IF THE ONLY PRAYER YOU SAID IN YOUR LIFE WAS "THANK YOU", THAT WOULD SUFFICE. ~Meister Eckhart

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

JOBS!

Consider yourself tagged!
This will be a challenge to my blogging buddies to list the jobs they have had over the years. I have included way more information than is necessary here. I was going through computer files tonight and came across the following:
Sitting in the smoking lounge one day at Lambda Larry was making a list of the jobs he had had, so I thought I would make a list too. The following dates are as approximate as I can remember.
  1. lining two baseball fields and running the concession stand, summers 1968-70
  2. busboy--Chatterbox Restaurant 1969
  3. dental assistant, clerical--Dad’s office 1971-72
  4. artist's model 1972-73
  5. delivery driver--radio supply company 1973
  6. cocktail waiter, drag queen--The Other Side 1974
  7. manager of automotive and sporting goods department of discount store--Big K 1975-76
  8. waiter--Ninth Street House 1976
  9. menswear sale--Wallerstein's 1976-77 (Paducah, KY)
  10. waiter--Polo Restaurant 1977 (Houston)
  11. menswear sales--Chelsea Row 1977
  12. receptionist--Locksmith's Hair Salon 1977
  13. shoe sales--Brass Boot 1977
  14. waiter--Delmonico's Restaurant 1977-80
  15. waiter--The Zodiac Room, Nieman-Marcus, Dallas 1980
  16. waiter--Delmonico's Restaurant 1980-81
  17. waiter--Vargo's Restaurant 1981
  18. retail sales--B&G Art Supply 1981
  19. picture frame shop manager--My Workshop 1981-87
  20. picture framer--Village Frame Gallery 1987-94
  21. faux finish painter--Los Angeles 1989
  22. rug designer, technical director--Hokanson 1994-2003
  23. free lance artist/designer 2003-present
  24. bookkeeper--Lambda Center 2005-present


My first job was to line two Little League baseball fields and set the bases. During game time I ran the concession stand with the help of my sister, So. The concession stand was at first in the building behind the home plate of the big field. Then my dad, for some crazy reason, decided to build a mobile concession stand on top of an old boat trailer we had. It was painted green and had a screen door and it was awful and entirely white trash. So and I would sneak the keys and pig out on sodas and candy during the days. We loved Atomic Fireballs and would feed the wrappers to Lucky Pony, who gobbled them up as greedily as we did the candy. We got busted one night after we emptied an entire case of Cracker Jack to get the prizes. We had dumped the Cracker Jack contents in the ditch at the ball field right next to the parked cars. One night the football coach's son and his gang of friends came up to the concession stand. Coach's son said to me 'You're a homo sapien'. I just looked at him and laughed. I knew he meant to say homosexual, but was not smart enough to know the difference. One year I used my profits from the summer to buy Arnold Palmer V-neck sweaters in every color and slacks to match. I was eventually nicknamed Mr. City Man by the Spees Gang (a gang of intellectuals, led by the Spees brothers) in high school. My favorite outfit was platform shoes, grey and maroon argyle bellbottoms, pink shirt, Burgundy Arnold Palmer sweater and a navy velvet blazer.

Sometime during the summer of '69 I worked for a day at the Chatterbox Restaurant. The older woman who owned it knew my dad when he was a boy and called him Toby. She would not stop talking (hence the name of the place) and I could only stand a day of it.

During high school I worked for my dad as his dental assistant. I made fillings, xrays, plaster casts of mouths, repaired partials/dentures and all the clerical stuff. I also had a collection of pulled teeth, which I gave to my friend Bruce for Christmas along with some cat scabs. In my senior year Dad was going to buy a horse. The horse was brought to the house, he saddled up and took off. The belly band was rotten and he rode the saddle to the ground, shattering both wrists and knocking a hole in his forehead. After that incident I worked in the office after school with nothing to do but think about boys and break into my dad's desk to get at the porno. I knew it was locked in a drawer so I wrote the manufacturer of the desk and got a replacement key.

I started at Murray State University, Murray, KY in 1972. I became friendly with a drawing professor who also taught painting. I became a model for her for a couple of years making $1.65 an hour. I have the painting she did, it's life size and I appear to be falling asleep which is not surprising. She was a tiny little lesbian who had the heat turned on fierce and played Frank Sinatra all the time. Jackie, the Boston Terrier, was always tied to a closet door and tried daily to get free of his leash. I tried my first adult cocktail there, a bloody mary. I only took one sip--how can anyone drink tomato juice?

I was a delivery driver for a radio supply company that delivered to the quad-state area of KY, IL, MO, TN. It was unbearable and I got filthy. I drove that route once with a trainer and attempted it once on my on. Then I left home unannounced and went to New York City where I spent the summer coming out and wandering the streets of Manhattan. I stayed with my friend Maude and her parents in a fabulous ground floor apartment and was spoiled rotten.

While at MSU we would get away by going to Nashville to the Other Side, a gay disco/restaurant/piano bar combination. Big groups from MSU would be there, sometimes 20 or more. I eventually got a job there serving food and cocktails. There was an annual Fourth of July drag show and I performed for the first time as Merna Turner from Smyrna, TN. I went on to a short lived, but highly important drag career doing comedy stylings of Bette Midler, Leslie Gore and other campy stuff. 134 pounds, huge red afro, long black nails and tiny black satin hot pants. It was huge fun.

Back home in Paducah I got up daily, got in the car, fired up a bowl of Columbian and reported for work at 9 am to manage the automotive and sporting goods department of a now defunct discount store, Big K. At lunch I would go pick up Phillip, a straight boy I was in love with and who kissed me on the back porch during a new years party. We would get stoned and I would lay against the counter all afternoon listening to David Bowie and Lou Reed on the car 8-track players on display. I got caught once selling discount paint to Curtis. To get out of it I went to the stock room and printed price stickers to reflect an older date and discounted price. They knew I had done it but couldn't prove it. My boss was the owner's son and I got stoned with him all the time, so no love lost I guess.
My friend Curtis' father, Curtis Grace Sr, was opening a restaurant in an old Victorian house in downtown Paducah and I got a job waiting tables there. We got stoned on the veranda before lunch, went home for a nap and came back in the evening. I weekly hand lettered the prix fixe menu and did art for advertising in exchange for a bar tab. Every night after work we all went to Beefmaster's for cocktails and dancing. It was the 70s and we danced with the same sex and no one bothered us.

After a highly dramatic and public firing from Ninth Street House I got a job selling menswear at Wallerstein's. They had been in business for 125 years by that time. It was a bizarre time spent stoned out of my mind hanging out with young men and old farts that had been there forever. I once seduced a guy through the front window.
My first job in Houston was at Polo's Restaurant. It has just been purchased by a group of four gay men who knew nothing about running a restaurant. I quit after they expected me to wait half the restaurant one night with no bus boy.

Brief stint at Chelsea Row in the Galleria selling clothes. I came in so left over from a night at the Old Plantation doing Mafia quaaludes and gin that I could not hold an intelligent conversation. They released me from that position.

I had met this crazy woman who looked just like Genevieve Phillips, the heroin addicted wife of John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas. Her name was Gigi Phillips. She hired me as the receptionist of her then very trendy hair salon, Locksmith's. We showed up one morning, locked out and were informed she had wigged out and closed the place overnight.

I went through an employment agency and got a job selling shoes at Brass Boot in the Galleria. I never reported to the agency that I had gotten that job and they never called me back to check.
So had moved here from a brief stint in Chicago and gotten a job at the Galleria Plaza Hotel in the security department. She led me to a job waiting tables at Delmonico's, an upscale restaurant. I only worked the business men's lunch and made great money. I even appeared in the hotel's brochure along with my ex-stripper friend, Terry. God, we had so much fun there. On my first day someone pointed me out to Terry as the new guy and she said, 'Oh. goody, a homosexual.' We became fast friends.

During my tenure at Delmonico's, Garry, my then partner, and I spent six months in Dallas where he was trying to get into management with the phone company. I worked lunches at the Zodiac Room at the downtown Nieman Marcus department store and we moved into a townhouse, unknowingly on the cruise route. Returned to Houston and Delmonico's after Garry failed to make management. I was relieved of my position at Delmonico's when, after my shift was over, I did not jump up off the rear bus station counter when the food and beverage director, a Nazi from Austria, walked through. He called me to his office where I proceeded to rant and rave about him being an American hater. I was escorted to my locker to change and out of the building.

After a brief stint at Vargo's Restaurant, a glorified cafeteria set on beautiful gounds, I left after the chef described the day's special as Chicken Coq au Vin in Wine.

Garry and I were living out off Gessner and I got a job at a mom and pop art supply store. We had quaint painting classes in the back room and Betty, the B of B&G taught copperplate calligraphy. An air brush painting class started up and we started carrying air brush supplies. I was fired the morning a break in was discovered, where the only supplies taken were air brush equipment. I didn't do it.

I wrangled a position in a picture framing store, where I quickly mastered the art of framing bad artwork and pictures of ugly people. I was made manager of the store and we painted it Diane Mauve. It was a popular color of the day. Went on to manage two other stores for them.

Was lured to Village Frame Gallery by higher pay. Spent several really fun years there and became quite proficient at museum quality framing. Worked for a really fun woman who insisted that her mean ass mother work there too. Her fun was to play the blame game, swear her cooking was terrific and tell us over and over--you don't understand.

During the Village Frame years I spent a three month period in Los Angeles living and working with my old friend Phil. He was at that time a painting contractor and we did a lot of faux finishes in Palas Verdes. I hated LA.
I befriended an interior designer and his lover. The lover decided I was going to come work for him designing custom rugs and carpets, which I did. Then I moved into technical director traveling the country, Mexico and Canada supervising installations. He moved me to LA to keep tabs on the dry drunk manager of the showroom there. I came very close to having a nervous breakdown there and started drinking heavily. After three months I returned to Houston. Drinking had embittered me and, coupled with the move of most of the technical aspects of my job to the manufacturing facility in Canada, my job performance suffered. They laid me off and then brought me back as showroom assistant where my knowledge of the company was, in my mind, taken advantage of. This resulted in some powerful resentments. I went through rehab during my employ there and was treated swell by the boss who stopped drinking and partying a long time ago. After struggling to stay sober and failing a few times he had had enough and let me go.

Since getting sober I have had my first showing of my artwork, selling 13 pieces and getting commissions for three more. I recently sold two pieces to a man in Las Vegas who saw my art album via a link on Durlx. I am now freelancing rug and carpet design and interior design and am quite happy.

Funny how things cropped up in my mind while I was writing this. The reasons I left places of employment, both of my own volition and that of others. The fun I have had in most jobs I have held and the people with whom I had that fun. Reading what I have written about the past I realize that my alcoholic behavior was evident from an early age. And although I didn't really start drinking heavily until the 90s, my life was heavily sedated by marijuana and ruled by fear and anger for years. I never thought my job history was that bad because there were long periods of quality commitment to employers, but looking back I left many jobs under less than desirable circumstances.

15 comments:

JJ said...

Wow you have worked a lot of jobs and interesting stuff too.
JJ

Mary Christine said...

Hey Scott, thanks for sharing all that wonderful stuff with us. I can so relate to so much of what you wrote. I will write mine out later today, or this week. I have quite an extensive work history too, punctuated by years of unemployment. yikes.

My adventures said...

how long have you got? when i applied for social security disability 11 years ago, they did a print out of my work history... in the 18 years that i was employed, i had 67 jobs... the longest being owning my own flower shop in atlanta... lots of one day jobs, i was never on 90 day probation, the company i worked for was, if i got bored, i quit, if a great travel opportunity came up, i quit... i was only fired once, from neiman's in san francisco, for telling a customer that she could of at least had the garment dry cleaned before she returned it!!! that's a great tag, but i'm afraid i've forgotten more jobs than i remember!!!

lushgurl said...

Holy Crap Scott, you never cease to amaze me!!! I was having a difficult day before I read this. Now, thanks to you, I have tears streaming down my face and a whole new respect for former employers of us "more difficult" employees!
As always YOU ROCK... BIG HUGS today!
Oh and before I forget, I also tagged YOU for the seven songs tag!!!

piglet said...

your dad was a dentist. i've heard horrific stories about children of alcoholic dentists. not imposing that your experience was similar, it just brought it back.

you are a colorful man, proud to have made your acquaintance.

Unknown said...

OK Scott. I made a list but did not get to details as you did. Do I tag someone else?

My favorite jobs on your list...

cocktail waiter, drag queen--The Other Side 1974

free lance artist/designer 2003-present

Meg Moran said...

I always love your posts, but this is my favorite ever. Meg sings: "getting to know you, getting to know all about you....."

Recovery Road London said...

I'm with Meg.

Thatnks for sharing the ride with us. An honour, Squire.

Unknown said...

P.S. ~ Love your new banner and beatle ~

Anonymous said...

whoa.that is a lot of information!
well.
coolio bo boolio..my rezzy is a total bore.
Not thinking I have much to share on this but I will tell you I once played a zombie in a film pilot.
It was the day I decided acting really wasn't for me.lol
True story.
Thanks for sharing more of yours Scott W !

Zanejabbers said...

What a tail of trails. I love it when I read peoples histories. I seem to have a better insight to this person. And now that you are sober you are moving right along with your art in rugs, tables, and individual pieces. You are blessed with talent and I'm glad you share it. Live, Love, Laugh.

Scott M. Frey said...

Thanks for the tag to your story... You've led quite a life, sir! I too have a bit of a work history over the years. Ut must be that short attention span of mine... it surely wouldnt have anything to do with my disease, lol.

I will write mine up later on in the week as time allows!

Shannon said...

I just loved reading this. I am smiling ear to ear learning all the cool and quarky things, that make you, you.

You are soo cool. I will post mine :) thanks :)

Anonymous said...

This is one of my favorite posts of your, too, Scott. What a pleasure to read and to read more about where you came from in terms of job choices, etc.
And I absolutely love the MernaTurnerfromSmyrna -- that is so classic for N-Ville! Good work.
Peace,
Scout

Anonymous said...

I'm Curtis Allen Grace's niece and i was looking things up on my grandfather. It was cool to read about your life.