Second semester at SFSU I took a job in the shipping department of Inland Metal. Full disclosure: My stepdad worked (and still does) at Inland. He got me the job. I worked full days packing cellphone tower antennas. You know those weird white boxes you see strapped to cellphone towers? Those things. Inland assembled em and I packed em. This is when I met “the crew,” my companions for the next 10 years. Jay was (and still is) a super charismatic, funny, inspirational, hard-working guy. He introduced me to the SF Bay trance scene (Mars & Mystre) and a bunch of his close friends from high school. We meshed and I was swept up in the tornado of the Entropy Crew. Jay named the group Entropy because, well, he majored in physics. We all just agreed because why not?
Jay and I spent long hours packing antennas to the thump thump of trance music. We were hands down the fastest packing crew in all of Inland. We packed more antennas in a single day than any other crew.
When Jay went back to school at UC Santa Cruz, I was left on my own. One of my coworkers, Alan, hit on me mercilessly. Another was caught falsifying his time card. I had a big crush on Antonia, one of the women who assembled the antennas. She was about my age but already had two kids, I think. I learned to drive fork lift pretty well. Looking back, driving forklift was one of my most satisfying jobs.