Maybe it's because my dad was a Jiffy Lube Marxist that I tend to see everything as a class struggle. It always seemed to me that if there were jobs out there that had to be done, and we recognized that we were all in need of those services, then we were all equally on the hook for doing those jobs. It was my dad who gave me his copy of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at an early age and told me it was his favorite book. Being a mechanic, or a crane operator, or a truck driver always seemed cooler, and maybe even more powerful, than being a hospital administrator or an attorney - at least to me. I was happy to let my brother, or anyone else, read the instructions while I built the model. I didn't share my grandfather's concerns that someone else would make more money than me.
My family's sense of money as a finite resource was much like our sense of serving sizes at the dinner table: when the supply is limited and there are a lot of hungry people, take what you need and leave some for everyone else.
Not that we were poor. All four of my parents had full-time jobs, even if they changed them up every now and then. Government jobs. University jobs. Sales jobs. Oil change jobs. Whatever. People whose dads are doctors will tell you right off, as a way of explaining their own eccentricities, "growing up, my dad was a doctor." My dad's job isn't even the fourth thing I'm likely to tell you about him.
My dad is a funny, sarcastic, smart, mischievous, drunk philosopher who worked, for a time, at Jiffy Lube. Although he spent most of my childhood, and probably the majority of his working years in the shop and in the office at Shutters, he ended his working life in the same place he had started as a recent college graduate - as a caseworker for Florida’s Department of Children and Families where he dealt with the bureaucracy and heartbreak of what was commonly known as “welfare” as it morphed from AFDC to TANF. I never gave a shit about his title or what he did for a living, but it turns out, he did - much more so than I thought at the time. His tendency towards depression, alcoholism, and chronic disappointment in himself ultimately led him to believe that his two sons would simply be better off without him. He wasn't suicidal, he just quietly checked out of our lives.
My father's mother was an artist with a PhD in education, and her father had been the superintendent of schools in Long Island. Her mother was an opera singer who had performed at Carnegie Hall. My mother's father was a Colonel in the Air Force who fought in every war from Germany to Vietnam. He flew 36 bombing missions over Germany in 1945 without losing a man and went on to pilot missions in Korea and Vietnam while my mom and dad marched against the war in DC (putting the final nail in the coffin of my mother’s relationship with her father). When my grandfather got back from Vietnam, he went to work for NASA on the Apollo program. I don't tell you these things to bask in the glory of my family's accomplishments - I tell you to show just how little we were able to accomplish on the shoulders of their achievements. The more I think about it, the more I marvel at what a hard time my parents and I had at turning all our obvious advantages into any sort of power. Maybe we just didn't want it, but part of me feels like we never understood that it was there for the taking.
Plenty of people's parents pulled strings to get them their first jobs. I'd gotten my own jobs since I was fourteen (from phone solicitor to busboy to machinery auction attendant), but at eighteen, my parents finally pulled some strings for me with the father of one of the kids on my youngest brother's Little League team and they got me a construction job - framing houses in the Florida sun. That summer, I shot a 16-penny nail through my index finger, and I watched as my co-workers drew up dirty water from their igloo coolers to shoot heroin in the sweltering van on our half-hour lunch breaks.
Having left high school at seventeen to start college as an early admissions student in the Honors College, I'm pretty sure I was the only one of my classmates who spent the summer throwing 3/4" sheets of plywood to sweat-soaked junkies in the 95-degree heat - my slowly-baking head full of Plato, Descartes, and Wittgenstein.
That same summer, my dad left his oil change job and joined a construction crew that happened to be working right around the corner from mine. I think he had been on shaky ground with Jiffy Lube ever since he dropped an oil filter against the battery terminals on a late-model BMW, welding it to the terminals, and causing the whole car to burst into flames.
When I finally got around to seeing my dad again, he had on his forehead the same two callouses that I had on mine, one just above the outside of each eyebrow, like something that ran in the family. When you hoist a four-by-eight sheet of plywood up from the ground to throw it on the roof, there's a second where you have it airborne, balancing upright with its bottom edge at thigh level, waiting for the man above to catch it and pull it up. If he misses the catch (maybe it was a bad throw, or maybe he’s too high), the sheet will tip back towards you and hit you either on the right or left side of your head, depending on which way you’re looking. Eventually, you will develop callouses on both sides, but it takes a while, and it only happens to the ground man who is literally and figuratively the lowest man on the job.
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Finding and keeping a job that would pay the bills always seemed like more of a struggle than it should have been for me. I was supposed to be smart and resourceful. Why couldn't I figure out this capitalism thing? For a long time, I thought that if I could just break through to the next level of clientele, making things that were ever-more expensive for people with more and more money, I would finally have made it.
I couldn't have been more wrong.
Just a few years ago, the best bespoke tailors in New York City were charging $5k a suit, but they could only make about 2 suits a month. Running a business in New York City that only grosses $120k a year is not exactly the road to riches, and these guys were some of the best in the world. As a craftsman, there's only so much you can produce with your own two hands, and you can increase your prices to a point, but there's a ceiling there, and the ceiling isn't all that high. To use one of venture capital's favorite terms, the business isn't "scalable". Plus, do you really want to be working for the richest of the rich, making things you could never afford to buy for yourself?
The richest people I ever met didn't make their money selling small numbers of expensive things to rich people. They got rich selling huge numbers of cheap stuff to poor people.
So, while I continued to make expensive stuff for the only people who could afford it, I used the steady income and benefits from my new fire department job to take some of the pressure off. This allowed me to stress a little less about the economics of the whole affair, and it gave me an opportunity to enter the even more economically foolhardy world of art and art making as a quasi-profession.
In my best years as a designer and builder of exquisite pieces of custom furniture, I had a hard time making much more than $50k a year with no benefits, pension, or any real security. These days, I can easily make twice that (plus pension, benefits, and security) just for keeping houses full of the cheapest Rooms To Go furniture from burning up. In the days before fire and EMS mergers were common, the paramedics would taunt the firefighters with an oft-repeated joke - “Paramedics save lives, firefighters save furniture”.