Presto

Presto by Charles Rammelkamp, Bamboo Dart Press, $8.99.

Having worked on both sides of the temp divide, I was eager to read Presto, a flash fiction collection by Charles Rammelkamp that recounts the narrator’s many temp experiences, and the “real life” they accompanied, sometimes as foreground, sometimes as background. It’s a bemused, open-eyed journey by a young man seeking his place in the work world of several years ago, before the gig economy expanded this kind of work to encompass an entire sector of society.

“I’m a Presto. I do temp jobs. Kind of like a knight errant from days of old. I go from place to place,” says his narrator. (p. 28) Such forced romanticism might help to rationalize the paradox of temp work. Employment is the great entrapment of American society, leading to benefits, status, self-worth, and a sense of belonging. Yet, the temp is the rebel, the outlier, the free agent who answers the call of the unexpected vacancy, the unsavory task, with no intention of becoming a team player. They are below entitlement to the panoply of work benefits, yet they are above the fray.

Rammelkamp’s twenty temp experiences, and his two ending retrospective tales, capture the tricky navigation of temp work with wry humor. “Presto” is the name of the agency that sends him out into the world, and we follow him onto each worksite. There’s pity for the stressed-out supervisor holding the kind of job you’d only want in your worst nightmare, such as Cliff, the staff bartender who so antagonizes the lounge band that he endangers his temporary assistants. And there’s contempt for the office manager martinet whose micromanaging prompts the temp to quit on the spot. Quitting is always a temp’s prerogative. Few managers instill confidence or lead one to aspire to follow in their footsteps.

The narrator is a native of Michigan navigating various East Coast cities, unsettled about his future, open to anything. Most of the wide spectrum of assignments seem to have been fulfilled several years ago. So the impact of technology and generational shifts in work culture that have gotten so much attention lately don’t really pertain.

What is humorously striking is the sheer unsuitability of this person for each job: the painter who can’t paint, the lifeguard with no skills, the taxi driver who gets lost, the security guard who embellishes the nightly log with detective story fantasies. “Temp to perm”? No way for this one, and that’s fine with him.

Sharply written, and closely observed, the book portrays these various temp jobs as background while “real life” goes on. Pollster, pretzel man, envelope stuffer, adjunct professor, telemarketer, all consume time and energy while questions of romance, grad school, and finding a future press in. Still, time at Presto may not have been totally wasted: “I actually enjoyed these little three-to-five day gigs. You sort of learned things about your fellow human beings, though if pressed to say what, exactly, I’d be at a loss for words.” (p. 35) Or was it wasted, after all?

This ambivalence is his primary response as the temp parachutes into workplaces riven with games and secrets: another temp sucks up to the boss, hoping to be hired fulltime; territorial disputes rage over the best location to sell pretzels; extras jockey for camera angles on a film set. The goal is to navigate these challenges as quickly as possible without getting entangled. Not always easy. Aware of his own flaws, the narrator usually gets through the assignment with his dignity intact, though sometimes that takes a special effort. The wry, affable tone of these stories reflect the loose-ties, low-stakes nature of temp relationships. Again, the temp’s main superpower is he can walk away.

Yet taken together, these experiences serve as a subtle commentary on work, as explored in the final two chapters. In “The Same River Twice”, a fully-employed, successful chemist attending his high school reunion tries to lord his status over the high school mean girl, now a mere plumber’s widow. She’s not impressed. She can still take him down with one snide remark. So much for work as self-worth. In the final story, we find the somber endgame of the temping gig.

Touching on questions of self-worth, the rawness of workplace interactions, the mediocre management overseeing most jobs, these experiences accumulate into a sometimes dismaying impression of working life. Grounding it more clearly in its time (I deduce the 1970’s and 1980’s), and giving the narrator a more textured response might have sharpened the insights Presto offers. But a less easy-going narrator might not have temped quite this often, for quite this long!

Hilary Leichter’s novel Temporary out a couple of years ago, created a mythical world around the idea of temporary experiences. However, Presto stays grounded in the lived experience of this narrator and the ways odd jobs at early on in life can become beguiling if risky distractions.

Presto tracks characters from doing work beneath them to pay a few bills, to someone who is no longer up to working at all. Thus, it captures not only the life cycle of temporary employment, but the pathos of working in our late capitalist economy for everyone, perm or temp. Rammelkamp explores this condition lightly and with entertaining verve, making Presto very much worth clocking in to read.

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