Down the Up Escalator (7 page)

“I don’t even know where I’m calling. Evansville, is that near Chicago?”

“No, Evansville, Indiana. I’m literally right across the river from Kentucky.”

“Oops, sorry.”

“That’s all right. I was born in the Chicago area. We moved here when I was three.”

When I asked how his family got to Indiana, Michael launched into his father’s life story. “My dad never went to college.
His
father left, and he had four brothers and sisters to help take care of. He worked two jobs and finished high school at night.”

Mr. Kenny senior had taken a job with a national-brand food company “for the security.” Michael represented his dad’s thinking about security with emotions it was hard to interpret over the phone. The company had moved his father to Evansville, Michael said, and then downsized, leaving him stranded. So his dad got a job as a supervisor at the Indiana distribution center of a national retailer where he works to this day.

“Dad, he’s been busting his hump working for these corporations for the last thirty-five years,” Michael said. “He’s actually the second-longest employee at this center, and yet they just put him on a night shift to try to force him out of the job. They even threatened to take his pension away from him at one point if he didn’t quit. Someone actually said it to him: ‘We’ll fire you and take it away from you.’ ”

Michael went on with great feeling about the pressure his father worked under. “You know the way a corporation can scrutinize over you. When you supervise four hundred people, they can always find something that one of those people wasn’t doing right that you should have caught. But he still didn’t quit, and they still didn’t fire him.

“My dad, he’s resilient, he’s right-on, but he hates what he does. It’s paid his way—well, the job and credit cards. But it hasn’t got him satisfaction. He finds that in church these days. I’m not going to live that way.”

“Do you think your father would talk to me if I came to Evansville?” I surprised myself by saying.

Michael said he’d ask. A couple of weeks later he reported that his religious, Republican, and “right-on” dad was willing. (He really was a terrific salesman.) So we drove the new little car to Evansville, Indiana.

Michael and His Friends

At Michael’s suggestion we checked into the Casino Aztar Hotel. The casino itself is a numbingly lit and Muzak-filled showboat, moored on the Ohio River. But the adjoining hotel offered double rooms for seniors at $39 a night. The senior discount must have been a real selling point because there were quite a few gamblers with walkers and portable oxygen tanks at the slot machines.

But the Aztar had just been bought by Tropicana Entertainment. A receptionist congratulated us on getting in under the wire. The senior rate was already scheduled to go up considerably, she told us.

“That’s okay by me,” I assured her, especially if it meant that her pay wouldn’t go down too much. She said amen to that and explained that after the last cuts she’d moved her family across the river to Kentucky. But she wasn’t going to find any place cheaper to live than that, she said.

His fiancée, Caitlin, was still working at the print shop, but Michael had quit the XM call center to spend time fixing up the house they’d just bought. It cost $95,000, and Caitlin had put all of the $20,000 that her grandmother had left her into a down payment so that they could get a low, fixed-rate, twenty-year loan. “Caitlin is very good with money,” Michael said. She was determined never to refinance their house. Indeed the couple feared debt so strongly that “we don’t possess a single credit card.”

————

We were to meet at the new house as soon as Michael got back from driving a friend to a job interview. Though it was only an eight-minute ride from downtown, it was set in a cluster of old, rural-feeling houses circling a pond. Michael was relaxing on the porch when we arrived.

Michael Kenny turns out to be a blue-eyed, brown-haired midwesterner. The three-quarters of him that aren’t American Indian are Irish and German. As for the dreadlocks, perhaps because he’d warned us or because they were so neatly tied back, the young man who stepped off the porch seemed not only presentable but winsome as he showed us the work he’d already done on the lawn.

“By the way, I found someone who’ll hire me with my hair.”

“Who?” I asked.

“Me. I’m hiring myself.” Michael had designed and was planning to manufacture T-shirts for Deadheads to sell at Grateful Dead concerts. He’d already applied to incorporate the new T-shirt business.

Michael had been a hard-core Deadhead in his younger days, following the band from city to city on their tours. It was among fellow Deadheads that he noticed the fellowship among dreadlock wearers and started growing his. He showed me how the hair was allowed to tangle for months before being separated into the strong “roots” that remain forever untouched. Michael’s roots hadn’t been re-rolled for over nine years. “My energy is carried in my hair. Everything I’ve done in my last decade is with me. Here, pull,” he said, showing me how strong his scalp had become.

One of the things that had impressed Michael about my husband
was that Frank had actually photographed Jerry Garcia. “I never saw Jerry myself,” Michael said with regret, “but Caitlin did.”

“You know who else did?” I asked and explained that when I lived in San Francisco in the 1960s, friends had repeatedly tried to drag me over to a house in the Haight where this cool band rehearsed in public and anyone could go in and listen. When I finally went, I ran out screaming, “This is too noisy! I can’t stand it!”

“That must have been before their acoustic period,” Michael said tactfully. Rather than dismiss me as the most uncool person on the planet, he brought his guitar out on the porch and played a couple of Jerry Garcia’s children’s songs. He has a very pleasant voice, and he chose some nice safe songs for me. I liked them.

Michael took me inside to see a photograph of the Grateful Dead in front of their house at 710 Ashbury Street. “Yes,” I remembered, “that looks like the place.”

The guitar playing, the T-shirt art, the laid-back young man on the porch all brought back San Francisco in the 1960s. But Michael Kenny wasn’t just a retro hippie. He was also an up-to-date hippie. The T-shirts he designed with the Dead’s lightning bolt logo were strictly 1960s, of course. But the artwork that Michael was setting out, most by friends, included magnified photographs of microscopic glass cuttings and various up-to-date electronic crafts. It was a lot more skillful than the tie-dyes I remember from the 1960s.

The housewares Michael was unpacking were also contemporary hippie. His things were gathered and artistically embellished from today’s discards, not from the already vintage or collectible. Bohemians of all eras have always preferred the unpolished and the unmatched. It allows them to scrounge aesthetically satisfying furnishings while limiting financial ties to “the system.”

But even though one abjures wall-to-wall carpeting and suites of furniture, some hard currency is always needed. In the 1960s, even on a rural commune, there was always someone who put on high heels and stockings—it was usually a woman, as I remember—and went out to earn cash. In those days one could easily drop in and out of such employments, so we took turns. But Caitlin held one of the rare nine-to-five jobs in her circle. So while she worked a permanent, full-time job, the couple’s less steadily employed friends made the new house their gathering place.

Shortly after I arrived, Bean, a tall, lanky youth, dropped a friend, Pete, off and exchanged a few words with Michael about the set Michael’s group would play that evening at a local pub. He spoke through the kitchen screen door.

“You gotta go to work?” Michael asked.

“Yeah,” Bean said with a sigh, and split.

“Boy, he looks sad,” I said. “What kind of job?”

“He’ll be tossing pizzas for the rest of the night,” Michael answered. Then he said to Pete, “He picked up a double [shift] yesterday. He must really need the money.”

Pete, an old high school friend of Michael’s, had been back in town for two weeks. He was heavyset and also in his twenties, but he already had a former wife who had remarried and moved to Florida with her new husband and Pete’s daughter. With not much going on in Evansville, Pete relocated to be near his child. But after nine months he hadn’t found work in Florida, so he moved back. In his own words, “I’m kind of in between things.”

Michael asked his friend about his job-search methods, ignored Pete’s evasive reply, and delivered these pointers.

“The Internet is pretty much how you have to find a job these days. You can’t go out and pound the pavement like we did ten
years ago. Then, if you put in five, six applications a day and had decent references and were willing to work in restaurants with high turnover, you could find a job in three, four days. Now you can’t put in applications in person anywhere, unless it’s McDonald’s.”

Michael’s description of the job search when he first got out of high school reminded me that even ten years before the Great Recession it had already been harder to pick up casual jobs than when I was young.

Michael described the futile feeling you got from Internet job hunting.

“For one thing, they never list the name of the company. A restaurant, they’ll just say, kitchen job available; line cook; the pay per hour, the hours, and the skill set that they want—that’s all. You send them your résumé; if they don’t need you, you’ll never hear back from them.

“Look, you can try the Internet thing,” he said to Pete. “Or you can put in an application with one of the staffing agencies.” (The friend Michael drove to a staffing agency that morning was a single mother who had been laid off from the plastics factory, one of the diminishing number of large manufacturers left in town. She was signing up at an agency for immediate shifts of warehouse work. “It’s the same loading job I sent that father in the shelter to,” Michael reminded me. “It’s hard on your body: the quotas are always going up; but she needs the cash right away.”)

“But the best place in town for anybody that needs money,” Michael now instructed Pete, “while you’re looking for the job, is go down to XM Radio, take the two-day training course, learn the computer system, and sit there in a comfy seat and talk on the phone all day.

“He likes talking,” Michael said to me. I’d seen no sign of that.

“He likes computers.” That might be true. “But he doesn’t think he’d be good at it. But if you only do it for a couple, three weeks, that’s four, five hundred dollars, and that gives you a little bit of money to hold on till you find other jobs.

“Plus, it gets you back into working again, gives you a schedule, makes you feel good. That’s the thing about a daily job that I really miss. Working on my own ideas for years and sometimes procrastinating—definitely procrastinating—it’s caused me to suffer when I could have been doing something that …” Michael couldn’t quite finish his thought. “They’re always hiring at XM,” he concluded.

Pete said nothing.

I asked Michael if many of his friends were “in between things,” like Pete and Bean. He told me proudly about his close friend, Bob. Through his mother, Bob got an apprenticeship with a sculptor who had a commission to build a metal fence—“an artistic fence”—for the city. When the apprenticeship ended, Bob returned to the usual dead-end jobs punctuated by long stints of unemployment. Then, because of the metal-fabricating skills he’d acquired, and through a lucky contact with the Masons, Bob got a job earning $18 an hour for a company that makes natural gas combustion chambers. “It required him to understand schematics, which he picked up like that. Bob is brilliant,” Michael said.

“He’s had that job for
two
years. And to see him over that time go from working behind a hotel desk, running the place all night, and only making $8.50 an hour to working his way into a machine shop where they do very high-tech and precise work.

“He owns his own car that’s paid off. He lives in his own apartment that he doesn’t have to worry about paying for every month
because his job covers his bills. He’s got
in
surance, and everything is completely turned around for him. It’s a rare story. I’m very happy for him. Very proud.”

To hear Michael talk, you’d think his friends were drug addicts or ex-cons. What his brilliant friend Bob has is a steady job at a living wage. A full-time job at $18.50 an hour is $36,000.00 a year—enough to support a single guy or even a family if the wife brings something in. Yet for Michael it was the epitome of success. Pete thought so too.

Maybe I have to reconsider the word “hippie” for Michael and his friends. In the 1960s my hippie friends made a conscious lifestyle choice. They dropped out of financially and socially rewarding careers to do something more “meaningful.” That included meaningfully chilling out.

Michael and his friends seem to have arrived at the hippie ethic from another direction. They don’t have the option of well-paying, steady jobs. But they do have the option of not feeling bad about that.

Over the course of a long afternoon Michael and I, both great digressers, discussed many things and people. But two men came up repeatedly.

Ever since our phone conversation, I’d been thinking about the widower who had been living in the shelter with his children.

“I don’t remember his name,” Michael said, “but I remember he couldn’t be here till seven—which was a half an hour late—because he had to get his kids to the bus stop. He couldn’t leave
them at the shelter unattended, you know. So I worked it out for him to where he could get his girls to the bus stop in the morning and be off in time to pick them up there as well.

“I felt very good about that. That was my satisfaction. But now I think, ‘How was he going to pay rent and food and get the heat and electric turned on on $7.50 an hour?’

“Something that I feel sick about—and it’s not to look down on anybody who runs a staffing agency, it’s just the business—but a staffing agency gets paid probably $12.00 to $14.00 an hour, and they only hand over $7.50 an hour. That’s almost half the amount we take from these people that go work these jobs that hardly any of us would want to do. But the companies would rather pay us $5.00 an hour, per person, just so they don’t have to deal with them.” Michael sometimes sent out an entire temp crew with its own foreman. No one from the client company had to speak directly to the day laborer.