First Jobs

[Lightning Rod]

My first real job, outside of mowing lawns and throwing papers or baby sitting, was at Ashburn's ice cream parlor in Dallas. This was a job where I actually had to punch a clock, pay taxes and show up on time. I think I was making a dollar seventy-five an hour, which was a respectable fifty cents above the minimum wage in those days.

Ashburn's ice cream was home-made and delicious and we sold it for six cents a dip.

I had secured the job by the time honored means of knowing somebody. My grandfather played golf with the owner of the company. They had eleven stores in Dallas and I was placed in the flagship Ashburn's #1 on Knox St.

Knox St. is a short street. It's about six blocks long and it sits in a peculiar place between Highland Park (where Dick Cheney lives) which is a very affluent part of town, and pedestrian East Dallas. In the mid-sixties there was also a small black community two blocks away where the people from Highland Park kept their domestic help.

On Sunday afternoons the place would be packed, the black people and the rich people shoulder to shoulder waiting for their ice cream. The cash register at Ashburn's #1 would, by ten o'clock at night when we closed, read $5000. That's something like eighty thousand dips of ice cream. I'm glad I was young; it was a strenuous job. After a year of working there, my right forearm looked like Popeye's from dipping ice cream. (this muscular development was also supplemented by enthusiastic masturbation)

Ashburn's #1 was a mere hundred yards from the Highland Park city limits. As you walked up Knox St. you would pass second-hand bookstores and antique shops and the Highland Park Cafeteria where old ladies in hair nets would serve you roast brisket that would melt in your mouth.

Then you come to the Knox St. Theater. When I first started working at Ashburn's #1, The Knox St. Theater was boarded up. It had once been an elegant theater but had fallen on hard times with the advent of suburban movie houses. Some developers grabbed the property and opened a nightclub there. It was called The Phantasmagoria. This was the mid-sixties and The Jefferson Airplane had just recorded White Rabbit and psychedelia was all the rage. Johnny and Edgar Winter were the house band.

By this time I was getting sick of dipping ice cream and punching a clock. My only drug experience up until that time had been the Bacardi rum that one of the older guys at Ashburn's #1 was able to buy at the liquor store on Knox St. We used the lime sherbet to make Daiquiris in the milk shake machine.

Right next to The Phantasmagoria there was a little nook of a shop. In late 1966, Chuck Knox leased the space and opened the first head shop in Dallas. He called it Psychedelic Supply. Chuck had been to San Francisco and had seen what was happening in Height-Ashbury and recognized a potential business opportunity.

It just so happened that I went to high school with Chuck's younger brother. So again it was demonstrated to me that in the matter of employment, it's not so much what you know as who you know. I asked Chuck for a job. I went from selling All American Sunday Afternoon Ice Cream to selling cigarette papers and black light posters and buttons that had risque slogans on them.

Then, at the second hand bookstore, I bought a copy of Doors to Perception/Heaven and Hell by Aldous Huxley. The rest is history. I began my spiritual quest by quitting my job at Ashburn's #1 and swearing that I would never punch another man's clock, and I also found some LSD.

[tinkerjack]

Left behind in east baltimore,
first job in a produce market
day started at two am
been a wage slave all my life
only the past five years I took a lesson from jitterbug and learned to scuffle for the yankee dollar

Back in 1980 I had to fill out an application for a customs cartman's liscense, to haul the steam ship containers from the port to the rail yards. They wanted to know my life story and employement history, after about two hours and two hundred jobs listed they said good enough, now get back to work.

Never saw the good side of Dallas, just the wharehouses and the produce markets. Back in the eighties they were tearing down affordable housing and putting up five thousand square foot houses. I imagine the trend continues. Only now they are knocking down the 5,000 footers to put up 15,000 footers.

I love this song, only heard it once but etched on my mind

Artist/Band: Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Lyrics for Song: Dallas
Lyrics for Album: Braver Newer World

Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?
Well Dallas is a jewel, oh yeah, Dallas is a beautiful sight.
And Dallas is a jungle but Dallas gives a beautiful light.
Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?

Well, Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you're down.
But when you are up, she's the kind you want to take around.
But Dallas ain't a woman to help you get your feet on the ground.
Yes Dallas is a woman who will walk on you when you're down.

Well, I came into Dallas with the bright lights on my mind,
But I came into Dallas with a Dollar and a dime.

Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eye.
A steel and concrete soul with a warm hearted love disguise.
A rich man who tends to believe in his own lies.
Dallas is a rich man with a death wish in his eyes.