Robots

Just days after I landed that job at the Sunset, Rudy called me to report to work! I would be a casual. There were so many events in Albuquerque that day that he ran out of members and had to dredge through applications. That is how I worked for one single day for Gary Disco of Disco Display House, which was busy setting up booths for a robotics show at the Albuquerque Convention Center. That was in April 1984, but precisely when? Hmmmm. Let me see. We have Newspapers.com now, and it can pinpoint it exactly. We were there on Thursday, 12 April 1984, to put together the International Personal Robot Congress Exposition, as it was called, or was it the First International Robot Congress? It would run three days, from Friday through Sunday. Gary walked a large group of us around a massive room and, as we approached each display booth, he would point to one or two of us and say, “You, over in this booth.” Our attenuating group approached the booth for Omni magazine. I had no idea that Omni would be there. Gary looked at me and the guy next to me (can’t remember anything about him), and said, “You two, this booth.” Talk about coincidences! I had been researching Caligula, a disastrous film that Penthouse magazine “Presented” and later falsely claimed to have “Produced.” That meant, of course, that I had been researching Penthouse, which meant I had been researching its founder, Bob Guccione, which meant I had also been researching Guccione’s other publication, Omni. Too bizarre.

Marcia Potash was supervising, and I was a bit clumsy, since I was not accustomed to piecing together display booths. Besides, I did not have a conception of what the completed display booth would look like. I pulled out a slab of it from an enormous velvet bag, and it turned out to be an aluminum-painted logo. I started to lean it against something so that I could figure out where it belonged, and Marcia screeched in horror! “Be careful! You’re going to scratch it! Can’t you see what you’re doing?” Yikes! She was right! There was no varnish on it, no protection of any sort, just bare metallic paint on a metallic surface. It would have been helpful if she had warned us of that before, rather than after. Oh well. So typical. That was my first and last mistake that day, and no harm was done. That set her off, though. She decided, from that first moment, that she just did not like me at all, and she treated me as though I were an inept and exceptionally stupid four-year-old. I tried to de-fuse the situation, and worked with far more care than usual. I also tried to chat her up. With a tone of friendly bemusement, I said to her, “I never thought I’d be working for Bob Guccione.” She took umbrage, and screeched out, “And what’s wrong with working for Bob Guccione? He’s a VERY. NICE. MAN!!!!!” Whoah! Hair-triggered. Nope. That wasn’t going to discourage me. I was absolutely determined to make friends with her by day’s end. A little bit later, I mentioned some arcane knowledge I had picked up about Penthouse and Omni, and she melted. She smiled. She was totally calm, completely warm. She was impressed. She gazed at me. “I’m surprised you know that. Not many people know about the Penthouse/Omni connection.” “I thought everybody knew.” “Everybody in New York City knows, but not anywhere else.” So, we got to chatting for a while, and we became friendly. Hooray!

The display booth was up, Marcia was happy, and Gary called us to roll up carpets in another part of the Convention Center. Now, mind you, I am lazy. I do not work out. I am not in good shape. Rarely have I been in good shape. For someone like me to spend two or three hours, nonstop, rolling up carpets that must have been 100 or 200 feet long, and then carrying them away to storage, well, that’s an experience. I think you can imagine what it does to the muscles the next morning. As we were all dismissed at about five o’clock that evening, Gary stood over us as we filed out, and he smilingly picked me out for a compliment: “You’re a remarkably good worker.” Those five and a half words made the whole day worthwhile, and I did not see or hear him say any such thing to anybody else.

I dropped by the Convention Center, I think on Sunday, to see Marcia again, but she was not there. In her place was Brian Gessner, and so we chatted a little bit. He was friendly, but wary. As I would discover later, paranoia was the common thread binding all Penthouse employees. Among other things, I mentioned that I needed some good employment, and he gave me a bit of sage advice: If you want a job, go to California. You won’t find a good job anywhere else. I thought he was right, but I had no idea how to earn enough money to move to California. Just days later, something unexpected happened.