Hi Friends,
I am writing to you from a friend’s house in Los Osos, California, where it’s wonderfully foggy and the air smells like eucalyptus trees and the bay’s sweet decay. The last time I was here, I was evacuated from the Caldor wildfire (and later wrote about that in the last essay of my book Animal Bodies), but my memories of California’s Central coast go back much further than that. I spent my undergraduate and graduate school years here, and at one time, I lived just around the corner from where I am sitting now.
In so many ways, my time here was not only marked by the fun times I had with friends and my studies, but all the jobs I held: barista in Baywood, sandwich maker at Gus’s Grocery, tasting room attendant at Edna Valley, Meridian, Cambria, and Claiborne and Churchill (I got around in the wine industry), and events coordinator at Saucelito Canyon and finally marketing coordinator for the Santa Barbara County Vintner’s Association. I also had one of my first writing gigs. I made 60 dollars per wine article at Vintages magazine, which I thought was really something else (but really, it was about 3 cents a word). Many of these jobs were second jobs, as I was teaching as an adjunct at Cuesta, Cal Poly, and Alan Hancock as well. So many jobs!
It was from my mother that I learned not only to work hard at any job I could get but also to define myself by my work, for better or for worse. My mother grew up in northern England, just after World War II, and her family was so poor they didn’t have indoor plumbing and used newspaper for toilet paper, because that was all they could afford. At 15, my mother left school to work two jobs: at a laundry in the morning and a chip shop at night. And her parents took most of her wages, so she also went to work at a factory that made rocking chairs. She went on to work her entire life, doing all the sorts of jobs (mostly food service and retail) you can get without a high school diploma.
So when I turned 15, my mother declared that it was time for me to get a real job! I had been babysitting, cleaning neighbor’s houses, and washing their cars (I was terrible at all of these jobs (and remember the babies’ cries when they awoke after I poked them to make sure they hadn’t died). But at 15, I could get a worker’s permit and start to make real money—$2.30/hour!
My first real job was in a call center, which makes it sound fancier than it was. I worked next door to the bargain movie theatre in a strip mall storefront packed with plywood desks and rotary phones and people much older than I was who were mostly smoking cigarettes at their desks. For those of you born after the invention of the iPhone, I’ll include a photo of a rotary phone, so you can picture it.
My job was to go through the onion-skinned telephone book and call strangers and ask them to buy trash compactor bags. These bags were very strong! Some of the proceeds went to help the veterans! I had no idea what a trash compactor was because at the time, only rich people had them, or at least that’s what my father had told me. And how the money went to veterans? I also couldn’t tell you.
Most people hung up on me, as people do, but surprisingly, I sold some of the bags, which I then had to deliver. This was a problem because I didn’t yet drive. One of the older men (he must have been about 22, which to my 15-year old sensibility was OLD) from the call center offered to take me to the fancy parts of town to deliver the bags, which was worse than making the calls, especially because he wanted to know if I “wanted to party” afterward. When I told my parents about this, they made me quit that job, and I didn’t argue with them. I quickly got another job at Penguin’s yogurt, where I got to wear a cute apron and visor and eat a free frozen yogurt every shift, which felt like winning the lottery.
I try to be nice to people who cold call me now, thinking back to my 15-year old self who thought $2.30/hour was a great fortune, and compared to the one dollar an hour I made waking up babies from their slumbers, cleaning gross toilets, and getting yelled at for using dish soap on the neighbor’s corvette, it was.
There’s a certain fondness we hold for these terrible first jobs, no matter how harsh the entry is into the work-a-day world. The crappy job as rite of passage. The way our hair smelled like fish ‘n’ chips, or smoke or pickles at the end of the day. The way we