by Studs Terkel
Your shoes, the soles were loose . . .
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 . . .
Your shoes, you had them taped . . .
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?
In a way I did disrupt. It’s the kind of thing Gandhi or Thoreau or Christ would say. If you really want to strike a blow at the corruption of society, come into eternity. I have to concede that a human being who sits down and meditates—tries to get in touch with God or whatever—is the most threatening fucking thing of all. On a physical plane, I wasn’t interfering with them at all. But the fact that I sat with my back straight and most people at their jobs don’t sit with their backs straight, that’s weird. They looked at me and they felt guilty. I wasn’t trying to irritate them. I wasn’t trying to throw any magic their way. I was just looking at the flowers.
Most of all, I wanted to be touched by these flowers. I stroked a couple of petals really gently. I was trying to reach out and say, “Hey plant, I know you’re here in this office and it’s probably a drag and you’re lonely. But I love you.” I took a couple of petals that had fallen off the table and put them in my pocket.
The third complaint . . . ?
. . . was about my shoes. He said, “It’s entirely unacceptable to have tape on your shoes.”
Were you fired because of the shoes, looking at the flowers, or assuming the samurai position?
No. On Monday morning I called up the paper and said I’d be fifteen minutes late and I was fifteen minutes late. Tuesday morning I called and said I’d be fifteen minutes late and I was fifteen minutes late. He said that was entirely unacceptable. So he gave me a written memo.
So that was it?
No. Originally they pissed about my clothing. I said, “When I wore my good clothes they got ruined here, tearing against the typewriters. You ought to provide some kind of smocks.” Surprisingly, he accepted the idea and gave us smocks. Hell, it was hot and it was summertime. So I started wearing just the smock and no shirt. And he said that was entirely unacceptable. “Suppose somebody comes in and sees you. This is a business office.”
Nobody complained about my work except the head copy boy, and I made a deal with him. I said,
“Let me do all the paper rounds and I won’t be in the city room.” I hated the way they treat you in the city room.
I got great satisfaction from the paper rounds, far more than going to a library or hanging around the city room. I’d go down and fill up the cart and that fucking thing’s heavy. I’d have to push it and it would take strength and I’d sweat. It’s like 250 or 300 papers to go around on each edition. I liked it ’cause I sweated and I got into conversations with people. I’d get done and I would say, “I did something.”
I’d do the rounds and go sit outside in the flower garden. After a week or so, the head copy boy said, “Look, the other copy boys see you sittin’ around while they’re working and it makes them uptight.” I said, “Okay, I’ll come back, do more work, but I won’t do all the paper rounds.” They were uptight not because they saw me sitting around—because dealing with these reporters, these pigs, who called them “Boy!” all the time, they wanted a chance to get out.
(Mumbles) Then it wasn’t the shoes or the samurai position or the flowers or being late . . . ?
No. I was going through all this upset. I said to the head copy boy, “I’m going through all this weirdness and I haven’t gone to lunch. I might as well leave early.” People do that kind of shit all the time. Come five’, I started getting my stuff together and changing. I would come to work in blue jeans and change into a pair of pants and a shirt. At the end of the day I could change back into blue jeans. At five thirty, I would just (snaps fingers) walk out the door.
At five thirty somebody walked in and said to me, “Here are some clips. Can you go and get ’em?” I said, “No, I’m leaving.” Another copy boy says no, too. The next morning the editor came to me and said, “You left early . . . blah, blah, blah, blah . . . And you refused to get the clips.” I said, “Let me explain.” And he said, “That’s entirely unacceptable. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back.” To me it was more like the one that broke the pig’s back.
I had been thinking for months, What will I do when I get fired? Will I smoke a joint in the city room? Will I meditate in the library? I wanted to do something to show, Hey, I’m better than you motherfuckers. I’m getting fired because I’m different. I don’t want to be a cipher. I was thinking, How could I show that? By kidnapping Marshall Field? By shooting him? I had to think fast, so I looked at the editor and said, “I hope you can live with the conditions you’re creating.” And I just turned around and walked out and started to cry.
He hurried after me and said, “Wait a minute. I’m not creating these conditions, you are.” I said, “No, no, no, I’m not the one that has the power. You’re the one that has the power.” I walked out of there. Then I hung around the office most of the day selling copies of Rising Up Angry.63 (Laughs.)
I’ve gotten myself on unemployment. They were nice to me the first few times, then a woman told me to get a number. I wanted to tell her, Fuck you. I can wait outside your apartment and knock you over the head and steal your money. Fuck your money. It’s not your money in the first place. It’s mine. I worked for it. And if you don’t give it to me, I don’t give a fuck, ’cause I’ll live anyway. When I was younger and applied for a job and the guy wouldn’t give me a reason for not hiring me, I would say, “It’s okay.” I wouldn’t yell at him, “You’re a racist pig.” I’d think, Fine. Mao Tse-tung will hire me to kill you. Or I could be a bank robber. But that bitterness, I don’t like being bitter. I’m a pacifist.
I have picked a career for myself. I want to practice the kind of traditional medicine that is more spiritually oriented than modern Western medicine. I want to learn herbs and massage and things like that, and meditation. I don’t want to be dependent on other people. This notion of self-reliance is peculiar today. The frontiersman lived by his own effort. Today nobody does that. I want to be a frontiersman of the spirit—where work is not a drag.
STEVEN SIMONYI-GINDELE
We’re in the offices of the Capitalist Reporter, a sixty-four-page monthly tabloid. It’s in one of the older office buildings along a mid-Manhattan street. Though the quarters are cramped, an air of busyness pervades. At work, among half-filled paper coffee cups and ash trays, higgledy-piggledy, are several young people, long-haired, casually dressed.
He, the publisher, is twenty-six. Born in Hungary, he emigrated to Canada after the revolution. He is as informal as the others. On his lapel is a large “Jesus Loves You” button; on his feet, sneakers. His dog scrounges about on a blanket in this inner office.
“We report on people making it. How to start out on a small investment, how to invest outside the stock market and get a rich return. Like buying cheap land, antiques, farms . . . We do well-researched stories of people actually succeeding, with little or no capital, going into business for themselves and making a go of it.
“We’ve done what we preach. We started out with thirty thousand dollars—ten thousand dollars in capital and twenty thousand dollars in loans. After our preview issue we had only eight thousand dollars in the bank. We’re now in our second year—we had a hundred thousand trial subscribers and have a fifty thousand dollar newsstand distribution—and circulation is growing. Right now, we’re undercapitalized, so we’re penny pinching. Each person has to do the work of two or three.
“Pat64 and I became partners in business eight years ago. It was several years of struggling, saving our money, putting it into ventures, and losing it and investing it again. Finally we found we have the ability of conveying a sales message in print.”
I went to work when I was nine years old. I used to get up at three-thirty in the morning and deliver four hundred newspapers. I was bored by school and left in the last year. I was never afraid of working. I always enjoyed the challenge and I always enjoyed the reward. I did all kinds of things.
I was a bus boy when I was thirteen. It took me six weeks of steadily looking for a job. It was high unemployment at that time in Canada. I realized then the only security a person has is what he himself can do. There’s little security in a job, working for somebody else. I like to control my fate as much as possible.
I don’t believe the answer lies in making money. It didn’t for me. By the time I was twenty-one I was driving a Cadillac and I could afford a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-month seashore apartment in Florida, go to shows, and spend two hundred dollars a night and take my mother out, my grandfather, and live like a king. But I was more frustrated than when I was making thirty-four cents an hour delivering for a drugstore in Toronto.
I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy. Happiness is not related to money. Being successful at what you’re doing is the measure of a man. The measure of a man is standing on his own two feet. To succeed by himself without leaning on other people to support him.
My quest I have already found. I found that in the Bible. Until I was twenty-four, I never read the Bible. But I heard that God had a plan for every human being and I could have a direct contact with God through Jesus Christ. I asked Christ to come into my life. At that point, I realized what life is all about. My life became really worth living.
Before I found Christ, I learned how to ski, how to sail, how to fly, how to speak French. All these things I dropped after I had a mastery of it, because they didn’t satisfy me. You can master making money like you can master algebra. After you get the basic essence, any person can do it.
Before I accepted Christ, I didn’t feel I had a good deal until I really crushed a guy and squeezed the last penny out of it. So when I accepted Jesus, I realized I was a slave to this money. I called up Patrick, who was my partner at the time in another venture, and I told him I wanted to get out. We were in publishing. We were selling books through the mail. Self-improvement, educational, sex manuals. Quite acceptable, normal for the trade. We had a very successful campaign selling the book. We sold about 150,000 copies. It was a very profitable item. But I would not do it today.
I feel I could start any business. It boils down to a formula. You find there’s
a need for something. Then you supply that need. There is a spread between what it costs you and what you sell it for. That’s what’s called a profit. I don’t know a fairer way of rewarding a man than by profit. What a man sows, so shall he reap.
Each man has a calling. The gifts God has given me is to be a businessman. To be able to organize, to be able to sell, to be able to understand figures and what not. I want to use these gifts for the glory of God. I don’t want to do anything in my business life that would shame my Saviour. So I always look to guidance from the Bible on how the business should be run. My principles of doing business have changed altogether from two years ago.
Previously my guideline was: what you could get away with, that was right. The only mistake you could make is to get caught. You had this gut fear inside: What did I tell this guy last time he was here? That no longer worries me. I always tell the same story to everybody. Everything I do in business must be aboveboard—must be something I can face God with once I appear before Him after I die.
An issue of the magazine features in graphic detail the successful exploits of a strikebreaker in Canada. “Maybe strikebreaking is the wrong word to use. What that person does is supplies, in a competitive system of labor and management. Strikes is one of the legitimate weapons labor can use. Management also has a right to keep functioning. Because of physical threats made upon management, most companies are not willing to continue to function. Law enforcement has not been able to guarantee the personal safety of people for their right to run their businesses if their employees don’t wish to work. What this company does is take photographic evidence of physical violence on people who continue to work for the strike-bound company, and takes them to court to restrain them . . . That’s the essence of what I gathered in the story.”
