C Hribal - The Company Car

“What’s that?” said our father.

“My check and bonus,” said the son-in-law. “Can you believe Pop’s bonus checks for this quarter were only averaging thirteen percent?”

“Thirteen percent?” said our father.

“Yeah, and he expects me to swallow that. Can you fucking believe it?”

“No,” said our father, “I can’t.”

By the time Dewless went Chapter 11, two of our father’s paychecks had bounced. One was missing. “It’s in the mail,” a nervous Mr. Dewless promised over the phone. “And I will not come in your mouth!” our father shouted back. “Wally, the children!” said our mother. As though we didn’t know who it was being screwed. He hadn’t received a commission in six months. When they went belly-up, they still owed him six paychecks plus the commissions.

It was quite a hit. To get us through, Robert Aaron and I cashed in the money we’d been saving for college. The family’s coffers remained unfilled. Our father blamed himself, as though he should have seen it coming. Perhaps he should have; perhaps he was blinded by almost, sorta being a consultant to that shit son-in-law, but when you got down to it, because Dewless was a family operation, our father’s screwing was strictly small-time. To get really screwed, you needed a major corporation. Our father went back to Dinkwater Chemical for a spell—he was desperate—but he had feelers out, and one of his old friends, Benny Wilkerson from the Cicero Velvetones, was now a regional sales manager for Drydell Chemical, an outfit out of Dinkwater only slightly smaller than Dinkwater themselves. “But we’re growing, and we need somebody in specialty chemicals in the Midwest, Wally. You could be that man.” Our father was sold, sure he’d finally found a place that would treat him right. We were over the hump.

Too bad Drydell got grabbed soon after that—in the late seventies—by Perle Chemical, which in turn was snatched up by Lakeland Oil. Lakeland Oil didn’t want to do paper, they wanted to do paint, so they sold off the paper unit to Dinkwater Chemical, and our father could either go back to the Dinks or switch to paint. He wouldn’t have had any choice in the matter at all except Benny Wilkerson had been bumped up a couple levels in the moves, and while they were combining and downsizing—mostly salesmen our father’s age—Benny was able to tell our father, “No promises, but if you’re willing to learn paint we can keep you,” which was as much of a display of loyalty as our father expected. In making that offer, however, Benny had stepped on the toes of the new paint manager and, sight unseen, had made an enemy for life. The paint manager wanted both Benny’s and our father’s heads on platters. And given that corporate communications during the merger had been placed in a blind trust operated by the Keystone Kops, he was able to get exactly that. Our father would talk to his regional sales supervisor, they would agree to something, “but just let me run it by the higher-ups,” and by the time it went up and came back down the corporate pipeline, the person who’d agreed to whatever had been fired, left the company, or was to be found in a different department entirely, and the directive or agreement had been lost, forgotten, or changed beyond recognition. The new orders were accompanied by a memo welcoming a new regional supervisor to his tasks. No mention of what had happened to the previous manager. Our father joked that someone was killing the regional supervisors and distributing their body parts in industrial-size barrels of creosote and paint thinner. “It’s how they got rid of Hoffa,” he said. “Everyone thinks it was lead overshoes and a trip to the river, but I bet he’s in a warehouse somewhere, his bones slowly dissolving until he’s poured down the drain during a Superfund cleanup.”

And so it went. Our father took to subscribing to the theory of prior arrangements. That it was a conspiracy. That everything—the whole goddamn world—was a conspiracy.

Conspiracies go better with drinking. The worst of it was when our father took absolute leave of his senses one evening and started screaming at the television set that Walter Cronkite was a Communist. I thought of Ahab. Twirling down, twirling down, twirling madly, madly down, a ballet of failure still tied to his obsession, a victim of the thing he most desired. Then I thought of failures less romantic. Not Ahab trailing like an afterthought behind the whale as it sank into the abyss, but Wally as Willy Loman. I knew how that ended up. I put the thought out of my mind. Besides, if Wally-Bear was Willy, that would make me Biff, and I didn’t want to think about that much, either.

Our father was not one of those brutal drunks that ruins or blights lives. There was no hitting in our family, and although there was a lot of screaming, the verbal abuse was minimal. The anger was directed mostly inward. Broken green and bloody glass replaced our father’s normal eyes as he slumped in his easy chair, lashing out at Walter Cronkite (a Communist!) and Hubert Humphrey (another goddamn pinko!) and teachers and unions and those who demonstrated against the Vietnam War or didn’t vote for Ronald Reagan. Our father’s days as a suburban Republican were over. There were enemies everywhere, they were in cahoots, and they were evil. He was now a nut, a crank, fodder for the extreme right’s assault on the national consciousness in the years following Reagan’s ascent to the throne. But these assaults on Walter Cronkite, we knew, were the outbursts of a deeply frustrated man, and in some ways I think our father was careful to pick remote targets that couldn’t be held accountable.

He even forgave the companies he worked for. They were only doing what companies did when they were managed by the petty and the incompetent. It was not the company’s fault; it was the fault of bad management within the company, and if our father could just get the higher-ups to recognize that, the scoundrels would be thrown out, an enlightened management would be installed, and all would be well in the land of the Dinks.

Our mother, for all her health problems, was a battler. She believed nothing would get better unless our father went to war against his own company, getting everything in writing, fighting for what was his, slugging it out with the higher-ups. Our father believed the higher-ups knew what they were doing. He would not fight. Instead he retreated into the belief that the very thing afflicting him would save him. Our father was good at this—clinging fast to opposing beliefs. Not giving credence to explanations that made sense.

He did not, for example, believe in the democracy of failure. That everyone had an equal chance at it, just like happiness. He thought only losers were punished with failure, and if he was failing, then it was his fault. He would rail against his company but then accept the wisdom of its arbitrary judgments. Elsewhere the world was full of conspiracies, but in his own life it all came down to him. He’d dropped it, the whole ball of wax. He deserved it, what happened to him. Failure was a meritocracy, and he was one of its minions.

He was helped in this belief by staying in touch with Louie Hwasko, his best friend, best man, and piano player for the Cicero Velvetones. Louie’s life had not gone the way he had hoped either. His marriage to Helen Federstam had not lasted—Helen having decamped for California years ago—and his marriage to Shirley hadn’t lasted either. They’d had a half dozen or dozen tumultuous years of too much drinking and too much cheating.

“ ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ should have been tattooed on her boobs,” he told our father. “I couldn’t keep up with her extracurriculars. When she was done with me for the evening, she sometimes went out and found somebody else.”