It's been over a decade since I left college, no diploma in hand. Bravery and foolishness go hand in hand at that age, and I was no exception. My grades were dropping like a rock, my attention span was nil, and in the restlessness of youth some kind of change felt imminent. When an old girlfriend of mine, smart as a whip, told me she had no intention of following three years of computer science, it seemed like The Sign. Change I was used to, as long as it was of my own design; I'd switched majors halfway through a creampuff Economics program to English Lit, changed my clothes and haircut...
I left college for home in the fall of 1989, just before the start of what should have been my senior year. The first thing I did was register with temporary agencies. Office temping is probably the fastest way to learn about the inner workings of business, and the most forgiving. Years of hand-typing hexadecimal machine-language code from magazines into my Atari 800XL had given me a remarkable accuracy rate in data entry, and I was popular with the clients. One offered me a permanent position as a forms typist, but after you've spent five minutes correcting each typo on four carbonless sheets with four different colors of carbonless Liquid Paper and blowing them semi-dry, it doesn't seem as attractive.
Besides, what I wanted was a graphic design job, or at least something in technical documentation. Remember, this was the age of Windows 3.0 and Macintosh skills weren't as ubiquitous as they are now. I had piss for a portfolio, except for the pile of technical docs I'd done for the college computer center. Pictures and words, pictures and words.
A year passed and what I learned was that New England was in the worst economic slump it had seen since the Ford administration, the tech jobs in demand were in SQL database management, and a twentysomething self-proclaimed desktop publisher with no sheepskin didn't impress the few, low-paying markets for graphic skills.
I took a job as an assistant manager with a local newsstand bookstore. The pay sucked, the hours often meant working completely alone at night, the central management kept details of the bookkeeping secret from us, and they refused to stock or order books they couldn't get at their preferred discount from the publishers. However, as the only news distributor for the three-county area, our continued existence was a given. My manager was a giant, broken old Irishman with a tremble in his hand and a nameless fear of the owners, who lived in a motel and kept to himself. In retrospect I think our customers spent more on cigarettes and the state lottery than books.
Ruth, my girlfriend from college and now pursuing a Master's in library science at UNC-Chapel Hill, came up to visit and offered me an ultimatum: either move down South with her or call it quits. I looked at the hometown where nothing has changed in thirty years, the culture is nonexistent and the jobs were too, and packed up my Toyota. Ahhh, the fresh air of change again...
Ruth and I lived in nearby Carrboro while she finished her degree. Again I dutifully registered with the temp agencies, figuring that the hi-tech world of the Research Triangle would have better options. Ruth informed me that the Ph.D.s in Chapel Hill were waiting tables. After a brief stint as a telephone customer sales rep for Adam & Eve (and those Better Sex Videos), I answered an ad for a typesetter position. The job was at a high speed copy shop doing a brisk business, and the pay was mediocre but with potential. Moreover, the owner felt talent was more important than degrees. In other words, he could pay me less. Meanwhile, my mother (widowed since 1978) landed a job correspondence school job teaching fiction-writing, a job she could do out of her home.
Besides typesetting resumes and fixing poorly-formatted theses, I did a fair bit of graphic design for Chapel Hill's businesses and locals and built up a reasonable assortment of samples. The hardware and software I was using was good and I got experience managing a large database of documents. I also had some of the friendliest co-workers who were mostly my age. When Ruth graduated I was sorry to go.
Where we went was Wilmington, NC, where they shoot "Dawson's Creek." At the time, they were finishing the last seasons of "Matlock" and it was a mecca for TV-movies and B-movies. This had something to do with the nonunion laws in North Carolina that made it possible for films to be made without union employees at union pay. This particular advantage didn't seem as attractive after the nonunion weapons supervisor working on "The Crow" went home early one night and Brandon Lee got the wrong end of a hollowtip in his abdomen.
Wilmington is a handful of paradoxes. It's a remarkably small town in an undistinguished coastal location, which originated as a major port city in colonial times. The chief export was what were euphemistically called "naval stores," pine tar to you and me. The place dried up when the railroad moved out of town in the fifties (and the city converted the rails to parking lots), only to experience a small surge of regular tourist income from the proximity to the beach. As other coastal ports along the Carolinas popped up, with deeper riverbeds and therefore able to handle larger cargoes, Wilmington found its lock on shipping slowly degrading. Add to this the lack of interstate access within ninety miles or a clear route to Raleigh...
By the early 1980s interstate 40 rolled into town and major franchises not far behind. Hotel construction exploded and hasn't slowed yet. At this time Dino de Laurentiis needed somewhere to shoot "Firestarter" cheaply and he sent Frank Capra, Jr. to scout locations. Capra found a town with an interstate, nonunion laws, burgeoning theatre community and what's more an airport with a studio-sized parcel of land right across the street.
Optimism over the future brought a wave of urban professionals from other parts of the country who dug in early. In fact, too many of them, and the first thing they learned was that tenth-generation North Carolinians cut off from cities didn't think they had much need for public relations people, graphic designers, ad agencies... The second thing these newcomers learned was that the locals had grown used to paying people chicken feed with no benefits and weren't interested in paying "city" rates for professional services.
It took six months to find a job in graphic design. In fact, any kind of permanent work. The firm I worked for did local graphic design and published a free music-events monthly, with two designers, a part-time resume writer, three sales representatives and the owner, who divided his time between aspects of all these positions. The clientele was impressive, and the office was small but suitable. Ruth and I got married the next summer.
The next two and a half years I gained considerable experience in spot color and 4-color graphic design work, direct contact and contracting with printers, conventional pasteup, layout, publishing deadlines, sales, marketing, invoicing, advertising design, oh, and resume writing. Which was a good thing, because over that same period the other designers, sales reps and resume writers looked at their paychecks, especially the ones that bounced, and moved to greener pastures. By the end it was just the employer and myself, and one cold morning in March I told him I was leaving for an embroidered goods catalog looking for a technical artist. We were living in a house by then and between our student loans and the mortgage we weren't cutting it.
The company, recently transplanted from New York after thirteen years, needed someone who could redraft customer logos six times lifesize for embroidery digitizers, who later traced over the enlarged image on a giant tablet with a crosshairs puck. This time my tools were french curve, 2H mechanical pencil, T square and drafting tables. The computer was used for crude scans for preliminary enlargement (my actual drafting was done on onionskin traced over the enlarged scans), and laying out type. After some pointed suggestions that the illustration program could actually be used for the redrafting and save some time in the process, I was evicted from the art pool and moved directly into digitizing.
Embroidery digitizing turned out to be an almost perfect job for me. The tasks were short, I could concentrate easily on each, and there was always room to be competitive with myself. Moreover, I could compete with the mooks at Lands' End and LL Bean, whose work was not always on par with our company's, and we knew it. I trained new digitizers and artists and expanded the number of art formats we could accept from customers and began experimenting with new techniques. The conventional art tools grew dusty and we moved into a completely computerized system. Old paper tapes were systematically converted to archives. And our first-time customer design approval rate turned over from mostly rejections to approvals, dramatically upping our throughput (and making our CSRs' lives a living hell). In the interim I learned more about DOS and Win95 than I expected, especially troubleshooting. The pay was better (after a few negotiated raises) and I had real insurance.
I asked my mother to move down to Wilmington to live nearer us. With only a week's vacation a year, spending it each year in the place I spent my life getting away from didn't seem like a good idea, and besides her other son lives in Moscow now. Her job could go anywhere she did. The house was over a hundred years old, and we knew she spent most of her time in a few rooms. She eventually agreed and after some wrangling she sold the house and bought a nearby condo in 1997 with a tidy profit to spare.
Unfortunately there was some other baggage we didn't count on. Her health had deteriorated in the previous years due to a steady diet of cigarettes, Kahlua and food consisting entirely of starch soaked in butter. A trans-ischemic attack (or TIA to you) in the previous year had left her verbally aphasic for two hours, but she recovered. The next attack wasn't as kind, leaving her unable to speak ten words consecutively without one being the wrong word. She promised her physician she would change her diet, start exercising and drop the cigarettes.
Ruth and I had concerns of our own trying to start a family due to medical complications. This wasn't distraction enough. One bright, clear July afternoon visiting an old friend in Charlotte, our car was rear-ended at 45 miles an hour, totaling both cars and injuring both Ruth and our passenger. We learned soon after that the officer at the scene decided we were at fault and the next six months were spent on the telephone and fax machine fighting with both insurance companies, the other party's adjuster, and the Charlotte police department. (During that year there were 36 more accidents at the same intersection, and a drunk pro basketball player died there just two months ago) After much work the police officer changed the report to our advantage, but the stress had taken a toll on my outlook and our marriage, sending me into a clinical depression I didn't fully recognize yet.
I had also played the top of my game at the shirt catalog company, and knew it. A much smaller company down the road, which primarily did contract digitizing for other embroiderers around the country, had an opening for another digitizer. They liked my sample portfolio and before long I was working in a reconverted Piggly Wiggly supermarket, digitizing jacket-sized logos, shirt logos, cap logos and having a ball. I didn't supervise or train anyone, but we had a good time. Now that there were two full-time digitizers and one half-time (our supervisor, who also handled marketing), our customers noticed our turnaround was faster than the competition and started increasing their orders. In the next 2 years we added as many digitizers (one of which I trained in the previous company) and found it necessary to restructure our filing system to keep up. Without notice Mom quietly quit her job, eventually telling me it was to finally resume writing on her own.
Meanwhile I discovered Prozac and cognitive therapy, where my counselor made me read a book called Driven to Distraction. Those of you who have ADD know what I'm talking about. A lifetime of wondering why I was restless, why a driven, bright kid had been kicked out of two schools for failing grades and was now working as skilled labor while my brother worked as a corporate attorney in Russia and my wife held a Masters', whether I was totally fucked up... it all came together. (and if you're one of "us," I can't recommend enough Thom Hartmann's book ADD: A Different Perspective. If you never take another piece of my advice read this book.) I felt whole, and even suggested Mom might benefit from seeing my shrink.
Ruth, on the other hand, had spent seven years in the same cubicle at the same university library. In her typical fashion, she had taken the bull by the horns on the professional development front and surpassed the expectations of her job description. Despite this the resources of her department couldn't keep up with the growing needs of the electronic library, and her chances for advancement were nonexistent. Wilmington, despite a recent infestation of coffee bars, was no more progressive or diverse than it had been in 1992. Hurricanes were now a guaranteed fall phenomenon and we'd already suffered through Fran. Carolco had gone under and the film and TV jobs had moved to Vancouver. One local director friend of ours actually commuted to Baltimore every week to work on "Homicide."
By a peculiar twist of fate (karma?) a dear friend Ruth had made in library school (later her bridesmaid) had recently left a position at Northern Arizona University, and had much positive to say about the place (which had an opening in Ruth's field). She applied.
About this time she received a phone call at work from the credit union wanting to know why we were attempting to transfer insufficient funds from savings to checking. "We" weren't; I shared joint checking accounts with both my wife and my mother there, and from time to time the credit union got confused over who was who. To our horror we discovered that the profits from the sale of the house were kaput. The condo was in wretched condition and she had been untruthful about nearly everything she told us she was doing, largely to keep us from interfering. Disoriented, alcoholic and malnourished, we attempted to stabilize her nutrition and finances, but despite her agreements to cooperate she managed to undermine all these efforts. Her friends back home, who hadn't seen her in two years, weren't much help. At the age of 31 I had no choice but to put her in a rest home. This is a diary all its own, for a later date.
NAU offered Ruth the job the same week.
The next five weeks were a blur of packing, saying our goodbyes, answering complaints from the rest home about her behavior, disposing of goods to Goodwill, fixing strange leaks in the house, and little or no sleep. Bertha arrived two days before the mover, flooding the interstate between him and us. Our attempt at escape nearly stranded us in Raleigh. Despite it all we got into our cars, drove onto I-40 and kept going for the next five days until we arrived here in Flagstaff. Flag is almost as different from Wilmington is can be, and this time we were both jonesing for a change like this.
If you aren't familiar with Flagstaff, it is not a desert like Phoenix. When the temperature hits 80 the local paper prints hints on how to "beat the heat." The snow stops falling as late as May. The San Francisco Peaks look like a picture postcard and the air, while thin, is clean and dry. Because the elk cause car accidents when they salt the roads in winter, they use ground lava cinders instead. Consequently cars never rust out here and it isn't uncommon to see vintage AMC Eagles choogling around. Aging hippies pepper the population, and the new agers with more money than common sense live down in Sedona.
After a while I found a temp job on campus stocking textbooks in the bookstore, and then a position in the library's web development team opened up. Which is what I'm doing.
To our good fortune the house sold in January. However, with the market as depressed as it was, we made a net profit of minus five hundred dollars. Still, being a homeowner was a very useful experience, and I'm a much handier man with tools for it.
In general, I'm a handier man than the one who left college with no clear idea where he was going. I still don't have a college degree, but I can cook better than most men I know, I can handle plumbing, painting, refinishing, reupholstering, minor car repair, entertaining guests, designing, drawing, writing, billing, delegating, supervising, training, programming...
Butchering a hog, conning a ship and dying gallantly aren't on that list, for those of you who read too much Heinlein in your teens, but you can't have everything. As Steven Wright once said, "Where would you put it?"
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