The Bowery (NYC Beat Cop)

As promised here is the story my cousin Andy Mavraganis wrote about bewing a beat cop in New York. It's my favorite story to so far grace this blog. Andy followed his father into the NYPD, and it's especially haunting for me to read this and think that this was his peek at what made up his father's world.
This site now has a home page uniting it with my other pages. www.Rockass.net.
Thanks and Happy Halloween, KLJ
PS: Send me your job stories.

I was assigned a foot post on Bowery Street, that section of New York City made infamous by its' squalor. I suppose there are sadder places in the world, where people lie dying in the streets, of starvation and disease. Then again...those places are an indictment of humanities sadistic criminality, of its' greed. Such places inspire in me anger, as much as sadness. That such conditions exist demands the word "altruism" be stricken from the books...it doesn't exist. It’s so easy to stop physical hunger, if less simple to cure disease. How do you feed a persons soul? What can you say to someone who's felt too much pain? To one who suffers from "too much”? The "Bowery" was the saddest place i'd been.

It was about ten in the morning. I’d just shared a breakfast counter with four black prostitutes, one of whom offered me a free sample of "the funky jiff" she had risin' in her "breadbox” after two days in jail. I asked for a rain check and stepped out to have a smoke on Bowery and Grand. A man with raging eyes and "Hells Angels" tattooed across his once impressive, presently shirtless chest growled menacingly "Gimme a smoke"! I asked him if he was still an "Angel" to which he replied "fuck them"! "I'll kick all their fuckin' pussy asses and yours too!" making sure i knew he meant it. I smiled with my teeth, leered with my eyes, gave him the smoke and said "You're welcome", making sure he knew i wasn't looking for a fight but was all ready to bash his fucking brains in if it would please him. He laughed his crazy man laugh and stampeded off, his gait befitting a man on the deck of a destroyer rolling out to sea, looking for a wall to walk through.

It was late July and, though early in the day, getting hot, humid and sweaty. I crossed to the shady side of Bowery St. and looked in the direction the ex-"Hells Angel" had stomped off in, half surprised he hadn't paused to crush somebody’s face when "Good morning officer, could you spare a cigarette" eased my tension. Not that giving out cigarettes had been therapeutic for me. It was the voice, the quality of it, its' noble gentility. He was somebody, who and how long ago i had to ask, “A lawyer? Wall Street?” Still wearing the pinstriped suit he disappeared in or so it seemed, he didn't like my question, if a sudden facial contortion and simultaneous eye glazing were any indication. Just as suddenly i felt the heat of regret expose me. As i lit his smoke and was thinking what to say next, the radio dispatcher called for an available unit to handle a possible D.O.A. (dead on arrival) on Bowery and Hester. “Perfect timing" i thought, excused myself from his eloquent if tortured presence and took the assignment.

The dispatcher informed me a bus (ambulance) was on the way and the desk clerk at the S.R.O. (single room occupancy) would bring me to the specific room wherein the possible D.O.A. was located. We always had to say "possible" D.O.A. If some poor bastards head is across the street from the rest of himself, he’s a "possible" D.O.A. It's a legal technicality, all radio and paper communications being matters of court record. Only an E.M.T. or M.E. (medical examiner) can legally pronounce someone, or his or her parts, dead. As i walked south on the Bowery i took a mental run through the paperwork and order of notifications. My graduation from the police academy which seemed so long ago was in fact only a month behind me. I tried to imagine what i would encounter...would there be a crowd, a distraught relative(s) or friend(s)...would it be a homicide, an accident, an overdose?

I opened the door and looked up the stairs, two stories straight up to the caged and bulletproof front desk. I climbed up to the window and was greeted by a nervous, disheveled clerk who says "I called you officer and i'm coming right out". When he joins me i ask "are you sure he's dead"? He lowers his head and nods, frowning. “Please follow me".

We walk through a big doorway to our left, taking us into a very large, loft like space, with high ceilings. The walls were milk chocolate brown half way up, with eggnog yellow binding them to the ceiling. In the center and to our left and right is a room within a room. This "room within" has doors all along, about ten, ten feet apart, each with a number on the door. The inner rooms' walls do not reach the ceiling; i assume they were about eight feet high. We walk to the left, pass a few doors and stop. “He’s in there.” pointing to one of the closed doors. I asked if he'd touched the doorknob "in case there was foul play" to which he answered yes. I pulled out my shirt and opened the door, just like in the movies, saw the foot of the bed to the left, the end of the room on my right, stepped into the room and went stiff. He was right next to me, almost touching my left shoulder, almost drooling on me, hanging by his neck, from one of the 2x4's to which the wire mesh ceiling was fastened, like his neck, to keep things "out”. I stepped back and tried to look like i bumped into the door jam purposefully. Cockroaches crawled all over him, his blue face too, sticking its' tongue out at me, all purple and swollen, like his lips, as if to taste the slime oozing over them, down to his chest from his nostrils. The room stunk from the shit that dripped out the bottom of his gripes stained pant leg onto the floor, where the flies were feasting. His shit speckled thick yellow toenails were like talons. His white t shirt hadn’t been white for a long time. There was a note "safety" pinned to his holey grey cardigan, apologizing for any inconvenience he would cause. That was all it said...all he had to say, his epitaph. The bare light bulb was soft white, a warm, if perverse, contrast to his cold blue flesh. The "room" is about ten feet wide and six feet deep, just enough space for a single bed, a foot locker, a dresser on which his Crawley hot plate rested and his self strangled corpse.

The desk clerk kindly brought me a chair on which to sit right outside the room and start my paperwork. I was angry. I thought the clerk could have...should have warned me. I didn't let on. Not 'cause i'm considerate, or even professional, I just had to act hard to compensate for my too young to have seen much face. I was twenty two. As the hours ticked by, the EMTs, detectives and medical examiner come and go as do the inhabitants of this sad place. Some of their faces are hidden behind empathetic masks; others i just wished were hidden. I’m wet with sweat, tight like a knot, tired and depressed. Ah, finally, the morgue guys show up. In a few minutes i'll be out of this hell hole, out in the sun, out where the roar and stink of truck and cab traffic, the stench of sun baked urine will be as refreshing as talcum powder after a shower. They wrap the black rubberized plastic "body bag" around him like a dry cleaner would a hanging whatever, zip it from the bottom up to the neck and cut the rope. He hits the floor in a deadened thud. They close the top, noose and all, drag him into the hall and put him on the stretcher. They pick him up and we're off. I follow them. Left to the big doorway, right to the stairs and ah...almost done now when...they throw him...literally just toss him crashing down the straight, two story stairs and he hits the bottom with a final earsplitting bang! I freeze. I must not show the shock on my face...i must act hard, unaffected, fearless! The sudden alarming noise confirming what my eyes refuse to believe, the sight of what was just a few hours ago a human-being being thrown down two flights of stairs! I'm blazing mad! I want to smash those fucking scumbags with my nightstick, over and over again...for scaring the hell out of me with the sudden, unnecessary noise and sickening me with this horrific vision! I swallow it and don't let on. This is just more than i'd bargained for! Alright, the guy IS fuckin' dead,(i'm telling myself),he's got no relatives, no-one gave a flyin' fuck about him while he was alive, certainly no-one cares now...but what about all the "other" no-ones here? Don't those fucking morgue wagon ghouls think their throwing that guy down the stairs will crush any of them? Maybe not...what the hell do i know...forget it man, just get the hell out and walk as fast as i can, back to the locker room, outta this monkey suit and outta this fuckin' neighborhood.

I didn’t think about this day again...or wouldn’t, until about fifteen years later, about eight years ago. It was about six in the morning, the twenty-eighth and last day of my stay in an alcohol rehab, perched on a mountain top with panoramic views of New Hampshire’s' Green Mountain range. Nine years after my first rehab. A detective who'd been drinking a quart of Jack Daniels a day at work and another when he got home and a commercial fishing boat captain/magician whose' coupe de grace made a ninety foot, two million dollar trawler disappear through the tip of a crack pipe, had asked me to share a coffee and a sunrise with them before i returned to "civilization"(hahahahaha) the next morning. After coffee and the sunrise, a fellow lunatic handed me a poem about the penniless, alcoholic death of the composer of "Camp town races”. I read it, excused myself, got in the shower and it all came back. More accurately, i was still there, in that S.R.O....i cried so hard, for forty five minutes i cried in the shower, for that old man, for the morgue wagon guys, for the detective, the captain, the murderers, the starving, for myself, for everyone who's cared enough about life to ask "am i doing enough?" (because we never do)... and especially for those who haven't.


Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE
My Cousin's brutal tale of being a beat cop in NYC is HERE
Swimming with dolphins in Gay Hawaii is HERE.
Being Will Ferrell is HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!
and my home page is HERE.

Spammer Chapter 4

By Bailey Armadale

Here's the final installment of the spammer series, or is it? I'm working on getting Bailey to give us a fifth, we'll see. Be sure to check back monday as I put up a beautiful but brutal story from my Cousin Andy, a retired NYC Cop. In the meanwhile I love to get comments, and I appreciate you all spreading the word about this site. Peace, KLJ
PS: If you're jonesing for more check out my other true stories and my fiction by clicking on my picture to the right.

2003 was the year that the entire email marketing industry fell apart. Spamming and email marketing still continue today and will be around for many more years, but it is on the decline and thanks to tougher laws and better spam filters, most spam is never even seen by its intended recipients. It was also the final year of operation for The Evil Email Company. In just a few months time, a barrage of problems would force the company to close its doors for good. Some were caused by the way the industry as a whole was changing while others were due to good old fashioned internal office drama.

At the beginning of the year it was very obvious that things were very different from how business had been just a few months month earlier. Business was slow during the holidays, as it typically is every year, but unlike other years it did not pick up in January or even February. An overabundance of email companies had finally burned out the effectiveness of the medium. Most of us didn’t care though. We were just weeks away from being sold, and that meant big bonuses for every employee, particularly those in management like me. I was expecting something in the neighborhood of $50,000 for just having been a loyal employee. Unfortunately it was not to be.

The first major blow to the company came in March when the large company that was in the process of acquiring The Evil Email Company retracted their offer. While their accountants were reviewing our books it began to dawn on them that their recent acquisitions of Spamabunch and other email marketing companies were not the profitable venture they were assumed to be. In fact, it had turned out to be a dire mistake. These email companies were only generating half of their projected revenue. After a few months the acquisition company realized that they had been taken, and did their best to stop the bleeding. They immediately cancelled all plans to acquire more email companies, and began severe layoffs to the companies that they already bought. Meanwhile the owners of all those acquired email companies were sleeping on pillows stuffed with hundred dollar bills. Chalk up another victory for the spammers of South Florida.

With the bid to purchase The Evil Email Company retracted, the top members of the company were at a loss. Everyone had assumed that it was a given, and that they would all be getting a piece of the pie and wouldn’t need to work anymore. Now everything had changed. With the industry a wreck, long-time clients having left the company, and no plans for the future the only thing the company had was a big pile of uncertainty.

Drug use had been a part of the company as long as I had been employed there, but for all the pot, coke, and painkillers that came through the office, it had all been done at a recreational level. With only one or two exceptions, it never interfered with anyone’s duties. Nobody played until their work was complete. However, with the business in a rapidly decaying state and a cloud of depression looming overhead, the drug use was becoming more common and more of a problem. Those who had been hiding their problems as functional addicts weren’t able to hide it longer. The best example, or perhaps worst, would be the company’s Executive Vice President.

The V.P. was one of the most likable guys in the world. He had that old Bostonian charm, but not coupled with the arrogance. He was friendly, funny, and the kind of guy everyone would want to hang around. Before coming to work at The Evil Email Company, he was also a manager of a popular strip club. How that qualified him to run an email company was never very clear to me. Then again, the company drug dealer had previously been his personal connection, and all the beautiful yet completely under qualified female assistants were his old employees and these were things that the owner appreciated. The V.P. had only been hired a week or two before I was and because of that I think he made an effort to look out for me. Whenever I had something bad going on in or outside of the company he was the first to help me out with a few extra bucks, time off, or whatever else I needed. For this reason it upset me to see what happened to him.

While he was a great guy, nobody would ever accuse him of being a saint. He liked to drink and he liked cocaine. Normally this was something he did on the weekends only. Once the offer to buy the company had been retracted that changed from a weekend activity to an after business hours activity. It wasn’t too long until his habit was something he was doing in the office, usually right off his desk. His drinking was even worse. It got so bad that after a while a couple of us got together to assign days of the week when it would be our turn to drive him home. I will admit that he was a fun drunk. He would become even friendlier and very determined to shake your hand. It did become a bit troublesome on the drives home though. Eventually his wife and a few of his friends in the office persuaded him to go to rehab. While there he was let go from the company.

With so many problems surrounding his company, the owner found solace by finally settling down in a monogamous relationship. Unfortunately for his wife, it wasn’t with her. For the better part of 2002 the owner has been sleeping with one of the top sales people in the company who had been going through a nasty divorce at the time. Once her divorce was final, the owner found the time to start up a more stable relationship with her instead of spending time and money chasing younger girls at the local bars. She wasn’t attractive or particularly pleasant to be around, but she was convenient and for the owner, that was enough. During 2003 the owner was almost never in the office, though the company’s suite at the Marriot got more use than ever.

With the owner almost entirely absent from the company, coupled with the downward spiral the industry was going through, things were going to hell very quickly. The talented sales and IT people were leaving left and right for better jobs. The ones that remained were too dumb to get a job elsewhere, or like myself, were just too lazy to look for employment elsewhere. At the beginning of the summer our office had thirty people working in it. By the time September rolled around only 15 people were left, and each week someone else would head out door, either getting fired or finding a new job.

The office, oddly enough, was still enjoyable experience in those depressing times. Those of us that remained did our day to day jobs, but with fewer clients and an executive staff that either quit or stayed at home, most of us found ourselves with a lot more free time than before. So most of our time was filled with playing PC games, watching movies, and occasionally drinking.

The day after the company’s accountant finally quit we found a giant half-empty bottle of Sky Vodka that three people managed to kill before 1 PM. That was probably the only time I had ever been completely drunk at the office. In my inebriated state though I finally came to grips with certain undeniable truths, with the primary one being I needed to get the hell out of that office and find a new job. Why I avoided the truth and put off finding a new job is still something that confuses me. I suppose it was just comfortable. Whatever the reason a new job was the immediate goal. It didn’t take too long for me to find one either. I called up an ex-coworker who owed me a favor and moved on to new e-mail company, and luckily this was one of those rare occasions when I got the favor paid back. An interview was set up at this new company and I was hired on the spot.


With three days notice I gave my resignation to the head of the two-person IT department since he was the closest thing the company had left to management, and said goodbye to the other three people who remained. I probably didn’t even need to give those three days though since at that point we were doing almost nothing. The week after I quit the owner finally returned to the office and announced his intention to close down the company in the next two weeks. That didn’t matter to me though. I was headed off to a new company that was growing and headed in a positive direction, or at least so I thought. Little did I know that the new email company I was headed for was going to make my old corrupt company look like the Red Cross.


Read chapter 1 HERE
Chapter 2 HERE
and Chapter 3 HERE
Will there be a Chapter 5? Spam me with requests for it and I'll pass the requests on to the Spammer himself.

Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.

Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!

the rare personal post

Where am I now.
I guess I haven't escaped a career after all.
I just finished Jeffrey Brown's new book.
I feel kind of melancholy.
I started off all happy to have a new book to read, a cold fall night, a hot cup of tea.
Now I wonder why I'm thirty three and I am still working dumb meaningless jobs and writing and hoping that someone's reading it.
I'll go off and do another stunt soon to get more attention to my writing.
It feels cheap.
Like I should just be able to throw the writing out there and it will gain an audience rapidly cuz of course it's so damn good. yeah. Ha ha.
Oh well.
I keep writing. Something's gotta happen sometime.
The longer you do something the better you get at it. usually.

Spammer Chapter 3

By Bailey Armadale

(These spammer stories are getting a great response. I have to put in a few words here asking you all for a hand. If you can e-mail folks about this blog, link it from you site, or otherwise help promote it, I would be most appreciative. I will continue to put a-lot of work into the content rather than promotion, and that's why I need your help. Thanks, KLJ.
PS: Send in your work stories.)

2002 was a remarkable year for the Email Marketing Industry. Revenues were going through the roof for every company in the industry. New email companies were popping up left and right and most were no further than five minutes away from our office. Many people in the business joked that you could solve the world’s spam problem simply by dropping a bomb over a few blocks in Boca Raton, FL. The biggest event of 2002 though was the sale of the country’s biggest email marketing company to a legitimate company whose management had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

The biggest source of spam in South Florida was a company I’ll call Spamabunch. They were the first organized email marketing company in the country and over the years had developed a reputation that put them in a category reserved for Hitler, Satan, and the music of Michael Bolton. In an effort to hide their identity they would often buy small e-mail marketing companies and then assume the name of the smaller company. This simple process allowed them to legally purchase new email records, but more importantly it helped them to temporarily fly under the radar of anti-spammer groups. Eventually they caught the attention of a large acquisition company that does credit checks and reports as well as teaching credit management. From an outsider’s perspective Spamabunch was a well run company that was turning a profit. If you could look past the reputation they had carved out for themselves they could potentially be a good acquisition for the right company. After doing a little research the acquisition company thought they were the right company.

The reasoning for the acquisition company buying Spamabunch was logical. If they owned Spamabunch they would have access to over 125 million postal and email addresses. With that information they would have new ways of contacting existing clients and would be able to create new clients as well. At the same time they would own a company that was supposedly earning tens of millions of dollars each year. So after some heavy negotiating and light research, the acquisition company purchased Spamabunch for 134 million dollars. Less than a year later it would be a decision The acquisition company would regret, but in the meantime the entire industry was turned upside-down at the news.

Once Spamabunch was sold, the owner of our company saw dollar signs. At first he was quite bitter, as he was one of the original founders of Spamabunch along with two other men. Being unable to get along with them though, he accepted a buyout from them for a little over a million dollars. Had he stayed, he would have made significantly more than that. However upon learning that the acquisition company was still buying other smaller email companies in order to get their hands on as much data as possible, he made it his goal to sell his business, the Evil Email Company.

During this time I also received my final promotion that put me into the management level of the Evil Email Company. Originally I was hired as a sales assistant, and while I was an excellent assistant it was becoming painfully obvious that I was a terrible salesperson. This was primarily due to the fact that I had a conscience and always had a difficult time trying to convince other companies that they should advertise with spam. However, I was very good over the phone and very personable so it was decided I would be the Director of Customer Relations. As a member of management I was now getting a much bigger paycheck, and perks like access to the company stash if I so desired.

The job entailed of two things. First I would assist any sales person who was having a difficult time with an unhappy client. This was not an uncommon problem because at the time email was very easy to sell, and anyone of ambiguous morals who could pick up a phone and say his name without stuttering too badly could become a salesperson. Unfortunately this filled our office with many inexperienced salespeople. Often times these salespeople would not know how to handle an unhappy client, so it would be my job to get on the phone and smooth out the problem. I actually enjoyed this part of the job. By doing my job right the client would praise me as a hero and thank me for taking care of the matter, and the salesperson would buy me a round of drinks for saving their client. The second part of the job however, was a much more miserable experience.

In an effort to generate more revenue and look more attractive to a prospective buyer the Evil Email Company began pumping out twice as much email to increase campaign success. As a rule whenever we mailed out an email ad to our member base we would double the amount of mail sent. If a client paid for a campaign of a million records, we would mail out two million records. By doing this, the click-thru rates and purchase rates looked much more impressive, and a client would be more likely to have a successful campaign and thus more likely to spend more money with us.

Now we were quadrupling that number. A client paying for one million records would actually have four million mailed out. Campaign results were going through the roof, but in the process we were burning out our lists and creating a very unhappy member base. In addition we also began buying other companies’ email lists without even running a permission pass on them. What ended up happening was a nearly endless stream of member complaints. And who got to handle all of these complaints? The new Director of Customer Relations.

Each morning when I got to the office I would have at least 100 emails awaiting me. Some were polite simply asking to be removed from the list and never mailed to again. My favorite came from a very nice woman who wrote an email in prose insisting that she did not need Viagra. Others were a bit more aggressive. One disgruntled gentleman threatened to drive his pick-up truck through our office. The most violent of all threatened to kill several of us and wished that we had been on the 22nd floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11.

The phone calls were the worst though. The CAN-SPAM Act now requires contact information to be included on all emails so that if someone receives an email and wants to be removed they will not have a hard time in getting this request fulfilled. In mid-2002 though, the CAN-SPAM Act was still over a year away from being implemented and we made sure that there was as little contact information in our emails as possible. That still did not stop everyone from finding us though, and after jumping through all the hoops necessary to find our phone number, most callers were not happy.

All the calls would start out angry, often with a good bit of profanity, but most of the time they would calm down after the caller realized he had found an actual human being to talk to and would finally be removed from the list. There were plenty of exceptions to this though. One man named Mike berated me over the phone for 10 minutes threatening to burn down the office and cause me bodily harm. For some reason, at the end of his call he refused to give me his email address though, so he was never removed from the database. Another man claiming to be a lawyer gave his life story to me and how it was his goal to wipe slime like me off the planet. Some were angry while others were just exasperated. I once took a call from a woman who was in tears, and repeatedly told me she could not get off the lists no matter what she did.

I could understand the frustration these people felt, but I could never relate to why some people got so emotional over it. Unwanted email is an inconvenience, but if a couple dozen unwanted email is the worst thing that will happen to you, I will happily switch lives with you. It was this thought that helped me to rationalize what the company was doing no matter how frustrated I got with the situation. Still at the end of the day I was having a hard time feeling good about myself. The company bar tab was coming in real handy around this time.

While I was inconvenienced by it to say the least, the aggressive mailing did pay off, at least in the short term. 2002 ended up being the most profitable year the Evil Email Company ever had, increasing profits by over a million dollars from the previous year. In December we were preparing to be the next big buy-out for the acquisition company, as their accountants were in our office once a week going over our records. Our Christmas party was held on a yacht that sailed up and down the coast while all of the employees drank, danced, and smoked whatever they could get their hands on. No one doubted that 2003 would be an even better year. Unfortunately as good as 2002 was, 2003 would be the exact opposite and it would be the year that the fortunes of entire industry would start to disappear.



Read Chapter 1 HERE or Chapter 2 HERE.
Check back soon for Chapter 4

Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.

Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!

Spammer Chapter 2

By Bailey Armadale

In Palm Beach County, FL there is a stretch of road called Misery Mile. You will not find the road on any map, but if you ask around, plenty of people will know what you are talking about. The stretch of road containing Misery Mile is in one of the most affluent areas of South Florida and is the last place you would expect to have earned such a name. But the name does not reference the beautiful trees, golf courses and expensive homes in the area. Instead, it was dubbed Misery Mile because of several companies that have made their homes in the corporate office parks found scattered along the road. Many of these are direct marketers, companies that people curse on a daily basis, and still they managed to take root in a very exclusive area. For those of you who may not know, a direct marketer is more commonly known as a junk mailer and sends you hundreds of fliers, brochures, and special offers to your mail box each year. So it should come as no surprise that the email marketing industry made its home here, as well.

It was only logical that it should happen. The spam industry is the direct offspring of junk mail industry. During the late nineties, a small group of junk mailers realized that they could reach the same people to whom they sent hundreds of pieces of unwanted junk mail via the Internet and, in the process, save thousands of dollars by avoiding the costs of postage and printing. It was a simple idea and the results were impossible to argue with. As word got out among advertisers that they could reach their target market through email and save a great deal of money, the spammers flourished, and one of the men who profited the most was the owner of my company.

The owner started an email marketing company with several other men in the late 90's that would eventually go on to be the single biggest spam house in North America. However, the owner was such a loathsome being that even his partners could not stand him, and eventually they bought him out for a little over a million dollars. With that money, he set off to start his own company, the Evil Email Company -- a venture that allowed him to continue making money off of email, but still have plenty of time for his outside interests, namely infidelity and cocaine.

My first impression of the owner was not positive -- nor was my second, my third, or any other impressions I would later have of him. I had worked for The Evil Email Company for about two weeks before I finally met him. When I was hired as a sales assistant, meeting the new guy was not exactly a high priority for The owner, but the company was still small enough that everyone knew everyone else in the office from the owner down to the receptionist, so in time I would get my chance. Before I met him, words like "pioneer" and "genius" were thrown around when other employees described him, and many went so far as to call him the most brilliant man in the entire industry. So when I finally met him, I was disappointed to say the least.

The owner was unspectacular in every sense of the word. He was a homely and slightly overweight man who stood a towering 5'7". At age 35, he looked 50. His rapid aging was the result of a combination of his entrepreneurial spirit and a lifestyle that would have Scott Weiland saying "slow down." I would not know this until several months later at his birthday party, where I spent the rest of the night asking others, "Is he really only in his thirties?" His first words to me were actually just a grunt and a nod before he went into his office. There he remained for the rest of the day. As a new employee, I was a bit disappointed that I would not get a chance to impress the owner of my company and get to knowhim. Later on, I learned that getting to know The owner was actually very easy as long as you were willing to go to the bar across the street where he would spend several hours each day after work running up the company's tab.

The owner's greatest contribution to email marketing is the single most devious and sneakiest trick in an industry that prides itself on finding new ways to trick people. For years, email marketers were looking for a quick and easy way to add new email addresses to their databases. The more recipients you could mail, the more money you could make, but collecting the names took a lot of time. Buying the addresses was easy enough, but just simply using someone else's database as your own was illegal, even if you paid for it. Challenged by this, the owner managed to find a gray area and with it he created a process that would make him millions of dollars. It was called the permission pass.

The permission pass is a simple system designed to legally increase the size of a company's mailable database without letting the recipient realize they have just opted-in to receive more e-mail. An email is sent out to a person with a generic offer for a vacation special or debt consolidation or anything that would not really interest the recipient, but would not offend them either. It would be the kind of email that most people would just look at for two seconds and then delete. However if they scrolled to the bottom of the email, there is a message in very small print with verbiage that tells the recipient that they are being added to a new mailing list, and unless they respond to this email with a message saying they did not want to join, they would start receiving advertisements and offers immediately. Since most people delete the email before they even bother reading the entire message, the permission pass successfully generated extremely high rates of new usable email addresses.

If the owner bought a list of 1 million email addresses and used this permission pass, he would easily end up with 99% of the names legally his. It was brilliant, and best of all it was totally legal. As long as you received that email and did not respond to it, you were automatically a new target. The model was quickly noticed by other email companies and was adopted by all of them. It was the perfect way to add a couple million new members to your lists without the bother of taking the time to convince people to knowingly subscribe. The process is now illegal as set forth by rules in the "Canned Spam Act," but for several years this model was responsible for millions of people getting added to new lists on a daily basis.

If the owner was known for something even more than the permission pass, it was how hard he partied. Few people in the email industry were saints. One of other early spammers in the area was a former drug dealer and had served several years in prison. Others had backgrounds in porn and other industries that you would not tell your parents you worked in. But the owner somehow managed to put many of them to shame with his lifestyle, and more impressively got the company to soak up all the costs. The perfect example of this is how our company came to be one of the local Marriot's best customers.


In any given week, the owner would spend about half his time in the office. The other half would be spent at a bar across the street drinking himself stupid and/or trying to pick up women. Despite being married and extremely unattractive, The owner still managed to do pretty well for himself, and when he had no luck at the bar he could always come back to the office and dip his pen in the company ink. Whoever he picked up though would inevitably end up with him at the Marriot for the afternoon, the evening, or sometimes up until the next day depending on whom he was with and if our company's corporate drug dealer had made a recent visit. Once he returned to the office he would hand the receipt to the accountant and have her file under entertaining expenses.

Once the trips to Marriot reached over $10,000, our poor accountant had enough and we had to find a way to curtail his expenses. Eventually, our top salesman was brought in to work out a deal with the Marriot so that we would have a permanently reserved room that was good whenever he needed it at a much discounted rate. When the deal was done, the owner was so happy he took the salesman out to lunch to a strip club that offered a free buffet and that was the last we saw of either of them that day.

Once again, the owner was setting the model for both the industry and his employees.

Read Spammer Chapter 1 HERE.
Check back for Chapter 3 Tomorrow and 4 on Friday.
Monday I have a gruesome and beautiful story by a New York Cop.

Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.

Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!

Spammer Chapter 1

By Bailey Armadale

Check your inbox. Do you see any junk mail in there? You probably have quite a bit. Individually you and your email address are not that valuable. At most that email for discount pain killers cost the Canadian pharmacy that sent it to you one tenth of a cent. So for every ten pieces of unwanted email that you find in your inbox, the company that sent them made about one penny. So really, to a spammer you are literally not worth a dime.

So why do they keep your email address around? Well, it's pretty simple. Once they get your email address and the email address of about 999,999 of your closest friends, this nameless company will make $1,000. Not a bad day's haul really. Especially considering that this nameless company has at least 20 million email addresses. In a given week they will mail to each one of these people at least 3 times, earning somewhere around $60,000. Yes indeed, spamming pays and it pays well. Want to know the scary thing? Three years ago you were worth a whole lot more to them. In some cases an email address would cost as much as ten cents per name. You only had to mail to 10,000 people to make that important $1,000. However, those were the good ole days of spamming and they are long over. Granted they still are not too bad today, otherwise we would not be using spam blockers, but with the advent of new laws and better spam fighting technology the true glory days of spam are
over.

How do I know this? For about two and half years I worked for a spammer. Well technically that is not true. The company that I worked for called themselves a "legitimate email marketing company" meaning they rented office space as opposed to just mailing out of a basement. They also had some big name clients too, which ultimately is the way email marketers separate themselves from common spammers. A common spammer sends out emails for nothing but debt consolidation, porn, and Viagra offers. An email marketer sends out emails for vacation offers, special deals on golf clubs, and occasionally actual brand name companies. At the end of the day though it is still nothing more than unwanted junk mail clogging up your inbox.

It was a good time though and while I was embarrassed to tell anyone what I did for a living the money was too good to pass up. Even if the money was not so good, the office life was unlike anything I had ever or will ever experience again, and people were drawn to it like moths to a flame. Our office had just about everything you would need. There was a fully stocked kitchen with snacks, coffee, soda, and several bottles of vodka. There was plenty of eye candy since all our under-qualified secretaries and assistants were actually hired from local bars and strip clubs. Every Tuesday a car wash service came by the office to details peoples’ cars, and every Wednesday the cocaine dealer would stop by to replenish any dwindling supplies.

Make no mistake about it, when a company makes money hand over fist and the average employee is only 30 years old there is bound to be some serious partying going on. And there I was, age 24, caught up in the middle of all of it.

Many people wonder why I took a job working in such a disreputable industry. The answer is a combination of ignorance and desperation. Prior to working in email marketing, I was living in Austin, Texas, and had been unemployed for a little over seven months, a victim of the great dotcom crash of 2000. Despite numerous interviews, I was having simply no luck finding a job. Having two different and doomed dotcoms on my resume was the career equivalent of a Scarlet Letter. Finally, I took a risk and moved down to South Florida at the urging of a friend who said the job market was still relatively good down there. One month after I moved, I had an interview and was offered a job as a Sales Assistant by The Evil Email Company, a mid-sized email marketing company, and one of the pioneers of the industry.

Like many new employees in an email marketing company, I did not really know what I had gotten myself into. I was just a young guy, broke, with a seemingly useless advertising degree, just looking for a job of any kind. At first glance, everything seemed on the up-and-up. The media portrayed spammers as guys living in basements or in foreign countries where they could not be prosecuted. The people at this company worked in a big office and drove BMWs. Besides, all the people I interviewed with kept telling me this company only dealt with “permission-based email-marketing,” meaning that the people who were on our email lists signed up willfully and of their own accord. At one time, that may have even been true, but if it was when I was hired it would not be for much longer.

Other email companies were popping up left and right like mushrooms after a rainstorm. They were spreading like Starbucks. Because so little start-up capitol was required, a good businessman could easily turn a profit within two months. So in order to stay ahead of all the new competition The Evil Email Company started cutting corners. Decisions were made to hit our email lists twice or three times as often. Instead of collecting quality data through legal channels, the company started buying bulk groups of email and broadcasting to them through loopholes in Internet law. Eventually, we were just stealing data and mailing to every single email address we could find, in hopes that no one would complain too loudly when they got some unwanted email. We were fine, just as long as we made money. No one questioned what was going on, despite the fact that we were doing was blatantly illegal.

By the time I really figured out what was going on, I could not leave. For a while, I did not care anyway. I was making too much money and having too much fun. I might not have been snorting lines with the Vice President in his office or claiming money spent on prostitutes as a business expense, but even as the guy who was known as "the quiet one", I was still getting away with stuff that would get a person fired from most other companies in a heartbeat.

A company is like a person though, and that kind of lifestyle does not ensure a long healthy run. Within four years of the company being opened it closed. The year before it closed for business, our little office of 30 people posted profits of over three million dollars, but between tougher anti-spam laws, an oversaturated industry, and some rough vices that affected nearly everyone from the CEO down to the junior sales people it crashed and burned the following year. It was a wild run though, and in that time I learned a lot about just how unethical an entire industry can be when greed takes over.

This article was previously published in Jive Magazine.
Check back soon for Chapter 2 and 3

Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.

Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!

Sperm Donor

by Anonymous

When I was a tender young age of 21, I decided to get a vasectomy, and I ended up being a sperm donor. There were many reasons I had and many events leading up to the decision to get a vasectomy.

One of these events was an ex-girlfreind claiming that she had gotten pregnant by me and had an abortion. So she wanted some money to pay for it. I felt like an asshole for not having been there for her, an incredible amount of guilt. This drove me deeper into the depression I was already experiencing. Later on I found out from a mutual friend that not only had she slept with several other guys that same weekend, but many of those guys also paid for an abortion that never happened. Not surprisingly, she has never returned my phone calls since that time.

After that experience, plus some childhood abuse issues I am still unraveling to this day, I wanted to get a vasectomy. I didn’t want to make a decision I could never reverse, so I decided to store some of my sperm for possible future use. So I went to a cryogenics lab for the storage. The staff was clean, professional, and discreet, which is good because the storage and processing costs were a lot for me. To process and store one ejaculate cost about $150.00 (this was 1992), with other storage fees for long term storage. They also wanted a minimum of five ejaculates.

I had to make sure to abstain for 48 hours, and take no alcohol or any other drugs. They were also very concerned about cold medication, as it could cause dehydration. After my first donation I got a call from the lab. It turns out that my ejaculate size was rather large, my sperm count was 50% above normal, and the survival rate of my sperm after freezing was also 50% higher than normal. They wanted to know if I would be a sperm donor. They would pay me $35.00 per ejaculate, I could donate twice a week, and I would be paid at the end of the month. They also threw in storage of my personal sperm indefinitely for free.

I told them I would think about it. To be honest, I was a bit giddy. Even at the time it seemed silly to me to feel proud of a biological function that I had no control over, but I was. I called them up the next day and signed on.

There were lots of forms to fill out, mostly relating to privacy. That is one of the reasons I am writing this anonymously, I signed a form saying I would never publicly reveal my employment.

I also had to take a monthly AIDS test. I hate getting blood drawn and I never got used to it. I also had to take some medication because they said I had some sort of minor infection. Apparently it’s pretty common, and usually asymptomatic. I was just a dumb kid so I didn’t follow up on exactly what it was.

To make the donation I would enter the lab from a back door with a key they had provided me, pick up a sterile cup, then go up a flight of stairs to the donation room. The rooms were like small waiting rooms, maybe 10’X10’ with a couch and a sofa. The room was kept dimly lit and there was always a stack of Playboys and Penthouses. After filling the cup, I took it downstairs again, labeled it and left it on a table.

It was actually pretty routine after a while. The thing that I disliked most was abstaining. I was 21 and my hormones were always racing. I was single at the time, so it was easier. After a while I got bored of the magazines, they just didn’t get new ones fast enough. Since there were 2 rooms, I would switch so I could find new reading material. One time I wore in a brightly colored hat and was asked not to were it, as it might attract attention from people visiting the fertility clinic, which was part of the lab.

There was also a time when another donor was there and we were labeling our cups at the same time. The first thing I thought of was to switch the cups. I would never do such a thing, but the thought struck me. It must have struck him also because he was grinning also. He finished his labeling and walked out. As I finished mine, one of the lab assistants came into the room and was giving me a look like she’d just sucked on a lemon. We had done nothing wrong, but I swear she could read my mind right then.

I donated for about 18 months. The money was great, about 30% of what I was making at my full time job, and it almost paid for rent each month. I eventually started dating again and went less frequently. Eventually they said they had a surplus of my sperm and only wanted me to donate once a month. I decided to quit at that point and move on with my life.

I didn’t end up getting the vasectomy, but that’s another story. I have since moved far away from that state and have a wife and child now. I wonder if my personal sperm is still being stored 13 years later…



Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.

Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!

Two From The RC Forum

I'm a regular on the forums at www.RetroCrush.com and I asked for work stories there. Here are a couple in their unedited, raw, it's Saturday morning and I'm too lazy to do any work form. Enjoy.

First, from "ChickiePie" who has a cool Danger Mouse avatar, but hasn't given me a site to link to:

I was a high school teacher~ some of these didn't happen to me but to friends of mine.

a kid was put in the back of the room for being disruptive~ he promptly stuck a paper clip into an electrical socket, throwing him across the room, knocking him out, and shorting out half the school.

another kid handcuffed himself to the pencil sharpener when his p.o. came to take him away.

a class had a couple of kids who could fart on command. My friend shut all the windows, screamed "then you can sit in your own stench! I don't care!" and walked out.

at the end of the year a student presented his teacher with a chart documenting what color shoes she wore every day for the whole year. It read like this: brown brown black RED!!! black brown dark blue etc.

After back to school night teachers go out and get loaded. The whole faculty is hung over the next morning. A history teacher I know showed a film strip the next day that was in two parts. He was still so drunk he didn't realize that he was playing part one of the strip with the tape for part two. None of his kids noticed, either.

My husband taught a stripper who offered him $500 for an A. She also told him that she loved him and that "she didn't just want to have sex with him, she wanted to KISS him, too."

Boy, those are just off the top of my head.


I Hope Chickiepie sends us some more good stuff. And now here's some goodness from Anthony Vera who doesn't like paragraph breaks.

Further Adventures From Hotel Nowhere
Current mood: Amused and Awake

Well, here I am once more, writing for the sake of it. Here is some advice to take with you in the future, when in charge of pizza night at a place for the "disfuctional", make sure you let people know that you are in charge of their meds... case in point: A man wanted me to hold him a piece. I told him if he didn't get any now, we may run out. He repeated for me to hold him a piece, and I again I told him to get it now, though he ran off purposely ignoring me. So of course everyone wanted pizza, and tried to get seconds before everyone got a piece. "I didn't eat anything all day." was a common remark, which I was able to retort with "You had Subway earlier dude!" Which everyone got a voucher for Subway, which is nice of Subway to do by the way. After a few minutes this lady wanted a second slice. I told her to wait until more people came down. She said that she was really hungry. Not wanting to deal with being "Pizza Monitor, I told her to ask the staff in charge, to make sure it was okay. It was, so I gave the last three or so pieces to whoever was around. So, after the pizza ran out, not more than a minute later, the older "gentleman" came down and asked me for the slice of pizza I was to hold for him. I told him. "Sorry guy, all out of pizza." He then berated me about not putting a slice aside from him. I then mentioned that I had repeated a couple of times to get it now. He said that he didn't hear me. At this point I just shrugged and reminded him that next time he get it when it's available so this wouldn't be a problem. He want and sulked in the corner for awhile. The woman who asked me for the second slice approched him and told him that it was "fucked up" that I wouldn't hold a piece for him. That's when I said, "But you wanted two pieces."

Thanks to Anthony and Chickiepie.

Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.

Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.

And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!

Jeffrey Brown's Work Story

Jeffrey Brown is one of my favorite comic book artists. His relationship tales are my favorite, reminding me of a cross between Charles Schultz and Woody Allen's Annie Hall. I was thrilled when Jeffrey sent me this work story. This is an original story that has not been seen elsewhere. Please check out more of Jeffrey's great stuff by clicking here.
i've come from the future to let you read my review of jeffrey's latest by clicking here.

Click Here To Read Becca's Work Story

Click Here For The Full Listing Of My Work Stories

And please send in your work stories!

Dolphins and drag queens

Here's a story by my good friend and fellow ICBINC member Becca detailing her adventures working at a resort in Hawaii. I have another guest work story that I'm doing some editing on. Send me yours, maybe I'll put it up. To get to my job stories click here.


Dolphins and Drag Queens
(six months at a Hawaiian resort)
By Becca Costello
www.myspace.com/beccacostello

Ever since I’d gone backpacking on Kauai for two weeks in college, I had been determined to find a way to live in Hawaii permanently. No matter that my skin was the color of an ace bandage and the only island my ancestry could lay claim to was the United Kingdom. Somehow, I knew I was descended from tropical people and was destined to return to my Polynesian roots.
Through a series of letters and phone calls, I got a job in the kitchen of an oceanside resort on the Big Island. I carefully interrogated Daniel, the resort’s reservationist/activities director/human resources manager. I didn’t want to labor at any beachfront skyscraper with nightly hula shows where girls in plastic coconut bras and silver lamé “grass” skirts sang “Blue Hawaii” for mai-tai-sloshed honeymooners from Minnesota. I would only work for an establishment that truly shared my respect for the ancient heritage and traditions of the island chain I had once vacationed on for all of 11 days.

Daniel assured me that the resort was only one story tall, and was at least 20 miles from the nearest town (but just across the street from the beach). The resort did not exploit the native culture with cheap entertainment. The guests were there for healthy introspection, he said, a sort of yoga, if you will. “And,” he added, “we blow a conch shell every evening at dinner, to call the guests to the dining lanai.”

The conch shell sounded more Lord of the Flies than Islands of Aloha to me, but just the word “lanai” was enough to send me packing my bags. I booked a flight to Hawaii and Daniel promised to meet me at the Hilo airport.

When I arrived, Daniel wasn’t there. Michael, the resort’s owner picked me up in a sandy van with a turtle painted on the side. As we drove the 40 miles to the resort, Michael told me how Daniel had broken his heart and run off to the mainland with a guest; leaving him without a lover, friend, reservationist, activities director or human resources manager. He alternated between tearful remorse and sneering, “Who’s gonna love your fat, macadamia-eating ass now?” at the passing sugar cane fields.
I rarely saw Michael in the days after that, and when I did, he didn’t seem to remember me. He was always arm in arm with one guest or another, heading for the hot tubs. What I had thought was a quiet yoga center had turned out to be “Men’s Adventure Land!”

Every week, a new batch of hard-bodied gay men from the mainland would arrive at the resort, ready to partake in such masculine adventures as getting an even tan, dressing in drag for dinner and giving each other oral favors in the Jacuzzis. The resort had two hot tubs, which the staff was welcome to use “any time!”

Unfortunately, the tubs were usually too crowded with copulating men in the evenings to allow for much soaking and, fortunately, they were drained and cleaned every morning. This left only the hottest and brightest part of the afternoon for the staff to use the Jacuzzis. Mostly, we just went to the beach.

For the guests, the pinnacle of the week’s events was the Saturday night dance held in (what else?) the Rainbow Room. Once again, all the staff was invited to attend.

The first time, I got dressed up, (or rather, the Hawaii version of dressed up: a sarong and some coconut lip balm) and set out to cut a rug. We were forbidden amplified music in our cabins, so as not to disturb the sounds of the guests fucking each other, and I was dying for some tunes. Not to mention, I was single and ready to see about a little island romance.

At the dance, the DJ played three songs – Donna Summer, Diana Ross and Donna Summer – before breaking out that ol’ homosexual chestnut “It’s Raining Men.” The Weather Girls weren’t even to the first “Hallelujah!” before a man in the center of the dance floor ripped off his sarong and let his electric eel out of the reef. By the second chorus, 90% of the room was naked. Since 90% of the room were also gay men and the other 10% were straight women staffers like myself, I went back to my cabin and tried to make some more headway on James Michener’s Hawaii.

I soon realized I wasn’t going to find a soulmate here, but hey! I was in Hawaii, wasn’t I? I lived across the street from the ocean! A warm ocean! I had made it!

As the months went by, I swam every day and grew thin and meditative and tanner than I’d thought possible. I floated on the sea and sat for hours studying the moon with a sincerity I would never have understood on the mainland. In the absence of any straight men or even television, many of my female co-workers became similarly enamoured with nature. No one more so than Erica, the dolphin lady.

The resort was a mile away from a black sand beach where a pack of dolphins swam by every morning at 7 a.m. sharp. Erica went out nearly every day to meet them. She told us she could communicate with them telepathically.

One night, she sat us all down in the break room and explained her method for becoming a dolphin’s psychic friend: You think of a picture, like you and the dolphin swimming together, she told us. You get it really clear in your mind’s eye and then you beam it out to the dolphin. If you do it right, the dolphin will come over to you.

I didn’t really understand, but I knew had to try it! I mean, when do you ever get a chance to swim with dolphins if you’re not one of those Make-A-Wish kids?

As soon as I had a morning off, I hustled down to the beach with my flippers and mask. It was already 7:10 a.m. I couldn’t see Erica or the dolphins, but I was afraid to miss them, so I dove in and began swimming straight out to sea.

I kept my head down as I swam and watched the sea floor grow more distant. When the bottom of the ocean was barely visible, I started getting nervous. I pulled my mask up and looked for dolphins on the horizon. Then I got really nervous.

As the waves opened and closed around my head at split-second intervals, I saw one gray fin in the water about 20 feet away from me. Every Jaws movie I had ever seen flooded into my consciousness. I was very far from shore, treading water like a piece of flailing human chum. I remembered Erica telling me that, if a fin bobbed up and down in the water, it was a dolphin, but if it stayed level, it was a shark. I tried to watch the fin, but the waves kept blocking my view and it was impossible to track its motion clearly.

I yanked my mask back over my face and tried to see underwater. To my shock, I noticed the bottom of the ocean was completely lost in an impenetrable blue haze. The tide was pulling me further out to sea.

Trying my best not to resemble a wounded seal, I started swimming back to shore and nearly ran into…a dolphin!

A bulbous-nosed, smiling, Flipper-like dolphin! Then there were two, three, five, eight – the whole pack had surrounded me. Instantly, my terror gave way to amazement. I had never been around a wild animal that wasn’t scared of me, that was as big as me, that was probably smarter than me. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I wanted to say hello, but my mouth was full of snorkel. I felt like I should at least give them the “Live Long and Prosper” sign.

I remembered Erica’s telepathy lesson and thought, “OK. I’m going to send them a picture. What do I want to tell the dolphins?”

They were looking at me, like they were waiting for me to do something worth their while. I wanted to communicate something smart, something warm, something that would forever end humanity’s isolation from the rest of the animal kingdom. All I could think of was the word, “Love.”

Love! Great! You can’t go wrong with love, except, how do I make a picture of love? What does love look like? A picture of Michael entertaining guests at the hot tubs popped into my head, but I cast it aside before the dolphins could catch it.

A heart, I thought. A heart is the symbol of love. I pictured a shiny, pink
Valentine heart for the dolphins, but then I realized that dolphins have a different language. They don’t know what a heart is. I might as well be sending them a Mercedes symbol or a semi-colon.

I started worrying. I’m not doing this right, I thought. What if I’m irritating them? Oh God, I am an interspecies annoyance.

Most of the dolphins had moved on at that point. I was getting tired treading water and I was still very far from the shore. Sadly, I waved at the remaining dolphins and started paddling inland.

One of the dolphins followed me. I smiled and swam back in his direction. He turned and swam away, but slowly, so I could keep up. When I turned back, he swam after me. It slowly dawned on me that we were playing tag. We went back and forth, each time getting a little closer to shore, until finally I knew I had only enough strength left to swim in. I waved again, laughing through my snorkel, and we swam our separate directions.

I had flown hundreds of miles and braved naked, raining men and inter-species telepathy lessons looking for a connection as simple as “Tag! You’re it."

Roofing, Comedy, Trash Orgies and Panhandling

So I’d come to terms with who and what I was. I would probably not be finding a career or a stable job anytime soon and I accepted this. I’d probably also never be as bored as most people seemed to be. In the meanwhile I performed stand up comedy, sometimes dressed up as a fly named Francois. I started a comedy troupe called I Can't Believe It's Not Comedy and toured from San Diego up to Seattle. I write for the local weekly paper on a freelance basis and my writing is seen by many on various websites including my own.

We revived the Tuesday Night Grindhouse only now it was the Trash Film Orgy and it was a six week festival playing at Sacramento’s nicest theatre The Crest, on Saturday Nights. For the first few years it was hosted by Francois Fly, but he and I quit after a couple of years, because that’s what we do. The show goes on without us.

I’ve been on stage with porn star Ron Jeremy. I’ve been tackled to the ground by actor Bruce Campbell. I’ve shared stages (and dressing rooms) with the country’s most beautiful burlesque dancers.

Bryna continues to go to school and we continue to be broke but we have our creature comforts and each other and we’re happy except when we’re not which isn’t too often and can usually be remedied by swapping jobs again.

Currently I’m exploring panhandling on freeway offramps as an artform. When not perched on an offramp with a cardboard sign I still sit in the office of the roofing company but as my two year anniversary approaches I’m planning my next move. And it’s a good thing too since I spend most of my time at work writing about the jobs I’ve had in the past.

You may think this marks the end of this blog, but it's really just the beginning. I'll be cleaning up all of this stories and adding to them, but the best part is I'll be running stories from other folks about their job experiences. I'll also be going out and applying for the worst jobs I can find and hopefully getting them so I can write about them.

Please keep visit, post comments, I get CRAZY amounts of hits to this here blog but hardly any comments. I appreciate links to this blog. Thanks.

PS: I'll work on getting the images going again. I used up all the free space that blogger gave me for photos.

Click here for previous post -------- Or here to start at the beginning

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The Tuesday Night Grindhouse

<<<< (Left to right Standing: Elizabeth, filmaker William Lustig, Me pointing at Lustig, Leesa
Kneeling: Patrick, my sweetheart Bryna and Emily Elders)

I’d actually managed to save up a few bucks while working for Spike and Mike, but it was burning a hole in my pocket. I was now working at The Fish Company and doing aquarium maintainence on the side. I was looking for something of an artistic nature to do in my off time.

I’d gone to Old Ironsides, my neighborhood bar on movie night. They were showing Phantasm 3. The woman working the projector explained that her attempts to find a drive in that would show old b-movies or to get the films into The Crest Theatre’s midnight rotation had been unsuccessful.

I remembered that The Colonial Theatre was sitting empty and that I had set up an aquarium for the owner’s son at his restaurant. I went to find Jim Jr. immediately. Jim liked my idea of opening the theatre for a four dollar cult film show with live hosts and musical guests. He took me to talk to his dad. Jim Sr. liked the idea as well and would let me have the theatre for $200 a night allowing us to show whatever we wanted as long as it wasn’t porn. He’d even run the projector for us. This meant we’d need fifty people through the door just to pay for the building, never mind renting the films themselves. It was still worth a try.

I went to Cinemania, the video store owned by the lady I’d seen at Old Ironsides. I introduced myself to Leesa and her husband R.J. and pitched my idea. She gets the films, I get the theatre, we promote together and we’ve got a show. She agreed to the deal, and found a print of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ trash masterpiece 2,000 Maniacs to kick things off with.

I asked my friend Bunny Dave who was great in a dress, more of a pop culture transgender fashion model than a drag queen. I hear all the best transvestites are straight, but Dave sure was an unusual entity in Sacramento. We got about forty people out to the theatre. Not a bad start, on a tuedsay night, in the ghetto, but not paying the bills either. Regardless we were stoked and things got off to a swell start.

Erick Foemell, the suavest man in town, discovered the crying room upstairs. The crying room was meant for moms with noisey babies to sit in. A large window with a speaker over it let them see and hear the film. This became our VIP room, to thank our volunteers, and Erick built and stocked the most beautiful bar. He’d be up there in his vintage suit mixing up cocktails and charming the pants off the ladies (often literally.)

By the end of the night the film had frozen in the gate an melted and we had to drop the third reel beacause Jim Sr. had loaded it backwards. This meant dropping more than a quarter of the movie including the notorious barrel roll scene.

The audience had a great time regardless and they were back the next week. Jim Sr. was not. I had to find an hire a projectionist, a handsome young Mexican kid named Angel became our Angel in the booth.

Patrick was my right hand in getting things promoted and Bryna took care of making sure we had a volunteer staff, which turned out to be all female and all blonde. Bryna’s all blonde army was I’m sure part of the events draw. The Crying Room was a blast but downstairs was pure insanity; live chainsaws being weilded by humpbacks running through the theatre, a girl riding a motorcycle down the aisle, mud wrestling. Patrick had a habit of nay saying my ideas which worked to our advantage. Anything he said couldn’t be done, I had to do. Topping ourselves each week became a challenge and people we talking.

At the second or third show I got a report that some kids were smoking pot in the parking lot. I went to check it out an sure enough four guys and a girl were hot boxing a station wagon. They freaked when I tapped on the window.

“Oh, hey, um, yeah, we were just leaving.”

"What? The movie hasn’t started. You gotta stick around. But listen, smoking put out here is pure stupid. If the cops don’t get you the crackheads will. If I was going to smoke some pot I’d probably just do it inside the theatre. Unfortunately I run the place so I could never tell you to do something like that, but I’d probably be way too busy to notice.” This was an old Spike and Mike trick. Look the other way when the pot smokers come though and you’ll have one demographic firmly secured. Sure enough the kids all sat in the second to last row and that row was a bit more full each week, until eventually I could count on two rows of stoners at each show.

Our intermission entertainment often featured a masked mexican wrestler named El Flaco Loco. We were showing Canibal Ferox, a particularly gorey Italian film featuring a casteration scene. We decided to have El Flaco drive a nail through his penis on stage. Flaco was in the lobby with the large fake penis shoved down his tights and the blood pack loaded and ready. He went to the front door, intending to have a smoke and he noticed a crapload of cops facing their guns at the theatre. His first thought was of the penis and how they’d respond when they found it strapped to him. He backed away from the door while pulling it from his tights. This got the cops uptight as the combination of the mask and the reaching for something in his pants looked like a shoot out ready to happen.

Bryna found me and told me that we were surrounded by cops. I laughed and then I saw that she was serious and quite scarred. I went to the door, putting my hands where they’d be visible in the little round window.

“Hi. I’d like to come out. I’m the manager of the theatre.” “Come out with your hands on your head.” I did so, and I was amazed. There was a swat team facing me with blindingly bright lights and a helicopter circling.

“On your knees.” As I got to my knees I looked at the cops, most younger than me, with their big scary guns trained on my head. They were frightened and their fingers were on the triggers. One backfiring car would mean my death. I dropped to my knees and two cops rushed me, one on each side. They patted me down and I explained why the gentleman was wearing a mask. I made up some BS about him being wired to a special effect box that didn’ allow him to walk out the first time without unplugging. They sent me into get Flaco.

They put the great masked one through the same routine they’d just put me through, only they were much rougher with him. The cops calmed down and by the time the surprised audience came out for their intermission cigarettes the cops were joking and laughing with Flaco and I.

From talking with the cops we pieced together what had happened. It seems a neighbor had called saying that a masked man and a man with a gun had entered the theatre. The man with the gun was my friend Michael who had come as a suicide victim. Small hole on one side of his head, big hole on the other. The cops refused to be a part of the intermission show.

El Flaco Loco drove the nail in and blood shot past the sixth row of seats. Business went on as usual. Leesa and RJ secured a copy of Fulce’s great italian gore fest Zombie. We had one of the guys from the band Rancid come to the show with a gaggle of other Berkley punks and we had plenty of Sacramento horror fans finally give in and check us out, giving us our biggest audience yet.

We were a lilly white crowd in a black and hispanic neighborhood and this bothered me. I wanted to see the neighbors enjoying the show. Two black girls were walking by and taking long strange looks at the goings on. I told them to go on in and check out the show.

We had a great dub band playing at intermission and then the Zombies showed up. Three of them and they made their way from behind the audience toward the stage. When the two black girls, who had no idea what to expect saw the shuffling ghouls they began screaming. When the ghouls climbed onstage and tore the drummers belly open and pulled out the bloody intestines and started eating them, both girls were on their feet screaming to high heaven. I should have paid them. They made the night. I was sure I could expect a house full of their guy friends once they spread their tale but maybe we did too good a job as we never did get the neighborhood folks through our dooor.

The gut eating effects worked great and were so simple. A ziplock bag full of chocoate and strawberry syrup and intestines made from condoms generously donated by the local free clinic was taped to the drummers belly. Slip on a shirt you don’t mind losing and let the magic happen. I felt a tinge of guilt at miss using the clinics condom so I passed a bunch out the next week with a good safe sex message.

Things were going good, but of course we still weren’t paying our rent. Despite press releases the papers ignored us completely. Television media paid some attention. The local Fox affiliate called and threatened to call the police if I kept sending them my pornagraphic press releases. This from the station that carries the Simpson and COPS, my two favorite shows. If your’re John Waters post Hairspray you get to be on NPR but when you’re an unknown scum bag you get jack.

I asked RJ to recommend a scary film for Bryna and I to watch and he sent me home with Maniac. I didn’t sleep that night and called RJ the next to see if we could get a copy on film. He made a few calls and rung me at work to tell me that Mr. Lustig, the director, wanted to come to the theatre and present the film. Again we got a wide draw and our live scalping was a hit. Lustig loved the audience who gave a standing ovation to the shotgun to the head scene and who actually asked him about his experiences in producing porn for the mafia. This was definitely his crowd. Our sound system sucked but he forgot about that once the aplause started. We rented him an expensive room with at the Vizcaya bed and breakfast and I took him to my favorite greasy spoon for breakfast where we had a great talk.

“Mr. Lustig, I’m thinking of going to film school.”

“No, no. Take that money you would have spent on film school and make a film. You’ll learn more in one film than you’d learn in a lifetime at some school listening to jerks that went to film school themselves and have never even made a picture.”

He climbed into my bus and I took him to the airport.

We continued struggling along and having a great time. Well, some of us were having a great time. Leesa and RJ were feeling like I’d promised them a bed of roses that I was failing to deliver. Tensions were rising.

We booked a woman in prison flick called Barbed Wire Dolls. I liked to screen the films before we showed them but mysteriously Cinemania’s copy of the film was out everytime I tried to watch it. Oh well, I trusted their taste. The night of the flick I was running around like a chicken with his head cut off, as usual. Then I walked into the theatre to see me some movie. There, on the screen, was a fifteen foot tall pussy staring me in the face, threatening to swallow the Tuesday Night Grindhouse whole if Jim Sr were to wander in at that moment. I walked back out into the lobby. El Flaco Loco was there laughing. “Surprise” he said.

“You knew about this?”

“Oh, yeah. Leesa and RJ said not to tell you it had porn scenes in it.”

“Yeah. Not exactly a harmless joke. We could lose this theatre.” I sat and watched the door for Jim Sr. or either of his boys who often came by to check things out. Luckily no member of the family visited tonight.

Leesa had moved to Sac from LA and pulled this LA is the center of hip and Sacramento is a cow town attitude. I’m ashamed that I let it work on me. “Dude, don’t get all bent because there was a fucking pussy on your screen. This is supposed to be this trashy show and you’re gonna fret because we showed a pussy.”

I was totally in favor of pussies, on screen and off, but I was not okay with failing to respect the deal we’d made with Jim Sr. I wasn’t ready to fight though. I just made sure to screen the rest of the films.

RJ took a trip to LA to pick up a Harry Novak flick, from Harry Novak himself. RJ was loading Wham Bam Thank You Spaceman into the trunk of his car when Novak happened to wander out of his office heading for his own car.

“Oh, RJ, I forgot to mention, I spiced the film up a bit, for the nineties!”

“What do you mean. How’d you spice it up exactly?”

“I just added some stuff to bring it up to date you know, for the nineties. I mean, what was hot then, it’s like kid stuff now. You’ll like it’s hot, for the nineties.”

RJ called me and I arranged to meet him at the theatre with Angel to see what Novak’s secret spice was. We spent the night cutting porno out of the film. Oh how I wish we could have left it in. It was hillarious. Two aliens named Private Dickhead and Sargeant Asshole or some such silliness are walking down the street talking very dirty and then, suddenly, the screen is filled with faded pink footage of seventies hard core porn, the speaker blairing fusion jazz. After a minute or so of this, we’re back to the aliens, getting a soda. Harry Novak’s nineties edit was a thing of beauty.

We needed a Russ Meyer film and when Leesa saw a 35mm print of Super Vixens for sale in The Big Reel she nabbed it. We put posters up around town and did our futile press releases. Two night before the screening I got a phone call.

“Keith! Russ Meyer just called us. He knows we’re showing the film and he’s furious and I gave him your number.” Leesa was freaking out.

I was skeptical that the real Russ Meyer had called and when my phone rang not twenty seconds later I was ready to talk to a joker. “Hello, Keith Lowell Jensen.”

“Mr. Jensen Russ Meyer. I understand you have my film.”

“How am I to be sure this is actually Russ Meyer?”

“Reasonable. Call Hollywood information, ask for Russ Meyer Films.” And click, he hung up.

I got the number from hollywood information and dialed. “Satisfied?”

“Mr. Meyer. Wow. I’m a big fan, and I intended to show your film through what I assumed were legal means. I’m ready to work this out with you.”

“Mr. Jensen, I own every print of every film I’ve ever made, struck the prints myself and never sold one, nor did I ever authorize other prints to be made. My lawyers are always ready to prove this.”

“No need sir. I’ll send you the film immediately.”

“Mr. Jensen you’re a gentleman.”

“I try to be sir. I’m a big fan of your films and I’m hoping we can help each other here. I’m sending you the film, as I said, but I can send it now and you’ve got one more print, or you can let 40 or so of your biggest fans see the film and I can send it to you with a small royalty check and a world of thanks from your Sacramento fans.” I’d gotten really good at talking the shit.

“I like you Jensen. Show the film.” This was an amazing event. Russ Meyer did not allow his films to be shown except for Faster Pussy Cat Kill Kill. We showed Super Vixens to a crowd of sixty or seventy trash film lovers. The print sucked, but nobody complained. Cal came over from the restaurant next door. He was muslim and had once told me not to refer to Bryna as my girlfriend in front of his children. I was worried how he would take this ultra violent sex farce. He loved every frame of it.

After Super Vixens we went right back to losing money and Leesa and RJ decided they’d had enough. They wanted out which I understood but they wanted me to pay them back their investment in the show thus far! I did my best to make sense of this one.
“No fuckin’ way. You guys stay with the investment, risking more loss, or you cut your losses now. You can’t bail and still get back your investment. Who the hell pays me back when I bail. Forget it.”

It was the first time I’d stood up to the cool kids and they were okay with me for a bit. But, after I pissed off one of their contacts getting a movie back weeks late they suddenly wrote me off. I was added to their long list of enemies. They never did say a word against me to my face, but I heard from our mutual friends that they had plenty to say when I was not around. They packed up and headed back to LA where they ended up working with Lustig, so something good came out of their grindhouse experience.

I plugged on. I tried everything including working with Jim Sr. to get the theatre open seven days a week showing second run action films on the days when we weren’t wallowing in filth. People were beginning to notice us. I worked with some promoters who brought a big ska festival to the theatre. The theatre being up and running caught the eye of other pomoters and, as I had no lease, Jim Sr. rented the place out from under me.

He got his just deserts when the new renters got raided durring a live sex show featuring and under age “actress.” Gossip spread that I had been busted for hosting a live sex show durring a grindhouse intermission and I did little to discourage it. It was way cooler than the truth of our demise.

>>Click here for the next story, PetCo>>>

In Alliance

Visiting the In Alliance website I discovered that they wanted two years experience in the field and two years of college. I immediately volunteered to work with my friend Steve at The Short Center, an art therapy program for folks with developmental disabillitites. I hoped they’d settle for two weeks of experience and that my being smart enough to drop out of highschool would be good enough. Miraculously it was.

Durring the interview, Ruby who ran the program that I was hoping to be a part of asked me what I’d do if I was coaching somebody who was developmentally disabled and they said they wanted to be a doctor. I told her I’d encourage them. I’d find out what they liked about the thought of being a doctor and if it was the white coat I’d see if we could find them a job that involved a white coat. I could tell right away that this was the answer Ruby was looking for. I got the job.

I was a job coach. This meant I would work alongside adults with developmental disablilities and help them to learn how to do their jobs, how to communicate/put up with their bosses and customers and just overall how to keep from getting fired.

It was an interesting line of work. I had more to teach the various managers and co-workers than I did the people I was being paid to train. I found myself explaining to the manager of a major retail store that playing titty twister with his employees was a bad idea. No, I couldn't teach Jim, the very strong young man that I was job coaching, not to twist the titty quite so hard. I would have to teach Jim not to twist the titty at all, and to report to human resources should his titty again receive a twist.

I loved the guys I worked with. We called our clients "consumers," a title I still don't understand or agree with. Clients works much better for me. We placed our consumers in competitive, non-segregated employment and our goal was that the consumer, with the extra training of their job coach, would do the job as well as an non-disabled person in the same position. The truth is our guys usually did better. I had one woman I trained who worked for the state and she was quite fond of letting me know that he made more money than me. Why she wasn't the one doing the training I'll never know.

I did have a few occasions where I was helping someone to do a job that I wasn't sure they could do. Kevin got a placement on an assembly line. If Kevin fell behind the line stopped, meaning everyone stopped, while Kevin caught up. His co-workers didn't pull out their knitting and make small talk while they waited for Kevin, nor did they offer assistance and encouragement. The gang members and ex-cons that kept that line moving believed in negative reinforcement, and when the machinery came to a close and the little flashing light came on above the station that was to blame the insults and projectiles came flying in.

Management did nothing to discourage this because management was terrified of those they managed. On each run of the assembly line a few work stations would not be used. It was difficult explaining to Kevin why he had to sweep when his station wasn't running, but if he'd been wise enough to have had his face tattooed in high school he could catch a nap during such times. Ultimately Kevin lost that job, I think more because he wasn't the smiling, happy guy that people with developmental disabilities are supposed to be than because of his ability or inability to do the job. I felt guilty for being so relieved to be off that line, but I was openly cheerful at being able to cancel my appointment to get "19th Street Crew" tattooed across my forehead.

I heard many stupid things while working as a job coach. "Oh, I love retarded people, they're so happy."

"Sometimes I wonder who is really retarded, them because they're simple, or us with all our silly problems."

These kind of well intentioned comments made me want to over share. I would love to have told the exercise woman at the old folks home that that happy, simpleton she worked with was on anti-depressants after several suicide attempts. I had to bite my tongue not to share that the always smiling, pleasantly plump salad making consumer was struggling with sexual addiction and related compulsive behaviors that made me glad his job involved wearing an apron.

The public response to these disabilities often made for not so simple, happy, go lucky lives. Segregation, exploitation, sexual abuse, there were many fun aspects to being developmentally disabled. And even well intentioned parents who shield their child with disabilities from all harm can end up encouraging a sort of perpetual childhood that again does not make for a well balanced or happy adult.

I had an older consumer who resisted my help with all his might. I had no problem being patient with him, as I could only imagine what he’d been through in his life before landing in the comfortable situation he now found himself in, a position he clung to for dear life.

It felt great to be part of a program that helped people with disabilities get out in the world, earn their own way and participate in the community, and that helped the community get to know itself in all it’s diversity.

The other job coaches were a real mixed bag. My co-workers were mostly college graduates, or so I assumed. Most had gotten useless degrees in art or philosophy, or they were folks who were working within their field of study but were just starting out, on their way to bigger and better things, that is to say higher paying things.

One coach, Don, was a Promise Keeper. The Promise Keepers are a conservative Christian group of men who will keep their promises to their wives, their family and their god. They scare the hell out of me. When the promise keepers held a rally (they probably call it a convention) in LA, they advertised with giant billboards portraying pictures of the crusades, with the words "The Promise Keepers are Coming!" You see why this is frightening. Their is a fantastic essay on line by a Promise Keeper about Eye Bouncing. After meeting the Christian woman of his dreams this guy ditched his floozies and his porn and got right with god. But his marital bliss was diluted by his continued need to look at underwear ads in the paper and his lust after tight, lycra shorts worn by joggers. He describes these shorts in great detail. The day is saved when our hero discovers Eye Bouncing. He explains how repetition breeds habit, and he begins averting his eyes rapidly when he sees anything that could be sexually stimulating. In no time his eyes are actually trained to be deflected by anything that could turn him on. He's recommending this to his Promise Keeper buddies. He's sure he's made a breakthrough.

Such was the extent of my exposure to the Promise Keepers until I met Don. Don is the sweetest guy you ever want to know. He is hard working, a dedicated father to his two daughters and a devoted, loyal husband. The only thing not to like about Don and his family is how nice, how good looking and how happy they all seem to be. Don cared about the consumers he worked with like they were each a part of his family and he cared equally about his fellow job coaches. Don was a great guy and we got along fine, until the morality test.

We had a department meeting. These meeting often involved trust and team building exercises, many of which were pretty goofy, but being paid to act goofy is not a problem for me.
The job coaches and the office staff circled up the chairs and we each received a photocopied hand out on which was printed a story and a series of questions about the story.

The story told of five turtles starting with a female turtle trying to bring a present to her boyfriend. Let's assume the present was some sex. It becomes clear as the story goes on that the present was just that, but it's a fun assumption either way. So, female turtle goes to boat ownin