Overqualified (3 page)

I remember how even after he sold the salvage yard, he ran an alternator rebuilding shop out of the garage. He lost
money, and I think it worried my grandmother, but he always had something to do. When we did talk, it was so I could help him with his parts database on the computer. I remember how excited he was with the features, the index and photographs, and how he never seemed frustrated when something went wrong with the program. He would call me and tell me the error message to see if I could help. I was always surprised by the call.

My brother Adrian lived with them for a while, after he was kicked out of our house. Way out in Dartmouth, an hour from the nearest bus stop. Every day he would get a drive into town, or at least to the ferry, with our grandfather. When he was living there I'm sure that things weren't perfect, but Adrian formed a closer relationship with my grandmother. That's what I was jealous of at the time. He told me once that she said he was her favourite grandson. I understand that now. How nice would it be, after your children are gone, to have your grandson living with you?

My grandfather was driving Adrian into Halifax a few years ago, and it was either rainy or snowy. I can't remember. A man staggered into the street, drunk, and they hit him. I remember Adrian telling me about sitting quietly in the car, my grandfather crying, while they waited for the ambulance.

What a strange thing to be jealous of.

Joey Comeau

Dear MIT,

I am writing to apply for a position as researcher in your Linguistics department. I would like to focus on language and memory, specifically the language of nostalgia. I have been trying to write down my memories and it's all such bullshit. Is nostalgia like kittens? Does it make our language stupid? OH MY GOODNESS YOU'RE A KITTY!

I remember the woman with brown hair who taught me grade four; she left halfway through the year. I loved her. Her name started with an M. Mrs. Munroe? I can't remember. I can remember the shape of that room, and the view from my seat out the window. That window had a grate on it, and all class I would just stare. Focus on the trees, focus on the grate. Focus on the trees, focus on the grate. Back and forth. I remember sitting in the back of her classroom and reading science fiction books. I almost failed that year. I almost failed every year. I can't remember her face.

It doesn't really bother me that I can't remember, though. It was a long time ago, and it's not important. Sometimes it's nice to look back and only remember little bits. My memories of that school, of being that young, are like a weird slideshow.

I remember how excited I got when the Scholastic book fair came to our library. I went through the catalogues again and again, noting which books I wanted to buy. Then, when the
day finally came, I would spend forever going from table to table, trying to choose.

I remember the girl's bathroom and not the boy's. I only went in once. The showers had seats. I remember that my best friend waited on the field behind the school for another friend of mine, and he hit him in the leg with his baseball bat. This was elementary school.

So much violence.

I remember both their names, but not their faces.

There must be a way we can talk about the past so that it's more than just the past. Everything that has happened or will happen exists together. Just at different times. People die, but that isn't any different from the edge of a table. The table is still there. It just doesn't stretch that far.

I am not saying any of this right.

I remember we went on a camping field trip and I was sent home. I remember screaming and kicking while someone carried me. I remember my brother got his foot crushed in a gate out behind our school. It was recess. He always wore that red sweater. I remember how quiet everything seemed and how nobody would let me near him.

Joey Comeau

Dear New York Times,

Thank you for taking the time to review my resume. I am writing to apply for the position as editor, and I'm certain that upon closer examination you will find that my enclosed resume demonstrates my ability as an editor perhaps more accurately than it describes my experience in the field. I mean simply that any difference between the results of a background check and the employment history I have delineated should be taken as an example of my skills.

My skills as an editor extend beyond my job history to encompass the whole of my past. A stint in juvenile hall adds a much-needed bit of excitement to a childhood I can barely remember. I don't mean to imply that I'm a revisionist. I was never a revisionist. I won awards. I dated the prettiest girls.

Like, once, in college. I met a pretty girl who was a lesbian. Everyone told me that it would just break my heart to fall in love with her, that I was wasting my time, that I was asking for trouble. Well, within a week she had fallen for me. And there was no trouble at all. Her love for me overwhelmed her and she forgot all about her distaste for the immediate facts of the matter (if you will). We're still happily married. We have kids. Two, I guess. A boy and a girl. Handsome and pretty. It wasn't even hard.

My brother was never hit by a car, and the last time we spoke (just this morning) he said he loved me, and that he'd had a nightmare where he told me to go fuck myself over
something as stupid as a rent cheque, and then died before he could apologize. He said that when he woke up he felt really bad about that, and I said, “It's okay, man! The important thing is that we love and respect each other and that you're still alive! I love you, bro.”

We had a pretty good laugh about that, and then we got wicked drunk. I will make a very good editor for your company, whether you hire me or not.

Joey Comeau

Dear Mister President,

I would like to apply for a job as your Chief Environmental Advisor. Everyone is so afraid all the time. Of dying. The world is running out of oil, or ozone, or patience. We're all doomed. I can't read the newspaper anymore. I like to listen to stories about cats with one crooked fang that sticks up, about dogs who drool when they're happy. Why don't they have that in the newspaper? Why don't they have stories about drunk drivers who hit young men, and afterwards everybody laughs with nervous relief. They say, “Man, that could have gone much worse! Haha, we dodged a bullet there. Can I buy you a drink?”

Sure, everything falls apart. Love is like that, too. Even family is like that. But I'd like to quote Mr. Mitch Hedberg, if I may: “A girl asked me if I drink red wine. I said yes and she asked, ‘But doesn't it give you a headache?' And I said, ‘Sure . . . EVENTUALLY.'” Pause for effect. “‘But the first and the middle parts are amazing.'”

Everything falls apart, and it fucking sucks and we're all going to be in those wooden boxes eventually. Pause for effect. But the first and the middle parts are amazing!

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Nintendo,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my resume. I am writing to apply for the position of game designer. We have a chance here to help children experience games that are more true to life than ever before. Computer graphics have improved and improved and improved, and some day soon we're going to have to ask ourselves where we can go next in our search for realism.

We need virtual pet games where you clean and feed and love your furry little friend, but where that car still comes out of nowhere so smoothly, a god of aerodynamics and passenger safety. Where your mother says, “Good thing we kept this.” And she takes a shoe box down from your closet. Where you hear your father's quiet joke that night, when he thinks you are asleep.

We need an airport simulator, where the planes carry your whole family from A to B, job to job, and dad still drinks in the shower when you have to pee. Your older sister still comes home at three in the morning and wakes you up so she can sit on the edge of your bed and cry. Where you try to make friends faster at each new school, so you tell jokes even though you don't know anybody and nobody gets them. Everybody says you're the weird new kid. So at the next school you don't say anything at all and then you're the weird quiet kid. The plane touches down and you all lean forward in your seats because of inertia, and again and again someone says, “I hate to fly.”

We need a new Mario game where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try to push down that sick feeling in your stomach telling you she's “damaged goods,” a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex-negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom, “Do you still love me?” and you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, to keep it even.

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Apple,

I am writing to apply for a position with your company, and I am including my resume for your review. It outlines my experience as a computer programmer in the field of natural language processing.

Late at night, drunk, our language changes. In the day, I simply eat a piece of fruit, but late at night, while my girlfriend Susan sleeps, I tell another woman how I am piercing the skin with my teeth. Then I am cutting flesh from it and laying those pieces on my tongue. I am imagining that its flavors are hers.

We can train the computer to recognize these changes. Your connection can be suspended for your own good, long before you hit send. Txt Msging and email are the new drunk dialing, and we can help protect users from themselves. We can protect them from their own natural inclinations to lewdness, regret, longing, desperation. Imagine a robot operator listening to your calls, robot finger at the ready, waiting to disconnect you when you call at 4 a.m. to say you should never have let her go, that you think about her breasts sometimes, about that hollow where her neck cups up behind her ear? I'm sorry that I let you go. I should have followed. I can't bear to think of you with him, piercing and laying his flesh on your — DISCONNECT.

There are reasons why we can't just do what we want. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I am suddenly
certain that I will die. My brother was a year and a half younger than me. He was charming and all of the girls loved him. Now he's dead. A drunk driver came out of nowhere and he is dead. And I will die. I will die and Susan is the last girl. I sit on the bed beside her while she sleeps and I think, “This is the last girl.” But that's not as scary as it seems, is it? Love is important. But this is the last girl I will love, too. That's scarier. My mind goes in circles, and then I go and sit down in front of the computer, Apple. That's where I need your protection.

We can make the world a better place for the broken.

Joey Comeau

Dear Credico,

I am writing to apply for the position of Sales Rep. I'm located in the city of Halifax, where your ad says you are currently recruiting, and I am including my resume for your review. My resume details my sales experience, and I assure you that I am the person for this position.

Sometimes I think dent-resistant side panels are a waste of money, but then I remember ladies be always throwing them selves at my car, and titties can wreak havoc on a paint job. When it's warm, women like to take their titties out for a walk. You never see them in the winter, but in the hot months I guess their titties just start scratching at the door and yowling, and they need to be appeased.

Titties can be like rabid fucking animals, man. They claw at the carpet and they tear shirts down to the navel. I am an animal too. I can't stop thinking about them. Their titty pheromones get stuck in my head. They get in through my face. What I am supposed to be thinking about? A house? Two and a half children? A nice quiet family plot on a hill down at the graveyard?

TITTIES TITTIES TITTIES.

FUCK.

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Yahoo,

Thank you for taking the time to review my resume. In addition, I have attached transcriptions of some of my most recent games on your online Yahoo Chess server. I believe that my ability and skill as an analyst and strategist in the games section of Yahoo.com will demonstrate that I'm a perfect fit with your company. It is worth noting, before you review this material, that I lost every time. The real strategy lies in the chat transcripts that accompany each game.

I played under the fake name Trish Highsmith, and when pressed for information about myself I supplied intriguing but vague details. I pretended to be a fourteen-year-old lesbian. Some days I claimed to have relationship problems. I pretended to be a girl who was learning to play chess so that she could beat her girlfriend at the game. I could have said anything, as long as I was a girl. I figured people would be more likely to give me pointers if I were a lady. Instead, things got out of hand.

Trish_Highsmith: I'm the bass player in a band, and I'm thinking of studying the philosophy of history at the graduate level. What can we know? Are there degrees of certainty about our beliefs regarding the past? Is direct observation the only truth we have? I refuse to believe that. Is history just a joke? I just don't know what to think.

RNorth_dinocok: Do you have a boyfriend?
RNorth_dinocok: What color are your underwears?

RNorth_dinocok: What do you look like?
RNorth_dinocok: You seem really nice.

or

Trish _Highsmith: That was an awful move! Sorry, I am practising my openings, and sometimes I worry too much about making the move I remember instead of watching where you're moving and taking that into consideration.

MSaturday_Stud_Stud: What do your undies look like?
MSaturday_Stud_Stud: Show me your pussy.
MSaturday_Stud_Stud: Checkmate.

Actually, halfway through writing this email, I realized there is no connection between strategy and my actions. These transcriptions don't show my skill as an analyst. On reflection, they show only that I like to pretend to be a girl on Yahoo Chess so I can talk dirty with other men.