i was out with some friends tonight and we were sharing personal and professional horror stories.
so, in the interest of entertainment and public self-flagellation i’ll share with you a relatively benign horror story.
let’s go back to the beat(no pun intended)in 1985.
i was dj’ing at the beat, a nightclub in portchester, new york.
on weekends it was busy, but i didn’t have the good fortune of dj’ing on weekends, i dj’ed mondays and sometimes wednesdays.
i was paid $25 a shift(if i was lucky), and my hours were from 10pm until 4 a.m(yup, $4 an hour, plus all of the ginger-ale that i could drink).
from 10pm until midnight there would usually be 5 or 6 people in the bar, but from midnight until 4 a.m we were lucky if 3 or more people were hanging out and drinking.
so i would stand in the dj booth and play records to the 3 or 4 drunks who happened to be hanging out and drowning their sorrows.
the dj booth was freezing cold and completely roach infested. oftentimes i would kill a cockroach(pre-vegan days), and within minutes other cockroaches would be eating their deceased brethren.
at least 10 times a night i would either have to brush the cockroaches off of my records or i would have to brush the cockroaches off of the turntables or i would have to brush the cockroaches off of me.
it was pretty common to play a record and see a cockroach or two standing on it, going round and round.
around this same time i had a friend who was working at the beat who was a heroin addict(actually, there was a lot of heroin at the beat, and i remember on a few occasions finding someone nodding out in the toilets)and he would shoot up in the bathroom or in his car and then sit in a chair and just nod out when it was slow.
that’s todays story.
more to come.
moby
