So, I need to find work. I’ve applied at very few places because I don’t feel motivated—Panera, Starbucks, Wheaton College, and a music studio—and got one job out of it so far. The music studio. Here’s how that played out.

I showed up at the studio three minutes late. Jake, with whom I scheduled the interview, was also running late. I walked up the carpeted stairs, through the heavy door, and was greeted by a nice but sickly face.

“Hi!” said she, brightly.

“Hello. I’m looking for… Jake?”

“Oh, you must be Ian. My name’s Katie.”

Katie, it ends up, teaches at the studio. We talked while I waited on Jake and she for her next student. She was feeling very sick and didn’t want to do any teaching that day, but is a dedicated sort of person. Jake finally showed up, like a strong wind, knocking the back door open and howling through the hall toward his office. He saw me, paused to shake my hand, and offered to show me the rooms (but Katie had already) and promptly and somewhat messily showed me into his office.

He launched into a spiel about his business which was punctuated with long and distracted looks out the windows. The blinds covered the top three quarters of them, so this meant that, from time to time, he would hunch over in his chair, extend his neck, and squint, presumably at the traffic on the busy street outside.

His spiel was really something, though. Jake is a self-proclaimed entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur he is, through and through. I asked him what other ideas he was working on, and he said, “Me? Oh man. A thousand things. How much time do you have? Hahaha! I mean do you really wanna hear this?”

“Sure,” I said with an earnest nod.

“Well, for instance, and I’m gonna get sued out the ass for this, but I’ve already bought the web domain and everything: Ugg Muggz.” Ugg Muggz is going to be a sleeve for coffee mugs made of the same material as the boots—the same suede on the outside, the same fluffy wool-looking material on the inside. “So, see, a girl can be wearing her Uggs and using her Ugg Mugg and they’ll match. It’ll be great.” I don’t think just anyone could pull this off, but I think Jake can.

The interview was on a Friday afternoon. At the transitional house that I manage, we’ve moved house meetings to Friday at 5:15 p.m. So, I told Jake that I’d need to be leaving soon for a house meeting. He looked at me curiously and said, “House meeting?”

“Oh. Yes,” said I. “I run a transitional house for men in,” and here I hesitated, “recovery.”

“Oh…” said he, just barely missing a beat. “Are you also in recovery?”

I took what I thought might be my last look around his office and said, “Yes.”

“What were you on?”

“Heroin.”

“Oh. Oh! Damn!”

“Yeah.”

“So how long you been clean?”

“Two years,” I lied. I don’t know why I lied. Well, yes, I do. The more time you have clean the more legit you sound. This year and a half feels very long to me, but I know very well that it’s not actually very long.

“Oh ok,” he said. “Yeah I’ve been clean for four years, but I didn’t go the traditional route. I just stopped one day.” I could see him looking around the room now, calculating the value of items not just in his office, but the whole studio. After a beat, he remembered I was still there and said, abruptly, “So I guess it’d be really obvious if you were using again, ‘cause you’d come in and be all ‘bleh bleh bleh.’” He said this with heavy-lidded eyes and a slack jaw.

“Yeah,” I said.

The interview didn’t last much longer after that. He sent me off with several I like yous and a So we’ll start getting you some students for Wednesdays. I felt pretty good.

But, then I had a few questions for him. I called him two days later and left him a voicemail. He didn’t call back on that day. He didn’t call back the day after, either. I became worried, but called him back today, and he answered.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Jake. It’s Ian.”

“Oh. Hey, man.”

“Hey, I wasn’t sure, because of the way we left things, if I’m working for you or not.”

“Yeah, you know, I just kinda have to count the cost.”

“Believe me, man, I understand. I totally get that.”

“Yeah you know so I guess—“ and here the phone cut out. So, I texted him.

Hey man the call dropped. Let me know what I can do.

He texted back that I should write a short bio and send a picture for the studio website. So I should do that, probably. Now.