On the artist's jobs (part 2)
Re: Ghislane Leung’s job list: part 2 of my job history
I thought I’d start off earlier, then go back to my jobs after college in Part 3. In high school, I worked at the famed Pearl Art Supplies. I either took the bus or got dropped off (to this day, no driver’s license). I was sixteen. It was in the strip mall off the main road in our suburb between the Trader Joe’s and the Tower Records. There, I restocked shelves, and sometimes took naps in the designated nap corner, where over several years, employees had incrementally moved the matte board shelf a few inches until there was enough space to sleep behind it, using a folded-up piece of felt as a pillow. The framer, Tony, routinely slept back there, so it was often occupied. He was a 300-lb linebacker Hagrid-type who was super friendly and had a lot of acne on his back, which he told me his girlfriend liked to pop. I thought it was pretty cool he’d actually sleep on the shop floor every day and just wait for customers’ feet to disappear between the crack of the wall and the matte board shelf before coming back out.
Besides Tony there was Jason, a short, red-haired guy in his early 30s, who painted clowns at home. And our janitor, who was from Ghana, who routinely brought in the most incredible meals for us at lunch: rich peanut butter chicken and soups. Pearl, for those unaware, was a franchised discount art supply store based in Florida that spread throughout the US. We sold really strange things that other art supply stores didn’t want, like covers for toilet paper made from dolls (the dress covered a plastic skin-colored tube which inserted into the middle of the toilet paper roll, giving the dolls a ghastly flesh-covered appendage under the fabric skirt). People stole from us a lot, even going as far to squeeze out acrylic or oil paint from the tubes rather than taking the whole thing. And people would come in asking for “button bags” — “you know, like for sewing”— obviously for drugs. We had endless amounts of craft paint. Once I remember having a very heated discussion about which color to choose for Jesus’ skin color. Unlike for Santa’s: we sold a paint in shade of “Santa’s Flesh.”
We had a tiny, cluttered break-room with a small TV and a stack of VHS tapes which you could watch on break. I always chose the most stimulating films to stop myself from falling asleep at work. I watched Trainspotting this way, through 15-minute increments. I remember watching the scene where the dead baby crawls on the ceiling and having it echo behind my eyes horrifyingly as I advised people which supplies to buy on the shopfloor. My manager was a creepy guy in his 30s or 40s who was balding and who LARPed on the weekend. He routinely sexually harassed me (this would become a constant throughout my working life), including telling me “You’d be pretty if you got a nosejob.” I was sixteen. He told another coworker once that he’d seen me getting out of a car, and he “couldn’t have guessed who those legs belonged to!” I reported him to my manager, a British lady in her fifties, but she told me there was nothing she could do, and a few years after I left the store, and the entire national franchise, closed for good.
During and after Pearl, I also worked at a record store called Som Records in Washington, DC, on 14th and T streets. It still exists. I got paid 8 dollars an hour to sweep the floors and alphabetize records. This was more of a (what the Germans call) a “prestige job” since it paid so low and basically I was there to meet “cool” people in the DC music scene. Sometimes famous rock stars came in and I got to talk to them. (A Washington Post employee approached me many years later to ask if I had been inappropriately in contact with one of the rock stars, who was going through a #MeToo-type cancellation. I said no—to me at sixteen, being asked to hang out at a bar was peak cool, and inappropriate, sure, but nothing I wanted to say on record.) My biggest memory from this job was wearing my handmade “Free Pete Doherty” t-shirt my friend made with puff paint and freezer paper and spilling coffee all down it.
For my jobs after high school, see Part 1.