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A Tremendous Interview
By Robert D. Kirvel Am I qualified? Let me ask you. Is any parent or teacher, any janitor or CEO, ever qualified his first day on the job? No. Or if they say so, it’s false deceit. People say when you interview like this or write a resume, don’t preach or brag. Show it, don’t tell it. Keep your opinions under the radar, and don’t offend. Well, that’s bunk. Let me tell you something about myself. What a person thinks—of himself, others, life in general—is about choices. Everything’s about choices in life, and I’ve made tremendous choices. Am I qualified? I am so over qualified. People make a big deal any more about where we live and our exposure to demographics. College grads go around lecturing the heartland how they know more physics than people in the soil, and you have your Californians living in a burrito bubble against hard-working Joes fighting for a chance. But what really shreds conversations between doers and bleeding hearts is their belief, you know, in ethnics and foreign immigration, about supposed happenings like cosmic rays melting the glaciers and monkey evolution and bathroom abortion. Here are some actual facts. You can hook up with reality right on cable or the Internet. Facts are right there on your phone these days, but more appealing is this thing of magical thinking. What you call tribalism and talking over the web only with people on your side. Magical tribalism is so big these days. I’ll say it. It’s insane how, right now, you’ve got your know-it-all campus tribe with their socialism newspapers and tofu books on hip replacement. Then there’s the common-sense tribe of Ma and Pa Rustbelters getting stomped on by all those politicians in the cesspool. That’s a true fact: laws and taxes pouring out of the cesspool and drowning the little guy. Does that mean all your local and national politicians are bad guys? No. I’d put it more like brainpower puckered by their own muck. Now Americans are the world’s greatest subspecies capable of reason—everybody knows that—yet so many don’t apply their fear and hate into critical thinking. Just picture those marcher–moochers who get a stiffy saving some chipmunks but go limp at stockpiling personal ammo against wackos. That’s pretty phallic if you ask me, and not in a good phallic way. Some American ideals going around these days are designed to kill—if not life, then freedom—or at the very least maim human beings and melt the planet. I’ll tell you what will melt the planet: freezing in your bed by not drilling more gasoline and logging trees, that’s what. Equal pay, that’s what, because—just between you and me?—people aren’t equal, and God gave men brains to see their women. Now I love all women whether they’re stacked or ugly as a ditch, but who should I believe? Some lezzy in a white lab coat paid by ivory-tower science journals for their opinions? Some welfare mom or burger-flipping goober cooking up picket signs instead of my lunch? The environment too. It’s big now, really big. I think about clean water and air all the time. I say we have free rain and trees and carbon dioxide right here in the Land Of The Free the Lord gave us, and that’s clean enough. Right? Look, if people want to go out there and make protest posters or throw some paint on canvas and call it art, I say go to it, but the Bible gave us trees and rebar. Let’s build some migrant prisons. I’m talking real job security here, with inside housing. Like when the hillbillies built that giant Noah’s Ark thing in Kentucky with the dinosaurs in there for safety and people standing against killer vaccines. Tremendous. I’m a big science and art supporter. My thoughts on diversity? Sure. Tremendous. It’s important these days to say you have a friend who’s homo. I get it. Or at least a person with minority color or even a homeless schmuck with skid tracks inside his pants or some towelhead guy called Enrique. I know people inside out, is what I’m saying. I wouldn’t want to marry into spastic, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have the greatest respect. Ask anybody. Your company is facing financial times, right? Regulations are killing business. I’m not bragging when I tell you I can solve the money deal like nobody; hell, I can solve the national debt in a heartbeat. Get rid of the cheaters. I have friends, important scientists. They tell me they can build a super nuke-type thing today a zillion times bigger than before that can split the world apart. Think about it. America sells a shitload of those Bigboys to our allies for super bucks because they have no choice—or else, right?—and we pay off our national debt. Let those moocher scumbags cough up some cash for a change. How’s that for economics? Buy American or else : get it? Goodbye U.S. money problems for all time. Same for your company because I’m a builder. Sure, you probably know things about this organization here, but one thing you’ll never know. You will never know more than you , but I do. I have intuition. Je suis Charlie. I speak the languages. I carry a big stick, if you catch my drift, and I know a door to hurt. Through that door, I know pain, and through pain, humility. I want the next guy you hire on here to be—let’s just say it—better than you will ever be. I want that person to be me. Like I say, humility. Bottom line. I know how to make this a beautiful, beautiful place, trust me. I’m the guy whose time has come. I think we understand each other, as long as you don’t have some slut supervisors who don’t know sheepskin from Shinola looking over my shoulder and screwing everything up. So do I have the job now? |
Robert D. Kirvel is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee for fiction. Awards include the Chautauqua 2017 Editor’s Prize, the 2016 Fulton Prize for the Short Story, and a 2015 ArtPrize for creative nonfiction. He has published in the UK, New Zealand, and Germany; in translation and anthologies; and in a score of U.S. literary journals, such as Arts & Letters. A collection of 22 interrelated stories is slated for publication in London during 2018. Links to most of his literary works can be found at twitter.com @Rkirvel.
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