The Lying Voice

Walking west on Center, I look down and notice the dirty sidewalk. It’s dirtier than usual. I’m used to dirt, blight, crime, dumping, shit, etc., so it doesn’t bother me. It should. I was just noting the difference between dirty and gross. Gross status involves vomit and human feces, so, I guess I was lucky, the streets weren’t that bad.

The light is red at Milvia. In front of me, the beginning of a farmer’s market occupies the 1900 block of Center. Vendors are setting up their booths with tents, tables and product; early birds are milling about, eyeing the urban farmers. Most are boomers with recycled bags.

“It’s terror of the flames!” The scream was loud, almost a bark, echoing off the civic buildings. I look up and see no one matching the description of such dramatic words. I’m the only one at the light, so I wait.

“It’s terror of the flames!” Again.

“It’s terror of the flames!”

Every 5 seconds it comes again, like the barker is working off a click track.

“It’s terror of the flames!”

Obscured by a row of booths on the north side of the street, the barker comes into view, flanked by one security guard. The guard is smirking, knowing this is just the first of many flanks. It’s Berkeley. He walks him to the end of the block and lets him loose with the others: an eastern block woman with kids who are picked up at the end of day by a mini-van full of other eastern bloc families; Street Sheet peddlers and a mixture of shitty musicians and run-of-the-mill homeless.

I watch as the barker is returned to his people. He looks a lot like Allen Ginsberg – Gallagher-bald, rimmed glasses and an air of academia -- and is carry of a cloth satchel that hangs a little below his left hip. The satchel is out of character. He must be nouveau homeless. If you cleaned him up a bit, he could easily be writing poetry in front of Café Med on Telegraph. Homeless poet, I like that. He continues to bark every 5 seconds.

The light turns and I walk to my destination, halfway down the block. A no nonsense cop is out front talking to two young people, as I approach. I move past them and reach for the door.

“Are you here for the test?” she says, slighting blocking my path to the door. She’s tall, svelte, boyish and intimidating. No bullshit. My sister would love her.

“Yes,” I say.

“Did you park in a lot or on the street? The door will be locked during the test, so there’s no leaving to feed a meter.”

“I’m in a lot,” I said. The confirmation email for the test said to park in a lot. So I did.

She turned her head to the other two:

“I walked.”

“I’m in a lot, too.”

The cop opened the door and said to walk down the stairs and follow the signs. We were the last to be admitted. Anyone after us would be met with a stern rebuke, I assumed.

The building was all angles and concrete. Newer but made to look art deco: painted metal instead of copper. The name of the building was written in Frank Lloyd Wright font. It’s the official font of Berkeley, I think.

The 3 of us entered a large office room with 20 rectangular desks, 4 chairs to a desk. 37 people occupied the 20 desks. We were told to sit at a desk with one person. We made 40 people. This scene would repeat itself 4 more times in two days. 200 people for 3 dispatching jobs. This is how they recruit for high pay, low education jobs. I applied for a job at BART that accepted 3000 applications for one job. I didn’t get it, but 2,998 other people didn’t get it, either. There’s some comfort in that.

Before starting the three-hour test, two HR people from the City of Berkeley spoke. They were friendly and encouraging. They must’ve been new because most HR people are beaten down from carrying the burden of employee secrets. Most look like they’re missing a quart of blood.

Tag teaming, they explained the test: 11 sections of multiple-choice answers, focusing on verbal ability, reasoning, memory and perceptual ability, what ever that is. I tried familiarizing myself with the material before the test, but it appeared to me the test was common sense and relied more on your individual talent to talk, type and listen at the same time, while conveying everything in a clear, concise and articulate manner. Some people are good at sports, some aren’t.  It’s kinda like that. Attention to detail was not my thing so I was in trouble.

HR introduced the cop at the door. She was in charge of recruiting or something similar and spoke to us about the arduous process of becoming a dispatcher. For those who passed this test, the next stage was an oral interview, and then a typing test, and then a lie detector test and, finally, some sort of psychological test. She said the oral interview would review our whole lives, start to present, and they’d know if you lied so don’t lie. This made the class uneasy and gave pause to the room.

Most of us had already lied or embellished our resumes, to look more employable. More than likely this variance would be picked up on the lie detector test, so most of the applicants that moved on to the next stage would have to come clean or learn how to lower their blood pressure when they inevitably asked the question: “Did you tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth during the application process?”

For the mishmash of undereducated people in the room, we would learn to lie for a job that paid almost 100k and required only a high school diploma.

After the no-nonsense cop finished her scared-straight act, she introduced a Berkeley dispatcher of 20 years. Dressed in a dark hoodie with a yellow star on the right breast and the words Berkeley Police under the star, he was the opposite of the no bullshit cop. Slightly stooped, laconic and calculated, he said the job was stressful but if you balanced it with an outside life, you’d be fine. That was it. I stared at the yellow star on his hoodie. It looked like a concentration camp star badge.

As the test circulated through the room, I looked at the participants and did the math: I was the oldest in the room by 15 years; 70% of the test-takers were women, the majority African American; And, of the men in the room, I was the only one that was bald. This was all-important, for some reason or another. I was already preparing for defeat. The stated adversity of baldness, age and gender would assuage disappointment and justify doing poorly on the test. If I were younger, hairier and a woman, I would’ve passed. Woe is me.  Even so, I was oddly confident. The stew of the undereducated in front of me was a motely crew. How hard could it be?

The first section was the easiest. Look at two sentences and identify the sentence that is most clearly written. 13 questions. We had had 5 minutes to complete. From there on, the pace picked up and it got harder.

The next section I screwed up. We listened to radio calls and were to assign the calls an A, B or C status, highest priority to lowest. Sounds simple enough, but my inattention to detail kicked in, and I didn’t really comprehend the instructions. By the time I realized my mistake, the test was almost over. I didn’t finish the section and surmised I wrongly answered 9 out of 13 questions, due to the mistake. The disappointment was immediate. My eyes well up. I knew I wouldn’t get the job. I thought of leaving, but I stayed put. On the eve of my 56^th birthday, I was a few months from divorce, had negative $251 dollars in my bank account, unemployed and severely depressed. And, it looked like I wasn’t getting this job. It was beginning to look like I would be joining my new friends at the edge of the farmer’s market.

With the realization that this job wasn’t going to save me, suicidal thoughts crept in. This wasn’t unusual. In the past 6 months, I’ve used suicidal thoughts to ease my anxiety of the future. Self-soothing, if you’re in the know. It’s simple: why worry when you’re not going to be around in the future? However, It was the first time the lying voice in my head said, “Your friends and family are better off without you.” This was new. Up until now, the voice concentrated on me. Now, it was broadening the circle and disinformation. This scared the shit out of me. If the lying voice convinces me of this, it’s all over.

There are no winners in divorce but there are losers. When my marriage fell apart, I realized that who ever has the most money, has the power. Duh. It didn’t matter that I was male and, traditionally, the male moves out and the wife stays in the house, with the male paying alimony and the mortgage. Nope, it looked like I was moving out and would pay exorbitant rent for the worst studio in Oakland, losing all stability and dreams of the future. In this picture, I was the female, but instead of getting the house and a monthly check, I was figuratively moving into a homeless shelter with 2 young kids. A mixture of pride, martyrdom and gender-generational bullshit kept me from asking for more. Or anything.

With a new white trash attitude of fuck it (another form of self-soothing) and an old feeling of suicide ideation, I returned to the test with less vigor and more despair.

Lumbering through the sections, while keeping an eye on the clock, the arc of the test started easy, got gradually harder and then dissipated back to easy. I told myself it didn’t matter. But that was a lie – it mattered a lot. I lied to break the fall.

All hope ended with section 8 of the test. The arc was at the top of the bell curve and planned on dishing out a dollop of hurt. It came with an audio recording of dispatch taking quadrant locations and identifying a shitload of license plates. Quadrant locations came every second in the form of numbers. While we recorded the locations on a piece of paper, we identified 100s of license plate numbers on one piece of paper, double checking the license plates on a separate piece of paper that also contained 100s of license plate numbers. And then we had to mark it true or false on a Scantron. The idea was to do both at the same time. Because the quadrants came so fast, I was barely able to verify the license plate numbers. The end came and I looked down at the Scantron. I finished 9 questions out of…81. I looked up at the clock. The end couldn’t come soon enough.

HR asked us to form a line. The test was over. Sitting at a table near the front, I was either going to be first in line or last. I didn’t want to sit in line and small talk about the test. I jumped up and handed HR the Scantron, the booklet and a myriad of papers with my information on it. I quickly moved to the bathroom and then out the front door. I wanted to the first at the parking lot pay machine before it backed up with test takers.

Outside, the farmer’s market was winding down. Ginsberg was gone and the eastern bloc family was still making money for their human trafficking pimp. I saw no test takers in front of me, so I slowed the urgency of getting their first.

At the pay machine, a woman was finishing up paying for parking. I recognized her from the test.

She turned and said, “How do you think you did?”

“It was harder than I thought,” I responded

“Really? I thought it was pretty easy.”

“Good luck.”

Good luck.”

She was in her mid-20s and wearing tight jeans, heels and sported a side-part bob. She either dressed for the job or had a lunch date after the test.

Defeated, I slowly walked to my car, head down, arms hanging at my sides, the instrumental of Christmas Time as my soundtrack. With suicidal ideation comes depression. Or the other way around. If you were to look at me, you would sense something was wrong. Regardless, I was hungry. Chipotle would suffice. It had parking, wouldn’t be crowded (assumed) and had no pretention of a café or a recommended restaurant. It was a good place to go unnoticed, to sit in the corner and stare at an invisible person across from you. Weird and creepy, but fast food restaurants accepted this kind of behavior. And I had a Chipotle gift card. That was the driving decision.

No one was in line. I ordered my regular chicken quesadilla, chips and soda, and grabbed a paper bio-straw and a mound of napkins from the soda dispensary area. I ate on a stool facing San Pablo Avenue. To my right was REI, an outdoor super store; on the other side was a CVS. A homeless man in a 49ers jersey was pacing out front, peddling something. Every turn of the pace triggered the electric door opener of CVS. This wouldn’t last long.

The restaurant was ¼ filled. Everyone was on their phones. People in wool socks and puffer vests passed by on their way to REI; the sick and errand-runners went the other way.

I Googled “It’s terror of the flames.” It couldn’t be some random words formulated in a mentally ill brain, it had to be something. I was right. It was taken from a larger quote about suicide from David Foster Wallace, the author of the supposed-to-read book Infinite Jest. Fucking homeless poet.

I silently acknowledged the connection. Maybe the homeless poet was talking to me? The bio-straw was soggy from the soda, the cylindrical shape caving in on itself. It was gross. It was time to go. Fuck it.