Spring semester, 1973, eleventh grade. I was sixteen. First day back after winter break, the principal called me into his office and told me that he was putting me on OJT, no more curriculum, no more math, history or French, no more cutting up frogs. On the Job Training was two morning classes a day and a job and that was fine with me. The two classes were the OJT class (we learned how to balance a checkbook) and a gym class; the work experience was to provide the rest of our education.  This all happened after my grey-haired French teacher caught me cutting her class for the umpteenth time and sobbed in the principal’s office. In fairness to Madame, it wasn’t just her class, I’d had attendance problems in all my classes.

The first job my OJT teacher found for me was at Apache Carwash at Apache Plaza, a strip mall a few exits up the freeway from my mother’s house. The job paid $1.60 an hour. My co-workers were mostly on work release from the state prison.

It was a full-service carwash. Customers drove in one end, got out of their car, walked to the waiting area at the far end of a long, narrow baby blue concrete hallway with sagging ceiling tiles and paint peeling off the walls in Wheaties-size flakes, then drank stale coffee or not and watched through the fogged plexiglass window for their car to come squeaking and jerking out of the steaming wash tunnel.

Most of the time, I worked on the entry end where we vacuumed the carpet, washed the floormats and pilfered the cars, sifting through the ashtrays for change amongst the cigarette butts, groping under the seats, giving glove boxes a quick rifle. One guy found a snub nose .38 Smith & Wesson under a driver’s seat, put it in his pocket and carried it around for a few days until he lost it. Another guy found a leather blackjack but had to give it back when the owner came looking for it. The pilfering was finders keepers, there was no sharing. When the mats were clean, one of us would idle the car onto the chain and roller belt that pulled it through the sprayers, brushes and dryers.

On the far end, when the car rolled off the end of the belt, the outside was hand-dried, the upholstery wiped down and the inside of the widows cleaned. The best job on that end was driving the cars off the line across seventy-five feet of wet concrete to one of the two overhead doors; the challenge was to spin the tires to get up as much speed as possible then dynamite the brakes and skid to a stop before you hit the door. One of the guys smashed a Corvette through one of the doors and that slowed things down for a few days.

One afternoon, a guy drove in with a dark grey Lincoln Continental, mid-sixties, suicide rear doors, nice car but grimy like it hadn’t been washed in while. As the guy was getting out I looked in the back, garbage covered the back seat and floor up to the top of the front seat; burger bags and boxes and paper cups and fries and chicken bones and chunks of fish burgers and bits of meat patties and half-eaten buns dry and greasy with mayonnaise and ketchup and wrinkled tomatoes and pickles, the whole mass sticky from coke-colored soft drinks splashed over the pile like he’d thrown the cups over his shoulder when he was done being thirsty.

The driver, smirky guy, thirties, wearing a suit and tie and an overcoat, saw me looking at his mess, “All yours, buddy. Have fun.”

I opened the rear door and trash dumped onto the wet concrete floor at my feet. I yanked the yellow rope that shut down the line and Petey, the guy on the passenger side, he’d done time for assault, he and I got to work grabbing fistfuls of the nasty shit with our bare hands and dumping it in the steel trash drums. Frank came stomping back in his rubber boots to see why the line was down. Frank was the manager, he was maybe thirty, rumor was he’d done time for B&E. He saw what we were doing and yelled in my face, “You’ve got my fucking line shut down for this shit? Fuck him. Fuck him. Fuck him if he thinks I’m going to be his fucking garbage man. Fuck him.”

Frank grabbed the keys out of the ignition, opened the trunk; golf clubs, golf shoes, leather brief case, suits and shirts wrapped in clear plastic from the drycleaner, a couple of bags of groceries. Frank picked up the drum I’d just filled and dumped it on top of the groceries and clothes. And then did the same with the drum on Petey’s side. The garbage overflowed the trunk and Frank couldn’t close the lid until we’d tucked and crammed it into the crannies and the three of us slammed it together. We had fun, just like smirky man wanted.

Tex, tall, faded 501s, t-shirts, Mickey Mouse boots, Army field jacket, his last name, Dallas, sewn above one pocket, US Army sewn above the other, long hair, heavy beard, salesguy smile. He’d done a couple of tours as a grunt in Viet Nam. After he got out, he drifted around the country until he ran out of money and tried robbing a gas station. He got busted and learned his lesson and gave up armed robbery. Now he was peddling dope: weed, crosses, reds, blotter, black beauties, junk, blow; whatever a guy asked for, Tex knew where to get it, what was good, how much was too much, what was a fair price. He supplied the whole carwash.

After a couple of months at Apache, my teacher found me a job with Associated Motor Carriers Tariff Bureau, Inc., AMCTB. The company compiled and printed trucking tariffs; my job was to proofread pages and pages of columns and columns of numbers and once proofread, hand them back to one of the dozen or so floral-dressed, high-heeled, big-haired old ladies in the typing pool clacking away at pistachio-green IBM Selectrics. When they were done painting out their mistakes with lumpy whiteout and vaguely aligning the corrections in the rows and columns, they’d slap them down in my inbox and spin around and click click click back to their desks all the while not looking at me like the mistakes were mine. I’d print them on the company’s AB Dick offset printer, collate and staple. The job paid $2.50 an hour, a nice little bump from the carwash.

My immediate coworkers were Dicky and Catman. Dicky was working to make AMCTB a career, he was short, skinny, balding and thirty and had diabetes and a wife. He was our boss. Catman, good looking guy with good hair down to his shoulders and a skinny black mustache, was 24, eight years older than me, and lived in his mother’s basement in a wood-paneled apartment that he’d built for himself. He had a waterbed and no plans for a career beyond five o’clock.

I’d get to work at 10:30 and at noon Catman and I would take our lunch break. On Wednesdays, we’d take his car, a yellow ’66 Impala, 283 V8, automatic, black vinyl top, chrome Cragars, and head over to Mr. B’s, blow a number on the way if one of us had some weed. Mr. B’s was a tired, street-front bar with blacked out windows facing University Avenue that on Wednesdays hosted a lingerie show, Mr. B’s Lunchtime Lingerie.

We’d been there a couple of times, me sucking down screwdrivers, before the bartender got around to asking for my ID; I showed him the draft card I’d made on the AB Dick and that was good enough for him and forever after, when I gave him the nod, he’d mix up orange juice and vodka with two maraschino cherries on top and a little plastic straw and hand it to me with a wink. Drinks were sixty cents, I’d give him three quarters.

Once the show got going, Catman and me and twenty or thirty other guys would stand in a press to watch, guys in dusty work boots standing next to guys in shined dress shoes, all of us, drinks in our hands, heavy-breathing the hot fog of cigarette smoke, Mennen deodorant and sweat, shuffling and shifting our feet on the butts and spilled liquor.

And the skinny girls with ribs you could count and no butts and no breasts, and the fat girls with G-string floss disappeared between wobbling cheeks, and the girls trying to hide yellow bruises behind silky scarves and makeup that looked like latex paint, and the girls with scars or bandages or missing teeth just trying to get through their set, would, one at a time, clump around that little stage in their platform high heels, painted fingernails clenching the smudged stainless steel pole as they peeled off their costumes and bras while pretending with no enthusiasm to dance to whatever music was on the cassette tape they’d handed the bartender. And we whistled and yelled and threw coins on the stage and went back to work.

In June of 1974, my high school gave me a diploma certifying that I was educated.