Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [15]
I’d already begun to wonder if this was what I wanted to do, if this was how I wanted to be treated, for the next twenty-five years.
Three Jobs That Would Never Appear on My Résumé
Yonkers, New York, 1983
“I spoke to someone in the laborers’ union, and if you go up to Peek-skill first thing tomorrow morning, there’s a good chance he can pull some strings and help get you a card to join.”
I had just graduated from college, where I’d spent the previous three years writing for one of the country’s best newspapers. There, I’d earned scholarships and a steady paycheck, and thanks to student loans, a loan from my uncle, and a loan from my soon-to-be wife, Judy, I’d paid for every cent of it. The problem was, once my co-op gig ended upon graduation, the Globe could only offer me a part-time job and no future guarantee of full-time employment. So I was back in New York, engaged to be married, and, because I was without a job, feeling particularly vulnerable.
Hence the sage advice of my father, who at the time, with the mental institution job finally over, was laying brick on lower Manhattan skyscrapers by day and driving a New York City cab at night. And hence my actually considering said advice.
I realize now that this was a particularly difficult time for my father, a child of the Depression, a self-made man who once had a thriving construction and paving business. He was only trying to protect me from the disappointments he’d experienced. To my father at that time, my not failing was what mattered most.
I get it now, but still: thanks for believing in my hopes and dreams, Dad.
Prior to the laborers’ union offer I did a short stint as a reporter at the New Haven Register covering sports and, briefly, metro news and politics. But the uneasy feeling that had first revealed itself in the locker rooms at Fenway Park had become more manifest. It was one thing to be looked down upon by a future Hall of Famer, and quite another by a minor-league hockey player, or a corrupt East Haven councilman. I decided that covering regional sports and uncovering small-time campaign improprieties, an understandably admirable and rewarding job for some, weren’t for me. I liked newspaper work, but not enough to work nights and weekends for $189 a paycheck. So there we were, my wife-to-be and I, sitting in our Plymouth Turismo on a gray winter’s day, staring at the long line of men in work boots and Carhartt jackets with sweatshirt hoods pulled over their heads waiting, presumably, for the same thing that I sought. The coveted union laborer’s card.
To me the situation didn’t seem out of the ordinary. I’d been mixing cement and hauling block for my father since I was fourteen. But to Judy it was something altogether different. I imagine in that line of somber men leaning into the wind she glimpsed an aspect of a future she had never planned on. I imagine that to her the line of unemployed would-be laborers represented not a temporary job but a scene straight out of The Grapes of Wrath.
“You’re a writer,” she told me. “Not a laborer. You’ve been looking for a job for what, a month?”
“Six weeks. It’s just to get some cash coming in.”
“I don’t care what your father thinks,” she told me. “If you get out of this car, I will never speak to you again.”
My first job in New York was for a forty-five-year-old man who published a respected wine magazine out of his Upper East Side apartment. Every day I copyedited his forthcoming book on wine, laid out his monthly magazine, and printed up ads on some kind of tintype press while he usually did nothing. Most of the day I sat next to an older Trinidadian woman, an administrative assistant who either was not one for small talk or for some reason detested me.
It was boring, tedious work, a far cry from the excitement of the Globe and Fenway Park. However, I knew it was a place-holder job until something better came along. And on the plus side, I wasn’t hauling twelve-inch block