Don't Let Me Die In A Motel 6 or One Woman's Struggle Through The Great Recession (15 page)

I was escorted to
Elena’s
office – sh
e was a VP who worked for
Ellie
, an even
bigger
VP.
I sat down and
delivered the spiel.
I was good – I was an
actress.
Elena
could tell I knew my stuff.
A
Manager came in, looking like a bloated Larry King.
Blah blah, we talked shop.
Discussed our mutual friends.
E
verything had gone swimmi
ngly.
They asked if I had any questions.

“
Elena
, I hear from Tom at Fox that you’re looking
at internal candidates
.
Do outsiders have
a chance?”

“Yes, of course.”
She paused, maybe fighting her words. “In fact, you’re the best
person
we’ve seen.”

YES!
The Best!
This is what I was used to.
I drove off on a cloud, an
d had a hopeful Than
ksgiving with my
best
friend Tanya
.
My parents were going to
join us
, but when I
’d
told
them
a few days before
that
I was depre
ssed,
they quickly made other plans.
As Liza
sang
in
Cabaret
: Everybody loves a winner.

It took a week
to hear back from Megalith
.
They had
been very impressed
but in the end
had
gone with
their own
.
So much for the viability
of outsiders. I was still
outside
the castle
walls
,
trying to break down the
portcullis
,
but they would never let me
back
in.
Thi
s buoying of hopes and deflating
of same would
play out
over and over.
I would be t
old I was the leading candidate. . .
just
not L
eading enough to hire.
If they were looking for a
zaftig
Jew
who
knew IT and did standup
,
th
e job would
not go to me.
You could say it was a buyer’s market.

I started to
disengage
from reality.
I
continued looking for work
, but it was like a
corpse
scrounging
for food.
Pointless.
There were two
surprise
acts of charity, both from good friends.
They loaned me
$700
each, and for one month, at least, I was able to stave off
the landlord
. Thank you, Tanya and Julie. You provided a light where there was none.
Tanya enclosed a note with her check saying that I had always been a generous spirit. . .
yet, for all I had given
(jobs, computers, money
, time
)
, only two people
on the planet
had come
through for
me.

Nigel couldn't help –
h
e had run out of
benefits
.
My parents did what they could, but they
didn’t understand
the severity of my
crash
.
They
sent
$200
here;
$300
there
,
but you might as well
have applied
a Band Aid to a gushing head wound.
I was bleeding from the head;
especially
from the heart.
My
sister
had disappeared.
I didn’t know where to turn.
It was like my
Grandma’s
old joke:
If you were standing up to your neck in shit, and someone threw a bucket of snot at you, would you duck?
I didn’t e
ven have that choice.
In fact,
I had no choices.

I
scraped up twenty dollars and
took Aurora to one of the
Twilight
movies.
I sat in the Arclight Theatre, head in
hands, and it wasn’
t just
due to
the film being bad
.
I had now officially lost everything, including the means of making a living.
I wasn’t
mourning
the
past
– I just wanted a way to move forward.
But there was no real hel
p for
those of
us being
c
rushed by bathymetric pressure.
The
One Percent
wasn’t
even
aware
that
the economy had tanked.
T
hey sped in their
Benzes
down
Hayvenhurst
, staring blank-eyed if you mentioned “The Ninety-Niners.”
And what was that?
t
hey’d
ask
politely.
I wanted to crush their skulls.
The Ninety-Niners were those
who had exhausted Unemployment
, and were thrown, like
refuse
, into the
White House garbage
.
There was no social “safety net”, not in the land of Mammon.
We might as
well have
been dropping dead
on the sidewalks
of Calcutta.
And I realized a hard shiny
truth:
that when you were desperate and needed help; when you had sunk so far that your screams were muffled in mud, nobody
really
gives a fuck.

I hadn’t known that before.
I had always assumed, as a middle-class gal, that your family would be there for you if you
ever
were truly destitute.
Mine was not.
And i
t was thi
s, more than anything,
that brought the tears to my eyes and the
sickness to my soul
.
Larry said
that
his
brothers
would
all
become waiters
before
one of them needed help
.
But my
allegedly
close
m
ishpa
cha
– that got together for birthdays
and Hanukkah
–
wanted only the good times and
wished away the
bad.
It wasn’t a
con
scious
shunning
–
more
of
a lack of ca
ring.
I had become invisible, like
Lily Bart
in
House Of Mirth
, after she loses her money.
When she’s fired
from the
milliner
’
s
, she
goes to her shoddy room,
takes opium
,
and
dies
.
All her
rich
friends in high places don’t even notice she’
s gone.
In my invisible world
, corporeal
figures
moved
around me, but I was left standing
alone
, up to my neck in shit.

###

One night,
I drove
the truck
and parked
in front of
my childhood
home
:
17176 Escalon Drive.
I knew how to position the tires (into the curb) so I wouldn't slide off the steep hill. 17176
was a three-story home on a block where every fourth house was the
sa
me, but the
distinguishing
factor
was that this was Encino South, and
Escalon stretched for
a mile
.
A few years
back
,
during
the
housing boom
, I had seen my old house
for sale at
a cool million;
now, there were
realtor
signs
dotting
the hill, and
the houses had plunged $3
00,000
.
. Yet
it
wasn’t
monetary
worth
that dr
ew
me here,
up above the city
where stars could still be seen
.
It was worth measured in my life:
a time when I’d been happy, when
promise stretched out before me
, just like the Valedictorian (me) said it would.
I looked up to my left.
There was Mrs. Levine’s house where Mr. Levine, long
passed
, had held a wild Sukkot, and where the tropical
growth on her
lot
now rivaled
Bora Bora.
I looked at my old house.
It was painted a
pale cream
, not the
deep
dark
brown of my
youth
, but red bricks
still lined the
front
where
bee
s had swarmed, and the adobe garden path, built by Pete the contractor, still
stretched
past
bougainvillea
under the wrought-iron gate
.

How I wanted to knock on that
door;
go back to my old room
upstairs
which opened
onto
a balcony
where an owl
had sat and hooted (a sign of good luck?) for year
s
.
Now
I had
no real home
to go to
–
t
his was it.
A
reel
of how it was – with its 70’s avocado appliances
,
and ghastly green shag carpet that had to be raked and no
t vacuumed;
the
green
stripped
couch where Pam lounged
as
my
Mom cheerfully
raised her;
my
sister
doing
backbends in
the den
while
I Love Lucy
played
–
unspooled on my mind’s screen.

I wanted to
step into
that
reel
–
to
demagnetize
everything that followed
.
Then, I was not invisible.
I had value, and we had
fun:
playing music wildly in the living room; dressing up like
snobs
for Dad’s benefit when he called us “low-class”
in jest
.
What had happened
to
the frames’ silver content:  the closeness and love that we shared?

I gripped the steering wheel tightly to
repel
a feeling of terror.
What was I afraid of?
The present, or myself?
“Pride goeth before a fall,” but I had fallen first,
then tripped over
my pride.

What would Mrs.
Levine think of smart little Amy
now?
She did so well in school
but
is
currently
applying for food stamps
.
She
has an Honours
degree,
but depends on handouts from
friends. She counted on her family, who
promptly
counted her out
. She worked without a break for
thirty-three years
and now, she is broken.