Cotton Pickin’

I used to spend my early summers in North Carolina. Every year was the same thing: I would look for a job in town the first few weeks, which were always pretty scarce. One year I took a position in the cotton fields.

It didn't seem too bad at first: the pay was pretty good for outdoor labor. I was to follow the massive machines that mechanically lifted the majority of the cotton crop and pick up remnants the great machines left behind. How hard could it be? And $6.00 an hour at 18 years of age seemed like a tidy sum at the time.

But it ended up being damn near unbearable. It was inhumanly hot. The sun bear down on us like napalm-smeared bayonets. I don’t think I’d ever sweat so much in my life.

My co-workers ran the gambit: students like me, older folks who had been let go from jobs at local factories who were struggling to make ends meet, and young, drug-addled burnouts.

The days dragged on like weeks.

We all had one thing in common though: we were all black. So you can imagine a long, linear crowd of us in the soul–burning sun, gathering cotton and dropping them into canvas bags, being watched over by the (for the most part) white supervisory staff.
My mind would drift and I felt like was like traveling back in time. Was it, all those years ago, like this? Am I experiencing retroactive déjà vu? Probably not, I concluded. But it still really, really sucks.

I think I lasted a week.
I ended up spending the rest of the summer making $3.35 at Burger King.

Biking In NYC

The Leopard drank beer and laid around in front of the TV a bit too much this Winter, so once the weather broke I finally decided to venture out and get some much needed exercise.
For me, my bike is the weapon of choice to battle the vestiges of an inert existence.

Getting into the rhythm of the city riding is another thing altogether. In my misspent youth, I was once a bike messenger, briskly weaving between moving traffic, riding down insanely steep staircases and cruising the wrong way down a one-way streets. This was second nature, never delivering a second thought during my my appointed rounds.

Nowadays, older (but probably not much wiser), helmet is firmly on head, earphones are in pockets and attention is on the business at hand. Yet even those precautions go but so far on the mean streets of New York.

I ventured out down the city bike paths to my job the other morning thinking myself quite the adventurer, only to be thrust in a crowd of like-minded Brooklynites. Immediately, my middle-aged alarm went on as I fell back, followed by a youthful assemblage, not wanting to block anyone's path.
I had barely made it across the Brooklyn Bridge when I began to gasp for air, refusing to get off the bike and stroll, as others in my age group had done, as I rode to the top, and then coasted down the other side, incredibly grateful to ease my burning legs.
Once on the Manhattan side, cars whooshed by, making me fear I'd make my destination in one piece.

A word to the wise when navigating the clogged streets of New York: There are NO rules.
"Green" means, red; "walk" means stop.  Everything is intuitive. Somehow, I made it to my place of employment. But somehow I think a peace - keeping stint in Afghanistan would have been easier.

My Job World Part 2

Around 1994, I began to learn some of the basic design programs which were still coming into fashion: Pagemaker, Photoshop, Freehand and a little later, Quark.

The Leopard's background has mostly been in drawing, so it took a little getting used to a technological mindset. Soon, I had a little experience working on small publications, but for the most part, I was kinda of figuring things out as I went along. My first real gig as a designer was at a small magazine called Pizza Today in Indiana.

Yup, a magazine solely about-- pizza. And yes, before you ask, The Leopard did get a lot of free pizza. The whole enterprise was really a promotional device for the owner, who put on a huge Pizza Expo every year for vendors catering to the business. Apparently, this was extremely lucrative and made him a millionaire. But the magazine was legit. It was bi-monthly, and there was a full staff. The thing I remember the most was sitting around in an editorial meetings discussing stories about pizza. How they come up with them issue after issue, I'll never know.

After leaving there, I took a gig at a tiny minority-owned ad agency. It was run by a former football player who didn't really have much experience but a lot of "heart". He used to call me B.O.P. (Big Ol' Pimp) because I drove around in a late 70's customized van at the time that an uncle gave me--a Leopardmobile if you will. There were numerous cash flow problems at the agency. Sometimes, we didn't get paid at all. Eventually, he fired the whole lot of us except for one guy. But I learned a lot while I was there about the business.

But boy oh boy, did I have learn the hard way.