Apartment #1
Location: Boston, Mattapan.
From: August 28th 1994 to November 1994.
Housemates: Three Irish security guards, plus an Irish construction worker.
Jobs: Security guard, Construction Worker, and Furniture Mover.

On my first day on the job as a security guard I was assigned to the Boston Garden arena – home to Boston’s basketball team the Boston Celtics. I was luckily enough to be stationed courtside. However, my shift started at 12 am and ended at 8 am, so I never actually got to watch a game. They had just repainted the hallowed court and my job was to make sure that no one broke into the arena in the middle of the night and run all over the court. No one did – at least for the 4 hours of my shift that I actually managed to stay awake. On occasion I would wake up, high on the varnish fumes. I had just finished my undergraduate degree and this was my first day of work in the real world – I was watching paint dry.

Over the next two months I was stationed at the construction site of the The Shawmont Center. This would be the new basketball arena for the Boston Celtics, as they were going to tear down the Boston Garden. I sat at one end of the imposing, gray, cavernous building. My job was to make sure no one walked onto the site. No one ever did. The only person I would see was my fellow security guard. A nice Nigerian guy veering upwards towards seven feet, he would arrive at the same time as me and promptly enclose himself in the workman’s shed, bed himself down, and snooze away the next eight hours.

Very often I would pull a double shift. The boss would call up and ask me to go to a new location because someone didn’t turn up. I would usually do it for the time-and-a-half-pay. However, this meant that by the time I got home and back, I could only squeeze in about three hours sleep. At one point I sat in the Ashmont station after a 6th consecutive double shift. I was waiting for the trolley to take me out to Mattapan and I stared at the small colored tiles on the platform. I was so tired; my mind was beginning to short-circuit. Suddenly the little tiles began to move. The red ones formed into an elephant, it’s large trunk swinging wildly. The green ones became a giraffe, tall and elegant. The yellow formed into a tiger. Soon I had a whole wildlife park before me – all jumping, running, and frolicking together. I snapped out of it with the screech of the trolley.

As September blended through October and into November it got progressively colder on my night shift. During those long nighttime hours, much time was spent reading. Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, by Douglas Coupland, was one notable book. I was at the tail end of the so-called Generation X – a generation that came to adulthood in the late 80s and early 90s. It was a generation that was overshadowed by the Boomer generation. We had too much education, but we had become apathetic and disillusioned with our commercialized culture. The future offered only hopelessness and struggle and we wanted out. Considering Nirvana’s disaffected Smells Like Teen Spirit had been the anthem for my college years, I could identify. While the book’s characters struggled by, I sat in the cold and read on. They worked in the service sector, and over time all their ambition was slowly being drained away.