AD NAUSEAM.(job loss narrative)

Chased Away, by Akhil Sharma

Union Blues by Julian Barnes

All Washed Up, by Antonya Nelson

Cloudburst, by Peter Trachtenberg

Long ago, I got a job proofreading advertising copy for a swank little boutique ad firm situated in a hip downtown loft. For years, I had searched without success for a job like this, a job that could be both engaging and rote, challenging and leisurely, a job I might "enjoy"even as I remained detached, a job with colleagues who were smart, good-looking, and--in some hard-to-define way having to do with cultural and artistic ambitions--like-minded. And, of course, I wanted this job to leave me some disposable income at the end of each month, and, because I needed time to get on with the writing that I thought of as my real work, I wanted to roll in three days a week, max.

At last, this job, this godsend, came. But, in a way that provoked the sorts of questions about desire and appearance that psychoanalysts and folklorists routinely ask in their work, it wound up causing pain and, in the course of a few weeks, the end of my friendship with my co-worker H., a lesbian writer who, many years later, got into drugs and took her own life.

There was a time when H. and I and our friends lived in a world in which out-and-out support for one another's artistic mission was essential as the token of membership in the larger community of people with hopes and dreams. This was also, as it happened, the era of act up, the time in which the play "Angels in America"was first popular, the time in which it was coming to be accepted (at least in New York and San Francisco) that erotic practice and the freedom to produce a self-defining sexual identity might justifiably constitute moral, political, and spiritual vanguardism. I mention this because it was an idea that I found appealing--it allowed me the fantasy that I had an inside track on matters relating to diversity and happiness--and because it informed the way I came to see my new workplace: a plank-floored, high-ceilinged, soft-colored, hyperdesigned space in which Led Zeppelin played loudly through public-address speakers, and in which even the "accounts"people wore transgressive fashions.