Grunt Labor in the Mile High City

When I was a senior in high school I took a class called Critical Thinking which was taught by a temperamental man named Mr. Olson. A very tall and thin forty-something, one minute he would be laughing and joking, cracking the funnies and being corny and then someone would say something slightly off color and he'd be throwing one of his desk drawers across the room, red faced and sweating, veins bulging out the sides of his neck. He was a fluffy bunny with glasses and a rabid dog. He was a friendly cigar that explodes in your face. He was a pretty flower that sprayed you in the eyes with water that was really hot and burned you badly. I always treated Mr. Olson the way I would a pitbull or angry gorilla. You look at him, you smile, you keep your distance and you definitely don't try to sniff his balls.

Critical Thinking was the type of class that tried to make you think outside the box. Every week we'd get a packet some fifty pages long of news reports Mr. Olson had collected and we were instructed to read them all over night so we'd be well versed for discussions the next day in class. To this day I'm positive that no one ever finished an entire packet. In fact, I'm pretty sure almost everyone, save for the valedictorians, just found themselves skimming through as much as they could before class started, trying to figure out if their arguments were against abortion or if they believed that being gay was born or bred and why. There had to be a why. Always a why. Unlike our parents who stated, "because I'm your parent" we actually had to have a real legitimate reason for thinking the way we did.

One day the topic of being raped in college came up and we were all deciding if the elements involved could actually deem this case as rape or if the girl "had it coming". After the conversation, Mr. Olson asked if any of us were planning on going to college and roughly 90% of the class raised their hands, myself included. He wisely told the group that college would be expensive and asked how many of us had saved up $20,000 or more. About a third of the people raised their hands, all of them wearing name brand clothes and designer glasses. I was sure they misheard him. I was certain what they heard him say was, "how many of your parents are paying for your school that's going to cost $20,000 or more".

He asks how many people have saved up $10,000 and another third raises their hands. These are the upper middle class kids, the kids who won't ever own their own business or inherit their parents', but they will manage fast food chains and become successful dreamers. He follows the second place question up with the bronze, "how many have $5,000?" and then "how many have $1,000 saved up?" and that's pretty much it for the remaining third, minus me and the kid wearing the Cannibal Corpse shirt and I'm wondering how I got put into THIS group? Who signed me up to be on THIS team? I'm wearing khaki pants, Chuck Taylor sneakers and a shirt with a picture of Jesus on it. I should not be in this group. I look around and the class is sort of looking at me and I look at the Cannibal Corpse kid and I think he is asleep or dead and I think he has scars all over his wrists and up his arms from cutting himself. I attempt to distance myself visually from him by smiling at everyone, something I'm sure he would never do. I look towards the front of the class and Mr. Olson is staring at me, dead on, eyes peering into the back of my soul. He opens his mouth to speak. "...and finally, how many people were planning on going to college but haven't even begun to THINK about their financial situation?" And there it was. I slowly slip my hand into the air; the dirty, poor kid who loved Jesus more than money. Would Jesus carry him through college? Would Jesus buy him a hamburger? Would Jesus purchase his school books? I was the communist sympathizer, so uninformed of the world. A few of the trust fund babies laugh quietly and Mr. Mel Olson smiles. I'm sure he expected just as much out of me - always late to class, always grabbing for D's but constantly catching the F's, not talking much and when I do it's mostly in nervous garble and incomplete sentence structures, you know what I mean? Hmm? Dude?

When it came time to really put my nose to the grindstone and attend college I took out three Stafford loans for about six grand a piece and used these to cover the vast majority of my tuition and dorm fees. To get extra money to buy things like beer bongs, atari 2600s and a Honda motorcycle, I applied for a work study program and took up a job renting out camera equipment at a place in my school called The Cage. It paid me minimum wage but afforded me the luxury of becoming familiar with several different types of cameras, lights, sound gear and editing equipment. There were several people that worked there for free, volunteering their time simply because of the experience, so I considered myself lucky that I was receiving anything.

Two years and who knows how many working hours later, I was fired from The Cage when the director of the program discovered me drinking a glass of water in the computer lab. He'd been out for my blood for about the past six months for reasons (still) unknown to me and this was the opportunity he'd been looking for to nail the coffin closed. I was standing behind a group of students, helping to expedite their projects for the end of the semester when he spotted me through the plate glass doors with the rim of a cup (actually, strangely, it was a canteen) pressed against my lips. Normally, drinking water was not considered a crime in my school but in the computer labs, you may as well have been blowing your butt dump all over the monitors and keyboards for all he cared. It was restricted activity whichever way you cut it. Frederic came storming in, one heavy footstep after the next and stomped right up to me, stuck his thick New York finger in my general vicinity and said that I was, "finally done for" and that he "demanded my card". The security in the school was set up with keycards the faculty were given to grant access to certain doors and he was demanding I turn mine in. The entire class had stopped what they were doing to watch this showdown in Post 2. I pulled out my velcro wallet and opened it up. I pulled out a white keycard and he SNATCHED it out of my hand like a hungry eagle snagging a trout. He holds it up in front of my face and says, "You're never getting this back" and I say, "that's my keycard to the dorms". I dig back into my waller and pull out an identical keycard for The Cage. He hands me back the stolen keycard and takes the second one, this time a little slower and then says, "you won't be needing THIS anymore" and I say, "I guess not".

Had the confrontation ended there, I probably could have laughed the entire situation off and just moved on with my life, attaching myself to another job somewhere else, always holding a particularly vicious grudge in my heart for ol' Freddy baby, but it didn't stop there. He went on, making false accusations about me stealing equipment and returning things late and ruining other shoots; things so far-fetched it was hard to believe he wasn't just making it up as he talked. And again, had it been him and I in a room, alone, I probably would have laughed at him, mocked his strange New York / Georgian accent, stood up and walked out of his office.....but it wasn't. He was accusing me of these ludicrous charges in front of my schoolmates, both friends and strangers and making me look like a fool. I tell him "that never happened" and then I say again, "that never happened EITHER. Who told you this?" He says he just knows it's true and then turns to storm out, figuring that if he just leaves the room, he'll leave me behind as well. That, however, is not how I operate; I cling to your shoe like some piece of sticky dog turd you've stepped in. That said, he seemed relatively surprised when I chased him down the hallway and demanded who his informant was. WHO told him I'd brought my equipment back late? WHO told him I'd done these things? Instead of an answer, he looks at me and simply says that he'll never be giving me a recommendation so I shouldn't even bother asking.

It is at this point that I finally notice through my bleeding rage that there are actually more students standing around in the hallway watching us then were originally observing the fight in the computer lab. in fact, a few kids in the labs have opened the door and are standing, watching, listening. Other kids in other classrooms are waiting for what's next. Students and teachers have stopped their conversations and lectures to peer into the hallway, wanting to catch the final moments before the pending apocalypse. They're thinking this is better than pay-per-view. They're thinking they've got front row seats, free tickets. They think, "I know Frederic made a kung-fu film called "Tiger Street" but does he know kung-fu himself? Will he beat John within an inch of his life with his black belt skill set?" Tiger Street is Frederic's pride and joy. It is his claim to fame - a feature length kung fu movie that plays late nights on Showtime.

The people watching, the crowds, the audience, the film lovers. They want a show. They want the act three climax and I feel as though it would just be a shame to let them down. Frederic and I stand in the long hallway facing one another, only about ten feet apart, all eyes on us. There is near silence and then, like a bowling ball crashing into a glass wall, I state, "Don't worry Frederic. I would never ask the guy that made Tiger Street for a recommendation". Not another word is said. Not one syllable, grunt or heavy sigh. He stares at me in silence and, to this day, I don't believe that I actually managed to stun him or shock him into a mute phase. I believe what happened is that my statement triggered his psychotic button and he knew that if he started to speak he would start to scream and then he would start to pummel and murder me.



A few weeks before I moved out of the dorms a friend of mine got in touch with me and said that he'd spoken to Frederic who had openly admitted that he was wrong about me and all the equipment. It was all just a big misunderstanding on his part. Oops. I saw him at the school a few times after that but he never spoke a word to me, apology or otherwise. Regardless of Frederic's view of me, I still owed the school a small trove of money and I'm sure they wanted it no matter what my financial situation was, so I headed back out into the market to find a job. Collin McKennan, another friend of mine (I have so many) that happens to look like the bass player from Blink-182, was working at UPS at the time and let me know that they were hiring, had great advancement opportunities, paid really well and you basically just worked out all day.

I went down to their Aurora center, applied and then came back for the initial interview, along with roughly twenty other people. Two weeks later I had outlasted nineteen of the possible occupants by begging and pleading with the hiring staff. I explained to them that I NEEDED this job. I told them that I was moving to California in roughly three months and (again) had saved no money. This was my only option and I promised to be a good worker, not because I wanted to be but because I NEEDED to be. Bosses enjoy desperation. They like having you trapped in their little web.

Out of sympathy, I'm sure, they ended up hiring me and paying me for one week of training where I sat and watched safety videos that taught me how to construct a proper box wall. I figured this would be a synch since I could get to level nine on Tetris with no problem and if I was really paying attention could even hit twelve. After the first day of being in the actual factory, I had somehow managed to send two entire trucks off packed with the wrong materials and had my supervisor tell me that my box wall was the worst one he'd ever seen in his entire UPS career. Also, to say that this was a workout was a bit of an understatement. This was slave labor. There may as well have been broad shouldered white men walking around with staffs and whips, beating the poor and lowly Egyptian workers into submission, making sure we continued to build our walls of cardboard rather that stone. After eight hours of picking up forty pound boxes, i thought I was going to die. My bones ached, my feet stung and my brain had gone numb. I crawled into my car and balanced precariously on the verge of tears for a few minutes before firing up my jalopy and coasting over to Jade's place on the other side of town. What had I gotten myself into? Maybe it wasn't so bad. Maybe I just needed to warm up to this new lifestyle. Tomorrow, after all, was a brand new day..........

.......the next morning I called in and quit. I was hoping to get the answering machine, hoping to be able to just leave a very polite, quick, painless, non-confrontational message when the guy that had gone to bat for me, had originally helped me lock down the job, picked up. I explained that I wouldn't be coming in again, ever again, forever. I let him know, politely, that the job just wasn't really my cup of tea. I let him know that "it's not you, it's me". For some reason he still asked me to come back. I tried to tell him that I was the opposite of an asset to their company. I told him I'd sent things destined for Georgia to Vermont. I told him that birthday cards addressed to Cindy in Montana were going to end up at a Monty's house in Utah. I said I was bad with numbers and even worse with stacking boxes. I told him about my supervisor and still he asked me to return. I didn't deserve this punishment. I wanted to be yelled at, scolded, hated. I wanted to be told that I'd put everyone in a hard spot. I wanted to feel bad for what I was doing and this guy was making me feel HORRIBLE. He was killing me with kindness and I was dying one breath at a time. Eventually I had to just put my foot down and say, "Emery, listen to me. I am NOT coming back. I do not like it there. I will find something else to do. I have to go to class" and he sadly complied and I hung up my phone and proceeded to get drunk with my friends.

Another two weeks pass before a friend of mine contacts me, telling me he's managing a restaurant. He tells me he's looking for help from five in the morning until noon. He's looking for some busboys / dishwashers to come down to the kitchen to give the latino ladies that pretty much made up the staff, a little hand. I said sure, absolutely, yes, yes, yes. My bank account was operating on a downhill slope and my student loans were getting ready to come up in just a few months. On top of that, my big move to LA was sneaking up on me and I needed........well, a deposit, a new bed and, to be completely honest, a few tanks of gas to make it over the mountains. I began work right away.

The women whom I was employed with spoke nearly zero English and didn't seem to be interested in learning any so I took to picking up Spanish. Among the words I learned were, "good", "bad" and "sick" which did nothing when trying to ask "where did you hide the bread?" or "how do I properly drain the fryer so I don't burn my hands beyond recognition?" They would smile, no matter what you asked, and say, "Bien, bien".

"How are you today?" "Bien, bien"". "Oh, that's good that you're doing good. How was your ride to work?" "Bien, bien". "Fantastic. I ride a motorcycle. I think it's one of the best ways to get around the city and a GREAT way to start the day". "Bien, bien". "I hate my job. I hate cleaning up after people. The smell of this food nauseates me. I'm thinking about going home after work and blowing my brains out all over the wall. Do you have any thoughts or advice regarding suicide?". "Bien, bien".

Five days a week I'd wake up at 3:30am, roll off the couch I was living on, toss on my dirty work clothes and migrate to the living room where I'd stare at a blank television and think about making an omelette until Collin got home. He was working nights over at UPS and so, being roommates, we'd only cross paths for about forty-five minutes every day. He'd come in the door looking dead beat and I'd be sitting on the couch in the dark looking like I just woke up. We'd each crack open a beer and watch an episode of "The Chapelle Show" before going our separate ways, trading places for the next few hours and it was like this that he and I existed for the next few months, like some 21st century, homosexual clones of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo.

I worked at the kitchen job until a day and a half before I left, using my remaining time to pack up what little belongings I owned into my girlfriend's Lincoln Continental along with our dog. We set out of Denver with some CDs I had burned and showed up in LA about seventeen hours later at our new home, an apartment we were renting site unseen and that amounted to (literally) nothing more than a garage stall with a toilet in the corner. We didn't have a bed and our pillows were about six hours behind us in another car that was following (sort of) behind us. It was 3am and we laid down on the tile floor together, blanketless, sharing our only roll of toilet paper as our pillow and I stared at our barren ceiling wondering, hoping, that I was going to get this whole film career to work.