Cleaned myself: 0
Monkey see, monkey do: 0.5
Tics: 0
Believe in God? N, ridiculous.
YTLH: 0
So I am to have a job. Roger Hunter has conspired with my father to trap me using the ploy that it’s not a proper job. It is something to keep me occupied and in funds until something more appropriate comes along. Their Ace being to say that new positions are more easily found when you’re already in a job, so that when the right one comes along I can make of this one with Roger whatever I wish to help secure it.
I knew that they had me when they attached a salary – something I’ve not experienced for some time now. The package on offer is two thousand per month cash, as expenses, no deductions, and that the deal that will be declared to the tax man is that I am on 10% of Roger’s take whenever I have a hand in selling a car. The interesting aspect of it all is that I will actually receive the 10% in addition to the expenses. I haven’t accepted yet even though I am only three more mistakes like the one I made on Rafa away from having to take whatever is offered to me.
Instead of responding to the offer I ask what the job will entail and Roger says, ‘promotions.’
I wonder whether that means sales, marketing, PR or advertising? And he and my father chorus, ‘all of them.’ They roll their eyes at each other as if I don’t get that I am to write my own job spec – they not knowing what it is they’re offering me, and me being the expert.
‘Peter, who used to put all the adverts in the local paper, retired before Christmas,’ Roger tells me, as if that says everything that needs to be known about the position he’s offering.
You might also wonder, as do I, how I come to be here. How I come to be in the position where I need to accept an absurd job from an idiot, when everyone I know in the generation above me believes that I have the world at my feet, and everyone I know of my age already has a proper job. So do I.
I mean, if I’d bothered to get an intern’s job when I was at college, like everyone else did, I’d be on my way by now. I could have done anything, a tea-boy or a runner on set in a production company making films and TV programmes. I could have stuck out the hard years on no money when it wouldn’t have made any difference to me, and then started to work my way up the ladder. Who knows where I’d be now?
But what did I do? I waited, not sure, not wanting to play my hand too early, determined to make a good choice, and instead I made a series of bad choices. And then I had my rent to make, then I had to take a job that paid, and then, and then … until one day, realising that I was stuck on a merry-go-round of low end temporary jobs that would never go anywhere, I plucked up the courage to ask my father to fund the internship at something approximating to what I wanted to do. About three years too late. I don’t even like advertising; it’s just the acceptable face of careers, that’s all. I want to be making programmes and films, just as loads of other people like me who got their shit together quicker, are doing right now.
Imagine that, I would have been on set with other people like me. They’d have recognised the type, and encouraged him. I’d have been given opportunities. I’d have met all sorts of people of influence, and because I liked what I was doing, and good at it, I’d have got on. I could have met people. Real people, like Julia Louis Dreyfus. I could be her partner now, me the producer, director, writer, whatever. She acting in my productions, us two co-creating new projects. I wouldn’t be sitting through wall to wall carpeted New Year’s Eve dinners for the aged, listening to job offers to work in a garage forecourt; I’d be in our Malibu Beach House waiting to see in the New Year with a jug of mimosa followed by an hour of yoga. Then maybe a yoghurt.
Plus, I can use Roger’s London flat when I need it.
Dickie White's Diary 