Why I Left You

I was about 20 when I entered Job Corps. I didn't know much about the program at the time. All I know is they train you for a couple of months, give you a place to stay, and hand you a little over $1000 dollars to start your life off when you complete it. That's all I needed to know. No matter what they had me doing there, in upstate New York, it couldn't be any worse than being down here, poor and restless in Brooklyn. At the time, I lived in a one bedroom, basement apartment with my grandmother and uncle. My uncle got the one and only bedroom, leaving my grandmother and I to sleep in the tiny cramped living room that seemed to always be overcome with roaches and water bugs. My grandmother was clean, and I was hardly in the apartment enough to make much of a mess. But a hot basement in Brooklyn was automatically going to be the beloved chill spot of the roaches. Especially if the owner of the house wasn't as neat and wanted to act as if they had never heard of "Terminex" or one of those extermination places. My family and I didn't always live in such conditions. Just about a year ago, we lived in a beautiful 5-bedroom home with a finished basement and everything, but lost it all in the housing collapse, and now we are here. I really wanted to move out and get my own place, even if it was just to rent a room somewhere like my mother did. But unfortunately, I had just gotten "downsized" from a job working for an art store in the city. I'd been working as a buyer doing tons of paper work, vendor interviews, shipping problems, merchandise orders, but I was still making the same $8.50 an hour I'd been making as a phone operator, which was the job I'd been initially hired for. I'd been demanding a raise for a few months, but the blond lady I was working for would tell me "In another month, we're working on it." After a few months of this, I was beginning to lose my patience. I know that many businesses may have been struggling in those post-9/11 days. But judging by the quantities of orders we had to place and shipments of merchandise, I had to make sure came through the little art store wasn't doing too badly. Furthermore, I was doing the same amount of work as people in the department, except they were making about $15+ an hour and I was making bus fare. I decided then that since they were gonna pay me like I'm ignorant, I would act the part. I'd punch in for work, then go with a home girl to K-mart to go shopping. Or we'd go out for a long lunch and browse around and buy stuff. Every now and then, I wouldn't come to work until 11 or 12 o'clock, because I just had to see who was and was NOT the father on the "Maury" show. When my bosses confronted me and did their little scare tactics, I'd simply say to them, "You payin' me $8.50. I'll do $8.50 work". I definitely wasn't scared about them firin' me. They could get some other dummy to sit in this chair from 9 to 5 placing orders, talking to assholes, and deciphering mountains and mountains of paperwork till their eyes went cross. I was not the one. On second thought, I wasn't downsized, I was just fired. Truth be told, I'm surprised they kept me as long as they did. I was going at this for months before they finally let me go. I was having too much fun at this job. Who wouldn't? I spent a big chunk of the day shopping and f*****g with my boss. I figured that a dummy who'd work this hard for 8.50 an hour wasn't easy to find, so they kept me around hoping I'd go back to working like I did the first month, when I was still stupidly confident I'd get a raise. In any case, that job was over, and I needed to find a place to live. The basement just wasn't working any more and even though I'd spent a lot of time hanging out in the city with my pack, going to parties with my friends, or just chilling by their house, the reality of what I had to come back to just wasn't poppin' no more. What happened at the art store shook me up a little. It seemed to me that they were really trying play me for a fool, and I wondered if perhaps, had I finished college and gotten a degree, things would have been different. Though I'm sure most of the other assistant buyers weren't college grads, some probably were. All I asked was to get treated fairly, at least 10 dollars an hour, and I'd wait and work my way up for the rest. But I was a young African American female with no degree. I wasn't hard to replace. They could go to the welfare office and find someone to do this job for even less than what they paid me. That thought sealed the deal. I'd check out this Job Corps thing. Get some kinda training under my belt and a better place to stay. Then I'd get over a grand to help me get my first Crib. It sure sounded like a good deal to me. Before I knew it, I had signed up and was on a bus heading just east of west bubblefuck, to some place I had never heard of, to a system I knew nothing about. When I got to the center, I realized I had signed myself up for prison camp. It wasn't a hard type of prison camp, but sort of a "Camp Cupcake" soft Prison Camp kinda deal. I saw people walking around in "uniforms", which looked like the kinda uniforms they give people in jail. The dorm rooms were cramped and small, and we all had to share them with roommates. And I may have been a little rough around the edges, but some of these people looked like they had criminal records already, even though we were all high school/college age. My desperation to get out of roach city may have caused me to sign on the dotted line too quickly. But now I am here a very, very long way from home. And as the "inmates" of this prison camp started circling us...I realized I may have bitten off more than I could chew...