During my years in Troy, I cultivated two of my favorite interests: music and beer. The enjoyment of these two pleasures was often combined by spending my evenings in a small basement bar in downtown Troy called the Rolls Touring Company. This was an establishment without peer in the Capital District, or indeed in the rest of the world as far as I have discovered. The Rolls featured live musicians seven nights a week, and served a wide variety of beers and other drinks, from the pedestrian Budweiser to my old standard Beck's or Spaten Dark. The Rolls was also the home of a widely famed and feared drink known as the Moose River Hummer, or Moose for short. Pitchers of Moose have been known to deliver a kick similar to that of a real live moose, and leave you with as much of a headache afterwards. The Rolls, and the Moose, are still alive and well in Troy (although the bar has moved from its original location in a basement on Fourth Street to a more spacious location on Third Street), and I recommend a visit to anyone who finds themselves in that corner of New York.
From my nights of enjoying acoustic music at the Rolls, I also took an interest in the coffeehouse program at RPI, an intimate little venue known as Mother's Wine Emporium. Working with Mother's for three years introduced me to some of the excellent music being produced by modern acoustic artists, a group so diverse that it's really misleading to try to bring them all under the label "folk". But that's how a lot of them still identify themselves, so I guess it's as good a word as any. I was actually the chairman of Mother's for a year and a half, discovering the thrills of booking a good season of entertainments, staffing weekend shows and attempting to balance a budget that was horribly overspent for the past two years. After three semesters, I couldn't handle the load any more, and passed the reins on to more capable hands, but running the Mother's shows was certainly one of the high points of my Troy years.
Working for ITS, the computer and phone service for RPI, had its advantages. I was able to remain in Troy for five years after leaving school, and the pay, while modest, allowed me to live fairly comfortably in the Capital District, as long as I maintained the "student" lifestyle (which basically meant continuing to live with roommates). My job gave me access to many different kinds of computer equipment, and many opportunities to play around and gain experience with Unix, the Internet, and many other aspects of computing which were then considered new and esoteric, but are now quite valuable. On the down side, working as a computer operator meant inconvenient hours, little opportunity for advancement, and not much respect from management or the other workers. Still, conditions were tolerable enough for me to remain at the job for five years, and it served as a good stepping stone to better things.
Two of my co-workers at ITS, both of whom I actually met before I began working there, had a strong influence on my life during the late 80's and early 90's. Scanner, who was an officer in the ACM during my student years, introduced me to Japanese animation in 1987, and also got me involved in a collaborative writing venture known as Bar-Trek. It was also Scanner's urging that convinced me to go to Philcon in 1987, thus beginning my tradition of adventures at science fiction conventions. My other most influential friend during that time was Kent LaCross, a veteran operator at ITS who was also a connoisseur of books, trains, and restaurants. Kent was a rather eccentric figure but still a good friend, and his untimely death in 1990 came as quite a shock. With Kent for encouragement and inspiration, I planned the first of my great cross-country train trips, and experienced for myself the unique pleasures of rail travel.
Although my time in Troy had its good points, nothing stays the same in life, and in a college town, the pace of change can be even more rapid. Many of my friends remained at RPI, or within the Troy area, for longer than the traditional four years, but by around 1992, I began to notice that my circle of friends in Troy was thinning out considerably. Many of the people I cared most about found jobs in New York City, New Jersey, or Long Island, and I began making many trips back and forth between Albany and Manhattan (a relatively quick ride of about two and a half hours via Amtrak). I'd always had a fascination for New York City, and the more I hung out and explored there, the more I realized that this was where I'd like to be for the next phase of my life. 1992 and 1993 saw me become more and more disaffected with Troy and eager to leave, and by the spring of '94, the right combination of events fell into place to enable me to get into motion.
A long-distance romance which started in 1993 had me seriously considering a move to Atlanta, and in early 1994, RPI began to talk about downsizing its workforce. By the spring, RPI unveiled a "voluntary separation" plan which would give a generous severance package to anyone who resigned before the actual layoffs began. Shortly after I made the decision to accept the severance plan, the romance fell apart, but I figured that since I had already committed myself to leaving Troy, I might as well stick with it. It was just a matter of changing my destination. My friend Bill helped me to find a job in Manhattan, and also generously provided me with crash and storage space for a couple of months until I found an apartment of my own in New Jersey. So by the beginning of May 1994, practically five years to the day after I started my job at ITS, I became a business-suited corporate weenie in New York.
Part 4: Jimcat in the Big Apple
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