Episode 32
Last time I mentioned finally making the call to shut down Frustrated Housewives. Once I did that, I honestly didn’t know what came next. At that point I had no friends in San Antonio, just Mike. So, I took a job managing a Mailboxes Etc, mostly because it was close to the house and because I had no idea yet what I actually wanted to do for work down there. It brought in some money while I figured things out, and it turned out to be a genuinely interesting experience too.
The store sat right across the highway from The Dominion, a very high dollar gated community. George Strait had a house there. So did players from the San Antonio Spurs, other sports stars, musicians, mobsters, and Alice from The Brady Bunch, among others. They’d come into the store to ship things, and some of them kept mailboxes there. I think part of why they liked us was that nobody made a fuss over them.
I remember the first time I saw Tim Duncan (from the Spurs) in person. The door opened, and I watched this enormous man duck down just to get through the front door. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone that tall standing right in front of me before.
Another time, I was shooting passport photos for a guy and his family. He had on a ball cap and looked vaguely familiar, though I didn’t think much of it. I had him take the cap off for the photo and thought, man, I know this guy from somewhere. I finished up the pictures and ran his credit card. The name on the card said George Strait. I was working alone that morning. When my coworker showed up an hour later and I told her, she about died, she was a huge fan and missed meeting him by an hour.
Another day, I saw this burly guy wrestling with the door, trying to haul in some big chair by himself. We were a shipping store, so a big item wasn’t unusual, but a guy walking up with a seat over his head, then struggling to carry it in alone, was a different story. I went to help him out. Turned out it was a stadium chair from UT that he’d bought for a friend and needed shipped. He was nice, and kind of shy in a way I found charming. People in the store were starting to make a commotion – I could tell he must be “someone.” So, per standard “famous protocol” I took him to the back room to handle the paperwork and figure out how we were even going to ship the thing. I had no idea who he was. He just introduced himself as Steve and thanked me for pulling him out of the crowd. We finished the transaction, and it wasn’t until after he left that I found out he was Stone Cold Steve Austin. Wrestling wasn’t my scene at all. I knew the name, but I had no real sense of how big he actually was. I think he liked that about me, because he kept coming back to me specifically after that.
I remember one Christmas he came in visibly embarrassed, hauling a big box of stuff to ship. We went to the back and started pulling everything out, and it turned out to be a stack of Stone Cold Steve Austin action figures. He turned beet red, looked at me, and said, “They’re for my kids. They give them to their friends.” His kids were living in the UK at the time, and we got them set up with a nice round of Christmas gifts. Good times.
I was working there on 9/11. I remember that morning well. The owner of the store never closed, regardless of the reason. The attacks had already happened by the time we opened. We did not have a single customer that day. It was so eerie. The streets were empty. So were the skies. Someday I will try to better capture what that day felt like, maybe in a song. For now, I will keep it to myself and just say that I do think it forever changed me and the world we live in.
While working there was entertaining, I needed insurance and more money, so I took a job at a call center until something better came along. Beyond the whole talking on the phone thing I’ve already told you about a few weeks ago, another thing that soured me on “regular” office life was the questions people ask when you’re the new hire. Are you married? Oh, you and your wife? Do you have kids? Harmless enough sounding questions on the surface. But back then you could still get fired from a job just for being gay. It was mostly women asking, either out of genuine nosiness or because they didn’t have anything else to talk about, or both, instead of just sticking to work. It always made me deeply uncomfortable, because whether they realized it or not, they were basically outing you to the whole company. I learned to keep my answers short and never go into detail.
I hated that job. It was at a large insurance company, doing customer service. I was old enough this time to understand how corrupt some of these large companies really are. It paid okay, but I was miserable. About a week in, I decided it wasn’t for me and kicked my job search back into high gear.
While I was at IPA in Fort Smith, we used a software program called CuteFTP to move website files here and there. One day I was doing some kind of work on a band website and noticed the company’s address was in San Antonio. I looked up their site, poked around, and found they had a tech support role open. There was a test involved, so I bought a quick book on FTP protocol, studied up, and applied a few weeks later.
The interview itself was weird. Very casual, and honestly the guy interviewing me seemed more nervous than I was. Eventually he brought in this very young guy to ask me a few questions. He grilled me pretty hard and could tell I didn’t have experience working on the back side of software. But I never claimed I did, so that was fine by him. He could tell I was capable of learning, had the right attitude and personality, and clearly wanted out of whatever job I was currently stuck in. He asked how soon I could start if they offered me the job. I told him today. The last question he asked was whether I hated my current job. I kind of laughed and said something like, well, I don’t love it.
A few days later they offered me the job, and I started at GlobalSCAPE Software. That place felt so unique to me at the time. I’d later learn the vibe wasn’t really specific to them so much as the software industry in general, but it was full of people with odd quirks, nerds, antisocial types, outcasts almost like me, and the office itself was cool. We kept the lights off. Soda fountain and video games in the break room. It was a very creative environment. Oh, and nobody asked if I had a wife. Nobody cared one bit about my life outside the office. It was great.
As I learned more, I moved into a kind of tech and sales support hybrid role, and also got to help with new software development and documentation. If I’d still been in San Antonio working there today, I’d be making some serious money. But as usual, we moved a couple years later for Mike’s next job. Over time I made a few genuinely good friends there. It was a small office, maybe fifteen to twenty employees total, so bonds formed easily. I’m still in touch with a few of them today, nearly twenty years later.
Since I still didn’t have an active music thing going, I leaned into whatever fun the city had to offer to keep my mind busy. Very transient area, again, which we already know I like. San Antonio is a tourism town, plain and simple. There isn’t a whole lot more to it than that. If you actually live there, you start to notice a vibe similar to Las Vegas, where the locals genuinely don’t care about you or your problems unless you’re family or a very close friend. They’ll make you feel like the most important person in the world right up until they’ve got your money, and then you’ll never see them again.
I should mention GlobalSCAPE had a Las Vegas connection, and as an employee I ended up going there often. That encouraged my addiction to the place, and we started making several non-work trips each year on top of it. Anyway, my point about actually living in a tourism town is that you get burnt out on service people not caring, and eventually you just get numb to it. It’s a shame. You drop off some clothes at the cleaners and they lose a piece or two. “Oh, you didn’t give us that many shirts.” It’s right there on my receipt. “No, that’s not correct. It must have been written down wrong.” And that’s the end of it. You’re dismissed, and you stop expecting anything different.
Beyond that, the food was great. That’s really where I learned to appreciate Mexican food. I also made a couple of genuinely good non-work friends there. A few people who worked with Mike hit it off with us, and I remember the first night we all met up for bowling. It was a blast. They drank like we drank, ate junk food like we ate, some of them liked the same music, and it was just fun. We started hanging out more and more, and eventually they brought us into their “family” world. Hispanic culture there runs so deep on family, and once you’re in, you’ve got an instant lifeline. They called us their “white friends.” We enjoyed their company enough that we eventually moved into the same neighborhood, over by Sea World. Still in touch with most of them today.
Around that same time, I really started getting the itch to do something musically again. I’d always been a fan of crooners like Dean Martin and Bing Crosby, but once I became a regular in Las Vegas, I developed a real appreciation for that whole scene, Elvis and Liberace, too. I still wasn’t ready to go full on crooner myself, though.
I think the thing that finally sold me on doing something new was seeing Tom Jones live one night in Las Vegas. We were front row, and the show was just intoxicating. I loved every second of it. You could tell he was completely in on the joke and was having a blast. All those crooners were, and still are, in on it. It floored me. How had I never picked up on that before? I remember staring at his shoes the whole time. Shiny black shoes lined with diamonds. I remember thinking, okay, I’m doing something when I get back to San Antonio. I don’t know what yet, but something.
Around that same time, I was getting to the age where keeping the weight off was becoming an actual challenge. So I bought a little exercise machine, one of those ski machine glider things. I tried it a few times and found it unbelievably boring. So I hooked an old laptop up to a speaker and loaded it with crooner karaoke tracks. Every weekday morning I’d get on that machine and sing for thirty minutes to an hour. In the process I started picking up a proper breathing technique for singing, and I started finding my own style, and it almost sounded good. Still not good enough to release anything, though.
So I came up with a comedy persona called N’Elvis. I built out a whole backstory, how this poor kid’s parents lived down the road from Elvis’s parents. N’Elvis was born a year later. They were huge Elvis fans already and named him N’Elvis specifically to remind him that he was not Elvis and never would be. He was an unplanned child who ruined his parents’ life by not being born Elvis. Oh, the shame. Over time, in the mythology I made up around him, N’Elvis ran away to North Korea and became a superstar there. I hear he still is. I recorded a few tracks of N’Elvis singing some of those karaoke songs and passed them around to friends, and every single one of them thought it was hilarious. I knew I was onto something. I still had a ways to go in actually finding my own crooner voice, but I was on a track.
Then, right as it was almost together, Mike got offered a transfer to Dallas, and we moved. It felt almost like a step back to square one, but at least I had a spark of an idea of where I was headed musically next. Plus, since I wasn’t involving a band, it wasn’t really that much of a setback. More of a distraction. N’Elvis got shelved once we landed in Dallas. But a bigger, more refined version built off that same N’Elvis persona would emerge soon enough.
Overall, I’d say San Antonio was a good experience. I’ve got some fond memories of the place, and I think I could live there again someday. That said, the adventures keep rolling, and we’re headed to a bigger city next: Dallas. We’ll get into that in a few weeks, after I give this life story stuff a rest so it doesn’t get too boring for you all.
A funny thing I’ve noticed lately is that with all the crazy politics and noise going on in the world right now, I find myself missing some of the fun, goofy stuff from the early social media days. Remember the ice bucket challenges, or those lists people used to post? I do, and I actually stumbled across an old one of mine the other day called 15 Albums in 15 Minutes. Remember that one? I found it genuinely interesting rereading the list I’d made back then. So I think I’m going to do something fun with it next week, maybe a deeper dive into that same 15 in 15 with more detail on the why behind each pick. Maybe you all can play along too. That’s your hint to start putting on your thinking caps.
Anyway, just something fun for a breather, nothing related to politics. I don’t know about you all, but I will be genuinely glad when all these election ads are over and we can get back to watching quality entertainment, like Naked and Afraid, in peace. Can you imagine all the good that could be done with the money political parties waste on ads? I hate to say it, but most of us have already made up our minds who we are and aren’t voting for. The ads are just overkill at this point. Oh well, I’ll shut up.
More road ahead next week. Try to make yours a good one.
Jeff
Audio credits: Intro/Outro music: Intro – Proud Mary by N’Elvis, Outro – The Name Game by N’Elvis.
Listen to the “What Was That Song?” playlist, featuring music mentioned on Jeff Elder Isn’t Real:
