If you believe you’re young, in love, it’s impossible to look for
a job without reading want ads, even if you know most are
screening tools for employment agencies, and even the few
legitimate ones are for jobs at the bottom of that line’s stack,
whichever one or ones you pretend to be interested in, telling
yourself always, Well, I have to start somewhere, and there’s no
Burt Morgan around to say, “You’re darn right. Start at the top!”
So eventually you’re likely, from sheer boredom after another
morning circling “prospects” in the Times at a Dunkin’ Donuts
on Broadway between 124th and 125th—prospects you’ll call
in a few minutes from a pay phone or mail your résumé to that
afternoon—you’re likely to dip into other sections of the news,
and that’s how you find out, after reading the writeup of last
night’s miserable game against the Padres, about the recent in-
crease in murders for revenge. Not much in the wanteds today,
but you applied for a job with Pinkerton the summer before
and have a good idea of what might trigger revenge murder
after speaking to the man who interviewed you there and
who pretty much implied that the job was yours as soon as
you said so. How nice! How different! And all you have
to do is—what, follow the unfaithful husbands and wives,
take a compromising photo? His face comes into focus as
he speaks, the man across the desk, that is, a detective, you
assume, as you yourself may soon be one if the interview
continues along the same promising lines followed so far.
“We don’t do much of that private eye work,” he says,
“in fact never did. Those are mostly ex cops, ex for this
reason or that. No, we work for companies, and we work
from the inside. For instance, you’ll work in factories
most likely, not at anything skilled, of course,” and he
smiles, “because you don’t have the skills, otherwise you
wouldn’t have called yesterday and come in today, right?”
and he goes on without stopping, he knows the answer,
“No, it would be something very simple, very boring, and
entirely undemanding, it has to be, because your real job
is to keep an eye on the other workers and find out who’s
jacking off, who’s stealing stuff, who’s trying to organize
a union, and to write up reports after you go home for the
day or night, depending on the shift, and get those reports
back to this office so we can review them and pass them on
when we see fit, you won’t know anything till you move
somewhere else,” another smile, “fired for stealing yourself
is what your former colleagues will be told, perhaps by
the real worker hired to take your place by a personnel
manager who’s been told what to say by his manager. Dig?”
You certainly do, and you tell the man—completely in
focus now, you see a single white hair sprung from his
left nostril, the fingerprints on the lenses of his glasses—
you’d like to think it over that night, you’ll call him to-
morrow, and you say it so that your acceptance is a fore-
gone conclusion, the overnight pause a sign of exem-
plary restraint. You won’t call back to decline a job that
sounds like an invitation to be found dead in a garbage
can, in one piece or maybe several, the reward perhaps
deserved for being a company stooge, an industrial spy,
and that night Maria’s roommate’s boyfriend, a cop,
when he leaves the apartment after hearing the story,
presses a .38 caliber bullet into your palm as he shakes
your hand, smiling, a gesture you still haven’t figured
out when you leave Dunkin’ Donuts after paying for your
coffee, though you can feel the downdraft of icy air chop-
ping branches off the trees at the base of your spine, and
not until you reach Claremont do you realize that you left
that day’s Times, with a few circled names and numbers,
behind. Fuck it. There’ll be more ads to circle tomorrow.
You wish Patty were here, but she’s at work. She has a job.
Ed. Note: "Playing the Market" originally appeared in the 3 series of expanded broadsides edited and printed by Richard Stull in Newburgh, New York.