Assault Pays

The guy who won Alone a few seasons back said now he’d be able to get his kid’s eye fixed. Maybe help his dad retire. The guy who lost that year looked like he’d barely survived a camp. You could count the disks in his spine. He was an electrician with a rage issue. I didn’t like him much at first. Not that he needs me saying so. But near the end, watching him break down, his body racked with sobs because he was hungry and cold but if he held out another day maybe he could do something else with his life, I couldn’t help but feel for the man.

There’s always a story with these shows because we’re watching Americans. Someone has twins on the way. Someone’s husband’s been out of work for months. Someone’s dad’s in prison and she’s raising her siblings on a line cook’s salary at Waffle House. I’m mixing up shows and whatever the correct word is for “contestant” when the contestants are human beings competing for a chance at life.

A lot of these shows, they’ll cloister the contestants away in a cool apartment with an endless supply of liquor and wait for the drama to ensue. Alone is a little different. To begin with, they’re Alone. If you haven’t watched the show, and I am not recommending it because I’m not entirely sure watching isn’t abetting a crime against humanity, here’s the game, as it were. They drop self-described survival experts off in some remote place. The contestants get to bring a tarp and a few tools like an ax, a fire stick, a gill net, some rope, maybe a bow. They each bring a case of camera equipment with which they’re supposed to film their experience.

The first few episodes, you don’t choose a favorite. The ex-military guys don’t usually last too long. They’re scared of bears or injure themselves or they were doing this to being attention to suicide, as though anyone needs attention brought to suicide. But that’s a different essay. A few episodes in, most everyone has dropped out. They do this by calling a producer on a sat phone and saying “I officially tap out.” A boat arrives and the contestants say they’re sorry. They just valued their health or accomplished what they wanted to or miss home.

Now you’re left with the people I know all too well—the desperate and the completely insane. They don’t get to tap out. This is all they’ve got. They’ll eat flattened mice and starve. They’ll watch frostbite spread across their toes. They’ll scream at empty nets and burn themselves trying to get warm after falling into the ocean.

All the while, they’ll tell the camera they’re not going to quit. They want to fix up their van to live in. Buy a little land so they can feed their family. Put a little away to send the kids to college. Only one will make it. Better odds than not going on the show I guess.

Back when I was a cable guy, I worked for a time with a guy we’ll call John. We were duck-walking through an attic when John mentioned that if I let him assault me, we could split the 70k the company would pay out. I asked him how he knew it was 70k. He said it was in the handbook. A felony assault on the job was worth 70k.

I’d been training John for a couple weeks. John isn’t his real name but you could threaten me with an attic in the summer and I still couldn’t tell you what his real name was. He was a strange dude who pretended he’d served in the Marine Corps and I strongly suspected he was a sociopath. I was fascinated by him. And I didn’t mind the help. He didn’t need the training. He’d been a cable guy longer than I had—different state, different company. But cable is cable.

Most of the training I was doing was telling him dude, you cannot pat a customer’s kid’s head. Don’t ever touch a kid are you serious. John. Why would you tell a guy who’s really proud of his new TV that plasma is on its way out. Just let him be proud of his TV, bro. When he told a woman she looked hot in her yoga pants, I skipped the words and just smacked the back of his head and apologized to her. (That I’d smack the back of their heads was the compromise men who worked near me generally agreed to because the other option was HR. Sometimes some other asshole in the room might run to HR. Like the time Kenny said, “happier than a faggot in a dick store,” for which I raised my hand and he said, “hold on,” took his hat off, and accepted the smack. I said I’m mostly smacking you because it doesn’t even make sense as a joke. And he agreed it was dumb as shit. When HR called us in separately to ask me if he’d said “faggot” and Kenny if I’d hit him for it, we both denied the incident. Kenny was hood as fuck. He wasn’t going to snitch. And I wasn’t going to be the white lady who got his ass fired. So I guess not everyone agreed to the compromise. But then, I wasn’t going to smack a guy who might hit back, even metaphorically.)

I told John a felony assault usually entails some injuries. I could think of a few other problems with his plan. He said, “you’d have to say I had a gun. Not me. The man in a mask who’d assault you.”

The conversation paused before I could ask him why a man in a mask would assault a random cable tech. We’d found the wall. I pulled the insulation back, showed him how I could see the light from the headlamp I’d braced in the outlet hole I’d cut, “that’s the wire for the electrical and we want six inches to the right.” I drilled the hole and sat back on my heels so he could see the flashlight below. It turns out there was something I could teach him—my trick for finding the right spot to drill for a wallfish, running a cable through a wall. I told him to go downstairs and catch the wire. He was appropriately impressed with my flashlight trick. I thought it was common sense. But I’m incredibly lazy so I have to be a little smart.

John was still on the assault idea when we got back to my van. I was wondering who the fuck reads the employee handbook. But it was a more interesting a conversation than most work conversations. It seems now most work conversations, not just at work, most conversations I had with anyone in those days when my entire social circle was people working shit jobs for shit wages, mostly all anyone talked about was how to cash in. Find a hustle. Sue someone. Build an app. Something to sell.

My girlfriend had an idea for man candles. They’d smell like meatloaf. Or a campfire. Or leather. Neither of us knew how to make candles. Most everyone I knew was buying into MLMs selling everything from shakes to essential oils. I grew mushrooms because I couldn’t find mushrooms and I wanted to do shrooms. She thought we could sell mushrooms. You can’t sell mushrooms for a living. Not back then, before microdosing was cool. If I knew people who did mushrooms, I’d have probably had a source for them and wouldn’t be pressure cooking pint jars of brown rice flour. I needed the mushrooms because I wanted to forget for a moment that I was fucking trapped. Unlike most anyone I knew back then, I didn’t believe there was a hustle that would buy me out of it.

That’s not to say I didn’t buy lottery tickets on occasion. I liked driving around with a daydream in my pocket as much as anyone. But while my friends sold scrap copper from their electrician jobs or guys I worked with sold the aluminum casings from old cable plant that had never been removed while others tried to start home businesses doing anything from computer repair to closet organization, I just wanted to forget long enough to write something. Friends would tell me I should sell a book. I’d tell them that’s not how anything worked. But I’d pull up behind a Safeway in Alexandria, somewhere no one would see me and knock on my window to ask for a remote or tell me their internet was out, and since you’re right down the street... And I’d write. I’d write in google docs because I didn’t have my own laptop but I didn’t want to store anything on the laptop my company gave me. Maybe I did dream I could sell a book. But I didn’t dare dream it aloud.

My fatalism on the fact of my entrapment wasn’t helped by knowing my circumstances were a matter of dumb luck. I had a friend in Berlin, we’d lived together when we were 14. We used to chat sometimes over google. She asked me once what my dog did all day while I was at work. She wasn’t trying to be a dick. She was just horrified at the fact of any job that didn’t allow me to take my dog to work with me. Her intentions notwithstanding, I burst into tears. I worked 10 hour days, add an hour or so to the commute and my dog was alone for 12, sometimes 14 or 16 hours a day. Most of the time, I had roommates. But I rarely had roommates who’d bother to let him outside to pee. One house I moved out of, there were panic circles of dog piss on the basement rug where he’d desperately tried to not piss in the house. He just fucking leaked. When I lived alone, I’d leave the door open to the yard. But roommates wouldn’t allow a door to just be left open. I wonder sometimes, how many relationships I got into or stayed in because there was someone to let my fucking dog out to pee.

My friend in Berlin said I should come visit. I promised that I would. But I was never going to Berlin. I could barely afford to go to New England for Christmas. I asked her once, having done the math, why she was up so late. She said she’d been laid off so she was out celebrating. I could imagine the nihilistic impulse. But she said, no. She was earnestly celebrating. She’d still be paid. Still have an apartment. She was entitled to her apartment. She had time to go on holiday to Spain. She usually went in August for her month off. But now that she was laid off, and being laid off didn’t change her financial circumstances in any way whatsoever, she could visit in the off season. Avoid the Americans. I closed the laptop. I love her a lot but what an asshole.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to let John assault me and blame it on a random guy in a mask. I’d been assaulted in the military and later on, investigated for being gay. So when someone told me the VA was now paying disability for non-combat related PTSD, I filed a claim. Unlike too many of my counterparts, I was able to prove my case easily. When the Air Force investigated me, they’d found I once visited a doctor off base—the abortion I’d had after the assault. And when they asked every airman on base if they knew I was gay, a lot of airmen said yes, and by the way, she’s being harassed for it. So I sent the case against me to the VA. And, a couple years later, I was approved for disability, along with a sweet check for back pay. I used the money as something like a writer’s grant. I bought a Winnebago and gave myself 5 years to become a writer, whatever the hell that meant.

When I sold the Cable Guy essay, I was working at a bar in Austin, barely scraping by even with the VA payments. I blew the $1000 I was paid for the story on a vet bill and new glasses. Then it went viral and it looked like I’d sell a book. One night at work, a guy named Josh, who everyone called lesbian Josh because it’s funny but it takes too long to explain why, said I should start a podcast. I should capitalize on the moment. I thought it was a strange thing to tell me. But then, once I found out what you get paid for a book, I thought maybe I should start a podcast. I am, afterall, writing this on substack.

The writing world isn’t immune to the hustle. I don’t know many writers who survive on writing alone. Most everyone I know is part of a couple where one or both have a day job. As surprised as I am that I made it past the gatekeepers, that without an MFA or a network, I managed to write and find an agent and sell a book, I’m just as surprised I made it past the hustle without getting burned. There’s an entire industry made up of struggling writers preying on struggling writers. Sign up for my fiction class. Sign up for my how to get an agent class. Sign up for my astrology for writers class and I’ll teach you how the stars will edit your book. Unless you’re a Leo. Leos don’t edit. Buy my how to freelance book, don’t forget to sign up for the class. Stealing copper feels more honest. I won’t pretend I navigated it without losing too much money because I’m smarter than anyone else. I didn’t have the money to lose.

I don’t have a problem with writing classes. I have a problem with the insistence they’re necessary. I have an even bigger problem with the miserable rates we make for writing. Sell your traumas for $200 and a free month’s subscription. There’s a point in every writer’s career when they do the math and realize those guys back in the 1920s were making the equivalent of 30k for a short story.

Nowadays, I think maybe I watch Alone because I don’t want to forget how close I was or maybe how close I still am. But at least I get to have a dog and I’m home to let him out. Maybe I watch it because it feeds my own nihilism. This is the American nightmare. Risk a couple months sleeping under a tarp, stalked by wolves, starving and freezing, and maybe you’ll have a shot. Maybe you don’t have to go back to that job that’s fucking killing you.

I just think maybe there’s a better way. But then, I told John what my friend in Berlin said about being laid off. He insisted it wasn’t true. It wouldn’t work. No one would work if they didn’t have to. I said it seems to work all right over there. He just shook his head and muttered, that’s not true.