Field Notes: The Art of Survival

Tales of the Strangest Gigs I Took to Fuel my Creative Dreams

I recently found a notebook that has to be at least twenty years old. As I flipped through it, I recognized my handwriting but could not make heads or tails of the content…

There are around forty pages of this nonsense. I was hard-pressed to think of a single moment in my life where I would have been concerned with something like “corporate/bulk accounts.” What the hell was I looking at?

Then I saw that part in the bottom right-hand corner: “200 bottles a week”

Ooooh. Right.

This was the summer I sold counterfeit perfume and cologne! And these were my notes from the three-week-long training phase they told us 80% of the participants would not make it through. It didn’t take long to figure out why by the way. With each passing day, this whole situation grew creepier and more cult-like. But I really, really needed a job. So I was among the 20% that reached the end.

At that point, this company loaded me up with boxes and boxes of their knockoff products and I hit the road to try and unload it. But you see, the real money was in recruiting others to work under me and then taking a percentage of their sales.

So yeah. It was a pyramid scheme.

I hadn’t thought about that in ages. And I think it’s because that’s not even the strangest job I had that summer. But that’s how it went back then. I was playing in a band, trying to make it as an artist, and just looking for a way to pay the bills in the meantime. So there were a few years there where I just sort of floated from one shitty gig to the next.

Like that independently owned and operated tree service company. Which is a fancy way of saying it was one guy with a pick-up truck and a wood chipper. There was no paperwork or background check for that job. I just met him at a McDonald’s where my “interview” consisted of him asking me how much I could bench press and then telling me the job was mine if I could beat him at arm wrestling.

No red flags there! I started the next day.

Unlike the perfume cult, there was no training for this whatsoever. At the end of my first week, I was handed a chainsaw, strapped into a harness, and pulled fifty feet into the air to start hacking away at a giant oak tree.

Everything was going okay until the branch I was standing on snapped and I lost my balance. No problem, that’s what the harness was for, right? So yeah, I only fell a few feet… but I was still holding a running chainsaw. Thankfully, I inadvertently let go of the lock-out switch at some point which stopped the chain from spinning. Good thing too — when I came to a stop, the bar had landed on my leg. If it had been running, it would have been ripping through the meat of my left thigh.

That probably should have been my last day. But once again, I really, really needed a job. I didn’t last much longer though. A couple of weeks later, I accidentally destroyed this guy’s wood chipper. I hadn’t broken this pile of branches up into small enough pieces before throwing them in and so it jammed. When he dropped me off that night, he wrote me a check for what he owed me. But it was a Tuesday and I usually got paid on Fridays. So I had a feeling I would not be hearing from him again. It was time to arm-wrestle someone else for that job.

I bounced back though. Not long after that, I found work as a photographer. But in case that sounds even slightly legitimate, let me provide some additional context…

The place was called Van Gogh Portraits. I thought it was an odd name given that Van Gogh had been a painter and not a photographer but whatever. None of my business. So the way this worked was that someone from this company would hang out in the maternity ward of hospitals and hand out vouchers for free baby pictures to new parents. A photographer would then show up at their home, set up some lights and a backdrop, and take a bunch of photos. That was the part that was free. The parents would then be sent watermarked proofs of those photos so they could decide if they actually wanted to purchase any prints. If they did, then the photographer earned a commission.

I shadowed three other employees for about a week. The job involved checking in at the main office first thing in the morning, getting a list of clients (usually between 6-8 a day), and then being sent on your way. Most of the destinations were nowhere near one another. All of them were in pretty bad neighborhoods.

I had concerns about driving into some of these areas with a trunk full of expensive equipment, but I kept my mouth shut because the boss was pretty scary. He looked like Don Rickles and had a similarly gruff demeanor, but minus the sense of humor. When I told him my friends had joked that I should start telling people I shoot babies for a living, he just stared at me.

The other thing I kept to myself was that even after spending time with the other photographers, I still had no idea what I was doing. Especially when it came to dealing with babies. My first solo appointment was with a mother who wasn’t much older than I was at the time. I tried running her son through the series of stock poses I’d been taught, but the kid had the dexterity of a bowl of pudding. I couldn’t remember anything about how the other photographers had done this. I gave the baby commands like “Sit!” and “Stay!” as if it were a dog.

About halfway through this trainwreck, I heard some guy yell, “Whose fucking car is that in the driveway?”

Dad was home. And he was not happy to see me.

Mom pulled him into the bedroom where I could hear them arguing. I couldn’t make out every word, but I got the gist of it — she was insisting that she’d told him about this several times while he remained adamant that she had not. While they went at it, the bowl of pudding and I just stared at each other.

Eventually, one of them stormed out of the house. I assumed (or really just hoped) it was Dad, but no such luck. Mom was the one who took off. I never saw her again. Instead, Dad walked back into the room to supervise the rest of my visit.

He took a seat to my right, completely ignored my attempts at small talk, and just shot daggers at me while I tried to work. I’d already been nervous, but now I was terrified. Which is probably why it took me a minute or two to realize he was holding a small pistol. He wasn’t pointing it at me, it was just in his hand dangling off the armrest.

Message received.

I packed up my gear, got the hell out of there, drove back to the office instead of my next appointment, and left all of my equipment with Mr. Personality’s secretary. I still really, really needed a job. But not that bad.

And that’s just a small sample of some of the more bizarre things I’ve had to do in order to try and make ends meet. There are so many others.

But what about you? I’d love to hear about some of the worst or weirdest jobs you’ve had while pursuing your creative endeavors. Sound off below!

Take care, friends. Talk to you soon.