C Hribal - The Company Car

The weeks pass like this—on the road, selling, meeting, making presentations, drinking, schmoozing, taking a guy out after dinner to catch a few perch or walleye, writing up reports, doing lab work on the weekends and evenings, selling and schmoozing, tossing back shots and beers, selling and schmoozing, the drive from town to town, mill to mill. Paper mostly, a few paint plants—specialty chemicals, forest products division, Dinkwater Chemical, Dinkwater Park, New Jersey. Yeah, New Jersey. Naw, they got no paper mills in Jersey. But they got chemicals, they got plants, they got corn-fed midwestern scientists who know what they’re doing. That’s what you need—guys who know what they’re doing. The guys on the floor at these mills—they know what they’re doing. You can work with them. It’s their managers and supervisors that you have to put on a different kind of act for. They’re the ones you don’t get sleep over, making that extra Rob Roy to see you through, your eyes swimming in their bloody sockets. You close your eyes, feel them buzzing in their sockets, your brain seeping into the back of your skull, yet there’s this pressure, right above your eyebrows. Five minutes’ rest will do you a world of good. Five minutes’ peace from staring at the petri dishes with their little blotches of mold you have to count and measure—all that jazz. All that crap. Close your eyes, feel your brain gently buzzing, feel the electric light’s glow as a sound, a fluttering by your earlobes, feel the changes in the room’s temperature and air pressure through the soft fleshy lobes hanging beneath the ear cartilage. You’re a bat, scooping up insects in the night outside just before they fly into the bug zapper. They smell something terrible when they hit the zapper’s wires. It’s as though their wings are made of petroleum. You dip, you swoop, you’re catching them with your open mouth, sensing where they are through the minutest of wing flutters. You swoop out of the night. Feed me, feed me. Your brain is a single phrase of need, and your wife, your children are a long ways away.

Our father wakens to the smell of burning plastic. His trial is ruined, a melted blob. The smoke is terrible; the incubator stinks of burning bugs. He pulls it out; the petri dishes look like something that escaped from a Dalí painting. He has two choices: write up the numbers as he thinks they might have come out given what he knows about the products, and hope they don’t ask to see the petri dishes, or run the petri dishes again and make arrangements to come back later in the week with the results. The problem is he’s in Mosinee right now, in the middle of the state, and his next trial is scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday in Ashland, way up north. He can do it, but it means he’ll be getting home Friday night close to midnight, and he’ll be surly by the time he arrives, maybe on the downside of a buzz, and to counteract that he’ll stop in Banana’s or the Dog Out for a pick-me-up, lose track of time, and come home at 2:00 A.M. thoroughly shitfaced. And Susan will be waiting, furious and fuming. Then the kids will be up early, jumping on him, the little ones, anyway, and his head will be pounding, throbbing most likely, and Jesus Christ if it won’t be like that all through Saturday and into Sunday, and maybe he’ll get five minutes’ peace and maybe not, and he can’t wait already for next Sunday afternoon and evening to roll around, when he disappears from the family to get ready for the next week’s trip, and here it is only early Tuesday morning of the previous week.

We had long suspected that for our father the motels and the bars were familiar, comforting places, with delights both expected and unexpected. He knew what he would find there, and anything out of the ordinary would be a pleasant diversion—the house special, a fellow Navy man at the bar, somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody. He knew how to act in places like these, whereas home was for him a frequently visited foreign country, a place where he knew how to get around but the locals seemed to be speaking another language, and their customs were so, well, foreign. Better to drink in your room than to have much to do with them.

Our mother, at times, felt the same way. We had broken her down. The strain of raising us virtually alone was too much for her. There was the financial strain—with so many kids, even if our father had been doing well it would have been tight—but there were the emotional costs, too. What is it like being alone all week, making all the decisions, and then having this man you love, this stranger, come home every weekend to upset the applecart with his flamboyance, his effervescing ideas, his schemes, his drinking? It probably would have been all right if our father had stayed on his high-flying clouds. She could have reasoned, “This is who I married. I knew what he was like from when he first wanted us to get married on TV.” But could she keep saying it as our father’s great ideas got shot down one by one and he sank into a different kind of abyss? As he kept changing companies, looking for that elusive thing he always wanted: respect.

It was not forthcoming. He had left Dinkwater-Adams because they did not value him enough to give him what he wanted, what they eventually gave to somebody else: territory in Wisconsin where he could buy a farm. At a church social a few years after moving, he ran into a Dinkwater-Adams rep from the northern suburbs of Chicago who now had the territory our father had coveted. He lived in the next town over from us. He had gotten the northeastern Wisconsin territory three months after our father quit the company.

It was the same way with Dinkwater Chemical. And Dewless Chemical and Drydell Chemical—all headquartered in Dinkwater Park, New Jersey. Our father was a company man, but he was not corporate. He loved the company; the company suffered him. Suffered him not because he didn’t get results—our father could sell fire extinguishers to Satan—but because he didn’t look the part. Or he looked the part from a previous decade. No tailored suit, no razor-cut hairstyle. Our father was fat, he was jowly, he wore Sansabelt trousers and clip-on ties. When we were little and wore clip-ons, this made perfect sense to us. Later they were an embarrassment. They were necessary for him, however, because when you are leaning over two living-room-size steel drums spinning at five thousand feet per second, if a tie end flops onto a drum’s surface, you will be yanked into the machine and crushed into pulp in a matter of nanoseconds. With a clip-on tie all you lost was the tie. Over the years our father lost two ties that way, and he’d once seen a man disappear into the rollers, his viscera spurting from him like you’d squeezed a foil packet of ketchup. Even our television-sapped minds could understand that would not be as comical as in the cartoons, where animals were regularly pancaked under steamrollers and walked stiffly and two-dimensionally back to wherever they went to hatch their next scheme.

Still, it looked cheesy. When bolo ties briefly became the fashion, our father went from clip-ons to bolos and never went back. How bolos, with their bullet-weighted dangling strings, were an improvement on safety over the clip-ons was never explained to us. Perhaps he simply loved the look so much he was willing to risk the danger. Or maybe they stayed tucked inside his shirt better. Sartorially, he was clearly siding with the guys on the factory floor, and with the shift managers, most of whom started on the floor and who could make or break his trials for him, but it certainly wasn’t the look the Dinks were promoting back in New York and Jersey.

Our father didn’t have the right sound for the Dinks, either. He was loud. He laughed easily and often in a voice that could be heard from the shop floor to the shift manager’s office. He did not like dirty jokes, and didn’t tell them, but he could burst out with that crescendoing, booming laugh when they were told by someone else.