No Work, Many Chores

I have no paying work.   The job I thought would provide a bit of freelance every month is not going to mean much.   I'll probably get something from them every couple of months or so but nothing much beyond that, I don't think.  The woman who took over for the previous work-giver-outer doesn't know me. She has her own stable of writers.  I'm an afterthought, if I'm even a thought at all.

So back to my story.   After I received my sentence from student court, , that very afternoon,  I packed my trunk and took the very next train to Chicago.  From there a plane home to New York.  There was no way in the world I was going to serve 90 work hours on the commons.  I was too important to be serving on what amounted to garbage detail.  I had my pride.  What were they thinking?

I arrived in New York.  For some reason, I thought my parents would be glad to see me.  I was their boy.  I was in error.

"You're not going to lie around the house," my father said, "You're getting a job.  And I mean this week.  I don't care what kind of job it is."  This put a damper on my plans to sleep till noon,  laze around in my bathrobe until maybe four in the afternoon and then see my friends.  So a job.  My father tossed the NY Times into my lap.  "Look for a job," he suggested.

As it turned out, there weren't many jobs for college drop outs of low ambition.  My resume was brief.  Very brief.  And I quickly discovered that was not really all that employable.  Most jobs required a suit.  I wasn't wearing no suit.  Nevertheless, after a couple of days I found an ad for a job working in a parking lot.  I would park cars for $2.26 an hour.   One problem.   I didn't have a driver's license although I did know how to drive and how hard could parking possibly be?   It was a nightmare.

You had to park the cars, backing up, at 90 miles an hour into a space almost exactly the size of the car.  The manager of the lot was a guy named Joe, I think.   What I mostly remember about him was that he never shouted, never seemed to get very angry.   Even when I was scratching nearly every car I parked.   But he had this vein in his neck and when I had one accident after another, the vein in his neck would go crazy.  Spasming like a son of a bitch.  There was a regular customer.  A blue Caddy.  I didn't have the passenger door completely closed so when I backed it up, fast, I tore the door off.  In this instance Joe actually did get angry.   He told me I would not be parking any more cars.   What?

What do you do in a parking lot, if you don't park cars?   You sweep.  They give you s very wide broom and you sweep.  You sweep the lot, but mostly you sweep the street in front of the lot.  This lot was on 35th and Park.  It's no longer there, but the subway is.  People would emerge from the subway and look right through me.  It was my first encounter with invisibility.   I didn't care for it.   I requested a transfer to one of Kinney's other lots.   They had many.  Joe was happy to have me transferred to a lot they had at 42nd Street and 10th Avenue.  It was, at the time, the most dangerous neighborhood in the city south of Harlem.   Now this lot is also long gone, but in those days it was a block square and, as the new guy, I got the night shift.  In the winter. In the cold.  There was no business at the lot after 9 pm. You'd have to be crazy to park your car there.  So I hung out in the little unheated shack they have for the staff.  I was the staff.  The entire staff from midnight to 8 am.   In the little drawer below the cash register was a blackjack, as if, when some guy pulled a gun on me,  I would be quick to swing into action with my blackjack.  Uh huh.   (FIND OUT WHAT I DO ABOUT ALL THIS IN TOMORROW'S POST)