The Pen is More Inimical to Employment than the Sword (Page 1 of 1)

By Jack Mauro

The following story possesses these advantages: It is true; it is heartbreaking in a doofy, lame-ass, minor way; it has given me pause, a thing I don’t usually have a lot to do with, and it is evidence of how oddly Peyton Place-like Knoxville can indeed be.

So strap your bad selves in, kids. Here goes.

Not too long ago, I began work as a server in the Crowne Plaza restaurant. Now, I have in my time run about in many a dining room, from scary Gothic halls in Palm Beach, Fla., with real dukes and duchesses eating baby grand pianos made out of chocolate, to graveyard shifts at the Military Trail Denny’s, with knife fights constituting, and not breaking up, the monotony. The Crowne, though, was all right. The people working there are more than all right. Waking at 4:30 a.m. is never a kick, but all things considered, it was a pretty agreeable place to make a buck.

Then – O, woe betide the day! – Jack Neely wrote about the Monstrous Convention in Knoxville That Did Not Dine Around Town. I do not mock Jack’s article; it was awful good. It was so well-written, in fact, that it made me fly to my keyboard and write to the Metro Pulse editor about it. And, wicked little devil that I am, I referred to actually having tried to direct these conventioneers to local eateries. Because, I wrote, I hate my job.

I hate my job. In “Middlemarch,” George Eliot writes of how four simple words (in that superb novel’s case, “What can I do?”) may take on stunningly diverse meanings through how they are uttered. Well, Georgie, print is just as fucking elastic sometimes. My four words were set down as nothing more than a throw-away joke, a dash of feigned bitterness to give pizzazz to an otherwise too dry anecdote. That, at least, was how I saw it. The hotel, she didn’t. And the ground opened up and the gods coughed, and darkness took me like – to paraphrase Ray Romano – a monkey tearing into a cupcake.

The Crowne didn’t throw me to the streets. Nor did they demand penance in the form of a scarlet WA (wise-ass) on my issued black vest. They simply let/helped me… disappear. As I myself had indicated before this contretemps that notice might be given in the near future, they were, in a sense, just giving the old bastard (wise-ass me) what he asked for. I blame them not. I am rational. The bare fact is that I insulted the place in print and only a dolt would anticipate a loving reaction to such.

I can be, however, dolt-like at times. I went through dwarf stages of grief. I felt dejected and I ate a whole sour cream pudding cake. And then I pondered. Was I so accustomed to writing fictional pieces that I overlooked the standards of our non-fiction world? Am I such a cloistered type that it couldn’t possibly occur to me that anything I wrote could have a semi-rotten impact? Or – and this is much, much worse – did I momentarily forget that print carries with it none of the nuance of the spoken word, particularly in a letter to the editor and particularly when the party targeted in the letter is unacquainted with my droll, wry, sexy, tongue-in-cheek persona? 

Maybe some of the above. Most probably the last. On the black ink side of the ledger, though, it looks like those vengeful gods mentioned earlier have a whole network of divine brethren, not all of whom are out for my hide. Because this turn of events pushed me into more writing, more pursuing of paid writing work, and even the obtaining of some. The real God rips off a nametag and erases your timeclock codes. But He does, true to the adage, open another door.

Speaking of adages: I’ve never much agreed with the oft-turned-to one, which claims that that which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger. I tend to find that what doesn’t kill us usually just makes us bruised. But what it also can do is make us, maybe, a little more careful before the next go-round. Stronger would be cool but warier works, too.