It may not be as exciting as it sounds…
I worked at a magazine distributer, and printers buy back the unsold magazines in bulk. Instead of shipping tons of magazines back, some poor jerk, in this case, me, has to ‘strip’ off the part of the cover with the bar-code on it. This is not quite as easy as it sounds. You use a razor knife, and you are flicking through huge stacks of thousands of magazines a day. The official title for this job is ‘stripper’. I used to just tell people that that was what I did without explaining what it really meant, because I thought it was funny…
Although, I did once get paid to be a model for an art class… I don’t really want to talk about it, but it was interesting…
I have had more jobs than most people. I get bored quickly, and I tend to be resistant to authority. It is nothing personal…
Most of my jobs have been hard, physical labor…
That is what happens when you drop out of school… (and you could, supposedly, end up with a haircut like that one my mom gave me)… Stay in school, kids…
For a long time, I was a stay-at-home dad. I think this is why my kids turned out to be so brilliant, and I know it is why they have art in their souls… My wife is a computer programing genius, and I am no kind of genius, so it made sense for me to stay home… This was before it became socially acceptable, and I took a lot of teasing, but let me tell you, this is no easy job to have…
But let me also tell you, the fringe benefits are wonderful…
My very first job was at a donut shop in the Bay Area. When you are 15, and they tell you you can eat all the donuts you want, you don’t ask a lot of questions…
I worked at other restaurants, like Sizzler to name one, in the glamorous world of dish washing. Then, at age 17, I ended up in the U.S. Navy…
Here I am in boot camp, learning how to polish a garbage can…
Not really a step up from dish washing, but I did learn how to make a bed with military efficiency…
Gradually, you get your act together…
And they let you begin to dress like a milk man… That is me on the right…
This is the only picture I have of me in a real uniform. Unless you count this one…
Maybe I should have cleaned the mirror first…
Even in the Navy I had a lot of jobs, from aircraft mechanic on an LHA… Landing/helicopter assault craft, to painting things and swabbing decks and polishing brass… (it could have been worse, I could have still been polishing garbage cans)… I learned many useful things in the Navy. The first thing I learned was that I could legally drink alcohol on Navy bases, even though I was only 17…
I sort of hinted in an earlier post that my Navy career began because I had started to get a little too good at getting into trouble. It may surprise you to learn that during the 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, most of the enlisted people in the Navy were trouble makers that had stolen a car, or got the police chief’s daughter pregnant… (these are real examples from people I met)…
After the Navy and I went our separate ways, I continued trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up…
I spent some time in Cynthiana, Bourbon County, Kentucky, cutting and hanging tobacco on a Navy friend’s family farm. It would take too long to explain what ‘cutting and hanging’ tobacco entails, but it is the hardest work you can do for 5 bucks an hour…
I ended up back in the Bay Area, and my quest for honest employment continued…
I ended up back in the sordid world of dish washing, or I became a ‘plate-tectonics ceramic industrial engineer’ as my friends and I called it. But at least I took a step up. I got a job at Narssi’s. Narssi was an interesting guy. He was big in the Bay Area. His restaurant was the second-highest rated French restaurant in the United States. He catered all the Bill Graham rock shows. Zha Zha Gabor ate there one night. Narssi was, I believe, Syrian. The cooks were all American. There were no French people working there. But the waiters could make 500 to a thousand dollars a night. Dishwashers, not so much. But we all partied together after work. Narssi wouldn’t actually talk to anybody below the level of chef, so if he was standing right beside you and wanted to tell you something, he would have to find the head chef, who would find the sous chef who would find the head waiter who would find a waiter who would find a busboy to tell you to wash a certain set of dishes. It was sort of funny. It didn’t last too long…
I did janitorial work, and I was a church custodian. I was a parking lot attendant. There were other jobs as well.
Then I got hired by Tower Records. Tower Records was huge in those days, because we still used records… The store by Telegraph Ave. in Berkeley was the only store that had an art department. So we did all the signs for all the Tower Record stores in the world. We made them out of foam core, these big sheets of Styrofoam-like material. We would project an album cover up onto a wall with an overhead projector, and draw the artwork. Then we cut out the shapes with Exacto-knives, painted the pieces, and put them back together. I was finally a professional artist! I spent most of the time cutting letters out for display signs, and I hated it.
This is the only picture I have of our work… Not a Led Zeppelin album cover exactly, but maybe you get the idea.
Here is a picture of me from those long, long days…
Tower Records was a fun place to work in some ways… It is where I met my future wife. We got to chat with Whoopi Goldberg once. Cherilyn sold a Stevie Wonder album to Carlos Santana. And we got free tickets to some good rock concerts.
Before long, we decided to try moving to San Diego, just for a little while, a change of pace, as it were. We weren’t married yet. San Diego is where Cherilyn grew up. It is also where I was stationed in the Navy, and I had been going there every summer with my family to visit my mom’s mother. I didn’t know we would be staying.
I got a job doing home health care, taking care of elderly patients, mostly with Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s. That was emotionally rewarding, even though it was all the bad parts of being a nurse with none of the good pay. But then the government cut the funding.
I did my stint as a ‘stripper’ and then got a job as a driver for a lithograph company. I used to drive enough miles to go to New York and back every few weeks, without ever getting more than 40 miles from the office. This is where many of my near death experience stories come from. I delivered everything from single boxes of business cards to half a million deposit slips for a major bank. I have a lot of funny stories of how I entertained myself in those days, but this is taking too long as it is.
Then I did the stay at home dad bit. Recently I was working, once again, as a church custodian, but the economy tanked, and that was that.
During these years I did do some projects. I made custom T-shirts for a while. Some of them were really weird. Maybe I can find some of them and scan them, we will have to see.
I also got paid 200 dollars to do a piece of art for a once-famous musician, but I won’t bore you with that story… Even though it is the closest I ever came to getting paid for my artistic talent using my own creativity.
What are we supposed to tell our children when they say they want to become artists, actors, writers, whatever? You want to do Shakespeare but you may end up doing Charmin toilet paper commercials? Follow your dreams, but have a backup plan? Prepare for rejection?
I have had a lot of get-rich-quick schemes. I guess my tikis would fall into that category, although there was nothing quick about it, and I didn’t get rich.
Here is my latest plan… I want to start a business that lets people hire me and some of my large male friends to dress in black suits and put ear-pieces in our ears. Then we pretend we are like secret service-type bodyguards. You could go to your high school reunion with five or six guys surrounding you and keeping people away until you tell us to let them by. How impressed would your friends be? For an extra fee, you could have paparazzi and groupies yelling for your autograph. Imagine going to a baseball game or the mall with an entourage like that…
Again, multimedia abounds… I was writing a novel, but it was turning into a graphic illustrated novel…
As the characters became more real and I could picture them as real people, it helped bring the story to life for me…
My drawing skills were still improving, and it was another chance to practice…
Art feeds the story, and the story feeds the art…
What about their clothing, their tattoos, their weapons, their jewelery?
I actually used to hang out and party with some Hell’s Angels in the Bay Area… My God brother used to be one… I have always had a theory that being a writer requires having a crazy life full of adventures. You can imagine living in a native village in Africa, but if you really do it for a while, you can write a much better story, because you know that there are small lizards running around inside the thatched roof, and you know what the food smells like, and what the children do to alleviate boredom. Imagination is not a substitute for an adventurous life.
There are scenes in the book, particularly ones that take place during a week-long party/festival, that are drawn from things that I observed hanging out with real bikers. I am not suggesting that you do so. Do not show up without an invitation. But do have an adventure or two.
And here is a chief of one of the clans…
I did do some full-page illustrations depicting some of the more exciting scenes. There was a battle where the clans were attacking a fenced in city…
It looks better in full size, but there you go…
So there you have it. The various forms of artistic expression that form the kindling for the fire inside your artistic soul. Just keep feeding the fire and it will soon blaze out of control. Just be sure that is what you want your fire to do.
