Collaboration isn't just for the French

I am writing this on a flight to Los Angeles where we are going to shoot the first five commercials for the campaign I began last summer. It was July 27th when I stood at a urinal on 22nd street and was suddenly struck with the idea which, through various barrel jumps, backflips and slaloms, has brought me to this seat on American Airlines.
Of course, it’s absurd that it should have taken 200 days for three or four minutes of advertising to go from my urinal to your television. Well, actually the commercials haven’t even been filmed yet. It’ll be closer to 300 days before they actually hit the airwaves. This is certainly a long time for even advertising to be birthed, but not unheard of.
When you sell your creative work, the results are invariably a collaboration between your imagination and the processes of the person or corporation who is funding them. In the case of a new brand advertising campaign, your collaborators include various levels of decision makers in your agency, some ‘creative’, some administrative and some strategic, all of who provide input based on their own experience, ego, time and attention span.
Next, the work runs through the filter of the client company’s marketing executives. Some have long and illustrious careers producing great advertising and can often make your ideas better and sharper. Others have ended up in marketing by virtue of their success or failure in another part of the company. I have worked with clients who were former antifreeze salesman, flight attendants, bank tellers, and tax attorneys. When I created ads for the Postal Service, my client was a former mail carrier. However, their past is not necessarily an indication of their utility as creative collaborators.
As I have done a lot of corporate and brand advertising, I invariably end up presenting to CEOs and CFOs. Most of them have little interest in advertising and consider it a waste of time and money. They tend to be results oriented, I’m from Missouri, kind of left brainers, Some, by virtue of having a lot of money and a lot of power, have odd and interesting ideas about how advertising should work. They often cite their wives’ or children’s opinions. Because they are unused to talking about executional creative matters, their words are often ambiguous and hard to take at face value and much time is spent by others, parsing their phrases and trying to determine the hidden meaning behind all sorts of cabalistic executive signs. I have worked with agencies who note down the colors of executives’ ties and shirts in an effort to come up with logo and advertising palettes that will pass muster.
These creative approvals are funny things. They are so often subjective and frankly irrelevant to the effectiveness of advertising. The best clients are the ones who are extremely clear and smart about what they know best. They tell you what they want to accomplish with their businesses and how advertising can help. They couch their reactions to the work you bring them in terms of their original intent. Often they are surprisingly lucid and insightful, demonstrating in spades how they got to where they are. They respect the people they hire and assume that they will do their work well. They keep their egos in check and use their authority to clear impasses further down the food chain. They can break loggerheads with a phrase or two. As one CEO said to me recently, ‘People assume that because everyone has a voice that this is a democracy. It’s not. I want this done so let’s move on.” Someone who works for someone who works for someone who works for him and who had been our daily contact had said something equally memorable and candid in an earlier meeting:” My boss told me that my job is to tell you what you have done wrong. I can’t see anything wrong in what you’ve done but I still have to figure out how to do my job.”
There’s little question that, unfortunately, much of what we are paid for is to deal with the process. To be able to listen to someone’s incoherent rant and turn it into some thing actionable. To respond to the various thumbs stuck in the wet clay of one’s idea and yet emerge with something that isn’t embarrassing and wasteful.
There are different styles that creative people have to deal with this obstacle course. Some defend their work against every single remark and soon devolve into shrill defensiveness. Others sit quietly, waiting for the moment to insert a devastating retort. Some try to come up with constructive responses as the clients lays out his objections. Some give long rebuttals that communicate little but ego and leave the client wondering if they heard a word she said. Some sit gulping in anxiety, waiting for others to defend their efforts. Some smirk smugly, all but saying ‘ You are such an idiot”.
The most constructive approach is, first, just to listen. Particularly when there are lots of clients of various levels in a room, they tend to circle around each other, ideas canceling each other out, objections overruled, problems solving themselves. Then, if the audience has the patience, summarize what they have said and see if they agree with your summary. Then offer a solution or two for the present and withdraw and try to form a coherent plan of response. When you do respond, show them what they asked for, accompanied with a range of other solutions.
I think most clients like the creative process. They want to be wowed. When they come up with their own ideas and insist upon them, they also have a nagging feeling that they’re doing the wrong thing, buying a dog and barking themselves. In some ways, advertising seems easier than other creative forms. When I do illustration work, no one has ever redrawn my pictures like some clients feel they can rewrite my copy. When I work with composers, I have (almost) never seen a client tell them which specific notes to play. A bad and desperate client will push past agency and director and go up to an actor and tell him specifically how to say his lines but he’ll rarely get in front of the camera himself.
The key again is to listen and observe. That’s the way to get the clearest sense of what’s really going on. Then by re-presenting the client’s POV to him or her, you show that you get it, you want to help, you care. Don’t insist on logic — often the process spits up a lot of nonsensical mandates that come about through intricate games of Telephone that make no real sense. People, intimidated by their inarticulate bosses, can resort to just taking dictation and passing the buck on to you. But try to see through that and get to the truth underneath.
Then, try to take all of the comments as a new creative challenge. Be willing to sacrifice your children in order to end up with an even stronger result. I’ve often had good ideas become great ones as they were annealed on the forge of the approval process. Despairing of being able to fix your crippled creation, you toss it aside and fabricate a far more elegant solution.
Am I making it all sound horrible? Do I seem like an arrogant know-it-all who thinks all clients are boobs? Maybe so, but I don’t really feel that, not most of the time. It’s a thin line to tread between making something that fits the needs of the people who hired you to do it and something that you are proud of, that is fresh and exciting to you. I often write commercials based on events or perceptions that have occurred to me and it is heart breaking to see them mangled beyond recognition. It feels very personal. But in the end, it really isn’t. That’s what Art is for, to express the personal. The creative work we are paid to do, while growing from our integrity and values and personal aesthetic, is always a collaboration and must be respected as such. When created honestly and openly and generously, it is is the best sort of collaboration, Rogers and Hammerstein, Dolce & Gabbana. At other times it’s more Rogers & Frankenstein, Dolce & Gambino. So you pick your fights. You say to you yourself, if they want to drive this Lamborghini over the clff, it’s their dollar. I won’t allow myself to be twisted in the wreckage. Recognizing that jobs and millions of dollars are at stake, that these matters are impacting people’s better judgment, doesn’t make you a hack. Just a professional.
So the simple answer is: throw yourself 90% into what you do for money. Reserve that small part for self-protection. Be willing to stand back, to be objective and dispassionate. And channel the feelings you have, the reaction to disappointment and limitations, and put it into the work that really matters: your Art. Now be uncompromising. Insist on the highest quality from yourself. Be clear, be strong, be energetic and bold. Experiment, reach, push. Stay up later than you would on a client project. See yourself in this work, the real you. Keep working, keep fighting, be heedless of others. And keep telling yourself that you work to earn a living and that you must never forget to to do the living that you have earned.

Aliens

Last night we went to a preview for James
Cameron’s new movie, Aliens of the Deep. It was pretty spectacular in
3-D Imax, all shot on the bottom of the ocean with extraordinary
critters and lunar landscapes. Cameron chatted with us just before the
screening and told us he much preferred these personal efforts to
Hollywood fare and would be continuing down this path. Here’s a guy who
made many of the biggest blockbuster movies ever (Alien, Terminator,
Titanic, etc) and won Oscars (Top of the World, Ma!) and instead of
making more and more crap full of explosions and mayhem has
increasingly devoted his creative energies and resources to these
little underwater documentaries aimed at schools and scientists.
As I mentioned a couple of days, I am thinking these days about the
balance between creativity for one’s pleasure versus creativity for
hire. With the exception of the few Damien Hirsts and Richard Serras
making big bucks, art is a business done mainly for its spiritual
rather than financial rewards. As an illustrator, one can make an okay
living, probably about the same as an experienced postal worker. One
has a certain amount of liberty in the way in which one works but, by
and large, you are executing other people’s ideas or at best creating a
drawing to accompany a story someone else has created. If you work for
publications, you’ll have decent freedom to interpret the assignment
and most of your drawings will be accepted pretty much as you draw
them. If you get one of the rare advertising illustration assignments
still left around, you’ll make a lot more money but have to redo your
work many times to fit the exact visions of the art director, creative
director and client.
Advertising is one of the most lucrative businesses for creative
people. We make double what designers do but generally get half as much
respect from our clients (most of whom make far less than we do). Our
ideas have to go through many layers of approval and then rounds of
testing but millions are spent to share them with the world.
Make no mistake. There is a fundamental difference between the work we
do for ourselves and almost anything we do for hire. Art is an
exploration, an unfolding of things that are deeply rooted in who the
creator is. It is not meant to fit an agenda or even express a message
(though much art is decoded for its ‘messages’, an aspect of the work
that is usually a byproduct of the artist’s process and not its true
purpose). Creativity that is commercial is always restricted by its
purpose. It may seem very free and loose and personal but it isn’t.
Even if one uses a song or an image that were created for personal
reasons and one puts it into advertising or design, one changes its
spirit forever. You can’t help but deform it by changing its content.
The song may sound lovely in the commercial but it is twisted to fit a
different agenda and thus loses it true beauty, a bird in a gilded cage
At the highest end of the advertising and design world, it appears that
top creative people have enormous control and freedom but I know many
such folks and though they are freer than their peers, compared with
the freedom of true fine artists they are crippled slaves.
Making the transition from one world to another is awfully hard.
I have hired artists to make ads for the first time and they are
horrible at it. I have hired movie directors to make their first
commercials and they struggle with the whole notion of shooting
something to time, to fitting a story into 30 seconds. Even Martin
Scorcese balked at it and produced mediocrity compared to directors who
are used to fitting their skills to the task. Composers, photographers,
painters, actors, all have trouble making the transition to the narrow
confines of commercial creativity.
The inverse is equally true. When I first started working with
publishers, I completely misunderstood the relationship. I thought my
editor was my client and assumed I had to follow their suggestions to
the letter. My agent disavowed me of this, pointing out that I
was the client, I was the goose laying the golden eggs, the producer of
the product that everyone else was profiting from ( which is equally
true in advertising but that value equation is rarely acknowledged as
if one’s salary was a lump-sum deal that expunges any rights of
ownership). Sure, the relationship was one of business partnership but
my vision was what my publisher wanted. That was a tough one to get
used to but enormously satisfying and liberating. IWhen I write a book
(and it becomes increasingly so with each book I do), I am out to
express myself and to find the best possible way to do so. Others’
functions is simply to help me understand how clear and engaging I have
been in doing so but the direction and responsibility are mine. That
feels a lot more like art to me. The check one cashes in such a case
may do less for one’s bank account but much more for one’s heart.

These thoughts on the value of creativity are rudimentary and a little
conflicted. I’ll keep working on them and share them as they are
polished.

Early morning habits

Too long ago, I went to the gym every day. At seven a.m., the doors opened and a small group of us would shamble in and begin lifting weights. I had a little notebook in which I charted my regimen and recorded my progress; accumulating the little pencil scrawls kept me committed for close to a year. I was pretty intense about it, seven days a week, rain or shine, always at 7 a.m. If I overloaded the stack of iron and strained a rhomboid, I would switch to a leg routine for the next few days until I healed. But I had to keep going
I took a fair amount of pleasure in how my body developed. I wasn’t a steroid freak or anything though some of the other 7 a.m. crew were a little scary, particularly a couple of the women with lats like pterodactyl wings and neck as thick as my thighs. For me, weight lifting felt like a creative act; I liked how my arms felt like they belonged to someone else, like touching a horse or a large dog’s back. I had made my body into something, something essentially useless as I rarely had to lift toppled trees off cars or open jars of pickles, but something hand-crafted nonetheless. I don’t even know how healthy the whole thing was: I almost always hurt somewhere and woke up each 6:30 wincing and groaning.
When it was still cold and dark outside, Patti would urge me to stay in bed but I would refuse. There was simply no room for discussion. If I missed a day, I would lose momentum, my streak would end. I was convinced that I had to be 100% committed to my routine. The pathological drill sergeant in my head gave my will zero room for excuses.
Then my sister said she wanted to join me. For a week or so, she met me every 7 a.m. and it was fun to have someone to work out with. Till one morning she called me at 6:45 and croaked that she didn’t feel like going today, that I should take the day of too. So I did. And the day after that and so on. I never went back to the gym again.
——-
Habit is enormously powerful. The bad ones are easy to pick up and a drag to shake. Each bad habit starts by stifling a voice in your head, the one that knows better, and says ‘go ahead, just try it’ and leads you to drag that first cigarette though you know it’ll lead to the grave, to accompany every burger with fries, to flop on the couch in front of the tube, to drink too much, talk too much, do too little…. The angel on your shoulder doesn’t stand a chance.
For me, developing good habits requires the same sort of censorship. However, this time I have to stifle the voice that leads me astray, to be absolutely rigid in my refusal to capitulate. It works best when I have an inflexible routine, like my 7 a.m. appointment at the gym.
These days, NPR wakes me up at 6:57 a.m., and I go mechanically through a series of maneuvers that have me walking up the street and arriving at my desk at 8:30 while the office is still cold and empty. I am at my most productive in that first hour. I’d love to add another hour to my morning, to rise before six and really get something done with my first cup of joe. I haven’t muscled myself into that harness yet.
What does this sort of rigidity mean when it comes to creativity? Can you be so iron-clad and expect your imagination to function just because you have put it on a regimen? Will the ink lie cold in the pen? Will the mind stay half-asleep?
Not if you insist. The muse can be put on a tight schedule. I have had to come up with ideas, on deadline for decades and, if anything, things flow more easily when you bear down on the brain. It’s not guaranteed but showing up is half the job. If I am focussed, resolved, and present, ideas will come.
I’d like to be more disciplined about my drawing. When I have an illustration assignment or a commitment to another like sketchcrawling, I can deliver. I just did it in Paris, crawling out in to the cold rainy dawn to draw. But it’s not as much fun as when I am suddenly inspired to pick up the pen. It feels like work. But maybe that’s because I am irregular in my early morning sessions. I mean, I could stagger over to the gym tomorrow at 7 am and bench press something but it would not be fun.
My pal, Tom Kane, has a great habit. When he walks into his office each morning, he snaps on his computer, loads the NY Times homepage and draws something from one of the lead stories in a Moleskine reserved for the purpose. Each day, at least one drawing of a newsmaker. Only then does his work day begin. His book is full now, brimming with great caricatures and portraits, built one drawing at a time. His drawings muscles ripple. Of course, he does not stop there; he draws New York City most days, detailed pen and ink drawings that fill the page from corner to corner. Tom’s compulsive too. He cannot stop until every square inch of paper is covered and crosshatched. He tells me he doesn’t do it because he enjoys it; he does it because he has to. He’s got the habit.

Sour Grapes and Bleeding Hearts

At various points in my life, I have not gone with my gut. I have relied on my head exclusively. I am a good talker and so am able to construct rationales for most things and then press them hard enough so that those armed only with intuition are usually cowed into silence. Those voices usually include my own, that gentle inner voice that then stands back, shaking its head sadly, to watch with the rest for the fall out.
There was the job I took because it was a way out of a company I had ceased to like. I convinced myself that it would be a way to strengthen my experience in making television commercials, even if the commercials I’d be making may not be that great. After five months, I resigned. None of the twelve commercials I made in that time became a part of my show reel of work.
There are meals I’ve eaten, girls I’ve dated, clothes I’ve worn, words I’ve spoken, without attending the counsel of that part of me that says quietly, “Do your really mean this? Is this really a reflection of you? Or this just expedience, just a way of getting it done, an overly logical A connects to B connects to C sort of thing?”
A year ago, when Howard Dean seemed so thrilling, and then imploded, we looked around for a common sense solution. Kerry, the “war hero” couldn’t possibly be accused of lilly-livered-liberal-doveishness. The man had killed, for Cripes’ sake. Sure, he was opposed to lots of things I value. He voted for the war (he just did, folks) that I was marching against. He’s against gun control and gay marriage and does the whole Catholic thing and is married to a rich Republican and has that mechanical way of speaking that actually made Gore (Gore!) seem spontaneous and fluid. But, he was the one they told us was “electable” so don’t fall into the usual hair splitting trap that always kneecaps Democrats and get with the program. So I gave money and followed every squeak and fart of the campaign and filled myself with buckets of bile and loathing even though I was completely uninspired the whole time. I never felt that hair rising on the back of my neck feeling I had when Clinton talked about the place called hope, when politics was about uplifting, selfless commitment that brought tears to these reptilian eyes.No MLK, no JFK, no FDR, no Jimmy Stewart as Mr Smith goes to Washington.
The Bushies feel that knee-weakening sense of purpose. The rest of us just threw in our lots with hatred and nihilism. Our strategy was the same as the neo-cons going into Baghdad. Kill the fucker and we’ll worry about what to do later. All that matters is to destroy the enemy.
That’s not a liberal impulse and we’re not very good at it.
Now I look at the country I have adopted and think, “Why did I ever believe that my POV would be the same as the majority? I pride myself on being different, for fuck’s sake.” But most of all, why did I get so worked up about something I didn�t truly believe in? When will I learn that expediency never satisfies?
But what option was there? Dean? Nader? …Gephardt? Better yet to realize that true passion and inspiration comes rarely in mainstream politics. There are so many other causes to which one can attach oneself and breathe real fire.
I’m done with politics for a good while. I have taken Josh Marshall and wonkette and The Note off my list of browser favorites. I have decided to go to sleep reading Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter rather than watching CNN or Jon Stewart. I will spend my spare time not reading the Times’ website but doing what I really get pleasure out of: Drawing in 04, folks. That’s one issue I can readily cast my vote for.

Summer Time Blues

I have been working fairly hard since coming back from vacation and, between that and trying to wedge in some drawing (and absolutely hating my ultra-expensive-from-the-tube watercolors as opposed to my tried-and-true Grumbacher set) and not doing enough guitar practice or going to the gym or telling my wife that I love her (in fact, she left yesterday morning to fly to Los Angeles for the Poseidon Adventure convention ( don’t ask) and various new book matters including signing my new contract and gearing up the Change Your Underwear publicity tour (apparently, I’ll be on CNN morning news, Good Morning America, Today Show , etc. after Labor Day), this blog has moved to the back of the pack. So, sorry about that.
A propos of nothing much but the fact that it’s summer and I’m working, I’ve been thinking about summer jobs I had as a kid.

My first summer job was when I was eleven, and wanted desperately to be a veterinarian. I got a job working for the town vet (this was in a small Israeli town called Kfar Saba) who worked in the pound and the adjoining slaughterhouse. My job was basically to clean out cages and feed the dogs and cats but I also helped out where needed. I remember the sickly sweet smell of the gassing room and the stiff dog limbs sticking out of garbage cans in the back.
Someone once brought in a skinny dog that was entirely covered with shiny green ticks. He looked like a bunch of grapes and we had to shampoo him and pour kerosene on him then shampoo him again; slowly the ticks dropped off, squirting his blood onto the cement floor. A week later, the dog joined the others in the garbage cans in the back.
I was as ghoulish as any prepubescent boy and loved to hang around the slaughterhouse. The cows would be herded up a ramp and would meekly follow the cow ahead until they got close enough to smell the blood of the abattoir. Then they would raise their heads and roll their eyes and try to back down the ramp or climb over the rusting railing. One could have painted a line on the floor to mark the point at which they all realized their fate.
Once inside, men converged up on each cow and shackled their hooves. Motors mounted to the ceiling raised the shackles on chains and the cows would soon be dangling upside down and then lowered into a long metal tub. A board was put under the cow’s head and a rabbi stepped forward to slit her throat. To be properly kosher, the knife had to be so sharp that a piece of paper dropped onto the blade would be cleaved in two.
Next, the shackles were removed from the dying cow’s front hooves and the motor would hoist her up to be dressed by the butchers. A minute or two after crossing the imaginary line, the cow would be unrecognizable, a side of beef.
Occasionally I would help out in a two-story shed behind the slaughterhouse. Cow intestines were brought in by the barrelful and we would slide them through v-shaped boards that would squeeze out the contents into gigantic metal sinks, leaving us with empty sausage casing. The cow shit would run down to the first floor and into a cart tethered to a balding donkey. Without looking over his shoulder, the donkey knew when the cart was filled and would then trudge out of the shed and across the courtyard to a deep pit. He would back the cart against a pole upending the contents into the stinking pit. Then the donkey would trudge back to its post in the shed.
One afternoon, the rabbis discovered they had unwittingly processed a pregnant cow. I was called in to haul the purple fetus away and carve it up. The dogs ate it with relish, untroubled that the meat wasn’t kosher.
The vet’s thirteen-year-old son would occasionally hang around the office, snacking and picking his cavernous nostrils. One day, he announced that his father didn’t like me ‘ as a person. I was so upset by this first ever job review that I never returned to work. The vet called my parents, who were a little horrified by my daily descriptions of my job, and they decided for me that it was for the best that I spend the rest of the summer playing marbles and swimming.

At sixteen, I went to work at the McDonalds that had just opened on Court Street, rotating through all of the jobs in the restaurant. I worked the grill making Big Macs and burgers, twelve at a time during the lunch rush, toasting and dressing buns, searing frozen patties and stiffing them all into Styrofoam clamshells. Every few hours, I would scrape down the grill and then slide out the steel grease traps and carry them through the back door and into an alley. I would pry open one of the three steel oil drums that stood in a cloud of flies and dump in the grease and chunks of burnt meat. A seething bed of cream-colored maggots floated on the entire surface of the liquid within and would converge quickly on my offering. The smell was thick and alive and I would frantically slam down the lid.
I worked the register too, filling bags for sullen customers and praying that my register drawer would balance at the end of the shift. I made French fries, my arms slowly roasting under the heat lamps, my grill-burns stinging under showers of salt. Every week, an 18-wheeler would pull up to the curb outside and I would have to empty it contents into the freezers in the basement. I would pull a case of frozen burgers out of the refrigerated truck, carry it across the scalding July sidewalk, then down the stairs and into the store’s freezer, then up the steps, back out into the heat, into the frozen truck, back and forth, forty times. It was like training for a Rocky movie or the Iron Man triathlon.
The job I dreaded the most was working the lobby. The first part wasn’t too bad ‘ I pushed a little broom around and emptied the trashcans every ten minutes or so. I would drop the full bags through a steel door marked ‘rubbish’ and into a chute that dropped through to the basement. But twice a day or more, I would have to go downstairs and gather up everything that had come down the chute. This included all the bags I had dropped but also all the detritus that customers, confused by the sign on the chute door, had tossed down. Half eaten burgers, cups of ketchup, sodden French fries, dirty napkins, and diapers floated in ankle deep greasy water. All of this mess went into the trash compactor in the corner. Sometimes, I was so overcome by the smell and the vileness that I would rush over and throw up into the compactor, push the button to compact it and continue working. When I was done I would have to wrap wire around the bale and muscle it out of the compactor.
One day the owner took me a side and told me that since I was the only white employee, he had decided to send me to McDonald’s University to train to become a manager. I explained that I still had another year of high school to go and he told me I could get a GED later. I told him I was flattered but my parents had their hearts set on my going to an ivy league college. He looked at me like I had crawled out of one of the oil drums in the alley and told me to go down and compact the trash.
The next summer, after senior year, I worked in a record store. It was the summer of ‘78 and hald the albums we sold were the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever. More modest hits that summer: George Benson’s Breezin’, Steely Dan’s Aja, and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors.
I spent a lot of time studying the bins of records and soon knew the inventory cold. I developed a roster of regular clients who would come in on Fridays after work and they would usually walk out with a half records I’d recommended.
There were two phones next to the cash register and Peter, the owner was adamant that I not answer the white one. Occasionally, by accident, I would. The callers would invariably say they would like to ‘order a limo’. Whenever I passed such a message onto Peter, he would be irritated with me and tell me not to answer the white phone again. Other wise, our relationship was decent and he would give me occasional spot bonuses when I he saw me moving a lot of merchandise to my regulars.
Towards the end of the summer, Peer took me aside and asked me about my plans. I told him I was going to college. ‘Forget that, man,’ he said and told me that he would make me an assistant manager if I stayed. Besides the various girls who worked the register, I was the only employee so the promotion didn’t seem reason enough to cancel my plans to go to Princeton. ‘Come on, man,’ he hissed, ‘ I didn’t go to college and look at me now.’ I thanked him for the tutelage and again blamed it all on my parents. They had their hearts set on me going to an ivy league school. Peter glared at me and told me to get back out front.
The next morning he gave me an assignment. He had a wall covered with steel milk crates packed with records and he wanted me to move to his apartment, I spend the better part of the afternoon lugging them across the street and up to his fourth floor walkup. Halfway through, I realized that I would probably only be working for him for an other day or two and that if I quit now I could stop this back-breaking work.
Peter was in his bedroom with the door closed. I knocked and he said, ‘Don’t come in,’ so I went back to moving crates. After three more trips, I knocked again. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I said through the door.’ ‘Don’t come in!’ Three more crates. ‘Listen, Peter, I have to tell you something important.’ I said and turned the doorknob. Peter was sitting on his bed, which was completely covered by hundred of joints. He had a machine on his lap and was in the middle of rolling another one. Apparently this was the true nature of Peter’s ‘limo’ business.
‘Why’d you come in?! You’re fired,’ he roared. ‘I came in to quit,’ I said. ‘Well, you can’t because you’re fired! Just finish moving those crates.”
I went back to the store, selected copies of all my favorite albums and left the crates where they were.

After my freshman year, I got a job working for my congressman, the Hon. Fred Richmond. Fred had been arrested a couple of years before for soliciting a young boy but, in a style that would seem very out of place today, admitted his guilt, did his time, apologized to his constituents if he’d embarrassed them and the following year was reelected with a huge majority. I was his assistant press secretary, writing press release on how appropriations were being spend in the district and inserting various ridiculous things in the Congressional Record: “Mr. Chairman, the 14th district of the great stat of New York would like to acknowledge 23 years of productivity from the Waldman Tool and Die plant on Nostrand Avenue….”
The next summer I became an intern in the White House. My joke about the experience is that Jimmy Carter lusted after me, but only in his heart. I worked for National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski and occasionally helped out in Vice President Mondale’s office. The coolest thing about the job came each morning as I pushed past the tourists, waved my pass and strutted through the huge iron gates.
Despite the glamour, it was a shitty time. Each night I would take the bus way up north to Chevy Chase and sit in my rented room listening to my landlord scream at and then mercilessly beat his children. I was restricted form the main part of the house beyond my room and so I cooked on a small electric plate and washed my dishes in the bathroom. It was the summer of ‘80n and Carter was getting whooped in the polls. All of the political appointees were busy updating résumés and so I had only career bureaucrats to learn from. I spend most of my time in the White House library writing a paper on the War Powers Act that described how the president could commit troops to battle without congressional permission. This was during the Iranian hostage crisis and when the helicopters that Carter had secretly sent over the border crashed into the Iranian desert, my project tanked.
I decided to leave my internship but my mother and second step father were adamant: I was not allowed to come back to New York unless I had a paying job lined up in advance (I didn’t know it at the time but they were in the last months of their marriage). I was furious and decided to stay in DC and get a job.
I went to Georgetown and walked into the first French restaurant I saw. I was interviewed by the owner: “Have you any experience?” (I lied). “Do you speak French? “(Mais, oui) have you a tuxedo (I’d brought mine to DC in anticipation of the State diners I’d be attending). I started the next day, poured an entire dish of Boeuf Bourguignon on a patron’s Chanel suit and was immediately dismissed.
The next day, I went to a French restaurant on the other side of Georgetown. Same questions. with one addition: Where have you worked? I mentioned the place I’d worked the night before but not the terms of my departure. “Tres bien!” said the owner. ”That’s my cousin!” As he dialed the other restaurant, I slunk out the door. The following day, I was hired as a busboy at a Spanish restaurant. After lunch, the all Chinese kitchen staff asked me what I planned to do until the dinner shift. “Come with us!” the dishwasher said magnanimously. He had just bought a Camaro from the other busboy who had acquired a new Corvette from the waiter. I discovered their secret at the racetrack where they turned my $12 in lunch tips into $200. Clearly, I was onto a good thing.
Back at the restaurant, I discovered some sticky politics. The Maitre d’ who’d hired me was th partner of the chef who had been absent during the lunch shift. It turned out they absolutely loathed each other. When the chef discovered I’d been hired by the maitre d’, he fired me on the spot.
My next job was at a sandwich and ice cream store. I worked my ass off and ate all my meals for free at the restaurant. I didn’t speak to my mother for the rest of the summer and ignored her letters. By Labor Day, I had put aside $600, all in one dollar bills which I packed in to a suitcase and took back to New York. When I arrived home, my mother and stepfather asked me where I had been. With a dramatic flourish, I unlocked the valise and flung the contents into the air. “I’ve been making money like you told me to!” I cried, gesturing to the shower of green. They weren’t terribly impressed by my gesture.
The next summer I had one more restaurant job, this time at the chic River Café at the the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. It was celebrity hangout of sorts: I peed in the urinal next to John Belushi and watched a waiter perform the Heimlich maneuver on Elizabeth Taylor’s escort.
Once a month or so, this mobbed-up guy would come in with a thick wad of bills and announce to the maitre d’, “I’ve got sixteen large on me. Help me spend it.” He sat with the stack at his wrist, tipping every member of the staff that came by. Each time he flicked his cigarette, a busboy would present him with a fresh ashtray and he would reciprocate with a fifty dollar bill. He even went into the kitchen and tipped the dishwashers and the sous chefs. By the time the night was through, his stack was gone. He thought he was big man. We thought he was a dick.
Our shifts would sometimes stretch from lunch till 4 am and the restaurant soon became my whole world. I was buddies with the Chinese busboys who would sleep on metal shelves in the pantry, nesting on the fresh linen. They lived together, squirreled away by the dozen into tiny walk-ups in Queens, and saved every penny they earned. After a couple of years, they planned to return to the Mainland to open restaurants of their own. My pal Phillipe was the valet and I would nip out when I could and we pile into a Rolls or a Bentley and cruise the BQE.
Tokoyama-san was the sushi chef and he would make me secret spicy tuna. One hot afternoon, as I worked on the outside cocktail deck, he made me a bowl of sashimi which I stashed under the bar. I would return to pick at the snack, not noticing that the raw meat had spoiled in the August heat. Soon I had a near hallucinogenic case of food poisoning and didn’t eat Japanese food again for a decade.