American NuKem
Once in a while people see me walking around with a green t-shirt sporting the giant logo "American NuKem Corporation." It seems like a joke logo from a fake company, but it was (still is?) quite real. In fact, I had a job there long, long ago.
Freshman year of college ended, and I failed to look for summer employment because I was still very much a shitty 18 year old asshole. Eventually my dad found through his large network of local colleagues and connections a temporary job for me at American NuKem. They were a large corporation which as a whole dealt with the collection and safe disposal of chemical waste. I think. It didn't really matter since I worked in the sales office doing gopher work. The usual gopher, Tom, was a nice old man who planned be on vacation for chunks of the summer, hence why they needed to hire me as a sub.
Since the company just moved into a new building, a huge part of my job involved sifting through about 150 legal-size boxes full of papers, figuring out what they were, sorting them accordingly, putting them back in boxes, and stacking them in the basement. This may sound like a lot of fun, but the party really began when the company got audited, and everything had to be crack open again and re-sorted. Outside of this, the many other thought-provoking tasks on my to-do list included making coffee, washing the coffee pots, buying office supplies, xeroxing countless documents, shredding countless documents, and going out to buy deli meats for the "sandwich club." I also happened to be in charge of making sure all the company cars were occassionally washed and always full of gas.
Did I mention this company was located in Mahwah, New Jersey? I had a 45 minute commute each way every day from my parent's house in Rockland. At the time I drove a used car which my dad bought for $1. I'm not knocking it - he did what he could to maintain a fleet of vehicles for the large Lebofsky clan. Nevertheless it overheated frequently. A couple of times while I was on the New York Thruway I had to pull over onto the shoulder to let it cool down. For half the summer I ended up taking surface streets all the way to work, which took an extra 15-20 minutes each way, but I saved 40 cents by not having to pay the Thruway toll. Boy, was I a cheap bastard!
Being in northern Jersey meant I got to check out all the strangely fruitful Bergen County record stores during my daily errands. I found bizarre rarities and hard-to-find indie-nerd CDs/records at these places. Like I found a CD by this band The Ophelias which I only heard of via college radio geek friends, and could never locate at any of the world-class record stores in Manhattan. By the way, unbeknownst to me ten years later I'd be living in Oakland two doors down from the studio where some of that album was recorded.
I also would check out guitars and stuff at Robbie's Music - they had a painted sign outside the shop that didn't say "entrance" but "entranec." How and why did this hurtful error happen?! They never bothered to fix it for as long as I lived on the east coast.
This thrilling summer happened around the time just before I kept a daily journal in earnest, so many details were missing. I don't remember much of the people's names at this job. They were all nice folks, but most everybody was older than me, or more right wing than me, so I didn't feel like part of the team. There were a few younger people that I didn't really mingle with except for one time they invited me on a jaunt to a nearby upscale hotel where we would ride the fancy glass elevators up and down. There was also a company party at a beach which was awkward because I didn't know how to be a socialable human being until about age 35. It was at this party where I got that t-shirt.
Anyway, I made $7.50 an hour. For the first time in my life I had a salary that could almost enable a normal person to survive. I also had a side gig playing bass in a four-person musical pit for a community theatre in Westchester doing "Little Shop of Horrors." So in total I earned about $3000 that summer, all of which went right into a huge shopping spree at Sam Ash. I finally obtained some semi-pro equipment which I have been sorely lacking during the first 13 years of my musical career: a giant Peavey amp, a 5-string Ibanez bass, a Roland D-5 keyboard, and an Alesis Quadreverb. Yay!
The upshot of this was I ended the summer just as I started - completely broke. The Quadreverb was the last piece of gear to survive. Sold it recently for like $10.