I’ve always wanted to be up on stage, being applauded, rather than in the audience, applauding, and have consequently made a great many decisions based on what the heart wanted rather than what the head said was feasible. As a teenager, I didn’t allow my uncle to mentor me, as he’d read that his idol, Thomas Wolfe, had mentored young writers because I was too intent on a career as a professional athlete. Never mind that my adoration of sports never came close to compensating for the fact that I played them dreadfully. Then I saw A Hard Day’s Night and decided I wanted to be the Beatles, even though my musical aptitude at the time was ltitle greater than my athletic aptitude.
When it became ever more excruciatingly apparent in the late 1970s that.I wasn’t likely to regain my earlier (wholly unwarranted) prominence as a writer, I turned to graphic design, in which I had reason to beileve I had real aptitude. Had I not, as a 17-year-old Santa Monica High School inmate, won a hideous senior sweater that to this day I’ve never worn by designing its logo? In junior high school, I’d been comically, disastrously inept in wood, metal, and auto shops, but had enjoyed every second of print shop. As I saw it, the world was full of horrid graphic design, but I, by gum, would put things right.
I talked the proprietor of one of LA’s leading New Wave boutiques, the Village Mews, to let me design a catalogue for him, and felt for the month and half the job required as though I’d died and gone to Heaven, as I did again a dozen years later when I bought my first Macintosh with Quark XPress desktop publishing software. Purest bliss! That first day with Quark, I literally forgot to eat or drink or pee. I was The Wind in the Willows’ Mr. Toad at the moment he first glimpsed a motorcar.
My first proper design job was at Destiny Telecomm (I thought the doubled M was a nice touch!), a pyramid scheme in the East (San Francisco) Bay run by a cadre of sanctimonious Christians who’d apparently missed the bit in the Bible about the rich not getting into Heaven. When I signed on, their signature product was phone cards that enabled the bearer to do something or other. Over the course of a week they jettisoned the phone cards, and took to selling skincare products and salad dressings. (One of my colleagues theorised they were the same thing, in different bottles.)
Mama, can we have some of that delicious Destiny Telecomm ranch dressing on our crudites tonight?
The boss was a hyperneurotic, tennis ball-shaped little gay fellow who played the accordion at the company’s big Xmas party and believed that creating futuristic landscapes in a called KPT Bryce attested. vividly to his creativity. My immediate overseer was a hyperactive Christian who looked exactly like Homer Simpson, and whose saving grace was that you could tease him, except not about abortion, and — can you guess? — tease him I did. He’d forgotten more about Photoshop than I’ve yet to learn, all these years later, and was a talented sketcher, but a horrid designer. There was a luridly (and artificially) blond young female hipster, the poster girl for depression, iirrevocably morose. I actually enjoyed the idea of coming to work and seeing the pair of them. There’s something uniquely gratifying about making someone as staunchly morose as Andrea laugh. In that sense, it was the best job I ever had.
But then lots of new suckers gave the company money, and the over-men’s-fragranced pastor’s son who ran the show encouraged the little fat accordionist to hire lots more designers, only one of them even a little bit talented. Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, and not nearly enough work to keep everyone busy. The obvious solution was another hire — a black guy from actual Oakland who had the Christians-in-charge eating out of his hand within about 48 hours. He would invite one of them to come down to the graphics room to confer about something he was working on, and show them how to draw a straight line in Adobe Illustrator. He would shake his head in awe and say, ‘I think you’ve really got a knack for this stuff.” You should have seen their faces! One morning, I heard one of them proudly confide to another, “Do you know what Dre called me yesterday? ‘Homey’!” It was hilairous, and a little nauseating.
The one guy with real talent was a Motley Crue fan from Taiwan. He was so good that he inspired me to get a lot better, quick. We went to lunch together, and he ordered in Mandarin.
One afternoon I was openly exasperated with the little know-nothing nincompoop the fat accordionist had appointed Studio Manager. (There wasn’t enough work to keep two designers busy, but we had seven designers and a Studio Manager to oversee ‘em.) I was avidly urged to find employment elsewhere, and began freelancing for Chris Isaak’s girlfriend’s design talent agency. That ended in tears too, but you may like some of the things I’ve designed since this past autumn for Acerbia Designs.
A couple of days after I left, Destiny Telcomm, with two M’s, was busted for being a pyramid scheme. Where your Christ-child now, spawn-of-the-pastor?
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