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It’s an inescapable fact that for the majority of us, sometimes, work sucks.
It’s hardly news that for the post-boomer generations, fulfilling, lifelong, sustaining careers are far harder fought than ever before. And entry-level jobs often lead nowhere, trapping workers in an endless game of Whack-a-Mole, chasing a paycheck that rarely, if ever, earns the type of success that would bring them comfort, much less a livable wage.
Rex Marshall’s new memoirella published May 1, All the Jobs I Never Wanted (Banana Pitch Press, 128 pages, $15), unpacks Marshall’s search for work that fulfills both heart and mind (as well as his bank account—good luck). Through Marshall’s lens, work is rarely more than a means to an end—but in reality, there’s a little more to it than that. On the one hand, Marshall is developing the character that will eventually land him a prosperous career at the Portland State University Library, but he’s also collecting the stories that make up this debut.
Marshall’s narrative has a very era-specific voice, capturing not only the author’s long string of low-wage gigs but also the energy of the working-age male through the late ’80s and into the early ’00s. In this way, All the Jobs I Never Wanted acts as a counterbalance to the subsequent rise (and absurd nature) of hustle culture, the crippling instability of low-wage work, and the fleeting impossibility of fiscal independence.
Marshall’s thread weaves tales of his grandfather’s 80-plus-year tenure at a glass factory with reflections on his own brief dalliances with jobs as a hotel bellboy, a newspaper delivery driver, a laborer, a quality controller, and as a McDonald’s staffer whose border crossing from Vegas to Eugene, Oregon, sealed his rep as one of the most competent team members that particular Golden Arches ever did see. (A humblebrag hates to see Rex Marshall coming.)
The highs and lows of Marshall’s workplace lore wind around grisly maimings, toxic revenge plots, the vicious machismo of the male-dominated blue-collar workplace, and even harrowing tales of what is so coldly referred to in our national lexicon as illegal immigration (rather than the immigration of essential workers). Marshall sometimes comes off as a minor character in his memoir, which in many places reads as a close examination of America’s working class.
Between the lines of interpersonal true tales of workplace malaise, strife, terror and hilarity, a metalayer emerges. Marshall’s stories continually challenge the American notion of the pursuit of happiness, as many of the personalities that rotate around Marshall’s narrative nucleus exist in a sort of struggle-stasis. Marshall’s work, rather than poetically explaining the defeatism around American ideas of work, calls them out plainly. Readers sit in Marshall’s experience, parsing through the alienation, stress, and societal judgment that come part and parcel with low-wage work, which Marshall somehow balances with a modicum of grace—never really straying too far away from the emotionality of wanting to love life while hoping not to hate work.
As a memoirella—the pioneering genre Salem-based Banana Pitch Press has made its focus—All the Jobs I Never Wanted lands precisely as it should. The style Marshall employs calls to mind punk-rock zine culture of the ’90s, with a tone and tenor that bleeds grungy softboi trapped in a world of gritty hard men (a Portland archetype if there ever was one). For younger Gen Xers, Xennials and elder millennials, the rhythm of Marshall’s work will likely land with a soothing familiarity; Marshall was realizing the truths about American economics at the same time many of us were, and his unfurling of the experience is so relatable it’s almost uncanny.
A quick read at a concise 120-ish pages, All the Jobs I Never Wanted is less for the beach and more of a lunch-break reprieve. From flipping burgers to avoiding fisticuffs with burly warehouse bros to melting down over plasma donation gone horrifyingly wrong, there is a bit of each of our stories in this memoir. Because if nothing else unites us, let it be all these fuckass bills that never let up, and those crapass jobs that refuse to keep up with them.
SEE IT: Rex Marshall appears in conversation with Michelle Kicherer at Literary Arts, 716 SE Grand Ave., 503-227-2583, literary-arts.org/event. 6:30–8 pm May 19. Free.
