I see what truly awful jobs I had. This was after I earned my Bachelor’s degree. I thought the good days would come.

It began when I was a Hollywood intern at a movie studio. There was nowhere else to look but up until the internship was over and they weren’t hiring. Fast-forward to a few months later when I met a nice guy at a film festival who said he could get me a job for a TV show as a production assistant on another studio lot. That job lasted for four days because I wasn’t proactive enough. The check for that week was under five hundred dollars because the salary back then was a hundred dollars a day. That was my last crack at Hollywood.

Then I moved back in with my parents for three years in the small hometown where I’d attended high school. I went through a temp agency that got me hired at a hospital, where I worked inside a trailer and filed medical records inside dusty folders that were sharp around the edges. They gave me stinging paper cuts. I was working with only one other person, and he was a kid, about nineteen, who would harass me, calling me insulting names about my sexual orientation and stuff. I worked for two weeks before I quit and turned that bastard in.

Then I became a substitute teacher for a few years and dealt with the worst kids possible: junior high school kids who had no respect for authority. They would get out of their desks and leave the classroom without my permission. They would write bad things about me in their textbooks as I’d discovered. I left those schools feeling defeated each day.

I also worked a job selling air-conditioners. My supervisor kept his cigarettes in his shirt pocket and wore a cowboy hat. His teeth were metal. He would do this thing where he would lick the end of the cigarette before he stuffed it in his mouth, and all he talked about was commission.

“I’m not a good salesman,” I told him.

“You’re not a salesman,” he said. “You’re an air-conditioner specialist.”

Yeah, okay. I didn’t make it past training, which was over eight hours a day through the weekends.

This was before I moved to Hollywood to try to become a screenwriter, a pipe dream but a dream nonetheless. I needed something to look forward to because it’s all about the journey, not the destination. So while I was writing and revising endlessly, I took on jobs that no one else wanted.

I remember one job where I had to stand outside of a Walgreens in Northridge and sell trinkets to people walking by. As you would imagine, people ignored me all day. And to remind you, I have a college degree. None of it mattered. I couldn’t go a second day at that job.

I found their ads in the Los Angeles Times way back when. One job was in a basement somewhere in the valley. It was another sales job from so long ago that I forgot what it was that I was selling. But I was stuck in a dim basement with a bunch of young people wearing suits and ties, the women in dresses, the type of overzealous people who wore their smiles to bed. And I remember a pyramid diagram on a chalkboard and an acronym that stood for something related to sales and the pitch. No one wants to hear pitches. I’ve never tried to sell a product that sold itself. It was always something no one wanted. I came home that night beat up and tired in North Hollywood and told my parents what I was doing now for a job. I told them the name of the company, and my father got on the phone.

“Don’t go back there,” he said. “There was a story about them on 60 Minutes. It’s a pyramid scheme.”

Oh, great. I was too young and inexperienced to really know how a pyramid scheme worked. But the proof was in the details, as the grand puba of the company had drawn the pyramid on the chalkboard.

So life was giving me a clear and present message: that I was only cut out for the jobs that no one wanted. I didn’t try hard enough in college, so this would be my life’s calling.

Anyway, I finally gave in and found a job that would trap me for the next decade and a half, a job that I’d worked during the summer in my college years: food delivery. It was an easy job when traffic wasn’t so bad in Los Angeles. I delivered in the busiest parts of the city: Hollywood, West Hollywood, Miracle Mile, Century City, Westwood, Brentwood. And I had to commute all the way from North Hollywood at first before I moved to Hollywood in 2004. I stayed with that job because I didn’t want to work for another pyramid scheme or any temp jobs with predators who would harass me. Those were brutal days, sweating in traffic when I delivered food, living from paycheck to paycheck. But it sure beat sales. I quit delivering food close to ten years ago because the company said I had to pick either delivery or office work. I chose the office because I’d driven too many cars into the ground. So then I worked for a corporation and had medical and dental benefits. It was the only reason I stuck around at that job. But the cost was misery, not that any of the other jobs brought me fulfillment.

I remember my old boss from my delivery job, a real jerk who said, “The only people who deliver for us are either freaks or losers.”

I couldn’t figure out which one I was.