Why I Am Biff Loman

By next time this week, I’ll have moved back in to my mom’s house. That is punch line enough; no need to gild the lily. So let’s go over what steps you young folk out there need to take in order to have a life that follows the trajectory of the comet of awesome that is John Papageorgiou, Esq.


Turns out, only one thing is necessary: quit your mediocre-paying soul sucking 9-5 in order to pursue a career in an even worse paying field that offers no chance of success. That’s a bit cryptic of me, so let I’ll get into the nitty gritty: in April of 08, I quit a job at a shithole, Office Space-esque purgatory that, for the sake of anonymity and, in the name of good taste, I’ll refer to as “The National Student Clearinghouse” and direct link you to (www.studentclearinghouse.org). The place was a minefield of petty middle-management ambition, characters come to life from a Gogol tale. I was swallowing shit to the tune of a whopping $16.90 an hour, my only goal each day to guzzle enough coffee as soon as I walked in the door that I would be able to move my bowels before every toilet seat in the building looked like a Jackson Pollock painting.


Every day at 3pm, like clockwork, I turned on my little cubicle radio and tuned into the Washington DC-based Don and Mike Show and allowed the dulcet tones of radio prodigy Don Geronimo to wash away the leprosy that was my life like a trip to Lourdes (well, figurative trip, which was the only sort of trip I could afford on my salary). For those of you outside the DC area with no idea who the hell Don Geronimo is, all I can say is your life is poorer for it. And poorer in a real sense, not a “What, you don’t go to church on Sundays?” sense. Think Howard Stern with the charisma and wit ratcheted up exponentially. Outside of my parents, no one has had a more profound influence on my beliefs, my tastes and my world view than Mr. Geronimo, aka Michael Sorce, aka Al Nipple, aka Buster Hymen. He’s the Yoda to my Luke, the Dumbledore to my Harry Potter, the Travis Bickle to my John Hinckley, Jr. And, one afternoon, as I sat in my cubicle that was probably so thick with fart that you could float a paper weight on it (damn coffee), it all came together: I was going to quit the job I loathed and become the next Don Geronimo.


In retrospect, while I certainly respect the verve with which I made my decision and the balls it takes to follow something you love in spite of uncertainty…radio may not have been the wisest of choices. Apparently, there is this thing called the internet, and, well, it’s done bad things to radio revenue. In terms of forethought with regard to the growth potential of the industry I was staking my future upon, I would have been better off trying to find work as a goddamn triceratops because I had a boner for dinosaurs as a kid.


It has been almost a year since I finally got a job in radio, and I have yet to work on-air in any substantive capacity. The most my voice has been heard is doing assorted ten second commercials for Lifetime movies about shit like women that started banging their rich, cold husband’s loving but broke twin brother and were then forced to choose. It was called Double Stuf :Not Just a Cookie. In addition, I now work under 40 hours a week (who needs health benefits?) for $13 an hour. For those of you that slept through advanced calculus, $16.90>$13.


With my ten year high school reunion looming on the horizon, I’m furiously brainstorming angles I can work that don’t make my life look like a titanic abortion. So far, I’ve come up with dyeing my hair blonde, changing my name to Romy and wowing my fellow graduates by dancing to “Time After Time” with a grace that makes Baryshnikov look like Michael J. Fox. Increasingly, however, it looks like I’m going to serve the role of the guy with an astronomical IQ who did well in school but sucks balls at life that everyone who was envious of his scholastic accomplishments can now bury in the sand and metaphorically (god, how I pray it’s only metaphorically) bukkake.


I’m doing what I can to put a positive spin on all this, and, in truth, moving home has upsides: being forced to live out my sex life in a backyard pup tent mean fresh air, and my mom said I’m allowed to put any posters I want on the walls of my room. As long as they don’t prominently display any skulls, because that would be bad luck. In spite of my efforts to stay on the sunny side, Vegas has set the over/under on my post-move suicide at 72 hours. Just saying.