Donald Westlake: The Ax

Technically the computer belongs to the whole family, but it's really Billy's, and a year ago it moved into his room in acknowledgment of that truth. I'd made it a gift to the family at Christmas, 1994, the year before I was downsized, when we were still financially okay. The money was going out, in mortgage and taxes and schooling and food and gasoline and clothing, plus all of those things we hardly thought about but no longer spend money on, like rental tapes of movies, but the money was also coming in, adequately to cover expenses, the ebb and flow nicely attuned, like the inhale and exhale of a healthy body. So buying a computer for the family was extravagant, but not that extravagant.

Charles Dickens said it, in David Copperfield: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." He didn't say what the result was when you dropped annual income to zero, but he didn't have to.

The point is, the computer entered our lives when we thought we could afford our lives, and is still with us, in Billy's room, on the wheeled metal table purchased for it at the same time. His room is small, and crammed chock-a-block, as teenage boys' rooms tend to be, but oddly enough it's neater now that the computer and its table have been inserted there. Or maybe he just hasn't been able to buy so many things recently, hasn't been able to add to the pile of his possessions.

Well. When all this began, in February, almost three months ago, my second step, even before I had any idea what the plan was or that there would be a plan, was to go into Billy's room and sit down in front of the family computer and, from the wealth of available typefaces and sizes, create letterhead stationery. (My first step had been to take a post office box in a town twenty-some miles from home.)

B. D. INDUSTRIAL PAPERS

P.O. BOX 2900

WILDBURY, CT 06899

The post office box was actually 29, but I added the zeroes to make both the local post office and, by extension, B. D. Industrial Papers, seem more imposing. I made a joke of it with the clerk in the post office, who found the idea amusing and said she'd have no trouble putting 2900 mail into box 29, since in fact there were only sixty-eight boxes in the entire branch.

My next step was to write my ad, basing it on the ads I'd been circling in the help wanted sections for over a year:

MANUFACTURING

LINE MANAGER

Northeast paper mill w/specialty in polymers, capacitor tissue & film require individual w/strong specialty paper bkgrnd to head new product line mnfctring on rebuilt electrolytic capacitor paper machine. Minimum 5 yrs mill exp. Competitive salary, benefits. Send resume & salary history to Box 2900, Wildbury, CT 06899

Then I phoned the classified ad department of The Paperman, which it seemed to me usually carried more such advertising than Pulp, and arranged for them to run my ad, which would cost forty-five dollars to appear in three consecutive monthly issues. The woman I spoke to said there would be no problem if I paid with a money order rather than a company check, after I explained we were a small mill with little experience of hiring outside our own geographic area and would be paying for this ad from petty cash.

Then I went back to the Wildbury post office and bought the money order and signed it Benj Dockery III, with a very sloppy handwriting unlike my own. The copy machine at the drugstore gave me fine letterhead stationery from the original I'd put together at the computer, and I used it to send the wording of the ad plus the money order to The Paperman. Benj Dockery III signed the letter as well.

The ad ran first in the March issue, out the last week in February, and by the first Monday in March, when I drove up to check, box 2900 had received ninety-seven replies. "Those zeroes sure attract a lot of mail!" the postal clerk said, and we laughed about it together, and I explained that I was trying to start up a trade journal about trade journals. This was the response to an ad I'd run in selected magazines.

(I didn't want anyone to suspect I might be engaged in some sort of mail fraud, and start an inspector after me. What I was doing was probably not illegal, but it could be extremely embarrassing, and harmful to my employment chances, if it got out.)

"Well, I wish you luck with it," she said, and I thanked her, and she said, "More and more people are becoming their own boss these days, have you noticed?" and I agreed.

That first flush of mail soon dropped off to a steady trickle, kicking up again in the few days after each issue of The Paperman was published. The May issue, the last one with my ad, is still current, and I've had two hundred thirty-one responses so far. I'm guessing there'll be another ten to fifteen, and that will be the end of it.

It was fascinating to study those resumes, to see how much fear was in them, and how much gallantry, and how much grim determination. And also how much cocksure bloated self-important ignorance; those people are not competition, not for anybody, not until they've been roughened up by life a bit more.

Back in the transition period at Halcyon, when part of my workday was to sit through ongoing training in how to be unemployed, one of our advisors, a stern but hearty woman whose job it was to give us pep talks laced with harsh reality, told us a story, which she swore was true. "Some years ago," she said, "there was a downturn in the aerospace industry, and a lot of bright engineers found themselves unemployed. A group of five of them in Seattle decided to come up with some innovation of their own, something marketable, and after a lot of brainstorming and memos they did create a new variant on a kind of game, something that had real potential. But the idea needed seed money, and they didn't have any. Already in Seattle they'd learned that, when everybody is trying to sell the second car, nobody wants to buy one. They tried every contact they could think of, relatives, friends, former co-workers, and finally they were put together with a group of venture capitalists based in Germany. These financiers liked the engineers' idea, and were very close to agreement on funding them. All that was left was a face-to-face meeting. The financiers, three of them, flew from Munich to New York, and the engineers flew from Seattle to New York, and they met in a hotel suite there, where everyone got along very well. It looked as though the engineers were going to get the money and start their company and be saved. And then one of the financiers said, 'Let me just get the schedule clear. When we give you this money, what are you going to do to begin with?' And one of the engineers said, 'Well, the first thing we're going to do is pay our back salary.' And that was the end of it. The engineers went back to Seattle empty-handed, as well as empty-headed. Because," this counselor told us, "they didn't know the one thing you have to know if you're going to survive and prosper. And that one thing is: Nobody invited you. Nobody owes you a thing. A job and a salary and a nice middle-class life are not a right, they're a prize, and you have to fight for them. You have to keep reminding yourself, 'They don't need me, I need them.' You have no demands. You have your skills, and you have your willingness to work, and you have the brains and the talents and the personality God gave you, and it's up to you to make it happen."

I have taken that message to heart, perhaps more than she intended. And I have seen the resumes written by the people who did not have the benefit of her breed of advice, the people who still think like that benighted engineer: The world owes me a salary.