If I thought the 80's were bad, they were nothing compared to the decade of the 90's for me, both personally and financially. It seems like the bad start I got in the 80's just kept its momentum going through the entire decade of the 90's, and there seemed to be nothing I could do to stop it. Whatever I tried just seemed to make everything worse, like I had been cursed by a band of gypsies. By the end of the 90's, I would be in debt over six figures, lose my long-time fiancee', lived in eight different places, and have less than $2,500 to my name.
Starting in the fall of 1990, and lasting through about early 1994, I managed to barely scrape by. It was the period of the recession of 1990. I had finally quit the family business, for reasons that remain murky, but it was mostly money; I think my last year there was my highest paid year-around $16,000 or so, which was a fortune compared to my salary from 1983 through 1989. Plus, despite putting in 7 years with the company, I just was not getting any respect. I mean, low pay is okay, if you like your job, but if you have consistently low pay, without so much as an "atta' boy" once in a while, and the job is completely monotonous, you can only last so long. Regardless, I said "see ya' later", and was on my merry way, just before this latest recession hit, if I recall correctly. As usual, my timing was perfectly horrendous.
Looking back on it, I would bet that my Dad hired me just to keep my Mom happy. She could be a nightmare to live with if she was unhappy over something and, despite her contempt for my childless and wifeless ways, she did seem to care about my welfare. That's what a paycheck from dad felt like too, welfare, because it certainly wasn't because he thought I was worth anything, that's fer' damned sure.
This was their game though. Make things impossible for me, impossible for me to achieve any semblance of normalcy. Isolated farm, low pay, control freak parents with a huge chip on their shoulder for whatever reason-I still don't know. Then, when I became middle-aged and unmarried with nothing to show for my life, blame it on me. "Oh, Kurt's a confirmed bachelor. He's just a party boy", my mom would tell people to cover up the results of their half-ass dysfunctional child-raising techniques. I would just get the urge to strangle her at that point.
I think it goes a lot deeper than what I realized at that time. I would be willing to bet that my Dad came along and "adopted" us, my Mom-divorced with a young child at the time he entered the picture, in order to sell more insurance, in the big picture, to be more successful, in portraying the family man image that was so important back in those days in business, the 1960's in America. * That sure would explain a lot of things. In fact, I would bet a million dollars on it.
With us, he had an instant family. It was purely a business move, nothing more, nothing less. Sociopaths will get wealthy, because it takes a sociopath to do such things, to fake a family. I say this because when my mom passed away years later, in 2011, he almost immediately took down every picture of her and threw out all her possessions-emptied the house of her entire presence.
Anyways, there I was in mid-1990 somewhere, driving around in my piece of junk car, well, at least I had a car-things could always be worse, right? But in comparison to my peers, I was doing badly. It really came down to family support. Where I had a hostile, wealthy Dad that was dying to see me fail miserably, friends and acquaintances had an incredible amount of family support, to put it bluntly. Resume's were everything in those days too, before the advent of the internet, and I didn't have anything notable on my resume, except for some vague office-work gopher job.
Plus, there were a lot of new faces around. I remember sitting in traffic, during my job search in the Philly suburbs thinking, "where did all these people come from?" What we didn't know at the time was that we had a wide open border with Mexico, and cheap labor had been flooding into the States since the 80's or even earlier than that. Eventually this massive influx would begin to be felt, in lowered standards of living, increased medical care costs, more-crowded highways, ever-increasing crime rates, and general change in appearance and culture of the population. Now, it merely made the job-search a little harder than when I had graduated from college in the 80's.
Point: If your country is getting really crowded and shitty, and crime is out the ass, chances are the corporations are importing cheap labor, sending existing high-paying jobs overseas, greasing the politicians, and pocketing the profits.
Still it was a golden era, compared to the America that awaited us about 10 and 20 years down the road. I would go back to the America of 1990 (or earlier) in a heartbeat.
After a few months of this. my parents didn't really give me much feedback on the whole situation. I don't think they cared much at that point, what I did. They were set up pretty well, and they had their adopted kid to worry about. I think he was just getting out of high school, or had a year left. Unfortunately, I had never been really close to my "brother". He had always hated me, even though I was there first.
Can you imagine showing up at some guy's house, and resenting him, when he was there 13 years already before you? I really think it was the money that made it so weird. Plus, when he got older he took on the same disdainful attitude towards me that my Dad harbored also. So now I was stuck with double-asshole Dads. I tell you I got terrible luck. It's not like I had any access to Dad's money either, which is all the new kid cared about. They kept me poor as hell. Don't let your parents adopt, trust me.
But, the fact that they had adopted another child and then treated me like crap and the new kid like gold was a sure sign that I should just leave home and never come back, but you're blind to these things when you're younger. I was in denial. "It's just a temporary thing, right?".
Having nowhere really to actually go, I stayed on my friend's couch for a while-he had a little house down by the Susquehanna River, and eventually he rented a room to me for a few months. His wealthy Dad was a friend of my wealthy Dad, but his Dad actually liked him and had given him a house after graduation! Don't get me wrong. I didn't want everything handed to me, but at least take an interest in seeing all your kids get a good start, not just the new guy, if you've got the means and you are a Father! "Fish" was having his own problems though, as the recession was taking a heavy toll on his father's steel company, which had been around since about 1964 or so.
This also got weird, because his parents were good friends with my parents, and I'm sure they were getting a full report on their 30 year-old runaway's status. I can hear it now, "Yep, he's still sleeping on the couch. Should I have him call you? No, don't bother. He's learning a good lesson from all this, that he's only good for yard work."
The Fishers were a real nice family though and huge! I always wondered, what's it like to be related to half the county? I wouldn't know because I've had to move ten or twenty times, but I would think it would be a great advantage in business. Everywhere I have moved, in trying to start a business, everyone is like, who in the fuck are you? Then I go broke and end up leaving town in the middle of the night, only to repeat the cycle somewhere else.
It still breaks my heart that the Fisher family had to be witnesses to the dysfunctional relationship I had with my family at that time. We had already moved to the neighborhood back in 1966 for six months before my new Dad moved us away for seventeen years, probably the best six months of my childhood. Then my parents moved back to the area and of course, everybody was a stranger to me by then. The senior Fisher was an ex-Amishman with an eighth-grade education, who had built a steel fabrication service out of a garage on a country road into a 14 million dollar company in under 15 years or so, an amazing story, really. I don't think there were any problems until he brought the kids into the business, who all had gone through high school and some college. It just goes to show you what a scam formal education is in this country.
My first job search here eventually brought me to a local radio station, where I got a job in advertising sales. I got the idea for this venture from a friend of mine in Philadelphia who had been hugely successful in advertising sales. The only detail left out was the other guy had started right out of college, unlike my 8 years-late entry into the work force. Unfortunately, I sucked at it immediately, and I went nowhere.
Did I look too good? Was it the physical fitness? Jeez, I should have just opened up a gym. "But there are too many of those". Why did I listen to the naysayers? Back to the job interviews, problem is, if you show up anywhere for a job interview and you're in any kind of physical shape, people tend to think you just got out of prison. Plus the male bosses in corporate America of that era were very often screwing half the female staff under them, so to speak. I'm sure this is still true in modern day America, in the few corporations that are still here.
Who knows. I think a lot of the problem with my inability to find a good job or get any business, had to do with the fact that men just didn't want to hire me, or if they did hire me they just made sure that I did very poorly, like the experience with dear old Dad's company. If women had been in charge anywhere, I am convinced I would have scared up a few more opportunities in the job market, even though it was the shitty early 1990's.
In fact, I believe the perfect career for me would have been to skip college-saving four years of wasted time there, and become a hairdresser. It would have been great. I like women, they like me. I'm artistic and have an eye for beauty. A straight hairdresser. Are you kidding me? It would have been a genius move. I guarantee I would have made a fortune.
I believe I made one sale the entire time I was at the radio station (3 months). I think the problem was that it was a really small town, and most of the decent accounts were already locked up by the manager (male, asshole) at the same station, so I was competing with my boss-not a very good arrangement. I did manage to sign up a restaurant just before I quit, and they reported one of their most successful weekends, ever. I had been pestering these guys for months to try radio advertising. Advertising doesn't cost, it pays! That was one of the little taglines in the radio advertising business.
Then I was unemployed again, and still trying to figure out where to go and what to do. I finally got desperate enough to check out my old lifeguard job at the beach (Avalon, NJ), because the Captain (Murray Wolf) was still there from my stint back in 1983 after college graduation (see "The 80's"). I called him, and he said "sure, come back". He was a man of very few words.
I would have to take the lifeguard test again, and it was about six weeks away, so all I did was hang out at my buddy's little house, watch TV, and go swim laps at the local college pool up in Millersville to get in shape. Luckily, I got away with this because they didn't bother to ask for my college ID until the last week before I left to take the test. Try getting away with that these days. Anyways, I got a week off before taking the test, enough time to peak physically, without losing what I had gained in the pool. I passed the test with flying colors on a rough water day.
1983 had been an incredible summer at the beach, because I had roomed with a bunch of buddies of mine from college (Elizabethtown College), and two of them had been hired by the Beach Patrol with me.
This time, things worked out only okay, not great, because it was 1991 now, I was older, and there were no familiar faces around. Unfortunately, I thought 31 was old at that time, but it really is not. Also, 1983 had been such an incomparable experience, that coming back was naturally a big letdown. I don't remember getting laid even once in the summer of 1991, which certainly had not been the case years earlier. It didn't help that, in my mind, I was just an "over-the-hill loser" now, with an uncertain future, instead of a fresh college grad with a supposedly great future. Given a chance to defeat myself, I usually will.
I also remember that the economy was bad in 1991, so bad that Captain Murray was firing lifeguards for the slightest infractions. The inside story was that the town was going broke, and there was pressure to reduce the size of the borough workforce. It's really kind of a miracle I didn't get fired this time, because I had been away for so long and I do remember making a few stupid mistakes.
Plus, we froze on the beach that summer, due to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the South Pacific. Yes, the eruption had been so huge that it affected the entire planet. So the summer consisted of sitting on the cloudy beach in our jackets while a cold wind battered us most days. The sun was a rarity that summer.
By late August all the college boys had left for school, leaving a skeleton crew, including myself, on the beach. This group consisted mostly of older guys and screw-ups like myself who had nowhere to go. It was kind of nice though, because there were very few tourists or kids around anymore, and the volcanic ash had finally cleared up in that part of the world, so we had clear, sunny days in the 80's with low humidity.
The rules were relaxed for the post-season, so we did not have to keep bathers right in front of us, as long as we watched them wherever they swam, Just the same, I did save two children from drowning one morning, while I was setting up my beach stand. It happened so fast, while their mother sat on her blanket some distance away on the empty beach, reading a book.
I was alone, vaguely conscious of two kids, a boy and a girl, about 8 to 10 years old, swimming around, about 20 feet from the beach. Glancing over at them, I suddenly realized to my horror that they had been pulled out by a riptide, and were tiring quickly, starting to sink under the murky water, as the waves rolled over their barely visible heads. They hadn't even made a sound. Dropping my fresh cup of coffee into the soft sand, I grabbed the big orange life preserver, and frantically headed into the surf.
By the time I got there, they were both in dire straits. I swam behind the girl, lifting her head up out of the water, and slipped the preserver in front of her face while she grabbed it as she coughed and choked, and I pulled the boy onto my back, while he wrapped his arms around my neck in a death grip, and that's how I swam back to the beach, holding onto these two kids.
Naturally, the mother was most grateful, and the staff had showed up, alerted by radio by someone, and had recorded it as an official rescue. Pretty cool day at the beach.
On most other days during that September, I spent most of the time working out, and rowing the boat in the warm summer sun, picking up an even golden tan. For pushups, I would hook my feet over one of the crossbars of the lifeguard stand, and do them at different angles. My goal was 1,000 push-ups a day. For dips, I would place the oars under the wooden seat, so the handles would stick out, horizontally. I would do 250 of these. Then, I would row the lifeguard boat back and forth along my designated beach.
At night, I would drop by the local pub on my bike, down a few beers, and then pass out back at the house, with the cool night breeze coming through the screen windows, smelling of salt-air. All my roommates had gone, so I finally had my little bachelor pad, if only for a few weeks. Then, I would wake up in the morning to the sound of seagulls, and head back to the beach for another day. I was in heaven.
Starting in the fall of 1990, and lasting through about early 1994, I managed to barely scrape by. It was the period of the recession of 1990. I had finally quit the family business, for reasons that remain murky, but it was mostly money; I think my last year there was my highest paid year-around $16,000 or so, which was a fortune compared to my salary from 1983 through 1989. Plus, despite putting in 7 years with the company, I just was not getting any respect. I mean, low pay is okay, if you like your job, but if you have consistently low pay, without so much as an "atta' boy" once in a while, and the job is completely monotonous, you can only last so long. Regardless, I said "see ya' later", and was on my merry way, just before this latest recession hit, if I recall correctly. As usual, my timing was perfectly horrendous.
Looking back on it, I would bet that my Dad hired me just to keep my Mom happy. She could be a nightmare to live with if she was unhappy over something and, despite her contempt for my childless and wifeless ways, she did seem to care about my welfare. That's what a paycheck from dad felt like too, welfare, because it certainly wasn't because he thought I was worth anything, that's fer' damned sure.
This was their game though. Make things impossible for me, impossible for me to achieve any semblance of normalcy. Isolated farm, low pay, control freak parents with a huge chip on their shoulder for whatever reason-I still don't know. Then, when I became middle-aged and unmarried with nothing to show for my life, blame it on me. "Oh, Kurt's a confirmed bachelor. He's just a party boy", my mom would tell people to cover up the results of their half-ass dysfunctional child-raising techniques. I would just get the urge to strangle her at that point.
I think it goes a lot deeper than what I realized at that time. I would be willing to bet that my Dad came along and "adopted" us, my Mom-divorced with a young child at the time he entered the picture, in order to sell more insurance, in the big picture, to be more successful, in portraying the family man image that was so important back in those days in business, the 1960's in America. * That sure would explain a lot of things. In fact, I would bet a million dollars on it.
With us, he had an instant family. It was purely a business move, nothing more, nothing less. Sociopaths will get wealthy, because it takes a sociopath to do such things, to fake a family. I say this because when my mom passed away years later, in 2011, he almost immediately took down every picture of her and threw out all her possessions-emptied the house of her entire presence.
Anyways, there I was in mid-1990 somewhere, driving around in my piece of junk car, well, at least I had a car-things could always be worse, right? But in comparison to my peers, I was doing badly. It really came down to family support. Where I had a hostile, wealthy Dad that was dying to see me fail miserably, friends and acquaintances had an incredible amount of family support, to put it bluntly. Resume's were everything in those days too, before the advent of the internet, and I didn't have anything notable on my resume, except for some vague office-work gopher job.
Plus, there were a lot of new faces around. I remember sitting in traffic, during my job search in the Philly suburbs thinking, "where did all these people come from?" What we didn't know at the time was that we had a wide open border with Mexico, and cheap labor had been flooding into the States since the 80's or even earlier than that. Eventually this massive influx would begin to be felt, in lowered standards of living, increased medical care costs, more-crowded highways, ever-increasing crime rates, and general change in appearance and culture of the population. Now, it merely made the job-search a little harder than when I had graduated from college in the 80's.
Point: If your country is getting really crowded and shitty, and crime is out the ass, chances are the corporations are importing cheap labor, sending existing high-paying jobs overseas, greasing the politicians, and pocketing the profits.
Still it was a golden era, compared to the America that awaited us about 10 and 20 years down the road. I would go back to the America of 1990 (or earlier) in a heartbeat.
After a few months of this. my parents didn't really give me much feedback on the whole situation. I don't think they cared much at that point, what I did. They were set up pretty well, and they had their adopted kid to worry about. I think he was just getting out of high school, or had a year left. Unfortunately, I had never been really close to my "brother". He had always hated me, even though I was there first.
Can you imagine showing up at some guy's house, and resenting him, when he was there 13 years already before you? I really think it was the money that made it so weird. Plus, when he got older he took on the same disdainful attitude towards me that my Dad harbored also. So now I was stuck with double-asshole Dads. I tell you I got terrible luck. It's not like I had any access to Dad's money either, which is all the new kid cared about. They kept me poor as hell. Don't let your parents adopt, trust me.
But, the fact that they had adopted another child and then treated me like crap and the new kid like gold was a sure sign that I should just leave home and never come back, but you're blind to these things when you're younger. I was in denial. "It's just a temporary thing, right?".
Having nowhere really to actually go, I stayed on my friend's couch for a while-he had a little house down by the Susquehanna River, and eventually he rented a room to me for a few months. His wealthy Dad was a friend of my wealthy Dad, but his Dad actually liked him and had given him a house after graduation! Don't get me wrong. I didn't want everything handed to me, but at least take an interest in seeing all your kids get a good start, not just the new guy, if you've got the means and you are a Father! "Fish" was having his own problems though, as the recession was taking a heavy toll on his father's steel company, which had been around since about 1964 or so.
This also got weird, because his parents were good friends with my parents, and I'm sure they were getting a full report on their 30 year-old runaway's status. I can hear it now, "Yep, he's still sleeping on the couch. Should I have him call you? No, don't bother. He's learning a good lesson from all this, that he's only good for yard work."
The Fishers were a real nice family though and huge! I always wondered, what's it like to be related to half the county? I wouldn't know because I've had to move ten or twenty times, but I would think it would be a great advantage in business. Everywhere I have moved, in trying to start a business, everyone is like, who in the fuck are you? Then I go broke and end up leaving town in the middle of the night, only to repeat the cycle somewhere else.
It still breaks my heart that the Fisher family had to be witnesses to the dysfunctional relationship I had with my family at that time. We had already moved to the neighborhood back in 1966 for six months before my new Dad moved us away for seventeen years, probably the best six months of my childhood. Then my parents moved back to the area and of course, everybody was a stranger to me by then. The senior Fisher was an ex-Amishman with an eighth-grade education, who had built a steel fabrication service out of a garage on a country road into a 14 million dollar company in under 15 years or so, an amazing story, really. I don't think there were any problems until he brought the kids into the business, who all had gone through high school and some college. It just goes to show you what a scam formal education is in this country.
My first job search here eventually brought me to a local radio station, where I got a job in advertising sales. I got the idea for this venture from a friend of mine in Philadelphia who had been hugely successful in advertising sales. The only detail left out was the other guy had started right out of college, unlike my 8 years-late entry into the work force. Unfortunately, I sucked at it immediately, and I went nowhere.
Did I look too good? Was it the physical fitness? Jeez, I should have just opened up a gym. "But there are too many of those". Why did I listen to the naysayers? Back to the job interviews, problem is, if you show up anywhere for a job interview and you're in any kind of physical shape, people tend to think you just got out of prison. Plus the male bosses in corporate America of that era were very often screwing half the female staff under them, so to speak. I'm sure this is still true in modern day America, in the few corporations that are still here.
Who knows. I think a lot of the problem with my inability to find a good job or get any business, had to do with the fact that men just didn't want to hire me, or if they did hire me they just made sure that I did very poorly, like the experience with dear old Dad's company. If women had been in charge anywhere, I am convinced I would have scared up a few more opportunities in the job market, even though it was the shitty early 1990's.
In fact, I believe the perfect career for me would have been to skip college-saving four years of wasted time there, and become a hairdresser. It would have been great. I like women, they like me. I'm artistic and have an eye for beauty. A straight hairdresser. Are you kidding me? It would have been a genius move. I guarantee I would have made a fortune.
I believe I made one sale the entire time I was at the radio station (3 months). I think the problem was that it was a really small town, and most of the decent accounts were already locked up by the manager (male, asshole) at the same station, so I was competing with my boss-not a very good arrangement. I did manage to sign up a restaurant just before I quit, and they reported one of their most successful weekends, ever. I had been pestering these guys for months to try radio advertising. Advertising doesn't cost, it pays! That was one of the little taglines in the radio advertising business.
Then I was unemployed again, and still trying to figure out where to go and what to do. I finally got desperate enough to check out my old lifeguard job at the beach (Avalon, NJ), because the Captain (Murray Wolf) was still there from my stint back in 1983 after college graduation (see "The 80's"). I called him, and he said "sure, come back". He was a man of very few words.
I would have to take the lifeguard test again, and it was about six weeks away, so all I did was hang out at my buddy's little house, watch TV, and go swim laps at the local college pool up in Millersville to get in shape. Luckily, I got away with this because they didn't bother to ask for my college ID until the last week before I left to take the test. Try getting away with that these days. Anyways, I got a week off before taking the test, enough time to peak physically, without losing what I had gained in the pool. I passed the test with flying colors on a rough water day.
1983 had been an incredible summer at the beach, because I had roomed with a bunch of buddies of mine from college (Elizabethtown College), and two of them had been hired by the Beach Patrol with me.
This time, things worked out only okay, not great, because it was 1991 now, I was older, and there were no familiar faces around. Unfortunately, I thought 31 was old at that time, but it really is not. Also, 1983 had been such an incomparable experience, that coming back was naturally a big letdown. I don't remember getting laid even once in the summer of 1991, which certainly had not been the case years earlier. It didn't help that, in my mind, I was just an "over-the-hill loser" now, with an uncertain future, instead of a fresh college grad with a supposedly great future. Given a chance to defeat myself, I usually will.
I also remember that the economy was bad in 1991, so bad that Captain Murray was firing lifeguards for the slightest infractions. The inside story was that the town was going broke, and there was pressure to reduce the size of the borough workforce. It's really kind of a miracle I didn't get fired this time, because I had been away for so long and I do remember making a few stupid mistakes.
Plus, we froze on the beach that summer, due to the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the South Pacific. Yes, the eruption had been so huge that it affected the entire planet. So the summer consisted of sitting on the cloudy beach in our jackets while a cold wind battered us most days. The sun was a rarity that summer.
By late August all the college boys had left for school, leaving a skeleton crew, including myself, on the beach. This group consisted mostly of older guys and screw-ups like myself who had nowhere to go. It was kind of nice though, because there were very few tourists or kids around anymore, and the volcanic ash had finally cleared up in that part of the world, so we had clear, sunny days in the 80's with low humidity.
The rules were relaxed for the post-season, so we did not have to keep bathers right in front of us, as long as we watched them wherever they swam, Just the same, I did save two children from drowning one morning, while I was setting up my beach stand. It happened so fast, while their mother sat on her blanket some distance away on the empty beach, reading a book.
I was alone, vaguely conscious of two kids, a boy and a girl, about 8 to 10 years old, swimming around, about 20 feet from the beach. Glancing over at them, I suddenly realized to my horror that they had been pulled out by a riptide, and were tiring quickly, starting to sink under the murky water, as the waves rolled over their barely visible heads. They hadn't even made a sound. Dropping my fresh cup of coffee into the soft sand, I grabbed the big orange life preserver, and frantically headed into the surf.
By the time I got there, they were both in dire straits. I swam behind the girl, lifting her head up out of the water, and slipped the preserver in front of her face while she grabbed it as she coughed and choked, and I pulled the boy onto my back, while he wrapped his arms around my neck in a death grip, and that's how I swam back to the beach, holding onto these two kids.
Naturally, the mother was most grateful, and the staff had showed up, alerted by radio by someone, and had recorded it as an official rescue. Pretty cool day at the beach.
On most other days during that September, I spent most of the time working out, and rowing the boat in the warm summer sun, picking up an even golden tan. For pushups, I would hook my feet over one of the crossbars of the lifeguard stand, and do them at different angles. My goal was 1,000 push-ups a day. For dips, I would place the oars under the wooden seat, so the handles would stick out, horizontally. I would do 250 of these. Then, I would row the lifeguard boat back and forth along my designated beach.
At night, I would drop by the local pub on my bike, down a few beers, and then pass out back at the house, with the cool night breeze coming through the screen windows, smelling of salt-air. All my roommates had gone, so I finally had my little bachelor pad, if only for a few weeks. Then, I would wake up in the morning to the sound of seagulls, and head back to the beach for another day. I was in heaven.
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