My roommate Chad and I met forty years ago in a Women’s Studies class at the University of South Florida. Post-college we went our separate ways, lost touch for a good stretch, and reconnected a decade or so ago. Not long after he moved to Austin. We’re coming up on a year as roommates, a situation I never would have guessed might happen back when we were teenagers digging into gender studies.
Chad has produced a lot of videos for me. In fact he was the one who encouraged me to transition from page to screen several years ago. Not yet tuned into TikTok, not even really tuned into YouTube, my earliest videos are adorably long, including some in which I simply sit still and read my work. For, like, fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. When I finally got around to asking him for pointers on how to better catch up with the times, and when he told me some of the most viral videos are less than a minute, I thought that was ridiculous. Impossible! But the information stuck. I’m pretty sure the most popular video I ever posted was a one-minute TikTok shot immediately prior to the midterm elections, during which I removed quite a few articles of clothing in an attempt to convince people to vote Greg Abbott’s pathetic ass out of office.
Was it profound? Hardly. Was it good silly fun? Absolutely.
Most evenings Chad and I sit around for a half-hour or so and catch up on each other’s days. Chad is extremely patient with me (or else extraordinarily patient in disguising his boredom) anytime I launch into a story during which I digress no fewer than twenty times. I’ve been aware of this conversational “style” of mine for a long time. Before I got the fancy ADHD diagnosis, I referred to it as verbal hyperlinking. I’ll get one and a half sentences into some tale and then some word I’ve said acts like a squirrel and the distraction sends me off on another subplot. Used to be I could almost always, eventually, wind up back at my original point. That skill is lessening as my brain ages. No matter, journey vs. destination and all that, I enjoy a lot of the memories and I’m grateful for a listener who not only can follow along but who is familiar with a lot of the characters that populate these tales.
An added layer of entertainment comes in the form of tripping myself up as I consider the logistics of whatever story I’m telling. So, for example, recently when I was asking him if he remembered when I had a crush on Fuckeye Jones, lead singer of the Impotent Sea Snakes, a Tampa band that took more than a little inspiration from the New York Dolls, I stopped myself several times. “Wait, how did I ever even manage to contact him?” I ask out loud. All I had was a dorm phone—ONE PHONE FOR THIRTY WOMEN— and no answering machine and I was calling his landline also with no answering machine.
Toward this end, I went down another rabbit hole recently, recalling for my captive audience my early days in Austin. The original topic was a light discussion about Chatbot, which I have yet to explore. The hyperlink I grabbed onto was the tale of how, long before there was Chatbot, there was SpikeBot.
My kid wasn’t yet one. His father was struggling to find a job. I was breastfeeding which, even with pumping, restricted my schedule. Even if I had been interested in finding him daycare (I was not) so that I might go out to work, there was no way I could afford such a luxury.
Ever industrious and a nascent entrepreneur, I opened a little business called S&M, Ink. The S was for my name, the M for my kid’s father. I printed up flyers which featured a pair of hands bound together and the tagline: “In a bind?” and walked around campus handing them out. For a small fee I offered to tutor students and coach them in writing term papers. I imagined my son’s father would help me (he, too, had an English degree) though in the end he got a part time campus job and it fell to me to deal with clients.
Though I paid lip service to the idea that I would not be actually writing these papers, just coaching, it didn’t take long for me to recognize that the market—kids too busy attending sports events and frat parties—did not want to be coached. They wanted to hand me a topic and a wad of cash and come back later to retrieve the “product.”
Here I must hyperlink (literally) to a piece I wrote for Texas Monthly about this experience. You can read the piece right here and I encourage you to do so. Because, gosh I hope this doesn’t sound like bragging, it’s a fine, fine piece. It’s funny and has held up nicely in the 29 years since I wrote it. This pleases me very much. I don’t often go back and read my past work and I think part of the reason is I’m afraid I won’t like it.
In the piece I describe, among other things, how my greatest challenge was making the papers just dumb enough to avoid suspicion. Once I—who grew up Catholic—got a B+ for writing a first person essay for a coed about the trials of growing up Jewish. One of the hardest assignments was writing about the history of women in Texas politics. I was so enthused about this that I couldn’t help but write beautifully. But then, considering the student I was working for was a teenage dude from the Midwest, I had to go back in and dampen the whole thing. And (see the screenshot below) I explained how I reached a point where I could write term papers on anything at all, including Dr. Seuss books.
I also must hyperlink (metaphorically) to a memory that came to me as I described the tale to Patient Chad. One thing about this business of mine, which existed pre-Internet, is that I did not work on a computer. I worked on a weird little word processor with a very, very distinct dot-matrix font. So when I wrote five papers for one class, I urged all of those students to have their papers re-typed in a more traditional format, lest the professor become suspicious. This, in turn, reminded me that back when I got to Austin, there was a business just off of the drag called Martha Ziveley Typing. Seriously! I’m not *that* old and yet I was alive (and an adult) when brick and mortar typing services were still a thing. Call me an easy audience, but this just cracks me up.
And yet another hyperlink comes with the memory of how I plotted, with absolutely zero success, to go viral, before going viral was a thing, once that Texas Monthly article came out. A Wall Street Journal reporter who’d read the piece somehow managed to track me down in New Jersey, where I was visiting my family. I encourage you to stop and think about this determined reporter who could not Google me (no Google then) and yet somehow managed to find me.
The reporter wanted to know if there had been an outraged response to the article in which I freely admitted I helped college students cheat their way to a degree, an admission I made without remorse. I replied that I’d not heard of any backlash. But then, after the call, imagining a little illustration of me above the fold in WSJ, eager for attention, I devised a plan on the spot.
I worked that landline in NJ and tracked down a phone number for the dean of UT. I made contact with his admin assistant and, feigning being a concerned parent who’d just read the article, I demanded to know what the dean thought. As I recall, at some point I slipped out of my role and briefly gave enough of a clue to suggest I wasn’t actually a parent.
Not that that seemed to matter. The admin assistant seemed bored at best. She said no one had seen the article and her tone strongly implied no one cared. So much for making a splash at WSJ.
I didn’t stay in business long. Not because I got caught. But because I grew weary. I also found other work, part time gigs at Magnolia Cafe and Esther’s Follies, augmented by ample freelance assignments from the Austin Chronicle and, when I was lucky, national assignments. My students, the regulars, panicked. They offered to pay me more. One of them wanted me to move to Chicago with him to help him get through grad school. He said his parents would pay me handsomely. No thanks.
So do I regret this gig? I regret only not knowing my true value at the time and thus grossly undercharging those kids who, as you might expect, mostly fell in the category of white, privileged and extremely wealthy. They knew and I knew that no matter how they did at university, odds were extremely high they would make it out in the world, buoyed by family wealth and connections.
I do, once every ten years or so, imagine what would happen if I contacted them and reminded them of our fleeting relationships and asked if they might want to compensate me for the hard work that I failed to be fairly compensated for. I imagine now, if I did such a thing and they responded at all, they would lean heavily on Chatbot to compose their reply.
I’ve got no heavy conclusion for you here. The times they really are a’changing. Is Chatbot really going to change the face of, well, pretty much everything? I’m so old the only thing that comes to mind is that I can easily remember the advent of personal calculators and the math class panic that ensued. We were banned from bringing such devices into the classroom, the suggestion being computers are used for cheating. Now computers are everywhere and no big deal. Maybe twenty years from now Chatbot will be the source of silly nostalgia, ultimately as relevant as fax machines and CDs. Maybe it will prove to be the final evil that destroys us all. I’m thinking I’ll be far too old by then to be concerned. I just hope that if I wind up needing to hustle for dough, if I resume ghostwriting to feed myself, I will be able to use some artificial intelligence app to make it all so much faster and easier than it once was.
NOTES:
*I do love a good conversation. Do tell in the comments—what are some of the less savory jobs you’ve taken to support yourself?
*The ranch is BEAUTIFUL right now. If you want a weekend getaway or a place to host a party, just holler.
*The fledgling Tiny T Tiny Flea Market continues to grow. The next one is April 22nd. If you want to be a vendor, drop me a line.
*Please consider subscribing to my substack for $7 per month. Helps me feed all the animals. If you’re not up for a monthly contribution, you can throw a tip in the tip jar on venmo @spike-gillespie. And it also helps when you share my writing with your friends—a totally free way to give an old crone a hand.
Thanks for reading.
This read was totally worth not eking out another $50 this morning.