From Accounts Payable – My Life Past Due
Someone once said that a thief is a capitalist without capital, but I was too square to steal the means of production. My experience as a laborer working with large machines in my youth, along with Sam Giancana's rejection of my application to work for the Outfit in Chicago because I talked too much, convinced me to get out of production into office jobs, where brains and conniving came in handy along with typewriters and adding machines before the personal computer came along.
I ran away from home to Chicago a few days after my 13th birthday. My experience as a dishwasher came in handy there, and I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant, where I lied about my age. I scrapped off the dishes at one end of a conveyer, which pulled the dishes through spraying hot water, and dried them with towels at the other end. The boss was impressed by my Midwestern work ethic, so called, and got me bussing dishes, where the waitresses took good care of me because I got their tables cleared fast on busy evenings.
But I got the flu really bad and was fired lest I got others sick. My pay and clothes were stolen that night as I slept. It was midwinter at the time and snowing. A girlfriend in Oak Park stole some money from her mother's purse and brought it to me along with some of her father's old clothes as all I had was my skivvies and had to bum a dime to call her, standing almost naked by the payphone on the street.
I fortunately recovered from mild pneumonia and got a job paying $1 per hour at Illinois Masonic Hospital, first as an orderly and then manually developing X-rays. The major event there was when I fell asleep in the darkroom. I was dead tired because I had been all night with my first girlfriend, a 17-year-old bisexual stripper for a club run by the Outfit in Calumet City. Needless to say, I was totally in love and would have liked to marry her if I could have gotten a marriage license at 13 and if she had not run off with her girlfriend to New Orleans. I did not hear the technician pounding on the locked darkroom door, so he had maintenance take the hinges off the door and wake me up.
The hospital soon bought a new-fangled X-ray developing machine. It was a rather large machine, relatively automatic, yet the process still required careful attention, which I diligently provided. Chest X-rays were the most common films. My own lungs were susceptible to infections. I had been hospitalized with pneumonia before I ran away from home, and before that was hospitalized for two months with high fevers from some unidentified disease. So I got sick again after getting drunk in a strip club one night and passing out in a snow drift on the curb. I lost my hospital job and was in bad straits without a cash reserve, something that eluded me for many years.
Fortunately, I saw the fellow who had stolen my money and clothes a year earlier. He was at the Greyhound in the Loop. I chased him and roughed him up. A hoodlum was watching and snuck me out of the Loop as the police were arriving. He got me an interview on Rush Street with Sam, who referred me to an employment agency, where I learned to operate adding machines at his recommendation—accounting would eventually become my career. I landed an office job with a magazine publishing company, where I worked alongside a former mercenary soldier who told me stories of war in Africa, how pregnant women were tied to trees and their babies cut out of them, and such horrors.
The publishing company was reorganized and I was out a job with a week's pay in my pocket and rent coming up. I do not remember how I survived. I do not remember being frightened by life on the street. I guess it seemed normal. I picked up odd jobs from time to time. Then I met a innocent girl from Minnesota, in town with others celebrating their high school graduation. I lied my way into her arms and wound up in Minneapolis.
I worked lathes, drill presses, punch presses, and grinders in bitter cold Minneapolis, nearly freezing my toes off on the ill-heated bus to work. I drilled countless holes and turned out thousands upon thousands of left-handed screws besides right-handed ones; and, among other things, I put the wooden handles on tile knives and sharpened barrels and barrels of them on the grinder.
I shan’t forget a poor man I worked with there. He was overcome by fumes from the degreasing tank as he leaned over it to wash a basket of oily parts: he fell into the degreaser tank and drowned. As if that were not enough to ruin the day, I had ignorantly placed my liverwurst sandwich on the housing of a idle machine, where it grew so rancid from the heat after the machine was turned on and until noon that my stomach violently turned just after I gobbled down a big bite to comfort myself after the ambulance had left with the drowned man’s body. Several of us got drunk at the corner pub in our fallen comrade’s honor. I am ashamed to say that we inadvertently sideswiped a few parked cars on the way home, but never mind. I stumbled into my girlfriend’s apartment, collapsed on the floor and vomited up a pink solution of beer and sloe gin on her white rug before I passed out.
Although I did not know what I was doing, my girlfriend married me because I loved her and that is what girls do. Life was tough and bitter cold in The Cities, so we moved to Topeka, where I had family; as if that would do us any good, since I had ran away from that family years before because it was not good for me, and I hardly needed a daily reminder of my youthful indiscretions as a frustrated juvenile delinquent. I was basically a good boy who was wrongly accused of being bad, hence I took the suggestions in one way or the other and got even.
I understand that ‘topeka’ is a Native American term for “a good place to dig potatoes.’ But it was especially difficult for a young paleface to get a job in Topeka; not to mention the impoverished Indians or the poor Mexicans who lived in tarpaper shacks near the railroad tracks. I declined an offer to climb into fuel storage tanks, newly fabricated for filling stations, and to weld the seams together; or rather, I accepted the job but quit before I showed up. Instead, I took a job at a machine shop; its main customer was Goodyear. Two months later, the union steward got me fired on the pretext that I was incompetent. I had been unwittingly stamping out nearly twice the quota of parts on one of the punch presses, which had aroused the ire of the journeymen. Wherefore the shop steward gave me a task far beyond my competence as a barely experienced apprentice: to dismount a large motor from a huge upright lathe used to turn out tire molds, and mount it on a different type of machine. After I was fired, I resolved never to work at a machine shop again, and I swore I would stay away from rednecks who chew tobacco and have an unseemly habit of grabbing the crotches of their coveralls every ten minutes or so.
I found a night job cleaning the potato chip machine at Frito Lay. The chip machine was laid out along the length of the building to convey and process the potatoes dumped into the hopper at one end. The spuds were scrubbed; the stones dug up and shipped with them sank to the bottom; and then the washed potatoes were dropped into a rapidly spinning cuff; thanks to centrifugal force, they were sliced into chips by the razor sharp knives in its sleeve. The chips were conveyed by a series of paddles along a long cooker full of oil, from which they arose along an incline, dripping off much of the oil, under a huge salt shaker at the top of the incline, and then dropped onto a shaking table which rid them of excess salt and oil. Part of my job was to climb up to the salt shaker with 50 lb bags of salt and load it for the morning shift.
But for one other man, the fellow who ran the cheese-puff machine, I had the plant to myself at night. The puffs were made by forcing flour mixed with other ingredients through a hot collar with holes in it. Although he let me operate the machine during his breaks, and told me about the guy at the saloon who found a thumb in his potato chip bag, I did not like him very much, as he was a spitter and was wont to spit into the large cardboard boxes as they filled with puffs.
Cleaning the potato chip machine was not a bad job; I worked well without supervision. After washing the machine I spread lye on the concrete floor and hosed it down. I could literally hear the rot oozing from the crates late at night: somewhat rotten potatoes were cheaper and made good chips, with delicious brown rings in them. My job climaxed every morning when I started up the machine: I turned on the gas jets and leaned my upper body into the huge oven, using a burning broom as a match to fire it up so the oil would be heated for the early shift.
I lost the job when Pepsi took over; the main topic of conversation had been the virtue of buying stock before the buyout, but I had nothing to spare on my lowly pay. My wife was pregnant, and now I was out a job, strapped with car payments. I asked the bank to repossess and sell the car, a chrome-laden white Impala convertible with red interior. I was car crazy in those days, and had purchased it with a settlement my wife had received for a car accident. I suppose we were better off without it, as it was always breaking down: it broke down on its new owner just after he bought it at the auction, and sat alongside the highway for several weeks.
Things were not going very well in Topeka, to say the least, and we were reduced to eating mostly potatoes. Almost flat broke, I filled out an application for welfare. The lady from welfare visited us just as my car was being towed away repossessed. She was so rude and contemptuous that I ordered her out of the house and resolved that I would never accept welfare as long as I lived. I told my wife that I would rather steal food from grocery stores and rob banks than be a welfare recipient. Two hours later the police came to the door, arrested me for nonpayment of five one-dollar parking tickets, and threw me in the cooler with a bunch of drunks.
Fortunately for the future of my young family my father paid the tickets and the fine; I did not have the thirty dollars, and I would have had to serve thirty days in jail to work it off. As luck comes in streaks, I found a job the very next day, fabricating aluminum window frames for a company whose main customer, Holiday Inn, was expanding. Our pay included one silver dollar every week. It was good to have another job: I bought another car, a tornado hit the capitol building a block from our apartment, and President Kennedy was assassinated.
We see hollow aluminum framing everywhere we go, usually in store fronts. Truckloads of aluminum extrusions came in from Georgia. A journeyman cut them into the right lengths with a circular saw – one man cut his hand off on purpose. I drilled holes and riveted brackets onto the ends of the hollow aluminum lengths so they could be assembled in the field and glass installed in the frames. One day I forgot that my hand was inside the end of a length of aluminum extrusion as I was drilling a hole in it, so I drilled a hole clean through my hand. That hurt badly but did not do much damage as the drill slipped off the bone and glided through the muscles. On the way to the hospital I resolved that someday soon I would get away from laboring on greasy and dangerous machines, and return to the typewriters and adding machines I had had some small experience with earlier on.
My resolution came true, as that Topeka machine shop was the last one I would see the inside of. My marriage did not last, much to my everlasting disappointment, ending just when I believed I could actualy fulfill the vow. We lived in Chicago for awhile, where I had a railroad job adding up loss and damaged claims, manually from top to bottom the bottom to top to check the total. She had an office job too. After the divorce, the good woman went back in Minnesota and I went on to New York and became a full-fledged numbers man and frustrated dancer, actor, and singer. I did well in the office although my aptitude for crunching numbers is lowest. My employers liked my street smarts. A man has to survive one way or another. I was too square to steal some capital. Amor Fati.
I had it so much easier, but loved all kinds of work at low pay. Smashed my finger between two bowling balls setting pins in high school. Had a fellow coworker at a mobile home factory with a death wish driving his jalopy to roll it over every week for the case of beer at stock-car races. At the state fair saw him flying through the windowless windshield about 40 feet in the air in front of the grandstand as everyone, including me, watched in horror, landing on a hood of a car in the infield and sliding down like a sack of potatoes. Only to be seen on the midway the next night with a beer in hand, still walking and still drunk.
Heard later that during a construction job, he sat down during lunch propped up against the rear duals on a dump truck, probably fell asleep, and the dump truck backed over him, killing him dead. My twin brother, who ripped the finger badly on an exposed nail as they lifted a wall to the side of a mobile home floor in that same factory, but was back to work the next day.
During my three summers there, I only got a sliver of steel from driving screws in my eye, being irritated to hell with my newly bought ("moneybags" my father called me) contact lenses and had to have it surgically removed (don't blink!) with a scalpel as I tried to keep steady. I also got large forearms like Popeye from pounding thousands of nails and a red rash on my arms from carrying rolls of pink fiberglass insulation that no one else would carry and then staple it to the top of the walls with great flourish. So glad the day that it wasn't cancer-causing asbestos. Although it was in the floor tile I chipped out badly to replace.
After college, Roger worked many jobs, but his first at a pot and pan factory where he was responsible for machine safety, had a woman who refused to wear pullbacks on an aluminum stamping machine, have both of her hands cut off.
Ron