WANTED: HELP
Expired unemployment benefits leave one jobseeker, once soughtafter, scrambling.
On Monday, Kelly Ingram found out that her unemployment benefits had expired. She was floored. She thought they’d last at least a few more months.
“So now I’m screwed,” she said. And she laughed, because hey, what else are you going to do?
Ingram is hardly alone. Though the economy is recovering, many of the jobs that evaporated when the pandemic hit have yet to reappear: According to the Bureau of
Labor Statistics, the U.S. had 6.8 million fewer jobs in June 2021 than it did in February 2020. And the latest Texas statistics show a whopping 6.5 percent of the state’s workforce is unemployed.
Ingram, 46, used to sell highend makeup in department stores. When the pandemic hit, she was repping Aesop at Saks Fifth Avenue. The money was good — especially for somebody without a college degree — and Ingram was in demand. Pre-COVID, she didn’t bother to apply for the jobs she
saw listed on a Facebook page for Houston makeup artists; instead, employers got in touch with her to see whether she was available.
That doesn’t happen these days. Maybe, partly, that’s because Ingram started a Facebook group, COVID Call-Outs, to shame big businesses that behaved badly during the pandemic — endangering their employees and customers, laying people off in the rudest ways possible. Maybe a stick-it-tothe-man, justice-for-thepeople attitude isn’t what the cosmetic industry is looking for these days.
But a bigger factor, Ingram thinks, is that the jobs just aren’t there anymore — not like they used to be, back when Facebook overflowed with openings. She suspects many of those jobs will never come back. Shopping for makeup isn’t as fun as it used to be, back before shared eye-shadow samples suddenly looked like fomite pits.
It’s time for her to figure out something new, Ingram said. Fast.
’68 Charger
To pay rent and feed her pets, she doesn’t mind listing vintage clothes that don’t fit anymore on Poshmark. But only if things get truly desperate will she sell her ’68 Dodge Charger. It’s the kind of car that the Dukes of Hazzard used to drive; when Ingram got hers, she had to paint over the Confederate flag on its roof.
She likes the Charger’s muscle-car power, and she likes the way that people look at it. Classic car guys, she laughs, are shocked to find out it belongs to a woman in bright-red lipstick and cat-eye glasses. And it amuses her to lend the Charger to a Black friend, who messes with people who stare at him by honking the horn. It still plays “Dixie.”
The Charger makes her feel like herself.
The Ramones
When Ingram talks about doing makeup sales, she sounds as though she’s talking about the clothes she’s listing on Poshmark: Nice, but not her anymore. Maybe it’s good that the job she used to do has disappeared. Maybe she doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life urging wealthy women to buy moisturizers.
Selling makeup wasn’t at all what she dreamed of doing as a teenager. She was a wild child then, a Goth girl on super-duper probation at Memorial High School. And because
“Who gets to eat at a Kettle Restaurant in Tennessee with the Ramones?!”
Kelly Ingram, recalling a high school adventure
her parents moved away from Houston her senior year, she lived in an apartment by herself.
Once, after a Ramones concert, Ingram and a friend followed the punk band to a Dunkin’ Donuts, and invited them back to her apartment to play video games on her Sega, the hot new system at the time. She doesn’t think that the band guys realized she and her friend were in high school. C.J., the bassist, seemed to think they were hot.
The Ramones invited them to go with them to their next tour stop. Of course they went, Ingram said: How could they not? It was the Ramones! “Who gets to eat at a Kettle Restaurant in Tennessee with the Ramones?!”
When she returned, Memorial — not a fun! fun! rock ’n’ roll high school — did not look kindly upon her unexcused absence from class. She didn’t graduate, didn’t go on to college, didn’t rack up those credentials that might now be useful in finding her next job.
But telling the story, Ingram doesn’t sound sorry. Her Ramones story is like her Charger: Most definitely who she is, vivid and fully alive. She’s not sure that she can find a decent-paying job like that. But she’s trying.