Closing Time (41 page)

 

At the end of my freshman year, Richard Nixon, never one to lie down on the job when an opportunity to torment my family presented itself, closed down the federal program that had been bankrolling my education. Because I had a 3.9 grade-point average, my mother and I ultimately were successful in persuading the financial aid office to award me an academic scholarship. But housing, meals, and books I would have to pay for by myself. Having already gone a bit overboard in the book-buying department, I would now need to move back home for at least part of the summer and put a few bucks together. The downside of this was that I had to see my father. The upside was that I got to see my mother and my sisters, at least until Ree and Eileen caught that train to New York. This was the one good thing about going home. The only good thing, in fact.

For the next four years, I worked at summer jobs, raising just enough cash to pay for off-campus housing during the school year, as well as concert tickets, alcohol, and the kinds of invigorating but only marginally nutritious food that college students have always favored. I did not spend any money on drugs, as drugs always seemed to be widely available, funneled to all and sundry by elusive benefactors named Vega, Mellow, or Shelby. Moreover, because of my blue-collar background, I always preferred alcohol to hallucinogens anyway.

At my previous jobs I had been employed by fascinating, self-made men from whom I would draw inspiration that would last a lifetime. Now I would be exposed to a different type of man. Legend has it that while campaigning in the West Virginia primary in 1960, John F. Kennedy visited a coal mine. Outside the cavern stood a line of miners, waiting to shake the candidate’s hand. As Kennedy emerged from the bowels of the yellow-dog Democratic earth, he was approached by a man who asked point-blank, “Did you ever have a job?” Kennedy thought about it for a second, then replied, “No. Not really.” To which the miner said, “You didn’t miss much.”

The working-class men I met on my summer jobs shared this opinion. Some, no more than a handful, were the sorts of archetypal lunch-pail heroes who have always made America great and, had they lived elsewhere, would have made those countries great as well. But a lot of them were slobs. In the summer of 1969, I worked sixteen hours a day for one solid month, first on the night shift at a bubble-gum factory a mile from my home, then all day long at a gas station right around the corner. The men who worked at the factory, mostly pulling down a few bucks more than the minimum wage, were a relatively cheerful, engaging group of fellows. The men in the gas station, also bringing home slightly more than a pittance, were miserable pricks. The gas station attendants and car mechanics were all white; the workforce at the bubble-gum factory was racially mixed. The ethnically heterogeneous group learned how to get along; the men in the homogeneous group were always at each other’s throats. What conclusions social scientists might draw from this data I cannot say; ethnic diversity might not even be relevant. But I think it was.

At the time, I was little concerned about such matters. I didn’t take these jobs because I thought they would be interesting or because I thought I would learn anything that would be useful to me later in life. I already knew that poorly paid jobs merely led to other poorly paid jobs, and I had long since ceased believing in the secret wisdom of the proletariat. I took these jobs because I was desperate to raise cash to rent a room off campus so that I could read Tolstoy and listen to Fauré in peace. As paying for a place of my own necessitated a formidable war chest, I spent a couple of summers working myself into the ground.

I took the night job at the bubble-gum factory because of an accident during the day at the gas station. I’d started working at the filling station in June, intending to quit in August and attend the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York. But those plans went up in smoke after I stepped on a plank in the back of the garage and impaled my foot on a nail. Unable to walk, I was laid up for three weeks, by which time the festival was over.

In those prelitigious ages, there was no question of applying for unemployment benefits or suing anyone; working-class people didn’t do that sort of thing. Nobody’d told me to step on that nail, nor was the unidentified party who had left that plank lying there willing to fess up and admit that he bore some responsibility for the mishap. The consensus was that I should have been more attentive while I was clambering around in the darkness looking for an inner tube, so I should simply grin and bear it, being as I was, in the patois of the filling station community, a dumb fuck. My friends motored off to Yasgur’s farm without me and were promptly pulled over by Garden State troopers on the zany charge of “failing to make a good account of themselves on the New Jersey Turnpike.” This specious, though undeniably creative, allegation was later dropped, but not before an inconvenient return trip to a court in northern New Jersey.

Both my coworkers and my father took malicious delight in my podiatric misfortune, the incident confirming their worst fears about the American educational system. Why in the name of Christ, they wanted to know, were we sending kids to hoity-toity universities if they were only going to end up shredding their feet on rusty nails? What good was reading Tacitus and Lucretius and Giraudoux if you were only going to end up hobbling around on crutches, they’d like to know, though they never actually cited Tacitus or Lucretius, much less the effete French playwright Jean Giraudoux, instead using the more general term “all those big shots.”

This was back at a time when, if working-class people said or did anything malignant, untoward, or moronic, sociologists would argue that they had been “conditioned” to act this way, that their racial epithets or repellent behavior toward women were not prima facie evidence of stupidity or defective moral character or a generally feral lifestyle but the result of a top-secret disinformation program involving the surreptitious psychocranial implantation of dangerous or offensive ideas by the federal government or that shadowy social-engineering leviathan known as the Establishment. My pump-jockey cohorts behaved the way they did because they had been conditioned to act that way by the Hidden Persuaders; they did not dislike me personally; they did not think I was a commie or a fag; they did not wish me ill. They simply felt uncomfortable around anyone from their own class who was getting a higher education, understanding as they did that higher education was a repudiation of all that they were and all that they stood for.

What they stood for was nothing; people who are simply trying to survive are too busy feeding their families to symbolize anything. Decades later, when the emotional buffer of success allowed me to reflect on the pathologies of the working class, I no longer held a grudge against this coterie of ill-tempered drudges. They acted the way they did only because they were jealous of anyone who had a chance to avoid cleaning windshields for the rest of his life. Saddled with the workingman’s ingrained contempt for the educated, they sought to buoy themselves with the reassuring belief that even though people like themselves could not tell William Shakespeare from Willian Penn, they made up for it by possessing inexhaustible reserves of common sense. Sure, college boys could tell you the importance of the Treaty of Utrecht or the causes of the Second Punic War. Some of them, the really clever ones, might even be able to untangle the relationship between Hasdrubal, Hamilcar, and Hannibal. But could they repair a carburetor or repoint a spark plug? My stepping on a rusty nail confirmed their worst prejudices; they found it side-splittingly amusing that someone so book-smart could simultaneously be so life-stupid. Today, I no longer hate them for snickering the way they did, though I hated them at the time. In retrospect, I realize that they simply could not help themselves. They were seeking solace from their miserable lives by telling themselves that a college education was not the be-all and end-all of existence, that they hadn’t missed out on anything. They were like the bald man who consoles himself with the thought that at least he’ll never end up like Absalom. They meant no harm by it. And, like I said, they were idiots.

The men who worked at the bubble-gum factory were cut from a different cloth and made much better company. It helped that they were not all white men, which the gas station attendants were; they didn’t use the words “nigger,” “shine,” “rughead,” and “coon” every ten seconds throughout their eight-hour shift the way the gas station boys did—with the occasional “spic” or “wetback” thrown in for ethnic balance. They also didn’t keep eyeing you suspiciously, the way the grease monkeys did, suspecting that your failure to make regular use of such terminology meant that you were a nigger lover. This was an era when white people still used these terms within earshot of the reviled ethnic groups in question, whereas today they only use them in the privacy of their homes.

I landed the job in the bubble-gum factory because management was always looking for student help in the summer. I have no idea why college students were in such demand; we came cheap, but so did the retreads that punched the clock fifty-two weeks a year. One summer I worked the day shift on the packing line, stuffing freshly wrapped packages of gum into boxes, but the other three summers I signed up for the graveyard shift as a maintenance man, mostly mopping floors and disposing of trash. I was never terribly fond of bubble gum before I worked in the factory, and after seeing the size of the brassy, irascible rats that used to patrol the warehouse, I was even less of a fan afterward. But it gave me pleasure to tell people that I was now working the graveyard shift, because expressions like “working the graveyard shift” made me feel like a man.

The Fleer Corporation, best known for its Dubble Bubble gum, was a second-echelon operation that lacked the dazzling bravura of the industry giant, Topps. Whereas the Topps empire was sustained by young boys whose passion for trading baseball cards back and forth did not abate with the passage of time, Fleer’s built its marketing strategy around the irresistible allure of cheesy prizes. The gum itself was revolting, so disgusting that even the rats were not all that taken by it, much preferring the staff’s peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, the rodent epicure’s delight. The actual physical work at the factory—swabbing the decks, tossing out trash, scrubbing machinery—was mindless drudgery, not unlike pumping gas, and the time could pass slowly, especially if you showed up for your shift under the influence. What made working there tolerable, and even memorable, was that several of the full-time employees were, to use a popular term of that era, characters.

Night-shift bubble-gum factory employees did not arrive at such a career impasse by happenstance; the men assigned to the dawn patrol were all in some way defeated by life. But they seemed to understand that they had conspired in their own demise, either by failing to study hard in school or by hitting the sauce too often and too enthusiastically over the years. They regularly offered up comical tips for avoiding a similar fate, even though they knew there was no chance that I would follow in their footsteps, since the whole point of being a college boy was to put yourself in a situation where you could make a much better class of mistake with your life.

“There’s no future in cleaning shithouses,” one feisty white man well into his forties used to caution me as he pirouetted with his mop around the men’s room. “No matter who tries to tell you otherwise, don’t believe them. There is absolutely no future in cleaning shithouses.”

“And Larry is the man who’s in the best position to know,” a somewhat younger black man named Melvin would chime in. “Larry has degrees in shithouse science from some of the finest institutions in America. He’s forgotten more about cleaning shithouses than most people will ever know. And look where it’s gotten him.”

“It didn’t get me any further than the shithouse!” Larry would proclaim. “So put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

Larry and Melvin had regular assignments, carrying out the same basic chores every night. Larry cleaned the bathrooms, the cafeteria, and the offices; Melvin washed down the floors throughout the factory. The monotony of it all didn’t seem to bother them one bit. The summer workers, students like me, often helped out with mopping the floors, but mostly took the jobs the older men didn’t like or found too physically demanding to perform. One of these was loading up the trash receptacles out back with busted wooden pallets—skids, as they were called—that had previously been used to carry boxloads of the deadly provender that was Fleer’s stock-in-trade. The trash receptacles, generally referred to as gondolas, sat at the edge of the loading dock in the rear of the factory. Once a gondola was filled to overflowing, a truck owned and operated by uncollegial Neapolitans pulled up, loaded it onto a flatbed, and hauled it off. Then an identical gondola was installed in its place. Tossing generic trash into these gaping maws was no big deal, but the skids were heavy, unwieldy, and jagged-edged, with nails sticking out, and if gripped without gloves or flung around in a careless fashion, they could easily shred one’s fingers. That’s why I always wore gloves.

The late sixties and early seventies were an era when Caucasian college boys working in factories during their summer vacations were in awe of older black men, viewing them as repositories of untramelled wisdom their own fathers did not possess. The older a black man was, and the less gainfully employed, the more likely he was to be a geyser of sagacity. Those of us who were working class ourselves were less receptive to these men’s charms, as we had previously come into contact with elderly black men who had not proven to be astoundingly wise. But the middle-class boys from the ritzier neighborhoods were invariably smitten by these tough, well-traveled, inner-city solons, fawning like school-girls in their ebony presence.

The wise old black men, for their part, capitalized on this fulsome homage by getting the white boys to do the crummy jobs that they themselves abhorred. One such individual was a tall, heavyset man who presided over the garbage-disposal unit with a severity, detachment, and solemnity that suggested Pluto manning the reviewing stand in Hades. He walked with a limp, smoked like a chimney, and had a silky, sultry singing voice. A stickler for detail and a bit of a perfectionist in a job that required no perfection, he would instruct us to heave the trash into the gondola, chuck in the busted skids, then climb inside the tip and jump up and down on the accumulated refuse to compress it. Meanwhile, he would stand back and belt out the first few bars of “One Enchanted Evening” or “Lush Life,” the most frequently performed numbers in his impressive, albeit limited, repertory. Occasionally, he would punctuate his regal, velvety Johnny Hartman impersonation with a procedural tip derived from his many years of experience in the waste-management sector such as, “More to the left” or “Watch out for that rat down by your foot.” Once we’d hauled ourselves out of the gondola, he would press a button to activate a huge iron compacting device that would squeeze the trash far back into the recesses of the unit. Then we would start the process all over again, repeating it several times until no more trash remained.