Happy Trails to You--And You and. . . .

Economic indicators are wherever you want to find them. In this case, it is a Mexican restaurant in North Hollywood. The decor tends toward Santa Fe rugged, long on cattle skulls and saddle blankets. A three-piece band--guitar, fiddle and Dobro--plays in one corner of the bar. The musicians pick and twang their way through “Red River Valley” and “Streets of Laredo” and “Happy Trails” and any other cowboy ballad to which they can recall a respectable majority of the words.

It is Monday night and the rain keeps falling. The crowd is sparse, mainly young men in cowboy hats propped against the bar, putting down Buds. They listen politely enough to the music, but also keep watch on Keno numbers flashing across a television set.

“Cowboys with beepers,” the Dobro player calls them.

He is a short, stout fellow in his early 50s. As he hunches over his instrument, working hard on every lick, a black cowboy hat hides most of his face. All the crowd can see is a chin, stout as the man himself. It’s his first paying gig, and the music doesn’t come so easy.

“I have no illusions,” he will say. “This will take years and years.” A pause. “But I have the time.”

And here the Dobro player will smile, just a little wickedly.

*

He’s part of a new breed, this late-blooming picker. He is one of those white-collar American workers who have been downsized, right-sized, bought out, laid off, let go, terminated, eliminated, jettisoned, sacked and otherwise sent packing--horizontal flotsam of a vertical economy. He appeared in this space once before. It was one year ago, and the ax had fallen.

He described honestly, albeit anonymously--one never knows who might be needed for a reference--how it felt to be strapped to a “Styrofoam parachute,” his phrase, and pushed out after 21 years of hard work for a most prosperous corporation. To be brief, it didn’t feel swell.

In the year since, he has made some money as a freelance consultant, but nothing close to his $60,000 salary. He has seen his youngest child married, and learned he soon will become a grandfather. He’s become adept at monitoring stocks from a home computer. He sunk his buyout money into his old company, sensing correctly that its wholesale whacking would thrill Wall Street. It’s seems perverse, he agrees, but “if anybody deserves to profit from the downsizing, it is me.”

He also has tested, and retested, the employment waters: icy cold. Four of his pursuits stirred serious interest but no job. When he applied for a part-time municipal position, he found himself in competition with 400 others. He survived to the final cut, which earned him an opportunity to grovel before bureaucrats seemingly thrilled by the power they held over a hungry field of applicants. They made a few euphemistic remarks about his “breadth of experience,” and then gave the position to someone younger.

*

He also has seen national awareness of the downsizing predicament explode. For whatever reason--the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, the dynamics of critical mass--a country that was largely silent on the subject of wholesale corporate job elimination is now, all at once, talking of little else. Nobody seems to be offering cures, but at least they are treating it as a disease and not simply some benign bidness-is-bidness phenomenon.

He has his own ideas on the matter: “I think an economy predicated on firing people--no matter how you slice it, ‘downsizing, layoffs, out-sourcing,’ in essence they are firing us--an economy based on that sooner or later is going to give rise to some big ugly dark creature. I don’t know what it is exactly. I don’t know when. But I can kind of feel it coming over the horizon.”

All this aside, his most pressing battle is with personal demons, namely bitterness, resentment, fear. He believes he has them licked. He sticks that chin out again and insists he’s ridden that Styrofoam parachute to a better place. He doesn’t miss commutes. He doesn’t miss corporate politics: “Until you are free of it, you don’t realize how hard you are working for not so great a return. I’d rather make less, and have a lot more fun.”

And so he prefers to talk about his music. He’s hooked up with these other musicians. He is learning from them. He is dreaming. Who knows? He and the band were hired not long ago to perform at a funeral for an old cowboy. They say that when he played “Happy Trails” on his Dobro there wasn’t a dry eye at the grave. Perhaps he brought some extra feeling to it.