I've hung dry wall, painted houses, popped popcorn at a movie theater, and been a cafeteria worker at college where I changed giant milk containers and filled huge vats of concentrated juice. I also washed dishes, scraped food, and threw away garbage. I would come home at the end of the day sticky and stinking of sour milk and garbage. Big fun. And the girls love it.

The job that probably imprinted itself most on my brain, tho, was working at the Bronx zoo. I was an attendant at the children's zoo, which was my first summer job. Actually, I was the photographer at the children's zoo first. My job consisted of standing for 9 hours in a little shack at the entrance to the children's zoo, taking pictures of children holding a chicken or guinea pig in their lap. These evil little future frat boy date rapists and air headed Brittany clones would be all dressed up for a fun family day at the zoo. There they would run around screaming and crying, pissing their pants and kicking the petting zoo animals, all while mommy and daddy snapped picture after endless picture of their precious little angels who were busy torturing animals or stuffing their gobs with overpriced popcorn and lemonade. (But I'm not bitter.)

Eventually the idea would dawn on them that they wanted an "official" picture of the miracle of their blessed union (usually conceived after much drinking of the consecrated wine and snorting of the blessed "Bolivian Marching Powder" at the holiest of temples: "The Limelight" nightclub on 21st street.) So they'd redirect the screaming tribe towards the photo booth where they'd stand on a line so long the only way to justify it would be if Madonna were snapping the pictures out of her vagina...

CLICK!! Thanks for your patronage! Tell your friends! CLICK!! "Like a virgin..."

The way it was supposed to work was there was a 10-foot space in my little shack where we'd place a kid holding a terrified little animal. Then I'd snap a picture, hand it to the family, collect 3 dollars and they'd go off on their way sighing and loving. Nice dream. The way it actually worked was a little different.

The shack was an empty space with just a chair, a cabinet and a camera. The camera we used was an enormous Polaroid that had to be wheeled around on a platform. It must have been 20 years old the day I started. I'll bet they still use it. It was a cranky son of a bitch and misfires and damaged shots were commonplace. I'd go through 20 boxes of film a day. 20 boxes at 10 shots per (not including the inevitable damaged shots) and photos were 3 bucks apiece (I think.) If you do the math then you'll see that it's an average of about 600 beans a day. That's a lot of money for a young kid to deal with. I tried to keep it all as straight as I could for as long as I could, but I was 14 and temptation and poor math skills were bound to creep in. More on that later.