A Travis Bickle Summer

[from www.automatoncity.com]

I was laid off from my job last week.

Some background information: I worked as an editorial assistant and blogger for a national business magazine. It was a screwy exit. This was the fourth round of layoffs since August and everyone in the art, editorial and online content department were taking on extra tasks and duties. Then, a month ago, we were told that there would be no raises, while not-so-secretly, the VPs and such received bonuses. More figures for six figures, I suppose, and no incentives for the ones actually doing work. The horses are being whipped while the farmers are laying around eat their carrot-on-a-string.

This, of course, screwed up my perspective of business.

To be fair, the entire journalism industry is taking a nose-dive. There are massive layoffs everywhere and several long-standing publications and periodicals have closed within the last year.

No, what bothers me is that my former magazine took a personal nose-dive of character. There were damn fine people working there still when the nearly dozen of us were laid off, but they weren’t in places of power.

When I started there as an intern, the editor-in-chief knew my name by the second day and the editors were supportive. There were birthday lunches and photo albums on the shelf. There were still shady vice-presidents, but they never interacted with my family of art and editorial.

Then, disgruntled with the suits upstairs, the editor-in-chief and other editors left to start their own business.

And then we made a puppet hire or two for those suits upstairs.

And then good people got laid off.

And then everyone wasn’t so nice to each other.

And then some higher-ups brought in their friends and turned our informative magazine into puffier pieces.

And then the magazine wasn’t so fun anymore.

So, when I was laid off, I wasn’t heartbroken. But I was finding myself increasingly disillusioned and disenfranchised. I took the $3,800 I made from servence and decided to rethink things. I don’t want to work for liars and hypocrites anymore. I want peace and purity in my leaders.

And I want some leverage.

Yesterday, I considered what I wanted. Summer’s coming and I have no job, a situation that reminds me of when I was 16 and the most important things to me had no relevancy to tax breaks. I sent out a resume yesterday and came home to watch my friend change his oil. Wearing a bathing suit, I drank a beer on the front lawn and just watched the oil drain out. I couldn’t tell if I was tired, bored or having a great time. The weather was perfect and, again, I thought about my next job, whatever it may be.

Until then, I figured I should just provide myself with minor victories. I should be able to cross off the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time. I’m at 60-something right now and in the next few months, I should complete the list.

So, last night, I watched Taxi Driver.

And then something funny happened: Travis Bickle started making sense. One thing after another, Bickle was laying down the universal truth, and I was uncomfortable without how I identified with the weirdo loner’s simultaneous apathy and empathy.

I thought he was…talkin’ to me. “Yes, Travis Bickle, I am talkin’ to you. You’re the only one here and I am talkin’ to you,” I thought.

Granted, I was sleep-deprived and unsure if I was hungry or antsy. But Bickle’s slow descent into madness or hyper-realization was sparking plugs inside my wirey body.

Either way…Travis Bickle was speaking some truth.

“The days go on and on… they don’t end. All my life needed was a sense of some place to go. I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that one should become a person like other people,” Bickle wrote in his journal in his small, untidy apartment.

How could that not apply to the unemployed?

“My life has taken another turn again. The days can go on with regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next. A long continuous chain,” Bickle narrated as he wrote another journal entry.

This almost seemed paraphrased from my roommates, who have all been unemployed for months. One roommate has been technically unemployed since December 2007, another since November 2008 and another on-and-off since January. They always talk about how days bleed into each other when you have no timetable of a desk job or sick days or vacation days or the plights of a morning carpool.

But I remember coming home from work to antics and stories, all while I was typing in a cubicle, counting planes from my window (by the way, in the course of my job, I saw 181 commercial planes, 102 non-commercial planes and 41 helicopters).

I felt like I was missing out.

But how, or is, life wasteful without a career? Is it more booze or more to prove?

And then you can’t sleep. I mean, why go to bed? You don’t have a day job. You just have sheets and blankets that seem useless to you now. You think you can stay up all night and do everything and nothing. You have no school, no work. Friday at 10:30 a.m. has the same tone as Sunday evening 6:30 a.m.

To you, Saturday night, 2 a.m., is Tuesday morning, 6 a.m.

“I still can’t sleep. Damn. Days go on and on. They don’t end.”

You’ve got it, Travis. You have hold of something terrible and beautiful.

You are my new reverend.

The Reverend Travis Bickle, God’s lonely man…he is surely a truthseer and truthspeaker.

“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Huzzah! Huzzah!

But what now, Reverend Bickle? What say you now for the future and of me and all that is this? What are you going to do, and in turn, what should I do?

“I’ve got to get in shape now. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on, it’ll be 50 push-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups. There will be no more pills. There will be no more bad food. No more destroyers of my body. From now on, it will be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.”

And so I follow the Reverend Travis Bickle. I’ll do what he says. I’ll get in shape and never work for another liar or hypocrite again. I’m gonna run the fucking show now.

“Listen, you fuckers, you screwheads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.”

You’re goddamn right, Travis Bickle. The reverend is goddamn right.