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    Can't Hold A Real Job
    Can't Hold A Real Job
    Can't Hold A Real Job
    Ebook82 pages1 hour

    Can't Hold A Real Job

    By Mel C. Thompson

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Two desperate temp agency workers struggle to make rent in San Francisco. Their economic desperation drives them to specialize in working with clients who need short-term white-collar criminals to carry out their schemes. The perks are substantial, but the risks are high. Not only are the criminals being followed by federal agents, but the federal agents are being followed too.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMel C. Thompson
    Release dateDec 9, 2018
    ISBN9780463604502
    Can't Hold A Real Job
    Author

    Mel C. Thompson

    Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

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      Book preview

      Can't Hold A Real Job - Mel C. Thompson

      Can't Hold A Real Job

      Tales of California Grifters And The Spies Who Follow Them

      Mel C. Thompson

      Copyright © 2018

      Mel C. Thompson Publishing

      3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

      Lafayette, CA 94549

      For more information about Mel C. Thompson’s work or to learn more about how you can support his ongoing literary projects, including his work with the other authors published by Mel C. Thompson Publishing through Amazon's Kindle subsidiary, please contact the email below or write the address listed above:

      melcthompson@yahoo.com

      Cyborg Productions, Blue Beetle Press, Citi-Voice Magazine, Zero Capital Press, The Lost Continent Review, and Marble Lobby Press are all imprints of Mel C. Thompson Publishing Company.

      Preface: Influences Found In This Work

      Go To Table of Contents

      I was heavily impacted by the financial crisis of 2008 and the problems in the sub-prime home-loan market that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and, more recently, moved with morbid curiosity regarding the details of the collapse of Theranos, Inc. And what economically-cynical person could fail to be enthralled by Leonardo DiCaprio's The Wolf of Wall Street which depicts the rise and fall of Stratton Oakmont? Virtually all of the acts of corruption in the book are modeled on these very public cases.

      The spies who appear in the work might be said to be modeled after characters in overly-obvious pulp fiction, and to the extent that they achieve three-dimensionality, they might alternately be influenced a by Somerset Maugham, (not that I could claim to have carried off such craftwork properly). The continual reintroduction of the absurd into all of their lives has primarily to do with the way I view life, and secondly has a bit to do with my love of Woody Allen's ability to blend the gravely-serious with the almost-slapstick. (I make no pretense to have escaped the realm of the derivative, but only attempt to make an original collage, as it were.)

      The main federal agent in the story is basically a pastiche of various people I have known who seem to, by their pure grace and disarming nature, all but fumble their way to success. That character is a tribute to my admiration and envy of such characters, admiration and envy being two things which the French and Russian novelists admitted came together quite naturally.

      Table of Contents

      Preface: Influences Found In This Work

      1. God Will Forgive The Life of Crime

      2. Ten Thousand Years' Worth of Felonies

      3. Politely-Tolerated Outcasts Forever

      4. A Bunch of Reprobate Gangsters

      5. Every Major Antidepressant

      6. Chief Killer Among Killers

      7. Your Desperation And Flexibility

      8. A Pink Sheet For A Failing Steel Mill

      9. Burn The Whole Thing Down

      10. Weapons He Was Prepared To Use

      11. A Wonderful Addition To Our Most Peculiar Society

      12. The Global Friendship Bank

      1. God Will Forgive The Life of Crime

      Go To Table of Contents

      Hugh, you do know if they ever catch you, or me, or our clients, you'll go to prison for life, right?

      Yes, you've told me that a dozen times now.

      But I think if you got out of here, while you still can, the trail on you will go cold in a few years. Then, you know, when the feds finally kick in our door, you'll be a kind of distant afterthought. Of course it's way too late for me to get out of this business, so my life ends whenever they shut down this office. But you're still young. I feel kind of guilty keeping you involved.

      Cheryl was prematurely wrinkling and had a husky voice from too much drinking and smoking and casual sex. But Hugh, at least a decade younger, loved her just the same.

      Try to think of it this way, Hugh noted by raising his typically didactic index finger into the air. Somebody fucked up bad when we were young, and somehow we didn't have the sparkle and shine that it takes to make it in this city. How could mediocre performers like ourselves ever compete with the indefatigable go-getters who are fighting each other to pay double the rent of normal cities? We've both tried living other places and nowhere else works. We'd be screwed if we were forced out. We live as long as we get to live here. And these scams are the only way to make enough money to keep our heads above water. So we play this game till Big Brother comes and hauls us off for good. What does it matter? Our families can't stand us. Nobody's going to marry us. Hell, I can't even keep a cat. Be real. Who would miss us very much? They'd make a show out of weeping for us for two weeks tops, then they'd forget we ever existed. Our real lives ended long ago. All we have left is this charade. You recruited me. I took the job. And now we both have to live with it. Too bad they don't have co-ed prisons. I would really like to be your cellmate.

      That's so sweet of you, said Cheryl Horton, a slender brunette with big hair whose large brown eyes almost seemed to melt whenever a coworker said something nice. Ah well, she continued, I tried to warn you.

      Yes, morally you're covered regarding me. God will forgive the life of crime part of the deal. Heaven knows you're painted into a corner and that's that. And me, I'm as manic as the day is long. I can't hold a real job. No truly credible employer could live with that for long, and even if they did, I'd probably run away. My doctor says it's something about the fear of intimacy. And, as I said before, I've seen downtown Stockton enough times to be afraid of what economic exile would do to me. We have nowhere else to go. This is our last stand. We have to face it bravely.

      Cheryl put down her pen and hunched depressively over her desk. I would just die if I had to move to Stockton or Reno, or Modesto, or wherever it is the losers have to go to once they're booted from their rent-controlled apartments.

      "Precisely. The only happy tenant is a tenant paying market rate in a new high-rise with concrete floors and steel-mesh walls and double-paned windows. No noise; no substandard conditions; no angry landlord who feels you're mooching off him through rent control. No one gets those conditions

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