These days, there are a lot of young people out of work. I met a few of them at church earlier today, including one young man who got his first job just last week. He's 19 years old and will be interning for the summer at a pharmaceutical company. In the mail room. Why the mail room needs interns is beyond me, but oh well. Funny thing happened to me when he asked me the question: "What was your first job, Mr.?"
I got to thinking about this young man and starting out. And then me.
When I was his age I already had three different jobs in the bank and was happily chasing women as young and horny Marine. Before that, I had worked for three different summers and most of my senior year in high school. There was a program back then for us inner city youth called JTPA, the Job Training Partnership Act. It was a nice little bit of Reagan/O'neill legislation that helped out a ton of kids like me. It was repealed by Clinton/Gingrich, but I digress.
Well, I got my third job from JTPA, which was awesome. I was appointed assistant to the secretary of the President of the New York City Transit Authority, who at that time was David Gunn. Pretty cool gig for a 17 year old kid from the projects. All high up in the executive offices and what not. $3.35 cents an hour, no taxes.
My, second job was a bit more of what you'd call a real job. Real work. Not sitting in a cubicle type work. Sweaty, nasty, muscles ache type work. I was an interior painter and furniture mover, working for a brutal taskmaster from Jamaica. His philosophy was get up in the morning, work like a hungry slave all day long until sundown, and then complain that daylight isn't coming fast enough to get back to work. But, the man knew an extraordinary amount of things about paint and how to apply it, when and where and in what quantity. This knowledge has stuck with me over the past 20 years. I always do all my painting myself and I do it quickly and beautifully. I'm very proud of myself when I paint a room. Another thing he taught me well is moving things quickly, without damage to the item or injury to onesself. Including fine art and grand pianos. Yes, I've moved a nine foot, 800 pound grand piano up 6 flights of stairs. There's a science to it, trust me on this. Most of the time I earned no more than $20 a day.
But that first job. That first one where I actually did something for someone else and got paid for it. I remember it well, mainly because of the extreme searing heat. The smell of the black tar. The wooden ladders that had little splinters all over them that would get stuck in my hands as i climbed up and down, up and down, up and down. Carrying shingles on one shoulder, and a bucket of tools on the other, walking up the ladder holding on to nothing so as to not have to go back and forth on so many runs. That moment of dread when the sun, beating down on you relentlessly, mercilessly as you work to put the heavy shingles in place, gives you a cloudy moments rest, only to continue its brutal profession just as soon as clouds move on to mercy others.
Roofing in the hot summer. In South Georgia. And, to boot a little side money picking peaches in Fort Valley. Joy!
Its was a rote job for young black men at that time. It was hard work and it paid diddly squat. BUT...
and I do mean BUT...there was that fine brown thing who used to work at the McDonalds over in Jeff Davis County. The one who liked my Brooklyn accent. The one who, went I went to get my lunch there, kept telling me not to go inside a McDonalds with a dirty, filthy, sweaty shirt on. The only who told me I should work with my shirt off and put the shirt on at lunch. So i did what she said and yes, she did show up at the worksite. Georgia peaches. Yum.
I managed to ramble on in my own mind through all this in about a minute's time, talking to the young man the whole time. While I was giving him the usual mentoring stuff about hard work and doing your best, etc. etc., I can't help but wonder if instead I should be warning him. Something is amiss in our world, and upon consideration, I know that it began to happen to me when I was his age. A dislocation between work and pride. A discrimination of a sorts, against imagination and experiment.
I understand that I was supposed be getting prepared for the job of the future, but all I did when I worked in the office for the big shot was make copies and stamp things. Perhaps the idea was that through osmosis, I would pick up some of the social cues appropriate in white America like naming global vacation locations with a single pronoun or psychopathic eye contact, I would be better prepared for a changing world of "jobs of the future." But actually, jobs like this...and the one this young man is getting, aren't going to get to the essence of what work should be like.
You should be able to to look at something, with pride, and be able to say "I did that" or "we did that." Why? Mainly because it teaches you the value of what you are working FOR. Not for monetary gain only, but to have the satisfaction of changing the physical world with your mind or your hands. Preferably both. That's what work is. That's why work is important. That satisfaction of using your body and mind for a purpose. It is just as important as all the other human things like love, and freedom, and joy.
So it really doesn't matter that one gets a job in an office or not. What is important is that there is satisfaction at the end of the day, or the end of the week, or the end of the project. That you can point to a roof and say, I did that. That was my first job. Learning to appreciate and gain satisfaction from work.