Career Tracks: Part III

They say one man's trash is another's treasure. Somewhere amid the vast wealth I surround myself with lies a laminated copy of the December 14th, 1986 edition of Newsday's Sunday Kidsday section. Clearly when I say “somewhere” I mean specifically inside an old toy chest dubbed the “storybox” after a chest on one of my childhood favorites, The Magic Garden. I may be a packrat, but I know where a surprising amount of things are in here. And while my name is listed along with the rest of my classmates who submitted stories and artwork for that edition, my artwork was not used and my article was bumped to the weekday black and white column, inexplicably using a crappy illustration by some kid from another school. I have copies of that article here as well, and mine was a poll titled “Comic Books are Still In.” In it, I asked 90 kids if they read comic books. 57 said yes, with 28 preferring Archie, 11 Whitman, 9 Marvel and 9 D.C. I was surprised the superhero comics didn't do as well and, at the naive age of 12, that I would have the kind of luck in which I would be the only one of my classmates not to be included in the full-color Sunday section. But I didn't care; my name had been published in something I read regularly, and it would be another seven years before I saw my name in a publication by one of those aforementioned comic book publishers. But that's a tale for another day.

After a long, hot day of painting we had stopped off at my manager's house for some iced tea. I was somewhat shocked when he left the kitchen and returned with a zip lock bag of weed. I was definitely horrified when his girlfriend dumped it out on a Kidsday lying on the table, tore off a strip, and began rolling a joint in something I read regularly and cherished as a child. They offered me a puff, but I politely declined, suddenly remembered having to be somewhere else, and excused myself. I guess that explained how my manager could be older than the rest of us, supervising a group of college students painting houses and businesses, and yet still live with his mom. Then again, I suppose it's theoretically possible for someone who's never even tried any kind of drugs to be sitting home alone on a Saturday night pushing thirty and writing a blog entry in his parent's house. In theory. At any rate, the rest of that summer was uneventful, with the crew passing a blunt around as far as I knew on one other occasion painting a wealthy client's isolated home in one of the wealthier areas near where I lived. Again I declined when they offered, and at the end of the summer I was glad to leave the job and return to school. Whatever job I took the following summer, it certainly wasn't going to be with that crew.

Between my junior and senior year of college I worked in a Texaco station pumping gas on a six hour shift that paid five dollars an hour. Generally I worked from noon until six PM, although occasionally I pulled the earlier 6AM-noon shift and by the end of the summer, the much cooler 6PM-midnight shift. None of the six pumps had automatic stops so if someone wasn't filling up completely, I had to make sure to disengage the catch before I gave them too much. Even with two of us manning the pumps, it was a lot of running around, especially on Wednesdays when a discount on premium had the cars lined up around the block. The station may have been in a wealthy area, with clients who often paid more attention to their cell phones than us, but they loved their cheap gas. Running around in the heat for these people was exhausting, but there was a Dairy Barn next door and their two-quart iced tea was a lifesaver--and my lunch. It was a slim and trim 150 pound MCF that arrived for his senior year of college, and I was in the best shape of my life that summer.

The job was demanding, but at first didn't seem to have any of the criminal elements of my last job. Besides pumping gas and checking oil, we would check the level of the tanks at the end of the evening shifts and set up the flags and oil displays at the start of the morning ones. My partner was usually a Turkish fellow named Bahri who had moved here after his mom died. He seemed nice enough at first, but seemed to grow annoyed with me as my confidence grew. I recall one day when we had the morning shift and I had some uncharacteristic energy. I had put out all six flags by myself and changed the price cards in record time, and when I bounded back in the office and asked if he was ready for the day he snapped at me, “You think you are most so high!” which left me bewildered. It was neither the first nor last misunderstanding we would have, and he would often be proven wrong on many things, such as the character of some of our co-workers...

Tune in next time, when I reveal how easy it used to be to steal someone's credit card without them even realizing it...