An American Dream for the 90's

As I write this, it's the tail end of a sunny February afternoon in Chapel Hill. The mercury has been a constant 40 degrees, I've been driving around all day, and this town has been giving me a headache. Maybe it's that I can't wait for winter to end. Or maybe I'm pissed off that the most exciting thing I could think of to do today was going to a bowling alley to play some damn pinball.

Yeah, Chapel Hill in February. New York it's not.

Was that a postcard I got from you via Los Angeles? I thought I recognized your scrawl. Something about visiting Bela's grave. I still haven't seen Ed Wood, but I want to, regardless of the bad reviews it got from sources usually in the know. Best film of '94? No contest - Pulp Fiction. Best old film I've seen recently - On The Waterfront. Before that it was probably Love Story, with Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal. Of course, I've hardly seen any movies lately because I've been working crazy hours like the wage slave I am. But more about that soon. Oh, and you know what new film I'd love to go see right now? The Brady Bunch Movie. I bet that shit will be funny as hell.

So, what is up with you? Hope life in the city treated you well this past year. My only visits to NYC since last new year's have been very brief ones, for a night or a day at a time, just passing through. One memorable time last fall was when I was home for a few days and Jared and his girlfriend Heather Anne drove Tony, a friend of his, and myself down to see Deee-Lite play the Sound Factory. But overall, I've gone through Big Apple withdrawal. I spent this past New Year's in D.C. hanging with a Chapel Hill crew, and chilled most of the big evening at D.C.'s premier nightclub establishment, Tracks. Although now I hear this new club called Buzz is giving them some serious competition. Incidentally, it's now around the end of March. This note has been lying around half-written for awhile.

I've been working full time since September in a "entry-level" position in an advertising agency/market research firm called FGI, which used to stand for Four Guys, Inc. when the business was first founded. Now it's more like Fucking Getting Irritated. Let's make that a "basement-level" position, because I do work in a basement. It's actually a phone center, a.k.a. an electronic sweatshop, staffed by students, recent grads, college flunkouts, and middle-aged slackers with whom I work daily.

If my supervisors had their way, I would be on the phones eight hours a day, calling anybody, anywhere, for all types of stupid projects, mostly trying to reach the people who are the most difficult to reach over the telephone. I also do mass mailings and general clerical work, but my official job title is sort of a cross between "market research assistant" and "telemarketer." I'm kind of amazed I've lasted this long in the place, but I figured there would be some advancement opportunity upstairs into the actual ad agency portion of the business. Guess again. They did start me at $8 an hour, and it has been good to get something post-college down on my resume. It's also allowed me to get an up-close look at how a medium-to-large-size (200 employee) company functions, and also how this company treats its employees, the fucked up working conditions we're subjected to, low wages paid, etc., knowledge I can put to use in future labor organizing projects. But now I'm ready to be out.

It's bugged, too, because before I got this job I was making crazy money working for myself, and enjoying the hell out of it. This was during August and September, right around the beginning of the school year. Spurred on by my need to move all my stuff out of the Pink House, and get rid of half of it, I became a used furniture broker. Things mushroomed and I started selling absurd used furniture to kids moving into dorms and apartments, all kinds of crazy shit, and netted about four grand altogether. Not bad for six weeks' work. It was fun.

Working full time for six months has given me all the motivation I need to get me off my duff and tightly focused on my political fundraising plans, pronto. So for the last week or so, I've been trying to jump- start a job search that will hopefully extricate me from the fucked up wage slave work I'm doing now and give me more time to work on my own stuff. I've been applying for administrative assistant-type positions, mostly in Chapel Hill and Durham, to work 25-30 hours a week. I don't really want to have to drive to Raleigh, which is about 40 minutes away when traffic is light. And during the workweek, traffic is anything but light around here. That's one of the biggest drawbacks to living somewhere where the state government has been too shortsighted over the years to invest in public infrastructure. I'm not even talking about the lack of a any type of light rail system in all of North Carolina, I'm screaming about there not even being regularly scheduled fucking public buses that will take you between Chapel Hill and Raleigh. Do you want to know how many times the public buses run between here and Durham, which is 20 minutes away by car? Twice a day - once in the morning, again at night. No weekend service. Period.

So I'm trying to find some work that's less physically and mentally debilitating than what I'm doing, will let me work less hours, and pay more. Sort of like an American Dream for the 90's. I'm also trying to coordinate all kinds of schemes and projects with various individuals who are also tired of sitting around on their slacker butts and are starting to want to get paid. Speaking of dough, my personal business ventures may be bringing me through the Big Apple real soon. Like, it's now Sunday night, March 26, and I'm thinking of taking a road trip north this coming Friday, the 31st. I would be stopping in D.C. to drop something off and (maybe) pick something up from Erica Salmon. I haven't seen her in a long time, since probably back around Clinton's inauguration, more than two years ago! That's so wack. But the minute I tell Tony Fishel that I'm driving through D.C., he's on me. "Dude, you have to get my shirt from her! This red, long-sleeved shirt of mine that she has. I've been totally missing it!" So I may have to see her on the drive-by.

Yeah, so our initial destination for Friday night is Boston. Tony is now living with my brother, and they have a phat crib over in a section of town called Jamaica Plain. Three other roommates and them share the place, two floors, very big, very nice layout. And Tony claims to be throwing a rave on Friday night at the crib itself, "a small rave, only 50 people." Oh, did I mention that their house is on a residential street packed tight with baby strollers and old people? Maybe this is Tony's idea of a neighborhood outreach program. But regardless, I will be on hand to give witness.

And then, my tentative driving companion has expressed interest in stopping in New York on our way back, i.e. next Saturday night, April 1st. So if this all pans out, and I do end up in town, I'll give you a call. Hope you haven't moved or anything, since I'm sending this letter to your most recent address. And it would be cool to see you.

- Letter to Robb Teer, 3/27/95

What's up down here on Tobacco Road

Whassup, cat. This is a diatribe coming to you straight out of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, home of that graduating motherfucker himself. How's life in the Apple treating you?

Right now we're looking at 'round about 2 am, chillin' with a new Bob Marley CD that arrived today courtesy of those ignorant imbeciles at Columbia House who seem to have no problems sending hundreds of dollars of free merchandise out to imaginary individuals. I'm procrastinating doing real work, like writing one of the ten papers I need to finish in the next month in order to graduate with two majors. I'm also putting off going to the copy store to work on a flyer for this benefit keg/rave we're throwing here at the Pink House next Saturday. Hundreds of drunk people destroying their brain cells in order to benefit a local literacy education project - makes sense! So it's a perfect time to write you a letter.

...

Let's see, what's up down here on Tobacco Road. Are you a big basketball fan, Robb? I hate sports in a general, ideological sense, but b-ball is so ubiquitous here that it's hard not to caught up in this March Madness bullshit. So, I'll admit it, I have been known to actually watch short stretches of particularly decent games. On TV, of course. I've been to exactly one home game since I've been down here. It was my junior year. We were playing Florida A&M, and the game before the one I went to, a brawl had erupted on court. One of their players actually stepped on another player's head. So I was like, cool! Let's check this shit out. But nobody even got elbowed.

This year the Heels got eliminated from the tournament right away. People were walking around like somebody had stolen all their comic books or something. There were positive and negative sides to this development. On the positive side, people weren't out mobbing the streets every night a game was on, fucking with me whenever
I wanted to drive somewhere around town. On the negative tip, it meant that all these basketball yahoos who would normally have been holed up in bars drinking beer were clogging up the libraries, cafeterias, and other places on campus where there are already far too many motherfuckers to begin with. Oh well.

...

I saw this cool play on campus recently called Life As Art: A Tribute to Paul Green. He was a Chapel Hill playwright who essentially set up my school's drama department. Have you heard of In Abraham's Bosom? This was the play he wrote about race relations that won a Pulitzer prize in 1927. Check out a copy of the script. It was incredibly hard-hitting for its time, especially for the South. Green also worked with Richard Wright to adapt Native Son for the stage in the 1940s.

Right before Easter, it was my birthday. I had a phat time, since my friends organized a little birthday get together for me at our house. Folks were stopping by all evening, bearing gifts.


My housemates baked me a cake, and one of my really good friends down here took me out to dinner. Her name is Jyoti (pronounced Jo-thee), she's a dancer, and a speech communications major. We're going to be working on business and activist projects together this summer. One of the profit-making ones will be a local ice cream delivery service. I'm also going to try and open up a Chapel Hill nightclub as a business partner with my housemate Steve, who's from the Bahamas.

On the non-profit end, I'm applying for grants to fund some grassroots democracy projects. I've enclosed a copy of one of my grant proposal project descriptions for you to check out.

...

I heard from Tony on my birthday. He was trying to come down here for his spring break (his perpetual quest for the past three years), but things didn't pan out. So he claims he'll make it down for my graduation in mid-May. Well, I won't be moving into condo land until mid-July. Until then, the Pink House remains the spacious crash pad of choice for any friends seeking to escape Northern landscapes. Don't know if you planned to get out of New York for a road trip any time soon.

- Letter to Robb

The New England Tour '93

It was late December, right before Christmas, and we all needed to get north. Our friend Mel Benner was headed home to Philadelphia. I was going up to Rhode Island. For whatever reason, Derek Elliott was bypassing his parents' place in New Jersey on the drive up, instead heading for Boston to hang with Lem who was visiting his aunt in Jamaica Plain.

Lem's cousin, Derek, Lem & his aunt at her house in Boston

Mel's mom very graciously greeted us with open arms when we showed up around 8 am in the morning. Then she cooked us breakfast, I think it was pancakes. Clearly, we had gotten a late start, and drove through the night from Chapel Hill.

This was actually the second time in a space of a few months that Derek and I had breakfast at someone named Mel's house in Pennsylvania – the first being our Fall Break '93 trip to NYC when we crashed at Pink Housemate Mel Lanham's place (just south of Valley Forge) along the way. But dropping Mel Benner off meant a trip to the heart of downtown Philadelphia. Before we got back on the road, Derek, Lem and I made some new friends on the mean streets and with our tour guides along for the ride, took a driving tour of South Philly that shocked all of us. The blocks we drove through looked like war zones. It was the most rundown urban landscape in America I've seen before or since.

After Xmas, in the aftermath of a blizzard-strength Northeast snowstorm, all of us (minus Mel) would connect in Boston with Tony Fishel, who was at that point living in an apartment on Mass Ave.


It was right before Tony moved to a huge three-story house in Jamaica Plain with my brother Jared and several other roommates, including his then-girlfriend Shelly and possibly Pete Moss, who would later relocate to Baltimore and become a fairly well-known DJ on the rave circuit. Jared and Tony lived in two attic rooms on opposite ends of the third floor, and it was a swank pad. Their house was within blocks of Lem's aunt's place.

Then the three of us drove down to NYC to spend New Year's Eve with Dana in the city. To be exact, we were crashing at his place, although on our own for entertainment, because he was probably spending the night with Erika. I think that's how everything went down.


Details are hazy, but among other places we stopped by a party at Rashmi's apartment in midtown Manhattan after running for like, twenty blocks through the cold streets to try and make it there by the time the ball dropped. We could hear the Times Square crowd in the distance.


And then likely ended up over at Sapphire, our favorite little out-of-the-way NYC club, which was around the corner from a spot where my RI buddy Robb Teer was working as a bouncer for a hot minute.

Altogether, we hit three major cities, which was about par for the course on a Pink House road trip.


"This is dedicated to all those who will contribute to the New England Tour '93, whether in the city or on the road..." – Lem, 12/21/93, 2:32 am

Rave of the future at Purple House

Ian, Clay, Matt, and the rest of the Purple House residents were willing to let me promote one of their house parties, especially since I promised to import out-of-state talent (our crash pad pal from Boston, DJ Stony). I'm not sure what color purple crossed with pink makes, but that was this night's flavor. We were all comrades in arms when it came to livening up the off-campus party scene. Also when it came to catching scabies, but that's another story.


There were three versions of this poster, each featuring a different Rhode Island crew member who was going to make the trip. But despite my grand plans, none of the special guests hyped on the posters materialized, supposedly due to a broken-down car. I don't remember what Dana's excuse was, he was visiting from NYC and crashing at the Pink House two nights before:

"So that's how these kids are at the law school. They get on my nerves. Their philosophy is, 'I just want a job, I don't care who I sell out, I just want to work in the firm, I just want some money for my kids.' " - Dana, rap session with N'Gai and Erik, 3/17/93

but apparently his plans changed and he couldn't stay through the weekend. Regardless, the party went on as scheduled, a good time was had by all, and Dai's spirit certainly hung in the air, two weeks after his epic first visit to Chapel Hill.

Ren and Stimpy rock Chapel Hill

A couple Mondays ago, I had dinner with my housemate Jay, Caroline Philson, Eric Wagner, and a guy named Bob Camp, who is the new director and chief writer of the Ren and Stimpy show! Later that night, he spoke and screened four episodes on our campus, in this huge building called Memorial Hall which seats 1,800 and was completely full. There were people standing outside on the windowsills in forty degree weather watching the cartoons. There were two old episodes...and two totally new, never-before-seen ones!



The new ones featured this sick new character named George Liquor. If they eventually get broadcast, they're called "Dog Show" and "Man's Best Friend," and they're awesome!



UNC-CH was the first university Bob Camp has ever been asked to speak at, so he was really cool and laid back about the whole thing.


As CUAB chair, Eric Wagner was responsible for the whole setup, and invited me along to the dinner. I hooked Jay up, and Caroline found her own angle to scam him into letting her come, too. During dinner I got him to draw a cartoon and give me his autograph on one of the Ren and Stimpy flyers I'd created for Derek Shadid's student congress campaign. Caroline also took a picture of us together. Did I mention that Bob Camp is also an extremely patient man? He dealt with my fan antics surprisingly well. And the clincher of the night had to be that it was free food and drinks for all of us at Pyewacket, where the dinner was held, courtesy of student fees. What a deal.


Photo by C-line

And Bob Camp was such a twisted character! He told us all about the sorts of jokes they've tried to put into episodes of the show, only to have them vetoed by Nickelodeon. Apparently, now that John K. (the show's original creator) has been fired, the guy who does the voice of Stimpy (Billy West) is going to do the voice of Ren. Also, have you ever seen this one episode that came on at the beginning of this past (second) season, called "Powdered Toast Man"...?



Well, that episode has been banned altogether from ever being shown again, and all because of only three letters that Nickelodeon got about it from parents who were disturbed by the Constitution and Bill of Rights getting burned in a fireplace at the episode's end. Pretty fucked up.

- Letter to Robb Teer, 12/2/92