I’m All Out of Hustle
But what’s that Beckett phrase? I can’t go on, I go on…
When I was on the verge of turning thirteen, I had three jobs. Twice a week, I held a tiny infant in my arms, frightened I’d ignore the baby, drop the baby, kill the baby. Wondering why they wailed on the level of pieta because they had it so easy. Every weekend, I was on my knees scrubbing floors and toilets, and when I wasn’t knee deep in Clorox I delivered the Sunday papers.
Back then I couldn’t work legally but I wanted to work so hard, so much, that I stole the papers that allowed me to hold a job. I applied to fold khakis at The Gap, but I wasn’t hip enough with my no-name acrylic sweaters and five-dollar denim. Or rich enough to own a pair of their blue jeans. Sometimes, I’d walk into the store just to feel the clothes. Imagine what it would be like to outfit myself in cashmere and cotton finery.
In the end, I continued to feed babies, clean floors, and deliver newspapers in torrential rain. Hoarding every quarter. Saving up for that pristine white Gap hoodie I saw in the window.
I tell myself this life is an upgrade from laying out a bedsheet on a Brooklyn sidewalk and selling the contents of our thinning home. Red roses in cheap picture frames. Fake porcelain figurines made in Taiwan. And when times were tight, I even hocked the…
