When I was eighteen years old I needed a real job. Prior to my eighteenth birthday, I managed a headshop for three years while being paid under the table, and I volunteered at a few places. Where better to start the workforce than an office supply store? It wasn’t a full week of working until we had a morning huddle which informed us of the stores’ impending closure.
Back to the job hunt.
I was contacted by a retirement home for a night shift security position, and I graciously accepted.

The hiring manager was an old Boston guy who used to be a blackjack dealer in Vegas. For the job interview, picture a guard shack with a man smoking Marlboro reds telling me, “you can’t let ’em catch you smoking in here.” I found his character to be endearing, so I took the job.

Over the course of the next two years, I drove a company truck, and a golf cart through a 50-acre property. My shift ran from midnight to 8am which proved to be more of a conflict than I predicted.

Many times, I’d be partying and have to come into work. One of the more notable nights was the night I showed up to work high on heroin. My friend brought it over, he wanted to do like a “first time doing heroin” thing together and I was really into being edgy. This was an unplanned excursion but when new free drugs called me, I answered.

I was high at work interacting with residents and coworkers.

Occasionally I had to clock in on New Years Eve at Midnight. Naturally, I was drunk. My boss and coworkers understood my proclivity for alcohol and would barter with me using beer for free cleaning or the occasional shift coverage.

My line to add levity to the torture of sleeping for only a few hours during the day was “Oh yes I have breakfast before I fall asleep and dinner when I wake up!”

I don’t find that line so amusing anymore.

A quirky thing about working nights are daylight savings time shifts. One night a year I left early and one night a year I worked an extra hour. Total mindfuck.

I don’t believe this economy allows for the working class to comfortably live while working just one job. I often work two or more simultaneously. With that mindset, I took a second job at a call center. People would drive up to a gated community and we, in our “central station” answered the call to verify their entry. This was the first time in my life I ever drank on the job.

Beforehand, working while intoxicated seemed so taboo, so scandalous, but after sitting in that drab office chair reciting “may I have the name and address of the person you’re visiting” ad nauseum over a shift of ten hours, I no longer saw the harm. Some of my call center coworkers saw my name in the group chat rooms and DMed me thinking I was a woman. I have a unisex name and, when they found out I wasn’t a woman, they would ghost me. Even if I actually needed their input on a work thing. I reckon they couldn’t live with their embarrassment.

Drinking was not the only way I amused myself at this job. I deliberately spelled common words wrong when inputting visitors in their system. I spelled Papa John’s wrong so many times that somebody went into the group chat and blew up the public feed, “WHO DOESN’T KNOW WHAT PAPA JOHNS IS!? THIS IS RIDICULOUS!” Meanwhile I’d snicker and laugh with the other ne’er-do-wells beside me in our cubicles.
I think the most heinous thing I did during this job was one time the bathroom was closed for cleaning and I went in anyway and the cleaning lady saw my dick. She laughed it off, but that one still seemed a bit much even for me.

I quit that job because no 19 year old should be working in a call center no matter how nice the pay is. Entrance to the call center required a badge. I left my badge at my desk once, and couldn’t reenter. One of my coworkers refused to let me use his badge to get in, or to swipe me in with his badge. “One badge. One entry.” He said. This is coming from the same guy who gave me $200 to get him a sheet of acid on one of our lunch breaks. Our acquaintanceship had ended upon this interaction.

Another incident occurred where the friend who referred me to this job sold me some Xanax in the parking lot. The transaction was cinematic, I pulled in real slow and she slowed down coming from the other direction. We both rolled our windows down, and without stopping we swap the pills and the money like a secret handshake. This snowballed to a nadir resulting in me showing up high at work on some extended release oxycontin. I vomited in the bathroom. No cleaning lady that time.

Despite my hijinks, I remained employed at both jobs. I eventually quit the call center but the retirement home I stayed until I left the state.

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Over four years later, I relocated to an Appalachian town renowned for college football. I attended college and needed to supplement my income. Falling back on old habits, I searched for night shift security jobs and found a position where I was asked to babysit an empty parking lot for $15/hour.

The job was a construction site where a pedestrian had recently fallen to their death. The company was in a bind to hire security, and I was at the right place at the right time. I did not have a car for the first three months of work. I was hired in December and I patrolled this parking lot while freezing my ass off. I was wearing layers on layers, sitting with a propane heater, I even crawled in the bulldozers and hope for warmth only to find more bone chilling stillness. Naturally, I drank on the job. ‘Twas a fun rabbit hole to distract from the cold. The local alcoholics at the gas station would let me crash in their apartment on occasion. This continued until the temperature went below ten degrees. At that point, I experimented with the idea of “leaving early.”

This job was unsupervised. I texted to clock in, I texted to clock out. I still have not met the man who employed me in person. I don’t think I ever will.

I did eventually get a car. However I did not stop drinking until over a year into my employment. Most of the homeless guys that I had to kick out wanted to drink with me. If any college student I had to kick out saw I had beer on me, I lost credibility as a security officer. Eventually, the construction company installed cameras in the lot, and told us that they were going with the cameras because cameras are a cheaper option leaving me furloughed.

Another two months go by, and I get a call from that employer asking if I wanted to be relocated to working at three different hotels over the span of 4 days. 2 days at one property, 2 days at a property across the street, and 1 night at a property across town. Working night shift security at three hotels owned by a company that rhymes with Milton was some of the wildest shit I have ever experienced.

My first night on the job: The woman who worked night shift front desk weighs approximately 280lbs and is missing a leg. She was close to my age, and she lived out of her car. For the whole night she’s regaling me with her bisexual adventures, and how one of her girlfriends was under psychiatric observation, but she also had a sugar daddy on the side.

Two weeks from that conversation she had a threesome with two of the cleaning staff, and then she quit and moved to a different hotel. I don’t remember her name, but I’ll never forget her as a coworker because that was impressive. She would often smoke weed during her shift and when the bartender got off of her shift they’d hang out on the patio and smoke cigarettes. I joined them on occasion if I wasn’t too drunk. The drinking was now a regular occurrence. I showed up to work so drunk that I clocked in, walked back to my car and the next thing I knew it was 6am and time to go.

When my one footed coworker left, she warned us that they were re-hiring somebody who quit before he got fired (a move I am all too familiar with). In story, the guy sounded like a nightmare, but I really didn’t put two and two together until the guy worked his first day. This guy was in his 40s, divorced, and 100% addicted to pain pills. He would follow me around the hotel all night rambling about this and that. One night he divulged his detailed plan to steal liquor from the kitchen. I texted my boss and he replied, “Maybe he’s joking”
It’s not our job to police the staff. I didn’t really know how or what to do it but it freaked me out because what if he followed through with his devious scheme and blamed me?
My final straw with him was the morning he went through withdrawals. He was covered in sweat and he’s swaying back and forth, and he’s coming closer and closer to me saying “please don’t tell my boss. Please don’t tell anyone.” I told him he was making me uncomfortable and to get the fuck away from me. I took a video of some of his episode and forwarded it to his boss, but no action was taken. The other front desk worker wasn’t much of a reprieve. Nice fellow, but he cornered me and asked me if I was willing to marry his wife for citizenship. I genuinely considered it, but had to turn him down. 

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The other hotel property I worked at had a different vibe entirely.

Besides one of the front desk guys who went on vacation without notifying management and got caught trashing his hotel room where he left needles in the room (I call him Kevin Needles), the staff at this hotel was pretty tame. The breakfast lady bought some weed off of me once and the AGM was a snarky gay dude who was really into video games so I got along fine with the staff.

The guests are where things got shaky at this job.

One day this lady came in and had me print off 200 pages of Facebook posts because she had to go to court the next day over her house. I was a fucking security guard. I helped her, but I was vocally not happy about it. I was like “yeah y’know you old people kill me. You see one young guy and go, ‘oh sure he knows computers.’” The entire process took two hours.

I befriended the lady afterwards, and to my benefit because they were regular guests. On future encounters, the lady found new ways to hold me hostage. One night she brought her son with her and he was the biggest Florida Gators fan you’d ever meet. This man is 50 years old and he’s going on for hours about the Jeep Rubicon and the engine being made out of aluminum for a certain year, and how our state’s football fans blew up his car and fight him for being an obnoxious Gators fan. Real Good ol’ boy.

The guests don’t stop there. I remember this skinny dude who talked like Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers but with a Kentucky accent. This dude chatted my ear off about trucking and then invited me back up to his room. He was carrying a 30 rack of Michelob Ultra and an 8 ball of cocaine that he was doing with his wife and his daughter.

So there I was, coke falling out of my nose having a night in with the family. But this was where the self-awareness kicked in. This isn’t security, and I’d have been fired under any other circumstances.

On my last night at this hotel, I cooked a pizza in the breakfast oven and set off the fire alarm. The whole hotel was evacuated. That still did not get me fired, just temporarily banned from this hotel.

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The third hotel property begins with a bachelor party. The party was full of guys in the weed industry. One of them wanted to shotgun a beer with me and I said, “Hell Yeah!” The concierge told us, “Go outside. I am not having that come down on me.” We complied. Later in the evening, an intoxicated member of their party called the concierge and me fools and the concierge did not like that.
We received several noise complaints about them and had to go up to their room only to find dog shit all over the floor. We removed one of the drunk guys and kept him downstairs with us to end the yelling match. This drunk man began going on about how attractive dolphins are and how dolphins like humans can be gay. This man said, “unfortunately, I’m not gay” and both me and the front desk guy were like what the fuck? He then proceeded to lecture us about ‘the egg’ by Andy Weir.

I swam in the pool on one occasion, and the GM saw it on camera. They weren’t sure who it was or who was on shift to allow me to swim. The concierge did not snitch- he’s a real one. But I still did not get fired!

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Two months later, I got a call, “How would you like your old job back?” Turned out the cameras at the construction site were not as effective as expected. Some odd ten thousand dollars worth of equipment was stolen from the site and they needed security bad. Guess who came back?

At this point in time, however, I was no longer showing up for work. I’d start the shift, or maybe show up late, I’d circle the block, and go about my business. Sometimes I’d be at the gym, sometimes at an AA meeting, one night I was playing a gig less than one block away from the construction site while on the clock. I was never properly caught. My conscience kicked in after I had quit drinking and I quit via text. I have not looked back.

Upon review of this narrative, I’m a bit of the villain in these stories. A thief. A liar. A miscreant. But I don’t believe that I’m the only one.

By law of averages alone, there have to be more. Think of how many like- minded people I met during these stories.

As a society, are we to accept supporting the lifestyles of selfish depravity under no other construct than trust that we will take our jobs seriously? Were there times in which I did some good during these jobs? Yes. There’s good in the worst of us and bad in the best of us.