Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (86 page)

He was talking about
me!
That struck me as a weird way of relating to somebody. He started by saying that clothing is unimportant, “so that’s why I’m asking you to change your clothes.” It was just so bizarre. I told him, “Look, now that I’ve got a job, I’ll buy fancy clothes, I’ll rent an apartment, I’ll take a shower.” He seemed pleased, but he wanted me to cut my hair. I balked at that. He rose from his desk and stood up. The interview was over. He said blah, blah, blah, blah and hustled me out of the office. I was very shaken by it and went out and cried. Or maybe I didn’t cry at that time. But once he was pissed off at an assistant editor and took it out on me and yelled, “You got to look like a young businessman tomorrow or you’re out!” That’s one time I’m pretty sure I did cry,’cause I just don’t know how to relate to it.

I was enjoying my job, because I was answering the phone most of the time. People would call up and complain or have a problem. I’d say, “This is a capitalist newspaper and as long as it’s a capitalistic newspaper it’s not gonna serve you, because its purpose is not to serve you. Its purpose is to make money for its owner. If you want some help . . .” And I’d refer them to the Panthers or the
Seed
.
⁶²
People were very grateful. They’d say, “Thank you very much.” After they talked to me forty-five minutes or so, they’d say, “I’m glad I talked to you. I didn’t know the Panthers were like that.”

 

 

About what?

 

 

No complaints, no hassles. I was very polite. At that stage of the game, I was in a very mellow mood. I was giving organic raisins and walnuts and sunflower seeds to everybody—to reporters and rewrite men. I was bright and cheerful and everything. The city editor was very short and rude to people that called up and hung up and stuff like that. I’d say, “That’s a
person
on the phone.” I used to walk around the office and say, “How can grown people spend their time doing this?” I got into long raps. I actually got one, who’d been a reporter for twenty years, to seriously question himself: Am I doing anything worthwhile? I liked doing this, to persuade people to think. It was my contribution to the world. That’s why I told people who called for help that they should write letters or call up the editor or come down and take over the paper. A lot of people responded very well to those suggestions.

 

 

(A throwaway.) Sometimes. What finally happened was—I was involved in a severe personal relationship and I really got obnoxious. I was very alienated and very hostile. I stopped bringing in organic food. I started taking a couple of hours off on my dinner break—which is very cool. I’d grab two, three beers and smoke a joint or two on my break. The grass and the beers put me in a very mellow state. The straw broke when somebody called up and the reporter hung up on him. The guy called back and I answered the phone. I got real mad at the guy, too, and called him a bigot, racist, and hung up on him, too. The guy complained. And I was the one who got in trouble. It was a big thing, with the editor coming down on me for my attitude on the phones. I guess he found out about those other calls. I couldn’t understand his anger. I was just trying to convey my feelings to the people.

My fantasies all spring at the paper was getting a machine gun and coming in and shooting them. Getting psychedelic hallucinogens and putting them in their drinks. Getting a gun and walk into the editor’s office and shooting him. Maybe pointing the gun at him first and say, “Okay, how do you face your death?” I saw a Japanese movie once where two guys met their deaths in two different ways. That’s the kind of fantasies I had, cutting ’em up with knives.

Other people’s fantasies, from what I could observe, were sexual. They were not connected with the political realities. They would look at the young women—attractive by white, bourgeois standards, the ones with long blonde hair and miniskirts—and draw erotic stimulation.

 

There was one hired as a copy girl, through some uncle who had pull, and within a month she was an editorial assistant. There were two copy boys that had worked there for a couple of years, that were married and had kids, and weren’t getting fucking paid as editorial assistants.

A copy boy is a kind of nigger. You stand around in a room full of people that are very ego-involved in a fantasy—they think they’re putting out a newspaper. These are the reporters and editors. Somebody yells, “Copy!” Sometimes they yell, “Boy!” You run over—or you walk over—and they give you a piece of paper. You take that piece of paper someplace, and you either leave it there and go back to waiting around or you get another piece of paper and bring it back to the person that originally called you.

The other thing you do is go down, when the editions come off the press, and you get three hundred copies of the paper on a big cart and you wheel it around and put one on everybody’s desk. And stuff like that. “We’ve got a pack of photographs to pick up at Associated Press, go over and get it.” “Somebody’s in town making a speech, go and get it.” Or, “Take this over to city hall and give it to the reporter that’s over there . . .”

Copy boys are also expected to do editorial assistant’s work. That’s answering the phone and saying, “City Desk.” If it’s a reporter, you connect him with the editor or whatever. If an individual is calling about a story that says, “Continued on page seven,” but it’s not on page seven, I look through the paper until I find where the story is and tell him. Or I go get clips out of the library. You take one piece of paper and exchange it for another. It’s basically bullshit.

When I first worked there, I ran. They’d say, “Copy!” and I’d run. Nobody noticed. It didn’t make any difference. Then I started walking. Why the fuck should I run for them? This spring, I started to shuffle. That’s when the people started to complain about me. I started in February, 1970, and I was fired May 20, 1971. I was out with hepatitis for six months.

Want to know why I was ultimately fired? I had a pair of shoes, the soles were loose. I didn’t want to spend money on shoes. I was taking home seventy bucks a week and saving fifty. I wasn’t hanging around the paper because that was my destiny. I was just some little pinball that had dropped in a slot. I was there because a bunch of accidents put me there. I also had a will and an energy and I was moving. I was in motion, creative

I wanted to have a computer at the paper. I wanted an arrangement where you could get up in the morning and call up and say, “Okay, this is Charlie. I can work on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the evenings. And on Wednesday morning. I absolutely cannot work Wednesday evening.” Everyone would be calling up and the computer would put it all together. They would call back and say, “Okay, these are your hours this week.” ’Cause it doesn’t make any difference who shows up, the way they run the paper. These are the kinds of ideas I had. I wanted decision making in the hands of the people who did the work. I wanted to fuck capitalism.

I saw those things in terms of classes. The seventh floor was the executive. The fourth floor was the middle class—editorial, reporters, and all that. The ruling class had their offices there too, not up with the executives. I used to see Marshall Field in the hall. I was thinking, If they kill Bobby Seale, maybe I should get a gun and come in here and shoot Field. Maybe that’s a reason for me to keep this job. I’m not accomplishing anything else here. I don’t want money. Money isn’t worth it.

 

 

Oh well, you can’t look at it as accomplishing anything. Like one of the editors told me, “If you behave yourself, you won’t get fired.” I wanted to take a baseball bat and smash his head in, except I wanted to do it with my hands. He made me so angry. Here is this motherfucker, who is comfortable, he’s not struggling—in truth, there’s not a hell of a lot for him to struggle about, ‘cause he’s a fuckin’ marshmallow in a bag of marshmallows. He’s a nice guy. I mean, I like him. But he’s a fuckin’ marshmallow.

 

 

Yeah. What I did was put glue on ‘em. And then somebody suggested I put tape on ’em. So I did. People kept suggesting that I buy shoes. I kept saying, “No. I don’t want to buy shoes. These shoes are fine.” There was no reason for me to stay in their culture.

Still I was making friends with different people. I was trying to get the foreign editor to do an article about opium that the CIA is responsible for bringing into this country as heroin. I read it in
Ramparts
. They just laughed at it. A week later, another paper ran a column by Flora Lewis about the
Ramparts
article. I was incensed by these pigs. This guy thinks he’s my friend. I mean, I like him a lot. He’s really a nice person. I don’t know if I would get any pleasure from shooting him up with a .50-caliber machine gun and seeing his body splatter to pieces. I’d be emotionally disturbed by an act of destruction as total as that. But I would get some satisfaction out of it, because of the rage I feel towards these guys. The way they wrote about the demonstrations and the Panther grand jury. I’m so enraged by these swine . . . They pretend they’re liberals. They pretend to be concerned. They never fight over an issue. This editor told me, “I fight every day for space.” God!!

I had my most hostile fantasies on the job. I just reached a point where I just didn’t want to hand out the fucking newspaper. I wanted to burn it. It’s like you get a job in a prison. It’s the only job in town. Your job is to go around the cells and hand out a washcloth. I don’t want to be just handing out washcloths. You begin to realize this guy that’s locked up is just another human being. Maybe I could help him out. I’ll bring him cigarettes. I think that was the real reason I passed out organic walnuts and raisins. And my thoughts.

The job was also a corrupting thing. I realized I could get a lot of free books, a lot of books came in to review. And records, I could cop records. You sort of be nice to this guy because he’ll give you the records. I was getting corrupted.

How pitiful these people are! They kept telling me I should try to keep the job. It was security. I could look at these guys that worked twenty, thirty fucking years, and they were telling me if I cut my hair and wore different clothes, I would be like them. They don’t want to have to say, “Jesus! I blew it! I’m sixty years old and I’ve wasted it all.” I’m not stupid. I can work. I’m lazy, most of us are. But we’re lazy because we’ve got nothing worthwhile to do. I lost a year of my life working there. Was it worth it?

I’m saying godly things, that’s what it’s all about. How can we get that boot to step three inches over to the left or the right, so it won’t trample that flower. Look at these rich motherfuckers who don’t know shit. We don’t have to have a society in which you work because you’re tricked, cajoled, manipulated, or pressured into it.

How many jobs in this country consist of locking things or counting things, like money—the banks, the cashiers. Or being a watchman of some kind. Why in the hell do these jobs exist? These jobs are not necessary to life. This guy I was talking to yesterday said, “Money makes the world go around. Brothers kill each other over money.” And that’s true. I pointed to the sun. “What makes that go around? You’re not gonna tell me money makes that go around.” So there’s something else besides money. You can’t eat money, you can’t fuck money, you can’t do nothin’ with money except exchange things. We can live without money. We can live with people and grow food and build a table and massage a neck that has a sprain . . .

 

 

Oh yeah. You wanna know why I was ultimately fired? I’m very interested in Oriental stuff. Sometimes I fantasize about being a samurai, especially after I see a Japanese movie. So I used to sit Japanese-style on my knees on the floor. (At this point, he shifts from the lotus position to that of a samurai.) I’d pick a quiet corner of the room.

 

(
Softly, hardly audible
)
The city room . . . ?

 

In front of the desk of the religion editor. I thought it was appropriate. Sitting and breathing. People tried to ignore it. Some people thought I was meditating. I said, “Sure I’m meditating.” I don’t know what meditation is exactly, so I would be reluctant to call it that. I used to do this, before, on the floor of the mail room. One day a guy objected because he thought if a guy came in wheeling a thing, he wouldn’t be able to see me. I showed him I could move extremely quickly. That put his fears to rest.

One day the head librarian, he’s such an ass-hole—I really hate to call people ass-holes because they’re all nice, I’m more obnoxious than a lot of people I call ass-holes. But he’s the kind of guy only interested in himself, which to me is a very outdated point of view. I mean, if you study Zen or ancient philosophy, they all say the same thing, and that is that no man is an island. Okay, so he came in and said, “Don’t sit like that.” I said, “Why not? I’m not bothering anybody.” He said, “I don’t want you to.”

I said, “Man, let me explain . . .” He said, “Do you want me to talk to the editor?” I said, “No, no, no, don’t talk to him, he’ll fire me.” So he said, “I don’t want you sitting there, it looks just terrible.” I said, “Okay, I won’t sit in the corner, I’ll sit in the middle of the room.” He said, “No, no, no, don’t do that either.” So I left. I went down and sat in front of the desk of the religion editor.

About a week or so later—one of my stops with the paper is the public relations office. There was a vase with some flowers in it. So I sat down in the chair and looked at the flowers in it—maybe five minutes, six at most—and I got up and left. A couple of days later, the editor called me into his office and says, “I got three complaints I want to discuss with you. One was from the librarian. He told me about your sitting on your knees and I told him if you ever do that again to throw you out. The second is about you and the flowers. They complained you disrupted the office.” I said, “I was sitting there with my back straight and breathing (breathes slowly, deliberately, deeply) instead of (gasps frantically)—right?”
That
disrupted them?