Below are the 6 most recent journal entries recorded in mollymccloy's LiveJournal:

Wednesday, June 15th, 2005
9:38 am	One Hog Island Part 3 of 6 Hope you're still with me. Computer finally fixed. I will be doing a reading of my work in Philadelphia on June 27 at the Khyber. More info to come. if you're new to this journal, you may want to scroll down and start with part 1. One Hog Island Part 3 "Burns, Thomas, Jackson, Rodriguez, McCloy..." Miss UPS red the names of the people who were moving on in the application process. I made the cut. So did everyone else in the group. Even the guy who had been muttering complaints about "The Man," and "Uncle Sam." And this guy was a real troublemaker. Every time he piped up, the rest of us shot him a collective glare that said, "Come on, Buddy, we aren't even on the job yet." I especially needed to get away from this grumbler. I am easily influenced. To survive any job without going crazy or becoming someone I'd hate, I have to find just the right role models. I was scribbling away again on another set of forms, when I noticed the kid in the Allen Iverson jersey drumming his fingers on the desk. "Hey, Lazy, can I use your pen," I asked. "Sure, I only got one job at Wendy's here. Takes me five minutes." "I like Iverson--he hassled those Lakers. Like a hornet." "You like basketball?" Chris Webber. Shack. Hakim. Tim Duncan. Kevin Garnett. We named all our favorites and there we were, a high school kid with a do-rag on his head and a thirty-three-year-old dyke stretching up out of our seats, swinging arms to fake jump shots and lay-ups, filled with divine hope and energy even under florescent lights, our asses anchored to industrial furniture. He told me he couldn't play high school ball anymore due to bad grades and I told him to try a walk-on at the community college. I asked him about his job at Wendy's and he shrugged." "It's a job," he said. "So what." He described all the usual hells, thirteen-cent raises, Saturday night slaving to the bing-bong of the drive-thru bell, grease trap filled with a substance that looks like pumpkin pie but smells like old meat--but so what. As he gave me that perfected low-wage shrug, I could see exactly how this kid would play basketball, eyelids low and smoky for the fake, the no-look pass. He would play it just like my old coworker Reza who screwed two hoses together and pulled them through the Taco Bell kitchen to spray off the drive-thru oil slick right through the ordering window while the loose joint of the hoses doused floors, counters, and stoves. He would play it like Mike the caterer who faced down the hostility of three hundred charity breakfasters by switching all their regular coffee to decaf. Like Rico who had no towel to clean puke off our speedy ferris-wheel type ride called The Enterprise and decided to run it on high speed for five minutes to spin dry it. Yes, I could do this type of work again. So what. "You have the majority of the application done," Miss UPS announced. "When you take the airport tour tomorrow night, they'll have a couple of short forms for you. It will be a snap." I arrived for the tour at 8 pm the next evening and another UPS yuppie handed me a stack of forms two-inches thick. There were forty of us this time, packed into rows. I knew we were in for the long haul as soon as I saw the large TV turned on for us in front of the room. I recognized my three favorites from the first interview session, the Iverson kid, the shriveled man, the grumbler. There were only two other women in the group, a roly-poly teen and a gravel-voiced woman with damaged hair who might have been older than me or had just, perhaps, lived harder. The men, in groups of three, looked ahead at the TV and made low comments and chuckles without looking at each other. I could never quite catch their words, but it seemed the commentary was sexual, because the laughter grew louder every time a woman came on the screen. I could guess, from previous experience, how my relationship with these future coworkers would go. I would be asked if I was married. Did I have kids? It would be determined that I am queer, but never spoken. My extended college studies would become the reason I didn't have a mate, and would normalize me somewhat. I'd make a few enemies, a couple of friends. I'd steer clear of the drama of robbed lockers, dope on the job, and boss-employee romance. I'd stick to someone I trusted, some earthy gal, functional in a way I was always supposed to be but could never get quite right, a woman who could stack twenty plates on her arms, spin intricate insults for the bosses, and put customers in their place, all at the same time. I wondered for a moment why we weren't already sorting each other out like this. Then I recognized the culprit. The TV. Everyone was staring at it. After another round of five-minute interviews, someone called over an intercom, "Just a little more paperwork, guys. The tour will begin at 9." One at a time, we provided our two pieces of American citizen proof for a manager in an adjoining room and we signed a few more forms with her. Then when each of us was finally finished, the interview guy came out of his office and stood in front of us. This was 9:40. Tour time. Interview Guy was easily a half-foot shy of six-feet and his chubby cheeks gave him a boyish look. He stood right in front of the TV, and many of the guys behind me were twisting out of their seats and craning their necks to see the show going on behind his head. He clasped his hands and smiled at us like a waiter about to serve dessert. "Now, we're all going to fill out some paperwork together," he said. "No, no you've got the wrong form. That's Union membership--you want welfare-to-work. No, that's the ethics statement." We were walked through the new forms step by step. In unison. When one person had a question we all had to stop writing. I had trouble flipping quickly enough and finding the right forms. None of the packets were stapled in the same order. The woman with the damaged hair reached over and, with one swift move, lifted and slapped my packet on the desk where it landed, correct page up. Others were still struggling. "Cindy, will you help her find that? Now everyone should be on page six of this form, the one with the eagle on it. Everyone, page six." Interview Guy shifted a bit to the left and I could see the TV screen. A teen boy cowered on the ground in middle of a cornfield. His farmer dad towered over him, brandishing a sledge hammer. "I love you, Son. I always have. That's why I have to do this" Dad swung the big hammer over his shoulder in an arc aimed right at the kid's head. part four coming soon... (Comment on this)
Friday, May 20th, 2005
10:08 am	some links I have an older article at www.popmatters.com/features/000513-march.shtml and starting summer of 2005 I will have a column on idothisidothat.com (1 Comment |Comment on this)
9:44 am	One Hog Island Part 2 of 6 Miss UPS shifted from side to side and pulled her skirt hem closer to her knees. She cleared her throat. "Now, Molly, do you think you would like working at UPS?" "Like. Working." I stalled for a moment. As a child of the lower middle class, I had watched my dad come home at 6 p.m. every day looking like someone had tied him to a truck bumper and dragged him through the streets. I was not bred to lead boardroom cheers like some type-A executrix. I was never taught that work is something people like. My own working days had done little to correct my early childhood image of my father lolling under the glare of the TV--a good man had been milked, wrung out, and, quite possibly, fucked by a pack of wild pigs. "I think this job is a good fit for me," I replied carefully. "It's surprising how well women do at this job, Molly. I've seen two-hundred pound men break down and cry." I nodded. She scribbled on the clipboard as if to rate these nods, so I tried a few more good ones. The puppy nod. The all-knowing veteran nod. "Okay, then, Molly, can you tell me why you'd be a good fit here?" Back in my days of after-school jobs I ws a whiz at ducking chores and ditching customers. My high school and college teachers all advertised their diplomas as the only escape from a career in "burger flipping." Designed as a negative motivator, their threat rhetoric about the chore of cooking ground beef was on par with Santa's toy deprivation for evil tots, and Catholicism's hell for the lowly masturbator. I learned that educated folk have no respect for low-wage work and soon I developed a split work ethic. I studied like mad for tests, but hid in the walk-in refrigerator at Taco Bell when there were dishes to be done. The state of Arizona has a historically high drop out rate, but I went on to earn a couple of English degrees. I "made it out." "Everybody comes here for the health insurance and the tuition reimbursement. Is that why you're here, Molly? I nodded again. Damn. I was coming home to the same low-status whip-crack world where my drop-out brothers had landed and stayed so long ago. "Burns, Thomas, Jackson, Rodriguez, McCloy..." Miss UPS read the names of the people who were moving on in the application process. I made the cut. So did everyone else in the group. Even the guy who had been muttering complaints about "The Man," and "Uncle Sam." And this guy was a real troublemaker. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 18th, 2005
10:46 am	One Hog Island One Hog Island --Part one (part two available upon request) "My job? U.P.S.? It's a dream job. You start out unloading planes at the airport, but after that...who knows?" The delivery woman had strong hands and big knuckles. Lean, elegant muscles revealed themselves as her forearms flexed. She handed me my birthday package and smiled as I signed for it. "And no dressing up?" I pointed at her brown shorts. "No heels? No yuppie outfits?" "You'd be good at throwing those boxes around, girl." She snapped the pen into place on the top of her clipboard, and climbed back into the seat of her truck. She wrangled with the gear shift a bit and revved the engine. "Good luck." She gave me a jaunty salute as she cruised out of my south Philadelphia neighborhood. I mulled it over. I was already through the first draft of my novel and I didn't at all miss the full time teaching job I'd sacrificed to write it. I did miss my health insurance, though, and that's where U.P.S. came in. Their ads offering health benefits for part-time workers were posted all over the community college where I taught part-time with no benefits. U.P.S. would be different than all those other jobs. I could be a happy worker like that delivery woman. I wanted my own pair of steel-toed boots. I wanted the speediest forklift in the warehouse. The U.P.S. representative swung open the door to the job center and hurried in. She was a slender woman, and her gray suit had large, angular wrinkles pressed into the back of the skirt. "Bad traffic," she said and then that shock of hair sticking up from the back of her head made sense too. She had an audience of ten, me and nine guys, scattered about the room in our metal chairs with the abrasive red cushions. The small room was windowless and the walls were adorned with prints of windsurfers gliding into orange sunsets. "Be prepared to fill out a lot of application paperwork." She let her statement weigh in with her ten-second shots of grim eye contact, first at the shriveled man in the rust-colored silk suit, then the wild-haired guy in the mechanic jumpsuit, then the kid in the Allen Iverson jersey, then me. She used both hands to plunk down the file folder. Stapled packets skittered onto the floor. The table wobbled. "U.P.S. used to ask you to list the last three positions you held. Then we started asking for jobs you've held in the last five years. Now if you want to unload planes with us, we need names and numbers for every supervisor you've had since high school." Wow. She wanted fifteen years of my supervisors. There was the hefty thrift-store manager who always slouched in her chair, wore floral muumuus, smoked Pal Malls, and never crossed her legs. The Taco Bell supervisor who liked to clean out his ear with his pinky. The stylish forty-year-old receptionist at the community newspaper who broke down and cried one day when her husband refused to approve major surgery for their kid's pet hamster. The overly tan and blonde volley-ball referee who had a great collection of indy vinyl, an eating disorder, and a preference for meth-head boyfriends which was designed specifically to piss off her Midwestern parents. The Seattle Copy Mart manager who had once partied with Neil Young. The ex-con Fun Forest Amusement Park director whose unfinished wizard tattoo with its dots for eyes and lopsided triangle hat looked exactly like the scribbles of a three-year-old child. "This is the standard application process for any airport job now," U.P.S. Rep told us. "We're on Orange Alert, you know. They just upped it from yellow today." I was rolling up the packet and stuffing it in my bag, wondering which boxes I'd have to dig through and which phone calls I'd have to make to get all those names and numbers--when I heard a certain scratching noise from across the room. It was the shriveled man. He had those rust silk sleeves rolled up and was scribbling his way through thirty former jobs, pen furiously squinch-squinching its way across the pages. My grunt worker instinct kicked in. I ripped the cap off my pen and raced the shriveled man, line by line. When he flipped a page, I flipped a page too. Numbers and surnames flowed from my ballpoint pen. I decided "6-6-6" was the area code for both Olympia, Washington and Flagstaff, Arizona. And I figured I might as well name all those former supervisors "Shirley Cockburn." (4 Comments |Comment on this)
10:17 am	Ugly Scribbled Clown The Ugly Scribbled Clown by Molly McCloy My brother Bill was twenty-one and still living at home when he got his first simple tattoo on his right shoulder. Out of loyalty to his favorite band The Butthole Surfers, Bill had etched into his skin one of the band's early logos: the scribbled, one-dimensional face of the "PCP Pep Clown." From what I can remember the clown looked like it had been drawn by a six-year-old and its face was peppered with razor stubble. PCP Pep might have had an eye patch or maybe it was just that one eye was about a third of the size of the other, each of them shaded in black with a crude crosshatching technique. I was home from Seattle the day my mom found out about the tattoo, so I had the opportunity to watch her yell at my brother as I'd never seen her yell before, in three consecutive sessions, slams of my brother's door punctuating the serial rages. During the first round, my mom yelled, "You're going to get a disease," a perceptive comment, considering that she didn't yet know the first half of the tattoo was administered by some neighbor kid with a homemade Bic-pen-and-IV-needle gun. She also didn't know that in addition to having a PCP clown tattoo, Bill had actually taken PCP a few times, a reckless move even amongst his circle of dropout friends, the LSD and marijuana crowd. "You'll never be able to get a decent job with that thing on your arm. What were you thinking?" My mother was agitated in a way that was painful for me to watch. Seeing her frown and pace the floor reminded me too much of the high school days I'd escaped just a year prior when I turned eighteen and left home. Here I was again, and her she was too, a chubby figure in a teddy bear sweatshirt standing under a poster of Sid Vicious with his razor-slashed chest. She wrung her hands. As her face crumbled and slackened into a heavy frown, it seemed she was trying with all her might to reconcile two opposing urges: her need to pretend our family was becoming a clean middle class machine right on schedule and her need to investigate the persistent pathology that always ripped apart this time-table. To my mom a tattoo was a sure sign we were still lower class, worse than dirty hair or clothes, worse than a weedy front lawn, not quite worse than a teen pregnancy, but close. Sitting on my brother's bed and plinking on his guitar, I knew that Bill had problems more serious than some ugly tattoo. Of all the issues, this was not the prime one to go crazy over. I think that deep down my mother knew this too, but it would take years and a whole series of disasters before we would start talking the way we needed to. As my mom grappled with the tattoo situation, I decided to just check out. The best way to deal with my own painful empathy for my mom's distress was to just sit and watch her like she was a distant cartoon. Plink. Plink. Plink. For his part, Bill nodded quietly, whined explanations when he got a chance, and said, "You're right. I know. Yep." Mom backed out of Bill's room, refueled her rage in the kitchen, and came barging through his door again with, "You're desecrating your body. I don't care if you pay rent. I can kick you out." Then she slammed the door behind her. During the quieter third and final session, my mom sat down on Bill's bed and looked at the tattoo with the eye of an RN, checking for infection. She recommended Neosporin. She asked why, of all things you could inscribe into your body, why the ugly scribbled clown? The simple answer is that my brothers love pissing off my parents. The real answer is not so simple. Right before I left home, at the tail end of the high school years, Bill and Joe started calling my dad "Mad Dog Mike." This nickname was a stroke of mean genius for the two teens who had been terrified of my loose-cannon dad when they were little boys. My younger brother Joe who always slid out of any punishment teamed up with my older brother who had, from the time he was very young, endured meticulous criticism of even his best efforts, loud humiliation, a shove or two against the wall, and even an occasional choke hold. The pair of teen jokers would imitate the old man's reddened face and his folksy admonishments, "Better smarten' up," and "You aren't going to school, you aren't going to work--Sounds to me like you've been fuckin' the dog, son." They'd retell the tales of various failed punishments during the high school years: "Remember that one time--Mad Dog went berserk!" This nickname for my dad was a cut above the boys' usual pranks. Usually they loved to tell everyone about the time they paid a developmentally disabled kid to phone Bill's cokehead boss at The Donut Farm and tell him to "fuck the donuts." They would reminisce about the time when, at three a.m., they called guys who had placed "need a bandmate" want-ads and asked if they could come over right then for a practice session, whether the guy's girlfriend was hot, and whether he'd mind if they crashed at his house for a few nights. I let those stories get lost in the boys' ongoing banter, but I loved the Mad Dog dialogues. I too had wasted all that time being terrified of my father. It was our turn, finally, to laugh until it hurt. Since I seemed to enjoy their routine, my brothers decided to tell me about plots I'd never even noticed, the various attempts to enrage my father so they could watch him explode. They'd mow the lawn and leave random uncut patches. They'd pour their used cooking oil down the kitchen drain to clog it up. And there was this strange manipulative streak that didn't demand a reaction at all: in the middle of the night, Joe used to turn his stereo on with the volume at silence and then swing the dial over to high volume for a loud 5-second blast, just so that everyone in the house "would wake up for a minute and not know why." In contrast, the practice of riling up my mom was one that predated the teen years, and probably started with my dad. My mother had been a good Catholic girl who didn't curse at all when she married my father. When my brothers and I were little she would yell "Mike!" whenever my dad broke loose with fuck, shit, or damn, and she'd yell an even louder "Mike!!" when he called some reckless driver a cocksucker. There was something very satisfying about the over-the-top drama of her reactions and we elementary school kids quickly caught on. "Motherfucker, cocksucker, two-ball bitch," we'd rattle off the urban third-grade colloquialism of the time. The answer to "What time is it?" was, "Half past the monkey's ass, a quarter to his balls." Whenever you were unlucky enough to get the middle seat in a car, the sibling on your left would say, "left ball," and the sibling on your right would say, "right ball," look at you, and point: "who's the dick in the middle!" "Bill!" my mom would yell. Or Molly, or Joe. I'd love to tell you that, unlike my brothers, I outgrew the attention-seeking behavior. I'd like to say I was nothing like my two brothers who dropped out of school, took acid at punk rock shows every weekend, dyed their hair black, shaved their heads, cultivated an obsession with G.G. Allin (who was known for eating his own excrement on stage), loudly refused all opportunities for education or job training, and postured as haters for an especially troubling six months when they spouted the racist philosophy they learned from their skinhead friends. It's true that in most ways, I was nothing like my brothers. I finished high school with reasonably good grades and went on to college. If anything, I disengaged from my family, and, as soon as I was old enough, tried to leave all the complicated stimulus-and-response patterns far behind. After I'd had a year of college one hundred miles from home, I wanted to lay down even more distance, so I moved to Seattle to work for a year and establish residency for college there. When I think now about whether I too liked to rile up my parents, I have to admit that I did, although I like to think my aim was slightly different from that of my brothers. One time when I was fifteen, my dad and I argued toe to toe, my eyes level with his adam's apple, his anger rising from his clenched fists to his chest and head, just about to boil over, my own Irish up too as I yelled right back, able to face him in a way my brothers never could because I'm female and he wouldn't, he wouldn't, although sometimes he did, and this time he did--he shoved me. I stormed off to my room and plotted my retaliation. I decided to take a trick from my brothers' book when I walked back into the living room armed with my camera. My dad was intently focused on the hardware ad insert from the Sunday paper. For some reason, he was wearing no shirt and when he looked up at me, I captured this image of my father's rage, a half-naked, bearded man with eyes that look like they could shoot poison, his fists caught in a kind of block-and-strike pose, those same hands gently pinching the thin pages of the ad he was reading. The next day I showed the picture to my friends and we laughed at him. Years later I watched my mom fly into a tizzy over Bill's tattoo. I had already been thinking about getting my own tattoo and since I had some sensitive issues I desperately needed to address with my mother, I decided it would be best to get the tattoo just prior to my mother's Seattle visit and then hit her with the "double-whammy." I would catch her off guard with the tattoo and then talk about the important stuff. I planned the whole thing with my best friend over the phone. My mom flew in and we had a few fun-filled days of wandering all over the city, until one warm afternoon when I wanted to wear shorts with sandals. I decided that rather than letting my mom find my ankle tattoo, I'd make a general announcement. "Mom," I said, "I've got a tattoo and I'm gay." My mom looked at me and her face changed. Where she usually had dimples and chubby cheeks, she now had sheet-white skin that drooped into jowls and a disgusted frown that said she'd just seen the contents of a port-a-potty unloaded right there in my living room. "You got a tattoo?" she said. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
9:44 am	More Soon I wanted to load some work on here, but my computer is screwed up, haunted, and out of my control. Will try my roommates computer. check back soon. M (1 Comment |Comment on this)