PNP/1997

Just over fifteen years ago, I got a job at a gas station slash convenience store. This was a place where you could not pay for your gas at the pump. Instead, you had to enter a small store chockfull of salt, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, gambling machines and other addictive items. The business model revolved around selling gasoline at cost and making money from the in-store purchases.

I landed this job on the spot after walking in to inquire about the Help Wanted sign while wearing a t-shirt with a wolf on it. Holly was the manager, and she was really into dogs. The opening was for minimum wage, working four ten-hour overnight shifts. I figured it would allow me to take summer classes at the university during the day without altering my general routine too much. I’d just turned 21, and was still invincible. Besides, it was the only available job around not requiring a vehicle or experience.

I had spent the previous three summers working as a cook at the Saylorville Marina near Polk City, but when the spring semester of 1997 ended, coinciding with the expiration of the last of my college scholarships, I moved out of the dorms and into a two bedroom apartment in downtown Cedar Falls that I was to share with four other roommates. Splitting the rent five ways meant my portion was somewhere around $70 per month. I'd never paid rent before, so I was concerned whether that was cheap enough to allow me to save to pay for my next school semester, which I’d calculated was all I needed to graduate with a double major if I took three summer classes.

Third shift at Petro-N-Provisions (known by everyone as PNP) consisted of eating day-old donuts, drinking pot after pot of coffee, confiscating the fake IDs of underage drunk college kids, stocking the shelves of a walk-in cooler that you had to climb around in like a monkey, jumping off the roof of the building into stacks of empty boxes and setting powdered creamer ablaze- all while blasting hard-core rap out of a boom box. Basically, this job was freaking awesome.

At 8am on the mornings when I didn’t have class, I’d ride DJ's bike (which I had on long-term loan) home from work, eat a bowl of cereal and sleep until 2pm. Then, I’d practice drums non-stop until 8pm, take a bath (the apartment didn’t have a shower) and either head back to work or, if it was a day off, spend the night reading from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. On school days, instead of riding home, I’d sleep for two hours on the couch at the house inhabited by my friends Amy, Tausha, Risa and Brad, which was conveniently located a few doors down from PNP and closer to campus. After classes, I’d eat a slice of pizza, a stuffed baked potato or a veggie bagel with shmear from the Union and read from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman before heading to the Library, where I’d checked out a locker to store books, toiletries and a changes of clothes, to work on homework and read old Downbeat magazine articles before heading either back to work or to Stebs, the live music venue slash bar in Cedar Falls.

One of my roommates was only there two nights a week, and then she traveled back to Des Moines (presumably with a supply of toilet paper as it was constantly disappearing). The others were my closest friends at the time, so I had spent plenty of time in the apartment even before I'd lived there. But it wasn't long before Eric and Annie moved away, and since Erin and I worked opposite shifts, I amused myself by creating morbid vignettes with her Tickle-Me-Elmo doll before I left for work for her to come home to.

I didn’t really end up saving much money that summer, and my parents paid for the final 21 hour credit load that would finish up my college life. It also eliminated sleep entirely, which quickly became unbearable, but luckily around about the time I’d resolved to never eat another donut, a second shift position opened up.

My university barely had three years worth of information to dispel, so that last semester mostly consisted of editing papers I’d already written about books I’d already read. I started working during the day, still forty hours a week but shorter shifts, often alongside Holly, who was generous enough to buy us both lunch every day and let me drive her car to pick it up. Her salary was $200 a week, which I thought at the time was a lot, and still recognize it as enough to be able to buy another’s lunch when they need it.

Most of my usual haunts were also frequented by this girl named Buffy, and she introduced me to some interesting contemporary music and literature. On the day of my graduation, she and I drove to Dubuque so I could play drums as part of a pop trio named Circus Fun. The head of the psychology department had attempted to entice me to attend the graduation ceremony by pointing out I’d get to wear special badges or sashes or whatever for being valedictorian, Magna Cum Laude and whatnot, which acted to make it sound even less appealing than a total waste of time. The head of the philosophy department laughed about not going to his graduation either. Dubuque proved noteworthy in that it was the last of my dates with Buffy and gigs with Circus Fun.