Looking for a job

I went around in search of a job around Creek Street. In downtown Ketchikan, I wasn’t really sure what I was in search of. There was no goal in earning money other than to spend my money on dumb stuff. You know – sneakers, clothes, and junk food. I didn’t think of long-term investments like a car to get me around that rainy town. I cared less for the idea of saving for a college tuition. I just wanted an excuse to feel important, to feel like I could get out of the house, sitting around waiting for the eternal drain of time to sink me toward where the fish corpses that didn’t spawn upstream went.

Mind you, I had the confidence of a 5th grader with light up shoes or a watch that spun or made crazy voices when finding a job. In fact, I had completed a whole summer of job training at Ketchikan High School. I sat around for an entire semester after school with a bunch of local kids to learn how to interview at a job, write a resume, and communicate as a “professional.” At 15, I had a lot of issues in communicating, taking things seriously. It was no surprise that most of what I remembered from that training was a couple of transplant Armenian kids from Los Angeles. We spent most of that time job training exchanging our fantasies of gangster movies. I had a theory that both kids – a brother and sister – were up there perhaps after causing a raucous from whatever dishy neighborhood in Southern California they were from. This training for them could have perhaps been a punishment. The fact that they were in Ketchikan made me think then, do people end up places out of their control or because they are there for their own reasons? Why in the first place did I decide to seek job training in a small town that barely had jobs, let alone laborious hard labor for a Filipino guy like me?

Even with this new build confidence in training, it didn’t erase the fact that I was Filipino in a town of white-owned businesses. Looking back, I was a naive little dude that probably felt there was a job that was as good as me. Boy, was I wrong. On that day at Creek Street, I walked into Troll Art, a famed little store that sat below a local Chinese Food joint. With my buddy John, who was there with me for moral support, I walked into the store with the optimism of a fresh faced pup. I walked up to a woman who looked like she was important. I knew this, because she wore some long, dangling earrings, a turtle neck, and a long frilly skirt. She looked quirky enough to run a joint filled with a bunch of fish paintings. John went look at some of the product. I approached the woman.

“Hey, how’s it going?”

She had a smile on her face. They always had a smile on their for some reason, even if it was raining shit outside.

“Yes, how can I help you?” she asked.

As she was folding some shirts, I went straight in for the kill.

“I wanted to know if you had any job openings.”

She began laughing.

“That’s cute. You know, we did, but if you had come by earlier before the summer season started you might have had luck.”

I pushed down the urge to retort back to such a roundabout way of saying “No.”

“Okay, well what kind of jobs were they?”

“I don’t know. Like clerks?”

I heard a woman from behind the cash register let out a laugh. Still determined, I kept asking the woman questions.

“Will there be any soon? Any openings?”

“You might have better luck looking somewhere else around town. Have you tried near the docks?”

I turned around dejected. Then I spotted John who was within earshot, as if he had been inching near the woman and me for the past few minutes.

“How’d it go man?” John asked.

I shook my head. I folded up my resume hotdog style and put in my back pocket.

“Shucks,” he said.

“John? Is that you?” the woman suddenly asked.

She turned to face him. Her face lit up, like seeing an old war bud in some trench that I had no participation in digging out.

“Hey!” John replied.

It turned out that the owner and John had known each other, probably a long lineage of Ketchikan connection. A long line of white fisherman and artists and townies that had been forged by the downfall of nuclei that was drawn upon from Native land. Here I was, much like other Filipinos in the town in search of a better life. Except, I didn’t want a job at a cannery or McDonalds or as a janitor. I wanted to work at a job unlike any of those to escape the idea that I was anything like them. I didn’t want to smell like guts. My home already smelled of fried oil. I couldn’t bear the idea of wearing dirty work clothes. When John finished talking with the woman, he tailed me toward the exit. So far, the search for a job yielded less glory, more confusion about what it meant to be serve a purpose or function in such a dead town.