My Voice: A Memoir by Angie Martinez Read Free Book Online Page A

around.
    Before long I’d found my way into every department as I tried to learn as much as I could about all the moving pieces that made a radio station go. Then I wound up getting hired part-time to work on their street team. It was not glamorous. For something like three dollars an hour, I’d drive the van, hang up posters at events like sales appearancesand whatever other outside errands needed to be done. Every day I would come to work looking like a member of TLC. My uniform of choice was oversized tees and baggy pants and kicks. Nobody else at the station dressed like that. That was just me . . . I was a hip-hop kid working at a dance station.
    •   •   •
    T he lessons of hard work were starting to pay off. But I had a lot more to learn about time management and setting priorities. I had kept my agreement with my mother that if she helped me get an internship, I’d go to college. But after enrolling in a full load of classes at Borough of Manhattan Community College, I was failing. Between school and the radio station, I clearly cared more about my job than about my classes. For a while I did enough to avoid getting kicked out of community college. And then my mother started paying less attention, so I started dropping classes. And eventually I stopped going altogether. There was no way I could keep taking on more and more at the station while trying to pretend I was going to college.
    I was doing too damn much. If I would see my younger self right now, my advice would be: “You need to sit your ass down for five minutes. Focus. Set some goals.”
    Did I have any goals that I was working so hard to achieve? Not really. Maybe I had an instinct that I was somehow going to run into my goal and find what it was that I was supposed to do. But for the time being my attitude was just that I was happy to be there and I was eager to do whatever was asked of me so that I could learn everything. My motivation came in the form of wanting to go above and beyond because, why not? I had all of that young, dumb energy to give. Never underestimate the value of that passion.
    Too often I see interns starting at entry level, trying to move up fromthere with minimal enthusiasm. I have to wonder—where’s your fucking energy? You may not know what you want to do, but so many opportunities are in front of you that you can’t waste a moment. You will not be young forever. So when you are, when you don’t have big responsibilities yet, and you have an opportunity, you should do it till your knuckles bleed. You should keep going hard until somebody peels you up off the floor and is like, “Go take a nap.” Why wouldn’t you?
    While I was in that zone of hyper-energy—working in the office, getting coffee, being on the street team, driving vans—I had to drive one of the radio personalities, Deborah Rath, all the way to Great Adventure for an event she was hosting. Tall and thin and blond, Deborah was known for playing dance music and did lots of events like this. The drill was that after driving her in the Hot 97 van more than sixty miles to Great Adventure, I was supposed to drive back to Manhattan and then down to some dead-end, rat-infested parking lot in Midtown. When I parked there, I would stomp my feet so the rats wouldn’t come running my way.
    As usual on that particular day, after driving back from Great Adventure, I was supposed to park the van in that nasty lot. Well, I had been going nonstop, from school to work and back to work again. I was on no sleep. And the next morning I was supposed to pick up the van and show up at another event. So instead of putting the van in the lot for a few hours, I thought,
I’ll keep it, go home, and get a bit of sleep
. It was against the rules for a street team member to do that, but I was exhausted. It was the only thing that made sense. I had to.
    At that point I lived on the Upper West Side with my mom. I was still living at home, not even a full adult yet. What a