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One torpid June evening, a decade or more ago, my wife and I attended a dinner party at a modest home on tony Mercer Island, a short bridge crossing away from Seattle. The island rises like an afterthought from Lake Washington in a determined effort to break away from the lake’s expanse and divide it into two narrow and long channels, an effort at which it fails but on an admirable scale. The lake affords a vast amount of beachfront real estate that, because its nearness to the city’s pulse, is beyond what any of us can afford, including our friends, the Peter Tonglaus, who live on a bluff high above the water and not even in sight of it. The house, though new, was nothing special and was, in fact, pretty much like the houses in which all of us lived. They were modest, genteel. They were nice, but not awfully nice, and were considered good values. They would appreciate slowly, steadily.

The party was ostensibly to celebrate some minor personal occasion but was really to salute summer, which was nearly upon us and existed as an oppressive reminder tonight with its humidity and temperature more suited for August. All of the women and some of the men were librarians; the rest of us spouses. Spouses is no longer the correct word, I know. Some of us were true husbands and wives, others live-ins, and a few same-sex partners or mates—whatever they are called, in that current bureaucratic, euphemistic jargon we have all hate and use unquestioningly. The library was Seattle Public, its main or downtown branch, that is, a large central facility, and the sponsoring department was Humanities, a recent melding of History and Literature, which my wife headed, a division now made permanent by edict, long after staff had grown accustomed to each other and to sharing a reference desk for years, teaching each other courteously how to behave as interchangeable entities (for practical purposes, anyhow) but calling upon each other from time to time in order to field tricky specialist questions that arrived in the form of ground balls hit by batter patrons, either in person or over the telephone. Morale was high and everybody respected and liked each other.

Parties such as this one were held no less frequently than twice a year, sometimes quarterly, when our occasions demanded fresh gatherings, so we all knew each other fairly well, at least by sight, even those of us who were but spouses, etc., and not co-workers enriched by daily interaction. Thus I knew Peter Tonglau, and he me, but not very well, and we would call out to each other jovially and address each other by the correct name, after which we retreated and began to look for somebody else to talk to. Usually there was no one better around, so we would wander miserably, desperately, forlornly around the room, studying the bad art on the wall (often children’s classroom exercises) and the non-library books arranged alphabetically or by category with our heads tipped ninety degrees from the vertical in order to try to read the authors and titles, for librarian families are nuts about books and hoard them according to their tastes, often revealingly, nakedly, regardless of what the public’s may be. Shelf-reading is a reasonably interesting way of killing moments that might otherwise be deadly dull.

Not a breath stirred the warm, heavy air; of course not, for we were inside, and the open patio door inhaled nothing refreshing but only more of the same oppression. What the open door was thought to do was to let out a little of the amassed body heat. This was psychologically a good thing, if true, for it helped us believe we were getting cooler. And perhaps we were. We all held something to drink in one hand. Few any longer smoked, or owned up to doing so, or would have a nicotine fit within an hour of being deprived of his or her tobacco fix. Glasses mostly held the ubiquitous white wine (yellow, really), or some weak mixed drink from the limited stock provided by the host and later to be reimbursed from the Staff Fund. My SevenUp and my wife’s could easily pass for vodka and tonic, if the curious did not get near enough to sniff our glasses. (And they’d better not.) I thought back (I am always doing this; better get used to it) to the time when Norma and I would both be puffing away on a Chesterfield (me; a real lung-kicker’s poison) or a Benson and Hedges (hers; filtered of a fraction of its deadliness by means of a foam insert at the tip) and clutching a well-watered Scotch in our hands. This was before we retrogressed to beer and then to drinks that could only be called soft. It was a matter of conjugal self-survival, we decided. Some of our friends had drunk themselves to early death. Others had smoked themselves there.

After a few moments all the spouses and spouse-surrogates were circling the living room, dining room, den, and TV room in counterclockwise fashion, as Peter and I were doing. We had started it, but traffic patterns have their own atomic structure and strict rules govern how they will behave. Meanwhile, the humanities staff was totally at ease with each other, chattering away and exclaiming aloud over minutiae. How I envied them, though this was much like work to them and the cooperation made necessary by having a common goal, serving the public. It was the old, You Do This, I’ll Do That sort of thing, but made more complicated by the fact that more than two people were involved; all the female staff members cooperated cheerfully, routinely, while the males held back, as if shy, but really just chronically lazy, and let the women organize, arrange, and perform most of the work. At least the most difficult, time-consuming stuff.

I am uncomfortable at these outings and, along with a recognizable number of short- and long-term partners, and fiddle a lot and look mildly dyspeptic. Well, I hadn’t eaten for about eight hours and was not much heartened by the food prospect ahead. It was the kind of gathering where everybody brought a favorite dish. The dining table was laden with these, some of them hot, none of them really, but the host had not yet given the signal to dive in. What was the problem? It’s always been a wonder to me the process by which this announcement takes place. Clearly it is the host’s duty to wave the starting flag, but he or she (usually she) is guided by the urgency radiated by the guests and the gesture comes tardily. It is an inherently female thing to do, though the task is sometimes performed by a man. He does it poorly, probably because he doesn’t fully understand the rules and is blind to the nuances of the situation. I, my stomach whining, waited impatiently for the pulse, the motion towards the table, but a large part of me didn’t want to eat at all. That part would gladly flee the scene and go foodless for the rest of the evening, as a tradeoff for being issued some socially acceptable form of escape. But none is given, not ever.

I am a finicky eater. It’s not that I believe I am about to be poisoned by people I scarcely know—though at these things it is a distinct possibility—as I am keen to the fact that unknown food substances undoubtedly contain spices and herbs unfamiliar to me and my stomach. My tongue will not identify them soon enough and semaphore to my esophagus and stomach that they are benign and okay. Therefore a precautionary tightening up takes place, all along the food canal. My tongue rolls back in the mouth, my jaw narrows, my throat clenches, etc., all the way down to the entrance to my anxious stomach. It becomes a fist. You get my point. So when the time to eat finally arrives, I am in no shape for the task, though paradoxically I have been hungry for hours.

The solution, I know, is for us to be the first couple to leave the party, hurry home, and gorge myself with known safe substances such as pasteurized cheese and crackers, home-baked cookies, etc. But that time is presently as long off as sleep, nearly, and my stomach knows it. There are hours left before that can take place and I must somehow get through them, one by one. So I carefully, moderately, pick and choose from the wealth of items displayed before me and select only those that I recognize and have thoroughly tested and are known to be harmless. This includes bread stuffs, ham (it is hard to ruin a ham), roast beef that has clearly not been contaminated with additives and lies nakedly on its platter, sliced brown and black and pink. And my wife’s scalloped potatoes, clearly identifiable among many similar dishes by the Pyrex container and lid used to transport it each time, still warm, to wherever we are invited to such a communal dinner.

Still I take tiny portions. Specially to be avoided, I caution you, by people like me, though compromising but a fraction among what are already minorities, surely, are innocuous-looking salads. One time I was tricked by a clever hostess into trying one; she stood over me to ensure that I wouldn’t refuse to put some on my plate. A large, empty area stood waiting. The bowl looked innocent enough—three types of greens, including endive, a little crumbled hard-boiled egg, chives (they don’t bother me and actually aid in digestion), firm attractive tomato wedges, croutons of a normal color (that is, not spiced up), perhaps a bit of grated cheese that appears harmless. This is all that was there. I chose a long-respected dressing from a chilled bottle. You can always trust the folks from Kraft. I took a tentative bite—and almost spit the stuff in the lap of my dinner partner. Shrimp. Tiny, fragile shrimp, devoid of color, disguised in some sort of slime that looked like ground cheese in oil, had been added to the salad in a devilish plan to sicken me, or otherwise ruin my evening.

"Excuse me," I muttered, rising to my feet, putting my reinforced paper plate down on my chair as if to mark it as mine and, clutching my paper napkin tightly, darted to an unoccupied nook of the next room in order to divest my mouth of its foul contents. Let me tell you, there is not enough SevenUp in the world to wash away the taste of shrimp from someone not prepared to ingest it.

Many people, I’ve since learned, have favorite dishes they have prepared for decades, and they enjoy parties because it gives them an occasion to mix up another batch of familiar slop. Often the chief ingredient is some special spice (curry will do) or some unheard of combination of herbs. Thus every meatloaf is suspect. Mixed vegetables in a sauce is a favorite culprit. How we wish to distinguish ourselves and be made famous by what comes out of our kitchens. But how little real culinary skill is involved in this near-criminal experimentation. And how often people, namely women, get away with it because nobody dares to speak up and announce the truth of what is being done to them: subtle poison.

This includes myself. I have never, never, ruined a dinner party by rising to my feet and speaking what I know about that lies at the heart of the situation. Instead, I quietly retreat and eject the matter into a paper napkin, which I leave wherever I wish. Let them try to identify me later. It is impossible to get clear, readable fingerprints from a heavy, wadded up napkin.

Desserts are generally safe. The simpler the better. The worst thing you can do to apple pie, for instance, is to put in a lot of cinnamon. Cinnamon won’t hurt you, though it surprises your mouth in much the same way as chili powder does. Now, chili powder can burn your gullet for hours afterwards and take away your appetite for a day or two, but does no real harm, I am aware. The mouth, even the tongue, recovers quickly from a large, unnecessary dose of cinnamon, though for the moment you may doubt it. Trust me. A covered dish may do you wrong, but I won’t.

So I ate some ham, my wife’s clearly identified scalloped potatoes (mild and delicious, as always), and three or four different kind of bread and rolls. I stayed away from two or three voluptuous Jell-O salads because you never know with what the stuff is polluted. And I tried a piece of layer cake, but left most of it on my small plate, for it had an odd aftertaste that stopped me in mid-chew and made me hesitant to masticate and swallow the rest. It took five solid minutes of chewing before I finally decided to risk it. Then we all put our plates on the kitchen tile and I, feeling relieved that this trauma was over, flowed with the others back into the living room, dining room, and den, and faced the rigors of the remaining evening, which could only be more pleasant.

I saw Peter Tonglau talking to another Peter. This was Pete Garrett. We were all three long-time library spouses. The real McCoys, not surrogates, not intendeds, temporaries, situationals, shack-ups, live-ins, or recently uncloseted come-out partners or mates. True husbands, I mean. Long-termers at life. This we had in common, much like graduates of Army basic training, whatever the year and war. Tonglau was tall and thin, but his features rather rounded, a bit hesitant and shy-seeming, as Chinese-born Taiwanese often are, or are reared to be. It is a type of diffidence not to be accepted at face value. He is sharp, perceptive. He wore small, wire-rimmed, white-gold glasses, each lens nearly round, and they looked thick without being noticeably bifocular. He was, I knew, an engineer at Boeing. Well, I had worked there, in my time, and had extensive experience with its vast aerospace engineering department, though I had been in finance—indeed, in a marginal subset called record management, intended to save the company money but instead costing it a lot more because of its elaborate hokum.

I thought I should be able to talk a good game to him, though cautioning myself against excessive sarcasm. The place was not called The Kite Factory for nothing. It had to do with a certain flightiness of the people who had bit the bullet and determined to work there past the first five years, after which time their retirement was vested.

Garrett was tall also, but sharp-featured, somewhat angular, with a growing little potbelly that might have been cultivated and not exercised away, for it comprised his link to the gentry—if we have such a class, and we do. He was of Scandinavian descent, despite the Irish name, and his thin gold hair had recently silvered attractively, and he knew it. Accordingly, he chose grays and blues that would enhance him and it. He was five or six years older than me and twenty-five or more senior to the Boeing Pete. He worked for Weyerhaeuser, the huge international firm known far and wide for its debasing of its land, but it claimed to be recently modestly reformed in its logging practices and advertised itself widely. Pete had risen moderately high in the company, over all these years, was now head of its facilities, at least regionally. He worked at their headquarters campus in a nearby meadow near Auburn. It was an industrial park that did a successful job of imitating a greensward coastal university site, such as Santa Barbara or Santa Cruz.

The Weyerhaeuser campus was a truly pretty place. I had been there for a series of meetings hosted by a vice-president who looked and acted so much like Garrett that I kept getting them mixed up and thought perhaps there was a corporate cookie cutter which management used to sort out and move ahead those with the correct physical appearance, assuming all the other ruthless qualities would follow. But no, they were different men, though differing similarly. I could imagine the Weyerhaeuser Pete driving to work each day in his Volvo (a Mercedes was probably out of reach for him, just as Mercer Island waterfront was for the other Pete) and arriving here at the sprawling glass and concrete palace, where he spent the day planning the purchase and distribution of vast quantities of office supplies and industrial equipment sent round the world to branch operations. This was fairly impressive, at least to me.

We went into the Boeing Peter’s study, which was in the process of becoming a bedroom for their first-born daughter, who now required one of her own. Betty Tonglau was pregnant with their second child, who would soon take over the large closet off their bedroom deemed the nursery. Thus we move up and out through life. Peter accepted his displacement with stoic fortitude. I remembered the Weyerhaeuser Peter’s study in a fine mainland house, with a view of the same lake, a room which was really an extension of the kitchen and was intended to be a family room, or TV room, but held most of his modest implements, such as pipes and tobacco and staid men’s magazines. Oh, yes, it contained a black leather Eames chair and footstool. A real one, not a crude imitation of the kind that can be found deep in. the recesses of major chain department store. Nothing quite caresses the fingertips like real leather does. Just as the Boeing Peter was being displaced by the next generation he sired, the Weyerhaeuser Peter was acquiring living space recently given up by a family gently dissolving its bonds, as his children went away to college, or else returned briefly after graduation and then found jobs and apartments nearby. He had a son, destined to be a minister, and a daughter, who after a few more years of law school, became first a deputy prosecuting attorney for the county and then a public defender. I take it the two jobs are pretty much the same.

It was so hot, close, and muggy, that we soon flowed out onto the patio; others quickly followed our lead. The idea was, if a ghost of a breeze were to arrive, nobody wanted to miss it. We had shed light-weight jackets and loosened ties—those who had bothered to wear them. Weyerhaeuser Pete brought his pipe from out of his side pocket, made an overly elaborate fuss out of examining its scarred bowl, cramming loose tobacco into the void, inspecting his work, tamping the loose stuff with a special little tool that collapsed back into itself neatly afterwards, looking to see all was done according to ritual, then applying a match that flared excitingly but did not ignite the nearby drapes, disappointingly. The pipe issued forth a thick white plume as Pete drew noisily on the stem. The aromatic odor was seconds behind the cloud. It spread around the patio as fast as bad a chemistry-class experiment. Then it hung in the air flatulently.

Our subject was work. We came around to it immediately, or rather they did. It was a common enough topic but always made me nervous, for I have trouble explaining myself. Not these two. Their identities were closely identified with their companies. They had careers. How I envied them. And how I dreaded the question I knew would come up, sooner or later, as it always does: "What is it you do, Bob?" I’ve always had trouble stammering out an acceptable reply. You could say I give myself away early by my hesitation.

As a writer, I cannot simply tell people I write. It’s what I do. This problem goes back to school days, when everybody was pretending to be something that he or she wanted to be but never was, not quite. To say you were a writer in an English Department was asking to be compared to John Milton. You were asking to be laughed at. (They were happy to oblige.) Or else you were expected to have already produced a thing or two. A short poem in a literary magazine would carry you a long, long ways. But nobody I knew had done it, so far. Now, years later, the prospect of self-stigma remained with me. How I longed to say—truly or untruly—I was a carpenter, say, or engaged in direct sales. Even indirect sales seemed a firm and respectable identity. When I went to the Blue Moon Tavern for a beer, and took a seat up at the bar, there was always some clown who would challenge me as to what I did. Most the patrons were some kind of pseudo-intellectual. Often they were engaged in the manual trades. For a while I told people I was a fisherman, which was true enough. Then one day I ran into a real commercial Bristol Bay sockeye fisher and he wanted to know the name of my boat. That showed me up for the pretender that I was. My total sales from writing that year was less than $600. Fortunately I had a wife with a good job. Little did I know, in my less than splendid state of isolation, that most writers have spouses (that word again) with steady jobs. I thought I was the shameful exception. Rather, it is the rule.

So I contented myself, that torpid evening, with listening, believing that if I did a good job of it the subject might never turn to me or my occupation. I was fifty. Time to be something useful, however dishonorable. Yet they all knew I really wrote and had a Grand Pyramid of manuscript to show for it, with little published. And a decade later, with two published books under my belt, the situation was not much different. Both books were on flyfishing and had sold something less than two thousand copies each; these numbers did not much matter to these people. They saw writing as decent, respectable work. In their circle, the fact that I had sold so few copies was more redeemable than if the books had been best sellers. Some of the great books of all time had sold pitifully small numbers of copies originally. I had been told this, over and over. To me it was just another example of the old "undistributed middle term." A number of terrible books had sold large numbers of copies, as well.

So it was mostly I who was ashamed of what I did and my lack of success, as it might charitably be called. Yet I did not envy the engineer or the facilities manager who stood in front of me, exchanging familiar chitchat. Or rather I envied both of them their paycheck, but not much of anything else. Oh, yes. The Eames Chair. That decidedly. Aside from these items, their lives did not evidence much diversity and challenge. They were solid citizens, dutiful, and probably voted in every election, including those for school bonds and street repair. I doubted whether either had watched a pornographic movie—at least till not to completion.

Well, I had, plus a number of other things I might not want to own up to. And I had held many jobs, some of them incredible, that qualified me for an award for what might be called the direct opposite of dependability. For now I was content to listen to these careermen exchange veiled confidences to a world and worlds to which I was an outsider. Or was I? I had worked more than a year at Boeing, and I could tell you the period of time exactly, for it began when my wife was three months pregnant (I take my son’s age, and add six months on to it) and ended when he was just over a year old and racing all over the house at breakneck speed.

I had been hired as a procedures analyst because I had done similar work in the Army. Experience counts as experience, no matter how trivial or menial. My grade was GS3. At the same time, a woman friend of mine, a fellow English major, was hired as a GS9 or 10. The higher the number the lower the rank and pay. She was at the bottom rung, a helper to a secretary, while I was near the top of the peasant’s ladder. Shows what a pair of testicles will do for you.

I had thought to make some joking reference to this, but realized that both Petes were so much a part of the system that they would find no humor, no irony, in the fact that the company (Weyerhaeuser would have done the same thing) would treat the similar pair of us so differently. There was nothing I could do that Verna could not do, and probably better. Her typing was much better than mine. Yet I made six-hundred dollars a month, while she made about half of that. Of course, both Petes would have asked; what part of it don’t you understand? So I kept mum. Eventually, in nine-months time, the same length I now realize as my wife’s gestation, I had risen to supervisor. La-de-da. It came through on Christmas Eve Day and my boss had given me my "brown badge" (don’t ask what the brown is for, for you already must know) in mid-afternoon; this was a decade before that day became a holiday, too. I took home my new status symbol and fastened its clasp to our Christmas tree. This act my pair of Petes would understand. By now I was far past performing such a gesture and somewhat ashamed of what I’d done, though it was no more than an expression of simple vanity. And more money was nice.

I could not wait to quit. Each payday—every other Wednesday, it was, shortly before first lunch—we were issued our paychecks. "The bi-weekly insult" we called it, though it was much more money than any of us could earn anyplace else, so it was really a kind of fond complaint and ironic tribute to the company all of us—my friends, anyway—hated to the core. Responsibility had been diffused to the point of being a vapor. They had an appropriate joke, "If my boss calls, get his name and I’ll call him back." But the reality was, many of us had multiple bosses, along with several duty stations (as the military, which I was just out of, called them), so if you reported to no one person, you in fact reported to nobody, and if you had desks scattered around the company, nobody could expect to find you at any particular one of them, not at any given time, so you could be anywhere, and I often was. Nowhere. I couldn’t be located. I never left the company property, but discovered mysterious nooks, unknown then and now, to anybody but me. There I scrunched down and read my books.

Tonight I listened to the two Petes, a half-smile on my face, my mind space-traveling back to my own tour of duty at Boeing. Pete Tonglau described a company I had never experienced, one comprised of serious young professionals, engineers all, involved in meaningful work of great complexity and import. I and my friends had mocked them with our comical, self-indulgent behavior. We had taken the company’s money and given them nothing in return except disloyalty and lack of devotion. I felt suddenly ashamed—but only briefly. (It never lasts long.) Apparently there were people, perhaps out in the vast prison of a factory, who worked hard and ceaselessly, or else those magnificent airplanes wouldn’t roll off the assembly line.

But me and mine had been involved in aerospace, not airplane manufacture, and our product was paperwork weapon systems and space exploration vehicles (Bomarc was one, Dynasoar another) doomed never to be built. And nuclear-headed rockets, Minuteman, never fired in to be anger. (And what anger it would have been!)

We formed an underground, we company haters, recognized each other by not so secret signs of public dismay, frequented each other’s company, avoided the rest, goofed off with professional expertise, wandered the long, echoing corridors with literary little magazines in our briefcases, searching for our special nook, wherein we could waste away an entire afternoon, with a little luck. And then on every other Wednesday, our crisp check for some undeserved sum in our pocket, we waited for the four-thirty factory whistle to signify the day was ended (but in truth the real one just beginning). We hied ourselves to where our personal transportation vehicle, our car, was stashed in the vast company parking lot, and headed away at breakneck speed to our favorite tavern. For I presumed that the other dissidents did as well.

Mine was The Elite, another joke, one with terrible irony attached. The pub was owned by Doreen, who served as barmaid until the day grew dark and the usual nightly crowd materialized, after which she retreated to the cashregister bastion, which was always clanging, while a steady procession of scantily-clad women, some down on their luck, worked the tables, delivering overflowing pitchers of draft beer to table after table, while poolballs exchanged clacks and the juke blared. I, on whatever barstool I could find vacant, generally down at the end by Doreen, whined to her and whoever would listen my lament about my lot in life, while I slurped down three schooners before returning home to my wife and month-old son, a little looped but eager for dinner.

Peter Tonglau’s Boeing was like Peter himself, dour, slightly sad, conscientious, efficient, brave, industrious, dedicated, intelligent, and steadfast. Mine was wasteful, idiotic. How could the places be one and the same? And yet they were. It was then that I began to realize that the world was multifarious and rich. There were as many solutions to the puzzle as there were people to pose problems about its nature, or who could attempt to define its terms.

I had a casual friend who worked his whole productive life at Boeing, a Stanford grad, no less, also an engineer, who began his day driving by to the Renton plant, eating his breakfast on the way, which consisted each day of two cold hotdogs and buns provided by his obedient wife, along with coffee out of the huge inevitable green metal thermos poured into one of those bottom-weighted cups that dared you to overturn it. Others continued to work there more or less happily. I simply couldn’t; it wasn’t in me. I quit when I was a few dollars ahead, my son ready to walk, announced my departure in spite of the fact (or perhaps because of it) that they had just promoted me to supervisor. This became a touchstone of my life: Promote me only if you wish to lose me.

"So you worked at Boeing, too?" asked Tonglau Pete, turning his serious face to mine. By now I was dead serious, too. It was a result of long listening to the preceding conversation and keeping an agreeable smile on my face, all the while. I saw no reason to change it now, even though I was being given an opportunity to reduce their world to shreds. Boeing Pete was, after all, my host for tonight, even though this was technically a no-host dinner party.

"Nice bunch of people," I murmured. "I shall not easily forget a few of them." There; that should do it.

"You were, I believe, in records management?"

I had foolishly said as much at an earlier gathering of these people. My mistake. People remember. Not so much as a grin as he spoke the words. What an opening. As if records could be managed in any other way than in speeding up their destruction. Or for that matter in reducing their sheer volume. I was tempted to tell them about the madness of a division-wide reports-control study that my boss and I had foisted on top management and relate some of the humorous episodes that resulted. With straight faces, we had told everybody in the division to forward to us one copy, and one copy only, of every recurring report that and to include with it a list of its recipients. Experimentally we included all machine-prepared reports as well, just to get a handle on the extent of them, we said, there in these the early day of computers. By the end of the second day after our memo went out, over the signature of T. Wilson, the division’s head, we had filled a room the size of a basketball court with bundled paper. I spent the morning of the second day hunting for additional storage space. Nothing I found was adequate.

But why bother telling the two Petes? They would think I was making up the story. That’s the trouble with the exact truth. Nobody believes it. Or else—much worse—they would recognize the story as reliable and see no horror, no irony, in it.

So I simply said, "Yes, right, records management. A dubious science. More of an art. We are envious of you real scientists and engineers. But as I remember it, your record keeping was awful. Always losing important files just before a critical meeting. We had a bevy of women you were always requesting help from in order to straighten out your messes."

Peter Tonglau smiled. We lived in the same world, after all. The world of Boeing. It was a real place. It had borders and limits. It occupied space. I did not mention what the file consultants told us about the engineers, upon their returned from that world of organized folly. They were mostly new hires, girls and women fresh out of high school or arrested at some point in college, on the lookout for men, husbands, and never did they go into a well-paid engineering area without taking the measure of the man who was in such sad in need of having his files reorganized in order to save him from the state of entropy rapidly approaching.

"How can a guy be so dumb and smart at the same time?" was an often-heard complaint. Or, "If he never opened his mouth, he might pass as an intelligent human being but, my God, everything is of exactly the same value to them. Don’t they have any sense of humor?"

"They have engineering jokes," I told them. "They’re pretty funny, but only if you’re an engineer."

"And if your aren’t?"

"Unintelligible," I replied, without any evident irony or mirth, for I am at my funniest when dead serious. The reverse is true, as well, for it is hard to try to be funny. So I played it straight tonight—that is, earnest and solemn—in my statements about working at Boeing and, as a consequence, perhaps, soon had the pair of Petes in stitches. But all said lightly, with evident good humor. Gone was the bickering rancor that had filled my days there. So does time heal old wounds, or else sand smooth the jagged edges of old scars.

Tonglau now revealed teeth that were white, even, and had received excellent care under the Boeing dental plan; whoever made his crowns knew what he was doing. I looked deep into the shining porcelain and was quickly taken up in the throes of remembrance, those ancient days gripping me again and denying escape. The two Petes seemed to be asking something of me now, something specific. Was I to . . . entertain them? Well I could, though I never saw myself as an entertainer, except in the stillness of my writing. They were asking me—the air of them—for a perspective different from their everyday. They wanted me to return to a past life and to communicate to them some insight into the lingering confusion that still was there, that never changed.

But that world was no longer mine, if it had ever been. No matter. Entertain them. Make up a story. You are supposed to be good at it. So, caught up in a flood of the past, my audience captive, attentive, wholly mine. It was not hard to find the words to begin. Words, after all, are my medium. They are the tools of my trade.

I had been hired as a trainee for a newly formed group called Group Capacity Analysis, or GCA for short. We were immediately issued stop watches and told we would be trained how to use them to time repetitive office tasks. We had clipboards and nifty Scripto pencils, with endless leads and replaceable pink nipple erasers (highly erotic themselves). We also had flow charts, organizational outlines of Boeing units, departments, and sections, lists of personnel with their GS and supervisory grades, which were the equivalent of salary grids, etc.

The first day of our training, I listened nervously to a presentation by a highly paid consultant from Touche Ross put us at our ease by relating how he had once told an office staff that in the morning his team was coming into the area to take some preliminary measurements. No big deal, nothing to get excited over or to worry about. Staff relaxed. Next morning he arrived at work, hung his jacket on a hangar provided by an accommodating secretary, sat down beside, her, smiled, she smiled back, and he said, "All right, Betty, go ahead. Begin. Do the work you normally would do if I wasn’t here." And he pulled out his stopwatch and punched the start button.

Betty fainted dead away.

Everybody in the room laughed except one. I stood up and announced, "This is not for me. Goodbye, all." And headed for the door.

"Stop. You can’t quit now."

"Just watch me."

"No, I mean, you can’t quit, even if you want to. Your paperwork is spread all over the company, at the moment. Your security clearance is at the FBI. We can’t call it back." I wondered who the "we" was, since he was only a consultant.

GCA was the equal to the Gestapo, I was beginning to think. And this hired consultant? One of the SS?

It proved true that I physically couldn’t quit, not at the moment. They had to find me another job until my paperwork reached a stopping point and the terminating paperwork could begin. It would take two weeks—longer for the security clearance. And what would the FBI say? Or rather, what would they do on hearing the request was revoked?

So Boeing found me another job. It was in records management, that dubious field of business science, where one bunch of idiots hid records in unlikely places, then begged other idiots to help them find the records and put them into some kind of seemly order, please. All this activity had to be documented, of course. Because I had done much the same sort of thing while in the Army, writing down procedures that were intended to be repeated, because soldiers were always being transferred elsewhere and all continuity would be lost without written records, and the veneer of order would be reduced to babbling incoherence, Boeing now firmly requested that I not leave but remain and join another small group of dolts assigned the documentation responsibility for the records management unit. How could I say no? I needed the money badly, what with a wife soon to end her employment and slowed down considerably by morning sickness? Besides, all those records (records again) having to do with my hiring were now being routed through the company mail in every direction, not to mention outside the company to the dreaded FBI. They were impossible to retrieve while in transit and so I could not leave, for I did not already quite exist. That is, I had no completed forms on file, which would have to be canceled by other forms sent through the same company mail that would permit me to terminate, as they called it. Did I not understand the problem? Couldn’t I remain for a few days longer, so that I could officially leave? Of course I could, they’d put it so nicely.

Better yet would be if they could find something else that I might like. I’d had enough experience with Boeing so far today to think this was unlikely. But I wanted them to remember me as a good sport. And I did not want to sabotage the national effort to build missal-delivery systems for nuclear weapons and space-exploration vehicles before they could be built. So I stayed. And stayed.

It was the most tactful, gentlest, considerate falsehood I’d ever delivered, and I’ve had my few. Both Petes beamed. I told them the one about leaving the plant with a new-hire secretary, a real beauty. With my usual flair for sarcasm that often goes unnoticed, I turned to this red-headed, high-heeled knockout, who loomed an inch taller than my then-six feet, and murmured, as a huge commercial airliner rose from the Plant Two Air Field, "Doesn’t it make you proud to know that you helped build this baby?"

"Oh, yes," she cooed. "Every time I see one of them. Proud indeed. But I’m not sure I can tell a Boeing from a Douglas. Is there some trick to identifying them?" She touched my sleeve, turning, and asked: "Look, do you have time for a drink? There are a whole lot of questions I’ve been dying to ask somebody who has worked here a long time."

I’d been there three months now, but why give the show away?

I said, "I’ve got a pregnant wife got o get home to a hot dinner."

"I didn’t meant anything by it," she explained. "Jeez."

I had the two Petes in stitches now, though nothing very funny had been said, and knew myself that my story was roughly forty percent true, which is pretty accurate for me, in public-speaking situations.

The Weyerhaeuser Pete said, finishing up his chuckle, "You guys. Boeing must be a terrific place. I envy you. A laugh a minute."

"No, not at all" said the other Pete, but the first one was not done and continued, "Can’t say the same thing about my firm." Note, firm, not company, or business, or industry. Not even its hallowed name, for it must be self-evident.

"I don’t suppose, Bob, you’ve had any experience with Weyerhaeuser"—and now the name was reverently spoken—"I mean, its people or its physical plant?"

"As a matter of fact, I have," I replied drolly. "Do you know Dave Mumper?"

Indeed he did. Mumper was a senior vice-president for something important, such as public relations. He lived on a lake front home near here, where we stood this heat-soaked night on the crowded terrace, where couples and singles kept drifting out and past us.

I’d been to meetings with this physically impressive dude as a member of the advisory board to the Puget Sound Water Quality Authority. Lest this impress you unduly, the board was comprised of 97 people picked half at random, half to give voice to a diverse majority of citizens, some of them members (as was I) of environmental organizations without whose selection there would most likely be a public outcry. I was known to be flyfisher who wrote on a free-lance basis, and therefore had unlimited time at his disposal. What better way for him to use it than on a board where his small but noisy faction would be squashed by so many formidable figures from industry?

On the committee Mumper and I were ostensible equals. Ha-ha. The man was about seven feet tall and wore thousand dollar suits. He had silver hair and a remarkable tan, considering that it was dead winter. He had a pleasant way of addressing you as though you might work for him, he had so many who did, and he couldn’t be expected to recognize them all. It was designed not to urge you to put away your fear and discomfort, for you were among friends, but rather to make you increase your apprehension accordingly. He had a way of looking a few inches over your head when he spoke, as though to remind you that you were not as tall as he and must be wishing otherwise; he did this even when we were all seated at a conference table. The Weyerhaeuser Campus was where we met; the room had no windows and its airflow mechanically changed every five minutes by compressors, a room without a wallclock (much like the military, which presumed every soldier had a wristwatch) and no other visible means of indicating time, so you could hardly complain about how long the meeting was lasting, since there were no visible clues available to us.

Mumper would always nod dim recognition in my direction but never call me by name, though I immediately began calling him Dave as though we were old friends. Perhaps the two actions were connected. I hoped so.

Additionally I knew some other Weyerhaeuser employees, but these could correctly be called field hands, since they worked away from the campus and had grit and cuticle problems from repeated contact with the soil and with trees either on the ground or soon to be cut down. Some were engineers, others were soil scientists, wildlife biologists who had sold out, superintendents, crew chiefs, botanists, surveyors, clear on down to cutters and fellers and guys who ran those mammoth machines that could embrace a tree, snip it off deftly, delimb it in one fell stroke, turn it horizontally, and load it on a waiting truck How mechanized logging had become. Soon it come be done without people.

At the first meeting of the non-point source water pollution committee, I arrived twenty minutes late. I usually am punctual, but get easily lost, almost as easily found again, and I took the freeway I-5 South from my home, in the direction of Auburn, allowing myself plenty of time. But my mind must have wandering (it was a nice day to be fishing) for I went past my exit and found myself looking off in the distance at a Mt. Rainier that loomed much larger than it should have. I found an off-ramp, swung under the noisy freeway, circled a distance, found an on-ramp, and soon was speeding in the opposite direction, the mountain now over my right shoulder. Once again I missed the right exit. I performed the maneuver again, but in the opposite direction, with my friend the snowcone in front of me again. This gave me a certain unearned sense of security. Now when I came to my exit I was wary and alert. A green sign on the shoulder announced, "Lodging, food, gas." Well, you can’t go too far wrong, with those amenities.

Signs every few hundred feet announced "Weyerhaeuser Central Campus". Many large universities are not advertised so well. Nor hospitals with emergency rooms. I swung off the micro-freeway onto another long, curving, cement glide and spotted the complex ahead. It was beautifully landscaped in towering old grown firs, no doubt imported for public-relations purposes. It was also ringed in lush budded rhododendrons. Many cars were clustered near the hotel-like entrance to the major buildings. I parked at a distance and began the long trek to the entrance. It took me another five minutes. Then I had to sort my way through the lobby and search the directory for the room reserved for us—a room that was identified by a combination of letters and numbers. To reach it I had to take an elevator. More time gone. It was playing a Haydn string quartet.

The rugs were thick and looked like they had been laid just last night. White noise issued forth discretely from overhead devises that resembled smoke indicators. Now I like meeting rooms that have a glass panel in the door so you can preview what you are getting into. There was none. I entered blindly and saw about thirty people hovering over a table, all engaged in rapt discussion of some advanced technical matter.

"I’m glad you found the place," Mumper, who chaired the group, called out to me, in a more or less public aside.

There was no chair for me, none at the table, but I spotted one against the wall, one on which everybody had piled his winter coat, and it was quickly emptied for me, the coats all dumped on the floor in a heap. I drew up to the table. Mumper was waiting to go on until I had made some sort of explanation for my late arrival. I tried to oblige.

"Freeway trouble," I told them all. "Nearly got lost." Faint chuckle—I had them now. "But then I saw a sign. ‘Lodging,’ it said. I misread it, in my haste. Thought it said ‘logging.’ Turned right and it brought me here in an instant." They were all laughing now. Mumper continued to look Nordically coldly annoyed. I would never win any game with him, I knew. As an environmentalist, I was his natural enemy until death.

I told the two Petes only a fraction of this and what had followed. It was best to change the subject. I began to talk wildly about the subject of non-point source pollution. It was the worst kind, for it could not be traced quickly back to a single culprit or a tangible source. It was insidious, deadly, obscure. It ruined lakes and rivers, creeks and ponds, all that it came in contact with, and it came in contact with everything. Bad dairy practices (cows shitting at the edge of a stream, for instance), logging and road-building over mountainous terrain, privies and failing septic systems, paved parking lots (which collected rainwater and mixed it with effluent from cars, etc.), agriculture, etc., all were proven sources, but ones that couldn’t be traced back to a single point. Hence its name.

Another advisory group was studying and would report back on point-source pollution—that which emanated from, say, a pipe or factory outlet or oil-storage facility. They were our closely-aligned other self, a somewhat warped mirror image of what we were concerned with and met regularly over, in dual committees ordered to report back to the central authority, which was made up of politicos, famous scientists, vocal Indians, and environmental activists whose chief aim was apparently getting their names into print. Weyerhaeuser often hosted such events and played the fatherly role of facilitator (a term already suspicious to me) in order to put a veil over their daily crimes being perpetrated on the environment.

I did not discuss much of this with the two Petes, instead describing how impressed I was with the facilities of the campus. This was true and pleasant enough. There did not seem to be many real people around the place. I caught a meal in the employees cafeteria—a vast area comprising about an acre of Formica tables and chairs. The executive dining room was pointed out to us, its door locked when I tested it. It was here that Mumper and his cronies ate on fine China, away from the roar of the rabble. I tried to imagine the noon menu, but got no farther than cold cucumber soup when I had a dire need to relieve myself, standing up. I began to range up and down the hallway, darting right, then left, looking for a door with a sign saying Men, but the rooms only had numbers and letters, and some of them not even those. Finally, after about half a mile, I came to one that said simply Restroom. Unisex, was it? Good. I flung back the spring-laden door and was hit by a wave of perfume and urine. A scream surely followed. Clearly it was intended for women only and currently in use. I tried an adjacent door and was met with a row of urinals. Relief!

Why not leave now, since the meeting was making no forward progress? I would hardly be missed, what with people coming and going in good numbers. I met a young woman in a hushed corridor who looked equally lost.

"Know where you are?" I asked cheerily.

"Not really," she admitted. "This is my first day on the job."

"I’m on my way out," I confided, like an old-time employee. "Walk you to your car?"

"I’d be much obliged," she said with a bright smile.

But I soon gave myself away and looked lost.

"Do you really work here?" she asked.

"No. I’m a fraud."

‘Do you know where we are?"

"Haven’t a clue."

"Come on, follow me. I have a pretty good idea."

Our cars were within sight of each other’s. We parted there, without another word. I wondered whether she came back to work the next day or thought better of it, as I had, or had tried to do, at Boeing, oh, so long ago.

By the time of the next Weyerhaeuser meeting, I had my room number memorized and had no trouble finding the room. It was in a different building, at its far end—about as far away from the first room as one could get. It was as though Mumper were anxious to expose us to as much diversity as he could in so short a period of time. Meetings continued to unfurl like a long banner carelessly on which no single word was legible. Timeless, purposeless our discussions took place in a world in which there were no minutes or hours, no daylight, no night. Occasionally we got off the subject and into some daring areas where we stayed for long, perhaps hours. Point-source issues were continually injecting themselves into our non-point source world. What a difference a piece of pipe meant.

Then all at once our time was up, the work done with, or carried as far as we could towards completion; a final report had to be pulled together by those not smart enough to duck assignment when the selecting finger pointed at him or her. This included me, for I had foolishly let them know I was a writer, and we get drafted for such tasks. Meanwhile Mumper had cleverly vanished. He had real work to do, places to go, important people to see. But the use of his company’s facilities was graciously extended to us. More meetings followed. When would they ever end?

The two Peters stood fixed and fascinated, there on the hot patio, as I prattled on. Not all of what I told them was literally true, only figuratively. A good story in my book counts for a lot.

Peter Tonglau said, with a sly smirk that said he didn’t believe a word of it, "You have certainly had an interesting life." Was this a variant on the ancient Chinese curse, I wondered? "So many jobs. So many people from so many different places. Nothing much ever happens to me or my friends at Boeing. All we ever see is each other. Of course there are thousands."

And the other Pete added, "The same with the people I know at Weyerhaeuser. Your portrait of Dave Mumper is unrecognizable. Nice guy, though I hardly know him. He always speaks to me, calls me by name. Of course I am a long-time employee and eat in the executive dining room. It isn’t much like you describe it, Bob. But then you are a fiction writer, aren’t you? In fact, the physical plant sounds more like the Green River Community College, down the road a piece. You sure you weren’t there?"

I smiled. It is what we do when our veracity is doubted.

The Weyerhaeuser Pete continued, "Anyway , you seem to have a had a lot of interesting jobs. Certainly more than the pair of us. Tell me. . . . What else have you done? Where have you worked?"

For a minute there I thought he was going to ask me what I did each day. And how do you explain writing and rewriting to someone who does his work with others—by committee, so to speak? Well, you can’t. But in the real world of work I have had considerable experience. Mostly menial. Awful jobs. But a few of them good jobs and all of them, in the long scheme of things, interesting. That word again. The ancient curse: may you live in interesting times.

I think times of revolution were meant.

Both men had worked at only the one job since they got out of college. The jobs they had before then were very much like the ones I had afterwards. That is to say, they are only amusing in long retrospect.

One of the Petes (I forget which) rattled off a list of jobs. I surprised them and myself by having worked at many of them, eighty or ninety percent of what was mentioned. Let’s see, and here I tick my fingers: Carpenter, house painter, rockery installer, processor of turkey carcasses on the way to the cold-storage locker, auto-freight biller, railroad fireman, polelineman, several kinds of accountant, electronic repairman, ditch-digger (non-union), teletype operator, tuxedo-rental outfitter, limousine driver, on and on. I had written short stories, poems, a few bad novels; advertising copy, insurance brochures, obituaries, Signal Corps standard procedures; had proofread, edited, laid out magazines and booklets, and been fired from two local daily newspapers. I had freelanced like a fiend for two weeklies, one monthly, and several national magazines with staggered (and staggering) publication schedules.

There were more. It seemed once that they would go on forever. The two Petes had led me to an important realization. All I had ever wanted to do with my life was write. But in order to do so I had to do almost everything else, at least for a while. And then I got lucky. I found free and able myself to do just what I wanted. Until that time, however, a lot had happened to me. I’d had a lot of jobs, a lot of life experiences having to do with work, that is, labor.

It seems to me it is a subject worth further analysis and effort. I mean, putting it all down. Do you get my meaning?

Write? Right.

2

My father was a businessman. Yours, too? Though he worked for a large department store that paid him a salary, and in time inched his way up to an admirable executive position, in his mind he was an entrepreneur. You know what that is? One who makes money out of . . . air. Thus, as his son, I would be one, too. He would help me, for I was too young to know my own natural course or the intricate workings of the world of commerce, and without a bit of direction would founder helplessly. So he helped me start my first early businesses. At the time I submitted because I was too small to do otherwise. He weighed about three times what I did. Big hands and arms, heavy frown. Besides, it didn’t occur to me I could resist or even refuse. So I did what I was told. I learned then what all of us are supposed to learn: Little Practical Lessons in Life. They will stand you in good stead when it comes time to go out into the world and make your own way. This means cheerless, tireless work.

In time I forgave him. I even came to love him. I did so for my own good. It is better to love and admire your father than not to. I pass this along to all of you who hate your fathers, however substantial your reasons. Turn all that early rancor to love and it will be much easier on you, you and your stomach lining, you and your throbbing brain. But each of must do his own unfair share of suffering. I can’t deprive you of it, even if I wished to. No, it is your lot.

There used to be weekly magazines other than Time, Newsweek, Business Week, and US News and World Report, family magazines, homey publications that were delivered to your door—usually the backdoor—probably on Wednesdays. Small boys did it. I was one of them. We formed a legion. We were and are an unsung national phenomena. Here I wish to sing about us briefly.

We sold subscriptions to what we were later to deliver, magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post (long before it dropped "evening" from its title), Colliers, Look, and perhaps Life (but I suspect not and don’t remember carting it around in the little canvas sack slung over my shoulder). I don’t remember the financing, either. My father probably helped me with this to the point where none of it remains for my memory to clasp. Nor do I recall climbing back staircases and knocking on doors with broken and sagging screens that fail to quite close in front of them. But I must have. And rather than suffer the ignominy of terse refusals and that self-same screen being drawn closed between me and them, it must have been only one more slight in a boy’s long day. I do remember the rather awesome duty of having to make the weekly delivery, no matter what. In this regard we boys were rather like postmen. Bad weather could slow but not deter us. And we were nearly married to our dreary little jobs, for we delivered in sickness and in health.

I think it began even before Norman Rockwell was in his heyday. The Post had covers drawn by less worthies. There was a kind of smooth cartooning style, pre-Disney, in which real-looking people had soft edges and were engaged in primarily household tasks, the men fixing things with a smile and chuckle, while a small boy paired with a small girl, brightly watched, the women in their kitchens (their primary duty station, as it were, in jargon of the war not yet quite hatched), smoothing the edge of a cherry pie or pummeling a meatloaf into a pan, in both cases a porcelain-clad oven door waiting in the background to be opened and the dish admitted. Usually the pictorial was haloed, or encircled in an oval frame, almost begging by the design of its shape to be stuck up on a wall as a handy object-lesson to all of the abject nature of domestic tranquillity.

It was not yet a lie.

We left Chicago, let’s see, when I was nine, and all this occurred a year or two earlier, and I was in, say, the second or third grade, in Coe Grade School, in a true polyglot neighborhood, where people spoke German and Irish and Polish and Negro and Italian openly in the streets, and everybody but us was poor as the soil down at the corner rapidly being turned into a public stadium by armies of the lazy and indolent, that is, the unemployed, the WPA. Our brick apartment was spacious and new, my father an assistant buyer at Fields, no less a store, probably on a bonus and override and his department was Furs, don’t laugh, and the fact that nobody in the South Side could afford fancy furs didn’t make a whit of difference, there were people in Chicago who could afford them, and bought them. But you couldn’t be too poor to buy a magazine from a boy to be enjoyed by the whole family, or to save up for a Philco radio that would bring you all the news, free, plus the blessings of Jack Benny and Fred Allen. These were the fruits of labor

Do I make myself seem old? Well then, old I am. But I don’t want to strive to glorify those precarious times, only to signify that we were well off. My mother didn’t have to work (heavens, no!), but I did. How else for a growing boy to learn all the vital imperative to his future success in the modern world? But first, survival.

I was an ugly kid and it was a wonder—looking into my eager little snarly face, eyes rimmed in perfectly round little gold glasses—that anybody bought anything from me. But don’t forget about the pity element—maternal pity. I must have drawn it forth unconsciously, even while I pridefully fought to evoke every emotion but it. Picture this: A Chicago winter, ungracious, cold, the famous wind howling off the lake and carrying the infamous stockyard smell in the providently in the opposite direction. Here is how I am clad: brown/gray whipcord knickers; high boots (for snow), with empty pocket- knife pocket on one, for already I had permanently misplaced the tool or weapon; fleece-lined real leather aviator’s jacket, with both slash and zipper pockets; a helmet of matching black leather, sans goggles, which they didn’t come with and would have caught us all unprepared as what to do with, without an airplane to go along with them. No gloves, and they would have been nice and useful. And slung across our universally narrow little boys’ shoulders the beige canvas bag sagging with about thirty pounds of corner-curled fresh magazines, delivered to our own backdoor only moments earlier, baled, as if fodder for distant cows, perhaps the apartment-dwelling housewives who would buy them.

Remember that I was already goggle-eyed, almost a forerunner of a young John Lennon, though he decades off and I nowhere near so hiddenly handsome. I had a bit of a squint and the glasses helped correct it but did not remove its puzzling and puzzled gaze completely and gave me a querulous, slightly questioning expression, as though not clear myself as to what neighborhood I was in, or in reality which world. This evidently evoked some pity (but no Aristotelian sense of terror), for generally large, overweight women signed up for my magazines and for me myself and I to deliver them weekly. Wednesdays, after school and before everybody’s dinner was set on the table.

I had a certain adenoidal, slack-jawed look, my thin lips wet, my lower upper teeth edges slightly showing. At my nose there was a constant drip—every thirty seconds I kept wiping at it with the back of my right hand, in hopes of permanently banishing it but always failing. I wore the ear flaps of my heavy cap deftly turned up, their chin straps fetchingly dangling up and down, reminiscent of the open doors of the Mercedes Benz 300, which would be a long-time in arrival. My cap was too big, in fear that I might outgrow it too soon, and tended to slip on my narrow skull to one side of the other, and this gave me a jaunty look that the situation wouldn’t otherwise acquire. So I must have appeared intentionally rakish to the matrons who opened their screens to me in piercingly cold weather and, with a nod of recognition, accepted the flat magazine which was only their due, since it was already paid for.

A cup of cocoa would have been nice, but I don’t remember ever being offered one, or even one of prevalent coffee, widely drunken by children then, with canned Carnation milk and a tablespoon of sugar, if you were among the employed. Or in summer a Coca Cola, which might have replenished all the moisture I’d lost sweating, climbing endless back steps in the long slanting afternoon sunlight. Or a kind word and not a grunt upon delivery. But I remember a nickel tip I once received. It was from a man, and he might not have been the woman’s husband, it now occurs to me. Married men are a lot more frugal.

We moved away from Chicago the following year, but the requirement to work continued. I had a small allowance, enough to buy a five-cent Good Humor bar thrice a week, my decision which days, after which it was gone, cry your heart out, son, until the following Sunday night, when the stipend would be renewed. My earned money went for tops and kites and small colored balls, and gum (chewing) and candy bars and hamburgers on the way to and from matinee movies at the Avalon Theater, a walk and a streetcar ride away from home. Milk Duds and some kind of plastic-like chewy gumdrops and of course popcorn with real butter (the imitation hadn’t been invented yet, but there was a kind of prevalent yellow grease or tallow that was sometimes substituted; it came from the stockyards, right down the street) and bottles of pop, usually warm, the latter an item I was to get to know much better and soon.

We went to Highland Park, a tony suburb from which everybody, every man, that is, and shopping-fevered woman, as well, commuted by rail to Chicago, an hour away; the Loop was their destination. I was soon gainfully employed again, to my father’s relief. Ten now, nudging eleven, a cub scout, I ran a little cold-drink conspiracy at local softball games. Dad’s idea, of course. I would buy the bottled drinks, paying a deposit on each glass container, at about half-price of what I would sell them for, a real racket, or was it, perhaps only business as usual, and purchase ice by the block, moving all of this cargo in my little red wagon to the ballpark three blocks away and set up my heavy cases of drink on or adjacent to the ice block, which quickly took on a free-form rounded form, drawing in on itself alarmingly until it disappeared into its own puddle on the ground. Then everybody got a warm drink. I remember the orange, oddly (girllike) shaped bottle, and how the cap would bend before it budged, becoming a soft vee, and how I must gather most of them up during the game and all of them by the time the crowds dispersed after, leaving no litter aside from my puddle. The empties went back into their cases, no longer orange or brown (Coke) or brown (rootbeer). And, no, I did not have a nifty changemaker, chrome, belted to me and filled with dispensable coin, only wished desperately that I did, to no avail. I would pay my bill with the soft-drink company—there was one that sold all three beverages—on Monday, then count what was mine. My take. It was always amazingly small. I had worked hard, in the strong sun, hauling ice and pop cases that must have weighed thirty pounds apiece and made—get ready for this—a cool dollar thirty-seven. I had? It would buy something then, but not much.

Enough perhaps to treat my friends to malted milks. The first of last of the big-time spenders. I was he. Another Little Lesson Learned, but what was it? It has taken me a lifetime to fish through all the possible answers.

Weekly I had my magazine delivery route, city or no city, winter or summer. I had still my tan canvas magazine bag, or else had acquired another one from my new distributor, clean, unworn. My fate was to service central Illinois with weekly family rags cozily catering to advancing the cause of domesticity. A certain type of news enhanced the women’s rather cloistered existence. There was romantic fiction for Mom; the magazines catered to her interests and, where they found none, created new ones. She was to cook a wide variety of dishes all pretty much the same but differing only in blandishments not generally known and none too extreme. She was to sew, and already knew how, but needed imaginative stimuli in the form of patterns to devise new and attractive designs for bedspreads, pillow covers, throws, and curtains that would make Pop whistled in admiration first time he beheld them, coming home from the shop, office, or factory the same night.

There were no daring clinical articles on how to hold your man sexually, only on how to renew romance in a marriage grown dull with repetition. Men—poor dears— never quite knew what was going on. America was a nation of Dagwoods, who had lucked into marrying pert, curvaceous, knowing Blondies. Men were manageable clods, good-hearted, fumbling, dumb in all ways but in making money through business—and this was passing strange, for the smartest man alive was no match for the average dumb woman, who could get her way through patience and guile. Every time. A bit of scent, a flounce or two, his favorite dish prepared for the table—it was all the answer to the female frustration and won the sexual dependency game in the last inning.

I was not aware of any of this, of course, only of the need to please my father and demonstrate early money-making skills. These were the rewards for relentless application, that is, work. Dull, stupefying, grim, grudging, ceaseless toil. Women did not work, men did. It was out in the true world. I was in training to be a man, you might say, at eleven. I was apprenticed to the trade. I was to do, on a micro-scale, what men did largely, what I would do when I had acquired my size and the strength. Thus programmed, I could hardly wait, even though what I had performed so far seemed largely fraudulent, that is, intended to delude and trick a small person like me, with growing mind and perception. No, women did not work, not really, only played at working with jobs such as receptionist, nurse, grade-school teacher. These were temporary, tasks to tide them over until men destined to be their husbands came along, motorized knights on gasoline chargers. Nobody, especially tutored sons, took their efforts seriously. They belonged in the kitchen and, more mysteriously, in the bedroom.

Chicago had extended its unruly sprawl Northward to a string of bedroom communities linked by the lake and the commuter train, a silvery diesel. Everybody strove to be much like his neighbor, only a little bit better, or better off, when measured by a set of commonly-agreed upon standards, mostly ones of status and social significance. We lived in a two-storyed stucco house, cream-colored, with an expanse of lawn fore and aft, and it was my job to cut it when my father went to NYC on one of his annual buying trips, which took up the month of lush June, when grass grows fast. I’m not complaining, you understand; little apprentice men do not whine or complain. They bear up and complete the task at hand. So bowing my skinny little legs and arms, I ran the mower along the ground, sending the grass catcher flying, spilling its heaped contents every few seconds, which was only par for the course, that course being one suitable for golf. Occasionally I indulged myself in guiding the mower blades across some of my mother’s peony blooms, subjecting them to the guillotine. From the edge of the newly shorn lawn their petals looked up at me in pained surprise. I grinned back and pushed on. I pushed hard, for it seemed to be an uphill battle, and in fact was.

This was good training for what lay ahead, for when we moved to Seattle a couple of years later, with my dad’s promotion to Fur Buyer at Field‘s satellite store, Frederick and Nelson, mowing laws for new neighbors was my chief means of earning pocket money, so necessary for being anything other than a sniveling dependent, his slave. Please don’t tell me I was already that; I knew it well enough. I cut his lawn, now regularly, but I had honed my skills to the point where I could expand my cutting activity into an exhausting, sweaty little business. It was one in which I could learn further. I don’t know exactly where this idea came from. I was not mine. It must have come from someone older, someone with whom I was in daily communication at the dinner table.

With my new bicycle I was able to range freely the attractive town, Highland Park, and there was a new carrier on the back of my red and white Schwinn that held the canvas bag jammed with this week’s issue of magazines. So I pedaled wide in search of sales, knocking on front doors, for this is what custom dictated in the suburbs for me and other tradesmen. Chicago is comprised of apartments, at least in the newly developed South Side, and we took our trade to the rear staircase, for the front door to the apartments (three-storey, two units to a floor) was locked to all except the mailman; he had a special key to the outside door and others that opened the individual gold-fronted slotted letter boxes. The slot was so you could peek inside to see if there were any letters yet.

Everybody else—the whole world: men with ponies on which to photograph terrified children, men who bought old suits, men who delivered ice or milk, men who desperately sought old gold and called out their willingness to buy it, men with trays of notions including but not limited to shoelaces, cold creams, furniture polish—used the back fire escape that opened on everybody’s kitchen, one after another, each with its dutiful wife busy over her bubbling stove. No, this was the country, or rather suburbia, for the real country was more distant, with its cows, horses, fields of beans or corn. We glimpsed this when we took the train into the city to shop at Fields or to attend some important event. The country was always a league away and the people and animals small and indiscernible from such a distance.

I went to front doors now. I had no special guidelines. Women opened doors easily to the likes of me, fearing no threat because they could see a small boy coming up the walk. My beige canvas bag proclaimed my business. I think it even was stenciled on the front, Magazines.

Some of my work took me into the early evening. I remember an unhappy Halloween when, with a raging fever, I went to my appointed task, feeling awful, and finally vomited in relief at the curb. I was in bed for the next three days and happily listened to the daytime radio programs ordinarily not available to me. It was a sick boy’s privileged by many in his time.

If hypnotized, I’m sure I could remember more jobs between 1939 and 1941, when I was nine and ten, but no hypnotist is handy and I must rely on frail memory, which is short of facts. I played the B-flat cornet and took lessons from a man who has no face today. I hunted frogs and gophers and garter snakes, and imprisoned them in Mason jars with lids in which I had punched holes with a hammer and nail. They died in time, a little early. I read cheap mysteries and onerous comic books. My mother hated the very idea of them. This made me love the even more. They were exciting and harmless, a great source of anticipatory joy. When I had a son, I encouraged him to read them. He did not have my enthusiasm, however. I, however, always did what I was told. I joined things, took on projects fair and foul. I could see no alternative to doing so.

When I compare my life to his, my son’s, I detect one strong difference. Early on he learned how to say, "No mas," in English. In other words, he negated doing things I had no idea I could dispute or get out of. My life was closely parsed out for me and there were few options. Oddly, though, most of the time I swam in free time. That is, when there was no school.

I had some kind of paper route, perhaps two different ones. The early one might have been delivering a slender local advertising flyer of four or eight pages, insubstantial, suitable to being folded in quarters, not long thirds, so that each paper formed a perfect square, like a handkerchief, resembling greatly a half-completed triangle that could be sailed, not flung, in the direction of a front porch. If you did it right, it would settle to the ground like a parachute, a thing beautiful in itself, but if done incorrectly would boomerang slightly and come to rest in the laurel bush that stood nest to everybody’s elevated front stoop, three steps leading up to the freshly painted porch.

I would make up many neat slender squares and arrange them neatly in my newspaper bag (a bag different from my magazine shoulder bag in that it hung over my head and came to rest snug on both shoulders ideally, and bore its load equally divided, fore and aft, front and back. I would fold my papers while walking slowly from one block to the next, one house to another, until my bag was crammed full. Then I would begin sailing them at houses. I even hit a few.

I fetched things for people on my ready Schwinn. It is why I had the little wire basket fixed in front, and a powerful spring clamp on the back fender. A pharmacy rises, then fades. Surely I did not run drugs, though I might have liked to, at a later age. No, no, no. The pharmacy rises, then falls, in memory. Do I imagine it? It is hopelessly mixed up with comic books, wirebacked icecream chairs, malteds (I had not yet learned that if you asked them to "hold the malt powder" the concoction became a milk shake, and cost a little less and tasted just as good, if not better), a rack of magazines not quite like the ones I formerly sold subscriptions.

The pharmacist of memory looks like a doctor or dentist, or a good impersonator, kindly, firm, distant, old. I believe I delivered groceries, too, for one of those long departed Mom-and-Pop stores , of which there were many, but no big ones yet that belonged to chains and displaced the small ones. These were coming, but had to wait for something significant to occur first and to run its course.

3

There were more jobs available when the war began. Women took them. But there were many that went begging. Old men came out of retirement, long past military age, and seized the opportunity to make the biggest money of their long life. And small boys were quickly hired to do the work that older boys had done only months earlier. In some cases the work of grown men. The situation created about the only true labor market of the Twentieth Century. It was a truly wonderful opportunity, if you liked to work. I didn’t, but how could I avoid it, my fate? I was able to fool people into hiring me for various chores, after school and on Saturdays. At the age of eleven, I began a ponderous succession of short-termed employment that was to dog me for many years. And—though this is out of place in my chronology—I remember exactly when the realization hit me that this was not what I wanted to do with my life later. Forgive me if I interrupt the chronology to described it here, but it is of paramount importance. At least to me.

The year is 1953 and I am 23. I have just returned to Seattle from Fort Ord, California, where I’ve completed my Army basic training. I cooked a deal with them before I enlisted; what with my draft board depleted of candidates and my deferment for purpose of going to college having been charitably extended into a further year of graduate school, I agreed to sign up just before my induction notice was sent (at which point it would have been too late in the game for cooking deals) to serve for three years, so long as my duty station would be in either Seattle or Alaska, and in either place I would perform whatever duties the Signal Corps asked of me. They, in turn, would not send me to Korea. Or to Europe, much better, but I would have only a five percent of drawing, which was not good enough odds to draw to.

So I spent a few months playing with guns, call them pieces, and mix with wonderful guys I would not have otherwise met, and learned how to punctuate my speech with works like fuck, fucking, mother fucker, etc., heedlessly, frequently, inappropriately, and sometimes tellingly. I walked long distances under heavy loads, relieved myself in public open places called latrines, ate food so over-seasoned that I could not tell whether it was hot or cold, put on weight, became lightly muscled and very bitter. I marched around, ran at double time, singing out stupid chants with the rest of my squad, platoon, company, regiment, and division. I thrust my newly sharpened bayonet on the end of my M-1 into canvas bags stuffed with sand that looked nothing like the enemy. I crawled through mud with my piece cradled like a baby, while overhead every fifth bullet fired by a stationary machinegun lit up the sky like a little red mosquito. Once, on a calm blue California afternoon, I looked up from my low station and actually saw a real bullet in the air. Fortunately, it did not have my name on it.

I got sick with soldiers, drunk with soldiers, well with soldiers, washed my clothes with soldiers and stood in endless lines endlessly with soldiers. We looked alike but were ultimately as different as we could be, in spite of the Army’s effort to standardize us and make us act in lockstep. When they finally issued the temporary command to stop executing some silly drill, "As you were," I always murmured, I was a civilian. But I never walked away from a formation. Not even that final day of basic.

I returned by bus to Seattle at the end of my training. Everybody but me took his money and flew. I rode the bus, first into San Francisco, then to Seattle, pocketing the difference in cost. Elizabeth had just been crowned queen and I wished her well. The man sitting next to me was a migrated Englishman, and he raged all the way about what he’d like to see done to the Queen. It involved various kinds of buggery. I was ill with URI (Upper Respiratory Infection) and running a high fever. Drifting in and out of consciousness I could only listen to him, and soon realized that even the army non-coms did not express themselves with such variety and inventiveness as this Englishman.

Back in my home city,
Seattle, my friends who had given me a going-away party, and recently recovered from it, three months later, organized a welcome home blast. I went to it, with a former girl friend, then immediately to the hospital, for I was sick-sick. In the Army there is no place for malingering. You are either at your duty station or in a hospital bed. There is no in between position. Some people like the military, for no ambiguity dwells there, as it does in real life. Isn’t the Army real life, somebody might ask? No, I would reply; it is a dream state. Everybody lives in a dense vapor.

Out of the hospital, into a freshly starched tan summer uniform, I went to work for my first day of duty at the Federal Office Building, feeling a little weak and buoyant. It was a gorgeous June day, complete with sun peeking over the transom, as eight A.M. drew nigh. I remember climbing the wide cement steps to the large brick building; I see it as though it were only this morning. I entered the sparkling lobby. Nearly three more years of this, I reflected. My heart sagged. All around me were civilians sentenced to a longer term, a lifetime of going to work here awaited them. I studied a few faces. No despair, no heavy sense of trepidation. Each wore a calm, morning face. It was a fresh Monday. Each mug was filled with cheery hope and anticipation. I almost gagged on it.

Here it is, gang, the rest of your life. Not mine. They could quit, sure, I could not, but it was worse than that. Let me put it differently, my acute realization, my epiphany. Satori. There is a scene in "Born Free," the movie, when the marvelous lions, forced to enter cages and transported for days or weeks to some new relocation, are bid leave said cages. And you know what? They refuse. They have adjusted, adapted, acclimated—whatever the right word is. They won’t come out of their cramped quarters. They believe they love their cages. They are at home there. Offered freedom, they decline it. No, thanks; we’ll stay inside. Lions. Wow.

Similarly, there are men sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison, without ever hope of parole, who believe they have the world knocked. Three squares, a dependable bed, free medical care, a cigarette allowance, barbells to work out with, TV, and—get this—each day a walk in a closed courtyard in which the very sky looms overhead like a tiny blue box. If you want to get regularly buggered in some additional ways, that can be arranged as well.

Sure, a regular job is nothing like the lion or the prisoner, not unless you want to pull up a chair and look at it closely. I did, that June day. My vision, or whatever it was, is still with me. It has governed my life ever since. It has been implicit in my behavior since. It will be with me until I die. And I think the overwhelming desire to write was part of it. I needed the time and the freedom to do my work. The decision was ultimately selfish. I don’t really understand it myself, only that it is strong and irresistible.

The jobs I’ve taken, early and late, have been some form of dire necessity. I’d say, "Isn’t it always the case?" but the answer is no, not necessarily. Career People would work, and often do, for free, just to keep busy. The Profession Calls. But somehow money manages continues to stick to their fingers. It is so even with some writers, but not many. What is our life for, we ask? It is to write about. The unwritten-about life is not worth living. Plato said that, or was it his buddy Socrates? All I know is that it sounds Greek to me.

To write, however poorly, requires much time, paper, pencil or pen, today a computer, a dictionary (ever wonder why ninety-nine percent of those words are doomed never to be used, not by the likes of you and me?), a chair to sit in, and a neat little table, with a light that can be turned on, when darkness comes. All else—food, sleep, booze, coffee, smokes—is irrelevant. But in order to write, one must first take care of what Thoreau called the Necessaries. We make our arrangements with society. The story of a man, a writer’s, work arrangements, runs counter to his list of achievements as a writer. It is a nagging, niggardly, negative thread running through his life.

The days that followed my assignment to my first duty station were hell and I took out my disenchantment (let’s call it) on everybody around me, all civilians except a colonel, who didn’t want to hear from me on any occasion, for even one instance would mean bad news to me. I understood completely. This was the army.

My days went something like this: rise, after three hours of drunken slumber, at around ten to seven. I had a bachelor apartment in the familiar University District and was frequenting in mufti those self-same places I had haunted only a few months ago dressed much the same way as a student. On the surface there was not much difference. My scrawny beard was gone, my hair was shorter, but I was still rail-skinny, and because I would not wear my glasses considerably cockeyed. (I don’t know which is less becoming to women, wearing corrective lenses or looking off in two directions at once.) The army claimed me, but for only forty hours a week; they held a raincheck on the rest of my time. I never forgot it.

Aside from the plump bird colonel (nice guy, really), who was Comptroller, everybody on my floor was a civilian. To find another uniform I had to board the elevator and ride up to Five. There I reentered the familiar khaki scene. Men dressed like me, with similarly cut hair, dashed around clutching pieces of paper in their hands, shouting and vying for attention. I relaxed in my cordovan dress shoes. If I wasn’t home, this was the next best thing; I was among my peers. Enlisted men. For aren’t all victims equal? The looks we exchanged were ones of shared doom.

It was not all that bad. In fact, there were moments of pleasant illusion. Freedom is a word. I was almost an equal with a civilian woman, elderly, who taught a course in Work Simplification. Don’t laugh, there used to be such a practice, a kind of pseudo-science. She was a GS-7. We had a secretary with long red fingernails, but we shared her with the Colonel. She became a friend of mine and we rode the same bus to and from work, and sometimes shared a car ride. And there was a fat GS-9, Hal, a man who lived with his mother, about fifty, and we used to talk sports (the universal language of men), the various pro teams, far off, for our city had none to date. We used to quarrel, Hal and I, and he would get pissed and not talk to me for a week, but this hurt him more than me, for it was he who needed the talk, not so much I. Our boss, a GS-11, Herb, who was a pretty mild-mannered all-around good guy, felt sorry for me, the poor GI, and let me get away with murder. I did not decline.

I was a sorry soldier, one wishing desperately to live the civilian life and trying to come as close as I could to it, shedding my khaki as soon as the bus spirited me home after 4:30 P.M. I had a bachelor pad (read: one big room, kitchen at one end, bed at the other) in the U District, which was as near as I could get to the University Itself, the source of all good things and bad in my recent civilian endeavor or life. Mama. I knew girls there, had buddies in school still, or hanging on, knew the stores and shops and taverns intimately; taverns were important, a place for nightly rendezvous and assignations and spontaneous parties, which seemed to grow out of the beery mists of cigarette smoke about midnight, each and every night. After dinner, often in a nearby restaurant, if I hadn’t a girl who would come in and cook for me, and usually I didn’t, it was a search for a warm bed other than my own. I was twenty-three and penis-driven.

At work, we followed people around at their tasks and wrote down what they did. These eventually resulted in Signal Corps Standard Procedures, or Operating Procedures, depending, according to a fine-line separation that I knew then but cannot discern clearly today. One was longer lasting than the other, I think. And the principles of work simplification—I was a long time coming to the realization that it was different from doing as little work as possible, which was the Army maxim—were to be rigorously applied to each repetitive task. Little did I know that this tedious form of experience would stand me in good stead when I took my first steady job, about five years down the pike. So I paid as little attention to what I did daily as I humanly could and became next to invisible—though Ralph Ellison, whom I was reading at the time, would surely find fault with my version. I only strove to blend in to the point of almost disappearing. In my little brown uniform, without a single stripe yet on my sleeve to call attention to myself, I moved like an automaton and often went unrecognized, which was a good thing, for if not drunk still from the night previous I was surely badly hungover and in strong need of being left mercifully alone.

The Army’s idea was, and I knew it, that I would remain in Seattle for one year of my military service, then be transferred to Alaska to serve out the rest of my tour. It was in fact a pact. Only I had signed it, but the Army honored it, and in a way when that civilian-like year was up, and I was flown to Anchorage, then taken by convoy to Glenallen, my life was saved, for I was badly wasted through dissipation and my own bad cooking. It was as nearly as abrupt an upheaval as my leaving graduate school for infantry basic training. I went from a warm office to the spring woods in a country not yet a state and still sparsely settled. Where we went the settling got sparser by the mile.

But first Anchorage. I arrived with a fresh crewcut on the longest day of the year, June 22. The year was 1954 and the Korean War was winding down like a cheap watch. Our ranks were comprised of those fortunate enough to delay conscription this long. Among our numbers at Fort Richardson was David Shine, made famous by the Army/McCarthy hearings recently ended. It was easy to see that David was rich and famous; he drove a new Ford with dealer license plates. He treated it like some men treat their women. One of its tires was flat when I first saw it. Later, it was covered with mud and grime. I suspect, in five thousand miles, it was ruined. David drifted in and out of view, tall blond, often with a girl in tow, which proved that his association with Roy Cohen hadn’t ruined him for their charms. It was rumored he was in the movies and could walk away from the army any time he wanted to, without reprisal, for he had friends in high places. He just didn’t want to. Peculiar.

I spent two weeks in a temporary duty assignment in the supply shack, awaiting orders. There I entertained the non-com in charge with a stories, lewd fictive accounts of my past life, and would stop at critical points in the development of my tale until he had agreed to issue me some item of gear or clothing that I deeply desired but was not supposed to have. I had to sign a hand request to make each item legal, but then it was mine. So when I went out in the field I had a load of stuff the likes of which nobody else had and all were wildly envious and covetous. Here are some of the items: bunny boots, white, so my feet at least would be invisible in snow; Splitkin skis, also painted white, with metal edges, web-bottomed poles, and skiboots of the same color. Alpaca field-jacket liner, when everybody else was wearing the new, bulky green kapok. Ear-flapped cap to match the liner, also non-issue, and verboten. I don’t know where I got the idea I could wear the stuff, but I tried, and got away with it. In the field my gear slowly disappeared, as it was either stolen or taken from me in my presence by some sergeant who knew I wasn’t supposed to have it. And then, sometimes the very same day, I would see him wearing it.

Law of the jungle, part one. Adapt or die.

To celebrate my arrival, Anchorage had an earthquake. It was a five or six on the Richter Scale. This proved ordinary. I celebrated my arrival by working my way systematically through all the bars on Fourth Street, which ran like an arrow through the center of town. I started on one side and had one drink in each, and moved on. I went East, or was it North? Already I was turned around. Meanwhile a large red sun dipped in the West. I reached the end of Fourth, the furthermost reach of Anchorage, and was still on my feet, the sun low on the horizon. When I emerged from the bar, the sun held steady. I crossed the street unsteadily and entered a bar opposite. One was indistinguishable from another. I left a quarter of my beer in my glass and went back out on the street. Now sun was rising. The time was nearly one A.M. It was already the next day and the moving u in the pale sky. I returned to my bunk at the Y, where all us temporary soldiers were housed, and caught a few hours sleep before it was time to report to my duty station, the supply shed, where my chief task seemed to be to entertain and extort.

A week later we sad soldiers were loaded in the back of deuce-and-a-halves and were trucked out on the Richardson Highway, pointed at Valdez. Our destination, however, was fifty miles to the East, a tiny settlement West of Glenallen called Tonsina. All these place names prove a huge disappointment. You await the next map name with excitement and anticipation. Nearly always you could whiz on by it with only a moment’s lapse of attention. Blink and it is gone. But as they say about a lot of things that are awful, the pleasure’s all in the journey. Or else, the journey is all. And the scenery was splendid, seen standing up in the back of a truck, as one of several men in fatigues, issuing catcalls to each new roadside attraction. These included mountain sheep, glaciers, truckstops, crumpled cars at the edge of the road, and, most excitingly, logging trucks whose brakes had failed on some hairpin turn and now lay barely recognizable as such, belly-up, at the bottom of a ravine. A truck minus its load and seen upside down, buried in fresh undergrowth, resembles some prehistoric beast (perhaps a mastodon) that has met its evolutionary end and been left to decay on its back, deep in a natural grave. Or grove.

There is a certain low order of social behavior made viable when you are wearing fatigues, riding along in the back of an open truck through countryside never any less than magnificent. Any female of any age seen in passing, no matter how distant, is deemed fair game. Anonymity bestows privilege, or so we thought, and adopted behavior patterns deemed appropriate, on the spot. We hooted after them, females, or whistled, or shouted our odd obscene greetings—whichever seemed most appropriate to us as individuals. This was not very often, of course, for most of what we saw was mountainous and unoccupied woods. Once we saw a bear at an obscure roadside garbage dump and it, heavy-assed, glared at us over its shoulder, then resumed its feeding task.

"Female bear?" wondered the soldier wedged beside me, then, not waiting for a confirmation from me, expressed expressly what he would do if it was.

Fuck a bear? You got to be kidding?

It was a different army than the tamed and docile one in Seattle, where all was done in a warm office, with the weather raging outside. Now we were outdoors permanently and it was others, yet unglimpsed, who lived and worked indoors. I began to think I might never be less than cold again. A hundred miles rolled by, two. We came to the important intersection where a highway branched off from ours and headed for Tok Junction and, beyond it, far Fairbanks; continuing on, we soon reached Glenallen, where some of our contingent were housed. It was a lodge, with bar, and some kind of barracks out behind and a few solitary buildings arranged alongside. This I soon discovered was your basic domestic unit in Alaska and comprised a map point or vehicular destination. There was no more. It offered shelter, a kind of tasteless bulky food, liquor of course. All this cost money. The army provided each of us with what they called Temporary Duty Pay. This was a food- and-shelter allowance. At each inn (as it might be called, in another lifetime, in a different place) they knew exactly what TDY was worth, in dollars and cents, and our room and board bill was exactly that amount. It was another form of separating the wheat from the chaff, the victim from his currency. It is exercised worldwide.

Our station was Tonsina. A sweet little river ran beside the gravel highway and in back of the lodge. The place was run by a tough old skinflint named Foster and the bar scotch was Dewars, though there were several kinds of bourbon. Our TDY was $257 dollars a month and it is what we paid him; for this we got double-tiered bunks with cotton mattresses, all in one great room (there were no women except the cook and waitress, who lived away) and a john down the hall, with open toilets and showers a deux. The food was copious, brought up on the boat, and unappetizing. Uncooked thawed meat tends to be green, perhaps from the freezer, but when your rib-steak is cooked, it becomes just the right shade of brown. Nobody ever got sick except from drinking too much. And for lunch, which we ate in the woods, they packed you as many sandwiches as you thought you could handle, plus stale fruit and cookies. I started out with one sandwich and worked my way up to three. In the process I started putting on muscle and weight.

We were to build a telephone pole line from Glenallen to Valdez, the old Valdez, the one to be destroyed by earthquake and rebuilt away from the beach, where a tidal wave had destroyed it. There was already a phoneline in existence, on tripods that had no roots in the hard earth and was regularly blown over or else toppled by snowfall. At first I was assigned to the gain-and-frame crew. Our work went like this: First we dropped telephone poles from a flatbed truck along a line surveyed and cleared by a crew that worked quickly ahead of us. Then we followed up at the location of each pole by laying on the ground a cross arm, pegs that fit the cross-arm holes, and screw-on glass insulators. Plus bolts and screws and washers, fore and aft, to hang the arm on the pole.

We gain-and-framers trotted from pole to pole, doing our cheery little duty, a bag of tools on our shoulder, like some woebegone Johnny-Appleseed of the pole-line construction business, or good Samaritan of the North. When we came to a pole, we halted, unshouldered our bag, measured the pole for curvature, sawed a couple of cuts into the concave side of the pole, took out our cold chisel and went to work forming a flat surface that would be home to the cross arm. Meanwhile the north woods hummed with bees and birds, moose and bears, the distant comings and goings of Army trucks, aircraft passing overhead. Mountains were within climbing reach, for those of us so disposed, if only we had a couple of days off in a row. Our single Sunday wasn’t long enough. It was when we collapsed and slept ourselves back into shape for the coming six-day week.

It sure beat Korea.

Zeke—Sgt. Zekewitz—had recently returned from FECOM (Korea to you; Korea to you, too) and we envied him some but not much of for long. God, he was stupid. He had matriculated as an E-2 Private, gone into combat (or so the story went, and I had no cause to doubt it), and had an assortment of non-coms shot out from under him—first his corporal, then his platoon sergeant, then his field first, then his first sergeant. Dead officers were flying all over the place, as well. Everywhere you walked there was some lieutenant or captain lying in a pool of blood. They moved Zeke up, up. It didn’t matter that he was stupider than a board. There was a hole in the command that needed plugging and who else was there at hand? He finished his tour a master sergeant. He had hoped for a career and now he had one. And because the Infantry couldn’t stand what it had created out of adversity, they gave him to the Signal Corps. Their loss was now our loss.

That first night on the job, an easy one, I went into the bar after dinner for my nightly libation. I had in mind about six, then a turn-in about nine o’clock. So had Zeke. It was his regular practice.

"Arnold, have I bought you a drink yet?"

I had to admit he hadn’t.

"Give this young soldier a drink and bring one for me," he said. His was Dewars. So was mine.

We drank them down, his fast.

"Now you buy me one," he ordered, my generous sergeant.

I could see how this would work out, over the course of the evening. He would probably end up one up on whomever tonight’s sucker was. He would stay on his feet until it was certain he would not lose. It was the other guy who quit first, nearly always. Bed time was nine or nine-thirty, if someone was buying.

In the morning, after nine hours deep sleep, the guy was a veritable daisy. He smoked cigars, not cigarettes, and had no hangover. But in the night, if you had wanted to, you couldn’t have wakened him. Dead drunk.

We had another master sergeant named Moose, a little guy. Army humor. Moose was married, had a wife a short ways away, who was nicknamed (of course) Mrs. Moose. She looked just like him. Moose was about five-six and so was she. He was round and bovine-looking, and she was even more so, nearly a mirror image. True, she didn’t have his sparse little mustache—at least I don’t think she did. Rumor was—awful Army rumor—that they were going to have a calf. It made him a little testy.

Moose was in charge of the gain-and-framers, while Sgt. Stockdale had the hole diggers. I don’t know how it happened, yes I do, but in one more week all of us who had some college, or a lot, were transferred from the various functional crews and assigned to Stockdale, whose crew was known as the absolute bottom, the dregs. We dug holes for telephone poles and nothing else. We were too dumb for ordinary work, having been to college. We had our bag of gaining-and-framing tools taken away from us and were issued five-foot shovels. We also had solid steel prybars, and a couple of long-handled weapons called a spade and a spoon. They were for reaching into the hole when it was too deep to be worked with a shovel and had approached five feet in depth. The long spade would continue our effort past that point and the spoon, a slightly cupped implement, would lift out the dirt and clay and small stones. For bigger stones, you got down on your belly, took up your prybar, and Young Soldier, you worked that rock back and forth until you could clasp it in your own two hands and you lift it out. You understand me?

I understood too much already. It took me about two days until I discovered I could put a brand new five-foot shovel into a hole with two big rocks at the bottom and bend it in such a way that I could break the hardwood handle off right where it met the metal. All of us could. It was not a matter of strength, only know how. The trick provides an hour or so of idleness until a new shovel can be found and you are able to go to work again. You are left alone in the silent woods with your soul.

Stockdale knew all about us; he had seen our type before. It did not matter to him that we were a variety of types and (academic) disciplines, short and tall, thin and stout, smart and not so smart, lively and languid, inventive and plodding. He knew everything there was to know; if not, it was not worth knowing. He could have gone to college, too, and wasted his time loafing, like we did, but instead went to work young, right into the Army, even before finishing high school. This was because his Dad died in a mine and there were younguns (the number varied from three to eleven, depending upon who he was talking to) that needed support. They were his military dependents. So he had worked for a man’s wage, while everybody else had played at foolish games, read books, and dated girls. He had begun his life’s work, poleline construction, done military style.

What, digging holes for telephone poles? God, there was heavy equipment that could do it easier and faster. Hadn’t the army heard of it? Not Sgt. Stockdale.

None of us could make it in the civilian army, he told us draftees. We were too soft. The war came along and filled the army with lazy no-gooders like ourselves, and it was his job to try to accomplish his mission—namely, a lot of holes in the ground, with men who were square pegs. We made his task nearly impossible. But as a good soldier he would not shirk nor complain. But let us step out of line and make matter worse. . . . On and on, every day.

Stockdale thought I was lazier than most and I set out to prove him right. Once, when I had hovered over a difficult hole for several days and he thought I might be stalling, he announced, "Arnold, I’ll swear, you’d turn down a piece of ass because it’s too much work."

"Sarge," I countered, "give me a three-day pass and I’ll prove you wrong."

He let that go right on by him. Unarmylike, we had no passes, only our free Sundays.

"Maybe you’re just dumb. Is that it? Don’t know how to dig a hole, get a great big itty-bitty rock out of it? Didn’t they teach you that, in that college of yours."

"Right, Sarge."

He leaped on it. "I knew it. You look here." He smiled. He lay down on the ground that had recently been soften by rain. A good three inches of water stood at the bottom of my hole I had been fooling around with a big rock that I had been careful not to dislodge. "Hand me that bar and you watch close. I’m going to show you something" He took the tool and noticed appreciatively that it was slightly bent.

"You do that?" he asked over his shoulder.

I nodded modestly.

"Now look-ee here."

He began to work away on the rock, both arms extended deep into the hole. I watched, something I do well.

After a few minutes he said, "Hmm. Not so easy as I thought. Now, don’t go getting the idea I can’t do it."

"Do what, sergeant?"

"Get the rock out of the hole, stupid. Why do you think I’ve got my head in this hole in the ground?"

"Beats me. I was going to ask you."

The hole was between four and five feet deep. Since it was raining moderately, the hole was filling slowly with water, which was now about six inches deep. Stockdale now had the prybar wedged deep in the hole and was shoulder-deep in it.

"Arnold, hold my ankles. Get a good grip, will you?"

"Sarge, you’d better not."

A pen and pencil set, clipped to his shirt pocket, now released its grip and spilled into the hole. "God damn it," he said, and began to grope for them, feeling around in the mud. He extracted first one, then the other.

"You hold these, you hear?" He was from the South, and in times of stress you could hear his twang become pronounced. He passed me his writing implements for safekeeping. I put them in my own pants side pocket.

"Take a firm hold, Arnold. I’m going to get that mother of a rock."

That was about as close as he let himself come to swearing. I had to admire his self-restraint. Stockdale dove deeper, both hands working hard. He was heavy. He was exceeding the balance point

"Sarge, I can’t hold you. You’re slipping." And he was, for I was releasing my hold by degrees. I pulled at his boots, but only to the side, as he plunged deeper into the hole, head first..

His descent was arrested by his head striking bottom. I released my grip on his boots and rose to my feet.

"Sarge, I’m going to go for help."

"No, you’re not," came his muffled voice. "You’re going to stay right here and pull me out."

"Anything you want from the canteen?" I asked. But I remained. And by degrees, with his considerable squirming help, I worked him feet-first back out of the hole. First his knees hit solid ground and then his big hips. He was solidly built and strong. He pushed himself up and away from me.

"Goddamn you, Arnold," he muttered.

"Going to court-martial me, Sarge? Send me away from here? Put me on a worse crew?"

He looked at me levelly and began to laugh.

"Saved your life, I did, " I added.

"You are a sorry son of a bitch," he told me, shaking his head from side to side.

"What makes you think I’m sorry?"

4

It was all fun and games, off in the woods. YMCA and Boy Scout camp had been worse than Army Alaska. The people I met and got to know were straight out of Dickens. For instance, there was Blankenship, a Mormon. I had known him earlier. In college, we had been in neighboring fraternities. A shame like this, carried into later life, is a tie that binds.

He too had skis. His had civilian bindings. The temperature was in the mid-eighties and it was a long time off before we might encounter snow, but we were of a mind on this matter. He wanted a winter coat, unique, non-GI, and to this end was trapping or else shooting with a .22 rifle as many rabbits as he could find. Then he skinned out about a dozen and, spread-eagle style, stretched them on a drying rack he had fashioned out of green alder. His scraping job had been none too thorough and the rack was visited by hoards of flies and stank. This did not bother Blankenship, and I soon got used to it, too.

We compared skis. Five-ply Splitkins, both, mine painted white, his showing the natural wood, a little bit worn and frayed, with extended metal edges for ice conditions.

"You got yours from supply, didn’t you?"

I said I did.

"Lucky. What did you have to pay for them?" he asked.

"Pay? I told the bastard stories."

"These cost me twenty bucks," he explained. "You’ll notice the lack of paint. They can’t be traced back to the army."

"You must have wanted them plenty bad."

"I plan," he said, his voice lowered modestly, "to transfer to the Ski Patrol, after the summer is over. Come join with me."

"The Signal Corps has no Ski Patrol, " I countered. "It’s only the Infantry at Fort Richardson that does. It means transferring into the regular army."

"Exactly."

"Fool, it means Korea."

He shrugged. "If I do it right, it could mean a winter of downhill skiing instead."

"Not worth the risk."

"We’ll talk about it later. You might be surprised how different things may look to you, when a little snow is flying."

"A white world?"

"Cold and white. They have rope tows, I hear."

"Who has?"

"Ski Patrol at Fort Richardson."

"You wish."

Blankenship received the Wall Street Journal by mail, which is a near daily, but the mails being what they were, his arrived in big batches. Thus six or eight would come at once, after which there was a dearth of news about the world of business, in which he was greatly interested. He would arrange his newspapers chronologically, then begin to wade his way through them, working front to back. I helped him. There we sat, in among the mosquitoes and drying bunny skins, the June sun beating down, in front of his tent. Reading. He was camping out, living on chili and Dinty Moore beef stew, pocketing his TDY pay and not paying homage to Foster at the lodge, who would take it all. Talk about frugal. The lodge had little that he needed. The Dewars offered no appeal, for he didn’t drink, and our food was nothing to write home about.

He had gone native. It is what happens when a good mind is sent into exile and decides to make the best of the situation. He doesn’t cope, he triumphs, at least in his own mind, though is many others he might be thought to have gone into rapid decline and his mind in a dangerous condition. But I saw in Blankenship the survivor instinct taken to a new level. He was Natty Bumpo, Robinson Crusoe, the father in Paul Theroux’s Mosquito Coast; you know, the Harrison Ford type. Blankenship was tall and fair, with good teeth and a big, ready grin. We got together regularly, lay in the sun, tanning, reading about the nefarious schemes of big business, enjoying the shade provided by his drying racks of stinking skins, I smoking my Chesterfields and drinking coffee out of my Thermos, while he taunted me about my harmful habits. To confirm his bad opinion of me, I used to suck on an occasional warm Schlitz. He made his head go tsk-tsk.

Aside from this, we were good friends. He always greeted me warmly. Mormons are a worldly, forgiving lot. They always hope for a spontaneous conversion. Fat chance. But my soul—immortal or not—was worth the effort, in his opinion. I was flattered, until I learned that it gave him bonus points with Jesus.

He ended up on the lowly hole-digging crew, too. It took him a little more time. Sergeant Stockdale admired Blankenship—his business acumen. Perhaps he feared him, for he gave him continual wide berth. Stockdale had forgiven me for letting him slide into the hole, head-first. The army is no place to hold a grudge. He believed it to be an accident. It fit my profile. I was not very strong, he knew. I didn’t remind him of my flair for breaking shovel handles.

Because Lady Moose was overdue to calf, we had to play her husband, Sgt. Moose, on a slack line. He was snarly and mean, not having had any sex for a while. This made him more like the rest of us, but he wouldn’t recognize this shared trait and behaved like Hamlet, wandering around in a constant slow pout, muttering soliloquies to himself. Daily he got weirder. He demanded attention, and because he had rank but not size, we used to pick on him. He loved it. The things we did to him got worse and worse. Why did he put up with them? One of our favorite tricks was to kick his feet out from under him and, with him lying helplessly on the ground, one of us would sit on his chest and begin to pluck the hairs out of his already sparse mustache. It must have hurt like crazy, but he would lie there, whining softly, smiling his protest, hardly defending himself at all.

"Come on, you guys, have a heart."

"Have two," we’d reply, pulling again on reluctant hair, just to hear him whimper. Then we’d let him go and he’d slink off. Back to work.

The muskeg, permafrost, and tundra had absorbed about all the holes we could provide and our poles were all pretty much buried in the ground, but no wire was yet stung and still the tripod line, side by side with ours, continued to function. A few interesting things had happened along the way. As we entered true mountain country, frozen ground rose nearer to the surface and impeded our digging, so that each individual hole took longer to accomplish, as the year wore on. Usually, when we had encountered reluctant ground (you might call it), a special crew was called in, one with jackhammers and dynamite. Narrow holes were drilled into the problematic ground, the holes jammed with explosive sticks and powder caps with fuses, all told to stand far back, for there was "Fire in the Hole." And—boom—the recalcitrant rock was smashed to a million powdery smithereens, and the solitary hole digger resumed with his work, until he reached a predetermined depth—say, six feet. Then he moved on to the next flagged stake one hundred and fifty feet away and began digging again. On each stake was written the depth the hole was to be dug. A machine, of course, could have done it in no time, but a machine was not available. What we had was a surplus of manual labor.

One time we tried something new on a particularly stubborn hole. It was called a "shaped charge," and had proved its worth in FECOM, unpopularly known as Korea. The thing looked like a landmine and lay nearly flat on the ground like a plump griddle cake. It was detonated electronically. We stood back thrice the ordinary distance—which proved none too much. The earth shook and we thought an atomic device had been triggered, but the permafrost proved a worthy adversary and did not yield the ground to any depth. Instead, the shaped charge blew a hole eighteen inches deep, but sixty yards in diameter; it formed a true crater, one similar to a meteorite implosion. We stood back and gazed at it in wonder. Then officer in charge ordered in deuce-and-a-half loads of quarry rock to fill it up. Good ordinary dynamite completed the job, providing the additional depth the hole required. We never used the shaped charges again.

Enough holes dug and filled in the Tonsina area, we began to commute longer distances daily; soon we had to move our base camp West, towards Valdez and the sea. We scouted out the land ahead and found Thirty-Five Mile Lodge. It had a bar and restaurant, but no sleeping accommodations, which necessitated our buying small, cheap travel trailers. For this we used our TDY pay. This was a common Alaskan problem pegged to the traditional Alaskan solution. A soldier named Harvey and I traveled 350 miles into Anchorage and bought a small ratty trailer from a dealer who sold them in spring and bought them back at half-price in October, when cold and snow brought construction to a halt.

Harvey—his last name is lost to time—and I had much in common, including a taste for bebop, Dewars scotch, and Chesterfields, or practically anything else that could be ignited. We had no electric lights in our trailer, only a twin-mantle Coleman lantern, and we had to use the toilets and showers out back behind the lodge. If you’ve seen the movie, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, you will understand our basic situation. Only we didn’t whore houses. These were thirty-five miles away in Old Valdez. To get there you had to have free time and a way to cross Thompson Pass. The girls there looking nothing like Julie Christie.

Harvey and I read evenings, mostly paperbacks, but about eight or nine became restless and withdrew to the bar, where we found everybody had a head start on us to which we could never quite catch up, try as we might. One night, after both having been visited by some cruel and unusual Army punishment for being disobedient, perhaps caught sleeping in the woods, we’d both been punished. Feeling badly put upon, we took our revenge the only way possible—on yourselves. We each tried to drink a fifth of Scotch and almost succeeded. Then, almost at the same moment, we lost our dinner and the Scotch on our shoes and on the ground outside our trailer.

Fit punishment.

"People who drink like that," said the bartender, "are known to howl at the moon, besides."

Dead right.

Usually we sipped our whiskey and complained bitterly about life in the Army. I had a part-time job most evenings helping out a kindly hopeless drunk do the payroll for Morrison-Knudsen Construction, whose road crew worked along side ours and was billeted near by. Barney needed companionship more than he needed help, and we used to chat into the early evening hours, while he drank. He never offered me a shot, probably on the assumption that there wouldn’t be enough left for him; I understood the principle. It was never discussed. Construction workers were making an outlandish $2.50 an hour, and so was I. Overtime pushed them (but not me) to the outer limits and some of paychecks were astronomical. There was nothing to do with so much money except gamble. The game was poker. The ante was modest enough, but the raises in seven-card stud were enormous, and a single pot often contained hundreds of dollars. One big winner quit his job and caught a lift to Fairbanks, where he bought a new Pontiac. Then he got in another game, lost the Pontiac, sobered up, and asked for his old job back. A good worker with only the common weaknesses, he was immediately rehired.

Blankenship had gone off in the opposite direction and was now working with a survey crew a hundred miles to the East. Sundays in Valdez were generally solitaire, for Harvey had his own life. I bought a week-old copy of the Sunday New York Times, withdrew to a favorite bar on Front Street (every town has a Front Street), ordered my favorite drink—a screwdriver, made from fresh/frozen orange juice— and read my heart our about a world populated largely by civilians. The huge quantities of Vitamin C I ingested I believed would improve my health even better than a workout in a gym, had one been handy.

Old Valdez was undergoing a street-improvement project and had open canals, that is, streets opened up with diggers to a depth of six or eight feet, at the bottom of which lay unjoined sewer pipes. Since it was raining, the sewer pipes were awash, the bottom of the holes thick with mud. One Saturday night, a friend visited the whore house, had a stiff drink afterwards with the madam, stepped out the front door, and fell at once into an open sewer. He lay face down for almost an hour before being rescued by the next visitor to the house, who also upon departure fell in. They went off together to celebrate their new friendship with a drink.

So it goes.

Meanwhile, Lady Moose had given birth to her girl calf at the Army hospital at Fort Richardson, in Anchorage. We went in to visit her on one of our biweekly journeys for groceries to the PX there, a round trip distance of 700 miles, but we didn’t complain, for they had fresh eggs, airborne steaks, live music, and girls in a seedy section named Eastchester Flats. Their whiskey included brands other than Dewars. We used to argue, Harvey and I, whether or not we could taste the difference between Johnny Walker red and black. This required repeated testing, with a waterback to cleanse the palate so we could taste and argue again.

Nights grew cold, while days remained warm but not so punishingly, and the mosquitoes seem to have taken their squadrons elsewhere. The pole line grew in length and crossed Thompson Pass, a real feat. When we went in the opposite direction into Anchorage for grub, I could always recognize the poles I had gained and framed because they were crooked. This was because of my chronic depth-vision problem; it caused me to cut the bevel for the cross arm wrong and to drill the hole on which to seat it at a beveled angle. Each of my poles greeted me like an old friend. Eventually, in time, the army had to replace them.

We Chechacos donned GI wool shirts mornings, when frost stood an inch thick on the ground. Soldiers who had a year on us of Alaskan winters laughed and called out, "What are you going to do when winter comes?" Apparently twenty-degree dawns weren’t enough to merit bringing out the cold-weather gear. The old-timers went around in T-shirts or fatigues, scorning even unlined field jackets. The idea was, if you used up all your issued warmth so early in the season, you would be left shivering in your boots when true winter finally got here. It would be soon.

We didn’t care much about the taunts. Most of us knew we would be transferred to Southeast Alaska, where the outdoor work goes on year round. These guys would remained Quonsetted here, gathered round their gasoline fires, drinking the winter away and dreaming about The Outside, as they called the contiguous states.

With the first light brush of snow on the ground, we were trucked into Anchorage, which had turned bitter cold. We were housed temporarily at the YMCA again and took precautions against nightly assaults in our beds by homos and thieves. Harvey and I drank our evenings away, of course. We returned to our favorite haunts in Eastchester Flats. The music was lively and so were the girls. I think Billie Holiday sang there then; if not, some impostor did her songs just like her and sat alone at the end of the bar afterwards. A number of apartments were under construction and stood unfinished, and the whores used to operate out of bedrooms that had no doors, plumbing, or electricity, and had no more than an old mattress thrown on the floor. Most were black and either gaunt or obese. No middle ground could be found.

Often on our nightly wanderings, Harvey and I would pass the lot where our small travel trailer stood and thought it looked at us plaintively. Did it remember us? I was drinking too much, I realized, and determined to knock it off, or at the least cut it back drastically. L I began to read again, E. M. Forester, and to play cribbage at an all-night lunch counter. While I was gone from the Y, one night my dufflebag and its accumulation of paperback classics disappeared. Nobody had a clue. It was the usual case.

November dragged on dismally. Each morning we reported to Fort Richardson and the army found meaningless chores for us to do. But we kept hearing rumors we would be shipped out soon. Rumors are to believe. Finally my orders were cut and I was given them in triplicate. I went for my gear. My two footlockers full of Mozart and Dizzy Gillespie were safe, along with my 78 rpm record player, much mufti, and all my books with hard covers. These weighed so much than when it was time to fly out of there for Juneau and Ketchikan, a second DC-3 had to be charted. It wasn’t all my fault. We were allowed fifty pounds each, and I had two-hundred, but nobody was counting or casting blame. We were off.

The flight was in an unheated DC-3 and there was no oxygen. We flew at sixteen thousand feet, for the sake of the bumps. I remember spitting on the metal floor and watching it freeze before my eyes. Many were sick, but for once I wasn’t.

I spent a night in Juneau and the next day flew by Grumman Goose to Ketchikan, where I was led to believe I would remain. I soon found a bachelor apartment. Again we were on TDY pay, which makes everything possible. In the morning some of ate in oatmeal or eggs and toast in a little workman’s café across the street; at night we ate dinner in round-the-clock restaurants that were pricey. We rode public transportation in our fatigues to one of two duty stations—then transmitter site on the North end of town or the receiver station to the South, where an antenna field was being installed on a rainy hillside.

The transmitter site was also our unit’s headquarters. Inside the building, soldiers strolled around in Class A uniforms and moved pieces of paper around from desk to desk. We watched them through the streaked glass enviously and hated them at once. How dare they, while we slithered stupidly in the ceaseless rain?

We were part of the same organization, but as different as day and night. They were ACS, Alaska Communications System, signal Corps, US Army; we were the 530^th Heavy Construction Company, Signal Corps, US Army. Two different units of the same corps. One did the shitwork, while the other lounged under fluorescent light, warm and dry. Off duty, they would not speak to any of us, the bastards. We were the dregs of the army. And they were right. Oh, how I wanted to be one of them.

And I soon was.

5

I had some vacation coming. In the Army it is a month’s worth each year, but try to find the time and permission to take it. However, the Army softens its hard heart around Christmas, where, throughout the Western world, much meaningful work comes to a halt for fifteen days on each side of that holiday. What I was doing lay on the far side of essential. So I flew home to Seattle and tried to be a civilian again. I worked at it diligently.

I did everything by twos and threes. If you wanted to have a beer with me, I would drink two schooners to your one. As for sex, there was a steady progressions of coeds and working girls on the Ave. that were easy to meet at parties and found their way to my bed chamber. (It couldn’t have been the uniform, for I doffed it immediately after work.) Some of the parties were for me, to welcome me home again, and when girls thought it was for good I didn’t dissuade them. And I found my way to parties held by absolute strangers, parties to which I was not invited through some small oversight on their part, but attended, all the same. I had money to spend and needed help. I was after memories, emotions to be recalled in tranquillity, when I was back in dreary Alaska.

None of my bitterness was gone; in fact, the ironical contrast with civilian life made it even stronger and more unattractive. But young women are attracted to sad young men who hate the world, and think them romantic, especially if they are drinking heavily and tend to express themselves in obscenities. I was known as a poet. Ha., Anybody can be anything he says he is around a university, at least for a while, for it takes people a while to separate out the real phonies from the unreal ones. If a guy calls himself a writer, and can drop the name of a few authors, there is no limit to how far he can go in perpetrating a personal fraud. If he is a soldier, too, and a war is tapering down to a less than grand climax, he is all the more romantic-seeming. Girls will lie down for him readily, often even before he has learned their names and where they can be found again.

Arriving in Seattle in mid-December, I had two weeks until Christmas, days which I spent with my parents, nights with old friends and new ones. Christmas came and went in a daze. The army seemed far off. There was a interval until New Years Eve, and on the following day I had a train ticket to Sun Valley. (I thought of Blankenship, now in the Ski Patrol at Fort Richardson, and knew he would eat his heart out with envy. Soldiers always promise to stay in touch, but rarely do. We exchanged no letters, for we lost each other’s army address.)

I had met a girl at a party held by the Leahys, one of many, and when it came time for bed, she joined me. We had a fling that lasted about a week before I left. I thijnk she expected me to stay in touch; this was not my intention. For Christmas I gave her a three-speed phonograph as a way of thanking her for her sexual favors, but she took it as a sign that we were engaged. Now at Sun Valley I was billeted in a unit behind the Challenger Inn. I took my meals in the bar, the Ram, or else in the cafeteria.

This girl, Molly, kept phoning me. Since nobody had a private phone, she had me paged repeatedly. Soon everybody knew who I was. It is a great way to become well-known fast, but I do not recommend it. For a solid week, wherever I went, my name was being called out over the PA system, or sometimes by a guy in person.

"Isn’t that you, Robert-o?"

"Another Bob Arnold staying here, I think."

"Hadn’t you better answer the page?"

"It’s not for me."

"You sure?"

"An imposter, certainly."

At The Ram, my favorite place to drink beer, the din was so loud that a page couldn’t be heard. I started my nights early. The Ram had beers on tap that I had never heard of, and I was determined to sample them all. There I met a girl from Chicago; I told her I was from Chicago, too, and that was all it took. Everybody was on the lookout for somebody of the opposite sex, especially the women who had come here for naught much else. We went on a sleighride, out to an inn that served hot mulled wine and fried chicken on red checked tablecloths. It was so cold on the ride that we and the others all huddled together under thick gray Union Pacific blankets on the straw, studying the sky and its salted stars. The reminded me of Van Gogh. The temperature was about zero, according to a gauge I spotted outside the inn.

While all this was going on, I spotted a blond and began to eye her; she was from Duluth, a Nordic beauty, and I managed to get her alone for a moment and ask her for a date. She agreed to one the following night. I was not discrete about this and the girl from Chicago got properly miffed. So what? Sun Valley was full of girls, most of whom would pass at twilight time for beautiful.

I thought of less of Molly, and only when I was being paged. So many distractions, including snow. Time was growing short. Soon I would be headed back to dread Alaska. The slopes here were the best I’d ever seen, though to tell the truth, I was not the world’s best skier. Corn snow makes one better than one thought he was.

I stuck to Dollar Mountain mostly, a place for beginners and intermediates, which suited me fine, and was where all the girls were. Once, though, I rode to the top of Badly. It had three chairlifts, each steeper than the previous one, and slightly terrifying in combination, as we sped towards the sky. I had mastered the stem Christy and my Christy was dependable only on easy slopes, though it was getting better daily, or so I told myself. Coming down I fell only twice. Okay, three times. Maybe four.

In the cafeteria that night I took a table with another guy. The place was jammed. He was a little grim and sour, just having broken his ankle on the slopes. It was in a big white cast, barely yet signed. I picked at my meal. "This chicken is sure tough" I told him. "But the rice and gravy are okay."

"Fool," he said, "this here is bunny."

"You’re kidding? Bunny, as in rabbit?"

"The same, asshole."

"I knew that," I said. "I was just testing you."

I did not eat any more of the stringy dubious meat, though I slopped up what I could separate of the rice. I kept a weather eye out for anyone carrying a tray to a table who had made the same mistake as mine. Everybody managed to keep a straight face.

That night might luck improved. I met a dental hygienist who was traveling the West for the feds, that is, the government, examining and treating Indian children for gum disease. We hit it off immediately. She told me she once taught dancing for Arthur Murray. I couldn’t doubt it, the way she whirled me around the floor. She was gorgeous, with a mane of blond hair like a palomino and breasts large enough that I couldn’t get really close to her without crushing them. She didn’t seem to mind. It was soon evident she liked me. Now, I’m distrustful of women who like me; it seems a sure sign of obvious bad taste on their part, but decided to give her a second chance, all the same. Maybe she wouldn’t be able to see through me in the short amount of time we would have together.

We hitched a ride into Ketchum and experienced some great jazz, live. It was as cool as the weather outside. We danced until I was thoroughly sweated under my heavy sweater. Then she wanted us to sit by the fire a while. It was almost too much.

Try to keep a girl like that from dancing. Her feet kept moving even while we were sitting down. She was the type to dance alone, if nobody else was willing. Me, I was pooped. I think I was running a slight fever. My mouth tasted like pennies. Was it my trench mouth coming back? What a time for it. A dental hygienist, she certainly must know it from my bad breath. She was a pro, wasn’t she? Maybe she had some medicine—penicillin in her purse that would put me right immediately. Dare I ask?

Evidently she had no clue, for she kept tilting her head back and thrusting her tongue into my mouth. It is a way of getting to know somebody rather quickly. In fact, I became closely acquainted with her from the waist up. No farther, he hands and mouth kept telling me. She was not going to get involved beyond that point with some stray soldier. Smart girl.

We took the bus from Ketchum to Omak, Washington, where she was temporarily stationed at the Indian reservation just outside of town. We necked all the way, heedless of the other passengers, who must have been embarrassed for us. The good thing about the Army is, it makes you somebody other than your true self. All that necking, I had to admit I missed Molly, who was eager to provide more. But kissing can be fun, nearly an end unto itself, if your partner is any good at it, and she was. You can get used to a condition of semi-permanent disappointment.

She had a car waiting for her in Omak, a sedan that was government issue. It had that familiar inhuman look. We rode around town in it, visiting various restaurants and bars. There weren’t many. "Friendly Omak," it proclaimed itself. Oh, yeah? I made a simple U-turn in the middle of the street, in order to circle back to a parking place near the movie theater where we were headed (Van Johnson and Elizabeth Taylor, pretending to be Scott an Zelda in The Last Time I Saw Paris) and a cop lurking behind a billboard pulled me over without using his siren, only his flashing red light. What I had done was safe enough, for I could see ten miles in either direction in this flat unoccupied country, but he wrote me out a ticket, all the same, the bastard. I explained that I was a soldier home on leave for Christmas. No mercy. In Omak they have hard hearts for all strangers.

I posted my forfeitable bail. This left me with ten dollars, what was left of my bus ticket back to Seattle, and a motel I’d already paid for for the night. My date dropped me in front of my unit, the motor idling. No, she wouldn’t come inside. It was goodbye and good luck. I knew as much.

We parted with a chaste kiss front lips that had been gnawing mine only hours later.. I touched her breast under three layers of wool and she smiled at me patronizingly, I thought. In the morning I made it to the bus station just as the Greyhound was hissing its front door open. I had two days before my plane back to Ketchikan left from SeaTac Airport. I spent them wastefully, with a sense of impending doom whose poignancy only someone still in the military can testify to.

6

I returned to Alaska in a driving rain. What else is new? It rains all winter long, without respite, and for most of the summer, too. There are about six days out of the year when the skies are cerulean and not a drop falls. People tend to remember each one of them and frequently remark about them.

I learned that I had been transferred indoors, as I had requested. What joy! The major in charge of the station had noted by constant whining and self-debasing. He didn’t much like the rain himself and saw a lot of benefit in keeping dry. A man after my own heart, I thought. I was put to work on a maintenance crew at the transmitter site. It is but a short step from there to a state of total indolence. But the men I worked with were the best I’d seen in years. They were one kind or another of electronic nuts. The guy who was in charge of the night shift, which I was on, had sold his car in order to buy a hi-fi stereo systems. They were brand spanking new, then. The equipment took up his entire living room, but he didn’t care; so much the better. He spent his early evening hours, before heading off for work, fiddling with his dials, aligning his tweeters, building his speakers (which were huge, of the infinite-baffle woofer type), adjusting his gains (but not, I guess, his losses), attenuating this, minimizing that, twiddling with buttons and switches, pushing knobs, fine-tuning rheostats; scanning, searching, maximizing, minimizing, enhancing, dropping, drooping, adding stuff, and God knows what else he did, before hurrying away to the transmitter site, where further instrumentation awaited him. Even though it belonged to the Army’s, it mattered to him.

He had a record of a train he once played for me: it blew its whistle, it rang its bell, it hissed its passenger doors open and closed with a snaky hiss, it chugged, it puffed, it pulled away from the station with a Doppler sound, it drew back in again with a sigh and a moan, as though air were being let out of its tire. You could hear the train slowly getting underway again, hesitantly, after disgorging its load of passengers or cargo. Railroads were familiar stuff to me, for I had worked for Northern Pacific during my college years, and so it was more of what I was already well used to, but to Pete it was more fodder or grist for his mill, the stereo set. He would put on a long-play record and listen as if— previously deaf—these were the first sounds he’d ever experienced. He liked to have some listening company, which included me. Bored, I was happy to oblige. He liked his friends to enjoy what he had assembled and to experience all the wonderful effects, which were one kind of noise or another. And . . . he served drinks.

Pete loved Ima Sumac, a songstress from Peru, whose range spanned eight or more octaves. He would turn the treble up, heighten the bass, and play an illustrative track of hers, lying back in his chair (and expecting you to do the same in yours) and listen as though it might be the last thing you’d hear on earth; then he would twiddle the bass some and take a little off the treble, and play the same track over again. Lo, a new Ima was produced, a different one, with a voice fuller and more luxurious—if that were possible. Or so he said. Truthfully, I couldn’t tell much difference or state for a fact which Ima I liked best. Some people have such an ear, others do not, but Pete was keen to subtleties and could detect minute changes in pitch. He knew what Ima needed to complete herself, to be perfect, right down to the kilowatt and, if need be, a decibel’s difference.

He had the only 15-inch woofer in Ketchikan, perhaps in all Alaska, and ordered it custom-made. Huge, the freight bill must have been stupendous. He set it in his closet door, using the compartment inside (where his clothes lay hung in rows) as a sounding board. The effect was tremendous. Perhaps his clothes, including his dress uniforms, made the difference.

I was only mildly envious and made do with a tiny portable radio that could be slipped in and out of my dufflebag. My old phonograph was till with me, a bit battered and bunged, but it played only monaurally. There were no special effects for me to enjoy, no knobs and dials to tweak for woofing and tweeting. Just a dull volume switch, plus off and on.

Nights were like the aftermath of a good party, slightly sad and laid-back. We didn’t drink on the job, but we could smoke and eat, and enjoy ourselves immensely in most other ways, so long as we didn’t leave the premise. That was okay with me, for it was raining outside and I was grateful to under shelter. Great intervals of deathly quiet and inactivity stood between work chores that occupied only minutes or moments to perform. We carried impressive clipboards around the site and wrote down our entries in preprinted forms, often guessing at the data when the instrumentation wasn’t reliable or we were too lazy to walk a few yards to get true readings. Throughout the night we entertained each other as best we could, or else read materials brought into the building, along with our lunches. This was often low-grade pornography.

I read great literature, of course. It was my mainstay, my method of staying sane, when all about me at times seemed mad. College prepares you for the long hours of idleness that lie ahead and gives you the means to fill them up meaningfully. Nightly you either drink or you read. There is a time for each, for both. The two sort themselves out nicely, I’ve found. I read long into the night, as though death was near and I was eager to soak up all the earth’s accumulated wisdom for a future void of light and intelligence. I read all the chestnuts I hadn’t had time to tackle in school. Moby Dick, the real thing and not the tepid Maxwell Geismar version that has been gutted of its wonderful blubber-rendering detail. I found that if I could stomach this, I could digest the entrails of most other books, ones that were tame and tedious in comparison. Literature has seen me through the long Alaskan nights of the soul, a time in which many perish. Books are a crutch for the stumbling soldier.

Most of the men were career military, un- or poorly educated sods, whose tastes had been arrested at the girlie magazine level. They presumed I was exactly like them and reading the same stuff, though mine seemed to lack adequate pictures, which made it inferior stuff.. Consequently, I often had somebody looking over my shoulder. He would be wondering, I could tell, if I had found a book that he might borrow next. Were there any pictures? How explicit was it, anyway? A common greeting to a reader in the army and elsewhere in the world, I reckon, is, "Get into her pants yet?"

"Almost there," I would invariably proclaim.

"Oh, boy."

"You want to be next on this one? Plenty dirty." The book in question was Finnegan’s Wake, dirty enough in places for a anybody’s taste, but admittedly takes a bit of effort to fully fathom.

"Any pictures?"

"Sorry. You got to use your imagination."

"Shit. I’ll wait for the next picture book.."

"Don’t blame you any. Excuse me, I got to get back to my page. Guy’s about to get off on her."

"Oh boy. Don’t let me stand in your way, buddy."
If I had been reading the Bible (a genuinely dirty book, by the way), the questions would have been much the same, and I would have answered similarly. These guys were largely unprincipled, concerned with second-hand sex. That was not readily available to most of us.

Now I was tackling Proust, and the questions were all of the same kind and totally irrelevant. I answered them as best I could—devious and appealingly, but nobody would bite and ask to be next on the book. It is a weird world where sex itself is not the target but only some illusion to it, some surrogate version of the real thing, false and insubstantial. Why, a real woman walking into the transmitter site would throw these guys, these sad pretense for soldiers, into a panic. They would bolt for the door or, worse, become tongue-tied, real wallflowers when confronted by the real thing, about which they chattered incessantly. And me among them, I am afraid. It is another case of the lowest common denominator. What joins us is also what drives us the farthest apart. It’s an irreconcilable world, I’m afraid.

You might think that nighttime at a transmitter maintenance site would be the ideal arrangement for a man who considers himself a writer, wouldn’t you? But I couldn’t write a thing. There was something about the place, all of the men with next to nothing to do, wandering around, peeking over your shoulder at what you were reading, seeking conversation and diversion, that, though not busy, you were never able to make use of your time for something practical and beneficial. Such as writing. It was a non-conducive climate. All of us were miserable. There is a certain kind of misery that does not lend itself to creative endeavor. It tends to promote the opposite.

We entertained ourselves by listening in on radio/telephone conversations under the guise of monitoring them, which was one of our duties. Ha, ha. Phone calls travel over copper wire until they reach us, where they enter radio transmission equipment and are changed into radio signals. FM. This means their frequency is modulated. We had to make sure the channels were clear and working. So we listened in. What some people will say to each other over a wire to which they think nobody is listening! Absolutely incredible and too lewd for repeating.

Want to hear some? I did..

"Love you, baby. You being true to me?"

"You know I am, honey.."

"You keeping that muffin closed up tight, like a good girl?’

"You know I am, honey. It’s only for you. I’m tight as a clam."

You know she’s lying by the sweet sound of her voice. When people are telling the truth, they tend to speak in an even tone, with little modulation. When the tone is cloying, you can be pretty certain someone is being unfaithful.

It didn’t much matter who the poor guy was—soldier, sailor, coast guardsman, marine. All were being cuckolded in much the same manner. This poor sap was in the Coast Guard, because Ketchikan had a large detachment station there, but I, a soldier, could easily identify with him. We were all in the same boat in the same swim, namely the Pacific Ocean. Each of us had been reduced to the protagonist in a dirty joke. On and on this couple talked, exchanging lies, while his meter ticked. It was always the guy who paid the long, long-distance charges. One way or another. He was all of us. A kind of Everyman.

7

Just about the time I learned to tune a transmitter really well, and had caught on to the true nature of the world of men and women, and what constituted high fidelity, at least as revealed among them over our radio/telephone circuit, the major in charge called me into his office one dim afternoon and said sweetly, "Arnold, I have the perfect job for you. You are exactly the right man for it. I will hence describe your duties to you. I want you to think it over and let me know your answer. It need be in the affirmative."

So I listen, as he outlined what I would do in the most glowing of terms.

I listened dutifully, then replied, "No, no thank you, Major. But thanks for asking."

He urged me to think on it some more. He was, in real life (for this was clearly the phony one), a lawyer. Now he was an army lawyer. Why (I asked myself) would a man go through law school, pass the bar exams, then go into the Army and make it a career?

There was no good answer. It defied reason. The major (Stang was his name) was moderately smart, I knew, and certainly clever. He knew enough to give me a choice in a matter not involving any choice at all. This was right out of Catch 22, and he corresponded directly to its famous character, Major Major. Perhaps he aspired to be this person, unreal as it might seem, for we were living unreally in unreal times. I wanted to shake his hand and compliment him on his sense of humor. But you don’t offer to shake an officer’s hand, let alone a major, not unless he proffers his first, and they seldom do. So mine hung limply by my side, greatly unused.

I went away; I thought over the matter for a few days and gave him my response. I declined again.

He urged me to think about it some more. He was, in real life (for this was clearly the phony one), a lawyer. Now he was an army lawyer. Why (I asked myself) would a man go through law school, pass the bar exams, then go into the Army and make it a career?

There was no good answer. It defied reason. The major (Stang was his name) was moderately smart, I knew, and certainly clever. He knew enough to give me a choice in a matter not involving any choice at all. This was right out of Catch 22, and he corresponded directly to its famous character, Major Major. Perhaps he aspired to be this person, unreal as it might seem, for we were living unreally in unreal times. I wanted to shake his hand and compliment him on his sense of humor. But you don’t offer to shake an officer’s hand, let alone a major, not unless he proffers his first, and they seldom do. So mine hung limply by my side, greatly unused.

I went away; I thought over the matter for a few days and gave him my response. I declined again.

"You are going to Annette Island, where you will be in charge," he continued, as from the previous time, not having said anything to me this day, not even hello, only looking up at my entrance as though I were a large insect come fluttering into his office, which was unlikely, for this was still drear winter.

"Let me congratulate you on the wisdom of your choice. I knew all along you were the right man for the job."

He was not only dull, it would seem, but obtuse. He looked at me with true exasperation and I could see the kind of man he was at heart. There was not an ounce of kindness in him anywhere. Nor benevolence, either.

"Arnold, you try my patience. You are going, whether you want to go or not."

"Thank you," I replied. "It was not my intention to try you patience, only to get out of going. I like it here. Ketchikan suits me"

"You leave for Annette Island at oh-seven-hundred hours tomorrow. Be on time. It isn’t that the boat won’t leave without you, only that the captain doesn’t like waiting and will make your trip unpleasant. Take the rest of the day off to pack your gear. No, don’t thank me. The army always gives you the rest of such a day off. If I could I wouldn’t, you exasperate me so."

"Thank you, sir."

A wise man, soldier or not, knows when he is licked. There is a time for submission, and this was it.

The island was shaped like the letter C, lying on its side, as though somebody had delivered it a knockout punch and it now lay groggily trying to recover. It was long ago settled by a renegade band of Indians who now owned its entirety, having emigrated from the wilds of Central Canada and been led by a (now long-deceased) Father Smith, a wild-looking, slightly mad, flame-haired minister, to their new home. The US Government had deeded them the island, I know not why, and then had been forced to lease it back from them during World War Two to build a airplane landingfield for its military. After the war it became a commercial venture, leasing the field to various airlines, and the Indians—well, some of them—became wealthy.

Standard Oil was one of the largest concessions. Naturally it cost them. Pan Am, Pacific Northern, Ellis, all airlines, plus the Coast Guard, used the field and paid through the nose, for the location served Ketchikan, being the only flat enough place around for hundreds of miles on which to land a commercial aircraft, plus the smaller amphibian Grumman Goose flown by the shuttle service that took people too and from the island. The Army controlled all communications for the island, and I was in charge of them, which meant I must maintain them in good working order and collect the user fees. This included land telephone, radio telephone, teletype, and a office at the airfield, where I met the planes and offered them my telephone/teletype services for a fee.

The Indians owned and controlled most everything. It was said that, if you had to go to the john, they would pick up a fee for you using the public toilet. And, smart, they would make you pay first. (Toilet paper was additional.) Besides myself and the Indians, there were personnel from the three big airlines, the Coast Guard Air Detachment (rescue at sea was their specialty, nay, their mission), and the CAA, whose staff numbered but three. They kept pretty much to themselves. There were also assorted maintenance personnel for the airfield and service personnel for the Coast Guard detachment. I could have lived with them, I suppose, but nobody had thought about it and I, for sure, was not one to suggest it.

I lived with Pam Am, who had the biggest contingent of personnel on the island, including cooks, airplane mechanics, groundskeepers, maids, launderers, ticket sellers, baggage handlers, etc. This was because we often had passengers staying overnight because they were socked in; the shuttle aircraft were not flying because of the inclemency. Occasionally passengers were trapped here overnight, and had to be billeted and fed. Also there were the meals onboard the plane that had to be prepared ahead of time and put in warming trays. So we had a full complement of cooks at Pam Am. Additionally we had to put up the plane’s crew, which included yummy stewardesses. They were a tasty morsel. We valued the arrival of each plane from the States, for it brought with it fresh meat and vegetables.

I maintained communications for the island, including the Indians tripod phone line into their major center, the town of Metlakatla, which my personnel record indicated I had plenty of previous experience doing, though in point of fact I had none. I would go to the airfield each time a commercial liner landed and open up my little office, enabling them to make phonecalls and send telegrams. When something broke down, I would fix it. And my diplomatic skills would often be called upon to work closely with all these mutually dependable people, most of whom were hopeless alcoholics. I myself was a borderline case.

The way the major described it was pure artistry. I was a veritable one-man band, you know, one of those guys with a kazoo in his mouth, a washboard on his chest, a couple of squeeze-ball horn beepers, all the while working a great bass drum with my foot pedal. The wonder wasn’t how good the music was, only that there was any identifiable melody emitted. A Renaissance Man of Communications, the major might have called it, me, but did not. He knew I was a college man and as a consequence could be snowed, or bullshitted, only in certain areas, not in others. There is a fine line. Thus he recognized my need for privacy and running my own show. It was a job for a man for all seasons, namely, the long wet winter ahead, which would follow a spring and summer measured in but minutes. In his opinion, I was the one.

I, in turn, learned to respect and admire the major’s special talents. One of the reasons he was put there, in dreary Ketchikan, was because he was a lawyer. Yes, an Army lawyer. It was he who negotiated the contracts with the Metlakatla Indians and, in the process, gave them nearly everything they wanted. Such generosity. Imagine a small tribe living snugly together in new government housing, the streets of pure mud, no sidewalks, but with every imaginable electrical appliance provided, some of which continued to work past their warranty period. The government not only gave them a world of concessions but paid them for accepting and using the concessions.

It went something like this: Say the tribe needed telephone service. Fair enough; we all do. Try to live for more than fifteen minutes without a functioning telephone. Anybody alive will tell you, "Impossible."

So the Army, my major, negotiated a contract to put in the phoneline, which I was to maintain and keep in good working order. Of course the Army paid them to provide this badly needed service. Say it was two-hundred a month. Then the line broke down and need work to be made functional again. The Indians charged the Army to do this for them. It gets weirder. For each telephone provided, working or not, the Army paid them. And each time it had to be repaired, or a shorted-out line made to operate again, the Army was presented with a bill. For each of these operations, an Indian consultant had to be retained. He was a specialist, a specialist in Indian affairs, and generally nothing else. Nobody knew the Indian requirements as well as another Indian, it only held to reason. Indian Reason.

What he really knew was how to charge for his time. The exact amount of time he expended assisting and in other ways advising was known only to him. He kept track of it. The place he kept it in track was in his mind. Upstairs. Often he would tap his forehead in order to come up with a calculation. It was a wonder to see. He rounded out his time to the nearest hour, but since the hours spent tended to get all mixed up without having been written down he could only remember it to the nearest half-day. There was really very little difference, say, in a period of time that came to nearly an hour and a period that was half a day. Thus, if you called him on the telephone about a matter, not only would he charge you for the call, but he would charge you for the time he spent talking to you about fixing whatever it was that had gone wrong that he was complaining about. To make his bookkeeping more manageable, he would round off a little more. He rounded it upward. The agreed-upon basic unit of time for consulting work (the tribe discussed this for months before it reached agreement) was one full day.

Rate of pay was that of the highest paid non-Indian involved in the transaction. This was nominally the major. If a major made ten dollars an hour, let us say (for this was 1954), so did the Indian consultant. He was to be paid $80 each time you talked to him, even if it was about when you might repair his telephone. He may have broken the phone using it to pound a nail in the wall in order to hang up his hat. If he had a hat. Whether he did or not didn’t really matter.

I was to be party to this and much more. The major did not want to alarm me with more details about doing business on Annette Island, so he stopped there and asked again for my compliance.

"If you don’t mind, sir, I’d just as soon stay here in Ketchikan. I have a nice apartment and I’ve recently made some friends."

"A girl?"

"Would a girl help my case any?"

"No."

"Perhaps a girl, perhaps several girls, but most assuredly friends. You remember Pete, who sold his car to buy a stereo, since we don’t have much here in terms of roads to drive a car on?"

"I know the man."
"A career soldier, unlike myself. He is in charge of my shift at the transmitter and is teaching me a lot. I’ve just begun to grasp it, the basic elements."

"Let’s see, Arnold. Wednesday morning, 0700, we have the first flight scheduled for departure for Annette.."

"Can’t possibly make it, sir. That’s the day after tomorrow. I’ve got a dozen, two dozen, things to do before I could even think about departing."

"Hasten your thinking and have good day. Dismissed."

"You have one, too, sir. Have two."

And so I went off to my new home. I settled in and could think only of escape, for it was a bleak and forlorn place, with minimal women. I would beg a ride to Ketchikan on Saturday afternoon. I used to ride bravely in the co-pilot’s seat of the Grumman Goose; the controls had been removed in order to make room for one more passenger, a place which left me white with terror. It was a joke among Ellis Airline pilots and also the ones for the Coast Guard, whom I often drank with, in their club, which was not segregated according to officers and men but allowed us to mix indiscriminately and with no harmful after effects.

The Coast Guard pilots were among the world’s best and would often fly when nobody else was fool enough to try. They thought of themselves as fighter pilots, I guess, deprived of combat aircraft, and were determined to a man to get revenge on the system by trying to smash up their expensive patrol aircraft by going out in the worst of weather, which they laughed at like the madmen they were. They were heavy drinkers and barely had time to sober up from the night before before being told to rev up their engines and head out. This they did cheerfully enough. You simply could not keep them on the ground.

Contrary to what I’d told the major, I had a girl in Ketchikan. Actually I had three, but when you have three, you often find you don’t have even one. which turned out to be the case. So I was often on the outlook to replenish my stock, that is, to have more, or to even have one I liked a lot and could depend on. This was more than I deserved, for I was totally undependable and often ruined my chances of a second date by turning up an hour or two late for my first one. Or not at all.

I would fly back to Ketchikan at every opportunity, though I was not supposed to, was supposed never to leave my duty station, the island of Annette. Of course the major, to whom I reported ("Arnold, I never want to hear from you again, get it?") knew I was derelict in my duty and was, in fact, often gone briefly from my island and drunkenly roaming the one he inhabited, slinking around the streets, a bottle of Dewars in my hand and sucking on one of my deadly Chesterfields. I was looking for women, fresh or stale; it did not much matter to me.

If Ellis Air wasn’t flying because of raging inclemency, I would petition my buddies in the Coast Guard. If they were not immediately responsive, I would plead:

"Hey, friend, I got a babe waiting. Long blond hair, down to here. Long blond legs, up to here." My hands flew in illustration.

"If a duck won’t fly, I won’t, either. And the mallards gave up the cause hours ago."

"Pretty please? Maybe she’s got a friend."

"Are you offering me a girl, soldier?"

Suddenly we were military again, opposing branches of service, not guys who had been sipping from the same bottle, a few hours back. And he knew how sensitive I was about being an enlisted man.

"No, not just any girl, nor a friend of my girl. The very girl herself. You can have her, I’ll set it up, it’ll be easy, she is easy. I’ll go off and find myself a new one. But, whatever, please fly me into Ketchikan, or else I’ll go mad. It’s a sight you don’t want to see, believe me."

"Might be worth it. No, I don’t like being stuck here, either. I’ve flown in worst stuff than this. The question is, can you handle such a flight? I remember how you spreadeagle yourself each time we come in for a water landing."

"That’s just so you will be able to see out my side window. I have no personal fear, believe me." It was a lie, of course.

So off we would go, into the peasoup weather, the wind blowing so hard that a man can’t stand on his feet at less than a thirty-degree angle, rain splashing on the cabin windshield as though we had dove into the sea itself. The wings would rock back and forth as the pilot held the brakes and throttled up for takeoff. One time we taxied down to the end of the field, which was awash and ablown, and wheeled into the wind.

"Shit," said the pilot, a lieutenant, "I’m not taking off in this slop. What kind of fool do you take me for?"

"Only the very best kind," I replied, my morale descending like a plumb bob, as I suddenly realized I had lost my last chance to get laid tonight, small as that might be. The heart (not to mention the loins) live in eternal hope and constant disappointment. We are all characters straight out of Samuel Beckett, most of the time.

On those Saturday nights when I managed to get flown in, I roamed the streets like a lunatic. It is important to have a clear visual image of me. I wore a gray glenn plaid suit, skinny rep tie (mostly black), not too clean white shirt, camelshair topcoat, black Tyrolean felt hand with silver band—the same one that had stood me in such good stead in Sun Valley. None of this was ideal for the rain, which was constant. I was generally soaked as I walked stiffly down the slickened streets of Ketchikan, drunk, careful not to slip, slide, and fall down in the streaming gutter, which was flowing dangerously high. I went from bar to bar, never remaining long in any one of them, and was generally tolerated by the bartender, a he or a she, who instantly recognized me and knew I was no threat to the overall tranquillity of the place. I mean, nothing a bartender wants less on Saturday night than another fistfight fight. Often my first drink was on the house. In return I only stayed for one.

Restless and ever on the prowl, quickly I surveyed the scene for available women (usually none; none again) and was ready to move on for richer ground, for the truth was, a bar is a poor place to meet women, and most of the ones you encounter you don’t want, movies and novels to the contrary.

So anxious to meet and mate, I usually forgot to get a hotel room, or else I was over optimistic, and when one AM sloshed round, and I was ready for sleep, I had no place to go; the hotels were all full. Then I had to made do. It is at such a time that one’s sense of enterprise is truly tested. I knew one place where I could always find a place to lay me down—the major’s desk. He would no more come into the office on a Saturday night than he would invite me to his home. It was the safest place in the world, the most secure, place in the world. I’d push his stack of work papers off on the floor, or more charitably stack them there, and curl up on the desk the way a possum would, my topcoat over me, and in a matter of seconds I’d be dead to the world. I didn’t exactly pass out, but you might say that insomnia never bothered me.

In the morning, holding my jaws tightly clenched so that my teeth would not rattle from my shivers, I’d regard the world through bloody Mary eyes and not like what I saw. I’d have to fly back to the island immediately, for it was too late to grab breakfast in a restaurant, and would get to Pan Am just in time for lunch. Everything there was a la carte and I would order myself a great bloody airborne steak from the grill.

"Throw it on and turn it over," I told the cook, a personal buddy and a great fishing companion who taught me how to bevel-cut large herring that no salmon would refuse.

He did expressly this.

The steak looked into my eye and said moo. "Put it back on and count to one-hundred," I asked.

He did what I told him, but the steak was still blue and cold in the center, but that was the way I ate them. I had some strange idea it was manly; also, a sure cure for the hangover that was pressing at my temples.

A flight was due in a at two o’clock in this otherwise languid afternoon, and I would have to open up shop for the passengers and offer them my commercial telephone and telegraph facilities. Then, unless one of my circuits was down and needed immediate tending and repair, I was free for the rest of the day, or until the next plane arrived. So my sense of loss of my freedom was ever brief.

My equipment was stored in a loft upstairs in the huge Coast Guard Air Detachment hangar across the airfield from the terminal and my office. There were four large Motorola FM units, about which I knew nothing at all. Two were active, two held in reserve. If something went wrong with one unit, and it often did, I was to carry it across the field and put it on the first seaplane headed for Ketchikan. Then I would kick in one of the standby units, I hoped with a minimum loss of continuity. How the damn thing worked internally—the guts of it—remained a mystery, but I was told that if I wanted to fool around with it (after I’d gotten the standby unit up and working, of course) there were spare vacuum tubes in a metal locker, plus a little tester for them, since they were highly undependable. The special tubes were about $25 each and you never knew until you plopped one into its many-pronged socket whether it would light up or not. And some that were lit like veritable Christmas trees did not function, bright as they glowed. So I plugged them in, pluck them right out again, and threw them away if the set did not perform. Often I would throw away three or four hundred dollars worth of tubes before I got one that transmitted and received the way it should, hang the expense. It was the Army’s problem. Then, proud as I could be, for I had corrected the problem unaided, I would radio Ketchikan that I and I had fixed the problem, so as not to worry about the dysfunctional set presently arriving by floatplane.

I thought this enterprising attitude might lead to a promotion, but it didn’t. There was one good reason why. Let me explain.

At the airfield, in a safe, I had a cash box. It always held fifty dollars startup money, plus whatever I’d taken in the previous day. I banked through the mail each working day. Each morning bright and early it held fifty bucks in cash, or was supposed to. Point of fact it usually was somewhat less. This was because some poor goof of a Coast Guard enlisted man, a brother to myself, would get on the wire to his girl, say in Tennessee, and they would talk about whether or not they would ever get together again to, ahem, do it, and, by his sly indirection, whether she was doing it with somebody else, ("of course not, what do you think I am?"), and on and on it would go, while she tried to console and comfort the guy with tales of her faithfulness, probably while the other guy was feeling her thigh, and the Coast Guardsman would end up with such a bill. I instantly calculated it and asked for payment. The guy simply didn’t have it; he didn’t know he’d talk so long and the bill would be so much.

So I would cover for him, one way or another. That is, I would come up short in my till and carry it over. I’d let it go. He promised to borrow from his buddies, but often the money came late. The, most unexpectedly, he’d show up and thrust the crumpled bills and loose change in my hand, murmuring thanks. Then I would have to make everything right in my books. Balance them, I mean, and account for the missing money. In my mind I knew right to the dime or dollar how much I was short. Sometimes I’d make up the differences out of my own pocket and then pay myself back later, out of the till. Each morning I had to send the right amount to Ketchikan by courier, that is, in a little locked bag on the first seaplane flight of the day.

One morning I reported to my office at about nine, my self-appointed starting hour; a flight was due within a few minutes. A strange gnarled man in a blue/black suit was waiting for me; looking angrily at his watch, he said had been waiting an hour. His glance took in my costume, a unique blend of civilian garb, Army uniform parts, and odd bits of clothing given me by my buddies in the CG. He did not like what he saw. (I thought it rather fetching myself, a sure sign of style in these remote parts; the very best a man could come up with.) He was an Army auditor. They are not known for their wit or sense of humor.

"Where the hell have you been, Arnold?" he greeted me. Now, civilians have no real power over the military, but they can make things difficult, and their recommendations often lead to bad events. He had something of that sort in mind for me.

"You don’t want to know."

Actually, I’d been in bed, until moments ago.

"Let’s see your cash box," he persisted.

Oh God, here it was. I was short, short again. A CGsman yesterday had run up a real bill—I’d monitored the call myself from my office, and if anybody did real need, he had. His girl was pregnant, and she told Philip he was the father, even though he’d been in Alaska for a year. She was explaining to him how this could be, and he was trying to comprehend. I mentally complimented her on her skill in story telling. She almost had us both convinced. I knew in my head that I was about eighteen dollars short. I hadn’t enough in my pocket to make it up.

I searched my pockets. "Can’t seem to find the key to the box," I told him, this nameless accountant who suddenly had such power over me and how I operated.. "Be right back." And I dashed off across the field to my maintenance loft, even though I knew it was no source of ready money. I needed time to think. Where could I find some money fast? I could not stall and play dumb for long.

I spotted the Lt. Commander who was second in command of the station. His name was Pete and he was nearly a friend. I briefed him on the situation.

"How much money do you need?" he asked, reaching for his wallet.

"About eighteen bucks. Boy, you should have heard her, Pete. What a line she fed him. You know, it could have been you, it could have been me, just as easily."

"I know. Just lucky, I guess."

I tucked the twenty—a shade too much, but no time to make change?—in the sole of my hand, inexpertly palming it, and raced across the field and back into my office.

"Found it. It was in my shop. Left it there last night, I guess."

"My, wasn’t that dumb of you?" he said sarcastically. "Now let’s see the insides of that cash box."

"Coming right up, boss," I said, in my most unctuous manner. I’m afraid it wasn’t very convincing or sincere.

I spun the dial on my safe, reached into it, and most crudely brought out the black tin box, opened it up clumsily, and flopped the bill onto the top. The auditor looked at me askance and said he had never seen such a poor performance. I grinned sadly and shrugged both shoulders. Slowly, as though it were his own money, he began to count it out.

"You’re three dollars and thirty-one cents over, Arnold."

"It’s Pfc. Arnold, let me remind you," I said, and it stayed Pfc. Arnold for another six months, when his report hit the fan. I was six weeks overdue to become corporal and this lengthened the time further.
The major called my office the same day.

"You dumb son of a bitch," he began.

"Hi, Major," I replied. "I thought you didn’t want to hear from me again?"

"Look, I don’t mind you sleeping on my desk. . . ."

"You know about that, sir?"

"I know about everything you do, Arnold. I am God, so far as you are concerned. And God says you’ve fucked up. Again"
"Yes, but I’ve got a good explanation."

"There is no good explanation for an auditor, Dog Shit."

"You can’t call me Dog Shit, sir. There’s the Uniform Code of Military Justice that prevents you"

"You forget, Dog Shit, that I am a lawyer. The Uniform Code of Military Justice says expressly that I can call you Dog Shit, Dog Shit, under special circumstances. Any time I like. This is one such time."

"As you keep reminding me."
"As you keep reminding me, sir."

"You don’t have to call me sir, sir. I am but a humble enlisted man."

"Don’t toy with me. I could bust you, son."

"I’m about as low as I can get, sir."

"You aren’t stupid, Arnold."

"Thank you, sir."

"But you’re dumb."

"Explain to me the difference. Sir."

"I’m not about to explain anything to you. You won’t be corporal, that’s about all I can tell you."

"It means forty bucks a month to me, sir."

"It doesn’t mean dog shit to me, Dog Shit."

And there it stood. It wasn’t bad enough to courts-martial me over, but it was serious enough so that my major had a tiny blemish on his record because of me. I wanted to tell him that he wouldn’t have made light colonel, anyway. It was pretty well known around the islands that his job and his rank were terminal, and he was stationed in Ketchikan mainly to deal with the Indians on Annette Island. Otherwise, anybody else could have done the job.

To me it was a major matter though only comprising three-dollars and thirty-one cents. It would buy a medium breakfast then in practically any restaurant. But the fuss it led to, and what it cost me, and perhaps my major, who usually only dealt in larger tariffs paid to the Indians at $80 an hour, government money, it loomed large. I tried to forget it, but never quite managed. And, oh yes, I did make corporal, but it wasn’t until the end of my tour of duty.

8

Once upon a time there was a man and he went to Alaska and stayed there, oh, three months or six months, then flew home, and during all that time he not only wasn’t an alcoholic, he never took a drink. There is a monument to him in Anchorage.

Bronze, it has since turned green and is coated with white pigeon excreta. It figures.

Here is an Alaskan love story. A man is married and has three children, two boys and a girl, but that doesn’t matter, and things are not going too well between him and his wife, and he drinks some, and she drinks, too, and when the kids are old enough, they begin to drink, but long before this, the man decides he wants a new life, so he quits his job (they were about to fire him, anyway), grabs the family bank account, strikes out, flies to Alaska, is instantly hired at some shit job, continues to drink heavily, but who there doesn’t or is apt of complain?

Ten years passes. He thinks, I ought to return home and straighten out the whole mess, make everything right with everybody, at least get a divorce. Five years more pass.

He meets a woman. She has three children, two girls and a boy. She has been separated from her husband ever since she moved in with a guy who turned out to be a bad character and use to tap her with the palm of his hand along side the skull whenever he felt like it. When she ditched him at a movie theater, saying she had to pee, pee again, the way women do, she took up with a guy who said he had a lot of money and was in the business of recycling VCR that came into his hands unasked for, some every night. But he was arrested for having in his pocket a simple baggie full of talc that a man he hardly knew had asked him to hold for him, just for an hour, and would pay him well for doing so, and innocent old he, it turned out, was stuck with the bag, which held a small quantity of cocaine that had been stepped on so many times tested out to be almost pure talc. But it contained just enough cocaine that he went to jail for a year and she headed for Alaska. She began to drink a little more than in the past because it helped to endure the long black Alaskan evenings that began about noon and didn’t end until nine the next morning.

The two met. It was something at first sight.

Soon they began to live together. It happens. They had so much in common, you see. Both liked ribsteaks smothered in onion, with chili alongside, and a big glass of beer, not so cold as to lose its taste. They liked Cagney and Lacey reruns, Seahawk football, looking a Dahl sheep through powerful game-spotting scopes that you could rent with quarters, boilermakers, the rich produce fields of Palmer. Had any couple ever so much to share? Their sex life was good, if not great, and she found no reason not to go down on him, when he asked nicely, so he returned the favor, though not so eagerly. They would have gotten married, if they hadn’t already been married to somebody else. It was but a technicality. Both carried snapshots of their kids, though they knew said kids had grown to adulthood and probably they wouldn’t recognize them if they bumped into them on the street. How sad, but then life was no extended picnic. Daily the past they shared grew longer.

He was Ralph, she Wilma. They were the salt of the earth, they believed. They could not be surprised and hardly ever delighted. So it goes. He drove a gravel truck for M-K. It paid twice what it would have, Stateside. She found she was better at doing nails than at hair styling. She opened up a boutique, which is a fancy name for a small shop catering to women. Then she opened another. Each lasted about a year. She blamed each failure on landlords who raised the rent exorbitantly. A lie is generally partly true.

As Christmas approached each year, they were filled with separate dread. The two were very much alike. Each planned to return home and straighten out disparate matters. But each year there was something that got in the way. Wilma went through the menopause, secretly stating, "Thank goodness. I couldn’t endure getting knocked again." Ralph found a brand of bourbon that made his morning headaches a little less debilitating. She said it was really from all the cigarettes. It took one to know one, he said angrily. Smoking was one of the few things they now had in common, he believed. One night on a long haul he stopped for an eye-opener, but had a double and remained for some good, male conversation. They found him the next day at the bottom of Sumpter Canyon, still in the cab. The truck lay on its side like some great slain beast, perhaps a mastodon. There was little blood, so the cops reasoned he hit his head on the dash and that was sufficient. It often is the way.

Wilma closed her third shop, which was barely profitable, and went to work as a counselor for Indians who did not know how to drink. They had associated problems as well. She was supposed to listen to them talk, look interested, then make referrals to people with more specific skills who would help them, such as rehabilitation centers and places where they distributed perfectly good, clean used clothing and food stuffs deemed surplus but not to be resold. There she met a man, part Eskimo, looking for some overalls. He looked right, had all the necessary attributes, so she invited him home for a steak dinner as only she knew how to prepare, she bragged. First you had two belts of Jim Beam, and then you slid the ribsteak into the pan, along with a little bacon grease to keep it from sticking and to give it a little special flavor, not that they needed any, not really. Meanwhile the chili came to a fast boil. You wanted to slice the onion as thin as you could, so you could almost see through it. The beer didn’t much matter, but Pabst was okay, and it was okay too if it hadn’t visited the refrige since it had left the store..

Afterwards she would put a tape in the VCR. It was either more Cagney and Lacy (he had passed the liking it test) or B&B, which is what they called Bevis and Butthead, as though it were a drink. They had the same kind of humor.

I could go on, but I needn’t. You get the picture, such as it is? An Alaskan Romance should leave some things for the imagination, such as it is.

9

There really wasn’t very much to do in maintaining the Annette Island Station, but I tried to each required task with as much twist and flair as I could, as though somebody were watching. Perhaps the major.

Once he flew in and I met his flight. It wasn’t to see me expressly and so I wore my usual original uniform. He scarcely gave it a glance. I gave him a ride to Metlakatla in the car I had just bought for $35 and ran only on helicopter gasoline. He was here to negotiate a new deal with the Indians and I feared that, once again, they would get the best of him. He was their patsy. He figured he would save the Army some money by not taking the taxi, which was owned by one of the Indians and who charged excessively for, whereas I was free. The idea was, you save five dollars on a ride in order to spend twenty-five thousand on more unneeded consulting services for furnishing the Indians with another needed service. Now, that’s economy. When he had done his nefarious business, I drove him back to the airport and waved goodbye. He had not said a word, the whole trip back. Come to think of it, he hadn’t had much to say on the first trip.

I liked and admired the Indians, and some of their young women who, if you looked at them not too closely or in the wrong slant of prevailing light, were almost beautiful. In a couple of years they would turn to fat. So they had a brief period of bloom when they were attractive. This was the same year when some of them found white husbands. We military knew enough to try to avoid them, though not everybody was successful. Also, there were the Pan Am hostesses, but they seldom overnighted, unless there was a terrible storm that grounded the planes. We lived in hope of such an event. Rarely did they occur.

Movies were flown in to benefit the troops, who were Coast Guardsmen. I was the only soldier on the island and had full privileges. The movies were shown in the CG canteen, which is also where they ate. It contained a bar; it was the only one on the island, for it was dry; the Indians saw to this. We saw all the first-run movies and drank beer until mandatory closing, which was weeknights at eleven. That is plenty of time to get fully drunk. It was in the canteen nightly that we got to know each other, those of us compelled to be here, for whatever his reason.

There was Orlo, who was representative for Ellis Air, the Grumman Goose seaplanes painted blue and orange. He did not like to drink alone, but would, if he couldn’t find somebody to stay up with him, to all hours of the early morning, to keep him company. One by one we did, then begged off in the future because it was too exhausting and demanding. So he drank alone, usually in his room, when the canteen closed and he still could walk. His room at Pam Am was next to mine.

Orlo was the chief PNA officer on the island. In fact, he was their only representative. He reported to himself. It is a nice arrangement if you can get it. As in my case, his superiors didn’t want to hear from him unless there was an emergency. We both strove never to recognize one. He sold tickets, handled baggage, logged the shuttle flights in and out, along with their passengers, checked them off on his list, one by one, until he had them all safely, or knew the good reason why not, finally waved bye-bye to the Super-Constellation as it lifted up at an incredible sharp angle that would guarantee a stall and crash for any other plane. Then he was free to resume his primary duty, which was to drink. This he did extremely well.

Orlo and I and a guy named George, a cook, a passenger agent named Rick, who was remarkably handsome, and a few more assorted characters lived at Pan Am. We each had individual room connected by a long hallway. It was much like a military hospital in that it was one-storey, made of wood, and strung out in a wandering course as though built in afterthoughts. Our building additionally was built on stilts, a few feet above the pervasive muskeg. It was an impossible place to heat in winter because the walls were thin wood. The heat ran all the time. Either you shivered or you roasted. Noises were easily transmitted and seemed to be greatly magnified, almost as though we were all living in one room. Thus we had few secrets.

Rick was a passenger agent, as was Snyder, a married man who had special married quarters, that is, a house, as did the station manager, Juan, who was Mexican. There was a young woman, a former stewardess, who was also a passenger agent, but she lived in Ketchikan and we only saw her at parties. I think I dated her once, but it was uneventful and her name continues to escape me.

To pass the time I read a lot, but then I always have. There comes a time in the long Alaskan night of the soul when a book is not enough. It never is. The heart, or soul, cries out for some human contact. This usually meant some kind of party. Parties were always spontaneously happening. And thank goodness. One by one we’d come out of our lairs, a silly grin on each of our faces, and we’d party. This was nightly. A party would last until, one by one, as we had started out, we’d quit.

Orlo usually started the party. You came to dread it, at the same time you looked forward to it. A pixy grin on his flushed elfin face, he’d rap at my door, which was only a few feet from his. He’d usually had one or two for starters, all by himself. He was what you might call a crazy drunk, but an enormously good-nature, and this part of his personality never changed, no matter how much he imbibed.

He had a full-sized hi-fi stereo assembled in his tiny room, or cell (a room just like mine), with speakers the size of armchairs, and though he didn’t much care about music, as such, considering it all carefully organized noise, there was some noise he liked better than other, and his present obsession was Beethoven’s Ninth. This was about the time when long-play vinyl records (33s) had just come out and Toscanni had recorded the Ninth with his orchestra and some famous choir. The last part of it was vocal. He’d play his record at top volume, over and over, and the walls would rattle, the floor shake, and off in the hills the wolves would hear the sound and hit their high note, or series of notes, either in harmony or protest.

We drank steadily and often. There was a liquid called Everclear. "Everclear, beware," the label should read, for it was five-percent short of being pure grain alcohol. Orlo had a source. All booze was illegal on the island, but there were ways. The stuff arrived in an unlabeled Mason jar, looking completely innocuous; it was rumored that if a drop fell on your bare skin it would burn you like infamous white phosphorous would. We cut the stuff, of course. Canned grapefruit juice was a favorite choice; the stuff was tart enough to neutralize the bite of the noxious stuff. (If we’d had frozen orange juice, it would have been the perfect mix, but all we had on hand was canned, and grapefruit proved better.

We all had different ways of exiting the scene when we were drinking. Rick had the room on the other side of mine, and he would simply sink deep into his armchair and nearly disappear. He’d start to nod off, snap himself awake with a nacreous grin, full of teeth, rise, stretch, excuse himself, and go off to bed. Because of this I never thought he was an alcoholic, but he might have been. His behavior didn’t rule it out.

Orlo drank long into the night, becoming more manic as it wore on. He usually experience total amnesia afterwards, not remembering anything that took place after midnight. We would recount to him his antics and he would be disbelieving. This made him a weird Cinderella type, who continued to believe his coach was not really a pumpkin, drawn by a legion of field mice.

When sober, Orlo could dance not a step, but past midnight you could not stop him. If a woman wouldn’t dance with him, okay, he would dance alone. And he did, asweat, as the hours passed. He was a veritable whirling dervish. Women (the wives of Coast Guard officers and CAA civilians personnel) were terrified when they saw him approaching. But, drunk, he could dance like a tripping wind, you might say, but he was also a bit out of control, wild, apt to veer off in any direction, and perhaps fall down.

In the morning he would remember none of this . We’d describe to him in detail his various actions, and he, red-faced, would deny them, one after another, which sent us into mocking gales of derision, so he knew he was probably wrong and had done what we said. Poor guy.

We took turns chronicling his events—"You did this, you did that, don’t you remember, you went up to her, you said, you put on this hat, you took off your shirt." "I did not," he roared. Oh, it was wonderful. But if you were Orlo—if you lived inside Orlo, as he did—it must not have been much fun, hearing all this described, over and over, as though his hidden life were a movie known to all but him.

A huge blue vein pulsed at Orlo’s temple. Right, I think; it was on your left, when you looked at him. Yes. I wonder if it wasn’t an aneurysm in the making? When he had been hard at the bottle, in the morning it was fierce. It bulged up as if a small snake had secreted itself under the skin. He must have known about it, seen it in the mirror when he shaved away his stubble—if he could see anything, those awful mornings.

He crawled late out of the sack and drove without breakfast over to the airfield, just in time for the arrival of the nine-o’clock flight, in order to greet the first PNA passengers, alighting. He still had that screwy grin on his face from the previous night, a bit lopsided and crooked. It was with this air of self-mockery that he greeted us all, as if to say: I know, I know, I’m a lush, a bit of a clown, too. Well, all right. So be it. I look slightly mad to you, don’t I? Well, if you could look inside, you’d really see something weird. You don’t know the half of it. You are seeing me at my best."

No woman would have him, but all found him and his ways fascinating. How long would he last, on a given night; when would he drop? And he was highly likable. Memorable, too. The stews that landed were always asking, "Hey, where’s Orlo? Show me Orlo, will you, please? Pretty please?" For Orlo was an assurance that a great good time was happening, or soon to happen. He brought it into being.

On one of those rare nights when a plane or two had been grounded by weather, the stews would take turns dancing with him, down at the Coast Guard club. He was known as an incredible dancer, and it was true, but only if he was drunk. You had to see him to believe it, and it was a great shame he never could see himself as we did, for it was a natural phenomena.

There are several stages of drunkenness, of course. Or that drunks go through repeatedly. Some people (me, for instance) get a little high and become garrulous. We raise our voices, laugh a lot, tell stories we would not otherwise think to relate. When we pass into the next stage, we get sloppy. Then sleepy. This is tantamount to passing out. We become quieter and quieter, until we are still, asleep.

But with drunks like Orlo, they are long past spilling. Neither do they slur their words. They rarely stagger. But those of us of us who drank nightly with Orlo saw a small, subtle change take place. It was as though he had taken off a tight hat. He was liberated, deep in some interior recess, and the new freedom gave his body a corresponding sense of release. He was free to soar. Hence the mad dancing, and whatever else might follow. Usually nothing else did. When the music stopped, as it often did, he didn’t not hear it, and continued dancing, alone or with someone. The necessary music was all in his head. And that head carried a huge bulging vein at its temple. Weird.

I kept waiting for something to happen. I mean, that blue vein, the color of a nearly raw steak cut sideways with a sharp knife. At its center. Blue-black you might call it. I waited for it to, well, explode. The life flow out of it. But it never happened, not so long as I was stationed on the island. Orlo continued to function and do his job well. It was physical, it was grueling, it went on day after day. And night after night he drank long and excessively.

10

Even when we were partying—Orlo, Rick, myself, and the others—I was on duty. I never forgot it. I was Army property—what is meant by the term Government Issue (GI).

Even when you are a one-man band, as I was, you are the only entertainment, the only one on duty; there is not substitute or replacement, no other soldier for many, many miles, to bring one here would require either a water or an air journey. In effect I was alone. If anything went wrong with my circuits, all communication between our island and the rest of the world would stop. Pan Am, PNA, Coast Guard, Ellis, Standard Oil, CAA, Indian Tribe, assorted peripheral persons gainfully and ungainfully employed—traffic with them would halt. It would stay that way until I fixed it.

It was a responsibility that wore on me. It ground me down. A phone stood by my bed. I could her its ringer trip over before it actually rang, and the sound filled me with dread. It might happen in the middle of the night, for instance. I would wake instantly. I’d answer the telephone and every time it was bad news. Get out of bed and go fix something, whatever it was that had broken down.

There were situation when this might happen. The first was when my FM/transmitters or receivers went out, and my hurrying down to the airfield and plugging in a fresh tube didn’t do the job. Then I’d go over to a standby unit and in the morning I’d have to ship the failed unit to Ketchikan.

The other time was when my tripod telephone line to Metlakatla blew down in a storm. And it regularly did. Oh how I dreaded the onset of a Pacific storm. It meant a lot of wet work for me. It was a time of misery.

The telephone line served Metlakatla solely. But the Indians used it a lot. When it stopped functioning, so did they, as individuals and as a tribe. Usually the line became grounded. They kept picking up the telephone and hearing no dialtone. All the same they sent out a mechanical ring from a crank on a box; it was an audible signal that traveled at about a thousand Hertz. It tripped a ringer on the receiving telephone that somebody was waiting to talk to them. It was a funny arrangement. Since the signal was in the vocal and audible range, I could approximate the frequency with my mouth and tongue (still can). It was taught me by Dave, the sergeant who preceded me on the island and passed it along to me, as a parting shot. There we stood, telephones in hand, trilling away at each other like a couple of berserk magpies, until the relay on the other end tripped. We could always hear it, for it was a kind of double click arrangement, when we did it right. And then the person on the other end, an Indian in Metlakatla, picked up the phone. And nobody was on the other end.

Dave laughed, hanging up, passing the phone on to me. I’d hold down the talk lever and trill myself, sounding like a fool (had there been anybody except Dave to hear me), tongue against front teeth, modulating and varying my pitch until I got it just right and the relay kicked in and the ringer did its job. It was a useful thing to know how to do, for you can call somebody from a headset or handphone that has no ringer.

Anyway, I had a box with a ringer right over my goddam bed. So I was never free, not really. In the middle of the night I would wake to the click-click of the relay being activated, even before the ringer was. I’d snap awake in my bag like a current of electricity had passed through my body. Already, before the first ring had sounded, my hand was reaching over my head for the phone on its hook. I’d flip the talk switch and groggily answer, "Yeah?"

The voice on the other end would already be talking. "Arnold, you’ve got a big problem." This I already knew. "You got a line down, the one to Metlakatla."

"But it’s raining, Sarge. There’s a storm raging."

"I know there is, Arnold. Why do you think I’m calling? Soldier, on your feet and into your boots. We’ve got an outage here. Hop to it."

And I would drift back to sleep, or half-sleep, knowing there was no pair of eyes watching me. But of course I couldn’t sleep, not really, knowing what awaited me. A short drive, followed by hours of hard work. It was best to get up, get dressed, and get the matter over with. There would be no rest, no peace, until I had.

One time, with the wind howling, soaked to the skin from rain that hit at a slant as from a showerhead, I picked up the downed copper line, just as somebody in Metlakatla cranked the ringer to see if the line had been fixed yet, and the jolt hit me much like lightning, and I must have arched in my shoes, my arms extended, my fingers frozen in their knuckle curl to the bare wire; I couldn’t have let go of the wire if my life depended on it, which it just happened to do. Not until the goof on the other end let go, thinking, no, it wasn’t fixed, for there was no answer. Then my fingers could unclench from the wire.

I hurt in every bone of my body. My hair was frizzed. The next day was worse. But I got the line up off the ground and temporarily suspended on an insulator that would permit current to flow again. The next day the Army sent over an expert. I met his plane, eagerly. He and I knew each other from Ketchikan. He was a jack of many trades and a fearless climber. When an airplane warning light went out on a tower, it was Bill who volunteered to replace it. He climbed the ladder like an ant, going hand-over-hand out on a girder until he came to the dark bulb, which he deftly unscrewed—there, three-hundred feet in the air—holding the fresh one in his mouth, base first. Then he exchanged them. If a jolt of electricity had gone through him, as it had me, the bulb in his mouth would have lit brilliantly. You could have seen a mile by its light.

The downed pole had been rocked into position, the ground being either so soggy (muskeg) or hard (permafrost) that it would not support a properly dug hole. (And oughtn’t I know about those?) So we moved aside some supporting small boulders and cut loose the line from the pole. Then we righted the pole, just the two of us. It was an interesting operation and went like this: We rolled the pole into position where the butt would be stationed. Then Bill picked up the small end of the pole. It had no crossarm on it, only a peg and glass insulator. Lifted it, I say, by both hands under it, doing a neat clean-and-press. Then he hobbled himself forward a yard or so. He screamed for me to relieve him. I lunged forward and grabbed the pole where he had originally held it. Now I took its full weight, while Bill moved forward, cursing. He lifted. I merely followed up on his lift, assuming very little of the weight. We repeated this simple calisthenic until the pole was nearly vertical.

"I’ll hold it, Arnold, while you go get some rocks."

"Where am I going to get them, Sarge?"

Everybody in the Army was a sergeant, you see. Except me, who wasn’t yet a corporal, one rank lower You couldn’t go too far wrong, calling whomever it was yelling at you, Sarge. Not unless he was an officer. Seldom, if ever, was an officer present, not if real work was at stake.

"They’re right at your feet."

"Oh, yeah, these?"

They were the same rocks that had failed to support the pole when the storm had struck. Each of them weighed a couple of hundred pounds. I was now supposed to roll (not lift) them to the base of the pole, one by one, until Bill could release his stabilizing grip and help me position the other rocks.

I had never moved so much as half this weight alone before. My general idea in life, then and now, is to get as many people involved in the action as possible. "Many hands make light work" is my motto. It only makes good sense.

However, there was nobody but Bill and me to rock in that pole, much as I’d like to have another or two. And he was obviously preoccupied. That left me. So I started moving rocks. And you know something? They can be moved alone. If there is no way to get out of doing it, you can do it, but it may take a while.

I used muscles I didn’t know I had, though I now knew, for I continued to ache in those muscles from the jolt of electricity yesterday. Once stirred into life , they proved capable of extraordinary brief effort. While emergency outages such as the line blowing down sometimes happened, they didn’t occur very often, thank goodness, so my life normally ran tranquil and even keeled

One day the major called up.

"Arnold, you lucky dog," he told me. I wondered what new horror he had in mind?.

"Hi, Major. How you doing, sir?"

"You sent in those papers and you didn’t even tell me. Shame."

"You mean, I’m going home?"

"You’re going back to college, you dumb shit. Haven’t you had enough of that place? I thought you’d decided on an Army career. And now I’ve got to train a man to replace you in—what?—the course of three days. How am I going to do that?"

"It’s easy, sir. Why. there’s practically nothing to the job. It’s a snap. You said so yourself. I’ll take him through the ropes—like Dave did me—in three hours. Maybe four, if I have to give him a tour of the island and it includes the canteen."

"Arnold. Quit testing me. You are still Army property."

"Never doubted it for a minute, sir. Who did you find to replace me? Another Renaissance Man? Did you subject him to the usual battery of aptitude tests? Did he have to be able to walk and talk, wiggle his ears, stand up to electric shock treatments? Can he hold his liquor?"

"I did the best I could."

"I see. First man to walk in the door, that day?"

"You come pretty close."

I was packed that very afternoon. The guy flew over and offered me his hand to shake. He was evidently a college man; only they will do this to you. The major could really pick them out. Another Army misfit. Suddenly I realized that Dave and I had both been misfits. This clearly was a job for those like us, men unsuited to the Army. Freelancers, oddballs. Three in a row, three of a kind. Us. Brothers.

The chief ticket agent for Pan Am, whose plane I was to fly me out was Snyder. I forget his first name. He was red-headed, pudgy, mean. We didn’t get along well. He lived in a company house with a wife and three daughters. Living with four females does something odd to a man. It makes him bitter and secretive. He finds he has to get away from such overpowering femaleness but there is no place to hide. Often such a man will go to the basement and to where he’d hidden a bottle. In Alaska, there are no basements in which to hide—the ground is either too hard or too soft. So Snyder had no outlet. But he had a wicked sense of revenge.

We had one of those surface-friendly, deeply barbed relationships that might pass as a friendship among people who do not know the parties well, or the mutual contempt involved. But you have to get along for you must work together daily. He was, as I said, the head ticket agent. He who arranged the seating on my flight out of there. Do you think he’d give me so much as a window seat? Think again. I kept hinting at being seated next to some luscious divorcee who would know just what I needed, this horny soldier returning to civilian life. Ha. Or perhaps some young babe, who evidenced an unmistakable licentiousness.

Snyder knew better.

The back of a DC-7 has a long single seat running the full width of the plane. A bus has just such a seat, too. It will accommodate about seven people. Snyder put me in the seat one away from a window. On each side was a woman of advanced middle age who weighted about twice what she ought to. Neither knew the other, but they might have been sisters. I could just picture Snyder planning it out, his seating arrangement, and snortling as I boarded and hunted for my seat. Then the look on my face when I found it.

Both women were talkers. They had no interest in me, but quickly found much in common. So they discoursed across me, each of them eagerly leaning forward to be heard over the engines’ drone and pressing into me. Ah, Snyder. A master’s touch. All these years, I’ve longed to pay you back. But there never is the opportunity, is there?

11

The Army and I had a week left together left. It was nearing Christmas week when that week began, the year ending. Like so much of my time spent in the Army, I was left to my own devices to amuse myself, evenings and nights, having only to report to my duty station by eight the next morning. I was stationed at temporary barracks at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, which is not very far from Seattle. An Army buddy who had been separated from active service a few months early met me at the base; this was Jerry Courtier. He had a car, was in fact a State Highway Patrolman. He’d merely exchanged one uniform for another, in my opinion, but I was glad to see him. He drove me into Seattle, to my parents’ house, where I would sleep and obtain a car of my own, a loaner, but in the meanwhile we drank. We drank as civilians, which is not a whole lot different from drinking as soldiers, only a certain restraint is sometimes in evidence. But not always, not in this instance.

The Army held formations each morning for all of us short-timers assigned to the temporary barracks. Roll was quickly called, after which we were free to light ‘em up and go to a dayroom and await announcement of the next step in our terminal processing. We were all old soldiers and the Army knew better than to ask anything much of us. We performed parade inspection of the grounds, which consisted of walking in extended formation its full width, picking up cigarette butts, tinfoil, clover, chewing gum, and whatever other unsightly objects we found deposited there. Meanwhile a thin dry snow fell and over our heads was blasting horrible deranged Christmas carols from a sound-system designed solely for voice. Its Hertz range must have been between three and four hundred, at a decibel level cutting off above ninety.

I drew KP the day before Christmas, but bought my way out of it for $20, thanks to a guy from Kentucky, who had no chance of returning home by then and no better use of his time. He needed the money, too.

I was pre-registered at the University of Washington to finish up a quarter or two on my masters. It was a tedious chore, but only more of what I was used to, and certainly better than the Army, so I looked forward to it greatly. What could be better than college life again—girls, books, and beer? I was used to the best of each. I had applied for the Ph.D. program at Berkeley and Stanford. The Poet Richard Eberhart had written me a letter of recommendation so superlative that I did not recognize myself. He said I was a promising young poet and either school should be glad to have me.

He was a really nice guy who knew how to stretch the truth as though it were elastic, if it would help somebody academically. And it did, enormously.

Stanford turned me down cold. But Berkeley offered me a scholarship.

12

The course is devious, if you haven’t noticed. Nothing in life proceeds in a straight line, except maybe a line drive in baseball or an undeflected forward pass in football. Even a slam-jam in basketball proscribes a downward arc. As a matter of fact, nothing flies perfectly straight. There is always a slight bend to its course. Knowing so much, there is no good reason why I should strive to be linear. So now we go back, back in time. We travel a long way in time, time past. It is nearly to my beginnings, at least from the standpoint of accomplishing what might be called useful work (though little of it really is). Dig?

My father wanted me to set my goal to be the best grasscutter in the world. To be satisfied with nothing short of the absolute top—as though all of us were ceded and they held contests or meets for this type of competition and one boy won out over another, in a kind of round-robin lottery, with the winner emerging slightly scarred to take on the next opponent on the higher rung of the ladder.

"You’ve got to be kidding?"

He wasn’t and I wasn’t supposed to be, either.

So, applying what I’d learned at home, I was to go out into the world—the neighborhood—and solicit jobs. A few "No’ should not deter me. I was in effect making cold calls. This is what it is called in business when nobody wants to hear from you but you contact them, all the same.

You either soon stop doing this or you develop what is called guts. Guts is nothing more, you learn, that the ability to keep going foolishly, when every fiber in you being says to quit. You teach yourself to disregard these warnings.

Another name for it is tough skin. The only reason to develop it is for money. But money is never enough reason, though at the time it may seem to be. To learn this valuable lesson (and what else is life?), takes a lifetime. When you’ve learned enough, all that is available to you, you are old and soon die. You take all of that hoarded information to the next place, which may be no place at all. In which case it is the grandest of jokes. You are its butt or its recipient. Take your pick. They are the same.

So I trotted around the neighborhood, Carleton Park, and knocked on doors, especially those that were preceded with tall grass, and asked for work, as I had once asked if anybody wanted to subscribe to one my magazines, which would be delivered to your backdoor, every Thursday afternoon of my young life. And you know what? People hired me to cut their lawns. Generally they were women. It was then I learned that women make all the key decisions in life. Men—men associated with these women—are given the delusion that they make them, and without the delusion would never agree to the perpetuation of such a farce. They’d kill it dead in its tracks.

Never fear.

I usually had my push-mower (the only kind I’ve ever used, more than once, with the various other powered kind) with me, and I think this helped some, helped me to get the job, because the sight of an eleven-year-old, skinny, bespectacled lad in short pants, sans shirt, sandy hair aswim on top of his head, is enough to pluck the heartstrings of most women. I wasn’t cute, I was pathetic, and never underestimate pathos. It is a killer.

I charged a dollar, dollar and a half, I think. It is hard to remember these things, and all the years of inflation that stretch between then and now. It isn’t much, but things didn’t cost much, so it evened out. I was still addicted to comic books, but hadn’t yet learned the thrifty collector’s trick of buying outdated and damaged ones from certain stores; they tore the covers off and sold them, the dime ones, three for a dime. My quick young mind would have computed this at one-third cost. Mine were a dime, three for a quarter, or was that adult bus tokens? It is all a jumbles, the past is, beyond complete recall and comprehension, as well it should be. Somethings must be finally let go.

I suppose I bought candy bars, for this was in a period before my crooked teeth required an orthodontist’s close attention, and also his admonition that if I ate more than an occasional mite of sugar, my teeth would rot beneath my braces, and he would several years hence remove them, the braces (not the teeth), and they would be nothing but cavities. So comic books, candy bars, and probably soft drinks. These comprise a boy’s extravagant world, until he develops superior vices in time.

I continued desultorily soliciting and mowing, edging and trimming, carting away soggy cuttings in cardboard boxes to neighborhood dumpsites, which were vacant lots with built-in screenings of weed and Himalayan blackberry. Here and elsewhere, the latter provides a convenient hedgerow or barbed thicket baring entrance. It is a perfect place to hide a body. Not that I had any to hide, other than my own frail, arm-weary one, one rendered in that condition from prolonged pushing of a mower uphill.

The lawns were either uphill or downhill; rarely was any flat for long. The best parts of town are always hilly. If so, then this was a fine one, indeed. Seldom was the ground flat for long. It was almost as though the earth itself dreaded the horizontal plane and found ways of negating it with indecisive actions, either away or toward an invisible center. The grass, of course, followed course. It had no will of its own and could only dumbly do what the earth dictated. And I, neither. My mower went skyward, or toward the depths, depending upon what the ground did. Form it I learned a valuable lesson.

Downhill is greatly to be preferred, but there is a law having to do with the conservation of energy, and with its expenditure, that goes, For every downhill run there is a corresponding and equal (though seemingly at the time twice as long) uphill run soon to be navigated. It cannot be escaped. So you are only deluding yourself, Boy, when you rejoice at having discovered a stretch in which you can coast. Soon there will be the terrible comeuppance.

Once I thought I had beat it, the law of the expenditure of energy, and this could be accomplished by pulling the mower back up the hill which it had just come down, an action which requires about a third the expense as pushing it there, with the blades thickly whirling. But then what about the cutting? It still has to be cut, doesn’t it, and the wheels have pressed flat the grass in twin tracks ; these, if not let standing in order to be cut at the same height as the rest of the blades, will suffer from impression but overnight rise again and reveal the shortcut taken.

Of course you can drag the mower backwards over the adjacent strip just cut and ameliorate the tracking situation, and this I did, for a while at least. But a dragged mower with grass catcher attached trips over its toes, so to speak, and the fasteners come off the twin catches, and the hook that secures it to the mower handle (if yours is anything like mine) spins off, and the flexible bottom of the catcher flexes and, lo—the cut grass spills all over the landscape. You either leave it there or are forced to gather it up in cupped hands and place it within the sprawling catcher and hope that the catcher does not trip and spill again before it is normal time to empty it.

And where do we empty it, Class? In one of the cardboard boxes that are periodically hauled to the vacant lot, behind the prickly hedgerow. Accomplished lawn cutters (this does not include me, alas) spread out a heavy canvas sheet on an already cut portion of the lawn and empty their catcher contents into it. Then, when all the grass has been rendered a uniform short length and there is no more to be found to cut, the sheet is gathered up by its four corners, approximately, a bag is formed, and looking like one of Santa’s helpers, the bag is shouldered and trudged to the same dumpsite and empties in a big, sprawling fresh green heap. Not I. Boxes.

I’d always dreaded the trimming part. I suppose it goes back to my father’s field inspections and the trauma of him always finding me deficient in some small (though at the time, large) respect. I’d cut a corner, so to speak, by not cutting a corner that needed, etc. But I was of a divided mind on the subject. When you get to trimming, the heavy work is all done, if I exclude edging with a long-handled tool with a round, toothed blade on the end, one that goes round in an endless circle, like a squirrel on a wheel, but not so smoothly. The cutter’s wheel requires considerable leverage and applied strength. Even then it sometimes cuts poorly or fails to cut at all. Then tufted grass is left protruding over the sidewalk like a bad afterthought. You either have to apply the wheel again or go after it soon with the hand clippers.

I sometimes used the hand clippers for sidewalks because it was easier, neater, and took longer. Time was relative, but hard work was not. My mind was divided because I could sit down half or more of the remaining time. You sit on your butt, often in the shade, and scoot along the damp ground (this is Seattle, remember), snipping the tall clusters of blades at the lowest convenient reachable level, letting them fall where they may. (My father was always after me for not picking them up, at least at home, so I measured my occasions of employment according to whether or not I could get away with leaving them, green still, and not picking them up, knowing that it would take a few days and I had already been paid for the job before they would turn olive, then brown, and be noticed. I hoped they would be forgotten by the time I returned for the next cutting, which was often a week or ten days away, depending. Depending on how fast the grass grew at the particular time of the year.

I won’t name all of the contributing factors.

I cut grass primarily and supplemented my gross income with little apprentice jobs of delivering newspapers once a week. This was in the era of weekly newspapers and they dominated; they cost nothing and everybody was entitled to at least one and read the damn thing, for it is where local grocery sales were announced. The big daily downtown newspapers (which I was to get deeply acquainted with in certain widely separated periods of time in my life) did not carry these. So house wives (remember those?) learned about them through the cheap flyers hand-delivered to their stoop, on Thursdays I believe. It was the same day my weekly magazines were delivered, in their time, in bulk, to my parents’ house. A day to be dreaded by boys small and not so small.

I never thought I had moved up in the world and in the realms of employment by graduating from magazines to newspapers and don’t think I did. The former were no longer available to me, but the latter certainly were, for boys were always being propelled early by parents like mine who were anxious to develop characteristics of thrift and industry in little personalities in which they were lacking. And since parents pressed early for routes, long before Responsibility and Determination were formed, boys were always quitting them, sometimes on the very delivery day itself, and substitutes or new carriers were being sought.

A boy can be a virgin carrier only once. After that he is knowledgeable and worldly wise. He cannot be easily fooled again. But he can be coerced. What is a boy but malleable material, with the right stuffing, for itinerant entrepreneurs with a persuasive bent and a passing need? And to support them there is always a principled parent who believes such labor builds character.

School, as usual, was a conspicuous bore and daily trauma. Work, though much the same thing, was different in scope and territory. A boy is daily filled with dread. There is the hopelessness of school to be suffered through, followed by a cheerless succession of tasks to be performed alone, or in concert, on Thursdays and other days of the week and especially on Saturdays. Saturdays were as much a day for hard labor as Sunday wasn’t.

There were the Shopping News and the Magnolia/Queen Anne News. In my time I delivered both. Both were skinny, sad substitutes for newspapers, and each expressed the owner’s sentiment on a host of issues in which he had strong feelings on page two, which was the verso. School bond issues (for), state and national tax increases (against). How pocked streets and pitted sidewalks were a neighborhood disgrace but it was the niggardly city that was at fault. And so on. Meanwhile local grocers, and the new chains, A&P and Safeway, ran adds for produce in season and specials on tinned goods nobody much wanted or bought, even on sale.

The classified ads were few and pitiful.

The papers were both so thin that we boys developed special ways so that they could be folded and tossed in the general direction of front porches, or else would come variably close. There was the tight round fold, but my favorite was the flat square fold because it would sail. O how it would sail, sometimes even in a straight course. Often it proscribed a boomerang’s crazy twist and would seem to turn on a wingtip and start to come back at you. But then it would fail and fall to the ground, about halfway to where you wanted it to land. Depending on whether or not it was raining, you either retrieved it for another, nearer throw, or left it lying where it fell, like a despised enemy soldier.

I’d previously used my bike—the red and white Schwinn—for my deliveries, in Highland Park, Illinois, but here the distances were so short, the papers so thin and light, that I could easily carry them in my canvas bag’s two giant pockets, the one in front, like a papoose, the other in back, like a bona fide Boy Scout pack. I was not yet twelve and aspired greatly to join that group of quasi-delinquents. Thus burdened, fore and aft, with my days consignment, wide and flat as they had come to me, I set off on foot, folding along the way. Soon my front sack was full of little square numbers, all packed in neat tight rows. When the front sack was filled to capacity, I turned the bag around with a quick twist in my shoes, flipping the bag up and ducking my shoulders down, giving the balanced sacks a neat twirl. Lo, and I had in front the remainder of the load, each paper flat and wide again, awaiting its fold. My thumb and first finger on each hand grew progressively sore and rubbed nearly raw.

This activity was repeated weekly, into a dim future. I was paid a small amount—I can’t remember exactly what. A dollar or two. Just enough to keep me at it and not enough to make any real money for doing it. But then, what we my choices? I was one of a legion of boys hired as cheap labor, none cheaper, a never-ending supply of them coming of age and growing out of it, often graduating on to the Real Number, a daily-and-Sunday route with one of the big downtown newspapers. So this was a nether time, a proving ground, another competency test in growing up only slightly burdened and traumatized. Of course I exaggerate. Hyperbole is my method. But sometimes hyperbole is close to the truth of the situation.

Before I was deemed old enough and sufficiently responsible for such a job, there was a brief directionless interval. It was across one summer. I think I was twelve or thirteen. Where I heard about the job, I have no idea. I don’t think my father fed it to me. And I don’t remember reading the classified Help Wanted ads in the daily paper, but perhaps it was there. It seems likely. There or posted on some bulletin board in the grocery store. I interviewed for it and was instantly hired. It was as a gasoline station attendant. I always thought of the job as Richfield. Richfield it is and was to me.

The war was on, a year or two. It changed things immensely, especially economic conditions and the labor market. While women took men’s jobs, so did boys; women’s work had been confined to the office, and there were still some grimy tasks they were not thought capable of performing. Mine was one. The guy who owned the station and worked at it days was Mike Garrison. He was a fat old drunk, and none too honest—to put it charitably. He ran a blackmarket in gasoline and tires. I’d say he was a case and a half. Mostly he was in the back room, cooking up deals. My job was to wash the windshield and other glass area, check the water and oil, and put the gauge on the tires and inflate them if necessary. This I was to accomplish by the time he pumped all the gas in. Since there was rationing, nobody bought more than a few precious gallons; what saved my hide was the incredible slowness of the pumps. The fractions of a gallon would creep round, measured I think in tenths, as I raced round the vehicle, dipping this, wiping that, pumping something else, and wooshing air into the tires one by one with a tiny nozzle that kept slipping off the valve and shooting air at a crooked stream off to the musty side. Sometimes I let out more than I pumped in. And if the timing was close, the poor car limped off flat footed, so to speak.

All this with a smile, as the rain streaked down.

Mike explained, "It is important to smile, even though it may hurt. Hurt your face." He himself rarely smiled and was a self-styled exception, being the owner of the station. It must have been a franchise. He had a frowning, pickle expression, I’d call it. Perhaps it is what you develop when you expect arrest at an moment. I never knew, or wanted to know, the nature of his transactions. There were all these tiny white stamps torn off of ration cards labeled A, B, C, and maybe D, and each measured a customer’s allotment of gasoline according to his need. But everybody had need. I mean, how does a guy go anywhere, without gasoline? Well, he doesn’t. He sits at home, idle, fretting away. He’s a prisoner. His car squats in the garage, hunched down on its tires, raring to go, but lacking the wherewithal.

Tires—mostly retreads—were scattered out in back. Most were mismatches. Now, with rubber gone to war, along with most everything else of negotiable value, the baldest of tires had great value. And a tire with discernible tread, even retread, was worth a lot of money. Try to find one, though. Mike had them. Where they came from, I’ll never know. At night a truck would appear and offload its contents—six or eight beatup numbers, dusty from storage in somebody’s vault. Mike’d throw a tarp over them, and on top of the tarp he’d stack old cardboard boxes full of used oil cans, broken fuel pumps, whatever he had as a disguise. Then when a needy customer arrived and they went through their hunker-down negotiations and had agreed on a price for a tire, unseen, he’d lead the poor guy out back and unveil the prize. If nobody but me was looking, the guy’d throw it in back and drive off fast.

Gasoline was another matter. Since I didn’t handle the pump, wasn’t authorized to, it was strictly Mike and the driver. Sometimes he got paid before he pumped, if you know what I mean. Mike would lean low over the driver’s window, some words would get mumbled, the man would peels some stamps out of a booklet he kept close to the vest, so to speak, pass them over, there’d be a pause, and the stamps and pause would be followed by some money, always loose bills, never any change. I noted all this amid my scurrying activity. Mike would pocket the bills on the right side of his gray, grimy coveralls, not looking at it or counting it or bothering to straighten out the bills, or separate the ones from the fives or larger. Then he’d whirl, wipe the back of the same hand under his nose, where I presume it accumulated something; then he’d lay the back of that hand against his black hair, with a sideways motions, and a moment later he’d lace his fingers through the hair and sweep it back with a combing motion. It is, I thought, what kept his hair shiny and laid flat to his head. That and the rain that seemed always to be falling, so that as soon as I had the windshield squeegged dry, it would start to grow its perspiration of tiny drops.

In that and in many other ways my job was a losing proposition.

The station was on Seattle’s waterfront, on the water side of a street called Alaskan Way. I presumed that this was because if you followed it North long enough, it would lead you to that territory, not yet a state, not for many years, and those long after I’d left there as a soldier. I knew better, of course. Alaskan Way took a jog and became, briefly, Denny Way, then Elliot Way. Every street was one Way or another. To get to work I’d ride the Number 19, Carleton Park bus across the Garfield Street Bridge and, in reverse order of the above, ride down Elliot to Denny to Alaskan, much like a ground ball double-play, five-three-one. I’d get off on the edge of Denny, then walk the longish distance to Richfield and my job, my lunchpail under my arm, almost as though I were a youthful version of organized labor. And I guess I was.

Today the Edgewater Inn sits on the site. It is where the flush go to stay, if they have a water bent. Then, the waterfront was a dump, a habitat of bums and seafarers, who have now moved to Pioneer Square, where they terrorize or try to tourists and denizens alike. I used to wend my way among them, thinking them harmless and much unlike me. I think I was lucky. Probably it was because it was evident I had nothing much to steal. People used to have to have a reason to attack you, not shoot or stick you with a knife just because they were bored and to do so might relieve their tedium. Or because it might be fun.

Cops liked Mike’s Richfield and used to hang out there. He knew how to treat them right. They in turn treated him right, whatever that meant. He kept a bottle or two around and would drink with them, and they’d roar at Irish jokes, ethnic jokes, dirty jokes, whatever was going round. Then Mike leavened some. It was like he had an off/on switch. There is something about the Irish and police work that is exclusive and possessive. As for me, I was invisible to them. You talk about your Invisible Man. Well, once he was a boy. You might not see him, but he sure saw you.

Things have changed some and Seattle police are now longer a bunch of drunks with their hands held out for a gratuity. I have been assured this and believe it to be a fact. Often there was a cop or two, sleeping it off in back, among the tarp-covered tires and used parts. Some rode motorcycles and others squad cars that were parked off to the side, as though they were awaiting repair. This no longer happens, I’ve been told. Nor do they ask for free stuff, such as money, booze, cartons of cigarettes, gasoline. But back then it was endemic.

There were other duties for me to perform, in between cars with dirty windshields. I had to clean up the two bays of the garage. All that dripped oil. There was a keg of some stuff called Grease Wheat, and I would sprinkle it on the floor in good quantity, then sweep it up—grease and all—with a pushbroom. Or so was the theory behind the sale of the stuff. Actually, it worked pretty well. It soaked up, slopped up, much of the oil that was still liquid. The wheat was stained black and tended to sling to itself, its grains or kernels. It became sticky and caused me to have to bear down on the broom handle. The stuff then slid, rather than be pushed. When I got a big pile, I scooped it up in a regulation dust pan. This I carted to a huge garbage can that contained only used grease wheat. It was important, Mike told me, to do this at the end of each day, or else one of the two mechanics (they were never on duty at the same time) might slip and hurt himself. He might go caroming into one of the bays and meet his bitter end.

I could see how this might be. The bays were sunken pits, and when it came time to drain the crankcase oil out of a car, the mechanic would descent (like the steps of Hell, I thought) until he came under the car or truck. It was possible for him to standup, stand tall, and use his wrench to loosen the nut that held the oil in the pan. Out it would come gushing. He’d catch it in a big pan, but some always spilled out. And since most cars were old, there being no new ones manufactured in time of war, most leaked oil as they drove in and drove out. So the front of the garage was always a slimy mess. My job was to make it a little less so.

I didn’t mind. It was messy but necessary work. I could see the end result and it was good. I was less successful in psyching myself up for cleaning the restroom. Phew. There was only one, and we all used it, along with the customers who came into Mike’s Richfield expressly for that purpose. He tried to deter them, but often couldn’t. What were they to do—do it in their pants?

Mike would lie to them. "It’s shut down," he’d say. "The plumbing is broken. Sorry." "We don’t have one." This nobody believed, so he didn’t exercise it often. "Out of order" was the best he could do. But if the poor guy looked him in the eye and the eye doing the looking was pained, Mike would give in. He had a heart, albeit not large. "Oh, go ahead. But try not to leave it a mess, will you?" He was thinking of me, I suppose, and I ought to be grateful. I guess I was.

What a foul place it was. Often people couldn’t get to the toilet on time. They’d pee on the floor, approaching. Or they’d shit on the edge of the toilet seat, just a little smear, a present for me, the kid. Or they wouldn’t flush. What did they want, me to examine their leavings? It was too much trouble to pull the handle, I guess, or maybe they figured the handle was dirty (it was) and they’d soil their hands, hands that had just touched their private parts and what came out of them. They’d want to keep those hands to themselves and not sully them with what might have been on somebody else’s.

So I would flush for them. I’d clean the toilet bowl with a little brush and some liquid, swirling it around and around, flushing time and again until the bowl looked clean. I’d wipe down the toilet seat and dry it with paper towels, of which we had a bundle. I’d fill my pail with hot sudsy water and get the mop and wash down the floor, not wringing hard at first and letting the soapy water stand in puddles. I’d swirl it around and around. Then I’d go get some clean hot water, wash out my mop, go over the area (not large) time and again, progressively wringing my mop dryer and dryer. Then I’d finally pronounce my floor done. It didn’t exactly sparkle, nor did the garage, but to me it seemed a good job. A word of mild praise from Mike would have gone a long ways. There was none. Next day the place was a mess again. Once more I’d tackle it with reluctance, but soon have it close to shining. I began to think of it as comprising the shape of my life, both present and for time to come. I was—what?--thirteen, fourteen?

I came to hate the job, as I did most jobs, in their time. It was not the extent of the corruption that did it, in this case, but the grueling race to complete my assigned tasks before the guy started his motor, gunned it, and drove off, as I was fitting the nozzle, say, to the third tire. This was a trifle dismaying. It was doubly so because Mike would always point out to me how I’d failed to accomplish my tasks. And he would brook no explanations. Most were obvious or self-evident. Perhaps I just wasn’t fast enough.

The corruption seemed to be the ordinary state of affairs, either good nor bad, simply how things were. It was how business was conducted, I concluded—in whispered asides, money surreptitiously changing hands, goods delivered out of the back room, cops hanging around, bottles of whiskey making their appearance. And is this awfully different from today, I wonder? Most dishonesty is a matter of degree, I’ve found, and a little corruption may be a good thing, but too much hurts business and drives away customers. Business is really a matter of attracting customers and inducing them to buy things from you. You make as much money as you can. This is called markup. You buy low and sell high, and grow rich. That’s all there is to it. This I’ve learned from Mike’s Richfield. It has stood me good stead ever since. And perhaps it may explain how I never did very good at business.

I may have gotten some of it wrong. It’s important to give all experience, including work ones, a fair shake. It may be my fault that I didn’t. That would explain my failure.

12

There were other jobs, seasonal summer ones. I don’t know where I heard of them. I think my father spotted them and pointed them out to me, knowing I wasn’t any too perspicacious in that department. Small boxed ads in the Sunday newspaper. Or else they were posted on bulletin boards, the usual source. Berry picking was one. And the two kinds of beans, the ones you had to stoop to pick, entirely, and the other kind, pole beans, where you stooped some, too, but much of the work was at waist-level and even (delightfully) higher. Waxed, yellow, string.

Berries are the pits, you know. Even though they don’t have any. They ran special buses from various Seattle locations out to the farms. They left, as I recall, at seven in the morning. They came back at around six. The ride was less than an hour. The rest of the time we picked whatever they had that was ripe or ready. We were kids, mostly, plus a few large girls that had breasts but were not yet what you’d call women. The boys were the kind that you never saw before, even at school. Come to think of it, the girls were, too. Where they found them I have no idea. They answered the ad for pickers, just like I had. But I think they were propelled by other motives. Me, I came from a home in which there was money, but I was out to learn valuable little lessons that would serve me well, when the time came for me to go out seriously into the world. Thus, this was serious work.

For them, the other kids and the large girls, it was. The money was desperately needed at home. Oh, there were a few guys, a few girls, who were out for pocket money, but stoop labor is a terrible way to earn it. And you soon learn that you are not constitutionally or temperamentally suited to it. This is another way of saying that most of were spoiled rotten. That is another of my father’s phrases. Perhaps you have gathered that.

Though I was spoiled rotten by my own father’s standards, I am sure, I was not supposed to be, and to unspoil me was his best intention. Somehow he had failed in raising me, though God knows he had tried hard. But to try hard is not enough. You have to succeed at what you set out to do. And we had not. The failure was both of ours. He had failed as a father, I as a son. A certain amount of penance under the strong son might bake some of the failure out of me. As for his failure, his penance, he could only wait. Our redemption was solely on my thin shoulders.

Of course I exaggerate. Don’t I always? But exaggeration is a means of reaching the emotional heart of a given situation. The surface events do not justify the hyperbole, but what lies underneath it—the abject emotions—are true enough. The sense of failure that I had was in excess of what the events themselves could merit. Yet I felt them powerfully and believed what my emotions told me.

Do all fathers do this, instill in ordinary sons a sense of guilt at falling short of various marks set (without consultation) for them? I reckon so. It is a terrible thing for them to do. They deserve some appropriate punishment. That they are often loved, even loved excessively, is probably punishment enough. For there is a sort of reverse order of things in which guilt is assuaged and turned into its direct opposite. It leaves the unearned recipient astonished, dumbfounded, and full of fury. That is all to the good.

We are so individually wracked, men and women, that the only way we can set ourselves free is to recreate the failure, the young traumatic event, in our progeny and follow closely their progress, these pilgrims, through a similar close-combat course or minefield. If the second generation, girls and boys, survive it, escape with only a few lacerated veins, not arteries, we are reborn into completeness, guilt-free. Is this too much to ask?

Yes.

First come strawberries, followed by raspberries, and finally blackberries, for which there is not commercial market. In vegetables, asparagus precedes peas, and corn is much later. Beans come somewhere in between and are normally picked by hand. The Mexicans do this well. Anglos are comparative failures at stoop labor. It may be hereditary, it may be the result of conditioning. The results are the same. Try, for instance, standing along side an eight-year-old Mexican kid and pick bean for bean, you with your adult height and strength. In minutes the kid will show you up for the slothy toad that you are. Or that I am. For it is what happened when I did it. Over and over.

You do not tell your dad this. It is your deep, dire secret, and only the grave will claim it. (Or your memoirs.) You take the sad new home with you at night to the family dining table, at which there is nightly a kind of round-robin review or confessional of the day’s activities, and you tell them everything but the truth. You skim the surface events and relate the rest in outline form. You kit a highlight or two and try to turn the attention away from yourself. You talk about others and sometimes project onto them something funny and sad that happened to you, but that you don’t want to admit. In short, you learn how to be a story-teller. Perhaps it starts here. Or rather there.

13

I moved on to a full-sized paper route of my own. Daily and Sunday. Never a day off. It started out at about 80 papers. Over time, it fluctuated in both directions. Never did it exceed 100 papers. That is plenty.

Delivering newspapers every day is a life of its own. There is school, there is home, there is the time spent in transportation. Nobody studied at home more than a quick little math. Delivering took up all the free hours between school and dinner, not to mention to what it did to your Sunday mornings and the lurking terror of what was to come, Saturday night.

Often the paper-delivery truck was late. We waited at the shack, an assortment of route boys. No girls in our number. There was, thank goodness, a basketball hoop bolted to a telephone pole, with a naked bulb light overhead, topped by a reflector that resembled a pie plate tipped at a cocked angle like a hat. We hurried out our waiting time by shooting baskets and in time got good at various aspects of the games of Horse and Twenty-one. The street was too narrow for a half-court game, and the best it had to offer was two on two, or a crowded three on three, where you were always tripping over the curb or some guy cutting to the basket. In time we fielded our own team for the newspaper’s intramural league. I played one of the centers, yes. We had a double-post alignment that was ludicrous. Well, I had a hook shot, could in fact shoot it about equally badly with either hand and arm.

Horse was our mainstay, though. We played it in the sun, in drenching rain, even at early winter dark, under that crooked streetlight. I remember shooting baskets when some powdery snowflakes were descending in a cone of yellow light, all very pretty and dry. Most of us got good at garbage shots, which are those shots that take place under or very near the basket and are dependent on English or spin. If you have a left hand almost as strong as your right one, you have a big advantage, for you can make garbage baskets ambidextrously, maddeningly so, and put away you opponent quickly. Those dispatched in this matter tend to be sullen, sarcastic, and resentful. They say awful things about the one who beat them.

Don’t misunderstand, I wasn’t really very good. From a distance, my shots would bounce high and go rimming off, not hang close to the hoop, where they might be easily tipped in by somebody taller. And I made a small proportion of my jumpers, which meant I was always losing a game of Twenty-One, which is dependent on making the first, long shot. So Horse was my game, if any game was said to me mine,. And my specialty was garbage.

Thursdays the paper was huge, choked full of advertising inserts and colorful flyers. Often the truck was late, so we had more time for basketball, true, but the work that followed into the dark was harder and compressed into a shorter time frame. And customers would be irate and blame us, the delivery boy, for matters that were his, or rather my, fault. Sometimes I’d encounter a guy standing in his lighted doorway, waiting for his paper, a scowl on his face. He’d brook no explanation, either. So after trying one or two, I never did again. I’d carry the blame on my own two skinny shoulders.

Saturdays were a kind of preview of Sundays, only teasingly light. They might have as well dispensed with the Saturday paper, it was so slight, its news so insignificant. Instead, they delivered it early in the morning and made you rise early, earlier than is healthy for a growing boy, and show up at the paper shack while it was still dark. I was young enough, all of us were, so that we had no social life (read: sexual) to be interrupted or destroyed by such an early rising, but it pretty much ruined the weekend, followed as it was by Sunday, and its massive load of newsprint.

What you wanted to avoid, if you could, was going so short on sleep that you went back to bed, once your load of papers was distributed to the neighborhood doorstep. But it was hard not to, not to be come dependent on doing so, for after a week of school, who wants to turn in early on Friday night, when the whole luxurious weekend was upon you? Surely not the paper boy. Thus weekends became a kind of nightmare. You made it through Saturday morning, sure, but you were held in the iron grip of knowing what lay ahead. Sundays were traumatic. In my case, my father helped me out.

He’d rise and breakfast with me, which was kind of fun. Then we’d set out in the family car for the shack. It was the route boy’s job to put the bright thick inserts in the center of the already plump newspaper, one after another, for they came widely separated, the inserts printed way ahead of time, the paper itself late last night in order to incorporate most of the late sporting scores. What we did was marry the two. Then we took the porcine paper and stacked them, one atop the other, and when the single stack got tall enough, so heavy, we took turns carting them out to the car. First we filled the trunk (commodious, for it was a Buick), then the backseat. That usually did it, but if not there was some more room in front, alongside the passenger, namely me. He’d drive me to the start of my route, then sidle alongside me, the motor idling and heating to the point when soon the cooling fan kicked in in order to bright down the temperature in the radiator, which was nearing the boiling point.

Dad would cruise along, stop, wait, while I grabbed a paper under one arm, another under the opposing one, and one in my hand, half folded (half because the damn thing was so fat it would not more than bend), and dash from door to door, laying my bundle flat again on each stoop, taking care to put it under shelter, any way that I could. For it was generally drizzling. At some houses I jammed the paper between screen door and front door, and often the screen wouldn’t close because of the paper’s size. So I’d wedge the door mat up against the bottom of the screen and say a little prayer that the screen now swing wide and let the contends spill out and become sodden.

Wind was a factor, as well. Wind could distribute the guts of your paper—especially the inserts—across the lawn, sidewalk, and into the street. This made a colorful display. So you would half-fold your paper and encircle it with a narrow rubberband, hoping it would hold, or else the earlier scenario would prevail. Sometimes you would use two rubberbands, circling high, circling low, but still the paper would tend to spill its guts in a sideways manner, or else one or both of the bands would snap under the strain, and the results would be the same as above. So it was hard to win, hard to know what the right thing to do was and do it.

I suppose each of those Sunday papers might way six or seven pounds. I don’t know because I never bothered to weigh one of them; there wasn’t time. Besides, it weighed what it weighed, so what did it matter? Each had to be hand-preped, half-folded, banded, loaded, off-loaded, trundles to the door, and left securely. But say it weighed in at the upper limit, and there were eighty of them (often there were more), this would put their gross weight at over five-hundred pounds. A quarter of a ton. It is not something you transport in your little red wagon. No, it is a sizable amount, and one that requires adult assistant.

They had carts, special carts, which you could buy from the Times and they would transport eighty or ninety pounds of papers, all stacked up neat and tall, but even if you had one, bought one (they would buy it back, when you quit), it would not carry your entire load, and you would have to circle back to the shack, your cart empty, for the next load, and then it would be back over the considerable distance again to the point where your deliveries ended because you ran out of papers. Multiply this times four or five and you have a pretty good idea of the independent boy’s Sunday morning. And you were supposed to have them all delivered by seven in the morning. Ha.

So parents were called in for assistance and most dutifully answered, if not awfully cheerfully. Mine did. Rising any hour before ten in the morning was my mother’s idea of hell, but I remember some few mornings on Sunday when she would stagger to her feet, drink her orange juice and freshly brewed coffee (time for only a two-thirds cup), and follow us out to the garage, where the car was already warming its engine, which my father insisted on doing, for it reduced the chances of it eventually needing a ring job.

When your parents rise early to help you with your route, you know you are loved. You know and they know, you couldn’t have done it without them.

And I probably wouldn’t have wanted to do it without them. I didn’t really need the money, but it was considered unmanly for this boy not to be gainfully employed, ever. Where such an idea came from I had no idea until years later I read some family documents going back into the previous century and got a sense of what the Puritan ethic really was—was like, as in like to live under. I mean, the general idea was to get up early in the morning (something Mother and I disliked about as much as avocado) and work hard, unremittingly, until sufficiently late in the day that it was time to brush your teeth and turn in. Behind it was a staunch religious ethos best exemplified in sayings like, "Idle hands make . . . ." You can supply your own predicate. Whatever it is, it isn’t good.

I come from a family of ministers and teachers. The difference didn’t used to be much, only one of degree. What was taught was the same as what was preached. If you were busy enough, toiled hard enough, you would stay out of trouble. It was more important to stay out of trouble (with God) than to make a lot of money, but money gainfully earned (hard work again) was good, was the fruit of labor. This is all an old stew, reheated over and over. Nobody wants to eat it, but there it is. What do you do with it? You can’t exactly throw it out because it is part and parcel of what motivates you and comprises the core of your very life.

You throw it out, you throw out yourself, too.

There were counter forces at work, of course. Natural man, or natural boy, is slothful. And sloth runs as an undercurrent to the industrious life. A teacher, a scholar, must spend idle time. . . reading. What is lazier, more unproductive, than to sit all day with your face in a book? Or writing one—when you could be building a house, for instance, or organizing some group that will manifest itself, its soul, in a useful collective activity.

I was naturally indolent, still am. My dictionary defines indolent as: "disinclined to exert oneself, conducive to inactivity or laziness, languorous." There you are, you got me, encapsulated in a nutshell. C’est moi.

You have here a prescription for a personality disorder known as schizophrenia. Oh, maybe not the real advanced, textbook variety, by the garden type, one diluted by a tendency toward the norm, not away from it. One of those situations that leaves you muttering, "There but for the grace of a whole number of things go I." And if you think you have lucky stars, you thank them.

I do not think myself unique. No, the situation I describe is cultural and widely diffused, disseminated. We all of us suffer from it to a greater or lesser extent. It is nearly universal and might be described as the general plight or malaise. Collectively our egos and ids dominate us still, while out super-egos remain embryonic, show no signs of developing. We are locked in ourselves and our sloth. We wish for a key to let us out, but there is none, not unless it can be manufactured out of our suffering. Fat chance.

A job delivering newspapers wears on you. You have no day off. When you are sick you deliver, as you do when you are well or have some fascinating competing activity. And this is how you learn another of life’s little lessons, namely, there is no respite save severe illness. And this tempts you to either acquire some nearly fatal disease or else fake it. But there is always a doctor to keep you honest and to point out to your parents that, no, you aren’t exactly faking it, but the problem lies mainly in your head.

To my father this translated, "He only thinks he’s sick." To this day I do not know what the difference is.

Lying around sick, reading, or lying around well, reading, all produce the same results: tepid scholarship. I mean, how else do you learn things, those subjects that aren’t taught in school? It requires idleness and languor is the enemy of good deeds and fair intentions. I was in the enemy’s camp. My very bones protested what was asked of me by my ancestors, those venerable teachers and proselytizers of religion, Baptists and Methodists and Presbyterians, and a whole lot of bastard (excuse me) sects no longer existent. What an odd world it is, this one of ours, with good people pulling you one way and others greatly admired telling you, no, you should head in the opposite direction.

At the shack, hauling newspapers daily, was a host of people who I guess comprised my friends. If not them, certainly my peers. There was the handsome Bob Stratton, who introduced me (literally) to girls. Girls liked Bob—not this one, but the other, with his fine blond hair combed back in Pachuka locks and heavily slicked down. He was as skinny as I, and the paper shack was right down the street from his parents’ house, so it was an easy matter to go over to his house and wait for the black Times struck (like death’s chariot) to hove into sight, with our daily prescription of work.

He shot baskets too while awaiting our daily consignment of paper, newspapers one day away from being discarded or used for other purposes than people’s reading. What waste, what misuse of resources. Of course it is still going on, trees being murdered so we can have our daily fix of advertisements sprinkled in with news, news of which very little affected our lives, let alone impacted it. But don’t get me wrong. The daily newspaper was our mainstay and there was yet no TV to bring us our nightly news fix. In my time I went to work in the newsroom of both papers, the good gray Times and the meretricious Post-Intelligencer, thought by conservatives to publish something less than the full truth. And was duly fired from both. But that belongs to another time.

Wally Ord, of whom I can bring back no more than a fleeting laconic image, dour and reflective, was another route boy, and so was one of the Hennes twins, I never knew which, never was able to identify each of them correctly, even guessing, which gave me a 50/50 chance. Given such odds, how could I four times out of four be wrong? Well, I was, and it persisted late into life, when we were all grown pudgy and (them) balding. And for a while the infamous George Trick, who lived up to his name by being a life-risking trickster, famed for climbing high and out over a tree hanging two-hundred feet above the beach on Perkins Lane, never hesitating, never faltering. One slip and he could have become a B-section headline on one of the newspapers awaiting him in our shack. But he was lucky, he was blessed. I suspect he turned staid as he aged, never attended or if he did finished college, and went into his father’s lucrative business, which was stationary.

I don’t mean that it didn’t move, only that it had the corner on office supplies.

All of us shooting lethargic baskets with uneven skill and stopping when the black-as-doom truck arrived, its back door rolled up, and our individual bundles dumped out into the street, which was really an alley, in front of the shack, which was really a family garage. How often one thing is really another.

We lugged our bundle into the shack and hoisted it up on one of the shack tables that was mostly used for stuffs, and then we counted out our papers to ensure the count was right. It often wasn’t. This was called a short. If you had a short, you had to borrow from somebody who had an extra, and there was some bookkeeping that followed. We had a shack manager, sometimes a mom, and the news had to go into the supervisor or district manager, and the record made straight, for otherwise you were billed for an extra paper or for one you didn’t get. Similarly starts and stops from customers were sent in and your count adjusted on a daily basis; then, when it was time to collect from your customers, you had the unenviable chore of arguing with them about when they put in their start and their stop, and they always thought you were charging them for extra papers, papers they never wanted, never got.

Some of them were chiselers, no matter how much money they made, and this was a very affluent neighborhood. It is a wonder how the wealthiest people will try the hardest to cheat a boy out of his hard-earned money. I guess it comes down to the idea: the less I pay you, the more I have for myself. And: it all adds up, if I keep it.

Picture this: a scrawny fourteen year old boy has just finished delivering his load of Thursday papers on a late afternoon in November; it is as dark, though, as if it were midnight. The familiar Seattle rain is falling at its usual wind-driven slant; when walking South or West, it strikes you in the face and will come under the brim of any hat made. Gradually the boy’s shoulders become dark with wetness and so do the fronts of his jeans-clad legs. Hours ago his low shoes were soaked and sloshing internally.

Do not give this boy much pity. It is his usual condition and is undeserving. Save your tears for what comes later. On the heels of his delivery he reversed course and begins to make his month’s collection. A word in the form a of a digression is necessary here. At the end of each month, The Seattle Times Newspaper issues each of its carriers a collection book. In it are recorded his route number, draw, and list of customers, with addresses. This is all preprinted. If they are daily, daily and Sunday, Sunday only, etc., this is included. Now the boy and every carrier buys his papers from the newspaper at a discount. I forget precisely what this is, but let us say at 60 percent of retail, which is or was rather standard. Thus a daily paper might cost him three cents and he charges the customer a nickel. Remember, the year is 1944. Things were cheap then, but only relatively so. A nickel would buy you a whole lot of different small things, a newspaper being one of them.

The Sunday paper was more of course. A great thick thing full of colorful comics and inserts, plus expanded sections of a host of local topics, it might have sold for thirty cents. Fifty cents? Whatever, the boy bought the fat paper from the company for eighteen cents, or thirty cents, depending. Then he marked it up forty percent, and when it came time to collect for it, he made a pretty good profit on each item, though the downside is that his load weighed a large fraction of a ton and required parental assistance to load and deliver.

So now it is time to collect and make his profit. His little book has a Customer’s Copy and File Copy, the latter yellow. It is the route boy’s record that he has been paid and what he wants to see is a whole book full of yellow pages, which means that everybody has paid. Ha. Double ha.

Carleton Park is a residential section of Magnolia Bluff, and most of the houses—and certainly all of the ones with water views of Puget Sound—are impressive. They are owned, can only be owned, by people of affluence. You might say they were rich, if you had little money yourself. Men did not cut their own lawns but employed little independent laborers such as myself to do it, but we lost out in time, before and after the war, to an industry of second-generation immigrants, generally Japanese or Italian. But this is another matter and has been discussed earlier. What I’m getting at is the men had no need or inclination to cut their own grass. They employed others to do it. Likewise their wives had women who came to their houses on buses and did the cleaning, including in some instances windows. They worked for half days or full days, either departing by self-same buses headed in opposite directions at either noon or five P.M. Most were either black or brown.

The boy approaches house number one in the reversal order of delivery and sees the neatly furled paper lying in the shelter area of the porch where he just flung it. He rings the doorbell and waits. The front of the house is dark. People are no doubt in the nether part of the house where the kitchen is and the formal dining room. It is early dinner time. This is the ideal time to make collections, the newspaper tells the carriers, because people are most apt to be home. What The Times doesn’t tell you is that families hate being interrupted at meal time and can be vicious.

A light pops on, then another. Sometimes the porchlight follows, but often it doesn’t and the door is opened to darkness. "Yes?" asks a voice, generally male, for women are hesitant about opening doors unto darkness.

"Collect for The Times," the boys calls out. Now that is about as succinct a statement of intent as is possible to manufacturer for the occasion.

"How much is it?" the voice calls out. It is a reasonable question and frequently a misleading one, for the boy is tricked into believing he is about to be paid.

He calls out the cost.

The replies are various and original, at least, up to a point. They may run like this:

"Do you have change for a fifty?"

Fat chance.

In fact, you start out with a pocketful of bills and a ton of loose change borrowed from your family or retained from last month’s collection, for just this purpose. You don’t want to, you see, contribute to your own downfall by being without. But the bills and spare change get eaten up fast and soon all you have is large denominations.

If you have change for a fifty—a lot of money then—they often try you next time with change for a hundred. You aren’t Rockerfeller, you want to tell them, but it is counterproductive, wit is, even when it is funny, which this isn’t.

More often they simply call out, "Don’t have it. Come back in a day or two."

This may seem a simple statement of economic conditions, true or not, and nothing to be despised. It is a statement of fact, as well. Unless it is a lie. Now, why would affluent (I avoid the use of the term wealthy because it has connotations that might make me seem to be manipulating my audience in the direction of undeserved sympathy, which is not my intention) people who have the wherewithal in their pockets say they didn’t have? It goes back to my earlier maxim. If I give it to you, then I don’t have it for myself, and that will never do.

A boy forms some unsubstantiated general conclusions. People are cheap, people are mean, people are resentful (of being interrupted during or just before dinner, or are resentful in general?), people who can say Yes enjoy more saying No, etc., into the night. "Go away. Come back some other time." What time would be good, you don’t ask, because you know the true answer is "Never."

There are only a small number of people like this, truthfully, but they stand out and loom large over time because of the damage they can do to a young man’s finances. For if you don’t pay for your paper, I must. And if I must return, time after time, to collect from you (though it is right on my route, admittedly, and only delays my return home for my own tepid dinner), then the profit I make for my time and labor becomes hugely diluted and diffuse. And while I can compute the math into an hourly wage now rapidly descending, I don’t. There is some bad news you don’t want to know, whatever the price, whatever the discomfort it may bring.

And then there are those who skip out on you. Why pay the boy is you are going to move and will never see him again? It is admittedly a small economy, but these add up. Enough small economies effected and it is the same as medium sized moneys coming in. It only stands to reason. Rich persons are not cheapskates, they only seem to be. And if nine out of ten are not, then the one out of that number rises unforgettably in one’s mind and memory.

It is enough to make a boy a Marxist.

I didn’t become a Marxist, however, until two years later, and it was the result of reading Das Kapital. The chapters on surplus value are highly recommended. There you learn that the one who makes the item receives very little of what it costs to purchase. There are many, many hands reaching out along the route to the consumer, and each hand’s fingers take a bit of the price in terms of profit. Their contribution to the produce is minimal. In this sense, as a delivery boy and collector of bills due, I am among the scourges of capitalistic society. I neither made the newspaper or wrote its news stories. But to a few in my posh neighborhood I was the focal point, the only place where they could truly effect economies.

Thus I was instrumental in what is termed historical materialism and served as an undistributed middle term in that terrifying process called dialectical materialism. Though of course I did not know it at the time and only came to realize it a couple of years later.

14

Newspapers aside—and they all should promptly be put there—my next serious labors involved food preparation. I was not in high school proper (there is no proper high school, by the way), only the matriculated eighth grade, which in the absence of junior highs at the time or middle schools became a kind of loose attachment of high schools themselves and the lowest rung on their ladder.

We went through some kind of unmemorable graduation exercises at Magnolia Grade, then were rewarded by a daily long bus ride to and from Queen Anne High School, which occupied a hilltop five miles or so away, but could not be reached (at least not by busline) in a straight line by required because of the steepness of the hill involved, I guess, a pronged or forked approach, veering far to the South, only to return abruptly to the North again, doubling up the distance of the bus route and resulting need to be traveled, in order to escape circumnavigating the hill itself and approaching it, as it were, head on by means of a mechanical device called a counterbalance.

A counterbalance is a heavy load that counters or balances the one of a electric trolley propelled up a slope in excess of six degrees and impossible for its powertrain to accommodate; it has to be assisted in this Herculean task by a system of levers and weights designed to neutralize it tendency to collapse back upon itself and slide back down the short distance it has managed to achieve. The weights do this. They in effect descend the hill slowly, thereby enabling the trolley bus to ascend equally slowly, until be degrees it has triumphed over the grade and now finds itself delightfully at the top of the hill or counterbalance. And that is how—Children—each day we went to the towering school and were returned from it. All by a system of weights and levers. Just think. Miraculous, isn’t it?

It didn’t seem so to me. High school—no matter how approached, had still to be entered—was a nightmare made manifest. I had to have new clothes to accommodate what was in style, see to it that my hair was cut a certain way and no other, and walk and behave in a manner that seemed aloof, though under its veneer could be seen to be trembling with trepidation and terror. The word "cool" had not yet come into use but was on the edge of doing so. Hip and hep were not carefully differentiated, but usage favored the latter, by only a slight amount. And the fact that we transferees were all on the bottom rung of a ladder previously deemed to have but four steps (for we were the first class to matriculate as the eighth grade), we were worse than the absolute bottom. We were beneath that, beneath contempt. As for me, I hardly noticed any difference.

My father was always on the outlook for work for me, namely, a job. He had worked steadily his whole life, beginning at about age four, and so should I. (If he were still alive, I’d ask him now what about the years zero though three—did he just lie around the house, devouring food, listening to his crystal radio, playing with his jacks set?) So the job slinging hamburgers at the Grizzly Inn must have come as a result of my own initiative, though not without prodding. And the grand sum of sixty-five cents an hour pops into mind, though it could not have been so much. It is an unlikely amount. Five or more years later I was working as a copyboy at The Seattle Times (no less) for the magnificent hourly wage of fifty-five cents an hour, and all of us to be qualified were college students with at least three solid years of distinguished work behind us. A major in journalism was necessary and the jobs so coveted that we formed a queue. I got mine honestly, fairly, because my father rode to work in a carpool with the paper’s advertising manager.

To sling hamburgers at the Inn immediately raised the slinger to status nearly equal to but a bit shy of being a substitute on the third team of any school sport. Instantly I went from being a dork with tax tokens dangling from the cinch cords of his oilskin slicker (de rigeur) and cute sayings spelled out in white adhesive tape (there being no other kinds of tape on the market yet, let along any company to be named 3M on the horizon to be formed) all over its back to a person with a recognizable identity signified by a raised eyebrow or two, accompanied by a slight lift of one corner of one’s upper lip.

The Grizzly Inn was owned and operated by a middle-aged curmudgeon who had an eye for blossoming high school girls but knew enough to let it go at that and hired boys for all his counter work. Boys he understood and could boss around in a way that they understood. They cold be hired and fired at whim. Girls were complicated and confusing, sexual and unsexual, preoccupied with boys who were still children, while they themselves were on the cusp of licentiousness. Boys then. Only boys. But one couldn’t help but admire. . . .

Nor could I. I was in a power situation. Boys and girls alike would cue up to buy burgers from one of us three slingers at each lunch period. There were three. We would democratically dispense our wares, theoretically, but in actual practice we served our friends first, and were known to each other and the world according to who those friends were. And if they were somebody, or Somebodies, and we served them first or even early, we were adjudged to be on the same plane of existence as them and partook of the glory, or whatever it was.

Our grades had to be good enough to be excused from one studyhall and it had to be fore or aft of the lunch hour. We normally had a half hour. But if you worked, you could add a studyhall hour to it and cover all three lunch periods. Each tailed off at the end of the half hour and gave you a little free time to chat with your buddies, who were all happy to be seen chatting with somebody who was a slinger, or rather Slinger. And it was then we got to eat our own lunch.

We made our own burgers and they were the envy. Was it here—the Grizzly Inn—that the double meat, double cheese, was born? If not, it was one of those steps in evolution that took place, like geology, all over the earth at about the same time, at the same rough moment in evolutionary time, born over and over, in diners and full-fledge restaurants and inns and luncheonettes, in America (first of all), then in Britain, Europe and in decades to follow, eventually South America, Asia, India, Australia, and whatever slow to evolve, tardy nations that eventually became sophisticated.

George Lamerieux owned the Grizzly Inn and was a bit grizzly himself, over the ears and along the back of his head, where his gray hair was receding fast. He wore little gold-rimmed eyeglasses long before they became fashionable again. In this sense he could be said to be a style leader. He had no more paunch than any ordinary man of forty-five and smoked like a forest fire. He could work with both hands above his foul apron and the ash from his cigarette would follow him but not drop until he intended it to, always to an innocent portion of the floor and not into somebody’s food. Early in the day he would receive delivery of the ground beef, then regrind it finer himself and add to it a host of neutral ingredients, a dominant one of which was oats.

Oats bound the fatty meat together and kept the thin burgers from fragmenting and ending up on the griddle as crisp islands of hamburger bits. This was greatly to be avoided and George did so. He dipped into the vast vat of bound hamburger raw material with an ice cream scoop and produced a ball of clingy pink substance. A moment later this was flattened with a hand roller into a perfectly round potential burger that looked much like a pancake. These were stacked, with a square of waxed paper between each. When it came time to cook them, we took turns being the cook and laying them out, all in a close row, on the griddle, waiting a few moments, and then beginning to turn them in the same order we had laid them down. So thin, they took only a minute or two to turn leaden gray and ready for a flip. And, no, we didn’t toss them high into the air and watch them fall, cooked side down, back to the iron, no matter how pretty the girl was who was watching us. George wouldn’t tolerated it. We knew how many competent guys were on the waiting list. They would do anything short of murder for our jobs.

I found it fun to watch the meat shrink back upon itself. A patty started out impressively large in diameter, though alarmingly thin. As it cooked it became a veritable water drop falling on parched earth. We were warned not to over cook the meat. George measured them all precisely. Cooked quickly, there was not much fat lost, nor size, and the resulting product just matched the size of the bun. It was a perfect marriage.

You could have cheese on yours for a nickel more. Most did. The cheese was processed American and had a low melting point. This George prepared in neat squares the same morning, along with the canisters of condiments—sliced dill pickle, mustard, mayonnaise, lettuce, relish. You could drop a square of cheese on an already turned paddy, turn around, count to ten, and it would be softened slightly but not yet runny and just right to lay down on a bun. We had a clever way of handling these. They came from a local baker, newly baked and already sliced in half for us, on trays in racks, each bun leaning up slightly against its neighbor. We reached for these as the burgers shall we say matured? The bottom of the bun was placed on the newly turned paddy and the top of the bun on top of that. This warmed the buns and gave the bottom one a nice sogginess. Then the top bun we removed and dressed according to prescription, with "Everything" or some lesser combination of condiments. The meat and bottom bun were lifted off the griddle, matched to the preped upper bun, and brought harmoniously together. Voila, une burger.

The competed item was folded into a paper napkin, covering its lower half, which additionally caught its drips and juices, and given to the customer, who was all the while salivating. Money changed hands. There were no potato fries, though George was French enough to have thought of it. We served a limited fare. Perhaps he thought there was not enough profit in it. Men have their reasons. They are not always rational.

Up front, across the street side of the Inn and facing the school, was what might be called the drink concession. There were high-backed booths to accommodate the boys and girls who wanted to sit there and drink malteds, milkshakes, or the house favorite, the phosphate. Otherwise, kids ganged in back at picnic tables ranged across a cement floor, with low-backed booths circling the room, a large one, one in which you could hold a dance, though George never did, in my time, not that I heard of. Everybody in back ate burgers, though most were washed down with drinks brought from the front of the Inn.

You could bring your burger forward and sit eating it in one of the booths, and you did this if you were with a girl, which I never was, or in a party that included girls, which I rarely was, or perhaps wasn’t ever. In back kids voluntarily segregated themselves by sex. That is another way of saying boys sat with boys, girls with girls, and never the twain, etc., or rarely, and then only in front. Or mostly in front. Or in front, if ever.

You could buy a phosphate large or small, and I believe it was girls who were employed to mix and serve them. Thus phosphates were loosely considered girls’ drinks, though I loved them. And I do remember drinking them, a few years later, with girls, up front. There were lemon phosphates, cherry phosphates, pink lady phosphates (which were a blend of the two former ones, with the cherry in much lesser proportion. For the bold there were vanilla phosphates, for if vanilla is so good in shakes and malts, in only follows that it can’t help but be good in the world of phosphates, or can it? Try one and see. Mediocre, I’d say. And for those even more bold, chocolate phosphate, which looked ugly and tasted even worse. Yet I knew kids—girls, usually—who drank them regularly.

There were spigots whose recesses contained flavors mundane and exotic, plus jars with pouring spouts that held even more foreign tastes, a few drops of which added to your clear, sparkling tasteless drink produced a brief new order of being. A phosphate bit at your tongue and its cold left an aching aftertaste deep in your mouth. It was lovely. And after a burger, it cleansed your palate, as the gourmets were in wont of doing. If you were a new smoker, it cut through the accumulation of tars and nicotine, and left you and you hope your breath refreshed, newly treated.

I learned to smoke at an early age, back behind the Grizzly Inn, and did not regret it until many years later. A sophomore girls, seeing me puff on an early Chesterfield, sighed snidely, "How blasé." I had to look up the word, having much difficulty in spelling it correctly, and when I was sure of its meaning, felt a surge of pride at my accomplishment, though I knew for sure she meant the remark with utmost sarcasm.

I decided to treat it as keen insight on her part. Other than this remark, she would not consent to speak to me, this blond beauty, who already could French inhale and probably (I dared to wonder) kiss accordingly.

I was still pretty much a joke to the world, especially its female half.

15

In my senior year of high school, with my first full-blown affair underway, I had a serious need of making money, though I did not want work to take me away from my natural inclination toward idleness and play. Fortunately my love of fishing, and flyfishing in particular, provided the unexpected means to making enough money to keep functioning, especially in regards to paying the expenses of having a regular girl friend. 

in shakes and malts, in only follows that it can’t help but be good in the world of phosphates, or can it? Try one and see. Mediocre, I’d say. And for those even more bold, chocolate phosphate, which looked ugly and tasted even worse. Yet I knew kids—girls, usually—who drank them regularly.

There were spigots whose recesses contained flavors mundane and exotic, plus jars with pouring spouts that held even more foreign tastes, a few drops of which added to your clear, sparkling tasteless drink produced a brief new order of being. A phosphate bit at your tongue and its cold left an aching aftertaste deep in your mouth. It was lovely. And after a burger, it cleansed your palate, as the gourmets were in wont of doing. If you were a new smoker, it cut through the accumulation of tars and nicotine, and left you and you hope your breath refreshed, newly treated.

I learned to smoke at an early age, back behind the Grizzly Inn, and did not regret it until many years later. A sophomore girls, seeing me puff on an early Chesterfield, sighed snidely, "How blasé." I had to look up the word, having much difficulty in spelling it correctly, and when I was sure of its meaning, felt a surge of pride at my accomplishment, though I knew for sure she meant the remark with utmost sarcasm.

I decided to treat it as keen insight on her part. Other than this remark, she would not consent to speak to me, this blond beauty, who already could French inhale and probably (I dared to wonder) kiss accordingly.

I was still pretty much a joke to the world, especially its female half.

15

In my senior year of high school, with my first full-blown affair underway, I had a serious need of making money, though I did not want a job to take me away from my natural inclination toward idleness and play. Fortunately my love of fishing, and flyfishing in particular, provided the unexpected means to making enough money to keep functioning, especially in regards to paying the cost of having a regular girl friend, who needed to be taken places. Girls expect this (though there is nothing I like more than staying, if you know what I mean). So I looked around—studied my horizons, you might say—and saw a possible way. It involved tying flies, but in order to do so an make any money a number of fortunate situations had to occur. My stars had to be in just the right conjunction.

They were. The war shortly over, there was a pent-up demand for all kinds of things. Things were just getting back to normalcy. Good hooks were arriving on the market from England and Norway again. And along the Pacific Coast of America, anglers were finding that salmon would take big shiny flies fished near the surface. Coho salmon were particularly prone to this lure. The flies were flashy and incorporated polar bear hair in their wings. Natural white was good, but it required a topping of brightly dyed colored polar bear. Now, polar bears did not exactly give up their thick lustrous coats so we could tie flies; no, they had to be hunted down and, well, killed. There were no environmental safeguards in place yet, only the great difficulty of getting to where the bears were, shooting them, getting their carcasses back to civilization. And the demand for polar bear rugs was not extreme.

Scraps left over from rugs were ideal for such flies. My father was in the fur business. There was no demand for polar bear coats, but the fur was utilized in hats and muffs. If you were in the fur business, you knew everybody who was at the center of the trade, and polar bear trimmings could be found. Dad went on regular buying trips for his store, Frederick and Nelson, a West Coast subsidiary of Marshall Field, every June. I pleaded with him to bring me back some scraps, however small, however few. He surprised me by bringing back a whole lot. Of course it was all white.

To get the colored stuff I had to find somebody who dyed furs and needed white. This was Roy Patrick, who ran about the only flytying store in the state of Washington and as far South as Eugene, Oregon, where there was another solitary store. So Roy and I got together. I swapped white for the principal colors—red, olive, royal blue, green/gray, yellow. It was a wonderful arrangement. Mine, of course, had cost me nothing. I had nothing to lose.

But I had plenty to make. I found three stores who would buy all the flies I could tie. Through collusion they offered forty-seven and a half cents a piece. This they would double to sell my flies at retail for ninety-five. Today this would be about four or five dollars each. It was a princely sum. I certainly wouldn’t, or couldn’t pay it, if I fished for these fish, but I didn’t. So the matter was moot. All I had to do was tie them. I don’t know how much money I made, for I never kept track of my sales. I’d simply tie up a bunch, trot down to one of my stores, lay my wares on the glass counter top, and collect my money. What a racket. Of course I had contempt for them and no special pride in my product, because the money came in so effortlessly.

Not that it was easy to tie such flies. It was hard work, for the materials didn’t behave well. Polar bear hair is bulky and resists being lashed to a hook; unless you use very heavy thread, it keeps breaking and your wing flies into the air and is lost, or else you salvage it as best you can, whip on some more thread, and try again. And again, if necessary, until you have a fly that is halfway secure.

Mine were never all the way secure. This means that if you tugged on the wing very hard, or fished the fly under difficult conditions, the wing would probably come off. I wouldn’t bet that it wouldn’t. If it did, none of my stores ever reported the bad news to me or asked for a replacement fly for their customer. The customer probably ate the difference.

I was not enough of a businessman at that age, 17, to sit down and figure out how long it took me to tie a single fly. It was no doubt longer than I think it was, today. But if my polar bear hair was free—both to barter for colored and to tie my underwing with—the hook perhaps cost me a penny. Thread and tinsel were fairly small expenses. If I cleared only forty cents a fly, that was doing pretty well. I think it was more than that.

And what did I do with all my money? I blew it. Cary, my girl, was not extravagant in her demands of me. I had occasional use of my father’s Buick, but most often we used her father’s DeSoto, and for both I had to buy gas. That was great. And there were movies to pay for, hamburgers and milk shakes, phonograph records, Modern Library books, for I was fashioning myself as some sort of intellectual, expressly what kind I was a long time in concluding. I remember, that lovely long summer of piece-rate goods, reading Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. A little of each. I mean, these were thick books, serious stuff, deadly dull, and I’m afraid I didn’t do any of them but Freud justice. He was choked full of sexual metaphor. And some of it wasn’t metaphor.

I took my good luck for granted, both girl and work. The following summer, after I had completed a year of college, things had changed mightily. The girl was gone, lost to let us call it attrition. And when I went back to my stores to ask about orders for the polar-bear coho flies, I found a man, George McLeod, who was a professional, had moved in and got all the orders that I had lucked into, the year before. He tied a much more secure product than I did, and its wings would not come off, no matter how much you tortured the fly. He also packaged them neatly, cleverly, more businesslike. Each went into a cellophane envelop, and the envelopes were attractively stacked, one fly atop another, in three tall rows on a preprinted card.