For Twins in New York, a Long Struggle in a Tough Job Market - NYTimes.com

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By N. R. KLEINFIELD

SEVENTEEN months out of Rutgers University, they live in an unwelcome continuum of mass rejection. Between them, Kristy and Katie Barry, identical twins who grew up in Ohio, have applied for some 150 jobs: a magazine for diabetics, a Web site about board games and a commercial for green tea-flavored gum; fact-checking at Scholastic Books, copy editing for the celebrity baby section of People.com, road-tripping for College Sports Television.

They did not get any of these. More than a year has lapsed without so much as an interview. Apparently, even a canned response was impossible in New York.

“I wake up hopeful and check my e-mail and then all there is is the Merriam-Webster word of the day,” Katie lamented. “Or a stupid Facebook thing. So-and-so sent you a puppy. Or a drink. Great!”

Kristy recently friended an editor on Facebook, thinking that was the ticket. Zip. She talked up a guy on the subway, found out he worked at a radio station, dispatched a résumé. Zip.

They play softball, asking teammates what they are up to, sifting for leads. They took an improv class, something that might lead to something that actually led to nothing.

To imprint themselves on potential employers’ minds, they send Buckeyes, a chocolate-coated peanut-butter confection that is an Ohio specialty they make to perfection. “I’m going to send some out today,” Kristy said the other morning.

Eyes crusted with sleep, Katie rummaged through Craigslist, journalismjobs.com, Whisper Jobs. She fastened on a notice for an editorial assistant at Cure magazine, aimed at cancer patients.

A résumé entered cyberspace. “I’ve sent out something,” she noted. “I’m not wishing on milkweed seeds.”

Kristy: “I’m so tired of coming up with cover letters that I think are interesting, and then nothing.”

Katie: “You think, O.K., do I kick somebody’s door in?”

Kristy: “My computer is burning up. It’s saying, ‘I’ve uploaded your résumé so many times, I’m exhausted.’ ”

Good kids who went to good schools, the brassy, effervescent Barry twins, 24, always envisioned their young adulthood in New York City as a lush time of stimulating work, picturesque travel and a rich social orbit. But they graduated into a downbeat nightmare of a job market. According to an analysis of government data by the Economic Policy Institute, the unemployment rate for college graduates under 27 so far this year averaged 7.1 percent, nearly double what it was in 2007 and the highest yearly average in the 30 years this data point has been tracked.

And so Kristy and Katie and most of their friends are forever hunting for jobs, both mundane interim work to sustain them and long-term positions that could mean a career. Many days, it is as if they are stalking something on the endangered species list.

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They were born in Columbus, Ohio, the middle of six siblings. Their parents divorced when they were 15, and they don’t stay in touch with their father but are close to their mother. She is remarried and lives in Weehawken, N.J., selling items for estates and art dealers and doing freelance writing.

The twins began at Marietta College in Ohio, then transferred as juniors to Rutgers’s campus in Newark. They graduated in May 2008 with journalism degrees, internships under their belt and student loans totaling $39,000 apiece.

Their dream is to work together in sports reporting or have a TV show, but they are flexible. They talk of teaching piano, or inventing, say, a lipstick-case microphone. “If you’re in a bar you would hold it up and say, ‘This guy is creepy, get out of here,’ ” Kristy explained.

She works as a bartender, three nights a week, at Dive 75 on West 75th Street, making about $800 a week. Katie had been working at another bar, but was fired in June after landing in Cancun to begin a vacation. Her boss said she played the music too loud.

This summer, the twins moved from Newark into a cozy two-bedroom fourth-floor walk-up on West 73rd Street, $2,900 a month. They share it with their brother Zack, 22, a junior at Parsons the New School for Design. Occupying the living room couch is Zack’s classmate, Rostislav Roznoshchik, who works part time at the Blue Donkey Bar. He wants to be a public artist.

Growing up, they mowed lawns, shoveled snow, fetched mail for the elderly. And, of course, there was the squirrel lady, who could not countenance roadkill not receiving respectful burials. She gave the twins $5 an animal to shovel corpses off the streets and bring them to her. Money is money.

Those weren’t perfect jobs, and the last one they had in Ohio was what convinced them it was time to head East. They worked as clerks at the Dancing Donkey, a crafts store with a donkey out back named Donk for kids to feed. Business leaned toward slow. The twins invented games to endure the tedium, like who could stay the longest in her chair without moving.

Now, jobless, days going by one at a time, Katie found herself saying things like: “It’s driving me bonkers. Like what has my existence come to?” And: “I’m going to stab myself.”

She showed her nails: nibbled beyond existence. “I’ve been like a woodchuck,” she said. “My hands hurt.”

Kristy held up hers: gone.

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The dogs today. To pick up spare money, Katie fills in for a dog walker when he’s away, which is not that often.

It’s not nanotechnology, but you do need to know technique. The first dog, Cassie, for instance, does not like to budge. The trick passed on from the owner was to drop a box of tissues on the dog’s hindquarters.

Sure enough: tissues dropped, dog out the door.

Dogs were fine, but the work got Katie’s thoughts going the wrong way. There’s a guy she sees around the neighborhood who wears plastic bags for shoes. When she’s walking dogs she begins to worry that that is going to be her, without work, stumbling along in plastic bags.

Of course the twins have no health insurance. Not long ago, Katie had a bad earache — felt like a screwdriver pushing into her ear — that she self-medicated with tea and over-the-counter pills. Kristy has been sensing pain on the right side of her jaw. It hurts when she eats something hard or yawns widely.

What they do have is friends, and they support one another. A guy who manages a tomato-canning plant gives them canned tomatoes, olive oil and coconut milk. An accountant ex-boyfriend of Kristy’s does their taxes. He also sends gifts, like a CD to learn Russian, although Kristy has never expressed even tepid interest in learning Russian. They, in turn, rake the leaves at his New Jersey home and wash his car.

Another friend works as a waiter at an Italian restaurant while he tries to locate voiceover work. The twins drop in with a big group, then he’ll round up people to run up a tab at Kristy’s bar.

One night at Prohibition, a bar on Columbus Avenue near 84th Street, they slid into outdoor tables with a dozen comrades. Their brother Zack told how he and a friend had been handing out homemade cards to strangers to lift their spirits. One says on the outside, “I would be lying if I said ...” And then inside it says, “That you aren’t gorgeous, because you are. Please pass this on to someone you feel is gorgeous.”

One member of the group was in law school, another training for a career in ophthalmology. Others were doing things like sleeping in a museum as part of an exhibition, selling at Bloomingdale’s, bartending.

A guy hoping to start an online business was taking a $600 aptitude test to tell him what he’s good at.

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Mom came in for lunch, at a Chipotle on 42nd Street. They began by joining hands and saying what they were thankful for, then Mom said, “Tell me something new.”

Katie mentioned a baby-sitting job: two days.

They had gotten some good buys at a thrift shop: a coin belt for $3, an “Animal House” DVD for $2, an X-Men tennis racket for $3.27.

The twins love Mom, whose name is Tyna Walker-Lay, but she can get to them at times. Like when she says she can’t tell the relatives back home they’re bartenders. She says that just about every time they talk.

Katie said: “Relatives in Ohio think working in a bar is a step down from prostitution.”

Katie said to Mom: “You know, you once thought we should be schoolteachers and have the summers off.”

Mom: “That’s still a thought down the road.”

Mom points out, with regularity, that they need jobs with benefits. She has noted that a prison guard gets benefits.

Grandma e-mails from Columbus, telling the twins she prays for them. Or that Ohio has openings for office clerks. A few months ago, when Katie wrote that she had split up with a boyfriend, Grandma came back with: “Are you girls ever going to get married?”

Mom had to run: “Some of us have to be productive, have benefits, 401(k)’s.”

She told them she loved them.

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They claimed a couch upstairs at the Aroma Espresso Bar on West 72nd Street, where they like to ingest caffeine and comb the Web: Think, think, think.

The other day, a brainstorm hit. They would devise a blog called Twin Town, write about their lives and invite guest material, somehow woo advertisers.

Kristy said she could do a photo display with the gnome bank that she had lugged around Newark, snapping pictures of it at the park, at a beauty store, in a police car.

Katie said she could list idiotic reasons people give for breakups. Kristy liked that one, mentioned the guy who ditched her because he said her jokes weren’t funny. Katie brought up the friend whose boyfriend left after telling her she slammed his car door too hard.

“Excellent,” Kristy said.

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Happy Hour at Dive 75, Kristy at the bar. Familiar faces trickled in, spat out orders. Here was Ren Quiroz, the friend who manages the canning plant. Another friend, involved in pharmaceutical pricing, showed his new tattoo. Their roommate, Rostislav, arrived. He said he earned $4 at the Blue Donkey today. Katie showed up for a beer.

Kristy worked the crowd, playing Hot Dice and Connect Four. She doesn’t mind bartending, but it’s no career, not for her. As she put it: “Bartending is like dating a guy you know you’re not going to marry.”

And: “I keep wondering how do I propel myself out of the bar world, where I look cute and pour beer, into a world where I have thoughtful conversation about the world rather than stuff like why do people clap at the end of good movies. Or, why do you think Heidi Klum married Seal? I don’t care why!”

Katie was moping a bit, saying, “I’ve eaten so many canned beans lately.”

And: “I need a life coach to come in and tell me what I’m doing wrong. I keep singing that song, ‘Something’s Got to Give.’ ”

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The wind picked up. They got drinks from Starbucks and sat in the park on Columbus and 66th Street, the acceleration of life around them.

Katie said that a friend put her on a list to get into focus groups: “They pay you to say if you like green ketchup or hate Lysol. I can do that.”

Kristy said the bar had been so slow one night that she found herself singing Celine Dion to the fish tank: “There’s got to be a way out of this,” she said.

They had been chewing over ways to get noticed, inject some news into their lives. Mom always told them: “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll always be what you’ve always been.”

Kristy suggested hiring a helicopter to scatter her résumé over Manhattan.

They had a saxophone, so Katie thought of playing in the subway with a sign inviting job offers. “I could have Mom sing,” she said.

She dug out her phone and called Mom. Mom did not embrace the idea, mentioning how mortified she would be, saying she would have to wear a hat and dark glasses.

They looked up to find Michael Moore shambling past with a small entourage. They caught up to him, told him they admired him and were looking for jobs and wondered when he knew what he wanted to do. He told them how he was unemployed, collecting $98 a week, saw the General Motors chairman on TV, and on and on.

And: “I realized when bad things happen it’s really just the window to the next good thing happening. That’s not too hippy-dippy a thing to say, but that’s what I found.”

Kristy said, “Yeah, I know what you mean.”

And Michael Moore said, “On the other hand, when things are going really well, it’s like, when’s the next shoe going to drop.”

He laughed. They laughed.

He said, “Thank you very much and good luck.”

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Katie launched into “Nowhere Man,” then “In My Life,” the sax’s mournful wail ringing through the tunnels in the Times Square subway station on a Friday afternoon. Her sign read: “Don’t Give Money, Give Business Cards.”

Kristy had come along, lugging the milk cases that served as a music stand. It was their luck that a seven-piece band roared away on a nearby platform.

Some people took pictures. Most did nothing. A few cards fluttered into Katie’s case: a music combo, a realtor, a music editing firm, a comic book store, a placement agency and a dentist in Kentucky. Plus 54 cents.

They had had a meeting with Deadspin, a sports blog, but no real jobs there, just the suggestion to join an Australian football team and write about it. Katie was pursuing an internship at the United Nations. Kristy decided to try to interest New York magazine in an article about the effect on kids who appear in unflattering YouTube videos. From a posting on Monster.com, she heard from someone who wondered if she could translate Arabic.

“That was like the world laughing at me,” she said.

And so it went, and so it went. Jobs were out there somewhere. Something had to give.