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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,