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(the eleventh job I was kinda fired from).
c.1995
When I was in my senior year in high school, I was interning at Plan B skateboards under the supervision of Mike Ternasky, Carl Hyndman and Dave Andrecht. Upon graduating they hired me on full time. Growing up in San Diego, this was it for me. I was ready to work here diligently for the rest of my life. I was now getting free product, including full clothing and I had complete art supplies at my fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—not to mention a ramp to skate in our office. When I say full art supplies, I mean it too—from a darkroom, to paints, pens and etc… to full on video editing equipment and cameras galore. I also got to be around the best pro skateboarders in the industry all day every day and it was my job to film them, photograph them and to create logos and artwork for them.
This was my dream job and I spent every day I worked there happy and content. After being there for a little while, I was promoted and promoted again. My last promotion was to become one of the head video photographers and to take on more team management tasks.
The first big management thing I did was to have all the riders fly in from their home cities to one hub and to then arrive as a team in Vancouver for the 1994 Vancouver Skateboarding Championships. It went over fairly well and when Mike Ternasky (M.T.) came home from the trip we were supposed to have a meeting that Monday about a pay raise and more responsibilities.
I was really excited about it to the point that I got to work an hour early to prepare to commit myself to M.T. for however long he was willing to work with a loser kid like me. This is a guy who took me from a mediocre high school art kid with no chance of going to college or getting a good job, to interning for him folding clothes and shipping product under skateboarding legend Dave Andrecht, to assistant art directing under super talented Carl Hyndman, to being a video photographer for one of the most legendary skateboard filmmakers in the history of skateboarding to date—M.T. himself.
However, on the way to work, and our subsequent meeting, M.T. was hit by an 80-year-old woman looking over her shoulder while running a red light. It was on a blind corner. The woman was speeding. Mike never saw her. He left behind a 7-month pregnant wife and a whole crew of people that would have done anything for him. He was the most important person ever in my life. He was the only person who truly believed in me. And he was someone who I had idolized since I met him during the H-Street days at the H-Street house near school W (in my skatelandias map).
Immediately after he died, his wife Mary, asked me to help fly in and pick up the massive amount of people that came to his funeral and to console Mary. I kept it together the best I could between having parents who didn’t care or understand and a girlfriend who thought that Mike’s death was taking away from my time with her. However, after the funeral, I just lost it. I stopped working altogether and soon, I just returned all my equipment to Plan B. It seemed like the company would not go on and I had completely lost my will to live.
Nevertheless, I still had to make rent, so to make ends meet, I got a job first at souplantation (job #10), which was subsequently a disaster. Between my family not supporting me and having a horrible girlfriend, I just couldn’t keep it together any longer. I was getting really deep into street racing at the time and I had some friends in L.A. who lived in San Pedro right near the Brotherhood Raceway on Terminal Island and another group of friends in L.A.’s Koreatown.
My friends in Pedro had recently been in a crash that killed another one of my friends only days after M.T. died—Chris Amon. Chris was racing a girl who ran him into a pole when he lost to her. She cut him off while giving him the finger. Chris’ body crushed my friend Jon and his girlfriend Vanessa’s legs in the back seat. They were in Pedro trying to walk again and felt that I would be in a good place if I came up to be with them while they were rehabilitating themselves.
I was a real mess when I got up there but living with these friends helped realize that life was not over and that I could go on. We took long walks through Del Amo mall, we went to the track and raced our cars and I took on two jobs to pull my weight. I was working at the Carson Swap Meet selling children’s clothes while my friend Min sold chipped phones out of the back and I got a job at Trader Joe’s.
At Trader Joe’s I worked with an assortment of rejects like me. We all kind of made each other feel better and we talked constantly about moving on from where we were at in life. I worked with a stone butch dyke saving money to move to SF with her girlfriend where she planned on transitioning. I worked with a tattoo covered cholo who had gotten shot in the gut and lost some internal organs. He walked with a limp from another bullet he took in the thigh when he was in high school. He was taking classes at the local JC and wanted to get a degree in criminal justice. His brother was gunned down under a mile from the Trader Joe’s while we were working. He was playing ball and waiting for my co-worker to get off work. He got in an argument over a bet placed on the game. The other people left and came back shooting. I worked with a goth girl left over from the goth/rave Jane’s Addiction L.A. world that had crumbled. She was unhappy with her boyfriend and would steal his smokes for me. He smoked Kools. We would take breaks together and she would plan her break up with him every day, and every day after, she would come back with a fresh pack of his Kools to offer me for my listening skills.
Pretty soon after staring there, the manager, who in essence was a really nice guy, realized that I was messed up and that he made a mistake hiring me. The sad thing is, I was actually trying hard to do well but I was so depressed and so poor at the same time, that I couldn’t do a good job.
At first, I literally had to steal food from there to eat. I let my roommates come in and load up a cart. I would then only charge them for a few things and let them go. I would eat out of the food on the floor and take food on breaks with me that was un-purchased.
Soon after that, I started having a smoke when I brought in carts, then two smokes, finally it was taking me close to an hour to bring in the carts. When questioned, I told the managers that I had a bad back and that I could not push more than one cart at a time.
My register was off everyday. I never took a cent out of the register, I tried my hardest but it was off every day. They took me off the register. I started stocking. I was too slow at stocking. They put me in the freezer and would only let me out to do register for an hour or two when the other people went to lunch or on break.
I smoked in the freezer, ate food in the freezer, put away about a gallon of orange juice on average a day in the freezer. The fans made it so no one could smell the smoke. The freezing temperatures made it so no one checked on me. I was happy in the freezer. I was alone in the freezer. I could sit around in the freezer. I could work at my own pace in the freezer.
When I would get called in to do the register, I would try to do a good job but not too good because I didn’t want that job all over again, so I worked slow. 8 hours at a register does not work for me. I cannot do it no matter how good I try to be. Unfortunately, I could not even do an hour at the register perfectly. At the time, Trader Joe’s had these old style registers that didn’t do any math for you. I was really bad at math back then. I never even did pre-algebra in high school. I would be 5 cents off one day. I would be 20 cents off another day. Each time it would kill me to be off. The manager would reprimand me and I would genuinely feel bad. The manager would send me back into the freezer and I would put on the freezer gear and go back into my well-stocked snow cave and think, “fuck everything” or “no one understands me.” I was sure I was the first person to feel this way and that besides Bukowski, everyone else in Pedro couldn’t feel what I feel when I say I am in pain.
This went on for about 3 months. I would get there at opening, stock the isles. Then, later on I would stock the freezer, take in some carts, cover registers for people’s breaks, take my patented 30 minute 15 minute breaks and hour long 30 minute lunches. Finally, I would get reprimanded for all my daily failures. I got used to this routine. The managers got used to this routine. No hard feelings.
Right at the end of summer, one of the managers asked to see me outside. I figured I was up for one of my daily reprimands and thought nothing of it. I was still numb from M.T. dying. I still didn’t have what it took to go on but I was going on day by day with nothing really pushing me forward other than the need to pay rent and eat. The manager was the nice one. He was a good guy. I liked him as far as managers went. I never really broke anything or did anything too messed up because I liked him so much. At this point, my only crime was grazing off of the food and letting my friends walk off with some free food. The manager told me that in the hour I was working the register that it was under $500. He sent me home on suspension.
I was devastated. I have never stolen money from anyone. I am totally guilty of screwing around, breaking things, eating the food on a job, taking long breaks and other stuff but I never steal money out of the register. I don’t know why. People have Pmed me to tell me I am an asshole for all the things I do on jobs. Other people have Pmed me to tell me I am a genius for the things I do on jobs. Regardless, there is a line I do not cross. I never outright steal out of the register.
When I got home, I got more and more depressed. I thought about Mike. I thought about my parents. I thought about my 23-year-old ex-girlfriend who was now dating some 15-year-old boy with a kid already. I thought about working at the Carson Swap Meet selling children’s clothes as a front for all this wannabe gangster shit. I thought about racing my stupid car. Finally, I started thinking about some kind of future but I couldn’t see one. I felt all weird and crazy. My roommates were out of town. I had to get out of the apartment, so I drove up to my friend’s place in Koreatown.
When I got up there, my friends knew I was upset and they decided to take me on a special date. They took me to play pool. They gave me a chipped cell phone, so I could call my best friend Justin. They bought me dinner at Sizzler because to them, Sizzler was fancy healthy food and they thought it would make me feel better. Even though I couldn’t eat anything at Sizzler, it did make me feel better. We saw a movie at City Walk.
Nevertheless, when they all went to sleep I hit bottom. I looked out the window. It was pretty soon after the riots and L.A. wasn’t looking so hot. Koreatown was still pretty burned out and there was absolutely no shortage of empty apartments. My friends had a 1-bedroom corner top floor apartment in the Du Berry near 5th and Vermont. I looked down in the alley and thought about jumping off. There was a homeless guy shooting heroin sitting on an old discarded mattress below me. I watched him shoot up and then lay back on the mattress, the needle still bobbing in his forearm. I thought about how I would probably land on him, or near him. I thought about all the other homeless dudes down there finding me splatted on top of this guy with a needle still in his arm and I thought about them checking my pockets and stealing my Adidas and my only good outfit. I went back to the couch and played some streetfighter.
The following Monday, the manager at Trader Joe’s called me up in the morning and asked me to come in around noon. When I got there, he told me I would be paid for the whole day and all the days I had missed. He told me that another manager had taken the $500 out of my register right after I was done using it, did a drop, forgot to record it and went on a 4 day vacation. The other manager came out and apologized. They told me that besides the $500, I was only 3 cents off. The general manager asked me to come back to work the next day. I told them I couldn’t. I said that it was wrong the way they treated me like I had stolen money from the register and that I couldn’t work there if that was standard procedure. They still felt bad and paid me another full week.
(the eleventh job I was kinda fired from).
c.1995
When I was in my senior year in high school, I was interning at Plan B skateboards under the supervision of Mike Ternasky, Carl Hyndman and Dave Andrecht. Upon graduating they hired me on full time. Growing up in San Diego, this was it for me. I was ready to work here diligently for the rest of my life. I was now getting free product, including full clothing and I had complete art supplies at my fingertips 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—not to mention a ramp to skate in our office. When I say full art supplies, I mean it too—from a darkroom, to paints, pens and etc… to full on video editing equipment and cameras galore. I also got to be around the best pro skateboarders in the industry all day every day and it was my job to film them, photograph them and to create logos and artwork for them.
This was my dream job and I spent every day I worked there happy and content. After being there for a little while, I was promoted and promoted again. My last promotion was to become one of the head video photographers and to take on more team management tasks.
The first big management thing I did was to have all the riders fly in from their home cities to one hub and to then arrive as a team in Vancouver for the 1994 Vancouver Skateboarding Championships. It went over fairly well and when Mike Ternasky (M.T.) came home from the trip we were supposed to have a meeting that Monday about a pay raise and more responsibilities.
I was really excited about it to the point that I got to work an hour early to prepare to commit myself to M.T. for however long he was willing to work with a loser kid like me. This is a guy who took me from a mediocre high school art kid with no chance of going to college or getting a good job, to interning for him folding clothes and shipping product under skateboarding legend Dave Andrecht, to assistant art directing under super talented Carl Hyndman, to being a video photographer for one of the most legendary skateboard filmmakers in the history of skateboarding to date—M.T. himself.
However, on the way to work, and our subsequent meeting, M.T. was hit by an 80-year-old woman looking over her shoulder while running a red light. It was on a blind corner. The woman was speeding. Mike never saw her. He left behind a 7-month pregnant wife and a whole crew of people that would have done anything for him. He was the most important person ever in my life. He was the only person who truly believed in me. And he was someone who I had idolized since I met him during the H-Street days at the H-Street house near school W (in my skatelandias map).
Immediately after he died, his wife Mary, asked me to help fly in and pick up the massive amount of people that came to his funeral and to console Mary. I kept it together the best I could between having parents who didn’t care or understand and a girlfriend who thought that Mike’s death was taking away from my time with her. However, after the funeral, I just lost it. I stopped working altogether and soon, I just returned all my equipment to Plan B. It seemed like the company would not go on and I had completely lost my will to live.
Nevertheless, I still had to make rent, so to make ends meet, I got a job first at souplantation (job #10), which was subsequently a disaster. Between my family not supporting me and having a horrible girlfriend, I just couldn’t keep it together any longer. I was getting really deep into street racing at the time and I had some friends in L.A. who lived in San Pedro right near the Brotherhood Raceway on Terminal Island and another group of friends in L.A.’s Koreatown.
My friends in Pedro had recently been in a crash that killed another one of my friends only days after M.T. died—Chris Amon. Chris was racing a girl who ran him into a pole when he lost to her. She cut him off while giving him the finger. Chris’ body crushed my friend Jon and his girlfriend Vanessa’s legs in the back seat. They were in Pedro trying to walk again and felt that I would be in a good place if I came up to be with them while they were rehabilitating themselves.
I was a real mess when I got up there but living with these friends helped realize that life was not over and that I could go on. We took long walks through Del Amo mall, we went to the track and raced our cars and I took on two jobs to pull my weight. I was working at the Carson Swap Meet selling children’s clothes while my friend Min sold chipped phones out of the back and I got a job at Trader Joe’s.
At Trader Joe’s I worked with an assortment of rejects like me. We all kind of made each other feel better and we talked constantly about moving on from where we were at in life. I worked with a stone butch dyke saving money to move to SF with her girlfriend where she planned on transitioning. I worked with a tattoo covered cholo who had gotten shot in the gut and lost some internal organs. He walked with a limp from another bullet he took in the thigh when he was in high school. He was taking classes at the local JC and wanted to get a degree in criminal justice. His brother was gunned down under a mile from the Trader Joe’s while we were working. He was playing ball and waiting for my co-worker to get off work. He got in an argument over a bet placed on the game. The other people left and came back shooting. I worked with a goth girl left over from the goth/rave Jane’s Addiction L.A. world that had crumbled. She was unhappy with her boyfriend and would steal his smokes for me. He smoked Kools. We would take breaks together and she would plan her break up with him every day, and every day after, she would come back with a fresh pack of his Kools to offer me for my listening skills.
Pretty soon after staring there, the manager, who in essence was a really nice guy, realized that I was messed up and that he made a mistake hiring me. The sad thing is, I was actually trying hard to do well but I was so depressed and so poor at the same time, that I couldn’t do a good job.
At first, I literally had to steal food from there to eat. I let my roommates come in and load up a cart. I would then only charge them for a few things and let them go. I would eat out of the food on the floor and take food on breaks with me that was un-purchased.
Soon after that, I started having a smoke when I brought in carts, then two smokes, finally it was taking me close to an hour to bring in the carts. When questioned, I told the managers that I had a bad back and that I could not push more than one cart at a time.
My register was off everyday. I never took a cent out of the register, I tried my hardest but it was off every day. They took me off the register. I started stocking. I was too slow at stocking. They put me in the freezer and would only let me out to do register for an hour or two when the other people went to lunch or on break.
I smoked in the freezer, ate food in the freezer, put away about a gallon of orange juice on average a day in the freezer. The fans made it so no one could smell the smoke. The freezing temperatures made it so no one checked on me. I was happy in the freezer. I was alone in the freezer. I could sit around in the freezer. I could work at my own pace in the freezer.
When I would get called in to do the register, I would try to do a good job but not too good because I didn’t want that job all over again, so I worked slow. 8 hours at a register does not work for me. I cannot do it no matter how good I try to be. Unfortunately, I could not even do an hour at the register perfectly. At the time, Trader Joe’s had these old style registers that didn’t do any math for you. I was really bad at math back then. I never even did pre-algebra in high school. I would be 5 cents off one day. I would be 20 cents off another day. Each time it would kill me to be off. The manager would reprimand me and I would genuinely feel bad. The manager would send me back into the freezer and I would put on the freezer gear and go back into my well-stocked snow cave and think, “fuck everything” or “no one understands me.” I was sure I was the first person to feel this way and that besides Bukowski, everyone else in Pedro couldn’t feel what I feel when I say I am in pain.
This went on for about 3 months. I would get there at opening, stock the isles. Then, later on I would stock the freezer, take in some carts, cover registers for people’s breaks, take my patented 30 minute 15 minute breaks and hour long 30 minute lunches. Finally, I would get reprimanded for all my daily failures. I got used to this routine. The managers got used to this routine. No hard feelings.
Right at the end of summer, one of the managers asked to see me outside. I figured I was up for one of my daily reprimands and thought nothing of it. I was still numb from M.T. dying. I still didn’t have what it took to go on but I was going on day by day with nothing really pushing me forward other than the need to pay rent and eat. The manager was the nice one. He was a good guy. I liked him as far as managers went. I never really broke anything or did anything too messed up because I liked him so much. At this point, my only crime was grazing off of the food and letting my friends walk off with some free food. The manager told me that in the hour I was working the register that it was under $500. He sent me home on suspension.
I was devastated. I have never stolen money from anyone. I am totally guilty of screwing around, breaking things, eating the food on a job, taking long breaks and other stuff but I never steal money out of the register. I don’t know why. People have Pmed me to tell me I am an asshole for all the things I do on jobs. Other people have Pmed me to tell me I am a genius for the things I do on jobs. Regardless, there is a line I do not cross. I never outright steal out of the register.
When I got home, I got more and more depressed. I thought about Mike. I thought about my parents. I thought about my 23-year-old ex-girlfriend who was now dating some 15-year-old boy with a kid already. I thought about working at the Carson Swap Meet selling children’s clothes as a front for all this wannabe gangster shit. I thought about racing my stupid car. Finally, I started thinking about some kind of future but I couldn’t see one. I felt all weird and crazy. My roommates were out of town. I had to get out of the apartment, so I drove up to my friend’s place in Koreatown.
When I got up there, my friends knew I was upset and they decided to take me on a special date. They took me to play pool. They gave me a chipped cell phone, so I could call my best friend Justin. They bought me dinner at Sizzler because to them, Sizzler was fancy healthy food and they thought it would make me feel better. Even though I couldn’t eat anything at Sizzler, it did make me feel better. We saw a movie at City Walk.
Nevertheless, when they all went to sleep I hit bottom. I looked out the window. It was pretty soon after the riots and L.A. wasn’t looking so hot. Koreatown was still pretty burned out and there was absolutely no shortage of empty apartments. My friends had a 1-bedroom corner top floor apartment in the Du Berry near 5th and Vermont. I looked down in the alley and thought about jumping off. There was a homeless guy shooting heroin sitting on an old discarded mattress below me. I watched him shoot up and then lay back on the mattress, the needle still bobbing in his forearm. I thought about how I would probably land on him, or near him. I thought about all the other homeless dudes down there finding me splatted on top of this guy with a needle still in his arm and I thought about them checking my pockets and stealing my Adidas and my only good outfit. I went back to the couch and played some streetfighter.
The following Monday, the manager at Trader Joe’s called me up in the morning and asked me to come in around noon. When I got there, he told me I would be paid for the whole day and all the days I had missed. He told me that another manager had taken the $500 out of my register right after I was done using it, did a drop, forgot to record it and went on a 4 day vacation. The other manager came out and apologized. They told me that besides the $500, I was only 3 cents off. The general manager asked me to come back to work the next day. I told them I couldn’t. I said that it was wrong the way they treated me like I had stolen money from the register and that I couldn’t work there if that was standard procedure. They still felt bad and paid me another full week.
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