The Interview

I showed up in the wrong clothes.

In fact, this was less of an isolated incident than a general tendency. At key moments, I tend to underdress, overdress, mis-dress, misfire, send the wrong message, jam the signal.

Back in the day, for example, I was a punk who didn’t dress like one. This pissed a lot of people off, cast suspicion over my countercultural credentials, chipped away at my punk points until nothing was left in the coffers.

Initially I believed, ingenuously, that punk was about breaking rules. It quickly became clear, however, the punk had rules of its own, a set of countercultural codes that were strictly enforced, a dress code even. There are rules, it turns out, to breaking the rules.

This isn’t a reproach. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that punk, as a cultural phenomenon, developed its own conventions. All culture is artifice, and punk is no exception. I did, however, come to punk looking for someone else, more signified and less signifier, more content and less form, more transgression and less enforcement, more rock and less talk, as Propagandhi once said.

My childhood transpired in the suffocating confines of The Sunny Place Church of God, a local evangelical stronghold and recruiting center for Far-Right political extremism. Fire and brimstone from the pulpit on Sunday mornings, enough to burn off your eyelashes, the recitation of memorized bible verses on Wednesday nights, Jesus Camp in the summers, Abstinence Movement pamphlets, Operation Rescue meetings after choir practice on Thursdays, all the usual authoritarian fetishization of arbitrary rules, a sadomasochistic fascination with punishment – when I ran away from home at sixteen, I knew exactly what I was running away from.

Punk seemed like a safe place to begin the metamorphosis, the long and arduous process of deconversion. The destructive dimension of punk has long been celebrated, its challenge to bourgeois sensibilities, disdain for the mainstream, resistance to the commodification of everything, its general negation of capitalist values. Many of us, however, were more concerned with its affirmative aspects, that is, with punk as agency, as robust assertion, as an alternate mode of creating art and ideas, equipped with its own channels for the production, distribution, and consumption of culture. In other words, I wasn’t merely running away from something, something abusive, something oppressive, but, more importantly, running towards something else, a more productive way of interacting with people, a more meaningful way of being in the world.

As such, punk, for me, had to be more than a secular religion, more than straightedge, more than finger pointing and fist pumping and self-righteous slogans. This is how I arrived at my position, non-negotiable, of not looking the part, of opposing dogma as such, even punk dogma. Besides, what could be more punk than transgressing the rules of punk? Is punk-raised-to-the-second-degree a double dose of rebellion or does it simply cancel itself out, like a double negative? While I clunk to the former, the punk scene itself proved deeply invested in the latter interpretation.

For better or worse, I jumped ship before punk washed up on the shores of indie rock. One day I donated my records and Jack Kerouac novels and then, hours later, slipped through The Hole in the Chain-link Fence in the dead of night. No one noticed I was gone.

If you wanted to find me after The Great Escape, you would have had to go to the library. Instead of squats and venues, I started haunting the corridors and lecture halls of The Anachronic University, a last remnant, the gem in the rough, that bastion of free inquiry, the UNLP.

Even in this new life, however, I missed the cues. Too much of an activist for academia and too much of an academic for activism, I was once again in-between, residing in the interstices, living liminality, unintentionally leading a double life. This time, there was nothing I wanted more than to blend in. I tried to get it right, to show up in the right clothes, but something was always off. A sweater was too tight, sweat socks too loose, shoes too formal, scarves too long, jackets altogether too big for my small frame.

Now that my academic career has run aground even more dramatically than punk on the shores of indie rock, I’m still at it, still trying to iron out the wrinkles, still showing up in the wrong clothes.

Cargo pants or corduroys? Cut-offs or cardigan? Short sleeves or sweater? Dress shoes or work boots? Tattoos showing and tucked away? I had been going over all the variables in my head in the days leading up to the interview, going back and forth, trying on garments, taking them off again, parading around in front of the mirror, but I just couldn’t figure it out. How do you dress for an interview for a job cleaning toilets? Am I expected to look the part? Do I bring my plunger? Coveralls? Gumboots?

A little voice inside kept saying, just be yourself. Dress like you normally do. 

I should have known better than to follow my own advice. When has that little voice ever been right? Decades of experiences has demonstrated that people really, really don’t like it when I am being myself and really, really do prefer when I negate who I am and, instead, try to be who they expect me to be. The less I express myself, the better I get along with people. This has long been the rule, yet another rule that, on the morning of the interview, I chose to disregard.

So, I wore the clothes that I wear when I feel more myself than at any other time, which is to say when I am at the library. Besides, Hadn’t Mendi left The Community Center in a bind when he quit from one day to the next? Hadn’t he personally recommended me for the job to the big bosses, Rylan and Kay? Able-bodied and willing, wasn’t I solving a problem for them replacing Mendi in his duties?

From the very beginning, I had hoped that the esteem that Kay and Rylan had for Mendi would be transferred to me. I assumed that this transferral was simply how things worked, an assumption that bore all the force of a syllogism:

If K + R esteem M, and

if M esteems me, then

K + R esteem me.

As is often the case with presuppositions, this turned out to be faulty reasoning, a false syllogism, one that the empirical world was more than happy to disprove: when I showed up to the interview, Kay and Rylan were every bit as distant as the other day at Mendi’s breakroom party.

"Dialogue with Sitting Man," Liliana Porter

“I talked to Mendi yesterday,” I said, walking into their office. “He’s doing well. He says ‘hi’.”

Rylan didn’t miss a beat. “I know. He texted me this morning.”

The interview was off to a bad start, and it quickly became clear that I was overdressed.

“The job involves a lot of squatting down and picking things up from the floor,” Kay clarified. “Are you sure you can handle that?”

Rylan chose a similar line of inquiry. “There are boxes to pick up, a lot of them, heavy ones. The trash bins, they’re heavy too. And you have to push them all the way out to the curb. Across the cobblestones. Not an easy task. Not to mention the stairs. God, this building has a lot of stairs. Sometimes I run out breath just going to the photocopier!”

The implicature seemed to be that this degree of physical activity might be too much for me. I eat well, stretch daily, exercise often, use a bicycle as my principal form of transportation, and even skateboard occasionally, so it wasn’t clear why my physical state was even an issue.

Then, I remembered that I was wearing my library clothes. It didn’t matter how worn out they were, how comfortable, how cozy. It didn’t matter that they were also my biking clothes and skating clothes and cleaning clothes and cooking clothes. The bottom line was that they were sending the wrong signal.

I tried to set Rylan and Kay at ease. I even contemplated pushing back the chair, dropping to the floor, and doing a one-armed push-up, one of the tried-and-true party tricks that I have kept in my back pocket all these years.

I could have told them about all those Marshall half stacks that I loaded in and out of the van every night on tour with punk bands. I could have told them about the skate spots, the hardest ones to find, the ones that don’t figure on any map, deep in the back streets of the industrial corridor, where I skated until the third shift was almost over. I could have told them about all the stairs of the fire escapes that I climbed at night just to be able to see over the wall, the river in the distance, a black line, and the port with its sad orange lights.

But it’s not what they wanted to hear. Something more intelligible would be that I wake up every morning at five a.m., put on my grey sweat suit, and jog ten kilometres, like a good solider, like a wind-up toy, like a middle manager.

I had survived, at the UNLP, thirty-two final exams, each of which took a minimum of three months to prepare, then two comprehensive exams in grad school, whose reading lists topped one hundred items, and, more recently, the defense of my dissertation, yet there I was, failing the test, throat dry, palms sweating, forcing a smile that wasn’t being reciprocated.

Beginning to wonder if I would even get the job, I fumbled with the clipboard, the one I had brought with me to the interview, the one with five different copies of my resumé because I couldn’t decide how much information to suppress.

It’s not that I had any shortage of experience in the field. Until the night of The Great Escape when I passed through The Hole in the Chain-link Fence and no one noticed, I had worked cleaning warehouses, first safety supplies then parachute gear and finally non-perishable health food. These jobs were punctuated by periods, between one tour and the next, when I worked as a dishwasher, a profession that I have returned to in recent summers due to the precipitous collapse of professions in education.

It's not, then, that I didn’t have enough experience but rather that my academic credentials invalidated it, as if knowledge were somehow incompatible with physical ability. Thus, the five different versions of my resumé. Each one tipped the balance between intellectual and manual labor a little further in favor of the latter.

There wasn’t, however, any need to decide on a resumé. Unable to act, the decision had been taken for me, that is, from me. From the other side of the clipboard, Rylan stood up abruptly and extended her hand across the desktop. “We’ll give you a call before the end of the day.”

This can’t be good, I thought. I hadn’t even been able to make my case. I held the clipboard to my chest, like a shield with quivers driven into its surface, as I walked backwards out of the office, careful not to bump into the walls.

It wasn’t a call but a text message. I was on the rooftop of a building down by the river when it came.  You start Monday. Be there by 5:30 a.m. Arturo will be training you. Wear proper attire. 

Barely visible in the distance, a ship was pulling into port, slow and heavy as can be, bathed in orange light, perhaps even a little relieved.