Roughneck (4 page)

       The cab crept forward, a car length at a time. Bathed in a boozy, rosy glow, I gazed out at the splendor immediately ahead...Men in tailcoats and tuxedos, women in evening gowns. They milled around beneath the gaily decorated canopy, roamed up and down the broad steps. Laughing, talking, calling hellos to each new arrival.

       The last vehicle ahead of me drove away. I pulled up in its place. The doorman stepped forward smartly and flung open the rear door. There was a grunt, a gasp, a curse—and a thud.

       And out into the entrance, the cynosure of a hundred horrified stares, tumbled Allie and his lady. Each puffing on a cigar. Both completely naked.

       I took one startled glance at them. Then, sliding out of the door on the opposite side, I ran.

Things went very well for me until early spring of the following year. Then the manager of the store which employed me was fired, and everything began to go wrong. The former manager had been a quiet, gentlemanly sort, as kindly to everyone as his job would allow. The man who replaced him was a brassy loudmouth—one of the most deliberately offensive men I have ever known. I had barely got to my desk the day of his arrival when he called me on the carpet.

       "Notice you're keeping a couple of women," he growled. "What I want to know is how you're doing it. How you buying stuff for whores on the dough you make?"

       "Buying stuff for—for—?" I stared at him, open-mouthed. I didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about.

       "Maybe you've been knocking down a little, huh?" he went on. "Well, you'd better lay off. You want to buy stuff for whores, you have 'em co-sign the account with you. And no phoney names, see? None of this crap that it's for your mother and sister."

       I understood him then, all right. But I could still only stand and stare, sick with a swiftly mounting fury...Mom and Freddie. In one and the same breath he had accused me of fraud and referred to my mother and sister as whores.

       I think I have never been closer to murdering anyone.

       Apparently he saw how I felt.

       "Well,"—he forced an uncomfortable laugh—"guess I kind of got my wires crossed, huh? No offense."

       I didn't say anything; I couldn't. So, after a word or two more of grudging apology, he waved me out of his office.

       My last class at the college let out at 11:50 in the morning, and I had to be at the store at noon. I had no lunch period, then, as the other employees had; and I usually grabbed a bite when I made our afternoon deposit at the bank. I was never more than a few minutes about it—just long enough to gulp down a sandwich and some coffee. Both Durkin and the former manager had consented to the arrangement.

       The new manager, having given me a few days to cool off, called a halt to it.

       Whether I ate or starved was strictly my own headache—see? I could drop my last morning class, or I could do without lunch; that was for me to decide. All he knew was that I was not going to do any more "fugging around" on company time.

       "Getting too goddamned much money, anyway," he grunted. "We could get a full-time employee for what we're paying you."

       Well, I had to hold the job, at least until the end of the school term. So I restrained my temper—and went without lunch from then on—and I continued to swallow his insults and arrogance in the miserable days that followed. I had plenty of company in my misery. As boorishly rude as he was with me, he was often more so with the other employees. No one could do anything to suit him. He was always "taking over" on a sale or a credit interview, showing the "goddamned incompetents" (us) how it should be handled. And when the sale or the interview went sour, as it often did, he was furious...Goddammit, couldn't we do anything right? How the hell could he do his job and ours, too?

       The credit manager, Durkin, an executive in his own right, caught as much hell as the rest of us. But while he appeared a little hurt at times, he showed no resentment. As a new man, he said, the manager should be given every chance to make good. It was his job to give orders. It was ours to carry them out, insofar as we conscientiously could. That was the only way you could run a business.

       "I'm sure he means well," Durkin would assure me earnestly. "After all, we're all here for the same purpose. We all have the store's best interests at heart."

       I was sure the manager did not mean well, and that he had no one's interest at heart but his own. But I had learned the futility of arguing with Durkin. Not too intelligent outside of his work, he was utterly devoted to the store. And in his mind the absentee owners were minor gods. They 'had' to know what they were doing, and since they had put the manager here, 'he' had to, also...That was that, as far as Durkin was concerned, and it continued to be that until early summer, a couple of weeks before the end of the school term. Then...

       By way of getting new customers into the store, the manager had written a sales letter. Durkin, who had been charged with having it mimeographed and mailed out, showed me a copy of it.

       "You're a writer, Jim," he said. "You know all about these things. What do you think of it?"

       I read it, shaking my head. It was filled with wornout catch phrases which were completely uninformative and brassily offensive. No one was going to believe that we were giving away merchandise. No one would believe that we were in business solely to "befriend the good people of Lincoln" and that we yearned only to be their pals and buddies.

       "It's the worst kind of junk," I told Durkin. "If this doesn't put us out of business, nothing will."

       "Oh?" Durkin frowned troubledly. "You really mean that, Jim? You're not just saying it because he wrote the letter?"

       "It's the awfullest bunch of tripe I ever read in my life," I said, "and you can tell that stupid bastard I said so."

       "Well," Durkin murmured worriedly. "You certainly ought to know, Jim. You're an authority on writing. Maybe I'd better..."

       Turning away from my desk, he went into the manager's office. Almost verbatim he gave that gentleman my opinion of the letter. Then, as the manager gaped at him, apoplectic with fury, Durkin suggested that I be commissioned to write a "really good" letter.

       Well, the manager finally found his voice, and all hell began to pop. He cursed Durkin out at the top of his lungs. Then he called me in and he cursed us both out together. He'd show us, by God. He'd teach us to make fun of our betters. He would have ten thousand of the letters printed up—ten thousand instead of the five thousand he had originally contemplated. And we—Durkin and I—would have the job of addressing, sealing and stamping them. We'd do it on our own time, with no assistance and no extra pay.

       He dismissed us with another string of profanity. Putting through a rush order to the print shop, he got a delivery on the letters that very evening. And for the rest of the week, and part of the next, Durkin and I worked night and day. I was sore as a boil, naturally. Durkin, strangely enough, seemed completely at peace with himself. He remained stolidly polite to the manager. In fact, the more the latter gibed and nagged at him, the more polite he became.

       It was the manager's idea to "sweep the town off its feet," to hit it such a blow that it would be "rocked to its heels." So the letters were allowed to accumulate instead of being sent out a thousand or so at a time. He kept close watch on our progress. Seeing that we were near the finish, he remained with us that last night, although he did not, of course, help us with the work. He looked on, grinning maliciously, as we packed the letters into boxes and loaded them into Durkin's car.

       "I guess that'll teach you," he jeered when, at last, the job was finished. "Snap into it, now, and maybe you'll get that stuff mailed before midnight."

       He drove away laughing. Durkin told me to go on home, that he would take the letters to the post office himself. I protested my willingness to help, and for the first time in our acquaintance he was curt with me. He didn't want my help, he said. He preferred taking care of the letters himself.

       I went home. He got into his car and drove off. Late the following afternoon, I learned the reason for his unprecedented conduct.

       I was working the cashier's window at the time. A quiet, nondescript little man came up to the wicket and asked to be taken to the manager. I suggested, according to store practice, that I might be able to help him.

       "I'm not sure the manager is available at the moment, sir. If it's something about your account, some misunderstanding or—"

       "Post office department," he said, displaying his credentials. "Are you in charge of the mail?"

       "I handle some of it, yes," I said. "I'm not in charge, but—"

       "I'm in charge." Durkin came up and stood beside me. "This young man has nothing to do with the mail."

       "I see," the little man nodded. "Well, we received a call from the sanitation department a little while ago." He broke off cautiously. "I think I'd better see the manager."

       "You can't. There's no need to see him," said Durkin.

       The little man looked at him. Reaching through the window he tapped Durkin on the arm. "Mister," he said, and his voice cracked like a whip, "you get the manager for me and be damned quick about it!"

       Durkin shook his head stubbornly. The manager, having heard himself referred to, came out of his office. Surlily, he inquired what the hell was up.

       The inspector introduced himself. He explained. And what happened then is impossible to describe adequately. The manager gasped. He choked. His face purpled, puffing up like a balloon, and his eyes stood out from his head like doorknobs. He began to bellow, to scream.

       Durkin was fired within the hour, as soon as approval could be obtained from the home office. I, a mere clerk, was discharged immediately—the suspected instigator of, if not an actual accessory to, the credit manager's crime.

       "I'm certainly sorry, Jim," he apologized. "I tried to keep you out of it, you know. That's why I sent you on home instead of—"

       "But why did you do it at all?" I said. "My God, Durk, you might have gone to the pen for a deal like that. We both might have, if the company wanted to get tough with us. Why the hell did you do it, anyway?"

       "Why, Jim," he said, reasonably, "you know why I did it."

       "Dammit, I don't know," I said.

       "Sure, you do. You said the letters were junk; they'd hurt the store. So, naturally I..."

       ...so he had taken all ten thousand of them—all carefully addressed, sealed and stamped—and thrown them into the city dump!

With the school term finished, I got a full-time job in another department store—a tumbledown old emporium on the outskirts of the business district which catered largely to the farm trade. It was a strange place, operated by a baffling network of absentee owners and concessionaires. Although an approximate fourscore people worked in it, the auditor and I, his assistant—and a few custodial employees—were the only employees of the store proper. The others were all in the pay of the various concession owners.

       A man named Carl Frammich was the auditor. Our duty was to keep tabs on the concessions—the grocery and clothing departments, the cosmetics counter, the cream-buying station, the barber shop, the restaurant, and a dozen-odd other stores within our store. We collected their receipts, and supervised their help.

       Complaint department? That was us. Credit and Collections? Us again. Personnel, Purchasing, Payroll? You guessed it. Everything that no one else did—and the clerks did nothing but sell—was handled by the auditor and his assistant. Frankly, I was soon overwhelmed by the job, and, for much of the time, didn't know what I was doing or why.

       Carl Frammich...Of all the weird, off-trail characters I have known, he was the weirdest, the most off-trail. Stacked up beside Carl, my old friend Allie Ivers was a dull-normal person. Carl looked like the devil—literally, not in the slang sense. He was Satan come to life, and he had the devil's own cynicism; and he could rarely say three words without two of them being blasphemies or obscenities. Yet his voice was angelic. It was the sweetly piping falsetto of a five-year-old. Musical and high-pitched, and with such a pronounced lisp that it was often impossible to understand him.

       "Tompn," he would say, "bwing at doddam fuddin cash ledger in here an ess oo an me twike a skewin balance on uh sonabitsin bastud." Or, "Tompn," he would say, "do down and tell at doddam assho in weddy-to-weah to top skewin up his salestickets or I'll tum down air an kick uh fuddin kwap outta im..."

       Despite my own errors in that direction, I have always said that no man can work while he is drunk. But I say this with one mental reservation—lisping, Satanic-looking Carl Frammich. Carl was dead drunk throughout the three months of our association. He came to work drunk, and he drank throughout the day. Straight alcohol when he could get it, anything from horse liniment to "female tonic" when the alcohol was unobtainable.

       He would stagger up the stairs in the morning, bottles protruding from every pocket, and lurch wildly toward his desk. Sometimes he would make it on the first try, but more often than not he would wind up in a corner or sprawled on the floor. And once he almost went out the alley window. But whatever his difficulty before he gained his desk, he would never allow me to assist him.

       "Need the fuddin etertise," he would explain solemnly. "Dot to teep in tundishun. Always watch oor doddam skewin helf Tompn and oo be awright."

       Once seated, Carl seldom arose until the day was over...and the day we worked was never shorter than twelve hours. He didn't eat anything. He didn't go to the toilet. When he had to urinate, he simply scooted his chair around, hoisted himself up on the arms and let go out the alley window. Since the window opened on the store's parking lot, there were frequent and bitter complaints about this practice. Customers were constantly grumbling that Carl's urethral discharges had seriously damaged the paint on their cars, and one guy declared that several holes had been eaten in the hood of his vehicle. All the complainants got short shrift from Carl.