Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (109 page)

I think about guys that were in college with me in the early fifties. They sell real estate, insurance, they’re engineers, they’re bankers, they’re in business. They probably make a lot more money than I do. It’s like they’re twenty years older than me. They seem a lot closer to my father than they do to me. They’re in a groove, they’re beyond change. They’re caught into something which is so overpowering—it’s as though their life was over. It’s all settled. I think my job is keeping me young, keeping me alive.

 

 

Laing
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says in a sick society almost anything that is done is harmful. I have that feeling about my classes. You walk into a classroom and you’ve got an enormous amount of power. I’m six seven and here were these fourth graders. You can imagine how much power I had there. They all listened when I spoke. I was the big father figure. They all loved me and I took care of them and it was a great thing for my ego. But I felt it wasn’t really using enough of me dealing with fourth graders. There was something missing for me.

I ended up teaching adults. Again, that’s very satisfying for the ego. You get into a classroom and you have all the power of the institution. You tell people what to do and they do it, what to read and they read it. You tell people what to think, how to interpret things . . . You can make them feel guilty because they haven’t read certain things, because they’re not familiar with them. Teachers are playing that kind of game all the time. And I was right in there, with both feet.

I was scared of my students when I began. I did everything I could to keep from being caught in an error, in a lapse of knowledge. I used all the authority I had to keep them at a distance, to keep them in their place. If any of the students didn’t hate my guts, it wasn’t because I gave them no reason. There was no communication going on in that classroom at all.

The traditional education sees the school as a place where the student gets poured into him the accumulated knowledge of the past. I’ve gone very much from one end of the pole to the other in the last seven years. I’m very interested in listening to my students. But I still feel hypocritical about my work. I suspect people in the business world have to stay away from thoughts like that. Yet there are things I feel pretty good about. I know there are students I’ve helped. I’m not sure I ever helped anyone when I was selling business machines or insurance.

I’ve become suspicious of the teacher who automatically thinks he’s superior to somebody who’s out there working as a salesman. I don’t think there is anything automatic about it. I am working for an institution that turns out students so they will be salesmen.

When I began teaching at college, I pretended to be this authoritarian figure who knew everything. Gradually, over the years, it’s become possible for me to walk in the class and to admit to my own confusion. As I present the person I really am to my students, they present the people they really are to me.

When I was a salesman, there was never a day in which I felt I could be absolutely honest. It was essential that the role be played. I was on somebody else’s trip. I would fit into that slot and behave in a certain way. In order to do that, it meant wearing a mask every minute on the job.

One summer I took a job out in Missouri, selling insurance. After I learned the pitch and got out in the territory I realized it was a crooked operation, a con game. Oh God, they were a terrible outfit. (Laughs.) I needed the money and I was a salesman. I found out I couldn’t do it. I’d be driving down the country road and I’d come to the farm where I was supposed to make my pitch. It was difficult just to turn the car into the driveway. I’d drive around the place three or four times before I could pump myself up enough to go in and talk to the guy. I sold one policy in seven weeks and then quit.

I feel that my unwillingness to settle into a groove—my fear of being caught in a rut—is related to my father and his job and his success. While my contemporaries have been out pursuing exactly what it is my father has, I got a good look at it early enough. So I knew it wasn’t the way I’d spend my life.

The corporation really wants that person’s whole life. They like to have a guy who will join a country club for the corporation, marry an appropriate wife for the corporation, do community work for the corporation. These are the peple that really make it. That’s my father’s life.

It’s hard to think of a friend that my father has. I don’t know of one. There are people he works with. These are people in the family. That’s it. Because of his particular job he’s less in contact with people than a lot of businessmen. He’s an accountant, a bookkeeper.

I can’t talk to him about my social life. I’m sure he’d disapprove of a lot of people I’m close to, a lot of things I do. I really feel my life is wide open. I’ve got problems, there are things that get me down, but on the whole, I feel younger than I did ten years ago. I have a lot of friends, students, who have affected my life.

When I think of my father, the strongest memories are the very, very early ones. He hadn’t been completely sucked into that business. He still had a life separate from the job. I must have been less than four. There was a parking lot across the street. I can remember sitting with my father at the window and he would name all the different kinds of cars for me. I remember his taking me out on a Sunday morning in the park. I’d be riding the tricycle and he’d be walking . . . I can’t remember a time we spent together after that.

By the time I was ten I was aware of the distance between us. I was aware he didn’t understand me. I was aware he didn’t know what I was thinking, what I was feeling. That gap continues . . . (Pause.) When I got old enough to go out on my own there was nothing to hold me back. His job is the key to his life and, I think, the key to mine.

 

I started workin’ when I was eleven years old. With a peddler on Saturdays, at five o’clock in the morning until it was done. For twenty-five cents. The peddler used to yell out the wares and the woman would holler out the window, “Bring me up the potatoes.” I’d run upstairs and give it to the woman. Fifty years later I’m runnin’ a freight elevator. I been runnin’ it for the past thirteen years. A man does a certain job and it becomes so repetitious there’s no imagination left . . .

There’s all kinds of problems in retiring. The inflation makes it difficult for a man to retire because the money he gets is wiped out and the number of years he has to be in a union in order to acquire a pension is such that he never reaches it. Most of my friends died on the verge of getting pensions. I have pictures of when I was a truckdriver. There’s eight guys in the picture. Me and one other fellow are left. All the rest are dead. So retirement for the average man is pretty rough. He feels he’s finished and even then he can’t be finished because he hasn’t got the means to live on, or has to depend on his family. And he doesn’t want that.

 

 

There’s not the same fraternalism today. There was a pride. A fireman on a ship, he took a certain pride. Then, he was a truckdriver amongst truckdrivers.
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He was proud of being a truckdriver, he wasn’t ashamed. Today it’s impersonal.

Oh, there was a certain amount of adventure to it. In 1933 I drove a trailer from New York to Pittsburgh. They didn’t have the roads they have today and the lights. You went over the Alleghany Mountains, you didn’t go through short cuts. You arrived at places where drivers always met. These roadhouses had logs and the driver would jot down who he was and where he came from. They would meet in Pittsburgh at four, five in the morning in a bar, and they had a party. Everybody got charged up and went to bed and then went back to work again. Everybody seemed to know each other.

 

He re-creates the conditions at sea before the birth of the National Maritime Union: eight men in a room, no doctor aboard, tensions, fights . . . As for the longshoreman’s lot, it was purgatory ashore: the shouldering of two-hundred-pound bags from one end of the dock to the other, hour after hour . . . “The only break was if you went to take a crap or five minutes to steal off a smoke.” At six dollars a day, “It was during the Depression and you were glad to get it. When the ship was loaded, you wasn’t workin’ no more—till you caught the next ship. You drove a taxi all day and came home with a quarter. I don’t leave you untouched. That’s a physical grind. If you don’t think sittin’ in a chair and bitin’ your nails to the elbows wasn’t physical . . .”
(
Laughs.
)

 

Operatin’ a freight elevator doesn’t take too much imagination. Plenty opportunity to think. You think maybe I shoulda did this or I shoulda did that. But ah, what the hell, you don’t worry too much. After all, I recognize my limitations. Ninety percent of the freight elevators is automatic today. That’s the thing that’s going down with the gandy dancer. He’s gone too.

You have all kinds of problems, especially with the disgruntled. If the elevator isn’t there fast enough . . . there’s speed-up in everything. A truckdriver comes, he’s got a load, he wants to get rid of it, right? He’s in a hurry. You have to have a certain amount of patience to understand his problem. It’s not easy to be an elevator operator, because you get all kinds of abuse unless you understand why the other guy’s upset. He understands that you know it, then you become friends.

The boss gives the guy a bad time. He says, “Where the hell are ya hangin’ out?” Jesus Christ, the guy’s sittin’ there, he’s givin’ me a call, “Why the hell don’t you hurry up?” He says to his boss, “I had to wait for the elevator.” Then the elevator man becomes the guy who you can blame all your problems on. That’s the way it is.

Each boss on each floor—say I have twelve floors—seems to feel he’s the guy that pays the elevator’s wages. If there’s no heat in the buildin’, he gets the elevator man, “Where the hell’s the heat?” Or the water or the lights go out or the hallway gets dirty. He says, “Where the hell is the elevator? The hallway’s got no lights, my workers are gonna fall down.” He’s worried about his workers only so far as it affects his production, where his profits are involved. The elevator man, you’re young, you can be more demanding. But as you get older, it’s not so easy to be as demanding. Once you get white it’s not so easy to walk around and say you want a job. Soon as the snow gets on top of your head you ain’t wanted no more.

The elevator man is usually older, he’s on his way down. But he can out-survive the truckdriver. Because the truckdriver at forty, his kidneys are beginning to kick up or he’s got his whole prostate gland giving him a bad time. Forty, forty-five, many of them I know, they begin to get ulcers because of the pressures—the traffic cop, the lights, the speed-up . . .

Of course, there’s humiliations with the elevator man. There’s no measure of intelligence. It’s a simple job and you gotta survive. Now there’s limitations . . . Don’t think the elevator man just takes shit. He’s as abusive as the next guy. He got the chip there too. He knows the guy’s comin’ in and the guy’s gonna holler at him and he’s gonna holler back at the guy, right? What the hell, nobody’s mad, really. They call each other names, but that doesn’t mean nothin’. If you didn’t have that, you’d really blow, you’re finished.

Every worker looks down at the other. Let’s say he’s a guy who’s on top of the skyscraper and he’s tossin’ these things and he’s walkin’ out on the beam: I’m number one. Here, boy. I’m makin’ the biggest buildin’. He’s proud, right? The truckdriver that drives the big trailer in and out and backs it into . . . he’s got a certain pride. And he looks down. Now the guy who sweeps the floor in one of the shops, the elevator man can look over him, he’s a little bit lower. (Laughs.) Each one has their guy . . . But what pride is there in lookin’ down?

The guy that opens the door, could he have pride? Even the elevator man has pride. But the guy that opens the door for the rich man and holds the umbrella on his head, it’s a little more harder for him to take pride in it.

You have to understand the worker in this society. This is a society of profit, right? But in the socialist society the elevator man could be an honored person, too, just the same as the highest person. Because they don’t get there unless the elevator man lets them up . . .

I believe socialism is gonna be the future. I believed that fifty years ago and I believe that today. I never lost my doubts which way the human race is gonna go. The capitalists are puttin’ together cars, it’s socialized, the production. But the means of returns are not socialized. It goes into a few, but it’s produced by the many. You see the results in the workers around you. Some of ’em are broken at thirty, at forty, some of ’em at fifty.