First Person Shooter – Part Time, Part One

I’ve had some jobs in my day.

It always happened like this. I needed some money so I found some way to make it. The thought of a career never really was my thing. Being something – a doctor, a lawyer, an Indian chief just didn’t ring true. The sense of permanence, grown-up-dom, self-importance, and lack of adventure always had me taking whatever would have me. More often than not this strategy left me broke and desperate and wondering where I would lay my head for the night. Looking back it was not a strategy or a conscious decision at all. I think it just comes down to wiring. I was not wired for the other way. Maybe it was the books I read at an early age… who knows.

Here are the jobs I’ve held in more or less chronological order from  the age of 7 on: I sold seeds from door to door in suburbia, then Christmas and Easter cards, I delivered newspapers, I mowed lawns, I raked leaves, I stuffed envelopes, I built lobsterpots for fisherman, I picked peas on a farm, I taught tennis, I sold marijuana by the joint, ounce, ¼ pound and pound, I worked alongside a bee farmer, then helped train birddogs, and by mistake almost poisoned horses…

I worked in an old folks home, I worked as a night guard in a library, I worked in a copy shop, I framed houses, I painted houses, I tore down houses, I’ve waited tables…

I’ve sold Christmas trees on the sidewalks of NY, I telemarketed shitty magazines from a warehouse in Jersey City, I drove an ice-cream truck in Michigan, I bounced for a brief spell in a bar in Birmingham, I drove a beer truck in Virginia, I worked as a shill in an auction house in Atlanta, Georgia, I taught Latin in a private high school in Mississippi, I opened an illegal bar on top of a convent in Rome….

I’ve  worked construction on a high-rise, I’ve sniveled as a stock broker, I gave blood whenever and wherever they were paying for it, I’ve tutored attention deficit teenagers and written theses for lazy grad students. I’ve scribbled ad copy for Cinemax pseudo porn and styled an urban-rooftop-wet-dream for the Home and Garden Television Channel. I’ve dot-commed with dipshits, transported precious paintings from gallery to restorer to collector, I’ve sold antiques…

I’ve exported furniture from Mexico and overseen the making of hand bags in a state prison…

I’ve helped put together famous boy bands,  I’ve done castings for movies, television, commercials and print, I’ve done location scouting and acting, I’ve opened a bar, a bookstore and a café in Guatemala. I’ve smuggled booze…

I could go on. But the beautiful part of all that, especially in the mid-later years, is that when I was not doing THAT, I was lazing about, reading, bopping into museums, catching a bus to another town, scribbling in a journal, strolling the streets  of a city, looking in windows, going to movies, waking up in another country…

In the breaks between having some money and having none, I’d often go to a used bookstore and buy a handful of books by one author and go on a focused reading binge. Graham Greene I read this way, Bruce Chatwin, Balzac, Shaw, Faulkner, Maugham, Bukowski, Dashiel Hammet, Mickey Spillane, James M. Caine, Celine, Chomsky, Paul Bowles, all filled these glorious  and episodic sabbaticals. (When people would ask what I do, I’d say just that, I’m on a sabbatical, as though I had just taken a brief leave from a teaching position at a prestigious university.)

For some strange reason during these sabbaticals I’d often take to collecting broken chairs that had been discarded in the street. I felt a kinship to them. They were a bit rocky, interesting in an off kilter way and in need of ass. I’d take them home, and with a little glue and sandpaper and paint, I’d fix them up and give them as gifts. Where others would bring a bottle of wine to a party, I’d show up with a slightly cattywampus chair and get an odd look as I passed through the door. It got to the point that briefly I held the moniker, The Chairman.