By Michael McCarthy

Writers must often find ways to pay the rent while waiting to become Rich and Famous. The traditional method of accruing wealth is to find an agent, with whom you can correspond and bemoan the circumstances of life while waiting for royalty checks to appear in the mail (before you find out that the agent, publisher and distributor is making all the money from your book). Of course, in order to have an agent you must first write a book, and before writing the book you need to have something to write about. So the first step in writing a book is to go get yourself a Bad Job, so you have something to regret, and are sufficiently motivated not to do something like dig ditches ever again.

Luckily there are lots of Bad Jobs to get, and many writers are conveniently placed to obtain these jobs because they lack any other job skills. Also, being writers and therefore a cut above everyone else they often take many Bad Jobs, often over the course of many years, before they discover are not more talented than anyone else. After enough Bad Jobs thy finally become motivated enough to write a Great Book just so they don’t have to wash dishes/dig ditches/cut hair/serve slop for a living any more.

I am pleased to admit that I am just as slow as any other writer, or perhaps even more so, because I took many Bad Jobs over the years until such time as I truly became Highly Motivated. I also possess virtually no discernable job skills of any value to an employer desperate enough to hire me, aside from an ability to talk a lot and type rather badly. Unfortunately, the only job you can get as a bullshitter is in sales, and that’s too much like work for most writers.

My first Bad Job was at age 14 as a weekend busboy at Restaurant Claude St. Jean in suburban Montreal. My brother quit the job so I took it. He was supposed to get a dollar a day from each one of the six waitresses, but reality intruded so he never collected his money. Neither did I, in the one week I worked there. At age 14, we were far more interested in the free food. The owner told us we could eat anything we wanted for lunch, as long as it wasn't steak. The first tour I got of the kitchen, the chef winked at me and hoinked a giant greenie into the vat of spaghetti sauce, thereby reducing my appetite to a reasonable proportion. Probably the manager told him to do it.

Of course the only Real Bad Job is the one that gets you killed, and my own personal favorite (like many writers, I have about many others just as awful) was as a lumberjack. A logger is the person who cuts down logs in the forest. A lumberjack is the guy who moves lumber around in the mill. My job was to "pull greenchain," which is yanking boards off the pulley right after a giant saw cuts them into various lengths. Then you stack them in a pile on the platform and a forklift takes them away to a truck, and off to market.

I was a hippie at the time, living in the country in the fashion of the times, and could not get a job to save my life. Little towns are often redneck town, which means certain people – like employers - hated hippies. Every once in a while the local sawmill would get a big order for planks large enough to build houses, boards known as "4 by 10's," which indicates their huge size and weight.

Whenever they got an order for 4 by 10s, all the regular workers would book off sick, and the mill would hire anybody, even hippies. So I got a call at dinnertime. Would I like to work the midnight to 8 a.m. shift on the greenchain? Does Santa Claus love little children? Since I was dead broke, and didn't have a car, I walked the ten miles to the mill from my house. Hard to hitchhike at 11 p.m., especially in a town full of rednecks.

It took me about 5 minutes on the job to realize that I did not have a clue about how to pull greenchain. Evidently it is something of an art form, acquired over time by men who did not do well at school. You had to give the planks an almighty yank as they went by, or else they wouldn't budge. Each plank weighed about 50 pounds and they came by every 5 seconds or so. Of course nobody told me to bring work gloves, so I had splinters in each hand, not to mention the blood blisters that broke as the night shift progressed.

After an hour I was thrashed within an inch of my life. Plus, I didn't know how to make a tight, compact pile for the forklift. If the pile fell part, you had to jump down off the greenchain to the ground, and pick up all the lumber lying on the ground, and somehow make a new pile all over again. Each pile consisted of about 100 planks, and every pile I made fell apart the moment the forklift operator tried to pick it up.

At 4 o'clock in the morning we took a break. The shift foreman came by and told me I was the most useless prick he had ever seen, and he put me to work doing "maintenance" for the second four hours of my shift. He gave me a shovel and told me to clean the sawdust from under the saw. This was a giant blade about 8 feet across, and needed oiling constantly to keep it going. So I got underneath the giant blade, which was about six inches from my head, and started to shovel sawdust. I had to line down on my belly to get underneath the saw, lying down in a puddle of grease dripping from the saw. If I lifted my head at all, my safety helmet would touch the blade.

Within about 5 minutes I was completely tarred and feathered. Of course this was all going on at 4 o’clock in the morning, in the pitch black, underneath the sawmill. Nobody came by and said: "Hello Michael, how are you doing down there in the dark? Would you like a coffee and donut?” Every once in a while I would take off my helmet to see the scratches the saw had left.

At 8 a.m. the whistle went. As filthy as a scarecrow, I stood by the side of the road, hitchhiking. Hundreds of rednecks drove by, laughing their heads off at this silly hippie, looking like the victim of a Ku Klux Klan attack. Nobody stopped and picked me up, of course. Would you let somebody who looked like that get in YOUR car? It was a 10-mile walk home along the highway. About half way there one redneck stopped in his pickup and let me sit in the back of the truck. "You know fella, every month they do that to some hippie, and they get a real laugh out of it."

When I walked into the front door of my little cottage, my girlfriend started to scream. "Jesus Christ, look at you. Get off the carpet! Your brand new clothes are ruined! What the hell is wrong with you? Don't you have any sense? I hope you don't expect me to wash these clothes?" Blah blah blah.

I crawled into a bath. I hadn't slept all night, I was thrashed beyond an inch of my life, and my girlfriend sat there and gave me shit while I tried to get the grease out of my hair. I had to buy an entire new set of clothes. I got a check from the mill eventually, but I had to walk down to the mill office to get it. (See "10 mile walk, hitchhiking, above). It came to less than the money I had to spend to buy new clothes. A month later I broke up with my girlfriend, who moved back to the city to go find a job. I wasn’t far behind.

Nowadays I have the toughest job of all, writing copy for magazines and newspaper editors, vicious uncaring swine who collectively are as thick as a pile of planks. But as tough as it may be sitting at a computer all day, thankfully I don’t have a giant 8-foot saw tickling the back of my neck. But at deadline it often just feels like it.