So after working at Phone Survey, Inc for about a year, I was kind of getting fed up with people getting on my case for calling and disturbing them at home. It seemed like it was just getting worse and worse every day. And it also looked like we were getting fewer and fewer projects, so that meant I was making less and less money. On top of this, we had been told we were supposed to be getting health insurance, but the woman who was supposed to be providing it for us wouldn’t tell us when that was supposed to kick in. (And this was after we had filled out the insurance forms and turned them in.)
I never told my girlfriend Bez that I wanted to get another job, but she had a friend who worked as a bartender at a hotel. They had a nightclub and they were looking for a new DJ. She knew I used to be a radio DJ and recommended me for the job. It wasn't radio, but I would be able to get back to playing music again, even if it was going to be just a single room of people.
I went over to the hotel to meet the club manager, whose name was Tird. It was the Doubletree Inn in Aurora. The name of the nightclub was F. Scott's. (The hotel had a restaurant next door called "Fitzgerald's.") It was a rather upscale nightclub. When I first got there, I found Tird at the DJ booth spinning records. He appeared to be maybe five years older than me. When I went up to him, he put on a cassette tape that began with the song "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman" by Aretha Franklin. We went over to a booth and talked. I told him about my experience as a radio DJ and Music Director with KZZO-FM in Clovis, NM. I said that even though I didn't work in radio at the time, I still kept up with the latest happenings in the music world and had a good ear for what people like to hear.
He had me get up and DJ for about a half hour. There were just a few people in the club, and no one was there to dance. I looked through their library. They had a good selection of music, but there was nothing current. The only most recent song they had was "She Drives Me Crazy" by the Fine Young Cannibals. I picked out a few songs and played them. Then he asked me to do a mix from Billy Ocean's "Carribean Queen" into Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean." I didn't realize it, but the two songs actually sequed quite nicely. After that, this customer came up, gave me two dollars and asked me to play a certain song. Even though the club didn't have that big a library, they did have it organized and I was able to quickly find the song. After I played it, Tird put on another tape and we continued talking.
The main marketing for the club was aimed at the guests. If people from out of town were looking for a little night life, they were encouraged to come down to the club and check it out. That way, they wouldn't adventure outside the hotel and spend their drink money elsewhere. Tird told me he had a vision for the club that it could be turned into a hotspot for young people to come to. (I don't know how he was expecting to do that with the music library they had, but I didn't tell him that.) He said he would hire me and pay me $8 an hour. I was rather thrilled to hear that. I tried to give him the $2 the customer gave me, but Tird said I could keep that. SCORE!
I came in and trained. One of the first things Tird told me was that I was going to be a contract employee, so they were just going to pay me not as an employee of the Doubletree Inn, but as a contractor. I didn't really know what that meant. I was hired to replace someone who recently quit. The guy who trained me told me he was about to move out of town, so he would also be quitting soon. He told me that one of the problems with being a DJ at F. Scott's was that the DJ booth appeared to be an afterthought. Other clubs put the booth way in the back. Here, they put it next to the dance floor in the middle of one of the seating sections. This meant that customers could come up to us from all sides to request songs. And there was a problem with people coming up, reaching over and seeing what records we had. He was right. This was an issue.
Tird had me show up an hour before we opened at 4pm to help set up the club. This involved blowing up the balloons for Happy Hour. He wanted balloons all over the club every single day. I told him I wasn't really good with tying balloons and that I was one of those people who couldn't stand the squeaking. He said he didn't care and that it was part of my job. So I figured out how to tie the balloons.
Because I was "technically" an employee of the hotel, I was able to take advantage of the free meals they had in the employee cafeteria. They would put out a few items on the steam tables. It was pretty good, but I started noticing that most of the food tasted like rubber. I couldn't figure out why they would serve us food that tasted like that. Then I realized that what I was tasting was the latex residue on my hands from tying the balloons! I started thoroughly washing my hands after doing the balloons, but no matter how much soap I used or how hard I scrubbed, I couldn't get rid of all the residue. I had to resort to eating everything, including hot dogs and sandwiches, with a knife and fork. It was always nice when we ran out of helium or balloons.
I also had an issue surrounding the song "Tender Love" by the Force MDs. I didn't have a problem with the song. It was a magic song. It never failed to get romantic couples out on the floor. After that, you could build up the tempo and have a lot of people enjoying the music that followed and stay on the floor. When I first started working at the club, I played it at least once a night. However, when the guy who trained me left, I couldn't find that record. HE TOOK IT!
Weeknights were split up into two sections. We had Happy Hour from 4pm to 7pm. During this time, I would play an AOR and Pop-style format. After 7pm, we turned into a dance club. We were typically busiest on Friday and Saturday nights. One a month, there was an older adults singles group that would have a get-together on a Saturday night. Those nights were REALLY packed and everybody seemed to be having a good time. It was great when there were a lot of people out on the floor. And it stunk when no one was dancing.
My first couple of weeks, I thought I was doing a good job. But one day, Tird came up and talked to me and started telling me how to DJ. He was giving me certain "rules" I needed to play the records. This drove me out of my mind. It was similar to my experience with Crad, in which I thought I knew what I was doing, but he had different ideas and having to follow his arbitrary directions threw my head in a tizzy and I was always second-guessing myself. After that, I just never felt like I was doing things right.
A problem we encountered was that we had no way of getting new music in without purchasing it. After about a month of playing the same stuff over and over, I went out and bought some new records. I was expecting to get reimbursed for those. (A funny thing was that I tried to buy Milli Vanilli's album, which was really hot at the time. It would have saved me from buying a lot of separate songs. However, the vinyl version was one of the first casualties of the mainstream drive to CD. I couldn't find a vinyl copy of the album anywhere!)
Then Tird tried to spice things up by bringing in a friend he had worked with before at a theme restaurant. This guy had a girlfriend and she had a friend. They would come out and do dance routines on the floor. They created some excitement, but no one was coming to our club just to see them.
One night, this guy came up and introduced himself to me. He turned out to be the guy I replaced. He told me he was coming back to work at the club. I thought it was a good thing because I had been the only DJ for the past couple of months and having to work six nights a week was really wearing me down. My schedule changed somewhat. I still worked Saturday nights, but he worked Friday nights and a couple of other days. We had a couple of days in which I would work the Happy Hour and he would work the night.
This went on for about a week. One night, as I was leaving after working Happy Hour, Tird was waiting in the booth closest to the door where I usually left. He said, "Before you go, sit down. I need to talk to you." I said, "Uh-oh." He went into this spiel about how the club wasn't happening as he had anticipated and he had to let me go. (Of course, this didn't make sense. He should have laid off the guy I replaced. In fact, he shouldn't have even hired him back.) He said he was also going to have to let the dancers go, blah, blah, blah.
I don't know why I expected a nightclub to be any different than a radio station. He told me to show back up the next day to collect my final paycheck. When I arrived and was about to enter the club, I heard a song on the PA system that we didn't have in the library. It was Yello's "Oh, Yeah." I went into the club. There was somebody in the DJ booth. HE WAS AUDITIONING FOR TIRD! I just went in and got my check from Tird. As I was leaving, the DJ sequed into Depeche Mode's "Strangelove." I thought, "Yeah, that's going to make this place a real hip joint when your DJ's playing stuff that's THREE YEARS OLD!"
While I worked there, I had a really big crush on this one female bartender. Her name was Gaz. She was tall and thin and had short blonde hair. She had a great smile and I mostly admired her from afar. We did get to talk a few times, but since I was involved with Bez, I couldn't really pursue anything.
One of the bad things was that I had given Tird the receipts for the records, expecting to be reimbursed. He got a note from the accounting office that said they needed to know which records I bought before they would give me my money back. I didn't bother to do that after I got laid off because I figured they wouldn't give the money to someone who no longer worked there.
A few months later, I got a message from Tird on my answering machine. He said he wanted me to call him. I thought maybe he wanted me to work there again. I decided to call him just to tell him no. When I called, he just asked for my Social Security number. Not long after that, I got a 1099-MISC in the mail. It wasn't a W-2, so I didn't know what to do with it. I just did my 1040-EZ with the W-2s I did receive and didn't even include the F. Scott's money as income.
About 18 months after I was let go, I decided to visit the club to see if anything had changed. I went on a Saturday night. As it happened, it was the night that singles group got together, so there were a lot of people in the club. I sat down at a booth, ordered a soda and watched things for a few minutes. I didn't recognize anyone from when I used to work there. Then, I saw someone who looked like Gaz at the bar. Her hair was longer and curly. I went right up to the bar to get a closer look. When I used to work at F. Scott's, all the bartenders had nametags. I guess they didn't have that requirement anymore because she wasn't wearing one. Since it was really loud, I yelled at her: "Gaz!" She looked up. "Hi, I'm Fayd! I used to work here! Do you remember me?" She remembered. She asked what I was up to. I told her I was the Assistant Manager at the Mayan Theatre. She said she knew my boss, the House Manager. They were working together on some charity project. She told me what she had been up to, but I don't remember what she said.
Even though I was single at the time, I still didn't have the guts to ask her out. I was always certain she had a boyfriend. After I was finished talking to her, the DJ was playing "Carribean Queen." The next song was, you guessed it, "Billie Jean." Yep, some things never change.
I actually felt like going up to the DJ booth and taking the records I bought, but never got reimbursed for. But I really didn't want to cause a scene.
As I was leaving the club, I walked past Fitzgerald's. Tird was at the host podium. My hair was much longer and I was dressed rather raggedly, so I hoped he wouldn't notice me, but he did. He called out, "Hey!" We talked a little bit. I told him where I was working now, but I can't imagine he really cared what happened to me. I left and never set foot at the Doubletree again.
That 1099-MISC caused problems for me in 1993. I got a notice from the IRS that I owed $600. I wasn't surprised and didn't fight it. I agreed to pay $200 a month for three months. However, after losing the job I had at the time, I had to switch the payments to $50 a month. Because I owed on my taxes the next year, it took me two years to pay off the IRS.
I found out later that I could have significantly reduced the money I owed the IRS by doing an amended return with a Schedule C and claiming certain expenses, like the cost of those records and the driving I did running errands. But that probably would have only reduced the amount by about $50. I would have had to pay someone to do that return and it would have cost more than $50.
They still have the nightclub at the DoubleTree Inn, but it's now called "Fitzgerald's Pub." I can't really tell from the pictures, but they started a microbrewery there and appear to have gotten rid of the dance floor and the DJ booth.
Gaz is now an independent marketing consultant in the Denver Metropolitan area AND Princeton, NJ. (You've got to be REALLY good at it to cover TWO large markets.) She used to work for Johnson and Johnson. Her profile photo still shows that great smile that I remember.
I don't remember Tird's last name, so I have no idea what happened to him. I can only imagine he wound up managing a Tim Horton's. Otherwise, I don't really care what happened to him.
I never worked in another nightclub again.
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