Presto Change-o: Poet and Author Charles Rammelkamp Flips Through Jobs With Little Luck but Much Wit
Presto by Charles Rammelkamp
Bamboo Dart Press, Claremont, California: 2023, $8.99
He's employed by the City Sanitation Bureau.
At pale dawn,
from the place where it was happening,
he gathers, takes away, throws into the dumpster,
what is tacked to trees half-living,
what is trampled into the grass
Wisława Szymborska
“I’ve Been Observing for Sometime”
There is no paucity of western writers— essayists, poets and troubadours—who chronicle the joys and challenges of the working life. Work is how we sustain life, or most of us, anyway, so it is no small wonder that so many, from the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Elizabeth Barret Browning, Dylan Thomas to Carl Sandburg, have impressively pressed their pens into the ink of this topic.
It is hard not to think of Dolly Parton warbling famously “Working nine to five/ What a way to make a living/ Barely gettin' by/ It's all takin' and no givin'”, as one of the most recognizable voices bemoaning the serious drag of it all. Others, like Brooklyn’s Walt Whitman or Philip Levine, son of Jewish immigrants who began working in Detroit auto factories at the age of fourteen, have spilled out wondrous epiphanies about the difficulty yet simultaneous beauty of it all, as in the Levine poem “Making It Work”:
We work in rain,
heat, snow, sleet. First warm
spring winds up from Ohio, I
pause at the top of the ladder
to take in the wide world reaching
downriver and beyond.
Into the fold of these laborers littérateur, steps Baltimore-based poet and editor Charles Rammelkamp, with his new chapbook, Presto, a lighter-hearted, but no less engaging, literary exploration of the topic. In his previous books, Rammelkamp has leapt off gigantic historical topics (Catastroika being one notable example, in which he manufactures poetic monologues spanning Russian history with cameos by the likes of Houdini and Nabokov), and poetic biographs (such as in his book Mata Hari, in which he takes on that mammoth historical persona).
In Presto, Rammelkamp turns his biopic lens upon himself and parses his journey as a worker for a temp firm (the eponymous Presto of the book title) which sets him adrift in a host of seriously bizarre worlds of work, from envelope stuffer for an insurance company to telephone surveyer, distributor of flyers for a new pizzeria, to chauffeur for a man referred to simply as “Foster”— who wears a necklace of actual human teeth. Rammelkamp’s main gig, college adjuncting, was not producing enough funds to survive, apparently spurring the writer to sign up with Presto, where a temp agency supervisor named Marge assigns him to the various jobs.
Marge becomes a character herself in this chapbook of micro-essays (or are these narrative prose poems? The genre is fuzzy, like the jobs). Whenever she appears, Marge is cheery and upbeat, explaining the myriad jobs to the author as if they are actual “opportunities”.
“It could even lead to something full time,” she offers up in “The Perfect Storm”, one of the longer pieces, about a position clerking at “a little desk at the entry of the Student Registration Building”. As if anyone would want such.
“I don’t have to carry a gun, do I?” is the first sentence of “Guarded”, a piece about his assignment as a temporary security guard at a department store over the holiday season. On his first day there, the boss offers him coffee and donuts, then hands him a uniform. When he balks at the uniform, she responds: “You have a problem with that?” Rammelkamp did. The gun was apparently a-ok, but the outfit a bridge too far. “I think I better go home,” he says, “I’m feeling like I am going to throw up.”
As with many of the stints in Presto, this one was not going to pan out.
“Can I still get a cup of coffee?” The writer asks, pre-departure, and in that phrase is both the genius and the problem of this book. Rammelkamp seemingly chuckles through these laboring scenarios, finding degradation but mostly levity, and we laugh alongside him as they are pretty dang ridiculous..
If the whole scenario, in which a man is sent out to accomplish absurd duties in strangely Ionescoe-esque arenas of labor, seems familiar, it may be because the whole “what will Marge offer up next” mechanism that sets many of the vignettes in motion, is reminiscent of a major trope in American television and cinema. After awhile, as the book progresses, Marge begins to seem a lot like “M” in the landscape of the 007 movies; the “Chief” in Get Smart, and “Charlie” of Charlie’s Angels, among others. Which, by logical extension, makes Presto the M16, Control, and the Charles Townsend Detective Agency of the book. But Presto isn’t sending Rammelkamp out to save the world, spy, or investigate shady underworlds. He is being sent out to do things one can hardly believe need to be done at all. Like taking a survey at a McDonalds “in advance of the release of an animated film about Jesus, or maybe it was Moses” for ten dollars an hour.
The “work” Marge assigns Rammelkamp illuminates strangest suburbs of American occupation, in which a person can be sent to bartend a New Year’s Eve party (with zero bartender training) or fill orders for business school textbooks or cold call for support for homeless vets with PTSD, and fill in for a day as country club lifeguard. While most Presto jobs seem to only be for a day or two, all make Rammelkamp question himself and his purpose in life. “It’s always struck me how much our jobs are our identities,” he opines in the chapbook’s introduction. “What do you do?” is often the first question a stranger will ask in a get acquainted conversation.”
Despite all the absurdity, there is a serious issue trembling at the heart of this book which on its surface can seem flip and satiric. It’s the same message-in-a bottle of working America that floats to the surface in the very serious writings of Barbara Ehrenreich in Nickel and Dimed. In that book, the author chronicles underworld employment adventures that, in her case, are part of a social science experiment. (Ehrenreich takes minimum wage jobs in various parts of the country and discovers that in no place in America can you afford to live on such pay.)
Rammelkamp never talks about hunger, cost of living challenges, or such serious survival stuff in Presto. Rather, he smirkingly and even snarkily holds up a mirror to some very deep deadzones in American work, A world we are told daily is doing so well. “Unemployment is way down,” the nightly news chirps. Even the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times seem eager to assure us of the viability of our economy and the vast opportunities out there for American workers.
In this slim volume of flash essays, or prosy narrative poems, Rammelkamp illustrates that he is able to get jobs aplenty through this unemployment agency. But none of them are real. None of them viable. Most of them, like his authorial tone, are jokes.
Most readers, I’m sure, like this one, will enjoy laughing their way through Rammelkamp’s various employment snafus. But one can also drift away from the hijnks and riffing in these adventures and misadventures in the strange pockets of work the author falls into with Presto and other part-time gigs he takes on.
People, as everyone knows, actually get stuck in this nether sphere of American work, underpaid, underinsured, and underemployed, all the time. All while being told how great they have it in the labor force of America the beautiful, where at the time this review is being written proudly touts three percent unemployment, a record low. Even the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times seem eager to assure us of the viability of our economy and the vast opportunities out there for the American worker.
This may be so, but when you look at the jobs, like the clownish assignments that meet Rammelkamp via Presto, what kind of record is it, really? In Presto, Rammelkamp is the Huck Finn of unemployment, meeting each position with a kind of dead pan sarcasm. But we also know the truth, that there are so many others out there, horribly exploited and struggling, chained to the lower rungs of American work, more akin to half-dead Oliver Twist than playful Huck.
Elizabeth Cohen
Elizabeth Cohen is a writer, editor, journalist, mama, and dog person who hails from New Mexico. She is the author of five books of poetry, a memoir, a book of short stories, and a co-authored book about the first Navajo woman surgeon. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Columbia and recently retired from her position as a professor of English from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh to work on her writing and as a full-time book coach. Her newest book of poems, Martini Tattoo, was published in the fall of 2022 from Alien Buddha Press.