Also this issue: Rebel May Care Punk rocker Phil Irwin came and left, but still loves Philly. -Alex Richmond Follow My Lead Karaoke Nation's Steve Fishman on why karaoke makes a better cultural metaphor than get-rich-quick scheme. -Maura Johnston BQ Shorts FICTION BQ Shorts NONFICTION Middle East Memoirs Two writers struggle with the realities of Middle Eastern life. -Sara Marcus

June 26-July 2, 2003

cover story

Take This Job and Shove It

Working stiff Iain Levison strikes a blow for the rights of working people -- and hit men.

by Elisa Ludwig

In Since the Layoffs, former loading dock manager Jake Skowran watches his Midwest town wither away a la Roger & Me when the tractor-parts factory closes and moves offshore to exploit cheaper labor. Angry and in debt and abandoned by his girlfriend who has now shacked up with a car salesman, Jake refuses to succumb to downsized depression. Instead, he discovers a vocational direction that is both financially lucrative and emotionally healing. He becomes a hit man.

"The character is basically me, except that he kills people," says author Iain Levison, forking Hungarian goulash at the Melrose Diner on a break from painting houses in Delaware County. Levison is a beefy man whose dark hair is just tinged with silver, but his grin is boyish. "I’d like to think that if put in that situation, I might behave the way Jake did. He’s not a nightmare to me; he’s a role model."

Since the Layoffs is being released by Soho Press in tandem with the paperback release of A Working Stiff’s Manifesto, the 2002 nonfiction account of working 42 jobs in six years that has garnered Levison comparisons to Barbara Ehrenriech’s Nickel and Dimed. But while both authors decry the conditions of the working poor in America, Levison, unlike the sociologist Ehrenreich, did not work for an hourly wage as an experiment.

Levison has actually lived on both sides of the tracks. He was born in Scotland and spent his early years in what he describes as the "slums of Aberdeen," and his family was neglected by his father, who was then in medical school. Later, when Levison was 7, his parents reconciled their marriage and moved to the States, where his father became a successful doctor and they settled into life on the Main Line. Levison got an English degree at Villanova before realizing that the $40,000 in debt (which today seems a paltry sum) would not serve him in the workforce. So he worked other jobs -- moving furniture, driving trucks, cutting fish -- and wrote on the side. After spending 10 years as a peripatetic laborer, Levison returned last November to Ardmore, where he now resides.

It is Levison’s belief that, as most writers are nurtured by affluence and education, popular portrayals of the working class are often unrealistic and flat. "I think basically it’s a stereotype whenever you see working people depicted in a film, TV or in literature," he says. Gesturing to a copy of his book, he pauses, "If you call that literature, I don’t know."

If he is humble about his own work, Levison still holds lofty goals, striving to create "fully fleshed-out characters, real living, breathing people who are having trouble because of the way the American economy is structured." Since the Layoffs’ Jake takes books out of the library and likes to mess with the debt collectors who call his house. While he feels degraded by his situation, begging for free cigarettes from his friend who works at a convenience store and pawning his possessions, he keeps his sense of humor. For a murderer, he’s pretty likable.

For Levison, the real injustice to working people, at least as far as books and media are concerned, is that too often economic hardship is left out of the plot, giving people the false impression that the rest of the world lives like Friends. Worrying about bills may be considered mundane subject matter, but that’s precisely because it’s so commonplace. What’s more, Levison feels that Americans have a deep financial inferiority complex, blaming themselves if they can’t make ends meet. "If you look around, talk to people, your friends, money concerns enter into the conversation a lot. I’m wondering why in American culture it’s such an important thing to pretend that we’re all doing really well. And as a matter of fact very few of us are."

The satiric tone of Since the Layoffs is actually a rather thin patina over Levison’s moral outrage. Having witnessed more than one economic downturn in his working life, and having observed a growing number of people with degrees in marine biology working as pet groomers, Levison is convinced that corporate greed has reached an all-time high. He is very serious when he says, "I don’t see why, with the economy treating the working poor the way it does, that this doesn’t happen more often than it does. People should be grateful that it doesn’t." In his view, the factory closers and 401k thieves, beholden only to stockholders and not to the communities they reside in, are of an evil that is on par with murderers. One evil, he says, grinning, should be able to beget another.

Touring behind his books, Levison has found that his work is being received well. As he puts it, "The response from people who have to eat shit every day is positive."

Levison has garnered similar praise in print. Both The Wall Street Journal and Entertainment Weekly have lauded his ability to capture the experience of the blue-collar man. But despite the warm critical reception to his work, Levison is still working, painting houses and alternately waiting tables at Tango in Bryn Mawr. "I'm getting really tired of this. I'm waiting tables and I'm going to be 40 next month." He chews thoughtfully and reconsiders. "On the other hand, sometimes working, even painting houses, structures your time a little bit. And writing is a very unsocial thing, and you get ideas when you're working, sometimes from interactions with customers and friends. So even if I started making gobs of money from the books I might just do a little bit of work on the side."