Without a Net by Michelle Tea

Author:Michelle Tea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

EVERY DAY I WAVE AT THE SANDWICH MAN ON MY CORNER.

I drive by him every day. He stands on the corner with a handmade sign advertising inexpensive lunch specials. I think about his health and the tedium of it all. I think about him when I wonder what my next job will be now that I’ve moved from San Francisco to L.A. Actually, I don’t imagine his face when I think of him, but rather the face of his costume, which is a large (from above his knees to a few feet above his head), sun-bleached sandwich with a shop logo on it. The sandwich is made of bread and floppy lettuce, and on the bread is a big smiling face with two huge eyeholes cut out of it, for the sandwich man to breathe through. His hands are big and padded like Mickey Mouse’s, which I guess are the hands that a sandwich would have if a sandwich had hands. I wave to him when I’m stuck at that corner of Highland and Santa Monica.

When the sandwich guy waves back, he seems so enthusiastic that it breaks my heart, although perhaps it’s only the big, cartoonish hands that I read as excited. It’s quite likely that the guy wishes I’d stop waving at him like some five-year-old at the poor kids’ Disney. Probably he should conserve his energy. It can’t be good for you, wearing a polyester suit in the middle of Los Angeles in summer, where the temperature frequently rises to 100 degrees. This is a dangerous combination—polyester, holding and shaking a sign, and the desert sun.

I had a friend who worked for an ice-cream shop as a bear one summer, and she had a whole padding of ice that she kept in the freezer to put on for work. “You can faint like that,” she said, snapping her fingers for emphasis. Another friend of mine appeared on a talk show in an E.T. outfit. He nearly faded away because the costume was basically one of those rubber Halloween masks that almost killed you as a kid, but that went over your whole body. He was hunched over in the thing for an hour, waiting for his turn on the show, and by the time he got up there he was more like a sad, creepy, abused E.T. than the happy, bicycling-over-the-moon one from childhood. He made it offstage before passing out, but ended up, I imagine, depressing most of the audience.

Sometimes I see the sandwich walking home down Santa Monica Boulevard with his big square head slumped down. Of course, the tilt of his head may be a logistical thing—so he can see—but I choose to read it as a guy down on his luck stuck in this dead-end job as a sandwich. I make another vow to bring him a cool beverage with lots of ice. I wonder what his pay might be.

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