Around the time we began living in a post-Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights world, I was living with my parents in L.A. and driving an hour in freeway traffic to and from a job as a paralegal. In the evenings, as I stopped and went and stopped and went in the long crawl home, I’d sometimes look at the cars on either side of me, mostly occupied by solo drivers like myself who looked as crushed as I felt, and I’d say to myself, “You have completely failed in life.”

Growing up, I vowed never to come back to L.A. to sit in traffic to get to and from a job. But here I was, and the journey was better than the destination. With no window nearby, the only light that entered my cubicle was fluorescent. The smells that entered it rotated from burnt coffee to burnt popcorn to tuna. My cubicle walls hid people until they were right on top of me, and someone was always peeking over them to invite me to come stand in the crowded kitchen and sing “Happy Birthday” with everyone else. When we got to the person’s name, I always had to keep quiet but not look like I was keeping quiet, because I couldn’t remember anyone’s name. It was stressful, but I went. A piece of cake could be the highlight of my day.

Somehow I’d found myself a girlfriend (thanks, Internet!) but still I was unhappy. She didn’t mind because she was unhappy too. We drank a lot, and I was beginning to wonder if we had a problem. So when my then-girlfriend got offered a job in New Orleans, I told her she had to take it, and I went with her.

Problem solved! To have a drinking problem in New Orleans, you have to wake up underneath the statue in Jackson Square, naked, newly tattooed and covered in blood. Even then you only might have a problem – it depends whose blood it is.

In New Orleans I just wanted to avoid another office job. I thought I'd try teaching again. But when a month went by and I still hadn’t found anything, I took the streetcar up St. Charles to the Jewish Community Center. Maybe the Jews would be inclined to help out one of their own. The director told me she didn’t think anyone would sign up for the writing classes I wanted to teach, but I could give it a shot, and in the meantime, they needed a game room attendant/tutor. She was kind enough to bump the pay up to seven dollars an hour, because I had a master’s degree.

I worked six afternoons a week in a linoleum-floored, cinder-block-walled room decorated with a giant poster of SpongeBob SquarePants and crayon drawings by five-year-olds. The drawings appeared to be of tornados. There were two battered foosball tables, a ping pong table with a sagging net held up by a binder clip, an air hockey table missing one goal, and a stained and rutted pool table.

At first it was the best job I’d ever had. The pay was absurdly low, but kids hardly ever showed up, so I could spend most of my time editing the novel I’d been working on for three years. When no one signed up for the writing classes I offered, I was more relieved than disappointed.

But then word got out that the game room was open for business, and that there was a free Ivy-educated tutor on call. Parents started bringing their kids in, putting an abrupt end to my honeymoon with the JCC. These children had the attention spans of goldfish. The kids who weren’t there to be tutored got to play and watch cartoons, and as soon as the TV turned on, every kid in the room seemed to go instantly slack-jawed and catatonic. Also, there was no appointment schedule, so parents just pushed their kids into the room and left me to juggle tutoring math, English and science (about which I knew nothing) all at the same time. I also had to remember to keep an eye on the kids who’d come there to play games, because they tended to hurl ping pong paddles at each other and joust with the pool cues.

With the increased traffic, every surface in the room became covered with a thin, sticky layer of high fructose corn syrup. Some kids showed up every afternoon to watch cartoons until their parents picked them up. They watched that autistic kitchen sponge and his retarded starfish friend get exploited by the crab boss with a Napoleon complex. They watched a show about an anorexic teenage girl who leaves cheerleading practice to battle a mad scientist with vitiglio, which I was warned not to confuse with the show about the black teenage boy who’s harnessed the power of electromagnetism to fight another mad scientist, or the show about several teens with various superpowers fighting still other mad scientists.

One day a frazzled mother dropped off her thirteen-year-old daughter with her math homework. “So you went to Dartmouth?” the mother said doubtfully.

“I did.”

“My husband went there.”

“Oh.” What else was there to say? “Cool.”

The mother left, and a redheaded kid whose name I never learned said, “You went to Dartmouth? And you work here?”

“I’ve made a lot of mistakes,” I admitted.

I set to work helping the girl with inequalities. If -2x>8 then x is less than -4. Like all the girls I knew when I was her age, this girl rejected my very existence. She didn’t look at me, spoke in one-word sentences, and she seemed to tune me out completely when I tried to explain to her that you flip the inequality sign when you divide by a negative. I admit I’m no math wizard, and my attempt at explanation ended with, “Because that’s just what you do,” but still, she got every question wrong. I’d resorted to shouting at her, “No! Flip it!” when I was distracted by the sound of the toilet flushing in the single bathroom attached to the room. It had been flushed several times in the last few minutes, adding a nice metaphorical soundtrack to my tutoring attempts. Finally, the door opened, and little Kevin walked out wiping his hands on his pants.

“I think it’s bwoken,” he said with puppy eyes.

I went inside. Water had overflowed the bowl and a large puddle was spreading across the tile floor. The toilet was full of paper.

I left the bathroom and shut the door. “You used too much toilet paper.”

“But I had a lotta poop!” he said.

This job is a lotta poop, I thought.

The brightest side of the job was a nine-year-old named Royce. He came every afternoon for two hours, and we did his homework and played ping pong or foosball together. He was half-NFL football player, half Jewish personal trainer. He said “Please” and “Thank you,” did his homework, asked good questions, and actually learned stuff. He talked really animatedly about totally lame kid stuff like Pokemon and Teen Titans, reminding me of my old obsessions with G.I. Joe and Garbage Pail Kids.

In January the last batch of potential editors on the planet rejected my novel. The carnival parades made getting to work nearly impossible. The toilet now overflowed every other day, and the room had begun to smell like a septic tank. Also, I’d recently been told by my supervisor, who was at least five years younger than me, that I had to make “extra-sure” the ping pong balls and paddles were locked away because people were seen playing ping pong late at night.

I knew who the people were, or at least one of them: an extremely large personal trainer who worked in the JCC’s gym. He’d started coming into the game room every afternoon and taking over the ping pong table with one of his workout buddies. He was a real Texas asshole, and he thought he could push everyone around because he was big and had a shaved head and one of those barbed-wire tattoos across his bicep.

One day just before closing time, the Texan and his workout buddy scared away some kids and started playing ping-pong. I let them play for a few minutes, and then I told them to leave. They refused.

“You know, you aren’t really supposed to hang out in the game room at all.” I pointed to the Game Room Rules, helpfully tacked to the corkboard on the wall. “You must be between the ages of 6 and 17 to use the game room.” I read it aloud for him, just in case. (Illiteracy is the “hidden” disability.)

The Texan puffed his chest out. “What?” he said. He turned to his friend, “I don’t like how this guy’s talkin’ to me. You hear how he’s talkin’ to me? I should kick your ass.”

A rush of adrenaline sent my heart beating crazily, but the Texan didn’t punch me or butt me with his bullet-shaped head. Instead, he threw down his paddle and stormed out of the room. His slightly less enormous friend followed him.

Royce was the only kid in the room. He’d been sitting on the couch, quietly watching TV. Now he gave me a stricken look.

“Sorry,” I said. "Everything's fine."

A few minutes later when I walked out, I heard the Texan whining to the receptionist that he wanted to file a complaint about my “tone of voice.” Walking to my car, glancing over my shoulder every few feet, I marveled at my officiousness. The only thing sadder than the fact that I had this job was the fact that I was actually taking it seriously.

Nothing came of the Texan’s complaint. Everyone else thought he was an asshole too. But still, when I found a job doing bookkeeping at a downtown law firm, I quit the JCC. On my last day Royce gave me a perfect spiral of a hermit crab shell from his collection, and he thanked me for helping him with his homework. I thanked him for his company and managed to get to my car before I got weepy.

My new job paid a little better than the JCC, and there were no kids, no parents, no sticky surfaces. Comforted by the semi-protection the three half-walls of my cubicle afforded me, I entered letters and numbers into the proper fields on my screen. Every now and then I became so absorbed that I lost myself and found the zen of data entry. My breathing matched the breath of the office, the low hum of my computer fan and the quiet buzzing of the lights. Also, on some days there was birthday cake in the kitchen.

TAGS: failure, Jeremy Resnick, los angeles, New Orleans, shitty jobs, traffic

Jeremy Resnick has taught writing at NYU and UC Merced. He lives in Los Angeles but is spending a few months in Sao Paulo, thanks to the generous patronage of the Karen A. Callahan Writer-in-Residence Program. Email him at jeremyrresnick@gmail.com.

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