I was never sure what this large, affable if somewhat distant man was seeking to accomplish through this convoluted exercise. The people who ran the factory did not care how tightly compacted the trash was, because a fixed number of gondolas were hauled in and out each week, and whether they were filled or not made no difference to anyone, least of all the Cosa Nostra. It was not as if this loading-dock Zorba was going to advance his career by getting us to climb into the gondola and jump up and down on the trash, since no one in management could possibly have any idea what was going on out there at three o’clock in the morning. The managers all worked the day shift; the closest thing to a person in a position of real authority on the night shift was the foreman, a tubby old man with the mournful eyes of an unpopular beagle, who rarely left his office and never spoke. In the end I decided that this Gautama of Gondolas, this Ramses of Refuse, had resigned himself to the fact that the closest he was ever going to get to legal redress for the myriad injustices that had been visited upon him by a racist society was the sight of two skinny white boys jumping up and down on a mountain of rotting bubble gum while trapped inside a trash compactor with a bunch of mean rats. Monday through Friday, thirteen weeks straight.
One night, one of the other students decided that it would be great fun to activate the trash compactor while I was still inside the gondola. There I was, bouncing up and down, trying hard not to look ridiculous, when suddenly I heard that horrible, overly familiar churning sound and turned to see the huge wall of metal surging toward me. It was the most terrifying moment of my life. The boy, whom I had not cared for previously and cared for even less now, immediately realized that the prank was unlikely to be received in the spirit in which it was intended. Judiciously, he turned off the device. Alas, the time for judiciousness had passed. I vaulted out of the gondola, screaming bloody murder, chased him, snared him, dragged him to the ground, straddled him, and began pounding him in the face. I hit him harder than I had ever hit anyone; I hit him until he cried. I did not lead with my left, as Len Mohr always advised; I simply buried my fists in his pudgy little face. After that evening, I did not punch anyone for thirty years; a combination of exhilaration at being in a position to beat someone senseless while occupying the unassailable moral high ground, coupled with horror at the capacity for violence that dwelled just below the surface of my personality, discouraged me from taking another swing at a human being until I finally stumbled on a second person who deserved it. What the boy had done was unforgivable—to this day I have nightmares about that trash compactor—but what I had done was cruel. He never came back to work. I never went back into the gondola.
Most of the cleanup jobs at the bubble-gum factory involved mopping, which I disliked intensely. But one night a week there was a way to get out of this onerous assignment. High above the factory floor sat a large metal funnel through which sugar seeped down to the machines below. The state health code mandated that the funnel be cleaned every week. None of the older men wanted to climb up into the rafters, because they were out of shape and afraid of heights. I wasn’t. Once a week, I would haul myself up and pretend to be scrubbing down the cylinder’s lining while I was actually reading an easily concealed paperback copy of
The Sun Also Rises
or
The Great Gatsby
. Since our supervisor was too fat to shinny up and see how the work was progressing, I could lounge up there for hours devouring the great classics of Western literature, occasionally banging on a wall to make it sound like I was actually working. I read
The Scarlet Letter, The Magnificent Ambersons,
and Guy de Maupassant’s
Boule de Suif
while pretending to be cleaning that funnel. Maupassant had once written a short story in which a woman, asked to display her jewels, introduced her two children. My parents had not read it.
Experiences such as these are charming in retrospect, superb material for someone who plans to pursue a writing career. But I did not think of them as material while they were happening; at that point, they were the story of my life. Anecdotes about ripping good times in the bubble-gum factory are amusing only if the narrator is no longer stranded in the bubble-gum factory. The full-time employees were. To me, they were like recurring characters in
Great Expectations;
every summer when I came back to work, I couldn’t wait to find out what had befallen them since the last rousing installment of
Adventures in the Confectionary Trade
. But there wasn’t much in it for them; they had no expectations, great or small. They knew that one day we college boys would graduate and get real jobs and they would never see us again. It was nice to think that these decent, generous men had something of value to teach us about life. But it wasn’t so valuable that any of us would ever be coming back for additional instruction.
Most of the men were amused by the college boys; if they resented us, it was not apparent to the naked eye. Louie was the lone exception. Louie was a short, squat Jewish man who always sat by himself in the cafeteria, eating a Delicious apple or a Bosc pear which he peeled in almost ceremonial fashion with a small, ugly-looking penknife. His face wore an expression of permanent apoplexy. He was probably in his late fifties, but he acted as if he had somehow managed to get on the wrong side of Nebuchadnezzar during the Babylonian captivity and had been suffering nonstop misery ever since. There was no way to get on his good side, because he didn’t have one. Anything you said to him was interpreted as an insult; any comment, no matter how harmless, triggered a Krakatoan eruption. The college crew quickly learned that it was best to avoid him. But Melvin loved to give Louie a hard time, teasing him about his wife and his religion and what he did with the bedazzling sums of cash he was hauling down in the bubble-gum factory.
As soon as Melvin hit a nerve, Louie would eject himself from his seat and hurtle toward him, threatening to slit his throat with his puny penknife. At this point we would all jump up and beg him to quiet down, to let cooler heads prevail. Meanwhile, Melvin would laugh convulsively, having once again gotten his victim’s easily gettable goat. The explosions were not playacting on Louie’s part; even though Melvin could have broken him in half, knife or no knife, Louie was forever primed for action.
This intramural melodrama went on night after night after night. To be honest, it made lunchtime worth looking forward to, because no matter how innocuous Melvin’s comments were, Louie always went after him with his ridiculous little knife—every single night. Melvin only had to say, “Hey, Louie, I was wondering . . . ,” and Louie was off to the races. Louie truly hated Melvin, but because the rest of us laughed merrily at this nightly charade, he hated us, too. We justified our lack of compassion by telling ourselves that Louie’s contempt toward black people, while clearly exacerbated by his relationship with Melvin, had certainly not begun there. The feud never ended; neither of them ever gave an inch.
Though I liked Melvin, I sympathized with his victim, wondering why his tormentor found it impossible to lighten up every so often, perhaps even give Louie the occasional night off. On the other hand, there was no earthly reason Louie had to take the bait every time, no reason why he had to go from zero to sixty in three seconds flat as soon as Melvin started needling him. I never in my life met a man locked in a more inflexible state of rage than Louie. And I never met a man with more ability to get under a man’s skin than Melvin. I worked at a lot of jobs where one employee might sometimes give another a hard time, but it was usually done in a good-natured way. There was nothing good-natured about this.
One morning when I was late wrapping up my shift, I saw Louie gamboling out of the factory all dolled up in a business suit, white dress shirt, subdued tie, and black shoes, clutching a battered attaché case. I asked him where he was going, and he told me to mind my own goddamn business, nosy cocksucking parker that I was. That night, I asked one of the older men if Louie had finally had it up to here with Melvin’s abuse and was looking for a new job. No, he explained; Louie had once worked as a salesman on Jeweler’s Row downtown but had lost his livelihood a few years earlier. This may have been because even by the standards of ill-tempered jewelry salesmen, he was a bit too much of a pill. Ashamed to let his neighbors know how he now earned his daily bread, Louie went to work at 10:30 every evening clad in full white-collar regalia. He never returned home the next morning without first showering and shaving, removing any lingering vestiges of the fine white powder that permeated the factory, powder so pervasive it was impossible to keep off our clothes. How he thought this fooled his neighbors was a mystery; who wore a suit to the graveyard shift? Now I really wished Melvin would give it a rest.
To Louie, working in a bubble-gum factory, even as a janitor, was a step down. My father didn’t see it that way, because a factory employee could always fight his way up the ladder of success, while a rent-a-cop like him was trapped for life in a dead-end job. One summer, because of staffing shortages, I worked the day shift at the factory. I did not enjoy the nine-to-five grind, because the shop floor was crawling with supervisors, which meant I had to work harder and there was no possibility of disappearing into a gigantic stainless-steel funnel and reading
The Idiot
all night. Looking on the bright side, working the day shift meant that I could spend the evenings drinking with my friends. Looking on the dark side, if I came to work hungover, it was that much more likely that I would get my hand jammed inside one of the machines and perhaps lose a finger. So there were trade-offs.
One afternoon during the summer between my junior and senior years, a boy who had graduated from Cardinal Dougherty the same year as I and had become an assistant manager in the bubble-gum factory, tapped me on the shoulder and asked if he could have a word. I was wearing a ridiculous white pajama-type uniform with a tatty mesh hairnet; I looked like the Michelin man after a stint on Devil’s Island. He was dressed in white slacks, a white shirt, and a blue tie, the ensemble crowned by a snappy piece of headgear that was a cross between a pilot’s cap and a kepi, as if the French Foreign Legion had inexplicably launched an airborne bubble-gum delivery unit. Usually when the managers took one of us college boys aside, it was to ask us to do them a favor and go into the bathroom and tell the regular workers to finish their joints and return to their workstations. Union rules prohibited managers from going inside the rank-and-file’s bathrooms; they had lavatories of their own. I hated being given this task, because I lacked the moral authority to tell men ten to twenty years my senior to stop doing drugs, and because I feared that one day one of them might put my head through the wall to reinforce this point.
But rousting addled members of the goldbricking class was not what the manager wanted to see me about.
“We’ve noticed the way you handle yourself around the other employees,” he explained, “and we think you’ve got real management potential. We were wondering if you might be interested in entering our management-trainee program.”
I was always good at keeping a straight face, so I didn’t snigger as the dour, intense, earnest young man delineated the package I was being offered. Though he had no way of knowing it, I was not staying up till four in the morning listening to Penderecki’s
Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
just so I could land a job as a night manager in a bubble-gum factory. I politely told him that I would consider his proposal but pointed out that if I entered the management-trainee program, I would have to put off my plans to finish college and would then lose my draft deferment and would almost certainly get sent to Vietnam, where I might die. The young man himself must have wangled some kind of medical exemption from the draft, as bubble-gum manufacture was not an industry vital to the nation’s defense. I was not going to college to get out of being drafted; I was going to college to get out of the working class. But I had no desire to go to Vietnam, nor did anyone else I knew. It was 1971, it was a war we all hated, and it was already lost.
My fellow alum went on to tell me that Fleer’s would be willing to defray a good portion of the costs of my college studies, as it had his, provided the courses related in some way to the production, purveyance, or packaging of bubble gum. I thought this was quite hilarious and told everyone I knew about the offer. I omitted no detail—his grave demeanor, his obvious sincerity, the part about having “real” management potential, as opposed to the ersatz kind of management potential that was so common those days. My friends were amused. My sisters guffawed. My coworkers chuckled. My father was livid.
Not everyone living in the United States today can understand the symbolism of the terms “blue collar” and “white collar,” but in that era a man who wore a white collar was going places and a man who wore a blue collar or a green collar or a brown collar or a gray collar wasn’t. My father understood what it meant to be in management, even at some fifth-rate bubble-gum factory. Because he had clawed his way up to the periphery of the white-collar world when he worked as an expeditor at the appliance company, but had then been purged and cast back down into the proletarian darkness, he knew precisely what the difference between blue- and white-collar jobs was. To thumb my nose at an opportunity for a good salary and a pension and a future and a chance to wear a tie on the job was the height of arrogance and stupidity. This was not so much because he would have wanted the job himself—he hated wearing ties and taking orders from little shavers in kepis. It was because I acted like the whole thing was a joke.
“If that’s all they taught you at college, you’ll never amount to a pimple on an elephant’s rear end!” he would exclaim, trotting out his most durable execration. He’d been using the same lexicon of denigration since I was five; there was no reason to break in any new material now.