J.O.B.'s

As far as I can recollect I’ve had 40 jobs in my life.  I assume that this is more than most people, and they've ranged widely in pay scale, contribution to society, legality, and longevity.  I think I’ve been fired from about 12 of them and quit the rest.  Most of the time I’ve been paid wages that were an insult, but I've also managed to participate in a few profitable endeavors.  Regardless, I am fairly certain of one thing – that I’ll leave this earth in the same financial state as I entered it.  I’m ok with that.  Looking back and documenting these jobs isn't important in itself other than offering a touchstone of where I was, and who I was, at that time in my life.  Writing about a ll the jobs I've had has been fun, like looking through your old address book with many of the names scribbled out and written over.

The highpoints?  I almost killed a turtle, got fired for not being Jewish, ran a cottage industry embezzling from a pharmacy, washed a lot of pots and pans, sold my plasma for grocery money, did construction as a front for a drug dealer, threw out a lot less garbage than I was supposed to, worked as the errand boy for a mobster running a sports gambling racket, did work release for the State of Colorado penal system, painted three lifetime’s worth of houses, taught Russian immigrants English, got fired from a job before I was even officially hired, took care of horses as a ranch hand in the mountains, got electrocuted on a regular basis, and worked in the Epidemiology department for Yale University.  Quite a varied existence now that I take the time to recall it all.  I remember the countless uncomfortable, sweaty hours breaking my back with heavy labor, the vast spans of mindless boredom like a desert with no oasis, but mostly I look back and recall the knuckleheads that I worked with and wonder, “Where the hell did these people come from?” 

I will try not to bore you with the mundane details, just a list with a brief explanation of each, and then I’ll fall into further nostalgia when warranted.  I hope you enjoy it a lot more than I did living it!

1. Mowing lawns, raking leaves, shoveling snow.  Since a very early age I was given responsibilities to work around our yard.  To make a few bucks here and there I was also mowing neighbors’ lawns, shoveling snow off of driveways, and raking the nonstop leaves in the beautiful autumn in Connecticut, where they would fall, red, orange, yellow, and brown, faster then you could rake them up.  I hated work and it felt like slave labor – so THIS is why my mom had kids!  But of course much later I would appreciate her instilling a work ethic in me.

2. Paper route.  I walked the route, instead of bicycling, most of the time because my route was up and down steep hills, lugging a huge canvas bag filled with the New Haven Register.  I wasn’t good at the collection part, and if I added it all up I probably lost money on the paper route.  My hands were always stained with newsprint but it wasn’t so bad in the summer.  I liked the solitude of the 5am streets as I walked down Hartford Turnpike, up Ridge Road, and down to State Street, where I would stop at Country Foods for a fresh cinnamon roll before finishing the route.  In the winter or when it was raining it was brutal.  Sunday papers sucked and we’re twice as heavy because of all the inserts, but that was where the big money was.  In retrospect it’s amazing that only 30 years ago we lived in a world where little kids could walk around all day by themselves, even in marginal neighborhoods, and no one worried.  Nowadays kids can’t even play in their front yards without supervision.  Why the hell is that?

3. House sitting.  I did my share of house sitting and dog sitting around the neighborhood.  One time I took on the task for some neighbors who were really odd and had a filthy house.  It creeped me out to be there.  Apparently I thought the work part of the house sitting was optional, because somehow I managed to neglect my duties with the turtle tank.  When they got back the filter had tipped over and the water was murky with half-wet cotton material.  It almost killed the turtle, but a day drying out on a rock in the front yard and he was fine.  I didn’t get paid.  Dammit – I really needed that $8!

4. Dishwasher, Abel’s Deli.   This was my first real job. At 15 years old I made the rounds at the Hamden Plaza to find anyone who was interested in hiring a lazy, insecure punk kid.  Larry Abel hired me on the spot and I started as a dishwasher and busboy the next day.  His restaurant served authentic Jewish deli food and it was amazing, some of the best grub I’ve ever had, and half the time I spent my wages on a cow’s tongue Ruben sandwich after my shift.  The work was hard but it didn’t bother me because I got to hang out with Paul.  Paul was a cool thug, around 17 years old, who was from a very rough neighborhood in New Haven.  He taught me a lot and we had a blast.  I was just starting to listen to hip hop, which was pretty new around 1986, and we would pop a tape in and listen to the newest beats as we worked.  He was a street fighter, and loved to mess around and always play fight.  He would kid around that I couldn’t go home without my “nightly beat down” and proceed to beat the shit out of me.  Of course he was only using about 5% of his strength because he could of snapped my puny neck with one hand, but Paul preferred the strategic ambush. I would open the supply closet to grab the mop and he would jump out and start whupping my ass, or hide behind a car and jump out for our beat down sessions.  Of course I got a few punches in but he didn’t even feel them.  One time I went out back to take garbage to the dumpster and pull launched himself off the ten foot high roof of a storage unit with a flying body slam and just leveled me.  It sounds brutal but we were super cool and good friends and talked about life a lot – he was just trying to toughen me up and I sure needed it!  We were washing dishes one night, Paul recounting his latest street fight, when another worker came in, a Jewish cook.  He started talking about how he knew all of this karate and proceeded to unleash a furious kata of kicks and punches right there in the dishwashing area.  The floor was wet, and when he threw an overhead roundhouse kick he completely lost his balance and flopped into a full dish rack, sending about 50 plates and bowls smashing to the floor.  The owner was PISSED but Paul and I couldn’t stop laughing.  One Sunday afternoon I engaged in a casual conversation with one of the Jewish waiters.  He asked me where I went to temple. 

“Temple?  I’m not Jewish.” I told him.

“So what are you?” he asked, puzzled.

“I guess I’m German.” I let him know matter-of-factly, because I didn’t particularly feel religious, and didn’t think anything else about it.  The next day I got a call from Abel’s Deli, informing me that they would no longer be requiring my services.  I was shit-canned for not being Jewish.  Oh well, it was a great place, and I still can’t sleep well without my nightly beat down!  

 

5. Office help and laborer, Some Boring Company.  My mom remarried while I was in junior high and my step-dad, Bill, was….how can I say this nicely?...a DICK!  He was the military taskmaster who believed in hard work and rules and little else.  That agenda did not at all jibe with my plans on treating my prime high school years like a booze cruise docking at Hedonism.  One summer Bill got me a job at some company where he worked – it had something to do with engineering but I don’t even remember what it was called.  I had to dress up (which meant putting on a collared shirt and underwear, abandoning my Commando lifestyle) and stand over a copy machine all day, making reprints of huge blueprints.  It was SO boring that I couldn’t take it.  I worked in silence and didn’t talk to Bill on the ride home.  One day they were short in the warehouse and needed a helping hand to unload a truck that just came in.  Bill volunteered me, and I spent three hours lugging boxes inside an aluminum tractor trailer under the summer sun.  I loved it.  At least I wasn’t bored, and the other guys wore whatever the hell they wanted and swore and talked about women’s anatomy liberally.  This is where I belonged.  I begged for a permanent transfer to the warehouse, and for once I think Bill was semi-approved, mistakenly assuming that I was developing a work ethic.  It was great in the warehouse – we just kicked it and goofed around unless there was the occasional truck to unload.  The warehouse guys resented the office guys and made fun of them, and I couldn’t agree more.  We played daily games of stickball with a ball of masking tape and a broom handle, and anytime you wanted a nap you would just take the lift up to the top row of storage racks, about twenty feet up, and find a soft spot among the packing materials and snooze as long as you wanted.  I survived the summer.

6. Landscaper.  When I was in high school your summer job really defined who you were, and where you were life was going.  I estimate that 73% of adult males in my hometown of Hamden turned out to be landscapers.  There are actually 1.7 landscapers for every lawn in Connecticut, and to get your state business license they require you to have two tattoos and a sleeveless flannel shirt.  I was, unfortunately, a house painter.  It was the bottom of the barrel, other than maybe the roofers or street pavers, which might as well been an entrance program to acclimate future inmates to prison ways.  The cushy jobs were camp counselors, like Mitch D had, and I even knew a few lifeguards, but they were too high in the summer job caste system to talk to me – a lowly filthy painter - in public, at least until the summer was over.  Working at a restaurant wasn’t always fun but at least you got to dispense unbelievable amounts of free shit to your friends, and likewise get hooked up at their place of business.  The best job I’ve ever seen in high school?  Goo worked at Ashley’s, a homemade ice cream shop with a hippie theme. 

But I digress.  One week when my painting work was slow, maybe because of rain, I got hired on as a landscaper on the crew with my friend Mikey Mercs.  He lent me his sleeveless shirt and I fit in undetected for the week, shoveling mulch all day.     

7. Cashier, Spring Glenn Pharmacy.   Oh boy, here we go.  Anyone who worked there, or walked into that establishment during those days is probably laughing out loud right now.  First off, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if, after confessing to these crimes in writing, the Hamden Police Department showed up at my door within five minutes.  I would gladly surrender, and even put the handcuffs on myself, because I am guilty as sin of robbing this place blind.  The owner, Barry Kuehl, was trying to eek out a meager existence working his family business, a pharmacy and all around convenience store in the nice suburban neighborhood of Spring Glenn.  If anyone knows where Barry Kuehl is, or his descendants, if he’s not broke and destitute, living in a mental institution somewhere playing volleyball in a bathroom and chain smoking chocolate cigarettes, please have him contact me immediately.  I would gladly write him a check for everything I stole, plus interest for the last 23 years and a little extra for emotional damages I surely inflicted.  This would be just the start to the long process of reparations, cleaning my karma, and purging my soul of the heinous crimes I have committed against the Spring Glenn Pharmacy.

Then again, I did not operate alone.  I was only 16 years old, fresh off my firing at Abel’s Deli, when I was hired on at Spring Glenn Pharmacy on the good word of some of my sister’s friends, all two years older than me, who worked there.  The pay was ridiculous – starting around $3.25 an hour if memory serves, minimum wage at the time, but we created our own employee perks package.

This was before the days of computers and high-tech video cameras, even before acceptance of credit cards and debit cards was ubiquitous.  For those of you from the younger generations, computers have indeed bolstered our lives in every way imaginable, and thank God internet porn is now readily available from Bejing to Bakersfield with the click of a button, but you have NO IDEA what we used to get away with in the Golden Ages of larceny before computers and security cameras.

My job was simple and mundane – I mostly worked behind the front counter, operating the register as people bought candy, toiletries, newspapers, cigarettes, and even beer. Sometimes it was busy but most of the time the customer flow was sporadic, and I could take out my high school textbooks and sneak in a few responsible hours of studying during my shift.  I chose not to, instead reading through trashy gossip magazines, pilfering from the cash register, and finding every excuse to roam the aisles, stealing everything that wasn’t bolted down. 

The old timers at SGP, mostly Levi, EButt, and Ann, showed me how to operate “The Business,” or “The Biz” as we called it.  It was a simple scam – when customers came with exact change we would ring it into the register and then immediately void the transaction and pocket the change once they left.  This only worked if they had exact change and no other customers were immediately behind them.  I got good at it.  Really good.  I created a cornucopia of excuses, scripts, spare change trays, and bait-and-switches to encourage payment with exact change. I added variations to the hustle, like the “Half-Biz,” where I would punch in a transaction with exact change or close to it, but not hit the Enter button to officially document the purchase.  Then I would feign a distraction – dropping a coin, a bloody nose, needing to change out the roll of paper for receipts, just to prolong the transaction.  Inevitably the customer would be in too much of a rush to wait for little or no change, and just take off.  Once they left I would just cancel the transaction, not needing to void it because it never officially even happened, and pocket the cash.  It was best to keep a mental tally of how much you had earned with “The Biz” that day, and then take the lump sum out at the end of your shift, so not to be seen dipping in the till frequently.  With the help of the Biz you could make an additional $10 to $75 per shift.  Sundays were a gold mine, though hard work, because everyone came in to buy huge Sunday papers and would just throw $2 at you for a $1.75 paper and not even want to wait in line or wait for change. 

Of course we didn’t stop there.  Our friends would come in during our shifts, wandering the aisles and filling up shopping carts of items, and then dump them on the counter when no other customers were behind them.  I would ring up a Blow Pop for .25 cents, then void it, then re-ring it, then void it, etc. to make it sound like I was working hard ringing up a lot of items.  They would walk out with grocery bags of stuff for 25 cents.  My friends loved it, and I parlayed my generosity with the bread off of Barry Kuehl’s table into a barter system where I also got hooked up at Dunkin Donuts, Mr. Steak, Ashley’s Ice Cream, and Bob’s Stores where my friends worked.

Getting caught didn’t occur to me, or I just didn’t give a shit, because I was reckless and ridiculous in my larceny.  Barry had a chronic cough so it was easy to hear him coming, like a cat with a bell attached to it.  He was a classic perv and would pander all over the high school girl employees but leave us guys alone to work/steal in peace.  The only real security was a pharmacy assistant, an odd lady named Mary Ann, who would roam the store and give us the evil eye while trying to amass evidence of our atrocities to report to the Kuehls.  She was a worthy advisory because she was equal parts midget and ninja.  You would just be kicking it up front, talking to a friend or slipping something in your pocket and then POOF!  Without even a sound she would appear right behind you with hands on hips, ready to report you.  I swear this little troll was only 4’10”, so she could walk upright down any aisle and appear in an instant without any notice or sound.  She terrified me and still haunts my dreams.

Soon the old guard moved on to college and I got jobs for Goo, Capper, Levi’s little sister Allison, and others to replace them, and handed down the Biz to them like it was passed down to me.  I was rolling in it – always had the new colognes, the cleanest notebooks, the newest technology in erasable pens, but my true commodity of choice was bubble gum.  I would acquisition probably a case of gum a week – from Bazooka to Bubbalicious to Trident to Big Red – and pass it out liberally at school.  I walked down the hall and threw everyone a whole pack when they asked for a piece, like a crack dealer giving out the first taste for free.     

Believe it or not but at that time pharmacies could sell beer and liquor.  They entrusted us 15 and 16 year olds to inventory, stock, and sell this booze. Big mistake.   The alcohol was more closely guarded and it was way too blatant to throw a six-pack of Rolling Rock into your backpack or try and get it out in full daylight.  So the scam was to throw a liquor bottle or cans of beer in the trash when no one was looking and cover it with a magazine or plastic bag.  Then whoever was on trash duty would collect it, along with all of the other rubbish, and take it out back to throw it in the dumpster.  The bag with the booze was carefully placed on the side of the dumpster, and we would circle back after hours, under cover of night, to extract it and start the party.

There were a couple shit assignments at the SGP, which I mostly managed to avoid either with slick excuses or because of my seniority.  The pharmacy sent a worker to do deliveries every afternoon, to a few private homes but mostly to hospitals and medical facilities.  This was, for the most part, a great assignment; you got to drive around in their piece of shit Hyundai, tunes cranking from the tape deck, unsupervised and breathing the air of a free man for three hours.  But the drawback was that you had to deliver to the dreaded fourth floor at Arden Manor hospital.  The first three floors contained docile rehabilitation and elderly residents.  It smelled like pudding and mothballs, but it was no worries – quick in and out.  But some times you had to take a delivery of prescriptions to the fourth floor, the psycho ward.  The security was tighter so it took much longer to deliver up there, and it was no fun when you were high.  You witnessed some crazy people doing crazy shit before you could run out. 

The other bad assignment was to clean that bathroom and inventory and stock Tampon Alley.   These were both in the basement, down an impossibly steep set of creaky stairs, into the stone and dirt remnants of an early 1900’s building.  It was dark and moldy and infested with spiders and probably rats.  It was here that they kept shelves of extra merchandise, including an unbelievably disproportionate amount of feminine products, hence the nickname “Tampon Alley.”  Inventory and re-stocking had to be done.  The bathroom looked like something out of a POW camp and some unlucky soul had to clean it once a week. It was rarely me.    

I would still be working at SGP to this day, still working the Biz and passing down this wisdom to newcomers like an ancient Indian Shaman, but things got too hot.  I don’t really remember why I quit, but I must have been fed up with them trying to order me around like I was an employee or something.  It turned out to be fortunate timing.  Only two weeks after I left there they called all of the workers into the office one by one and interrogated them.  The Kuehls had hired a security firm months before to scope out why they kept losing money, despite a steady stream of customers, and ultimately suspected that someone was ripping them off.  The firm had been sending in undercover agents, posing as patrons, for months and collecting evidence.  Each worker was grilled and eventually cracked under pressure, all of them naming me as the grand offender.  Some of them were fired and later on cameras were installed.  Mary Ann was promoted to Head Commandant and given Nunchucks and throwing stars to carry around when she was on-duty.  To my amazement, they never contacted me and the police never came to take me away.  Years later a shiny, new Walgreens opened up across the street and the Spring Glenn Pharmacy went the way of the dinosaur.  But I can’t complain, we had a good run, and I still have some bubble gum stashed away, twenty something years later.

8. House Painter, College Pro Painting.  Every summer the good jobs were snatched up first, leaving only the dregs of hard labor.  Unfortunately I was too lazy and didn’t give a shit, so I would always wait until the last minute to start looking for work, and end up having to paint houses.  It sucked.  It was hot and humid, and you were always covered in sawdust, paint chips, oil-based primers that wouldn’t come off without a good scrubbing with paint thinner, every color of paint know to man, or putting your whole hand in a hornet’s nest, or an incessant nasty poison ivy rash all over your body, which I found I could only cure by pouring gasoline on the infected areas.  Not to mention I’d be risking my life, dangling off of roofs or hanging out 20-30 feet up on a ladder all day, just for 6 bucks an hour. 

The only way I got through it was because I worked with my good friend Chris Johns, a rugged hockey player with a surprisingly jovial and witty personality.  We passed the time with endless pranks, inside jokes, and our favorite: hypothetical questions that served as a mind fuck.  Our favorite game was developing multiple-choice questions that the other would have to answer.  For instance, I might ask, “If your whole family was held hostage and they would kill them unless you did one of the following, which would you do:  1. Eat a plate of dog shit  2. Got to prison for a year  3. Take a punch in the face from Mike Tyson?  We developed impossible questions, all of them involving hostage situations with family members that forced us to choose some horrible and often perverse fate to save them all.  Between those mind-bending questions and an oldies-music mx tape that Chris had we somehow made it through the summer. 

9. Garbage man, University of North Carolina, Charlotte.  My freshman year I went to school in Cack-A-Lack, and soon got a job emptying the trash out of dorm bathrooms.  I got the job with my roommate, Josh, a really cool Cuban Jew from Manhattan, who would go on to do some ground-breaking things at that university, but we had an inglorious beginning.  Every Saturday and Sunday we were supposed to go around to the three huge high-rise dorms and take the trash from every bathroom and throw them down a central trash chute.  There were four bathrooms, men and women’s on each floor, about twenty floors to each building, and three buildings. That’s a lot of freaking trash.  It was disgusting.  On the weekends college students turned into animals, and after a big Friday night the trash can and surrounding areas were overflowing with pizza boxes, food remnants, half filled beer cans, red Jungle Juice punch, bras, vomit, stained boxer shorts, blood, swarming flies, various discarded sexual apparatus, and one time I swear I saw an elephant enema in there.  It was straight foul.  Josh and I did it the first day for about three bathrooms, then said “fuck this for $4.25 an hour,” and went out to throw a baseball in the quad instead.  We never went back or discarded one more bag of trash.

We were fully expecting a phone call on Monday morning firing us, but it never came.  In fact we got paychecks that next week like nothing was wrong.  We deposited them and kept on sleeping in and watching movies instead of working on the weekends.   Two weeks went by and two more paychecks came in the mail. We were amazed – they didn’t know we had quit!  Of course we never told anyone, and on Monday the regular cleaning staff came in and threw out a weekend’s worth of garbage, I’m sure cursing us the whole time.  Instead of a court martial for abandoning our posts we were being rewarded with paychecks for phantom labor.  This was perfect!   The paychecks kept coming as I worked on my tan and chased coeds.  This was truly what I called a Win-Win.  Or at least a Win. 

A month in we got a warning letter that our job performance was unsatisfactory.  Damn right it was!  We cracked another beer and turned up the tunes.  The paychecks kept coming, but so did the warning letters.  Wow, they were actually serious about people doing their jobs.  Buzzkill.  This charade must have gone on for about 4 months before we received a letter stating that we were terminated for accumulating too many complaints.  It was accompanied by our last paychecks.  That was, by far, the best job I’ve ever had.  I really blame the incompetence of the HR department for not figuring out sooner that we were robbing them blind.  With inept supervision like that it’s no wonder that this country is going to pot.  Geez. 

 

10. Dishwasher, University of Connecticut cafeteria.  I transferred up to UConn and was living in the fraternity house.  Every day around 4pm I walked across the street to the dorm cafeteria, where I helped set up dinner and then washed dishes.  In exchange I didn’t get a paycheck but a free meal plan, which was fair compensation.  I actually did work hard at this job for two main reasons.  Number one, I worked with someone who was even more lazy and nihilistic than me, a frat brother named Scherbs.  He was a great guy, very entertaining and easy to talk to, and shot straight with me.  We were supposed to trade off who washed dishes and who scrubbed the heavy metal pots and pans, but I just ended up doing all of it while he hung out and bullshitted and made me laugh.  Reason number two?  I was high as a kite.  All the time.  Smoking weed was my way to escape some heavy shit in my life at the time, plus it was just fun and just felt good, so I was perma-high.  That made all the arduous scrubbing and washing tolerable, more of a theoretical distraction that was going on outside my body while I floated around in my thoughts.  It was cool working there – the grub was decent, I got to hang out with Scherbs, Gahan, and Dun, and our boss, a trailer-park resident named Pearl, who was always just as high as me, let us do whatever the hell we wanted.

11.  Staff, University of Connecticut Add/Drop.  This was a cool job, high up on the food chain in college, because you actually had an in for getting the best classes before everyone else.  Way back in the Stoned Ages of 1992 the whole class registration process was done with a process of filing index cards in boxes, each class full when the box was full.  The whole university had to go through this archaic ritual for a week at the start of each semester, waiting in line after line and hoping to emerge from the chaos with a passable academic schedule.  It’s amazing to think about how things were done before computers made everything so easy.  I sat back and pulled the strings while everyone scrambled.  I got to work with my buddy Rich, and we scoped out the latest crop of incoming honeys and hooked our friends up with good classes too, as corrupt as Turkish train conductors.

Playing the system was nothing new to me in college.  Parking near the center of campus was at an extreme premium, and most people had to pay huge fees just to get a space in a lot a 1/2 mile from their classes.  One day at our fraternity meeting an alumni brother came, who was a chiropractor in Hartford, and said hi quickly.  As a nicety he said "if there's anything I can do for you guys let me know." and sat down.  I was at his office the very next morning.  I complained of back pain, a spinal injury, blurred vision, man-cramps, numbness in my legs, and shooting pains in my rear molars.  Certainly with all of these afflictions I deserved a letter to the administration requesting a handicapped parking pass?  He reluctantly agreed and wrote me the letter and told me to get the hell out of his office and never come back.  I brought the letter down to the Disabled Services office, feigning a limp and jut generally trying to look like I had lived a life of painful despair.  I think I wore a raggedy sweater for effect and probably looked prefect for the part of Oliver Twist.  I gave them the paperwork and they were buying it, hook, line and sinker, when a friend of mine walked by outside the open front office doors.
"Hey Norm, are you playing ball again today?" he asked, much to my horror.  I shooed him off and feigned surprise, but the lady behind the desk looked at me hard with her one good eye.  The gig was up.  Her face winced and contorted, her glass eye rolling back into her head, though I couldn't be sure if it was because she was so mad at me but holding her tongue, or if she had some pre-existing condition shit going on, but she eventually just gave me the parking pass. I was the cat's meow with that parking sticker, and could park right in the center of campus or on the front lawn of our fraternity house for a quick game of sand volleyball.
What does this have to do with my job?  Nothing, but it's funny, so hang in there.  As I mentioned previously my grades were more random than a Jackson Pollock painting.  If I started a class and wasn't doing well around midterms, which I usually wasn't because I wouldn't even show up until around midterms, I would just petition to drop the class and be done with it, the grade of W for Withdraw not hurting my GPA. One semester I was even more complacent or high than usual, and went to drop a class I was flagging well after midterms.  I was informed that that late in the semester I could only drop a class with special permission from the Department Head himself, and needed his signature on a special form.  Well that sounded like a lot of work and groveling with a low chance of success, so I chose to circumnavigate the problem. I grabbed a UConn phone directory, looked up the name of that Department Head, I think it was Dr. Whitestone or something like that, and scribbled his signature on the form myself.  Problem solved.  I marched down to the office of Academic Affairs and waited my turn in line to talk to the sweet old lady behind the counter.  I tried to turn on the charm, complementing her on how white her dentures were, and handed her the form, thinking it would be easy breezy.  She looked at it, did a double take, looked again, and cleared her throat.
"Young man, who is this head of the Department who signed this?"
"Dr. Whitestone, the head of the department," I said confidently.
"And you're sure it was Dr. Whitestone who signed it for you?" she asked again.
"Yup."
"Well young man, Dr. Whitestone died of a heart attack last year.  The blood rushed to my ears.  Panic set in.  I had grabbed an old directory and forged the signature of a dead man.  I was trapped caught red handed.  She had the form with my name right on it so there was no way to back out of it.  I didn't have time to think - my reflexes kicked in.
"Wait, what?" I asked her, scratching my head and doing my best to look confused.  "What do you mean?" and I craned my head to look at the signature on the paper that she held.  As a reaction she brought it closer and turned it to show me the signature.  Like a jungle cat pouncing on it's pray I SNATCHED that paper out of that old lady's hands with a violence that even surprised me, and ran on out of that office.  I caught a glimpse of her face on the way out and she looked like she was going to have a coronary and soon join the good Doctor.  All I could hear as I sprinted down the hall and out onto the street to freedom was an old lady with nice dentures screaming "Stop!  Stop!  Forgery!!!! Forgery!!!!  Security!!!!!!"  They never caught me but I had to take an F in that class.   

12.  Entrapeneezy.: Sold weed, bet on basketball.  I lump these two “jobs” together as side hustles I had to get me through college.  I sold weed a little bit, all small time – just enough so I could smoke for free.  To make it look official I got a pager (yes, this was pre-cell phone days), but the only people who ever paged me were my mom and my girlfriend.  “Mommmmmmm!!!  Not now – I’m trying to sell drugs!”  My girlfriend wasn’t supposed to page me unless there was an emergency.  You could tell a girl 100 times to only page someone 911 when its an emergency, but then they use it 13 times just before lunch to see what you want from Subway. 

Betting on basketball, however, was surprisingly profitable. I love numbers, statistics, and patterns, and went into it with a lot of research and a solid system I developed.  I would only bet NBA hoops – college was too unpredictable – and always bet the underdog to cover the spread at home.  Bad teams usually make a run at home not to get blown out, and the odds makers gave a liberal spread to the bad teams.  I carefully tracked betting every underdog at home during the season, calling in my bets to our local bookie and getting my money delivered to the frat house, and won at about a 75% clip.  I even hit a few parlays and trifectas that brought me in a few hundred dollars each, a nice chunk of change in those days.  I think I could still use that system and make a living. 

13. House painter, Griffith Painting.  During the summers in college, just like in high school, I was always too late to apply to the good jobs, so I would be stuck painting houses.  It was cool though, the houses and jobs were much nicer up near Hartford, and I was pretty experienced by then.  Plus I could get high and paint to help pass the time.  I remember one summer I worked 40 days in a row. 

 14. After-school program counselor, Willimantic Elementary.  I worked as a counselor for an after school program in the neighboring town.  I’ve always loved working with kids and they respond well to me, maybe because they can sense I’m not completely full of shit like most adults.  The best part of this job was that they had a really nice indoor basketball court perfectly scaled down to size for ten year olds.  The rims were only 8 feet high but they were top-notch breakaway rims with glass backboards.  We’d play hoops every day with all of the kids against me.  They called me Shaq, and I would mercilessly block their shots, push them out of the way, and unleash ferocious dunks, hanging on the rim and screaming after each two points.  They loved it and it was great for my ego…until I had to play against those my own size again.

15. Intern, Yankelovich Partners.  I got kicked out of the University of Connecticut for academic failure, my transcripts looking like a roller coaster of solid A and B work plummeting into F’s, D’s, and indecipherable letters  - I’ and X’s, from one semester to the next.   My mom almost killed me.  They allowed me to still take two classes a semester to try and earn my way back in, and to fill the time doing something productive I managed a paying internship at Yankelovich Partners, a marketing research company.  My sister worked there and helped me get my foot in the door.  I really liked it, commuting down to Stanford, Connecticut to a fancy office building and working among intelligent, professional people.  I held my own, and the sociological impulses that dictated consumer behavior and identifying future market trends really interested me.  UConn kept me in time out for two semesters, both with A work, and once they let me back in I got A’s and B’s the rest of my time there.  

16. Waiter, American Canyon Inn.  Nice view, no money.  I moved out to Fort Collins, Colorado right at the end of my college career and got a job at a soon-to-be opening restaurant up near Horsetooth Resevoir.  My buddy Denny and I slaved away doing construction to get this place ready to open, with promises of a fair paycheck when that happened.  I was broke, and sometimes the only substantial meal I would eat in a couple days is when I gorged on the free food up there.   They opened, it was a cluster fuck, they never made any money, and we eventually quit or faded away.  We ran into the daughter of the owner years later.  She told us that the place closed, her parents went bankrupt and divorced, and it really screwed up the family.  She had about ten piercings on her face alone, so I believed her.  Sounds like most restaurants I know.  I remember watching the OJ Simpson chase while eating my country-fried steak at that place.  

17. Supervisor, Fort Collins Department of Parks and Recreation.  My buddy Mitch D came out to Colorado with me for the summer.  He was doing an internship with the town parks and rec and got me a job supervising a work crew of “at risk” teenage kids.  The job was great.  It didn’t pay much, but our job was to clean up a beautiful park right next to my apartment.  Every morning I would wake up ten minutes before I was supposed to be there, throw some water on my hungover face, and stumble over there behind dark sunglasses.  I told the kids to work a little and then pretend to work the rest of the time, keeping their rakes and shovels close in case the big boss man drove by.  We even had a spotter who was supposed to whistle if he saw the boss's car coming.  I just napped in the sun and read the sports page.  I had finally broken through to being a supervisor instead of a scrub worker, and I was handling it well.  Those kids were great, and I feel like I made a big impact in their lives.

 18. Security, Edora Ice Rink.   Don’t get too excited when you read that I worked security – there had been a recent rash of locker room break ins and thefts, so I had to camp out in the men’s locker room all day to discourage robbers.   I was SO bored.  It was hot and humid in there, didn’t smell quite right, and no matter how many books I read it wouldn’t pass the 6 hour shifts.  I came to banging my head into lockers to see if I could make a dent before passing out, just to relieve the boredom.  

19. Landscaper, Fort Collins, Colorado.  My buddy Dirty Denny and I really needed jobs – we were broke from a summer of doing nothing but smoking weed and playing Frisbee golf.  I opened up the Yellow Pages and made some calls and found a nice enough guy, a landscaper, who needed some laborers.  At that time we were technically homeless, or “in transition” as I’d like to call it.  We were sleeping on the front porch of our buddy John’s house, unfolding sleeping bags on a hammock and an old nasty couch right out under the open stars every night.  It wasn’t so bad, and we had my dog Miles to keep us company.   In the morning we tied up Miles and shuffled off to work.  The landscaper had us carry and unroll sod all day, brutal physical work.  At one point he asked for a volunteer to back up his brand new beautiful pickup truck that pulled the cart of sod.  I thought I was the man for the job, so I jumped in the cab, put it in reverse, and proceeded to turn it to hard, ramming the metal cart into the side of the corner of his new truck.  Oops. We worked a few more days laying sod and then one morning, waking up at the dawn on the front porch, we were so tired that we made the executive decision to not show up again.

20. Youth counselor, Fort Collins Recreation Center.  During my time in Colorado I progressed within the Parks and Rec department to a job helping them open a youth community center. It was within half the huge building of the old Fort Collins High School.  We catered to after-school programs for at-risk and inner city kids in that area, which wasn’t a whole lot.  My job was mostly to play basketball with the kids who were around high school age.  All of the other workers were much older or female, so I was the only one who could supervise and keep order on the basketball court.  The other workers hated me for it because I was always having fun but also so effective at my job.  The kids loved me though, I kept it real with them and I earned their respect by throwing them around and holding my own on the hoop court and not bullshitting them.  In fact I was starting to get through to some of the kids who had issues at home and were getting in trouble with the law.  They had a lot of anger and just needed someone who really cared and listened to them.  I also met a very good friend – Larry Dawson, who everyone called Zeus.  Larry was from the projects in the Bronx and used to move ya-yo to make ends meet and support his mom.  They moved out of there because he was getting in too much trouble with the law and his mom wanted a more positive environment.  Zeus was huge – about 230 lbs. of solid muscle and looked a lot like a young Mike Tyson.  He was also one of the sweetest, nicest, most genuine human beings I’ve ever known, and we became great friends, like a big brother and little brother.  His mom eventually died of AIDS and I know things were sometimes hard for him in lilly-white Colorado.  We lost touch but I once sent a postcard to the only address he had given me - his uncle in the P.J.s in the Bronx.  I bet it was the only time a postcard picturing mountains and wildflowers got delivered there!  I would love to know what happened to Larry and I really hope he’s doing ok. 

Ironically I was living clean, not partying or doing drugs at the time – just working and working out a lot, but I got arrested and thrown in jail one night for someone else’s shit (and that’s another story).  When I got bailed out and back to my apartment to check my voicemails the next day I got a message that I had been fired from that job, no questions asked, no one even bothering to wait to see if I was guilty.  

To be continued with the next 20 J.O.B.'s