No, I didn't write this.
It was written by some guy named Papa Chach
Just read and enjoy !
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"I was a little hustler as a kid. My family didn't have a thing, we lived in the projects, we couldn't afford shit. I remember being in sixth grade, in Middle School chorus, going in to the Christmas concert that year we were all supposed to order these red sweaters to wear for the concert. My mom had to write a note to the chorus teacher that we couldn't afford whatever princely sum they were charging for that magical red sweater. I had to wear something homemade, red, sure, but it wasn't the same. I felt certain, as we sang those carols, that the audience of hundreds watching us were all looking at me and wondering why my sweater was different. It burned.
I decided to take matters into my own hands a few months later. I went on down to city hall and filed for my working papers, and I got a job delivering the Troy Record. I think my route had forty-five or so houses, more on Sunday. On weekdays the paper came out in the afternoon. After school the paper boys would go down to the office and pick up our stacks. On the weekends we'd have to get down there by seven to pick up our papers and pay our bills.
I was a demon when it came to collecting. I'd track deadbeats down all over the goddamn town. I remember approaching one guy who owed for me three weeks in an auto repair shop. He had a red, oh, I want to say it was a Monte Carlo, though I could be wrong. He was talking to the mechanic, Bruddy, he was my dad's mechanic, too. I browbeat him down for the $3.75 he owed me, and I felt real good about doing it. I felt like a million bucks when he gave me four ones and told me to keep the change.
.
The circulation manager was a guy named, I swear to God, Schlicko. He'd be down in the office on Saturday mornings to collect our bills. Schlicko harangued us about dropping past-due accounts and tried to motivate us into selling more papers. I bought what he was selling hook, line, and sinker. I'd be damned if I was gonna wear any imitation, knock-off bullshit sweater-vest to the next Christmas concert, and if I had to raise the money myself to buy it, well, so be it. American Dream, fuckers. I would go out and pound the pavement most Saturdays, knocking on doors, trying to talk old ladies into buying subscriptions for the newspaper they needed in their life, the Troy Record. I did OK. I got ten or fifteen more deliveries on my route. I learned how to butter people up for tips. There was a guy named Jeff on my route, a roofer. I remember he always had all kinds of money on his kitchen table. I remember looking at it with lust, wishing I could just scoop it up off the table and into my coat pockets. One Christmas I hustled a $5.00 tip out of his girlfriend. Lord, I thought she was the most beautiful thing my thirteen year old eyes had ever seen. She answered the door in a bathrobe, her Farrah-inspired feathered cut glistening as if she had just showered.
I was a cheap bastard. I wouldn't have given a starving orphan a nickle. The only thing I
spent my money on was cupcakes and these long, tall, sixteen-ounce bottles of RC cola at Hayner's bakery. Every day after I finished my route I'd walk to Hayner's and buy three, day-old cupcakes and an RC and I'd talk to Kate, the elderly woman who worked behind the counter, and to the customers who'd come in and out. Kate would tell me I should sell cars when I grew up, and sometimes, she'd give me a loaf of day-old bread or some day-old glazed donuts to take home to the family. I'd feel like the king of America when I walked through the door with a box of donuts or a loaf of bread for everyone to enjoy. I figured someday I'd grow up and sell Cadillacs or something and make a bunch of money and lift my whole damn family out of the projects.
One summer I broke my arm playing Babe Ruth baseball, diving, like one of my idols, Yankee third baseman Graig Nettles (my other idol was Yankee catcher and captain Thurman Munson, who died tragically in a plane crash on August 2nd, 1979) after a line drive in the hole between third and shortstop. This made delivering the papers difficult and, as I had over a grand in the bank by this point, I quit the route.
That same summer my folks told us myself, my two sisters, and my brother, would leave the public school we attended to enroll in the private school my father taught in.
Things changed; our new school liked to teach their students critical thinking skills. The more I read and learned about the way things actually worked, the more my interest in growing my savings account waned. For the first time I learned about the large swath of people shut out from the American Dream I had so feverishly believed in. My father strategically left some Hunter Thompson out on some end tables and I gobbled that up and thought, damn, this is all a lot different than I realized.
Going into my senior year of high school I knew I needed to raise some more cash for my eventual trip to college, so I got a job at the local Grand Union. I talked a good game in the interview with the store manager, a guy named Pete who drove a white Subaru wagon, which was somewhat exotic in those parts in 1983. I talked about how their decision to go with grocery baggers would give them a leg up on Price Chopper, and he seemed impressed.
Within a couple of weeks, though, it became obvious that he hated me.
I never really figured out why, but he made the hours of my shifts miserable. He sent me out into raging thunderstorms to collect carts. If I let out a furtive yawn whilst bagging frozen peas and such on Saturday mornings, he'd call me into his office and yell at me for showing no interest in the job. He constantly compared me to this kid Mark, who he seemed to idolize. I didn't really think I did things much differently from Mark, the customers seemed to love me, and I hustled around the store trying to anticipate Pete's whims, but nothing I did made the cut.
And he cut my hours, little by little, so that by late October I'd gotten down to a Friday 5-9 and a Saturday 7-1.
The new bottle law had just come into effect, and on one of those Saturdays, Pete told me to take a bunch of bottles from the front of the store out to the dumpster in the back. He didn't tell me what to do with them, where they went, or anything like that. He just gave me a key to the dumpster and told me to get to work.
I dragged all these bottles out to the back of the store, several trips worth, and then stared at the red dumpster, wondering what the fuck to do next. I had nothing more than that key and Pete's screeching voice in my head to base my decisions on. I saw a padlock on the front side door of the dumpster and thought, well, this must be it.
I put the key into the padlock and opened the side door. I figured we had to stack the bottles up inside the dumpster.
That side door opened and about seven million bottles and cans came rolling out.
It was about forty-five degrees outside, the sky all early-November gray. I knew they expected me back inside to bag groceries soon. I tried to push the spilled bottles and cans back into the dumpster, failing, of course. After about a half hour of Herculean effort, I'd managed to get about half the bottles and cans back inside the dumpster. I half-shut the door on the rest of mess and went back inside to bag groceries.
An hour or so later Dennis, the assistant manager, told me Pete wanted to see me in the back of the store.
Dennis walked me back there, where Pete waited.
"Dave," he said with utter disgust, "where the fuck are your brains?"
He pointed to the mess I'd left and yelled and screamed at me for awhile, talking about how someone could have gone back there, scooped up those bottles and cans, and brought them back into the store for a second refund.
"This will be your last day with us, Dave," he said. "And I want this fucking mess cleaned up before you go."
I stood out there in the chill for hours before I got those damn bottles and cans back into the dumpster. I felt like a chump, an idiot. The American Dream that looked close enough to touch back in my paper-route days seemed a million miles away.
For the first time, I had been fired.
The following summer, through my Dad's connections with the local Democratic party machine, I got a minimum wage job at the Saratoga Spa State Park. The job involved mowing lawns and picking up garbage after concerts. This is where I learned to hate the Grateful Dead and their fans. The Dead played the Performing Arts Center and their followers streamed in over a couple days, camping out in the park and various parking lots. I was already discovering punk and college radio types of music but this scene sealed my fate. The night of the concert a steady rain began falling, and I spent forty hours over the next three days, four in the morning until six at night or so, cleaning up the ungodly mess these supposed earth-loving folks left in their wake. Mounds of garbage, raw meat, human feces, bottles and cans, even an artificial limb, as far as they eyes could see. Ten foot by ten foot patches of grass would take an hour to clear. It was like a war zone. A woman about my age stopped me to ask where the Syracuse bus station was and I told her, well, first ya gotta get to Syracuse, beyond that, I can't help ya.
I worked that job for the first four summers of my college career. The foreman detested us college kids because he knew, or thought, we were a bunch of snot-nosed, spoiled-rotten little brats, no matted how much Deadhead detritus we cleaned up. He intentionally mispronounced my last name for all four years, just to bust my balls. Not that I cared. Despite my diligent efforts to clean up garbage and mow lawns, he loved to inform me that I "had a bad altitude." Eventually, in the fourth summer, he fired me. Some of the younger kids had screwed up some lawnmowers having "chariot fights" as they called them; chariot fights consisted of them turning on their mowers and running at each other at full speed, crashing the mowers into each other, which shaved pieces of the wheels off. They ruined a crew cab one afternoon and the next day he informed us that we wanted answers by noon. I didn't feel up to ratting them out by the, and that was that. I got called into his office off a mowing job.
"Davey," he said as I walked in, without looking at me, "as of two p.m. this afternoon, you are no longer employed by the state of New York."
I was supposed to graduate the following spring, but, as will happen, life got in the way. My best friend at the time got into a jam with a girl, and I was also in the middle of an unrequited love thing, and we smoked the weeks of the spring semester away, one bowl larded with hash oil at a time. On Mother's Day 1988 I called home to wish my mom a happy Mother's Day and I casually mentioned I, um, wouldn't actually be graduating the following week.
"Do we have to tell Dad about this?" I asked. "Maybe I could get a summer job and take a couple of classes and no one's the worse for the wear?"
"I have to tell your father," she said.
I got a summer job delivering bread for a local bakery and actually managed to not get fired. I still like to say it was the best job I ever had; walking into the bakery at six forty five in the morning and helping pull that bread out of the oven left me deeply satisfied. I wanted to keep on working there but my folks insisted I go back to school. but that didn't turn out well; I ran into my friend early on and one thing led to another and I failed two of the three classes I needed to get over the hump. The next spring I took two classes and failed one of them for lack of effort. I still remember the sound of my mother in the basement the day those grades came, crying as she slumped over the washing machine, lamenting the fact that her oldest son would never manage to graduate from college.
That summer I signed up for one last class, an urban history session, three weeks only, and I nearly fucked that up, too; still trying to work my way through the unrequited love thing, and having just seen her a few days before, I got staggeringly drunk on my way to class one morning and disappeared for a couple of days, but finally, I got it done.
They wanted to throw me out of the house at that point, my father insisted I needed to learn to either sink or swim. My younger brother, from early on more mature than I, said to my dad, well, dad, you can do that, but I'm telling you, he's gonna sink. And he was right.
So I finished school and my folks decided it was time for me to get some sort of job, and I read some want ads and walked into a local hotel and talked my way into a gig as as the weekend night auditor. I worked the front desk Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday three in the afternoon until ten at night, and then did the night audit Saturday and Sunday nights.
I knew I was on my last legs with my folks and for awhile I kept my nose to the grindstone. I worked my shifts and came home and worked out and played hoops. I threw the folks some of my paycheck for electric and heat and food, saved a little, bought a lot of records, and whiled away a bunch of afternoons at the race track up in Saratoga.
It all went well for awhile. I had some time to figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life: grad school? move to the city? write the Great American Novel? Some fucking thing. I helped my Dad coach the local summer league baseball team and we had great success.
'round about Halloween, I was sitting behind the desk, the night audit stuff finished, must have been about four in the morning, a Saturday night. Two young, well-dressed couples came in, looking for a room. We were booked solid. They begged and pleaded with me. Sorry, I said, we are plum sold out. I had been under strict orders from the management to sell every room in the place if stragglers came in, and they had given me permission to haggle with people, even showing me how to adjust things in the computer system if I had to resort to give away a $120 room for $50 at four in the morning.
"Look," one of the gentlemen finally said, "let's cut to the chase. We're on the road. We need someplace to party. We don't plan on sleeping. It doesn't have to be a room with beds. You got anything?"
Well, the old paper-boy in me woke up.
"We got a meeting room...but I got no way to put it into the system, I dunno..."
"Whaddya need to get us in there. We'll make it worth your while."
"I dunno, I probably shouldn't..."
"You like to party?"
"Uh...a little bit"
We settled on a price: two hours in the conference room for $60 cash in my pocket and a nice chunk of the bag of weed that he had flashed at me.
I escorted them in. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, I got high. They got me bombed. And then they gave me the three twenties and three mammoth purple-haired buds out of their bag.
Not surprisingly, this was the beginning of the end of my employ at the hotel.
The next night, after swearing the previous night had been a once-off, once the Rick the security guard left around two a.m., I got an awful hankering to get high. So I locked the front door and walked off into the night to find some rolling papers. About an hour and a half later, I walked back in with a pack of Zig-Zag 1 1/4s and a half a chocolate cake.
It was all downhill from there.
I went into the conference room and rolled up about two dozen joints and stuffed them into a big Band-Aid container I'd found in the pool room. I smoked one up in the pool room, figuring the chlorine would cover up the smell.
I was good at first, but I got sloppy, as stoners will. I'd call my friend Bags in DC whilst baked, talk for three hours long-distance on the company dime. I'd disappear into KSJ-land, the suite upstairs with a king-sized bed and unlimited cable. I'd go up there, lock the front door of the place behind me, and watch bad movies and porn and smoke until a half hour before the housekeepers came in. One Sunday night I dropped a huge duece in the crapper up there and clogged the toilet up, water spilling over the sides as I panicked. I barely managed to clean the mess before the manager arrived. My Band-Aid box eventually went empty and I started buying off of the assistant manager once a week. The holidays came and they assigned me New Year's Eve to work. I got wasted with half the guests, someone burned a huge hole in a rug, the cops swung by and I wasn't at the desk, and the accounting staff found empty beer bottles in the garbage can near my desk, and that was that. On my day off the manager called to tell me my services were no longer required. Can I ask why, I asked him. Do you really wanna know, he asked, and I said no, thanks. I told my folks I got fired for the long-distance calls and they insisted I apply for unemployment. I applied, and got turned down.
A couple of days ago, I met with a "consultant." He's been around of late, "evaluating" our practices, gathering data so he can make "suggestions" as to how we can "improve" our operation.
I've changed a lot since the days of getting fired a lot.
I met Lauren, fell in love, went to work in a temp job in the network center the summer we got married, the summer of '94. With a little more on the line, instead of fucking up, I worked my ass off, knowing I actually needed the money. The bank hired me full time, and I quickly moved up the ladder. Within a year and change I was supervising a dozen employees working the day shift in the ATM network. I knew it wasn't right, I knew I was climbing the ladder not only because I did my job well but because I was a white guy with a college degree who knew how to schmooze other white people with college degrees in positions of power.
Eventually I quit the bank and took a demotion, essentially, working for a lefty political organization, and I worked my way up there, from a relatively menial part-time job to the data master for the whole damn place. I quit that when Lauren died so I could stay home with our young children, Three years later I saw a job at a local college and applied for the hell of it, and I got it.
And all of a sudden there I am talking to a consultant. Alternating between suggesting improvements I know need to be made and wondering how much longer I'd have a job. I kept thinking back to all the jobs I'd been fired from, and rightfully so. I kept thinking back to all the luck I've had, too. And now I'm in my forties and it's not a game any more. I've got a lot to lose. I have no idea what the consultant might recommend, but I did think, damn, I am way overdue for my luck to run out. Now, matured and working hard, wouldn't it be a kick in the ass if I got fired again.
I suppose in the karmic sense, I deserve it, but I'm hoping to make another run through the escape hatch.
We'll see."
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/07/27/1114113/-FiredEdited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/29/2012 11:14PM by Dave the Atheist.