Career Tracks: Volume 2

“You! Yes, you behind the bikesheds, stand still laddie!"

Wait...I think I'm getting a little ahead of myself since I don't think my friend Mike had introduced me to The Wall by this point in the story, and in fact this isn't one of THOSE stories....

No, when we last left our mysterious cloaked high school senior, MCHSS had been caught slacking on the job. The Brother's eyes blazed with fury as my hockey playing co-workers froze and I jumped down from my perch on the lockers. “YOU! YOU, YOU and YOU!!! Monday, report to the PRINCIPAL's OFFICE!” I was screwed.

The rest of that evening, I cleaned the windows of the school in a daze, dreading telling my parents when they arrived at 10PM to pick me up from work. They were surprisingly understanding as I stammered out the tale, and the real apprehension lay ahead in the form of a visit to the principal's office. It was a LONG weekend.

It was an even longer Monday, as I put off the dreaded visit until the very end of the day. The principal was far more reasonable than the other Brother who had caught us, and ultimately after I offered that he dock my pay rather than give me any demerits and ruin my record, he let me off with just a warning. I would be able to finish my high school career with an untarnished record after all.

The summer before I started college I took a driving course. The instructor, who insisted we all call him “Uncle Al” even though no one in the class was a relative, was surprised to hear that with a four-year Math average of 95% I was not in fact going to become an accountant, but rather would be majoring in Graphic Design. I had continued drawing in high school and been one of the few active members of the art “club”, sad in that it was really just four or five of us who hung out after school, drew, and didn't actually talk to each other. But it counted as an extracurricular activity nonetheless, and while I still wasn't Todd MacFarlane, John Byrne, or even Erik Larsen, my confidence had improved to the point that I was going to try. Plus, playing Baritone Horn in the pep band was going to earn me a scholarship to cover half my tuition, and get me in to all the basketball games at Madison Square Garden for free. Go Red Storm!

Majoring in art was harder than I thought, and juggling basketball games and band rehearsals was never easy. Many a late night was spent in my basement studio after a game, working with gouache to the break of dawn to get colors just right for a particularly discerning professor. I didn't have much time to work, although in the summer my father and I played together in a fire department band, so parades provided some spending money. It wasn't enough though, so in the summer after my sophomore year I applied for a job as a “Triple-A Student Painter”.

It was an interesting job, and I suppose I could stretch and say it was my first art job. Part of it involved being a door-to-door salesman though, and I had to knock on doors and ASK people if they wanted their house painted. If they weren't home we had a calling card to hang on their doorknob with a photo of a painter-kid my mom thought looked like me. It was a summer fraught with challenges, of heavy ladders and skin cracking from turpentine. I briefly entertained a crush on my manager's girlfriend who was on our crew but once I learned she was with him, and a smoker, that died out quickly enough. I don't know what the worst part of the job was. Maybe it was the time I had to varnish the trim of a roof near a hornet's nest while lying on a ladder that at anytime could have slid off the roof. Perhaps the gas station we painted and me lying on the edge of a hot tar over hang in the blazing sun. Or maybe, just maybe, it was that marijuana incident....

It goes almost without saying, but....to be continued...