Nickel and Dimed: Undercover in Low-Wage USA (16 page)

But on Tuesday, when the Post-Memorial Day week begins, my life seems real enough again in a gray and baleful way. This is my day of drug tests, also of traffic and a steady, appropriately sphincter-relaxing rain. The first test, for Wal-Mart, is painless enough, conducted at a chiropractor's office a few miles down the highway from Wal-Mart itself. I'm given two plastic containers—one to pee into and one to hold the decanted sample—and sent down the hall to an ordinary public rest room. Easy enough to substitute someone else's pee, if I'd had a vial of it in my pocket or met a potential donor in the rest room. The next test, for Menards, takes me to the southwestern suburbs, to a regular allopathic hospital, complete with patients being whisked around corridors on gurneys. A dozen people are already ahead of me in the waiting room of the SmithKline Beecham suite I've been sent to, most of them, judging from the usual class cues, of the low-wage variety. The waiting room TV is tuned to Robin Givens's talk show Forgive or Forget, where today's theme is “You took me in and I cleaned you out.” Seems eighteen-year-old Cory stole from the cousin who took him in, thus ruining Christmas for the cousin's girlfriend and her child. Cory is not repentant, in fact makes excuses about having had to cheat and steal all the way up from the projects, that's how his life has been. Robin beats the air with her fists and yells, “Cory, Cory, stop being a victim!” Thievery is nothing, apparently, compared to the crime of victimhood. With each fresh denunciation of Cory, the studio audience applauds more excitedly. He is bad, as are some of the impassive viewers right in this room, who will soon be judged and exposed by their urine. My mind slides back to one of the “approve/disapprove” statements on the Wal-Mart survey: “There is room in every corporation for a nonconformist.” But no, no, no! The correct answer, as we will all find out soon enough, is “totally disagree.”

Finally, after forty minutes, I am called out of the waiting room by an officious woman in blue scrubs. What are they planning—to cut out my bladder if I fail to produce a testable volume of pee? I ask whether they do anything but drug testing here. No, that's pretty much it. She checks my photo ID, then squirts what looks like soap onto my palms, although there is no sink in evidence. Now I'm to go into a bathroom and wash with water while she waits, leaving my purse with her. I pause for a beat or two, goo-filled hands held out, pondering the issues of trust that have arisen between her and me. Why, for example, am I supposed to leave her with my purse while she doesn't even trust me not to sprinkle some drug-dissolving substance into my urine? But for all I know, any display of attitude might lead her to slant the results. So I go meekly into the rest room, wash my hands, and then pee, which I am allowed to do with the door shut, and our little parody of medical care is complete. The whole venture, including drive time and wait, has taken an hour and forty minutes, about what it took for the Wal-Mart test, and it occurs to me that one of the effects of drug testing is to limit worker mobility—maybe even one of the functions. Each potential new job requires (1) the application, (2) the interview, and (3) the drug test—which is something to ponder with gasoline running at nearly two dollars a gallon, not to mention what you may have to pay for a babysitter.

Until I know the drug test results, I feel obliged to keep looking for jobs. Most of my encounters are predictable and unpromising—fill out the app, get told to wait for a call, etc. but one stands out from the corporate, legalistic, euphemistic, and thoroughly aboveboard feel of all the others. The ad is for “customer service” work, a type of job I tend to avoid because it normally involves a résumé, which in turn would involve levels of prevarication I am not prepared to attempt. But this customer service job is described as “entry-level.” When I call I am told to come in at three sharp and to be sure to “dress professional.” The latter injunction presents a challenge, since my wardrobe consists of T-shirts and only two pairs of pants other than blue jeans, but I have a jacket and decent shoes brought along for a stop in New York on the way to Minneapolis, and this, fortified with lipstick and knee-highs, makes for a pretty damn impressive getup, I think. When I arrive at Mountain Air (as we'll call it), in a characterless white box building just off a service road, nine other applicants are already waiting. It turns out this is a group interview, conducted by Todd in a large room, where we applicants sit in folding chairs while Todd, a sharply dressed fellow of about thirty, lectures and shows transparencies.

Todd speaks very rapidly in a singsong cadence, suggesting that he does this several times a day. Mountain Air, he says, is an “environmental consulting firm” offering help to people with asthma and allergies as a “free service.” We will be sent out to the sufferers in our own cars, making $1,650 if we complete fifty-four two-hour appointments in thirty days-though you'd have to be pretty lazy to make only that much. Plus there are incredible perks like weekend training sessions held all over the country where they “get stuff done, of course, like hearing motivational speakers, but you can bring your spouse and have a great time.” All we have to be is eighteen or older, bondable, possessing a car and a home phone and having one year of Minnesota residency. Whoops! He asks if any of us are not long-term Minnesota residents, and when I raise my hand he says the requirement can sometimes be waived. What Mountain Air is really looking for is—and here he reads from a transparency—“Self-disciplined/ Money-motivated/ Positive attitude.”

Nothing, I note, about providing a service or healing the sick. In fact, compared with Wal-Mart's unctuous service ethic, Todd's emphasis on the bottom line is positively refreshing. We will be independent contractors, he tells us, not employees, which means, “if you lie to a customer the company is not responsible.” Even, I wonder, if the lies are part of the sales pitch the company has taught you? It's very simple, Todd assures us, just a “matter of taking people who have a very serious problem, though probably not anywhere near as serious as they think it is, and leaving them happy.” Any questions? None of this has made any sense to me at all, but I limit myself to asking what the product is, assuming there is some kind of product involved. Todd opens a cardboard box that I had not noticed sitting on the floor near his feet: a squat, slightly menacing-looking appliance he introduces as the “Filter Queen.” “So this is a selling job?” someone asks. “No,” Todd says with some vehemence. “We have a product and if they want it we give it to them”—though he can't mean give it to them for free. Now we are to have our personal three-minute interviews. When my turn comes, he asks why I want to do this and I say something, without thinking, about wanting to help people with asthma. Where do I think I am, Wal-Mart? Because when I call at the designated time two hours later, I'm told there's no job for me now, although I have made it to the waiting list. Maybe it was the residency issue that did me in, though I suspect it was the misplaced hypocrisy.

Meanwhile, there is the increasingly desperate apartment search. Whatever else I am doing at any point in this story, you need to picture me waiting for a call or looking for a chance to call some rental agency for a second or third or fourth time. Now that we're into the weekdays I sometimes get live humans on the other end of the line, but they are disdainful or discouraging. One directs me to a throwaway apartment directory available, in boxes on the sidewalk, but its offerings all include hot tubs and on-site gyms and go for over $1,000 a month. Another tells me that I've picked a bad time to come to Minneapolis; the vacancy rate is less than 1 percent, and if we're talking about affordable—why, it might be as low as a tenth of that. Listings in the Star Tribune are meager or nonexistent. No one returns my calls. Besides, it is dawning on me belatedly that Minneapolis is far vaster than Key West or Portland, Maine, and that my two live job possibilities—Wal-Mart and Menards—are separated by about thirty miles. My appetite for navigating the Twin Cities highways has been dwindling rapidly. Everywhere I go, some fellow or other who has never heard of Minnesota nice is stalking me in his pickup truck, making me covet the bumper sticker I see more than once: “If you're not a hemorrhoid, get off my ass.” Nor is the leading classic rock station turning out to be sufficiently supportive. I can handle seventy-five-mile-per-hour tailgaters on Creedence Clearwater Revival or even ZZ Top, but the Eagles and the Doobie Brothers are just no help. So one thing I do not want is to live at a hair-raising distance from my job, assuming, of course, that I get a job.

There is one possibility—one place in the entire Twin Cities that rents “affordable” furnished apartments on a weekly or monthly basis—and this place, the Hopkins Park Plaza, becomes the focus of my residential yearnings for the next three weeks, my personal Shangri-La. On my third call (the first two calls were not returned), I reach Hildy, who doesn't think there's anything at the moment, but I might as well come out and pay the application fee, which is $20 in cash. When I find the couple of two-story brick buildings that constitute the Park Plaza, several other apartment seekers—a middle-aged white guy with auburn dyed hair, a young Hispanic man (it's Latino in California, Hispanic here), an older white woman—are waiting for Hildy too, which explains why she doesn't return calls: the market is entirely on her side. The place, when I finally get taken around by Hildy, seems OK, although the corridors tend to be dark, noisy, and permeated with kitchen-waste smells. I can have a room without a kitchenette right now if I want, but it's in the basement and the price—$144 a week—seems a little steep. So I decide to wait for one with a kitchenette to open up—any day now, Hildy assures me, turnover is dependably high. This seems like a prudent and thrifty decision at the moment, but it turns out to be a major mistake.

I decide there must be something I am doing wrong, some cue I am missing. Budgie's
owners had been confident that Apartment Search would find me a place. When
I call another friend of a friend, a professor at a college in St. Paul who
has briefed me on the Twin Cities' industrial history, he concedes to being
aware of an affordable-housing “crisis” but has no idea what I should do. Those
rental agents who are kind enough to talk to me all recommend the same thing:
find a motel that rents by the week and stay there until something opens up.
[24]
So, through multiple calls, I arrive at a list of eleven motels in the Twin
Cities area, all of them of the non-brand-name variety, offering weekly rates.
The rates, though, are not anybody's definition of “affordable,” ranging from
$200 a week at the Hill View in Shakopee to $295 at the Twin Lakes in southern
Minneapolis, and many of these places are full. I head for the Hill View, which
wants a $60 cash deposit. I drive and I drive. I go off the map, I leave suburbs
and commercial strips far behind, I enter the open fields, which make for a
nice change, drivingwise—but to live in? The vicinity of the Hill View contains
no diners, no fast-food joints or grocery stores, no commercial establishments
at all except for a couple of agricultural-equipment warehouses. The distance
is unacceptable; as is the room, when I get to see it: no microwave, no fridge,
hardly any space not occupied by the bed. And what would I do if I didn't feel
like being in bed—invite myself in for a tour of the Caterpillar parts warehouse?

Twin Lakes (not its real name) is at least in Minneapolis. There the East Indian owner tells me that all his residents are long-term, working people and that I can have a room on the second floor, where I won't have to keep the drapes shut during the day for privacy. Again, no fridge or microwave. Weakly, I tell him I'll take it and will move in in a couple of days. No problem. He even waives the deposit. But I have a bad feeling about the place, partly because everything looks gray and stained and partly because there's a deranged-looking guy hanging out by the coin-op washer-dryer who follows me with bloodshot blue eyes.

On the job front, though, things are moving along briskly. I had been told at Menards to show up for “orientation” at ten o'clock Wednesday morning, and since I assume that my being hired is conditional on passing the drug test, I call to confirm the appointment. Yes, they're expecting me—I hope not just for the purpose of denouncing me as a chemical misfit. But the orientation is friendly and upbeat. Lee-Ann, a worn-looking blonde in her forties, and I sit across a table from Walt, who lays out the main points in a jolly, offhand way: Be nice to the guests, even when they get irate because they can't return things, and they're always trying to return things. Don't be absent without calling in. Watch out for a certain top manager, who hits on women when he visits the store and generally acts like “a shit.” We will need to wear belts, to which a knife (for opening cardboard boxes, I suppose) and a tape measure will be attached, and the cost of these items, which he pushes across the table to us, will be deducted from our first paycheck. And oh yes, we will be getting “little presents” now and then—ballpoint pens, coffee mugs, T-shirts promoting seasonal items. Then Walt hands us our vests and our ID badges, and I am touched to see that he has made up two for me, one with “Barbara” and another with “Barb.” I can take my choice.

When Walt leaves the room for a moment, I turn to Lee-Ann and say, “Does this mean we're hired?” Because it seems odd to me that no offer has been made or accepted. “Looks like,” she says, and tells me that she hasn't even taken her drug test. She went to the testing place, but she didn't have any photo ID because her wallet was stolen, and of course they wouldn't test her without photo ID. Then Walt comes back and takes me out on the floor to meet Steve, a “really great guy,” who will be my supervisor in plumbing. But here, on the sales floor, doubt rushes in. The shelves of plumbing equipment, and there seem to be acres of them, contain not a single item I can name, which gives me an idea of what it feels like to be aphasic. Would I be able to get by with pointing and grunting? Steve's smile seems more like a smirk, as if he's reading my mind and finding not a speck of plumbing knowledge lodged within it. Start Friday, he says, shift is noon to eleven. I think I haven't heard him right, nor can I quite believe the wage Walt tells me I'll be getting—not $8.50 but an incredible $10 an hour.