First Job

I got my first paycheck for knocking apart metal shelves with a white rubber mallet.
My first boss provided the mallet, and instructions on how to swing it upward, not downward, in order to disconnect the silver bars from the frame that held them in place.
An uncomplicated job. Six hours a day. All summer.
It was a big bookstore. Closing. Going out of business.
Located in Dinkytown, an enclave next to the University
of Minnesota. Thick with coffee shops and bookstores.
Looking at the blonde bland faces of university students of the time, I was not convinced that learning was happiness. My happiness would be a cheap thrill, like the Mickey Spillane paperbacks my dad littered our home with.

The dry thud of a rubber mallet striking metal, over and over again,
in an empty building, was the sound of my future.
Already flatlined at age sixteen. We were a blue collar family.
My father's advice to me: Just try to stay out of jail.
No family traditions of service and sacrifice. Of education and
shrewd money management. 
Only the story of a great grandfather who immigrated from Trondheim in Norway to Saint Paul in Minnesota, took one look at the gray wintertime slush, said 'to hell with it,' and went straight back to Norway. 

That first paycheck came to sixteen dollars and thirty five cents.
My mother shanghaied half for my account in the Farmers and Mechanics Savings Bank. 
I blew the rest on thick drugstore Cokes, Old Dutch Onion and Garlic Potato Chips, a new bicycle chain for my Schwinn, and Herbie Popnecker comic books. 

When my first job ended in August the boss said I was a good worker. He'd hire me again anytime to knock down shelves.
That really depressed me. 
Because by this time there was an alien inside me chewing on my chest cavity. It wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't tell me what was devouring me and making me miserable.

The alien finally burst free two years later in Florida, at the Winter Quarters of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows. Where I discovered that the odor of Stein's clown white, talcum powder, and sweat, smelled like my forever job.