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You gave the boss eight hours, and he always asked for more. He never sent you home after six hours, for example. You might have time to think.
That scene in the office stayed with me. Those cigars, the fine clothes. I thought of good steaks, long rides up winding driveways that led to beautiful homes. Ease. Trips to Europe. Fine women. Were they that much more clever than I? The only difference was money, and the desire to accumulate it. I’d do it too! I’d save my pennies. I’d get an idea, I’d spring a loan. I’d hire and fire. I’d keep whiskey in my desk drawer. I’d have a wife with size 40 breasts and an ass that would make the paperboy on the corner come in his pants when he saw it wobble. I’d cheat on her and she’d know it and
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That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man.
The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
After we ate I got into the bunk and Grace climbed in with me. She was the tallest of the three. I’d never been in bed with a woman that tall. I kissed her. Her tongue answered. Women, I thought, women are magic. What marvelous beings they are!
I was finally hired on at an auto parts warehouse. It was on Flower Street, down around Eleventh Street. They sold retail out the front and also wholesaled to other distributors and shops. I had to demean myself to get that one—I told them that I liked to think of my job as a second home. That pleased them.
“Manny, what are you doing working in auto parts?” “Resting. My ambition is handicapped by laziness.”
The arguments were always the same. I understood it too well now—that great lovers were always men of leisure. I fucked better as a bum than as a puncher of timeclocks.
“People don’t need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn’t be.”
It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
I had elaborated on my work experience in a creative way. Pros do that: you leave out the previous low-grade jobs and describe the better ones fully, also leaving out any mention of those blank stretches when you were alcoholic for six months and shacked with some woman just released from a madhouse or a bad marriage. Of course, since all my previous jobs were low-grade I left out the lower low-grade.
I was hired as what they called the extra ball-bearing. The extra ball-bearing is the man who is simply turned loose without specific duties.
It was a hot summer day. I began to sweat and itch. My crotch itched. I began to scratch. The itching became unbearable. I walked along scratching. I couldn’t be a reporter, I couldn’t be a writer, I couldn’t find a good woman, all I could do was walk along and scratch like a monkey.
The idea, I decided, is not to think. But how do you stop thinking? Why was I chosen to polish this rail? Why couldn’t I be inside writing editorials about municipal corruption? Well, it could be worse. I could be in China working a rice paddy.
The strength of the two cultures was very different too: Japanese women instinctively understood yesterday and today and tomorrow. Call it wisdom. And they had staying power. American women only knew today and tended to come to pieces when just one day went wrong.
“What does Danny know about submission? The only thing he has ever submitted to is his hand.”
I didn’t like parties. I didn’t know how to dance and people frightened me, especially people at parties. They attempted to be sexy and gay and witty and although they hoped they were good at it, they weren’t. They were bad at it. Their trying so hard only made it worse.
“I hate it when he fucks me,” Jan had said. She was now probably saying the same thing about me to him.
An old black man was sitting next to me. He had an interesting face; he didn’t have the usual resigned look that most of us sitting around the room had. He looked as if he was attempting not to laugh at himself and the rest of us.
