Work

My Personal History of Jobs

Photo by CHUTTERSNAP on Unsplash

I’m one of those people who’s had “a million jobs.” Think of Charles Bukowski, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac. I’ve never exactly liked work, if I’m honest with myself (and you). But work has certainly shaped me in myriad ways, and I’m including writing when I refer to “work.”

The first job I ever had was probably my most interesting. I grew up in Ojai, a small mountain town 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles filled with snow-capped peaks, a usually-dry river, thousands of orange trees, and a thriving arts community. The job was a summer gig called The C.R.E.W.—Concerned Resource and Environmental Workers. It was a fancy way of saying: Non-rangers who go up into the mountains and clear trails, cut down trees and brush, and add steps to steep sections of trail, etc.

I was 14.

We made minimum wage. (Around $6-something back then, the mid-late 90s.) What made the C.R.E.W. interesting was first off the work: We had to hike as a large group (20 or 30 of us) up into the mountains and work for eight hours doing hard labor in gorgeous nature. Even better, we sometimes did “Spike-outs” where we’d hike up to a base camp and stay several nights, trudging with our tools out a couple miles each day, working, and then camping at base camp each night. I remember the licking, popping flames of the fire. Wild stories. A black bear once. Coyote howls deep into the night. And glorious silence.

But also: Many of the “leaders” who were in their late teens or early twenties, who led groups of we boys around and told us what to do, were ex-felons fresh out of jail and prison who were working at The C.R.E.W. for free as part of their community service/release/probation protocol. They were often somewhat terrifying but always intriguing. One guy sticks out in my mind. I can partially picture him. He was tall, thin, bearded, unkempt. He always reeked of sweat, but we all did. It was high double digits, sometimes triple. Shimmering desert-like heat. Dry heat. Much of the mountainside was exposed.

Anyway I remember this guy telling us a story round the fire one night and then one of us asked what he’d done to end up in prison (he’d been in for several years) and then he told us the story of how he’d been drunk at some bar in Salinas and how he’d gotten into a row with some other drunk guy and one thing led to another and our leader had stabbed the guy. The guy lived but he was permanently damaged. We all sat around the fire in awe, eyes agape, staring at this older dude who’d taken someone’s life into his own hands and nearly ended it. I felt afraid and yet drawn to this man. He wasn’t a hero in my mind, but he was mystifyingly profound.

*

Over the years I had many more jobs before leaving home at 19. I worked at Ojai’s Lake Casitas, showing tourists how to use the little motorboats. I was 16, I think. That was a fun job. My best friend Jake worked there with me. Sometimes older guys would hand us a six pack of cold beer as a tip when they returned from fishing. We’d tie the cans with fishing line to the end of the little pier to keep the brew cold and then we’d drink when work was finished. I remember the hot beating summer sun. Washing the dirty boats out with soap and the hose after using the little mechanical lift to raise the small metal boat. I remember the smell of beer and cigarettes. I remember hitting on girls my age when their parents weren’t looking. I remember the stink of wafting sunscreen. I remember the smell of gasoline in the water. The sound of the little buzzing motors.

Later I worked bussing tables at a seafood restaurant in the Ventura Pier. I liked this job: Work went by quickly and I made tips. I loved having cold, hard cash each night in my hands. For a while I dated a girl who worked at the pier, too, in the ice cream store. I’d get off first and go to her work and help her close.

When I moved out of the house—suddenly, angrily, without warning, coming home and just snatching all my stuff and going, my mother screaming for me to stop—I was working at a prestigious tennis club in Ventura. Given my sloppy dress and nature and my drinking back then, this now strikes me as patently absurd and hilarious. How did I get this job? I worked from 5am to noon five days a week. I think I made around $10/hour. This would have been around 2003. I worked the front desk. I opened the place. Assigned old wealthy people to various tennis courts. Handed out clean white towels. Wore a dumb collared Hawaiian shirt with a little rectangular gold nametag. Smiled eagerly.

I was always hungover beyond belief. I first lived with a high school punk buddy and his girlfriend in a tiny one-bedroom apartment. I slept on the couch and paid only the utilities. Then I moved in with another punk buddy into a small house his parents owned in Ojai. I’d party all night and, still drunk half the time, head south to Ventura around 4:30am to open the place. I was good at my job.

The fatal flaw was my penchant for gossip. I stupidly got my buddy George hired there. He was a big-mouthed idiot. (As was I.) One night, wasted in Ojai, I was playing with a big knife. Predictably, I accidently swung the blade straight down into my right thigh. Two inches deep. Blood everywhere. Drunk. E.R. trip. The doctor wrote down “gang wound.” We all howled with laughter at that one. Gang wound. Anyway, for weeks after that I had to sit behind the counter instead of stand. I told them it was an accidental fall. George of course spilled the beans to someone who told everyone. After a year at the job, I finally one day got called upstairs into the office. They’d heard about what happened. They couldn’t have the rumors circling about an employee who was an alcoholic who’d stabbed himself, etc. I was fired.

*

At 22 I moved to Santa Cruz briefly where I did not work but managed to shoot heroin for the first time. I was a terrible blackout drunk during this period. I did things I don’t remember doing. Woke up next to women I didn’t recognize. Crashed my fixed-gear bike into a truck’s windshield crashing out all the glass one night. I simply got back up and stumbled away.

At 23, living in San Diego, I started working retail clothing jobs. I got hired at a tourist T-shirt store where we added one of 150 decals to a blank T-shirt or sweatshirt. The family who owned the store was Jewish; they’d moved to San Diego a decade before from Israel. The store was in gorgeous La Jolla, not a hundred yards from the beach. The owner’s nephew owned a store downtown in the Gaslight District. I worked there, too. After I got used to the job I worked alone. I had a key. I opened and closed, working five, sometimes six days a week. I lived with a punk buddy in Pacific Beach, which we both hated. It was during this time that I first read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. In 2006, after a year in S.D., my roommate and I separated ways and I went on my first hitchhiking adventure around Oregon and California. Later that summer I took an Amtrak train across the country to New York City.

Age 24 was a weird time. My girlfriend—who I later moved to San Francisco with—studied abroad in Spain while I lived in my 1977 GMC van which my friends and I called Godzilla. It had punk and metal posters on the inside walls and a foldout couch/seat/bed. I parked in random suburban neighborhoods and slept. I showered at friends’ houses. I surfed. I did community college. I got into a nasty, near-death car crash and got a settlement and used the money to live and travel Europe.

At 25 my girlfriend and I moved to San Francisco. It was January, 2008. We’d just traveled Europe for five weeks. I’d sold the van. We picked Ocean Beach. It was cold and foggy and felt like a totally new world to us. She attended S.F.S.U. studying English and I went to C.C.S.F. (City College of San Francisco) getting basic credits to transfer. I worked at The Wash Club, a medical laundry pickup and delivery company headquartered off Stanyon Street in S.F. I drove a company van all around the Bay Area and picked up/dropped off dirty/clean medical clothes, etc. Lots of blood on things. Grotesque smells. Bad parking. Feeling rushed. My girlfriend served tables.

From 2009 to almost 2011 I worked several retail clothing stores again. Particularly and most importantly an Italian clothing store in Hayes Valley in the city. By then my ex and I’d split up. I was single, still drinking like a fish, living across the pond in Oakland. In September, 2010—27—I got sober. I immediately moved to Portland, Oregon because a good friend of mine lived there and had two years clean and sober. I lived there for eight months. I still had some settlement money and a little savings and so for the time I lived there I didn’t work.

Everything changed around 2012. I had a couple years sober. I was back in Oakland, paying the atrociously low rent of $795/mo and all utilities included for my own little studio (impossible now). I went back to school, this time studying creative writing at San Francisco State. Over the course of 11 years I’d gone to seven different colleges, always moving, always dropping out, always drinking. Now I finally went back and stayed. I got my B.A. in writing in 2013. I interned for a literary agent. I started a blog. I started getting my writing published. I wrote several novels over the course of a few years. I began pitching one novel to agents (and getting rejected). And I started editing other people’s writing.

That was the lead to a new path. Since then, the past decade-plus, I’ve been editing books for money, writing my ass off, and more recently writing on Substack and sometimes walking dogs for cash.

I left out many jobs. In my teens and very early twenties I also worked at four different supermarkets, doing cash register work, stocking shelves, and even being the “meat-saw cleaner” once. (As horrible as it sounds.) In addition I worked for a moving company in San Diego. I got trained how to cut tile and did some remodeled kitchens and bathrooms. I used early AI for a surfboard shaper in Ventura by “cutting” his surfboards out of foam. The machine sliced the rectangle  of foam away revealing a surfboard based on the shaper’s dimensions and instructions; later the shaper would sand it all down and give it his special touch. Etc. I had a million jobs.

It's funny to me nowadays with the whole MFA culture for writers. The thing now seems to be to skip all that working and life experience and instead go into insane student debt just to be told “how to write” (which isn’t possible). I applied for and got accepted into the S.F. State MFA in writing program in 2013 only to decline it last second because I was already getting work published and because I didn’t want to spend two more years in a classroom with people who mostly weren’t serious writers anyway. All you need to be a good writer is life experience. Ask George Orwell, who never got an MFA and in fact didn’t even go to college. Ditto Hemingway and Faulker and Fitzgerald and Kerouac and Twain and Vonnegut and Atwood, etc etc etc.

I guess in the end all these jobs taught me how to be self-sustainable. And they taught me, in a roundabout way, that I really was a writer. I hated almost all of those jobs, minus just a few. I’ve always hated working for someone, having a “boss.” It always felt so demeaning, life-sucking. But I’m a sensitive freak; I’m one of those people who has to work for themselves. Turns out I am good at doing this. I can set deadlines. I can get things done when I need to. I get to pick who I work with and why. For me, it’s a much better way to live, though sometimes challenging. (And sometimes financially straining.)

I’ll always remember standing behind that counter at the tennis club, 19 and 20 years old, hung over as fuck, reeking of Old English forties, still drunk perhaps even, smiling stupidly at the wealthy white tennis players as they asked for a clean crisp towel and I assigned them a tennis court, knowing in the back of my mind that, come that evening I’d be at the punk show with my friends, wearing my gear, getting loaded once more, bopping around the circle pit, feeling more alive than I’d ever been in my life.

Fuck work. That’s what I thought back then. A necessity one had to do only to survive. Now? I enjoy what I do. I get to do what I love. And that is rare.