who put the kink in their skirts.
    I worked in a team with a black man and a haredi (one of them was a drug dealer, and it wasn't the black). We spent eight hours a day wrapping cardboard cutouts around unpleated skirts, which would then be steamed. After a while I asked to do something else, and prompty regretted it: I spent eight hours a day removing skirts from the steamer, which had the curious effect of melting my fingerprints.
    The road to journalism was paved with many stepping stones, each one making me all the more worldly. Like the learning experience I got at Ben Weider Bodybuilding International.
    For a 19 year old, this was a great calling card. What young women wouldn't be impressed, as long as I didn't tell them what I really did there.
    I started my bodybuilding career in the chest-expander department. For $2.25 an hour my job was to remove "Made in Taiwan" stickers from thousands of red wooden chest-expander handles and then affix "Made in Canada" stickers. Nothing much grew in my pectorals, but I developed some amazing muscles in my right thumb. I started grumbling after three hours, and was fired on my second day.
    I was a counselor at Mesibos Shabbos day camp, truly the perfect kind of guy to be leading around a pack of Lubavitch children.
    Quite a CV, eh?
    Add to that "paint can stacker." Job of a lifetime. For a month I learned all there was to know about the shipping room of UniChem Paint Factory. You laugh? It so happens there's a secret to stacking 80 cans of blue or green or red paint so that they don't tumble down.
    Half the time, I stacked the cans, the other half, I unstacked them. I really enjoyed the latter. A lady would give me an important-looking piece of paper that said "24 yellow, 24 red, 12 black" and I'd go from pile to pile removing the requisite number of the required color. I got so good I could tell what was in a can just by its label.
    (UniChem was owned by a sad-looking Holocaust survivor, yet many of his employees belonged to a local neo-Nazi gang. I asked one of them, a muscular, leather-jacketed French Canadian, about the curious pattern painted all over his motorcycle. He told me it was the logo of "Le Club." He had no idea it also happened to be the symbol of the Nazis.) 
    Eggrolls became my specialty. Shortly after I wound up my career stocking books at Rodall's Gift Shop, and before I did a stint for the Reichmanns gluing ceramic tiles together into samples, I was a professional eggroller.
    I learned the ancient Chinese art from an old Jewish cook at the De Sola Club, which happened to be across the street from the Soviet Consulate, where they have me on file as a potential Jewish agitator (I couldn't help but notice them, photographing me from their windows). I don't know, maybe they suspected I was stuffing microfilm into the eggrolls or something.
    Let's see ... I was a furniture mover in a bar mitzva hall, where I learned the science of carrying 10 chairs at a time without busting a hernia; delivery boy at an office supplies store, where I picked up all I know about typewriter ribbons (an expertise I don't get to use much anymore); and for a couple of months I shipped belts for a living.
    There was the dump truck factory. They were remarkably tolerant of me there at Atlas Hoist & Body, possibly because the place was owned by my uncles.
    Every time I screwed up in one department, they put me somewhere else. I was a forklift driver until I almost killed someone. Then they put me behind a desk in the Orders Department, until I almost killed someone there. As a stockroom boy in the Parts Department, I got to know every inch of a dump truck, and might well be the only journalist in the Western world who knows what a zirt is. I was also a grinder. A grinder is the fellow who smooths out the nubs left by a welder. I worked deep inside some of the world's largest dump trucks, one of which has a poem scribbled on it, written in a moment of intense inspiration while I was grinding nubs.
    Metropolitan News Agency is where I started my newspaper career, if you don't include delivering TV Guide door-to-door.
    Metropolitan News was a zany little shop. (We used to answer the phones "Mitch Paul News" for three reasons: if you said it fast enough it sounded like Metropolitan News; one of the guys working the floor with me was named Mitch Paul; and it drove the owners crazy.) Right smack downtown, near the corner of Peel and Ste. Catherine, the store was abuzz 24 hours a day. They stocked the most unbelievable array of newspapers and magazines -- from the Hay River Hub near the Arctic Circle, to Pravda to the Jordan Times (I got to read The Jerusalem Post for free) -- in a tiny fire-trap that in wintertime was swimming in slush, which was not a good thing for the newspapers stacked on the floors. It was also the only space in frigid Montreal heated solely by body heat: there wasn't room for five people in the place -- three if the very fat Mitch Paul was working -- but they must have had a million people in and out of there on any given day.
    Mitch Paul News was owned by the Feldman brothers, two shady Jewish characters straight out of a Richler book. They were always on the verge of a nervous breakdown, hollering at the customers, accusing us workers of stealing magazines (we did, but only as a matter of principle, to spite them), and anxiously glancing out the window for the cops (they ran an illegal bookie operation in the middle of it all.)
    I'm really sorry they fired me. I could still be earning $2.80 an hour and be perfectly happy there.
    But I had to go and make my fortune. Bellamy Restaurant paid me $2.87 an hour to be a busboy. This was a great place to work if you wanted to clear dirty dishes from hockey players' breakfasts. Unfortunately, I had to clock in at 5:30 a.m., which was not far off my usual bedtime back then. I lasted three days.
    So naturally I went into sales. Staplers. Adhesive tapes. When I was utterly desperate for a job, encyclopedias. The experience was helpful: I learned I was not a salesman.
    But I was very, very good at collecting garment scraps. There is fair money to be made from knocking on doors in the shmatte district, scooping the trimmings off the floor and trucking them over to a garment recycling depot. The CEO of this one-man, one-truck empire was a burly Lubavitcher who never bothered to give his company a name, and didn't ask to see my CV.
    By now, my intellect thoroughly well-rounded, I was ready for the newspaper business.
    The Gazette, Montreal's venerable morning daily founded by Benjamin Franklin, needed a new Page One columnist. No, I'm kidding; they needed a tearsheet clerk for the advertising department. I was perfect, because I hadn't shown any indication of being overqualified for the position.
    I was the best damn Orthodox Jewish tearsheeter the Gaz had had in its 201-year history, and it took a while, but they, too, fired me.
    (You understand, of course, it was never my fault that I was fired.)
    Fifteen years ago, when they asked me here at the Post about my employment record, I modestly declined to tell them everything.   
    I completely lost respect for the Post when they hired me.
    By now I've been working on and off (mostly the latter) for 25 years. In another 24, I can retire. 
    Or get another job.