I never figured a way out of the rat race, only how to be a more pleasant and faster rat.
Winter 1990
Jeff,
Got your letter the other day. It was a good one. Thanks. I'm sorry to hear about your dog. That's a tough one, made worse of course by what Shale said -- "Why not just get another one?" -- Why not just get another mother? That's what it amounts to.
Wow! That was some street story, complete with gunfire and karate kicks. I've never been around something of that magnitude.
Well, I hate to gloat, but 30-3, that's one solid whipping. I thought the Rams were going to play them tough, but it just goes to show you, Jim Everett at this point is still just a lot hype. Flipper Anderson and Henry Ellard are two of the best receivers in football, easy; and the Ram offensive line is probably the best. So why isn't Everett a helluva lot better than he is? (But in his defense there is and will always be, only one Joe Montana.) I'll be honest with you though, the 49ers are beginning to scare me. They're starting to look like a machine, like the Steelers looked in '78 and '79; they're losing their unpredictable good-guy feel. This is coming from somebody who has bled red and gold since the 5th grade, from somebody who has suffered through the 2-14 DeBerg years. The 49ers have never been a machine; they've always been fuck-ups, winning the tough games graciously and then dropping the easy ones to a team like the Lions. I'll never forget the 1985 season. It was the year after the '9ers beat the Dolphins in the Super Bowl. Every Sunday I'd go over to my buddy Oliver's and we'd hoot and holler and cook and drink. I was so completely wed to the team that year that whenever I'd go to study at a cafe I'd end up leafing through the Sporting Green, soaking in Wendell Tyler and Roger Craig's rushing-yardage per carry and Joe Montana's interception total; at night when I had trouble sleeping I'd recite the S.F. schedule complete with scores of games that'd already been played, as well as the starting offense, the starting defense, and the disabled list. Yep, I was a goner. That was my team that year -- I would've died for then, if anybody would've asked me to. The problem about it was that that was probably the roughest season the 49ers went through in the last 13 years. -- Their first game was in Minnesota against a very poor Vikings team (I think they only won three games the year before). Nine o'clock Saturday morning I tooled the bug down Telegraph. Ashley rode along for the season opener, sitting in the passenger seat, knitting up a storm. I turned up Ashby and parked in front of DREAM FLUFF DONUTS. I got out and purchased an assorted dozen. I handed the box to Ashley and slid behind the wheel, pushing the Volks back towards Telegraph. At the Berkeley-Oakland border I pulled into the parking lot of WHITE HORSE LIQUORS on 66th Street there. I stepped out and walked in through the open plate-glass doors and bought a cold pack of Coors (cans). Anyway, fuck this! I'm boring you, and I'm boring myself. I'm drunk and there's nothing good about me telling this tale; it happened too long ago. And the only reason I went into this was so I could tell you how great it was, how great it tasted, to drink beer while chomping down glazed donuts -- it was like the 4th of July; anyway, the 49ers lost the game (three fumbles in the first half, mostly due to Wendell) and ended up the season struggling to the wild-card game with a 10-6 record, only to lose substantially to the Giants, 17-3; the Rams won the division that year but lost to Chicago at Soldier Field in the NFC Championship Game, back when Soldier Field was artificial turf and too cold and too hard for poor Eric to run on.
Good news. I quit my job. It happened two weeks ago today. I was called into the supervisor's office, which isn't an office but a nasty little austere cubicle. She sat me down in a chair directly across from her desk.
"How long do you plan on working here?"
"For a while longer, I guess ... Why?"
"We've had some complaints about your language."
"What? Who?"
"That's not any of your concern."
My head began to swim, the walls were spinning. I was being treated like a brat, a schoolboy; I was in the principal's office at Louise Van Meter Elementary School and I was being accused of sneaking into the girl's bathroom during afternoon recess and there was nothing I could do about it. I couldn't think. I felt like I was stoned. I tried to speak, to say something in my defense, but all that came out was a slush of gibberish. The supervisor frowned coldly:
"Either clean up your language, or look for work elsewhere. It's reached that point."
A threat! An ultimatum! The blond beast in my belly stood up; the fog bolted from my brow. I was whole again! After months of demeaning proofreading and premeditatedly brain-deadening lunch-time beer steins and bourbon shots I was finally thinking clearly again. The only problem was that I was mad and getting madder by the second. The blond beast was fighting his way out of the belly and clawing up into my lungs. I took two deep breaths and exhaled loudly. The supervisor's eyes got big and round and white like two salty soft-boiled eggs. But it didn't do any good, the beast kept moving, inching up my neck and burrowing into my skull and nestling in my brain pan. I couldn't think anymore; all that beautiful clarity, and it had only lasted a few seconds. Everything I saw -- her face, the white walls, the dull sky through the dirty window (that dull bullshit New York Wall Street street steam Staten Island Ferry sky, it makes me sick) --it all looked red. For a moment I thought of grabbing a chair and hurling it through the window; then I wondered if I had the strength in my arms to wrench the desk off the carpeted floor and bring it whistling down on top of her stupid body. --Yep, that would've been the best: seeing her hideous middle-aged weather-beaten face staring up glassy-eyed and bloody-nosed at the fluorescent tubes strung from the ceiling, a huge Kodiak bear of a brown desk perched atop her heaving and splintered balsa wood chest. Instead, I gathered myself and walked to the door and turned and modestly said, "I quit." I went for the nonchalant, "baby-there's-nothing-you-can-do-that'll-get-to-me" approach because in between seeing red I'd figured out, in a millisecond or two, that this bitch was gonna get off, erotically, on any bit of fuss and battle that I put up; so fuck her -- the sadist. I nipped it in the bud.
That was it. I went to my desk, packed up my stuff, said my goodbyes. The next thing I knew I was out on Wall Street -- a free man for the first time since July 14th, 1989. Amen.
And let me tell you, Goddamn does it feel good to be out of work. Working steady 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, January to December -- in fact the whole corporate, industrial, american, money-making life-pattern myth -- is such a blow job, and a bad one at that, that I'm mystified how generation after generation can accept and endorse and then get ripped apart and put in the tomb by it. I'm all the more mystified because I'm as big an accepter as anyone. I've been working since I was 18, which isn't much compared to most, but it's put me in the frame of mind that whenever I'm out of work for more than a few days I start to feel that nauseating bite of conscience; I start to feel like a soft effeminate flunky; and at that point I'll rashly take any old shitty work that comes my way: pulling weeds for an Oakland hills housewife, teaching reading and composition to university freshmen, hauling sheet rock all over the Bay Area, researching scholarly materials for a chocolate-eating pear-shaped professor, painting San Francisco churches with an ex-con as an unforgiving foreman, night-shift data entry in a Times Square skyscraper, paging books in Doe Library during the butter of my college youth, running a microfilm machine in the shadow of the New York Stock Exchange, proofreading for a big musty & suspendered Wall Street law firm ... Oh man, it goes on and on to all points of boredom and oblivion and through it all, all jobs are the same but with the occasional exception that some are better than others.
All right. I've tortured you enough with my drunkenness. I finally had Ashley print out that astrological chart I've been promising to send you since who knows when. You must've requested it three months ago. -- I'm sorry, but I'm as lazy as a turtle.
I'm looking forward to hearing from you again.
No comments:
Post a Comment