In a Labor of Love, Book Explores Jobs in Workers’ Own Words

Even the dimmest wit wouldn’t conduct a phone interview from beside a jackhammer in Times Square at rush hour. So why did ultra-hip, super-smart co-editor Marisa Bowe attempt to discuss her new book “Gig” while striding through Manhattan’s cacophonous main drag? (Bowe quickly sensed the insanity and screamed into her cellular, “Never mind. I’ll call back from someplace quiet.”)

She’s like that some days, she later said: immune to all reality that isn’t virtual. A child of our technological times, she functions best while logged on to her computer at work, where she is founding editor of Word.com, a 5-year-old Web zine that financial types say is “targeted at Gen-Xers with better-than-average income and education.”

Bowe sees her constituency quite differently. They are people like herself, she says, who are globalized by technology--and yet somehow disconnected from what is generally referred to as real life.

They are offspring of the online culture, unresponsive to glossy magazines’ tales of celebrities and lifestyles, and aching for what Bowe, 41, describes as “an intimate look at how people actually live, day to day. The kind of stuff you’d get a little taste of in an Ann Landers column or at AA meetings--the gory details of people’s real lives. Once you get that taste, you really want more,” she says.

Bowe describes the writing in Word as “very heartfelt, very intense. It is first-person descriptions of things that happen to people or experiences they’ve been through. It’s all true. No fiction. Everybody moves around so much these days that you don’t really get to know people in a personal way.”

As part of her quest to achieve that closeness, she came up with the idea for a weekly column called Work, which consists of real people talking first-person about their jobs. “It seemed so simple and elegant. Just interview someone about their job and edit it down to a good column.”

The column blossomed into the book “Gig” (Crown), a sleeper with a growing groundswell of interest from all the usual media types as well as those who consider themselves serious analysts of our culture.

Jeff Ousborne, in a lighthearted Details magazine review, calls it a “remarkable collection of behind-the-scenes insights into how things work at work.” He seems to revel in the ironies that result from listening to this vast range of jobholders--from supermodel to slaughterhouse director--each of whom are given equal time and space to speak for themselves.

Ousborne points out, for example, that if you compare the tales of the aging transvestite prostitute and the advertising executive, “the transvestite ends up sounding like an optimistic, financially secure worker in a necessary service industry,” and the adman turns out to be the cynic with a deadened soul.

Author Susan Faludi also praises the book in a serious Village Voice review. But she seems to pick up only its unhappy bass notes. She cites the corporate securities lawyer, besieged by cursing clients who manage to reach his cell phone even while he’s attending the birth of his baby--and who are outraged when he asks them to call back.

“I’m not a happy guy,” he says. “The only thing I really feel like I totally enjoy at this point in my life is running.” Faludi seems to hear most workers as angry and “greatly troubled by the new work zeitgeist,” in which they come across as “stinging and disgusted observers of their own condition.”

How’s that? Did she not see the monologues by all those gentle people who say they are happy in their work? And those who want to help others more than they want to get rich? Did she not smile at the job description that’s a favorite of Crown’s Doug Pepper, who edited the book?

It’s told by a Farmers Market pretzel vendor in Los Angeles who started out part time to earn college tuition, then went full time, then ended up selling pretzels for four years because the job was so much fun and the money was so good--if she counted what she stole.

Because the pretzels were made by Mennonites, the vendor felt the job had a kind of religious fervor, causing her to dress and groom herself better than usual, which may or may not have led to the lust-filled afternoons in the pretzel-storage van with her vending partner, who was not her marriage partner and who eventually caused her to leave the job.

Bowe says everyone who reads the book has favorites that surprise even their closest friends and relatives. “My best friend’s favorite job description, by a blind worker, is one I never paid attention to and totally forgot was in the book,” Bowe says.

One of Bowe’s favorites is the computer systems administrator at a university. She says his job was “endlessly fascinating” until he endured a series of intense hacker attacks that compromised not only the security of the university, but U.S. security and, by implication, world security. He describes it in such a good way, watching this anonymous vandal invade and start to destroy his world.

“I never thought of these [security issues] as being overseen by real people watching over all this. Just machines. But this guy is even fascinated by the hacker. He loves people, but there’s also a limit as to how much energy a person can spend protecting something essentially unprotectable. It’s a really good parable for our times.”

There are also dozens of dignified monologues from contented, philosophical, benevolent and downright zany or perverse voices in the book--people from dozens of job categories ranging from CEO to sex worker, from buffalo rancher to murder scene cleaner-upper. Many of their soliloquies show profound understanding of the limitations and possibilities of life and work--and the inseparable nature of the two.

Most offer indelible looks at a profession, from the inside out. Like the sex star who burns himself on a purring Lamborghini as he tries to “perform” with his co-star on the overheated hood. The waitress who isn’t in it for the tips, but because she really likes helping people enjoy their meals. The retired Missouri high school principal with a doctorate who enjoys his gig as a Wal-Mart greeter. The high school math teacher who loves what he does but continually fights a powerful lust for the flirty teenage girls.

The New Yorker magazine published five excerpts from the book--a street coffee vendor, a high school basketball coach, a slaughterhouse human-resources director, an adhesive-company sales rep, a Taco Bell employee and a Web content producer.

Not riveting reading, you might think at first blush. But you’d be wrong. The coffee and doughnut vendor is a doozy, for example. It starts out as a benign description of the job’s high points and ends as a maniacal rant against Wall Street types.

A favorite of Bowe’s younger brother, John Bowe, who spent the summer of ’99 crisscrossing the country doing many of the interviews, is the tale of the financial advisor, whose job at first glance sounds boring.

“But this guy is totally amazing, his accomplishments mind-blowing. He’s a foot soldier in the integration of the global economy, going into tiny back-country towns of Latin America and convincing farmers who keep their silver in mattresses to invest in stocks and bonds. He literally faced the guerrillas in Guatemala in order to reach people and explain something very abstract. He gives a human face to the process of globalization.”

Marisa Bowe, a Minnesota native, lives in Brooklyn, not far from John, a freelance writer and filmmaker. The two of them, plus Sabin Streeter, a senior editor at Word, get credit on the cover as the book’s editors. They aren’t sure if they’ll get any cash for the “Gig” gig. John has been paid for his work, on a freelance basis, Marisa says, and she worked on the book while on salary at the Web zine. The publisher’s advance went to the firm’s owners, the Zapata Corp., a holding company.

But she couldn’t care less about all that, she insists. The gratifying outcome--a book that matters--is a kind of payment in itself.

The one “working” story that perhaps should be in the book and isn’t is Marisa Bowe’s own. Growing up, she had no idea what she wanted to do for a living. She was so focused on the problem that she repeatedly read “Working,” Studs Terkel’s 1972 classic collection of interviews on the subject.

“I had friends who also had no idea what they wanted to do. Many went to law or med school” because they saw no options, she says. Those who went to liberal arts colleges (she graduated from Columbia University in New York with a major in modern European history) “were given a constricted notion of what the American economy was made up of. Our only choices seemed to be professional schools--even if we hated the thought of it.”

Before starting at Word in ‘95, she “drifted around in all aspects of alternative media: guerrilla video, public broadcasting TV, as a hanger-on in the art world. I was writing, producing--all of it outside of the mainstream media.” And she was wondering all that time, she says, “what am I doing, why am I floating, where am I going with my work?”

At the time, she thought she had no direction. Only in the past six months, she says, has her life trajectory become clear. “I realize now that I had a direction all along.”

It came from her father, in the 1970s, when she and her brother were teens in Minneapolis. “He did public relations for Control Data Corp., a computer products firm that wanted its executives to have an understanding of the product they produced. So they gave my dad a terminal to bring home. He put it in the basement, and it was jacked into a mainframe computer somewhere far away. Control Data’s product was called Plato, which was intended to teach people mechanics and math and other things online.”

Plato also evolved into one of the first real online social communities, she says, which predated the Internet by years. She and her brother participated in that before they ever heard the words “virtual” or “cyberspace.”

“We were children of the future and we didn’t even know it. We just knew we liked what it was.”

She sees now that throughout her working life, she’s focused on the cutting edge where technology and culture intersect, she says. And she has always been interested in the dynamics of work itself.

“Let’s face it,” she says. “Work is your existential reality. It’s your fate. It’s your life. You’re like a Dostoevski character--no matter what you are doing, you don’t know quite how you got there. You kind of planned it but you didn’t. But the beauty of it is this: I think that to a large degree we can each affect our own circumstances through our own character. I think that becomes clear from the book. I think it’s inspiring and liberating to know that it’s true.”

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Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com.