The Right Man for the Job

From Mike Magnuson’s Author’s Note: The Right Man for the Job was originally published in 1997, and it’s based upon my actual experiences working from the fall of 1991 through the winter of 1993 as an account manager and repo man for a rent-to-own company in the poor black neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio. I worked some other jobs in Columbus during that stretch – temp-service general labor in warehouses and factories and construction sites and even one time dressing up as the Kool-Aid Man for a promotional event at a Bob Evan’s in Worthington – but the rent-to-own company job overwhelms everything in my memory of that period because of its systematic brutality, its unfairness, its business model built on squeezing money from people, mostly people of color, who had no money to begin with. To work in the rent-to-own business was to be a professional criminal, really, a person responsible for renting shitty furniture and appliances for excessive prices to low-income people, and the moment a customer was late on a payment, bam, there I was, banging on the door, demanding either the money or the return of my merchandise. I was good at the job, too. When I quit, I had been the store’s assistant manager for a few months and was first in line to become manager of a store of my own. Apparently, the corporate office had decided that since I had done such crackerjack work in the black area of Columbus – truly proving my mettle, according to them, in the worst imaginable conditions – I might do even a better job running accounts in rural Ohio, dealing with hillbillies who the corporate office figured were more or less just like myself. “If you can kick this kind of ass in the hood,” they would tell me, “imagine what you could do among your own kind.” It was all a disaster, on every level, or thirty years later it sure seems that way to me. I remember working epic hours every day of the week, and when I was occasionally at home, I suffered through a toxic relationship that grew worse and worse as the weeks and months scrolled by. I was tense and miserable and angry and guilty and terrified everywhere I went, but somewhere along the line, I got the hell out of there. I remember finally realizing that my Columbus nightmare had ended, that I was going to be okay, on April 20 of 1993. I found myself in a VFW in Bloomington, Minnesota, on midday break from my new job working in the back room of a big retail music store. I was enjoying a buffet luncheon and a beer and watching the Branch Davidian compound burn on the bar TV. What a tragedy that Waco situation was. What a classical human irony for me to watch the blurry flames on TV and think, Well, sir – at least I made it through Columbus without burning alive. A few months later, I enrolled in a fledgling graduate creative writing program in Mankato, Minnesota, and while I was there, I wrote The Right Man for the Job.