Back in the day, me and my friends all had several part-time jobs after school, and we had them before the legal employment age requiring parental consent on your employment application, which is a classic upbringing for working class New Yorkers. I had a work permit from my elementary school principal (I know it's against the law now...sigh), so I could earn a few bucks with my older brothers working paper routes. Once I hit 15, me and my two friends worked at the McDonald's in Nanuet (it's still there, too), with my mom's signature alongside mine on the job application. I simply didn't (and still don't) know how to live without working really hard for a buck. It's part of my DNA.
It was a daily part of my low-class, ethnic friend's lives, too. We all humped it with a few jobs living with our dysfunctional families, just to have food and new clothes, and to escape our insane asylum homes. I met my first French Canadian boyfriend (Hi, Joe!) at the Nyack McDonald's my friend Donnel worked at. Yeah, it was like that. Her dad had died unexpectedly and suddenly under mysterious circumstances overseas, which sent her entire family into a tailspin. Her "best friend" Laila had already been to rehab and sent back to her grandparents in Norway to "dry out" for awhile, which meant she managed the convenient store in West Nyack as a high school teenager.
That's just how it was for us. And it didn't end with high school. Me and my best friend fit right in with our new college friends, almost all of them "ethnics" from the city, with the occasional banged-up Italian chick from Syracuse with the drunk, abusive Indian boyfriend from "the res" thrown into the mix for local color. Oh, yeah? We have those downstate, too. Know what I mean? We fit each other real well. My college boyfriend worked at the school cafeteria, worked the door as a bouncer at the hip music bar downtown that his brother played at with his "art fag" girlfriend, and then he spent excruciatingly slow summers helping old rich Jewish ladies with their shopping bags get out of cabs on the Upper West Side, which financed our first European trip abroad that we got on discount because his older brother worked bags and the ticket counter for Aer Lingus.
It was everywhere we went, with everyone around us repeating the same insane chorus: if you want to eat, get a job. If you want clothes, get a job. Not health insurance or medicine(s), or a savings account, or a "golden parachute" if the job suddenly ended for reasons that typically had nothing to do with me and my hard-working friends, even if excuses were used, and by the end of high school we'd heard them all. Just survival. It was all about surviving for another day. Just one more day. We were hungry for life because we were really good at it.
And so, it wasn't a big deal to me that my Dominican friend Ariel from Brooklyn had been hustling various jobs since childhood, too. His mother Miriam was a loud, screeching hairdresser who worked intermittently for shops, and when those went bust because she got angry and threw a tantrum at the boss, she cut hair at home. We met in Oneonta because he liked my look as he passed me by on a campus staircase—we both sported Eisenhower jackets*, though he claimed his was real and I knew mine was a "faux" one that I bought for cheap down at the Jersey Shore on LBI over the summer—which gave him extra "cool points" in his desperately trendy "art fag" clique.
He lived in the dorm beneath us on the hill, right next to ours, so it wasn't long before his group and mine began mixing it up at parties. I introduced him to his first serious girlfriend—my friend "Dev", who pursued my friendship aggressively after Photography class, because I got great "crits" and she knew I knew a lot of "hot" guys—because he wasn't my physical type, and I already had a boyfriend who lived directly beneath me in my dorm. We had a lot of other differences, too, as our friendship unfolded, but suffice to say, he was very happy with his "consolation prize". They immediately hit it off as "city kids" who both wore hipster black almost exclusively, right down to their underwear, which Ariel promptly showed her to prove his "Goth" cred.
He had "Bauhaus" posters in his room, his busted-ass bikes that he fixed sometimes, and lots of dope, though he just as hungry and thirsty as us. We'd rip off smokes from each others packs during parties, and weed and beer was our collective currency that could get you instant access anywhere. Dev had already had a live-in boyfriend and a retail job in Manhattan, because her parents kicked her out of their Roosevelt Island place after she refused to go to a good college, and after they paid for Bronx Art and Science, a really prestigious city high school. Instead, they got a typical "Art Fag" with a lot of gauzy black clothes that needed steam cleaning, and a pretentious closed-jaw accent for their troubles, but she fit in with my bro from Brooklyn, and I liked that. I wanted us to keep hanging out, you know?
Ariel was busted like we were, and every summer we tried to think of ways to avoid going home for the horribly long summers that included mandatory hard labor at jobs we fucking despised...except Ariel. He was actually a street kid and not just some "wanna-be", because in addition to the usual skate-punk skills with a board, his dumb ass was crazy enough to work one of the most dangerous jobs in all of Manhattan—a bike messenger. It was like being a cabbie in the 'hood. You could get killed just for making some change. He told us harrowing stories about car doors that suddenly opened, side-swiping him off his bike that was then too broke too ride. No bike = no money.
In addition to tense stand-offs with cab drivers and truckers, he had to stay alive and stay on his bike to earn money. I can't really explain to you how insane a proposition it is, until you visit Midtown Manhattan during a commuter rush-hour, with the added bonus of a million dumb European tourists wandering around the streets during summertime. It was a stress test devised by some mythic "Men in Black": if you arrive safely, you survive. The worst accident he ever had was when he was ripped off his bike by a speeding cab, dragged with his bike underneath it, to come out the front end and grab onto the back of a huge truck's bumper that was right before him and the cab. Yeah. I know.
It was always a rough ride, but he loved adrenaline rushes and getting high, so the job took, give or take a summer session upstate. It was his way to earn, and we very much wanted to get back to our college campus in the mountains of upstate New York. It was our paradise away from home, and we got educated, too. We all had T.A.P. from the state** and single mothers (or close enough to it, with their notoriously bad marriages) who needed cash to maintain their lifestyles, not ours. I also took out a personal loan that I got for my mom so she could meet some expenses, and our tuition back then was...ahem...$750.00 a semester. Yeah, you read that right.
Everything else we had to pay for, including food, clothing, shelter, books, art supplies, medicine, and laundry. We were the most independent kids I'd ever met, and to match our advanced know-how, we'd developed maturely good tastes, like travel and fresh gear. Ariel had the added burden of being an arty hipster, which meant his hair and clothes had to be "on point" to give him status in his clique, a group of cool surfer/skater kids from Long Island, who were all more-or-less the same height, which made Ariel the tallest and skinniest at 6'1. That's a lot of hair dye and black clothes. He also needed the goods to maintain a connection with his bitch of a girlfriend who played hard to please like an angry, spoiled, rude brat. A lot, bro.
So, he did what a lot of messengers who were "hep cats" did on the side: he smoked and sold a lot of weed. I didn't really make the connect until a venture into the city for a meet-up between semesters, when his beeper would go off constantly. That's how they did back then, with special codes for "weed", or, if you were an upscale club-goer at night, coke. Ariel dabbled in a lot darker shit than me and my main crew, who were destined for scholarly lives, but Ariels' main goal was to work in a recording studio with "The Ramones", which he did, because he took us to the joint to scope it out. He still works with audio, too (sans the college bitch I introduced him to), doin' high-end installations for rich white people in the city (and occasionally their ski chalet or Woodstock country cabin in upstate New York), who want one remote control for their stereo system, alarms, and car park. Shit like that. He also married the daughter of the owner for extra security.
But, I can't deny that his bravado and skill at circumnavigating those crazy-ass Manhattan streets blew me away back then. That n*gga knows how to fuckin' ride in all that shit without dying, and that's impressive, yo. Props to you, pops! You were one of the coolest kids on the block back then, and you knew how to telegraph it, too. Good on you, bro! You were always one of my favorite Oneontans from the 'hood, guy! Have a great summer. Watch out for the sharks! With or without the "speed weed", ya hump. Ha! And, Dave, fuck you still. Ass hat. Keep yo' Niagara ass close to the Hudson River with yo' job, and off my shit this summa! I got shit goin' on and I don't need you sniffin' around being pokey, looking for an "in" with me like you do, Indian boy. Stay off my jock!
For the "Dog Pound"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_jacket
** https://www.hesc.ny.gov/pay-for-college/apply-for-financial-aid/nys-tap.html
