Labor Intensive

Reprint from three years ago

Happy Labor Day. I was laying in bed this morning thinking about past Labor Days and just what the day is all about. It's about work. It's about jobs and what you do or have done to earn your way through life. That got me to thinking and inventorying all the jobs I've ever had. It turns out I've had a lot of jobs. Albeit, some that lasted only a few days.

1. Paperboy. I didn't like it very much, but it did allow me some cash above and beyond the twenty five cents allowance my dad gave me.
2. Sandwich maker and chicken fryer at Geno's Pizza. I got fired from that job when I was sixteen years old because I was a little asshole.
   
3. Bag boy/Stock boy at the Jewel Food Store in Tinley Park. I did not hate that job, which says a lot.
4. Can packer at Continental Can Company. My first full time, adult job. I made as much money as a full grown man with real responsibilities, which I was not. That's because it was a union job.
5. Plastic cable tie mold operator in a plastics factory on the midnight shift. I made a lot of money here, but I hated it and eventually got fired after a couple of years because I kept calling in "Sick".
6. Ice cream truck driver.  One of those jobs that only lasted a few days. It seems like it would be a pretty nice job, but no. It turns out that kids are little morons who can't make up their minds about what they want. Also, they don't tip. On the third day of this job the truck broke down. I left it sitting in the middle of the street, in some little subdivision, in Alsip, Illinois, and never went back. 
7. Pizza delivery man on the North Side of Chicago. I liked this job. All cash, no taxes, and I got some interesting offers from some of my customers. None that I accepted though.
8. Hippie band roadie, Grand Mound, Iowa. This job only paid in beer, pot, and room and board. The only reason I got this job was because I had the Volkswagen van.
9. This should really be 8a. As a hippie I needed money from time to time, so one quick job I took was leveling out the corn inside a farmers corn silo. I had to climb inside with a shovel and move all that corn around until it was level. Somebody later told me that was dangerous, especially with a cigarette. Then I took another quick job re-roofing a house in Davenport. $1 an hour in August heat. At least the lady of the house made us dinner every day. It was worth the dinner alone.
10. Yellow Cab Driver, Chicago. I liked this job... until the night three guys stuck a gun to my head and took all my money.
    
11. Delivery driver for a wholesale shoe findings company. Shoe findings? Yes, the things a shoe repair man uses to repair shoes. That stuff had to come from somewhere, and I was the guy who delivered it to them. Probably the job I loved the most in my life. 
12. Night clerk at a 7-Eleven® in Oakland, California. Not a great job, but I did get free cigarettes, and all the slurpees I could slug down. Once again, not so bad until the night I got a gun stuck in my face and was robbed.
13. Television rental delivery man, San Francisco, California. I got into great shape hauling those giant color televisions (the kind with the tubes) up and down stairs and sloping sidewalks. I really can't believe I used to pick those things up and carry them up two, three flights of stairs.
14. Flash Cab Driver, Chicago, Illinois. The California thing didn't work out for me.
    
15. Bartender at a gay bar called Dandy's in Chicago. What I liked about this job were the tips. What I hated about this job is that everybody on the other side of the bar was having a great time, all drunk and everything, while I had to remain sober because I can't work drunk. That and the fact that the boss didn't let me drink until the last hour of the night.
16. Computer Tech, Burrough's Computer Corporation at Great Lakes Naval Base. Huh? That's quite a big jump from bar tending. Yes it is. I went to school at DeVry while driving the cab and bartending. It was the start of a good career. By the way, nothing pisses me off more than when I hear people deriding DeVry. They fulfilled their promise to teach me computer electronics, and I got a job before I even graduated.
17. Computer Tech, XL Datacomp. Good company. They're the ones who transferred me to Florida.
18. Computer Tech, Decision Data. They sent a head hunter out to hire me from the last company and gave me a fantastic deal. I would work about two hours a day and got paid a lot. 
    
19. Computer Tech, Some computer company whose name I cannot remember because it was such a horrible experience. Again, a head hunter came calling and I got talked into taking this job. Better money, and I was my own boss because I was their only employee in South Florida. I got fired for using the word 'fuck' in front of a customer. To this day I don't think I did, but what I think doesn't matter because that word slips out of my mouth like that goo from a movie theater popcorn butter dispenser. So it's a possibility. It all ended very ugly.
20. Computer Tech, Pyxis Corporation. This job involved repairing computer driven med dispensing equipment in hospital pharmacies and at the nurses stations. I truly liked this job, except for the sixty hours  a week that I worked, at all hours of the day and night.
    
21. Hot Dog slinger, Big City Dogs, in Oakland Park, Florida. I lost my job as a computer tech when it became apparent that I was going blind. The three accidents with the company van and my own car made that quite clear. So Mark and I bought a hot dog/hamburger stand. Seriously, it would have been a good investment, and it would have made a ton of money... if I were thirty years younger and Mark didn't hate it so intensely.
22. Retired Old Fart. Definitely the best job ever.  

Man With a Camera

The Mountain

In the summer of 1969 my two cousins and I took a drive out to California on Route 66. I had never been further west than Davenport, Iowa before that. Being three of us, we traded off driving and made it all the way to the Grand Canyon before we pooped out and had to sleep. On that trip I brought along my handy Super Eight movie camera. For the first twenty four hours I took very little footage. Then I spotted a "mountain" as we drove past Tucumcari, New Mexico. To a flatlander from Illinois that little mesa looked like a mountain to me and I started filming. As we drove further and further west the mountains kept growing taller and taller, and I kept filming. I must have taken three rolls of movie film of those mountains. All of it out the car window as we were zooming by. I'm not talking about the grandeur of the Alps or the High Sierras, just large rocky hills. I still have that movie film. It's all spliced together and labeled 'My California Trip'. I made countless people sit through that boring film. No way was I going to throw away one frame of that movie, I was nineteen and movie film was costly.

I must have got that thrifty trait from my dad. I was out at Mom's yesterday and was scanning photos again from the albums. What I noticed was how many of them were photos of nothing. Oh, I'm sure to my dad they were something. He paid for them, so they were of value. He never culled the bad photos when he got the prints back from the developer. Dad proudly mounted each and every picture he ever took in the albums, which is why there is a closet stacked full of them. He kept blurry photos, double exposure photos, and photos very reminiscent of those mountain movies I took when I was nineteen years old. Here's a couple of Dad's photos.

My Ghost Sister

I'm Sure It Was an Amazing Sight

Neighbors

When I was a small child, we had neighbors who my mother couldn't stand. I never knew why, I was only a small child, but she really did not like them. She even chased the "Man of the House" out of our yard once with a broom. I kind of wanted her to catch up to him, would have been fun to see her smack him down. When I was a bit older, we moved to the other side of town. Once again we had a neighbor who Mom did not like. This time I was thirteen and I understood why. The woman was a (Insert bad word here). She hated us the minute she saw the station wagon roll up the driveway with eleven children in it. A six foot fence was eventually built and we all coexisted.

I recently learned that my neighbor to the north of us sold his building. It is identical to ours, the only two buildings on the street that are identical, yet it is not the same. I have no bricks falling from the facade. I do not have weeds, wild trees, and out of control shrubs growing up past my front windows. Weeds are not growing from the cracks in my front porch. A huge pile of trash has not piled up next to the house along with rats nests. My back yard is not six feet tall with weeds. Yes, my neighbor has a lot of weeds growing around his building. So I asked the guy who rents the garage behind the house of weeds if he knew who bought the place? He told me that it was a business, some kind of real estate company. I said, "That's nice" and walked away. Inside, I was in a state of panic. A company? A real estate company? Holy shit, what the hell are their plans for the place? Slumlords, flippers, just what would I be living next to? Then I calmed down. The property is too valuable to be turned into a "Section eight" rental. And if it is flippers, that isn't a bad thing. The weeds will be cut down, the bricks tuckpointed, and the trash and rats nests will be cleaned up. They will remodel it and then they will sell it again. At which point I will panic again.

Sew, So

Notice that the scissors handle has been chewed

I'm not sure why the buttons on my pants keep coming off. I suppose it could be the thin, weak thread that is used, but I buy my pants from reputable manufacturers. I bought a nice pair of shorts from Eddie Bauer and within a few months the button at the top of my fly was hanging on by a thread. Sure enough, last week it came off... well, more like popped off. Went flying across the room, and if it hadn't been for Scout's keen senses I probably wouldn't have found it. So now I had a pair of shorts with no button and a button with a few chew marks on it. No problem, I would sew it back on. That is what I planned to do. So I searched the house and despite Mark having at least two of everything, he did not have a needle and thread. No sewing kit in the house. It was then that I remembered throwing one away when we moved. On my next trip to Walgreen's I found a little sewing kit right next to the incontinence and Ensure aisle. I bought the sewing kit and later that evening I sat down in the big fluffy chair with my shorts, the sewing kit, and the button. For what seemed like half an hour, I struggled with trying to stick the thread through the eye of that needle. When I finally, through a miracle, got the thread through the needle, it was all bunched up in a knot. No matter what I did the needle would not pass through the material. It would get stuck at the knotted thread wrapped around the eye of the needle. So after buying a sewing kit for five dollars, I took the shorts over to the cleaners two blocks away where the woman sewed my button back on for two dollars. Oh, and when I returned home the sewing kit was on the floor and Scout was chewing away on a spool of brown thread. Don't worry, all the needles were accounted for.

Green Goo

Joey and Kellen III

My niece posted this photo of her boys all gussied up for the first day of school. Look at that hair. That is a super nice mom job. Only a mom could turn two boys out for school looking like that. It brings back memories of my mom and my hair.

Besides brushing, braiding, and curling of my sister's hair, Mom would comb my hair just before sending me off to school. She had this big jar of green goo with a large opening. Mom would take the rat tail comb and dip it into that jar. She would load the comb up and then pull it back out dripping with that glop. Dip and comb, dip and comb, until my hair looked just right. The part would be arrow straight, the hair on top combed neatly across, and the hair up front was looped back into a pompadour that looked like a giant wave about to break on shore. On the long walk to school my hair would slowly dry into a hard crust, and by the time I arrived at school it was like a helmet. I looked spiffy. Seriously, that green goo would dry so hard that I would spend the first few hours of school obsessively tapping at it, trying to break my hair loose. I believe that the NFL actually discovered this green goo and built the first hard helmets from it. Anyway, it's good to see my grand nephews looking so good. Maybe I'll send my niece a jar of that green goo. I'm sure the boys would be very thankful of Uncle Alan for that.

Uncle Alan

Réédition de Nuit Nue

Here is a reprint of a story I wrote six years ago about our trip to Paris. It isn't a romantic view of the city, just a factual one. In fact, it is because we were treated like I would expect to be treated in any big city that I fell in love with the place. I like city life.

While paging through the photo album of our trip to Paris a few years ago, I wondered what the hell is wrong with some Americans? Why do so many of us speak ill of the French? Why the name calling? Why the freedom fries? The truth is that we are a lot like the French. We should appreciate that both they and we are nationalistic, patriotic, and think our shit doesn't stink. In some other ways the French are different from us. For instance most Parisians speak two or more languages, with the second one usually being English. That, I think, is so that they can make fun of Americans like Mark and me in a language that we would understand. It did happen that they mocked us on more than one occasion. There were some Parisians, however, who were very nice and treated us well, but that might have been because we were paying to stay at their hotel. 
While we were in Paris we visited an area known as Les Halles. We should have known something was up when the cab driver refused to drop us off in front of the club we were going to. He stopped at a corner and pointed, telling us in French to walk "deux rues". After strolling past prostitutes, drug dealers, and all sorts of sketchy types, we finally found the little club we were looking for. We entered the front door and were stopped by the door man, who then pointed us toward what looked like a coat check room. The man at the coat check room told us that there would be a cover charge as he handed us two black, plastic garbage bags. I stood there with the bags in my hand and asked him, "What are these for?"  "Oh, gentlemen. Tonight is naked night! Thee bags are for your clothes." Mark and I looked at each other, knowing what the answer would be, "No Thanks, not for us.", and I handed the bags back to him. Just to be sure though, I reached over and pulled the little black curtain aside, to see if maybe it might be interesting. What I saw has been permanently burned into my memory. There sat two, old, wrinkle-assed men, stark naked on bar stools, casually having a conversation, smoking cigarettes, and sipping their drinks. Bar stools, old man butts, and cigarettes. I grabbed Mark and ran.