The Bank Job

The 1980s were the heyday of slacker Day Jobs. This was one of mine.

A version of this story was performed at the Porchlight Storytelling series in San Francisco.

In the 1980s, before technology gobbled up the soul of San Francisco, the primary industries were advertising, finance, real estate, and hordes of young slacker Bohemians. A two-bedroom apartment was $800 at the most. Offices were filled with “temp workers”: actors, writers, artists, whatevers, filing and doing data entry, working phone sales for charities, pretending to look busy until it was time for lunch. Bars and restaurants were staffed with musicians and poets and budding filmmakers. We all saw each other on public transit, wearing the Day Job costumes, trudging towards another day of work for The Man, so we could earn enough for rent and burritos, and continue our weirdo projects in the off hours.

I was worthless as a member of the city’s service industry. I just couldn’t do it. I took the quiet gigs, answering phones and reading the zeitgeist books of that era: Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz, Spalding Gray. At some point I ended up a file clerk for a new bank which had just opened on Van Ness Ave., the Barbary Coast Savings & Loan.

This was a bank, so decorum was required. All of the women wore pantyhose, the men wore neckties. I opted for the skinny blue leather ties fashionable at the time. I was shown the basement, where I filed ridiculously large stacks of perforated green and white paper, dot-matrixed rows of numbers to oblivion. Apparently they recognized my potential, and I was moved up to the main floor and given a desk, and put in charge of ordering office supplies, and assembling furniture. This was the time of America’s saving & loan boom, and the place was expanding rapidly. New desks, new employees. And a host of bizarre characters.

The president of the bank was named Walt, who also had a sideline career as a Jimmy Carter impersonator. He even played Carter in a handful of movies. The resemblance was eerie. He’d also just come out as gay, and was constantly in a merry mood. Every morning, he’d stroll into the office, say good mornings, and every day I would get to say hello to gay Jimmy Carter.

The receptionist wore owl-shaped eyeglasses, and plastered photos of her horses and dogs to the counter of her desk. Occasionally she would shoot up from her chair, unplug her headset and scurry down the hallway to the restroom, yelling over her shoulder, “Somebody watch the phones!” I asked the HR woman what’s going on, and she replied, “Oh, sometimes she has uncontrollable diarrhea.”

A loud burly guy named Dave sat in a cubicle with a headset, desk littered with sports toys. He was perpetually squeezing some kind of tiny football, and saying things like, “Did you see the game yesterday? HA HA HA YOU BASTARD!!”

A thin woman named Ann from Ireland professed her love for Van Morrison so often that whenever we teased her about it, she drew sullen and quiet, and wouldn’t say hello to you for a week. Another blousy woman in her 40s named Anita seemed sort of hip, had a bit of rock and roll in her past, with the post-lunch Chardonnay breath.

Ersatz Jimmy Carter called me into his office one day. I noticed a People magazine profile of his lookalike career was framed on the wall. He announced that he wanted to buy a new car. A bank president should have a nice car. I don’t know if he already had a car or not. He did spend many lunches at Kimo’s, a gay bar on Polk Street, for a few midday cocktails. But it was only a few blocks away. The vehicle must be something used to impress clients. It was determined that I should be the one to research this new-car project, and report back my findings. For the next week, I ran around SF test-driving luxury sedans. We went with the Buick.

I was also tasked with shopping for a new office copier. I met with several salesmen, one of whom was just ridiculous. Tony Atlas wore a mustache and dyed blonde hair, swooped back, with gleaming gold watch and rings. A pink dress shirt with a white collar, and that little chain that went over the necktie knot. Off-gassing a powerful cloud of cologne. The kind of guy who would drive a Firebird Trans-Am, which he did. We went upstairs to the roof patio of the bank, to talk copiers. Atlas threw down his sales materials, sat in a chair, and wiped his face with his hands and muttered, “I gotta 21-year-old, she’s wearing me out.” I said nothing. Good for you! I imagined this poofy-haired mall gal, being driven around in the Trans-Am, a match made in 1980s hell. He looked through his fingers, realized I wasn’t taking the bro-bait, and said, okay, right, and opened the catalog to show me his wares. I bought a different copier.

I befriended another guy about my age. Joe was stuck in loan processing, going through stacks of paper folders. He wore thrift-store pants, held together with a safety pin, and proudly boasted they only cost five bucks. We existed on a similar level of sarcasm. Occasionally he would put a sealed envelope in my mailbox, containing things like a xeroxed sheet of body parts, with their perceived insurance value of each lost limb, and the handwritten message, “Thought this might be useful.” We became lunch buddies, and would go out for plates of Chinese and howl at all of the strange people that worked in this office: gay Jimmy Carter, the diarrhea lady, the copier guy.

My evenings were always busy, performing with sketch groups, and working on a humor magazine that I’d started, with something called “desktop publishing.” When it came time to mail copies to our subscribers, I smuggled in the stacks of envelopes and thoroughly abused the bank’s postage machine and shipped them out. At some point they noticed what was going on, and the knockoff Jimmy Carter announced that the bank would buy an ad in the humor magazine. So this very corporate-looking ad for Barbary Coast Savings & Loan Bank appeared in print, next to a sleazy nightclub ad, and a satirical catalog for a fictitious mail-order company which sold discounted U.S. weaponry to guerrilla dictators. They never renewed the ad.

In the midst of all this savings & loan merriment, I was called into the office of the HR woman. We sat in chairs and she eyed me with a gaze of quiet fury, and said, “I know what’s going on.”

I pretended to not have any idea what she was talking about, but of course I knew. I had been sleeping with one of the administrative assistants, who was married. And it had been getting a bit weird around the office. Being 25, I was completely naive about how to handle such things, and I’m sure the woman, a bit older than me, was probably freaking out a bit. I said nothing. She continued.

“In these situations, it’s always the woman who gets hurt the worst.” This HR woman was in her 50s, and if she’d worked in San Francisco during the 70s, I’m sure this was familiar territory for her. I said thanks, and stood up and got the hell out of her office. I may have even quit that day, I can’t remember. I didn’t stick around. There was always another Day Job out there.

An official FDIC press release reveals:

“Barbary Coast, with assets of about $12.5 million, became a matter of concern in 1991 when the OCC identified significant deficiencies in loan portfolio management, including liberal and aggressive loan underwriting standards and weak administration practices by prior management. The bank, which relied heavily on volatile deposits, also suffered a liquidity crisis which necessitated a halt in mortgage operations. Without this profit-making business, the bank could not offset its high overhead, costly funding sources and lack of a distinctive market niche in downtown San Francisco.”

It went out of business in 1994.