DISCLAIMER:

What you are about to read is a work of non-fiction.

The names of employers and employees have been changed to avoid
legal consequences.
Curriculum Vitae
Prologue
Chapter 1: Newspaper Delivery: “I want my two
dollars.”
Chapter 2: Newspaper Delivery: “I still want my two
dollars.”
Chapter 3: Industrial Painting.
Chapter 4: Bijou’s Bistro
Chapter 5: Caldor Holiday Help:
Chapter 6: Maintenance Guy for the Woonsocket
Housing Authority.
Chapter 7: Taco Bell
Chapter 8: Cutco Knife Salesman: My First Pyramid
Scheme
Chapter 9: United States Army Reserve: The
Toughest Job You’ll Ever Loathe.
Chapter 10: Taco Bell
Chapter 11: Certified Nursing Assistant
Chapter 12: Hospital Psychiatric Ward
Chapter 13: Gallery Monitor
Chapter 14: Clean Water Action
Chapter 15: Dunkin Donuts
Chapter 16: Musical Talent Booking Agent / Music
Venue Coordinator
Chapter 17: Sound Guy
Chapter 18: Technical Theater
Chapter 19: Endangered Theater
Chapter 20: Security Officer
Chapter 21: Family-Owned Photo Development
Place
Chapter 22: Home For Children
Chapter 23: Happiness Hill
Chapter 24: Never Trust a Junky: My Life As A
Methadone Counselor
Chapter 25: Methadone House: Methadone
Counseling Redux
Chapter 26: Stop & Shop: Two Days Lost In The
Supermarket
Chapter 27: Securitas
Chapter 28: Halfway House
Chapter 29: Spooky World
Chapter 30: Lighting Vendor: Not for, but at, Home
Depot
Chapter 31: Blockbuster Video
Chapter 32: Adolescent Day Program
Chapter 33: Random Amway Cattle Call
Chapter 34: Call Center Rep for a Temp Agency
Chapter 35: Secretary For Portable Container
Company
Chapter 36: Novelty Item Call Rep.
Chapter 37: The Adolescent Unit
Chapter 38: Outpatient Community Support
Counselor
Chapter 39: Author: My First Book Deal
Chapter 40: Horror Genre Merchandising Company
Brand Manager
Chapter 41: Convention Coordinator
Chapter 42: Camera Shop
Chapter 43: Target
Chapter 44: Security
Chapter 45: Security Part Two
Chapter 46: Author
Afterword: Painting Contractor For A Day
Prologue:

When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars action figures.

My mother would take me to a store to do her
shopping and she could leave me in the toy
department. I would walk the aisles looking at all of
the toys she couldn’t afford to buy me as a single
mother and I’d be fine just looking at them.
When my mother had finished her shopping she’d
come back around and get me.
One time I was left in the toy section, there was an
endcap that was just Star Wars action figures.
I guess I was a little OCD, because I spent my
time arranging all of the action figures so that each
peg had one kind of action figure on it.
A girl that worked for the store came around and
asked me what I was doing.
I told her I was matching up the action figures.
I didn’t know if I was doing something wrong. It
didn’t feel like I was doing anything wrong.
She smiled and thanked me and gave me a
quarter.
That was the first time I can remember being paid
for my time and effort.

The first job I ever had was in third grade.

I had a Vietnamese friend who taught me how to
make origami balloons.
You take a piece of paper and make it into a
square. Then, you’d fold it in half, and do about a
dozen more folds and you’d end up with a little nugget
of paper that when you blow into the hole on one end,
it pops open into a paper box, more or less.
My friend also taught me how to make frogs that
would hop when you pressed down on their figurative
paper asses, but it wasn’t a reliable design and the
paper frogs would lose their jump after a dozen
jumps.
The paper balloons were a hit with my third grade
classmates. I was hyperactive. Too smart for my
own good. I would finish my work before everyone
else and had a desk that faced the wall in the back of
the classroom so I wouldn’t distract my class-mates.
I’d spend most of my day tearing paper into squares
and folding balloons. At first, I would just give them
away, but, recognizing the rules of supply and
demand at an early age, I started charging a nickel a
piece for them.
Later on in life, I learned from one of my many
bosses, an entrepreneur that figured out how to make
people pay $20 for a pile of paper in a vinyl pouch by
stenciling the words “Zombie Outbreak Kit” on it, that
if you can figure out how to sell something for twice as
much as it cost you to make it, you’ve got a business.
Since my notebook paper cost a fraction of a
penny a sheet and I could make two or three origami
balloons per sheet of notebook paper and sell them
for a nickel a piece, I had a business.
I was only able to keep the business open for
about a week before the teacher found out and put
the kibosh on the whole thing.
It’s thirty years later and I’ll never forget what an
organized education does to stifle the entrepreneurial
spirit.
Since before I was of legal age to work I’ve been
working.
I was raised by my mother in a single-parent
household and money was always tight.
In order to earn my allowance, I had to help with
chores around the house.
 I learned how to dust, to vacuum, to wash dishes
and I was always told that you didn’t get something
for nothing.
This early training in work ethic has stuck with me
and I’m still skeptical of easy money schemes.
I always thought that hard work would be rewarded
with an appropriate compensation.
I realized at a relatively late age that if someone is
paying you to work for them, they’re making twice as
much as they’re paying you for your time and effort
and the only smart way to work is to work for yourself.
Chapter 1:
Newspaper Delivery: “I want my two dollars.”

When I was in fourth or fifth grade I had a friend

named Danny.
Danny lived across the street in the housing
project we both lived in.
When you live in a housing project, everyone
knows everyone else, and everyone knows everyone
else’s business.
Danny was weird for a variety of reasons.
Danny was blind.
Not for real blind, but legally blind.
He could see, but when he played Nintendo he
had to sit five inches away from the TV screen to see
what he was doing.
He was legally blind because when he was a child,
he was for real blind, and they opened up his skull
and operated on his brain to restore his sight. While
they were in there, trying to restore his sight, they
accidentally damaged whatever it is that made him
grow. I’m not a brain surgeon, and I will probably
never be one. Suffice it to say that Danny grew to
four feet tall and would never grow any taller. He still
went through puberty, but he was stuck with a scar
that looked like the seams on a baseball over his left
eye, and vision so partial that he was classified as
legally blind.
Danny had a paper route.
Saying that Danny had a paper route was an
understatement, but it’s the simple way to put it.
 The housing project was built so that it curved to
match a geographical formation left behind by the
icebergs that carved their way through our
neighborhood during the last ice age. At least that’s
what the scientists say, and since I’m not a scientist, I
have no reason to not believe them.
The project contained two plateaus connected by a
curving central road.
The plateaus were called “up the hill” and “down
the hill”.
There were about five hundred housing units
sliced ten each out of fifty long-house style buildings
into little two-story town-houses fairly evenly
distributed across the two plateaus.
The only differences between condominiums and
housing projects are location , rent, and residents.
Danny had the newspaper delivery for “down the
hill” locked.
You have to remember that when I was a kid and
the internet was still a governmental hotline to keep
the nuclear missile stations in constant contact,
everyone got the newspaper.
People used the TV to find out what was going on
in the world, and the newspaper to find out what was
going on in their town. They used the newspaper to
find jobs and find cars to buy so they could get back
and forth from those jobs and to find houses to buy so
they’d have a place to put themselves when they
weren’t at work and have a place to keep their stuff so
it would still be there when they got home from work.
Each day, the van from The Woonsocket Call
would pull up in front of Danny’s house and drop off
250 newspapers wrapped into bundles of fifty papers
each with thin plastic strips like the worst present
ever.
Danny had a wheeled collapsible metal box that he
wheeled out to the curb. He’d cut the plastic strips
and load the papers into the square metal cage on
wheels and walk through the project, shoving a
newspaper through every mail slot.
Weekdays weren’t that bad, because the papers
were relatively thin.
There’s only so much the world can change from
one day to the next, so the daily editions were fairly
thin.
The Sunday editions were a different story.
The Sunday editions were easily two or three
times as think as the weekday editions.
About once a month, a local retail chain called Ann
& Hope would pay to have a little chapbook included
in the Sunday paper and those chapbooks were the
bane of every local newspaper delivery person. The
chapbooks had pictures of everything that was on
sale, and since almost everything in that chain was
always on sale, the chapbooks were easily an eighth
of an inch thick and if you threw one at a window hard
enough it would smash right through.
Danny used two of his collapsible metal wheelie
carriages of Sunday and he’d hire me to help him
deliver his papers.
I’d wake up at six a.m. and meet Danny at the
curb.
 We’d load up the wheelie carriages and walk
through the neighborhood, jamming the Sunday
papers between the storm/screen doors and the
proper front doors.
In the spring through the fall we’d hear the call of
mourning doves and I thought it was beautiful and
would echo their calls until it got on Danny’s nerves
one morning and he told me to cut the shit.
For my assistance, Danny would walk with me to a
Burger King on Diamond Hill and he would buy us
breakfast. He had a thing for their French Toast
Sticks. He’d also pay me two or three dollars.
I was being underpaid, but I was too young to
know any better.
As a newspaper delivery person, you collected the
“paper money” from the customer and gave it to the
newspaper delivery person. Not the paperboy, but
the guy in the van that would drop off the bundles of
newspapers. If a person didn’t pay their dues for two
weeks they stopped receiving the newspaper till they
paid up.
The delivery person was paid fifty cents per
subscriber per week. So, with two-hundred-and-fifty
subscribers, Danny was making around a hundred
and fifty dollars a week, which was decent money
back then.
One last weird thing about Danny.
Since he was short, he bought an ALF suit and did
children’s birthday parties.
If you don’t know what “ALF” is, go ahead and
Google “Alf” and “Ha! I kill me!”.
 That’s what Danny would dress up as and he did a
pretty good impression.
So every now and then you’d see Danny walking
around the neighborhood in something that looked
like a big-nosed cross-breed between a wookie and
an ewok.
Danny would also walk around the neighborhood
with candy in his pockets and let the neighborhood
children root around in his pockets for candy.
Creepy.
Chapter 2:
Newspaper Delivery: “I still want my two dollars.”

As Danny grew older, he decided to give up the

newspaper delivery route.
He had finally reached the age where he could
receive benefits as an adult and the government set
him up with a coffee stand at the post office. I’d see
him there whenever I’d check my post-office box and
there would always be a worn-out looking woman
hanging around behind the booth with him. I later
learned that these women were prostitutes that were
addicted to drugs and Danny made enough that he
could afford to retain their services on a regular basis,
so life didn’t turn out that badly for Danny. He may
have been four-foot-tall and legally blind, but he had
money, and if you have money, you can buy women.
The economy had been sliding downwards, and
the integrity of the projects declined with the
economy. All of the old French-Canadian people that
lived in the housing projects instead of the “Old Folks
Home” high-rises died off. The white families on the
higher end of the poverty line moved out of the
projects into tenements in the surrounding area and
the empty units were filled with people that didn’t
know their neighbors.
When Danny gave up his paper route, I inherited
what was left of it.
People that had a decent work ethic and could
afford to pay for the goods and services they
requested had gradually moved out of the project and
had been replaced by drug-addict s. The route had
dwindled to a hundred customers. Every day I’d
knock on their doors and ask them if they had their
weekly “paper money”. Each week a few more of the
customers went onto their two-week newspaper
probation and then were dropped from the route for
non-payment until the rote dwindled down to fifty
customers.
The problem with my customers not paying their
weekly dues is that the newspaper delivery guy in the
van that dropped off your newspapers didn’t want to
hear any bullshit about you not having the money. He
was my newspaper pimp. A paperboy gets paid from
the profits after paying off the cost of the newspapers.
If, for example, it cost a quarter a day to have the
paper delivered, and fifty cents on Sunday, that
equals $3.50. The paperboy gets paid fifty cents per
customer. So if you have a hundred customers, and
they all pay up each week, you have $350 at the end
of the week. You give $300 to your newspaper pimp
and keep the remaining $50. Not a bad weekly
income for someone not past the legal age to work
yet. But if twenty of your customers didn’t pay their
dues, then you were $20 in the hole and didn’t get
paid that week. I usually didn’t get paid so after a
summer of losing customers and not getting paid, I
quit. My newspaper pimp was furious, but he couldn’t
hit me and I wasn’t going to work for free anymore.
Chapter 3: Industrial Painting.

My uncle, John, was an industrial painter.

He worked for a crew that would bid on big
projects and if his crew put in the lowest bid they’d get
the contract and they’d go in and change the color of
the inside of the building.
Most of their work was for what we used to call a
“department store” but is now called a “big box”. The
store would change ownership and they’d go in and
repaint the interior to match the company colors and
brand image from the old one to the new one.
So when Zayre’s became Caldor, and Caldor
became K-Mart, my uncle and his crew would make a
few grand.
My mother wanted to instill a decent work ethic in
me, so she talked my uncle into taking me along as
an apprentice. Kind of like what squires used to be to
knights.
I was supposed to help with loading the equipment
in and out of the building at the beginning and end of
the overnight shift and to help with clean-up.
I was useless.
The twenty-five gallon buckets of paint were too
heavy for me to lift and my hands weren’t tough
enough to handle the slim plastic rings. Mostly what it
ended up being was my uncle paying me ten bucks a
night to come along and watch him and his crew work
and try to come up with new ways to tell each other
racist and sexually explicit jokes so that they’d go
over my head. Despite their best efforts, they were
rude, crude dudes and I still got a few “Don’t tell your
mother what you just heard.”
It was a decent opportunity to familiarize myself
with the ways of men and working.
My uncle worked hard and played hard. After
thirty years of working with carcinogenic solvents
without proper ventilation, and doing a lot of drugs
with his disposable income, it all finally caught up with
him. He deteriorated until he couldn’t work and was
admitted to a psychiatric hospital for suicidal urges.
He’s now on disability and trembles all the time and
he looks so fragile that if you punched him he’d
shatter. Another lesson of what a lifetime of working
hard can do to a man.
Chapter 4:
Bijou’s Bistro

There was a little restaurant on the same street as

the high school I went to that would hire the local
skate punks as dishwashers. I caught wind of the job
because I hung out with the skate punks. I was never
very good at skateboarding but I was good enough
that I stayed on the board more often than not and
that was good enough for me. Skateboard was my
primary mode of transportation until I got my driver’s
license, and then until I got a car. I still own a deck
and I like to push around every now and then.
All of the skate punks took their turns working
there and were fired for being fuck ups, but you could
still use them as a reference to get a job as a
dishwasher.
I don’t remember exactly how I got the job but I
did.
I’d work the two or three busiest nights of the
week.
I spent all of my time in the backroom which
served as the kitchen and the dishwashing area. The
grill and oven were against one wall, the dishwashing
sinks and an industrial grade dishwasher on the other
wall. The busboy would clear the tables off into big
grey plastic bus tubs and bring them back for the
dishwasher. The dishwasher would throw away all of
the used paper napkins and left-over food and sort
out the silverware and cups and plates.
If the dishes were only marginally dirty, like with a
sheen of sauce or gravy left, I rinsed them off and
stacked them into the industrial dishwasher. If they
had food baked on, like the cheese from the baked
onion soup was always baked onto the soup bowls, or
the line of butter and seasoning indicating the high-
water mark for the baked scallop entrée, I used a
steel wool pad to scrub off the gunk and then stacked
them into the industrial washer.
When the industrial washer was full, I’d slam the
door shut and fire it up and it would blast the plates
with water hot enough to give you third degree burns.
It would take about five minutes to cycle and then I’d
pop the door open and take out the steaming dishes
and hand dry them with a towel, stacking them on a
shelf in the back of the room for the cook to grab and
re-use.
As soon as I emptied the dishwasher, there were
five bus buckets waiting to be cleaned out. It was
non-stop.
The heat in that back room was awesome. Not in
a good way, but in the literal way, as in, inspiring of
awe. Between the industrial dishwasher and the grill
and the oven, the place was like a sauna and from the
moment you stepped in there you’d start sweating.
My clothes would be completely soaked through by
the end of the night. There were skid-proof mats on
the floor but since there was always water sloshing
about they were useless. About ten times a night, my
right foot would slip and my shin would ram into the
open door of the industrial dishwasher which came
down to mid-shin height when open. I still have an
indentation in the bone of my left shin from that job.
 The job paid five bucks an hour and I worked there
for a few months until I had enough money saved up
to buy an electric guitar and I quit.
Chapter 5:
Caldor Holiday Help:

My aunt worked at Caldor as a customer service

associate. My aunt let my mother know that they
were looking for holiday help and my mother let me
know. I applied and was hired.
The job consisted of taking the returns and the
stuff that people left behind at the registers and
putting the stuff back where it belonged in the store.
The carriages of merchandise were separated by
department and I worked in the back of the store in
some sort of home décor department.
There were usually only one or two carriages of
merchandise to return and it was tough to make those
two carriages last the whole six hours I was allowed
to work two or three nights a week. I was only sixteen
and the labor laws were strict about how many hours
a week you could work when you were under
eighteen.
In the department next to mine there was a full-
time employee that kind of looked like Robin Williams
and had a decent sense of humor. He always called
me “The K.O. Kid” because I was always leaning on
the handlebar of a carriage slowly shuffling up and
down the aisles, milking what little work there was to
do. I also worked with a girl that I went to high school
with that had a lazy eye that would look off in
whatever random direction it felt like looking when
she’d talk to you and it was impossible for me to take
her seriously despite the fact that she was a regular
employee and I guess she was kind of my supervisor
since she worked full-time in the department I worked.
I wasn’t surprised when they didn’t hire me on full-
time when the holiday season was over.
Chapter 6:
Maintenance Guy for the Woonsocket Housing
Authority.

I had another uncle that was a maintenance

worker for the Woonsocket Housing Authority.
Not the industrial painting uncle.
I had a lot of uncles.
He maintained the two housing projects that the
city owned. The one that I lived in and the other one
on the other side of town that was even worse than
the one that I lived in. He’d handle fixing the
plumbing and heating and whenever the housing
authority was called for a service request my uncle or
one of his crew were dispatched within a few days to
fix whatever was broken, depending on the
seriousness of the problem. The people living in
these low-rent condos were rough on their units.
People were always breaking windows and tearing
storm doors off of their hinges and fucking up the
plumbing.
My mother asked my uncle to get me a job. My
uncle managed to line me up with an assistant
maintenance person job at one of the high-rises used
to store the elderly French-Canadian citizens of the
community. These were the people that had built the
city with bricks made from their blood, sweat and
tears and now that they had spent their lives, and
their children had lives and children of their own, they
were placed in one of several high-rises scattered
around the city and visited on the major holidays and
their birthdays, but otherwise left to waste away and
die in obscurity.
The first high-rise I worked at I worked for a real
redneck racist son-of-a-bitch.
He always wore a green Dickies jumpsuit with his
stomach girdled in, straining the front with his gut, the
crotch making him look sexless like it pushed his
genitals back into his abdomen.
I tried to buy a pair of Dickies slacks once, but
they totally tried to push my balls back into my
abdomen. I don’t know what they used for life-models
when designing those pants, but my downstairs
neighbors need a bit more space in the front yard to
run around in.
He’d tell me inappropriate racist and sexist jokes
in his dingy dusty oil-smelling office/workshop on the
first floor and I’d have to pretend to laugh at his jokes.
Then I’d take a vacuum cleaner and vacuum the
carpeted hallways of all seven floors of the high-rise.
The vacuum cleaner was useless. It was old and
didn’t have any suction to it. The cord had been cut
open and spliced several times and the wheels were
tangled with a decade’s worth of hair that had been
shed by people that were probably dead.
The hallways always smelled like cheap fried meat
and French onion soup. I always associate the smell
of poor people’s ethnic food with sadness and
impending death.
I was given a useless vacuum cleaner and I did a
poor job but it was only five and change an hour two
hours a day Monday through Friday. More of a work
program to keep me out of trouble after school than
an actual job.
My redneck boss didn’t like me very much, so I
was transferred to another high-rise.
My boss at the new high-rise was a short-
tempered guy that looked like Patrick Stewart.
My duties were pretty much the same. The
vacuum cleaner I was given at this high-rise actually
worked, but was twice as loud. When I fired it up, it
sounded like a jet warming up for take off. As I
worked my way down the hallway, the elderly
residents would open their doors and peek out and
seeing those sad old faces framed by their cracked
open doors was one of the saddest things I’ve ever
had to deal with, but not the saddest.
I ended up getting fired from that high-rise too.
I think I asked to have a few days off and only
work Monday, Wednesday and Friday so I could have
Tuesday and Thursday afternoon off to do teenager
stuff. My boss said, “Fine, if you don’t want to work,
you can have every day off. You’re fired.”
Chapter 7:
Taco Bell

The summer of my sophomore year in high school

I applied for and was hired for a job at the Taco Bell
on Diamond Hill.
It was walking distance from my home, I didn’t
have a car, and they’d hire anyone.
The place was a madhouse.
It was constantly busy from open to close and they
didn’t have enough employees and had too many
employees at the same time. They had three people
working the steam table, one working the drive
through window, one working the front counter, one
bussing the dining area and a manager who was
unable to handle coordinating everyone and
everything.
I mostly worked the taco station. I’d pick up five
taco shells at the same time and use the meat trowel
to trowel the beef slurry into the fried corn boats. A
handful of shredded lettuce and a sprinkle of cheese,
a quick origami wrap with the square wrapper, and I’d
slide them down the line.
Taco Bell offers a “meal discount” for their
employees, but 30% off food that you spend all day
fighting with isn’t much of a break. The best part of
the job was whenever I needed to get anything from
the walk-in freezer I’d wolf down a Choco Taco and
stuff the wrapper in my pocket. I’d have four or five
wrappers in my pocket by the end of the day. I wasn’t
too worried about getting busted because everyone
did it even though no one talked about doing it. Plus
searching your employees, especially under-aged
ones is way illegal.
I’d work four or six hours a week for $6.25 an
hour.
After a couple weeks I decided it wasn’t worth it
and I quit.
Chapter 8:
Cutco Knife Salesman: My First Pyramid Scheme

Since I quit the job at Taco Bell, my mother

insisted that I try to find another job.
She saw an ad in the paper soliciting salesmen for
the Cutco Cutlery Company.
I called and made an appointment and wore my
best version of business clothes to my first cattle call.
The presentation was made in a rented office suite
on the second floor of a commercial office building
downtown.
The presenter made their pitch.
The pitch was that everyone had to buy a sample
kit of knives to show their friends, family, co-workers,
and anyone else that would give you their time and let
you make your pitch. At the end of the pitch, the
presenter tried to get everyone to write a check for
two-hundred dollars for their sales sample kit.
I didn’t have two-hundred dollars and definitely
wasn’t going to ask my mother for the money. Even
at that relatively young age I could recognize a
pyramid scheme.
I know that there’s money to be made from
pyramid schemes as long as you get in at a high level
but I’ve never been naïve enough to try to be a part of
someone else’s pyramid.
If nothing else, participating in that presentation
was a valuable lesson.
Chapter 9:
United States Army Reserve:
The Toughest Job You’ll Ever Loathe.

As a junior in high school I was scared.

My high school was really racially intense and I
had to carry a knife in case I got jumped by five black
guys that didn’t like me because I had long hair and
listened to heavy metal.
I don’t mind a fair fight with even odds, but when
five guys decide to gang up on you and send you to
the hospital, carrying a knife seemed like a pretty
good idea to level the playing field.
Despite all of that bullshit I’m not a racist.
I realize that those guys were fucking animals and
that they were the product of the dying economy of
our town, a pocket community that was built on textile
mills that had all been abandoned. There were no
jobs outside of fast food, retail, and the hospital which
served the surrounding communities. When there’s
not a lot of prosperity and wealth to go around, then
the poor turn against each other and feed on each
other like rats.
One of my friends got jumped while walking home
along the railroad tracks and the guys that jumped
him smashed his head against the rails so badly that
he had a concussion and mild brain damage and
spent half of the year out of school.
It’s tough to focus in class when someone’s
spitting on you from behind and two of your
classmates start fighting and the fight spills out into
the hallway and the janitor has to come around and
mop up the blood off the floor.
I skipped school and hung out with my friends a lot.
Although I was smart, my grades were terrible. I was
barely passing and wouldn’t be given any
scholarships, the golden ticket to escape that town
that was collapsing in on itself like a dying star.
My mother told me that when I turned eighteen I
could either go to college or work or I was out on my
ass. There weren’t a lot of jobs to be had unless you
wanted to work your way up to someday managing a
Kentucky Fried Chicken or working the deli at the
supermarket till you lost a fingertip like my best friend
did.
The military was allowed to set up recruitment
tables in my high school.
Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines.
I picked the Army.
They said that if I did two years in the reserves
they’d pay for college and I believed them.
The day after the last day of my junior year in high
school, I went to Boston and went through
processing. They weighed me, finger-printed me, put
a gloved, and, thankfully, lubed finger up my asshole
to make sure my asshole worked. They made me
walk a line to make sure I wasn’t “duck-footed” or
“pigeon-toed” and then made me walk back on my
knees to make sure my knees worked. They made
sure that I wasn’t blind or color-blind. I took the
Armed Service Vocational Aptitude Battery, also
known as the ASVABs, the standardized testing for
new recruits. I scored in the 99th percentile. I had an
appointment in an office with a guy whose job it was
to help me pick a job.
In the military your job title is called a Military
Occupational Specialty or M.O.S. The guy leveled
his stare at me and said, “Do you want to be
Infantry?” I was smart enough to know that meant
“cannon fodder”. The first Gulf War started when I
was in junior high school and our country had begun
its endless fucking with and permanent occupation of
the Middle East. Hanging out and getting shot at with
a bunch of other guys didn’t sound like a great way to
spend what could otherwise be the best years of my
life. “What else do you got?” I asked. The guy sighed
and opened up a plastic box full of index cards. He
read off the first index card.
“Pediatrician?”
“Baby doctor?” I asked. “No thanks. What else do
you got?”
He went through the cards, reading them one at a
time and offered me the chance to be every kind of
doctor imaginable other than brain surgeon.
Podiatrist, Optometrist, X-Ray Tech, Dentist,
Combat Medic, Psychiatric Specialist.
You get the idea.
The Army was offering to make me a doctor.
I picked Psychiatric Specialist because I was
always good at talking people and I liked the idea of
helping people as a career.
Two days later I was on a plane to Fort Jackson,
South Carolina.
 While everyone else I went to high school with was
spending their summer driving around and getting
high and getting laid and working shit jobs, I was
doing something completely different.
My purpose is not to tell you about what it was like
being in the Army.
This isn’t the place, and that’s a different book.
My purpose is to try to explain what being in the
Army is like as a job.
As a job it flat-out sucked.
Basic Training was intense for all of the usual
intentional reasons and a lot more.
South Carolina in the summer gets dangerously
hot and military bases are usually built in the least
hospitable areas available. The Army Corps of
Engineers goes in and flattens everything out,
bulldozing the sand dunes into the swamps so you
could roll a bowling ball for miles.
There were fire ants and black widow spiders.
The heat combined with the humidity was so
intense that we weren’t allowed to do heavy labor in
the sun because trainees were getting heat stroke
and having seizures. Instead they had us work in the
shade. Like being in the shade really fucking
mattered. The heat and humidity were so
omnipresent that we would sweat through our clothes
and the sweat would evaporate leaving bands of salt
around the rim of our hats and belts. People still got
heat stroke. One morning, my bunk-mate, a thirty-
year-old trucker that looked like a tall Harry Dean
Stanton puked and passed out in formation. Since I
was his bunk-mate, it was my job to stick with him and
make sure he didn’t die, so I took him to the cafeteria
and forced him to pound fluids. They had this stuff
they called “Victory Punch” which was pretty much
just salty generic Kool-Aid. He drank about a gallon
of that stuff and ate about a pound of scrambled eggs
and then vomited it all up. Thankfully I didn’t have to
clean it up and I accompanied him to the hospital
where they hooked him up to an IV and I got a day off
of training.
When we were being processed, they immunized
us for everything imaginable and then some. I still
have small circular welts on the outside of the biceps
of both of my arms at the injection sites where a
hundred assorted viruses had been air-pressure
injected into both arms at once.
For the first couple weeks we were all sick,
drooling, weak and disoriented.
I had to go to the hospital with a lung infection and
came back with nothing but some Robitussin. A drill
sergeant intentionally knocked the bottle off of the
shelf of my locker. The bottle smashed on the floor
and he made me mop it up. Thanks, asshole, it’s not
like my respiratory infection could have worsened into
pneumonia and I could have died or anything.
I also shattered a molar. I have no idea when,
where or how it was shattered. I woke up one day
and there was something jaggedly sharp in the back
of my mouth. I was sent to the dentist where a
trainee botched the filling and I had to get the tooth
removed five years later. I was just practice. Not like
I need my teeth or anything.
We slept in bunk beds, sixty men to a “bay”, a big
open room.
It was kind of racially intense, but I was used to
that. I’m not a racist, so I managed to avoid most of
that bullshit. There were five white guys from
Alabama and three black guys from Detroit and
Chicago and they grouped up like prison gangs and
hated each other. It was all “nigger” this and “honkey”
that and it just made a bad situation worse. In case
you didn’t know, racism is fucking bullshit. Now you
know. Hope you’re taking notes.
Every morning we’d be up before dawn, run five
miles, do a thousand sit-ups and a thousand push-
ups and that was before breakfast. Sometimes the
food was great and sometimes we couldn’t tell what
we were eating and we just called it “Mystery Meat”.
It could’ve been kangaroo for all we knew, but we ate
it and asked for seconds.
After breakfast it was just playing Army with real
guns. There’s a term that’s almost exclusive to the
military. It’s “Hurry up and wait.”. We’d have drill
sergeants yelling at us herding us from place to place,
then stand in line with your nose practically touching
the back of the head of the guy in front of you for
hours on end.
I get that it’s to test people’s endurance and their
ability to tolerate the stress of military service so they
don’t shit their pants and run away screaming the first
time that someone shoots at them, but most of it was
pointless bullshit.
 The drill sergeants were the worst possible people
they could find and most of them were stupid on top
of being natural-born mean. Thankfully the drill
sergeants that were in charge of my platoon were
tough, but fair. If you did what you were supposed to
and didn’t fuck up, they wouldn’t make your day any
worse than it was already designed to be. If you
fucked up, you received their undivided attention and
that’s something you usually didn’t want. Not unless
you like doing two-thousand push-ups a day.
Halfway through basic training we were blessed
with drill cadets. Drill cadets are students that go to
West Point to become officers and as part of their
education they come out to basic training and study
under a drill sergeant to learn how to command
troops. Kind of like a student teaching or work study
program but for assholes that want to spend their life
in the military as officers.
Our drill cadets were a sort of Harry Potter type
boy and a quiet girl.
Not that I’m a sexist, but I’m just not intimidated by
women. Even if they’re screaming in my face and
there’s nothing I can do about it, I always have to bite
the insides of my cheeks to keep from laughing. That
was the hardest part of being yelled at by our female
drill sergeant or drill cadet.
The Harry Potter drill cadet tried to act mean but
he didn’t really have it in him. When he’d yell, his
voice would go up a couple steps in tone and it just
sounded whiny.
Like I said, we got lucky.
 I was in the third platoon.
The fourth platoon had two evil drill sergeants and
one sadistic drill cadet.
One of their drill sergeants was the one who
knocked my cough syrup onto the floor. The other
was always complaining about how he didn’t want to
be a drill sergeant anymore and he didn’t give a shit
about his job. The drill cadet was blonde-haired and
blue-eyed and had a look in his eyes like he liked to
drown dogs for fun.
One day, when we were on the firing range, which
was about seven miles out from the barracks, the
buses, which were run by civilian contractors, were
running late. Everyone was going to be late for dinner
and everyone hates it when shit doesn’t go according
to plan. The fourth platoon drill cadet decides that
he’s going to conduct a forced march back to the
barracks with his platoon. In a hundred and two
degree heat and 98% humidity. On the march back
four members of his platoon fell out from heat stroke
and the drill cadet fell out too. All of them died.
There’s no punchline to the story. They’re all dead.
I made it through basic training, barely.
I can run at a steady pace for hours, but not
quickly, and I barely made the minimum time for the
final P.T. test. Our drill sergeant put me behind a guy
that always clocked in at the maximum time for the
two-mile run and told me that if I lost that guy that I’d
be “recycled” and have to go through basic training
again next summer.
Fuck that noise.
 I stuck five feet behind that guy for the whole run
and finished just in time, puked, fell over, and was
helped to my feet and slapped on the back for finally
passing my P.T. test and shook the whole march
home.
So I pretty much wasted what was supposed to be
one of the best summers of my life hanging out with a
bunch of dudes, being verbally abused, and missing
death by pure chance.
At the end of the summer I got a plane ride back
home, I had a thousand dollars in the bank, and I got
to go back to high school for my senior year.

When I got back home I looked at the world

through different eyes.
When you have to stand in line for an hour with
your nose an inch away from the back of the head of
the guy in front of you, waiting for food you can’t
identify and eating everything on your plate and
asking for more, you just want to turn on your heel
and blast someone in the face when you’re at a fast
food place and someone complains about how it’s
taking too long.
“Really? Is it taking too long you fat fuck? You
have to wait five minutes while a teenager making
minimum wage is sweating over a fry deck making
your fat burger for you? Your life is so hard. I’m
surprised you don’t just kill yourself. Why don’t you
just kill yourself?”
I was totally self-contained and I didn’t want to
hear anyone’s bullshit and that’s part of what makes
me such an intolerant asshole to this day.
I know what the limits of my endurance are. I
know how long I can stay awake and still function.
How long I can run, how much I can lift, and how far I
can walk. I don’t want to hear your whining. I don’t
want to hear your problems unless you’re interested
in hearing solutions. If you’re the kind of person that
likes to complain about things but never seems to do
anything about all of the shit you complain about then
we’re probably not going to get along. I never expect
anyone to do anything I can’t do, but I also sleep less
and work harder than anyone I know. When I set my
mind to accomplishing something I feel genuine
sympathy for anyone or anything that gets between
me and my intended result because any obstacles will
be either overcome or annihilated.
I’m not easy to get along with. Scratch that. I am
actually really easy to get along with as long as you
can handle my directness and intensity and my
complete lack of interest in small talk and bullshit. I
don’t want to talk about the weather. In the summer
it’s hot. In the winter it’s cold. Sometimes water falls
from the sky. There’s nothing anyone can do about it
and tomorrow it will be different and today will be
yesterday which is another thing that you can’t do
anything about. Learn from your mistakes and always
remember that wisdom is intelligence processing
experience. Everyone fucks up and makes bad
choices in life. Smart people learn from their
mistakes and do things differently the next time.
Only a fool or a crazy person thinks that you’re
going to be able to keep doing the same thing and
expect different results. Be the change you want to
see or shut the fuck up. Your whining is only making
a bad situation worse.
The violence in high school was no longer a
problem. I could square off against five guys and my
only questions would be, “You sure about this? I
mean, you’ve all got health insurance, right?
Because five of us are going for an ambulance ride
and I won’t be one of those five.”
I haven’t had my ass kicked since, but I also don’t
go looking for fights. I’m pretty solidly built, and can
handle myself. I can kick through two-by-fours all day
long, but there’s always someone bigger around or
five guys your size that wouldn’t mind teaming up to
fuck up your life. No one wins in a fight, but it’s a
pretty useful reset button for your ego having your ass
handed to you. I’ve been sucker-punched in the back
of the head and just turned around to stare down the
motherfucker that punched me and his five friends.
I’m not the toughest guy I know or the best fighter, not
by a long shot, but I also don’t go looking for trouble
and usually if you don’t start any trouble there won’t
be any.
I didn’t have to work my senior year of high school
because a thousand dollars was a lot of money for me
as a seventeen year old. I just chipped away at that
all school year.
I was supposed to go to my local Army Reserve
base once a month for duty, but I didn’t have a car.
They lined me up with a girl in my area that had a
car, but her car kept developing worse problems and I
never made it to a single duty weekend. I guess it
didn’t really matter.
I almost didn’t graduate from high school because
my summer in basic training reminded me of what a
stupid fucking joke organized education is until you
reach the college level. I spent half the year doing
other, more interesting stuff than going to school.
My chemistry teacher seemed dead set against my
graduating. I had to re-take chemistry, but since I had
taken it the year before I passed no problem but my
teacher wanted to fail me for not being there most of
the time. I didn’t have to be there. I knew the
material and passed the tests. Being in class was a
waste of my time. The teacher asked to meet with me
and told me she was going to fail me and that I would
have to take summer classes if I wanted my high
school diploma.
I told her, “Listen, lady, the day after graduation,
I’m getting on a plane and flying to Texas for my
advanced individual training to be a psychiatrist for
the Army. If you think I’m postponing that to take
some class that I already passed because you have a
problem with my not being in your class every day
you are out of your fucking mind.” I scared her. I
wasn’t trying to intimidate her. I wasn’t threatening
her. I was just telling her what was going to happen
whether or not she liked the idea. I did not and do not
give a fuck about the opinion of some fucking high
school chemistry teacher. When I was in college and
dated college girls that were training to be teachers,
my opinion about teachers was further cemented.
They’re just as stupid and fallible as you or I and most
of them more so. I dated a couple girls in college that
I wouldn’t let train my dog, much less a child and I pity
the school system that hired them.
I managed to get a special exception and attended
my graduation, but I was given an empty sleeve
without a diploma because they didn’t print mine up
with everyone else’s because of the chemistry
teacher trying to keep me from graduating.
Fuck you, Mrs. Doucette. I hope you’re dead and
that it was long, lingering and painful.

As I predicted, I got on a plane for Texas the day

after graduation and my diploma was in the mail. I
was headed for Fort Sam Houston, Texas in San
Antonio. San Antonio is a beautiful part of the country
and I hope to live in Texas again someday.
Buy a bunch of copies of this book so I can just
move there and write books. Don’t let your friend
borrow your copy. Make them buy their own. Most of
your friends are probably the kind of assholes that
don’t return books anyways.
Advanced Individual Training was a lot easier than
basic training. I still had to wake up at dawn but they
alternated the work-outs, alternating running with
push-ups and sit-ups. I’d get a shower and breakfast
and then we’d march to the school building. I’d spend
eight hours a day in class, then march back home.
I still had to sleep in a big gymnasium sized room
with sixty other guys, but at least they didn’t wake us
up every night in the middle of the night and make us
run laps or move all of the furniture down to the
parking lot and then back again. They only did that
about once a week. Most nights, unless they planned
in advance to fuck with us, I had the time from dinner
till lights out at nine p.m. to do with as I pleased. I
even managed to have a girlfriend. Okay, a few
girlfriends. What can I say? I’m a popular guy every
few years or so.
I knew I picked the wrong branch of service when I
saw how the Navy guys were lodged. They had four-
man rooms and it was like a college dorm. In my next
life, remember, go Navy. Or Air Force. They were
treated pretty well too. The Army training for the
medical corps took place half on the Army base and
half on Lackland Air Force Base.
My A.I.T. would be sixteen weeks long. Eight
weeks of classroom coursework and eight weeks of
on the job training working on a psych ward on
Lackland Air Force base whose patients were Air
Force recruits who were deemed unsuitable for
military service due to latent psychological disorders
that were exacerbated by the strain of military
training.
We were supposed to get each weekend off, but
about half of the weekends they’d come up with some
bullshit refresher training course that everyone had to
take and we’d spend our weekend running around in
our standard issue grey work-out shorts and t-shirt,
screaming, carrying rubber rifles over our heads or
crawling across the sand of the volleyball court that
was only ever used to simulate a desert and never
actually used to play volleyball on.
They also had a dirty trick that if you wanted to
spend the weekend off of the base you had to know
someone in Texas that would vouch for you and say
that you were staying at their place with them for the
weekend in case the Army needed to call you back to
duty in case of World War Three or whatever. It was
total bullshit. The people that did know people in
Texas charged other people to pretend that they were
all staying at the same place and then they’d all take
off to Corpus Christi for the weekend and come back
well-rested, relaxed and tanned. I would have liked to
check out Corpus Christi too, but I didn’t want to go
badly enough to suck up to a local. I did manage to
visit downtown San Antonio and get my first tattoo
which ruined me for life. I have since covered it up.
I have a problem.
I’m dyslexic.
In grade school I had to have letters like S and L
and R taped to my desk so I’d write them correctly.
The whole “I before E except after C” thing still fucks
with me. I only remember how to spell “weird”
because I forced myself to learn the mnemonic “we
third”. Sometimes I say “green” when I mean
“orange” and vice versa. I know the difference
between the colors, but they have a lot of the same
letters and those wires are crossed in my brain. I
never call the fruit we call an orange a “green” but if
it’s naming the color I sometimes interpolate them.
We had to do written reports as part of our
coursework. We had to study case studies and write
abstracts by hand. Unfortunately for me and my
dyslexic brain, there’s a whole lot of the word
“beleive”, I mean, “believe” in psychological case
studies. If there were any spelling errors, the
instructor would hand it back with the errors red-
circled and I had to re-write the entire three-to-five
page abstract by hand and turn it in the next day. I
was writing two, three-to-five reports by hand each
night. Copying over my old one, fixing the spelling,
and writing up a new one which would come back
with some spelling errors the next day and I’d have to
rewrite that one the next night as well as a new one.
It was pain in the balls, but I could handle it.
Then one weekend they sprung a surprise
refresher training on us.
One thing I haven’t mentioned yet, but is
important, is that Advanced Training was more about
order than difficulty. Everyone had their uniforms
starched by a laundry services that starched them so
stiff that trying to put your leg into a pant leg was like
trying to force your foot between the plies of a sheet
of cardboard. Your uniform had to have visible
creases in it and your boots had to be polished to a
mirror finish or you’d catch hell.
I knew that “refresher training” meant crawling
around and fucking up a uniform.
I had a dilemma.
I only had one fresh sharp-starched uniform I was
planning on wearing on Monday.
Either I could wear my last fresh uniform to
refresher training and fuck it up and catch hell on
Monday or I could pull a uniform out of my laundry
and try to square it away with spray-starch and an
iron. I decided to go with the second option and I did
the best I could, but I’m no match for a starch bath
and an industrial press. I figured it wouldn’t matter.
The next morning the drill sergeant that was
conducting the refresher training saw my uniform and
went the fuck off on me.
When you’re dealing with a pissed-off drill
sergeant there’s not a lot of room for explanation.
You get to pick “Yes, Drill Sergeant!” or “No, Drill
Sergeant!” for your responses and drill sergeants
have spent years figuring out how to phrase questions
that can’t be answered with a yes or no answer.
He wrote me up for an Article 15 which is fairly
serious. In the Uniform Code of Military Justice,
which is the military version of the law, it’s the
equivalent of a misdemeanor. The consequences
can be loss of rank, extra duty, dishonorable
discharge, or imprisonment in a military prison. I don’t
know what your opinion is of normal prison, but
military prison is supposedly worse.
I appeared in front of the First Sergeant in charge
of the battalion and he asked me more yes or no
questions and didn’t allow me to explain the paradox I
was faced with.
I was given a reduction in rank, which also
determines one’s pay grade, from E-3 back to E-1
and given extra duty for the next eight weeks which
was pretty much the rest of my time in advanced
training.
What this meant was that instead of making
$1,500 a month I’d be making $1,000 a month. It also
meant that each night when everyone else got to do
whatever they wanted to after dinner, I had to change
into my work-out shorts and t-shirt and do
maintenance work. Vacuuming, dusting, mopping
floors, polishing metal surfaces. It all depended on
how sadistic the drill sergeant in charge of the extra
duty detail felt like being that night. I remember one
night I spent six hours in a lavatory using a spray
bottle annihilating the little black gnats that fed off of
the sugar in the urine residue in the urinals, then
wiping them off the walls. I also had to work
weekends.
Imagine getting up at dawn, running two miles,
going to class all day, marching back home, dicking
around doing menial labor from 6pm till 9pm, then
hand-writing ten pages of reports. Oh, and the
military has this thing called “fire watch” where, on a
rotating schedule, they wake you up in the middle of
the night to sit at a desk with a flashlight for two hours
to make sure the place doesn’t burn down and none
of the guys fuck each other.
I was only sleeping two or three hours a night.
Sometimes not even that. When people tried to wake
me up for a fire guard shift I would attack them and try
to murder them while still asleep so no one wanted to
try to wake me up anymore. What few friends I had
didn’t want to be associated with me anymore. I was
nodding off in class so I bought caffeine pills to try to
stay awake but they just made me nauseous and I
ended up vomiting them up as a mucusy yellow slurry
from an empty stomach.
One day one of the drill sergeants that was
actually a halfway decent human being that could turn
the hard-ass on and off noticed I looked like a zombie
and asked me what was wrong. I told him that I was
only sleeping about an hour a night and that I was
trying to kill anyone that tried to wake me up and that I
was worried that one night I would get up and start
killing people in their sleep, just going up the rows of
bunk beds until someone woke up and stopped me
and I’d come out of it being wrestled to the floor
covered in blood not knowing what the fuck had
happened.
It was the first time I ever saw a drill sergeant look
scared.
“Are you serious, son?”
“Pardon the pun, drill sergeant, but I’m dead
serious. I did the math. I’m making the equivalent of
seven dollars an hour and my life is a living hell. My
friends think that at any moment I could kill them and I
wouldn’t even know what I had done. I’d just wake up
pinned to the floor with someone else’s blood on my
hands. I can make the same thing in the civilian
sector working at a fast food restaurant without all of
the bullshit and I don’t give a damn about the Army
anymore. I just want to go home”
The drill sergeant escorted me to the hospital
where they ran a psych evaluation on me and I finally
got to tell someone about the tragedy of errors that I
got caught up in.
It was determined that I wasn’t a threat to anyone.
Apparently I just needed a good night’s sleep, but I
couldn’t be in the Army anymore since I wasn’t very
effective at focusing my homicidal urges towards
whatever country we were at war with that month.
I was put on light duty and everyone treated me
like I was a ghost.
I didn’t have to work out or go to class or do extra
duty anymore. During the discharge process I
worked at a library on the base and was told to take
whatever I wanted. I’d bring home a duffel bag full of
military training manuals each night. Training
manuals on improvised explosive devices and military
operations on urban terrain and psychological
operations. You know, just the kind of stuff that
someone that said they thought might accidentally kill
a lot of people should be reading. I’d also bring back
training manuals for anyone that asked me to bring
back one for them and I helped a lot of guys get a
sneak peek at the criteria for an M.O.S. they were
thinking about switching over to. I was a lot easier to
get along with because I was able to get caught up on
my sleep and I didn’t give a shit about anything
anymore. They couldn’t fire me, because I quit.
My “out-processing” took six weeks and I was on a
plane back home right around the time I would have
been going home if I had completed my training.
I received an Honorable Discharge and a diploma
for my course, even though I didn’t finish it. I didn’t
get to take advantage of the G. I. Bill which was the
only reason I enlisted in the first fucking place. All of
this over a bad uniform day.
“For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost…”
Ironically, of the four soldiers in my class, three
failed out due to psychological stress, and the fourth
was too stupid to pass the tests.
Chapter 10:
Taco Bell: Another Run For The Border

When I got back from Texas I needed a job.

I decided to apply at the only place I knew would
hire me.
The Taco Bell on Diamond Hill was full up, but
they said that a Taco Bell in Franklin, Massachusetts
was hiring.
I applied and got the job.
It paid $7.25 an hour which was about what I was
making in the military.
I had to borrow my mother’s car to get back and
forth from work. I worked second shift, so she’d use
the car during the day and I’d use the car at night and
pay for any gas I used, always returning the car with
the tank full. That was part of the deal.
The managers at the Taco Bell were grateful to
have me because I didn’t mind working as a “closer”
and didn’t care about working weekends.
The pace at this location was a lot slower than the
pace at the Diamond Hill location.
The only time it got hairy was during the late night
rush of drunks and stoners with the munchies. It
would usually be me and one other co-worker with the
manager hiding in the back doing paperwork. The
other employee would work the food line and I’d work
the window and wrap up the orders. The cars would
be lined up ten to fifteen deep and if anyone gave me
any static I would say, “Hey! You want it your way
right away there’s a Burger King right across the
parking lot. You want Taco Bell you get it as fast as I
can make it, okay, asshole?”
I was pretty invulnerable as the closer shift was
hard to fill and I was a good worker. I took no shit and
gave no shit.
Turns out that one of the managers was dealing
pot through the drive through window. Every now and
then some zit-faced long-hairs would pull up and not
order any food, but they’d ask for the manager. Let’s
call him “Butch”. They’d say, “Is Butch here?” and I’d
call for Butch and mind my own fucking business.
The kids would park and come in the store and Butch
would go into the store bathroom with them and come
out five minutes later. Was he paying the
neighborhood teenaged boys for blowjobs or to give
them blowjobs or whatever? Like I said, I minded my
own fucking business.
Since my manager was dealing pot out of the store
he was pretty easygoing. I got to hassle vegetarians
and eat whatever I wanted right off the line. I’d make
these amazing nacho cheese and Spanish rice
burritos that weighed at least two pounds and would
cost, around five bucks each if you tried to special
order one.
I learned a neat trick one night by accident.
Someone drunk or stoned pulled up and ordered
food. It was during the nightly rush, so I took their
cash and handed them their food and they just drove
off without their change. They left behind, like, $2.50.
I’m an honest person by nature and not prone to theft,
so I put the money aside for them, in case they came
back for it, but when they didn’t come back for their
change before close I pocketed the cash. It would
throw off the balance of the register and if I didn’t
keep it, my manager would either keep it or just use it
to defray a short drawer the next time a drawer came
short. $2.50 wouldn’t make a difference in the life of
the Taco Bell corporation, but it would make a
difference in mine.
I would pull the same trick every night during the
drunk/stoner rush. I had a routine down. I’d let the
car pull up, wait till the food was ready, have the bag
of food in my hand and tell them the total. They’d
hand me the money and I’d hand them the food and
say “Have a good night!”. They’d usually drive off
without their change. Oh, the art of manipulation. It
didn’t work if they gave me exact change or if they
weren’t drunk or high, but that was fine too. This was
before debit cards, so everyone paid in cash. It didn’t
have to work every time and only one lady busted me
in the act. I took her money, gave her the bag of food
and said “Have a good night!” and shut the window.
When I looked up, she was still sitting there with an
unamused look on her face. “I believe you owe me
some change.” She said dryly. I said “I believe I do.”
and gave her the change. After that I’d keep an eye
out for her pick-up truck so I wouldn’t make the same
mistake twice. Most nights I would leave with an
extra fifty bucks in cash in my pocket. You just had to
be good at small change math and balance out the
register at the end of the night. My managers and co-
workers never caught on and no one ever complained
because who’s going to make a big deal about a
couple bucks you left at a fast food place when you
were drunk or high? No one, that’s who!
Other than that, we’d get up to the usual
shenanigans that anyone gets up to at a fast food
restaurant. If a customer was rude to me, I wouldn’t
spit in their food, but I would use the tortilla for their
burrito to sponge off some of my ass sweat. Working
a steam table in the summer is sweaty work! If
someone gets dysentery, fuck ‘em. Next time check
yourself before you condescend to the people in
charge of preparing your food. I never jerked off into
the sour cream because that’s just disgusting, and I’d
have to do it in the dark in the walk-in freezer where
we kept the sour cream tubes and freezing cold is like
kryptonite against erections.
Speaking of erections I hooked up with the two
girls I worked with. Not at the same time, although
that would have been nice, but these were somewhat
more conservative times. We’re talking pre-internet
here. That’s always a nice fringe benefit, pun
intended. And, seriously, I was the smart choice.
The other three guys working there were our pot-
dealing manager with a huge kangaroo pouch of a gut
that smelled like a trash bag full of used gym socks
left on a beach at low tide; a Star Trek nerd; and an
underweight stoner. I had Danzig sideburns and
biceps that twitched like they had a mind of their own
and you could use a hammer to smash walnuts on my
chest. Who would you choose?
Chapter 11:
Certified Nursing Assistant

My grandmother saw a notice in the newspaper

that the city was offering a free Certified Nursing
Assistant course to anyone that qualified. My
grandmother brought it to the attention of my mother
who brought it to my attention, persistently, so I
applied.
I qualified and was accepted. I was given a
voucher to use to buy some nurse outfits. Scratchy
starched cotton-blend synthetics.
There were five other people in my class.
Four of them were idiots and one was a slut.
By idiots I mean the kind of people that would bray
with laughter at any kind of sexual innuendo and
made getting through the human sexual anatomy part
of the course an ordeal. The kind of fat, boorish, ugly,
unkempt people that would blend right in as a
character in the film Idiocracy.
I’m not really into the whole “slut-shaming” thing.
What a girl does with her body is no one’s business
but hers and the person she does it with. But the girl
in the class was the sister of one of my friends and
she had a reputation for being easy to fuck and she
had to drop out of high school in tenth grade because
she got pregnant and she had a cesarean scar across
her stomach like a wide smile that she’d show you if
you asked her, and a kid that was in Kindergarten and
she was only twenty-two and in those days we had a
word for girls like her and the word was “slut”.
 I aced the course while everyone else stumbled
through it and should definitely not have been allowed
to provide medical care to any living human being.
I took the state certification test for Certified
Nursing Assistants and passed it easily.
The practical part of the course was a nightmare.
We were given three one day assignments to see
what we’d be best at.
One in a hospital. One in a nursing home. And
one in private home care.
My day in the hospital, I was assigned the care of
a man that had fallen over and ruptured his liver while
chopping wood. He was bloated and yellow. I’m not
usually squeamish about humans and their
byproducts. I’m not a coprophiliac, but sometimes
shit happens. I was assigned to perform the man’s
morning hygiene including brushing his teeth, shaving
him, and giving him a bed bath. Brushing his teeth
was easy. He was doped up and bleary eyed and
was making weird cartoon sounds with his mouth. I
could have fisted his throat and he would have just
goggled up at me and chortled. Morphine’s a great
drug. Shaving was a bit more difficult because the
shaving cream and disposable razor the hospital
provided were useless. Instead of shaving the man’s
facial hair it was getting snagged in the razor and
being tugged out. Any of you that have had to shave
with a dull razor know this pain. I couldn’t do that to a
dying man, even if he just grinned and cooed at me.
The bed bath was equally awful. His penis had
swollen up to the size of a can of stewed tomatoes
and was lathered in a mucousy slime like the trail that
a snail leaves behind. I choked back my gag reflex
and gave the man’s elephant dick the once over and
called in the supervising nurse. When she arrived, I
presented the man with a weak, “Ta da!” She was
visibly unimpressed and rightfully so. Hospital care
was something I was apparently not suited for.
My day in a nursing home was also a nightmare. I
was assigned to a senile dementia ward. As soon as
you stepped on the ward your nose was assaulted
with the smell of piss and shit and disinfectant
ineffectually masking it. The worst part was that after
a couple hours you got used to it. I shadowed the
regular staff, two or three white women that were the
charge nurses and four black men from English-
speaking African countries like Nigeria and Liberia.
We went from room to room, preparing the patients
for their after dinner shower and it was like the scene
from Jacob’s Ladder where Tim Robbins is being
wheeled down a hospital hallway and as he is
wheeled by each room he sees a nightmare inside
each room each worse than the last. Inside the
rooms were a miscellany of writhing twisted insane
human forms or what was left of them.
There was a man who had mentally degenerated
to the mental age of an infant. He didn’t like men, so
he growled at me when I was introduced to him, but
he liked the female nurse and he growled at her like a
dog having its stomach rubbed as she undid his
diaper revealing his shriveled penis and five or six
flattened discs of feces which she bundled up, using
the outside of the bundle to wipe the crack of his ass
and fitted him with a new diaper. That was his whole
life. Lying in bed all day in a diaper and shitting
himself while thinking whatever a full-grown man with
the mind of an infant thinks about.
There was a woman who was dying from cancer at
a young age, but the cancer had accelerated her
aging. She spent her days curled into a fetal position
and was fed through a tube that was surgically
implanted into her stomach like the world’s saddest
crazy straw. Two times a shift she was rolled over
onto her other side so she didn’t develop bed sores
on the bony outcroppings of her skeletal frame. If she
developed a bedsore, it might worsen and open up a
wound which would necrotize, the area around it
dying by inches until it exposed bone or the infection
killed her. She had rolls of gauze in her hands to
keep her hands from squeezing closed permanently
because if that happened then her fingernails would
grow into the palms of her hands like vines
intertwining into a trellis.
There was a woman who was at least three
hundred and fifty pounds who spent her days naked,
wide-eyed and raving in a giant hospital bed. Her
only verbal expression was a screech like a huge bird.
When we went in to give her a bed bath, her urine
had glazed the inside of her thighs and they parted
with a wet slurping sound while she clawed feebly at
our hands, terrified at the alien strangers assaulting
her with facecloths.
The only light moment was an old black man that I
was assigned to try to take care of. He was old-
school black and didn’t much like white folks and
would probably rather walk around with a loaded
diaper than let some white-bread cracker change his
diaper. I think I might have been assigned the man
as a kind of hazing. He spent the entire shift shuffling
up and down the main hallway as if a doorway to the
past would suddenly open and he could step through
it and find himself at home among the family that had
abandoned him. I had to spend half of my shift
following after him, breathing in the wake of the
pungent fumes of his urine saying, “Please, sir, you’ve
obviously urinated on yourself. Will you please let me
help you get changed and into some clean dry
clothes?” over and over again. Finally at the end of
the night he tried to go to bed, and one of the dark-
skinned black men talked the man into letting himself
be changed, all the while cursing that “white-skinned
devil” that had been chasing him all night long.
Nursing home care was something I was apparently
not suited for.
The day as a private home care provider was
spent with a paralyzed metalhead man. I could see
why the agency paired us up. He was only, maybe,
five or ten years older than I was. He had long hair,
down to his waist and had heavy metal posters of
Ozzy and Dio up on the walls of his apartment in the
old folk’s high rise where they also sometimes
stashed the relatively independent disabled young.
We talked about heavy metal, but since he was ten
years older than I was, his timeframe was ten years
older too. Our venn diagrams of musical taste over-
lapped with Mötley Crüe and Ozzy Osbourne but he
wasn’t really into punk rock and I wasn’t into bands
like Testament and Dokken back then so the
conversation fell flat about after an hour. I wasn’t
sure what we were supposed to do so I figured maybe
my job was to keep him company. His regular nurse,
a pretty young woman came in and started to help
him through his personal hygiene routine. The girl
said she’d walk me out and in the hallway she
explained that the man was embarrassed to let me
know that I was supposed to help him to conduct his
hygiene routine. She said that he said that he felt
weird having a guy hold his penis and thread a
catheter into his urethra. She said that he said that
he didn’t want to get me fired or anything, but he
preferred having a woman perform his hygiene and I
replied that I totally understood and there were no
hard feelings.
I still know how to take vitals. Some things you
never forget. But I didn’t really pursue a career in
nursing based on those three unsuccessful trial shifts.
Chapter 12:
Hospital Psychiatric Ward

When I spent my day at the hospital as a nursing

assistant, I learned that the hospital had a locked
psychiatric ward. I contacted the human services
department and asked if I could have a job as a
Psychiatrist. I had been doing clinical psychiatry as
part of my coursework for my military training. I had
been monitoring medication effects and making
recommendations for dosage adjustments and was, in
effect, a psychiatrist.
The human resources director looked at me
blank-faced, stunned. When she recovered she said,
“Oh… no… you need to go to, like, eight years of
college to practice psychiatry.”
“But…” I said, “This certificate says I’m a
psychiatrist.”
“Yes, but our organization doesn’t recognize
military certification as credentials in lieu of licensure
by the state medical board… but I see here that
you’re licensed as a C.N.A. We could use another
C.N.A.”
So I was hired as a C.N.A. on the psychiatric ward.
I asked what the dress code was for my first day
and they said, “Oh, you know, hospital casual.”
I was still getting used to dressing professionally
so I showed up in a white long-sleeved collared
button-front dress shirt, khaki slacks and white
Converse low-top sneakers as that made sense to me
as “hospital casual”.
The first day I showed up they didn’t know what to
do with me.
I spent the better part of the day keeping a woman
company. She was in the middle of a psychotic /
schizophrenic episode and she was being held until
the medications cleared that up a bit and she
reoriented to reality. She was relatively calm and
spent the day sitting in a chair and petting an
imaginary cat. Every now and then she’d say, “Isn’t it
beautiful?” I knew that you’re not supposed to feed
into unrealistic delusions, but I also didn’t want her to
lose it and try to claw my eyes out so I just said, “Yes.
It’s quite nice.” And she smiled and went back to
petting her imaginary cat. That was my first day.
I worked there about a week.
I felt bad because they had another C.N.A. that
they hired for the same shift and she handled all of
the actual medical/personal care work. I didn’t know
why I was there. I guess I was just another body on
the ward and another pair of eyes in case shit went all
crazy and they need to wrestle someone to the
ground. I was still in great physical shape and would
probably be a handy guy to have around if one of the
patients decided to try to separate a staff member’s
head from their body.
The staff found out that I played guitar and asked
me to bring my guitar in and do an activity based
around it. I brought in my guitar and some crazy
Willie Nelson looking motherfucker asked if he could
play it. I cautiously handed the guitar over and he
played some unrecognizable song on my unamplified
electric guitar jabbering indecipherable lyrics with his
toothless mouth. He had band-aids on his fingertips
for whatever reason and those slipped off and he bled
all over the strings. I changed the strings that night
and sterilized the fretboard as best I could and
definitely never brought my guitar to work again. Not
just that job, but any job. I learned my lesson and it
stuck.
When the woman told me that I had to have a
college degree to be a psychologist, the next logical
step was to go to college so I sent for applications to
University of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College and
The Community College of Rhode Island.
I got accepted at all three based on my SAT
scores, but there were definitely not any scholarships
offered.
I decided to go to Rhode Island College since it
was in the middle as far as cost.
Based on my execrable high school grades, the
college required me to take math and verbal pre-
admissions tests to lock in my provisional acceptance.
I nailed them both and they required me to take a
Writing course over the summer if I wanted to be
admitted for the fall.
My mother was true to her word and since I was
going to college she let me live in her house. I tried to
keep working for the psych ward, but when I told them
what my class days and hours were going to be they
never got back to me about scheduling around my
class days and hours. So technically speaking I was
never fired and didn’t quit.
Chapter 13:
Gallery Monitor

As part of my student loan/grant package, I was

given two-thousand dollars a year as a work/study
grant. The way work/study works is the government
gives the student a set amount of financial aid that
can be given to any of many jobs available working
for the college to give back to the student. The
student gets help with their tuition fees. The college
gets cheap student labor and the money given to the
student by the government goes right back to the
college in tuition and fees.
A lot of students worked for the cafeteria. It was
the easy choice. They’d hire anyone and it was pretty
much your usual fast-food work, emptying the trash
and wiping down tables.
There was an office specifically designated to help
students match themselves up with work/study jobs
that might match their chosen area of study so I went
and flipped through their job books. I saw a position
for a gallery monitor so I went to the gallery and
applied. The guy running the gallery was half hippie
and half Warhol wearing tie-dyed shirts and topped
with a big mop of blonde-hair. I got hired to work
Saturdays, watching the gallery. The gallery had
installations throughout the school year and visiting
the exhibitions was a course requirement for some of
the distribution general ed “Art Appreciation” courses.
The college wanted to make the gallery available to
visitors on Saturday to make it easier for students that
were working their way through college to be able to
fulfill their course-required art gallery experience.
I worked there one year and the exhibits alternated
from awesome to ridiculous. The first one was this
awesome installation of night-vision goggle
surveillance footage looking paintings the size of a
whole wall that just drew you in like The Matrix.
There was the fall semester senior show and the
stuff put on display was lackluster college-caliber
work from people that haven’t mastered the tools or
their craft or established the work ethic necessary to
have enough finished pieces to have a solo show yet.
I mostly just showed up and unlocked the gallery
and doodled. Sometimes I’d lock myself in for an
hour and take a nap. It didn’t matter. Most Saturdays
no one stopped by except crazy divorcee art ladies
that would come to the art center on the weekends to
take advantage of the unused studio spaces and stop
by to nibble at me with their hungry eyes.
I get it. You’re forty-something and just broke
things off with your husband for fucking around with
other women instead of fucking you and you’re a
cougar on the prowl for some young stud to hate-fuck
you to make up for lost time. I’m nineteen years old
and I look like I fuck like an angry jackhammer and
would put your pussy in traction. I’m glad we
understand each other. Now go work on your
abstract expressionistic paintings of a coat on a
coatrack, and leave me alone, I’ve got doodling to do.
I got to help with an art installation by Guillermo
Gómez-Peña and that was pretty awesome because I
got paid overtime to come in and fill an entire wall
from ceiling-to-floor with his writing using silver
Sharpie paint markers and practicing my graph font
styles.
The next exhibit I think was my last working for the
gallery.
I was asked to re-paint the gallery walls before the
next show went up. The paintings were for a
staff/professor show and they all looked like a child’s
drawing of an orange sitting next to a banana on a
table blown up to about two-feet wide and three-feet
tall. It was twelve or fourteen of the same poorly
executed still-life from slightly different angles. The
paintings were leaning against the walls in front of the
places they were going to be hung for the show. I
only had to retouch the walls where the pins had been
pulled from the previous show. I figured I was pretty
handy with a brush, so I decided to one-hand it and
carry the bucket of off-white paint around with my
other hand. I didn’t think to cover the paintings with a
drop-cloth or just turn them so they faced the wall
before trying to spot-fix the walls. I wasn’t as handy
as I thought it was with the brush and a couple small
drips landed on the paintings. I wiped them off before
the paint set and figured no one would notice.
Remember, twelve or fourteen, poorly executed, still-
lifes of an orange next to a banana from slightly
different angles on a table.
I got a call the next morning. They noticed.
My boss asked me, “Did you drip any paint on the
paintings and then try to wipe it off?”
There was no point in lying so I just said, “Yeah.
That happened.”
“Why didn’t you just turn the paintings to face the
wall?” he asked.
“Didn’t think to.” I answered.
“Why didn’t you call me and tell me that this
happened?” he asked.
“Didn’t think anyone would notice.” I answered.
“Well, thankfully the damage isn’t irreparable and
the paintings can be restored in time for the opening.”
“The paint stores are still selling orange and
yellow paint, what a surprise.” I thought, but didn’t
say, and we hung up.
My contract was not renewed over the summer.
Chapter 14:
Clean Water Action:

Over the summer I lived with a friend I had made

living in the dorms and his girlfriend.
I had blown out the engine of a cheap used car my
father had given me as a gift for getting into college,
driving out to Pittsburgh and back to pick up his
girlfriend and her things to live with us that summer.
The engine probably would have gone that
summer anyway, but that trip just exacerbated things
and hastened the death of my 1984 Ford Escort.
My friend pretty much spent all of his time either
working at the college theater during the summer
recital season or cooped up in his room with his
girlfriend.
I tried to find a job but I didn’t really know where to
go or how to apply for one.
I know I had thirteen jobs already but most of them
I fell into or had been put onto.
I didn’t know anything about resumes or cold-
applying at every place in the neighborhood until you
found something.
There were 11” X 17” flyers printed on bright
fluorescent stock, and printed in Impact Bold that read
“Clean Water Action $12/hr.” staple-gunned into or
clear-packing-taped onto every phone pole and light
pole in Providence.
I called the number and made an appointment for
an interview.
They didn’t mention the rate of compensation and I
didn’t ask as I had been told that it was impolite and
bad interview etiquette to ask about compensation
during the initial interview and the flyer said “$12/hr.”
so I figured it was safe to assume the rate of
compensation was “$12/hr.”
I started the following Monday.
I showed up at their offices and there were thirty or
so of us, all bright-eyed and young and excited about
earning twelve-dollars an hour doing something that
was also good for our local environment.
We were broken up in teams of five and each team
was headed up by con-artist-looking veteran
employees. We were led outside to a fleet of
passenger vans and each passenger van headed out
to a different part of the state that had pockets of
relatively affluent residents.
When we got out of the van, we were told we’d be
going through the neighborhoods door-to-door,
ringing doorbells and knocking on doors and trying to
raise awareness about how heavy industry was
dumping chemicals into the rivers and those
chemicals were running down and dumping into the
bay and killing everything in the bay making it toxic
and sterile and lifeless. The pollutants were also
seeping into the groundwater and polluting the lakes
and affecting fish population so there was a hunting
and fishing angle to work with the sportsmen.
The purpose of canvassing the neighborhoods
was to tell your little eco-sob story and get the person
to write you a check for a donation to Clean Water
Action and if you did a good job today, you’d be
offered a job with the organization taking groups of
beggars out into the community and annoying
everyone in the relatively affluent neighborhoods on a
door-to-door basis.
“Pardon me,” I said, “but we’re not being paid for
our time today?”
“No.” our little eco-cult leader replied and led us
towards our first house.
So we had all essentially allowed ourselves to be
voluntarily kidnapped, climbing into a van and taken
off to an unknown destination and forced to beg door-
to-door for no pay.
Ingenious!
At the curb, our cult unit leader told us how to work
the mark and what the rules were. We weren’t
allowed to go inside the houses. We had to stay on
the doorstep, even if invited in. We weren’t allowed to
take anything offered to us by way of hospitality. No
snacks or bottled waters. We weren’t allowed to
accept cash. Just checks.
With that, the first person was sent up the walkway
to the first house, as storm clouds gathered over-head
and the sky darkened.
We went from house-to-house and batted the
cycle, each person taking their turn like emptying a
revolver full of well-intentioned eco-bullets into the
clouds overhead with just about the same effect.
By the fifth house it started to downpour so we
spent the rest of the day either waiting on the curb
getting rained on, or standing on a doorstep trying to
make a pitch for environmentalism while being rained
on, with rain running down your face. The person at
the door flinching back from idle spritzes of rain as the
drops scattered when hitting your head.
No one made any contributions. We spent eight
hours walking around or standing and waiting,
wringing wet, without a lunch break. We got to the
end of the day and walked back to the van and loaded
ourselves onto it, if nothing else, just relieved to be
out of the rain.
Back at the headquarters we were told that none
of us were hired and to go home and don’t come
back.
I didn’t have a car, so I had to walk a half an hour
home through the rain.
I got home and was too exhausted to even bother
changing out of my wet clothes. I could feel the soles
of my feet saturated with water and pruned up tight to
match my hands. I just collapsed in the middle of the
living room carpet and went to sleep.
I woke up to the sound of my room-mates girlfriend
screaming.
She had tried to wake me up and I had grabbed
her arm and tried to break it while still asleep. A
flashback to my sleep-deprivation time in the Army.
“I was just trying to wake you up!” she yelled,
rubbing her arm.
“I’m sorry,” I said, gradually coming up from sleep,
“next time use a broom-handle or something to poke
me with.”
Chapter 15:
Dunkin Donuts:

Since I couldn’t find work, I couldn’t afford food.

I knew from experience that Dunkin Donuts got rid
of all of that day’s stock at the end of the night when
they closed and if you showed up right before they
closed you could score free food as long as you didn’t
brag about it around the neighborhood or try to resell
it.
The employees are usually minimum-wage blue-
collar people and they know what want feels like so
they’ll usually give you a big bag of donuts or bagels
or muffins if you ask nicely. They’d rather see the
food get eaten than go into the dumpster and that is
how it should be. If they’re pricks about it, you can
just wait till they throw everything out and then climb
into the dumpster and dig it all out. You might have to
pick some coffee grounds off of your food, but it beats
starving.
I would swing by at close every few days and
they’d give me three or four dozen muffins and I
would eat muffins breakfast lunch and dinner and use
them in trade with my room-mates when I was short
on rent. I was living in a completely muffin-based
economy.
One night the black girl that was closing asked me,
“Why don’t you just work here? You need a job and
we need openers.”
It had never struck me to apply for a job at the
place I was begging for food from since I didn’t think
they’d hire a starving beggar.
 I applied and was hired that week.
I was given a cranberry colored polo shirt and a
visor to wear to work.
I showed up at 4:30 a.m. and waited for the
morning guy to show up and unlock the place. We’d
unload the donut bakery delivery from the donut
bakery truck and spend an hour decorating the wads
of fried dough. Back then all of the donuts pretty
much started out looking the same way. There were
the circle kind and the round kind. The circle ones,
we used a palette knife to spread frosting on and
sprinkled with jimmies. The round ones we jammed
onto a spout sticking out of a five-gallon vat of donut-
filling and impregnated with sweet delicious filling.
We inevitably got chocolate spread all over our hands
and clothes but we got to lick it off our hands and it’s
chocolate so it was tough to mind getting it on
ourselves.
We’d shelve the racks of donuts, brew two or three
huge vats of coffee and unlock the doors and were
balls-out busy until it gradually slowed down around
noon. We could drink all of the free coffee we wanted
as long as we only used one cup and I was wired so
high voltage I’m surprised I didn’t grind my teeth to
bits.
The pay sucked, but it was a job. I got paid for my
time at minimum wage and I still got all of the free
pastry I could eat at the end of the night.
It wasn’t a lot of money, so I started working a
couple other jobs to make ends meet and since one
of those other jobs kept me up till 2 a.m., it was hard
to get any kind of sleep and show up for 4:30 a.m.
After showing up late three days in a row I was
informed that my services were no longer needed.
Chapter 16:
Musical Talent Booking Agent / Music Venue
Coordinator:

Around that time I saw an ad in the free weekly

local arts paper that was looking for a venue
promoter. I called the number. The place was called
River City Something-or-other but they were
rebranding the place and cleaning house. I went
down to the venue and checked it out. It was a
shoddy little high-ceilinged-room in the back of an
Italian restaurant. Like a Polly-Pocket House, you’d
go through the back door of the Italian restaurant and
come in through the back door of the concert venue.
What should have been the back door of the Italian
restaurant was the front door-of the venue. The place
was about forty-feet wide and thirty feet deep but I
might be exaggerating. Most of that space was taken
up by a huge thigh-high ten-foot by fifteen foot stage
in the middle of the room. A bar with a mirrored half-
wall behind it lined one wall, and the other wall had an
entrance to a little crow’s nest DJ booth. The place
could hold maybe fifty people at maximum capacity
and was a total death trap if a fire ever broke out.
The owners were a fat Italian couple in their mid-
to-late thirties. They offered me a drink and I said I’d
take a water. The guy scooped up a plastic cup full of
ice and used the bar nozzle to shoot tap water into it.
The water was peppered with dead barflies because
the ice was infested with them. They explained that
they had a guy that used to book bands for the venue
but none of his shows ever brought any people. The
guy’s name was Mark A. DiPrete and his booking
company was M.A.D. Productions. He’d book all of
the shitty local high school talent show practice once-
a-month in their parents’ finished basement / their
“practice space” caliber bands who invited all of their
friends to come to the show and all of their friends
promised they would and none of them ever did so
the audience would always be the members of the
other two bands and their girlfriends who were on the
guest list and no one was ever of age to drink so
there was no money made from the door, and no
money made at the bar and the venue was stuck out
of pocket for the electrical bill. This was not a good
business model.
After a couple months of that shit, the venue told
him to fuck off.
As the new promoter I would be responsible for
soliciting new bands to play, booking the shows,
promoting the shows, and running the sound for the
shows. In exchange for my services, I would receive
$50 a week. It may not sound like much, but my rent
was only $135 a month back then so with the venue
management job and the job at Dunkin Donuts I’d be
able to actually put some money away and maybe
start to pay down my student loans.
The one downside is that I still had a month of the
old promoter’s shows I had to wait to fall off the
calendar because they had already been announced
and promoted and advertised in a tiny business-card-
sized ad in the free weekly local arts paper.
I kicked it into full-gear and tapped every
connection I had in the local music scene.
I had been in a band for about four years and we
had played some pretty big shows with some of the
better local and regional bands that came through on
tour. I didn’t mention that I was in a band before,
because this is a book about jobs, and a job is
something you get paid to do, and being in a band
never really paid off for me. Not unless you consider
$20 split between five guys one night every other
weekend a “job”. The upside was that I pretty much
knew and had the contact information for all of the
bands in the local scene and if I didn’t have their
contact info I knew someone that did.
The first month of shows where I had to burn
through the dates that the previous promoter lined up
sucked. They continued to be just as bad as they had
been before but now they didn’t even have the
promoter promoting them and I think half of the shows
cancelled because the old promoter told the bands to
cancel last minute to burn the venue, but the owners
still paid me my $50 a week regardless of if anyone
showed up.
I don’t remember the shows that I booked. I used
to have a binder with copies of all of the posters in it
but I think I threw it in the trash during one of my
suicidal “I don’t need anything anymore!” phases later
on in life but I’ll see if I can dig one up. People tell
me they remember the shows and remind me about
them but I can never seem to remember them. Life
was such a blur back then. I know I booked a punk
rock show with Showcase Showdown headlining. I’m
pretty sure I booked a hardcore punk show with
Paindriver opening and Dropdead headlining and I
know for sure that I booked a ska show with a couple
local openers and The Checkered Cabs headlining.
The Showcase Showdown show was the first of
my shows to come up. There were two local openers
and it was pretty well attended. About thirty people
showed up and paid $5 a head for three bands and
were definitely of age to drink, so the bar probably did
okay, although they never told me what the bar tally
was at the end of the night.
The venue had a policy that they would pay a band
$1 of the $5 admission from each person that showed
up. The way they figured out which band earned the
buck was they asked each person who they showed
up to see and kept tally on a napkin. At the end of the
night, the owners would hand me my $50 and the
money to pay out the bands. If you got a hundred
people to show up, the door would be $500, the
venue would keep $400 plus the bar, and the bands
had to split the remaining $100. There were usually
three bands on each bill, and $30 isn’t a lot of money
to split between four or five band members so I would
end up giving out-of-town bands part of my pay to
cover the cost of gas so they wouldn’t feel like they
wasted their time and would hopefully come back
again if I booked them. It was a delicate balance, but
despite the fact that the venue was obviously fucking
everyone over I managed to save my personal
reputation.
The final straw was when I booked a ska show.
 In addition to doing the booking and promoting, I
was also the “sound guy”.
I booked The Checkered Cabs through a local ska
band with the understanding that if they helped with
the booking I’d book them as an opener. I think that
The Checkered Cabs were on the Moon Ska label so
the show was a pretty big deal. A decent crowd
showed up and I was able to figure out how to mic the
openers. The keyboard and vocals went directly into
the p.a. The drums were loud enough and the venue
was small enough that I didn’t have to mic them.
Same with the guitar, bass, and horns. This was
great, because the venue was too cheap to pay for a
proper sound system so I had a small mixer, a cross-
over, a power-amp, two huge speakers, and two
microphones. That was it.
When The Checkered Cabs went on, I could tell
they weren’t impressed with the sound system but
they had driven up from D.C. so they were going to do
their best to make the best out of a bad situation.
There was a singer, drummer, guitarist, bassist,
keyboard player, and three horn players which makes
eight people up on a stage that usually only had four
or five people and their gear on it. The stage was like
a trampoline for the whole set and the mic the vocalist
was using kept shorting out and going dead.
At the end of the show, the owners tried to give me
the usual cut and I told them that they need to give
The Checkered Cabs a little extra money since they
were a big deal and there had been a good turn-out
and there were eight people in the band and they had
come up from D. C. I also told them that either they
were going to have to buy some pro-quality
microphones and cables or I was quitting.
They said they weren’t going to do either of the
two things I demanded so I quit.
Chapter 17:
Sound Guy

I had a friend that worked at Club Babyhead as an

assistant sound guy.
He got a gig that was giving him solid work so he
had to back out of helping out there so I went around
and asked if I could take his place. I think that he was
getting paid for his time and effort, but since I was
learning the trade on the job I was usually paid with a
coffee and a bagel if I would do the coffee run to the
closest Dunkin Donuts for the sound guys and all the
watered-down Coca-Cola in clear plastic cups I could
drink. Some nights we’d crash the free buffet at the
western themed dance club around the corner.
Those were great nights.
I could have really used some money, any kind of
money, but my rent was only $135 a month for a one-
room place downtown with no heat and a shared
bathroom that only ever had cold water.
I survived the best I could, taking cold showers
when I had to and trying to heat my room with a plug-
in heater about the size of a child’s skull, sleeping on
a couch with the covers over my head to try to retain
the heat from my breath. It didn’t really work.
I ended up getting really sick with walking
pneumonia. I was trying to take part-time classes in
college, taking the bus back and forth. I remember
one day I bought a bottle of juice, drank it, and spent
the day sitting in the back of my classes rasping out
gobbets of creamy dark yellow stuff from my lungs
into the bottle. If I coughed, it tore up my throat and
didn’t help with the congestion, so I learned that if I
breathed as deep as I could and exhaled steadily I
would exhale cheesy gelatinous gobbets. I filled the
bottle by the end of the day. I realized that I couldn’t
keep on living in a room that was usually colder than it
was outside, taking cold water showers, “working” at
night and attending classes during the day, so I
dropped my classes and lived with my parents for the
rest of the semester and picked back up in the spring
when I could negotiate on-campus housing.
Despite all of that, I loved working at Club
Babyhead.
I worked there the last six months they were open
and got to see a lot of amazing bands for free. Mostly
what I did as a sound guy was take out the sound
equipment case at the beginning of the night and lay
cable and mic the instruments while the sound guy
set the house levels at sound check. Then, between
bands I’d go up and take the mic clamps off of the
drum set of the band that had just played and clamp
them onto the drum set of the band that was about to
play. At the end of the night, I’d coil the cables and
pack up the mics.
Sometimes the sound guys would let me do the
monitors if it was a local show.
The Vandals came through and I got to do the
monitors. The singer kept asking for more vocals in
the monitors, but either he was hard of hearing or the
amps they brought were too much for the house
system. I had the monitors all the way up, clipping
red, and he still kept asking for more. The rack
started smoking and a small fire broke out when the
power-amp for the monitors gave up and
spontaneously combusted.
I thought I was going to be asked to not come
back, but the guys at the club were cool about it.
They said that Pop, one of the other sound guys, had
done some “sound-board grilling” too. The club
pushed their sound system hard and components
wore out. It was just something that happened
sometimes.
One night I showed up to work a hardcore show.
I wasn’t a big fan of the bands but I remember that
Madball was headlining.
The lead sound guy would be handling the house
and the second sound guy would be handling the
monitors and my job was to sit on the edge of the
stage and make sure that none of their scumbag fans
tried to steal the microphones.
The place was packed and the show started and
as you may know, a lot of hardcore bands have sing-
along choruses. From the first song, a huge guy,
about twice my width got up on stage and stood
behind the mic for the bass player for the sing-along
parts. My job wasn’t stage security, so I didn’t give a
fuck about the guy getting up on stage. My job was
just to keep an eye on the mics. The huge guy would
go to take the mic out of the mic stand and I would
point at him and give him a disapproving look and
shake my head, and he would stop halfway through
removing the mic from the clip. It was amazing to me
that I was able to control a guy twice my size just by
pointing at him and putting on a disapproving face.
This went on for about five songs. The band would
start the next song, get to the chorus, the guy would
get all excited and go to take the mic out of the stand
for the sing-along part and I’d point at him and he’d
stop. Then three crowd-surfers washed over me like
a filthy stinking badly tattooed tsunami and knocked
me flat and all bets were off. The guy plucked the mic
off the stand and I got off the stage and spent the rest
of the show as a human ratchet strap lying on top of
the house speakers to keep them from toppling over.
Good times.
I didn’t lose any microphones that night, but when
the Suicide Machines came through on a package
tour put together by their label they stole all of the
microphones. It was their fault for stealing them, but
also my fault for just leaving the mics out and trusting
that the bands wouldn’t blatantly steal equipment from
the venue.
The owner decided to sell the venue and the head
sound guy died unexpectedly. It wasn’t shocking.
The guy was a four-hundred pound diabetic that rode
his motorcycle year round. He looked like an ogre,
but he had a heart of gold and his death was truly
mourned as a huge loss by anyone that ever had the
chance to meet him.
The club closed and I started a new semester at
school.
Chapter 18:
Technical Theater

When I was working as a gallery monitor through

the work-study program, I’d often go over to the
theater department to borrow stuff for the gallery.
Paint and hardware and power tools. The gallery guy
and the theater department guy knew each other, and
they had one of those professional relationships
where they would share resources across
departments. Mostly the art gallery borrowing from
the theater.
My first room-mate worked for the theater
department and since I couldn’t work as a gallery
monitor anymore, I applied for work as a theater tech
and was hired. The pay was $6.25 an hour. My pay
was drawn from my work-study “award” which was
about a couple thousand dollars a semester. When
you used up the money in your award, you couldn’t
work anymore. Since my rent was paid for as part of
my tuition by living in the dorms, I could afford to take
a week off here and there to defray the drain on my
pool of available hours and spread the hours across a
semester. The work was focused around the four
major theatrical productions and the performances
that were scheduled to occur as part of the
programming offered by the performing arts
department. For each theatrical production, the work
schedule was focused around building the set and the
evening after the show had finished its last
performance it was all hands on deck in an event
called a “strike” where the entire staff of tech theater
student employees “struck” the set and reduced the
stage back to a fresh black deck.
The men that I worked for where named Russ and
Chris and they were both decent men that I respected
to the point of admiration. I liked the job so much I
decided to minor in technical theater instead of
minoring in art and music as I had originally intended
on doing.
In my first semester, I took the first art and music
classes towards pursuing minors in those fields of
study. The art classes were taught by marginally
talented artists that were hyper-critical of the work of
their students. I’m a decent artist and I sell a piece of
my art about once a month which is a lot more than a
lot of artists ever manage to accomplish, but I almost
failed out of my college art classes due to being
graded so critically.
My first music class was Music Theory. I had been
learning how to play guitar for about five years by
then and had a basic understanding of music theory
but I was completely unprepared for the pace of the
class. The class was designed for people that had
been a part of the band program in high school and
had already taken music theory. So while everyone
else in the class was bored while the teacher
exhausted all of my accrued knowledge of music
theory in the first couple of classes, I spent every
class with my hand in the air like I had used concrete
for deodorant. I never managed to complete the
transposition assignment for the first basic
contrapuntal movement piece by Bach. It’s not that
the assignment was too difficult. It was that everyone
else in the class had prior experience with the stuff
where I was learning it for the first time. I was quickly
left behind and dropped the class. I’ve continued to
maintain an interest in music, but that first class
definitely put me off of the idea of pursuing the study
of it in an academic setting.
The technical theater classes were different. It
was something that I hadn’t known I would be good at
that I fell into by accident and thrived at. I read all of
the Greek plays, and went on to read all of Brecht and
Artaud, Ionesco and Albee. I’d read the assigned
readings in the textbooks, but I would also read
everything else in the textbooks. I was a voracious
reader. I used to keep a Word document record of
the books I read because it was getting difficult to
keep track of. The document was something like
thirteen pages long with fifty books per page before I
finally developed the ability to remember which books
I had read without having to keep track of it in a
document and could abandon the document.
I took classes in set design and construction,
which also incorporated the elements of audio and
lighting design. I had some prior experience with
audio design from my club nights and I took to signal
path and audio design naturally. At the same time, I
was getting paid to practice what I was learning.
Sometimes the sets for the major theatrical
productions were fairly simple and interpretive. Other
times they were fairly elaborate. When the
performing arts department decided to do a
production of Noises Off, we built an entire half of a
two-story house that would revolve to show the other
side during intermission. During this process I
learned carpentry, painting, and general construction.
If you were asked to do something that was beyond
your ability, you were assigned to work with someone
who knew how to do that thing so you would know
how to do it the next time you were asked. There
were both young men and women in the technical
theater department, but the young men did most of
the heavy work. The young women tended to be the
“tomboy” type and did their best to act and talk tough.
It was usually an act, and a bad one at that, but as
long as they could pull their weight, adjusted for their
gender-based deficiencies, they weren’t hassled that
badly. The department had no use for a prima dona
that was worried about breaking a nail.
The “fly” system was a series of ropes and pipes
and pulleys that facilitated the pipes being lowered to
the stage to affix lights or scenery flats to so that they
could be suspended in the air. Sometimes the
scenery would be “flown” away during a performance,
but the lights were counter-balanced with weights and
tied off into position. Moving the weights to
counterbalance the lights required someone to climb
fifty feet up to the catwalk for the counterweight
system and spend half a day moving twenty pound
metal weights from one pulley system to another. I
liked doing that work because I could climb up there
and take my shirt off and do honest physical work to
earn my pay. Twenty pounds doesn’t sound like
much, and it isn’t. But when you have to shift a
hundred and fifty, twenty pound weights in a few
hours you’ve moved over a ton of weight in one
change-over and the sleep you slept that night was
well-earned and restful.
One excellent fringe benefit of working in the
performing arts department was that since most of the
male actors were gay, and the dance department was
almost uniformly made up of young women, there
were plenty of dating opportunities for a straight man
to take advantage of and I took full advantage of
those opportunities.
It also helped that the college had both education
and nursing programs that were well regarded and
those career fields also primarily drew female
students and the ratio of female to male students at
the college was five to one.
As an employee of the performing arts department,
I would get free tickets to the major theatrical
performances, and if I wasn’t in a relationship, I would
take a different date to each performance as a way of
taking them for a test drive.
I loved working in the theater department, but the
rate of compensation wasn’t matching the increase of
the cost of living. I worked there for two years before
seeking more remunerative employment. I would
have loved to have stuck with technical theater as a
career field, but it is a very competitive field and
finding work with a theatrical company outside of the
college performing arts department was more often
than not a matter of who you knew. I wasn’t very
good at playing that game. The performing arts
department drew a lot of damaged young people with
half-formed personalities and the social hierarchy was
worse than it had been in high school. You can chalk
it up to people with artistic dispositions being more
dramatic than the average person, or you can chalk it
up to them being immature, but my no nonsense
approach to life from my military training didn’t go
over that well.
The work was relatively easy and interesting and I
was actually learning some valuable skills that would
stick with me for the rest of my life.
Chapter 19:
Endangered Theater.

The problem with living in the dorms and working

for the performing arts department was that the dorms
closed during the summer and the amount of work
available during the summer hiatus dropped by about
half. Each summer I would go from having a deferred
rent place to put myself and regular work to being told
that I would have to find someplace else to live from
June through September.
Some people figured out how to talk the college
housing department into letting them stay through the
summer but I was never able to figure out that trick.
One summer I did figure out how to get a work
study grant for the summer as part of a federal
program. The catch was that you had to pick a job
from a limited number of available jobs and pretty
much work for minimum wage until your award ran
out. It was easier than trying to find a job that would
let you work for four months and then leave.
Employers at that time were looking for people that
were interested in fully committing to the company
and beginning careers and I wasn’t ready to give up
on the pursuit of my degree to join up with some
corporation and start putting in my time towards
retirement.
I probably would have been better off if I had done
that. I wouldn’t be carrying the weight of my unpaid
student loans through life which have pretty much
ruined my credit history for the rest of my life, so I can
forget about getting a loan to buy a car or a house or
even get a store credit card from most retail stores.
I managed to find a place to work that summer.
It seemed cool at first. An independent theater
downtown funded by art grants that was the originator
of a well-regarded Women’s Playwriting Festival.
They had a suite of offices a small white box gallery
space and a decent sized black box space.
There were four or five regular employees. An
executive director, a man whose name I forget. Two
women that worked in the office in a programming /
coordinator capacity and a woman that was in charge
of the puppet program. I was and am amazed that
“puppeteer” is a career field that one can pursue if
one is so inclined.
The two women working programming /
coordinating were both named Amy.
One was big, fat, and brunette. The other was
small, svelte, and blonde.
That made telling them apart easy.
The big brunette was quite proud that she used to
work at some kind of Kerouac institute out west and
would take every opportunity to mention that she used
to work at some kind of Kerouac institute out west.
The little blonde was one of those strident abrasive
women that definitely didn’t get told to shut the fuck
up enough during her formative years. Everything
she ever said was laced with condescension, which
is, of course, a great way to interact with the
employees provided to you for free at the expense of
the government to help you run your independent
theater.
The first task I was given was to take all of the
scrawled notes with addresses on them and update
the mailing list. That took me about two days since I
tend to work quickly when the parameters of a task
are clear and simple.
My next task was to take a print-out of the entire
mailing list of five-thousand or so addresses printed
out on little white labels die cut into eight-by-eleven
sticker paper and affix them to five-thousand five-by-
seven postcards with some kind of promotion for the
theater printed on the business side. That took me
one day. I was given a table and a chair in the gallery
space which was not being used and I just cranked
through the task expeditiously. There was a window
in the gallery space that looked out onto the street
over the entrance of one of downtown’s low-rent strip
clubs, but nothing really interesting happened that
day. At the end of the day, I told the Amys that I had
finished putting all of the labels onto all of the
postcards and they didn’t believe me, because it
usually took a week to get the postcards labelled, so I
had to take them back and show them the plastic
postal bins full of labeled postcards. I could have
milked the task for a week, but I was naïve and
believed in personal integrity and work ethic.
I was tasked with cleaning out the basement under
the black box. There were something like a decade’s
worth of old paint in something like thirty gallon cans.
My job was to determine which cans had gone bad
and which were still worth using and to dispose of the
former and label the latter with a dab of paint on the
lid to indicate the color. If you didn’t know, paint can
go bad. If your paint smells like mildew, or it has
separated back into a layer of the base with the
pigment settled to the bottom and solidified, you can
try to mix it back into paint, but it’s tough to get that
mildew smell out of the paint so whatever you paint
with that paint is going to smell like the inside of a
gym locker. That task took me one day.
There was a short play festival coming up, so my
next job was to repaint the floor of the black box back
to flat black. That also took me one day.
They decided to re-paint the gallery space so I
repainted that with a soft white and that only took one
day.
For my next task I was given the director’s rolodex
and told to reorganize it, and to alphabetize the
information.
I was beginning to think that they were running out
of things for me to do.
I was right.
I only worked three days a week, and after those
first couple weeks, they treated me like a
maintenance person. The kind of maintenance
person that empties the trash and cleans the toilets
and makes sure that the toilet paper is well-stocked.
I decided that this wasn’t a really good use of my
time and effort and the funds that they had been
granted by the government for what was supposed to
be an internship in theatrical arts. Since it was the
summer, and I was young, and the weather was fair, I
asked if I could come in two days a week instead of
three days a week since the trash didn’t really fill up
that quickly and the toilet paper didn’t empty out that
quickly and it was a waste of my time and effort to
come in three days a week.
Small blonde Amy asked, “If you’re only going to
come in two days a week, then why come in at all?”
“That’s an excellent question.” I replied, and told
her I quit.
The theater only stayed open a couple years after
that and I felt no remorse when I found out that they
had closed.
I also found out that small blonde Amy was
diagnosed with a brain tumor and I felt no remorse
about that either, believing that the world is a just
place and nice things happen to nice people and the
inverse was also true.
Chapter 20:
Security Officer

The following school year I worked hard and saved

up enough money that I wouldn’t have to work that
summer. I had about six or seven hundred dollars
saved up and I found a room-share with a bunch of
weird people on the east side about a mile from
Thayer Street, which was a pretty happening place in
the mid-nineties.
I found the room-share through a friend from high
school.
It was only a hundred dollars a month, plus my
share of the utilities.
I put most of my stuff in storage in my parents’
basement for the summer, so all I had was a small
foot locker of clothes and a few personal possessions.
I didn’t have a bed, so I slept in the closet, which
was long enough that I could lay out full-length with
my sleeping bag on the floor and close the door and
sleep in total blackness. I didn’t have much use for
the actual bedroom, and the other people I shared the
apartment with thought that was weird, but fuck them
and what they thought.
When I moved into the apartment, I had to buy
new light bulbs for the light fixtures, because
someone had removed all of the light-bulbs, which
was weird and should have been a warning, but I
didn’t have any idea why someone would want to take
all of the light bulbs out of all of the outlets.
There were four or five bedrooms in the
apartment.
One was kept by a guy named Jason who was
sort of in charge of the apartment. He was the guy
that you gave your rent and your share of the utilities
to and he supposedly paid the landlord and the
electrical company.
Another room was kept by a thin brown-haired
boy and his blonde friend. I could never figure out if
they were in a relationship with each other and it was
really none of my business.
The last room was kept by a girl named Lyndsey
that my friend from high school used to date and her
boyfriend.
Since it was summer, and we were all young,
there were always people coming in and out of the
apartment, and I didn’t really care since I had very
little of value in my room. This was before cell
phones and laptops, and I always carried my keys
and my wallet with me and it would be pretty obvious
if someone stole my clothes and tried to wear them.
The kitchen was a nightmare.
The sink was full of dirty dishes and greasy water
that smelled like a swamp. There were four or five
bags full of trash that no one seemed interested in
taking the responsibility of taking out on trash day.
The refrigerator was filthy and stale and filled with all
sorts of weird things in various stages of evolving into
something else.
The bathroom was just as bad, but at least the
sink, toilet, and shower worked.
The living room had two couches and a coffee
table. No television.
The coffee table was covered with cigarettes ash
and several over-flowing ashtrays and the upholstery
of the couches were worn thin and shiny with human
grease where humans frequently contacted them.
To make matters worse, I think that Lyndsey and
her boyfriend had a cat and the litter box was in the
kitchen and hadn’t been emptied for months. The
litter in the box was so impregnated with urine and
feces that it had solidified into a rectangle of toxic
asphalt.
Pretty much it was a flop-house, but it was cheap,
and I only planned on staying there for three or four
months until moving back into the dorms for the fall
semester.
Contrastingly I cleaned my room and kept it
immaculate… and slept in the closet.
I minded my own business and spent most days
hanging out with my friend from high school. We
dropped acid just about every other day and
skateboarded down to Thayer Street and just sort of
hung around. It was not a bad way to spend a
summer.
I paid my rent and my share of the utilities for the
first month no problem.
The second month, rent was raised and the utilities
were twice as much as the month preceding. I was
suspicious.
It turns out that the reason that the rent was
“raised” was because Jason, the guy who put himself
in charge of the apartment, was using everyone else’s
rent to pay his rent and living off of what everyone
chipped in to pay for utilities instead of paying the
utilities. The electricity got shut off. That was fine
because I didn’t really own anything that needed to be
plugged in, and all of the other people living in the
apartment were meth heads and that’s why all of the
light bulbs were missing when I moved in. Meth
heads break the ends off of light bulbs and use the
bulbs for meth pipes to freebase meth. That was how
I spent the first month of my second summer in
college.
The landlord decided that they had enough of the
bullshit, and decided to clean house. I moved
upstairs to live with my friend from high-school and
we split the rent on his room for the rest of the
summer. It wasn’t a big deal. It was a big room and
all I had was a small foot-locker of clothes and all I
needed was enough room on the floor to sleep when I
felt like sleeping which wasn’t often. My rent was
even cheaper, and the guys living in the other rooms
weren’t meth-heads and the place was pretty clean
and we had a great time all summer and dropped acid
every other day.
Everyone in the apartment was in a band, and
there were parties just about every other night. I had
a girlfriend that would come over and visit a couple
times a week. I tied a sock around the doorknob
when we were spending time together naked. My
friend from high school would have women over some
nights and when I came home to find a sock tied
around the doorknob I’d just sleep on the couch in the
living room.
At the beginning of August I received a letter from
the college that said that they wanted me to pay them
$600 or they would revoke my student loans for the
following semester and revoke my full-time student
status. This was a problem, because I did not have
six-hundred dollars and had been living off of what I
had saved up for the summer instead of working a
job.
A girl that came to one of our parties told me that
she was a security officer. I figured that if they’d hire
a teenaged girl to be a security officer that they would
definitely hire a fairly big-sized guy like myself that
had spent some time in the military. I asked her what
company she was working for and I went down and
applied.
I got the job.
I was given two sets of synthetic slacks and two
synthetic shirts assigned to work security for the
major regional newspaper. This was back when
newspapers actually mattered, so people would
sometimes get upset about what the newspaper
printed and storm down to the newspaper offices to
give the newspaper people a piece of their mind. I
was there to make sure that the piece of their mind
didn’t arrive as bullets.
The first weekend I worked, I was assigned to
work the front gate of the production facility. It was
easy work. You pretty much hung out in a little shack
about the size of a camper and checked to make sure
that everyone had an employee identification card. I
can’t remember if their identification activated the
gate, but I think it did, so you pretty much just had to
talk to the people that forgot their identification at
home and check their name against the list of
employees and press the button to raise the board
that went across the entrance. I was assigned to
work Friday and Saturday night, 4p.m. to Midnight. I
showed up at 4p.m. and worked my shift and the
Midnight to 8 a.m. guy called out. I needed the
money, so I took the shift. The 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. guy
called out and I took that shift too. I worked my
Saturday 4 p.m. to Midnight shift, and the Midnight to
8 a.m. guy called out again, so I took the shift. The 8
a.m. to 4 p.m. guy called out and I took that shift too.
The 4 p.m. to Midnight guy called out and I took that
shift too. I was working with another guard that would
go back and forth from the production facility to the
main building and check up on the two guards on
duty, and when he showed up at midnight, he let me
take a nap in his car for an hour. The Midnight to 8
a.m. guy called out again, so I took the shift. I worked
from Friday at 4 p.m. till Monday at 8 a.m. Forty-eight
hours in one weekend. That and two or three other
shifts that week and I was at about eighty hours, forty
of them paying time-and-a-half for overtime. I paid off
the balance of what the college wanted with one week
of work. Security was easy work so I stuck with it for
a couple years while in college,
I’d mostly work third shift, while working days for
the theater department and taking a full course-load
of classes and sleeping when I wasn’t doing any of
those three. I even managed to be in two bands and
have a few relationships on the side. I’ve always had
a love/hate relationship with sleep and I’m used to
running on fumes. Spending all summer on acid
definitely taught me how to deal with the weirdness
that accompanies being underslept and still being
able to function.
Most third shifts I’d bring a book to read for the first
couple hours, sleep four hours, and read the last two
hours. The good thing about having been in the
military is that I learned how to sleep lightly when
necessary, so on the rare occasion that someone
opened the door the main offices to come in and do
some late night newspaper work, the sound of them
opening the outside door would wake me up.
Another cool thing about working at the newspaper
was that I had access to a copy machine all shift long.
I’d make hundreds of copies of flyers for the shows for
my bands and I even published a zine, laying it out in
Microsoft Word, then cutting out the pages and taping
them to 8.5 X 11 paper in the proper order to fold it
into a booklet and making a hundred copies of each
page, double-sided.
This was before the internet was someplace where
everyone has their own personal soapbox to tell the
world everything about themselves. This was when
people used Netscape as their browser, and AOL as
their ISP, and even if you managed to find a website
for the thing you were looking for it was all text and if
there was a picture you had to wait for the picture to
download.
 I tried writing a concert review for the student
newspaper, but the editor completely rewrote my
review so it didn’t make any sense, so I decided to
publish my own alternative to the college newspaper.
I called it The Autonomous, and I wrote the whole first
issue myself. It was something like twenty pages and
the last five pages were listings for all of the local
entertainment venues and planned parenthood and
information that I thought would be helpful for people
new to the college that no one provided me with when
I showed up. I even managed to get an advertiser for
my first issue. A duckpin bowling alley on the other
side of the river. I talked the guy into giving me $50
for a five issue run. I published a hundred copies of
the zine and tried to sell them for a dollar a piece. I
sold maybe ten and ended up giving the rest away. A
lot of people said I did a great job and appreciated
what I had done, but when I tried to get people to
contribute content for the second issue nobody
followed through, and I had pretty much said
everything I had wanted to say in the first issue, so I
was spent. I still feel bad that I owe that duckpin
bowling alley four more ads. If I’m ever in a position
to give that place some free ad space or have the
money to pay the place back I think I might do just
that.
Working weekends in the shack at the production
facility you could pretty much do what you wanted as
long as you showed up at work on time, in uniform,
stayed for your shift, and didn’t get caught sleeping. I
had a boom-box with a CD player and a tape deck, so
I’d bring in a bunch of CDs and make mix-tapes for
people. This was before everyone had a CD burner
in their computers, and CD players were relatively
rare in vehicles, so mix-tapes was the way that you
would share music and play it in your vehicle if you
didn’t want to listen to the radio. I never wanted to
listen to the radio. I could also get caught up on my
reading for school and get caught up on my sleep
because I am capable of falling asleep while sitting up
with my head propped up on my arm/hand so I look
like I’m awake. It’s a valuable skill to develop early on
in your employment history.
Chapter 21:
Family-Owned Photo Development Place

Summer came again and I had to find another

place to live and work since I couldn’t live in the
dorms and the work available from the theater was
scant.
Someone told me about a photo developing place
out across the bay that needed a clerk/technician. I
don’t know what kind of lies I told to get the job, but I
got the job.
I worked out there three or four days a week. It
was a pain in the ass to get out there, because I had
to take a bus out there, then walk a mile and a half to
the store, but the pay was decent and the work was
relatively easy. The owners were a geriatric couple.
They were rarely ever there except when they
stopped by and checked in every couple days or so
for a little while just to make sure we weren’t running
wild. I worked with a Spanish guy named Victor that
had one of those thin mustaches but he was a cool
guy to work with. He was a photographer by hobby,
so the access to free developing was an added bonus
for him. There was also a photo studio attached to
the photo development shop that did a fairly brisk
business with wedding photos, family photos, and
custom school pictures.
As much as I hate to be an antiquarian again, this
was before digital photography was really affordable
and readily available. If you wanted to take a picture
of something you loaded film into a camera and took
your pictures, then took the film to a photo
development place and had the film developed and
pictures printed. It was fairly inconvenient process,
and a lot of people didn’t meet the minimum
intelligence required to operate film cameras properly,
so we got a lot of black frames of unexposed film on
every roll of film, and a lot of rolls of film where the
people had opened up the camera without cranking
the film back into the film cartridge, so the whole roll
was exposed and it fucked up all of their precious
pictures.
The machines that we were using to develop the
film and print the pictures were old, and required
extensive daily maintenance and even then each little
thing had its little trick you had to know to get it to
work right. If the chemicals in the film developing
machine were just a bit off, it fucked up the film. The
photo printing machine was infested with fine particles
that would block the image being reproduced correctly
which would show up as white dots on the pictures.
We had a little palette of watercolor paints and we’d
try to match the color and paint in the dots in the
pictures if the pictures seemed like they were a big
deal like a wedding or a graduation. But if it was just
some teenager taking stupid pictures of their stupid
friends, then, fuck it, they could deal with the dots.
We would also get a bunch of those disposable
cameras. People were in the habit of putting one at
each table when there was a wedding, so the people
at the wedding could get liquored up and document
the event. The disposable cameras would usually
come in with half of the pictures left so I’d just kill the
roll taking a bunch of pictures of myself making funny
faces, so I guess I was fairly well photographically
documented that summer.
Sometimes we’d get a roll of film with some kind of
nudity. Usually it would be one picture out of a roll of
someone flashing a tit or a dick. Since the place was
family run, we wouldn’t give the people those pictures,
because they didn’t want to be known as a place
where you could get your home pornography printed.
Ironically, those pictures would print up anyway when
you processed the rolls, so we’d just take those
pictures out of the stack and tape them up on the side
of the machines that the customers couldn’t see
because they were behind the counter.
Sometimes you’d get a whole roll of blurry, semi-
focused pictures from some guy that took a bunch of
pictures of his wife in bed with a disposable camera.
We’d always tell them that the pictures didn’t come
out and the men were usually embarrassed enough in
the sober daylight that they didn’t ask too persistently
about the matter.
I was also doing a fair amount of photography at
the time. I had a Cannon AE-1 SLR which is, in my
opinion one of the best cameras ever made. I’d
usually burn through about a roll of 36 each week and
since the developing and printing was free it was a
cheap hobby to practice for me that summer.
I still remember my first digital camera. It was a
Sony Mavica. It took something like 4 Meg pictures
and you could store about ten of them on the 3.5” disc
that you had to slide into the back, and then take out
and put into the 3.5” drive of your computer to upload
to your Angelfire site.
The summer ended and so did the job. I think that
there was some girl that went to college around here
that went home for the summer, so while she was at
home for the summer I filled in for her and when she
came back she took her old job back, but I think that
was the arrangement from the outset so I had no
major complaints about it.
Chapter 22:
Home For Children

Since I was studying psychology in college, I

decided it would be good idea to get a job in my
intended career field so that after I had graduated I
would have some work experience on my resume
which would hopefully help me get a decent job. The
$6.25 / hr. I was getting paid as a theater technician
through work study didn’t seem like it was a good deal
after I was doing it for a couple years. The salary cap
that existed due to the set amount of the work-study
award always meant that I wasn’t able to make as
much money as I would have been able to make if I
worked a straight hourly job in the outside world.
I used what websites there were, and I think I
actually found this job through a newspaper listing. I
went to the place and applied.
I was hoping to get a job as a counselor, also
known at the time as a social worker. What I didn’t
realize at the time, and what has plagued me to this
day is that I was pursuing the wrong degree. I was
majoring in psychology. There’s not much you can do
with a psychology degree unless you pursue the field
of study all the way to the doctoral level, but no one
felt the need to inform me of that fact while I was
pursuing my degree. If I had studied Social Work, I
would have been able to have been licensed as a
social worker with my Bachelor’s Degree and made a
decent wage and paid off my student loans and gone
on to pursue my Master’s Degree in Social Work and
follow-through and get licensed as a Master’s In
Social Work through the state licensing agency.
Pursuing my Master’s Degree in Social Work is still
a possibility, and the college that I received my
Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology from offers a two
year Master’s In Social Work Degree for those that
have Bachelor’s Degree in Psychology, but defaulting
on my student loans and the $15,000 that I had them
paid down to at graduation increasing to $20,000
probably disqualifies me from participating in a degree
program again in this lifetime until I pay off my
outstanding defaulted, and steadily increasing student
loans.
Since I wasn’t qualified to pursue licensure as a
social worker, I was offered a position as a direct care
staff, which was also called a “counselor” but in this
case the title was more of a euphemism since I didn’t
get to do a whole lot of counseling during my eighteen
year career in the field of mental health. A more
direct and accurately descriptive title for the job would
be “Behavior Management”.
I participated in a week of training. Most of which
was insulting to my intelligence, but after spending
some time with the people intended to be my co-
workers I can see why the training was necessary.
It’s easy to assume that just because you’re relatively
intelligent that everyone else is relatively intelligent
too, and you’d be sorely mistaken in that assumption.
I spent a shift working in the three different wards that
were housing behaviorally difficult children. There
were something like ten different units at the facility,
since the facility offered services to boys from five
through thirteen and girls from five through eighteen.
I wasn’t allowed to work on the units providing
services to females because I have a penis. I’ve
never had the least bit of interest in children,
regardless of gender as objects of sexual desire, and
I haven’t been interested in teenagers as sexual
beings since my mid-twenties, and even then I
wouldn’t allow myself to get involved with anyone
under eighteen. I’m not complaining. Due to the way
that our society indoctrinates females, I was probably
saved a lot of grief by being prohibited from working
with young females, but the principle of the matter,
and the implicit suggestion that I might be tempted to
engage in pedophilia with the residents of the facility
never sat quite right with me, especially since women
were allowed to work on the units providing services
to males.
This was a facility providing services to children
and adolescents that had been the victims of physical
and sexual abuse, and as a result had developed
chronic behavioral and personality issues. Many of
these children and adolescents had been sexually
molested and knew more about the experience of
sexual intercourse than children in a civilized society
should know. The double standard of women being
able to work on units with males was demonstrably
unfair when an attractive, well-endowed, young
female employee would be frequently asked for hugs
by young boys. The problem was that these women
weren’t sophisticated enough to realize that these
boys were copping a cheap feel by playing against
the woman’s nurturing instinct. I mean, sometimes a
kid just needs a hug, but after you’ve been molested,
physical contact with other humans becomes a
different thing and more often than not these young
boys didn’t just need a hug. If they did, then why
didn’t they ask the fat old women that worked third
shift if they could have a hug?
Recognizing that physical contact carried a
different connotation for children and adolescents that
had been molested, I maintained flawless physical
boundaries. On the rare occasion I was asked for a
hug, I’d always offer a handshake instead.
Don’t think that just because some of these
children had been molested that they were all victims.
Some of them were genuinely malevolent. Many of
them probably grew up to be child molesters. It’s a
mystery as to whether or not it’s a genetic
predisposition that compels individuals to target
children as sexual targets, or if sexual abuse
predisposes individuals to becoming sexual predators
themselves. It boils down to the old “nature versus
nurture” comparison, and, as of this writing, science,
social and otherwise have not been able to determine
the root cause of those behaviors.
I remember during my first week of work one of the
kids was acting up and the unit director asked me to
handle it. The kid was running up and down the
hallway and yelling because he had fucked up and
been told to go to his room for not following rules. So
I had to kind of box the kid out, and block his way,
trying to avoid directly physically interacting with the
kid, because then it might escalate into a physical
restraint. I managed to get the kid to stop and told
him to go to his room and he told me to go fuck my
mother. “Go fuck your mother!” he yelled, and I had
to check the urge to smack the kid upside his head.
That was the way that I was raised. Talk shit. Get hit.
Having a five-year-old tell me to go fuck my mother
stung a bit and I had to walk it off. This was part of
the job.
During the eighteen years that I worked in the field
of mental health I will have everything imaginable said
to and about me. You learn to develop a force field
and to not let anyone you work with know too much
about your private life, because you know that when
they get pissed off at you, they’re just going to use
anything they know about you against you. You learn
not to tell people what city you live in or what your
relationship status is, or if your parents are alive, or if
you have any brothers or sisters. But I will never
forget the first time that a five-year old told me to go
fuck my mother.
Coincidentally, that kid ended up spending most of
his time in the system and ended up growing up to be
the kind of monster that should have been euthanized
when he first started to show his dark side. Later in
my career I worked for an agency that he had
graduated into and he worked out this weird system
with the other boys in the home that he was assigned
to that when he would drop a utensil at meal time it
meant that he was touching his penis or that when he
ducked under the table to retrieve his utensil that the
other boy was supposed to show him their penis or
something weird and sexually creepy like that. I
never found out if he ever straightened out and
become a normal adult, but he probably didn’t and
he’s probably in jail.
In my first week I also saw a little boy grab a
female staff member by the hair and clench his fists in
her hair while kicking her in the face for about ten
minutes until the rest of the staff were able to extract
his fists from her hair. The kid got a time-out and
restricted privileges and the girl lost a few fistfuls of
her hair and had to show up to work with a swollen
face for a few weeks.
Since I was still in school I worked part-time until a
third shift position opened up. I’d work 11p.m. until 7
a.m. and my job was basically to make sure that the
place didn’t erupt into a riot overnight. First I worked
with the five-to-eight year old boys on the third floor of
this giant sprawling old building that used to be a
convent or something like that. There were four or
five staff that worked on the unit first and second shift,
but I was the only staff that worked the overnight.
There were eight kids on the unit, so if they ever
decided to gang up and take me out it would definitely
be a bad night for everyone involved, but most nights
were uneventful. Mostly it was just little boys waking
up in the middle of the night and asking to use the
bathroom. The bathrooms were locked because a lot
of the molestation that the kids had been subjected to
probably happened in bathrooms so bathrooms were
potentially a scary and sexually charged environment,
and the staff didn’t want the boys to lure another boy
into the bathroom with them for some sexually
charged private time.
But it wasn’t all awful.
Most nights I’d just come in with a large coffee and
a few books. I’d wait for the second shift staff to leave
and make myself a couple of baloney sandwiches out
of the provisions that they always had in the little
refrigerator on the unit, then read or nap until around
6 a.m. when I had to start waking the kids up and
getting them ready for the day.
The downside of working with the five-to-eight year
olds is that sometimes we’d get a bed-wetter. Bed-
wetting and delayed developmental guidelines
including toilet training is sometimes a side-effect of
physical/sexual abuse. Part of my job was to walk
along the hallway about once an hour and poke my
head into the rooms and if I smelled urine, I had to
wake the kid up and get them to change their bed
sheets and take a shower and go back to bed. They
definitely didn’t mention intentionally sniffing for urine
as part of the job description but it was part of the job
so I did it.
The purpose of the facility was to provide
placement for children that had to be removed from
the custody of their parents until the children could
either be reunited with their families or placed in
adoption. About once a week we’d lose a kid and get
a new one and the whole process of figuring the kid
out while he learned the rules started all over again.
They almost always tested the water to see what
happened and ended up in a physical restraint.
That’s why I never make threats. I learned that you
have to always be prepared to follow through on
anything you say you’re going to do and if you tell a
kid to go to his room, and he tells you to go fuck
yourself, you have to have your “If not, then what?”
plan in place. The “If not, then what?” for kids that
told you to go fuck yourself when you told them to go
to their room for acting up was usually them getting
dragged, kicking and screaming, to their room and
having their wrists and ankles pinned to the floor by
an adult twice their size until they figured out that
telling someone to go fuck themselves wasn’t such a
great idea and it was a whole lot easier to just go to
your room when told.
We got in a new kid that was really weird. It was
difficult to get him to pay attention to you and engage
you in normal conversation and he had thick coke-
bottle glasses and, unfortunately, he wet the bed
every night. So every night I had to wake the kid up
in the middle of the night and make him take a shower
and help him to change his sheets. It was a pain in
the ass, and the kid never seemed to be interested in
not pissing the bed every night. Pissing the bed was
just his thing. It was how he rolled.
One night I woke him up like usual. I would never
creep into the kids rooms in dark and touch them to
wake them up because they may have already had
more than their fair share of adults coming into their
room at night in the dark and waking them up.
Instead, I would turn the overhead light on and shake
their mattress with my foot and call their name until
the kid woke up. This night, the kid apparently
decided he had enough of being woken up in the
middle of the night and he came at me like a spider-
monkey, all flailing fists and feet. It caught me off
guard, but I have pretty quick reflexes so I caught him
by the wrists, turned him around, took him down to
the floor and pinned him like we were trained to do.
The problem was that I was the only staff working the
third shift. There was a roving supervisor that would
go from unit to unit all over the facility overnight, but
you usually only saw them once or twice a night, so I
was stuck pinning this pissed-off, piss-soaked young
boy to the floor of his bedroom in the middle of the
night. It was decidedly less than awesome. The
roving supervisor came through about an hour later
and I was able to extricate myself from the situation,
but that didn’t make it suck any less while I was going
through it and I went home smelling like someone
else’s piss for the first, but definitely not the last time
in my career as a mental health “counselor”.
I decided that I was sick of having to sniff for piss,
so when a position opened up on the ten-to-thirteen
year-old unit, I applied for it and was hired for it.
When you start working at some places, you’re the
low man on the totem pole and you have to do the
worst work until someone quits or is fired and then
you can take their job, which is hopefully better than
your job and they hire someone else to do the worst
work. Third-shift workers usually live and die in their
jobs, but third shift takes a greater toll on people and
tends to chew people up and make them old before
their time.
The unit was shaped like a “T” with the column of
the “T” as a hallway that led past the office to the
kitchen and common area/living room for the unit.
There were four bedrooms on either side of the top of
the “T” two on each side, eight boys on the unit. I
figured out a way to get a bit of rest while at work and
not have to constantly walk up and down the hallway
to make sure that the boys didn’t sneak across the
hallway and molest each other in the middle of the
night.
I went to the hardware store and bought four of
those motion-detector doorbells that ring when you
break the beam. I used post-it notes and masking
tape to muffle the speakers a bit, so that they weren’t
as loud because they didn’t have a dial to adjust the
volume. Each night after the second shift staff left, I’d
set up the four motion detectors on each side of the
hallway, each detector covering two rooms, so if any
of the kids came out of their room in the night they’d
set off the doorbell.
Fucking genious.
I managed to get a fair amount of rest while
working third shift while going to school full-time and I
held onto the job for a year after I graduated because
I was comfortable with it.
I also ended up reading all of the Harry Potter
books because the unit had the complete series in
hardcover. The reason that the unit had the complete
series of Harry Potter books in hardcover is because
when you’re buying a present for a boy, a book
seems like a nice, positive, constructive gift and why
not a Harry Potter book? The problem is that when
the kid gets pissed off and decides to have a temper
tantrum, everything in his room becomes a weapon
so you end up having a hardcover thrown at your face
and the hardcover ends up in the office. For the
same reason I ended up playing through the red,
blue, and yellow versions of the Pokémon games. If
you’re going to be a dick and try to take me out by
throwing your Gameboy at my head, then we’re going
to keep your Gameboy in the office until we think
you’re ready to handle it again, and I’m going to save
over all of your save slots, jerk.
Some nights I came to work and there would be
three or four staff standing outside of a kid’s room
trying to handle his behavior, and when I showed up,
the second shift staff just clocked out and left.
Although I did receive a dollar an hour shift-
differential, I definitely think I should have been paid
more if I can show up and do the work of four people.
I don’t know what it was about me, but when I showed
up, the kids definitely knew it was time to stop fucking
around and settle down for the night.
I think it was mostly because I was always calm
no matter what they said or did. I mean, I never had
to deal with anyone throwing fistfuls of shit at me or
trying to bite my eyes out like an angry monkey. At
least not while working at this place. But showing up
and telling a kid to cut the shit or it’s going to be a
long night for both of us and at least I’m getting paid
for my trouble seemed to work just about every time.
Another trick I learned is that telling a kid to go to
bed and go to sleep usually doesn’t work that well. If
a kid can’t sleep, then telling him to go to sleep just
pisses them off worse. Instead I’d suggest that if they
couldn’t sleep, at least try to lay down and get some
rest, because there wasn’t anything else for them to
do until morning. They were usually softly snoring ten
or fifteen minutes later.
The problem is that a lot of the staff were young
and incomplete people themselves. They never got
past the anger that I experienced the first time that
first kid told me to go fuck my mother and never
realized that no matter what the kid said it had nothing
to do with them. They never realized that the kid is
going to keep on saying and doing fucked up shit until
he finds a way to get under your skin and when he
finally finds that one thing he’s going to jump up and
down on it until you lose your fucking mind.
That’s their job as a behaviorally problematic kid.
Your job as an adult working with behaviorally
problematic kids is to just let it pass and remember
that you’re getting paid for your time.
A lot of the time, when someone new is hired at a
place, they’re offered the going rate that other
employees that have been there longer are earning
even after having worked there a couple years due to
satisfactory annual reviews and cost of living
adjustments. The current employees ask about the
new person and where they used to work and what
the starting pay at that place is. That’s how I found
out about another place that was hiring people for
about a dollar more an hour to start so I applied at
that place and when I was hired, I put in my two
weeks at the home for children.
Chapter 23:
Happiness Hill

I called up Happiness Hill and scheduled an

interview.
The drive to the place was a relatively long one
down a four-lane road that rose and fell like waves as
it made its way west. I didn’t know about how the
cities that the road cut across used the road as a
speed trap for commuters to raise additional revenue.
At least not then I didn’t, but I’d learn well enough
when I was running late and trying to get to work on
time. I guess all of the bank robbers, rapists,
murderers, drug addicts, wife-beaters and child
molesters were all safely behind bars so the police
could spend their time sitting in their cruisers clocking
commuters. At least that’s what I like to think.
The Happiness Hill compound was down near the
end of an old, poorly maintained road, and the first
time you see it, it looks like a really nice place.
There’s a huge central building with funky curved
walls on the edge of a big tree-shaded lake, and
several modern-looking dorms. It looks like a great
place to vacation at first.
My interview was with a guy that seemed like he
used to be a hippie. You know the type. The kind of
guy that was probably really into The Grateful Dead
and Jefferson Airplane and used to love to get high
and rant against the man until he became the man.
The interview went well and since I already had a job
and was just trying to get a better one I was at ease.
 I was assigned to work with the thirteen to fifteen
year old boys. The campus was all boys and was a
last stop diversionary program before the training
school. I don’t doubt that a lot of them ended up at
the training school or in prison anyway, but if we could
help to keep a couple kids from following that path
then I guess we were doing good work.
The unit leader was a flinty old guy that was into
The Velvet Underground. He let me borrow a tape of
their double-tape live set and I became a fan for life.
He also put me onto a book called Ringolevio by
Emmett Grogan which was another excellent
recommendation. Although there were four or five
“counselors” that worked on the unit, there was no
doubt that it was his unit. It kind of sucked because
he would regularly undercut your authority as a
counselor by taking the kids in for a personal heart-to-
heart talk to set them straight. It helped, but if you
don’t have authority to impose consequences in a
situation like that, then it makes your job a lot more
difficult.
Most of the kids weren’t pure evil. It’s just that
society changed since I was a kid. Most of the stuff
that got kids sent to Happiness Hill was the kind of
stuff that I used to do when I was a kid and got away
with. Skipping school and smoking pot and throwing
rocks at things and lighting stuff on fire. Those were
all just a natural part of being a teenager when I was
growing up but the world changed and that’s the kind
of thing that got you sent to a special camp in the mid-
nineties.
 One of the things that didn’t seem as common
when I was growing up that was a significant problem
when I was working at Happiness Hill was children
and adolescents as child molesters. There was a
whole unit specifically designated for young boys that
had been profiled as child molesters. The unit had
special rules and they weren’t allowed to mix with the
general population. Also, much like in the prison
system, the child molesters were treated with a
special scorn.
As with most of the places I worked in the career
field of mental health, there is something called a
“honeymoon period” that most new residents go
through when they first arrive on the unit. They spend
between a couple weeks to a month behaving well
and being friendly and following the rules and testing
the waters to see what rules they can break and what
the consequences are for breaking those rules.
When they feel comfortable enough in the
environment, they test the staff with their most
extreme behavior to see if the staff can handle their
worst behavior. The unit leader called it “flipping the
apple cart” and even though it doesn’t make a lot of
sense, it’s an expression that I still use.
Almost all of the melt-downs began the same way.
The kid has a bad day and decides to act up. You
can usually see the storm coming from a distance.
The kid usually acts strangely and pretends that
they’re testing the rules just to be silly, and when you
provide them with redirection or consequences, their
behavior escalates until it requires physical
intervention.
“If not, then what?”
For example, a kid calls another kid a racist name,
and you tell them to take a time out or to go to their
room. The kid says “No.” or “Fuck you.” or whatever.
Now what?
Usually the “Now what?” was, “Either you can go
to your room on your own or I can drag you there,
kicking and screaming all the way.” About a quarter
of the time, the kid will get up and mouth off all the
way to their room so you can have the rest of the fight
in private. The rest of the time, you have to put your
hands on the kid and there’s a struggle and you either
get them on their feet and use uncomfortable body
mechanics to keep them from squirming away while
escorting them to their room, or they decide to fight
you there and then and they end up locked up on the
ground.
During my career in mental health, I have been
trained in at least three different Physical Behavioral
Management systems. One was called “P.R.T.” for
“Physical Restraint Technique” one was called
“Handle With Care”, and I forget what the other ones
were called, but each place had their own euphemism
and acronym for wrestling with the residents.
Happiness Hill used Handle With Care.
I remember during the training there were about a
half a dozen of us, and we were required to watch
videos and read booklets and practice the restraints
on each other. During one of the exercises, the
instructor made a skinny guy practice an individual
restraint where my arms would be pinned back and
pretzeled up behind me while I was face-down on the
floor and the skinny guy was supposed to be keeping
me locked up and pinned to the floor. The instructor
said, “It’s impossible to get out of this hold. Go
ahead, try and get out of it!” As I’ve said, I’m a pretty
big guy, and I had been doing a lot of push-ups those
days. I flexed and I could feel the bones in the skinny
guy’s fore-arms start to bend. I could’ve snapped the
guys arm bones to prove a point, but I figure the guy
didn’t need the grief so I just said, “Alright, you win.”
Escorting a kid to his room is almost never the end
of it. After escorting them back to their room, you
have to keep the kid there until they work through
their temper tantrum. What it usually ends up being is
you and the kid playing one-on-one Red Rover with
the kid trying to get past you while you stand in their
doorway.
It’s not so much frightening as it is annoying. Most
of the kids come with a reputation of being violent and
having really fucked shit up wherever they came from,
but my full-time job was dealing with behaviorally
difficult kids. There’s no real pride in being tougher
than a kid that’s half your age and half your body
weight. Some staff probably got off on it, but those
people never lasted. Some staff couldn’t hold their
own and caught a punch or a kick to the face and they
didn’t last either. If you’re not smart enough to know
not to turn your back on an aggressive adolescent
that’s pissed off at you, then you get whatever you
deserve and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for you.
 On a good day, the kids would attend the on-
campus school which was mostly populated with
young female teachers and each unit would have two
staff on in case they needed to be called in to escort
one of their kids out of the classroom, back to the unit,
to cool down.
At night, there were four or five staff on duty and if
the kids had been good, those that had earned the
privilege to be taken out into the community were
taken out in either a van or a mini-van. Each trip that
went out into the public was staffed with two staff in
case one of the kids decided to act up in public. It
was never a problem that more than one kid would
act up in public, because the rest of the kids knew
that if they acted up while another kid was acting up
that the consequences would be dire and that none of
them would be going anywhere anytime soon.
It’s not like we could beat the kids up or anything,
but a month without dessert and not being able to
leave the campus again until you went wherever you
went next was usually enough. It was good to be on
the right side of the staff. If you acted well, you were
treated well. The staff could be friendly and you could
joke around and sometimes the staff would burn you
a CD of some music you liked or take you out for your
favorite fast food when you were taken out into the
community. There was a budget for that kind of thing.
Or the staff could spend the whole day sitting in front
of your doorway giving you the silent treatment while
everyone else participated in whatever activity that
the unit was doing that night. The choice was theirs.
 Sometimes the kids were kept there until their
behavior stabilized, and other times they were kept
there until their family had met the goals set by the
court for the family to be reintegrated, but some of
these kids had been raised by animals. Some of
them had to be taught to bathe correctly and some of
them had to be taught how to use utensils or how to
eat new foods since they had been conditioned to eat
a very narrow variety of dietary options.
Not all days were bad days. You could go a few
days without an incident, sometimes even a week or
two. Other weeks, every night was more like going to
war than going to work.
I remember when the facility received their yearly
clothing subsidy. The facility would receive a set
amount for each resident and an outside contractor
would come out with vans full of clothes and each kid
would be given a new outfit or two for the school year.
The year I was there, the outside contractor showed
up with boxes full of South Pole merchandise.
Probably factory seconds with minor imperfections.
For those of you that don’t know the brand, they
specialized in denim pants and jackets and t-shirts
with their logo screen-printed across the chest for
urban style enthusiasts. Although you can definitely
rock their gear with style in the outside world, when all
eight of our boys received matching South Pole outfits
including brand new jeans and jean jackets they
looked like a chain gang. When the outside
contractor had left, I was walking through the area
that was used for the distribution of the clothing and I
noticed that they had left behind an orange-plastic-
handled extendable razor tool.
The area was a rarely used rec room that was far
more frequently used to take a kid down to so you
could isolate them from the unit when they were trying
to disrupt the unit. I saw red and grabbed the tool
and went to the office of the guy that hired me and
was the supervisor of my supervisor. I said, “Got a
minute?” and when he invited me to sit, I said, “Guess
what I found?” and dropped the tool on his desk. He
asked, “Where did you find that?” I told him that the
contractors left it behind. He didn’t seem that
concerned. I said, “Do you have any idea what this
could do to a person if some pissed off kid got a hold
of this? If they were lucky they’d just end up going to
the hospital and getting a few dozen stitches. But if
you really had your mind made up, you could kill
someone with this thing. What are you going to do
about this?” “What do you want me to do about it?”
he replied. I was not happy with what seemed like his
complete disregard for the safety of his employees.
That, combined with the monthly speeding ticket I had
received trying to get out to the place, the speed traps
manned by bored police looking for easy extortion
money, the alternating first and second shifts, and the
general physical toll that fighting for a living took on a
person, I decided to look for another job.
Chapter 24:
Never Trust a Junky: My Life As A Methadone
Counselor

As I had mentioned earlier, I had pursued the

wrong area of study when I was in college, so I
couldn’t pursue employment as a social worker.
There were social workers at Happiness Hill and
they were almost all women and terrible at their jobs.
They would see the kids once a week, for an hour,
and then write a couple pages of report about the
meeting. They didn’t have to dodge fists, kicks or
head-butts and they were paid at least twice as much
as the direct care staff or “counselors” were paid.
By that time I realized that I had fucked up and
studied the wrong thing, but I had $15,000 in student
loans to pay off and couldn’t afford to go back to
school for the two-year Master’s Program in Social
Work so I could get licensed as a Social Worker. The
paradox was that since I had pursued the wrong
degree, I was only qualified for jobs that paid half as
much as if I had pursued the right degree, so it would
be twice as difficult for me to survive and thrive and
pay back my student loans so I could go back to
college and pursue the right degree to do what I
wanted to do with my life, which was, at the time, to
help people.
I searched the newspapers and the early internet
equivalent of job websites, which at the time, were
pretty much just the online listings of the employment
section of the newspaper. I had a friend that was
working as a security officer at a methadone clinic
and he said that they were always hiring counselors
and that I should go down and apply. I called the
place and dropped his name as a reference and they
scheduled an interview.
When I was led up to the interview, I was led past
a long line of scumbags. About half of them were
Hispanic, and the other half were haunted-looking
white people. They were the heroin addicts that were
lined up for their daily dose of methadone. I was
clean-shaven, and well-groomed, in a suit and tie with
a leatherette folio with my resume in it. If I was a
junkie, I would have been the best-dressed junkie in
the joint. My interviewer was an attractive redhead a
few years older than I was. She was pleasant and
engaging and I was appropriately charming in
response. This was a job interview, after all, and it is
best to be likeable if you want to be hired.
I was hired. The job started at 5:45 a.m. Fifteen
minutes before the clinic opened at 6 a.m. There was
a secure parking lot for the employees to park in so
that the junkies didn’t break into their vehicles and
steal their stereos. Each day, you would schedule
four or five hour long meetings with four or five of your
fifty or so client caseload. If the person was new to
the program, you would meet with them every day for
the first week, then twice a week for two weeks, then
once a week for a few months, then once every other
week.
The purpose of the meetings was to provide
counseling for the addicts as they participated in
methadone maintenance treatment as an alternative
to using heroin. There were also people there
because they had developed a pretty healthy
Oxycontin habit and when that wasn’t meeting their
needs anymore, they switched over to heroin. The
goal of methadone maintenance is to administer a
dosage equivalent to their use of illicit drugs and then
to gradually taper the dosage, decreasing their
dependency, until they were able to successfully
leave treatment.
I have my opinion about the program, but
statistically, 85% of methadone program participants
will return to the use of illicit substances, and,
speaking anecdotally, the people that were most likely
to make it work were white, middle-class people with
solid support networks. If you were black, or
Hispanic, and single or had just gotten out of jail, the
odds were not in your favor. For most of them it was
just a vacation from having to pay for their drugs.
A heroin habit can get to be quite expensive.
There’s the recreational user that inhales the drug
and does around five small plastic bags a day. Then
there’s the intravenous user that can go through
about fifty bags a day. I have no idea how much a
bag of heroin costs, since I have never tried to buy
one. Ten bags are called a bundle, and one of my
clients was going through about five bundles a day at
the cost of between $300-$500 dollars a day. I asked
him where he had been getting the money to support
his habit and he was never really quite clear about it,
but if you need to make money badly enough there
are ways to get it. When lying and stealing isn’t
enough, there’s breaking and entering and armed
robbery. A lot of the women would resort to
prostitution. There wasn’t any kind of universal rule
about if the heroin came before the prostitution or the
other way around.
Urinalysis was conducted regularly and randomly.
The program participant would have to provide a urine
sample before receiving their methadone. No urine,
no methadone. The reason for the urinalysis, is
because methadone is not an opium blocker like
Suboxone or Naltrexone. You can still do heroin
while on methadone, but it’s a dangerous game to
play because you’re already administered a dosage
adequate to address your withdrawal symptoms, but
not enough to get you high. But if you do heroin to
get high on top of your methadone it’s easy to
accidentally overdose and die. The urinalysis also
screened for cocaine and methamphetamines.
Program participants were not allowed to participate
in the recreational use of other illicit substances.
Stimulants also fucked with the metabolism of the
methadone, making substance abusers more likely to
return to the use of heroin to balance the premature
metabolization of their opioid replacement therapy.
If a person provided a urine sample that was
positive for Heroin or any other prohibited substance
then they were back to daily counseling sessions.
If a person had been a participant in good standing
in the program and had gone a year or so without
providing a urine sample with other drugs in it, they
could even apply for a supply of methadone that they
could take with them in case they had to go out of
state for vacation or on business or to a funeral, which
were the most common reasons that people were
allowed to take more than one or two days’ worth of
methadone with them.
The actual work of methadone counselling was
relatively easy.
At first, I would give the client the benefit of the
doubt and schedule appointments with them and if
they showed up for their appointments as scheduled, I
would lead them to my office and walk them through
the routine interview. The major questions were,
“Have you participated in the use of heroin or any
other illicit substances?”, “Is your methadone dosage
adequately handling your withdrawal symptoms?”,
and “Is there anything you need me to do on your
behalf as your counselor while you’re here today?”
As long as you covered those three questions, you
had enough information to write up a report and could
use boilerplate sentences like, “Client stated that they
had not participated in the use of heroin or any other
illicit substances.” and “Client stated their methadone
dosage is adequately addressing their withdrawal
symptoms.”
If the client dodged the appointments, then you
could put a “hold” on them. A “hold” meant that they
wouldn’t receive their methadone until they had met
with their case manager and the case manager
personally walked the client up to the window where
the nurses dispensed the methadone and told the
nurse that the hold could be removed. I had to deal
with a lot of shaking, unhappy addicts, but counseling
was part of the deal. Studies indicated that program
participants had a better chance of success if they
participated in regularly scheduled counseling, so
they were required to participate in regularly
scheduled counseling.
In addition to counseling, the counselor would help
their clients with other issues, such as providing
letters indicating adherence to the program to judges
and parole officers and helping the program
participants to coordinate with other social service
organizations.
I would like to think that we were doing good work.
For a few, we undoubtedly were.
For the most part, it was just a vacation from the
street life.
The rationale is that using illicit substances such
as heroin and cocaine requires participation in
criminal activity, involvement and association with
criminals, and the quality and potency of street drugs
is unreliable, and the substance abusers aren’t
participating in any kind of treatment.
Contrastingly, methadone maintenance is free or
affordable, which means that a person doesn’t have
to participate in criminal activity to support their habit,
the dosage and contents of the methadone are strictly
regulated, and the program participants receive
medical and psychological treatment for their
addiction.
And that’s the way it worked… in theory.
 In actuality, as statistics indicate, only a little over
one in ten participants use the program to quit
abusing drugs. As a counselor I was lied to daily with
straight faces. “Your urine sample tested positive for
cocaine.” “I didn’t do cocaine.” “Then why is there
cocaine in your urine sample?” “I don’t know.” “My
guess is that it’s because you put cocaine into your
body and your body metabolized it, which is why there
are trace elements of it in your urine. You don’t have
to lie to me. I am a substance abuse counselor. I
counsel people that use drugs. But let me advise you
that if you continue to provide urine samples that test
positive for cocaine, you will not be allowed to
continue to participate in the methadone maintenance
treatment program.” “I know.” They usually
continued to use cocaine, and were kicked off the
methadone program.
The weirdest part about being a methadone
maintenance counselor was that about half of the
counselors were former heroin addicts. I fully support
people that recover from addiction to a substance
helping others to overcome that addiction, but since I
had never used heroin, some of the addicts didn’t
trust me as a substance abuse counselor. You don’t
have to have been a drug addict to be a substance
abuse counselor. Whether or not I’ve ever done
heroin doesn’t mean that I am any less capable of
performing my duties, but some addicts only trusted a
former junky.
It was a weird work environment. There was one
guy I worked with named Jim who was this far-out
Tom Waits jazz blues guy. He had all sorts of toys
and musical instruments in his office. He had turned
it into a real home away from home. He put together
a sober talent show for the organization at a local
rental hall. Since I had let it get out that I played
bass, I was encouraged to bring my bass into work
and in the dead time between clients Jim and I would
jam in his office. Like I said, it was weird. The talent
show was a weird event also. I think the admission
was something like $5 suggested donation to go to
some sort of sober house. I played bass for Jim’s
blues band, and since I can play bass fairly well, I was
invited to play bass for about half of the six acts that
performed that night. Playing bass to a song you
don’t know is fairly easy, especially for the blues. You
just find the root note, and wait for the next note to
drop which is usually the third or fifth note in the major
or minor scale. Wait for the third note, and you’ve
pretty much got the verse. Learn the chorus and
you’ve got the song and then you can riff and fill up
and down the scale off of the base note.
Since I’m not a morning person the 5:45 a.m. start
for the job started to wear me down. I would sleep
every other night, because I didn’t trust myself to
wake up to the alarm. I’d stay up Sunday night into
Monday morning, work all day, sleep Monday
afternoon or evening, go into work on Tuesday, and
stay up Tuesday night so I wouldn’t sleep through my
alarm. It was pretty brutal, but that’s the only way I
knew how to make an early morning job work as an
insomniac. There was a policy that if you were late
three times during your first six months, you were
fired. I was late once a month for the first three
months and I was fired. I wasn’t too worried, because
the economy and the employment rate were strong
enough that if you lost your job, you could find
another job the same week. I was more embarrassed
and disappointed that I couldn’t even manage to wake
up for a job like normal people do.
Chapter 25:
Methadone House:
Methadone Counseling Redux

Since I had learned how to work as a methadone

counselor, and I was aware that there was more than
one methadone maintenance treatment program in
town, I applied for a job at another one. A lot of the
clients participating in methadone maintenance
treatment will change from one place to another in a
kind of revolving door, so, from processing their
admission interviews, I learned about the other
methadone maintenance programs in the area.
The guy that interviewed me for the job was a big
biker guy with Star Wars tattoo sleeves. We got
along well during the interview and I got the job.
This place had a policy that they’d start you off
with five clients, and if you did a good job with them
and proved that you could handle the workload, they
would give you five more clients, then five more after
that until you were up to the normal caseload of
between forty-five to fifty clients.
As a new counselor, you’re given the problem
clients that have asked for a new counselor because
they’re troublesome pains in the ass. It’s difficult, but
if you know your duties and know the job, then there’s
not a lot of wool for the clients to pull over your eyes.
My experience working in the field of mental health
made me excellent at de-escalation, which is a
valuable skill for anyone working in the field of mental
health to develop. First step is to determine what the
source of their anger is and to focus on that
exclusively. Let the client blow off steam and do not
comment for or against their complaints, but rather
reply with acknowledging statements like, “I
understand.” Or “I hear what you’re saying.” When
they’ve burned off all of their anger and talked it all
out, remind them what the central issue of their
problem was and suggest that you work together to
figure out a solution to their problem. The clients
leave your office feeling like you’re a sympathetic
counselor and that you’re on their side and it makes
the whole job easier.
Much like the preceding methadone treatment
program, I had to complete an hour or so of
counseling with each of my clients and hit the major
three questions during your interview and I had that
locked. After the counseling session, I had to write up
a couple pages about the meeting and make a copy
of it and put a copy in the client’s record binder.
The problem was that I had only five clients, and I
was scheduled for forty hours a week. That’s maybe
five hours of counseling appointments. I’ve never had
a problem writing up reports, at least not since the
practice had been drilled into me during my training
as a psychiatric specialist in the Army. It would only
take me about five or ten minutes to write up the
report and making a copy of the report and, using a
three-hole punch, make holes in it, and put it into the
client’s record didn’t take much time. I had five clients
and only about an hour and a half’s worth of work
each day. The weird thing was that all of the other
counselors seemed to be moving in slow motion. It
would take them an hour to write up a report and they
were having problems staying on top of their
caseloads. The guy that hired me, who was also the
manager of the case managers would stop in and
check to see how I was doing. Most of the time I
would be sitting in my office doing nothing, just staring
at the wall, waiting for the rest of the day to pass. The
guy would ask, “Whatcha doin’?” and I would shrug
and reply “Nothing, I guess. I’m already done with
today’s counseling session and my report is finished
and filed. When do you think you’re going to assign
me some more clients?” I’ve never been really good
at milking work. When I’m given something to do, I
work on it until it’s done. I’ve never understood how
or why someone would intentionally do something
slower than they could to kill time while at work.
After a couple weeks of spending most of my time
sitting in my office staring at the wall, the supervisor
with the Star Wars sleeves called me in to his office
and told me that it wasn’t working out and that he was
going to have to let me go.
“But… I’m really good at this job. I’m just waiting
for you to assign me more clients.”
It didn’t matter. Apparently I was fucking up the
grading curve and I had to be fired.
Chapter 26:
Stop & Shop: Two Days Lost In The Supermarket

Since I had fucked up or been fucked over at both

of the methadone maintenance programs I was aware
of, I didn’t know where else to get a job.
I was beginning to seriously doubt my career
choice working in the field of mental health and I
thought that maybe it would be nice to get a job doing
something that any blue-collar asshole without a
college degree seemed to be able to do to support
themselves.
I applied for a job at a supermarket.
The job was easy to get and easy to do.
I was hoping I would be hired on as a supervisor
for one of the departments, or an assistant manager
for the store, but those kind of jobs are hired for from
within and the kind of thing you have to spend years
earning.
I was hired as a stock clerk.
I was assigned two or three aisles to keep stocked
with merchandise from the back room for about fifty
cents more than minimum wage.
I was given a green polo shirt and a name tag with
my name on it to pin into it.
My training was pretty much being told which
aisles I was assigned to and shown where to get the
stuff to refill the shelves and shown a metal cart to
stack the stuff onto so I could wheel it out into my
aisles and restock the shelves.
This was another example of a job that I couldn’t
keep because I didn’t know how to milk it. Completely
restocking all three aisles I was assigned to only took
about an hour. Maybe two hours if I allowed myself to
sigh between each item I shelved while reflecting on
the fact that I was in my mid-twenties with a college
degree and was working a job that a high-school
drop-out could do.
That left about four hours each day for me to stand
around doing nothing.
When I got my first paycheck, about half of it was
taken by the Grocery Store Union towards my
membership in their organization. A membership that
I did not desire, but was mandatory if you wanted to
work for this supermarket chain. I’m sure that union
membership was helpful for employees that had been
working for the company for a few years and had
received annual evaluations and cost of living pay-
rate adjustments, but for someone just starting out, it
was a total kick in the dick, so I didn’t show up the
next week and I don’t think they even bothered to call
to see why I didn’t show up.
Chapter 27:
Securitas

Since I had worked as a security officer in college,

and they pay was better than the minimum wage I
was making at the grocery store, I decided to get
another job as a security officer.
Since I had given my two weeks and quit for the
last security place that I worked, I didn’t think that it
would be a good idea to try to hire on with them
again, so I checked the employment section of the
newspaper.
There was a security company advertising rates
between $11 and $14 an hour, so I called them up
and scheduled an interview.
Like most security places, they required that you
pay to have the Attorney General’s office run a
criminal background check.
The interview went well and I was hired.
They offered me full-time work, but it was only
paying $8 an hour.
I said that they were advertising between $11 and
$14 in their ad.
They said that those rates were only for certain
posts.
I could take it or leave it, so I left it.
Chapter 28:
Halfway House

When I was working for the Home For Children, I

got along well with one of my overnight supervisors.
He was a smart guy with eyes that seemed to look
right through you, which was kind of disconcerting,
but I got used to it. I was doing my job and had
nothing to hide so I had nothing to worry about, but
I’m sure it fucked with people that had something on
their conscience.
The guy appreciated the fact that I showed up
when I was supposed to and was awake whenever he
stopped by to check in on me while he was doing his
patrol around the units.
He’d usually hang out with me longer than he
would with the other overnight staff and we’d talk. I
forget what we’d talk about, but I think we mostly
talked about the mental health / human services
career field and what was wrong with it and how it
should work and how it could be fixed.
He told me that working as the overnight
supervisor was his part-time job and that he was the
program director of a halfway house program in Fall
River.
I remembered the name of the program and called
and asked for him. We caught up and I asked if he
was hiring. He expressed concern that the forty-five
minute commute each way would be somewhat
prohibitive for me, but I assured him that I needed
work and that I’d make the commute if he could get
me full-time work.
 I started working for the program as a staff
member at the Men’s Program. The Men’s Program
was an old funeral home that had been remodeled
into a residential program that housed around thirty
men that were mostly on parole or probation due to
criminal convictions due to crimes committed while
intoxicated or involving illicit substances or substance
abuse.
The goal of the program was to provide a drug-free
place for former drug addicts to live while they tried to
put their lives back together and integrate back into
society.
Most of the guys were day laborers. Painters and
carpenters working for building repair and
maintenance crews.
My job was to sit in an area partitioned off as an
office space at the entrance and monitor the comings
and goings of the residents. The doors locked at 11
p.m. and unless you had special permission to be out
past curfew, if you showed up late for curfew, you
were kicked out of the program. Smoke breaks were
scheduled every hour on the hour between 6a.m. and
11p.m. so that the residents wouldn’t spend all day
hanging outside the program smoking.
When you’re a new staff, the guys send up a guy
to ask if he could sneak out for a cigarette after
curfew. I was a smoker too, so I knew what it was like
to want to have a cigarette and not be able to have
one, so I said okay. The guy looked over his shoulder
and said, “He said okay!” and there were four other
scumbags hiding in the hallway just out of sight. I
learned that trick early on and wouldn’t make special
exceptions to the rules.
“Fool me once, shame on you.”
Each night I would be left two or three urinalysis
sample cups and in the morning at wake-up call at 6
a.m. I would find those two or three guys and escort
them up to the office and they had to provide a urine
sample before they did anything else or they were
kicked out of the program. It sucked for guys that had
jobs to go to, but since I had gone to get them right
when they woke up, they should have had a full
bladder and been able to provide a urine sample.
Technically speaking I was supposed to go into the
bathroom with the guys and make sure that I was
getting their urine fresh from the source, but that was
a pretty uncomfortably homosexually tense situation
so I trusted them to go into the bathroom and they
came out with whatever they came out with.
I did that job for a couple months when a job as a
case manager opened up at the program. I was
qualified for it, and it paid better, so I applied and
since I had been doing a decent job as the overnight
staff I was hired.
As a case manager, I was given about eight or ten
residents as my clients. There were three or four
case managers, so the house was split fairly evenly
between the case managers. I would meet with my
clients and find out what their plans were and make
sure that they were participating in sober social
activities and attending sobriety meetings like
Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous and
find out if there was anything that I could do for them
as their case manager to help them to reach their
goals. Pretty much just a jumped up version of the
big three that I used to ask as a methadone
counselor. I was good at my job. It was easy, or at
least it was easy for me. My co-workers mostly
minded their own business and handled their own
caseloads and other than the commute and having to
deal with creepy scumbags it was a good job. Most of
the residents stayed at the program for less than a
month unless they were having trouble finding a job or
lining up a place to live. Most drug addicts are pretty
resourceful. Unless they had burned all of their
bridges with their friends and family, and rebuilt them,
and burned them again, there were usually family
members or friends that they could lean on for work or
housing once they had fulfilled the requirements for
participation in the program.
Most of the other counselors were alcoholics or
drug addicts in recovery and, again, it was held
against me that I wasn’t an alcoholic or drug addict in
recovery. Just because I hadn’t managed to fuck my
life up and hit rock bottom didn’t mean that I wasn’t
qualified to help people rebuild their lives, but it was
held against me anyways. “Are you in recovery?”
“No, but it doesn’t matter that I’m not in recovery.”
“Then you don’t know what it’s like.” “It doesn’t matter
that I’m not in recovery. Do you want to finish your
mandatory counseling session or do you want to
spend more time arguing about whether or not I’m in
recovery qualifies me to do this job?” “…” “That’s
what I thought. Now, have you engaged in the use of
illicit substances since the last time that we met?”
The program director was a really intense guy. He
was in recovery from alcohol and he used all of the
intensity that he used to put towards drinking into the
program. He was ex-military and ran the program
with an intensity and commitment that money couldn’t
buy.
I worked that job for around six months when a
counselor position opened up at the Transitional
Program. The Transitional Program was a building
and program two houses down on the same street.
The Halfway House organization owned three houses
in a row. A Men’s Program, a Women’s Program, and
a Transitional Program. The Transitional Program
was for recovering drug addicts with co-occurring
mental health problems that needed more time and
help to facilitate their reintegration into society. The
pay was about the same, but the caseload was lower,
and more intensive. Something like six, compared to
the eight or ten client caseload at the Men’s Program.
They were a different kind of client though. I was
interested in transferring away from the steel-eyed
con-men that lied while looking me in the eyes. As an
added bonus, the guy that I knew from working at the
children’s facility would be my supervisor. Not that I
had any problem with my supervisor at the Men’s
Program, but I had a friendly relationship with the
other guy.
When I transitioned to the Transitional Program, I
shared an office with a woman named Lydia. Lydia
was from Fall River and Portuguese. I don’t know if
you know anyone of Portuguese descent, but it’s a
unique subculture. They are definitely of the opinion
that whatever they are used to within the boundaries
of their culture in their home environment is perfectly
acceptable within any other environment, including
professional environments. She wore pancake beige
foundation that didn’t match her skin tone so it looked
like she was made up like an ethnic mime. Dark red
lipstick and black eyeliner. Big earrings, off the
shoulder shirts and mid-thigh skirts. She always
showed up to work like she was heading out on a
date when her shift was over. I’d always wear slacks
and a polo shirt. Not that I loved polo shirts, but I
figured that the gravity of the position merited at least
wearing a collared shirt. Women always get an easier
time when it comes to dress codes. I’ve worked a lot
of jobs where I’ve had to wear pants all summer long
while the women were allowed to wear sleeveless
dresses and skirts. I always thought it would be funny
to wear a kilt to work and when I got pulled aside for a
talk about the dress code to claim that I was being
discriminated against and threaten to file a lawsuit but
I usually needed the job and it wasn’t worth the
hassle.
I like black clothes, so I’d usually wear black or tan
slacks and a black polo shirt. When I would wear
black slacks and a black polo shirt, Lydia would ask
me, “Are you goth?” and I would roll my eyes and sigh
and explain that I just liked the way that black clothes
looked and if you had a bunch of black clothes you
always knew you’d match when you left the house. It
was her way of passive-aggressively hassling me and
I always resisted the urge to reply, “No, I’m not a goth.
But since we’re making assumptions based on the
way that we’re showing up to work dressed like, are
you a prostitute?” That probably wouldn’t have gone
over too well.
Lydia and I split the week. The shifts were 8 a.m.
to 4 p.m., 4p.m. to midnight, and there was a third
shift staff that would come in and work Midnight till 8
a.m. I worked two 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shifts and three 4
p.m. to Midnights. It’s tough to work mixed first and
second shifts and I was never able to really adapt and
find a decent sleep schedule to compliment my work
schedule, so the first shifts were always difficult. I’ve
never had a problem working second or third shifts,
but first shift has always been a bitch.
There was weekend staff that worked the same
kind of schedules, but since they were in the habit of
hiring ex-drug addicts, when the staff would relapse
and stop showing up to work there were extra shifts to
be had so I was able to supplement my income.
I think that at one point Saturday mornings were a
part of my schedule too.
Saturday mornings were slow. I usually only had
one counseling appointment and most of the
residents slept in and kept to themselves, so it was
more a matter of staying awake for the shift than
being busy.
There was a shared computer in the office with
internet. This was in the LiveJournal days, so I’d do a
daily post in my LiveJournal and spend each week
eagerly awaiting the new StrongBad e-mail cartoon.
There was a woman that rented the office next to
ours to conduct counseling sessions. I’m not sure
why we were renting out the space, but we were and I
think she was providing individual and family
counseling and that the funding was somehow tied to
the organization that I worked for. One morning the
woman, a fat lady with cherubic cheeks and curly
shoulder-length hair, but hard mean eyes, came into
my office while I was watching Homestarrunner
cartoons and asked me what I was watching. She
said that she was curious because her kid would be
interested so I wrote down the website for her. The
following Monday my supervisor called me into his
office. He told me that the woman complained that I
was spending all day watching cartoons with the
volume cranked up and laughing loudly. The lady had
no idea that the supervisor and I had known each
other for years, so trying to get me in trouble was not
going to work. I told my supervisor what actually
happened and he told me to just keep it down and to
watch out for that woman on Saturday mornings. God
forbid someone looks like they’re having fun while
they’re doing their job, you miserable cunt. Just
because you hate your job doesn’t mean that
everyone else has to. In a couple months, the lady
didn’t show up anymore and the office was empty
until a new outside counselor started having meetings
in the office. I don’t know why the lady stopped
showing up and I don’t really care, but if she was as
much of an asshole to her clients as she was to me,
then I can see why her appointments dwindled.
I was dating a girl while working at this place. I
met her at fetish night at a club. Early on in our
relationship a douchebag tried to sour the relationship
by telling me that she had posed for a local
pornographic website. I looked up the website and
found her spread. First she was wearing a little black
velvet dress. Then she wasn’t. Then she was
topless. Then she was naked. Then she was putting
a vibrator inside of herself and making a pretty terrible
fake orgasm face. Pretty harmless, but I called the
girl up and told her that I found out about the site and
that we needed to talk.
I drove down to where she lived and we went to a
cemetery and talked about the whole thing. I told her
that I just wanted to know if she had done any other
porn so that I’d know about it so nobody could come
up and try to pour poison in my ear about her. She
told me that spread was the only porn she had done
and that she regretted it and that she had done it to
buy school books. I didn’t care. It was a pretty tame
set as far as pornography goes and it was kind of cool
to be dating someone that other guys thought was hot
enough to masturbate to pictures of.
Whenever I’d catch some guy staring at my
girlfriend, I’d nudge him and say, “If you think it looks
good, imagine how it rides.” and throw him a wink. I
didn’t mind. As long as a guy doesn’t try to break us
up, they can look all they want. That’s the price of
admission for dating an attractive woman. You’re not
going to be the only one that thinks she’s attractive,
so you can either accept it, and move on, or let it eat
you up inside until it ruins the relationship.
She called me up one night and told me that her
spread had been removed from the website. I guess
that someone thought it was a good idea to e-mail her
father and let him know about the spread. Her father
was the IT supervisor for a major university, and
probably knew a whole lot more about computers
than the hacks that put the site together. I’m not sure
about the details, but they felt it was a good decision
to remove her spread. Either that or he removed it for
them.
I used the shared computer to access the site and
clicked through the listings for the spreads and hers
wasn’t there anymore so it was a pretty good night
and worth celebrating.
I didn’t know much about clearing the registry.
I mean, I didn’t bookmark the site, and I only went
to it the once, but a few days later Lydia asked me if I
had been using the computer to look at pornography
while at work.
I flat denied it, because it was easier than
explaining what I just explained.
Lydia said, “It was horrible! I saw girls with girls
and boys with boys!”.
Well, Lydia, welcome to the internet.
My boss called me in to his office and, again, I
flatly denied it.
I’m not prone to lying, but since my job was at
stake I stonewalled.
 They couldn’t prove it was me, even though they
knew it was.
I figured that the issue was closed and we could
just move on.
When I was between clients, I’d close the door to
the office e and just chill out until my next
appointment. When the clients/residents would stop
by the office to ask for something they would knock
and wait to be invited to enter. When they entered,
they’d say “Oh, I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t…
disturbing you.” and smirk. It was pretty obvious that
Lydia had been gossiping with the clients, which was
pretty unprofessional. Not that going onto a
pornographic website at work to make sure that your
girlfriend’s photo spread wasn’t there was much more
professional. But Lydia was not very bright and not
very good at her job and dressed like a prostitute
every shift. I fuck up once and my professional
reputation was ruined.
Rather than have to deal with the awkwardness of
the situation I gave my two weeks and applied for
another job closer to where I lived.
Chapter 29:
Spooky World

While I was working as a counselor for the

Transitional Program I saw an advertisement looking
for actors and make-up artists for a haunted
attraction.
It was seasonal work, but I already had a full-time
job, so that didn’t fuck with me. I already had my rent
covered.
I called the place and scheduled a meeting.
I drove up to the place, which had a permanent
space in the area right outside of the parking lot for
the home stadium for the New England Patriots in
Foxboro, Massachusetts, whatever the fuck it’s called
now.
One of the co-owners gave me a walking tour of
the site.
There were two long Quonset hut structures. Each
structure had two haunts in it, one on each end, and
there were two outside haunts.
The themes for the inside haunts were a general
horror, a clown house, a mineshaft, and a haunted
disco, and the two outside haunts were a vampire
haunt and a Victorian/Plague haunt.
Since two of the haunts were outside, they took a
beating over the winter and they were being fixed up
for the Halloween season.
The owner asked me what my experience was. I
mentioned that I minored in theatrical tech and could
probably help with the repairs for the season but he
said that he had that covered. He asked me if I had
any experience with doing make-up. One of the
courses offered in the theater department was stage
make-up but I had dodged that requirement by
offering to do extra stage work under the guise of
“independent study”.
So I lied. I figured I knew enough about make-up
from all of the horror movies that I watched that I
could fake it until I learned it. So I was hired as a
make-up artist.
The pay for character actors was minimum wage.
The pay for make-up artists was a dollar more. As a
make-up artist, you showed up an hour early to prep
your station and then did around a dozen make-up
jobs. Any character slots left open by people calling
out or not showing up, you got your make-up done in
that theme and picked a costume from the racks of
moldy old costumes and you filled in for that person
for the night.
The make-up areas were in the ceilings above the
haunts in the Quonset huts. There were two make-up
areas and the work was evenly divided. One make-
up crew handled the general horror, mine-shaft, and
vampires. The other handled the clowns, the haunted
disco and the Victorian plague haunts.
I think I spent the first night working in the clown /
disco / plague area, but I didn’t fit in and no one was
really helping me to fit in. I didn’t know what to do, so
they sent me over to the horror / mineshaft / vampire
house. I met their crew and they were welcoming and
funny and cool and really helped me out. Since I was
new to the whole thing, they just gave me some
grease paint and some sponges and told me to do
some vampires. I didn’t know that sometimes less is
more, so all of the vampires I did the first night ended
up looking like KISS with fangs.
The girl that was in charge of that area took me
aside and taught me how to do more subtle work and
told me to buy an airbrush. I bought an airbrush.
The only time I had used an airbrush was once or
twice in high school, so it took me a little while to get it
down again. There’s a variety of different air-brushes,
but the one I bought cost $45 and had a button that if
you pushed it down, it regulated the speed that the
airbrush sucked paint, and sliding it back and forth
regulated how hard the air pressure blew. It took
some practice to get it so I wasn’t blasting people in
the face with paint or blowing their eyelids back, but
with a night or two of practice I had it down.
I would do six or seven vampires a night. First you
spray them pale, from the forehead to the collar.
Then you trace an s-curve down the sides of their
faces with a light grey to make them look more
skeletal/corpse-like. Depending on their facial
structure, you can hollow out their cheeks or paint a
furrow into their brow and darken out their eyes. Use
the empty airbrush to blow-dry the face paint and use
a Q-tip to judiciously apply some trickles of blood and
you’ve got yourself a vampire.
Since the pay wasn’t spectacular, the character
actors got to pick what they would be and most of
them were horror fans. There were a couple drama
queens and kings, for that matter, but most people
were relatively easy to work with.
There were some people that were really into their
characters.
We had a “Leatherface” a big guy that would run
around in an apron and a dead skin mask with a
chainless chainsaw and chase people around while
revving the engine. The guy that played that
character was cool and I’d bump into him every now
and then over the years when I would attend horror
conventions.
Then there were the people that took their
characters too seriously. Those people weren’t
spooky, they were creepy. The kind of people that
you wouldn’t want to invite to your home or leave
alone with kids. Most of them were into heavy metal
and death and Satan which makes me think that
they’d be my kind of people. But when I listen to
Slayer, I do so because I think it’s awesome and
hilarious. I don’t believe in Satan, and I would never
perform a sacrifice or drink blood, mine or anyone
else’s, in a Satanic ceremony and I’m fairly certain
that a few of the character actors that were a little too
into their role-playing had.
Make-up artists would fill in for people that called
out, so I got to work all of the different haunts during
that season.
The horror house and the mineshaft were really
dark and it was easy to scare people so they were fun
and easy to work.
The haunted disco was a “3-D” attraction. What
that meant was that most of the haunt and the actors
were painted in contrasting fluorescent paints and the
customers were given cheap paper/plastic dipolar
glasses. The floor plan was really open so most of
the work in that gig was playing human statue and
trying to scare people by lunging at them. It didn’t
really work.
The clown house was populated by a bunch of
assholes that were really into playing the part of an
asshole clown. Typecast Insane Clown Posse fans.
They’d just get high, put on clown paint and a clown
costume, get high again, yell at people and hit the
scenery with mallets and pipes, and stay high all night
long. If you weren’t creeped out by clowns, then it
was just annoying and the whole haunt reeked of
stale pot.
The two outside attractions were alternately
awesome and miserable to work. Autumn weather in
New England is unpredictable. The days are crisp
and clear, but the nights can get cold. On clear fair
nights, when the stars were out and you were scaring
people so badly that their bladders would let go it was
pretty awesome. The costumes were mostly cheap
second-hand clothes. For the vampire attraction it
was old prom dresses and suit jackets. For the
plague haunt, there were a few key characters, like
the big guy that played the Jack the Ripper character,
but most of the other actors just wore burlap sacks
and had swirls of toilet-paper latex-painted onto their
face as rat bites and popped out at people as “plague
victims”.
 After a shift of not being able to feel your fingers or
toes, you learned to bring a long-sleeved sweater and
wore layers under your costume to stay warm.
Not that the owners and managers were taking
unfair advantage of their employees. It’s true that
they were paying people minimum wage, but it was
fun, easy work and you could quit anytime you
wanted to. The managers had people that would walk
through between groups of customers and offer the
actors their choice of hot chocolate or hot apple cider.
There was a revolving break system where there was
a loose actor, and they would relieve the first person,
and when the first person got back from a fifteen
minute break, they’d relieve the next person down the
line and so on.
I had one of the first digital cameras. A Sony
Mavica that you had to slide a 3.5” disc into the back
of and you could take twenty or thirty 4 meg pictures.
I would take pictures of the make-ups I had done and
the make-up for whatever character I was going to be
for the night and journal about my experiences at the
haunt.
I complained that being a plague victim sucked
and a girl that worked for the Victorian plague haunt
took it personally and there was this big thing about it.
We managed to squash it, but it was ridiculous that
there was any drama about it at all.
Everyone was issued a laminated identification
badge and if you managed to scare someone badly
enough that they lost control of their bladder or
bowels and could get a haunt supervisor to verify that
the customer had pissed or shit themselves, you got a
special badge with the Toxic Avenger on it for doing
an awesome job.
One night I was assigned to be the bathroom Elvis.
The job came with a jumpsuit and a pair of gold
sunglasses. That’s about it. The other part of the job
was to stand outside the portable toilet trailer that the
customers used and to check inside every now and
then and make sure that the place wasn’t a complete
disaster. I wasn’t so hot about that part of the job, so
I didn’t do it. It wasn’t worth a dollar over minimum
wage to deal with the smell and mess of hundreds of
people’s piss and shit. I don’t know how much
experience you have with public toilets, but humans
can be vile animals when not held accountable for
their behavior and that toilet trailer was a nightmare.
The first time I went out, nobody recognized me as
Elvis. Because I was just some guy in a jumpsuit. I
didn’t care that people didn’t recognize me, but after
about a dozen customers asking me who I was
supposed to be, I went back in and Amanda used
black paint to thicken my mutton-chop sideburns and
spray my hair up into a duck-ass pompadour. Then
people immediately recognized me as Elvis. She was
good.
I spent the night working with a girl in a pink satin
jacket. She was supposed to be a zombie “Pinky Girl”
like the girl gang from Happy Days. If you have no
idea what I’m talking about, Google “Pinky
Tuscadero” and hopefully that will give you a frame of
reference. It was a cold night and she was wearing a
short skirt. Between waves of customers I’d let her
hug me for warmth and I’d rub her arms trying to
channel some heat into them. At the end of the night,
I got talked to about people complaining that Elvis
was humping the pinky girl, but, fuck it. I didn’t want
that gig anyway, and next time make sure that the
pinky girl knows to bring some leggings if she’s going
to have to stand outside in the cold all night in a skirt.
I ended up taking the girl back to my place at the
end of night and since I had the weekend off, we just
hung out at my place and watched horror movies for
three days. We’d make out and dry hump a lot, but
when I tried to get her out of my sweatpants she
resisted and I’ve never been one to force the issue. It
made for a pretty frustrating weekend. But it was nice
to have a girl to hang out with and make out with and
watch horror movies with for the weekend. She had
pierced nipples and a pierced tongue. She said that
having a pierced tongue made her better at oral sex,
which also didn’t help matters since she wasn’t even
considerate enough to blow me to take some of the
pressure off. She asked me if I would go to her house
and break in and pretend to rape her. I’m not into that
kind of thing so I said I wasn’t interested. She
probably wanted me to make a fist in her hair and tear
her clothes off out of sexual frustration, but I’m not
really into raping anyone or even really pretending to
so I’ll settle for a clean conscience and a missed
opportunity. She ended up dating the brother of the
guy that hired me and who knows what kind of
interesting hijinks they got into.
 Since I was working two jobs, I was wearing
myself pretty thin. One night, when leaving the haunt
park, I fell asleep twice while driving and the front tires
bumping up on the curbs woke me up. It was a moist,
cool night, so I rolled the windows down and the cool
air coursing through the car helped to keep me
awake. I came up on an intersection I had taken a
hundred times before but tonight I was going too fast
or the road was too wet and I lost control of my car
and ended up jumping the curb and landed on a
broad expanse of lawn. Both front airbags exploded
and the car stopped. I was stunned. I knew that I
had to get the fuck out of there. I tried to put the car
in reverse, but I had to restart it. I backed up, leaving
two ruts in the lawn, but I managed to make it back
onto the road. My parents lived about a mile or two
away, so I figured if I could make it to their house I’d
be able to figure out how to deal with what happened.
It turns out that both of my front tires were flat, so I
was trying to drive about five miles an hour in the
breakdown lane towards my parents’ house on two
flat tires. I made it about a mile down the road before
I was pulled over. The cops ran a field sobriety test
on me. I could tell that they were hoping I was drunk
so they could make a D.U.I. arrest and they were
disappointed that I was sober and just tired. That
didn’t stop them from giving me two misdemeanor
citations and a court date. So not only had I totaled a
vehicle that I still owed two-thousand dollars on, but I
had to deal with legal bullshit too. I think I had my
vehicle flat-bed towed to a tire place near where I
lived and waited for them to open in the morning and
paid to get the tires replaced. I cut the airbags out
and looked into replacing them, but they were
something like $3,000 each and I had only paid
$8,500 for the car, and still owed $2,000 on it, so I
figured I’d just pay it off and drive it until it died and
airbags be damned. My step-father found me a
lawyer willing to take my case for $700. I met the guy
once and paid him the $700. He showed up to my
arraignment and when the guy in charge of the
arraignment started the proceedings, my lawyer said
“I think my client can speak for himself.” And turned
and looked at me. I explained that I wasn’t drunk, but
just tired and that most of the damage was to my
vehicle, and that the scuffs on the curb weren’t just
mine. That it was a dangerous corner and I surely
wasn’t the only one to lose control and end up on that
lawn and that I had driven past the accident site and
the ruts I had made had already filled in and grown
over so the charge of property damage was ridiculous
since the only property that had been damaged was
my own.
The clerk changed my charges from criminal
charges to civil charges and I had to pay a few
hundred dollars in fines and court fees, but I was free
and done with the accident aside from the record
which would stay on my driving record for a few
years.
The season ended. I wasn’t invited to return next
year. I ended up with a dying car, an airbrush and
this story.
Chapter 30:
Lighting Vendor: Not for, but at, Home Depot.

I decided to take a break from working in mental

health.
I forget how I found out about the job, but I heard
about a job as a vendor for a lighting/display
company.
I applied and had to go down to a Home Depot
and find the guy that I was supposed to interview with
while he was working.
I showed up early, since I’ve found that being early
is better than being late when it comes to job
interviews. I saw the end of the job interview that had
been scheduled before me. It seemed like it went
well. The applicant was a thickset sad sack type.
Just your average loser looking for a job. They were
smiling at the end, so I knew I had to sink his
interview. So I lied.
I told the interviewer that I had a kid on the way
and really needed a job and would be dead serious
about whatever job I got because I was going to have
to raise a kid. My girlfriend was not pregnant, but I
needed the job. It worked.
I was given two blue polo shirts with the company
logo embroidered over the left pect, a palm pilot kind
of device, a work schedule and three stores to work.
The job was to work at, but not for Home Depot,
monitoring and maintaining the lighting section and
insuring that the displays were in accordance with the
national display guidelines as agreed upon between
Home Depot and the brands of merchandise that they
sold.
What you may not know, is that competition for
shelf space in stores is a competitive area.
Merchandise isn’t just randomly selected and
haphazardly arranged on the shelves from store to
store. There’s a reason you can walk into any Home
Depot and with a little bit of effort you can find what
you’re looking for. The floor-plans of the different
locations vary a little bit depending on if the store is
oriented east to west or north to south and sometimes
the aisles are a little bit longer or shorter than others,
but for the most part, chain stores carry the same
brands and same variety of merchandise across the
country and usually shelve them in similar places so
you can find what you’re looking for from store to
store.
Each day I would go to a different store location
and help to restock the merchandise and insure that
all display materials were properly displayed and that
all of the display fixtures for the lighting section were
up to date. I had three locations, but since I worked a
five-day schedule, the frequency that I visited each
store would vary week to week. It was like rolling an
egg, or trying to play a rhythm in a weird time
signature, but you got used to it after a while. The
closest store was about a half an hour away and the
furthest about an hour. It wasn’t bad work and the
pay was decent. More than I had been receiving as a
substance abuse counselor.
Each day I would use your palm pilot to take
pictures of my work, and I was supposed to spend a
certain amount of time in each section. Two hours in
light bulbs, two hours in fluorescents, etc. I used the
palm pilot to clock into and out of my assigned slots. I
learned early on that if I clocked into an assignment, I
could clock out of it and then clock back into it and
burn the rest of the time later. Most days there wasn’t
eight hours of work to do in the lighting department.
I’d pull down overstock and replenish the light bulbs
and that was about it. Maybe two hours of work if I
milked it. I’d clock into each function and spend five
minutes doing what had to be done, then I’d go to a
local movie theater and burn the rest of the time for
each assignment while watching the same movie two
or three times in a row. I got to see a lot of good
movies. The only risk was that the boss would swing
by to check up on me, but there were something like
ten different vendors scattered all across the state
and if my boss ever called me I’d say I was on my
lunch break and show up five minutes later. As long
as it didn’t look like I just stayed home that day and
didn’t do any work at all he never really made any
noise about it, and sometimes he’d find me working in
the stores, so it all balanced out. The stores were
serviced, there was merchandise available to be
purchased, I got paid regularly and I got to watch
movies too. All is well with the world.
At the end of the day I would plug the palm pilot
into a phone jack and set it to upload the day’s
information and that’s the only thing that they were
particular about. If I didn’t synchronize at the end of
the day, the next morning I’d get a call from the
supervisor, who presumable had gotten a call from
whoever he reported to, and he wasn’t happy, and
since it’s a good idea to keep your employer happy, it
was a good idea to make sure that I synchronized my
device every night.
Each store had a different cast of employees that I
had to deal with. For the most part they were easy to
work with. What got me hemmed up was that there
was a young lesbian that worked at the Middletown
location that was complaining that she didn’t see me
working in her store enough. I don’t know why it
fucking mattered to her. Her store looked fine and
everything was the way it should have been, but
some people just can’t be content to just do their jobs
and mind their own business and are determined to
find problems or make problems up if they can’t find
any.
When it looked like it was going to be a problem
for me, it was announced that my employers would be
opening up a new division and taking over the
vending for the home décor departments so I put in
for a transfer and was hired for the new division. As
part of the training for the new job, all of the people
hired would be required to attend a two-day seminar
in Massachusetts.
The people that had been hired for the new
division from my area had all met up at a central store
location to meet the guy that would be our supervisor
and get a walk-through of the section that we would
be maintaining in our store.
 There was a short stacked redheaded girl in the
group that seemed to like me from the moment that
we were introduced. As we made our way around the
home décor section and were shown the sections that
we would be maintaining, she would always end up
standing next to me and she laughed whenever I
made a joke and smiled when I looked in her
direction. Since the seminar was in Massachusetts,
but most of us lived in Rhode Island, our manager
suggested that we make arrangements to car pool for
the trip up to the seminar. I ended up talking to the
redhead and she said that we could use her
boyfriend’s vehicle to drive up to the seminar. She
mentioned her boyfriend, so I figured she was just
friendly, and that nothing sexy was going to happen at
the seminar. The girl came and picked me up for the
seminar. We were paired up with another employee
for our hotel rooms for the seminar. My mother’s high
school friend’s significant other worked for the
company, so I ended up being assigned to a room
with him. The redhead ended up being assigned to a
room with a really obnoxiously assertive African
American woman. The redhead and I sat at the same
table in a stuffy conference room as representatives
from all of the brands and merchandise that we would
be representing did presentations on the brands and
merchandise that we would be representing. It’s
about as boring as it sounds. Whenever the
representatives would open themselves up for
questions at the end of their presentations the
redhead’s room-mate would come up with some
stupid question to ask them and you could feel the
collective suppressed groans from everyone else in
the room as the brand representatives tried to figure
out what the hell her question was. It’s bad enough
we all had to hang out and listen to eight hours of
slideshows about floor tiles and caulk and spray
insulation without having to make the day longer than
it already was by asking the brand representatives
stupid questions about their products. I tried to make
the time pass by doing little doodles and passing
them to the redhead with a perfectly straight face and
sensing her to try to stifle her laughter. It was nice to
have a co-conspirator for the cause of fun to sit with.
The first day of presentations ended and everyone
went back to their hotel rooms to shower and change
for an exciting night of killing time in a hotel with
nothing worth doing in driving distance. My room-
mate got a twenty-rack of beer and was going to kill
the night watching TV and drinking himself to sleep. I
decided to go down to the hotel bar and try to find the
redhead. I sat at the hotel bar and ordered a beer.
The redhead wasn’t anywhere in sight, but our new
manager came down and sat at the bar and had a
beer with me. He was a good guy. He was easy to
like. He had a fatherly demeanor which made it easy
to trust him. He seemed like a guy that you could talk
to and work things out with if you got into trouble on
the job, but that if you fucked up, he could flip a switch
and give you holy hell if you needed a little inspiration.
We talked a bit and I finished my beer and resigned
myself to going back up to the room and watching my
room-mate drink beer and watch television. I ran into
the redhead in the elevator. I could tell that she had
showered and had put some effort into prettying
herself up. She was smiling at me really hard and it
was hard not to smile back. We started making out in
the elevator. We couldn’t go back to either of our
rooms because we had room-mates, so I told her that
I’d go down to the front desk and get us a different
room. I went down to the front desk and put my credit
card down on a room for the night on the floor above
the floor we were all staying on. I stopped by my
room to grab my stuff and told my room-mate that I
would be gone for the night and he was about ten
beers in and couldn’t care less. I went up to the other
room and called the redhead’s room and she came up
with her overnight bag. Since this is a book about
work and not a book about fucking, I won’t go into
details, but we didn’t get a lot of sleep that night. The
next morning we got up and got dressed and went
down to the presentation. We got about three hours
into the presentation and the girl bolted up and ran
out of the room. Everyone looked at me and I just
shrugged and looked non-plussed, because I was.
She came back in and told me through a note on a
slip of paper that she thought she was pregnant. She
had told me the night before that she had a birth
control ring, so I didn’t have to worry about getting her
pregnant, but I guess she thought that my sperm was
more powerful than her birth control. During lunch,
our supervisor took me aside and told me that the
redhead’s room-mate told him that she didn’t stay in
her room last night. He also told me that she was in a
relationship with a guy that worked for another
division of the company. He didn’t have to tell me to
cut the shit or there would be trouble. I’m able to read
between the lines. The ride back with the redhead
was pretty tense. She dropped me off at my place
and came up to check out my apartment. She said
that she wasn’t happy in her relationship and hinted
that she wanted to move in with me instead. It was a
bit much all at once and I told her that we could talk
about it a little further down the way and to keep me
posted about her period and to maybe have a talk
with her boyfriend about her unhappiness and try to
work it out. She ended up not being pregnant, and I
saw her a couple more times.
Once I drove out to visit her when her boyfriend
was out of time on a work trip and we went to a movie
and fucked in his vehicle after the movie. The second
time he was away for work and she invited me over to
their house and we fucked in their bed. She showed
me the seven-day five-slot per-day medication minder
full of pills she had to take to manage her
schizophrenia and told me that her boyfriend was on
the same kind of medication regimen and that it
affected his sexual performance. There was a copy
of the serial killer’s encyclopedia on the bedside table.
I decided I had enough of her particular variety of
crazy and stopped returning her calls.
It turned out that there was even less to do in the
décor section that there was to do in the lighting
section. I spent the first couple weeks of the job
organizing the overstock of carpet and carpet padding
in each of my three stores, but after that was done,
the merchandise in that section wasn’t moving fast
enough to provide me with any kind of regular work to
do as a vendor. The staff in the stores complained to
my supervisor that I wasn’t spending a lot of time in
the stores and I was fired.
Chapter 31:
Blockbuster Video

I’m no good at keeping my employment history in

order, because I worked so many jobs and some for
such a short time that the months and years get all
jumbled up. Most of the jobs I’ve worked aren’t even
worth including on my resume when I apply for a new
job and when asked about gaps in my employment
history, I just stretch the term of employment for the
jobs on either side of the gap to make up the
difference. Employers like employees that have an
unbroken history of working for one organization after
another for multiple years at a time in positions of
increasing responsibility. Employers are not
impressed to know you spent a few months working
at a video store for a summer because you used to
fuck one of the employees and decided to do
something easy for a change.
My friend Bill had been dating a girl named
Elizabeth. They broke up and she decided she
wanted to try me on for size. We hooked up a few
times and I was between jobs and she told me that
they’d hire me at the video sore she worked at.
I applied and was hired.
Places like this, straight retail and customer
service, for the most part they’re just looking to fill the
schedule with warm bodies. As long as you’re not
visibly retarded and you promise to show up when
you’re supposed to show up, stay for your shift and do
what you’re supposed to do they’ll hire you.
 The work was easy. I just showed up and
depending on if I worked open or close determined
what my day would be like. If I opened, I waited
outside until the manager showed up. The manager
unlocked the place and disarmed the alarm and got
the computers humming. The employee would empty
out the overnight return box and spend a couple
hours checking in all of the videos and putting them
back on the shelves. This was back in the VHS days,
when DVD players were relatively rare, so most of the
tapes were in generic store-brand-sleeved clamshells
behind the display boxes.
I thought that when I took the job that I would be
helping customers to find quality films to rent based
on my recommendations based on other quality films
that they had already viewed and enjoyed. Instead,
people mostly rented from the new release wall, and
the rest of the stock in the store was there for display
purposes. This blew my mind, because I was the
type of film enthusiast that would go to three or four
locations to find a director’s entire filmography and
binge-watch all of them in a row. Instead we’d get in
fifty or a hundred copies of films like Legally Blonde 2
and rent every one of them every night for a week and
have to tell customers that they’d have to come back
tomorrow or wait to see if anyone returned a copy.
During this time, Blockbuster would charge you
overdue fees as if you rented the video every night
until you returned it, or until the overdue fees had
come up to more than the tape was estimated to be
valued at, which, at the time, was about $50.
 Customers would come in pissed and demand that
we remove their overdue fees, and we could, but
usually we didn’t, because fuck you for returning your
tapes late and being a demanding customer. At the
time, the only competition were independent rental
places that didn’t have nearly the selection that
Blockbuster had. Granted, they usually had a much
better selection of videos, but they didn’t have a
hundred copies of Legally Blonde 2 so you had to wait
to see the next lame Adam Sandler comedy released
that season.
One thing that sucked about working for
Blockbuster was that there weren’t any chairs
anywhere in the store. This was intentional so that
the employees would constantly be on their feet,
ready to attend to the needs of the customers. But it
made for a shitty work environment, standing on your
feet for eight hours dealing with people that didn’t
understand why they couldn’t have a copy of Hope
Floats because there weren’t any copies of the
videotape in the store. Yes, I know you brought the
cover box up to the counter. Was there a generic box
with a videotape inside of it behind it? No? Then we
don’t have any copies of that video available to rent.
No, I don’t know when we’re going to get a copy in, it
depends on when people return their videotapes. No,
I can’t put one aside for you. It doesn’t work that way.
Yes, you can talk to the manager.
One small consolation was that I was able to put
together an “Employee’s Choice” endcap of videos
that people could rent for a dollar a night, compared
to the $2.50 a night that everything else in the store
rented for. You got space for about fifteen or twenty
videos if I remember correctly. I know I had Akira,
Ghost In The Shell, Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy,
Blue Velvet, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and some
other random stuff I don’t remember in my
Employee’s Choice section. Maybe about once every
couple of weeks one of my videos would go out, but
mostly it was just renting out Sandra Bullock and
Adam Sandler and Reese Witherspoon movies.
There were two managers. One was a middle-
aged woman whose nose had all of its veins blown
out in the stereotypical pattern of someone that was
drinking way too much too often. The other manager
was a younger guy that was actually pretty cool to
work with. He would let me put in stuff other than the
half hour promotional tapes that Blockbuster required
us to play over and over and over on a loop until you
never wanted to see the movies that they advertised.
He also put me onto the films of Takeshi Kitano which
I appreciate to this day since Kitano is now one of my
favorite directors.
There was a candy machine that everyone hated.
It was designed like a huge gumball machine, but you
could turn the top to dispense one of four varieties of
candy a handful at a time for a quarter. Kids would
always hassle their parents for a quarter and the
parents would give the kids a quarter, then the kids
would get a handful of candy and drop a couple
M&Ms and the next kid would step on the candy-
coated milk-chocolate pellet and grind it into the
carpet. That would go on all day and the carpet
around the candy dispenser was filthy. One night I
was working with the cool manager and he was
complaining about that fucking candy machine so
when I left that night, I picked it up and heaved it over
my shoulder and carried it out of the store and threw it
into the trunk of my car, saying that I was going to
take it out to a vacant lot and beat it to death. The
manager knew I wasn’t serious and I’d bring the
execrable thing back the next afternoon when I was
working.
I got a call the next morning while I was asleep,
but since I was asleep it went to voice mail. The other
manager left a message saying that I had an hour to
bring the candy machine back or she was going to
call the police. I called her back and told her that the
machine was undamaged and I’d bring it back that
afternoon. I brought the machine back and was fired.
I don’t know why she’d think it would be worth having
to deal with the police over about $30 of stale old
candy and maybe $25 in quarters, if I was lucky.
When I went to pick up my last check, the
manager on duty tried to get me to sign an agreement
that said that I would not go in or near any
Blockbuster location ever again. I said I wouldn’t sign
it, because I still had a Blockbuster membership and
intended on continuing to rent videotapes. She said if
I didn’t sign it, I couldn’t have my paycheck. I
informed her that was illegal and if she would like me
to call the board of labor we could have that
conversation. She gave me my paycheck and I
continued to rent at all of the other local Blockbuster
locations.
Chapter 32:
Adolescent Day Program

I decided to return to the career field of mental

health.
There were a variety of mental health and human
service providers in the community so I wasn’t that
worried about finding work in my career field. It was
true that I had quit or been fired from the Home For
Children and Happiness Hill, but there were still
dozens of mental health and human service providers
looking for qualified help.
A local mental health and human services provider
was hiring for a variety of different positions and
human resources sent me to interview for a day
program at the center for adolescents residing in their
residential programs. The goal was to provide
educational activities and job training for adolescents
with a variety of psychological disorders that weren’t
stable enough to participate in the public educational
system.
My supervisor was trying to improve the program.
He found money in the budget to buy a decent sized
television for the Hispanic lady that had been running
the program and I to coordinate viewing of
educational programs on. The kids in the program
just wanted to watch MTV. So I set up the parental
lock and blocked all of the fun channels. The kids
tried to get around the parental lock, but they weren’t
smart enough to guess what four-digit combination of
numbers I had used for the code, or patient enough to
try every variety of numbers from 0001 to 9999.
The kids in the program were relatively harmless,
but totally useless. It was difficult to come up with any
kind of activities that they could all participate in that
were constructive and character building when all
they wanted to do was sit around and argue and flirt
with each other. Not that I blame them. They were
teenagers, and mentally troubled ones. There was a
suicidal goth girl with huge welts up her arms like
speed bumps from where she cut herself. There was
a young blonde girl with OCD that would spend a half
hour arguing with you about which direction you
sneezed in and then go into the bathroom and wash
herself from head to toe in hand sanitizer and come
back dripping wet. There was a white guy that looked
like a member of the Manson family. He wasn’t
allowed to buy cigarettes since he wasn’t old enough,
so he would go around and squeeze out the tobacco
left in cigarette butts and store it in a plastic sandwich
bag and roll his own bastard cigarettes from his bag
of butt tobacco. There was a Spanish girl with
Oppositional Defiant Disorder and she was impossible
to work with. She never wanted to do anything and
anything we tried to get everyone in the group to do
she’d just hang out and bitch and cause problems
until she was asked to leave. There was a Hispanic
guy that was completely sedated with his
antipsychotic medication and just wanted to sleep all
of the time.
The unit director would come in to check up on us,
and on a good day, the kids were not arguing and
watching something not too terrible on television and
the Hispanic guy would be sleeping. The program
director would ask why that kid was always sleeping.
The reason he was always sleeping was because
there was an eight-foot long couch for him to spread
out on and sleep on. The program was hands-off and
no matter how much I pleaded with the Hispanic kid,
he’d always come in, lay on the couch and go to
sleep. So I got rid of the couch. I had one of the kids
help me move it into the staff conference room and
set it standing on one end in the corner. The Hispanic
kid would come in each day and fall asleep in a chair,
but at least he was sitting up.
Those were our regular kids. We’d have three or
four other kids that were referred to the day program
for being either suicidal or homicidal at school and
were sent to us to cool out and stabilize before
returning to public school, and that was the part of the
program that our supervisor was trying to expand.
The problem was that our regular clients were so
useless and disruptive that they brought down the
ability level of any activity for the relatively capable
kids that would be a part of the program for a week or
two.
I remember one day the lady I worked with wanted
to have a Taco making activity. It wasn’t a bad idea.
Teach the kids how to plan and prepare a meal.
Instead the kids just saw it as free taco day. The
learning experience from anything we did was always
lost on our regular program participants and they’re
probably living in the community on permanent
disability for the rest of their lives.
It was a morning gig. Nine to five Monday through
Friday. I was living a kind of reckless life at the time.
I had an apartment with two room-mates and one of
my room-mates ran a gaming store so the place was
always full of gamers coming over to hang out and
watch movies or play games all night, so I wasn’t
getting a lot of sleep. I remember one day I managed
to show up on time, but there was a weekly staff
meeting. The room was warm, and the meeting was
boring and I noticed I was nodding off and noticed
that the other staff members were noticing I was
nodding off so I pressed the nails of one hand into the
nail beds of the fingers in the other hand hoping that
the pain would keep me awake and I was still nodding
off.
I was late twice in one month and I was informed
that my services would no longer be needed.
Chapter 33:
Random Amway Cattle Call

I was looking in the newspaper for another job.

There was a sales position advertised but what we
would be selling was a bit vague. I called the number
and was told to show up the next Monday at 9 a.m. in
business attire for an interview.
I drove out to the location and it was a generic
office park. I parked and went in and there were, like,
thirty other people standing around waiting in
business attire. I figured out that the person on the
phone had told everyone to show up Monday at 9
a.m. I smelled a rat, but I didn’t know what kind of rat.
A young guy in a shirt and tie came out and invited
us all into a big conference room and asked us all to
take a seat. There were ten or so rows of chairs and
at the front of the room was a table with a bunch of
generic white containers. The guy in the tie started to
do a presentation about how we were lucky to be
invited to sell our friends, family, and co-workers
generic varieties of the products that they know and
love. I raised my hand and the guy recognized my
raised hand. I asked, “Is this a commission based
sales position or is there a base pay?” The guy
replied, “If you can hold onto your questions until the
end of the presentation I will be glad to answer any
questions you might have.” I replied, “You can
answer me now or I walk. If this is a pyramid scheme
I’m not interested.” The guy came up to me and
leaned in and asked if he could talk to me outside for
a second. We went out into the hallway and he
closed the door behind us. He tried to tell me that it
wasn’t a pyramid scheme. I told him that I know a
pyramid scheme when I saw one and thanks for
wasting my time.
I had sat through the whole Cutco Cutlery
Company pyramid scheme presentation. I wasn’t
going to waste my time listening to another pyramid
scheme pitch.
Chapter 34:
Call Center Rep for a Temp Agency

I decided to try my luck with temp agencies. I had

a friend on MySpace that said that she had some luck
with a local place called Manpower, so I went down to
their office and filled out an application.
The first place that they sent me was a windowless
basement filled with the upholstered modular office
cubicles referred to as “cattle-fattening pens”. The job
was to call people from local businesses and make
sure that they knew that Fleet Bank had been bought
out by Bank of America. It sounds simple, but we
were supposed to ask the businesses we were cold-
calling if we could walk them through a brief survey.
The “brief” survey was a five page script that took
fifteen minutes to get through. All of this for minimum
wage, by the way. I spent about an hour calling
companies and having people try to end the call or
hanging up on me and one senile old lady that I had
to keep trying to guide through the survey. I took off
my headset and went up to the guy that was in charge
of the place. He said, “Is there something wrong?” I
said, “I can’t do this. I have become everything that I
despise.” He shrugged and said, “It’s not for
everyone.” I called the office and went home for the
day and called them the next day to try to get a
different assignment.
Chapter 35:
Secretary For Portable Container Company

The next assignment for the temp agency was for

a temporary portable container company.
They rented the kind of long corrugated metal
containers that look like they can be picked up and
loaded onto an ocean freighter or a train. They also
rented work trailers for job sites.
My job was not going to be renting the storage
containers or work trailers. They already had
representatives that did that and made a respectable
living doing that. My job was going to be to fill in for a
secretary that met the needs of the sales agents. The
woman, who looked a bit like a plain young Jamie Lee
Curtis walked me through what the job was going to
entail.
It turns out that in addition to answering the
phones and directing the calls, she also acted as a
den mother to the sales agents. She would take their
lunch orders and order their lunches for them and
order snacks so that the sales agents would have
cheese balls to graze on when wandering around the
office between sales. She even dropped off and
picked up their dry cleaning. They obviously wanted
a cute young subservient girl to cater to the sales
agents that were actually making decent money. I
listened to the lady go through her whole routine and
asked if I could step outside for a minute. I called the
office and told them that there was no way I was
going to be able to do all of the stuff that the lady did
for the rate that they were offering. The office said
that they didn’t have anything else available at the
time.
I don’t include that particular experience on my
resume when applying for employment.
Chapter 36:
Novelty Item Call Rep.

I needed a job, so I checked the want ads again.

I saw a listing for a novelty company seeking sales
reps. It read like a legit job, so I called and made an
appointment. The appointment was at the old
location for the company. They were expanding their
company and moving to a new location.
The “appointment” was another cattle call. About
thirty people that showed up. I was the only one that
had bothered to wear decent clothes and a collared
shirt. Most of the other people showed up in t-shirts
and jean shorts. We were led to a conference room
with a bunch of tables and chairs and told that we
would be taking a test to determine our suitability for
the position. The test was relatively simple. Maybe
fifty or a hundred simple math problems. “If you need
to order five of this and ten of that and the customer
had a 25% discount, what would the total for their
order be?” I finished the test in about fifteen minutes
and raised my hand. I was told to bring up my test
and return to my seat to wait for everyone else to
finish their tests. The next person to finish their test
didn’t finish until ten minutes later. There were thirty
people taking the test. It was looking like it was going
to be a long morning. Five minutes later the woman
running the test took me out into the hallway and told
me I could go and that they’d be in touch. I had a
good feeling about it and I ended up getting the job.
The office was a space with three or four rows of
cattle-fattening pens with a telephone and a computer
in them. The job was taking orders for novelty items
from distributors and sales people from all over the
country. By “novelty items” I mean all the kind of
plastic crap that you can buy off street vendors at
parades or carnivals. Stuffed animals and rainbow
wigs and cheap Chinese trash that no one ever needs
but still ends up buying if it’s St. Patrick’s Day and
they get a couple green beers into them. Green
plastic bowler hats? We sold them. Flashing green
four-leaf clover pendants on shiny green plastic bead
necklaces? Those too. Mardi Gras beads? Every
color, shape and size imaginable. I’d spend each day
answering calls and taking orders from people that
were barely literate trying to order from their online
catalog. “Yes, sir, you want two cases of purple fuzzy
pimp bucket hats. Yes, sir. There are twenty-four in
each case. Will that complete your order?”
I don’t know why all of the ordering wasn’t done
online, making our job as salespeople unnecessary,
but some people seemed to still like the personal
touch of being able to place their order over the
phone with a person.
It was fairly easy work. Sometimes the woman
that had done the hiring, who was also the floor
supervisor for the salespeople would listen in on my
call and she’d call me over to her desk for some sales
coaching, but it wasn’t a bad way to make a living.
I was living in a crazy situation.
I was living with a guy I had known from high
school. We had lived together before and it had
worked out fine. This time he had two cats and two
dogs and a girlfriend. He was supposed to come and
help me move but instead he just came by and got in
the way and didn’t help and was a general nuisance.
I ended up moving all of my stuff down two flights of
stairs then back up three flights of stairs to his place.
The dogs weren’t house-trained, probably because he
was too crazy to take them out on anything
resembling a regular schedule, so every day there
would be piles of shit and pools of urine all over the
floors. He’d wipe up the urine or feces with a paper
towel and spray Lysol over it and that was his solution
to the problem.
Since he didn’t really help with my move, I threw
my back out. I had been developing a problem with
my back for years. Gradually there were certain
positions that were uncomfortable to sit in and it was
difficult for me to get up from and my hips would ache
and my legs would go numb. I thought it was just part
of getting old, and this was what my life was going to
be like, even though I was only in my mid-twenties.
The pain in my back and hips was awful after the
move and just got worse. The way that I explained it
to people was that it was like someone rammed a hot
spear through my hip, down the length of my leg and
hooked it up to a car battery. The pain was so bad
that I went to the emergency room one morning.
They shot me in the ass with some painkillers,
prescribed me a week’s work of muscle relaxers and
painkillers and released me. A week later, when the
muscle relaxers and painkillers ran out, the pain
returned and I was back in the emergency room,
where they gave me another week’s worth of muscle
relaxers and painkillers. Since I had missed two days
of work in my first two weeks of work the novelty
company justifiably fired me. I can’t blame them.
I was back and forth from the emergency room
each week until I was finally referred to a local clinic
for the poor and unemployed. The first nurse I saw
just prescribed me more painkillers, but by then the
painkillers didn’t do anything for the pain and just
made me feel like I was drunk all the time. I would
drive my friend to work at his computer repair job,
then just come home and float in a bathtub all day to
take some of the weight and pressure off of my back
and then go back and pick him up from his job at night
and drive him home.
Since I was in constant pain and unemployed, I
was given a free ride on the MRI machine at the local
hospital. I was told that I had bulging discs between
my L4 and L5 vertebrae and that it was putting
pressure on my sciatic nerve which was causing all
the pain. I was fully prepared to have to live on
painkillers and walk with a cane and live on disability
for the rest of my life. I went back to the free clinic
and the nurse that I had an appointment with wasn’t in
that day, so I was seen by an African American
clinician with a muddy African accent. He prescribed
me Etodolac/Lodine, a Non-Steroidal Anti-
Inflammatory Drug that I was supposed to take four
times a day.
I was doubtful that it would help, but I took it as
prescribed. The next day I didn’t feel any worse. The
day after that I felt a little bit better. By the end of the
week I was about half recovered. I was still tender
and sore as fuck, but I was able to stand up without
screaming like I was being burned alive. As I
recovered, I applied for a job so I could move out of
the dog-shit-piss infested environment that I was
living in.
Chapter 37:
The Adolescent Unit

I applied for and was hired for a job working as a

“counselor” on a locked adolescent unit at a mental
hospital about a half hour drive away in a neighboring
state.
I was able to walk without a cane, even though I’d
ache the night after, but I couldn’t realistically work
the job if I was incapacitated physically in any way.
The mental hospital was no joke. The patients were a
variety of suicidal, homicidal and just plain crazy and
at any moment a crisis could erupt that required
physical management of dangerous behavior and I
couldn’t be hobbling over on a cane to help with the
restraint.
I decided to live in my car and get a gym
membership in the area so I’d be out of the awful
apartment I was living in and close to work. Living in
my car was actually kind of nice. I’d work a 4 p.m. to
midnight shift, go park in the parking lot of a shopping
plaza and read under the parking lot lights until I got
sleepy, then I’d sleep until nine or ten the next
morning. I’d wake up and drive to the gym, shit,
shave and shower, get in a work-out for an hour, then
go get breakfast or lunch and go to work.
I was making a decent wage, and since I didn’t
have rent to pay each month, I was able to pay off the
rest of what I owed on the vehicle I lived in, and to
make payments towards a credit card debt I had been
avoiding for a few years.
 I was starting to look at starting to make payments
towards my student loan debt when word got out that
I was living in my car. I had made a few friends at
work, and one of the guys I worked with owned a
house and said he had a tiny slant-ceilinged
apartment over his house that he would rent me
cheaply until I got back on my feet.
I had a girlfriend at the time. Her parents had a
twenty-room $400,000 house on the historic register,
but she wanted to get an apartment with me. The
deal was supposed to be that she and her fat
obnoxious friend were going to try to find a three
bedroom apartment that we’d all move into. Instead,
my girlfriend talked me into letting her and her fat,
obnoxious friend move into the small, cramped
apartment with me. It wasn’t going to work out, and it
didn’t. I’d come home from working with crazy,
violent, mentally disturbed teenagers and find my
girlfriend’s fat obnoxious friend sitting on the living
room couch with her boyfriend, watching the DVDs I
had rented on the only television in the place. “Oh, no
thanks, I’d rather not try to start watching that DVD I
rented halfway through. You go ahead and finish it
and I’ll just hear the second half of the movie through
the thin walls in my room.” I’d leave her and her
boyfriend alone, but anytime I tried to watch a movie
with my girlfriend, her fat friend would come out and
provide her unwanted opinion as a constant
commentary.
The training for the job at the mental hospital
required new employees to spend a week working on
each of the four units to determine which unit they
would be best suited for. There was a general adult
unit, a co-occurring disorders unit, a special
developmentally disabled adults unit, and an
adolescent unit. I asked to be assigned to work the
adolescent unit, because I had mostly worked with
children and adolescents up until then so it seemed
like a natural progression in my career and something
that I would be good at. Most of the behaviors of
mentally disturbed adolescents are behavioral and
can be rationalized with. When you’re dealing with an
adult that is insane, no amount of rationalization will
resolve their issues, and it’s more about keeping them
locked up until the doctors figure out what variety of
medications will return them to relative sanity. The
developmentally disabled are also beyond
rationalizing with. And, having worked with the
alcoholics and drug addicts of the co-occurring
disorders unit before, I wasn’t eager to work with
sneaky, lying manipulators again. Not that teenagers
don’t lie and are not manipulative, but I had the sense
that maybe I could actually help some of the kids
before they went on to become life-long lunatics.
Much like the adult unit, the patients on the
adolescent unit were a variety of suicidal, homicidal,
and just plan crazy.
Dealing with the suicidal was relatively easy. If
someone really wants to kill themselves, they kill
themselves. Not that all suicide attempts shouldn’t be
taken seriously as a sign of serious mental
disturbance, but the human animal is dependent on a
variety of different systems to continue living. Deprive
it of oxygen, drain it of blood, set it on fire, put it
underneath a train, fill it with more of any of many
substances that are toxic to it, and the human animal
dies. Having all of those options, and not moving
onto the next one if the first one doesn’t work usually
means that person is externalizing internal despair,
asking for help, or warming up for the main event.
The adolescent psych ward was a relatively safe
environment. The patient rooms didn’t have doors on
them. The beds were bolted to the ground. The
clothes hangers were designed to be able to hold only
one or two items of clothing and if more weight was
hung on them they would switch down like a light
switch. There was nowhere to tie a bedsheet to so
that you could hang yourself. If you spoke or acted
like you were suicidal, you were put on twenty-four
hour suicide watch. That meant that there was a staff
within arm’s length or at least in visual contact with
the patient every second of the day. The patient was
pretty much just allowed to keep their clothes, without
their shoes and shoelaces. Their meals were brought
to them in paper cups and plates with plastic utensils,
minus the knives. But if you really wanted to kill
yourself, you could get the job done. You could tie
the leg of your pajama pants around your neck two or
three times, and die while the staff struggled to untie
the knots. I was told that shortly before I started
working there, there was a girl on suicide watch that
tried to kill herself by stuffing a sock down her throat.
Suicide watch was usually easy, because when the
patient was on suicide watch they weren’t actively
trying to kill themselves. They were getting the one-
on-one attention that they probably secretly craved,
and if you were lucky, the patient usually just slept
most of the time until they came out on the other end
of the black cloud of the suicidal urge.
Dealing with the homicidal was a bit more difficult.
A lot of that kind of teenager were sent to the psych
unit for using physical violence to hurt someone either
at home or in a residential treatment program they
were mandated to. The problem with this kind of
patient is that they have the self-impression that
they’re tough. They were either born into or placed in
an environment that wasn’t able to handle the
physically violent explosions of their personality
disorder. There was an abbreviated version of the
“Honeymoon Period” that usually happens at
residential facilities, but the bloom usually fell off the
rose after a couple days. They’d know the rules and
consciously defy them, and then wait to see what
happened. What these teenagers didn’t recognize is
that this is what the staff did every day and night
around the clock. They would not be the worst
adolescent that we had ever dealt with. They would
probably not be the worst adolescent that we had
dealt with that week. If they decided they wanted the
undivided attention of the unit staff, the room was
cleared, the rest of the patients went to their rooms,
and three guys twice their age and twice their size
came around and told them that there were two ways
that the situation was going to resolve. Either they
could do what they were told to do, and go back to
their room and take some time to think about if
whatever it was that they were doing was the best
strategy for winning friends and influencing people, or
they could be physically escorted to their room, or
they could just be taken down to the floor right where
they were. The patients seemed pretty evenly divided
on which option they picked. Even though they hurt
someone from wherever they came from, for the most
part they weren’t very tough compared to staff that
pretty much got paid to practice taking down
aggressive patients every day. Rarely would an
angry patient get the jump on a staff member.
Because if you were a unit staff and you didn’t know
enough not to turn your back on an angry teenager
that came in with a history of fucking people up, if you
got kicked in the back of the head, you probably got
what you deserved. Usually the patient ended up with
a bit of rugburn on their ankles and wrists and the
next time they decided to act up they stuck with being
verbally aggressive over physically acting out. The
whole stereotype of the young serial killer that grows
up to be Michael Myers or Hannibal Lecter is pretty
rare. I did work with one weird black kid that said that
he wanted to stab white girls like Michael Myers, and I
documented his urges and hope that he was taken
seriously and that the people in charge of keeping an
eye on people that want to do things like that kept
track of that kid.
I did let a kid get the jump on me once. There was
an autistic kid that was prone to explosive assaultive
outbursts. He had no business being on the
adolescent unit. He really should have been on the
developmentally disabled unit and after about a
hundred assaults/restraints on other patients and
staff, he was finally moved to that unit. That patient
was a constant, permanent, one-on-one, and if you
could do a shift with him without him jumping up and
trying to bite your eyes out, then you’d probably be
assigned to work with him for a few weeks until he
decided he didn’t like you anymore. It was exhausting
work. I would sit with him in a room that was
supposed to be for small group activities but ended up
being designated as his isolation room. The patient
would sit in a rocking chair, rocking back and forth
listening to the radio tuned to the local hip hop station.
If he recognized the song, he’d quiz me on whether or
not I recognized the song. He’d smile and tilt his
head and look at me and say “Bobby Brown.” I had to
answer, so I’d say, “Yeah, My Prerogative.” “When
did this come out?” he’d ask. “I don’t know, 1992 I
guess?” I could tell if you got it wrong because he’d
rock faster in the rocking chair and raise his voice a
little. “1992?” he’d ask, rocking faster. “I don’t know.
1990?” If I was closer, he’d slow his rocking. If I was
farther away, he’d rock faster and raise his voice even
higher. If I guessed wrong three times, his eyes
would go wild and he would jump up out of the
rocking chair and try to destroy me like a feral animal.
He wasn’t a very good combatant, but it was the
ferocity, the unexpectedness of his attack that could
catch you off guard. “One minute we were just sitting
there listening to the radio, and the next I was holding
his wrists while he tried to headbutt my face off.” new
staff were often heard to say after they lost their turn
at sudden assault music trivia. I was pretty familiar
with early to mid-nineties hip-hop since I was a
teenager in the nineties, so I managed to spend most
of most of the shifts I worked as a one-on-one staff
with that patient without having to wrestle him to the
ground and wait for another staff to notice that a
restraint was taking place when they happened to
wander past the window to the room. This was one of
those situations where there was a benefit to being a
relatively large, physically capable man over being a
relatively small and weak female. I’m all for gender
equality in the workplace, but when the little Asian
woman ran away from this client and I had to tackle
the patient to keep him from tackling her, I definitely
think that she should have been told that her services
would no longer be needed. It wasn’t all bad working
with that patient. Most of most of the shifts I got to
hang out and listen to the radio and watch the kid rock
in a rocking chair until he got sleepy and said he
wanted to go to bed. Getting him to do any of the few
things that we needed him to do, like take his
medication and take a shower was dependent on his
mood. If he had a rough night, he ended up getting
tackled and his meds were injected into his ass cheek
and he’d sleep through the night and wake up the
next day well-rested with a new disposition. It was
like a storm coming over the horizon, and then the
calmness after the storm. One night I managed to
talk him into getting his medications. I walked with
him over to the window where the medication was
dispensed. The other twelve or so patients were
hanging out around the window because it was
evening medication time. The residents weren’t
supposed to be hanging out at the medication
window, but they were and I was too busy keeping an
eye on my one-on-one to try to get the patients to go
to their rooms and begin their end of the evening
routine if they had been administered their
medications. There was a girl sitting in a chair next to
the medication window talking with another girl
standing next to her. It was kind of loud and there
were a lot of people moving around so it was a stress-
inducing environment for my patient, and I guess my
one-on-one’s paranoia kicked in because out of
nowhere he kicked the girl in the chair in the side of
the head. The girl put her hand to the side of the
head and looked up at us with a confused look. My
patient lunged for her and I tackled him in mid-air and
took him down to the tiled floor. The kids scattered
back to their rooms and my patient got his meds shot
into his ass that night. Tomorrow would be another
day.
Another time I managed to talk him into taking a
shower. That was going to be a good day. He was
given a Dixie cup of shampoo, a Dixie cup of body
wash, a towel and a change of clothes. The staff
would make sure the temperature of the shower
wasn’t too hot or too cold, and then the staff waited
outside. The patient would spend half an hour in the
shower and nobody was sure what he would do for
that half hour. The most popular guess was that he
spent the whole time masturbating over and over, but
as long as he was under the shower and he came out
cleaner than he went in, it was all for the greater
good. I managed to get the patient to the nurse’s
station and get him the Dixie cups of hygiene potions
and everyone was very nice and friendly towards the
patient to positively reinforce his deciding to take a
shower instead of trying to murder his one-on-one
staff. I managed to get him down the hallway and into
a locked room halfway down the hallway. The room
was used to store the personal belongings of the
patients that they weren’t allowed to have while they
were staying on the unit. Hair dryers and curling irons
and belts and metal jewelry. All of it was locked
away. The room was also used to store the box of
gym equipment that was taken down to the
gymnasium when there was an activity in the
gymnasium. Nothing too dangerous. Basketballs and
red rubber dodgeballs and whiffle balls and whiffle
ball bats. Mostly stuff that was hard to kill another
person with. I have no doubt that if you really wanted
someone dead, you could probably bludgeon them to
death with a firm basketball, but in this scenario, staff
would intervene before you were able to finish the job.
In this room was a closet where the clean linen and
towels were kept. My patient was smiling and in a
good mood and he had a Dixie cup of hygiene ooze in
each hand and wasn’t quizzing me about the release
dates of Salt ‘N Peppa albums, so I figured we were
in a relatively safe behavioral window. I turned
around and bent over, leaning into the towel closet
and asked my patient, “One towel or two?” He didn’t
answer, so I looked over my shoulder, the smile had
faded from his face and he was looking at the handle
of the yellow plastic whiffle ball bat. He dropped the
two Dixie cups, leaned over and took the bat out of
the box of gym equipment, and raised it over his
head, coming at me with murder in his eyes. What I
knew, that he didn’t know, is that it was a whiffle ball
bat. For all I know, he thought it was a wooden or
aluminum bat. From his perspective it must have
been amazing that I was deflecting his clubbing with
my forearms. I got close enough that I could grab him
by the wrists. I squeezed the pressure points in his
wrists hard enough that his hand went limp and he
dropped the bat and he tried to headbutt me. Imagine
slow-dancing with someone that wants to murder you.
I knew I had to get him out of the room, because if I
took him down in that room it could be hours before
someone wandered by and realized I was in a
restraint. I made sure I had a firm grip on his wrists
and walked him backwards out of the room while he
was trying to headbutt me in the face. I managed to
get him into the hallway and turned him around so I
was using my grip on his wrists to hold his arms
against his chest, and his back against the wall so he
couldn’t keep lunging with his trademark headbutt. I
looked to my left towards the nursing station where
there were two or three staff hanging out. I yelled,
“Little help here?” A guy that was new to the unit
made his way down the hallway. Since he was new,
he wasn’t familiar with the behavior of this special
patient so he asked the patient, “What’s going on,
buddy? Are you angry? What’s wrong?” The patient
had gone completely feral, his eyes wide and empty
with panic rage. I turned to the guy and said, “Grab a
wrist.” The guy grabbed a wrist and we used the
arms of the patients as levers to steer him into his
room and the charge nurse stabbed him in the ass
with his medications. He slept the night through and
the next day was a new day.
Not all days were bad days.
When things were relatively calm, staff were
supposed to run groups. The groups were supposed
to be therapeutic and/or educational. We were
supposed to discuss mental health problems and
symptom management and sex and drugs and
current events. As difficult as it is to have
conversations about these topics with any group of
teenagers, it’s even more difficult to try to have civil,
polite, appropriate conversations about these topics
with adolescents suffering from acute or chronic
mental health problems. They like sex and drugs. I
didn’t entirely blame them. I chose to try to run the
current events group. The groups would run for an
hour or two in the evening after dinner to kill the time
between dinner and bedtime. The first half hour of
the group was getting everyone to settle in, and
kicking out the patients too immature, disruptive, or
just plain insane to participate in the group. Then I
would ask the kids what they wanted to talk about and
try to parlay the topic into an educational experience,
then I’d run with the topic. You want to talk about
drugs? We can talk about drugs. But we’re not just
going to talk about how awesome it is getting high
and what your favorite drugs are. One time a girl said
she was angry about the war in the middle east, you
know, the one we’ve been engaged in for decades?
She said she hated George W. Bush. I said I’d be
hard-pressed to disagree with her but I wanted to
know why she hated George W. Bush. I ended up
drawing a map of the “middle east” and explaining the
history of American manipulation in the region. I’m
not sure all of it stuck, but at least I tried and I didn’t
have to restrain anyone for a couple hours. The
groups were actually kind of dangerous, because
there were usually only two staff in the group room
with anywhere from twelve to fourteen patients. So if
the patients ever decided to band together and kill the
staff and take over the unit, they could probably
overcome the two staff running the group and kick
them to death when they had gotten them down.
The kids that were too disruptive or crazy or
immature to participate in the group were monitored
by the other two or three staff that weren’t running the
group. It was still a break, because eleven or twelve
of the patients out of the fourteen patient maximum
census were all in one room and being kept calm and
occupied. There was a girl that was admitted to the
unit that was a complete sociopath. She wasn’t really
mentally disturbed, she was just an asshole. She was
raised by a morbidly obese uneducated white trash
mother and was big enough herself that she was able
to be a bully to other girls her age. Her tough girl
bully shit didn’t fly with the unit staff, so, recognizing
that she was physically outmatched she dedicated her
time on the unit to making every shift as difficult as
possible for everyone else. She couldn’t be trusted to
participate in any activity, so after several attempts to
include her in group activities, she wasn’t allowed to
participate in group activities. She figured out that the
most disruptive thing she could do was to pull the
protective shield off of the fire alarms and pull the fire
alarms. It was noisy and annoying and much more
effective than her just telling one person to go fuck
themselves all shift long. Since she liked to pull fire
alarms, she was assigned a one-on-one staff. The
one-on-one staff would spend the whole shift walking
up and down the hallways of the unit staying within
arm’s length of the girl. The girl would bolt and run
towards one of the fire alarms and if the staff was fast
enough, they kept her from knocking the protective
shield off of the fire alarm. If they weren’t, the buzzer
went off and she grinned malevolently as the staff
tried to get the protective shield back over the alarm
and sometimes ran off to knock the protective shield
off of another alarm if there wasn’t an extra staff to
stop her. That was every night. Eight hours a shift of
pacing back and forth up the hallways. The worst part
of the whole thing was that she wasn’t mentally ill.
She was just a jerk. She liked giving people grief, and
we weren’t able to punch her in the face and other
kind of behavioral reinforcement really weren’t very
persuasive. One time one of my friends was
assigned as her one-on-one while I was trying to run
a group. He got sick of her bullshit, so one of the
times she decided to make a sprint for a fire alarm he
flicked a foot out and tripped her. She flew forward
and her forehead stopped her forward movement
when it hit the corner of a door frame. In the group
room, I heard a scream that made everyone forget
about whatever we were talking about. All of the kids
wanted to leave the group and see what the
commotion was, but I managed to get to the door first
and peek my head out. The girl was sitting on the
floor, her legs splayed out in front of her, and her face
was washed in blood like a mask. I closed the door
and told the kids in the group that there was nothing
to see out there and why don’t we go back to
whatever it was we were doing before we all heard
that “I’m being murdered” scream? The kids didn’t like
it, and were restless, but I didn’t care and wasn’t
going to let anyone out of that room because having
mentally unbalanced spectators to yell and scream
and over-react to the situation wouldn’t help my friend
and the nurse that were trying to deal with the
situation. The girl ended up getting sent to the
hospital. They gave her something like forty stitches
inside of her skin and another sixty or so on the
outside and she was told that it would heal but there
would probably be a scar, and as mean as it might
sound, I think she learned her lesson about what can
happen when you put all of your energy into annoying
people that are trying to help you and she was
noticeably more compliant for the rest of her stay.
There was an African American girl admitted to the
unit. She came with a reputation for being incredibly
violent and completely psychotic. Despite that
reputation, she was surprisingly well oriented and her
integration to the unit was a peaceful one. She was
suicidal, but only in the general way and was
assigned a one-on-one staff. When she was feeling
anxious, she would go into one of the two padded
isolation rooms, and she spent enough time in there
that one of the rooms was designated as her room for
her stay. She would walk up and down the hallways
of the unit, like a restless jungle cat and just as light
on her feet. She preferred to have young white men
as her one-on-one staff and since that seemed to
keep her calm her preference was usually respected.
I actually kind of liked that kid. She was relatively
high functioning and had a sense of humor and was
easy to work with. When the rest of the unit was in a
group, she would walk down to the end of one of the
hallways and try to talk me into going into one of the
empty rooms and have sex with her. I told her that
there was no way that I was going into an empty room
alone with her, and that although we could be on
friendly terms that we were never going to be that
kind of friendly. She told me that staff at other
programs she had been in would have sex with her. I
told her that was unfortunate and that here wasn’t
there and I wasn’t them and that it wasn’t going to
happen. She would smile a sly smile and walk back
up the hallway. It wasn’t an unpleasant way to spend
a shift, and she would laugh at some of the outlandish
and immature behavior of some of the other residents
as they threw their drama turns and temper tantrums.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that she was
assigned to the unit for being emotionally disturbed
because she was so even-tempered and high-
functioning. One day she had been assigned a
female one-one-one staff. I think it was the useless
little Asian lady that had run away from the autistic
kid. That woman was more harm than help because
she was useless on the unit and took the place of
someone else that could have been hired to help.
The girl tried to beat the shit out of her one-on-one
and since her escort was a little Asian lady that was
bad at her job, the patient had a pretty decent chance
of fucking that little Asian lady up badly enough that
she’d have to take some time off of work to
recuperate. The Asian lady crumpled to the floor and
tried to use the clipboard she always carried as a
shield. Two other staff ran over and grabbed the girl
and escorted her to the isolation room that became
her room. She would not stay in her room and was
determined to continually try to leave her room and
attack the Asian woman who wasn’t smart enough to
just hide out in another part of the until for a while until
the girl calmed down. For a small, thin, girl she was
surprisingly strong. Part of her strength is that she
had lost conscious control of her behavior and her
attempts to leave her room and attack the Asian lady
had a feral intensity behind it. She didn’t care if she
was bruised or hurt or broke bones. She would
continue to throw herself at anything that was
between her and her target until either it or she were
destroyed. It took two full-grown and well-competent
male staff to block the front of her room. So she took
off all of her clothes so that female staff would have to
be assigned to block the entrance to her room. The
two female staff, although somewhat competent were
well outmatched by the strength, intensity and ferocity
of the girl. The girl decided that in addition to being
naked that she would make herself vomit so that she
would be less pleasant for staff to physically manage.
I wasn’t personally managing her incident, being a
male, I sat at the opening of one of the hallways that
branched off of the central nurse’s station and
managed the complaints of the male wing of the unit.
The complaints all had a whiny, plaintive tone to
them. I think that some of the boys were actually kind
of scared of the monster that the girl had turned into
and knowing that I was sitting at the head of the
hallway to keep the young girl turned wild from
running down the hallway and attacking them while
they slept was somewhat comforting.
I was told afterwards that the girl was using the
vomit as lubricant to masturbate with and had
slathered it all over herself from head to toe to make
herself more slippery and unpleasant to handle. My
friend Nick decided to take the initiative in handling
the situation. He got a gown and gloves and a mask
intended to prevent staff from getting blood on/in them
when a patient decided to hurt themselves and use
blood as a weapon. The plan was that Nick would go
in and grab the girl, the female staff would open the
door to the shower room and turn the shower on.
Nick would carry the girl in a bear hug into the shower
area and dump her in the shower and she could hang
out in the shower room until she decided to cool out.
Thankfully that’s kind of how it ended up working out.
When she was isolated in the shower room, she had
less of an audience and she couldn’t see the staff she
had decided to murder. The two female staff that
were kept busy keeping her in the shower until the girl
calmed down came out a few hours later, soaked and
miserable with the girl, dripping wet, wrapped in a
towel between them. The girl had a maniacal gleam
in her eye, but was no longer completely feral and
when she was given a clean set of clothes she
changed into them. She was allowed to have white
male staff for the rest of her stay on the unit and there
were no other behavioral outbursts on her behalf.
In addition to working full-time I was picking up an
extra couple shifts each week. Since there were four
units at the hospital, there was a pretty good chance
that someone would call out from one of the units
each night, and the shift manager knew that I was
always looking for extra hours, so I was usually
clocking forty hours and twenty hours of overtime and
that, combined with living in my vehicle meant that I
was making great headway towards paying off my
debts.
After I got an apartment with my girlfriend and her
fat friend, I wasn’t doing as well with my relationship.
Having to come home and listen to her try to dump
her stress about her day as a nurse and all of the
stupid old dying people that she had to deal with
watching die that I didn’t give a shit about was
wearing me down. I worked a stressful job too, but
unless something interesting or amusing happened at
work, I kept it to myself. I didn’t need to vent about
any and every thing like she did. All I wanted was to
come home and wind down. Spend a couple hours
playing a video game or watching a movie, and then I
would be more than happy to talk to her. But since
we shared a room, she was always right on top of me
as soon as I got home and there was no escape from
her voice and her stories about old white people dying
that I didn’t give a shit about.
I started to just leave when she started to argue
with me. I’d just leave the apartment and get into my
car and just go for a drive. “Where do you think
you’re going?” she would yell. “Out.” I would say.
“Where is out?” she would yell. “Anywhere but here
with you.” I would reply. This was why I wanted to
have separate rooms.
Two of the guys at work had a house they were
renting, and they were having trouble finding a third
room-mate. They knew about the trouble I was
having with my girlfriend and her fat obnoxious friend,
so they said, “Fuck her, move in with us.” So I did.
One day when I had the day off of work, and she was
at work, I moved all of my stuff out of the apartment
into their spare room. When she got home, she
called me and I told her that we were fucking done
and she could work things out with the guy that
owned the house or move out but I didn’t give a shit
either way. I told the guy that owned the house that I
was out and that he could keep my security deposit in
case he had to clean the place up after they moved
out but I didn’t think that the girls would intentionally
fuck the place up out of spite.
I was actually doing a pretty decent job,
considering the hours I was working and the physical
and psychological demands of the job. We got a new
kid in that was awful. He wasn’t exactly retarded, but
there was definitely something wrong with him. Not
retarded, but definitely slow. There was just
something “off” about him. Something that even the
other patients could sense. There usually weren’t a
lot of fights between the patients, but in his first week
on the unit, he managed to get into two. He wasn’t
insane, so psychiatric medication couldn’t fix what
was wrong with him. To manage his behavior during
his stay on the unit, the nurses prescribed him
Benadryl PRN or “as needed”. In addition to helping
with allergic reactions, the antihistamines have a
sedative side effect. So the new kid spent most of his
time sedated so heavily that the saliva in his mouth
was thick and stringy and gelled up into a white foam
at the edges. He was assigned a one-on-one staff to
protect him from the other patients and it was a tough
assignment to fill. He was sexually inappropriate
towards the female staff, so it was determined that his
one-on-one would have to be a male, and even then
he was creepy and whiny and needy and touchy-feely
and just generally unpleasant to be around. I was
sitting in his doorway as his one-on-one one night.
He smelled awful, like spoiled milk and cheese going
bad and hair grease and stale sweat. I was wearing
shorts because it was a hot day. He decided to try to
climb up my legs. His sticky icky hands stuck to my
leg hairs and plucked some out as he pulled his hand
off to find another handhold on my calf. I lost it. I
yelled, “Hey! I’m the only one willing to sit your one-
on-one because you have managed to creep out
everyone else on this unit. I’m just about the only
thing you have left here and you’re beginning to really
test my patience!”
The kid didn’t like being yelled at, so he jumped up
and tried to attack me. Our arms were flailing as I
tried to grab his wrists and take him down. I got ahold
of him as additional staff showed up to help with the
restraint and as the kid went down he was screaming
“He hit me! He hit me!”
When the restraint was over, the kid was
interviewed by a nurse and he said that I punched him
in the face. There was a staff that showed up in the
doorway that said that he wasn’t sure, but that I might
have swung at the kid. I was put on administrative
leave. Then I was fired.
The guy that said that I hit the kid didn’t last long
on the unit. It’s a hard job and it can be even harder if
the people you work with don’t watch your back and
my friends on the unit had no use for someone who
would go on record to get one of their friends fired.
It’s not like I beat the shit out of the kid and tried to get
my friends to cover it up. The kid attacked me. It
took me a few seconds to get control of the situation.
The kid said I hit him, and the staff said that he wasn’t
sure what he saw, but that it was possible that I
punched the kid. The worst part of the whole thing is
that it would have been incredibly gratifying to blast
that kid right in his stupid fucking face, but if I had
made up my mind to punch that kid in his face he
wouldn’t be screaming on the way down. He’d be
knocked the fuck out and drinking his dinner through
a straw until they unwired his jaw. Not that I would
have gained any kind of boost to my self-esteem for
punching out a teenager, but the fact that I was fired
because of a false allegation was and is annoying.
Chapter 38:
Outpatient Community Support Counselor

I looked up mental health and human services

providers online and looked for their Employment
Opportunities pages on their web pages. It was still
fairly early in the internet and a lot of the job postings
weren’t kept up to date, but it was a decent way to
find out who was hiring and where to e-mail your
resume for consideration by the Human Resources
department.
I applied for a position with a statewide mental
health services provider that had several regional
community offices to provide services to individuals
with mental health issues that were living in the
community.
It was determined that I would make a good
Outpatient Community Support Counselor. Either that
or it was the job they needed to fill. I worked out of a
central office and shared a pool of clients with ten or
twelve other counselors. Since I was new, like
always, I was assigned the most difficult clients from
the caseloads of the other counselors. I started off
with ten clients, then moved up to fifteen after a
couple weeks, then twenty, then twenty five. The cap
of clients was something like thirty or forty, so I
thought I was doing well. About two-thirds of my
clients would come to the office to meet with me so
that I could help them out with their participation in the
mental health system. Making appointments with
their psychologist, writing letters indicating successful
participation in a mental health program if they were
legally mandated to participate in the program,
checking to make sure that they were still taking their
prescribed medications as prescribed and hadn’t had
any major mental health crises since the last time that
we had met. That part of the job was fairly easy. The
other third of my caseload required that I drive out to
their home and meet with them. As may be expected,
these clients were the more difficult clients to work
with. About 80% of that last third I was able to meet
with successfully, and the other 20% would make an
appointment, then cancel and reschedule it, so I
never ended up meeting with them. Even at twenty-
five clients I was still drastically under-worked.
Twenty five clients that I only had to meet with once a
month and a five day work week meant that I only had
to meet with one client a day to meet the job
requirements. Sometimes I would check in, have my
meeting, then leave like I was going to go out and
meet with a client and just go home and play video
games for a few hours, then come back in and show
my face at the end of the day, write my report and go
home. It was easy work and I didn’t mind it. When it
came time for my first performance review after the
ninety day probationary period I was told that I and
the job were not copacetic and that I was going to be
let go. I tried to argue that I had been doing all of the
work that I was supposed to do and had met with all
of the clients that it was possible to meet with and that
I had been maintaining a full caseload, but my
arguments were to no avail.
 A lot of the clients were making more on disability
than I was making working a full-time job providing
assistance to clients that were making more than I
was. I’ve always known I was crazy, but I never
figured out how to get professionally and permanently
diagnosed as mentally handicapped.
Chapter 39:
Author: My First Book Deal.

I decided that I was done with working for a while

and I applied for unemployment.
I didn’t want to apply for another job and do
everything I was supposed to be doing and get fired
after a few months anyway. Working for a place for
just one year made my resume look like I wasn’t able
to commit to working with any one employer for any
considerable length of time and made me look like a
problem employee. I guess I was a problem
employee, because I wasn’t able to slow myself down
and look busy like everyone else was able to.
To my surprise, I was actually approved for
unemployment.
All I had to do was call in each Monday and press a
few buttons on my cell phone and I would get a check
for the same amount of money that I would take home
after taxes while I was working full-time.
I’ve never been the kind of person to just sit
around and do nothing. I like to sleep in and I have
my lazy Sundays, but after the first week of doing
nothing I started to feel embarrassed about not doing
anything when everyone else I knew had jobs to go
to.
I had been reviewing books for a variety of
magazines and websites. Mostly horror. There was a
local horror magazine trying to break into the national
horror magazine market and each month I’d give
them a two-page spread of book reviews to publish. It
felt pretty cool to see my name in print and know that
people were reading what I had written. I didn’t have
any kind of contract with the magazine, and I kept
copies of my book reviews in case anyone else
wanted to publish them. My friend from high school
was a big fan of going to horror conventions. We
went to a local one, and the owner of the magazine
told me to go and talk to a friend of his that wrote
regional paranormal books about the New England
states. He had written a book called Haunted Rhode
Island and Haunted Massachusetts and had just
published Haunted New Hampshire and would
probably work his way around New England and then
start branching west if the publisher continued to
publish his books. I went and talked to the author and
asked him for copies of his book to read and review
for the magazine. He told me that he bought the
copies of the books that he brought to conventions at
wholesale to sell for a profit, but if I contacted the
publisher and could prove that I was a legitimate
reviewer, they would most likely send me free copies
of his books to review.
I took down the name of his publisher and sent
them an e-mail asking for copies of the author’s
regional paranormal books for review. I received a
polite reply stating that they would be pleased to send
me the copies of the books I had requested and, by
the way, had I ever thought about writing a book
myself?
I hadn’t thought of writing a book myself. This was
before self-publishing became easy and everyone
and their cat decided that because they could write
that they should write and decided to call themselves
an author. This was when the means of production
and distribution of books were primarily held by
publishers and you had to get the approval of a
publisher if you ever wanted to see something you
wrote printed and bound and available for sale on the
shelves of a book store.
Since they asked, I told them I was interested.
They asked me if I could write a book, kind of like
the books that they would be sending me, but about
Long Island, New York. “I can write a book about
Rhode Island fairly easily.” I replied, and they replied,
“No, not Rhode Island. We already have a book
about Rhode Island. But our market research
indicates that if we can get someone to write a book
about paranormal events on Long Island that it would
probably sell well. Are you interested?”
Of course I was interested.
I had been reading books for as long as I was able
and had been reviewing them for a few years so I was
well familiar with what a book should look like and
figured I was capable of writing one.
As so many first time authors I was deluded with
thoughts of advances and royalties and fortune and
fame. The publisher told me that it didn’t work that
way. The way it worked was, I wrote the book, if I
ever managed to finish it, they’d check it out and see
if it was a book, and if it was a book, they would
publish it, and if it sold, they would pay me 17% of the
net sales after subtracting the cost of production and
distribution. So I had my first book deal, kind of. Now
I had to write the book.
Initially I wanted to take my advance and drive
down to Long Island and contact the owners of all of
the haunted hotels and restaurants and see if they
would write off my room and board in exchange for
the privilege of being mentioned in the book and I
could also drive out to all of the other public locations
and take pictures and make the whole thing into a fun
adventure. Since there would be no advance, I
decided to use the internet to do my research.
I started using the search queries “haunted” &
“Long Island” and “ghosts” and “Long Island” and
“paranormal” & “Long Island” and bookmarked every
page that I found. I started to see a pattern emerging
where there were several well-known and publicly
documented paranormal occurrences on the island,
but there was no one book or website that had all of
them at the same time, so I decided that would be my
goal.
To avoid plagiarizing any one source I would cut
and paste information and put it into a document that I
had created for each chapter. I also contacted the
authors of Ghosts of Long Island and Haunted Long
Island and asked them for copies of their books for
“review”. I faithfully read and reviewed their books
and used the table of contents from those two books
to refine and expand my searches for information.
As a gesture of respect towards the work of those
authors, if they had covered anything that I couldn’t
find mentioned anywhere else, I considered that
material to be unique work and the topic to be off
limits. But most of the authors and websites were just
writing about the same two dozen or so occurrences.
When I had about five pages of information for
each chapter, I started to boil down and rewrite the
information so that none of it could be traced back to
its original source. I also made a conscious effort to
rewrite everything in my own style of writing. Since I
was a sceptic, my goal was to write something like the
Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books written by
Alvin Schwartz and illustrated by Stephen Gammell.
Something kind of fun and creepy for the intended
audience to have fun reading, even if a lot of the
“evidence” was anecdotal and hearsay.
It was difficult to try to write my first book and there
were always things that were more fun that I could be
doing instead, so I put a piece of masking tape across
the top of my television and wrote across it in Sharpie
marker, “Do you want to be entertained? Or do you
want to be famous?” Each time I would flop down on
my bed and think about firing up my X-Box or putting
in a DVD to watch, I’d see the strip of tape and open
up my laptop and work on a chapter instead.
The whole thing took me six months to write. But
when I was finished, I was pretty happy with the end
results. It was a little over 30,000 words and about 66
pages in 8” X 10” page size ten point double-spaced
Times New Roman which would be about 120 pages
in trade paperback format and that’s about what it
ended up being.
The publisher was pleased with what I sent in and
doubly pleased that they didn’t have to make any
changes during the editorial process aside from
suggesting that I insert sub-chapter headings in the
chapters when I moved from one topic to another
within the general theme of the chapter.
They wanted me to call the book “Ghosts of Long
Island” or “Haunted Long Island” but since I had read
and reviewed both of those books, I flat out refused
and suggested my own title. They like the title and
told me that they would be publishing the book in a
couple months.
When the book was published, my editor, who was
also the editor for the series of regional paranormal
books published by the publishing company sent me
a copy of my book and a bottle of pink wine. I’m not
sure that you’re supposed to send alcohol through the
mail, but I appreciated the gesture and drank the
bottle of wine and put the book on my bookshelf.
There’s more to this, but it happened while I was
working my next job.
Chapter 40:
Horror Genre Merchandising Company Brand
Manager

My high school friend liked going to horror

conventions. He liked having company when he
would go on the road trips to the out-of-state
conventions so he’d invite me to go along and since I
was on unemployment and had a bit of disposable
income and plenty of free time, I agreed to go along
more often than not.
The first horror convention I went to was pretty
overwhelming. It was disorienting to see so many
people into the same thing that he and I were into. I
usually got picked on for having nothing but black t-
shirts in my closet, but at a horror convention
everyone was wearing a black t-shirt with a design
promoting their favorite horror movie.
I wasn’t really that excited to meet most of the
celebrities at the convention, but I was excited to
meet Tom Savini. I was a huge fan of the George
Romero zombie movies and it would be exciting to
meet one of the modern living legends of horror movie
special effects. We found Tom standing outside of his
booth. He was swilling NyQuil straight from the bottle,
so I guess he wasn’t feeling that well. I went up to
him and said, “Mister Savini, my friend and I drove
four hours down from Rhode Island to attend this
convention and the one thing that I wanted to do while
I was here was to get a picture with you.” He said
okay and he put his arm around my shoulders and I
put my arm around his mid-section and my friend took
the picture. When I checked the picture later, I was
definitely more excited to meet Tom Savini than he
was to have his picture taken with another fanboy. It
was disappointing, but I learned from that experience
that if I ever had anyone ask me to take their picture
with them because they appreciated my work I would
pretend to be really excited to have my picture taken
with them.
My friend and I went to two or three horror
conventions that year and if you go to enough horror
conventions you start to recognize some of the people
that you saw at other conventions. My friend
introduced me to some of his convention friends.
Most of them wrote for horror magazines and
websites and I told them I wrote book reviews and
since most sites had trouble finding people willing to
review books, I was invited to submit my reviews to
be published on their websites.
My friend liked standing in lines and having movie
posters signed by the celebrities that were appearing
at the conventions, but I never really wanted to stand
in a long line and pay good money to meet someone
that had been in a horror movie I liked for five minutes
of their time, an autograph, a handshake and a
picture with them.
I would usually walk through the vendor room and
chat with the vendors and find out how the sales were
and try to cheer them up if they were bored. I was
talking with a vendor and I asked him if he was
planning on having a booth at the next convention in
the area because someone that I went to high school
with was on the TV show Ghost Hunters and was
going to be a guest at the next convention and he
invited my friend and I to come down and keep him
company at the convention.
The vendor said that he wanted to reserve a booth
at that convention, but the couple that he hired to do
the out-of-state conventions broke up and each
demanded that he pick one or the other so he decided
to pick neither of them so he didn’t have anyone to
work his booth. I said that I could work his booth
since I was going to be at the convention anyway.
His eyes lit up and he said, “Really?” and I was pretty
much hired on the spot. He made me sit down and
watch a DVD of two episodes of a zombie TV series
that he was trying to sell for distribution/production
that most of the merchandise at his booth was a
variant on. A lot of “zombie-killer” themed t-shirts and
tank-tops and sweat-pants. I told him that I
appreciated the relative subtlety of his designs
because they were the kind of thing that I could wear
to work if I got another job working with children or
adolescents because they were horror-themed, but
subtle enough that they didn’t have a decapitated
head with blood dripping out of the neck stump on it.
He told me that was the whole point. We exchanged
contact information and he gave me a few free t-shirts
and we agreed that we’d lock the details through
phone calls and e-mail for the next convention the
following month.
We were both true to our word and we worked out
the details. My room-mate, the guy that tripped the
girl that split her head open on the doorframe would
let us use his s.u.v. as long as he was allowed to
come along for the adventure, and I invited my friend
that invited me to go to the horror conventions too, so
I would have two people I could trust to help me set
up and work the booth. We would drive down from
Rhode Island Thursday night, stop in Long Island and
pick up the merchandise and the booth hardware from
the guy’s storage space and then drive down to the
convention to get there in time for set up Friday
morning. I was going to get paid $350 for the
weekend and my friends would both get paid $50 for
helping me out. I told the guy that I wanted to make
sure that there was a system of accounting so that
there wasn’t any confusion about how much money
was made and where the money went. The guy told
me that he would conduct an inventory of the
merchandise going out and conduct an inventory of
the merchandise coming in and for me to keep a tally
of expenses that arose over the weekend, like buying
food and drink for myself and assistants and gas for
the vehicle.
It was a big adventure and I was really excited.
We made it to the place and the loading dock to the
vendor area was a long steep ramp that went down at
a forty-five degree angle. A lot of vendors lost control
of their dolly carts and their merchandise flew out all
over the place, but my crew managed to get our gear
into the place without incident. It took us a few hours
to get set up, but we were mostly ready for business
when the doors opened for the convention attendees.
Business was brisk and I discovered that I was an
excellent salesman. Even if I wasn’t trying to sell
someone something I talked to most of the people
that walked past the booth and most people ended up
buying something. It helped that we had decent
merchandise and attractive designs at affordable
prices.
A redhead came up and stopped at the booth and I
talked to her. We got along and she said, “You’re
cute!”. “You’re not bad looking yourself.” I replied
“Are we going to hang out tonight?” We exchanged
information and I had a date.
The first day ended and we were already selling
out of some of our designs and definitely sold out of
certain sizes. We went to the hotel and they had
moved our reservation. At first I was angry, but then I
saw the room they had moved us to. It was a huge
multi-levelled suite with two bathrooms. We all
showered and went back to the convention to be a
part of the after-party. My friend that tripped the girl
and I met up with the redhead and her friend. We
went to the hotel bar and my other friend wanted to
meet Udo Kier, but was afraid to go up and talk to him
because he was sitting at a table with a bunch of
other celebrities and the convention organizers. I told
my friend to order him a glass of red wine and bring it
over and introduce himself. He did and he had a
conversation with Udo Kier. I managed to bump into
Udo at the bar and I got his attention and said, “Mister
Kier? I know this might seem like a strange request,
but I would love to hear you say the word “wirgins”.
He took my hand and shook it while saying “wirgins”
and shook my hand for a good minute while looking at
my friend that had tripped the girl.
My friend took the redhead’s friend up to their hotel
room so I could be alone with the redhead and he
gave me the keys to his s.u.v. so I could take her
back to our hotel room. She was playing hard to get
and wanted me to prove that I was worth sleeping
with. We were discussing authors and she said she
liked Charles Bukowski and I said that if she could
find anyone else that could name all five of Charles
Bukowski’s novels that she should hang out with them
instead. I found a guy that looked like he read books
and asked him, to settle a bet, if he could name
Charles Bukowski’s five novels. He got Post Office
and Ham On Rye, but he was too intoxicated to
remember the rest. I turned to the girl and counted off
the five novels on my fingers. That got her into the
s.u.v. We were in the parking lot of my hotel and she
said she still wasn’t sure about the whole thing. She
asked me if I had seen her favorite movie Six String
Samurai. Not only had I seen the film, but I owned
the soundtrack album for the movie that had bits of
dialogue as lead-ins for the music. I turned to her and
said, “Fly away little butterfly.” She said “You know
this means we have to fuck.” So we did. I kept her
up for most of the night and was tired the next day but
it was worth it.
The next night I got too drunk and passed out
outside while watching Dawn of the Dead on a giant
inflatable screen in the parking lot. The girls were
dressed up like slutty cheerleaders and whenever
they’d see me or one of my crew they’d run away and
hide. I wasn’t exactly looking for a relationship, but I
guess they definitely wanted it to be a one-night
stand.
We packed up and left on the Sunday with a lot
less stuff than we had showed up with and around
$6,500 in cash.
We stopped to meet with the guy that owned the
company and unload the vehicle and give him the
cash. He was quite pleased with the situation and
asked me if I wanted to work some more conventions
for him.
For the rest of the year I would work one
convention a month. I’d rent an s.u.v. or borrow the
owner’s mini-van and drive out to conventions in New
Jersey, Baltimore, Pennsylvania, and Chicago.
My unemployment ran out, and I didn’t file for an
extension.
Instead I’d get a security job. I’d tell the security
job that I’d need one weekend a month off to go off
and do the horror conventions because I would make
more in one weekend than two weeks working
security. The security companies agreed, but then
when the weekend came up, I reminded them that I
was going to be gone that weekend and they told me
if I didn’t show up to work that I was fired, so I told
them I quit and dropped off their uniforms and waited
for the last check to come in the mail.
I did that three different times for three different
security companies, so I guess that counts as three
extra jobs, but there’s only so much you can write
about hanging out in an empty building overnight in a
polyester-blend uniform shirt making sure that no one
burned the place down.
By the end of the convention season, I had burned
through every security company operating in the
state. I told the guy that owned the company that if I
was going to work for him, I would have to work for
him. That I couldn’t make ends meet on $350 a
month and I couldn’t keep getting new jobs and
quitting them the same month when I’d take off to do
a convention. He asked me how much I would need
to make ends meet. I told him that if he could pay me
a hundred dollars a week on top of the $350 a month I
made from doing a convention that I could probably
make ends meet. He took a couple days to think it
over and told me that he would pay me a hundred
dollars a week to manage the social networking and
promotions for the company.
I did that for about another six months when the
guy said that it was too difficult trying to work with
someone that he couldn’t actually be in the same
room with. He asked me how I felt about either
commuting to Long Island once a week for a meeting
or moving to Long Island. I told him that I would move
to Long Island if he could guarantee me a monthly
salary that would cover my rent and leave me enough
to survive on after that. He agreed to those
conditions, so I told my room-mates I was moving to
Long Island at the end of the month.
 I drove down to Long Island and checked out a few
apartments. Apartments in Long Island are expensive
but I managed to find one for $800 a month. It was a
converted garden shed. A studio with a tiny bathroom
on the property of a huge house. It was in Westbury,
which was a pretty affluent community. Supposedly
Jay-Z and Beyoncé lived there too. It wasn’t a really
big town, but I never bumped into them. My boss
wrote a check for first and security and I rented a van
and moved all of my stuff to Long Island. I dropped
off the van and drove my vehicle back to Long Island
and it was a done deal. The garden shed didn’t have
internet, so my boss got a “skycard” for my laptop. It
was a wireless modem I would plug into the side of
my laptop that worked like a cellphone modem. It
was really expensive and any data overages were
also really expensive. For work, I would monitor the
online store for the brand and if there were any
orders, I would drive to the storage space, pack the
orders, and mail them. It was fairly easy work and
only took me a couple hours a day. It wasn’t a bad
life.
On Friday the 13th of all days, I was making a left
hand turn out of the post office parking lot. A big box
truck stopped to let me go and when I pulled out, an
s.u.v. going well over the speed limit slammed into the
front driver’s side corner of my 1984 Buick Regal and
turned it ninety degrees. I was lucky that it didn’t hit
my car in the middle because it probably would have
killed me. My car was totaled and when the police
showed up they determined that it was a no fault
accident. Sure, they had driven their car into mine,
but I had been taking a left hand turn out of the
parking lot so I didn’t have the right of way. So the
police figured that made us even. I didn’t have a
vehicle or the money to buy one and my boss was
threatening that I had better get a vehicle so I could
do my job or I was fired. I wasn’t making enough
money to just go out and buy a vehicle so I was in a
difficult situation. I suggested that my boss buy a
cargo van. We were spending about $500 a month
on renting a vehicle to drive out to the conventions
anyway, so after four or five conventions the vehicle
would pay for itself and I could use the vehicle to get
back and forth from the storage space and pack the
orders.
He took a couple days to think it over and agreed to
my proposal. His business partner took me to a place
in his neighborhood that had a bunch of
decommissioned vehicle fleet vans in their back lot
and we picked one up for $2,000 My boss told me
that the cost of the van would be deducted from my
pay at $200 a month until it was paid off. I had the
van about a week when I was driving to meet my boss
and his business partner for a business meeting at a
local diner. The vehicle in front of me, an s.u.v.
started to make a right-hand turn and then stopped
suddenly. If they had followed through and pulled in
everything would have been fine. But they didn’t and
the right front of my vehicle clipped the left rear of
theirs. It pushed in the front of my van and smashed
the bumper and rear directional of their vehicle. I
hadn’t had much luck in Long Island with accidents,
so when she pulled over, I just drove off. The driver
followed me. When I stopped at a red light, the driver,
a middle-aged black woman, got out of her s.u.v. and
walked up to the side of my van and yelled “You hit
me! Pull over!” I didn’t say anything. I went to the
diner and pulled into the parking lot and she pulled in
beside me. “License and registration!” she yelled like
she was a cop. I said, “Look, lady, you stopped short
and I clipped you. You can call the cops if you want
to, but I’m not giving you shit.” I think there was
something in my eyes that scared her because she
just got into her s.u.v. and drove away. I went in and
had the meeting with my boss and his business
partner. My boss said he was excited to see the new
van. I thought that he’d be a lot less excited to find
out that I had already managed to get into an accident
with it, especially with how he harassed me about
how I had to drive more carefully when that s.u.v.
came out of nowhere and totaled my Buick. When
the meal was over, I shook his hand at the door,
which made him forget to come out and look at the
vehicle. When I drove past them, the damage was on
the opposite side from the one that they saw and I
drove home.
I knew that being the perpetrator of a hit and run
accident wasn’t going to go well for me. I thought that
I might get arrested and go to jail. I contacted the
dealer that had sold us the van and I asked how much
it would cost to fix the front end. They quoted me
$800. I had $800 but I was supposed to use it to pay
my rent. I had to make a choice, so I decided to
spend my rent on getting the vehicle repaired. My
landlord told me that I couldn’t break the lease. I told
him I was moving out and if he had a problem with it
he could sue me, and, by the way, the place was
infested with spiders so if he wanted to make a big
deal about my breaking the lease, I could make a big
deal about having to kill about a dozen spiders a
night.
The van was fixed and I packed all of the stuff from
my garden shed apartment into the van. I drove up to
Rhode Island with all of my stuff and gave most of it
away telling my friends that I was probably going to
jail and asking them if they could hold onto my stuff
for me until I got out. They could use it, obviously, but
just don’t sell it or give it away to anyone else.
I drove back to Long Island and was terrified every
time I saw a police cruiser because I figured I was
going to get pulled over and that would be that.
A couple weeks later, I got a phone call from the
place we bought the van. Turns out that the plates
that they gave me were special limited edition “Liberty
Plates” and that when they tried to register the plates
at the DMV they bounced back so they’d have to give
me new plates. The plates I had been driving with
when I had the accident had never been entered into
the system.
I was saved by a glitch in the DMV system, but I
had still given up my apartment and given away most
of my stuff. There was a gym next door to the storage
place. I got a membership there so I could shit, shave
and shower. There was a 7-11 across the street so
that was where I would eat. I slept in the van, parked
in the parking lot of the storage space. It was still a
pretty good life.
Somehow or another my boss figured out that I
was living in the van. I think he asked me how the
apartment was working out for me and said he
wanted to come by and pick me up or something like
that and I tried to dodge and he figured out I was
dodging. I told him that I couldn’t make ends meet
with what I was making in Long Island, but if I moved
back to Rhode Island, I could get a place for half the
rent and he would save money on what he was
spending on renting the storage space and he could
pay me less than he was paying me. He just had to
trust me to take his entire operation and all of his
merchandise back to Rhode Island. It was a tough
sell, but the numbers made sense. Less monthly
expenses meant more profits. He gave me
permission to move the whole operation to Rhode
Island, so I rented a bigger cargo van, packed out the
storage space into it and moved back to Rhode
Island.
The timing was pretty perfect because the guy that
had moved into my old room in the house that my
friends from the mental health hospital were renting
was moving out that month. What wasn’t perfect was
that despite the fact that the house had a full finished
basement that ran the length of the house that would
have been perfect to set up the shelving for the
merchandise I brought back, the landlord wouldn’t let
us use the basement because he said he had some
stuff stored down there that he didn’t want anyone
stealing. We figured out how to break into the
basement anyway, and aside from the washing
machine and dryer, it was empty. There was a small
closet in the back of the basement with four or five
boxes of stuff in it. The landlord could have easily
thrown a keyed doorknob onto that closet and let us
use the basement, but he didn’t so I set up the
shelving in my room and slept on a narrow mattress
between the shelves that took up most of the space in
the room.
I would send my boss inventory reports and let him
know when we needed to reorder designs to maintain
stock on hand for the online store and we would work
on spreadsheets to determine how much of what to
order to have what we needed to bring to the
conventions. He would order the shirts from our
screen-printer and send payment, and have the shirts
and other merchandise shipped to my house in
Rhode Island. We always made it a point to have
club cards to hand out to people at the conventions so
they could check out the online store and buy stuff
that they didn’t have the money for while they were at
the convention because they had spent it on other
stuff like celebrity autographs. The online store
supplemented the business between conventions and
the conventions created more customers for the
online store. It was a pretty good business model.
Sales were a bit slack between Christmas and the
first conventions of the year in March, but between
September and November I was easily packing and
shipping twenty-five to thirty packages a day.
We started to plan to expand our convention
schedule and started to do two conventions a month.
The conventions were often booked on the same
weekends in different demographical areas. He and
his family would do the New York area one and I
would drive out to the long-distance one. We did two
conventions in Texas in two consecutive months and
that year, between the Texas shows and the shows in
Indianapolis and Chicago and the big show in
Toronto, I got to drive through twenty-four of the forty-
eight contiguous United States in one year.
Both Texas shows were awful.
One was a trade show for “haunt” professionals.
People from all over the country that owned and
operated “haunted houses” like the one that I had
worked at. They were there to buy props and lights
and smoke machines for their haunts or at least to get
a chance to see the merchandise available from
distributors of those kinds of things. I was supposed
to go down there and try to pitch the haunts on our
company being the company that would design and
provide all of the staff t-shirts for the haunts. It was
supposed to be an opportunity to land some easy
wholesale orders. It would have been easy money,
because all we’d have to do is take their money, my
boss was good at graphic design, so he’d design the
shirts, we’d send half of the money to our screen-
printer who would print up the shirts and send them
out to the haunts and we’d keep the other half of the
money as profit. The problem was that all of the
haunts already had deals with local t-shirt screen-
printers where they were from, so none of them
wanted to talk about having our company produce
their staff shirts. I had brought the whole convention
booth and set it up, so I did a decent business selling
t-shirts, which kept the trip from being a complete
waste of time and effort, but no matter how hard I
tried I couldn’t get people to agree to hire us to make
the shirts for their haunts.
The other show was a Creation Weekend Of
Horrors Fangoria show in Austin. Fangoria agreed to
license out their brand to Creation Entertainment,
because Creation had been doing horror and science
fiction conventions since there were conventions.
They decided to branch out into other regional areas
and picked Austin. It was a twenty-seven hour drive
and my boss was in the habit of not letting me drive
down the night before and check in at the hotel so I
would be well-rested for the load-in the next morning.
Instead I was always driving right to the venue
scheduled to arrive the Friday morning for the load-in
and it was exhausting work. The main guests were
Robert Rodriguez and Jared Padalecki from
Supernatural. Other than that, the guests were just
the usual horror film celebrities that were at most
horror conventions. Even though we were the first
booth you saw when you entered the convention area
and I had hired attractive and engaging booth girls to
work the booth that weekend, there just weren’t
enough people to recoup the overhead. I remember
lying on my back in front of my booth and doing
carpet angels because the vendor room was
completely empty of foot traffic for long stretches of
the weekend. We made about $2,000. That sounds
like a decent chunk of money, but when you do the
breakdown of costs, it wasn’t even enough to break
even. $125 a night for two nights at convention rate
for the hotel room. $250 a table for the booth. $350
for my rate as the manager. $50 a day for my booth
girl. $450 for the gas for the twenty-seven hour, two-
thousand mile drive from Rhode Island to Austin. And
just because you make money at a convention
doesn’t mean that it’s magic money that comes from
out of nowhere. You’re selling merchandise, and that
merchandise costs money to make. So for each $20
you make selling a t-shirt you have to subtract the $5
to replace that shirt in your inventory, so for $2,000
you have to factor in $500 for cost of goods.
$125 + $500 + $350 + $100 + $450 + $500 =
$2,025
When you break it down, I drove twenty-seven
hours to lose $25 for the company. At least I got to
meet some interesting people and I got to see Austin.
My friend from high school that liked to go to horror
conventions flew down to attend the convention with
his girlfriend. He and his girlfriend drove me out to
the house where they filmed The Texas Chainsaw
Massacre and we took pictures in front of it. We ate
at the Texas Chili Parlor where they shot some of
Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, and I got to see the
plaza at the University of Texas, Austin, where
Charles Whitman killed 16 people from the
observation deck of the clock tower. Sometimes it’s
not about the money. Making money is always nice,
but if you can’t make a lot of money the least you can
do is make sure you have a good time.
Between the two Texas shows, the publisher of my
book set up an in-store signing appearance at a
Barnes & Noble in Long Island to promote my book.
They asked me if I was interested and I said I was. I
drove down to the location a couple hours before the
signing was scheduled. They had posters in standing
displays with the book cover and the time and date of
the signing which I thought was pretty cool. I went in
and walked around. I went to their in-store café and
ordered a chai tea latte. The employees, two young
girls, barely paid any attention to me, much more
interested in their conversation than making my order.
I drank my drink and waited until about an hour
before the scheduled event and checked in at the
information desk. “Hello, can I talk to the manager?”
I think you’re expecting me.” “Who are you?” I
pointed to one of the promotional posters. They
called the manager and suddenly I was a celebrity.
The manager brought me around to meet all of the
store employees and they all had a copy of my book
for me to sign. The manager brought me to the café
and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I held up
my chai tea latte. The girls working the cafe said, “If
we had known who you were there’s no way we
would have charged you.” I told them not to worry
about it.
 The manager showed me up to the second floor
where around five-hundred or so chairs had been set
up in rows. In front of the chairs was a folding table
with a chair behind it. “Expecting a lot of people?” I
asked. “We’ll see.” The manager replied. The
manager asked me if I needed anything else and I
told her that I was all set and that I’d just hang out up
there until it was time for me to do my thing. A half
hour or so before I was scheduled to go on, people
starting coming up to the second floor and filling in the
seats. A young blonde woman and her mother sat in
the front row and I started chatting with them. The
manager came up the stairs with a portable p.a. about
the size of a medium-sized piece of rolling luggage. I
checked my watch and it was time to do whatever I
was going to do. I looked up and the entire place was
filled and there were people standing in the aisles.
Fuck.
I had been in a few bands so I wasn’t nervous
about being in front of people, but this was a lot of
people and they were all there to see me. I decided
to do my best Evening With Kevin Smith routine and
just do an introduction and open the floor up to
questions.
I did exactly that and turned each question into a
ten minute story and managed to make it until the
manager caught my attention and tapped her
wristwatch.
The manager took the mic and said that I’d be
signing books so I shrugged and stayed standing and
about half of the five-hundred or so people lined up to
have me sign my book.
I tried to move expeditiously through the line and
make every little message in the front of every book a
personal one.
I didn’t forget how disappointed I was when I saw
how unenthusiastic Tom Savini looked when I asked
to have my picture taken with him, so if someone
asked to have their picture taken with me I smiled
wide and pointed at them like I was really excited to
meet them.
Some of the people wanted to try and share their
personal stories about paranormal experiences, but
there was a long line to get through, so if they wanted
to share a story I asked them to step to the side and
tell me their story while I kept signing books and
posing for pictures. I think the people felt a bit put off,
but it would be unfair to make everyone else wait
while one person told me their story about how they
thought they lived in a haunted house.
Despite the potential for my method being a bit
dismissive I had a line of four or five people off to the
side waiting to tell me their personal experience.
The girl I had been talking to before the
presentation gave me her card. It was a card for her
dog-walking service. I didn’t have a dog. I realized it
was pretty much a ticket for sex. Thanks lady!
When everyone had their book signed and I had
finished listening to the stories of the people that had
waited to tell me their stories, the manager came up
and thanked me for coming out.
The event had been a huge success.
 The store sold something like 500 copies of my
book. The manager said that she hoped that I
appreciated what they had put together for me. I said
that it wasn’t really about me, but I was glad that the
event was successful and that the store sold a lot of
books and that everyone seemed to have a pleasant
experience.
I left the store and walked across the parking lot
and got into my van filled with merchandise and set
the navigator for the offices of my publisher in
Pennsylvania.
I had called ahead and told my publisher that I
would be stopping by to pick up a case of books. I
showed up at their building the next morning after a
ten hour drive and was really impressed. It was a
huge warehouse with a tasteful suite of offices built
into a corner of it. When I entered the lobby, there
was a sign with movable letters that said “Welcome to
our authors!” and had my name and the name of
another author on it, so that was nice. I went up the
stairs and introduced myself.
The president of the company came out and gave
me a tour. I got to meet my editor and the marketing
department. I had a meeting with the president in his
office and we discussed the possibility of having me
work on more book projects. I told him I could pretty
much write anything they needed me to. He took me
down to the warehouse. It was like the end scene
from Raiders of the Lost Ark, but nothing but books.
Row after row of shelf after shelf forty feet high of
books. The company was old school and actually
printed up all of the books that they offered and this
was where they kept them all.
The president showed me where the book orders
were packed and shipped and how if the books were
damaged in any way they went into two piles of books
stacked on palettes that would be shrink-wrapped and
sent to the pulpers to be recycled back into books. I
saw all of the books that were destined to be recycled
and they looked in decent condition to me. I asked if I
could have some and he said I could have as many
as I could carry. While I was picking books he
brought over the case of forty books that I said I
would be coming by to pick up. I stacked the books
that I took on top of the case of my books and walked
out of there with a pile of something like thirty books
stacked up in two or three stacks up to my nose. The
president told me that the cost of the case of my
books would be taken out of my first royalty
statement. At the time that sounded fine.
I got into my van and headed towards Texas.
The goal was to try to sell my case of books at
retail price at the conventions I was attending anyway.
It didn’t exactly work out as planned. People from
other parts of the country really weren’t interested in a
book about paranormal activity in Long Island. I
mostly just ended up giving them away to friends that
were interested in reading a book I had written. When
I received my first royalty statement, it was for about a
thousand dollars, but $600 of it had been charged off
for the box of books. That might not be right, but it
sounds about right.
 Whenever I was at a convention and I’d meet
someone who called themselves an author, I’d
mention that I had written a book too. I never had the
same fire in my eyes that they seemed to have.
Although I had written a book, and could look
myself up on the in-store computers whenever I’d go
to a Borders or a Barnes & Noble, I never felt the
need to call myself an author. I didn’t struggle to
write. Sure it was difficult, but I didn’t suffer with the
urge to write burning inside of me, consuming me
from the inside like a fire. I never said that I was born
to write and that it was my purpose in life. A few of
the authors I met were also publishers and they had
the idea to put together collections of short stories.
They invited me to contribute stories if that was
something I was interested in. I would write a story.
They came easily. They were accepted, and usually
the books were published. In addition to my first
book, I started to build a resume of publishing credits.
I set up an author central account and I had five or six
books linked to my profile. The short story collections
either didn’t sell very well, or the royalties were never
distributed. I usually received a contributor’s copy,
and I put them side-by-side in the wide milk-crate I
used as a milk-crate.
My editor asked if I was interested in writing
another regional paranormal book. This time around
they wanted a book about Buffalo. The city in New
York, not the animal. They asked if I could write in
the same style, but write a book that was twice as
long, because customers preferred longer books.
 I did some research.
I did the same searches I did for the Long Island
book. “haunted” & “Buffalo”. “paranormal” & Buffalo”.
“ghosts” & “Buffalo”. There were about half as many
search results for Buffalo as there had been for Long
Island. I didn’t see how I was going to write a book
twice as long with half as much material. I guess I
could fill the pages with a bunch of extra words, but
I’ve never really been one to fluff. I like to think of
myself as somewhat of a minimalist. I am also of the
opinion that a book should be as long as it needs to
be, but no longer and usually a little shorter. I wrote
up a chapter outline, an introduction and a couple
chapters, but my heart really wasn’t in it. It seemed
like a lot of work for relatively little compensation.
Another six months of writing instead of anything else
I could be doing with my time. In exchange for those
months of ascetic writing, I would get, maybe $600 if I
was lucky. A hundred dollars a month. Three dollars
a day. It didn’t seem like a very good deal.
I wanted to write, and I had been watching a lot of
horror movies. Not only because I enjoy the genre,
but also so that I could stay on top of what was
popular and keep that in mind when planning the
marketing and product development for the horror
genre merchandising company I was working for.
The trend at the time was towards what has come to
be called “torture porn”. The film Hostel had been
quite successful and two sequels were made.
I had read Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
and although I recognized it as a great literary work, I
wasn’t as offended as some people had been.
Granted, it was published in 1991, and I was coming
to it in 2006, and popular culture had changed in the
fifteen years between, but I think the book didn’t go as
far as it could have, especially in consideration of the
horror films that were being made and distributed at
the time. I decided I wanted to write the most vile and
reprehensible book I could. My only hard limits were
no pedophilia and no animal cruelty because not only
do they really do nothing for me, but they were easy
targets to offend and alienate readers. I wanted to
focus on man’s capability for inhumanity to other
members of its species, in particular, male frustration
and anger directed towards woman as I had been
seeing played out in the horror films that were being
released at the time.
I wrote the book and tried to find a publisher, but
either they wouldn’t read it or weren’t interested in
publishing it.
My boss started saying that it was difficult to run a
business with someone that he couldn’t meet with in
person regularly. He asked me if I would be
interested in moving back to Long Island again.
He said that things would be different this time.
The business was doing well enough that he wanted
to rent some office space and set up an office for us
to work in. I told him that I would need more money
than I had been getting the last time around. He
asked how much I would need and I told him that I
could probably make it work if I made $1,200 a month
and $350 a month to do conventions. In addition to
wanting to be a good employee and help to build the
business I had a girlfriend that lived in Danbury. It
was about two hours away from where I was living in
Rhode Island, but only about an hour away from
where I would be living if I moved to Long Island. I
figured I could work during the week and either I could
go up to visit her or she could come down to visit me
in Long Island on the weekends. We could go into
Manhattan and experience the city and it wouldn’t be
as lonely as it had been the last time I moved to Long
Island.
I moved to Long Island and my boss had rented an
office space for us to set up shop in. The place was a
bit run down, but had a lot of potential. We joked
about it looking like a Russian porn dungeon. The
kind of place you’d lure young aspiring actresses to
so you could use them to make snuff films.
The weekend after I moved to Long Island my
girlfriend broke up with me to start dating a guy she
had met at the community college she was attending.
It was the weekend before Valentine’s Day and I took
it hard. The only thing that saved me was throwing
myself into my work. I’d paint and renovate the office
sixteen or twenty hours a day, then just lay down and
sleep on the floor until I woke up and then work for
another sixteen or twenty hours. There was a 7-11 in
walking distance but I wasn’t really interested in
eating. I wasn’t really interested in anything. So I
smoked a pack a day and worked twenty hours a day
and lost a lot of weight. People told me I looked
great, but I felt miserable.
 We would get wholesale orders through a major
distributor providing merchandise through a catalog to
comic book shops and other distributors of t-shirts
and novelty merchandise. My boss would propose
five or six designs, the company would pick two or
three and offer the designs for pre-order. If there
were sales, and there usually were, the sales were
forwarded to us with half of the payment. We kept
half of that and sent half to our screen-printer to make
the shirts. We’d get the shipment of shirts to fulfill the
order in nine or ten big boxes of repurposed t-shirt
boxes. The screenprinter would order the shirts,
screen-print the designs onto the shirts, then pack the
shirts back into the boxes and ship them to us. My
boss would print up price labels on sticker paper tabs
and the inventory and shipping invoices. There were
three major distribution centers for the merchandise
distributor, so the shirts had to be split approximately
three ways and each shirt had to be packed in its own
thin plastic bag. It took me about a week to pack the
order and have it ready to be picked up by Fed ex.
There were between 3,000 and 5,000 shirts for each
design, but, remember, I was working twenty hour
days. We would always order a couple hundred extra
shirts to take to the conventions and sell through the
online store.
I didn’t like being in my apartment. There wasn’t
anything there for me.
I would make it a point to be home Sunday nights
for the first season of The Walking Dead, but other
than that it was just a place where my things were.
 I’d go home to shower and change my clothes, but
there was a toilet at the office.
After the first month, my boss’s business partner
found a great set of couches on the curb and we
drove the van over and picked them up and moved
them into the office. The three-seater was quite
comfortable and eight-feet long, so I had something to
sleep on between my twenty hour work binges.
We got an order for 5,000 Zombie Outbreak
Survival Kits.
This was the product that had pretty much
launched my boss’s business.
It was a vinyl pouch that kind of looked like a first-
aid kit. Inside were twenty-five bits of paper and
trash. Stickers and posters and little signs. Four
cards picturing zombies and four cards picturing
quasi-military zombie-killing characters from the
universe of the show that my boss was never able to
get picked up for production. He decided to revise the
kit for the latest incarnation. Before there was a
single button. Now there would be four buttons. One
for each division of the imaginary zombie killing
pseudo-military force from his TV pilot.
The contents of the kit cost about $4.50 We sold
them wholesale for $10 each. The distributor sold
them for $15 each and the retailer sold them for
whatever they wanted to. We sold them at
conventions and the website for $20 each.
$15.50 profit on 5,000 Zombie Outbreak Survival
Kits is 77,500
We wouldn’t make all of the money at once, but it
was still a pretty big deal for the company.
The items that would be put inside the kit were
priced out, the best price was compared with the best
quality and the materials were ordered. The contents
of the kits came in dozens of dozens of cardboard
boxes.
5,000 of each of the four 5” X 7” signs that would
be put together in sets of four and packed into the
kits. 5,000 11” X 17” “What to do in the event of a
zombie outbreak” posters, a well-produced parody of
the first-aid posters found in most workplace break
rooms. 5,000 of each of the eight cards that would
be bundled together into eight card sets. 50 rolls of
“Zombie Outbreak” caution taped that would be cut
down to ten foot strips and rolled into little tubes and
tucked into the kits. My boss bought a button-making
kit and bought a little over 5,000 button-back pins and
clear plastic button plastic. There were also 5,000 CD
roms that would be packed into 5,000 black paper
sleeves. The CD roms had supplementary material
like hi-res versions of the Zombie Outbreak poster
and computer desktop backgrounds.
My job would be to take these 5,000 units of the 25
ingredients. 125,000 little bits of chaff, and turn them
into 5,000 finished Zombie Outbreak Survival Kits.
The order was actually for 3,500 Zombie Outbreak
Survival Kits, but, like usual, we ordered a bit more to
have to sell at conventions and through the online
store.
I approached the task one component at a time.
Our internet provider had blocked the port to Pirate
Bay, and I didn’t know about proxy sites, so I used a
trick my high school friend had taught me about
looking up the album art for whatever I wanted and
looking for results on blogs and downloading the
albums in MP3 format from MediaFire.
I would look up a genre of music and download
everything readily available in that genre. I
downloaded a respectable library of punk, metal,
black metal, thrash metal, and blues. I’d set my
laptop’s playlist to a band or genre and listen to their
entire discography, deleting what I didn’t like as I went
along. I’d sit at a long conference table that my boss
had either bought or found for the office. Two boxes
of ingredients to my left, a box for the combined
ingredients to my right. First I folded the 11” X 17”
Zombie Outbreak Instructions poster and tucked them
into the plastic pouches. That way instead of having
5,000 posters and 5,000 pouches, I would have 5,000
pouches with posters in them. Then I took all of the
pouches with posters in them and put them to my left
with four boxes, one for each of the four 5” X 7” mini-
posters that would go into the packets. I’d take one of
each of the mini-posters and put them into the pouch
with the poster in it and put the pouch with the 11” X
17” poster and four 5” X 7” posters in it into the empty
box to my right. I did that 5,000 times and then I had
5,000 pouches with 5,000 11” X 17” Zombie Outbreak
posters and 5,000 of each of four 5” X 7” mini-posters
inside of them.
It was mind-numbing work, but someone had to do
it, and that someone was me. The music helped and
I was actually glad to have a task to occupy my time
and take my mind away from the bottomless pit of
depression I was perpetually falling into.
My boss would come in each day around 9 a.m.
and leave around 5 p.m.
He had a little office area and he would spend the
day trying to develop new business and calling his
industry contacts and taking care of any graphic
design work that was necessary for the company. I
was there when he showed up in the morning, and I
was there when he left at night. He was getting quite
a bargain for his $1,200 a month.
I had a female friend that was living in Philadelphia
that needed to get out of town. She had a lot of
offers, but all of the offers had implicit sexual strings
attached. I told her that she could come up to Long
Island and live in my apartment since I was never
really there. I told her that she didn’t have to fuck me.
I clarified that if she was of a mind to, I wouldn’t put
up much of a fight, but I wouldn’t be chasing her
around the apartment with a boner trying to put it
inside her. I told her that she could stay the first
month for free, so she’d have a chance to get back on
her feet and find some kind of work in the area, and
that each month after that she could pay $50, and $50
more each month until she was paying half the rent.
My landlord didn’t really like the idea, but I was a
good tenant and paid my rent on time each month
and I told them that it was going to be a temporary
arrangement and if there were any problems after my
friend moved in I’d take full responsibility.
 I drove the van down to Philadelphia and we
packed her stuff into the van and drove it up to Long
Island. The apartment was pretty much a studio with
a small kitchenette and a small bathroom. There was
a three-quarter wall dividing the apartment about two-
thirds to one-third and my king-sized bed took up
most of the space in the one-third so I told her she
could have the other two-thirds of the place as her
space. She didn’t have any money, so I told her I
would buy her food and cigarettes if she came to the
office and helped me put together zombie kits until
she found a job.
If I slept at the apartment, I would wake her up and
take her in and we’d make zombie kits for eight hours.
I’d buy her lunch and tobacco and I’d take her back to
the apartment in the evening, then go back and
assemble zombie kits until I either went back to the
apartment to sleep or slept at the office.
It wasn’t a bad life. It was nice to have someone
around I could talk with and joke with and to help pass
the time while making the zombie kits. We’d sit
across the table from each other with the laptop
between us listening to music and stuffing the
pouches. She was on a classic country kick and I
downloaded a ten disc Hank Williams set and a five
disc Johnny Cash set and we listened to those all the
way through. My boss was a fan of 80s post-punk
pop music like Adam Ant and Siouxsie and The
Banshees, so after about a week of classic country he
begged us to listen to something else. So we listened
to the entre Tom Waits discography in chronological
order. The deal was, we could listen to anything we
wanted, but anyone else in the office had the right to
veto, so my boss wouldn’t have to spend the whole
day grinding his teeth in his office listening to black
metal and I didn’t have to listen to eight hours of Elvis
Costello. Not that I mind Elvis Costello, but there’s
such a thing as too much of a good thing.
We were still doing conventions about once a
month. There was a girl I used to be friends with on
MySpace that lived on Long Island that I decided to
try to find on Facebook. I found her and I told her
what I did for work and asked her if she wanted to
come out to a convention and work as a booth girl.
She said she did, but that she wanted to come by the
office and meet me and my boss and make sure we
weren’t going to use her to make a snuff video and
dump her into the sound. I said that was perfectly
fine, and made an appointment for her to stop by the
office and meet everyone. My female friend and I
were outside on a smoke break. A tan sedan pulled
up alongside the building. There was an older woman
driving and a young woman with pink hair in the
backseat. They were arguing and then they drove off.
My friend and I looked at each other wryly. “Is that
the girl you were expecting to come by?” she asked.
“I guess?” I said, and then we went back to smoking.
The girl messaged me and said that her mother didn’t
want her to do the convention, but if I came around
and picked her up she would sneak out and come
with us. She was an adult, so I don’t know why she
wasn’t allowed to go to the convention. She didn’t
seem like she was retarded or otherwise not allowed
to make decisions on her own. Maybe it was one of
those situations where he was still living at home and
it was a “my house / my rules” kind of thing. I told her
there was no way that I was going to pull up and drive
off with a girl, taking her two states away for the
weekend when her parents weren’t going to give her
the permission to do so, and, for that matter, why the
hell did she need permission if she was an adult? It
was a weird situation, and I’m glad I knew enough to
avoid it.
I took my female friend to the show as my booth
girl. She didn’t come back to the room on the
Saturday night and it was none of my business as
long as she wasn’t being gang-raped or murdered.
Turns out she met up with and hooked up with a
friend of mine from Rhode Island that was a
convention celebrity talent rep. He was a few years
older than I was, and she was a few years younger
than I was. She had gauged ears and tattoo sleeves
right down to her knuckles. If he had a tattoo I never
saw it. I knew it wouldn’t last in the long run but I was
glad they had found each other and seemed to make
each other happy. My friend moved out, and I started
to patch things up with my girlfriend in Connecticut.
My boss decided to start dabbling in dolls. My
boss’s business partner had a fairly successful
business in his garage making replacement pieces for
a line of comic-book themed eight-inch action figures
that were popular in the 1970s. My boss smelled
money in the water and worked with his friend to put
together a proposal for the original creator of the
action figures. The original creator used some of his
industry contacts to get my boss and his friend some
meetings with one of the two major comic book
companies. They decided to do a re-launch of the
product line and introduce new characters in several
waves. The success of each wave would determine
if there would be a next wave.
My boss and his friend received the contract to
make the prototypes. The way a toy is made is that a
prototype of the toy is made in the United States.
Then the prototype is sent to China and they reverse
engineer the toy into its component parts, figure out
how to make ten thousand of each part, then put them
back together, heat seal them into plastic clamshells,
and send them to the United States to be distributed
to stores.
My boss and his friend would be paid $50,000 for
each prototype they produced. There were four
action figures per wave, and two waves a year, so
that was $400,000 a year. My boss threw all of his
energy into the new business.
The profit margin of the conventions had been
steadily decreasing. A show that had made $8,500
the first year we attended, made $7,000 the next year,
and $5,500 the third year as the country went deeper
into a recession. Unemployment increased and
people had less money to spend on things that they
didn’t need at conventions, so they’d save their
money to spend on celebrity autographs, and the
price of celebrity autographs had been going up about
$5 every half year so they were up to an industry
minimum of $20 and a $50 low-end for major
celebrities.
I started to run out of certain sizes of some of the t-
shirt designs in the warehouse. Then whole designs.
My boss was still siphoning off the profits from the
conventions and the online store, but he wasn’t
reinvesting any of it in purchasing new merchandise
to replace the merchandise that we had sold at a
profit to generate the revenue he was siphoning off.
We made it through the holiday season, but in the
dead period in January, my boss told me that the
horror-genre merchandising company wasn’t making
enough money for him to continue to pay me my
monthly salary. I pointed out that he had been
siphoning off the profits and not reinvesting any of it,
so I had people waiting for me to e-mail them when
we had a design they wanted in a size they wanted in
stock again. He wasn’t buying it. He had found
something that made a lot more money. The online
store is still up. It looks like most of the stuff available
through the store is merchandise distributed by third-
party vendors, so the site is more of a horror-genre-
merchandise aggregator than it is an actual brand
making its own merchandise.
My boss told me he would pay me a month’s
salary as a separation compensation and I could
either work that month out or not, depending on what I
wanted to do. I made sure that all outstanding orders
were packed and shipped and told everyone that I
had been having conversations with that they could
refer any future inquiries to the owner of the company.
I moved to Connecticut to be with my girlfriend.
Chapter 41:
Convention Coordinator

During the last year I worked as a Brand Manager

for the horror genre merchandising company, my
boss got a unique offer.
A former business partner of his on the west coast
had been booking genre conventions for decades.
They would book regional conventions in first and
second tier demographic cities featuring celebrities
from horror and sci-fi television shows. They’d work
out a contract with four or five stars from, for example,
Buffy The Vampire Slayer. They’d book a convention
hall in, for example, Cincinnati, Ohio. They’d charge
attendees $40 a ticket to come down and meet the
stars of the shows that they knew and loved. The
fans got to meet the actors they idolized, the actors
made some easy money signing 8” X 10” glossy
photos of themselves and having hundreds of fans tell
them nice things about themselves, and the
convention company recouped the cost they spent to
guarantee that the talent would show up as
advertised. They had a different event in a different
place every weekend of the year. It was a pretty
decent little business.
Each year they would do a big horror show. They
had a guy on staff that helped to run the weekly
conventions, but he was also the point person for the
big horror show. The guy supposedly had a bad
break up and went into a flaming tailspin and the
convention company had to regretfully inform him that
his services were no longer needed. The convention
company called my boss and asked him if he was
interested in the job.
My boss told them he wasn’t really interested
because he had his own stuff to work on, but thanked
them for thinking of him. Then he told me about their
offer and that he turned it down. I lost my fucking
mind.
I told them to call them back and tell them that he’d
take the gig and I’d do most of the work and he could
take the credit. I always wanted to run my own horror
convention and here was a once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to book a horror convention with someone
else’s money. I asked my boss what they were
offering to pay him to coordinate the convention and
he said they were offering $10,000.
My boss called his friends back and said he’d take
the gig. My boss and I worked it out that since I
would be doing most of the work, I’d get 85% of the
commission and he’d keep 15% for helping me out
with the stuff that I couldn’t handle, like graphic
design. Actually that was pretty much the only thing I
couldn’t handle.
The convention company told me that they had
locked Bruce Campbell as their big guest for Saturday
night and they had spent $50K to get him to lock in
contractually so they could promote his appearance.
Other than that, the guest list was wide open. I was
given a general idea of how much I could spend to
pursue guests and what I was allowed to offer to
guests that I was negotiating with.
 The convention company had an in house girl that
would draft and expedite the contracts once the terms
had been agreed to, and they had another girl that
would arrange the travel and hotel room at the host
hotel if travel and hotel were part of what we were
offering the celebrity to participate in the convention.
I was forwarded all of the e-mails and contacts that
the previous guy that had been doing the job had
been given. I didn’t get access to all of his personal
contacts and connections. I was just pretty much
forwarded all of the inquiries that had been forwarded
to and would normally be forwarded to that guy.
The convention company had been doing
conventions so long that they were set in their ways.
Their method was a big guest each night of the
conventions and twenty or thirty minor guests that
would either appear all weekend or day by day.
There were other, newer conventions that had
established dominance in their own territories and
they were doing business differently and hurting the
attractiveness of the convention company’s major
horror convention. Even in Los Angeles, their home
territory, there was a newer convention that was
giving them some serious competition. For their big
Sunday guest there was talk of having Clive Barker.
The convention company’s owner said that the
convention company had a working relationship with
Clive, so the negation process would be easy and he
would most likely agree to be a guest for a reasonable
rate. I had a friend that was representing Norman
Reedus and Sean Patrick Flannery as The Boondock
Saints. They were familiar with the national
convention model, in which, for a set fee, the
celebrities would be in attendance and available all
three days. I told the convention company that we
could have both of them and their friend Rocco for
$7,500, travel and lodging. The company wasn’t
convinced that it was a good deal, because they
thought that they would just be there for the Friday,
and Norman Reedus hadn’t blown up as Darryl on
The Walking Dead yet. I had to tell the company
several times that it would be $7,500 for all three
days. “All three days? Why would they want to be
there all three days?”
Another problem was that the convention company
was so old school that they really hadn’t kept up with
the past ten years of horror films. It will probably
happen to me too someday. It already kind of has.
But at the time I was watching a couple movies a
night, and I knew who everyone was and who had
been in what and what they were going to be in that
was going to come out later that year.
I would get the e-mails from all of the convention
celebrity reps pitching their stable of celebrities, and I
also contacted the celebrity reps that I had become
acquainted with during the five years I had been
vending at horror conventions. I wasn’t a social
climber. I’ve never been one to try to become
acquainted with someone to increase my own social
standing. But when you do a lot of the same
conventions with people, they become like a second
family. They’re the people you can swing by and ask
to keep an eye on your booth if your table help
doesn’t show up and you think you’re going to piss
yourself.
The convention talent representatives are few and
fiercely competitive. The celebrities don’t want to
have to negotiate with the convention organizers
directly, so the celebrities work with representatives
that they pay a percentage of their convention
appearance fee to do the negotiations for them.
If you’re a big horror movie celebrity like, Bruce
Campbell or George Romero or Dario Argento, and
you can ask for forty or fifty thousand dollars a
weekend for a personal appearance, your convention
representative can make four or five thousand dollars
a weekend acting as an intermediary.
Some celebrity reps have a small and select stable
of celebrities they represent and others have a huge
stable of mid to b-level celebrities that they represent.
I knew how much most of the celebrities were paid to
be at the conventions because, as a vendor, I had
spoken with most of the talent reps and convention
organizers so I knew how much to offer a celebrity to
appear at the convention I was booking. Working
against me was the fact that the convention company
had a reputation for having deep pockets.
Tony Todd asked for twice what he was usually
receiving for an appearance at other comparable
conventions and I had to, as politely as possible,
suggest that we would be pleased to have him in
attendance if he would accept a lower guarantee. He
would not, and we declined his offer. Pam Grier
wanted $8,000 and first class airfare from Denver. I
was and am well aware of who Pam Grier is.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that Pam has a solid
background in Blaxploitation, her horror film resume is
pretty sparse. Unless you consider Ghosts of Mars a
horror film. Just because it was directed by John
Carpenter doesn’t make it a horror film. I knew that
announcing her participation in the convention would
please a certain subsection of the attendees, but for
the same $8,000 and standard airfare I could get two
celebrities somewhere along the status of Sid Haig,
Bill Moseley, or Ken Foree, which would please a lot
more of the attendees. I counter-offered $6K and
business class. She declined and she got to stay
home and do whatever she would rather do that
weekend.
I managed to get around twenty or thirty decent
celebrities to agree to participate in the convention so
we could announce their appearance on the website
for the convention.
My boss called in a few favors and touched a few
of his contacts and put together a Maniac Cop
reunion and booked a bunch of his old friends from
the horror business as guests and panelists. He also
did all of the graphic design for the website and the
collateral for the show, the show program. If it was a
picture, he designed it. He earned his cut of the
commission.
In addition to booking the celebrities, I was also
responsible for scheduling the programming and
coordinating the vendors for the convention.
 Since I had been a convention vendor for five
years, I knew most of the vendors that booked tables
at most of the conventions. Also, since I was a
vendor, I was familiar with the kind of information that
vendors needed to know. Vendors exist in an odd
sort of limbo participating in conventions. They
usually pay more than any attendee to be at the
convention, but are usually not treated as guests.
Conventions tend to treat vendors as if allowing them
to rent tables to sell their wares is a privilege the
conventions are granting the vendors, rather than
viewing the vendors as a value add for the
convention. Since I had been treated like a
mercenarial carpet-bagger at several conventions I
had been a vendor at, I insisted that for the
convention I was coordinating that the vendors be
entitled to the same privileges that all of the other
convention attendees were entitled to. Nothing too
extraordinary. But at the end of a long day of having
to load in and set up your booth and making small talk
and trying to sell some of the stuff you brought to sell,
it’s nice to even be able to get into the desert party or
to be allowed in with general admission passes to the
evening’s presentations.
The week before the convention arrived.
Part of the deal was that the convention company
would fly my boss and I out the week before the
convention and put us up at the host hotel so that we
could be on the same coast to iron out any last minute
issues that needed to be addressed. I went out a
couple days before my boss came out. I got on a
train to JFK, then a plane to Los Angeles. I left at
night and arrived the next morning. I went from a
brisk New England in October to another warm, sunny
day in Los Angeles. I’m a pretty competent traveler,
so when I got off the plane I picked up my bag and
just started walking. Turns out that the host venue
was only about a mile away and across a street. I
checked in and went to sleep.
The next day my boss and his business partner
came out and my boss drove me to the offices of the
convention company. I was having a meeting in Los
Angeles. I met all of the people that I had been doing
business with over the phone and through e-mail for
the eight months that we spent preparing for the
show. They were all quite welcoming and it helped to
take some of the pressure off of the whole thing.
My boss and I went back to the host venue and
checked to see how the preparations for the event
were progressing. The staging and drapery and
tables and chairs that I had ordered had arrived and
been installed correctly, in accordance with the floor
plan that my boss and I had put together. The
banners that my boss had designed were being put
up. The whole thing was coming together.
I had a friend from the convention circuit fly out to
be my right-hand man for the convention. He paid for
his own flight, but he stayed in my hotel room and I’m
fairly certain I paid him a decent per diem for being
my assistant. He was a regular convention attendee,
so he wouldn’t be caught off guard by anything I
asked him to do.
 I also had a local girl that had e-mailed the horror-
genre merchandising company asking if we needed
booth girls for the Los Angeles area. I told her that
we didn’t but that I’d keep her in mind if we ever made
it out that way. I was good for my word and asked her
if she wanted free passes for her and her boyfriend
for the weekend and $50 a day to be my personal
assistants for the weekend.
Friday morning the vendors started to load in
around 8 a.m. Either that or they had loaded in the
night before. I think it was the night before, because I
think the convention opened fairly early Friday
morning for some reason. Most people have Monday
through Friday / Nine-to-Five jobs, so I didn’t see the
point in having the convention start early on Friday,
but if some people were coming in on vacation just to
attend the convention then I guess they had the time
on their hands to show up early on the Friday.
The celebrities showed up to take their places at
their assigned tables. Sid Haig was pissed when I
told him that he’d have a table next to Ken Foree. Not
that he and Ken didn’t get along, but unbeknownst to
me, he had been contractually guaranteed a two-table
spread and he had brought the booth gear to spread
out. I asked Ken if he minded changing spaces and
he didn’t mind, so that problem was solved. My friend
that repped The Boondock Saints couldn’t make it out
to be at the convention, so I assigned the girl I hired
from the west coast to hang out at their table and
make sure that the three of them were well taken care
of and to get them anything they needed within
reason.
There were four or five volunteers provided by the
convention company. I don’t know where they found
these volunteers, but they were either useless or too
weird to be trusted. I can handle weird people, but
not the useless kind of weird where you’re not sure if
you can trust them to be left unsupervised to handle
simple tasks.
General admission was opened and the attendees
started flooding in. I spent the entire day walking
back and forth through the combined celebrity/vendor
rooms and making sure that everyone was doing
okay, checking to see if they needed a water or
someone to cover their table while they took a
bathroom break if they were there by themselves.
About once an hour I had to go by the front desk and
handle something at the admission desk. Someone
that was supposed to be on the guest list or have a
free pass or a press pass that had been added that
week and hadn’t made it onto the list that was e-
mailed to and printed up by the admissions staff.
Nothing against the admissions staff. The woman in
charge of the staff was whip-smart and leather-tough.
I’d work my way from one end of the convention to
the other, duck into the staff break area to grab a few
cubes of cheese and a couple crackers from the
platters that we had the hotel put together for us, then
I’d make my way back in the other direction and go
outside and have a cigarette. Back and forth, all day
and all night, like a shark.
Whenever an issue would arise, I would either
handle it personally right then and there, or I’d ask my
assistant to handle it. When my assistant was
finished handling whatever I asked him to handle for
me he’d come and find me again and there was
usually something else for me to ask him to help me
handle.
Halfway through the Friday, I was called to
admission because there was a man there that said
that we were expecting him, but his name wasn’t on
any of the lists. I went to admission and introduced
myself and the man said he was Greg Travis. I said it
was nice to meet him, and asked what we could do
for him. He said that he was supposed to be a
celebrity guest. Since I had personally vetted every
guest for the convention and assigned them a table, I
panicked. Had I somehow managed to forget
someone? I didn’t recognize the name, so I said,
“This is embarrassing, but I don’t know who you are.
What movie were you in?” He said, “Rob Zombie’s
Halloween.” “Oh! Okay! Which character did you
play?” “I was the sheriff.” “Oh… okay… What else
were you in?” He told me another movie that he had
played a supporting character in. Then another. I
figured out that he had been in a lot of really great
movies as characters with a couple lines of dialogue.
What I also figured out was that his convention rep
had told him to just come down to the convention and
that we would be expecting him, without checking with
or getting confirmation from the convention first, so
we weren’t expecting him.
We were already at fire capacity for table space in
the floor plan, but the fire marshal had already come
by and done his walk-through and had been paid off
and left. I contacted the hotel staff and had them
bring me out another table. I set the table up in front
of a dog-leg that led out to a set of panic doors in the
corner of the building, but it was also one of the first
things that people would see if they turned right when
entering the convention. I told him, “Look, here’s the
deal. Your convention rep fucked you. He sent you
down here without even checking with us and I am
terribly embarrassed that we weren’t expecting you
and that I didn’t recognize you and absolutely furious
with your convention rep. I don’t have any empty
tables because we’re at capacity for fire code, but I
can make this table appear out of nowhere for you
and you’re welcome to have it for the day. The only
condition is that this is where the line for the Bruce
Campbell ticketed signing is going to go through, right
out those doors behind you, so when we start setting
up for his signing, around eight o’clock, you’re going
to have to give up the space. Will that work for you?”
He said it would and popped the locks on his
briefcase and started spreading out the movie stills of
his brief appearances in several excellent films. One
of the soldiers that didn’t have a character name in
Starship Troopers. The guy that Robert Loggia drags
out of a BMW and pistol-whips in Lost Highway. The
sheriff from Rob Zombie’s Halloween. I think he
appreciated me making the best out of a bad situation
and he really did have an excellent spot to sit and
explain to people who he was all day long. Eight
p.m. rolled around and I told him that the time had
come and he was good for his word.
There was a weird transition where the attendees
that had only had a day pass were herded out and the
vendor areas were secured. The main ballroom was
set up for the Bruce Campbell Q & A and the tables
were set up for his ticketed signing. I made sure
there wasn’t anyone in the convention but us carnies
and went to the staff break room to take the weight off
of my feet for a few minutes before I was assuming
the responsibility for supervising the security for the
Bruce Campbell signing. There were little cheese
circles cut in half with red and yellow rinds. I ate six
or eight of them and my boss and his friend came
over and sat at the same table and we started
chatting. My boss’s friend removed the yellow and
red rinds from the cheese halves before eating them.
My boss’s friend got up to make another trip to the
hors d’oeuvres table. I leaned over to my boss and
asked, “You’re not supposed to eat the rinds on those
little cheeses are you?” “No.” he replied “That’s wax.
Why?” I smiled sheepishly. “You ate the wax, didn’t
you?” “Yeah…” “How many did you eat?” “Six?
Eight?” My boss tilted his head and thought for a
second and said, “Well, I don’t think they’d let them
put cheese inside it if it wasn’t edible, so you’ll
probably be okay. It should pass in a day or so.”
“Well, if not, maybe I’ll shit a candle.”
My back was to the door to the room and the door
opened and the room went quiet. I didn’t turn around,
because I didn’t want to be the first one to be shot in
case it was a religious fanatic with an assault rifle. A
firm hand clamped itself on my shoulder and I
followed the hand to a wrist to an arm clad in the
sleeve of a white tuxedo jacket, above the lapels of
the jacket was a chin that was the envy of many a
weak-chinned man. Bruce Campbell looked down at
me and said, “How ya doin’ buddy?” and shook my
hand and that broke the silence in the room.
I got up and excused myself and checked with
Bruce’s personal convention assistant to make sure
that everything was set up the way they wanted it to
be for his signing. A clear line from the entrance to
his table with a fifteen foot space so that each person
could have their five minutes of personal time with
Bruce, and a clear path to the exit where the fans
would be escorted if they had to be escorted out.
One box each of blue, black, and silver sharpies and
a glass with three fingers of top shelf tequila for him to
sip between signings. I think he did the Q & A first
and then came out for the ticketed signing. It’s been
something like five years since that weekend so some
things are fuzzy and other things clear like they were
yesterday.
The signing went off without any major incident.
When Bruce had left, he left behind all of the Sharpie
markers and the glass he had drank the tequila from,
and I figured they would make decent little souvenirs
for people that I didn’t buy souvenirs for while I was
out there. “I didn’t buy you anything… but here’s a
Sharpie marker that Bruce Campbell used once.
Okay? Are we even?”
 The last of the staff were escorted out and I called
security and personally walked the perimeter of the
convention hall and made sure that the place was
empty and all of the doors were securely locked. The
security officer told me that he was the only one that
had the keys to the place and there were cameras
and motion detectors, but I wanted to personally
make sure that the place was secure for the night so I
wouldn’t have to spend the whole night camped out
keeping watch.
The next morning was an early one since I had to
be awake and aware before everyone else to call
security and have them unlock the building. The
vendors were allowed in an hour before the general
admission so that they could reset their booths and be
ready for the day. I walked around and chatted with
each one for a couple minutes making sure that they
had a decent Friday and had everything they needed
for the Saturday. One of the vendors, a guy that was
selling a bunch of toys and retro horror memorabilia
said that there was a problem. He said that there was
a Shogun Warriors action figure missing. I knew that
this was going to be an expensive problem to fix.
Before we were hired on to coordinate this
convention, our company had helped to coordinate a
temporary museum of horror memorabilia at the
competing convention in the Los Angeles area. We
had a good relationship with a toy and comic book
store in Long Island that carried our merchandise.
We asked them if we could borrow some of the
vintage toys from their window displays and they let
us borrow them and pack them up and ship them out
to Los Angeles to be a part of the toy museum. My
boss was careful to document and manifest the
contents and condition of each box, but when they
were shipped back, one of the boxes went missing.
Inside that box was a Shogun Warriors Godzilla. The
price tag on that two-foot toy was $250. My boss
apologized for the lost box, even though it wasn’t our
fault and paid the guy the full purchase price for
everything that had gone missing. It was the kind of
guy my boss was nine out of ten times, if given the
choice, he’d do the right thing.
So I knew that this vendor missing a vintage
Shogun Warrior toy was going to cost me a decent
chunk of the $500 I had asked for as per diem/in
case/shut up money. I told the vendor, “I don’t
understand. I personally made sure that the
convention hall was empty and personally checked all
of the doors to make sure they were locked with
security. Tell me how much the retail item for that
item was, and I will reimburse you right now out of my
own pocket. I’m going to call security and have them
run the video surveillance tapes and see if we can
find out who broke in and stole your Shogun Warrior.
Is anything else missing?” The vendor smiled a
sheepish grin and pulled the Shogun Warrior out from
underneath the table. “Ta da!” I wanted to leap over
the table and choke him until his eyeballs popped out.
It’s tough to get me really angry, but I had worked
hard and slept little. “The next time you want to play a
practical joke n somebody, you’d better pick someone
else.” I said and walked away before I told him to
pack up his shit and get the fuck out of there. I didn’t
stop by and check to see if that booth was doing okay
for the rest of the weekend. Go fetch your own water,
asshole.
The crowd was let in and there were a lot more
people than the day before.
I did the same thing I had done the day before,
walking back and forth and making sure that
everything ran smoothly. Clive Barker showed up and
I made sure he wasn’t mobbed and made it to his
booth. He had just had surgery to remove throat
polyps and he was weak and on painkillers and
couldn’t really talk. I set him up in a little alcove so
that he could sign and meet people but he wouldn’t
have to stand up and take pictures with people all day
long. He was already unsteady on his feet when he
showed up. He’d never last the day if he had to spend
it on his feet. He had a personal assistant and I
showed them the area. There was a little
passageway that led back to his alcove. It would be
perfect for Clive to have a little place to rest and
recuperate every couple hours if he needed to and we
had the hotel bring him some hot tea and iced water
so he could have it if he needed it. Clive was happy,
and his assistant told me to stop by at the end of the
night and he’d have something special for me. At the
end of the night I stopped by and Clive’s assistant
handed me something. It was white and thick like a
box. I didn’t want to be rude and inspect whatever it
was right then and there, so I slid it into my courier
bag and shook the assistant’s hand and Clive’s hand
and went off to continue my rounds. When I got back
to my hotel room that night, I checked to see what
Clive’s assistant had handed me. It was a hardcover
collection of Clive’s Books of Blood. I turned to the
frontspiece and Clive had written “Thanks for all of the
help this weekend.”
When I was a teenager, I was walking home one
day and saw a black plastic trash bag someone had
thrown out and saw the corner of some books
peeking out of some holes in the bag. I made sure
that the bag was just filled with books and not
anything vile and brought the trash bag of books
home. The books were mostly horror books and one
of them was one of the Books of Blood from when
they had been released as three separate trade
paperbacks. If you had told me then that ten years
later Clive Barker would give me a personalized
hardcover copy of his Books of Blood, I wouldn’t know
what to say. It’s one of my few prized possessions.
I showered and went to the dessert party. The
dessert party / ice cream social was supposed to be
this big thing for Gold Ticket Package attendees. It
was a separate private event that most of the
celebrities were contractually required to attend. It’s
not a bad deal really. It’s usually a pretty small crowd,
maybe a hundred attendees, and the celebrities are
comped their drinks, so for an extra $100 you can
have a beer or a cookie and a hot fudge sundae and
spend some quality one-on-one time with the stars of
your favorite horror movies. The girl from Los
Angeles I had hired was also part of a freak/burlesque
show. As a side deal, I worked it out so that for a
couple thousand dollars, her freak show/burlesque
troop would be the entertainment for the dessert
party. The party was a bit sedate compared to other
convention parties that I had attended at other
conventions, but everyone seemed to be having a
decent time, so I went back to my hotel room and
went to sleep.
Sunday morning was a lot like Saturday morning. I
woke up early, called security and got the place
opened up. The convention rep that had made me
look unprofessional by telling Greg Travis to just show
up without clearing it with us first had talked the
convention company into programming a special
panel for a film that I had never seen called Hunter’s
Blood. There would be five guests including the
director and they would do a panel and hang out
afterwards and sign for a while. I’ve seen a lot of
horror movies. A lot more than most people.
Probably more than you. If we’re talking statistics, I’m
probably in the 3% of people that have seen the most
horror movies. I had never seen Hunter’s Blood. My
friend from high school had never seen Hunter’s
Blood and usually if I hadn’t seen it, he had seen it.
My boss had not seen Hunter’s Blood and his area of
expertise was about as extensive as mine, except his
was shifted about ten years earlier than my area of
horror movie expertise. He knew more about the
Hammer Horrors and I knew more about the stuff that
had come out that year. The celebrities that would be
in attendance from the film would be Bruce Glover,
the guy that played the grandfather in Pumpkinhead,
two other guys, and the director. We scheduled the
panel for first thing Sunday morning because most of
the three day convention attendees would be sleeping
off their hangovers from the night before and who
gives a shit about these has-beens from a movie that
no one I knew had ever seen.
Bruce Glover arrived and asked to see the
convention organizer. I went over to handle whatever
had to be handled. He was rambling semi-coherently
about how he had been promised that in exchange for
his appearance he would receive a weekend at some
five star hotel in Santa Monica. I told him that it was
the first I had heard of it. The woman that had
handled the contracts was on site that morning so I
had Bruce follow me over to talk with her. She said
that we had definitely not agreed to contractually
provide him with a weekend at a posh hotel in
exchange for his appearance. For that matter, no one
on the panel had been offered anything to appear at
the convention. They were offered the opportunity to
have a reunion, to have a panel presentation hosted
on the main stage, and to sell autographs after their
presentation if they so desired. Bruce said that his
convention rep had promised him a weekend at a
five-star hotel and that if he didn’t get confirmation of
that then he would leave. I said that I meant no
disrespect, but he’d want to take it up with his
convention rep. We definitely weren’t going to be
reserving him any hotel weekends in Santa Monica.
We hadn’t even gotten anyone from that panel a hotel
room for that weekend, much less promised them
five-star reservations for some future vacation in
Santa Monica. But, if he decided he wanted to stay
since he was already there we would be pleased to
have him and I was sure that the other members of
the reunion would be pleased to see him again. I
think he stayed. I don’t remember. I don’t care. I had
other shit to take care of.
I was called to the admission area for another
unexpected celebrity.
It was Billy Drago.
No one told me that he was going to be showing
up that morning. Since I didn’t know he was coming, I
didn’t have a table prepared for him. It was the same
promoter that had already fucked me over twice that
weekend. I asked Billy to follow me. It turns out I had
one empty table for some reason, but it was the worst
table in the convention. It was at the end of a short
hallway next to the fire escape. It had a nice view of
the parking lot, but that was its only saving feature. I
asked Billy to wait for me at the table and I’d be back
in five minutes with someone to make a sign for his
table. I felt awful because someone I was kind of
excited to meet showed up and I had to dump him at
an empty table and try to find someone to try to make
him a sign or at least something so people wouldn’t
be asking him who he was and why he was there all
day long. I mean, I knew who he was, but I was a fan
of some of the films he had been in. I tried to find my
assistant, but he was busy doing something, and I got
hit with five different things while I was trying to find
someone to make Billy feel comfortable and make the
guy a fucking sign at least. But I didn’t get back until
fifteen or twenty minutes later.
And that’s my Billy Drago story.
The rest of the day went relatively uneventfully.
Sundays are relatively slow for most conventions
and things tend to wind down. Convention attendees
make their last purchases and head out early to pack
up their stuff and catch their flights or beat the rush
out on the way home. I hung out until the end of the
day, and made sure that the convention attendees
had cleared out while the vendors broke down their
booths and packed up their merchandise.
Our primary contact at the convention company
found me and congratulated me for coordinating a
successful convention and handed me a check for
$8,500 I thanked him for the opportunity and told him
to keep me in mind for the next one down the road. I
walked across the parking lot and deposited the
check in an ATM.
I went back to the hotel room and took a long
shower and let myself decompress. I had been in full
effect, operating at full intensity for four whole days
and it was nice to not be responsible for anything for a
little while.
My boss had some connections at Universal
Studios and he scored me four free passes to their
Universal Horror Nights attraction. I asked my right
hand man, the local girl I hired and her boyfriend if
they wanted to take advantage of the tickets.
 The girl offered to drive.
I had stepped off the airplane and walked a mile
and spent the entire weekend at the venue. I had
been in Los Angeles, but I hadn’t really seen Los
Angeles.
The girl took my friend and I on a one-night tour of
Los Angeles. We drove down Hollywood Boulevard,
stopped at George Carlin’s star on the walk of fame
and I got my picture taken kneeling next to it. I got to
see Grauman’s Chinese Theatre so I’d have a frame
of reference for when I saw it on television. We drove
past the sign for Beverly Hills, which was enough for
me, and I got to see the Hollywood sign hovering in
the sky off in the distance. We went to the haunted
attraction and the lines were long but we managed to
have fun. We stopped at Astro Burger and I had a
milkshake so good that I bought all of my friends one
and bought all of the shakes that they had left for the
ride. The girl asked me what I wanted to do next and
I said I wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. We drove
out to the Santa Monica piers and hopped the fence
and walked out to the pier so her boyfriend could
show me how the concrete had a weird effect that if
you stood in the middle of the pier and said
something, your voice would echo back at you from
all around you. We climbed down off the pier and I
walked down to the water and took off my shoes and
socks and stood ankle deep in the Pacific Ocean. I
let the waves lap at my ankles for a few minutes. I
turned around and grabbed my shoes and socks.
“That’s it?” the girl asked. “That’s it.” I said, “I just
wanted to see it so that I could say I saw it.” We got
back into the car and headed back to the venue and
the next day I walked back to the airport and got on a
plane to New York.

The convention company decided that they liked

the work that my boss and I had done and decided to
ask us if we wanted to work on the next convention.
They told us that they had been talking to John
Carpenter and were about to lock him in contractually
so they could announce him as the tentpole guest for
the next convention.
My boss had told me that he wouldn’t be able to
continue to pay me my monthly rate so he suggested
that this would be a perfect opportunity for me. Two
conventions a year at $8,500 a convention and I could
probably make what I had been making working for
him. My boss told the convention company that he
would be bowing out of coordinating the next one, but
since I had done something like 90% of the work on
our end that he felt comfortable handing the project
off to me. I also felt comfortable because I could shop
out the graphic design tasks that he had handled for a
lot less than he had been paid to create them. It was
something I was good at and I had already done one,
so it would be relatively easy for me.
When the convention company found out that my
boss was ducking out, they renegotiated and offered
me $4,500 to coordinate the convention. I was newly
unemployed and was planning on making this my job,
so I accepted their new conditions. I didn’t have a lot
of choice in the matter. I had moved up to
Connecticut to be near my girlfriend and my monthly
expenses were chipping away at the rock I had put
away from the last convention and that money
wouldn’t last forever. The convention company put me
in touch with Asia Argento’s convention rep and we
began the negotiation process. Asia has a reputation
for being a bit crazy and hasn’t done a lot of
convention appearances so a convention with both
her and John Carpenter would be a decent start for a
convention. I downloaded and rewatched all of the
John Carpenter films and contacted the convention
reps for the major characters for all of his films. I
knew that it would be unlikely that I would be able to
get or afford Jamie Lee Curtis or Kurt Russell. But
Tom Atkins was known as being relatively easy to
deal with and had done a fair amount of convention
appearances. I also had to tell a bunch of lesser
known / B-movie celebrities that I’d be willing to give
them a free table if they were willing to agree to show
up for the weekend but that their notoriety did not
merit compensation on the part of the convention to
insure their attendance. They were nice people for
the most part, but I had a limited budget and had to
spend it wisely. I remember Kelli Maroney from Night
of the Comet asking what we would pay her to be
there for the weekend. I told her that, by herself, I
would give her a free table and she could sell
autographs and keep whatever she made, but if she
could get in touch with the brunette and the male lead
for the film that I would pay them $2K each and cover
their travel and hotel and they could keep whatever
they made selling autographs on top of that so I could
advertise it as a Night of the Comet reunion.
The convention decided that they wanted to
integrate on-site tattooing for the next convention.
One of the major sponsors was a tattoo magazine.
By “major” I mean about $5,000. But they also had
the attention of a fairly wide audience of readers
whose interests included tattoos and horror movies so
their sponsorship contribution was more than just
monetary. The convention wanted to cater to the
magazine and tattoo enthusiasts so now instead of
coordinating a horror convention, I’m trying to put
together a horror convention / tattoo convention. I
have a fair amount of tattoos so I’m not completely
unfamiliar with tattooing and tattoo culture, but when
you’re trying to set up a big public event where people
are going to get tattooed there are a lot of things that
have to be handled. Each tattooist and tattoo station
has to be provided with an electrical drop, running
water, and a biohazard disposal station. The event
has to be visited by and cleared by the board of
health and we had to contract with a biohazard
disposal company to come by and take care of all of
the biohazard bins at a significant cost to the
convention that they were hoping to defray through
selling booth space to tattooists for the weekend.
I saw what they were thinking, but this was not
what I had agreed to, and I was doing more work this
time around for less money. I’m not sure if you’ve
ever tried to work with the board of health and
biohazard disposal companies and get licenses and
permits from the other side of a country, but allow me
to assure you that it is difficult. Since the convention
company had undercut my commission they almost
certainly weren’t going to pay for me to relocate to the
west coast. I offered to sign on and help them to
coordinate their weekly regional genre conventions,
like the old horror convention coordinator used to do
between horror conventions, but the company said
they liked me right where I was, thank you very much.
I was contacted by a guy from Florida that had
been putting together tattoo conventions. He said
that he’d hop in and handle the tattoo part of the
convention if I covered his travel and hotel for the
weekend of the convention and gave him a free table
and let him brand the tattoo village with his tattoo
convention brand which was something like “Ink-
Fusion”. I told him he had a deal. In one fell swoop, I
put all of the board of health and biohazard stuff off on
someone that had a track record of handling exactly
that and could focus on the things that I had been
doing for the preceding convention.
As the half-year between the last convention and
the next one started to dwindle away, things began to
get weird. I wasn’t getting prompt e-mail responses
from the people at the convention company. E-mails
weren’t being forwarded and celebrities weren’t
receiving their finalized contracts, and when I tried to
call the company, I couldn’t get through to my primary
contact or any other contract other than the lady that
answered the phones.
 About a month and a half before the convention,
the owner of the convention called me and told me
that I was fired. They said that the tattoo magazine
had pulled their sponsorship because they hadn’t
received their contract.
If you will recall, creating contracts was the
responsibility of one of their internal staff. The tattoo
company would call me and tell me that they wanted
to know where their contract was. I would tell them
who my contact within the company was that handled
contracts was, and what her extension was and ask
them to call her and remind her and that I would call
her and remind her too and then I called her and
reminded her and she said that she would get the
contract finished and sent that day and I asked her to
call the rep from the tattoo magazine sponsor back
and tell them that and I called the contact from the
tattoo magazine back and told her that I had spoken
with my contract contact at the convention company
and that she said that she would finish and e-mail the
finished contracts before the end of business west
coast time that day and that I would send everyone an
e-mail documenting what we had discussed and that
the convention company contract contact would finish
and e-mail the contract before the end of business
west coast time that day. She didn’t finish and send
the contract and the next day I’d get a call from the
tattoo magazine sponsor asking where their contract
was. This happened three weeks in a row until the
tattoo magazine finally got fed up and pulled out of
their sponsorship deal.
 The owner of the convention company said it was
my fault that the tattoo magazine sponsor dropped out
and I told him what I just told you and that if anyone
should be fired it should be their contract person
because by not doing the one thing that was their
responsibility like they were supposed to, the tattoo
magazine sponsor got fed up and pulled their
endorsement.
The owner of the convention company said he
didn’t see it that way and offered to buy out my
contract for a thousand dollars. This was, of course,
complete bullshit. I had worked five months on the
convention and completed all of the tasks that I had
set on time. I had booked all of their celebrities and
coordinated all of their vendors and had pretty much
created a convention that was ready to go, and I had
even managed to find someone to integrate the on-
site tattooing which wasn’t a part of the original
agreement. I had done the job, and they wanted to
renege on the contract the month before to save a
few thousand dollars. I told them I wanted payment in
full or I’d make it a point to use the full power of my
influence to tank the reputation of the convention that
I had been spending the last year restoring.
I know it was a brief “delusion of grandeur”
moment on my behalf, but I figured what I had put
together I could take apart.
The convention company had a reputation for not
giving a shit about their customers and over-charging
for “premium passes” that didn’t really provide a lot of
extras for the cost. I had over-hauled the premium
pass system and made it worth buying again and had
spent a lot of time answering e-mail inquiries and
monitoring conversations on horror fandom boards
and addressing concerns about the convention.
There was a lot more to the job than just hanging
out and telling Linda Blair that she wasn’t worth
$15,000 for a one-day appearance unless she could
get William Friedkin and William Peter Blatty to show
up on the same day so we could call it a “25 Year
Anniversary Reunion” for The Exorcist.
The owner of the convention company called me
back and told me that I could take $2,500 or I could
sue them for breach of contract and they had an
entertainment lawyer on retainer, so it would cost me
more to sue them than I could ever hope to make by
the time it was all over. I settled for the $2,500.
I had put together a decent convention and now I
wouldn’t be getting what I was supposed to be paid
for putting it together and would not be flown out to
coordinate and participate in the event. I wouldn’t get
to meet John Carpenter and Asia Argento.
What I think happened is that since I had already
done all of the preparatory work, they decided to offer
the coordination of the convention to the guy that was
handling the tattoo component for me. Maybe he had
suggested that he should have my job or could
coordinate the convention for less money or
whatever. I’ll never know for sure. But if that was the
case, he was much better at coordinating tattoo
conventions that he was at coordinating horror
conventions.
 In the last month before the show, they doubled
the list of guests and added every C-list “Who the fuck
is this person and why are they a celebrity?” guest
that lived in driving distance and was willing to sit
behind a table for the weekend. In addition to adding
a ton of trash and trying to sell it as treasure, since I
wasn’t there to make sure that everything ran
smoothly, the show was a logistical nightmare. I was
still able to monitor the forums and read the
conversation threads. The people that bought the
premium passes felt that they had been cheated and
had definitely not received fair value for their
purchase. The lines were long, the pre-reservation
system for will-call tickets malfunctioned, and the
programming /events schedule was poorly
coordinated and disappointing. The attendees felt
betrayed and realized that the convention company
didn’t give a fuck about the fans and were only
concerned with how much money they could wring
out of the fans. That show tanked the brand and they
haven’t done a horror convention since.
As much as I’ve tried to avoid naming names in
this book, if you ever get the chance to work with or
for Creation Entertainment, don’t.
Chapter 42:
Camera Shop

Since I had been given much less than I expected

to receive for putting the convention together I needed
to find a job because I knew that the adjusted
payment I received wouldn’t last long.
The internet had evolved since the last time I had
resorted to using it to search for employment. I was
able to use a job posting aggregation website to
search for everything available in my area.
I saw a posting for a camera shop and it seemed
like an easy way to return to hourly employment.
There were two locations of the store within five
minutes of where I was living at the time, so my
morning commute would be easy. Since I had
worked in both photo development and sales before,
applicable employment experience shouldn’t have
been a problem.
I submitted an application and got a call-back and
scheduled an interview. The interviewer was a store
manager for a store in a strip-mall half an hour to the
east. She was a somewhat older woman and might
have been a lesbian. Not that I care what her sexual
preference was, but sometimes a person’s sexual
preference crosses over into other parts of their lives
and this woman had a shaggy pixie cut and a “just
one of the guys” demeanor. I don’t remember much
about the interview, but since money wasn’t tight I
wasn’t really tense.
She asked me if I could have any job I could, what
job would I have?
I answered, “Batman. But I think that job’s taken.”
“Batman?” she asked incredulously.
“Yeah. You asked me if I could have any job I
could, what job would I have? And if I could have any
job I think that being a billionaire playboy by day and
a crime-fighting vigilante by night would be a pretty
sweet job.”
She shook her head and made a note. I didn’t
figure I was going to get the job.
To my surprise, I got the job.
I was told that I’d be doing my training at the store
location that I had interviewed at. That wasn’t the
greatest deal, since there were two store locations
five minutes from my home and the job was only
paying $10 / hr. But I would need a job soon and I
remembered how easy it was working in a photo lab
the last time I did that job.
Photo developing technology had changed in the
ten years since I had worked in the career field, but
had not changed so much that it was unfamiliar.
Pictures were still printed on light-sensitive paper and
run through a conveyor belt of chemicals to make the
paper not reactive to light and lock the image onto the
picture.
I learned how to run the new machines the first
day. The amount of photo processing they were
doing each day wasn’t enough to keep me busy all
day long, but they wanted to make sure that I was
capable and had been trained on the photo machines
before I was allowed to train as a camera and camera
accessory salesperson and work on the sales floor.
Since I ran out of photo production work the manager
gave me a bunch of other imaging work. Putting
together photo memorabilia books for post-
menopausal old women. Scanning hundreds of slides
brought in by the same old women from their trip to
Africa on safari when they were still young and in love
before having and raising children ruined their
marriages and wasted their lives. Scanning the slides
was easy, tedious work. Change the scanning
template on the machine from film to slide, put a slide
carousel full of slides within easy reach. Take the
slides out one at a time, slide them into the scanning
template, put the slide back into the carousel. Repeat
a few thousand times until the job was done. Easy,
but boring.
I helped the store to get caught up on all of its
backlog of slide-scanning orders and ran out of work
to do like I usually do, so they trained me on the sales
floor. Sales was easy. It was the usual “find out what
people came in for and they try to upsell them on a
better, more expensive version of the thing they
wanted and load them down with accessories and
warranties so they ended up paying out $400 for a
$100 digital camera.” deal.
I finished a few weeks of training and was pushing
to get transferred to one of the two locations that were
five minutes away from where I lived.
The manager said that I could transfer to a
different location, if I could do the company a favor.
If you take nothing else away from this book,
remember this. If a company ever asks you to do a
favor for them as an employee, make sure that
whatever they’re asking you to do is accompanied by
appropriate financial compensation, because, I assure
you when the time comes that you want to try to get
the company to reciprocate on the favor that you did
for them, they will have forgotten about the favor that
you did for them.
The favor that they were asking me to do was to
fill-in at a store location an hour south in an affluent
community just outside of a major commercial area. It
was where the people that were rich, but didn’t like
living in Manhattan, went to live when they wanted to
be able to get to the city with relative ease, but also
wanted to own a palatial compound with acres of
trees in every direction as far as they could see.
Of course it would only be for a few weeks, you
know, just until they could find a qualified applicant
from that area to fill the gaps in the schedule. And
then, if I did a good job, and if there were any shifts
open at either of the locations that were five minutes
away from where I lived, then I would be transferred
to one of those locations. It’s not like they were going
to forget about me and I’d be stuck down there for six
months.
Of course that was total bullshit and I ended up
working there for six months until I found another job
and quit.
I was in a tough position because I had spent a
month training for the job and the money from my
convention coordinator commission was starting to
run out. I told them that I would so it for a month and
help to train whoever they hired to fill in for me when I
transferred.
I drove down for my first shift in the new location
and met the people I would be working with. There
were two sales people, an assistant manager and a
manager. One of the sales people was an even-
tempered retired man that lived nearby and walked to
work. One sales person was an attractive young
blonde girl that lived in the area. She was the person
I would be replacing.
The assistant manager was a guy named Mike
that was around my age. He lived in the area and
had a passion for photography. In addition to working
in the store location, he would also do photography
for special events like weddings in his spare time.
The photo store chain offered “professional
photography packages” for special events but it was
just another way for the company to exploit its
employees and their passion for photography. The
company would charge something like a hundred
dollars an hour for their “services” and the
photographer would make something like $20 an hour
and the company would keep the rest, presumably as
a referral fee for existing as a place where people
could go to inquire about professional caliber
photography for their special events.
There was a glamor photo studio on the same
street that poached a lot of that kind of work and we
did their image processing. Mike worked for the
glamor studio on a referral basis. I got along pretty
well with Mike. It took a couple days to get him to
trust me, but once we got to know each other, he
taught me a lot of the tricks for how to coax the
antiquated photo processing machines we were stuck
working with to perform the way we wanted them to.
He was supposed to be a co-manager with the
manager, and was supposedly being groomed to be
the manager of his own store, but he was only making
a dollar more than the other sales people and less
than the other manager and was making a lot more
doing photography for special events through the
glamour studio. He managed the store on Sundays,
and it was a pleasure to work with him because he
was easygoing, even-tempered, and knew how to
deal with anxious customers.
The store manager was much less easy to work
with. He was gay, which, again, I have no problem
with in and of itself. I have a lot of gay friends and I
have no problem with their sexual preference. Who
and what a person wants to have sex with is none of
my business as long as it’s not me and I didn’t want to
and he didn’t want to that I knew of, so that wasn’t a
problem.
What was a problem was that he was hyper-
dramatic and prone to mood swings and was pretty
much the definition of the Borderline Personality
Disorder diagnosis.
He would show up late, and try to rush through the
morning preparations to get the store up to speed and
skip steps and leave things halfway through them to
start something else that he would leave halfway
through to do something else and leave halfway
through to start something else. He would try to
ingratiate himself with all of the anxious old rich post-
menopausal widows and over-promise them with
delivery times that we could never meet with the
machines we had in the store.
The machines we had were about ten years old.
They had broken down and been repaired then
broken down again and been repaired again and the
parts that had been used to repair the machines had
to be repaired and some of the parts were held
together with rubber bands and packing tape and had
to be just so or the machine wouldn’t do what you
needed it to do.
As a result the machines broke down for most of
the day about every other day.
The store advertised “one hour photo
development” which included having the pictures
printed up, but when the machines weren’t working it
was impossible to meet that promise, and the
customers were somewhat justified in their outrage
that their pictures were not ready as we promised that
they would be. Some of the customers went a bit
above and beyond with their righteous indignation and
would rant and rave and yell and scream about how
they were never going to come to the store again. I
had been screamed at before, so their histrionic
drama turns were just irritating. When I didn’t break
down and cry or bow down to kiss their feet they
noticed that I didn’t seem very concerned about their
pictures not being ready and I told them that I wasn’t.
The picture-making machine was broken and we
couldn’t make their pictures. I'm a fairly talented
artist, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t want me to try to
do 4” X 6” paintings of their vacation memories. If
they wanted, we could call them when the picture-
making machine was up and running again and we
were able to print their pictures so they could come by
and pick up their pictures. But yelling at me isn’t
going to make their pictures magically materialize in
the pick-up rack. If yelling at me made them feel
better, I could handle the heat, but I wouldn’t pretend
to be upset about the whole thing. They threatened to
write a letter to the company, and they often did. I
received a complaint or two a week and the district
manager would get an e-mail they would forward to
the store manager and the store manager would try to
have a heart-to-heart talk with me about the
importance of customer service, but I didn’t trust or
respect him because he was bad at his job as a
manager.
In addition to being bad at his job as a manager,
he had irritable bowel syndrome, so whenever he was
stressed out, which was every time some rich old cunt
caused a scene in the store because her pictures
weren’t ready in under an hour, he would get stress
diarrhea and lock himself into the bathroom for an
hour, so the backroom where we took our breaks and
ate our lunches always smelled like the inside of my
manager. When he wasn’t locked in the bathroom
shitting, he would leave the store to run errands that
should have took a half hour, but always ended up
taking half of the day, so we were pretty much left to
run the store as we pleased most days.
Mike the assistant manager quit to pursue event
photography. He came in on a day the other
manager was out and gave me a stack of his
business cards and whenever someone would come
in asking about the “professional event photography”
offered by the store I’d give him Mike’s card instead.
If the gig followed through, he’d come by and give me
a 10% commission for pushing the business in his
direction. He’d also come in on the days that the
store manager wasn’t working and I would run all of
his imaging work for him and let him use the
machines to tweak his work.
I might not have done that if the store manager
was good at his job and I respected him and if the
company actually hired someone to work at that
location and transferred me to one of the store
locations five minutes away from where I was living,
but they didn’t.
My girlfriend had been working at a Target and she
told me that they were hiring overnight help so I
applied there and tried working both jobs for a while to
try to make some extra money. The overnight job
was pretty physically demanding, but it paid about the
same rate if you factored in the gas I had to burn to
drive an hour back and forth from the camera store
each day. The next time the camera store manager
threatened to fire me, I quit.
Chapter 43:
Target

I applied for and was hired to work overnight re-

stock crew for the local Target chain store.
I had to break out my khakis and buy a couple red
polo shirts but it was a small buy-in for the job.
When you buy things off of the shelves in the
stores, unbeknownst to you, unless you’ve done that
job, there’s a whole crew of people that come in while
you’re sleeping to put more stuff on the shelves.
When all of the second shift staff were wrapping
up and the last of the night’s customers were having
their sales checked out, the overnight staff would
trickle in and head to the back room.
Each night one or two trucks full of shrink-wrapped
palettes of merchandise would back up to the loading
dock. There was an extendable conveyor track that
would get extended to the back of the truck and the
back door of the truck would be opened. There would
be two or three guys that would start unwrapping the
palettes and hefting the stuff onto the conveyor belt.
There were ten people on each side of the conveyor
belt. Each spot was designated for a different section
of the store and each person had an empty palette
behind them. As stuff rolled down the conveyor belt,
people would check the markings on the box. If the
box was going to department twelve, and you were
standing in the slot for department twelve, you took
the box or case off of the conveyor belt and put it onto
the empty palette behind you. Sounds simple, right?
That part was simple. The problem was that not all
items are packaged in uniform sized boxes. So after
the first layer of merchandise on your palette was
finished you had to play real life Tetris and try to
figure out where you could put the box so that you
could put another layer of merchandise on top of that
and you couldn’t put something heavy on top of
something light that would be crushed by the heavy
package. Actually it was more like Jenga. If you
fucked up, then your whole palette’s worth of
merchandise would avalanche and you had to try to
rebuild it. When your palette was full, you’d either
haul it out to the sales floor or put some shrink wrap
around the side so it didn’t avalanche out when you
used the palette jack to jack it up.
There were easy departments. Working children’s
apparel looked pretty easy. Working either the
women’s or men’s shoe department slots seemed
pretty light work too, but there was a pecking order in
the unloading area. The easy sections were taken by
short fat Hispanic women. If you tried to put yourself
into one of the light duty slots, a short, fat Hispanic
woman would come over and jabber at you in
Spanish until a thin Hispanic man would come over
and explain that you were in the woman’s spot. The
spots weren’t assigned, but, at the same time, they
were totally assigned. Since I was a guy, I had to
work the grocery department slot. It may not sound
that bad, but most food doesn’t come in single cans or
bottles, but in cases of cans or bottles.
Next time you go to the supermarket pick up a
whole case of bottled juice or cans of soup. It’s not
that heavy, right? Fair enough. Now do that two
hundred times. Those cases feel a whole lot heavier
all of a sudden don’t they? That’s what I did for the
first two or three hours of every night. I’d have to pick
up cases of apple juice and cases of bottled tomato
sauce and cases of cans of food and turn at the waist,
and bend over, bearing the weight of the case with my
lower back and try to find a spot on the palette to put
it where it wouldn’t topple the food pyramid I had been
building. It’s terrible lifting form, and I knew it was, but
I didn’t have much choice in the matter.
Since I already had lower back problems after the
first couple nights my lower back would lock up solid
and take my girlfriend walking on my back, digging
her heels in to get the muscles to unseize. I went to
home depot and got a lifting belt. I cut off the
shoulder straps because I have a waist, so the belt
wasn’t prone to wandering. Having that little bit of
extra lower back support made a world of difference.
I’d load between three and five palettes around five
feet high and jack them up and take them out to the
grocery department. The unload wasn’t complete
hell. Despite the racial tension that kind of hung in
the air between the white and Hispanic workers,
everyone was able to work together. If someone’s
palette avalanched, if the people on either side of
them weren’t busy they’d help the person whose
palette avalanched to rebuild their palette.
After the unload, we’d get a fifteen or twenty
minute break.
 I’d usually go to the bathroom and take a piss and
splash cold water over my head. My shirt would be
soaked with sweat but they usually were civil enough
to keep the air-conditioning on overnight.
I’d step out and have a cigarette with the other
workers. The overnight manager would clap his
hands and announce that break was over and we’d all
head back in and spread out in the store to unpack
the palettes onto the shelves.
The first night they tried to put me in with the
Hispanic workers. I didn’t mind from a “race-mixing”
perspective, but I was trying to learn how to do the
job, and I didn’t speak Spanish, and they didn’t speak
English, and about half of the Spanish workers were
illiterate. They’d open up a box, and if they couldn’t
match it to something already on the shelf, they’d
shrug and open the next box and leave it for someone
that could read.
The packages were coded with the coordinates of
where in the store the merchandise should go. If a
shampoo goes in the Health & Beauty section, Fifth
Row, Second Bay, Third Shelf, Fourth Item. The
code would be something like “Dept. 27, R5, B2, S3,
I4”. So if you found a box and couldn’t find some of
whatever was in the box on the shelf already you
could use a code to find the empty space on the shelf
and unload the box into the empty space on the shelf.
But if you were illiterate, you just left the box for
someone else.
The overnight manager stopped by the first couple
nights to see how I was doing and I said, “I don’t
mean to bitch, but I don’t speak Spanish, and these
people don’t speak English, so I’ve been playing
charades all shift long.” The overnight supervisor
laughed and the next night he told me to work with the
white crew working in the housewares/home
décor/furniture section.
The next night was a lot easier since I didn’t have
to mime everything. The small group of people I
worked with were decent hard workers, but they had
all of their hopes and dreams squeezed out of them
by life and were dead inside. They were all middle-
aged and on their second or third divorce with grown
kids that don’t talk to them, or young guys in their
early twenties expecting their second kids from
women they were starting to resent a little more each
day. They knew they’d never be the president of the
United States. They had steady work and this was
what their life was going to be like until the Target
closed or they died, whichever came first.
After a few hours, we’d get another break and I’d
usually smoke a quick cigarette and go inside and lie
on the carpeted floor of the apparel section and take a
ten minute nap and try to let my back relax a little. On
the way outside, everyone walked past the job
postings for the rest of the store. Day and evening
shifts in all the other departments. I noticed that they
needed four new staff in the electronics department. I
had just left a job at a camera store and had done
customer service and sales before so I figured I’d put
in for it. I interviewed for and was hired for the
position.
 It was a hell of a lot easier than working the
overnight restock crew.
I’d hang out in what was called the “electronics
boat” and wait for customers to come up and ask me
for assistance.
You know exactly what I’m talking about if you’ve
ever been to a Target, Wal-Mart or any other big box
store. People asking me to help them figure out
which cord or adapter they needed. People asking
me to use the special magnet stick or keys to unlock
the theft prevention locks for the video games. It was
easy work and I was good at it. I did that for a couple
weeks and I thought I was doing a pretty good job
when I was called in to the human resources
department.
They told me that I had been hired as a seasonal
employee and my contract had expired and they
would have to let me go. “But, I just got this new job
in a different department. The posting said that you
needed four people and you haven’t hired the other
three people you need. Why would you let me go?
I’m doing a good job. Can’t you change something in
the system and just change me over from a seasonal
employee to a permanent employee?” The human
resources representative, who, by the way, was not
the smartest person that I had ever met in a position
of responsibility, said that she couldn’t do that. I’m
fairly certain that she could. But that would require
her to actually do the job that she was hired to do. So
instead I finished out the week and picked up my last
check the following Friday.
Chapter 44:
Christmas Tree Shops

I figured I would try to get my next job the old

fashioned way.
I would go from one place of business to the next,
working my way up and down every street in the city,
asking if they were hiring, and if they were hiring, I
would apply for a job. I started off at the plaza my
girlfriend lived next to. They had a small Barnes &
Noble bookstore, a Hallmark gift shop, a Christmas
Tree Shop, a pizza restaurant, a laundromat, a
tanning salon, and a normal sized Toys “R” Us that
stood all by itself in the corner of the plaza. It would
have been awesome to work at the book store since I
was pretty familiar with books and had written a
couple, but I knew that it would actually be a lot like
the book version of working in a video store.
I decided to apply for the Toys “R” Us and the
Christmas Tree Shop.
I walked into the Toys “R” Us and was told that the
application process was done online, so I went home
and applied online. The interview was ridiculous. It
was something like a twenty-five internet-page
application/survey that took forty-five minutes to an
hour to finish depending on your intelligence and ease
of internet use. It was a lot of work to apply for a job
that would probably pay $1.50 over minimum wage
with no benefits. That was what the employment
market was like at the time. I stopped by a movie
theater and applied for a job there too, and I was
actually defeated by the online application. It was
something like forty-five pages long with character
surveys and word problems that required algebra and
graphs. I was able to solve the problems, since I had
graduated high school, but after half an hour of doing
homework for a job I hadn’t even been hired for yet, I
decided that it wasn’t worth the effort to be considered
for a job that paid $8.50 an hour to serve patrons
popcorn. You didn’t need algebra to ask someone if
they wanted butter on their popcorn.
I called the Toys “R” Us the following week to find
out how my application was going, since I know that I
had “passed” it. The store manager said that I had
passed the test, but that my application had been
“flagged”. I asked the manager what that meant.
They said they didn’t know but they’d call and find out.
I called the next day and they hadn’t been able to
figure it out. I think it was probably my credit record.
Not paying my student loans had sunk my credit
record, and since I had a lower than average credit
record, the Toys “R” Us corporation thought that since
I wasn’t financially responsible that I wasn’t the kind of
applicant that they wanted to consider for employment
in their chain of toy stores.
I applied at the Christmas Tree Shop.
I was relieved that they still had paper applications.
I took the application home and filled it out and
dropped it off the next day. The day after that I got a
call back from the store manager and we scheduled
an interview.
The store manager was a thin late middle-aged
guy with grey-white hair and intelligent eyes. He
reminded me of Billy Bob Thornton.
He looked at my resume and looks at me and
asked me why I wanted to work at Christmas Tree
Shops. I told him that I needed a job. It was that
simple. He told me that they were going to be
remodeling a corner of the store and that it was going
to be a new Health & Beauty section and that they’d
need a manager for that section once the remodel
was over. The manager would have to handle the
inventory and re-ordering and staffing the schedule
for the department. I said I could handle that. He
said that if I worked the remodel, then when
everything was up and running, I could be the
manager for the department. We shook on it. I told
him that I would need to work some hours between
that day and when the H&B section was up and
running. He said he’d put me on the schedule as a
regular staff and try to get me full-time hours for the
two weeks before the remodel started.
I worked second shift in the office supplies section.
I guess that’s what they called it. Cheap notebooks
and cheap pens and cheap stationary. I spent most
of the shift patrolling the store, looking for empty
spaces on the shelves to look for stuff in the boxes
stacked on top of the shelving units to unpack and fill
the empty spots on the shelves. I’ve always had a
pretty decent work ethic and whenever the manager
on duty would swing by to see how I was doing, they
would catch me working, so I was establishing my
reputation as a good worker.
 Even if I was just reorganizing the greeting cards
so that each slot had all the same cards and matching
envelopes, at least I was able to find something to do.
Since the store had cheap stuff for sale, people
were animals and if they took something off of a shelf,
they didn’t bother to put it back where it had come
from and just jammed it back anywhere there was
space. Each night you’d fix everything, and each day
people would come in and fuck it up, sometimes while
you were working on fixing it, which was always
exasperating. I always wanted to turn to the person
and say, “Hey! Put that back where you got it from,
you fucking savage! Can’t you see I’m trying to
organize this crap?”
The time for the remodel came.
The corner of the store that the new H&B section
would be going into was draped off with ceiling to floor
tarps zip-tied into the drop-ceiling frame. The old
shelves were pulled out and all of the merchandise
put on clearance and new shelves were put in. The
old shelves were about four-feet high. The new ones
were seven or eight feet high. They really weren’t
fucking around with this remodel and expansion of
their Health & Beauty section.
The remodel crew was assembled and the store
manager explained what we were going to be doing.
We’d be taking the store plan for the new section and
putting up labels to indicate where all of the
merchandise would be going on all the new shelving
units. Then a truck full of all the stuff going onto the
shelves would drop off all of the merchandise to stock
the shelves and the new section would look brand
new for the unveiling so that public could come in and
fuck it up every day. The remodel crew was mostly
women. It was a Health & Beauty section, after all. A
motley crew of squinty obese white women in 2XL t-
shirts with old food stains on them, and wrinkle-faced
rail thin women in acid-washed jeans with nicotine-
stained fingers. There were a couple “minorities”
mixed in for the sake of affirmative action but
thankfully the Hispanic women seemed like they
understood English.
The overhead music in the store was awful.
Top forty music from the seventies through the late
eighties. It’s not like I expect a chain store to have hip
alternative music playing, but having to be someplace
you don’t want to be doing something you don’t want
to be is just worse when you have to listen to Celene
Dion straining her way through My Heart Will Go On
and Bryan Adams telling you that everything he does
he does it for you. I wouldn’t mind if it was oldies and
Motown. But it wasn’t. There was a black woman on
the remodel crew and she would sing along with
everything that played on the overhead system loudly
and off key, snapping and clapping to the beat. I’m
not sure if I would rather have my fingernails pulled
out than deal with that for eight hours, but I’d have to
think about it before deciding. All of the other woman
did nothing but gossip and bitch all shift long. Sure,
they stocked the shelves, but they ran their mouths a
lot more often than they stocked the shelves. It was
unendurable. Everyone’s family seemed to be falling
apart. Everyone’s children were having children of
their own with unemployed drug addicts and everyone
had a relative that was either going to prison or
getting out of prison or avoiding the police so they
wouldn’t get arrested. I did two shifts of it and
couldn’t muster the fortitude and resolve to go in for
the third.
The manager called me and asked me what
happened. I told him that I couldn’t work with the
remodel team. He said he was sorry to hear it and he
actually sounded sorry. He was a smart guy, and I
would have made a decent manager, but if the price
of admission was a month of working with subhuman
mutants and having to endure their banal bullshit, I
wasn’t willing to pay that price.
Chapter 45:
Overnight Awake Counselor

I decided for my next job that I wanted to work in

the career field of mental health and human services
again.
I had seen a place with their offices visible from
one of the local highways while driving past it while
driving around town. The name of the place sounded
like it was a human services organization for disabled
people. I looked their company up online and found
their employment opportunities page on their website
and sent in my resume.
I went in for an interview and met with the director
of the orientation program. The rate of pay was
decent. Since I had a college degree and something
like sixteen years of combined experience in the
career field, they were offering me $12 & change an
hour plus benefits with a sign-on benefit if I lasted a
year, and a week of vacation time for each year I
worked for them with a cap of eight weeks. Finally a
place that knew how to treat their employees.
I was hired and had to wait a week for all of my
references and background checks to come in.
The guy running the new employees office had a
small staff of two people that handled coordinating the
schedule for new employees. The guy explained that
for the first month or so, I’d be able to put in for shifts
that were open at the twenty or twenty-five residences
in the area. When I found a place I liked or found a
place that liked me, I could put in for a regular position
at that residence and get hired on so I’d have a fixed
schedule with co-workers and clients I would be
familiar with.
The first two months were awful.
The organization provided services for a wide
variety of people with physical / developmental
disabilities. Traumatic brain injury, severe autism,
mental retardation and the miscellany of other things
that would probably keep you from being elected to
public office or from ever being able to hold a position
of responsibility or have a family of your own or be
able to own and operate your own motor vehicle.
Most of the shifts that were available were hard,
dirty physical labor providing services for severely
physically and mentally handicapped clients. People
that were in wheelchairs, not verbally communicative,
and would spend most of their lives with their head
resting on their shoulder drooling into their shirts.
I put in for mostly overnight shifts because there
tended to be less work and you got an extra dollar for
staying awake while everyone else was asleep.
I’d plug in the address of the place into my GPS
and show up fifteen minutes before my shift. The
second shift staff were usually friendly but exhausted.
It was demanding work. The third shift staff would
show up and the second shift staff would leave and I’d
usually be left with a middle-aged African American
woman with a muddy African accent. We’d sit in the
living room with the TV on for four or five hours and
the woman would usually sleep sitting up.
I didn’t care if they slept. I wasn’t there to check
up on them or rock the boat. I was there to do my
time and cash my checks.
At around five a.m. the woman would wake up and
we started to get the residents ready for the day.
There were about eight clients in each residence. In
the worst houses, that meant that you had eight
people that were completely unable to take care of
themselves. The African women and I would usually
split the residents evenly so we’d do four each. The
residents slept in hospital beds with the side rails up.
I’d strap them into a portable lift to transport them
from their bed into a bathing chair. I’d have to figure
out how to get the clothes they had slept in off of
them. They were usually soaked with urine. I’d push
the big naked adult into a wide showering cube and
use a removable shower nozzle to clean the person
as best as I could. Then I’d dry them off and use the
portable lift to get them up out of the shower chair into
their wheelchair and figure out how to thread their
palsied limbs into their clean clothes for the day and
ease them into their wheelchair and wheel them into
the living room and that was where they would spend
the day, sitting in their wheelchair in front of the
television drooling into their shirts.
After a couple months of that kind of
psychologically traumatizing work, I managed to find a
couple residences that had higher functioning
residents. Clients with mental retardation or autism
spectrum disorder that were able to take care of their
own morning hygiene routines with a minimum of
prompting.
 There were still eight residents in the houses, but
you could hang out from eleven at night until five in
the morning and watch television or bring in a book or
your laptop and work on whatever you wanted to work
on.
At five or six in the morning you’d wake the
residents up and help them with their morning routine.
Day staff would show up a little before seven and take
over from there. It was decent pay for easy work.
There were a few shitty mornings when a resident
decided that he woke up in a bad mood and everyone
was going to have a bad day, but that was only about
once a week.
I was working a lot of shifts at a place about a half
hour away. It was an easy drive since traffic was light
when I was commuting back and forth after everyone
had gone to sleep and before the world woke up.
I found a place that was closer and the work was
even easier.
It was a house with only three residents. They
were all high functioning. A nice old retarded man
that the staff were waiting to die in his sleep one night
and two mentally disabled women with primarily
behavioral issues that caused their families to have to
give them up for professional placement.
I worked full-time third shift and most nights the
clients slept through the night. They handed their
own hygiene and they were even allowed to sleep in.
One of the women was a bit higher functioning than
the other and she was a troublesome bitch.
Sometimes she would cause problems just to cause
problems, but she was retarded, so it was fairly easy
to step around her problem-causing efforts. About
once a week she wouldn’t be able to sleep so she’d
throw a tantrum and go into the shared bathroom and
pull down the shower curtain and throw a whole roll of
toilet paper into the toilet bowl. She wasn’t smart
enough to unfurl the toilet paper off of the roll and
tamp it down and block the toilet so she could flush it
over and over again and cause some real property
damage.
I’d just wait until she had finished her tantrum and
stomped down the hallway and slammed the door to
her room. I’d go into the bathroom, pluck the wet roll
of toilet paper out of the toilet, throw it in the trash,
hang a new roll and rehang the shower curtain and
make a note that she had a tantrum in the middle of
the night on her daily behavioral checklist. Day staff
would come in and they’d check the report and the
woman wouldn’t get her favorite snack at snack time.
That moody bitch could have a piece of fruit or
nothing at all. It was easy work and I was making
good money. Most nights I would bring in a courier
bag with my XBOX in it and hook it up to the flat-
screen TV in the living room and play Skyrim for six
hours a night.
My girlfriend was a lot younger than I was. I was
thirty-five and she was nineteen.
I didn’t start dating her because she was a
teenager. She had asked if she could work as table
help at a convention when I was a convention
manager and I hired her for a weekend. She had a
boyfriend, so I didn’t think of her as a girl. If a girl has
a boyfriend or a husband, I leave them the fuck alone.
I’ve had people try to break up my relationships
before and I didn’t appreciate it, so I had a general
policy of not trying to do that to anyone else’s
relationship. I also had a policy of not hooking up with
any of the girls I hired to work the booth because it
usually complicated things and I wasn’t entirely
comfortable having sex with someone who I was
paying a day rate to work my booth. It wouldn’t be
prostitution, per se, but it looked close enough if you
squinted so I didn’t do it.
The girl had a good sense of humor and we got
along well that weekend. After that weekend she
would find me whenever I was on Facebook and we
would chat. Usually in the middle of the night when
her boyfriend was asleep. She would complain to me
about her boyfriend. About how he’d intentionally
withhold sex from her and how he had broken up with
her before to be with another girl and then broken up
with the other girl and asked her out again. I had only
met the guy once at the convention she worked the
booth for and I wasn’t really impressed. A squinty,
chubby dullard that was a big fan of Rob Zombie
movies. One of those. I’d chat with the girl every day
and she came out to do a couple more shows as their
relationship continued to circle the drain. One show
they broke up and we hooked up and the rest, as they
say, is history.
As far as I was concerned it was a pretty good
relationship. I had been with a fair amount of women
and was done playing the field. I wasn’t dating
anyone when we started going out and I wasn’t really
looking. We had enough of the same interests and
she was intelligent and interesting enough that I was
constantly mystified by her. I told her that I loved her
and that as far as I was concerned I was all set. We
joked about getting engaged to be married and I
wasn’t joking. We changed our relationship status on
Facebook and all of my friends congratulated me
except for my ex-girlfriends, but I wasn’t Facebook
friends with a lot of them anyway because my
relationships usually ended badly.
I would drive out to visit her when I lived in Rhode
Island. I would get a motel room for two nights and
we would fuck three times a night and I would go back
to Rhode Island until the next trip out to visit her.
When I moved to Long Island, I’d only be an hour
away so I figured she could come down to visit my
place and I could save some money on the motel
rooms that had been taking bites out of my savings.
She broke up with me the weekend after I moved
down to Long Island, but you already know that story
but we made up when my job on Long Island was
coming to an end and I decided to move up to where
she lived to be with her and try to put a life together.
I managed to find a decent job in my career field and
was starting to put some savings away. She said she
wanted to be a mortician, so I helped her look up
mortician programs in the area. We went out to
interview at one and they told her that she’d have to
have at least an associate’s degree from a community
college to enroll in the mortician program so I helped
her to apply at the local community college. The plan
was for me to help her pay for her mortician school
and when she got a job in her career field we’d try to
move back to Rhode Island because she liked it there
whenever we’d go out to visit and stay with my
friends.
That was the plan.
Twenty-one hit her hard. Her mother was a pill-
head and her father was an alcoholic and they were
going through an acrimonious divorce while we were
dating, so I got the aftershocks from that. I knew she
really didn’t have a healthy relationship with alcohol.
We had had a few “incidents” with alcohol while we
were dating, but as long as I was around to tap the
brakes we could usually drink in moderation. The
problem with having an attractive girlfriend, as I
mentioned earlier is that other men are going to want
to be with her. If you’re in a stable relationship and
their advances are politely declined while boosting her
self-esteem then other men shouldn’t cause problems
with your relationship if you’re in an exclusive
monogamous relationship. I know that there’s a lot of
different ways to share your sex life with another
person but exclusive and monogamous was what I
was interested in at the time.
My girlfriend was friendly and had a lot of friends.
A lot of those friends were men. That, in itself
wouldn’t have been a problem, but when she would
hang out with them, I was never invited and I never
met most of her friends. I’d like to think that it was
unintentional, but I don’t think it was. She wasn’t
emotionally mature enough to enjoy a solid
relationship and take outside advances as flattery. It
didn’t help that I worked from midnight till eight a.m.
most nights, so when she would go out I would have
to go to work instead. I told her that I didn’t mind as
long as she texted me every hour and let me know
she was okay and that she texted me when she was
heading home and when she got home safely. I’m
not a possessive boyfriend in general, but I loved her
and I was worried about her out drinking with a bunch
of guys I hadn’t met. I figured if at least I had met
these guys I would know what they looked like in case
she got so drunk she blacked out and someone or
someone and a couple of their friends decided to
acquaintance rape my girlfriend. Each night she was
out with her guy friends I would get progressively
more incoherent texts letting me know she was alright
until she texted me to let me know she was home
safe, or at least she said she was home safe. I had
no way of knowing, but I also wasn’t going to drive
past her place after work and make sure that her car
was in her driveway. I trusted her. It wasn’t trusting
her that I was worried about.
One night she was texting me hourly and then
didn’t. She also didn’t text me letting me know that
she had made it home safe. I was nauseous with
worry for the rest of my shift. I went by her house the
next day and her car wasn’t there. I knew she had
gone out after work, so I went to where she worked
and her vehicle was still there from the night before. I
knew she’d have to come back sometime so I parked
beside her vehicle and waited several hours for her to
show up. She was driven back by one of her co-
workers. She got in on the passenger side of my
vehicle and we had a talk.
She said that she had drunk too much and
wouldn’t have been able to drive home so she just
stayed at her friend’s place. She said that nothing
sexual had happened between them. I had to either
take her word or end things. I took her word but told
her that she couldn’t keep living the way she was
living and expect me to stay with her. I told her how I
was sick with worry for the rest of my shift and I was
ready to have to hunt down her friends if she didn’t
show up the next day. It was an awful feeling. She
said she understood and that she’d try to keep a
handle on her drinking and that it wouldn’t happen
again. I am embarrassed to admit that the next time
she changed clothes around me I watched her to see
if there were any bite marks or hickeys that I hadn’t
left on her. That also wasn’t the greatest feeling.
It cooled down for a couple months, but the nights
out and the increasingly incoherent texts started again
and finally one night when she was out with four guys
I didn’t know and her texts couldn’t even be Englished
anymore I told her I couldn’t handle it anymore. That
we were done. She could come by my place the next
day and pick up her stuff. I didn’t want to have to
break up with her, but I had to choose my love for her
or my self-respect and I chose my self-respect. I
figured that maybe we could take a break and try to
work things out and things would be better afterwards,
but she started staying at her ex-boyfriend’s house
the next night and we didn’t get back together.
I couldn’t live in the city that I had moved to so I
could be with her. Everywhere I went reminded me of
her. I gave my two-week notice at my job and moved
back to Rhode Island.
I haven’t dated anyone since.
Chapter 46:
Security

My job in Connecticut had paid well enough that I

was able to save up some money, so I had a cushion
of cash to land on when I moved back to Rhode
Island.
It wouldn’t last long so I had, maybe a month or
two, to find a job before my money ran out.
I had worked for most of the mental health
treatment facilities in Rhode Island but now I had
more experience working with individuals with mental
retardation and other developmental disorders so I
looked up the local Association for Retarded Citizens
and applied.
I got called in for an interview and the interview
was going quite well. The staff to client ratio was
decent and they were looking for candidates with my
background. The woman interviewing me was
wrapping up the interview when I said, “Before I go, I
know it’s sometimes considered impolite to ask about
what the rate of compensation is during the initial
interview, but, what’s the rate of compensation?” She
told me that it paid $9 & change with no benefits. I
replied, “You do know that that’s a bit low for direct
care?” The smile left her eyes. I had tanked the
interview by asking how much I would be paid for my
time and effort. She walked me out and told me that
she’d be in touch. I knew that she wouldn’t.
I decided to try security again.
It had been almost a decade since I had worked
for most of the security companies in Rhode Island
and I figured that most of the people that I had worked
for or with had moved on or died and that it would be
okay if I applied for employment with them again.
I was right.
I was granted an interview at a place that I had
applied for the last time I had done the rounds of the
security companies. The last time I had applied, the
owner of the company had interviewed me. He was a
wizened old man with intelligent eyes. He looked at
my resume and said, “You’re overqualified for this job.
You’re a smart boy. You’ve got a college degree. Go
out and find something else.” I tried to argue that I
needed work and I didn’t mind being bored, but he
wouldn’t hire me.
This time I was interviewed by the same old man,
but he was ten years older and even more wrinkled
and wizened than before. He looked at my resume
and said the same thing he said the last time he
interviewed me. I wasn’t going to let him throw me off
the scent this time. I told him that I needed work, that
I showed up when I was supposed to, didn’t call out
sick and I didn’t have a wife or kids to complicate my
life and get in the way of showing up to work.
He hired me.
I came in later that week to meet with their hiring
manager. He asked me if I had a problem working
third shift. I said I didn’t and that I actually preferred
third shift. He asked me if I was afraid of graveyards.
I said I wasn’t. He said he was just checking because
he had a third shift at a graveyard that he needed to
fill and that a lot of Hispanic guard were superstitious
about graveyards after dark and wouldn’t work the
detail. Fuck it. I don’t believe in God, and I don’t
believe in ghosts. If some stupid Spanish guy thinks
that the ghosts of the people buried in the graveyard
are going to haunt him then he deserves to have to
work some other detail. I accepted the position.
The hiring manager told me I would be working
Swan Point Cemetery. I had to contain my
excitement. I had worked Swan Point for a month for
a different security company when I was burning
through security companies between horror
conventions. For those of you that don’t know, Swan
Point Cemetery is where the late, great, author
Howard Philips Lovecraft is buried.
I did a couple of each shifts at the cemetery to
train there, first, second, thirds and weekends before
settling into my regular third shift schedule. I worked
five nights a week from 11p.m. until 7a.m. I’d drive
over and park in front of the main gate. The cemetery
closed at 7 p.m. so the main gate would be locked.
The second shift guard would come over to the main
gate fifteen minutes before the end of his shift and
unlock the gate so I could drive in and lock the gate
behind me. We’d drive over to the maintenance
building where security was allowed to have a garage
bay with a desk and a refrigerator. We’d talk about
the job and he’d tell me if there was anything unusual
that I had to be aware of, then we’d drive back to the
main gate and I would let him out and lock the gate
behind him and I was alone in the cemetery for the
rest of the night.
I was supposed to use the s.u.v. designated for the
site and drive in circles around the property all night
long. I tried that for a couple weeks, but driving for
eight hours straight can get to be pretty exhausting.
Not as exhausting as standing or walking for eight
hours straight, but if you’ve never driven for eight
straight hour, try it sometime and let me know what
you think. I cut it back to doing a drive around the
perimeter every hours. Then every two hours. Then
once at the beginning and end of my shift and once in
the middle of my shift. Then once at the beginning
and end of my shift.
A guy I knew that worked at the site told me that
the clients were keeping an eye on the mileage and
that they had a window of acceptable minimum miles
driven every shift and I wasn’t in that window. He told
me what the minimum acceptable mileage was and I
would do a round at the beginning of my shift to make
sure the place was empty and then spend the last
hour of the shift driving in circles around the main loop
in the front third of the cemetery to get the mileage up
into the acceptable range. I thought I had things
locked and for a while I did.
When I would drive around I’d have my laptop
open on the passenger seat and blast death metal. I
listened to the entire Cannibal Corpse discography
over the course of a week and decided I didn’t really
like them very much so I deleted their discography
song by song as I listened through their discography.
When I wasn’t driving I would hang out in the
security garage and read comic books I had
downloaded as CBRs so I could read them using my
laptop. I read all of The Walking Dead and all of
Daredevil before I got fired.
The first week, I brought in a box of crayons and a
pad of newsprint and made fifty crayon grave-
rubbings of H. P. Lovecraft’s tombstone. I meant no
disrespect. I figured that it would be something nice I
could send to my friends that hadn’t had the chance
to come to Providence and visit the gravesite.
Besides, he’s not buried under the marker. The
marker was added decades later. He’s buried under
the obelisk marking the family plot in front of his
gravestone, so it’s not like I was standing on his grave
all night long. Maybe I am a little superstitious.
I gave away half of the grave-rubbings and sold
the other half for $25 each through Etsy. I’d only sell
maybe one a week, so don’t think I was making a lot
of money off of them. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried
to do a grave rubbing, but it’s kind of a pain in the ass
and doing fifty of them over the course a week
multiplied that pain by fifty. But I made a little extra
money and my coffee and cigarettes for the week
were paid for. Thanks Howard!
The site had a cell phone and the third shift guard
was supposed to call in every hour on the hour and
check in with the shift manager. The shift manager
would go from site to site checking on guards to make
sure that they were there and awake and in uniform. I
know it sounds like common sense, but don’t
overestimate how common common sense is.
 I’d set an alarm on my cell phone for every hour on
the hour and call in each hour five minutes after the
hour to avoid the rush. I set the alarm so I wouldn’t
space off or get lost in a comic book and lose track of
time, or if I was tired and needed to put my head
down on the desk and rest for half an hour, I wouldn’t
accidentally oversleep my call in.
Nothing exciting ever happened at the cemetery
overnight.
When you’d drive around, you’d sometimes see a
skunk or a possum or a rabbit or a coyote, but you
never saw hot goth chicks in corsets and capes that
had snuck into the graveyard so the security guard on
duty would fuck them while bent over Lovecraft’s
gravestone no matter how much I hoped that would
happen some night.
There were several beautiful angels and other
sculpted monuments and there had been problems
with vandals and vandalism in the past so security
was put in place around the clock and the vandals
learned that there was security around the clock, so
they stopped going to the graveyard after dark, so
there were no vandals for security to watch out for.
That’s the paradox of having security.
I wasn’t feeling well one night. I wasn’t completely
sick, just tired, sore, loose bowels, headache. Just a
minor virus visiting my body before my immune
system tracked it down and flushed it out of my
system. I didn’t see the point in calling out. I figured I
could show up for work and rest up without any major
incident.
 I showed up and set up my laptop to play an audio
book in the security office and planked out on a desk.
I woke up to the overhead lights coming on.
It was the shift supervisor.
I had slept through my cell phone alarms and
missed two hourly call-ins. He tried to call me on the
site cell and my personal cell phone. I missed both
calls. He showed up at the side gate and had to climb
over the cemetery wall and walk half a mile to the
maintenance building and found me laid out on a desk
dead asleep with an audio book playing on my laptop.
He was, understandably, not amused.
He had me walk down with him to the gate and let
his patrol vehicle in. He sent me home for the night.
The next morning I got called into the office and I
brought my uniforms with me because I had a feeling
about how the meeting was going to go. It went as I
anticipated it would go and I was fired.
Time to find another job.
Chapter 47:
Ghost Writer For Hire

I decided I didn’t want another job.

I was good at writing.
What seemed impossible to other people came
easily to me.
People would ask, “You wrote a book? How did
you write a whole book?”
I would always quote Stephen King and answer,
“One word at a time.”
I drafted up a flyer for my services as a ghost
writer.
I posted it to my local, regional and national
CraigsList pages and searched for postings under the
“writing / editing” tab.
There were a lot of people that posted ads like,
“Help me write my screenplay and when it sells I’ll
give you half!”. The chance of your screenplay
getting optioned is about as good as you winning the
lottery. Probably worse. Half of nothing is nothing.
You go ahead and send me an e-mail when you’ve
got some funding and the money to hire a
screenwriter that can do what you can’t do.
My goal was to find people that were having
trouble finishing their first novel or screenplay.
I have no problem writing novels and screenplays.
I would do a first consultation for free and get an
idea of what they were trying to do.
Best case scenario I’d be able to go off and write
the damned thing without them looking over my
shoulder trying to co-write with me. I figured I can
give you the framework and if you want to change
whatever you wanted to after it was finished and the
payment had cleared it was fine by me, but at least
you’d have something to work with instead of the
infinite white space at the bottom of the page with the
blinking cursor mocking your inability to write.
I managed to find a few clients.
One was a guy that was also a security officer. He
worked for the company I had just been fired from. In
his time off he practiced some obscure Asian martial
art that focused on stick-fighting. He had an idea for
a movie about a guy whose family was harassed by
the mob and the main character is a bad-ass martial
artist that uses his martial arts to receive the justice
that he had been denied and avenge his family.
I managed to write what I thought was a solid
screenplay about exactly what he wanted it to be
about with a bad-ass fight scene at the end where he
goes to a strip club called “The Pink Pocket” and kicks
the ass right off of dozens of mob goons and drug-
crazed customers and switchblade wielding strippers
then burns the place to the ground. Sounds pretty
awesome, right? I’d totally watch that movie.
I liked the guy, and I’m kind of a soft touch
sometimes, so I only charged him a dollar a page for
the screenplay. It came in around a hundred and
twenty pages, so I made a hundred and twenty dollars
for about a week’s worth of work a few hours a day. I
couldn’t make this work if I was only making $120 a
week.
 I found another client that was a lawyer in Boston.
He wanted me to write a screenplay about some
smooth-talking pick-up artists in Boston. One of them
was supposed to be a lawyer. I noticed a trend
developing. I realized I was pretty much writing the
wish fulfilment heroic self-actualization fantasies of
my clients in screenplay form which they hoped to sell
to a big movie studio so they could see Tom Cruise in
the role they had written for themselves.
I get it.
What do you think this whole book has been?
I think I’ve led a crazy life and worked more jobs
than most people and had some crazy stuff happen
and when I tell my stories to my friends they laugh
and say, “Why don’t you write a book about that?” So
I did. Here’s the book. Thank you for buying it and if
you didn’t buy it, thank you for reading it.
Since my client was a lawyer, I figured he had a
little extra money to spend, so I think I quoted him
$300 for the whole screenplay. It was a fair rate and
he told me to go ahead and write it. I had him give
me a hundred dollars and went off to write the first
third of the screenplay.
I told him that writing a screenplay about a bunch
of smooth guys in Boston would be boring, so I talked
him into making it a road trip movie where the two
main characters drive from Boston to Los Angeles.
He agreed to let me take it in that direction and I had
a lot of fun writing it. I wrote in a bunch of interesting
characters and crazy scenarios and used a lot of my
experience from driving back and forth across the
country for horror conventions to try to convey the
unique sense of driving down two lane blacktop lit
only by your headlights down an unfamiliar road. Of
easy-in/easy-out roadside motels and truck stops.
The motels almost always had nicotine stained
curtains and burn-marks on the furniture, glass
ashtrays, and bibles in the top drawer of the bedside
table.
I don’t think that the lawyer was thrilled with the
finished product. It was good. Damned good, but not
that he had in mind. He wanted Swingers in Boston,
with pick-up artists. I gave him something more like
25th Hour meets Natural Born Killers. He still honored
the deal and paid me the balance.
The lawyer contacted me a couple weeks later
about writing some short comedy sketches. His big
idea was kids, talking like adults. So, pretty much
Look Who’s Talking. When I mentioned that he said,
“No, This will be different.” “Okay.”, I said, “It’s your
money. What topics do you want me to write about?”
We agreed on six or seven topics and I went off
and wrote five, five or six page, dialogue scenes
between two kids. I didn’t want to be responsible for
whoever directed these things manipulating kids into
saying “fuck” or “cunt” so I managed to write in some
really adult content without indulging in any words that
I wouldn’t be comfortable with a child saying. Not that
I am particularly squeamish about language. Words
are just words. But it’s the principle of the matter.
The lawyer was happy with the shorts and paid me
$50 each and I got to pay my rent that month.
 A couple weeks later, the lawyer e-mailed me
asking if I could write a book. I told him that I already
had, but I was capable of writing another and asked
what he had in mind. He said that he wanted to write
a book on Mergers & Acquisitions.
Not Murders & Executions.
That would be too easy.
He told me that he had put together about forty or
fifty pages of notes but couldn’t seem to make a book
out of it. I told him to send me what he had and that
I’d charge him a hundred dollars every twenty-five
pages and it could be as long as he wanted it to be.
He explained that he wanted to be able to offer it as a
“loss leader” to try to develop some new clients.
I started doing research on mergers & acquisitions.
He had included the links to two or three different
sites on small business mergers and acquisitions and
I used those sites to determine what the key terms
and chapters would be and used those key terms to
do more research and get more information. Each
time I would find a website or a page that addressed a
certain topic I’d copy the content and plug it into the
book under the appropriate chapter heading to be
boiled down into repurposed content.
I had about fourteen chapters outlined and
managed to stretch it out to just over three-hundred
pages. It wasn’t easy, but it was $100 every twenty-
five pages for a total of $1,200 for the project.
I tried to find another client or another project to
ghost-write after that but the work seemed to have
dried up. It was all people trying to get writers to write
their screenplays or autobiographies for them and
then split the money with the writer when it sold for a
million dollars.
Since I couldn’t pay my rent if I didn’t have money
coming in I realized I’d have to get another wage
slave job, but I had managed to support myself for
four months and made it through the winter without
having to leave the house and working in my
whatever I woke up in each day.
It was a pretty sweet life.
Chapter 48:
Security Part Two

Since I had been able to get a job as a security

officer, I decided to apply for another job as a security
officer.
The job market had tightened up since I had
applied for my last job. For example, my friend from
high school saw a posting for a part-time job as a
janitor. He applied for and managed to get the job
which should be no big deal. But he found out that
there had been over two thousand applicants for the
job and the employer had to take the job posting
down halfway through the first day because they were
overwhelmed by the number of applicants. For a
part-time job. As a janitor.
I applied for the security company I had worked for
in college and when they asked me if I had worked for
the company before. I lied and said I hadn’t and they
didn’t bother to check. They had me sign a release
for them to run a criminal background check and told
me I’d hear from them. I called the next Monday and
they said that my background check hadn’t come
back yet. I called again the Monday after that and
they said that my background check still hadn’t
cleared. The next Monday I drove down to the office
and asked if there was anything I could do to expedite
the process. They asked me if I wanted to work Black
Friday. Apparently they had an overwhelming amount
of stores that wanted a security guard on site to
supplement their in-house loss prevention. I asked if
it was just a one-night thing. They said it was, but if I
did that for them, they’d find me work after that. I
asked them if they really had full-time positions lined
up for all of the guys that they were hiring to try to fill
the need for guards on Black Friday. They lied and
said they did. Guess that’s what I get for lying about
not working for the company before.
Now that I think about it, I actually did this before
the ghost-writing thing. I told them that I couldn’t pay
my rent with one night of work and for them to cal me
when they had full-time work available and I went off
and wrote other people’s dreams for the winter.
This story is still in the right place because I went
back to the same company after the ghost-writing
work and money had dried up and asked them if they
had managed to find some full-time work yet.
I went back every Monday for a month until they
finally found me something.
They said they were having a problem finding
people willing to drive to Newport for work. Newport
was about an hour away. The straightest way went
over a toll bridge. The less straight way was free.
They took about the same amount of time, but the
less straight way always seemed longer. They asked
me if I could cover for them in Newport… as a favor.
Just for a month or so until they found someone to fill
the shifts and then they’d find me something closer to
home so I wouldn’t have to drive an hour back and
forth from work for a ten dollar an hour job.
Of course they forgot about me, but I didn’t mind.
The job was working a weird kind of modified
second shift and weekend schedule. I’d work second
shift Friday night from 4 p.m. till midnight. Then I’d
work 6 p.m. till 6 a.m. Saturday and Sunday night. An
eight hour shift and two twelve hour shifts in three
days was thirty-two hours in three days which was
enough for me to live on and I had four days off each
week.
The job was working at a shipyard which was
really more of a parking lot for yachts.
There was a guard shack the size of a small hour
at the front gate and the security officer would make
sure that anyone walking or driving through the gate
was an owner or crew member of one of the yachts or
a guest of either of the preceding. Sometimes people
wanted to come in after dark with their dates and
wander around and look at the boats but I always told
them that the shipyard was closed to the public after
dark.
I wasn’t just being a dick.
A few years back three girl had driven off the end
of the dock and drowned. It was called a tragedy, but
if you’re stupid enough to drive off the end of a dock I
guess that’s just Darwinism in effect.
I’m sure that if you lived in a nice house, you
wouldn’t want people coming around and standing on
your front lawn and gawking at your house in the
middle of the night.
The guards were supposed to do hourly rounds,
but most nights I didn’t. They had what I call a patrol
baton at the post. It’s a device about the size of a
dildo that you carried around and touched the live end
to buttons glued onto things around the site.
Supposedly the shift supervisor came around every
now and then and picked up the device and plugged it
into some kind of port at the home office and printed
out a report of the patrols for the client, but if they did,
I never got in trouble for not doing patrols and didn’t
really give a shit.
I hung out at the front gate and watched the crews
from the boats walk out dressed like ivy league
students slumming it for the summer.
After the bars closed they’d come staggering back
with their hair all mussed and greasy, smoking and
missing articles of clothing, often accompanied by
local bar sluts.
The next morning the sluts would make the walk of
shame out the main gate with their party dresses all
rumpled and carrying their shoes.
The job tended to chew through guards because
you had to be able to recognize who belonged on the
yachts and who didn’t and know who to challenge and
who not to challenge. I don’t know why I was good at
it, but I was.
I’d drive down on Friday night and when my shift
was over I’d drive out to the beach and park looking
out at the ocean with my windows open and fall
asleep listening to the waves wash over to the beach.
I’d work Saturday and do the same thing. Sunday I’d
drive back home and spend the rest of the week at
home, so I was only driving back and forth once for a
three-day work week.
Newport decided to tear up its major road that
summer and coming through from the free way was
like driving down five miles of rocky country road.
The roads rattled the front end of my van so bad that
it wore out the suspension and the front wheels went
wobbly. I took the vehicle to a mechanic and he told
me that I shouldn’t take my van on the highway
anymore because the front wheels might fall off. He
told me that I would have to replace everything from
the control arm to the steering wheel and it would cost
me $900. I had only paid $2,000 for the van and had
already paid $1,200 to have the exhaust replaced
from the tailpipe to the catalytic convertor before I
moved back to Rhode Island. I didn’t have the $900
to pay for the repairs anyway.
I parked the van in the lot behind my apartment
and started taking the bus back and forth from work.
It was a twenty minute bus ride into downtown from
where I lived, and then an hour long bus ride to
Newport. So I took two buses down and two buses
back. I didn’t have a van to camp in anymore so I had
to figure something else out. I had a friend that lived
on the island and had his own place. I thought I could
ask him if I could crash at his place a couple nights
each weekend until I put myself into a new vehicle.
The first time I asked him he said that he had a
couple female friends staying over that weekend. I
didn’t bother asking a second time.
I’d take the bus down each Friday and spend the
weekend in Newport as a homeless person, with a
job. I had to pay my rent and hopefully save up and
buy a new vehicle. I’d keep an eye out for hiding
spots in the shipyard that I could hide in and sleep
between shifts. I can’t remember if I found a decent
one. That whole part of my life was kind of a blur.
Sometimes I’d sleep in a park across the street on a
bench during the day. I was always afraid that I
would wake up and find that someone had stolen my
backpack with my laptop in it so I would tie it to me or
chain it to me before falling asleep. I wrote a lot in my
journal and listened to a lot of Neurosis.
Since we were on an island, if there were any big
storms Newport took it in the teeth. There was a mild
tropical storm that landed while I was working. It was
windy, but not dangerously so. I walked around the
yard to make sure none of the boats had been blown
over and nothing had been blown off the building. I
didn’t see anything so I decided to take a shit. While I
was shitting, the owners of the shipyard tried to call
me to get me to collapse the umbrellas on their
boardwalk so they wouldn’t blow away. The building
was mostly made out of corrugated sheet iron and
was pretty effective at killing cell phone reception, so I
missed the call.
I went back out to the guard shack and lit a
cigarette. I was halfway through the cigarette when
one of the dock boys came up to the shack from
inside the yard. He asked me where I had been. I
told him I had been taking a shit. He told me that the
owners had tried to call me and when they couldn’t
get a hold of me they called him instead since he lived
nearby. I asked him why they called him and he said
that they wanted me to close the umbrellas for the
patio tables so they didn’t get picked up and blown
away. I asked him if he closed the umbrellas. He
said that he had. He said that he tried looking for me
for half an hour. I said that was unlikely because I
had been standing there smoking for five minutes and
showed him my half-smoked cigarette. The next
morning that half hour had become an hour and then
become three hours and then became the epic story
of a teenage dock boy valiantly braving the elements
to do the job of a security guard who was nowhere to
be found.
I got a call the next morning from the security
office telling me not to go into work that night and to
come in on Monday and they’d try to find me a new
assignment.
If you’re reading this, Oliver, I hope you get AIDS
of the eyes and go blind and fall into a portable toilet
full of concertina wire that topples over and rolls down
a hill into a bottomless pit, you lying, privileged, shit.
My job didn’t have any work for me for the next
month. They said that I needed a vehicle for most of
the assignments they had. I told them that I had
blown out the front end of my vehicle because I was
driving an hour back and forth from Newport for six
months which was only supposed to be a one month
“favor” I was doing for them and now I had to take the
bus to get back and forth from work.
They managed to find me a sixteen hour part-time
assignment walking around the vehicle rental garage
of the airport, making sure people aren’t fucking on
the roof, sleeping in the stairwells, spray-painting the
concrete or skateboarding. Since the locals know that
there’s a security guard on duty they don’t come
around to do any of the preceding so my job was,
again, redundant and paradoxical.
Since I was only getting sixteen hours a week and
that went on for seven months I was barely making
my rent each month, much less making enough that I
could afford to save up and buy a new vehicle. My
room-mate decided that he wasn’t making enough
working his two jobs that he was going to move out of
the apartment we shared. If I didn’t have enough to
cover my half of the rent, I definitely didn’t have twice
as much to cover the whole rent each month. I tried
to get the landlady to agree to let me pay half the rent
for a couple months until I could find someplace else
to live or find someone else to move into the empty
room. She wasn’t having it.
The story gets a lot more complicated and it
doesn’t have a lot to do with jobs or work, so I’ll spare
you reading a long explanation. Long story short, I
was homeless.
I had a backpack with my laptop in it and the
clothes I was wearing when I wound up homeless and
a single uniform shirt.
I spent a month being homeless when my job
finally managed to move the schedule around and set
me up with forty hours a week.
I’m at work as I type this sentence.
Two nights out of the week I walk around the
garage like a cut-rate vigilante looking for crime and
criminals and teenagers having fun so I can tell them
to go have fun someplace else like a cranky old cunt
yelling at the neighborhood kids to stop cutting across
her yard.
The other three shifts I spend in a five foot by eight
foot booth on the fourth floor of the garage making
sure that car rental customers are leaving with the
right vehicle because the car rental company
employees can’t be bothered to hire enough people to
walk the customers out to their vehicles and make
sure that they’re in the right vehicle and show them
how to work the window buttons and everything else
inside the car, so that wonderful job is supposed to
fall on my shoulders.
I always just shrug and say, “I don’t know. I’ve
never been behind the wheel of one of whatever
you’re driving.” And while I’m saying that they usually
figure out how to work whatever it is that they were
asking me to figure out for them.
People wealthy enough to travel by airplane to a
different place and get off the airplane and rent a
vehicle are mostly people that are over-privileged and
impatient and rude and condescending and haven’t
been told to shut-up often enough in their lives and
are sorely due for a solid ass-kicking. I don’t mean
someone kicking their ribs in until they die from
internal bleeding. I just mean a decent punch in the
face. I think a fat lip, broken nose or black eye would
definitely help to reset the over-inflated self-estimation
of most of these fat, well-groomed, affluent upper-
middle-class tourist types. Having someone tell you
to shut the fuck up or they’ll make you shut up and
then having them follow through on the threat does a
whole lot to clear your head and appreciate the fact
that you share the planet with a whole lot of people
that just plain do not care about how righteously
indignant you may feel about whatever you’re
offended by that day.
This job is a joke and my paycheck’s the
punchline.
I used my pay stub as proof of income and
managed to get a local vehicle dealer to hook me up
with a seven year old Chevy HHR with a little over a
hundred thousand miles on the odometer. It costs me
about $300 a month and I’ll be paying it off for the
next four years. If that was my only expense, then I
could probably just quit this stupid fucking job and live
off of my book royalties. But there’s car insurance.
And it‘s nice to eat food once a day or so. I smoke
cigarettes to deal with stress of being further in debt
than I’ve ever been. I live in my vehicle and hold
down a full-time job so I can make my payments on
the vehicle I live in.
The hole keeps getting better and all life does is
throw me another shovel when I could really use a
ladder.
Maybe if I sell enough copies of this book I can
afford to tell this job that I am no longer in need of
their employment.
That’s the goal of everyone that ever wrote
anything.
At least every author I know.
To make enough money that you can afford to just
support yourself with your writing.
Chapter 49:
Author

One night when I was trying to murder a shift

minute by minute I was waxing nostalgic about my
years working as a convention vendor.
I wondered if I had maybe made a wrong turn in
life and everything after that wrong decision was an
irrevocable downward spiral to an inglorious death.
I remembered a guy I knew on the convention
circuit that had read one of my stories.
Let me back up a bit.
I had a friend that was an author in Indianapolis.
He invited me to write a story for a collection of
zombie-themed short stories that he wanted to put
together.
I wrote the story and he thought it was good
enough to be in the book.
He invited me to come out to the next convention
in Indianapolis for the launch of the book. He had
managed to talk the convention promoter into giving
him a free table and invited me to come out and bring
some of my regional paranormal book to sell.
I told my boss I’d be heading out to Indianapolis for
the weekend and drove out on my own dime. When I
got there, the publisher told me that the books didn’t
arrive in time for the convention so we’d be three
authors sitting at an empty table for the weekend. He
had invited one of the other authors that lived in the
area to hang out at the booth for the weekend too.
The publisher was so upset and afraid that I’d be
pissed off that I had driven out there for nothing that
he was practically crying. I swear I saw him tear up.
I told him that I was going to go to the hotel’s office
center and print up a couple dozen copies of my story
and hand them out as a sneak preview of the
anthology. I could tell he wasn’t thrilled about giving it
away for free but he had fucked up by waiting too long
to order the books so he didn’t have a lot to say on
the matter.
I knew one of the guys that owned a prominent
independent DVD distribution company. I gave him a
copy of my story to check out. He stopped me the
next morning and said, “I really liked your story.
Where’s the rest of it?”
“Thank you” I said, “The book should be available
this week. The publisher wasn’t able to get the copies
in time for the convention.”
“No…” he said, “I mean, the rest of your story.
You created a great world in this. I want to read the
rest of it.”
“I appreciate that. If I get around to writing the rest
of it I’ll let you know.”
I carried that around in my head for seven or eight
years.
I was trying to murder a shift minute by minute. I
was waxing nostalgic about my years working as a
convention vendor. I remembered what the guy that
liked my story had said and I put my mind into the
world that I had created in the short story.
I posted a vague Status Update on Facebook
about a four-corner town I had driven through on one
of my trips through Texas. I imagined a character
visiting this abandoned four-corner town and trying to
scavenge supplies. I wrote a paragraph as a
comment. Then another. I kept adding to the first
paragraph comment by comment, paragraph by
paragraph. When I got home I copied and pasted all
of the paragraphs I wrote into a document blank and I
had something like two thousand words. I thought
about it and the whole story expanded in front of my
eyes.
I loved Stephen King’s The Stand.
When I read it as a teen, I always hoped that
someday I would write something with that scope and
breadth. I recently revisited it as an adult in audio
book format and I didn’t like it as much as I used to.
The “Mother Abigail” character annoyed me. With her
down-home-south dialect and her pious faith and her
“Come to Jesus chillen momma gon’ make er’thin’
alright.” I realized once again that The Stand is a
religious parable. The characters are divided into
“good guys” and “bad guys” and the good guys suffer
and persevere and triumph over the bad guys in the
end. It’s the horror novel version of a passion play. It
just seems childish as an adult. There were some
decent characters that I still liked, but even most of
those were caricatures. Thumbnail sketches of
people with a southern accent or deaf or retarded and
their “thing” was what defined them as a character.
Stu Redman had a bit more depth than most, but
most of the other characters were ankle-deep.
I’m not saying that I’m a better author than
Stephen King. But I am saying that I wanted
something more.
I have been a big fan of zombies since I snuck
downstairs in the middle of the night when I was ten
years old and popped the console TV on and watched
Night of the Living Dead and had the shit scared
directly out of me. Even though I knew it was just a
movie and that there weren’t zombies staggering up
the lawn outside in the dark, I hid behind the curtains
and peeked out the windows and checked anyway.
That film is that damned good. As a book reviewer I
had been given or sent a lot of zombie books. They
were all pretty disappointing. Philip Nutman’s
Wetwork was noteworthy for the gore, but everything
else just fell short of what I was looking for.
Someone at a convention had recommended that I
read some Brian Keene. I picked up and read The
Rising and thought it was only passably well written
and that the premise was ridiculous. The spirits of the
dead are possessing birds? Get the fuck out of here
with that bullshit.
I decided that if I couldn’t find the zombie book I
wanted to read then I’d write it myself.
I wrote up a sample chapter and put together a
fund-raising campaign so I could make enough
money to quit my job and try to write the book.
I can write ten or fifteen thousand words a day if I
don’t have to fuck around with a job.
I wrote twelve-thousand words at work tonight
between customers and I’ll probably have fifteen
thousand words and be done writing this book by the
end of my shift.
I offered to sell character slots in the book for $50
each and set the cap at 50 characters. I figure for
$2,500 dollars I could support myself for three or four
months and write ten or fifteen thousand words a day
towards an epic-length post-apocalyptic zombie-
epidemic book along the lines of The Stand without all
of the “come to Jesus” allegory and symbolism. Ten
or fifteen thousand words a day for three months
would tally up to around three-hundred thousand or
three-hundred and fifty-thousand words. The Stand
clocks in around four-hundred thousand and that was
my measuring stick. If King could do it at two
thousand words a day, then I could do it at ten
thousand words a day.
I sent out a press release to everyplace that I
could think of trying to get some coverage and all I got
in return was auto-responding “Thanks for your e-
mail!” messages. Other than that it was dead air.
I had ten friends that contributed to the campaign
and one person that I didn’t know. I ended up
clearing $500 after the crowd-funding site took its
taste.
I published the sample novella and wrote a second
novella and published that one.
Sales have been dead.
I set them both for free download e-books and they
moved 50 and 65 copies respectively so hopefully
they’re not just collecting free downloads and I found
fifty new fans for the project and they’ll tell their
friends and their friends will tell their friends and so on
so I can start selling enough copies of those books
that I can afford to quit my job and write the rest of
that book. Not only do I want to write it, but, fuck me
if I don’t want to read it too. I re-read the novellas
sometimes and get lost in the writing. I fucking
hypnotize myself and I don’t even realize I’m doing it.
Just like the first chapter of Stephen King’s It gets me
every time. I open the cover figuring I’ll just read a
chapter or two and the next thing I know I’m thirty
pages in and Pennywise is pulling little Georgie into
the sewer. I’m not saying I’m as god as Stephen
King, but I’m good enough that I enjoy writing what
I’ve written and hopefully there are some people out
there that will like it too.
I mentioned that I wrote a torture porn novel.
I couldn’t find a publisher, so I decided to publish it
myself and sales grew slowly.
The first month it sold maybe five copies and I
gave away about fifty PDFs to try to generate some
reviews. The second month it sold ten or fifteen
copies, the next month twice as many again. Now it
sells about $300 a month. It’s not enough to live off
of, but the extra paycheck helps.
I’m finishing this book at work tonight.
I’m going to edit it over the next few days and self-
publish it.
I already have the cover designed.
I designed the cover myself.
After I publish this, I’m starting on my next book.
I have the fire burning inside me that all of the
authors that I used to know had burning inside them.
 I’ve decided that this is what I do best and it is
what I want to do to support myself.
If it means I have to sleep half as much and write
twice much as everyone else until my work finally
catches on and I start making enough that I can afford
to do this exclusively, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to
make.
My next book is going to be another torture porn
novel adapted from a screenplay that I wrote as a
work-for-hire that wasn’t optioned.
The book after that is going to be a book like this
one, except about the hundred or so relationships that
I’ve been in with women since I started having sexual
relationships with women.
It’s going to be a lot sexier than this one, but I had
to finish this one first.
I think I wrote 15,000 words today because the
end is drawing me towards it like a compass is drawn
to a pole.
I just saved the document again. 92,505 words.
A hell of a lot longer than I thought it would be.
This seems like a good place to end this for now.
Afterword:
Painting Contractor For A Day, Fool For A
Lifetime

I have a saying I use.

The saying is “white room”.
I picked up the saying from a day I spent as a
painting contractor.
There was an ad in the newspaper and I called
about the ad and was told to come down the next day
to a small, seedy-looking office.
There was a young guy that had bought some
rental property and used the rental profits to pay it off
and buy more property and he was interested in hiring
a small contract crew to fix up and maintain his
properties. Interior painting and light carpentry.
Maybe a little rewiring/electrical and some drywall
here and there but nothing I couldn’t handle with my
experience building fake houses for theater sets
during my theater tech days.
I was hired.
Later that week, the guy that hired us led me up to
the third floor of one of the buildings he owned. He
pointed at the empty apartment and pointed at a five-
gallon plastic bucket of off-white interior paint and a
pile of painting supplies and he told me he wanted me
to paint the entire apartment white.
I said I could handle that and he left me to the
task. I painted everything. The walls, the
baseboards, the ceilings, the doors, the decorative
columns between the two sections of the double
parlor. Everything but the hardwood floors, the
windows, the electrical outlets, and the doorknobs.
The guy came up to check on me as I was
wrapping things up and cleaning the painting tools.
“How’s it going?” the guy asked.
“I think I’m done.” I answered.
The guy walked around the apartment, “Are you
fucking kidding me? You missed a spot here… and
here… and here… Make sure you go back and get
all of the spots you missed. I’ll be back in a couple
hours.”
I shrugged and went back to it. I painted all of the
spots that I had missed and he had seen because I
had spent the whole day painting a white room white
again and he had come into the place with fresh eyes.
The guy came back up and asked how it was
going.
I said I thought I was done.
The guy walked around the apartment, “Are you
fucking kidding me? You missed a spot here… and
here… and here…” He reached into his pocket and
took out a $50 bill and said, “Look. It’s not going to
work out. Here’s $50 for your time for the day, now
get the fuck out of here.”
I use the term “white room” when I’ve been writing
for twelve hours and 20,000 words and think that I
can make it to the end of what I’m writing if I can only
stay awake long enough and end up nodding off at
the keyboard and I forget how to spell the word “what”
because my childhood dyslexia creeps back in
uninvited and tries to suggest that maybe it should be
spelled “waht” and why don’t I try that out?
What I’m trying to say is that since I write and edit
and publish my own work, I ask that since you’re
coming to this with a fresh set of eyes, if you notice
any errors in spelling, usage, or grammar remember
that Stephen King had all the money in the world for
editors and I still managed to find an error in his stuff
every now and then as a fifth grader and I don’t have
the money to hire a professional editor to sift through
the debris but I tried my best and that should count for
something.
This ends the writing portion of this evening’s
programming.
Now to start the editing.
What have I learned from all of this?

Never work for a place that says that they like to

promote a “family” style workplace.
That just means that they’re planning on taking
advantage of you by over-working and under-paying
you and you’ll get all of the drama of a drunken
Thanksgiving dinner without any of the turkey. You
want to bring in home-baked lasagna or a plate of
brownies you baked for everyone to share?
Awesome. But don’t think that that takes the place of
proper compensation, affordable health care and
dental and paid accruable holiday and vacation time.

If the employer doesn’t mention a rate of pay

during the initial interview, ask.
I know it’s considered rude and forward to ask
about the rate of compensation during an initial
interview, but I want to know in advance how much
the job pays. Chances are I’m interviewing for more
than one job, and you’re interviewing more than one
candidate for the position.
Let’s not waste each other’s valuable time with
coyness. Let’s be direct and professional.
Will it make you seem mercenarial and like you’re
just in it for the money? Yes.
But let’s be honest, most jobs offer you financial
compensation because you have to wake up each
day and go someplace you’d rather not be and do
something you’d rather not do for eight hours each
weekday.
 If you can find a way to support yourself working
for yourself from home, you’re a rare and fortunate
breed. Otherwise, yes, I will want to know how much
money I will be receiving in exchange for not sleeping
in each day and going to your place of business and
spending my time and effort earning you money.

If the position is a sales position and they expect

you to work on a strictly commission basis
without a minimum wage base rate, don’t.
I’m perfectly fine with incentivizing pay scale.
People that sell more of the goods and services that
your company offers should make more money, but
that should be incentive based and seen as an
investment in your employees. It costs something like
four times to train a new employee as it does to retain
an existing one and it’s difficult to focus on your sales
pitch when every call means the difference between
whether or not you’ll cover your mortgage that month.

Unpaid Training
If a company says they want you to do a shift for
free to learn the job, or to come in and waste a day
watching eight hours of poorly produced training
videos, just imagine how else they’re going to try to
take advantage of you when they’ve got you locked in
and living paycheck to paycheck.
If there are other jobs to apply for in your area,
apply for them.
Know your rights as an employee.
Not every employer is an evil soulless corporation
trying to exploit their workers for commercial gain at
the cost of their time and happiness and self-esteem.
Just most of them.
Any time a company has a dress code that
requires you to wear their brand colors, or anytime
you find yourself being handed a paper hat or a visor
or polo shirt to wear for work that job’s probably going
to suck.
Unless the uniform is designed to insure your
health and safety, it’s an insult to your dignity as a
human being.
If you’re working with inhalable carcinogens and
your employer wants you to use a respirator, they’re
not trying to humiliate you, they’re trying to keep you
from getting cancer and dying.
Let the wookie win.
It makes sense that your employer will expect you
to wear pants and shoes and not show up to work
with anything that’s visibly soiled, ridiculously
offensive to other people, or too strongly scented.
But if you find yourself bursting out of a kitchen
wearing suspenders with all sorts of “wacky” pins
pinned onto them clapping and singing a jingle
surrounding a brownie with a single candle jammed
into the middle of it, you probably know you fucked up
and die a little more inside every day you show up to
work.
 About the Author

Sean Douglas does not want to get to know you

and isn’t interested if you want to get to know him.
Sean Douglas is interested in smoking cigarettes
and drinking coffee and not sleeping.
Sean Douglas does not have any distinguishing
scars or marks and where he lives is none of your
fucking business.