Scenes from the Class War

In my life I've had many jobs, from suit-and-tie to business casual to “just don't wear shorts.” But with the possible exception of the tough-guy street clothes I donned when conducting field visits as a parole officer, I could never have been mistaken for a member of what we generally call “the working class.” I never wore mechanic's overalls, or a reflective vest, or a shirt with my name stitched to it. I never sat in the back of a pickup truck on the way to work or carried a lunch pail or needed an extra seat on the Metro for my hardhat and tools. The space I occupied, even when I was making very poor wages, wages poor enough to be considered poor and never mind working class, was in fact a middle-class space. But this statement requires a bit of clarification.

Like most Americans, I have generally associated social class with money (or at least its absence). The government does it, too; there are very sharp lines drawn between “poor,” “working poor,” “lower middle class,” “middle class,” etc., and these lines are drawn by virtue of yearly income. But as George Orwell so brilliantly pointed out in his book The Road to Wigan Pier, class is often a state of mind and not merely a matter of income. In the England of the 1930s, he pointed out, a greengrocer and a naval officer had approximately equal incomes, but no one, not even the grocer, would have made the claim they were of the same social standing: the grocer, even if he possessed a superior income, was understood to be part of the “lower classes” while a naval officer, even one deeply in debt, with no land or title, stood well above him on the social register simply by virtue of his commission.

America's class system has similar nuances, at the middle-class level anyway, but ours tend to be weighted in favor of expectation – specifically, the sort of life we expect to lead, the amount of money we expect to have, and the way we expect to be treated by others in social situations. My own roots in regards to class are worth noting. My maternal grandfather was raised in a Catholic orphanage and at the age of fifteen was already a combat veteran, having lied about his age to join the U.S. Navy during WWI. He ended up becoming quite wealthy in the Roaring 20s, but the Depression ruined him and he spent decades slowly re-entering the adoptive class from which he'd been expelled. When he died prematurely in 1956, he was still considerably short of his earlier success, and it was only due to his wise investments that my grandmother and her daughter, my mom, were able to survive in comfortable circumstances. My paternal grandfather, on the other hand, was an itinerant electrician whose house in Chicago, which he shared with his wife and three children, was scarcely larger than the studio apartment in which I now somewhat claustrophobically inhabit. His children -- my father and uncle and aunt -- had to cut their own paths to the middle class via the power of hard work and scholarships. Thus, prosperity in my family tree was a relatively new phenomenon when I arrived on the scene in 1972. Yet knowing no other mode of existence, I possessed a middle-class outlook which I maintained – or which maintained itself, by a species of momentum – not merely through childhood and my teenage and college years, but through the long periods of poverty and near-destitution which came afterward. Part of this outlook took the form of expecting that the lifestyle into which I had been born would continue when I left the parental/collegiate nest and struck out on my own. I never thought about it consciously, but my general attitude was that somehow, even with an entry-level job, there would be no backsliding in my lifestyle or outlook. Indeed, even when I was near-destitute, averaging a negative bank balance the week before any pay period, coming home to a mailbox full of duns, eating spaghetti twice a day and going to bed hungry, everything about me remained fundamentally middle-class: dress, manners, speech, worldview, personal habits, even my choice of friends. I may have been poor, but I never considered myself part of the poor or of the working class, and neither did anyone else. Though I ate in truck-stop diners and drank in blue-collar bars, I was never mistaken, even accidentally, as someone who “worked” (meaning sweat) for a living. People knew at a single glance that I had been to college, that I preferred reading to television, that I'd never be able to change a tire by myself and that I'd probably use “perhaps” in a sentence if given half a chance. And this very correct classification carried with it both privilege and burden.

On the privilege side, I knew that I would be accorded greater respect, and often deferred to, by people in the service economy – waiters, countermen, cashiers, shopwalkers. Police officers would treat me with more civility than a prole or a poor man, and those I stopped to ask for the time or directions would be more accommodating. Poor women often regarded me as more appealing than men of their own class, whereas middle-class ladies would regard me as one of their own. Even rich girls would find me unthreatening, if nothing else. On the job front, I cut a better profile in interviews than someone who might not have been as articulate or as assured in a professional setting; therefore I could and did land work for which I was unqualified, purely on the basis of polish I had acquired as a result of my semi-genteel upbringing.

On the burden side, I was also despised by the very same class from which, in purely financial terms, I was actually indistinguishable. Some men wanted to start fights with me for no other reason than my speech-patterns, while some women went out of their way to let me know they considered me weak and effeminate for the same reason. Mechanics, plumbers and electricians – even tow-truck drivers – took one look at me and saw dollar signs, knowing in their hearts that I'd not know the difference between a cylinder head and a pile of jelly donuts. Homeless people who stared right through working-class pedestrians made beelines for me, often very aggressively, assuming I had money to spare (I vividly remember one homeless man turning away from me in disgust when I offered him a handful of silver change: clearly my clothes and manners had told him “cash only.”) The general consensus among working-class or poor people I encountered seemed to be that I was spoiled, soft, arrogant, condescending and in possession of an education which had no practical value and was therefore completely useless. And they were not entirely wrong. Class prejudices may be odious and immoral, but they exist, and like most generalizations and stereotypes, they are grounded in reality.

Life is full of strange and unexpected shifts of fortune, however, and recently an event transpired which allowed me a perspective on social class which I'd been previously denied. After a number of years working in Hollywood making video game trailers -- a nerd's dream-job, and a lazy man's as well -- I returned to the world of make-up effects. Now, when I refer to "make up effects" I am not referring to beauty makeup, nor to special effects, nor prop-making, nor visual effects, but to the craft (and in some cases the art) of manufacturing foam-latex and silicone appliances for movies and television shows. Every zombie, every demon, every monster, every badly wounded person, dead dog or cadaver seen in a movie or a TV show is constructed, wholly or in part, from foam latex (rubber) or silicone. And the process of making these things is about as messy and laborious as anything can be.

For starters, both foam latex and silicone are messy as hell to deal with. The former, in its liquid state, has the consistency of warm cake batter or icing, and has an especial affinity for sticking to clothing and arm-hair -- indeed, many "foam runners" shave their arms to eliminate the pain of having to remove the latex from their skin. The latter, in its liquid state, is probably the most aesthetically disgusting substance you will ever encounter, somewhere between seminal fluid and snot. Throw in everything else we have to work with -- acetone, 99% alcohol, styric acid, plaster of Paris, paste wax, etc., etc. -- and you have a perfect storm of dust, talcum powder, liquid and goo flying about all day long. This shit ends up not merely on clothing but in your hair, your ears, your nostrils, and sometimes in much more embarrassing areas as well. Any day in the summer where I take less than three showers is remarkable in itself.

Now, it so happens that both latex and silicone pieces are formed in molds, and these molds are often enormous and extremely heavy, since the positives are sometimes fashioned out of stone. The molds are held together by bolts, and when they are opened after baking, they have to be opened using both power drills and crowbars -- a task which requires both the raw animal strength of a lumberjack and the gentle dexterity of an eye surgeon. Likewise, every piece of equipment in the shop has to be cleaned after it is used, which means whisks, bowls, foam guns (picture an enormous syringe, the size of a shotgun), mold straps, etc., have to be scrubbed several times a day: if you have any form of arthritis or tendonitis, this repetitious strain on your hands will introduce you to levels of pain you weren't previously familiar with. In some cases, large foam pieces like cowls or full-body suits have to be washed and then wrung-dry in a mangler which would look quite at home in a museum dedicated to the Spanish Inquisition. And all of this, and much more, is done over and over again in conditions of deafening noise, blistering heat (have you ever been inside a walk-in oven?), suffocating dust and time constraints which would shame a mayfly. During shooting season, when we are running pieces for up to four television shows at a time, not to mention the occasional film, it is not uncommon to remain on one's feet for eight hours a day, in a ceaseless blur of exhausting movement: lifting, carrying, bending, kneeling, crawling, straining. (There have been times after work when I was too physically tired to drive home and had to rest for ten or fifteen minutes in my car before turning over the engine.) The point I'm trying to make is that what I do is very messy, and that in my work-clothes, I cannot be mistaken for anything but a member of the working class. My normal ensemble goes as follows:

Hot weather: Ball cap, sunglasses, bandanna (the Maryland State flag), sleeveless t-shirt encrusted with four of five different colors of old foam latex, spattered with paste wax, dusty with talcum powder and styric acid and shop dust. Work belt, similarly dirty, with heavy work gloves jammed in one pocket and latex gloves jammed in another. Cargo pants or jeans, out at one knee, filthy, and covered at the knees by thick pads whose logos have been long since rubbed away by hours of kneeling on the shop floor. Sneakers or boots, so layered in old foam the actual shape of the footwear is sometimes tough to determine.

Cold weather: All of the afformentioned, with a wool “burglar's cap” instead of a baseball hat, and a work-ruined khaki jacket with a broken zipper and ink stains all down the front.

In addition to this I usually have earbuds either screwed into the wells of my ears or dangling from the edge of my bandanna. Occasionally safety glasses or some other large tool, like an industrial box-cutter, swing from my belt. And of course I seldom bother to shave during the week, so I'm carrying a three-to-five day growth of beard as well. And this is the condition in which I both arrive to work at seven in the morning and leave at four o'clock in the afternoon, which means that any errands I run on the way to, or from, work, find me wandering about in my dirty MUFX gear. In the months since I've been doing this, I've noticed a difference -- sometimes subtle, sometimes profound -- in the way the world reacts to me.

For starters, when I walk down the street, or into a grocery or convenience store, the first thing I encounter is a decided sense of solidarity with other members of the blue-collar brigade. The guys stocking shelves at Ralph's, the cashiers at 7/11, the men in diners on break from road-construction projects, the Teamsters and production assistants on film shoots, all of these people who used to look through me as if I simply weren't there now offer a single, sincere-looking nod of commiseration. The landscapers and gardeners of Los Angeles, inevitably Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, also have included me into their fraternity. They sweat for a living, and they can see that I do, too: barriers presented by race, ethnicity and age all seem to dissolve in that single nod, because regardless of the color, hue or smoothness of one's skin, the sweat which pours from it looks exactly the same. This sense of group camaraderie manifests in small but profound ways. A few weeks ago I was walking to the door of the 7/11 across the way from my house, and a tough-looking biker dude of about fifty years reached the door a half-second ahead of me. This is precisely the sort of guy that, when I was a college student, government worker or entertainment industry flunky, used to regard me with hostility and contempt. I daresay if I had been in my slacker street clothes, he would have slammed the door in my face. But noticing my rig, my dirtiness, and my air of physical exhaustion, he seemed to recognize me as one of his own...and he held the door for me and let me enter first. The gesture was trivial but his glance seemed to say, "I get it, man; I know what it's like, and I can relate."

Looking so clearly like a WORKING MAN can have humorous side-effects as well. When I stroll into the bank to pay my rent, I notice a certain physical wariness from the well-dressed middle and upper-class people around me. They stand a little further away -- probably because of the dirt -- but also because they cannot relate to me, or rather they think they can't. I am that home-grown alien species, the workman, who is not supposed to arrive unless summoned, speak unless spoken to, or leave without permission. At the same time, they also tend to act slightly intimidated by my presence, as if I might be prone to punching someone in the face rather than simply saying "excuse me" when I want them to move. The slight but obvious discomfort they seem to feel, being stuck in a social situation (meaning a line) with someone they would not ordinarily associate with, and the often condescending or patronizing manner they assume should they try to pass the time, always makes me laugh a little up the sleeve I'd have if I only I were wearing them.

On top of this, I have often observed the loudmouth, trouble-making sorts you sometimes encounter on the streets of a major city give me no trouble at all when I'm in my workman's gear. They don't even make eye contact as we pass. It's true the blue-collar set is generally more ready, more willing and more able to kick ass if called upon to do so, and perhaps they understand this: or it may be they're simply savvy enough not to pick fights with a man who has two ridiculously sharp knives clanking on his belt. In any event, nobody -- not drunks, not homeless people, not smart-ass teenagers -- thinks it's worth their while to bother me, and this comes as a pleasant change from the days when I was a visibly middle-class guy in a neighborhood of the working poor, and couldn't go to the corner store without wondering if I was going to have to blast someone out of their socks.

From the standpoint of the sexes, I've noticed quite a bit of difference in the way I'm regarded by both men and women of all kinds. Men of higher social standing and better dress seem slightly intimidated and uncomfortable when I walk into a room with sweat glistening and tools all a-jangle. Somehow their masculinity is compromised by my mere presence, even when I am physically smaller or less muscular than they. This can be traced to basic middle and upper-middle class insecurity about blue-collar workers in general, for at the core of every male member of the MC and UMC lies feeling of inadequacy when confronted by someone who can actual do things. You may have a degree from Stanford and a Masters from Harvard, you may speak six languages and play the cello like a madman, you may be in perfect physical condition and clock six figures and know everything about international relations, but if you can't change the fuses, unclog a drain, shingle a roof, use a lathe, plane a piece of wood, handle an angle grinder, or tinker with an engine, deep inside you don't really feel like you have anything between your legs. The look of pathetic helplessness, of inadequacy and impotence, that any male white collar wears when standing beside an auto-mechanic, tow-truck driver or plumber hard at work is gross evidence of this. The white collar wants to take refuge in social superiority, in money, in the power of his intellect, but every time he attempts a sneer he is reminded that none of these things has any value in a crisis. The very things which makes him such a commodity at work, or in the dating scene, become liabilities when anything really practical needs to be done. What's more, awareness of his own physical softness often plagues him. In comparison with that callused, work-hardened, oil-smeared dude mucking about under his sink, he feels almost effeminate. Thus the grotesque sight of a man making $300,000 a year trying to make casual small talk and act buddy-buddy with a journeyman plumber who makes a tenth of that -- not because he feels any sense of kinship, but because his own inadequacies drive him to prove he can be "one of the guys," too.

In regards to women, I noticed changes of a different sort. If you take the work-version of myself out of a place like a bank, whose very nature tends to remind everyone of their social status, and place him in an area where there is more natural commingling, like a grocery store, reactions are more positive than I was expecting. There is less overt snubbing and more frank curiosity, possibly because -- so studies have told us -- women are genetically programmed to appraise and judge men based on their ability to protect and provide: and while a blue-collar man might not be able to provide much monetarily, his physical toughness and his practical ability around the house somewhat compensate for this. I've also noticed a little more respect from my female neighbors, when they see me trudging up my driveway in the afternoon, exhausted and filthy, tool-belt flung over one shoulder, work boots a-clattering on the concrete. Since, even in the 21st century, women probably perform an outsize percentage of physical, practical tasks around the home in comparison with their husbands, I'm convinced that they have greater innate appreciation for those whose jobs are of a generally physical nature -- a generalization, to be sure, but I think a fairly accurate one.

Perhaps the most profound change I noticed, however, comes not from without but from within. When I was working in video games, while the job itself was easy, the hours were extremely long, even brutal. Hundred-hour weeks were not unheard of, and as I once spoke about in this very blog, there was a time I went 30 straight days without a single day off. I used to drive down to Hollywood at nine AM in such a state of mental torpidity that I could scarcely operate the controls of my car, and often I wouldn't return until 3:30 the next morning. Yet one hot summer day, as I was sulkily plodding down Hollywood Way toward Warner Bros., I noticed on my left a crew of hardhats hard at work hammering shingles into a black rooftop. Even at that hour the heat of the sun was murderous, and the roofers, clad in their hats, neck bandannas, long-sleeved shirts and carpenter's jeans, looked as miserable as humans can look. I thought, "If you're feeling sorry for yourself, just imagine what their day is going to be like." I don't pretend that my present work is fully as arduous, or as dangerous, as roofing or construction, but it is hard enough for me, and it has served to remind me that despite the long periods of poverty and near-poverty I have faced in life, I never before really grasped what it meant to be of any other social class but the one I was born into. My middle-class attitudes, which carried me through life, sometimes buoying me up and other times dragging me down, are finally peeling away. I have, at the age of forty-five, finally managed to grasp that being born in a fairly comfortable set of circumstances does not entitle me to live within those circumstances for the rest of my life. Indeed, the gravitational tendency in capitalism is always toward poverty -- it is easy to be poor and to stay poor, but reaching the middle or upper middle class is damned difficult, and staying there, even if that class is your point of origin, is harder still. The scaled-down style in which I live, which I intended only to be temporary when I moved from Los Angeles to Burbank four years ago, has lately assumed a more permanent character. My material expectations have changed, possibly for the worse, but at the same time, I have freed myself of a dangerous delusion. I know now that in order for me to have what my parents earned, momentum is not enough. A sense of entitlement is not enough. Even my education is not enough. Only work -- real work -- will suffice. And as Orwell once said, that at least is a beginning.