1985-1991: First Job

Lately I've been endeavoring to write these biographical vignettes as sort of a record-keeping initiative and also just for shits 'n' giggles. It's a healthy way to spend a couple of hours, I figure, not to mention a good way to hone one's writing skills. Writing this sort of shit is also a good way to put your life's events into perspective, and if other peeps enjoy reading it, then so much the better.

So have at it. One man's tragicomic life story is another person's cheap entertainment, right?

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Biographical Installment #1
1985-1991: First Job

I entered the working world rather early in life, and rather haphazardly at that. In Spring 1985 I was in seventh grade at Rattlesnake Middle School in Missoula. I have a pretty clear memory of most of my youth, but for some reason, I remember hardly anything about seventh grade. I had four primary friends, guys that I'd known since second grade and that lived in my neighborhood. After sixth grade, two of them moved away. So seventh grade was fairly lonely for me. I stopped liking school as much and spent a lot of time at home reading almanacs and phone books and other such proto-geek pursuits. The fact that I spent so much time in solace probably explains why I don't remember much of it.

During the second to last week of seventh grade, me and another cat were walking home from the bus stop (presumably in silence) when this older kid named Rush came bounding out of his house at 922 Taylor (I remember the address because he lived right next to one of the friends who moved away, and now the mayor of Missoula lives there). He'd been working as a dishwasher at this new place called Goldsmith's that made their own ice cream. It was in this rickety old 1890s house on the banks of the Clark Fork river; an ideal location, being right near a footbridge leading to the university. I'd actually never been to Goldsmith's at the time; it had only opened maybe six months earlier. Rush told us that he was going off to a violin camp or something for the summer and asked if either of us wanted to take over his job. My friend declined for some reason, but I was immediately keen on the idea. Rush said to meet him in front of Goldsmith's after school a few days hence.

I asked my parents if I could get a summer job and they approved immediately, since they were probably not too excited to have me skulking around the house all summer. I met Rush at Goldsmith's and he gave me a tour of the place and showed me what his duties were. Since they made their own ice cream there, the place smelled a lot like a dairy farm. To this day the smell of dairy triggers an immediate memory recall of the first time I set foot in that place. And I had been really excited about getting a job, but as soon as I stepped into Goldsmith's, I realized that it was going to be a scary experience for me since I had very limited social skills, and was pretty much terrified of anyone outside of my day-to-day sphere.

I was told to show up the following Friday at eight. As that day approached, I couldn't figure out if that was supposed to be AM or PM. I remember stressing really hard about it, but being too afraid to call and ask, and I honestly had no idea whether they would even be open at 8 AM. Finally I had to have my mom call and get the information for me, and it was indeed 8 PM, which was lucky, because I had school at 8 AM. It was the last day of the school year, so we got out at noon or something like that.

Back at home that afternoon I was scared shitless about this new endeavor. There was this kid Ryan that lived next door that was maybe 4 or 5 at the time and I was talking to him through the chain-link fence that separated our yards. I can't remember why, but something set me off and I kicked the fence really hard, which knocked him off his Big Wheel or whatever and he ran inside to tell his mom that I beat him up. So I fled the scene and rode my bike around the neighborhood for a few hours filled with dread about my new job and also stressing about getting yelled at by Ryan's mom.

I eventually went back home and snuck in the back door and hid in my room to wait it out until it was time to go to the new job. When I got there, the place was packed (being a warm June night), and the other workers had to train me on the fly, and they were all too frazzled to go into much detail, so I pretty much had to figure it out on my own. But my tasks were pretty simple: I had to bus all the tables and wash all the dishes, and replenish the ice cream by moving it from the back freezer to the front counter freezer where it got scooped and served. I also had to make whipped cream by pouring cream and vanilla into a canister and charging it with Whip-Its. So I was pretty much just a little gopher boy. And for these tasks I was remunerated at the princely rate of $1.50 an hour, cash, under the table. Since, as a 13-year-old, I didn't really have any expenses, this seemed like a pretty good deal, and in fact I got a raise to $2.00 an hour after a month or so.

There were a few college students working there, and this was a very intriguing situation, since I hitherto never really had occasion to be around such specimens. Here were these people that seemed like adults in stature, but they were still able to relate to me on my level. I must've been quite a novelty to them as well, a shy and pretty sheltered 13-year-old kid that had no idea how to interact with adults (contrasted with my predecessor Rush, who was very worldly and talkative).

After a few weeks of working from 8 to closing, I picked up a few daytime shifts. During the day, Jane, the manager, pretty much ran the whole store, so she was glad to have me there to help out. But something about Jane disturbed me to my very core. She was a homely, overweight, sweaty, chain-smoking, ill-tempered lady that wore sleeveless shirts and had unshaven armpits, which was pretty traumatic for a kid my age. She was also into Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, a particular brand of Buddhism popular with Americans (that counts Tina Turner among its acolytes), which is fine, but she'd start losing her temper and swearing and clenching her teeth, and then suddenly start chanting "Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. Nam Myoho Renge Kyo." This was very unusual and disturbing to me at my tender age and thus I really hated working with Jane. She also was fond of giving me extensive cleaning tasks during slow afternoons, making me clean the utility sink and every other little nook and cranny in the place.

As the summer wore on, I found myself working noon to 3pm and 8 to closing five days a week, which was a pretty heavy schedule, and managed to eat away almost all of my free time. I liked working at night the best, because I got to be around the cool college kids and they seemed to think I was pretty interesting too, plus at night I didn't have to be around Jane. I got to eat a shitload of ice cream, and had a lot of extra money, too.

Goldsmith's had a big back yard that looked over the river, and it soon became my job to mow the lawn. But the store didn't have its own lawn mower, so I'd have to enlist my dad to drive his mower down. Worse, I still got paid my $2.00 hourly wage for mowing the lawn, with my dad's mower and his gas, and it took me all of about 45 minutes to do, so quick math will show that I was actually taking a loss and paying Goldsmith's for the privilege of mowing their lawn. It never occurred to me that I was being taken advantage of until my dad pointed it out and called and told the owner Dick Goldsmith that he had to pay me a flat fee of $10 every time I mowed.

And pretty soon the other adults that worked at Goldsmith's started getting me to mow their lawns and babysit for them and all sorts of other shit; I pretty much became the little slave boy, someone that you could pawn off all your shitty chores onto. But as school started back up, and fall and winter came, I started having less and less shifts at the store, so I had a little more time to do this other sort of stuff. Also during the winter, I got to know this guy John who was the ice cream maker. I really looked up to John, who was ten years my senior and was about to graduate with a forestry degree that he purportedly had no interest in using. John was a rich kid from Los Angeles who was really into bike racing, so he filled my head with all sorts of information about the sport which I avidly absorbed. By the next spring, I blew my savings on a racing bike with and started training in earnest; I even rode the 220-mile Tour of the Swan River Valley during the spring of my 8th-grade year.

When the school year ended, John told me that his friend Carey, who owned a bike store, was looking for some part-time help assembling the new bikes that got delivered. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity, so I jumped on it, and had the distinction of being the only 14-year-old kid around that had two jobs. I'd go to the bike shop most mornings, and work at Goldsmith's most nights, and spend the rest of my time training for bike races (I actually participated in a few that summer). I distinctly remember Carey having NPR on at the bike shop all day, and this was 1986, so they had the Oliver North Iran-Contra hearings on all day, every day.

John had this girlfriend Marjorie, and one night they invited me to come over to her house to watch "American Flyers," the bike racing movie starring a young Kevin Costner and Rae Dawn Chong. Marjorie's roommate had a sister named Kate who was my age, and who was visiting from Minnesota, and they were all cajoling me to ask her out on a date. I was of course terrified of girls, but they were persistent, and even hatched some scheme whereby I would bring Kate a pint of ice cream from Goldsmith's and I would write "Will you go on a date with me?" on the inside of the lid.

I later got word that Kate consented to the date, and so I swung by Marjorie's house on my bike and picked up Kate, and rode her on the back of my bike all the way across town to the movie theater, about five miles each way, which was a major ordeal. The movie was Club Paradise, starring Robin Williams and Rick Moranis, and I think we were both so nervous that we just stared straight ahead the entire time. No hand-holding or anything of the sort. I took her back to Marjorie's house, and that was the last I ever saw of her until about 12 years later, when she resurfaced in Missoula as a bartender at Charlie B's bar. I didn't even recognize her until someone said her first and last name and it all came flooding back. I went up and asked her if she remembered our date, and she in fact did, but she didn't seem at all interested in talking about it.

That same summer I spent a fair amount of my free time hanging around with my neighbor Tate. He was a year younger than me, but was incredibly bright and also seemed to me to be quite troubled. To illustrate this, consider the fact that one of his hobbies was collecting straws from fast food restaurants. He also had this apparatus in his closet where he would sit in almost total darkness and fling pennies at the wall, and they would roll down this chute back to him. He stammered a lot when he talked and jumped around from subject to subject very erratically; just a very peculiar fellow. Anyway, we spent many summer days exploring the buildings on the University of Montana campus, and eventually started spending a lot of our time in the Performing Arts building, which was one of the newest buildings on campus. The place was always totally unlocked, and since it was summer there was never anyone around. So we spent hours exploring the catacombs behind the stages and up on the catwalks above.

Tate and I also found the word "fag" extremely amusing for some reason. Please understand that no anti-homosexual sentiment was intended or should be inferred; I don't think either of us really had any appreciation for the fact that it was a pretty taboo epithet; I'm not even sure we knew exactly what it meant, but we just liked the sound of it, and we said the word over and over all day long in this funny voice like Mr. Magoo. I remember riding our bikes and yelling "Fag!" at pedestrians, construction workers, anyone within earshot. And Tate would steal cash from his dad (who I think was a big-time stoner) all the time, and his dad never noticed, so we always had walking-around money. So one day we bought a sheet of those round colored sticker labels for some unknown reason, and we were sticking them on doors and walls all over the place just to confuse people. Eventually we decided that we would place a bunch of stickers on a metal door in the back of the Performing Arts building such that they spelled out "FAG." As we were riding our bikes away, this guy came out that door and saw what we had done and started yelling at us, extremely irate about what we had done.

A few years later that guy came into Goldsmith's, and one of my co-workers, who was a college student, identified the man as one of her professors and added that he was in fact gay. Since I clearly remembered him from our little "FAG" escapade, and since I now knew what the term meant, I was overcome with guilt. I couldn't sleep for days because I felt so terrible about what we had done, even though we really had no idea what we were doing. At the same time I felt extremely relieved that he didn't recognize me. That guy probably thought we were Hitler Youth recruits or doing legwork for the John Birch Society or something.

The following summer I got promoted to ice cream maker, which was a dream come true for me. It was actually a pretty demanding job in the summer, when the store is selling a shitload of ice cream. And we had started selling pints to grocery stores around town as well. But as long as you could keep up with the job, you could pretty much set your own hours. Making ice cream is a pretty solitary job, which suited me well. Most people think that there's not much to it besides pouring some heavy cream and egg custard into a machine and then freezing it, but it's actually fairly complicated, especially when almost everything is homemade. For instance, for the chocolate flavors, you had to spend like three hours making chocolate syrup first out of cocoa powder, sugar and water. Very messy and time-consuming. Then, if you want to be efficient, you have to plan out all the flavors in advance to minimize the time you spend cleaning out the machine, which takes forever. So you could do all the vanilla-based flavors, then do the fruity flavors, then a quick rinse, then the chocolate flavors. You always do chocolate last because it makes a huge mess. And while one batch is mixing, you usually have to stir ingredients (Oreos, Heath Bars, nuts, etc.) by hand with a spatula, really quickly, before the ice cream gets too watery, label all the tubs with the flavor and the date, and get it into the deep freezer. Not much standing around for that job; you really have to think and act fast.

It was also my job to deliver all those pints to all the grocery stores around town, which was really a ramshackle operation. I would load as many pints as I could into this dorky camping cooler, lug it out to Dick Goldsmith's 1974 Ford pickup, and head to each grocery store. I delivered to about 12 stores, and had to make probably six trips back to the store to get supplies. It was a major pain in the ass, and an all-day operation.

Toward the last couple of years of high school (1988-90) I started treating my job at Goldsmith's as my own personal restaurant and social club. If my friends and I couldn't find anything better to do, we'd congregate in the back yard at the store and I'd give out pints of ice cream and whatever else I could scrounge. I had also figured out that Goldsmith's was a goldmine for finding college students who could buy beer for us. It was never too terribly difficult to find a willing person who'd walk to the liquor store across the street and pick us up some Schmidt tall-boys and California Cooler two-liter bottles and still tithe himself handsomely. I didn't really drink at all in high school, opting instead to be the designated driver. I really enjoyed schlepping around a carload full of ululating drunk people trying to sing the lyrics to REM's "The End of The World (As We Know It)" in unison. It gave me a unique sense of purpose, I suppose.

I spent the summer after high school graduation in almost total reclusiveness, lamenting my high school girlfriend's sudden and untimely desertion, but that's a story for another time. I took over my friend Jeff's paper route temporarily, so I was keeping very odd hours. Goldsmith's had a new manager (Jane got fired) who was wise to the fact that I had the work ethic of a three-toed sloth and thus had me scheduled for only one or two shifts a week. That September of 1990 I moved out of the nest into an apartment with some other dudes, so it was imperative that I start generating some income for rent and food. I really had to bust my ass to prove myself worthy of 30+ hours a week. College was out of the question as long as I had to support myself and still manage to catch up on all the beer drinking I had neglected in high school.

I did manage to earn my way back to full-time status by taking a bunch of dishwashing shifts, but I was still making only $3.35 an hour by this time, hardly a liveable wage even for someone living as frugally as I was. And once I got back all those shifts, I did very little to maintain my status as a trustworthy employee. I was a major slacker, due in large part to the fact that, by this time, I spent most days fighting severe, hideous hangovers brought on by getting blackout drunk three or four nights a week. And in 1989 or so, the Goldsmith family bought this old four-story mansion from the university, had the whole building cut in half, hauled it across the river and put it next to the ice cream store. They then totally refurbished it and turned it into a bed and breakfast. So I would use the B & B as my personal motel room of sorts, spending hours over there sleeping and hanging out for hours at a time, all while on the clock.

Right around 1990, this guy named Joe got hired at Goldsmith's. He originally came on as a dishwasher, and it was my job to train him and get him acclimated. Joe was perhaps the most perplexing human oddity I've ever met in my life. I don't even think that words can do him justice, but I'll try: Joe was an epicene, I guess, i.e., having ambiguous sexual identity. He was male in appearance, but that was about the extent of his resemblance to male-dom. He was extremely effeminate in demeanor, to an almost comical degree. When I first met him I couldn't tell whether he was just trying to freak me out or if this was his real nature. But I soon learned that he was a deeply disturbed individual. From what I could glean of his life story, he was independently wealthy, but I didn't know how he got that way. He was also really sketchy about his house; if anyone ever suggested that they come over to Joe's house, he got extremely edgy. But everyone loved Joe. He quickly became a waiter at Goldsmith's and people loved the spectacle of this strange fellow that would sing show tunes and Aretha Franklin songs at the top of his lungs and perform entire dance routines as he waited on tables. And often Joe would want to go out for drinks with his co-workers. He was a hoot to drink with, just full of energy and loud laughter and really knew how to have a good time. He was a great listener and seemed very engaged in anything you said&emdash; a rare quality among today's pathologically self-absorbed populace. Just a very gracious and warm person. Plus you never ever paid for drinks when Joe was there; he bought rounds all night long for everyone. And then at some point in the night, he'd just disappear, usually when most of the group was too crapulent to think it unusual that someone would just vaporize.

One day I was walking out of an outdoor clothing store and bumped into Joe on the sidewalk. He asked what I was doing and I told him that I was checking out this parka, but that I couldn't afford it. Without a second's hesitation, he led me back into the store and bought me the fucking jacket! This was very emblematic of his generosity.

I got fired from Goldsmith's in June 1991 (a week after I'd gotten arrested in another drunken caper, but that's a whole 'nother windbag anecdote). My firing was the culmination of several years worth of shirking, goldbricking, and just general worthlessness on my part. But the final straw was the following episode: we had a flavor called Champagne Sorbet. This required us (me and Charlie, the other ice cream maker at the time) to go to a liquor store and buy eight bottles of champagne. We bought nine instead and drank it after our shift. So I got fired, but Charlie somehow talked his way out of it. Even after my unceremonious firing, Charlie bestowed perhaps the greatest honor of my life: he invented an ice cream flavor and named it after me: Yalestar Chocolate Heath Bar. I have the little placard from the flavor board to this day. Charlie, by the way, now owns the very successful and very happening Big Dipper Ice Cream in Missoula.

As far as I know, Goldsmith's is still open, but it has undergone several major overhauls. It was strictly an ice cream store (with espresso drinks and a few pastries) from '84 to maybe '89, then they added a restaurant to it, with pretty decent results. Then of course the bed & breakfast. In about '93 they razed the whole building and rebuilt it into a bagel store, and in about '97 it became an Italian restaurant. For a while there, Goldsmith's was the place to work for hipsters in Missoula. At least one member of every band either worked at Goldsmith's at some point or had a girlfriend or boyfriend who did. And of my longest-standing friendships and acquaintances, probably a good 30% of them can claim some affiliation with Goldsmith's.

My claim to ice cream fame

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