Bill reached into his mini fridge for another beer. The only thing other than beer in the fridge was a package of cheese—American cheese, damn it!—and a jar of Miracle Whip that had probably gone off. He believed he deserved another beer after getting a phone call from Ms. Hadley, an assistant principal at his son’s school. She had rang him up, again, to complain about his son’s “behavioral issues” or some bullshit. This time, nine-year-old Josh had called his classmate Timmy a faggot. At first, Bill explained to Ms. Hadley that Timmy needed to toughen up and that his son was doing the boy a favor, but Ms. Hadley didn’t acknowledge the soundness of his argument and merely reiterated the school’s zero tolerance policy for bullying. Bill then told her that his soon to be ex-wife, his soon to be third ex-wife had custody of his son, and he only saw the kid one weekend a month. Which was fine with him. At 55, Bill believed he was too old to look after a nine-year-old. Besides, he already had three children—two from his first marriage and another from his second. All of that should be behind him now. His soon to be ex-wife number 3 should have done a better job at preventing the pregnancy or taken care of it without bothering him when she dropped the ball.
Ms. Hadley reminded him of a woman he knew twenty years ago when he still had his janitorial job at an office building downtown. Alice did the books at one of the law firms. She got herself a degree and probably made twice as much as Bill. Alice came all the way from Florida for the job. When an early snowstorm hit in November, she came rolling in with her car covered in snow and ice. She had managed to scrape off a peephole in her windshield with a credit card, but that was it. After paying Bill five dollars to take care of her car, she promised she would be prepared for the next snowstorm. Bill believed he was just as smart as Alice and Ms. Hadley, and it pissed him off that women like that had good jobs and he didn’t.
He had worked at the office building for fifteen years. His first wife was a nurse, and she made more money than he did. So they did okay, financially, but still, Bill sometimes complained that as the man, he should make more. Linda would remind him that she had gone to school to be a nurse, and she worked hard for her money. Bill believed he worked just as hard and was just as capable as Linda. He didn’t need a piece of paper to prove that, and if his employer needed him to learn a special skill, then he should pay for it and set the whole thing up. That’s how they did it in his grandfather’s day, Bill imagined, before this country turned its back on white men.
The janitorial job was the only steady halfway decent job he ever had, but when the owners of the office building let him go and hired a janitorial service, Bill blamed the illegal aliens that he imagined worked for the outsourced service rather than his employer. Bill still complained about the Mexicans who stole his job. Bill didn’t think he was racist, even though his oldest daughter had been accusing him of that for years, but the way he saw it, white men made this country, and now the Mexicans and blacks thought they were entitled, and he was tired of seeing them get breaks he never had.
When he started drinking heavily and refused to look for a new job for almost a year, Linda left him. Since then, Bill has worked at several fast food places, a grocery store and a couple of convenient stores. He’s never held a job for more than two years since working as a janitor. Sometimes, Bill daydreams about what life must have been like for his grandfather who had a factory job. He imagines the job wasn’t too demanding. Most of his coworkers were probably white. Hardly anybody was a faggot back then, and if they were, they had the good sense not to tell anybody and act like a regular guy. The men his grandfather worked with were probably all like buddies. All the bosses back then were white, too. Most of them were probably decent men. Maybe a couple of hard asses, but most of them were probably like one of the boys.
You couldn’t have close friendships with men like that now. You couldn’t count on a buddy to look after you anymore. Bill lived in the basement of an old friend from high school, a plumber, a regular guy, but even he complained when the rent was late. When Bill told him he couldn’t find a good job, even his old friend told him he should have learned a trade when he was young, and the friend told him he needed to learn to take a bit of guff from his bosses even if they were women or black or both.
Bill set his alarm clock for the first time in two weeks before passing out. He wanted to get to the polls early.
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