What was I doing late April of 1992? Well, I was a repo-man for a rent-to-own place called Colortyme. What a drag! No really, this is the worst job I ever had. More than just delivering washers and dryers and fridges and entertainment centers and sofa beds* to people around the slums of Ogden, Utah, this was an active collections job. However, if you rent from these places, it is a civil matter, meaning we had to take the matter into our own hands (bank loans and car repossessions allow you to bring a constable or other law enforcement/guns with you).
So the three delivery/collections employees all had routes that we had to work, and the company had a policy about your route: at the end of every week, we each needed to have our customers down to 6% or lower. That is, 94% or more of your customers had to be paid up for the week (other rent-to-own places in the area were on a monthly basis, so they worried about this 74% less than we did).
Scraping, scraping, scraping the bottom of the barrel each week, I would hound everyone for money, or their goods, though picking up their goods meant less money for us and that all figured into another scheme of “we want xx units out to customers”. Hence, we wanted money.
We inadvertently trained most of the flakey customers to wait for us to pick up their payments (it’s much easier to let someone come to you rather than drive or mail your bills). So I’m stopping by on Sunday mornings (the job was supposed to be a 9-5, but I worked seven days per week, 10 hours a day, usually), or Saturday nights, or Friday at 1 am on the way home from trying to have my own life to catch these people and shake $40 out of their pockets. Many times, it was a screaming match on the lawn or just knocking on a door fifty times with “I know you’re in there!” before I got the money; my friend Tony (high school friend who got me the job after I had been out of the country for two years and was desperate for work) would generally knock, some guy would give $20, he would knock again, get $20 more, knock again and get more money from these deadbeats. Horrible.
Besides the scary times (walking down pitch black apartment corridors at 11 pm, putting my hands on the wall and feeling my way alone for someone’s door, waiting to put my hands on some hobo who will kill me for my shoes), the low point was X-mas of 1991. I had hounded this one customer for a month and could never find them home. On X-mas eve, I stopped by, just ‘cuz. A seven-year old answers the door. He and his younger brother were alone in the house, playing Nintendo. Guess what I was there to collect money on. Yes, the TV. I took their TV. I know it is not my fault, but I certainly had no charity in this situation (the kids didn’t seem very surprised about it, unhooking the video game and starring at the floor). Fudge!
The second low point was late April of 1992 when these two brothers – guys who treated bill collections as a funny game – decided they wanted to fight me as I came by on Easter morning. They had knives, but I didn’t give a shit. I was seriously about to murder these guys over it all – I was that worn out and miserable because I had let the job turn me into a monster of sorts. Well they were all talk and the situation sort of diffused, but I didn’t get any money from them (my friend, who was soon fired, fudged the numbers that week to make it look like were made our quota).**
There are those musical moments that come along right when you need them, and the Beastie Boys’s Check Your Head (released April 25, 1992) happens to be one of the top ten ones in my life. As one of the songs on this album (“Professor Booty”) mentions, "I’ve been through many times in which I thought I might lose it/The only thing that saved me has always been music".
I’m not going to go into why I love this album so much (i.e. the first album where one of my favorite bands actually buckled down and treated their work as more than a party; the classic bassline of “Gratitude” that probably inspired 100,000 dudes to buy a bass guitar; all the lines I quote from each song, such as “good morning/it’s time to get up and GO TO WORK!”; the brilliance of “So What’cha Want”, how 1) the scratching on there established my love of turntable-as-instrument 2) the drums on that track is something I’m always striving to achieve when I think “I need big drums”), but this is something I needed to ground me from all the horrible things I had going on at the time (this job was my life, pretty much).
In 1993, I lost my first copy. I bought a new one immediately.
In 2001, I lost my second copy and didn’t bother getting a new one until 2007.
In 2008, some dink broke into my car and stole my stereo. Last night, I figured out that Check Your Head was in there. For a week, I kept saying "I need to rip that to my iTunes...eh I want to listen to it in the car".
To be continued, Check Your Head...
* Sofabeds weigh a ton, if you didn’t know. We once delivered one to a trailer park. I rolled my eyes once I figured out the address because I knew it was someone who hadn’t done the math. After ½ hour of us dragging it down the hallway, 20 minutes to fit in the room, we opened the bed to find that the woman needed about 3 more feet of room for it to open all the way. We tried all kinds of shit, lifted and dragged some more (wearing ties and collared shirts, we were) to no avail. It took twice as long to drag it back to the van, all the while the woman bitching about how “it should fit”. It doesn’t lady, what the hell do you want??!
** The one brother came in that week to pay. He wore a smirk on his face as he stared at me. I started shaking, and had completely lost my mind for a moment. I screamed, “What the fucking fuck are you looking at you fuckhead!!!?!?” Nice words from a dude who had been out preaching scripture to the Puerto Rican peoples a few months before.
*** I didn’t know until a few years ago that frat boys co-opted the Beastie Boys as party anthems. I choose to ignore that.
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