Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (83 page)

 

GEORGE: Of course you’re always lookin’ for a buck on the side. Years ago fireworks were illegal. It was a beautiful setup. The police were shakin’ down the peddler on the street and bringin’ it in here and sellin’ it to me. (Laughs.) I would turn around and sell ‘em on the counter—on the open counter. Sky rockets, Roman candles, the whole works. They would get calls that we were sellin’ illegal fireworks. They’d call us and say, “We gotta make a raid on you. Put everything away.” So they’d come in and say, “I don’t see nothin’, do you, Joe?” “No, I don’t see nothin’.” (Laughs.)

It’s such a rat race. We were becoming stagnant in the area. We were getting to be puppets. We were ruining our sense of being. We were ruining our vocabulary. What do you hear in here? “You got dat?” “You got dis?” “You got dose?” You find yourself talking like the trade that comes in, especially with the area degenerating as it is. You begin to feel like you’re not progressing in life.

 

 

GEORGE: The work is confining. In our spare time, between midnight and six in the morning, I built the whole upstairs. Made the attic into the girls’ dorm. We own the building, us and the finance company. (Laughs.)

 

IRENE: The tension is so great—you got to watch ‘em all the time. Turn your back, they’re fillin’ their pockets. We’ve had people fake injuries here and try to collect. By the end of the day you’re talkin’ to yourself.

 

GEORGE: This is where the psychic center has helped us a lot. We can come in here and just lay down for fifteen minutes and bein’ able to relax. It’s equal to an hour’s sleep of somebody else’s time.

I hope we won’t be doing this forever. If we can unload it, we have hopes to get into the psychic field, in a resort area, a rest home, retreat type of thing, where people can develop a finer awareness of theirself.

The only kind of family that can survive in a ma, pa store is where everybody pitches in and helps at all times. And have their little kingdom of their own.

 

POSTSCRIPT:
There is a sign on the wall of the apartment: “Great Spirit, grant that I may not criticize my neighbor until I’ve walked a mile in his moccasins.”

 

It can be splendid not to work for a while, because it changes the rhythm. You can reflect on what you’ve done. There’s no feeling of being indolent. I like being by myself for long periods of time and do not need an occupation. After two months, though, it doesn’t work for me. I begin to feel the need for a
raison d’etre.
Unless I’m in love. If I should be in love, after months I would begin to feel parasitic and indolent.

 

 

Oh well, love is a woman’s occupation. (Laughs.) It’s a full-time occupation if you’re married. Since I’m not married, I’m talking about a love affair. If you have any sort of ego, you can’t make a love affair a justification for life.

 

 

You raise the subject of guilt.

 

(
Slightly bewildered
)
I did?

 

I have come to some conclusions after having been free economically from the necessity of work. To be occupied is essential. One should find joy in one’s occupation. A great poet can make love and idleness fructify into poetry, a beautiful occupation. He wouldn’t think of calling it work. Work has a pejorative sound. It shouldn’t. I can’t tell you how strongly I feel about work. But so much of what we call work is dehumanizing and brutalizing.

I’ve done typing as a young girl. I’ve worked in places where the office was like a factory. A bell rang and that was time for a ten-minute coffee break. It was horrifying. Still, most people are better off—their sanity is maintained in anything that gives their life some structure. I disliked the working conditions and I disliked the regimentation, but I enjoyed the process of typing. I was a good typist. I typed very fast and very accurately. There was a rhythm and I enjoyed that. Just the process of work. Its movement. There’s something enlivening . . . A blank piece of paper, your hands on the keys. You are making something exist that didn’t exist before.

I tried to pay very much attention to the words I was typing down. I care about language. Some of the words were repugnant to me. If I were having to type some porno stuff or having to say, “Dry cereal is the best thing to feed one’s kids night and day, they’re going to flourish eating Crunchy Puffs,” I wouldn’t have been able to do it. But the process gave me satisfaction. There weren’t very many erasures. It was neat.

I really feel work is gorgeous. It’s the only thing you can depend upon in life. You can’t depend on love. Oh, love is quite ephemeral. Work has a dignity you can count upon. Work has to be a game in order for it to be well done. You have to be able to play in it, to compete with yourself. You push yourself to your limits in order to enjoy it. There’s quite a wonderful rhythm you can find yourself involved in in the process of any kind of work. It can be waxing a floor or washing dishes . . .

I worked for an employment agency, doing placements. They divided the girls into placeables and unplaceables. I was usually drawn to the unplaceables. These were girls who seemed to me to have some sort of—maybe, inchoate—creative gifts. They wanted jobs where they could feel as individuals. The girls whose hair was not in place, who looked untidy, who weren’t going to be that easily accepted. There were some eccentricities involved. I would spend most of my time with them. I would make phone calls to—God forgive—advertising agencies, radio stations.

If you concentrated on the placeables, you made money. These were the girls who came off the production line of high schools, particularly the Catholic schools. They seemed to be tractable young girls. They went into banks as filing clerks in those days. You called the banks and you had your card file and you sent the girl over to the job. You could be a mass production worker yourself, working these girls into the system. There were no tough corners, nothing abrasive. One of my colleagues made two hundred dollars a week shoveling people into these slots. I wasn’t doing what the other girls at the desks were doing. I found myself haunted at night by the unplaceable girls. The unplaceable girls were me. If I failed them, I was failing myself. I couldn’t make any money. I quit in three weeks. They probably would have fired me anyway.

They were pretty intense weeks. I suffered a lot. I needed the money. I was living on practically nothing. My girls were losers. I found it unbearable to reject them. You say, “We have nothing for you,” and send them away. Your time is money, you work on commission. There was a code on the application blank, so you could give the girl the brushoff and she’d never know why.

There were a couple of times I found jobs for the unkempt girls, whose stockings were baggy. And there was even some pleasure in placing those sweet, naive girls, who wanted nothing better than to work in banks, and they were grateful. Even there, the process—being part of something, making something happen—was important. That’s the difference between being alive and being dead. Now I’m not making anything happen.

Everyone needs to feel they have a place in the world. It would be unbearable not to. I don’t like to feel superfluous. One needs to be needed. I’m saying being idle and leisured, doing nothing, is tragic and disgraceful. Everyone must have an occupation.

Love doesn’t suffice. It doesn’t fill up enough hours. I don’t mean work must be activity for activity’s sake. I don’t mean obsessive, empty moving around. I mean creating something new. But idleness is an evil. I don’t think man can maintain his balance or sanity in idleness. Human beings must work to create some coherence. You do it only through work and through love. And you can only count on work.

 

A diesel’s a lot easier than steam. It’s a lot better job. Diesels can handle more cars, more tonnage. Diesel’ll pull anything. They move, they can run. They don’t take the know-how that you had to have with a steam engine. Steam engine was more of a challenge. Those men weren’t well educated, but still had the know-how. They could get more out of an engine than a man that had a college degree. It was all pride.

When they got the diesel and got rid of the firemen, they had to make ‘em engineers overnight almost. They’re savin’ themselves a penny, but it cost ‘em, in my imagination, a dollar afterwards. ’Cause they’ve got men now goin’ over the road that never even worked as a fireman on that territory, that hardly spent any time on the road.

Most of the diesel work, it’s electrical. If it breaks down, they can’t fix it. You’ve gotta send for somebody. In the old days with a steam engine, why, it was up to you to get that engine in. If something you could see was wrong, why, you could do nearly all the repairs yourself or put grease or oil or what was needed to bring it in. With the diesel, you got your throttle and a brake, same as an automobile. I think it’s easier than driving an automobile. You’re on rails. On an automobile, you gotta watch curves and all that. That’s truthful.

Diesel’s very clean. In the old days, with the steam engine, you had steam leaks and all that. And in the wintertime there was times you could almost go over the road and barely see any crossings, with the steam leaking around the cylinders. Diesel, you could sit in a business suit. Same as this room. It’s almost soundproof. With a diesel, all you are is like a bump on the log up there up front.

In the old days, I’d say nine out of ten of the firemen come from small towns. ’Cause they were about the only ones that had a strong back and a weak mind. (Laughs.) When I first started, they used to have the boomer fireman. A boomer’d be a man, he’d have the cantaloupe run down in Texas and the coal rush in Illinois and the ore season up in Escanaba and the wheat harvest out on the coast. They’d just go, and when business would slow up, why, he’d put his little suitcase and be on to the next place.

That’s when the company’d really get a break. They were experienced men. In the rush season, if they didn’t have these boomers and had to hire new men, they’d say it used to cost ‘em two thousand dollars to make a fireman. Until you knew what you were doing. When a boomer come up, he had about five, ten years’ experience, and you were getting it for nix. I had a half-brother who was a boomer. He got drowned in Cordova, Alaska —gold mining. Boomers were single. They’d all knew where the season work was, where they were gonna be hirin’, and would write to the master mechanic and be Johnny on the spot. They’re not doing that work any more.