Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

The Carl Henry office was in a building just off Union Square, on 18th, a small, simple establishment. The office manager, Mickey Kearney from Brooklyn, presided over Hilary of the Bronx and Doris from Queens, a pair of cheerless middle-aged clerk/secretaries. In the afternoon he was my boss too. The heavily pomaded hair he combed back in wiry furrows as if to emphasize his passion for order. Carl Henry had his private office at the back, in a large room with soot-grayed windows and a big desk and a comfortable chair that tilted back. I wondered if the cigars in his mouth were his own, or some Havana beauties. He spent all his time on the phone or writing in a large leather-bound journal. Sometimes he fell asleep at his desk. The women raised their eyebrows and grinned at me when we heard him snore. Doris gestured with her thumb as if hitch-hiking to the back office, while Hilary mimed falling asleep. “All right,” said Mickey, jerking at his lapels. “You’ve heard of work? There’s work to do here.” He was a weekend lush, kind of dim and borderline. Every afternoon he came over to my station, surveyed the outgoing orders, took his glasses off, put them back on, looked at his watch, and said, “You should have these wrapped up by 3:30.” My station reeked all afternoon of the lunchtime beer off his breath. I usually beat his deadline.

My performance was good enough that Carl Henry Tobacco decided to hire me full time for the summer. They were doing a massive promotional mailing, and needed me in the morning to fold the flyers and stuff the envelopes. I took it as a rite of passage. Riding the subway to work, rather than to school, was an empowerment. I felt grown up, part of New York’s working population, a workingman among working people. I liked arriving in the morning, settling into the job with Hilary and Doris, each of us from a different borough. I liked the feel of the flat bone tool they gave me to press across the folded flyers, to make the creases sharp. My big problem in the mornings was that after an initial surge of efficient folding and stuffing, my forehead would hit the desk. I was helplessly sleepy. It was no wonder. Most nights in bed I stayed up listening to Symphony Sid. Jazz was my passion. Jazz was my spiritual foundation. “Late Night With Symphony Sid,” on WABC or WMCA or WJZ when he broadcast from Birdland, was the cathedral from which the avatars of my spiritual yearning revealed the truth.

After a couple of weeks of my nodding off on the job, Mickey Kearney finally confronted me. He shook me awake. He didn’t seem to enjoy what he was about to do.

“I’m going to have to fire you, son.” I don’t think he’d ever learned my name.

I brought myself back to full consciousness. “But no. I get the packages all wrapped in the afternoon.” I hated the whine in my voice. “And to the Post Office on time.”

“You can’t be falling asleep on the job, son. Not here in New York City.” He took off his glasses and wiped his sleeve across his eyes. “I’m afraid you get fired because of that.”

Doris and Hilary communicated with each other with raised eyebrows and shakes of the head. They looked almost gleeful. I bet they ratted on me. Mickey might never have noticed from his cubicle. I felt nasty and stupid and dirty. I hadn’t planned on losing this job. I was saving to buy a camera.

“I’m really sorry. Can’t I…I just…”

“I’m sorry too, son.”

I hated that he called me son. He knocked on Carl Henry’s door, and entered to share his decision with Mr. Henry. The women looked at me, shook their heads, and whispered, “Bad break, huh. Too bad. Sorry.”

Mickey came out, straightening his tie. “Mr. Henry wants to talk to you, son.” He pointed at the door he’d left open, pulled a comb from his pocket, and left the office for the bathroom, rearranging the furrows in his hair.

Mr. Henry leaned back in his chair, his cigar between thumb and forefinger. He looked even smaller without his hat on, without the cigar in his mouth, behind his big desk. He scrutinized me for some long moments, and I stared at the tobacco stain on his lower lip. I was waiting for the lecture.

“I’m going to give you a raise, Steven,” Carl Henry said. He replaced the cigar in his mouth.

My heart stopped, or jumped, or I don’t know what. I had to hold myself down in the chair. I didn’t know which way to look. He actually lit his cigar. Everything in life, I suddenly learned, is unexpected. Everything’s the opposite of what makes sense.

“You fall asleep at the desk. Folding and stuffing is a tedious job. You probably don’t get enough sleep at night. You’re young.” He blew out a succession of the most perfect smoke rings I had ever seen.

“That’s all,” he said.

“Thank you. Thank you, sir.”

Back in the office I went to my shipping station to get ready for the afternoon. Neither Hilary nor Doris looked at me. Hilary was shuffling orders that the mailman had just brought. Doris was on the phone. Mickey Kearney looked a little neater after the bathroom. He glanced at me, then turned his back and re-entered his cubicle. I started to cut some corrugated to be ready after lunch break. After that strange turn in my working career, when my pittance rose from seventy-five cents to a buck an hour, I never again fell asleep on the job.

I noticed the first time we entered the mess hall that everyone wore a hard hat. If it was lunch I might have explained that the day wasn’t yet over, and they all had to go back into the woods; but here they were at the dinner table, their workday was over. They relaxed otherwise, but still wore their yellow hard hats. This was our first evening at the training camp, our first mess, so I assumed the mystery would explain itself.

Jingle and I picked up plates off the line — potted beef, roast potatoes, succotash, and the wedge of salad with a wedge of tomato, under pink dressing. We sat ourselves at the long table next to my buddy, Paul. He had arrived a day earlier and was wearing his hard hat. I hadn’t been issued mine. I was anxious to get the scoop on the camp so I threw a lot of questions at Paul. He looked a little apprehensive as he whispered in response. Even his whisper boomed out. I went on talking. Paul didn’t want to talk, which was not like him. I’ve never been struck by lightning, so I don’t know how it feels, but this was a shock that rocketed down my spine, launching chunks of beef from my mouth across the table.

“Less talking, more eating.” I heard a woman’s voice dredged up from some ancient sump of female power. She had cracked my skull with her iron ladle. “Less talking, more eating.”

Jingle had turned to see who was giving this order and I could tell by her look of curiosity and fear that someone formidable was behind me. I rotated in my seat on the pillar of pain that throbbed from the crown of my head to my heels.

“Less talking, more eating.” Pinky lifted her ladle again. In her other arm she cradled the pot from which she was doling seconds. She was a small woman, with a big presence.

“That really hurts.” I whispered the obvious to Paul. I lifted my arm just in time and caught her wrist to make her drop the ladle with a twist I attribute to some martial arts training.

“Less talking more eating,” she said with no less authority.

Pinky had been cook in many logging camps before she came to work for the Forest Service. The crews in those camps moved double time through the woods, running as they topped, felled, and trimmed trees, set choker, loaded trucks. Her job was to rush them through lunch. “Less talking, more eating,” was a habit from her days in commercial logging. I picked up the ladle, handed it to her. She wiped it on her apron, served me another scoop of potted beef with carrots.