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March 9, 2012, 8:31 AM


Nothing gives a man more of a sense of purpose, and there remains nothing more dignified, than hauling yourself out of bed and going to work. But some of those jobs that went away in the recession — some whole professions — are never coming back. That's what the men in this story are facing. They are men. That we all know. They might even be us.

By Ryan D'Agostino

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Larry scrambled around for work after college. He built swimming pools for a few months, mucking around in backyard holes spraying gunite. He worked for a metal finishing company. While he was doing his training for that, he visited a place called Fleetwood Enterprises, in Williamsport, Maryland. Fleetwood manufactured recreational vehicles, travel trailers, mobile homes, and other ways for people to enjoy the uniquely American pastime of bringing your living room along as you travel the country.

Larry joined as an assistant sales manager. It was great, until the late-1970s gas crisis hit. When you've got people pushing their cars in line at the gas station all night to wait for their turn to buy a few gallons, it's not a good time to be in the RV business.

But hell if Stocks didn't get a taste of what it takes to sell. When he saw an ad in the paper for something called a rack-jobber, selling magazines to retail stores, he called up and got the job. The Interstate Group. That was the company he took from $300,000 in sales a year to $78 million. It was also the company that got swallowed up — Larry included — by the Handleman Company in 1990.

If it were Stocks's decision, he wouldn't have sold. Two brothers owned Interstate, but basically Stocks was his own boss. And so while Handleman became a plush gig for nine years, Larry was drifting further from the places where he felt the strongest and the surest: sitting at a wood table in an airless conference room, or standing on the beaten linoleum floor of a department store with the fluorescent glare shining off his glasses, or holding the phone to his ear listening to every lilt and rhythm in the voice on the other end, trying to read the person's thoughts. Selling. Things. To people.

And so, as the twentieth century approached its end, he left.

Went back to the rack-jobbers.

Small-time. Sandusky, Ohio. Chaska, Minnesota. Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Four companies in thirteen years where he could call the shots. The last one was in Ivyland, Pennsylvania. By the time he took the job in 2004, online downloads of music and movies and video games had long been taking business from the stores where Larry used to haggle under the fluorescent lights. By last summer, most of those stores didn't exist anymore. And what that meant was, well, Larry's job didn't exist anymore.

On his last day, they had a lunch catered at the office, and his boss, a man he had known for years, praised his dedication, his intelligence. A few of them went out to a bar after. And that was it.


His older brothers used to call him Mikey Tikey. He was always a little guy, didn't really fill out until college. But Jesus, he could hit a baseball. And throw and run. All three of the Lesnik boys were good athletes, but because Mike was small, his talent surprised other teams. Mike Lesnik was a scrapper. He couldn't control his size, but he could control how hard he tried, and no one was going to try harder than him.

One day last October he was wearing a trim-fitting pinstripe suit, standing in a line of people in the lobby of a Marriott hotel in Farmington, Connecticut. Five months had passed since graduation. The few employment possibilities he had, if you could call them that — the small consulting firm, the big company that kept calling him back — were barely keeping the fuzz of discouragement off his brain. He and his girlfriend talked about moving in together and vaguely about spending their lives together, and it made him anxious, because he couldn't even afford a sandwich, let alone rent.

No one talked in the line. When Lesnik got to the front, he stood for a moment before entering the banquet hall and collected himself. Behind the tall oak door was a job fair. The ad had said to dress well, bring a lot of résumés, and be ready to talk. He could ace an on-the-spot interview, and he knew it. He walked in.

Immediately, a tall, weird-looking old guy with a ponytail and a backpack bumped into him on his way out. There were folding tables set up around the perimeter, and a few people stood in line at each, waiting their turn to be told they could apply for jobs online. Over in the Aflac line was a kid wearing khakis and a golf shirt, untucked. There was a table in the middle of the room where four or five people just sat, drinking water, thumbing the brochure. What the hell were they doing? Hanging out at a job fair?

Lesnik gripped his leather folder tight — the one that held the multiple copies of his résumé. He exhaled. This felt cruel. Like if you blindfolded a little kid and told him you were taking him to a carnival but instead you drove to an auto-parts store. It was crushing.

So what did Mikey Tikey do? He stayed for an hour and a half, waited patiently at every goddamn booth and listened to the rehearsed lines — Here's how to apply on our Web site, here's a brochure. And he told them no, he was looking for something higher up. Did they know of anything higher up? Something where he could use his M.B.A., where he could use his brain?

They looked at him a little funny, and smiled politely.


Greg and Janell didn't buy gifts for each other at Christmas — not even a video game for Greg — but they didn't mind that so much. Watching the girls open the few presents they could afford was gift enough.

He thought he would be working by now. He felt in his heart that he would. He had gone to a few job interviews, but they told him he was overqualified. Hanton is a worker, and he had worked hard to achieve what he had — supervisor, making forty grand, good car, nice little place in the neighborhood, got to take Janell out once in a while. Now he had to think about changing his résumé to make himself look less successful so he wouldn't have to keep hearing how overqualified he was. This felt strange. He wondered how many men out there were dumbing down their lives to try to get a job.

Not long after Christmas, he sits on his bed, watching Greg Jr. sleep, listening to his soft breaths, watching his tiny chest rise and fall, rise and fall. A few more weeks and the boy will be six months old. Janell is at work, the girls are playing somewhere, and the apartment is quiet. Greg has lived here so long he doesn't notice the sound of the cars rolling along Francis Lewis outside.

A woman walks by the house. He can just make her out through the window without straining too much — he doesn't want to wake Greg Jr. The woman walks slowly and carries a handbag at her side. It looks heavy. She might be limping a little. Her form drifts past the bars in Greg's front gate as if in a dream. She is about his mother's height, he thinks. She's walking north up the block, toward his old house. Probably coming home at the end of a shift, like his mother always did, those same footsteps a hundred thousand times on tired, cracked feet.

Greg pulls in a deep breath. He thinks about the furniture warehouse, and the job fairs he's been to, and his résumé, and about the future, and about his mother. He thinks about the bus-driver job, which would be great. A friend of his told him about a test you can take to work as an armed security guard — armored cars, that kind of thing. That's a job that doesn't disappear. He's going to pursue that. And he looks down at his sleeping boy, and for the first time in a long time without anybody looking, he smiles.


He started collecting coins maybe ten years ago. He has a big colonial collection, defined generally as before 1793. It's one of the better colonial collections around, he's been told. He has another collection of coins from the Belgian Congo that may be one of the best in the world.

He's selling the colonials. It wasn't the plan, doesn't make him happy, but there's no other way. He's putting it up for auction, where it could sell for $40,000, maybe more. That's a lot of money, but he has debt, and he has his rent and gas for the car. One thing he might not have much longer is the girlfriend. You know what she got him for Christmas, after all that old-and-new crap he bought her? A plastic tip jar for the nights he hosts karaoke at the bar. Probably cost ten bucks.

Ah, well. What are you gonna do, right? Maybe the age difference was too much. But he still feels like a kid — he just joined a band, singing classic-rock covers. He was very specific in the ad, even naming bands he likes — the Grass Roots, Paul Simon, Seal, Pearl Jam, Bush. These seem like good guys, and they play well enough that they could get some gigs. He lives in his little rented room out by the beach — inconvenient, but nice and cheap.

But what the people at karaoke night and the guys in the band and maybe even the girlfriend don't know about, don't see, is the work. The hours spent on CareerBuilder and and all the rest of the sites, clicking through the job postings, tweaking his résumé, uploading his cover letter, trying to stand out. The hours spent driving to job fair after job fair, twenty in two years — putting the suit on, tying the tie, bobbing among the smiling representatives of companies he doesn't want to work for, driving all the way back out to his small, kitchenless room.

The cold, crusty oatmeal on a tray on the hotel floor. That's what nobody sees.

A while back, he was driving along thinking about what might come next. All he knew was he wanted to work. It's nice to sleep late if he wants to, sure. But not forever. He thought about the jobs he had back in high school. There was Al, the kind old drunk who had a subcontractor business cleaning out abandoned buildings. He hired Scott to do the work for him, and soon Scott was loading dumpsters with all kinds of dusty furniture and crap pulled from dark corners. Al gave the kid a raise on his second day, to maybe five bucks an hour, for working so hard.

Then there was the farm. This was in the early eighties in upstate New York, way up near Rochester. Fertile country. Scott loaded bales of hay into wagons out in the fields and then piled them high in the barn. He picked vegetables for hours, bent over — cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, hot peppers.

When he came home at night, he'd blow his nose and it would come out black from all the dust and dirt. But then he'd get his shower, and put some fresh clothes on, and Scott would feel refreshed by the work he had done. He felt restored. That's what a day's work will do for you. And that's the feeling he wants again.


December. Close to the turn of the calendar, when his B-school graduation would become "last year." His phone rings.

Just a few days earlier, he had called a start-up company near Springfield, Massachusetts. His father knew about the place — they're in the business of trying to improve medical billing. For doctors in private practice, billing is one of the most expensive parts of doing business. This company is trying to make it easier and less costly. They had an opening they wanted to talk to him about, and Mike liked the people he met. It's a start-up, and he loves the idea of helping create something out of nothing. He had taken the big step of moving in with his girlfriend a month ago, before he had ever heard of this company. The rent was low because it was his sister's place, but it wasn't free, and in truth, he wasn't exactly sure how he was going to pay his share if he didn't find work soon.

His father had told him all along not to settle for something he didn't like — that's the luxury Michael inherited from his father's work as a doctor, and his grandfather's work as a metalworker, and his great-grandfather's work as an iceman. Michael had inherited the luxury of finding a job he enjoyed. This company, if it panned out, didn't feel like settling. On the phone was the woman who ran it, wanting to know if he could start work on Monday.


Four a.m. — that's what time Larry woke up most mornings after he lost his job last year. He was probably the first person in the United States to see the online job postings every day. He'd sit in the little area of the downstairs he was using as a workspace, in the early-morning darkness, and start pecking away, firing résumés off, futzing around with his cover letter so it seemed "personalized." He tried to make it obvious that he didn't care about job titles or even salary all that much. A young company could get his decades of experience for cheap. An established firm could plug him into a position and not worry about a thing. But it's hard to say all that in the little box they give you to write about yourself, or even in a cover letter. How do you tell them that you're the first person there in the morning and the last person to leave at night? How do you tell them that you're a worker?

When the sun came up, he drove through office complexes and industrial parks, writing down the names and addresses of companies that sounded interesting. Then he would go home and write a letter to each one, inquiring about any openings they might have.

Larry's boy was grown and had moved out long ago, did okay for himself. There was just Larry and his wife, Nancy, but now he was having to dig into his savings just to pay the mortgage. His unemployment check barely covered the $1,300 a month in health insurance for the two of them. He had a twenty-eight-foot Sea Ray docked down in Maryland, but he couldn't use it, not with gas prices the way they were. In fact, pretty soon he wouldn't be able to make payments on the boat anymore. They'd take it away. Well, that would be too bad, but there are people a lot worse off. Then again, that creates the problem of bad credit, and most employers run a credit check, and suddenly you've got bad credit because you couldn't make your boat payments... because you didn't have a job.

A few years ago, a man Larry had known for a long time couldn't find a job, and one day he went out into his garage and shot himself in the head.

It never got that bad for Larry, but still, it was discouraging like you can't imagine. But Christ, he thought, I have to keep trying.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, when there were no more résumés to send off, Larry and his wife would pack a lunch and go to the park. Or to the river. He would throw a line in the water, she would read her book. That was nice.

Then one day, the phone rang. It was Raymour & Flanigan, the furniture company, asking him to come in for an interview the next afternoon at the store over in Montgomeryville. Larry said okay.

Any good salesman will tell you that the most important part of selling is listening. A guy told Larry many years ago, when you're talking, the only thing you hear is what you already know. Larry was a good listener.

Raymour & Flanigan called back a couple of days later. And just like that, Larry Stocks was selling again.

No statistics changed — when Stocks went to work on his first day, unemployment was still around 8.5 percent, just as it was the day before. But a man who had been spit out by an economy that told him he didn't matter anymore, that his services were no longer required, had stared that economy down. He had swung back. He had outlasted it. He had done what men like him, and Greg Hanton, and Mike Lesnik, and Scott Annechino have always done: When there is no place to go every day, no job to haul your ass out of bed and show up for, you haul your ass out of bed anyway. You figure it out.

On Larry's first day, an older lady came into the store. They talked awhile — she was picking out a bed and a mattress for one of her sons. He was struggling, she said. Out of work. Larry nodded, squinted his eyes at her with warm understanding.

He made the sale — his first sale, after a million sales before that.

As he was finishing up the paperwork, the woman looked up at him. His suit fit him well, from his corporate days, and his shoes were shined. His tie was silk, and tied in a perfect half Windsor. "What did you do before, Larry?"

He looked down, smiled. Told her he ran a company that distributed music and movies. She said, "What happened?"

He said, Well, the company closed down, because people don't buy that stuff in stores anymore. They download it.

She nodded and stared off at nothing. She was probably just about old enough to remember the Great Depression.

"It's terrible out there, isn't it?"

Yes, it was. But I have a job, Larry thought. I'm selling. I'm working.


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