Arthur Hailey - Wheels

Predictably, some fell by the way, but a surprising number proved that all a deadbeat needed was a chance. By the time Rollie Knight arrived, much had been learned by employers and employed.

He sat in a waiting room with about forty others, men and women, ranged on rows of chairs. The chairs, like the applicants for jobs, were of assorted shapes and sizes, except that the applicants had a uniformity: all were black. There was little conversation. For Rollie Knight the waiting took an hour. During part of it he dozed off, a habit he had acquired and which helped him, normally, to get through empty days.

When, eventually, he was ushered into an interview cubicle - one of a half dozen lining the waiting area - he was still sleepy and yawned at the interviewer, facing him across a desk.

The interviewer, a middle-aged, chubby black man, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, a sports jacket and dark shirt, but no tie, said amiably, "Gets tiring waiting. My daddy used to say, 'A man grows wearier sitting on his backside than chopping wood.' He had me chop a lot of wood that way."

Rollie Knight looked at the other's hands. "You ain't chopped much lately."

"Well, now," the interviewer said, "you're right. And we've established something else: You're a man who looks at things and thinks. But are you interested in chopping wood, or doing work that's just as hard?"

"I dunno." Rollie was wondering why he had come here at all. Soon they would get to his prison record, and that would be the end of it.

"But you're here because you want a job?" The interviewer glanced at a yellow card which a secretary outside had filled in. "That's correct, isn't it, Mr. Knight?"

Rollie nodded. The "Mr." surprised him. He could not remember when he had last been addressed that way.

"Let's begin by finding out about you." The interviewer drew a printed pad toward him. Part of the new hiring technique was that applicants no longer had to complete a pre-employment questionnaire themselves. In the past, many who could barely read or write were turned away because of inability to do what modern society thought of as a standard function: fill in a form.

They went quickly through the basic questions.

Name: Knight, Rolland Joseph Louis. Age: 29. Address: he gave it, not mentioning that the mean, walk-up room belonged to someone else who had let him share it for a day or two, and that the address might not be good next week if the occupant decided to kick Rollie out. But then a large part of his life had alternated between that kind of accommodation, or a flophouse, or the streets when he had nowhere else.

Parents: He recited the names. The surnames differed since his parents had not married or ever lived together. The interviewer made no comment; it was normal enough. Nor did Rollie add: He knew his father because his mother had told him who he was, and Rollie had a vague impression of a meeting once: a burly man, heavy-jowled and scowling, with a facial scar, who had been neither friendly nor interested in his son. Years ago, Rollie had heard his father was in jail as a lifer. Whether he was still there, or dead, he had no idea. As for his mother, with whom he lived, more or less, until he left home for the streets at age fifteen, he believed she was now in Cleveland or Chicago.

He had not seen or heard from her for several years.

Schooling: Until grade eight. He had had a quick, bright mind at school, and still had when something new came up, but realized how much a black man needed to learn if he was to beat the stinking honky system, and now he never would.

Previous employment: He strained to remember names and places. There had been unskilled jobs after leaving school - a bus boy, shoveling snow, washing cars. Then in 1957, when Detroit was hit by a national recession, there were no jobs of any kind and he drifted into idleness, punctuated by shooting craps, hustling, and his first conviction: auto theft.

The interviewer asked, "Do you have a police record, Mr. Knight?"

"Yeah."

"I'm afraid I'll need the details. And I think I should tell you that we check up afterward, so it looks better if we get it correctly from you first."

Rollie shrugged. Sure the sons-of-bitches checked. He knew that, without being given all this grease.

He gave the employment guy the dope on the auto theft rap first. He was nineteen then. He'd been put on a year's probation.

Never mind now about the way it happened. Who cared that the others in the car had picked him up, that he'd gone along, as a backseat passenger, for laughs, and later the cops had stopped them, charging all six occupants with theft? Before going into court next day, Rollie was offered a deal: Plead guilty and he'd get probation. Bewildered, frightened, he agreed. The deal was kept. He was in and out of court in seconds. Only later had he learned that with a lawyer to advise him - the way a white kid would have had - a not guilty plea would probably have got him off, with no more than a warning from the judge. Nor had he been told that pleading guilty would ensure a criminal record, to sit like an evil genie on his shoulder the remainder of his life.

It also made the sentence for the next conviction tougher.

The interviewer asked, "What happened after that?"

"I was in the pen." It was a year later. Auto theft again. This time for real, and there had been two other times he wasn't caught. The sentence: two years.

"Anything else?"

This was the clincher. Always, after this, they closed the books - no dice, no work. Well, they could stick their stinking job; Rollie still wondered why he had come. "Armed robbery. I drew five to fifteen, did four years in Jackson Pen."

A jewelry store. Two of them had broken in at night. All they got was a handful of cheap watches and were caught as they came out. Rollie had been stupid enough to carry a .22. Though he hadn't pulled it from his pocket, the fact that it was found on him ensured the graver charge.

"You were released for good behavior?"

"No. The warden got jealous. He wanted my cell."

The middle-aged Negro interviewer looked up. "I dig jokes. They make a dull day brighter. But it was good behavior?"

"If you say so."

"All right, I'll say so." The interviewer wrote it down.

"Is your behavior good now, Mr. Knight? What I mean is, are you in any more trouble with the police?"

Rollie shook his head negatively. He wasn't going to tell this Uncle Tom about last night, that he was in trouble if he couldn't keep clear of the white pig he had spooked, and who would bust him some way, given half a chance, using scum bag honky law. The thought was a reminder of his earlier fears, which now returned: the dread of prison, the real reason for coming here. The interviewer was asking more questions, busier than a dog with fleas writing down the answers. Rollie was surprised they hadn't stopped, baffled that he wasn't already outside on the street, the way it usually went after he mouthed the words "armed robbery."

What he didn't know - because no one had thought to tell him, and he was not a reader of newspapers or magazines - was that hard core hiring had a new, less rigid attitude to prison records, too.

He was sent to another room where he stripped and had a physical.

The doctor, young, white, impersonal, working fast, took time out to look critically at Rollie's bony body, his emaciated cheeks. "Whatever job you get, use some of what they pay you to eat better, and put some weight on, otherwise you won't last at it. You wouldn't last, anyway, in the foundry where most people go from here. Maybe they can put you in Assembly, I'll recommend it."

Rollie listened contemptuously, already hating the system, the people in it. Who in hell did this smug whitey kid think he was? Some kind of God? If Rollie didn't need bread badly, some work for a while, he'd walk out now, and screw them. One thing was sure: whatever job these people gave him, he wouldn't stay on it one day longer than he had to.