I told him. “And that was in the shade.”
When we finished comparing complaints we’d clink our beer glasses together and agree that we were glad to be out of the Army.
“And how did you get out of the army so soon?” John asked. “I thought you were a Regular Asshole.”
I answered by holding up my still stiff hand.
“You probably got that by punching out a wall.”
John was close to the truth.
I had another friend at Henry’s named Bill. Bill was about to enter his senior year at college. And he wasn’t going to any “just pretend you’re awake and you’ll pass” community college. No sir; Bill was in Rutgers. He was always asking me what I had planned to do with the rest of my life. He urged me to go to college, get a degree, get a good job. But I was twenty-one years old and I didn’t want to be a college freshman at twenty-one. Besides, I had read about the anti-war rallies at colleges, and I didn’t want to be spit on by a bunch of pimply-faced, pot smoking, draft dodging, hippie babies. Not that Bill was one of those, of course. No, I told him, I already had enough of an education. “I’ve seen more and done more than you or any of your college cronies will ever see or do.”
Bill never talked much about the war. Being a non-military, college-type person he had probably heard only the worst about returning vets. Maybe he was afraid the wrong words from him would set me off on a wild bottle throwing, chair smashing tangent. But one late night at Henry’s Bar he did ask me how I was wounded.
I looked at my hand, then at my near empty glass of Rheingold and said, “You don’t wanna know.”
He never asked me again.
John lived in an apartment not far from my house. There were no apartment buildings in Orange more than four stories tall, so on Lincoln Avenue where John lived, all the apartment buildings were made by the same cookie cutter. During the steamy days of summer I would’ve much rather gone to the shore, but I didn’t have a car. My dad had a ‘61 Chevy two-door sedan which he used only to transport himself to and from his job. When the original paint color faded from years of neglect, my dad painted the car with gray house paint, using a very stiff brush. Each year the painting procedure remained the same, but the color changed. I guess my dad was experimenting to see which house paint would best adhere to a large metal object that was left out in every weather extreme. Because of the horrendous current color (much faded Forest Green) and the fact that the car emitted three different colors of smoke, depending on the time of day, I refused to drive the car even when it was offered to me.
John had a car; a nice Pinto. Unfortunately, John’s work schedule didn’t allow him to take enough time off to go down to the shore. John was a cashier at Shop-Rite, working a lot of nights and weekends. But the good part was that he had a lot of free afternoons. It was the hot and cloudless afternoons that I’d visit John and we’d go up to tar beach. We’d split a case of beer and talk about the good ol’ days: high school, the army, German and Vietnamese girls, gonorrhea, beer, malt liquor.
I laughed and said, “Remember the time we were throwing crab apples at cars and one guy stopped his car and chased us through someone’s yard and we all got caught in the clothes line?”
John laughed too and said, “Remember the time we went to Staten Island and we got drunk and threw up in Bill’s mother’s car?”
The roof of John’s apartment building was the greatest place in the world. I never wanted those days to end. I remember standing on a milk crate, peeing into the parking lot, and listening to John talk about his future, where he wanted to go, what he wanted to do. He had met a girl at work, Cornelia Birdwell, and it was with her he was planning a future.
“Cornelia?” I said, not trying to hide my amusement. “What do you call her, Corny?”
John responded seriously. “No, she doesn’t like her first name, so everybody calls her Birdie.”
“Birdie? Well, why don’t you bring her up here and see if she can fly?”
I was a little surprised that John had had any plans for the future, since my future plans only went as far as the next can of beer.
By the end of summer it was clear I would soon be out of money. My dad, up to that point, was understanding about my wanting to stay unemployed. I had been through an ordeal, or so he thought. But now we both knew I had to get my ass out of the house and start contributing to the household in particular, and to society in general.
My dad stopped me one Saturday afternoon as I came staggering home from Henry’s. “You know, Mac, now that your cast is off it’s time you started thinking about a job.”
“I know. I’m thinking about it.” Actually I wasn’t.
“The police and fire department are always looking for new recruits. And of course there’s always the phone company.”
There were those words again. Phone company. I didn’t tell him about the dream I had one night where I climbed a telephone pole and just as I reached the top my spikes broke off and I slid down the entire length of telephone pole, ripping and tearing my face like I was on a giant cheese grater. With all his sugestions, my dad never once suggested I go into his line of work—driving a bus. I don’t think it was because he didn’t think I’d be a good bus driver. I just don’t think he liked his job; in fact, now I realize he hated it. He just didn’t want me to be as miserable in my job as he was in his. He drove the number 44 bus from Orange to Newark. In all the years that I’ve known him to be a bus driver he never came home in a good mood. He rarely had a funny story to tell, and likewise he rarely complained. But when he did complain it was always about the same thing—people. The jerks with twenty dollar bills, the women with baby strollers, the rambunctious teenagers.
Once I overheard him say this at a family party: “It was raining. And this jerk gets on the bus with an umbrella, and as he’s closing it he’s shaking the water all over me. Then he starts yelling at me because the bus was two minutes late.”
With that in mind, I decided I would never, never, never get a job where I had to deal with customers.
Chapter Two
By October I had just about run out of money. I needed a job. I didn’t want one, but I knew my beer money wasn’t going to just drop out of the sky. I went to see my friend John at Shop-Rite. I thought maybe he had some pull and could get me a job stocking shelves. I figured that would be the perfect job. I wouldn’t have to work too hard, plus, I could take advantage of the employee discount. The kind of discount where you hide stuff under your jacket as you’re walking out the back door.
The store manager was sympathetic, and was even impressed by my war stories, but there simply was no position for me.
Well, hell, at least I tried to get a job.
On my way home I stopped at Henry’s and spent half of my last ten bucks on beer. As luck would have it , another friend of mine, Danny, had stopped in to buy a six-pack to go. Danny was a mechanic in a gas station. He told me there was an opening for someone to work five or six hours a night pumping gas and doing light mechnical work such as oil changes and fixing flats. He said his boss needed someone to start right away, and that I was sure to get the job.
I stopped by the gas station two days later and was hired.
I hated that first week at the gas station. But by the second week I hated it even more. I was working from 4PM till closing at 10PM. For the first couple of weeks the owner, Charlie, worked with me to show me how to use the pumps, how to change oil and oil filters, how to use the tire machine, and most importantly, how to keep tract of the money. Because of his tight control on bookkeeping I was never able to pocket even a few measly bucks for myself.
Charlie was big on selling oil, since there was more profit from oil than gas. He wanted me to check each customer’s oil when they came in for gas, even if they didn’t ask for it to be checked. Charlie wanted me to just go ahead and open the hood if the latch was on