In the spring of 19??, I
was living in Boulder, Colo. I was recently divorced and newly unemployed. I
had been let go, after a week, from an office position because I did not have a
car. They knew this at the interview. They thought it would not be a problem.
Turns out, it was. Pisser was, I’d given up a relatively cushy job as an assistant
manager of a book store. (Remember those? Funnily enough, it was located in a strip
mall along with, amongst others, a travel agents and a Blockbuster. It must be
a wasteland now.) Desperate for work, I took a job doing telephone market
research. You know the sort, those ’phone surveys about, amongst other things, elections
(“If the election was held tomorrow, who would you vote for?”).
That spring turned into one
of the best summers of my life, even though I had no money, no car, and a
pretty crappy living situation (I was rooming with two girls, an Indian girl
who very sweet but boring and a born-again Christian chick who was just boring).
I worked mid-afternoon to nine at night and weighed the least I have ever
weighed in my American life (I am convinced that shift had a lot to do with
that). I casually dated, read a ton, and hung out with some of my co-workers at
bars on the Pearl Street Mall during their late-night happy hours (none of us
could afford to drink any other time). One time, on a day off, I had a date in
one such bar. After the date imploded, I wasn’t ready to go home so I went into
the offices to see if anyone was about to finish a shift and wanted to get a
drink. One girl did, and said, “Yeah, let’s go to the Cellar, it’s Trivia Tuesday.”
The rest, as they say,
is history.
I’d have never
discovered the Pearl Street Cellar if she had not taken me there (no one did,
it was located, um, in a cellar and at the quieter end of the mall and pretty
much everyone who went there had been taken by someone else). My co-worker
introduced me to some of her friends there. One of them was a young man named
J. He was, at the time, the most handsome man I had ever met in real life. We
quickly bonded over our shared Capricornism (is that even a word/thing?) and our
love of the Pittsburgh Steelers (although mine was not as advanced then as it
is now).
I eventually got a “proper”
job but remained close to some co-workers, one of whom introduced me to her neighbor,
T. I became, um, friends with T. who invited me to a party at his house. Also
at this party was JTV, a friend of T.’s and a regular at the Cellar! I know to
most of you this would seem like a wild coincidence but this was in Boulder,
where instead of six, it is just two degrees of separation. JTV had brought
along a friend of his. The prettiest boy alive (yep, that guy).
The rest, as they say,
is history.
So yes, because of this
one job I met some of the most important people in my life. I am still friends with
J. and JTV, and T. and I are Facebook friends (he is married now, to someone
who used to work with another dear friend of mine, PLL - again, Boulder, two
degrees). I continued going to the Cellar in its new incarnation, when it
moved to a street-level location in the middle of the Mall, and I took E. and
D. there and we made it our regular hang-out in another brief but fantastic
time in my life.
So why am I sharing all
this? Because tomorrow, I start working a part-time and (god, I hope) temporary
position at a telephone market research company.
Will the rest, as they say, be history?
