Reasons You Should Stay In School. Bad Jobs Make for Good Stories.

Before we discuss anything else, a reminder: Moth Podcast, me on it, July 26th.

And yes, my Dr. Phil Strip Tease at Told went great. Thanks for asking.

Tonight I will be appearing at a show at Comix. It is my first time on the show, which is called Service Not Included. It is hosted by Justin Gray and it is about working in the service industry and dealing with the public. When I received the email asking to book me, it was emphatic that this was not a “waiter rant” show. Which is good, that would get old pretty quick. But doing a show about work, that is a lot of material. I really wanted to hit a couple of stories about construction or working in a warehouse, because in those jobs… Some of those people, there are very concrete reasons they don’t have jobs where they deal with the public.

When I was around 21, I had taken a job with a five man, non-union construction crew building a four wing nursing home in the middle of one of the worst winters in St. Louis history. This means that I go to the site every morning at 6a.m. in four layers of clothing, not a bit of skin exposed, in two feet of snow, and spend most the day chipping ice off the concrete foundation they had poured back in the summer. I had this job through a friend. A bad friend.

I knew I was in trouble the first day. I was riding in the truck with Greg, the owner operator, and he says, “Hey, Man! You like Rush?” And I’m like, the band from Canada? And he’s like, “No, Limbaugh.” And he cranks the radio.

“Bill Clinton is an atheist and a rapist and we all know it.”

Why don't you come up to my place and we will put on that new Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album?

And Greg’s like, “Yep! That’s right! The band is pretty good too.”

The rest of the crew is made up of the former members of a Sammy Hagar cover band who have give up on their Red Rocker dreams. They apparently had a good run at some point playing every Redneck bar in three states but they are all getting older now. And they are all enormous. I am the smallest guy on the crew. Which leads to the second confirmation that I am in trouble.

They start bringing in the wooden frames for the roof and they need a light guy to go up and guide them into place. The second smallest guy on the crew, the lead singer, freezes up on the ladder and they look at me and they say, “Donny can’t do it. He’s got Acrophobia.” I love a ten dollar word coming out of a Redneck. They get the most out of every syllable. I am smiling at this when I notice that they are all staring at me and I think, “Oh, shit.” So I spend the next couple of days fifteen feet off the ground on an icy I-beam while they swing giant wooden triangles at me. It’s like a game of American gladiator played with a crane.

In short order, this job starts to wear me out. Not just because of the hours and the work and the weather, all of which is horrible, most days it is ten hours, hard labor, in blowing ice and snow. But beyond that, the rednecks are wearing me down as well. I mean they pretty quick get past black jokes and gay jokes and then start working through the rape jokes and then I am just happy to be up in the roof frames alone and armed with a nail gun. And they call me Gibby, because they think that I look like the lead singer of the Stone Temple Pilots, but they have confused his name with that of the lead singer of The Butthole Surfers. In between rape jokes they tell me stories of the hey day of the band and the groupies, “Yeah, Gibby, I just threw that bitch down in the parking lot and fucked her right into the gravel.”

So, by December, about two months in, I am just hating life. I am dreading work every day. My girlfriend will drive me to the site and I am just morose the whole way. And they are picking up on my change in attitude and they don’t need it, especially because the four wing nursing home being built by six guys has gone over budget and over time. And some of the crew is getting restless. And for good reason. In a pre work meeting one day, the guitar player, John, tells Greg that he will need to start looking for a job with health insurance because, “Man, I’ll just be sittin’ on the couch sometimes and then, suddenly, BAM! Blood starts comin’ outta every orifice.” At which point I move a little further away from John.

Eventually, they came and took John away in a barrel.

So the last thing they need is me checking out. I can see the disappointment growing in Greg every day that I am like, “Yeah. Whatever.” And the other guys have stopped talking to me and tensions are running high. And then, about two days before New Years, I am getting a ladder off of a truck and this journeyman carpenter walks up and asks for the foreman. I point him towards Greg hoping that this guy is going to take my job.

January second, I arrive at the site and there he is. I tell my girlfriend to wait a minute. I get out and I get fired and I get back into the car smiling. As we pull away, the DJ on the radio says that today the temperature may get as high as seventy-five degrees. We went to the zoo.

I was going to go into that tonight, or the warehouse job for the prison cantinas, where I was also happy to get fired. But there seems to be an emphasis on dealing with the public at Justin’s show, so, I will be telling about the single most offensive job I ever had. Which was at a well established, mainstream independent bookstore in a very wealthy and fashionable section of Washington DC. This job made my soul dirty. So, come check out my shame, but again, I must be clear that this is a story about the most OFFENSIVE job I ever had. Show starts at seven o”clock.

Otherwise, check me out next tuesday at our new show, The Standard Issues, or I will also be at Jenna Brister’s Third Wheel at the Belleville on Thursday.