The Studs Terkel Reader_My American Century

by Studs Terkel

  I’m a dying breed. A laborer. Strictly muscle work...pick it up, put it down, pick it up, put it down. We handle between forty and fifty thousand pounds of steel a day. [Laughs.] I know this is hard to believe—from four hundred pounds to three- and four-pound pieces. It’s dying.

  You can’t take pride any more. You remember when a guy could point to a house he built, how many logs he stacked. He built it and he was proud of it. I don’t really think I could be proud if a contractor built a home for me. I would be tempted to get in there and kick the carpenter in the ass [laughs], and take the saw away from him. ’Cause I would have to be part of it, you know.

  It’s hard to take pride in a bridge you’re never gonna cross, in a door you’re never gonna open. You’re mass-producing things and you never see the end result of it. [Muses.] I worked for a trucker one time. And I got this tiny satisfaction when I loaded a truck. At least I could see the truck depart loaded. In a steel mill, forget it. You don’t see where nothing goes.

  I got chewed out by my foreman once. He said, “Mike, you’re a good worker but you have a bad attitude.” My attitude is that I don’t get excited about my job. I do my work but I don’t say whoopee-doo. The day I get excited about my job is the day I go to a head shrinker. How are you gonna get excited about pullin’ steel? How are you gonna get excited when you’re tired and want to sit down?

  It’s not just the work. Somebody built the pyramids. Somebody’s going to build something. Pyramids, Empire State Building—these things just don’t happen. There’s hard work behind it. I would like to see a building, say, the Empire State, I would like to see on one side of it a foot-wide strip from top to bottom with the name of every bricklayer, the name of every electrician, with all the names. So when a guy walked by, he could take his son and say, “See, that’s me over there on the forty-fifth floor. I put the steel beam in.” Picasso can point to a painting. What can I point to? A writer can point to a book. Everybody should have something to point to.

  It’s the not-recognition by other people. To say a woman is just a housewife is degrading, right? Okay. Just a housewife. It’s also degrading to say just a laborer. The difference is that a man goes out and maybe gets smashed.

  When I was single, I could quit, just split. I wandered all over the country. You worked just enough to get a poke, money in your pocket. Now I’m married and I got two kids... [trails off]. I worked on a truck dock one time and I was single. The foreman came over and he grabbed my shoulder, kind of gave me a shove. I punched him and knocked him off the dock. I said, “Leave me alone. I’m doing my work, just stay away from me, just don’t give me the with-the-hands business.”

  Hell, if you whip a damn mule he might kick you. Stay out of my way, that’s all. Working is bad enough, don’t bug me. I would rather work my ass off for eight hours a day with nobody watching me than five minutes with a guy watching me. Who you gonna sock? You can’t sock General Motors, you can’t sock anybody in Washington, you can’t sock a system.

  A mule, an old mule, that’s the way I feel. Oh yeah. See. [Shows black and blue marks on arms and legs, burns.] You know what I heard from more than one guy at work? “If my kid wants to work in a factory, I am going to kick the hell out of him.” I want my kid to be an effete snob. Yeah, mm-hmm. [Laughs.] I want him to be able to quote Walt Whitman, to be proud of it.

  If you can’t improve yourself, you improve your posterity. Otherwise life isn’t worth nothing. You might as well go back to the cave and stay there. I’m sure the first caveman who went over the hill to see what was on the other side—I don’t think he went there wholly out of curiosity. He went there because he wanted to get his son out of the cave. Just the same way I want to send my kid to college.

  I work so damn hard and want to come home and sit down and lay around. But I gotta get it out. I want to be able to turn around to somebody and say, “Hey, fuck you.” You know? [Laughs.] The guy sitting next to me on the bus too. ’Cause all day I wanted to tell my foreman to go fuck himself, but I can’t.

  So I find a guy in a tavern. To tell him that. And he tells me too. I’ve been in brawls. He’s punching me and I’m punching him, because we actually want to punch somebody else. The most that’ll happen is the bartender will bar us from the tavern. But at work, you lose your job.

  This one foreman I’ve got, he’s a kid. He’s a college graduate. He thinks he’s better than everybody else. He was chewing me out and I was saying, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He said, “What do you mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, sir.” I told him, “Who the hell are you, Hitler? What is this “Yes, sir” bullshit? I came here to work, I didn’t come here to crawl. There’s a fuckin’ difference.” One word led to another and I lost.

  I got broke down to a lower grade and lost twenty-five cents an hour, which is a hell of a lot. It amounts to about ten dollars a week. He came over—after breaking me down. The guy comes over and smiles at me. I blew up. He didn’t know it, but he was about two seconds and two feet away from a hospital. I said, “Stay the fuck away from me.” He was just about to say something and was pointing his finger. I just reached my hand up and just grabbed his finger and I just put it back in his pocket. He walked away. I grabbed his finger because I’m married. If I’d a been single, I’d a grabbed his head. That’s the difference.

  You’re doing this manual labor and you know that technology can do it. [Laughs.] Let’s face it, a machine can do the work of a man; otherwise they wouldn’t have space probes. Why can we send a rocket ship that’s unmanned and yet send a man in a steel mill to do a mule’s work?

  Automation? Depends how it’s applied. It frightens me if it puts me out on the street. It doesn’t frighten me if it shortens my workweek. You read that little thing: what are you going to do when this computer replaces you? Blow up computers. [Laughs.] Really. Blow up computers. I’ll be goddamned if a computer is gonna eat before I do! I want milk for my kids and beer for me. Machines can either liberate man or enslave ’im, because they’re pretty neutral. It’s man who has the bias to put the thing one place or another.

  If I had a twenty-hour workweek, I’d get to know my kids better, my wife better. Some kid invited me to go on a college campus. On a Saturday. It was summertime. Hell, if I had a choice of taking my wife and kids to a picnic or going to a college campus, it’s gonna be the picnic. But if I worked a twenty-hour week, I could go do both. Don’t you think with that extra twenty hours people could really expand? Who’s to say? There are some people in factories just by force of circumstance. I’m just like the colored people. Potential Einsteins don’t have to be white. They could be in cotton fields, they could be in factories.

  The twenty-hour week is a possibility today. The intellectuals, they always say there are potential Lord Byrons, Walt Whitmans, Roosevelts, Picassos working in construction or steel mills or factories. But I don’t think they believe it. I think what they’re afraid of is the potential Hitlers and Stalins that are there too. The people in power fear the leisure man. Not just the United States. Russia’s the same way.

  What do you think would happen in this country if, for one year, they experimented and gave everybody a twenty-hour week? How do they know that the guy who digs Wallace today doesn’t try to resurrect Hitler tomorrow? Or the guy who is mildly disturbed at pollution doesn’t decide to go to General Motors and shit on the guy’s desk? You can become a fanatic if you had the time. The whole thing is time. That is, I think, one reason rich kids tend to be fanatic about politics: they have time. Time, that’s the important thing.

  It isn’t that the average working guy is dumb. He’s tired, that’s all. I picked up a book on chess one time. That thing laid in the drawer for two or three weeks, you’re too tired. During the weekends you want to take your kids out. You don’t want to sit there and the kid comes up: “Daddy, can I go to the park?” You got your nose in a book? Forget it.

  I know a guy fifty-seven years old. Know what he tells me? “Mike, I’m old and tired all the time.” The
first thing happens at work: When the arms start moving, the brain stops. I punch in about ten minutes to seven in the morning. I say hello to a couple of guys I like, I kid around with them. One guy says good morning to you and you say good morning. To another guy you say fuck you. The guy you say fuck you to is your friend.

  I put on my hard hat, change into my safety shoes, put on my safety glasses, go to the bonderizer. It’s the thing I work on. They rake the metal, they wash it, they dip it in a paint solution, and we take it off. Put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off, put it on, take it off...

  I say hello to everybody but my boss. At seven it starts. My arms get tired about the first half-hour. After that, they don’t get tired any more until maybe the last half-hour at the end of the day. I work from seven to three thirty. My arms are tired at seven thirty and they’re tired at three o‘clock. I hope to God I never get broke in, because I always want my arms to be tired at seven thirty and three o’clock. [Laughs.] ’Cause that’s when I know that there’s a beginning and there’s an end. That I’m not brainwashed. In between, I don’t even try to think.

  If I were to put you in front of a dock and I pulled up a skid in front of you with fifty hundred-pound sacks of potatoes and there are fifty more skids just like it, and this is what you’re gonna do all day, what would you think about—potatoes? Unless a guy’s a nut, he never thinks about work or talks about it. Maybe about baseball or about getting drunk the other night or he got laid or he didn’t get laid. I’d say one out of a hundred will actually get excited about work.

  Why is it that the communists always say they’re for the workingman, and as soon as they set up a country, you got guys singing to tractors? They’re singing about how they love the factory. That’s where I couldn’t buy communism. It’s the intellectuals’ utopia, not mine. I cannot picture myself singing to a tractor, I just can’t. [Laughs.] Or singing to steel. [Singsongs.] Oh whoop-dee-doo, I’m at the bonderizer, oh how I love this heavy steel. No thanks. Never hoppen.

  Oh yeah, I daydream. I fantasize about a sexy blonde in Miami who’s got my union dues. [Laughs.] I think of the head of the union the way I think of the head of my company. Living it up. I think of February in Miami. Warm weather, a place to lay in. When I hear a college kid say, “I’m oppressed,” I don’t believe him. You know what I’d like to do for one year? Live like a college kid. Just for one year. I’d love to. Wow! [Whispers] Wow! Sports car! Marijuana! [Laughs.] Wild, sexy broads. I’d love that, hell yes, I would.

  Somebody has to do this work. If my kid ever goes to college, I just want him to have a little respect, to realize that his dad is one of those somebodies. This is why even on—[muses] yeah, I guess, sure—on the black thing... [Sighs heavily.] I can’t really hate the colored fella that’s working with me all day. The black intellectual I got no respect for. The white intellectual I got no use for. I got no use for the black militant who’s gonna scream three hundred years of slavery to me while I’m busting my ass. You know what I mean? [Laughs.] I have one answer for that guy: go see Rockefeller. See Harriman. Don’t bother me. We’re in the same cotton field. So just don’t bug me. [Laughs.]

  After work I usually stop off at a tavern. Cold beer. Cold beer right away. When I was single, I used to go into hillbilly bars, get in a lot of brawls. Just to explode. I got a thing on my arm here [indicates scar]. I got slapped with a bicycle chain. Oh, wow! [Softly.] Mmm. I’m getting older. [Laughs.] I don’t explode as much. You might say I’m broken in. [Quickly.] No, I’ll never be broken in. [Sighs.] When you get a little older, you exchange the words. When you’re younger, you exchange the blows.

  When I get home, I argue with my wife a little bit. Turn on TV, get mad at the news. [Laughs.] I don’t even watch the news that much. I watch Jackie Gleason. I look for any alternative to the ten o‘clock news. I don’t want to go to bed angry. Don’t hit a man with anything heavy at five o’clock. He just can’t be bothered. This is his time to relax. The heaviest thing he wants is what his wife has to tell him.

  When I come home, know what I do for the first twenty minutes? Fake it. I put on a smile. I got a kid three years old. Sometimes she says, “Daddy, where’ve you been?” I say, “Work.” I could have told her I’d been in Disneyland. What’s work to a three-year-old kid? If I feel bad, I can’t take it out on the kids. Kids are born innocent of everything but birth. You can’t take it out on your wife either. This is why you go to a tavern. You want to release it there rather than do it at home. What does an actor do when he’s got a bad movie? I got a bad movie every day.

  I don’t even need the alarm clock to get up in the morning. I can go out drinking all night, fall asleep at four, and bam! I’m up at six—no matter what I do. [Laughs.] It’s a pseudo-death, more or less. Your whole system is paralyzed and you give all the appearance of death. It’s an ingrown clock. It’s a thing you just get used to. The hours differ. It depends. Sometimes my wife wants to do something crazy like play five hundred rummy or put a puzzle together. It could be midnight, could be ten o clock, could be nine thirty.

  What do you do weekends

  Drink beer, read a book. See that one? Violence in America. It’s one of them studies from Washington. One of them committees they’re always appointing. A thing like that I read on a weekend. But during the weekdays gee...I just thought about it. I don’t do that much reading from Monday through Friday. Unless it’s a horny book. I’ll read it at work and go home and do my homework. [Laughs.] That’s what the guys at the plant call it—homework. [Laughs.] Sometimes my wife works on Saturday and I drink beer at the tavern.

  I went out drinking with one guy, oh, a long time ago. A college boy. He was working where I work now. Always preaching to me about how you need violence to change the system and all that garbage. We went into a hillbilly joint. Some guy there, I didn’t know him from Adam, he said, “You think you’re smart” I said, “What’s your pleasure?” [Laughs.] He said, “My pleasure’s to kick your ass.” I told him I really can’t be bothered. He said, “What’re you, chicken?” I said, “No, I just don’t want to be bothered.” He came over and said something to me again. I said, “I don’t beat women, drunks, or fools. Now leave me alone.”

  The guy called his brother over. This college boy that was with me, he came nudging my arm, “Mike, let’s get out of here.” I said, “What are you worried about?” [Laughs.] This isn’t unusual. People will bug you. You fend it off as much as you can with your mouth and when you can’t, you punch the guy out.

  It was close to closing time and we stayed. We could have left, but when you go into a place to have a beer and a guy challenges you—if you expect to go in that place again, you don’t leave. If you have to fight the guy, you fight.

  I got just outside the door and one of these guys jumped on me and grabbed me around the neck. I grabbed his arm and flung him against the wall. I grabbed him here [indicates throat], and jiggled his head against the wall quite a few times. He kind of slid down a little bit. This guy who said he was his brother took a swing at me with a garrison belt. He just missed and hit the wall. I’m looking around for my junior Stalin [laughs], who loves violence and everything. He’s gone. Split. [Laughs.] Next day I see him at work. I couldn’t get mad at him, he’s a baby.

  He saw a book in my back pocket one time and he was amazed. He walked up to me and he said, “You read?” I said, “What do you mean, I read?” He said, “All these dummies read the sports pages around here. What are you doing with a book?” I got pissed off at the kid right away. I said, “What do you mean, all these dummies? Don’t knock a man who’s paying somebody else’s way through college.” He was a nineteen-year-old effete snob.

  Yet you want your kid to be an effete snob?

  Yes. I want my kid to look at me and say, “Dad, you’re a nice guy, but you’re a fuckin’ dummy.” Hell yes, I want my kid to tell me that he’s not gonna be like me...

  If I were hiring people to work, I’d try naturally to pay them a decent wage.
I’d try to find out their first names, their last names, keep the company as small as possible, so I could personalize the whole thing. All I would ask a man is a handshake, see you in the morning. No applications, nothing. I wouldn’t be interested in the guy’s past. Nobody ever checks the pedigree on a mule, do they? But they do on a man. Can you picture walking up to a mule and saying, “I’d like to know who his granddaddy was?”

  I’d like to run a combination bookstore and tavern. [Laughs.] I would like to have a place where college kids came and a steelworker could sit down and talk. Where a workingman could not be ashamed of Walt Whitman and where a college professor could not be ashamed that he painted his house over the weekend.

  If a carpenter built a cabin for poets, I think the least the poets owe the carpenter is just three or four one-liners on the wall. A little plaque: Though we labor with our minds, this place we can relax in was built by someone who can work with his hands. And his work is as noble as ours. I think the poet owes something to the guy who builds the cabin for him.

  I don’t think of Monday. You know what I’m thinking about on Sunday night? Next Sunday. If you work real hard, you think of a perpetual vacation. Not perpetual sleep...What do I think of on a Sunday night? Lord, I wish the fuck I could do something else for a living.

  I don’t know who the guy is who said there is nothing sweeter than an unfinished symphony. Like an unfinished painting and an unfinished poem. If he creates this thing one day—let’s say, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. It took him a long time to do this, this beautiful work of art. But what if he had to create this Sistine Chapel a thousand times a year? Don’t you think that would even dull Michelangelo’s mind? Or if da Vinci had to draw his anatomical charts thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, eighty, ninety, a hundred times a day? Don’t you think that would even bore da Vinci?