On Being An "Essential Worker" During A Pandemic
Sometime in the middle of last year, when quarantine and madness were starting to normalize in everyone’s minds, after I spent two months in bed with COVID and another two months marching in the streets to protest a bunch of murderers that still haven’t been held accountable, I wrote a story about workers during the pandemic. It’s called Essential.
Honestly, it wasn’t meant to be a big deal. I wrote it for the magazine Taco Bell quarterly, which is exactly what it sounds like: a quarterly magazine featuring fiction and poetry that has something to do with Taco Bell. The POV character in Essential works at Taco Bell, but he served as a stand-in for those busting their asses in hospitals, clinics, grocery stores, and restaurants all across the country. For months, we called them essential, heroes even. The people working retail and food service didn’t feel like heroes. They felt scared of a pandemic half of America refuses to believe is even real, and abandoned by a government that decided it was considered weak to help its people. They weren’t there out of a sense of noble purpose, but because they had bills to pay, kids to feed, rent that was due. For months we praised them and thanked them for their service. Some companies even gave them hazard pay!
All of those companies have since quietly abandoned the hazard pay thing.
The minimum wage in America is the topic of the week. Many people think it deserves to be increased to $15/hour. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Inflation has skyrocketed well past the minimum wage in the last few decades, and that minimum wage has barely risen at all. $15 is low! Especially if you live somewhere like LA, where the average monthly rent of a one-bedroom apartment is well past $1500. Especially if you live somewhere like LA, the epicenter of COVID cases in the entire world. Especially if you live somewhere like LA, where our useless government has completely abandoned us.
Mayor Garcetti Tweets out vague platitudes every day, but the malls are open. There’s a stay-at-home order, I think, but you can still go out and get a tattoo. The day I wrote this blog post, the Los Angeles Public Health Department reported 14,669 new cases and 253 new deaths. Today. Who knows how many it will be the day it’s published?
And those people we were all calling heroes last year? Those essential workers? They’re still working just as hard, but we’re not calling them essential anymore. Now we’re arguing that they don’t deserve a living wage (which, again, $15 still isn’t) because why should burgerflippers make as much as teachers? Why should teenagers make enough money to survive? In America, we pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. We’re self-made. The American Dream says that if you work hard enough, you can be rich. (60% of wealth in this country is inherited). Never mind that teachers in this country have been woefully underpaid for generations, forced to spend their own money on school supplies. No, no, clearly the problem is the person who works at Von’s.
America has the power and the wealth to end poverty, homelessness, hunger, and COVID, but because of this horseshit myth of the American Dream, we just…won’t, I guess.
This is all a long-winded and angry way to say I work at Target.
Merry Christmas!
I took the job in early December because it was the only place that would hire me. The film industry is shut down, and it turns out that my cats get angry at me if I don’t feed them, State Farm randomly decided to reassess my car insurance policy and raise my rates, and my landlord can’t pay their bills if I don’t pay mine first. I tried to suggest that they also work at Target. Instead they raised the prices on our washing machines.
Truly, we’re all struggling.
I spend my days getting carts in the parking lot and bringing them inside. You never realize how heavy shopping carts are until you’re wrangling a line of six or seven of them, or twenty-five if you’re using the cart machine. You never realize how big the Target parking lot is until you see some asshole leave their cart at the far end of it for no reason. You never realize how borderline sociopathic people are until you go to pick up what you think is a paper towel at the bottom of the cart and realize it’s a dirty diaper.
I average about 40,000 steps a shift.
At first it was hard, brutal work. I’d get home after eight hours and just die. I’d wake up the next morning, entirely too early, and be sore beyond belief. I limped for a month straight. But it’s getting easier. I get winded much quicker now, after having survived my bout with COVID, but I’m working through it.
There’s a stigma about jobs like this. I have that same stigma myself. It comes out when I’m talking to people I don’t know very well, and I hide the fact that I work at Target, or quickly clarify that it’s only temporary, as if it’s embarrassing. It shouldn’t be. There’s no shame in needing a job, or in having a job. Some of the most brilliant artists I know are also nannies.
There shouldn’t be shame in not having one, either, but that’s a fight with society we’ll have to take if we survive the constant apocalypses. No one deserves to be in poverty. We should be past that as a society. But because of that Good Ole American Dream our slaveowning Founding Fathers preached about, I have to maintain my credit score or be homeless.
This is a good time to point out that credit is meaningless in literally every other country on the planet.
The discussion surrounding what jobs are worthy and what are unskilled labor has always gone on, and periodically it gets louder. Right now it’s very loud, and the same people who praised the folks at Target in August are now demanding they make less money than they need to survive. Funny how that works.
One of the things I heard a lot in film school was that, if you could be happy literally anywhere else, you should go do that instead. If you can be an accountant, or a farmer, or a driver, or a teacher, you should absolutely go do that. Because film is hard. Unforgiving. There’s no science to it. You can’t start in the mailroom and work your way up. Hell, in the 70s you could pretty much just go to USC and come out a filmmaker, with financing and everything. But the gatekeepers from that era made sure to shut the doors behind them and lock up tight. So every step is a battle. I’ve been in LA for almost seven years. Some of those years have been better than others, but the only time I’ve been financially comfortable was the period of 2020 after I stopped working on the political campaign for Jake Jeong and before my unemployment ran out.
I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’ve never had a Plan B, and that won’t change. I’ll either carve out my little corner of this industry or I’ll die old and poor, but there is nothing that will make me walk away. I can’t be happy anywhere else. So film it is.
But since film is hard, Target it is.
I’m not unique. Nothing about my story is, except maybe the parts where I drove from Alaska to Idaho.
Or that time I got drunk with Christina Hendricks at The Satellite.
My point is, LA is a town full of dreamers who have to bust their asses in jobs deemed unskilled until they find that break. Sometimes it’s a big break, sometimes it’s just a little one. Life in the film industry is a series of breaks until the bitter end. Even Guillermo del Toro has trouble getting projects funded, and he’s won Oscars!
Right now Tequila Mockingbird is hard at work looking for just a few thousand dollars to make our first feature, and it’s so maddeningly close and yet so far at the same time. It’s a movie about a Black woman, her roommates, and her conservative ex-boyfriend struggling through 2020. But more than that, it’s about life in America when you’re poor. It’s called This Sucks.
If you’re reading this, and you’re like me, don’t despair. Things will get easier. Things will get better. Then they’ll get worse, probably, but then they’ll get better again. Life is a series of ebbs and flows. Maybe you’ll get a dynamite PA gig but your car will explode. Maybe you’ll get funding for your movie but also a divorce. None of us got into this life because we love stability and consistency. We got into it because we love films and we love stories. There’s something magical about seeing words you’ve written brought to life on screen. I’ve directed countless projects and I still get a little giddy during the first rehearsal.
If you’re reading this, can you agree to do whatever you can to make this part of peoples’ lives a lot easier? Tip your delivery drivers. Be nice to the dude at Target, because he’s just trying to survive. Pay people a living wage if you run a business, or if you don’t at least quit screaming at Twitter that Taco Bell is going to become outrageously expensive if someone else does, because it’s not. For the love of god, put your shopping cart where it belongs. A person has to go get it, man!
And wear a mask. They’re real. They work. The day I wrote this blog post I started my shift at 6am. At around noon, I asked a woman to pull her mask up over her nose. And she did, but she gave me such a death-glare, you’d think I threw in some kind of racial slur (except something tells me she’s fine with racial slurs, so maybe I should use a better example ((not gonna)).
Essential is going to be published soon by the Lo-Fed Chronicle’s Quarantine Borders edition. I don’t know exactly when that’s going to happen, but I’m excited! The story is inherently optimistic, written at a time before I worked at Target, but also before the world turned on essential workers again. I should have seen that one coming. The poison of the American Dream is that, because all it takes to become rich and successful is hard work, if you don’t become rich, it’s because someone is preventing you from it. It can’t possibly be that the system was rigged from the start so that like seven creepy billionaires can magnify their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars. No, that would be crazy! Elon Musk worked for his fortune! His father certainly never owned an emerald mine! He started Tesla from nothing! He certainly never barged in on an already-existing company with an already-existing product and just took control of it because he was rich! No, it must be the immigrants. It must be because people who work at McDonald’s want to be able to work a full time job and pay their rent.
How dare they!
But just because it’s always been this way in America doesn’t mean it always needs to be this way. Things are getting better, because there are people constantly fighting to make them better. Workers and activists and unions and progressives who genuinely want to make life better for other people rather than just enrich themselves.
On the day I wrote this blog post, David Kim said that this is our generation’s calling: to make life bearable for everyone, and not just amazing for a select few and shit for the rest of us.
And I think we’ll succeed in that, no matter how long it takes, but I’ll end this post the same way I ended Essential.
“Damn, I wish I got hazard pay.”
