When I Was A Young Boy

Early in life I didn't really consider the nature of work so much as I just wanted a job--any job!--so that I could make a few bucks. I remember wanting 'things.' I remember desire and how desire made work and getting a job a virtual necessity. Work, for me--as for so many others--became a means for satisfying those desires that spoke to me in private.

I wanted a new bicycle. I wanted to be able to purchase clothes that I wanted--above and beyond what my parents could (or would) spend. I wanted--later on--drugs, alcohol, a car, new music, a guitar, an amplifier.

For several years in my teens--throughout my adolescence--that is the way it worked. I worked whatever job I could get merely for the pleasure of being able to feed those desires. Work was the means by which I could satisfy them. Apart from a life of crime I would have to delover papers and mow lawns and rake leaves and baby-sit the neighbourhood children. Apart from a life of crime and theft I would have to earn the right to satify desire. I was on my way into the adult world. Transitioning.

There was nothing selective about my early experiences with work. I was certainly not an idealist. Nor had Marx entered my consciousness except as a passing reference mentioned in World HIstory class at school. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I just wanted to do anything so as to make money... so as to satisfy desire. Fulfilling desire was the end. Any means would do.

I was fortunate, I suppose, in that I was able to secure some relatively innocuous work, making a little money, satisfying those teen-age desires. Work was, at that time, not something that I sought to derive meaning from. More meaning and significance came from relationships to and with friends. Work was just something that we all did on the side so that we could go out on a Friday night and cruise the backroads drinking, smoking, and sexing. Work gave us freedom to explore the often illicit nature of our burgeoning desires.

For instance, if I had enough money to purchase and support a car (gas, insurance, maintenance) then I could perhaps convince one of the young ladies to join me on a Saturday night. We could go to the dance in Ithaca. We could then take the backway home. We could then park down off the road a ways on one of the quiet two tracks that led back into a cornfield. We could then move our way to the proverbial 'backseat' and explore the sensual nature of each other's bodies. We could find out what our desires meant. We could discover together---her and I--what it was like to be free to follow the avenue of desire. And it was work--that often dirty word to teenagers all across the world--that made it possible. For without work we would be traveling back and forth to the dance in one of parent's cars. We would have been one of the kids who had to wait for their older sister to come and pick us up at midnight. We would have left the nature of our desires unknown. We would not have known the touch of another's skin, the taste of another's lips, the smell you can only gather as you move along the sensitive slope of another's neck.

Work opened up so many avenues by which I could explore sex and sexuality--with both positive and negative consequences. I could purchase clothes to make myself appear more stylish to the ladies. I could buy my way into a 'hip' self who would attract attention not by who he was, as much as by what kinds of surfaces I could afford. And it was all, in a manner of speaking, an exploration. I was naive and innocent in the way that many of us were. I was just going along with the crowd doing what I thought was expected of me. I had the same needs for attention. I had the same craving to be noticed... to be special.. to be seen... to be wanted... to be desired.

And not until today, have I realized how work was the primary means by which I sought to make myself more 'desirable to the ladies.' Not unlike the diligent little man-bird who builds a nest in the hope of it being satisfactory to the interests and intents of the lady-bird, I, too, busted my ass to try and get uhm... lucky. Even if 'getting lucky' back then was to just cop a feel. Translation: 2nd base.

I