Based on the limited figures I have at my disposal, I’d guess that this here blog has only around sixty regular, dedicated, engaged readers. Which perhaps isn’t many compared to some other blogs, but you all are the right sixty readers. Whenever I pose a question here, I am always amazed at the range of thoughtful answers I recieve.
In reference to l’affaire fiducie de fonds kids of several weeks ago (that is French for “the affair of the kids with the funds of trust,” according to Google Translate), I got a few interesting comments and emails. The first, from my old friend Brady Bergeson, a writer in Fargo-Moorhead and my favorite activity partner for a lively round of that classic hotel bar game, Can You Draw a Fairly Accurate Sketch of Vice President Henry A. Wallace From Memory? Brady says:
I was going to suggest you start a band called Trust Fund Kids. But then there’s this:
Brett, a friend from Minneapolis that’s roughly the same age as me (and an MCAD alumnus), adds some insight into the mindset of the typical college student in those post-Pets.com years:
I hypothesize that the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s may have been crucial to propagating the nationwide scare that trust-funded kids were lurking in and around every coffee shop and campus corner. Between ‘99 and ‘03, there were three different instances where I learned that a friend who had a decent apartment was seemingly supporting themselves via an online entrepreneurial venture or freelance web work. Eventually in conversation it would slip out that the freelancing work or web site was actually unsuccessful. And in fact, that person’s family owned eight apartment buildings in Boston, or a chain of grocery stores in Colorado. Once a juicy nugget like that hits a college town’s gossip chain, it spreads like wild fire, causing everyone to wonder who else may in fact be a secretly funded via a trust.
But here’s the real bombshell, from an anonymous reader named “Murk.” Murk proves him- or herself to be the Deep Throat of this whole “Trust Fund Kid” episode:
Not to muddy the etymological waters here, but, if my murky memory serves at all, I believe the term originated first as “trust fund babies,” before aging up a bit to the “kid” level. I seem to vaguely recall hearing the former term some time in the mid-80s. I place it there because my best friend from high school was literally one (receiving a trust from his grandparents at age 18), and I recall a light bulb going on about said friend once I’d heard the term (he eventually blew the entire fund on LPs top-end stereo equipment, and a generally profligate lifestyle while in college in Cambridge). Maybe your search should include tracking down this earlier term and theorizing why it may have aged through the years?
Of course! “Trust fund babies”! Using the same questionable research methods (Google Books and nGram), I explored the origins of that particular phrase.
Surprisingly, “trust fund baby” first turns up about the same time, maybe a little bit earlier, during the ‘84-‘86 period. “Places like Woodstock, NY, Taos, NM, and the Hotel Chelsea were filled with these Trust-Fund Babies,” reports New York City novelist Carole Berge’s 1984 Secrets, Gossip and Slander.
However, between 1984 and 1987, there’s almost double the references in print compared to “trust fund kid.” It seems to be in more mainstream use in the early to mid-1980s, turning up in everything from nonfiction sociology books to Mademoiselle articles, and even in a work entitled Fringe Benefits: The Fifty Best Career Opportunities for Meeting Men. (Unfortunately, the entire text of this landmark volume was not available online, so I can’t tell you what the results are, other than, in many respects, aren’t you glad it’s not the 1980s anymore?)
All of this would lead me to believe that “trust fund baby” is the older of the two phrases, and the one from which the now more common “trust fund kid” is derived.
As mentioned in my previous post on the subject, I am still giving credit to photographer Abby Robinsonfor coining the actual phrase “trust fund kid” in her semi-autobiographical 1985 Künstlerroman The Dick and Jane. Again, I can’t really prove this in any real, academic way, other than to say two things: 1.) there is no earlier instance on Google Books, and 2.) since I last wrote about this, I’ve purchased The Dick and Jane, and read it, and loved it, and it confirms my suspicions that Robinson may have been the coiner, for one specific reason. The book is a funny, thoughtful combination of the old, mythical world of the seedy, pre-WWII New York City and the then-contemporary world of seedy, pre-Giuliani New York City — a New York City that is now just as mythical as the old hardboiled New York City of Raymond Chandler. So it’s myth doubling back on myth, a fact reflected in the language in the book, a really inventive blend of ’80s downtown artspeak and ’40s hardboiled pulp fiction. One of the hallmarks of this type of writing is taking common phrases and punching them up a little bit; making them a little more colorful. I believe Robinson may have taken the then-current phrase “trust find baby,” and roughed it up, Bogart-style, into “trust fund kid.” Because “kid” is more hard-boiled than “baby,” right?
Again, I cannot totally prove this. I am not an authority on this subject. But Robinson was nice enough to exchange a few emails with me, and though she said she doesn’t think she coined the term, I told her I’m giving her credit anyhow. Someone had to coin it, after all. Why not her?
Many thanks to Brady, Brett and Murk for prompting me to further investigate this topic, and to Abby Robinson for indulging me. This is what South 12th is all about, my dear sixty readers: making crazed, unfounded speculations on things that happened 30 years ago that no one is really worried about. Well, most people aren’t worried about them: maybe me and you and the other fifty-eight are, and that’s why we’re all in this together.
(Post-script: Robinson’s favorite variation, “trustafarian,” seems unsurprisingly to be a pure product of the 1990s.)
(Double post-script: The French term for “trust fund babies” is “fiducie de fondspour bébés.” According to Google Translate.)
Since I haven’t used this space for much else recently, I figure it’s time for you to hear another boring story from my youth. I spent the weekend in Louisville, my hometown, and on Saturday, my brother Danny lent me a bicycle. I took Saturday afternoon to bicycle around the coffee shops and bookstores of the Highlands, where I lived in my early 20s. This boring story from my youth in particular is prompted by the large concentration of tattoo parlors in my old neighborhood.
On September 20, 2002, Kentucky Governor Paul Patton held a press conference admitting to an extramarital affair with a nursing home operator that he may or may not have bestowed with political favors. He had spent the past several weeks denying the affair after the Louisville Courier-Journal broke the story, but finally came clean, and came clean in a manner befitting the hammy, overwrought quality of politics in the South: with big, fat tears streaming down his face. The next day, the Courier-Journal ran a half-page, full-color photograph by AP photographer Ed Reinke on the front page of Governor Patton’s tear-streaked visage. Here it is:
I remember the glistening in the nostrils quite vividly.
The next morning, I saw the photograph (online? or in a physical newspaper? I don’t remember). I immediately thought what any heartless 22-year-old painter would think: wow, this would make a great painting.
(A pre-Sheperd Fairey side note: now that I think about it, at no point did it occur to me to credit Ed Reinke, or even significantly alter the image, though I used his exact cropping in the finished piece. I don’t know what you were learning in art school in the early 2000s, but I sure never heard a word about copyright and fair use until my schooling was well over. Then again, maybe you went to a better art school than I did.)
Working fast, in order to keep up with breaking events, I stretched a 4’x4’ canvas, gridded the drawing on top of it, and then impasto’d the hell out of a bunch of cadmium reds and yellows and zinc whites until I had a messy, meaty sub-Francis Bacon portrait of the governor’s tear-drenched face completed. I carried the enormous painting from my apartment on Gaulbert Avenue to my school’s art studio on foot. The whole way, cars stopped on the street to honk and people shouted their approval. It felt great, though also quite weird, as I wasn’t sure what, precisely, passers-by were approving so vocally. Presumably they just approved of the bloodsport of the whole thing.
The painting went over well with the art school crowd, and was subsequently forgotten as I forged ahead in my work and began painting series of cigarette butts and coffee stains. It languished in storage until I graduated a few semesters later, in early 2004, where I transferred it the studio I was renting in Butchertown (so named for the nearby hog butchering plants that made the rents in the neighborhood so affordable — at night you could literally hear thousands of pigs screaming as they were sent to their deaths a few blocks away).
It was in Butchertown a fellow visiting the studio saw the painting and decided he had to buy it. Amazingly, Patton had refused to resign, and remained governor until 2003, so the following year, memories of his scandal were still fresh in people’s minds. This fellow, like most Kentuckians, would still immediately recognize the image. He contacted me, expressed his interest in purchasing the piece, and asked for a price.
Besides not learning about fair use, another thing I didn’t learn in undergrad was how to price work. Honestly, the problem with painting as a medium is that you’re stuck with them if you don’t sell them, and 4’x4’ paintings take up a great deal of space. So I was happy to move this one to what seemed to be a good home. I gave him an arbitrary number: $500. Five-hundred dollars in that place and time would have covered my studio rent for almost half a year.
He didn’t blink at the number — it is a fair price, and in fact, a little on the low side, which I believe he knew. The problem was, my patron didn’t have that kind of disposable income. He instead wondered about the possibility of an in-kind trade of some kind. Professional services, perhaps. Labor for art.
My patron was the proprietor of a well-respected tattoo parlor. “Do you like tattoos?” he asked me.
“Uh, sure,” I said.
“Do you have any tattoo work?” he asked.
“Uh, no.” I said.
“Well, tell you what,” he told me. “I would like to offer you $500 worth of tattoo work.”
I knew almost nothing about tattoo art at that time. I did know, however, that $500 worth of tattoo work was an enormous amount. A few hours, at least. I believe that’s a sleeve’s worth. Or if not a whole sleeve, a lot of one.
Of course, I accepted. I was mostly just happy someone was interested enough in my work to offer money, goods or services in exchange for it.
The problem now was I had $500 worth of credit at a tattoo parlor I had no idea what to do with. As I told him, I had no tattoos. I didn’t really ever consider it.
Lots of people had ideas for me. My friend Dave wanted me, my brother, and his brother to get four matching tattoos. This seemed like sort of a good idea, but no one could agree on a design. Dave’s idea was to commemorate the neighborhood we grew up in, but the problem with that was the neighborhood we grew up in was quite boring, and I was less eager to commemorate it the more I thought about it. After all, if my parents didn’t still live there, I’d never have a reason to go back. The idea eventually fell away.
The possibility of $500’s worth of fleur-de-lis tattoos for a whole gang of Louisville friends was also floated. A fleur-de-lis tattoo is de rigeur for any Louisville native worth a damn.
My girlfriend at the time told me she thought I should give the credit to her, since I didn’t apparently need it.
“No way,” I told her.
Our relationship was then in its waning days — she was preparing to take a job in a rural part of an adjacent state, and I had no intentions of following her there (nor, frankly, did she have any intentions of inviting me). We would break up within a few weeks.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because,” I said, “I don’t want you to think of me every time you look at your tattoo.” Listen: I don’t have any tattoos, so I really don’t know how they work, emotionally. I figured whenever you looked at your tattoo, you would reflect on the circumstances through which you came to have it. I figured if she got one using the $500 credit, she would think of me whenever she saw it, and feel sad, or angry, or however it is ex-girlfriends feel when they think about me. That seemed unfair and a little creepy.
She was not happy. “That is absolutely ridiculous,” she told me. A few years later, I came across her blog during one of those late-night regret binges and discovered a post making fun of me for selling a painting for $500 worth of tattoo credit, and then not giving it to her, and then justifying that decision in a manner befitting the hammy, overwrought quality of relationship politics in the South. I still think that’s completely ridiculous, but it’s likely she did have a solid point. She would, after all, have a pretty thorough tattoo now if I’d given her the credit, as opposed to no one having the tattoo.
I sat on the patron’s business card, not knowing quite what to do with it. He’d told me to come in anytime to have the work done, and I think for a while I planned to, though I never figured out what exactly I’d have done. About nine months later, I moved to Minneapolis. The business card is long gone, and though I am sure the offer still stands, I don’t remember the fellow’s name, or what the tattoo parlor was, or where it is, or really any other details.
A good deal of your early thirties is spent coming to terms with the questionable behavior of your early twenties. There are a few lessons here, I believe, I’d be wise to reflect on.
First of all, it’s not right to rip off the work of photojournalists. If I owe anyone an apology, it’s AP photographer Ed Reinke. The fact that I did not profit from his work is merely a byproduct of my own inaction, and certainly wasn’t for lack of trying. If anyone deserves the $500 tattoo credit, it’s him. Unfortunately, Ed Reinke passed away just last month in Louisville following an accident sustained covering a motor race.
Secondly, there’s the tattoo artist, to whom I also probably owe an apology. If he still owns the paintings and has it hanging somewhere and looks at it, he must feel pangs of guilt, knowing he obtained it without compensating the artist. And not even as a result of his own actions! He tried to compensate me! I inadvertently undervalued his work by not taking him up on his offer, which seems almost like a slap in the face. I still am not sure what would have been the best course of action here: should I refused to take compensation, knowing well I’d likely not have use for that amount of tattoo work? Or should I have gotten the tattoo, using the opportunity to do something I might not have otherwise? I don’t know where that painting would be if he’d not come into possession of it. Probably at my parents’ house, in the basement, in that neighborhood I didn’t want immortalized in ink on my forearm.
I wonder what the tattoo artist’s guests make of the painting now: ten years on, the Patton scandal and its subsequent tears are a little-remembered footnote in Kentucky political history. I wonder how many remember the story. I’d only remembered it biking around this weekend, and seeing a plaque on a building commemorating the former governor.
Maybe, all things considered, the girlfriend was right. Perhaps I should have just given her the credit as a gift and let her do as she wanted with it. Perhaps tattoos don’t work that way, emotionally — perhaps at some point the tattoo’s origin is divorced from the tattoo itself. My patron willed a $500 tattoo into existence when he purchased my painting, a tattoo that does not exist anywhere. All would be better, perhaps, if it did exist somewhere. As it stands now, all that remains is a 4’x4’ painting hanging somewhere, the meaty impasto teardrops reminding all who see them of the painful emotional economies of artmaking in the Upper South in the waning days of the Patton administration.
Recently, I’d read Rush Limbaugh invoking on a mass scale the sort of cheap class warfare rhetoric that gets tossed around art schools, rock clubs, and other places where youth come together to take drugs and collectively sort out questions of privilege and authenticity among themselves. That is, referring to Occupy protestors as “trust fund kids.”
This was a phrase I heard a lot by the time I’d got to college, and I knew by the time I was twenty it was essentially meaningless, because none of the artists, musicians or scene people I knew socially had a “trust fund” in the formal sense. It was a term used to refer to “kids” — that is, people younger than twenty-four or so — that may have had well-to-do parents paying for their Orange amplifiers or their private education. But that’s not quite the same as having access to the enormous amount of family money implied by “trust fund.”
I am sure it was different in New York City. But rich people in Louisville were not rich to the degree that people on the East Coast are rich, and if they were on that level, they certainly weren’t sending their dumb kids to college in Louisville, where I’d be hanging out with them. Louisville is a city with only two schools: one incredibly crappy private Catholic college, and one sprawling, commuter basketball camp disguised as a land-grant research institution (I studied at both, running out of money to attend to the former and earning my degree from the latter). Any kid with an actual trust fund was being educated somewhere else. “Trust fund kid” was just a blanket term meaning “mom and dad pay their rent and the costs relating to upkeep of their Jeep.” It’s effective as an insult because it suggests sinister machinations of old money and lawyers, of hidden bank accounts and secrecy. In addition to that, it’s agreeably infantilizing. “Kid.”
The private college in question. Rich kids? Maybe. “Trust funds”? I doubt it.
My suspicion is that this term began gaining currency in the flyover states with the advent of the Internet, and the ability of people to read about “scenes” of various kinds in New York City, and then project the class conflicts of that arena onto their own local class conflicts. Louisville is an intensely class-conscious city — if you meet anyone from Louisville, the first thing they’ll demand to know is where you grew up and what high school you went to, and then mentally assign you to a socioeconomic bracket based on your answer. So any language that can be used to talk about class and privilege, whether it’s accurate or not, is easily co-opted. I imagine a bunch of pretty canny scene kids in Louisville reading whatever NYC-based blogs people read in 1999-2000 (I don’t even remember myself) and coming across some griping about “trust fund kids” fucking up the music or art or lit scenes there, and thinking, “ah ha!” and then sneering in public the next evening that what does so-and-so know anyway, he/she is just a trust fund kid.
Very unlikely that any “trust funds” were involved here, either. Image courtesy here.
Anyway, it’s a ridiculous term that’s been drained of any meaning it may have once had. It was ridiculous when I was twenty-one and used it to describe upper middle-class peers, and it’s even more ridiculous when used to describe the vastly heterogenous mass of people that have committed to the Occupy movement. I’ve known Rush Limbaugh was stupid since I was thirteen years old, but I didn’t realize he was stupid enough to co-opt the language of art school students from the early 2000s. I didn’t think anyone was that stupid. It really makes you consider just how crude this “class warfare” bullshit him and the rest of the Right are peddling.
All of this made me wonder where the term came from. This is going to sound like one those made-up things I post here sometimes, but this is all completely true. I am not really much of a journalist or a researcher except in the most amateurish, dilettante sense, so I really couldn’t think of any way to proceed except by doing a Google Books search for the phrase. That would, at least, pinpoint it somewhere in time.
There’s a smattering of references from the late 1980s, and quite a few from the 1990s, mostly in reference to rock bands and in articles in New York.
However, the very earliest reference to the exact phrase “trust fund kid” dates from 1985. It’s used few times in a novel by Abby Robinson called The Dick and Jane, published in February 1985 by Doubleday. Robinson is a photographer, and writes that the book was “loosely based on my experiences working for a private detective.” From page 26 of the novel:
Parker was a tall, skinny, horsefaced trust fund kid. He had so much dough, he was a retiree from birth.
There is a trust fund in this novel, though!
Abby Robinson has worked on a lot of really fascinating projects; she has the sort of polymath career I dream of having. As I noted, her work is primarily as a photographer, though she write this semi-autobiographical novel in the mid-1980s, and has also written extensively on photography in Southeast Asia, and has contributed to The New York Times and Ms. Currently, she’s in the graphic design program at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and is working on a photographic residency in China.
All of this is on her website, as is her email. So I emailed her, asking as delicately as I could where she might have heard the term or, if, you know, she invented it. (There’s no not-dumb way to ask that kind of question, but I did my best.) She was kind of enough to send a nice response, saying in part:
Alas, I don’t think that the term’s earliest use was in The Dick and Jane, though it’s fun to think that it was. I think it was already common parlance by then.
The term I like even better is “trustafarians.”
So there you go. It was already out there in the mid-1980s. If you have any ideas for how one might investigate the phrase’s exact origins further, I am open to hear them. But it’s unsurprising to me that the earliest usage comes out of the New York City of that time period.
As a person active in the world of visual art, you are often called upon to greet other art world acquaintances from New York City or Europe. This is usually really lovely, but there is often one minor difficulty: many times, they will want to kiss you on the cheeks.
Now, look: I like kissing people on the cheeks. I like kissing people, period. I am a supporter of kissing in all of its many forms, and let it never be said otherwise. But the fact is, greeting people by kissing them on each cheek involves specific maneuvering techniques that one refines over the course of years. Art people from New York and Europe have much more practice in this because they kiss each other on the cheek several times a day. As for myself, I am only in a situation a few times a year that calls for me to greet someone by kissing them on the cheeks. The will is there; the technique is lacking.
For example, I was at the Minneapolis Institute of Art the other day with an artist friend, a very smart, sophisticated native Minnesotan that studied in New York, and a curator he knew walked by. They greeted with the traditional hug and kissing on the cheek. And he admitted to me afterwards that he still feels totally awkward doing this. Not awkward about the kissing, but awkward about the stilted quality of his technique. And I realized, wow, I am not the only one.
It was then we hit upon the idea of offering a workshop for Midwestern art people on how to best kiss people from New York or Europe on the cheek when you meet them. It would cover need-to-know areas such as the best angle of approach, the precise amount of time the kiss should last, which cheek to do first, etc. Over the course of a few hours, with a lunch in the middle, attendees would learn valuable techniques to this art form, first with mannequins, then with live subjects. By the time the workshop is over, attendees would be able to confidently greet art acquaintances by kissing them on the cheek as well as any native of the Upper West Side or Dresden.
All that’s left to do is determine a fair price. Maybe $50? Not including lunch?
This may just be one of those things I dreamt, but I don’t think so. In the earlier part of this past decade, in 2003 or so, J. showed me a VHS documentary on the Athens, Georgia music scene from the late 1980s. It was a very good film and I remember quite a bit about it — there was a scene where Howard Finster was playing guitar with Dexter Romweber — but specifically, I clearly remember a scene where Michael Stipe looks at the camera and claims that he was the first person ever to use Christmas lights as everyday art-punk indoor house decoration. The first person, ever. In the late 1970s, he claimed. Before that, no one had ever strung up Christmas lights for decoration off-season. I may be misremembering this. But the reason I think I remember it so clearly is that I think J. and I watched the movie on that tiny TV-VCR I had in my bedroom on Gaulbert Avenue — a bedroom that was itself decorated with Christmas lights. I remember looking at Michael Stipe onscreen, and then looking at the Christmas lights, and then thinking, “wow, there is a direct correlation here.”
What a bold statement, Michael Stipe. If indeed he did make this statement, is it true? I had Christmas lights up in every apartment I lived in between 2000 and 2005. Around the windows, strung across the ceiling, over doors, around the perimeters of the ceiling. White ones, mostly, but I had a few blinking ones at various points, as well as the tube-style lights. I even once had purple Halloween-themed Christmas lights (I guess they would be called “Halloween lights”) that cast a ghostly purple light over the tiny one-bedroom apartment I had at Highland and Bardstown. It made everything that happened in that space seem important and cinematic and a little bit surreal.
Fifteen years after Michael Stipe first strung up Christmas lights in his Athens, Georgia art-punk house, it was still de rigeur to decorate your art-punk house Christmas lights. As far as I know, it still is, ten years after that.
I tried to confirm this with a Google Books search, but it’s not very helpful. There is no record I can find of Michael Stipe making such a claim. References to “Christmas lights” on Google Books first appear in print in the 1950s, from what I can tell. Wikipedia backs that up: “It would take until the mid 1950s for the use of such lights to be adopted by average households…Over a period of time, strings of Christmas lights found their way into use in places other than Christmas trees. Soon, strings of lights adorned mantles and doorways inside homes, and ran along the rafters, roof lines, and porch railings of homes and businesses.” It makes sense that it might take two decades for someone to figure out that they could be used to adorn mantles and doorways during the off-season. It makes sense that the person to figure that out might be Michael Stipe. Young, twenty-year-old Michael Stipe, in Athens, Georgia. Here I guess one could point out that Christmas lights create, in a room, an abstract sense of that room, not fully illuminated but filtered through a blur, in a similar way to how Stipe mumbles the lyrics to his songs, how he abstracts and blurs the words. One could point that out, but come on, let’s not get carried away.
Thirty-one years ago today, on a Saturday afternoon, I was born in Columbus, Ohio, in the heart of the state’s 12th congressional district (then represented by Republican Samuel L. Devine, a creep who’d been elected in 1959 after chairing the “Ohio Un-American Activities Committee” in the state legislature).
Three days later, on Tuesday, November 6, 1979, the voters of Ohio rejected a Constitutional amendment ballot initiative to “provide mandatory deposits on all bottles and prohibit sale of beverages in metal cans that have detachable pull-tabs” by a margin of 3-to-1. My dad probably voted in this one. Maybe he drank a can of Coke on the way to the polls.
Almost all of my birthdays fall right before, right after or right on election day. Inevitably, most of my birthdays are partisan affairs.
November 3, 1992. The evening of Bill Clinton’s election, as well as my 13th birthday. I was beside myself with glee, addled on hormones and teenage liberalism, eating popcorn and watching the coverage on TV. The 1990s, I thought, are going to be an awesome time to be a liberal teenager! Actually, as it turned out, I wasn’t completely wrong on that point.
Prove me wrong, Bill. Remember how insouciantly shaggy his hair was?
November 4, 1997. This would have been the first election I could have voted in, but I didn’t turn 18 until the next day. This would have been crushing in an election year, but fortunately, I don’t think the 1997 election cycle was that thrilling.
November 3, 1998. This was the first election I ever voted in, and it fell right on my birthday. The candidate I threw my first vote for was also the first candidate I was ever excited to pull a level for: Scott Ritcher, Reform Party candidate for Louisville mayor. Ritcher is a public figure in my hometown who has had a classic “only in Louisville” sort of career trajectory. He’d founded a wildly popular record label while still in his teens, and had an almost cult-like following in the local youth community. After the label folded in the mid-1990s, he got into publishing, design and politics, launching this year what might best be described (if somewhat cynically) as a youth-cult campaign for mayor. As a somewhat committed youth-cultist myself, I had a bunch of “Ritcher for Mayor” stickers plastered to the tacklebox I carried my art supplies around campus in. Ritcher was of course defeated in a four-way race by the Democratic candidate. He later ran for State Senate.
These exact same guys probably screen-printed my stickers by hand.
November 6, 2000. I am sure I spent at least part of my 21st birthday arguing with my painting professor about whether I should vote for Nader or Gore. I was recently trying to explain to a 20-year-old intern here at work that, when I was her age, there just really didn’t seem to be a huge difference between Bush and Gore — I explained that they were both running against Bill Clinton from the center, basically. She was incredulous. As well she should have been.
November 2, 2004. Oh, god. I don’t remember anything about my birthday this year. I watched the returns at Danny Cash’s place while sealing a couple hundred tiny paintings of cowboy murders into plastic sleeves in preparation for an art fair in Milwaukee I left for later that week. The blue coloration of the Upper Midwest on the electoral map looked really inviting and Canadian. Of course, four months later I was there.
It looked like Lower Canada.
November 4, 2008. Drunk, sitting on the curb outside Erte on 13th Avenue N.E., talking to Herbach the night before. “The thing is,” I moronically explained, “is that after tomorrow, we just won’t have to worry. Or not like we have for the past eight years. I won’t have to worry every single goddamned day that our president is dangerous, or that he’s going to destroy America. Think of what normal, intelligent people will be able to get done, just knowing that their president’s OK and not actively working to undermine everything I like about this country.” Good one, Sturdevant!
November 2, 2010. I feel like I have a hangover today. My birthday reveries are haunted by an orange-colored man from Ohio bellowing “Hell no!” over and over in a never-ending animated GIF loop. Somewhere, former Rep. Samuel L. Devine is smiling.
Post-script: Samuel L. Devine was unseated by Democrat Bob Shamansky on November 4, 1980. That was also the year my dad cast his sole presidential vote for a non-Democrat: not Reagan, obviously, but independent candidate John Anderson. Last time I was home, dad and I were talking about the way Carter was perceived by the left at the end of his presidency. “In light of all that, I think I sort of understand why you voted for Anderson,” I said.
“Well, I wish you’d tell me,” he said. “Because I don’t know what the hell I was thinking.”
“When you go in for a job interview, I think a good thing to ask is if they ever press charges.” - Jack Handy
After-school day care assistant. // I don’t remember this one at all. The kids were brats, I’m pretty sure, but not in such a way I recall anything about any of their brattish antics.
Dry cleaner counter clerk. // Jimbo convinced me I should actively seek out a job with the dry cleaner in our neighborhood, because when he’d worked there, all he did was sit behind a counter and read Dostoevsky. That sounded pretty good, so I applied the next week, and instead of putting me in a strip mall near my house, they sent me out to a location in an obscenely wealthy ZIP code right over the county line. It had a constantly backed-up drive-through, closed early, and we didn’t accept credit cards; essentially, an incredible confluence of factors guaranteed to create situations where wealthy people would be inconvenienced and become furious. An extremely old man once yelled at me from his Jaguar for a solid ten minutes for dry-cleaning his polo knit shirt instead of washing it, as people in line behind him honked and screamed. I remember only nodding and staring blankly at a vein throbbing in his temple. I still think sometimes of that vein, the way it pulsated, slowing and quickening as his voice lowered and rose. My last week of work I proffered my resignation to my supervisor, and she said, “Ah, you had a new job lined up this whole time. That’s why you’ve been doing such a poor job recently.” “Uh, yeah, that must be it,” I mumbled unconvincingly.
College development call center caller. // The university I was working for had absorbed an all-women’s Catholic college in the 1950s, which meant, inexplicably, that all of their alumni of that college retroactively became alumni of this university, and consequently remained on the call lists. Much of this position, then, was me calling 80-year old women who’d never attended or even heard of the university I was calling from, asking them to send me $25.
Elementary school weekend art teacher. // For several years, I taught free scholarship art classes on weekends to gifted 11-12 year olds from around the city on behalf of the local visual arts association. This was particularly poignant, as I’d attended the same program when I was a gifted 11-12 year old. Some of these kids must be college freshman by now. I sometimes wonder if they went to art school and are now cool, cigarette-smoking art school kids. At least a few of them were geniuses. I heard from mom that one of them had a summer internship at the art museum last year, so maybe I was an OK influence.
Caricature artist. // I somehow got a contract with a large regional food service corporation. The president wanted caricatures of each employee framed outside their door, so I wandered around this cubicle farm for a month, drawing people with NASCARs, golf clubs and fishing poles. I remember a few of these caricatures very clearly, specifically the middle manager that wanted me to picture him standing on a beach, but, like, make the palm trees marijuana leaves, but, dude, not so that it’s obvious, just so that it’s like, you know, if you get it, you’re like duuuuuuuuuude check that shit out. One of the higher-up executives wanted a picture of himself with a rifle and a water buffalo that he’d shot on safari. I drew “X“‘s for the water buffalo’s eyes.
Art museum attendant. // This particular museum had a chainsaw artist create enormous sitting structures for the gallery floors, made from foam and covered with parachutes. I sat around for seven hours a day on these structures reading books about Andy Warhol, and explaining to visiting college girls who the Velvet Underground were and which of their albums they should buy (A: all of them). The only arm-wrestling match I have ever won in my entire career was with my supervisor, a brilliant guy named Neal that had a tattoo of the pi symbol on his forearm. Obviously, the perfect job for a 22-year old.
Pizza delivery man. // I only lasted one night. The only uniform they had was an oversized knit polo shirt with the pizza company’s logo on it, and combined with the baseball cap and my oversized art school Buddy Holly glasses, it made me look like a twelve-year old child actor from a 1950s sitcom. I was assigned to deliver pizzas to the Swisswood/Rankin neighborhood of Pittsburgh, an impossibly hilly, perplexing and poorly-lit area of town. It took me three hours to deliver my first pizza, and the guy was decent enough to still tip me anyway. I called in to quit the next day, but got cold feet, so Neal, the aforementioned supervisor with the pi tattoo, called in pretending to be me. “This is Andy,” he told the manager in an absurdly deep voice. “I am sorry to inform you that I will need to resign my position with your organization effective immediately.”
Cigar label illustrator. // I made the acquaintance of one “Farmer B.” at some point in college, a tobacco farmer who ran a small cigar company out his farm in Trimble County, about an hour outside Louisville. He paid me to drive out to his farm and make sketches of the farm, the barns and the cured crops for use on the labels for the cigars he manufactured. “I take good care of my employees,” Farmer B. told me over and over. “You’ll come on out to my houseboat party for Derby sometime. Bring your girlfriend. No liberal girls, though.” I would laugh nervously. You still see these cigars in gas stations and liquor stores all across the state, with my little Micron 005 drawings of barns and tobacco on the label.
Art retail store assistant manager. // I began working for a chain art retailer as a salesperson, and within a month the regional manager got whiff of the fact that I’d spent several years in the art retail industry. He immediately bumped me up to an assistant manager position at a floundering store in one of the western suburbs. It turns out that being a part-time college employee of a local mom-and-pop store in an urban setting and being an assistant manager in a suburban strip mall corporate retailer setting require vastly, vastly differing skill sets.
Art retail store clerk. // This was yet another one. I felt at one point that it was all I knew how to do.
Ticket retailer call center salesperson. // A number of my co-workers here went on to obtain advanced degrees in arts administration.
State Fair automobile display assistant. // I handed out beer coozies and assisted fairgoers in dubious games of skill and chance for eleven hours a day at the Minnesota State Fair on behalf of a major American automotive company. My supervisor was a motor-mouthed, impossibly charismatic corporate carnie who’d chain smoke cigarettes on our breaks and shake his head about the impending collapse of the automotive industry. “This whole business is going straight down the shitter,” he’d tell me. “These motherfuckers have no idea what’s going on. [Major American automotive company] is going to be fucking finished in four years, tops. They’re all going to have to be nationalized by the end of the decade.” He was, at it turns out, at least a third correct.
Standardized test grader. // One of the projects I was assigned to was reading and evaluating narrative essays from elementary school children in Louisiana after Katrina, and it truly remains one of the most sobering reading experiences of my life. Regardless of the subject the kids were assigned — a time they rescued an animal, a time they helped a family member — they all wrote about Katrina. Most of them, anyway, except for one kid, who wrote a nonfiction piece about a talking bear he met once. “I am sorry I frightened you,” said the talking bear to the Louisiana student, after threatening to eat him. “I care about the safety of my children, and I become scared when I think they might be in danger.” “That’s OK, bear, I understand that you love your children very much,” replied the student. Actually, come to think of it, maybe that piece was about Katrina after all. Anyway, I remember it more fondly than many nonfiction essays written by professional writers that I have encountered subsequently.
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