C.J. MacLeod
Albuquerque, NM

C.J. MacLeod is a commissioned furniture salesperson in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is working on a huge still life series, paints commissions for people of themselves, their pets, and what have you. She paints plein air every season except summer. Her un-boyfriend says he wants to still be friends with her for all their lives, until one or the other of them dies.

How May I Help You?

I painted New Mexico skies and landscapes in my Toronto studio from reference photos. I had a show of paintings called “ Santa Fe”. My place was total southwest colors – purple, yellow, turquoise a glistening wet red orange on the inside of the kitchen cabinets, red orange knobs. I hung chili ristras in the dining room, and affixed stamped tin plates purchased in Albuquerque onto every light switch and electrical outlet. All I was missing in my created dreamworld was vigas, coyote fences, cottonwoods and the sleeping beauty blue skies, blue as the turquoise I wear on my wrists and fingers.

October, 1998 found me painting outdoors under the great blue New Mexico sky every day. I was attending a plein air workshop. And I met someone. And he said, you can’t paint from photos in your safety zone two thousand miles away. And he said, come live with me and be an artist.

I moved to Taos the following month. I planned to teach oil painting to absolutely beginners, writhe my second novel – this one would be about painting – paint, give workshops on following your dreams, publish a newsletter about how to mend your life by finding the courage to create, and have such a variety of bread and butter cash cow income streams that I could kick away the very notion of a day job: permanently remove the training wheels on that bicycle. I had been riding fettered too long.

My dream man backed out of the “live with me” part, and the easy transition I planned did not materialize. I found lodging with a pastel artist in half a doublewide trailer.

We paid $700 a month rent plus utilities, and found it expedient to leave the heat off. Fortunately, I am a prolific quilt maker. I slept on the floor on to of quilts, and under quilts, like a homeless bag lady sleeping in an alley.

One of the people in my painting class owned a bed and breakfast. I asked her for a job. The next day, I was a maid. Knock of the door, “housekeeping”. Puzzle over the lack of tips in the rooms. Drag the vacuum cleaner over gravel. Look forward to leftover breakfast, then be told you can’t have breakfast. There isn’t enough. And there isn’t enough time. Worry about being paid, when they don’t pay you on payday. Insist. Even though she gets really mad at you. Seventy five dollars. Your paycheck. The women and her husband leave on their Christmas holidays. Janey is in charge. Janey as not been paid. The owners never return. They have stolen Janey’s box of antique silver jewelry. Old pawn. Squash blossoms.

My second maid job was arranged by a friend of a friend. Again, heavy sheets to haul to the laundry room. Who would notice sheets are heavy, until you carry them across the parking lot every day. Throw the trash. Work to a fifteen minute deadline for each room. It’s not like cleaning house at home, where you have all day if you want it. Be scolded by the head of housekeeping for a lone pubic hair concealed under the hinge of the toilet seat. Be amazed at the absence of tips in the room. “People don’t tip much anymore”, the head says. Scarf up abandoned pizza left behind. Walk to work on a grey Sunday in February and find your name erased off the schedule. They couldn’t have called, save me the walk?

I leave. Walk out on the desert past WalMart. I pick up gnarled old wood for the crossed I make on a workbench I dragged in from the backyard at the trailer. I ask the universe, God. How am I to live without work? I hear the whoosh of ravens’ wings overhead. In the stillness, the answer comes...”This is your work”.

I get a job at KFC. Cleaning tables. Carrying huge bags of greasy grease chicken bones out to the bins in the back, behind a fence. Half empty sodas make the bag heavy. The bag leaks soda down the back of my leg, I also clean outside, do windows. Pick up cigarette butts the staff throws on the greasy rocks out the back door when they go on breaks. Hose off the red mud on the parking lot.

And I paint. Paint the sunset, the mountains, the cottonwoods, the adobe houses. I feel blessed, the most blessed of all people. My life is hard. I feel more alive than I gave in years, maybe ever. The pastel artist says, “You paint fast”, resentfully, as if there is something wrong with my art, for being fast.

My crosses sell. My other plans conflict with everyone else in Taos. Seems we all came to this art colony is not inclusive and inviting. What did I think? Is this not the reason it took me so long to jump off here?

A friend tells me Taos is the largest unfenced insane asylum in the world. I believe her. How insane do you have to be to move to a place with no jobs, poor as Appalachia?

I get a job at WalMart. Five-fifty an hour. The shifts I work change every week. It is hard to make plans, develop a routine. This loose fluid lack of structure is deeply upsetting. I am a Virgo. I thrive on orderliness, knowing what tot expect. (So why did I create a life for myself as a painter, for the love of God?) When the computer printout of the week’s schedule is posted, I copy down the days and hours. I think they jerk us around so we can’t get second jobs. One day the CM tells me I didn’t show up for my shift. I argue that I am here as assigned. I go to show her my assignment on the print out – there is a newly revised one. She claims it is not a different one.

They treat us like children. They think we are stupid.

A new store manager comes. She says she is always available to us, she is accessible to hear us, her door is always open. I speak up in the meeting. “I need more hours,” I say. “I am living in half of a trailer. I need to get my own place..I need benefits. I need to go to the dentist.”

She looks right through me, as if I haven’t spoken. She adjourns the meeting.

On Saturday mornings, I walk the two miles starting around 6, for we have a 7:30 am mandatory pep rally, where we do the mandatory WalMart cheer. After five pep rallies, I stop cheering. I haven’t learned the words. I do not feel cheerful, and I hate WalMart. Ia m going to be a little old lady living with cats, deep wrinkles like a dried apple surrounding my toothless cave-in on my gums mouth. I’ll have to make my paintings like the cave people did, using charcoal burnt sticks on rock.

At night, after we’ve worked our 8 hour shift, they lock us in while they count the money. My un-boyfriend waits outside in his dusty green pick-up. It is 10 pm. I have worked on my feet all day, scanning items as fast as I can. In the slow times, WalMart uses a list of items per minute scanned by each cashier. The un-speedy cashiers on the bottom of the list are laid off. So much for customer service and the blue vests with the yellow smiley face that say “How can I help?”

The vests should say, “I am a loser. Just give over your money and get out.”

I get a job with another putative friend, who owns a B&B on the edge of town. It is about five miles to work, too far to walk. My un-boyfriend gives me a bicycle. My putative friend pays me $8 an hour. The units are upscale. They all have sunken Jacuzzis. You could break your neck hanging over the side with your scrubbing bubbles and your cleaning rags.

Finally one Sunday, the mystery of no tips for the maids (unless you count half-eaten pizzas left behind) is solved. My so-called “friend” was away on a weekend horseback ride. Her sister and brother-in-law had gone to L.A., the mom came down sick and couldn’t work, couldn’t supervise, so the other maid had to do breakfast clean up alone while I tended to the rooms. Every room had $20 or so in it. Sometimes more, but sometimes less. I made most of my rent that day. And I realized that the others had been stealing the tips. Was it the owners? The other maids? Whoever got in first with the passkey.

I took a cashier job at McDonalds. I was not told that I would be required to mop the entire floor after closing as part of my cashier duties. McDonalds paid $6.50 an hour, with “rapid raises”...benefits after one year. Only a few weeks of mopping the floor every night with a heavy wooden handled industrial mop gave me pain in my arms and shoulders that kept me from sleeping at night. I told my supervisor, who blew me off. I told the store manager, stonewalled. Finally I told the owner’s wife I was getting an injury. She said, and this is no word of a lie, “We all have to be team players.”

My un-boyfriend said I could come live with him and work at the ski area. So I packed up and went higher up into the mountains. I rode the ski lift to work. In the winter it as cold and beautiful. In the summer, it was warm and beautiful, plus you got to see wildlife – bear, porcupine, chipmunks, ravens, deer. Last summer I was serving a burger out to a table and I guess I wasn’t concentrating. It sailed off the styrofoam plate like a frisbee..The burger, pickle, tomatoes, onion and fries were now fodder on the carpet. I asked the boss for another burger and he flipped out. He came unglued, as if I were the first waitress in the history of the world to drop an order on the floor. The intended recipient of th burger laughed and took a picture of me on the floor cleaning up the remains. She told me that it could happen to anyone. Her husband dug a great big fat tip for me out of his fanny pack.

I sent the picture to my mother.

THE END

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