Things That Carry You, Part 1

Ten years ago I took a job in a crappy call center. I was desperate for a job, having recently come to understand the errors of leaving a previous job (despite how miserable I was) for unemployment with no benefits. I was 24 and I didn't know much. But I did know that the previous four months of moping around my apartment and borrowing money to pay my cell phone bill were probably the lowest point of my life.

I took the job in the call center so that I could pay the rent while I figured out what the fuck to do with my life. I felt like a total hobo. How does the president of her class at an expensive liberal arts college end up in a call center taking orders for yoga pants and running shoes?

Of course I was good at my job. I’m always good at my job. Being good at my job is supposed to make up for being terrible at life. But excelling at answering the phone is probably not the potential that years of teachers and professors were hoping I would apply when I finally applied myself.

I knew that job was just a stepping stone to pulling my head out of my ass and figuring shit out. Luckily my best friend, the cell-phone-bill philanthropist, kept his mouth shut and didn’t utter the words I was furiously scribbling in my diary.

What the fuck was I doing with my life?

I almost wish I were doing drugs or drinking too much. There are support groups for that. There are steps, 12 of them, to put you on the path to a better life.

But there is no support group for 24 year-old assholes. So I muddled through.

A few months into my tenure, I was waiting at the bus one night. I’d recently moved from a Lake Oswego apartment to Chinatown, a cute little apartment building in downtown that I hoped would turn me into a fun, fashionable, twenty-five year old. But the apartment was so very far away from where I worked and getting home could take forever.

There were always people waiting for the bus, other people I worked with. They would stand around smoking and talking about the calls they took that day. Making fun of all the people we had to talk to. I ignored them. I turned up my music and buried my face in my book.

I felt a tugging on my jacket and I looked over. I could see an older woman talking to me, her mouth moving but I couldn’t hear her words. I pulled my earbud out.

“Sorry? What?”

“Do you know which bus to take to Beaverton?”

I helped her figure out what bus to get on. And then of course I had to talk to her. Why don’t people ever understand that earbuds mean unavailable?

And then of course I had to talk to her each and every time I saw her on the bus. We worked at the same place, not on the same program, but I still saw her 3-4 times a week.

At first I was annoyed. But then I got to know her.

Her name was Sherry. She was living in a women’s shelter in downtown Portland. She had a daughter in college. She was divorced. She worked for a utility company for a lot of years until something happened and she lost everything. She never explicitly said what happened, but I suspected meth or alcohol. She was pulling her life together. She dressed in Goodwill chic. I could tell that she once took a lot of pride in her appearance but lack of money had made that impossible. She kept her hair cut in a swingy bob and had a very sweet face. But she looked older than she was.

When we came back from our days off, she would tell me these funny stories of wandering downtown Portland and reading the newspaper and drinking coffee while she fed the birds. There were rules about what she could do at the shelter, a curfew. And she had to keep a job. She hated her job. But she didn't want to be in the shelter. She was in a program to reintroduce her to society. Not in a court-ordered way, but from what I gleaned, a way to get her used to living in a new world. A world unprotected by money and options.

Sherry wanted to move to somewhere quiet. She had a brother out on the coast but she hated him so despite his offer, she would figure it out on her own. But she wanted to live where there were trees and quiet. And she could walk in the mornings, maybe get a dog.

The only thing we had in common was that neither of us belonged at that call center. We should have been elsewhere. Living a different life. But for a few months, until I got a new job and moved on, we spent 45 minutes together talking while the bus shuttled us downtown. Despite living in Portland forever, she didn't know how to operate in a world where you took the bus everywhere, made very little money, and had to move a lot (apartment living can be very nomadic).

We lost touch very slowly. I moved once, then a second time. I got a new job and worked at the call center only part time for a few months and then not at all. We saw each other sporadically. She moved out to an apartment in Oregon City and took new buses. She couldn't afford her cell phone bill so even though I tried to call her to check-in, I always got an automated message response, “The person you are trying to reach is unavailable.”

The last time I saw Sherry was on the max in downtown Portland. I’d stopped to buy some paints and canvas at the art store on Yamhill. She was headed to the Lloyd Center to watch a movie.

We caught up in quick hurried sentences. She was good. I was good. She was happy but still hated her job. She was moving again because she was renting a room from a man who was a drunk with a jealous girlfriend. She’d only been there a few weeks. I loved my job and was getting ready for a month of weekend weddings, all my friends were getting married.  I was turning 25 soon.

“Twenty-five is a good year.” That was the last thing she said to me as I got off the max. The last thing she said to me ever.

Twenty-five was an okay year. My twenties were not my best decade. It was a growing year. A year where I got a job I loved. A year in which I met new friends and lived almost rent-free. A year where I was very lonely. I was still very poor. I got in a terrible fight with one of my favorite people and we didn’t speak for years. And then I moved to California, which turned out to be a bad decision.

About six months after I last saw Sherry, I got a phone call. It was from a company out in Bend, Oregon. They were calling to get a personal reference for Sherry so she could get a new job.

She made it to her woods. To her quiet walks. I've always imagined that she got a dirty little mutt dog.

The thought of Sherry getting even a small piece of the happiness she dreamed about while holed up in an attic room of a woman’s shelter is something that I've carried with me through some pretty dark nights of my own.

Sometimes you get what you need.