ICE BEER AMMO
1972 N.Y.C.
Street seller of Freakas (spinning tube musical instrument) one year. I bought them for one dollar and sold them for two, doubling my welfare check of $88 dollars every two weeks. By the end of the month I was so hungry my eyes would swivel to the balloon tires on police cars, thinking they had detected chocolate covered doughnuts. Briefly masqueraded as a blind street seller being led by my five year old son. Briefly…the reactions were heart-rending. I was in no shape to work and didn’t for the most part. I went to the Metropolitan Museum constantly as if it were a job, constantly. Spoiled me for galleries, which was probably a good thing.
Escaped New York May 1972
College friends who had gone on the buses to Nepal with the Hog Farm came back to the states and eventually made their way to Upstate New York. I hooked up with them and spent the Summer living in a five ton truck, looking for land. We wound up in Oxford near Binghamton. Cow country, twenty six or fifty six, I’m pretty sure it was twenty six clear days that first year.
Shoe factory $1.92/hr putting four styles on a rack for two guys working by the piece. Calculated that it would take me three years to handle one million shoes. Also learned that pinup calendars work almost as well as throwing cold water on your face.
Selling barn boards and building a highway billboard with wood from a mill that we helped build along with the Hog Farm who were visiting. Extra points for handling wood so green it would squirt sap in your face and extra heavy too. This was part of a scheme to raise money for one of our number in legal trouble. That will happen if you try to sell hash to a Jersey State Trooper in your hometown and they decide to make an example of you. Lawyer: your Constitutional Rights….blah blah. Judge, and I quote, “FUCK the Constitution.” Seven thousands dollars later ($42,067.59 in today’s money) our friend split for Cambodia.
Logging in a woods planted by WPA guys in the Thirties who just needed a job and didn’t get the memo about planting in rows. Also stashed seven seedlings under a large rock. Making the poor old Farmall, which probably wished it was in a vegetable patch, climb up on the pile of forty foot trees, a precious memory
1974
Dishwasher at the Florida version of Denny’s. When the dishwasher broke down we washed by hands for a week or two. The interior design keynote was orange and magenta tuck and roll vinyl everywhere. Jarring even on the best day. Since I started at five the object was to get stoned early enough to come down in time for work. In the event this morphed into getting stoned enough so as to come down at work and hit the free coffee to cover up.
Waiter ….graduated to waiter which sorely tested my marijuana impaired memory, disappointed folks hoping for a warm matronly waitress or cute girl waitress, all for $0.99/hr plus tips ranging from one quarter to four quarters. Waitstaff made the hot fudge sundaes which caused a traffic jam when the movie theater next door let out.
Industrial strength whipped cream canisters are ten times more powerful that store bought ones and when they run out of whipped cream will let out a blast of propellant that atomizes the beautiful topping you have made and distributes it on everybody crowded in the hot fudge sundae corner.
Favorite memory is exiting the kitchen at speed and catching the edge of a tray loaded with five sundaes causing them to fly up and fountain into five separate flight paths toward a table of five movie goers. Time had slowed down so I could record every detail of five perfect near misses, the open mouths, the popping eyes, the spectacular landings.
1975
Building docks with David and Carleton who we lived with and with Carleton’s foster Father Leroy, 75, in the little lakes around Melrose Florida. Best hot weather job combining swimming and simple carpentry, cedar wood that smelled like bananas and an occasional water moccasin to adrenalize everybody.
We did not have a slick set up like nor smooth clean aluminum pilings. [see below] We had fresh hot creosote telephone poles radiant with creosote. Carleton's Father Leroy would blast the sand out from under the piling from below in the water with a long steel pipe running a one horsepower water pump, which we then jobbed up and down to clear the hole. Once set we’d wrap our legs around the the nice hot splintery creosote poles and like a vaudeville clown act, drive nails into it at eye level, getting blasted in the face with the backsplash and fasten the stringers onto it. Basically the ideal way to do carpentry in the Florida heat.
Fortunately Leroy didn’t work topside except for the final nail in because he couldn’t see over his belly and it was ticklish to watch him memorized the boards as they disappeared underneath it. Also ticklish was the presence of water moccasin. That called for bringing out the tiny six foot workboat to stand in rather than the clown act leg wrapping. I wasn’t there the day a water moccasin swan over and attacked the little boat. Just as well.
Building fences, the cold weather substitute for dock building. See also: raiding orange orchards and pecan orchards for food. Tried picking oranges but could barely make gas and a sandwich money. I couldn’t hack hanging off a sixty foot ladder with a bag on my neck, only partly healed from a car accident, noticing that the ladder had spring loaded several small branches with six inch thorns covered with black mold aiming at my eyeballs.
Quit after three days feeling like I should say grace before eating an orange forever after. Morbid detail: the school bus that brought seasonal workers down from up North was white like a chain gang bus and had White Wolf painted on the side. Visions of the Lost Boys being turned into donkeys swam through my head.
1976
Ranch hand twelve dollars a day working with angus and a near one ton breeder who nailed Tommy to the boards of a pen when we were trying to move him to a different stall, creating a live action cartoon sequence of Tommy’s teeth flying out of his mouth, his hat scooting skyward along with his sunglasses. He lived. I did a quick rodeo clown act, Amos turned on me and I did a ten yard dash ending under a gate, so fast my eyes, on emergency circuit, didn’t adjust for my last second change from vertical to horizontal to get under the gate and presented the scene entirely in vertical format as if I were going through a door at the end of a hallway.
House painting ugh. New construction. The contractor used the same color of antique gold off white on everything. At the end of a job I’d be snow blind with the stuff and on a final go round looking for holidays (missed spots) had to look through a mist of rainbow colors, my eyes rebelling from recording one more minute of antique gold.
Scientific illustration for a thesis on the amphibians of North Florida doing half tone with a rapidograph, often using black dots to make a critter with white dots for a little zen effect. After a while my hand would jump up and down on full auto and it was as if someone else was doing the drawing and I was just watching.
Auto body work on Volkswagens in a slightly crooked hippie shop in the one stop sign town I lived in. Painted the sign for the shop and several other businesses there, beginning with one for the gas station that said ICE BEER AMMO.
Door to door knife sharpening: instant failure. Good way to scare whoever is home, though
1977 N.Y.C.
High end house painting for a crazy German who had decided to epitomize every stereotype about Germans with a management style that involved stopping by the job for ten minute harangues building to his stock phrase I THROW YOU OUT THE WINDOW and this for blemishes invisible to the eye and only detectable with your fingernail. Big plus was the all Yugoslavian crew and a radio station that mysteriously had only two sponsors [the Kreeeystal Palace in Queens and a dry cleaner also in Queens] that played traditional music from Eastern Europe for an hour straight at a time. The crew, used to state radio, didn’t see anything odd about the station having only two sponsor and I didn’t saying anything about the actual sponsor being Uncle Sam.
1978
Candy factory. Some genius decided that what the workforce needed was free coffee. In the old brick factory where Howard Johnsons candy was made everyone had sparkly eyes as a result, were chatty and social and most had been on the job for twenty five years or more. My job was to put the candy stripes on, flipping this eighty pound hunk, getting in nice and close so I'd leave an imprint of the buttons of my [ nice clean ] shirt that they issued. This was also a race because the taffy never stopped spreading. You had to go just shy of as quickly as possible or it got too long and floppy to carry over to the roller machine which turned it into a six-foot long cone ending in the inch or so size of the finished candy which was chopped and wrapped faster than the eye could see at the end of the machine.
In this din, so loud I could not hear myself singing at the top of my lungs, honestly, and so loud there was no point yelling in someone's ear, sat four dreamy middle aged woman with feather dusters and a box of corn starch, dusting away as needed to keep their strange giant rotating, seal babies from sticking to their cribs. That's what it looked like. They were lost in their own serene thoughts, rarely taking their eyes off their charges.
"We're going to make a Candyman out of you." They were training me on all the machines, some where as old as the plant and would have looked at home on Jules Verne's Nautilus, all copper with brass clad doors. Others, like the chocolate tank [ as big as an above ground pool ], that fed the entire place heated chocolate through a system of stainless steel pipes, were more Willie Wonka.
The pride of the establishment was a Candy Center Machine. It made the centers for their version of Junior Mints. It was the size of a carwash, cost a million dollars and was painted that pastel chlorine green you see in Russian space capsules. A rack came down and pressed indents in the corn starch laid out in 18x24 inch trays. Then another rack came down with corresponding hoses and filled the indents. Then they passed through a cooling area and were spat out on a stainless steel mesh conveyor belt and delivered to trays.
My job was to catch them on the trays and stack the trays on rolling racks. Sounds easy except whoever designed the million dollar thing had calculated very accurately where the upper limit was in terms of speed. The tricky part was when a rolling rack was full and need to be moved and replaced. It could get very Lucille Ball here if you didn't concentrate or one of the racks had a weird wheel and wouldn't cooperate.
It was twenty minutes on and twenty minutes off while the machine made up a fresh set of trays. During one of the down times I rolled one of the centers into a ball and sent it down the conveyor belt. It bounced down at just about the same rate that the belt was moving it back up. Nice and mesmerizing in a silly way. Time to do another set.
It was all about getting in a rhythm, I decided. So I tried a mantra. Om Sri Ram Jai Ram Jai Jai Ram Om Sr Ram Jai Ram Jai JAi Ram. A year and a half before this I had taken initiation in the Sufi Order. I found out my son was deaf and felt this this huge rush of energy come to meet the problem. "Oh Shit, I better do something fast or I am going to end up in the hands of the Christians or worse."
I did another set with the mantra. I was getting buzzed. It was definitely helping.
Then on the break I sent another center down rolled in a ball. "Now, with my third eye, I will capture the little ball and draw it to me!" I was goofing. The candy which had been almost hopping in place doing it's Down the Up Escalator thing, bounced a little closer. And closer. I popped it in my mouth.
Another candy and back to the Swami act. "I will now Repel the candy!" It skipped nearly to the bottom. I released it from my Powerful Tractor Beam and it made it's way back up. "No! back down Candy Ball. I glared at it. Down it went.
Just when I was starting to freak myself out the supervisor came over, "Hey, stop playing, don't do that." "OK" I was actually a little relieved. Nevertheless I took away that play could be as effective as 'trying" or "intention." I never did figure out what sitting meditation was about til years later when a girlfriend showed me. "Oh is that all? Like bubble rising up." It had always been described in such serious terms, emptying, posture, don't think, concentrate, Don't Think about that Elephant!
Street seller of record albums. Cambridge, right by Harvard. There were no other street sellers so I was viewed with a certain amount of suspicion, a desperado? a semi-street person? A mad scientist from MIT would come by wrapped in a blanket and in a raspy town cryer voice declare over and over MICROBES FROM OUTER SPACE. The, Is Life Actually Chaotic Factor, was that when I high tailed it to Berkeley months later, the first place I went to check out was Telegraph Avenue, of People’s Park riots, helicopters spraying tear gas and hippies camped on the sidewalk fame. I hadn’t gone half a block when the air was split with MICROBES FROM OUTER SPACE! Apparently Serge was essential background figure in my life and the powers that be had spirited him to Berkeley ahead of me.
1980
Construction. The boss was a real estate photographer who decided, hey I could be a contractor, hired one guy who knew what he was doing and then, not wanting to pay $35/hr hired whoever walked on the lot for $7.50. The first day we were making foundation trenches, me having dropped acid and the earth appearing to be layers of moth wings. My roommate injured his hand when he dropped his motorcycle. Needing time to heal he wore a glove with only his fore finger and pinky in the fingers of his glove. He carried a hammer from one place to another, looking business like, for a few days.
Daycare center worker. Bliss with the mostly pre-lingual set, practicing mind reading all day
Pattern cutter maternity clothes with my partner in a tiny shack in the back yard. The power cutter is probably the most dangerous tool I’ve ever used for the simple reason that the blade is not round but a square with rounded corners which meant it grabbed and chewed whatever it caught. One day a notebook was underneath the stack of cloth I was cutting. In a flash the knife went through the notebook and then conveniently through its own power cord before reflexes kicked in.
Making bird baths and planters. You know those planters that look like they are made with pebbles and you might assume, concrete? Well, they are made with pebbles and epoxy glue. We were given paper particle masks. Useless.
I lasted three days before I got poisoned and dragged myself home on foot, taking two hours to complete a twenty minute walk and completely changing my life. This was in the days before the general public knew what chemical sensitivity was, so I was on my own figuring it out.
I could see the auras of passing cars, I carried ear protectors and a respirator to drive. Listening to amplified music was out. Perfume, sunlight, sugar, coffee, pot, the list was endless. To cope I got a job doing rec therapy with old folks and have stayed away from the dirty, dangerous, and smelly jobs and worked for myself ever since.
1987-1996
Interior design, furniture maker. Mostly for Amy Wallace at the direction of Carlos Castaneda. Not something I thought would ever happen. He was making her jump through hoops, filling her head with the idea that they were married and he hadn’t had sex in twenty years, not true of course, sending her away to get a job waiting tables, telling her to get rid of her cats (a disaster…I arranged for them to go to friends in the country where they were killed almost right away) and on and on.
Aside from having good taste in plagiarism and a yen for controlling people, Carlos was an emotional abuser, it was distressing watching him pull my friend apart. When her father, Irving died in 1990, it was soon after that that, Carlos called and told her that her father had appeared to him in a dream and said he was trapped in vines under her house, and needed Amy to free him. Nice guy. Got his hooks in.
Finally she moved to L.A. to be with him leaving me to run her house as the boarding house for the Acupressure Institute when students came through town for six weeks. Amy didn’t want her mother to know she was in L.A. and wore a Barbara Streisand wig to hide her curls when she went out.
My job was to make Sylvia think Amy was still in Berkeley so I’d answer the phone occasionally and say she just stepped out. She did show up one day unannounced and gave me a start but I managed a reasonable cover story about her being away until much later so sorry no reason to wait around for her. This went on for a year and a half and then went poof in eleven days flat when the house got sold.
Mostly I remember carving the slate that the pitcher sits on, with Gloria, two, in a backpack, slivers flying to the right and left. The raccoons were sure we had made them a water toy and put the automatic refill hose to work filling the neighbor's yard. They managed to fill the yard more than an inch deep which alarmed the neighbor so much, she cried, YOU’RE GOING TO WASH MY HOUSE DOWN THE HILL.
The urn and the slate base are in forced perspective. The base is raked in other words. This was made before Amy went to L.A. to be with Carlos Castaneda.
Lots of work on a writing room. A ten foot table which I still have, cut down and sconces on all four corners. Carlos style feng shui. What building codes?: the sconces were a light fixture a bit of expanded metal lathe and me throwing plaster of Paris at the lot and the cord hanging and going to a plug. They were beautiful chinoiserie shells.
The white concrete catch basin was made on site with a big piece of sonotube. While making it it went through my mind like an earworm that white concrete can last for 5,000 years. It rested on a 600 lb piece of black slate. It barely lasted three years; the people who bought the house wrecked it first thing, dug a hole and broke it up. They wanted to make an apartment in what was a recording studio. The fountain was made in one of the boarded up windows. I went back with my daughter while they were still working on the house and all that was left was the urn with the base broken off. So we spirited it away.
Designed by Maybeck’s brother in law. One of the sweetest houses anywhere. Even with the stairwell, on the third floor you were oblivious to the activity in the rest of the house. There was a back staircase next to the kitchen up to the second floor, essential for avoiding people.
Inside the gate was an eighty year old weeping birch that I cut down with a rented garden chain saw. A tiny thing. At the crucial moment a guy stopped to ask directions of my girlfriend who was there to warn cars off. Dropped it in the street. Missed him.
One last thing: when I painted the trim I used all organic materials. The organic window putty was mostly linseed paste and linseed oil. Amy called and said there is something banging on the house. Won’t stop. When I got there I heard it too and traced it to where a blackbird was eating it, putting big holes in my work.
One of my favorite people ever. She had a wonderful child like quality in the sense of the belief that the things she wanted would surely appear which was contagious. So, can you fix the dishwasher would elicit an unlikely Yes from me who had never owned one or looked inside one. To this day I have no idea how I spotted the problem. The guy at the parts store could tell I had no idea what I was doing. In went the part, reminding me of reaching far inside the snack machine at school in order to rob it, and the darn thing started working again. I miss her so. It has been eleven years now and all the problems at the end have faded leaving me happy for the nine years we had together. We were so lucky to have the boundaries that we did and weren’t in each other’s pockets the way a couple would be. Love always.
