FIXER, by Edgar Kunz
In literature as well as in life, hating your job is an American tradition.
When Herman Melville introduced Bartleby to readers in 1853, could Herman Melville have known that his reluctant writer would become the avatar of weaklings and silent quitters for generation after generation? Bartleby’s mantra, “I’d rather not do that,” represents the flip side of American boosterism, and you can hear it reverberate through everything from Charles Bukowski’s 1971 debut novel, “Post Office,” to the printer-breaking scene in the 1999 movie ‘Post Office. Office Space.
You can pick up the echo in “Fixer,” Edgar Kunz’s terrifying second book of poems. Many of the opening pages of “Fixer” feel like Bartlebian messages from the front lines of the gig economy. The narrator of these poems bounces from one side to the other, each more absurd than the next. In “Tester,” he’s paid to sample chip dips—and is called in to describe the pros and cons of artichoke, French onion, and spicy three-bean queso:
I measure the rent
in how many sessions i have to dowith the dips. I start testing
what I can get away with: notesof clear espresso, mouthfeel
of a sun-ripened plum.I’m writing longer and longer.
I don’t think they read a word.
In “Model,” he is paid to pose in jeans at a gas station. In ‘Shoulder Season’ he is paid to cut windows out of solid sheets of glass. In ‘Real Money’ he toyed with the idea of becoming an air traffic controller:
I already found it
a job, but I can’t break the habitof the hunt. I dig around and learn
those are the suicide ratesare astronomical, shifts last one hour
on, an hour off, because of the extremeconcentration required. You get paid
both hours.
It should tell you something about the dark humor of ‘Fixer’ that the speaker in these poems thinks about staying solvent by looking for a job that might lead someone to end it. It’s scary out there, and Kunz knows it. While working on the book this summer, I realized it was unusual to come across so many poems about striving to get paid—and the nagging fear of what happens if you don’t. our narrator anticipates, with a tone of agony, the AI-driven change that awaits us all:
The About page tells us
half of all people
employment is sensitive:
forklift drivers, shop assistants
and manicure. I am not
all those things, but it’s me
not comforted
No one will accuse Edgar Kunz of being out of step with the zeitgeist. Here in ‘Fixer’ the shops have no comfort anymore. Employees hang by a thread, getting through each day doing something the robots can’t quite accomplish yet: laughing at the futility of it all. Kunz captures this state of being with lines that don’t require an advanced degree to decipher, and that’s something to be thankful for. He recognizes the impact of simplicity. (Bartleby isn’t the only literary ghost floating through these stanzas. Reading “Fixer” brings to mind Raymond Carver and the way his stripped-down working-class style served as a correction in the 1980s.)
Not all the poems in this book are about odd jobs. Some, including the lengthy title poem that makes up the middle third of “Fixer,” repeat a common thread that ran through Kunz’s powerful debut “Tap Out” (2019): the lineage of an alcoholic father who lost the battle with his demons. ‘Fixer’, the narrator and his brother sneak into their late father’s dilapidated apartment – two detectives of the heart, trying to find something meaningful amidst ‘the vomit bucket’ and ’empty plastic vodka jugs’ . You can almost smell the stench of the room, but Kunz doesn’t budge. As the poem progresses, the brothers travel outside. They try to retrieve some souvenirs that may have been left in a donation bin. They talk to people who remember their memories. They listen to a contrasting story about what he managed to succeed at, and again we hear the theme of working to pay the bills: “…he could fix everything, he was great, leaky tap,/Done, sticky door, done, lawnmower/will not start, finished.”
