Kaya’s logo. Tony the Tiger says smoking is g-g-g-r-r-eat, kids!

Friday March 21, 2008, 7:30 PM

Barnes & Noble
Greenwich Village
396 Ave of the Americas (Sixth Avenue and 8th Street)
New York City
212-674-8780

My first reading at this big chain, which seems to be losing outlets in Manhattan as fast as the old Tower Records. Quick! Save this store!

I just wrote a column for Seattle’s The Stranger about all the weird people who come to book readings:

Waylaid by Weirdness by Ed Lin

A lot of great things happen at readings, enough to make it more than worth my while to step up to the mic. I like hearing that someone loved my book—it made them laugh, cry, whatever. One guy even told me that he read my first novel, Waylaid, in one sitting. On the toilet.

Hey, it made me laugh.

The only downside to readings is when the Weirdies show up. Weirdies love mouthing along during the reading; asking many, many questions during the Q&A; and following the author for blocks afterward.

More here.

This is my Business Formal look, from my Forbes.com days.

Here’s an essay I wrote late last year and sent it out on the Asian American Journalists Association’s listserv in an attempt to sort of jump-start informal chatter and more open discussion.

It didn’t work, but I think it’s a hell of an essay, so here you go!

–

This year is my 15th in the hurly-burly world of financial journalism.

I’m amazed at what I’ve been through (being promoted, being fired, being downsized, being hired by a guy who was fired a month later and taking his job) because it feels like it’s been a relatively bump-free ride. I guess time smoothes out the edges both in historical financial charts and in life.

Now, the company I work for, Dow Jones, is poised for its first change in ownership in more than 80 years – and the buyer is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

In general, there seems to be more bemusement than panic in the air.

This is my second go-round with Dow Jones. I’m a manager now. Fourteen years ago, I was a punk J-school grad who was going to change the world. I fell into Dow Jones through the wire service. I had majored in engineering as an undergrad (mining, a degree that Columbia has since put through the PC-varnish and renamed “earth and environmental engineering”), so I had a facility for numbers. I passed the editing test easily and moved up fairly quickly.

I started when daily trading volume on the NYSE was about 250 million shares. (Now, that volume represents about 15 minutes of trading.) Over the next six years, stock trading – and financial journalism – exploded.

Early on, I chose to go the route of being a rim editor at the wire service. I figured it would be less taxing on my fiction writing than being a reporter.

As a rim editor, basically I was bombarded with press releases that companies were required by law to disclose material news. Of course, when the news was bad, the press releases would be written with such opacity, you could pour it in your cereal.

Basically my job was to pull out newsworthy items from those press releases and write 60-character headlines.

“Ford Sees Q4 Sales Down 44% From Yr Ago”

“Halliburton Gets $4B US Defense Pact”

“Ed Lin’s Eyes Glazing Over”

These headlines had to be written in a matter of seconds. Beating Reuters or Bloomberg in those days by 30 seconds was a coup. Getting beat by a minute would land you in a conference-room meeting with the “beat sheets” with your name in highlights.

But the payoff to the job was the regular eight-hour shift. I could go home and stretch out my “real” writing. But of course, the real writing didn’t seem to be coming together.

It’s a common critique that first novels are thinly disguised autobiography. My writing always seemed to loop back to my somewhat traumatic childhood of renting out rooms to johns and hookers at my parents’ sleazy motel in New Jersey. Writing it felt fake because I was pulling punches on the sex and softening the rampant mid-80s Jersey homophobia.

Then my younger cousin Charlie killed himself.

His family, like mine, ran a sketchy motel in Jersey. One thing that I have come to understand is how prevalent suicide is in the Asian American community. Nearly everybody knows someone who has committed suicide, but nobody ever talks about it. This became the catalyst that pushed my pen.

I just wanted to embrace everything horrible about that motel, that boy I was and that childhood, and yet still come out somewhat hopeful. It took about six months of writing nearly every day.

Meanwhile at work, I had briefly moved to a Web site Dow Jones had up at the time and then shut down after my 10th day working there. Then it was back to the news wire.

I was promoted to copy editor, which was like getting tenure. I was only 28 while several of my peers were in their 40s and 50s.

I knew a lot of editors and reporters who talked about their fiction manuscripts in the bottom drawers of their desks or their minds, but I shut up about my book and took a hard look at the newsroom around me.

“Now that I’m a copy editor,” I asked, “what do I do?”

“Do this until you crack,” joked another copy editor. Only it wasn’t all kidding. There was already one guy who was “hearin’ the voices,” as we called it.

I talked to one jaded grizzled veteran who was essentially my mentor at the newswire. Actually, I shouted to him, because between us was an old dot-matrix printer that fired off hardcopy like a machine-gun nest.

In my earlier days, when I was first in the so-called final seat, which published directly to the wire, I asked him how the hell I was supposed to read a dozen 500-word stories per minute.

“You just have to kind of eyeball it!” he shouted.

“What if the lede sucks?!” I yelled back.

“I’ve got two words for you, Eddie: F-11.”

F-11 was the function key that sent stories to the wire and queued up the next one.

Now that I was tenured, though, his advice took on a serious note.

“How do I make a career out of this?” I yelled.

He looked at me hard and said, “You really want to make something out of yourself?”

“Yeah!”

He leaned over, put his elbows on the printer and gently said, “Get out of here.”

Looking back at it, I’m reminded of the scene in “Cinema Paradiso” where the blind Alfredo forces Toto to leave the small town at the train station.

To show me he was serious, my mentor quit two weeks later, mumbling something about working on his collection of short stories. Maybe he knew it would spook me. A headhunter called me without naming a specific opportunity so I sent off a resume.

I got a call the next day from a guy who said he was putting together a new wire service and wanted to know if I was interested in helping to manage it. It was January 1999.

This unnamed new wire service, whose inevitable demise was hastened by 9/11, was put together by a private-equity firm that was known for buying up “distressed” businesses and rehabilitating them by chopping them up and gluing disparate pieces together. Later, when the Frankenstein’s monsters could sit up and walk away from the operating table, they’d be sold off.

The new wire was comprised of cast-off services from several national and international media operations. Unfortunately, the ratio of managers to workers in the newly acquired staff was about one-to-three, which basically set up a mass rope climb for the highest parts of the hierarchy.

I had come aboard to supervise a staff of about five with a directive to boost that to 20 by the summer. I was greeted with open suspicion by other managers and with guarded suspicion by my subordinates.

Luckily though I attended the 1999 Asian American Journalists Association’s Executive Leadership Program session in Los Angeles. It was comforting to hear other peoples’ stories of confusion and doubt, to know that I wasn’t alone. My big takeaway about the workshops is that being a leader requires supplication, savvy and a bit of showmanship in the newsroom. I remembered in particular Ron Brown saying that the quest for the corner office was “fun.”

It was tough to have much fun in my 12-hour days when I got back. I wish I had read “The 48 Laws of Power,” or at least browsed it. The very first law is, “Never outshine the master.”

My immediate supervisor was an all-too-typical kind of guy who was probably too scared to talk with his kids and was definitely too scared to talk with his reports, including me.

Although I was certainly supplicant to him, I was emerging as a threat to his position because I was gaining capital in the newsroom. I had fired two people, a nonproductive reporter and a chronic plagiarist (one time he had even left “Bloomberg” in the dateline), and dismissing staff flags one as someone to look out for. In fact, those were the first two dismissals at the new newswire.

I guess the beginning of the rot was when I caught a reporter who was under another manager who rewrote a press release into a bylined story, incorporating quotes as if she had gotten the CEO on the phone.

When I complained to her manager, he didn’t pull the story. I’m not even sure he compared the press release that was only about 10% different from the story.

I should have brought it up with my supervisor who may have quietly dropped the matter into the wastebasket. Instead, the reporter’s manager complained to my boss’s bosses.

When my supervisor fired me, he couldn’t even look at my face. He had his eyes fixed on my shoes. He told my Allen Edmonds that I didn’t have the skillset needed for the job.

I was hurt, angry and flush with cash. They had given me $50,000 to simply leave that day. It was November 1999.

A friend had cast me in the reading of a play by Diana Son ahead of Thanksgiving. It was down in Philadelphia and I took the train there and back with a fellow cast member, a woman I knew but had fallen out of contact with. It’s a long ride, more than two hours each way. This woman is now my wife and as of October 2007 we’ve been married five years.

In January 2000, when the world didn’t end, I figured maybe now was a good time to get in on some stock options with one of the crazy Internet start-ups sprouting like cicadas in New York’s Silicon Alley.

Getting an editorial position at a financial Web site at that time was easier than putting on a tie, which I managed to do before heading off to a crazy interview with worldlyinvestor.com. The burgeoning newsroom was in a former factory in Chelsea and the interview was held in the CEO’s office because there wasn’t room anywhere else. The CEO fumbled around with his Hot Wheels-themed keyboard and mouse as we joked our way through an interview.

“What is the goal of worldlyinvestor?” I asked.

“To lose as much money as possible!” said the editor-in-chief. I looked at the CEO and he didn’t flinch. In terms of professionalism, the interview went downhill from there.

When I got home, there were two messages already. The first one was a job offer. The second, and more urgent message, was that I had to go to the worldlyinvestor party celebrating another investment round.

After the free beer on Friday policy was abolished (it had lead to some interesting headlines), the fortunes of the Web site could be judged by the price on the soda machine. It went from free, to 25 cents, to 50 cents, to 75 cents and then to a dollar, but by then people were bringing in outside drinks, the ones that were left.

When I was hired, the in-house editorial staff numbered about 15 with a number of outside contributors. I had a vague senior editor title, which meant that I did just about everything and had a right to kill a story on sight. The editor-in-chief left in my fifth month there, as an ill wind from the rapidly swooning Nasdaq index portended doom and higher soda prices.

By December, the plug popped out of the socket. As staffers staggered in late and hungover from the holiday party the night before, about a third of them were sacked. Horrible timing or perfect timing? It depended on what you were waiting for: hanging on in a place devoid of morale or ending the year with time to watch the fired-dot-commer special of “X-Files” marathon reruns on TBS.

I put my feet up on the empty desk next to me, still waiting for Ron Brown’s “fun” to kick in. I had a frank talk with the then editor-in-chief in which he said worldlyinvestor was trying to sell itself and that it was tougher than hawking black-and-white television sets.

Meanwhile, I had actually found a publisher for my little novel. Kaya, a nonprofit Asian American press, picked up my manuscript. I had tried to find a literary agent for the book, but the general response was, “You’re a good writer, but you’re crazy if you think anybody’s going to publish this.” One guy told me to go see “Cider House Rules” to learn what a really good story is. Thing is, it would take a while for the tiny press to publish my book, but all I had was time before the axe fell on worldlyinvestor’s neck.

Then, strangely enough, a bidding war broke out for worldlyinvestor early in 2001. The winner was a software company out in California that had vague plans to incorporate us with their stock-analysis platform.

By March 2001, with the transaction about to close, worldlyinvestor’s editor-in-chief split for a rival site and handed over the reins to me. The catch was, I had to fire about a dozen editorial staff, in and out of the office. Most people knew what was coming, but I still felt horrible about it. I even reached one guy by cell phone who was on vacation, fishing on a lake, to tell him there wouldn’t be a job when he got back.

“Do what you gotta do,” he said, laughing. I think he was drunk.

As the editor-in-chief, I had to make sure our syndication requirements were met in the morning, or we wouldn’t get paid. One guy did our morning column that was supposed to publish at 6:30 a.m. to reach our syndication partners. He was usually on time, but once in a while he’d file late as I desperately clutched my coffee mug.

One day he didn’t file until 6:28 a.m. By the time I had the document set up in our publishing system, I had about 30 seconds to copy edit a thousand words.

“F-11,” I recalled from my old mentor as I scanned through the story. With about five seconds to spare, I still had to write a headline. The column was about being bullish, or “long” in stocks, so I banged out “Pippi Long-in-Stockings,” and published it.

The writer sent an angry instant message to the copy desk: “Is Ed Lin on drugs?!?!?!?” But after I had a talk with him, he never filed that late again.
In fact, he turned out one of the most touching columns on 9/11 the day after. But that column, along with the Pippi headline and three years of other stories, have been obliterated and aren’t even accessible via the Internet archive’s Wayback Machine.

I was the second of the last two guys in the space and I literally turned the lights out on the project. When worldlyinvestor was shut down for good, the site was wiped clean and the only things I had to show for my time there were the coffee mugs, customized Post-its and bottle-openers. It was February 2002.

A few months later, in May, my novel, titled “Waylaid” was published. It won some high praise and some thorough damnation. I did readings around the country and basically recast myself as a full-time novelist. Thing was, though, I had become so accustomed to writing at night after working during the day, that it became impossible to write. An oyster needs a grain of irritating sand to make a pearl, right?

After helping out a friend at a nonprofit center in Chinatown for the summer and fall and much eBay surfing through the winter, I finessed my way through three rounds of interviews for a copy-editing spot at Forbes.com. It was April 2003.

My first day there everybody I met told me two things. That I was the first new hire there since 2000 and that they hated their jobs. Morale was awful, yes, but the good thing about the place was that you could write about nearly anything you wanted to, including “reviewing” various upscale products and vacations (that policy has since been revised).

Pretty soon, I had a support base established in the newsroom (by drinking heavily and pretending to drink heavily), and soon a breaking-business-news desk was created with me heading it.

In the end, if you’re a manager, you can talk about improving the product with just about anybody. But if you have to sit through hours and hours of seemingly pointless editorial meetings, you’d want to sit with someone you enjoy being with. That is the person I have set myself to be, and it’s fun working in this professional persona.

But back to drinking. Yes, the boozing journalist is an archetype, but Forbes.com had some of the most serious drinking I’ve ever stumbled through. I shuffled in the door one night and found a chicken-salad bagel sandwich that I didn’t remember ordering in my coat pocket. I hoped it was paid for!

In any case, much has been written about the Forbes.com newsroom (http://www.observer.com/2007/revolt-page-slaves?page=0%2C0), and I haven’t much more to add to it.

As time went by, online financial sites began hiring again and most of my friends left. The writing was on the wall for me as well, with a headhunter hounding me. I had barely sent my resume out to him before landing the interview at Barron’s Online. How similar it was to kicking off my resume all those years ago to that nameless new newswire! Only now it was for an established brand and mature newsroom.

I started at Barron’s Online in December 2005. It’s funny, but I can’t think of a single thing to say about my time here, except that my second novel, “This Is a Bust,” will be published by Kaya in early December 2007, probably around the same time that News Corp. will close the acquisition of Barron’s parent Dow Jones.

I am 38 years old.

I am in my 15th year of business journalism.

Although I’m a “print” journalist, I have never worked at a print publication.

I have published two novels.

I am not certain what will happen.

I love what I do and I am having fun, Ron.

Well, when I rolled into Philadelphia, for the reading at UPenn I was sick. Just as well, because the entire Northeast was covered in a sleet storm. We were literally falling over each other on the ice as we fumbled our way to the Kelly Writers House. Even though we were about half an hour late, a roomful of people were patiently waiting. While I was reading I broke into a sweat and my glasses kept slipping off my nose, but, hell, nothing would stop me from reading for and poisoning the minds of young people! Thank you Mayumi, Warren, Jo and Jessica for having me and Lisa Chen over! Haverford and Bryn Mawr — you guys rock!

Then 24 hours later, it was off to the Asian American Writers’ Workshop for another reading with Tao Lin and Lisa. I’ve been a member of the Workshop since 1992. The place has had its ups and downs, IMHO, but it’s off to a great start in 2008. Lisa’s so shy, I just had to put a picture of her here. Thank you Nina, Jeannie and Ken for having us!

I’m still a little sick, so this is enough typing for me today. The tour continues next week in LA, SF, Berkeley and Seattle. Watch your ass, West Coast!

Is this generally known? Talking about his genetic makeup, James Brown wrote in his autobiography “I Feel Good: A Memoir of a Life of Soul”:

“I also have some Chinese in me, at least as much as I have black (and maybe a little Egyptian King Tut thrown in for good measure). All you have to do is look at my face–it’s all there.”

Don’t believe me? Check page 54, the beginning of the second chapter, using the search engine on Amazon.com.

Okay, okay, JB was pretty whacked out at times, certainly not in the least here. But hell, I want it to be true so badly. C’mon, papa’s got a brand new five-pound bag of rice!

In any case, happy lunar new year!

Corky Lee’s original photograph used for the cover of “This Is a Bust.” The Pagoda movie theater was torn down in the 80s.

Well, I’m about to embark on the first leg of the tour for “This Is a Bust.” Thursday, Sunday and then Tuesday.

I’m feeling good, though I haven’t yet decided what parts I’m going to read. Definitely Chapter 1, which is the setup for 1976 and all.

Back when I did readings for Waylaid, I would just jump in and start reading, without saying anything apart from “Hello.” But that’s not very audience-friendly. I’ll just be myself at these three shows, all of which promise to be extremely different.

I just love this photograph by Corky. Back when we were kicking around ideas for a book cover, I found it on a web site and asked the webmaster who the photographer was. No reply. That was a bad sign.

Of course, when I found out later that Corky was the photographer, he had no knowledge that it was being used — and without his permission. It seems that they’ve since taken the image down. He also took the back-cover picture of the mural that used to be on the side of the late, lamented Music Palace. I used to work this crazy 5pm-midnight shift and I would catch the double feature with the other scumbags there before going to work. The place is a demolished lot now, waiting for financing to clear the subprime mess and grow into a healthy condo to make Chinatown even more upscale.

In any case, plenty of time for more reminiscing at the readings! I hope I’ll see you New Yorkers in near future!

Yes, it’s here. Should be arriving at Amazon.com warehouses and select Barnes & Noble stores presently.

It’s the summer of 2002. Waylaid has been out for a few months. It’s getting some pretty good reviews and I’m receiving some weird emails from people who have somehow found me.

My old Web site, worldlyinvestor.com, has already gone belly-up but thankfully our parent company has survived and very graciously has chunked in several months of severance in our last paychecks.

I’m trying to finish up what eventually became This Is a Bust. It’s not going so well. I’m not good at writing during the daytime. In fact, I’m like Sonny Rollins. I get hot around 3 a.m. or so. In the morning my wife goes off to work, I make a pot of coffee and shop eBay all day. I’m finding some amazing stuff and the classic Macs and Atari cartridges are piling up in the house.

My old pal Jake drops in to tell me that the grant writer at his non-profit organization has just quit.

“You’re a writer — can’t you write grants?” he asks me. Jake’s the number-two guy at the organization, which provides after-school services (nice vague description, Jake!) to kids in Chinatown.

I cross my arms, put my feet on the coffee table and pause “Spartacus” on the DVD player. I’d be giving up a lot to start working. Apart from unstructured days in which showering and dressing are optional, I’d also have to cut off the $405 (pre-tax) that comes rolling in every week from unemployment.

But what the hell. It would be my first paying job in Chinatown and it was literally around the corner from our apartment. I wouldn’t even have to cross a street to get there.

I go in for an interview with the director (whom I’ll call Pop) of the organization (which I’ll call SIS). I’m a little surprised that the man is Italian American and even more surprised that I can barely understand him. He sounds like a smoker who’s had his voice box cut out, but in fact his neck doesn’t bear the tell-tale hole from such an operation. I can’t help but stare at his throat as he croaks on in administrative-speak about helping the kids.

“What should I pay you?” Pop grunts.
“The going rate,” I say.
“Naw, that’s not enough. I’ll give you $15 an hour.”
“All right.”
“You know I was born in this area. Before it was Chinatown, a lot of Italians lived here. Then you guys took over.”
“Well, you guys stole pasta from us.”
He smiles, but it’s a sore point. He doesn’t like the idea that pasta came from Chinese people. He probably doesn’t even like Chinese people.

Turns out that these “after-school services” include letting the kids play table tennis in the basement of SIS’s tenement building or goof off on the Internet on the computers on the upper floors. What are they doing up there? I’m not sure because when the kids hear me walking up the rickety stairwell, there’s a buzz of activity and they’re quietly doing something else by the time I hit the room.

–

My first day at SIS, I came into the office around 10 and found only one other person there, the accountant, of whom Pop had already told me was “on the verge.” Jake wasn’t in yet and neither was Pop. I said hello to the accountant but she barely acknowledged me. The brief glimpse of irrational hate in her eyes made me wish there was a metal detector at the door.

I got on the PC set up for grants and poked around. Pop had mentioned that a prominent grants organization had already expressed interest in visiting SIS to see how badly the tenement needed repair. It was in pretty bad shape. Bad enough so that I had to keep both feet on the floor, otherwise, my swivel chair would roll to the other side of the room on the tilted floor.

They had sent letter after letter to the grants organization, but apart from the initial feedback, SIS hadn’t received a reply.

I picked up the phone and called. I got to the secretary of one of the top executives at the grants organization. She even scheduled a time for the man to visit that week. Yeah, sure, he’ll show up, I thought.

Around 11 Jake came in.

“What time does Pop come in?” I asked. He laughed.
“You mean what day,” said Jake.
It turned out that Pop, the executive director of SIS, only came in two or three days a week, at most.

Later, at lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant, I asked Jake who takes care of business when Pop was out.
“Nobody,” he said.
“Nobody!”
“I have enough things to take care of, I have to deal with the whole bureaucracies of the schools.”
“Pop told me the accountant was ‘on the verge.’ I thought that meant she was incompetent and about to be fired, but apparently, it means she’s ready to crack!”
“It could mean both. A lot of people at SIS are ‘on the verge.’”

I met the other people who worked at SIS eventually, including a Catholic nun, a frazzled young woman from Taiwan who seemed to be out of her depth, and a hard-boiled counselor who dealt with at-risk youth.

Pop finally came in on my third day, the day the grants guy was supposed to show up. I told Pop, and also told him that I wasn’t sure if he really was. His eyes lit up like Christmas that there was a chance the guy was coming in.

Shockingly, the guy showed up. He was a dignified man in his early 50s and looked amazed at the state of disrepair the building was in, just from where he stood. I stepped into Pop’s office and introduced the two. I was about to leave when Pop asked me to take the man on a tour of the building.

“It’s my first week here, I don’t really know the place well,” I said to both men, apologizing.
“Please, just take this gentleman around the building,” croaked Pop, his eyes bugging out.
I didn’t know it then, but Pop had problems going up and down stairs. Jake wasn’t around that day, for some reason, otherwise I would have begged him to do it.

So I took the grants guy first — at his request — to the backyard, an area I had never been to. For some reason, some old PCs were sitting on the ground among the weeds. There was an entrance to the building’s crawlspace that the guy ducked into. There could have been a body in there and I wouldn’t know. He came out nodding.

“The foundation has seen better days,” he said.
“That’s one reason why we need this money so badly,” I said. We were asking for about $2 million to renovate the building. I was hoping he wouldn’t ask me anything deep about SIS, because I simply didn’t know.

I took him upstairs to the computer room and even stopped by the nun’s office, hoping that they’d get in a long, involved conversation that I could slip away from. Unfortunately, they had nothing to say to each other.

I took the grants guy into Pop’s office and sat back at my desk. I trolled the Internet for grants. It’s mostly a useless exercise. I’ve received no training and Pop has never given me a comprehensive history of SIS. He doesn’t even have copies of the grants my predecessor had sent out.

Nearly every grant application asks for a detailed history of the applicant, including breakdowns of past budgets. I’ve asked Pop several times, and he either demurs or claims that I haven’t looked through the files enough.

My file drawers are crammed with irrelevant documents, including books of pictures of past parties at SIS. Pop sure used to smile a lot. Even the kids are smiling. Now they just shuffle somberly past the office doorway before running up the stairs to the computer room.

Without the relevant information, it has become useless for me to even fill out grants. Three weeks in and I had fallen into this routine of coming in late, going to lunch as soon as possible with Jake, and then looking at pictures of old SIS parties.

Speaking of which, I actually did set up a fundraising dinner party for SIS. I trudged around all of Chinatown to all the other organizations that we apparently had a past relationship with and got them to buy tables for the dinner. As I went from non-profit to non-profit, I felt like I was getting a glimpse at the dirty heart of the less-credible world of community service.

A lot of these organizations had similar-looking boards of directors and were aligned according to allegiances with different members of the city council. They also used that old trick of Shoe’s — Pop apparently had a job at another non-profit, one reason why he wasn’t in every day.

I also gave brief interviews devoid of any real information to Chinese-language newspapers, in one sense being a Robert Chow-type, but in text.

When September rolled around, a number of colleges around the country contacted me to do readings for their Asian American group or multicultural literature class. (Some of these would go a little rough, but hell, maybe one should read the author’s books before inviting him.) I started taking time off from SIS to travel.

That was the beginning of the rot between Pop and I. With me not there every day, phone calls would go unanswered and the buffer zone between Pop and the accountant was now gone.

One day, I was trying to put together another hopeless grant application and as usual, Pop wasn’t helping me at all. I left the application on his desk. It was due in a week and I wouldn’t be there.

When I came back after a few days off, he tried to chew me out for not getting the grant done and blowing the deadline.

“I sense a lack of urgency about you!” he croaked.
“I’m just imitating you from a week ago, when I tried to get these numbers from you!”
“You show no initiative whatsoever!”
“Oh yeah? I quit!”
I went to my desk to get my jacket.
Pop popped out from the back.
“Hey, I was too hard on you,” he started. His rasp never sounded so mournful.
“This is a job for someone else,” I said.
I waited until I got home to call Jake and tell him the news.

I haven’t written a blog entry in a while, partially because I’ve been sorta tied up and also partially because I’m so tickled by the “To Hell With Williamsport, Pennsylvania!” headline on the last entry! That should be up at the top for, like forever!

Anyway, I’ve been thinking back to my first job in “the community,” working for a not-for-profit Asian American organization that I’ll call AC.

It was the summer of 1990, and I met the head of AC, a woman I’ll call Shoe, at ECAASU, which stands for East Coast Asian American Students Union. It’s an annual intercollegiate meeting with workshops, panel discussions and parties galore.

In any case, Shoe was looking for a summer office worker in New York City and I was totally psyched to be working for “the community” after working for “the man.” Of course, at that time, working for “the man” meant my work-study job in the maintenance office at 118 Hartley Hall, working the wet-vac half-asleep at some dorm room’s overflowed toilet.

Shoe was a middle-aged Chinese woman with a big mouth, big teeth and zero tact. She offered me the job on the spot after a clumsy interview that included her musings about how Chinese people view sex as a soup that shouldn’t be cooked until after marriage.

After ECASU was over, I boarded one of the buses that went back to New York. I ran into this guy I had met earlier and told him that I’d be working at AC with Shoe.

“Oh. . .” he said slowly. “I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t want to say something bad.”

I’m the kind of person who sees negative signs and keeps barreling forward. I want to see how bad things could possibly be, convinced that the situation is not that terrible or that everything is fixable.

On the first day of that job, sometime in June, I found myself standing on the roof of Teachers College on 120th Street. I didn’t know the elevator went to the roof or that the university rented out space to offices that were accessible only on the roof. There was a young girl there, I’d say about 16 or 17, who had the keys to the AC office.

The lock always gave her trouble and she had to fiddle with the keys for a few minutes before the door would finally open. Maybe having the cylinder lock exposed to the elements had something to do with it. In a few days, I’d start praying that the door would never open, but it always did.

The young girl said that Shoe was her aunt, which probably just meant a family friend and close enough to get the keys. Shoe never gave me a copy of the keys the entire summer.

The young girl’s job was to unlock the door and study. Also, I guess she was supposed to keep an eye on me, in case I tried to wheel the computers out the door.

The office was fairly big, about 1,000 square feet, but a lot of it was crammed with boxes and legal files. Several desks sat along the walls, but only two of them were inhabitable. The girl’s had a lamp. Mine had a computer and a phone.

I had thought that I’d be sitting with Shoe, doing important “community” stuff. Instead, my job was stuffing envelopes with propaganda about the need for funding Asian-American community groups and sending them to members of city council. Shoe rarely came into the office. She had a full-time job elsewhere.

One time I had to write a cover letter for a report on anti-Asian violence in the city’s schools.

Shoe had called me from her job to read her the cover letter I was writing. I had originally asked her to write and fax me a letter that I could type up, but she didn’t or wouldn’t.

So I started, “Dear Councilman. . .”

“What! That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard! You start it with ‘Dear’! Are you some kind of idiot?”

Then she slammed her phone down.

I tried calling her back at work, but she wouldn’t pick up. I couldn’t do anything else without that letter, so I started going through file boxes, making the high-school girl think I was working. I came upon a cache of large (five-inch diameter) almond cookies sealed in plastic.

“Can I eat these cookies?” I asked the girl.

“They’re left over from the Chinese New Year banquet. They’re not going to use them again.”

Cookies can last a few months, can’t they? They tasted stale but they weren’t horrible. I sat down in a chair in the sunlight and ate a cookie while I waited for Shoe to call again.

As the summer went on, I realized that Shoe could work herself into a frenzy with no apparent catalyst. Once she started, it was off to the races. Then her phone would slam down and I would reach for an almond cookie and wait. I ate a lot of cookies that summer.

It would take her about half an hour to collect herself and finally call back. Maybe the realization that she was paying me by the hour ($8, I think — not too bad for 1990) brought her back to her senses. I would read her the cover letter/fax/report that I was working on — the same exact words — and she would never fail to tell me that what I had was fine.

Maybe she only called me when she wanted someone to yell at.

One day, I came into work to find the office door already open. Who was in but Shoe and she had brought her son in, also. He was about four or five and very excited about talking.

Shoe told me to take her son out on my lunch break. It convinced me that one had to be extremely patient to be a good parent, a value that I didn’t have in college.

That goddamned kid never shut the fuck up. He read everything out loud — labels, signs, expressions on passersby — with no apparent need for acknowledgement. But just when I would tune him out, he’d suddenly barge in with a question and repeat it louder and louder (”What time is it? What time is it! What time is it!!!”) until I heard him and said something in response.

Then he would go back into his extroverted autistic state and babble on and on. I brought the kid back into the office and handed him over to his mother. She pointed to some things around my desk and then left with her son. I went over and had a cookie.

I think my breaking point was when she told me to hand-deliver an envelope to some place in Alphabet City. It was a major pain in the ass to get there, transferring trains three times from the upper west side of Manhattan diagonally to the lower east side. Getting there and back took about three hours.

When I came back there was Shoe sitting in the office, complaining about the amount of time it took for me to get there and back.

“It would have been cheaper if I had just hired a courier!”

It was time for me to leave for the day, but Shoe handed me a stack of envelopes she wanted me to bring to the post office.

They ended up in the trash instead. I don’t take shit from anybody on a hot, humid day.

My last day there, Shoe came in and begged me to stay and work through the school year.

“There were times I didn’t treat you so good,” she said, shaking her head. I said I couldn’t because I wouldn’t have time with my heavy courseload for my custom mining engineering/literature writing double major.

She told me she’d have my last check in a few days and that I should drop by to pick it up.

I didn’t bother and by the time half of the fall semester was over, this sophomore who knew me came up and explained that she was now working at AC for Shoe.

“You have to come by and pick up your last paycheck,” she said.

“Why? Can’t she just mail it to me?”

“She wants you to sign something. And we need you to come in soon. We’re closing the bank account and your check is the only thing that’s holding it up.”

“Oh, really?” I asked, intrigued. Screw something up for Shoe by merely doing nothing? Surely that was worth more than the $50 or so that my last check was for.

I never went back. A few more times during the year, the sophomore — looking ever more defeated and tired (but from dealing with Shoe or me?) — reminded me about the check.

It was the best check — but not the last in my years of service in “the community” — that I never cashed.