Resumé.

From a very early age, as much as I wanted to write for a living, I knew I wasn't the mattress on the floor of a six-story walk-up on Avenue C kind of guy. It was a gnarly New York I grew up in. We weren't many years away from bankruptcy, endemic arson, 2000-murders a year and the spectre of ever-present crime. Most of the shop-keepers along Broadway up in the Columbia neighborhood I lived in kept a club of some sort under the counter and such implements weren't just for show. 

New York at the time seemed like the Wild West and many sane people like myself sought to find a certain middle-class equilibrium to get away from the four deadbolts on the front door and grates on every window sort of existence.

Accordingly, while I knew kids from college who were night-time troubadours, or ersatz beat poets snapping out riffs in crooked-floored tenements with torn photos of Allen Ginsberg Howling on every third wall, I realized quickly, the Bohemian life was not for me. While I'd love to lay in bed till noon and work on my art, I knew that those plusses usually came with mean-spirited rats, roaches that swarmed like the Viet Cong during Tet and worse of all, vermin so prevalent as to be all but unidentifiable to anyone who had even an inkling of entomological training. 

In short, I worked and worked and worked until I could beat a path to a 7th-floor apartment in a white brick building on 73rd and Second. I escaped from grunge about as fast as I could pay the rent somewhere ungrunged. It was, in the words of Hemingway who was writing about something else entirely, "a clean, well-lighted place." There was laundry in the basement, doormen at the door and a sense of Scarsdale decorum without the boredom so rife in suburbia.

While I wrote stories and parts of novels and filled shoe-boxes with type-written tripe-writing, I always had a day job and the burning ambition to move up in my career and my life, which took precedence, and still does over novels and lives unfinished.

That said, it's not unusual for me to read things by the great Mason Curry, who as shown above writes often about the ways and means writers and artists persevere and become writers and artists, not merely copywriters and art directors. You can buy Curry's latest book here, as I did just moments ago. Curry's book relates stories and reflections on how  famous artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers throughout history have managed to successfully (or not) support a creative life. That is, how to do what I could not, balance their creative ambitions with the very real need to pay rent and put food on the table. 

BTW, there are those who walk among us who don't understand those who walk among us who buy more books than they can possibly ever read. And acquire more movies, as I do, on DVDs--because I like having hard copies for when elon musk and his fellow plutocrats crash the internet for their own nefariousosity, leaving us in the forthcoming digital dark ages where we've forgotten how to read ink on paper. 

I read in Nassim Nicolas Taleb's classic, "The Black Swan," that Umberto Eco had built an anti-library: a collection of books that one hasn't yet read because, as Eco asserts, "unread books are much more valuable than read ones." It's been said that Eco's library contained over 30,000 books. That's like buying a book a day for 82 years. Or to mutate the famous quip by John Kennedy, from back when amerikkka was a country, at a White House dinner honoring Nobel-Prize recipients (real ones), "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered at the White House - with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

Curry writes of an artist I don't know called Agnes Martin, who (above) wrote a list of every job she ever had. 

Here's an excerpt from Curry you might like, if your faculties have remained intact enough and you can still read:

James Dickey was “office writing radio commercials for Coca-Cola bottlers while at the same time working in secret on his poetry (“ Every time I had a minute to spare, which was not often, I would stick a poem in the typewriter where I had been typing Coca-Cola ads,” he said); the composer Philip Glass, who, in the 1960s and ’70s, in between short tours with his music ensemble, ran a moving company with his cousin and worked as a plumber and a New York taxi driver (“ I expected to have a day job for the rest of my life,” he said); the abolitionist and writer Harriet Jacobs, who was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813 and who, after having her freedom purchased for her by her employer, worked as the family housemaid caring for five children seven days a week, writing her book Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl at night while the children slept (“ I have not yet written a single page by daylight,” she confided in a letter); the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, who, in 2018, told The Paris Review that his favorite job was as a “night watchman for three hundred cows,” though he also worked as a miner for a time (“ That was almost comical—the real miners had to cover for me,” he said); the artist Agnes Martin, who worked as a waitress, a dishwasher, a janitor, a cashier, a receptionist, a playground director, and a tennis coach, as well as jobs for a mining company, in country schools, in a factory, in a hamburger stand, in a butcher shop, in a nursery, in a cafeteria, and as a baker’s helper ('Also raised rabbits and ducks,' she noted in a handwritten list of all the jobs she ever had); the poet Lorine Niedecker, who worked as a library assistant, a writer and research editor for a Wisconsin guidebook, a scriptwriter for a Madison radio station, a stenographer and proofreader for the journal Hoard’s Dairyman, and, from 1957 to 1963, a cleaner at the Fort Atkinson Memorial Hospital in southern Wisconsin—her final day job before her retirement at age sixty—during which time she adopted a unique haikulike form that became a signature of her late style; the painter Henry Taylor, whose earliest artwork included drawings of patients at the Camarillo State Mental Hospital in Southern California, where he worked the night shift as a “psychiatric technician” for eleven years, from 1984 to 1996; the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who produced more than two dozen books during the thirty-three years he worked as a civil servant at the General Post Office, writing for three hours every morning before he dressed for breakfast; the author Kurt Vonnegut, who at various points worked in public relations for General Electric, tried to invent a board game, lasted one day as a writer for Sports Illustrated, and managed a Saab dealership on Cape Cod (his son later called him “the world’s worst car salesman”); the Swiss writer Robert Walser, who worked as a journalist, a bank clerk, an inventor’s assistant, and, for six months, a butler for a count who lived in a castle in Upper Silesia* (Walser’s time at a Berlin school for domestic servants inspired his 1909 novel Jakob von Gunten, now considered his finest work and a masterpiece of early-twentieth-century fiction); and the playwright Tennessee Williams, who as an aspiring young writer worked at the International Shoe Company factory in St. Louis and hated it so much that he set himself the goal of writing one short story per week, working late into the night at his parents’ house. After work, Williams “would go to his room with black coffee and cigarettes and I would hear the typewriter clicking away at night in the silent house,” his mother recalled. 'Some mornings when I walked in to wake him for work, I would find him sprawled fully dressed across the bed, too tired to remove his clothes.'"

In my youth, I worked reserving squash courts and refunding money in a college student center, as the assistant dean of student [ahem] affairs at Barnard College, as a nightwatchman at McIntosh Hall at Barnard, as a reader of bad novels for a fourth-rate New York publishing house, as a catalog copywriter writing shoe copy for the Montgomery Ward catalog, as a game-room attendant at a penny arcade at a seaside amusement park outside of the Bronx, as a camp counselor in New Hampshire, as a dishwasher at an Italian place, as a aluminum-siding stevedore, as a night-cashier at a downtown Chicago liquor store, as a store-checker for a Chicago sausage company, as a paperboy in suburban New York, and probably two or three I don't well-remember or whom still owe me money. 

Right now I'm engaged in writing over 100 ads for a large financial services company. These are the small-type ads that I don't believe anyone really reads much-less gains useful consumer information from. But they've become somehow, this marketing flotsam and jetsam, the sine non qua of modern marketing. They have little effect but to keep people working for other people so that still other people feel important.

I've been in this situation before, and when I am done with the entirety of the work I have to do for this company and its various adjuncts, I'll have created a marketing platform which will "contain" probably 2000 ads and 50 or so longer pieces. My calculus says they'll pay me on the order of a quarter of a million dollars for all that.

Which isn't enough, of course. Though at one time it was beyond my very comprehension of Mammon. And I've always liked Mammon.

Whatever form it takes, Mammon beats a piss-stained mattress on the lower east side and roaches with a bug up their ass against you.