Overqualified (4 page)

Please hire me?

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Financial Services Firm,

Thank you for taking the time to review my application for a position conducting telephone surveys for your company. My resume lists my recent professional work in the field, but the formal structure of a resume doesn't provide room to discuss the personal nature of my first experiences with telephone surveys.

When I was eight years old I began to experiment with crank calling. A staple of mine was, “Hello, is your refrigerator running?” and then, “Well you'd better go and catch it!” I did not invent this joke. I did invent: “Hello. You fuck dogs!”

When the boys at school began to talk about sex, I felt stupid. I had no idea what they were talking about. So I called a number at random. A woman answered.

“Hello?”

“Is your refrigerator running?”

“It is,” she said.

“What's a clitoris?”

There are some questions a dictionary can't answer. The Internet could have told me what a clitoris was. I don't think any definition would have explained quite what Jeff meant
when he wiggled his fingers as he said it. People will always be our best source of information. Anyway, I'm not legally allowed to call strangers anymore. But if I worked for you, it would be okay again!

“Hello, I'm calling on behalf of Financial Services Firm. Do you have a moment for a couple of questions? Do you ever worry that maybe you don't have as much time as you thought? What about the things you haven't done yet? I don't mean kayaking or bungee jumping. I mean the girl with the dark glasses and the facial tattoo on the subway. I mean the woman who guides tours at the museum who has the crazy perfect laugh. I mean that man in my building who seems to carry his hockey stick everywhere. I have a girlfriend, Susan, and I love her. But it drives me crazy to see them and to know that I can't touch them. I won't ever be surprised by them. Do you get this way?”

Anyway, I could ask the questions that you wanted as well!

Joey Comeau

Dear Hallmark,

Mother's Day is fine, I guess. Except some people have lost their mothers. And some people have lost their fathers. Not everyone has family. You want a holiday with wider appeal. Well, we all have strangers on the edges of our lives. We can all be secret admirers.

Look around the next time you're at the mall. Or look online. Social networking sites. The Internet is full of people to secretly admire. I went online this morning and fell in love a dozen times.

There's a girl who makes detailed maps of her neighbourhood and she knows a boy who hates Allen Ginsberg — except for one line that he thinks is perfect. He has crooked eyes and takes all these pictures of balls bouncing. That is his obsession, bouncing rubber balls. He knows a girl who, in every picture, is pulling her shirt up to show off her belly. Every picture. “What's up? A camera? Yeah yeah. Let me get my belly out.” She looks so happy just to be here. She knows a trashy girl in a tank top, wearing a little too much makeup, who is out drinking with her sorority friends in every picture. This girl has bleached blonde hair and only one interest:
Carnival of Souls
(1962).

What ever happened to secret admirers? Are they just stalkers now? If you notice someone, if you pay too much attention, that's weird. All of a sudden you're that guy who sits on the bench in the mall, right in front of the store
where she works, staring inside all day. Or, worse, you're the guy who keeps going in. The guy with the Orange Julius who keeps saying, “I'm just browsing.”

But I've never been able to just walk up to a pretty girl and start talking. My brother used to do that. Charm was his specialty. The closest I can come is writing notes. I write notes to strangers while my girlfriend is at work.

“You have the best laugh I have ever heard. The only thing I know about you is that you work with maps and you always take the second straw from the dispenser — I do that too!”

You need a new holiday, Hallmark.

International Stalker Day.

Joey Comeau

Dear Aliant Zinc,

I am writing to apply for the position of bookkeeper. Attached, you will find my resume, and a list of my qualifications. I have been keeping books for four years now, and I am never going to give them back.

The first book I ever kept was
A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder.
A lady friend lent the book to me just after we'd met, when we were first exposing our tastes to one another. She smiled, handed me the book and said, “These words will change the way you think about your life,” or something like that. I don't really remember. I just remember the way that book felt in my hand. It belonged there.

When I was a child I had a mild case of obsessive- compulsive disorder, and this feeling was like that. It was satisfying the way counting the hairs on the other children during naptime was satisfying. It was like a nail being driven into a board.

When a week had gone by, my lady friend asked, “Have you finished with my book yet?”

I shook my head. “No,” I said, “but I'm finished with you.”

That was how it started. That was the beginning of my library. Keeping books became so much more satisfying than orgasms had ever been. Adding to my bookshelves was more exciting than ridiculous underwear or clumsy sexual innuendo. Every girl would lend me a book or two, and I
would slide it onto my bookshelf and write them a polite note.

“Lisa, please do not stop by anymore.”

“Allison, no thanks.”

After a few months, I realized that I needed a second bookshelf. My collection was growing rapidly. Whenever I talked to my mother, she wanted to talk about my fear of commitment. She was worried, she said, that I had been acting differently since my brother's death. She said I was always running from women who were perfect for me.

But romance was Adrian's thing. There won't be twenty sobbing girls at my funeral, none of them looking at one another, each clutching a handkerchief.

“Well, what was wrong with that pretty girl with the punk rock hair?” my mother said. “She seemed nice enough.”

“She owned every single Tom Clancy novel,” I said. “But love doesn't last forever.”

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Airwalk,

Sometimes it feels good to fall off your skateboard. It hurts like a fucker, and your body aches and you can't stop smiling.

Sometimes it feels good to go out and skate and climb and run until you're exhausted, miles away from home. You didn't plan on ending up somewhere so far away. You just did what your body wanted.

I've started to take disasters as good omens, like the death card in tarot decks. I've started to read the newspaper like people read chicken bones. Somewhere in that mess, you can tell the future. Where did they find her body? On the second floor? Don't invest in any new business opportunities this week. A bomb went off in the subway north of the main line, not south. That's a good sign. The death count was an odd number. Now is the time for a new love in your life.

I want a piece of everything today. Do you get like this? I feel sure that every stranger would be the perfect surprise in bed. Out of nowhere they would spit in my face, would mention Patricia Highsmith. They would smile at the exact wrong moment and that moment would be all I remembered. I've been meeting people's eyes on the street. I've been writing pornography to be read out loud. I want to wear a sign all the time around my neck that says, “Yes.”

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Greenpeace,

I have been thinking about sex. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. It's almost September, and soon fall will be here. I don't know what you're doing today, but maybe you would rather be thinking about sex, too. This morning I woke up and remembered an embarrassing sex story. Everyone has embarrassing sex stories, I hope.

My girlfriend Susan and I were in bed together, masturbating. We had just met. Everything was exciting and terrible. She was on her back, naked, touching herself, and I was above her, mostly naked, doing the same. I was eighteen or nineteen years old, and all I could think about was coming on her breasts. You know, like on the Internet. I think, probably, I was saying something to that effect. I wasn't mentioning the Internet, of course, but I was saying, “I'm going to come on you. I'm going to come on you.”

I'm classy like that.

I don't remember how she felt about the whole coming-on-her idea, actually, but I can tell you that I was very excited about it. I was almost lying on top of her. I was leaned forward so far. So when I felt my orgasm coming, I looked down between us to watch for the come shot.

I came in my own eye. It was like a 3D movie gone terribly wrong, and it stung. I started clawing at my face. Susan laughed and laughed while I tried frantically to wipe my eye
clean. She was curled up naked on the bed, laughing so hard there were tears. I started laughing too. I couldn't help it. We both laughed until it hurt, until the muscles in our cheeks were sore from smiling, and then we looked up at her ceiling, on our backs, exhausted. For the rest of that afternoon, every once in a while one of us would start laughing again and then so would the other.

I thought about that after we fought tonight. I get so confused in my head. I almost left her, but that isn't what I want. I want to sleep with other women, yes, but I want Susan, too. She is strong and sexy and just as surprising as those strangers. I don't want them instead of her. Maybe there is a way I can have both. I don't know. I do know that this love is important.

When the end comes, when the ice caps melt and the seas boil and the sky falls, I won't want to be hiding in some stranger's bathroom.

I will want Susan's hand in mine.

Yours truly,

Joey Comeau

Dear Sirs or Madams!

I hope you will consider me for a position with Nova Magnetics. My resume details my experience with magnet technical sales, but I would like to take some time to explain my other qualifications as well. When I was a child I accidentally swallowed a small kitten-shaped fridge magnet. It's still inside me, lodged in my intestine somewhere, and I hope to God that it stays there. It gives me special powers.

Do you know anyone who can see perfectly in the dark? Cats can do it. Owls. Heck, my little brother had abnormally good night vision, God rest his soul. But do you know anyone who goes completely blind if the sun even goes behind a cloud?

Well you do now.

And that's the least of my powers — I have others. For example, I have a form of ESP that allows me to consistently pick losing lottery numbers, and generally make poor life choices. I consistently make poor life choices. I had a shirt made up that says, “I consistently make poor life choices.” The shirt was not very popular. I can come up with unpopular t-shirt slogans on the spot.

“Kiss me, I have no night vision.”

“This womb drops babies!”

And, my least popular shirt, “Threesome?”

I wore this one on a date with my girlfriend, Susan. The date did not go well.

“Come on,” I said.

“Nope,” she said.

I am not a freak because I want to sleep with two chicks at the same time. That is perfectly normal! I am a freak because there is a magnet shaped like a kitten stuck inside me. I would love to discuss this position further. Please call. I am free all the time now.

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Hallmark,

Thank you for taking the time to review my greeting card ideas.

Idea #1

Front cover is a to-do list, scrawled on a notepad. The text reads: “Do dishes. Pick up light bulbs. Tell my lady that she means the world to me.” Inside text: “Apologize for pressuring her into a threesome.”

Idea #2

Front cover is a picture of a puppy dog with big, sad eyes. A Golden Retriever, maybe. Some breed that everyone loves, something vulnerable. The text on the front reads: “You think love has to last forever for it to be real. You think it isn't true love unless it lasts until one of us is dead.” Inside text: “That isn't love. That's dog fighting.”

Idea #3

Front cover is a pretty butterfly, pinned under glass. The text reads, “I love you.” There is no inside text.

Yours,

Joey Comeau

Dear Easy Rider Tours,

I am writing to submit my application for the position of bicycle tour guide, and I am including my resume for your review. It outlines my years of experience with leading tours in general, and with leading bicycle tours in particular. I look forward to lending my individual brand of tour innovation to your company.

The chance to lead a tour of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island is an exciting opportunity for me. For years I have been developing a set of specialized theme tours of these two great provinces, and the chance to implement them with busloads of unsuspecting tourists is like a gift from heaven.

I know that it's difficult to assess potential tours based simply on a description, and so I have prepared a mock script of my “Nova Scotia Tour of Joey's Ex-lovers,” even though I feel it would be better to work unscripted — to maintain a level of spontaneity tourists would likely appreciate. Here is a small sampling of the planned tour.

Stop number one: I never thought it would be like this.

“Coming up on the left, we find the bakery where my very first girlfriend works. Laura. When we were fourteen, we both got really drunk and had sex. Raised, as I was, with a strong sense of religious virtue, I stumbled out of her house, crying. I never thought . . . hang on, here she is.”

At this point I pull the megaphone out of my bag.

“HOW ARE YOU TODAY, HARLOT? OFF TO STEAL THE INNOCENCE OF ANOTHER CONFUSED CHILD? YOU WILL BURN IN HELL FOR WHAT YOU DID TO ME!”

I am hoping she won't laugh at me again.

Stop number six: Maybe if you shaved your legs?