Read Online Head Case by Cole Cohen - Free Book Online

seventeen-year-old daughter of the owner of the company. She is convinced that I am the stupidest person she has ever met. I tell my manager that I have a “learning disability,” but that can get you only so far. I don’t get fired from Perennial because no one gets fired. Chatting with my coworkers between phone calls is the only way I get through the day as we all search for other work. One is a southern line cook; another is a local roller derby girl. A year later, the building is rented out to Bomb, a skateboard company that replaces the Perennial sign with a giant metal sculpture of a bomb.

    September 2005–March 2006
    Assistant to Greg Pound at Pound Presents

    I call in a favor from a woman I know who writes for the music section of the local alternative paper. I met her when we were both interns; she was hired on for an editorial position, and I was not. In order to be hired from an intern position to a position of more responsibility, you have to show that you can consistently excel at basic administrative tasks (organizing music listings for a calendar, in this case). In my hands, filing and photocopying become a full-time job, so I’m generally not hired on anywhere where I intern in Portland.
    Still, despite myself, I manage to make an impression as a friendly person, so when I see the local music promoter Greg Pound’s posting on Craigslist for an assistant I ask her to put in a good word for me. I get an interview, during which I volley around band names for half an hour. I’m also at the lowest weight I’ve ever been in my life, living off nutrition bars and coffee to save money for Pilates classes. With everything moving further out of my grasp with each year since I graduated from college, I’m just looking for something, anything, that I can control.
    My position as Pound’s assistant grants me a free pass to any show in Portland, but I don’t know very many people in town to go to shows with and I’m overwhelmed about how to get to a venue and back on my own.
    I know nothing about music promotion except that I love music and believe that there are exciting bands deserving more recognition than they’re receiving. I picture myself as a sort of punk-rock Florence Nightingale, aiding bands on the verge of dying out, corralling Portland audiences toward the bands that really matter, in some small and selfless way changing the face of the scene for the better.
    I am an absolute holy terror of a personal assistant, and after the first month none of the three men who make up Pound Presents are speaking to me, including the accountant, whom I slept with sometime in the first two or three weeks of my employment, mainly because on my first day of work the junior booker told me, “Whatever you do, don’t sleep with Andy.”
    â€œWho’s Andy?”
    â€œExactly.” He gestured with his thumb toward the accountant, the tall skinny guy buried deep in clippings of ads for shows that we’ve placed in local papers. Andy.
    The coffeemaker is kept together with tape, we send out mailings in envelopes from record labels with their company names blacked out and ours scrawled in, but either in spite or because of this, Pound himself is making money. We are all caricatures of our positions. The accountant wears those black-framed nerd glasses, the junior booking agent constantly screams into the phone, I wear 1950s secretary outfits and make endless pots of coffee. The junior booker used to tell me to cover my ears when he screamed “cunt” into the phone; now his favorite antic when begging for a show is to plead, “Greg Pound is here with a gun to my head, and if I don’t get this show he is going to shoot me!” I send the posters for the Portland shows to Seattle and vice versa; I incorrectly chart daily ticket sales and send on this erroneous information to agents in California; I reverse the numbers left in an important phone