Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar

by Richard Ford

  You’re getting melodramatic, I told myself. I had begun lecturing myself, addressing myself by name. Take it easy, Frank, old boy. I would have rather said, Tony, old boy. Tony was my middle name, after a favorite uncle, a war hero at nineteen, shot up during a high-altitude bombing mission over Germany. He’d returned from the war half deaf and crazy. He’d perfected a whistle as piercing as a siren and all he did for three years was whistle and drink. He had hooded, melancholy eyes like Robert Mitchum’s. His name was Anthony, but everybody called him Casey. Franklin is a name I’d never especially liked. My father said he’d given it to me because it sounded like a good business name. I’d never been successful in getting people to call me Tony. You’re a Frankie, not a Tony, they’d say. Finally, I regressed to what they’d called me in the neighborhood: Marzek. Nobody used first names there, where every last name could be spit out like an insult. There was no melodrama in a last name. People are starving in this world, Marzek, and you aren’t eating. Famine. War. Madness. What right do you have to suffer? Trying to hold your guts together on the Western Avenue bus riding to work. At your age Casey was taking flak over Germany.

  I worked part time for an ice-cream company on Forty-seventh. Supposedly, I was going to school during the day and so I didn’t get to the factory till after three, when the lines were already shut down. It was October. The lines that ran overtime in summer shut down early in fall.

  A few of the production crew were usually still around, the ones who’d gotten too sticky to go home without showering, and the Greeks who’d worked in the freezers since seven a.m. still trying to thaw dry ice from their lungs and marrow. The locker room stank of piled coveralls marinating in sweat, sour milk, and the sweet ingredients of ice cream. I opened my locker and unhooked my coveralls from the handle of the push broom. That terrible lack of sympathy pervading all locker rooms hung in the air.

  “Look how awful he looks,” Nick said to Yorgo. “Skin and bones.”

  I quickly tugged on my coveralls.

  “Moves like he got a popsicle up the ass,” Yorgo said.

  “It’s a fudgsicle. Greek cure for hemorrhoids.”

  “He got morning sickness,” Nick said.

  “It’s punishment for being a smartass. God is punishing you. You think you don’t pay sooner or later,” Yorgo said.

  “I’m paying.”

  “You only think you’re paying. Just wait. You won’t believe how much more expensive it gets.”

  I pushed my broom along the darkened corridors, a dune of dust and green floor-cleaning compound forming before me. The floor compound reminded me of nuns. They’d sprinkle it on vomit whenever someone got sick in class. Vomit filled my thoughts and memories.

  Has it come to this, Marzek?

  It’s what Harry had kept mumbling as I barfed up Pisano. It was his favorite expression. Has it come to this, he’d ask at the subway window as he paid his fare, at restaurants when they brought the check, at the end of the first movement of the “Moonlight Sonata,” in letters to Ohio.

  A month ago it had been summer. I’d worked production, overtime till six p.m., saving money for school. At night I’d played softball—shortstop for a team called the Jokers. I hadn’t played softball since early in high school. This was different, the city softball league. Most of the guys were older, playing after work. The park was crowded with girlfriends, wives, and kids. They spread beach blankets behind the backstop, grilled hotdogs, set out potato salad, jugs of lemonade. Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I’d never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I felt as if I were cocked at the very heart of the Midwest.

  We played for keggers and after the game, chaperoned by the black guys on the team, we made the rounds of the blues bars on the South Side, still wearing our black-and-gold-satin Joker jerseys. We ate slabs of barbecued ribs with slaw from smoky little storefront rib houses or stopped at takeout places along the river for shrimp. Life at its most ordinary seemed rich with possibility.

  In September we played for the division championship and lost 10–9. Afterward there was a party that went on all night. We hugged and laughed and replayed the season. Two of the wives stripped their blouses off and danced in bras. The first baseman got into a fist fight with the left fielder.

  When I woke hung over it was Monday. I knew I’d never see any Jokers again. I lay in bed feeling more guilty than free about not going to work. I’d worked full time all summer and had decided to take the last week off before school began. I wanted to do nothing but lie around for a solid week. My tiny apartment was crammed with books I’d been wanting to read and wouldn’t have a chance to read once school started. I’d been reading Russians all summer and wanted now to concentrate on Dostoevsky.

  “Anybody who spells his name so many different ways has got to be great,” Harry said.

  I started with Notes from the Underground, then read The Possessed and The Idiot. The night before school reopened I read Crime and Punishment in a single sitting. It was early in the morning when I closed the book, went straight to the bathroom, and threw up. That was the first time it felt like crying.

  In high school the priests had cautioned us about the danger of books.

  “The wrong ones will warp your mind more than it is already, Marzek.”

  I tried to find out what the wrong ones were so I could read them. I had already developed my basic principle of Catholic education—the Double Reverse: (1) suspect what they teach you; (2) study what they condemn.

  My father had inadvertently helped lay the foundation of the Double Reverse. Like the priests, he’d tried to save me.

  “Math,” he’d say. “Learn your tables. Learn square roots!”

  On Christmas and birthdays he’d shower me with slide rules, T squares, drafting kits, erector sets. Each Sunday he pored over the want ads while I read the comics. He was resigned to his job at the factory, but he was looking for jobs for me—following trends, guiding my life by the help-wanteds the way some parents relied on Dr. Spock. By the time I was in sixth grade he’d begun keeping tally sheets, statistics, plotting graphs.

  “Engineers! They are always looking for engineers—electrical engineers, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers.”

  It was what he’d wanted to be, but he’d never had the chance to go to college.

  I enrolled in drafting class, machine shop, wood shop, math. When I became the first person in the history of Holy Angels High to fail wood shop without even completing the first project, a sanding block, he became seriously concerned.

  “You gotta be more practical. Get your mind on what’s real. I used to read Nick Carter mysteries all the time when I was a kid. I read hundreds. Then, one day I asked myself, Is this practical or just another way they make a sucker out of you? Who’s it helping? Me or Nick Carter? I never read another.”

  “But Shakespeare,” I said.

  “Shakespeare? Don’t you see that one well-designed bridge is worth more than everything Shakespeare ever wrote?”

  I swept my broom past the lunchroom. I thought about my first day working the production line. When they relieved me I got my lunch, thinking it was noon. It was only the ten-fifteen break. Sweeping floors seemed like relaxation after production. But people endured the line year after year. Except in Dostoevsky’s novels I couldn’t think of having ever met anyone purified by suffering. I didn’t want Siberia. The freezers were bad enough. People were condemned to them every day—without plotting against the czar.

  The cleanup shift was in the lunchroom taking one of several breaks. The men worked after the bosses had gone and were pretty much on their own so long as the machines were clean in the morning. Unlike for the production crew, a break for cleanup didn’t mean a ten-cent machine coffee. It meant feasting. Most of them were Slavs, missing parts of hands and arms that had been chewed off while trying to clean machines that hadn’t been properly disconnected.
I could never exactly identify where in Eastern Europe any of them were from.

  “Russian?” I’d ask.

  No, no—vigorous denial.

  “Polish?”

  No. They’d smile, shaking their heads in amusement. “Lithuanian?”

  Ho, ho, ho. Much laughter and poking one another. “Bohemian?”

  Stunned amazement that I could suggest such a thing.

  The lunch table was spread as for a buffet. Swollen gray sausages steaming garlic, raw onions, dark bread, horseradish, fish roe.

  Still, despite the banquet, a sullen, suspicious air pervaded the room. Next to the cleanup crew, the Greeks from the freezer were cheerful. Not that they weren’t always friendly toward me, though they were distressed that I was sweeping floors, as that had previously been “a colored’s job.”

  “Want y’et?” the burly, red-bearded man missing the index fingers of both hands asked, offering rye bread spread with pigs’ brains from the communal can.

  Cleanup always offered me food, urging y’et, y’et. It rhymed with nyet, but I suspected it was one of those foreign words actually manufactured out of English—some contraction of “you” and “eat.” They’d been concerned with my eating habits since the time they’d seen me plunge my arm up to the elbow into the whey and scoop out a handful of feta cheese from the barrel the Greeks kept in the fruit cooler.

  “Nyet, nyet,” they’d groaned then, screwing up their faces in disgust.

  “Nyet, nyet,” I said apologetically now, declining the brains, pointing to my stomach and miming the heaves. “Can’t eat . . . sick . . . stomach . . .” I explained, lapsing into broken English as if they’d understand me better.

  “Have to y’et. No y’et, no live.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Y’et ice cream? Dixie cup? Creamsicle?”

  “Y’et ice cream!” The idea startled me. After a summer of production, ice cream seemed no more edible than machinery. I wanted to sit down at this cleanup banquet table and discuss it. To find out how it had remained food for them; what it was like to work in after-hours America. They knew something they were hiding. I wanted to explore paradox with them: how was vomiting the same as crying? Dostoevsky like softball? Were factory wounds different from war wounds? We could discuss ice cream. How did working transmute it from that delight of childhood into a product as appetizing as lead? But my broom seemed to be drawing me away as if on gliders, down unswept, dark, waxed corridors.

  Besides, the engineering of ice cream is another problem. This is about soup. Or zupa, as cleanup called it. They called it after me, the words echoing down the corridor like their final pronouncement as I glided away: y’et zupa . . . zupa . . . zupa . . .

  I stood before my locker stripping off my coveralls, gagging on the sweaty-sweet effluvia of flavors hovering around the laundry bin—strawberry, burgundy cherry, black walnut, butter brickle. Zupa—chicken broth, beef barley, cream of celery—sounded like an antidote, the way black olives and goat cheese could counterbalance a morning of working with chocolate marshmallow, or pigs’ brains on rye neutralize tutti-frutti.

  It was six when I punched out; the deceptive light of Indian summer was still pink on the sidewalks. I walked, paycheck in my pocket, along the grassy median of Western Boulevard, traffic whizzing on both sides like sliding, computerized walls of metal and glass. Workers were racing away from the factories that lined Western, down streets that resembled nothing so much as production lines, returning to resume real lives, trailing the dreams they survived by like exhaust fumes—promotions, lotteries, jackpots, daily doubles, sex, being discovered by Hollywood, by New York, by Nashville, sex, going back to school, going into real estate, stocks, patents, sex, embezzlements, extortions, hijackings, kidnappings, wills of distant millionaire uncles, sex . . .

  These were things we’d talked about all summer while the ice cream filed by. Now I was free of it, weaving slightly as I followed the wavy trails of strawlike cuttings the mowers had left. I could still feel the envy I’d had all summer for the guys riding the mowers over the boulevards, shirts off, tanning, ogling sunbathing girls while grass tossed through the almost musical rotary blades. It had seemed like freedom next to working in a factory, but those were city jobs and you had to know somebody to get one.

  The factory had changed my way of thinking more in one summer than my entire education had. Beneath the who-gives-a-shit attitude there was something serious about it I couldn’t articulate even to myself, something everyone seemed to accept, to take for granted, finally to ignore. It had to do with the way time was surrendered—I knew that, and also knew it was what my father, who’d worked in a factory all his life, had wanted to tell me. But he’d never been able to find the words either, had never heard them or read them anywhere, and so distrusted language.

  My stomach was knotted. I was feeling dizzy and for a moment thought it might be because the line of grass cuttings I was following was crooked. When I stood still the colors of the trees looked ready to fly apart like the points of unmixed pigment in the van Gogh self-portrait I’d stare at every time I went to the Art Institute trying to provoke that very sensation. It wasn’t a sensation I wanted to be feeling now. I sat down in the grass and lowered my head, trying to clear the spots from my eyes. I tried breathing rhythmically, looking away from the trees to the buildings across the street. The flaring light slanted orange along the brick walls in a way that made them appear two-dimensional, faked. The sky looked phony too, flat clouds like cutouts pasted on rather than floating. It looked possible to reach up and touch the sky, and poke a finger through.

  I was starting to go nuts. It was one of those moments when the ordinariness is suddenly stripped away and you feel yourself teetering between futures. Then, at a restaurant across the street, under a Coca-Cola sign, I ate a bowl of soup and was reprieved.

  A week later I doubt if I thought much about any of it—the weepy, wrenching heaves that felt like spitting out the name Raskolnikov, the involuntary fast, the universe turning to tissue on Western Boulevard. It was a near-miss and near-misses are easy to forget if we notice them at all. In America one takes a charmed life for granted.

  Casey once told me that’s what had seemed strange to him when he first got back from the war. People seemed unaware they were about to die. It took him the next three years of whistling like a siren to readjust. By then he’d drunk himself into an enlarged liver, having settled back into the old neighborhood, where the railroad viaduct separated the houses from the factories and every corner was a tavern. His entire life had become a near-miss at nineteen.

  When I try to recall the times I almost died I get bogged down in childhood—repeated incidents like Swantek (who at age twelve was more psychotic than any other person I’ve ever met) demonstrating a new switchblade by flinging it at my head, grazing an ear as it twanged into a door. But my closest call would come a few years after that day I opted for zupa on Western Boulevard. It was as Casey had observed—I had no awareness of death at the time, though certainly there were strong hints.

  By then the ice-cream factory was only a memory. I’d finished college and was working for the Cook County Department of Public Aid on the South Side. I was living on the North Side in an efficiency apartment half a block from the lake. It was August, hot, and for the last few days there’d been a faint, sweetly putrid smell around the refrigerator. For the first time since I’d lived there I stripped the shelves and scrubbed everything with Kitchen Klenzer. While I was at it I even cleaned under the burners on the stove.

  The smell only got stronger, except now it was tinged with bleach. I tried moving the refrigerator, but it was one of those types in a recess in the wall and I couldn’t budge it.

  I went downstairs and rang the manager’s bell. No answer. By the time I got back to my apartment the smell had permeated the entire room. I got a towel and blanket and left to sleep the night out on the beach.

  As soon as I hit the street I knew something w
as wrong. Police and ambulance flashers whirled blue and scarlet at the end of the block, fusing into a violet throb. Shadows hurried away from the beach in the dark, cutting across lawns where sprinklers whipped under streetlights. At the end of the sidewalk a couple of cops had a kid pinned down, his face grinding in sand, eyes rolling as if he were having a fit. Flashlights moved slowly across the dark beach and groans and crying echoed over the hollow lapping of water. I hung around long enough to find out what had happened. A local gang, ripped on drugs, had made a lightning raid with bats, knives, and chains. Apparently they were after a rival gang, but anyone out on the beach had been attacked.

  Back in my apartment I smoked an old cigar, trying to smother the smell long enough to fall asleep. I was still tossing, half awake, sweating, trying to suck breath through a cold towel without smelling, when the buzzer rang around two a.m. It was Harry with a fifth of old Guckenheimer.

  “What the hell’s the stench in here?” he asked.

  “BO?”

  “No.” He sniffed. “I know that smell. It’s death! Yeah, death, all right—rotting, decomposing flesh . . . decay, rot, putrescence . . . . maggots, worms . . . that’s it, all right, the real stuff. Where’d you hide the body?”

  “Behind the fridge.”

  “Don’t worry. You can cop an insanity plea. I’ll get you a nice wing. Something quiet with the seniles—take a lot of naps. No, it gets too petty there. Maybe the hydrocephalics. You’d have to drink a lot more water to fit in. Aaaiiiyyyeee!” he suddenly screamed. “See them? There! Giant, swollen heads!” He was pointing at the window, eyes wild. “Whiskey, I need whiskey,” he rasped, slugging from the bottle, then wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Aaaiiiyyyeee.” He shuddered quietly.

  Aaaiiiyyyeee had replaced Has it come to this in his lexicon since he’d been working at Dunning, the state mental hospital. He claimed to see hydrocephalics everywhere.

  We walked out along the cooling streets, away from the lake, into a deserted neighborhood where blue neon Stars of David glowed behind grated shop windows. We were passing the old Guckenheimer, washing it down at water fountains, trading stories on our usual subjects—poverty, madness, slums, asylums—laughing like crazy. Harry kept breaking into the childhood song he’d started singing in my apartment: