Beyond Nostalgia

by Winton, Tom

  Just like it had become for so many other American mothers, it was mandatory for Maddy to supplement her husband's degenerating income. Though not at gunpoint, she was nevertheless forced to abandon her children for a job. Corporate America was shaving labor's income and benefits while pushing the already gouged prices of goods and services through the roof. Most men could no longer support their families, and why? So that instead of making just a handsome profit, corporate stocks would skyrocket. Greed ran rampant. Wealthy shareholders became disgustingly richer at the expense of the family unit. They literally smashed that unit. The higher the Dow went, the lower the quality of life became for working families. The way I saw it, Corporate America was responsible for the breakdown of the family and for two generations labeled X and Y. And one day, down the road, I would write about just that

  Not many working women had any energy left for their children during the few remaining waking-hours left at day's end. But somehow, at the end of each and every exhausting day, Maddy always managed to squeeze in some quality time with the kids. Though they did not survive unscathed - I could sometimes see in them the scars of their neglected generation - Maddy's super-human efforts did make a lasting, positive impression on them both. After work, she'd come home, put on dinner, turn on the washer and dryer, do dishes and make lunches for the next day. She went non-stop from sun-up until nine at night. And after all that she'd push even more to give Trevor and Dawn a bit of the matriarchal attention they deserved and so badly needed. Maddy Frances was, and still is, one class mother.

  I'll be the first to admit I wasn't half the parent she was. Maybe I can blame it on my own haphazard upbringing, the lack of time and interest my father had for me as a child, the frequent debilitating depressions passed on to me by my sick mother. Hell, I simply wasn't happy with my own life, the endless string of meaningless, low-paying jobs, the ever-present financial struggle and, of course, Theresa's ghost. Whatever the reasons, I often wallowed in self pity. Of course I was never abusive to the kids or anything like that, but I certainly was no little league dad either. It's a crying shame I didn't realize just how much I loved my kids when they were growing up. But, hell, I'm not alone. After all, don't most folks make much better grandparents than they were parents?

  Like I said, I had a heck of a time holding onto a job during those years. I really went through them. It would take all my fingers, and yours, to count the payrolls I'd been on during those twenty years. Rarely did I keep a job for a year or more. Paid vacations were a rarity for me. I sure did it all: sold furniture, doors, time-shares and kitchen cabinets. I painted houses, drove a hack, and did some wood butchering on a couple of occasions. One time, for a few months, I planted new water pipes beneath the Florida sand and I fixed the old ones when they burst. Those are just some of the jobs I'd had but did not hold. Always having a low tolerance for boredom, I found it in quantity everywhere I worked. I wouldn't find out what I truly wanted to do until I hit my forties. But, despite all the earlier job-jumping, Maddy Frances still hung in with me. She looked past this deficiency and all my other quirks. All she saw was the complete package and she loved it deeply.

  The longest I ever lasted on a gig was the four years I carried mail at the Fort Lauderdale Post Office. I might have actually kept that job, even handled the monotony, had it not been for all the harassment. Somehow I managed to eat whatever crow the postal supervisors laid on me during the ninety-day probationary period but after that charade ended, I went right back to my old ways. Like I said before, I never gave anybody grief without reason, so I sure as heck wouldn't take any. Not when I'm right. Never. Justice would always prevail, the good guys would always win, or so I thought. Unfortunately, all that went out the window along with the last John Wayne movie. Ahhh, The Duke! If he was still around today, he'd be enraged by the lack of integrity that has devoured the spirit of his country.

  A prime example of this lack of integrity is the U.S. Postal Service. If you're like me, and can't put up with constant, unprovoked, unwarranted abuse, you'll never cut it working for the P.O. Don't even bother taking the exam. It's not worth all the anguish. Believe me, I know!

  Management constantly broke my shoes because I openly expressed my opinions. Rat-a-tat-tat – disciplinary letters-of-warning poured into my personnel file. I fought every single one of these bogus reprimands through the grievance procedure or by claiming discrimination to E.E.O. And I won every time. But still, the letters kept coming. Even after I was awarded an accommodation letter for being the only carrier to show up when a tropical storm ripped through south Florida, they still harped on me. The award meant nothing. What mattered to them was that I kept on fighting for my rights, and nothing more. They were hell bent on making an example out of me for rocking their leaky boat. Boy, did I make that old tub pitch and roll, but nobody else would.

  Most of the carriers I worked with, male and female, were afraid to fight. Gutless is the way I saw them, constantly backing down from management. Always doing more than the union contract required for fear of being suspended without pay. But they loved to see me lose it, because when I fought for myself, I was also doing battle for them.

  Eventually I got sick and tired of all the fighting, stress, anger and hate. And one morning, after four years of martyrdom, I took what would be my last stand, out on the loading dock.

  It was mid-January and, as always, the snowbirds had flocked to their South Florida enclaves for the season. My route was part of that row of towering upscale condos that block the ocean view as well as beach access for everybody else along 'Lauderdale by the Sea'. The mail volume on my route, City Route #19, quadrupled in season. All the winter people had their mail forwarded from wherever they had come from. Well, talk about mail! Every last one of these beautiful people amassed half a forest worth of paper by season's end. If they had saved all the mail they received during the four months, they roosted in Florida, each snowbird could have cram-filled a Dempsey Dumpster. Home town newspapers, Wall Street Journal’s, Barron's, magazines, letters, junk mail, packages, annual reports and, of course, their endless streams of misbegotten dividend checks. I had it all on that ill-fated Monday morning.

  It wasn't the first time that Sinko, a 204-B (supervisor in training), his ever-present Masonite clipboard in hand, counted my mail as I humped it from the loading dock to my jeep. No little guy, Sinko was about six-two and two-sixty. Loose flesh sagged from his chins, as well as the gut that obscured his belt, but still, he was a powerful man. His sleeves, always rolled above his elbows for effect, exposed two beefy forearms and impossibly thick wrists. His chest was thick also and he had shoulders wide as a door. One of those naturally large-muscled men who their entire lives like to throw their size around, that coarse, obnoxious type that, because of their size, never see any need for diplomacy or politeness.

  Once again he tried it with me that Monday. As if I was dirt, he snarled, "Cassidy, you need to be back by four o'clock. Don't want no overtime today."

  "Whoooah, hold on. You better check your arithmetic. I've got about twenty-seven feet of mail here, that works out to somewhere around ten and a half hours."

  "Sorry, pal," he said in his taunting, merry way. "We gotta cut down on OT. Just be back by four or you know what'll happen." He pulled his disproportionately small mouth into a curly belligerent smile and leaned his ruddy mug right back into my face. It wasn't the first time that he'd gotten close enough with his corn-kernel teeth so that I could smell his foul rhino-breath.

  I stepped back, for a breath of fresh air, not because he intimidated me. That was when it dawned on me that I'd better check him out. "How many feet of mail you got me down for, there, boss?" I asked, drenching the last word with cynicism as I leaned toward his clipboard. His handwriting was as ugly as his face, illegible as a doctor's scribble.

  "Hey, don't strain your eyes. Let me help you here, Sparky," he said, jamming his fraudulent documentation to my face so close I could barely read it. It was blurry but I just
could make out what it said next to route 19 and my name. Just as I suspected, he had falsified my mail count. He'd written down nineteen feet, shorting me credit for eight, disallowing a full third of the delivery time I was entitled to. Seeing this now, right in my face, my demeanor swung from perturbed to livid in a nanosecond.

  I smacked his goddam clipboard away from my face, sending it airborne. All his papers dispersed mid-flight, floating to the ground like so many 8 1/2 x 11 yellow autumn leaves.

  Now, I hadn't locked asses with anyone since I was twenty-two years old, but I knew that was exactly where this was heading. For four years I'd taken their bullshit, fought paper with paper. Now I'd had it. I was sick of it all. I felt my hands take on an adrenaline tremble. My voice betrayed me too. It strained and cracked when I spoke, just like it had when I was a kid back on the block, during the heated exchange of words before a fight. My fists balled at my sides, trying hard to squeeze the shake out of them, I leaned into Sinko's big face.

  "Look, m-mutha f-f-fucka … " I was so hot that my diction (splintered as it was) returned from the streets of Queens. You can take the boy out of the city, but … blah, blah, blah. Although I'll never completely shake my accent, it had diluted somewhat over the years. I'd been making a concentrated effort to roll my r's. Freak that shit now! " … YOU DINK THIS IS SOME KIND A FFFUCKIN' GAME AW WHAT, SINKO? I GOT A WIFE AND KIDS TO SSSUPPAUGHT. WHO DA FUCK YOU DINK YAW SETTIN' UP HEAH?"

  My furious bellows bounced back and forth off the loading dock's three surrounding block walls like jai alai balls at a fronton.

  "Keep your voice down, Cassidy," Sinko snarled, "or I'll drag your ass into the old man's office right now."

  "YOU AIN'T DRAGGIN' NOBODY, ASSHOLE!"

  I'd had it. Thirty-three years old or not, there's some crap that can be settled only one way. I shoved the bastard hard as I could with the heels of my hands. More like two synchronized snappy jabs than a push.

  Sinko stumbled back a few feet, regaining his balance just as one of the big steel doors nudged open a bit. It was Anton Ford, another suck-up 204B. He stuck just his head out to see what all the commotion was about.

  I spun back at Sinko just in time to see him telegraph a right roundhouse at my head. Powerful maybe, but slow as hell. I parried the punch with my left and quickly rotated my torso, putting all I could muster, shoulder and all, behind a damned good right cross. That punch was propelled by four years of abuse, frustration and anger. I nailed him hard on the left temple, so hard there was a sickening thump like a ball bat smashing a gourd.

  The fat man went down, like right now, as if somebody on horseback had lassoed his ankles mid-gallop.

  Then, Ford came running over, screeching and hollering like his usual bad-assed self. But, as quick as he started, he shit-canned his designs to brow-beat me. When he got close enough to see the rage still screaming from my eyes, he realized he'd really pushed his luck. And this time his luck had run out.

  I went completely nutso on him, slamming him time and again with a flurry of quicker-than-the-eye rights and lefts. A blur of jabs and hooks that, had he had the time to think about it, he never would have dreamed some honky was capable of. Swear to God, when he went down, he landed right on top of Sinko who was still out cold. It was then that I realized the severity of my actions. Right or wrong, I knew I was in deep shit. I panicked, leapt off the dock and beat heels across the parking lot to my van.

  But there was no running from this. As each minute ticked by, I grew more panicky. I knew I was a lot of things but a fugitive was not one of them. An hour and twenty minutes later, I turned myself in to the Broward County Sheriff's Department.

  For the next six weeks, I sweated the repercussions the postal service might take. I'd committed a genuine, certifiable federal offense. They could have put me away for a long, long time. But they elected not to. They didn't prosecute. And I knew exactly why they didn't. Because of the unwanted publicity such a decision would surely generate. Publicity, plus the fact that if I had to fight this thing, they knew I'd come back with both barrels blasting. Shoot, I had plenty of ammunition. They knew I'd kept notes, documentation, on scraps of paper. Dates, times, names and particulars of all the innumerable harassment episodes they had put me through. To this day I resent not going after them legally before I'd reached my breaking point. Not that I'm in any way sorry for decking those antagonists, that was very satisfying, but had I sought legal revenge, I just might have collected some serious compensation for all they had put me through. But there's no use in thinking about that now. Besides, if it happened all over again, even though I'm now forty-seven, I'd probably handle it the same way.

  Ultimately, the postal service fired me. That was all they did. But, for all those weeks, I sure sweated. Only one thing, no, two things, that happened during this period made me feel I had any chance of getting off the hook. The two post office shootings. Yup, twice during those six weeks, there were post office killings in two different states - Arizona and New Jersey, I think. Regardless, in both cases, a distraught postal worker opened fire on his supervisors. When the smoke cleared, three people were dead. Though I didn't condone what they did, I knew firsthand what had driven those workers to such desperate measures.

  Of course Maddy stood by me through the whole ordeal, constantly reassuring me (though she really didn't know) that everything would turn out OK. That time in a federal pen was highly unlikely. She backed me on everything I did, always cushioning the predicaments I got myself into with her indefatigable optimism. She helped soften all my problems except my hidden dark secret. Oh, she knew about Theresa, of course. When we were dating, I told Maddy all about our relationship. But, in the ensuing years, she had no idea just how strong my feelings remained for that phantom girl, how often I thought of her, how I still yearned for her. I felt awfully guilty about that, but awfully incomplete without Theresa also. She just wouldn't go away. Sure, as the years passed, I got caught up in the demands of everyday life and thought of Theresa Wayman maybe a tad less often. But that heavy sense of loss, and the intensity of my longings for her, never diminished. I felt like an adulterer even though over all those years I'd managed to never once cheat on Maddy Frances. I fought off more than a few opportunities for what some might view as recreational sex, non-committal flings where the participants rationalize that none of the unknowing parties will be hurt by what they don't know.

  Over the years, I met my fair-share of flirtatious women, acquaintances as well as co-workers. During those periods when I was in sales, I even had some customers come on to me. Several ladies actually followed up the sale we'd consummated with a card, or a note of thanks, for helping them. Riiiiight! Although they had surely noticed my wedding band, those thank yous always included the sender's phone number. A few of them went so far as to call me at work. One told me, "I just wanted to tell you the bed I bought from you last month is well broken-in now and verrry comfortable. As a matter of fact, I'm in it right now!" And then there were the passes made by female co-workers, most of the time subtle invites to lunch or for happy hour drinks. But I always refrained. Each time I backed away, gently. Who knows, maybe I actually learned something that ill-fated night back in 1968. Maybe when I walked out that squalid room in the Flushing Projects something positive actually came with me.

  That doesn't mean remaining monogamous was always easy. I know! I don't want to start any gender wars here, but a man is a different animal than a woman. Mother Nature must be one staunch feminist because she's damned men with a ceaseless desire to screw everything that walks. The urge may quell somewhat with age, but if you keep yourself in reasonably good shape that instinctive drive never completely dies. Some people feel it's outright unnatural to fight off such urges but our society trains males, from their crib days on, that one partner is all you get. And, difficult as it was, my conscience remained congruent with that ingrained belief. For more than two decades my record remained unblemished.

  But the biggest test imaginable
was yet to come.

  Chapter 22

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question usually posed to children. But until I crossed, ever so warily, that gloomy entrance to middle-agedness, that threshold with no welcome mat, I hadn't a clue as to what I wanted to do with my directionless life. Nothing I was qualified for interested me. My favorite aphorism was 'I'm too serious about living to be too serious about work'. I thought I'd always feel that way. But about the time I began reading at arm's length, and needed to spring for my first pair of reading glasses (four bucks at a Pompano flea market), it became crystal clear what I wanted to do with my life, whatever was left of it anyway. I wanted to write.

  I finally realized that the creative well within me, no matter how shallow it might be, was the reason I never held a job for long. As necessary as the act is, soulless work ruins the best part of a man. It's an unconscionable waste of time. And that's why I never stuck with anything that my heart wasn't into. Always I was looking for something with substance. I needed everything or nothing at all. I had now come to realize that selling furniture, laying water mains, and everything else I'd sold the best part of my life for, had done nothing to satisfy my romantic or creative side.