Scenes From a Down - a poem

He was laid off last year from his job 

used to install and repair windows and doors, 

earning $11.50 an hour with health insurance.

The supervisor called him into a wood panelled 

office to explain they were downsizing and 

his services were no longer needed, he started 

looking for a job.the very next day.

In December, he went to the state fairgrounds

(he had seen a back page advertisement about an

impending job fair in the Columbia Star)

knowing that he would feel secure amongst 

the hundreds of other people also out of work.

He and an acquaintance applied for a few 

openings and shared a beer afterward. 

The most promising job was a position as a 

technician at an air-conditioning company. 

It paid $8.50 an hour. He never got that. 

He applied for more than 50 jobs since, 

welder, an auto mechanic and a painter.

“Anything,” he says. “I’ve been applying for anything.”

In February, he was finally granted an interview 

at a plant that made industrial adhesives.

They liked him, they liked his experience

They smiled, shook hands. It felt too easy.

The company ran a credit check and turned 

him down. All the deals that had gone awry, 

all those transactions he barely understood, 

all those strange assurances he accepted 

and advance purchases made on credit 

somehow wound itself into his credit story.

He suddenly remembered that one time when

he had walked away from a mortgage after

the large Wall Street firm told him that the 

terms had changed; in a terse letter 

with the relevant fine print underlined.

Of course, he was convinced the bank had 

cheated him. The bank countered in court 

documents that they had ‘explained and 

quantified the immediate identifiable risks'.

A few months back he got an e-mail from a 

college called the U.S. Career Institute. 

They were based in Colorado. They offered 

online training for “an exciting, professional 

career” in medical billing. It was $69 a month. 

His fiancé grudgingly agreed. He says that 

he was happy that someone decided to 

send him an email promising a future made 

out and waiting for someone just like him.

He now takes his classes online, making 

slow but steady progress. Staring at the 

computer for long hurts his eyes but he 

goes on through the day while his fiancé 

works at the nearby hospital. She is a 

secretary. She makes $7.70 an hour. When 

she gets home, they sit together and pass 

evening hours on a sagging couch, a pack 

of Newport cigarettes on the coffee table, 

and the television remote in hand, surveying 

a world mired in distress. They flip between the 

action movies and news channels, absorbing 

the shifting patterns of reality and make believe.

Sometimes they microwave the packaged dinner

while on other nights, they share leftovers.

Sometimes he falls asleep, one beer too many

and no dinner. They keep each other warm

as he dreams of completing his online course and 

then starting to bill for insurance companies who 

were bailed out by the folks in Washington. 

He dreams of making $30 an hour, like they said 

in the advertisements. The wind blows steadily 

against their mobile home as he hears the rains 

come down; slowly at first and then with an 

incessant frequency that seemed to crowd out 

the disposable income calculations that was 

just forming in Raymond Vaughn’s mind.

Note: This poem was adapted and modified from a story I read about a jobless individual trying to make ends meet in the Times.