Some notes on the particulars:

• I’m living at home and temping to make money to travel by land to Cuzco so I can hit the third letter along the alphabet of cities (I’ve already lived in Austin and a few months ago I returned home from Boston).

• A forty-five minute commute out to the corporationally enriched fields of Central New Jersey.

• A Corporate Park consisting of many three-story football-field-long rectangles that seem to have arisen naturally from the Garden States' once-productive and flat farms.

• A building favorably decorated gray–the walls are patterned with little black, gray, and white specks that resemble a magic-eye poster's surface abstraction that camouflages, or more accurately, allows for a three-dimensional illusion of something usually long-extinct to appear to a viewer who's perfected a focusless stare. When I stare at the walls I just look stoned.

The receptionist's face is scarred with acne-divots. She's not unattractive, blond bangs dyed over stringy brown hair, glasses, thin, a sloucher, drives a VW Jetta with the Trek logo on the rear so I know she has a mountain bike at home. I didn't even say hello to her for the first few days because I wanted to assert through silence a separation between myself and my fellow temporary-telemercenary Barry.

We were taking a break, passing the receptionist's desk for a smoke-break, and in his super-deep commercial pilot / movie-phone bellow, he asked me if I knew who had the best job in the world?

I said no.

The receptionist was on Barry's left. I was on his right. As he whirls from speaking to me and pounces toward the receptionist, pounding the hairy edges of his hands on the ledge of her tall 340 degrees-encircling desk of polished black marble, practically causing the sign-in book to juggle the pen-scrawled appointments just from fear and shock–he yells she does!

I muttered something. In times of great displays of uncoolness, in times of massive, almost aggressive, extrovertuosity–when someone so openly defies proper demeanor in pursuit of someone saying behind his back–yeah that Barry's a helluva guy–I, like the mild-mannered mountain-biking receptionist, play it as cool as a decapitated statue, or what I actually do is relax my eyes so it seems as if I haven't slept for a pay-period. I muttered something about how I was a receptionist at Xerox for awhile and I know it's hard to maintain an honest hello-how-are-you-I'm-fine smile for eight hours.

We step outside and Barry is non-plussed. He's checking himself out in the tinted windows. He's as big as me. Almost. His hair's thinning. He's showing me the holes in his belt.

"See this one here. This hole was where I was before the summer. But I've been working so hard I only eat when I can. I'm down to this hole. It's an uncomfortable weight for me. My clothes are baggy. I feel scrawny."

The poor guy's chubby. He has a thick, pendulous, bestubbled neck. His belly hangs over the thin leather belt he's making me focus on. He says he wants to gain at least fifteen pounds. I imagine the added girth will drop his voice below the audible range. He'll speak and you'll only feel the bass of his voice resound in your rib cage. When I ask him to say in his greatest basso profundo sign-song: if you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, press one now–he doesn't know what I'm talking about.

Barry's a professional telemarketer. After a long day of swinging bookmarks he goes to his evening job and listens-in on and critiques other cold-calling telemarketers. There must be a term for our sort of telemarketing–I think it's called call-in because it's not cold, the numbers we call have been contacted long ago. Then Barry comes in the next morning and while on a smoke break says how easy his other job is–a smoke break every hour and all he has to do is listen to telemarketers telemarket.

Years ago, I used to berate my employment. I used to say things like . . . if I spent eight hours a day drawing circles, after two or three weeks or even months, I would draw spectacularly neat little circles. If I spent the whole time working doing push-ups, I would be wrought of steel. Instead I'd waste the day and go home exhausted more from the psychological stress of a job that can't even support a frugal youth in a cold expensive city in which probably fifteen-percent of everyone's income goes to oil-heat or all the other typical alternatives to wearing heavy sweaters and scarves in the kitchen with the oven door open as an alternative to freezing to death. Years past, I used to berate my employment–now the temporary world has opened up my eyes praise-be-to-heaven to a world from which I am apart.

But nobody knows about the distance between myself and everything I see.

I am Telem1.

My voice resounds across the country.

Hear me make seventy calls before lunch.

Hear me enter into vigorous debate with Principal Homer Doty of Lake Charles, Louisiana.

Hear me bullseye the loophole.

See: the reason all of this is extraordinarily interesting to me. The reason you're reading this. Or at least the reason your guide is presenting this as a path to saunter down to witness the wonders that've appeared to me. Is this: we're offering these snazzy glossy full-color bookmarks to middle school students. The bookmarks advertise Bubbilicious' new flavor of chewing gum called Kickin' Cola. It's a benign advertisement. It's designed to encourage oral fixations. Gum chewing. Spouting big words. But it's school. And school's arch-enemy is gum.

When your parents are around, you can't fight, or walk around naked, or curse, or go around sticking your pre-adolescent tongues into the exposed and alluring folds of the ears of your most nubile playmates. Your parents may even toss you a two-centimeters-by-one-half-centimeter rectangle of some generic brand of cinnamon, or spearmint, sugar-free, no-stick, impossible-to-blow-a-bubble gum. But in school even this gum's outlawed. And as we all know from its competition with such brands as Bubble Yum and Hubba Bubba, Bubbilicious is a wedge with conspicuous sugar crystals all about helping chewers blow bubbles that, when popped, endanger the chewer with a sticky smothering facial. And so the twin evils of gum chewing and advertising are fused into one intruding Trojan horse of a vibrant, full-color bookmark. A free gift from Bubbilicious to America's middle schools to encourage students to record any words they've discovered while reading. When principals object, I say I understand. I do. But because the marketing team had such go for it on fourth-and-ten type cajones–OR bring a kryptonite vase to the Man of Steel's house warming party–OR give a powerful fan and an uncovered pail of Mt. St. Helens volcanic ash to a compulsive duster–you know what I mean–because the marketing team tried to give a free space heater to a hypochondriac snowman–I was all-over-it.

When I was introduced to my user name and password, I noticed the Bubbilicious script tucked beneath the keyboard, and I seriously felt a wave of pleasure proceed from my scalp down to the small of my back, then split to trickle down my hips and meet for one joyous moment to primp the cilia of my family-jewels, then divide again on an electrifying path down my ever-sensitive thighs. All this unrestrained response just because the winds of the temporary worker's world had blown the egotourist to the shores of paradox and orality. A land at the mercy of Poseidon. Where my password is outbound. Where I have carved in the computerized notes in large capitals things like SPOKE TO PRINCIPAL ANOLE WHO'LL GET BACK TO US THIS AFTERNOON. Where I am known as Telem1.

Barry is Telem7. His last name is Shonenfeld. Over the course of our one week of intersecting employment paths, he changes his name at least six times. First he changes Barry to Gary. Then Gary to Mark. Then Shonefeld to Seinfeld. Then Seinfeld to Davis. For awhile he's saying: hello this is Gary Seinfeld–and then the next time I hear his deep HI THERE–which must be an effective telemarketing technique . . . what with him being a telemarketing-critic and all–it's followed by: "Hi there, my name's Mark Davis." Next time I see him I'm like, "Barry, I mean Gary, I mean Mark–yo, yo, what's up with the desemiticazation, baby? I mean what's with this All-American goy-boy alias? I think the problem here, Barry, is that you're suffering from an identity crisis. What with you being a critic of effective telemarketing, you're turning the blade of your critique against your own telemarketing, you're suffering from a breakdown that's seriously impairing your sense of self."

Barry booms, "Well actually I'm just doing this for the money to support my flying. I'm really a pilot. If you ever want to go for a ride I'll take you. I don't own a plane but if a bunch of people split the costs, it's pretty cheap to rent one for a few hours."

I ask if he ever divebombs hot-air balloons.

His eyes alight wistfully, "No. But dog-fighting's the best."

I ask if he ever drops little homemade explosives on the inner-cities.

He sort of ignores the question and saunters back to his cubicle to carry on the telemarketing crusade and repress his struggle with identity.

I flip over the script I've rewritten. I've revised the script so that the gum element is minimized and the vocabulary builder, the incentive to learn big words, is maximized, and my whole schpiel sounds less like a typical telemarketing long-winded pitch and more like a batting practice lob that sets up the principal to give me a verbal–an agreement to receive the shipment of absolutely free bookmarks. I flip over the script I've rewritten and write a little kabbalistic reverie about a radical subset of the Judaic Aviation Club called the Cessna Angels that's responsible for the bombed-out look of our inner-cities. They fly around on night-raids and drop mozel-tov cocktails they brew and bottle in bathtubs out of Manischevitz and chlorine so that when dropped on some dirt-poor urban rowhouse the bottle explodes in just about as many shards of shrapnel as the name of God has syllables. I write this out on the back of my script and then get back to threading the needle of bookmark distribution.

At one point I realize this is the dream job for all those with serious oral fixations. All I have to do all day is chew gum, drink coffee, and talk incessantly on the phone. At one point I take a survey of the pen caps in the ten telemarking cubicles in our area: in six cubicles I find incredibly twisted victims of severe and excessive mastication. Pen caps chewed beyond recognition. At one point I make a joke about what kind of job this would be if it attracted the anally-fixated and what props would be incorporated into their business ritual etc.

My supervisor said that all of the anally-fixated have good jobs as analysts.

Barry and I are the only temps working on the Bubbilicious Bookmark Program. The salaried folk are all women busy with some IBM account that I hear wafting cacophonously over the grid of gray cubicles. Our supervisor is great. She's divorced, has a few kids, a few of which are my age and trying to act in Hollywood. She's really pleasant or at least has a muffled cackle and a sense of humor and asks questions about our lives and when I tell her about how I plan to live along the alphabet of cities and I tell her I'm actually not crazy, she says that it's amusing. She paints. An abstract expressionist like my mother the post-menopausalist. On my lunch break I lay in the grass just in front of my old, rust-eaten Subaru wagon's fender, pull my pant legs up to the knee to sun my shins for half-an-hour, spoon a nice melon into my mouth, and try to read Proust without losing the train of a sentence about a bottle lowered in a stream to catch tadpoles. She comes up. Pat. Bumming a match to chainsmoke Marlboro lights. She interrupts and we talk about literature for awhile. I talk about how Kerouac bit Proust. And then how I like to use hip-hop inflected Ebonics when talking about high literature to drop the pretension factor–although I'm sure the effect relates inversely to the intention.

Then we're talking about generations. How they showed films in the early '60s about bad girls with skirts just below the knee and ankle bracelets and how it was pretty easy to rebel against something so obviously constrictive. How now if you tattoo your entire body with corporate logos and solder a plastic swastika onto your dyed hot-pink head of hair, or pierce your temples with an arrow, you aren't rebelling at all. She says that's the covert plan of her generation–to make it so that rebellion is so played-out it's more counter-cultural to be counter-revolutionary. She stood above me–her taut stocking'd calves balancing on white hi-heels aerating the grass. A striking vision of corporate-avant.

I could spend the rest of this vignette on our lunch time conversations. How in the 60s, out of a group of a hundred hepcats, maybe only two were legit and the rest were just style-fuckers copping the moves of someone copping the moves of some sort of generational composite. But now that originality's morphed into appropriation, everyone's taking a taste of this and a smidgen of that and making an internal collage of personality that's personalized with regard to the selection but rarely is someone encountered who doesn't remind you of anyone in their selections or doesn't fit one of the many shrink-wrapped categories or types of people–someone who can't be defined by who advertises to them.

I say, "Long live the syndicate of my collective demographic!"

And to whom would it be better to market a new flavor of half-inch-by-half-inch juicy squares of chewing satisfaction called Kickin' Cola to than all the unsuspecting intermediate schools of our great nation. Kids on roller blades, with posters of Shaq at home, dark sunglasses, baggy jeans, striped shirts, and walkmans playing Collective Soul.

After awhile we switch over to writtens. All the verbals are logged into the computer. Now we do call backs. After they gave us the verbal we fax them an information packet that includes an agreement form they have to fax back to us to receive the bookmarks. Lots of people agreed but didn't comply with our instructions to fax back the written. And so as our quota of 400,000 bookmarks distributed draws near, Pat's got us on the horn rapid-fire dialing and asking for the principals–if they're not there then don't leave a message or say you'll call back and on to the next one. ABC–Always Be Closing. Pat's got Barry and me whipped-up into a fury. We only need five more calls verified and then we're done. The excitement level's high. As high as at a kitchen when a restaurant is slammed on the weekends after a home game. Barry yells out, "I got one!" Then I get one. Then Pat. Then Barry again! One more. Just one more. Pat must have got it because she's congratulating us, shaking our hands, saying we were good, and asking us to produce our time cards so she can sign them.

It's over.

A quick axe falls in the temporary world.

"Just like that," I say while filling in my hours.

"Just like that," says Pat sitting up on my desk.

It's three o'clock on a Tuesday. Pat escorts us to the door and inhales one last cylinder of rank carcinogen with us. Barry's saying he's gonna miss this place. Good people here. I'm saying we're the Hessians of the telemarketing revolution.

I ask Pat what will become of Telem1.

She says you'll always be Telem1 for those seven days you filled in the notes and the fields as Telem1.

I tell Pat that I appreciate her sensitivity especially at a time like this. Terminated.

Barry tight-shortedly saunters away after firm handshakes. Pat and I puff. She walks me to my electric-blue Subaru. She says thanks for your help and maybe I'll see you someday.

I want to give her a hug. But that would be unprofessional.

And so I drive to the record store, buy all the new Fall music, buy a six of Dock Street Pale Ale, drive to a friend's apartment complex to sit and wait for him, read, drink beer, read the liner notes of the new records–all in an attempt to shave the edge off the sharp mechanics of the wheels that just, temporarily, spit me out of the telemarketing sea into the vast unknowable ocean no longer served by Poseidon or ranged by Telem1–at least not by this Telem1.

And then, for a second, I realize that I left my revised script at my desk. I consider driving back but now I have beer breath. I'm worried that they'll read the little fantasy about the radical subset of the Judaic Aviation Club. It's just a spell of anxiety that passes. I realize it's not the script that I want. But, for a few moments, what I want is a secure income to ensure that in at least a month I can get the hell out of this crazy country before I come to love it too much to leave.