Dirty Job

Garbage is good.

One of the hardest things for people who desperately desire the creative life to understand is how the professional part of it can poison the art. They are sure that when they get everything they want, they will be absolutely happy and fulfilled. When this doesn’t happen, they are crushed.

I got my dream job early on, and there have been times I’ve regretted it. Not because I don’t love the work I do, but because experiences in the business outside of writing and drawing imprinted themselves on the work. When I would sit down to make art, bad memories came flooding back. I was triggered by my own art.

One of my first art jobs was drawing portraits at an amusement park. I was 15. I had to get special permission to work at that age. I thought it would be really cool to draw portraits for a summer and make money while making pictures.

But I absolutely hated it.

Even though the vast majority of people you deal with are going to be nice, that 10% can ruin your day. When you are making a picture of someone’s face, you are dealing with an especially sensitive subject. And since the portrait-making company preferred that we stick to quick-to-draw profile portraits, well, that was a real problem, too. In the days before cheap personal cameras and ubiquitous selfies, most people had never seen their profile. 

People can look very different from one angle to the next, and there would be upset customers who had no idea what their nose or chin really looked like. 

You had to be something of a psychologist, to judge what kind of person you were dealing with before you sat down and did that portrait. Some people wanted the truth. Some people want to be flattered a bit. Both are fine, and you want to make the customer happy. 

But if you guess wrong - boy, fireworks.

Fortunately, I never got subjected to the worst treatment from customers, but I did draw many a squirming baby. Most babies look pretty much alike, so the artists joked that we engaged in “make-a-baby” because there was no way to get a lock on that baby’s portrait while he was writhing and gurgling and spitting up. So we just drew Winston Churchill, and as long as the hair color was right, the parents were pleased.

The boss, however was really abusive: he broke the law by not allowing us to take meal and bathroom breaks. When you’re working in 100-degree heat, that's kinda not funny. 

At one point, we started going on soft strikes, walking off the job and daring him to fire us when we sauntered off to pee. He didn’t. He begged us to come back. Promised to let us eat. 

What a champ.

We were supposed to get paid a bonus for productivity whenever we hit a certain goal, but we had to make that goal every single hour we worked. So, he would schedule us to work at least one low traffic hour so we would never be able to make the quota. You could stand there for an hour and get only one person by the booth wanting a portrait at 10 AM, and late in the day you’d have 40 people. So all you needed to do to screw over the artist was schedule them for one slow hour, then overwork them the rest of the time to get maximum value.

In retaliation, some of us refused to work at top speed. I’d spend 45 minutes, an hour on a sketch. The boss wanted us to crank them out about every eight minutes. 

The top artists would get people lined up waiting to get us to do their picture, refusing to let anyone else draw them, and the other artists would be sitting there cranking it out. We were getting paid by the hour, were never going to get that promised bonus, and had no incentive to produce faster.

The boss would fume. But he never replaced us. We lured customers with our performance. People would gather around and “ooh” and “ahh”, and the crowd drew in more customers, but he'd palm them off on the faster artists. The customers, now stuck with a ten minute picture from some poor schmuck hacking it out, would get upset, unable to understand why that person over there drew better pictures than the person who drew their portrait.

This was my first taste of just how little the average public understands about, you know, artists. They literally had no idea why one artist was better than another. Or why someone who pumped a pic out in ten minutes did not do as good a job as someone who took an hour. 

Our boss was also embezzling from his boss. He got fired and started his own company the following year using equipment he stole from the company we worked for.

The next year, the job was available again, and the company contacted me. 

This was my first lesson in, "They all get angry at you and they complain about you because you didn't want to take their mess, but they always come back."

I said no to the art portrait gig company.

Instead I took a job parking cars at the same park for the park employer instead of the art subcontractor.

I quite enjoyed it.

It was hot, dirty, grimy work. Every morning, I had to police the parking lot and pick up garbage. Dirty diapers, condoms (I didn’t even know what they were then,) vomit, fast food. I had to direct traffic and get yelled at by angry drivers. My shoes melted on the hot tarmac. I had to stand shin deep in water during floods and got trench foot - that was really gross. I got bitten by a poisonous spider. The company refused to cover my workman’s comp, but health insurance covered my medical.

Sometimes they gave me extra work running rides at the park. I worked on a roller coaster. I also got extra work doing catering duty in a restaurant.

No matter how gross, or goopy, or harsh that job got, it was better than drawing portraits for that creep. It was good exercise and I got a great tan, albeit one that was bordered by my ankles and upper arms. 

When I got home from picking up dirty diapers, I still wanted to draw. I could cash my check, leave it behind for the day, and go back to making comics.

Drawing those portraits was nothing like great art making, and picking up dog poop in a parking lot wasn't a great job, either. But drawing those portraits for that creep was demeaning. I didn’t like how that made me feel about making pictures. I would rather pick up garbage than do art that made me feel like that. 

So, I picked up garbage.

Honorable work can be any kind of work. 

And the work you love can become a disappointment if circumstances re-frame it.

I would rather work with trash than work with trash people who make garbage of art making.