In 1980 I had a job at an art supply store, “Clyburn’s,” in Baltimore. It was around for years; the owner had died and his wife ran the place. Long closed, it was located on N. Charles St., in the middle of “the cultural corridor.” It didn’t pay much, but was the best job I ever had. It supplied me with money to live and hang out, and left me free to go home and pursue artistic projects.
My job was in the Shipping and Receiving Department, a room in the basement with a side door which opened to the street. My duties consisted of checking in deliveries each day and sending out, via UPS, orders to architects and design firms around the city. Normally all the work was completed in the first three hours of the daily shift. After that came the second part of the job, which was to look busy when the manager came down the steps with an order to be shipped the next day. This was accomplished by various strategies. One was leaving a package half-completed and taking up work on it when we heard the upstairs door creak open. I realize now that the manager, around 35, knew what was up, but he didn’t want to disturb the flow of the job by insisting that we stay busy for the full eight-hour day.
My co-worker was a young guy from Holland named Gekke Naaktgeboren. Though nominally my boss, he and I made the same amount of money, and our jobs were identical. But, as I later learned, he liked having the title. I hadn’t been there long before he clued me into the way things were done at Clyburn’s Shipping and Receiving Department. We got along fine. He was particularly good at imitating The Doobie Brothers’ lead singer Michael McDonald, performing “What a Fool Believes.”
The others who worked there, we were all less than 23, were also artists, most of them students at Maryland Institute. One was a painter named Jack Minter who, a short while later, had a spell of fame because he did a series of works on the travelling Treasures of the Past exhibition that was then in the headlines. He was an easy-going guy in the Don Johnson mold; he always wore Hawaiian shirts and loafers. He had a lot of female artist friends who’d stop by to say hello, maybe buy a paint brush or a sketch pad. This impressed and incited a degree of jealousy in the other workers, for these women were often very beautiful in that art-school-girl kind of way; they knew how to be decorative (bangs and black eye make-up) and provocatively intelligent (carry a copy of The Diaries of Anaïs Nin).
Another guy specialized in metal etching. His name was Richie Solomon and he was a Cohane, the priestly tribe of Israel descended from Aaron. He’d bring in samples of his work, done with an acid process. He thought the people around him were idiots, but liked me because I had read Crime and Punishment. He felt destined for bigger things, personal expositions in major galleries, scholarly conferences dealing with his work, perhaps visiting professorships, and I believe he would’ve achieved greatness if he hadn’t been hit by a car and killed while crossing Biddle St. on the last day of winter in 1980.
There was another employee named Louis, but his was a short-lived tenure. Just 17, he was a political radical. A couple of weeks after he was hired, a customer brought a roll of acetate to the counter. It was priced at $15. The normal selling price was $80. How did it happen? The manager and Mrs. Clyburn went through the aisles. All the prices were marked down, and always at a loss! There was pandemonium in the store, an emergency meeting was called. Who was responsible? Unashamed, Louis stepped forward. He felt the profit margins were too high, so he changed the prices. Artists, he explained, shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant prices to create their works. He was fired.
I learned the manager, Robert, was essentially an indentured servant. His brother had terminal diabetes and Mrs. Clyburn was paying for his medical expenses. Robert was there paying this off little by little each week. His dying brother, Tim, also worked in the store; he wore huge amounts of perfume to mask the rotting smell of his body. After we checked in whatever deliveries arrived that day, we’d take them upstairs to Tim, whose job it was to place them on the shelves.
Another problem occurred when Gekke took a three-month trip back to Holland. In his absence I was named the Boss of the Shipping and Receiving Department. No pay bump, the title was simply transferred. When Gekke came back and learned that now I was his boss, he couldn’t take it. He went to Mrs. Clyburn and said that I wasn’t a good leader and reclaimed his coveted title. The initial magic was gone.