Yes, I Did Those Jobs

And, no, I don’t want to ever again!

What was your first job? You know, the one that paid you actual money. Mine was cleaning Persian show cats’ cages for a woman who lived outside of town. $1 an hour. I was over the moon!

My fee for babysitting was only 50 cents an hour; I was going to clean up.

And I did

I cleaned up cat shit and cat litter and cat vomit and balls of cat fur. The lady’s husband had built a cinder block building out back when their basement got to be too full of cat cages. There were probably about a hundred cats or so it seemed to me. The lady herself spent hours every day bathing the cats. Those cats were the least cat-like cats I’ve ever been around.

They didn’t groom themselves. They didn’t evince any curiosity about anything around them. They just laid there in those cages, often in the litter boxes, with a dull, dumb expression on their pushed-in little faces. I lasted two weeks, I think. I wasn’t fast enough (a theme we will revisit throughout my work life).

Then I got my first “real” job with a W4 and everything!

I ran the concession stand at the local movie house in the little town I grew up in, Lodi, Ohio. The Idol Theater (get it? Lodi spelled backward, huh?) sat maybe 75 paying customers and was the only option for watching movies short of driving up to Medina where there was a two-screen multiplex. I think I earned $2.50 an hour, making the popcorn and cotton candy and selling it to customers. There was no cash register just a box. I had to figure out the customers’ change in my head.

That part was hell.

But I got to take as much popcorn as I wanted at the end of the night and making cotton candy was a blast. The first weekend I worked was when “Blazing Saddles” made its big Lodi premiere. I heard that movie so many times before I saw it that I could lip-sync the entire movie and did. Friends weren’t nearly as impressed as I thought they should be.

As I’ve written about Daddy and his legendary work ethic before, so let’s just say I was programmed to work and work hard.

But I knew this work stuff, it was temporary. I’d show up and do what was expected of me, but it was really only a matter of time before I made a name for myself as an Artist.

So I worked crappy jobs to earn money and drew my weird pictures and got ready for my Big Break.

A particularly tough job was with a sign company. I suspect that technology has transformed sign painting but it was pretty primitive in 1976. In order to trace the letters onto giant pieces of plywood for the really big signs, the lettering was done on paper and then the paper was attached by magnets to a massive steel surface. My job was to use “the stippler”, an electrified stylus that zapped tiny holes in the paper which was then taped into place on the sign and dusted with either chalk or charcoal to give the sign painter his letters (see? Primitive). My boss told me to be careful but that the stippler would bite me. Once.

He was right. On the second day, I let my guard down, allowing the tip of the stylus to make contact with the steel surface and just about got knocked on my ass.

That was bad. There was worse.

I think I got rotated off the stippler because my lines were too wobbly (and I wasn’t fast enough). Instead, I operated the automatic silk screen press. I had a pile of large sheets of paper to my right and a rack to my left. The trick was to pull the sheet of paper into the press, position it perfectly before the top part of the press lowered and the squeegee with the ink got pulled across and then to yank it out, get it onto the rack without messing up the wet ink and make sure the next sheet was in place before the screen came back down again. There was a foot brake to slow things down, but slowing things down was not in the job description.

I don’t think I lasted very long there but within less than a week my hands were covered in paper cuts and cleaning the ink off at the end of my shift using lacquer-thinner was every bit as painful as you’re thinking right now.

All this time I was drawing and painting and believing in myself.

I was an Artist. I wasn't going to waste time learning marketable skills. I wasn’t going to be a Secretary or a Shoe Salesperson or a Medical Assistant. The one skill set that could reliably earn me money was cleaning (thanks, Mom!). I spent years cleaning in nursing homes, assisted living facilities, cheap motels and flophouses, chain hotels, and even one really fancy four-star joint in downtown Cleveland.

Somewhere in there, I managed a day and a half at the Kirby Vacuum Cleaner factory where I got pulled from one line after another for being — wait for it — too slow. In case you’ve never had the pleasure, working on a factory line is every bit as soul-sucking, miserable, and tedious as you’re thinking. Maybe worse. Factories are loud, dirty, dangerous places and the fact that people were lined up to get jobs there tells you all you need to know about the economy in Cleveland in the 1980s.

When that fell apart, I got hired to work the deli counter at Grossman’s Deli not far where Cleveland used to be really industrial. I’d arrive at 5 am and put a massive pot of water on to boil with all four burners turned on under it. Then I’d heave three or four enormous briskets of corned beef into the pot, five on Fridays, and go cut and wrap about thirty thousand kosher dill pickles in wax paper.

The lunch rush was brutal but there were three of us behind the counter and we had our system. By 2 pm when the rush was over, there wasn’t an inch behind that counter that wasn’t slathered in grease including the phone.

When I let the owner’s son know I was an artist, I got the highly prestigious gig of creating signs about the various specials being offered daily and weekly. This could be it, I thought, someone could see these signs and I’ll be on my way!

The trick to “making it” as an Artist is to get your work out there and to be teachable. I dropped both balls. My idea of getting my work out there, aside from magic marker deli signs, was photocopying my pen and ink pieces and then mailing them out to anything in the Yellow Pages that sounded even remotely art-related. That got me one solid friendship that I have to this day and not much else.

As far as being teachable, not a chance.

I was blindly certain that my style was so unique that learning to draw or paint any other way would pollute the purity. Or some nonsense. I was simply insecure and refused to push myself.

So I kept working at minimum wage jobs doing the kinds of stuff no one else wanted to do. I washed piles of dishes and cleaned out sink traps filled with soapy, greasy, slippery strings of…something. I moved furniture and cleaned behind it. I folded mountains of laundry. The number of toilets I cleaned defies counting. I worked two hours a day, 7 days a week cleaning rooms in a flophouse with the owner’s mother who just pointed and grunted to indicate what I should do to earn the $8 I needed for my daily vodka.

There was also my cocktail waitress phase at a cheesy disco where the paychecks bounced and I had seniority on the wait staff after five weeks. I taught each new girl coming on to bring customers no-name gin, charge them for Tanqueray, and pocket the difference. At the end of our shift, we’d sit around and smoke the pot that the off-duty cops had confiscated during the night. With the cops. Of course.

Things were bad at this point but I was still drawing my weird pictures certain that I’d hit the big time any day now.

The trouble was that I could barely make ends meet with increasingly lousy jobs that paid so little I often had to choose between losing the phone or having the electricity shut off. This was when I learned that poverty does not build character.

A chance conversation got me a job selling poster art in a kiosk in what was essentially a vertical mall in the lowest level of Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. I’d get to the kiosk at 10 am, very civilized, and set up all the Georgia O’Keefes and Ansel Adamses, buy my coffee and settle in for my ten-hour shift. I did this three days a week. The worst part of that job was the gung-ho boss who would come down several times during the day to insist that I approach the browsing customers to make sales.

Maybe you’re different, but if I’m simply checking things out in any store and a salesperson approaches me to push the goods, I am out of there.

I’d watch the boss descend upon unsuspecting browsers, turn the charm up to eleven, and basically take them hostage until they managed to extricate themselves. I don’t recall his schmoozing ever resulting in a sale. Whenever he’d hover nearby, I’d dutifully go through the motions of talking up customers but once he was gone I’d return to my newspaper and coffee.

I managed to survive two Black Fridays on that job when I had an epiphany. If I didn’t take some drastic action I was doomed to remain in retail for the rest of my working days. No slam on retail, but the vision of endless Black Fridays stretching into my future made me queasy. I had to do something.

I went to college

I was north of 40 when I started college at Cleveland State University and just pushing 50 when I graduated from Columbia University having transferred after two years at CSU. Yes, it took me eight and a half years to earn my BA in Literature Writing because I never kidded myself that I could work and go to school full time. People who did that were crazed, unstable, and no fun to be around. I worked part-time and took two courses per semester until I reached the promised land.

A curious thing happened over the course of my college career: I realized that drawing had become uninteresting to me. I had to force myself to get back to a languishing piece and then, finally, I just gave up. I stopped drawing and painting and I stopped kidding myself that I would be the next Warhol or Basquiat.

Remarkably, my work life improved as college opened office doors for me. I’ve worked in some very nice offices. None of those jobs were particularly fulfilling but I’m easily bribed into giving up large chunks of my life in return for the privilege of sleeping indoors, paying the bills, and eating things I like. I’m a simple person.

College was also the Open Sesame to what has become my true work: writing. Thanks in equal measure to the professors and writing teachers who recognized my spark and my newly discovered ability to shut up and listen to constructive criticism, I’ve actually earned a bit of money here and there for my writing. I’ve even been nominated for a Pushcart Prize (didn’t win, but the nomination was validating).

More importantly, I have come to understand that work isn’t necessarily a dreary corporate sentence that precludes having a life. Moreover, the lack of a steady paycheck doesn’t mean it’s not work. I may not be able to support myself solely with my writing yet but each year I earn more and each day I attract new readers.

My fervent hope is that I never ever have to clean out another clogged drain, mop another floor, empty another litter box, take out another load of trash or dirty laundry, wrap another pickle, or endure another thousand paper cuts in order to earn a paycheck (however, if that’s what it takes to keep the landlord happy, yeah, I’ll do it).

At the same time, I’m forever grateful that I’ve had those experiences. Now I really know how good I got it plus I’m a great tipper!

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