Occupation, or Not

The Blunder Years: Caution, Wet Paint

Nov 14, 2025

Porter Paints assistant manager

After seeing in the new year and new decade, and playing bass in a punk rock band, I found myself leaving it all for Florida. Really long story how I got there, (told in my story/song, North of Wasteland) but I was back with the girlfriend that had convinced me to move to Lexington. We had gotten back together in the spring of 1980, and now she was headed to where her parents lived inland a ways from West Palm Beach with designs on an acting career, and encouraged me to join her. Florida was not my bag, really, and job prospects still were not good anywhere in America, and who was I fooling, Sherri was my only occupation.

After the local papers turned up squat, I went to a job recruiter. The pickings were extremely slim, but they got me a starting management position at a Porter Paint store in Delray Beach, on A1A, just across the street from the ocean. My job to start was to run the register and make up the gallons of paint, and eventually do the books. It was a small operation and there were only three of us in the store. On weekdays, there was a huge rush by the contractors picking up what they needed for their day’s work, and the rest of the day devoted to housewives and small projects. If you go to a Home Depot today with a project in mind, you can show the employee the card and number of what you want, they program it in and let the computer do the rest. Back in 1980, they had the cards and numbers, but the rest was done by hand, and I had to manually squirt a prescribed combination of colors into the gallon of base and put it on the mixer. The real fun was when somebody brought in a sample of something they wanted to match. I had to use my limited experience and intuition to get it close to what they wanted. It was a challenge, but it was really the best part of the job.

I worked six days a week (on Saturday’s we closed at noon), and rode my bike home for lunch every day. You could set your watch to the daily downpour of rain, where the humidity demanded the skies release twenty minutes of water. I wasn’t paid much and had to pay the agency back, so I didn’t save any money, but I was living with my girlfriend and acting in a summer stock theater production of Moliere’s The Miser at South Atlantic University.

Back at the paint store, there are two days that stand out. The first was the busiest of my tenure, the day of an approaching hurricane, and droves of people coming for painters tape to mitigate against window damage. All day long we had the transistor radio on, which would give coordinates for the path of the hurricane. We plotted the hurricane on a map, and you could directly see and predict where this thing was headed. It ended up swinging north. Like the old days of using a road atlas, the tactile experience and problem solving was a thrill. I do love GPS and how it has made life so easy, but I have to think our brains are changing without having to solve things anymore.

My other memory was accidentally spilling an entire five gallon container of white primer into the cavernous trunk of a brand new Cadillac. I tried to clean it up, but made an even bigger mess. I’ll never forget the kindness of the woman who owned the car. I was profusely apologetic and frantic, and was making an even bigger mess. She actually said to not worry, she would take it somewhere to get cleaned. I’m sure she felt sorry for me.

By the end of the summer, I realized that my future was not in Florida. Porter Paints was offering me a raise and my own store to manage in Boca Raton. I was intrigued because Boca had something of a punk scene and a cool record store, but I just couldn’t see my life there. For the first time, I was the one to break up a relationship before getting my heart broken.

Six months. Quit.

My first band—The Pods