PriorBlog

Here is an odd series of coincidences, or at least, odd to me.  A friend of mine, the eminent webdesigner Michael Borum, recently got a job at Oxfam.  When I heard about this I was reminded of a person I used to know named Noel Duncan, who worked there a while back, so I wrote to Borum today to see if he had met him, but no dice.

Later on I was thinking about a story from the summer of 1993.  Jeff Gagne (aka “The Whackmaster,” “Gagoo,” “The King,” “Dr. Gaggles,” “Gagnification”) and I were working as temps for Tower Records, where our job was to build cd racks.  This was back in the day when CD’s had gone from coming in a cardboard box to not coming in a cardboard box, and the change required a wholesale reshelving of the Tower stores in Massachusetts.  My dream was that someday when I brought Hazel into a Tower Records, I could point to the racks and say to her, “You see those CD racks there?  Do you know who built those racks?  Your daddy did, that’s who.”  But Tower went bankrupt about a year ago.

Anyhow, that summer, Gagne and I, along with other assorted flakes and misfits, toiled away with key wrenches and prefab wood, setting up racks and goofing off.  We did Burlington, we did Cambridge, and finally, we did overnights at the Newbury Street location.  It was a pretty boring job, and everyone was punch drunk with sleep deprivation.  For the purposes of this story, I need to introduce you to two of our fellow “rack rats.”

First, there was Eager Guy Whose Name I Forget (hereafter known as “Egon”).  This guy was really into esprit de corps, if that’s how you spell it.  He really took to the term “rack rats,” in fact, he may well have invented it.  While everybody else was sleepwalking through the night, he would take time at least once an hour to smile, whip his fist in the air and exclaim, “Rack Rats!” or “Proud to be a Rack Rat!”

There other guy I remember a little better, his name was Jay, and he was in a band called Super Model that always played out with another band called Space Humpin 19.99.  He had a very dry sense of humor, which made the job a lot easier to deal with.  I wish I could remember his jokes, but this was 13 years ago.  Plus his humor invoved a lot of kinesics, so even if I could remember them, they would suck coming from me. 

One early morning, while Jay was in the bathroom stall, he decided to do a promote his band.  Taking a sharpie, he created a giant swirling tag for Super Model and Space Humpin on the inside of the door.  I can’t recall with any certainty, but I think that Jay was a student at one of the art schools, and this tag of his, very recognizable, could be found throughout the hipper parts of Boston and Cambridge circa 92-94.

Unbeknownst to Jay, Egon had also decided to tag the bathroom stall.  You had to look hard to find it, but surreptitiously scribbled below the toilet paper roll in number two pencil were the tiny words “Rack Rats.”

There was this guy there who we rarely saw, who had something close to a glam rocker’s hairstyle.  We were told he was some type of higher up.  He was unfriendly, and didn’t think too highly of the Rack Rats.  It seemed as though he had a permanent scowl on his face.  A former Rack Rat had been caught stealing CDs earlier in the summer, and this only fueled his flame.  I think he hated us all from the get go.  His name might have been Darrel, but for all I know that might have been the name of the guy who looked vaguely like Bob Seger, who was responsible for driving us back and forth to Burlington and stuff.  That guy was actually pretty nice, but let’s just say for the purposes of this story that the first guy was Darrel.  When Darrel saw the graffiti in the bathroom stall, he hit the roof.  That night, when the Rack Rats arrived at work (truth be told, I wasn’t there that day, but Jay told me the story [and told it better than me, so if you see him, you can bug him about it]) Darrel had us all lined up and began his interrogation.

“WHO’S RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GRAFFITI IN THE BATHROOM STALL?”

You can imagine the fear and trembling overtaking Jay at this moment.  See you later, job.

“WHO’S EVER RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GRAFFITI IN THE BATHROOM STALL, STEP FORWARD OR YOU’RE ALL FIRED!”

As Jay described it, just as he was lifting his leg to step meekly forward, Egon bravely jumped forward, and with his eyes filled with tears admitted that he was the one responsible for the graffiti.  Darrel fired him on the spot kicked him out of the store for good.  That was the last anyone ever saw of Egon.  He had no idea that Darrel was most likely refering to the Super Model Space Humpin graffiti.   It wasn’t until a few days later, when the toilet paper ran out, that one of the Rack Rats who had just taken a dump noticed Egon’s tiny contribution to the stall.

For some reason I wanted to bother my co-workers with this story today, but I thought it would really bore the shit out of them, and so I did my best to keep quiet with it.  But, I was curious to see if there was any information about Jay’s old band on the web.  Super Model is too common a term to get anything from google, and Space Humpin 19.99 only returned one link.  I guess some deejay on WMBR has a website called drivingthedeathcar.com.  He played a song in 2001 called Space Humpin 19.99 by a band Lifter Puller.  I went to the guy’s home page and noticed that the site was named for James Dean’s car accident in 1955.  There was even a little picture of the wreckage.  When I first saw the picture I notice a young male figure walking in front of the car, who I, in a second of confusion, thought was James Dean. 

It reminded me of these lines from a Frank O’Hara poem about James Dean:

“Your name is fading from all but a few marquees, the big red
calling-card of your own death. And there’s a rumor that you live
hideously maimed and hidden by a conscientious studio.”

The first time I read them I was really impressed with them, so much so that I showed them to Noel Duncan, the Oxfam guy mentioned above.  I was vaguely creeped out by it, the notion of a fading marquee inserted into my own mind, when my memories, more and more propped up by google searches, fade as well, when all that remains is a single link.

Sniff sniff.

But one thing I will never forget…

RACK RATS!!