New Years 2008
By: Raw Adventurer
Tags: Travel, Short Story, Letting Go, Homelessness, True Story

Was just fired from both jobs and was dealing with a shitty break up that left me in shambles. A friend of mine invited me up to celebrate new years with him and his girl friend in NYC, I kindly accepted the offer. “Anything to get out of Northern Virginia” I said. I was working 2 jobs, two full time jobs at that. Being pumped full of adderall and alcohol to keep me going, and I’m an sure that I am going to be feeling the affects of that later in life.

I was fired from my main job at a music store for playing porn at the very end of our shift. See earlier in the week a good customer of ours came in with stacks of porn dvd’s and gave them to us sales men and woman as gifts. It was the Christmas rush and we were working every day to make our sales commissions, at the end of our shift, the manager went on the intercom and announced we were now closed for the evening, all of the staff members dragged their feet to the center of the store, exhausted from the open to close shifts and no customers were left, at least, I assumed there were no more customers left in the building.

I took note of the weary faces of my fellow colleagues and felt it was my duty to bring about laughter upon my fellow staff members. I slid in one of my dirty DVDs, turned on the TVs in a few of the departments, everyone laughed, mission accomplished. I walked through the crowed of staff members laughing and cheering me on as I to proceed to clock out. After I had clocked out, a father and his young son come walking out of the store like a bat out of hell. Everyone’s jaw dropped, I turned pale and knew that was the end for me.

My manager at that point had no choice but to write me up, to cover his ass, and I totally get it, just bad timing that is all. The next morning getting looks from my staff members as I’m going to the back to clock in and pretend nothing had really happened. My manager calls me back and fires me, he was actually really disappointed because he really liked me and I liked him. Although he was rather grim most of the time saying one thing I recall in a morbid type of humor, “This Christmas, Dan, my family is going to sit around the tree opening gifts and I’m going to blow my brains out, watch.” ending in an uneasy kind of chuckle. “Ahh come on man, don’t talk like that” was my reply, his response was “It’d be great through wouldn’t it?”. There was a sadness in him I could see, I hope he is doing well.

I had two other jobs during that time, one waiting tables and then later one working in a green house which I actually enjoyed. I had enough of waiting tables and jumped on the green house job when I got the chance, it was after all what I went to trade school for during my last two years in high school. It was great, I closed down the green house, some times we would have orders come in last minute but for the most part it was a relaxing job to have after 8 hours of hearing the opening to crazy train none stop at the music shop.

I have a condition when I’m stressed out or start a new job, I get eczema on my hands really bad, to the point my hands are cracking and bleeding, the timing of this was bad for my new green house job because they used a finger scanner to clock in and I often had a very hard time to clock in and had to write my hours manually. There was one night as I was taking over for the last person’s shift, she always had a huge mess she would ask me to clean up for her when her shift ended and I did so a few times till I said to her “This does happen to be a pet peeve of mine, cleaning up after people when they should take the time to clean up after themselves before their shift ends.” I continued “I’ll help you clean up but please don’t expect me to do this for you every time I come in to take over”. “Yeah, yeah” she said, “No problem, I’ll be right over!” I start getting ready to clean up kind of waiting for her to come over and start helping and I watch her storm over to the time clock and then walk out.

I went back to work the next day after working at the music shop and the manager pulls me aside and is very upset at me for supposedly lying about when I clock in and showing up late every day and supposedly stealing as well. I was fired that day.

At this point being totally jobless and kind of enjoying the slow pace and being able to catch up with myself, but also hating being caught up in my head. I had another job lined up, a government job, security clearance, benefits, the whole 9. It seemed really good but I had some apprehensions, I was for once able to do what I wanted, to be free, I had no girl friend, no kids, living at my moms house, I was 21 years old then and utterly depressed.

I celebrated new years in time square, had a hell of a time, taking shots of absinthe, going to someones house who was a singer song writer, there were artist of all kinds at this party, it really felt like the kind of people I needed to surround myself with. Anyway new years came and went and we were on the train at 6am heading back to my friends place and I said, “I’m not going back to Virginia, I’m starting all over, from scratch, even if that means being homeless, I’m free and I can do what I want for once.”

I ended up being homeless, during winter. I managed to get some random work like valet parking Ferrari’s and Maserati’s and doing some work for a guy who owned a music repair shop who had a pet crow, all while living in a train yard somewhere in Jersey and it wasn't up until May I got a job at a summer camp in Vail Valley, Colorado.

I probably should have just grew some balls and went into NYC but I didn’t. I was scared of the NYC.

— Side note- sorry for the shitty writing, I do not write often and I want to use this platform to document some of my experiences, please be patient with my writing, it’ll improve the more I write. Thank you!