Kenneth Gutman has worked a lot of jobs. “Do you know the Bruce Springsteen [line], ‘Well, the time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of glory days?’”
In an evocative essay titled “A Vendor Looks Back,” he writes about being a fisherman in the 1970s.
He ran the skiff that hauled the 1,400-foot net to a purse seiner; to close the net, “I’d circle back, throw off the inch-thick purse line to the man standing amidships [on the main vessel]… then, picking my moment, slam the throttle forward… I would have to time my pass to put myself on the crest of the wave as the seiner was in the trough.”
If his timing had been off, his skiff would have been smashed. “I’m here to tell it, so my timing was right.”
Fishing jobs in Boundary Bay fell off, and he became a welder in shipyards and fabrication shops.
He was injured twice.
The second time he had to threaten legal action against a patient care coordinator at the Department of Labor and Industries to get the surgery his doctor had advised.
He points to the incident as a hidden agenda of cuts to medical costs by cutting actual medical care.
When Ken couldn’t keep up the pace of this dangerous work, he became a truck driver and drove disabled people in transport vans. He developed sleep apnea, which made it hard to stay awake on the job, and found himself unemployed.
Ken notes that even though Real Change is a “modest” living, it has made all the difference to him. He likes the paper and enjoys talking to customers.
Ken studied English and history in college.
Ken has enjoyed watching his son develop as a writer. “I would read his copy, and I thought the only place I’ve seen this style of writing is in myself, so this made me very proud.”
He adds, “But my second bit of pride was when he continued writing, and it wasn’t my style at all.”
His son has had two scripts accepted by a German producer, though neither has yet been made into a movie: This makes Ken proud because he wrote play scripts that his son read as a child.
He keeps up with current events and listens to Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” He once sent Goodman the story of his battle with Labor and Industries, proposing a campaign to make “clerical obstruction of medical attention (coma)” illegal, with the slogan “End the coma.”
Earlier in life, he became disillusioned as an undergraduate by the Kennedy administration’s attempts to hide United States involvement in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Kenneth hopes to land a job teaching English as a second language. He has the credentials and has taught people from all over the world; he proved his experience at his job interview: “Her question was, ‘What is the difference between teaching Asians and teaching Africans?’ And I had experience with both. I knew the answer.”