Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [13]
I stopped commuting with him after that and never went back to the liquor store. At least during school hours.
I was determined to make a comeback. I was seventeen.
A few weeks later in a creative-writing class, we were asked to read our favorite poem out loud. To eye rolls, snickers, and sighs of highbrow community college artiste disgust, I read this:
The Men That Don’t Fit In
by Robert W. Service
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.
Clearly, in those days I wasn’t reading a lot of poetry (my alternate choice, which I suspect wouldn’t have fared much better, was Desiderata). This was the first thing that came to mind, if only because I had “discovered” it on a Yukon Jack whiskey poster that was tacked on my brother’s bedroom wall. Previously, I had recited it for my friends while drinking Yukon Jack in a moonlit field, and they seemed to enjoy it, to embrace being a member of the misfit tribe.
So for my first assignment in creative writing, I had brought in not a poem but a piece of guerrilla marketing. While others in class had recited Sylvia Plath, Dylan Thomas, and Allen Ginsberg, I read a liquor ad.
The Antithesis of Having a Distinct Sense of Anything
Boston, Massachusetts, 1980
My first day as a transfer student at Northeastern University was my first day in Boston. Six months earlier I had read a magazine article that said Boston was a great college (read: party) town. Northeastern accepted me, presumably based on my academic renaissance at community college and, I like to think, the emotional power of an application essay whose title could have been “I Don’t Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Laying Block in a Mental Institution.”
During my first week at Northeastern, a counselor asked me about my co-op plans. When I asked her what co-op was, and then assured her I wasn’t kidding, I was told that co-op was the reason most if not all students went to Northeastern. She said that 95 percent of the student body worked a co-op job related to his or her major every other quarter, creating a résumé and making money at the same time.
Ohhhh. Co-op. Yes, I absolutely had co-op plans, I told her. I’m all about the co-op.
A week later I was sent on my first co-op interview, make that my first interview of any kind, at the Boston Globe sports department. I was told that the Globe, and the sports department in particular, was the most sought-after job in the journalism program. It had national gravitas, and it paid well, especially for journalism.
I was up against more than twenty other students. With no familiarity with the paper and having done nothing in the way of preparation, I went to the interview in a flannel shirt and work boots that went especially well with my Charles Manson beard. I winged it in the interview. I told jokes. I said that I hated the Red Sox. I said the word “fuck.” Not because I didn’t care or wanted to come off as a rebel, but because I didn’t know better. I didn’t know about Woodward or Bernstein, Red Smith, or the First Amendment. Besides, the assistant sports editor who was doing the interviewing had said “shit” a few seconds earlier, so why the fuck not?
Despite or perhaps because of the above, I got the job, and it changed my life. In part because I wouldn’t have been able to pay my tuition or graduate if not for the money I made working full-time (thanks to overtime and covering for others) year-round. My tenure at the Globe also changed me because I was suddenly hanging out with (okay, getting coffee for) the best sportswriters in the country: Peter