Woman Holding a Fruit, Paul Gauguin
In the tiled passageways connecting New York City subway lines are colorful posters advertising businesses and products. One endorses The New School, a progressive university in Manhattan with a goal of supporting continuing education. Above a lush Gauguin painting, it counsels “IT’S NOT TOO LATE”, and reminds commuters that “At 35, Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker.” In the margin, someone has written “At 35, Mozart was dead.”
My mother had connections with New Jersey politicians and businessmen through her position at the Newark Athletic Club. Among them were the officers of People’s Express Trucking, and she got me a summer job with People’s the year I turned 17. Once, she had thought she might get me an appointment to West Point through the same connections, but that dream disappeared when I started screwing up in high school.
As background, problems at Schlitz’s Milwaukee brewery have impacted production, and the company is shipping, by rail, a few million empty beer cans for filling. The role of People’s Express is to get the cans off the freight cars, onto trailer trucks, and then to the local brewery. My role, and that of several other youths, is to do the actual work.
International Harvester, Cars-from-UK.com
The first day, we meet with our crew chief at the People’s Express offices on Raymond Boulevard. Three of us will drive an International Harvester pickup truck daily to the railroad yards in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; the others will drive in with the crew chief in his car. I volunteer to drive the truck, I’ve had my license for almost three months now, I like driving and have lots of confidence. (I was unaware that by law one must be 18 to drive in New York City, the issue never came up.)
The Williamsburg rail yards are about 15 miles away: across the Jersey swamplands, through the Holland Tunnel, across lower Manhattan, over the Williamsburg Bridge, then on through Brooklyn to the yards.
Red and green together mean yellow
Traffic lights in Manhattan come in two colors , red and green. If the red comes on during a green, that’s the same as a yellow, act accordingly. The system worked fine; I don’t know why they changed it.
The Williamsburg bridge is old and narrow, it was built for horse-and-buggy traffic. It’s difficult to drive through the tighter spots without scraping a running-board; I do that about once a week.
On the return trip to Newark, the traffic is generally worse.
Canal Street across Manhattan is always stop and go;, when it’s bad we seem to tie for speed with the pedestrians. One day we are neck-and-neck with a gorgeous woman walking with a man, they get ahead, we get ahead, as we breathe teenage sighs and make comments among ourselves about her ass. Uh-oh, he’s heard us! He walks up to the passenger window. What if he has a knife?! He speaks… “Would you boys like to fock her?” Relieved, we explain that no, we have to get back to Newark.
One day we are stuck inside the Holland tunnel for so long that we unzip and piss into the vents along the curb.
In the rail yards, freight cars are jockeyed around to align their center doors with our work platform. There are 48 empty 12-ounce Schlitz cans in each cardboard case. After we build a pallet of 35 cases (seven tiers, five cases per tier, 3 x 2 then 2 x 3, alternating), we use a pallet jack to get it into a trailer, 28 pallets per trailer; lather, rinse, repeat, it isn’t rocket science. I think we filled about three trailers a day.
Not beer, but you get the idea
We fall into a routine; on our morning break we have grape soda and pastries or pie. At lunch, we buy sandwiches and more grape soda, or beer, then sit on the end of an East River dock to look over at the Manhattan skyline or watch what floats by. A visitor from England once said about the East River, “All you Americans seem to do is defecate, fornicate, and eat oranges.” I would have said bananas.
We are sometimes drunk. The college guy has a ‘bit’ he does, I guess it’s a fraternity thing. He stands in the middle of Kent Avenue, drops his pants, and shouts “I KNOW ABOUT THAT, LADY, BUT WHAT ABOUT THIS?” Near the end of the summer he falls out of a freight car and breaks his arm.
Our truck has an on-the-floor gear shift, nothing new to me, but I’ve been using it wrong. Believing it’s a standard H pattern, I think I am shifting 1-2-3, 1-2-3 like normal people do, when actually I’ve been shifting 2-3-4, 2-3-4 for two weeks. So far, I’ve never needed reverse. One day they send me to get something at the hardware store. I park behind someone, and when I try to back up to leave, what is reverse for normal H people is actually low-low for me, and I keep creeping up on the car ahead. I finally go back inside and ask for help. The guy behind the counter comes out to show me, and I learn that I also have to push the stick down at the same time to get over and down to R. Ohh, I say, thanks! When I get back to the yards no one is the wiser.
We work six days a week and when the loadings seem to get behind, we are asked to come in on a Sunday. People’s Express manager Mr. Bruno drives up in his top-of-the-line baby-blue Cadillac to help us, parking next to our platform. He’s wearing sandals and some sort of crotchless wrap-around terry loincloth, and that is all. Every time he bends over, his nuts hang out. Two NYPD officers arrive, they see Mr. Bruno’s outfit and look at one another. They are here on a blue-law complaint, non-emergency labor is not allowed on Sunday. Mr. Bruno tries to talk them out of it, but oddly enough gets no respect; we pick up and go home.
We finally run out of empty cans, but there is still some summer left. People’s is nice enough to transfer the crew to the Continental Can Company, which I guess is some sort of sister company that shares directors with People’s. Continental Can, whose logo of three nested C’s can be found everywhere, is located in Paterson, New Jersey. Here, we are introduced to the Steam Jenny.
Modern pressure cleaner, used. Courtesy Auctions International
A 1950s-era steam jenny burns kerosene to boil water to make steam to clean dirty trucks and whatever else. It’s dangerous, and if you don’t get burned by steam, or knocked off your ladder by the nozzle kickback, it might blow up because you neglected some element of its care and feeding. Attention, attention must be paid to such a machine; this is drummed into our heads over and over by a wizened yard worker who seems genuinely afraid of the thing. Jeez, we get it, enough! Maybe he’s seen some steam-jenny carnage in his day.
We train by using the jenny to blast steam up and down the sides of a particularly dirty trailer; we use a housepainter’s ladder to get on top and clean there too. The company finds enough jenny work for us to last out the summer; we are careful, and somehow we survive.
From Google, top answer to steam jenny safety tips
People also ask
Can a pressure washer cut your finger off?
Because he received near immediate treatment at the emergency room he was able to keep his index finger, although some of its function was lost. It doesn’t matter if the fluid is water, grease or paint – all can cause permanent damage and even amputation when injected at high pressure.
Through the summer, we have been paid as grown men; we even get time-and-a-half for overtime. Those paychecks spoil me for going back to school: why return to pointless boredom when I can be earning money instead? I don’t attend school very much during my senior year, and I drop out towards the end. I do stop in to pick up my yearbook, though, and years later I have an observant visitor who wonders why no one ever signed it. That’s a long story, I say.
I still have my night job at the A&P warehouse so there’s no rush. My resume is pretty good for someone who hasn’t actually worked in computing yet – the 725-hour programming course at Automation Institute gets respect, but it’s not enough to hire me on. Everyone wants experience. I don’t have much luck getting interviews in New Jersey, so I decide to bite the bullet and look for a job in New York City. After a few interviews in run-down offices with computer illiterates who act like they’d be doing me a favor to send me to a potential employer, I strike pay dirt.
It’s April Fool’s Day, 1968 and I am at the classy Robert Half employment agency in midtown Manhattan. In honor of the day, WQXR plays Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks in the background. I have a good interview, and next day get a call that Condé Nast Publishers would like to interview me next week. They, too, are a classy outfit, so classy (I later learn) that they have a special print chain on their printer just to produce that fancy é with an accent in their name.
Graybar Building, 420 Lexington Avenue
My interview with HR (“Personnel” then) goes well; I am all tweeded up in my good suit and overcoat, looking British and carrying a rolled black brolly. Optics out of the way, I next interview with Mr. Harrison, the manager of “the IBM Department”. He sees that I have mad 1401 computer skills, and we hit it off otherwise. He introduces me to Ben, the other programmer, and we three go to lunch.
I am hired. Condé Nast publishes Vogue and Glamour magazines, so there are models and other alluring creatures running loose through the building, but our floor, the 4th, is 100% business. The fashion magic all happens upstairs.
Going home from my first day at work, after I get off the crosstown shuttle I am confused, and I get directions to the 7th Avenue line from an NYPD police officer. The next day, at the same spot, I am confused again and ask an officer for directions. He answers “Same way I told you yesterday”, and walks away annoyed.
Similar Maruse Padfolio, $135 at Amazon
After a week riding the subway, I retire my bulky attaché case, which tends to get tangled up in other people’s legs, in favor of a $4 generic zippered black leather portfolio I see in a drugstore window. I normally carry it at my side, but in a really tight subway car I clutch it against my chest like a frightened girl.
If I get close enough to my office window to get the right angle, I can see the the Chrysler Building, with its crowd of Vietnam War protesters.
I design and write programs in Autocoder assembler language, lots of them. I must be good at it, because I get a raise. I am particularly proud of this latest one because it works almost immediately, and the output is perfect. It’s an analysis of reader responses to a survey in one of the magazines. I bring the printout to Mr. Harrison, who studies it and says something like “Hey, that’s really good”. Then he adds “Uh, you spelled questionnaire wrong” and chuckles. I laugh too, but it stings a little.
Ben and I and our boss generally stick together. We seldom leave the 4th floor except to get lunch downstairs in the Back Bay restaurant, which is cheaper than it sounds. Every other Friday is payday, when we go up to the 11th floor to pick up our checks.
One payday we start for the 11th floor, just us three in the elevator, when it stops at the 6th. In steps one of the models, not at all self-conscious despite wearing the latest in fashion, a see-through blouse, no bra. The fabric is sheer and her breasts are lovely. Following some instinctive sense of decency, the three of us avert our eyes, and now with heads tilted back we stare at the ceiling in silence until she reaches her destination. She exits and the doors close. As the car begins to move again, we gleefully exclaim in unison “DID YOU SEE THAT?”
Sometimes at lunchtime we walk around midtown, trying not to look like tourists. It’s best not to look up, or stare at anyone. There’s a blind guy who usually stands near our building selling pencils; people drop money into his cup but don’t take a pencil.
One day Mr. Harrison, Ben and I have lunch with Diane, our IBM Sales Engineer, who is dressed for the times in short skirt and white over-the-knee boots. The subject turns to commuting and I say I’d love to live in the city, but there’s no way all my family’s stuff would fit in an apartment. Diane says I’d be surprised how much stuff can fit in an apartment, and would I like to see hers? I say something like “Thanks, but I don’t think so” in the politest possible business-neutral way. After lunch, Ben turns to me and says “You’re crazy, man!” Yes, I probably am.
Even the company’s benefits are classy. For the one-year anniversary of their start date, women receive flowers, men receive a boutonniere. These are delivered by flower-shop courier. Each December, everyone gets a half-day off to go Christmas shopping.
“Like walking into an old western saloon”
This December brings a disappointment: the company Christmas party is cancelled due to the Hong Kong flu. Mr. Harrison still wants to have a department Christmas party, and one day around noon we head for the Cattleman steakhouse. We are Mr. Harrison, Ben and I, computer operators Ginny and George, six or eight keypunch girls (‘operators’, sorry) and their leader Marie. We fill a long table in a private room. We will pay for our own drinks and split the rest of the bill. Most of us opt for the prime rib, which is excellent.
The keypunch girls are delightful – we don’t usually see them because they work in their own, noisy room. I know two of them, Susan the long-haired girl from across the river who seems to have a thing going on with the IBM repairman who refuses to wear a white shirt; and Marika, fresh off the boat from Poland, not much English yet, but not much is required to punch names and addresses into cards.
On the way back to the office we break into loose groups and I get separated. I’m a little drunk. The city is beautiful at Christmastime. As I walk by the Pan Am building, I hear music and enter the lobby. A choir is singing Christmas carols.
Everybody at Condé is nice, the work is rewarding and I love my job, but the commute is getting me down.
Would rather be somewhere else
From my house to work it’s only eight miles as the crow flies, but it’s a 4-seat commute with a lot of walking; even on a good day it takes 50 minutes. Coming in, I take the Newark subway to Newark Penn Station, then the PRR train under the river to New York Penn Station, then the 7th Avenue subway to 42nd Street, then the shuttle over to Grand Central. I get tired again just typing that in. At each connection there’s a significant walk and sometimes a bit of jostling to get from one conveyance to the next. I start thinking about another hot summer underground.
Beyond the commute, two events help me make up my mind.
So, I have soft-stabbed an old lady and said “fuck you” to a total stranger. It’s time to get myself out of New York, and also an opportune time to get my family out of Newark. I call an employment agency and ask them to find me a job as far south in Jersey as they can.
About four years later, I am in the city and stop by for a visit. By chance, the operators are running one of my programs. Whenever I see a night view of Manhattan with its million lights and offices, I absurdly tell myself “I made a difference.”
Midtown Manhattan
In grades seven and eight I had a science teacher that I really liked and admired, Mr. Fischer. He knew I liked science and science-fiction books, and was open to such classroom questions as, if light is really particles (turns out it isn’t), can it be used to push a spaceship along, even just a little bit? The atomic bomb and the possibility of atomic energy were also hot subjects in our classroom. Mr. Fischer was a bachelor, with a slight lisp and some fussy behaviors. Given what we know, or think we know, today, he was probably gay. Mr. Fischer was good friends with our music teacher Miss Barnett, who had season tickets to the Metropolitan Opera.
Miss Barnett offered Mr. Fischer a pair of tickets to see Aida, and he asked me if I wanted to go. My mom said fine with her, and off we went one Saturday on the bus to New York. On the way, we saw acres of empty steel drums stacked up in the meadowlands along the bus route. It later turned out they were not empty, as most of the world probably thought, and had been leaking toxic goo into the North Jersey soil for years.
We arrived at the Met, still in the original building at 39th Street, and climbed to our seats. This is not meant as a complaint about the tickets, but we were in real nosebleed territory, the highest section in the house. The section was so steep that when I looked around, I was peering straight between the knees of the old lady behind me. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the whole outing and thought the opera was fantastic. I know now that some people think Aida is bombastic, but what did I know then, kids love bombast.
Aida. Metropolitan Opera, 2014
Now, here’s what I think happened next, deduced by putting together two and two and based on the available evidence,
One Mr. Grady, who lived two doors down from us on Rayburn Terrace, was the janitor at Cleveland Street School. He was a devout Catholic who went to Mass every morning; he carried a rosary in his back pocket and could be seen fingering it from time to time. Mr. Grady hated Mr. Fischer for the predictable reasons, and had gotten wind of our opera excursion. Mr. Grady put a bug in my mother’s ear that perhaps Mr. Fischer was leading her son astray, and she should beware. My mother then confided in her boss, Mr.Edwards, with whom she was on friendly terms and maybe just a little bit office-romancy – Mr. Edwards would sometimes drive her home at night so she wouldn’t have to take the bus. Perhaps her bookish son was being groomed as a Friend of Dorothy? Mr. Edwards considered the issue and came up with an idea.
Next, the only tangible evidence I have of all this speculation.
My mother came home from work one day and said “Mr. Edwards thought you might like this calendar.” Indeed I would, for it was probably the most risqué pinup calendar then available, Vargas Girls in provocative poses and showing as much skin as was legal. “Um, thanks!” I had never been given anything by Mr. Edwards before.
After a decent interval I was upstairs, the staples were out and my top six picks were on the wall alongside the Honor Roll certificates. I was cured.
12 months of Vargas Girls
Temple of Dendur
One Sunday in March, I drive into New York City with my young family to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There is nowhere nearby to park, so I drop my family at the side entrance and keep looking. I work my way across town, still no luck. At a parking lot with a “full” sign posted I get an inspiration and show the attendant a ten dollar bill. He agrees that there is just enough room for one more car, and I walk back to the museum to catch up with my family. While we are in the Arms and Armor room admiring Henry the VIII’s steel codpiece, we hear the noise of a brass band out on Fifth Avenue. We have forgotten it is Saint Patrick’s Day!
We step out onto the museum’s broad front steps. Many people are here already, watching the remaining groups and bands organize and warm up before they march off to connect with the parade’s main body. The groups nearest us are at a momentary standstill. One man standing near us on the steps incessantly blows a green plastic horn. Blat. Blat. Blat. Finally, from half a block away, we hear “HEY YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER, STOP BLOWIN’ THAT HORN!” Our step-mate pauses to consider, tucks the horn under his arm and departs.
The following day, the New York Times features a photo of Ed Koch at the parade, wearing a tweed cap and cable-knit sweater. Hizzoner is shouting at someone out of frame, his hand to his mouth like a megaphone, probably just repeating his catchphrase “How’m I doing?” demand. I entertain myself by giving him a felt-tip word balloon of the demand we heard yesterday.
One day during the summer my mother takes me on a bus trip to New York City to visit her cousin. I don’t think I was ever in the city before that. As soon as we get out of the bus on Eighth Avenue, I am impressed by the rich stink, not the garbage-and-urine city stink we know today, but the honest, heavy stink of cows and massive amounts of cow shit. We are at the block-long cattle pens of the West Side stockyards, in the city’s slaughterhouse district. My mother half-apologizes for the stink and we start walking east. After a few blocks the air freshens and we go into an Automat, the fast-food restaurant of the day. At the change booth my mother pushes two dollar bills over to a bored clerk and a brass chute delivers a shower of nickels.
There are walls of sandwiches, pies and much more, each on its own clean plate and behind its own swing-up glass door. Drop enough nickels into a slot, turn the knob, lift the door, slide out your choice. Coffee is a nickel – grab an empty cup, insert your nickel, turn slowly the S-shaped arm to dispense an exact cupful. We grab a table for four, sitting across from each other. Very soon a man approaches and asks “Is this seat taken?”. It isn’t, we say, and he takes the seat between us. Unlike myself, my mother seems unfazed by this strange event. There is minimal but cordial conversation. We finish, say goodbye to our new friend and leave. The Automat did not expect its customers to bus their tables.
We head eastward to Third Avenue, home of the Third Avenue Elevated, sort of an above-ground subway line. When we get to our cousin’s building, it stands facing the El and about fifty feet from the tracks. Her apartment is on the third floor and the windows are open. I remember our cousin apologizing for the train noise but it really didn’t seem so bad after a while.
After the ladies get settled in the kitchen, I go back to the front room. Trains come by in one direction or the other every five minutes or so. I am old enough to read and I lie on the carpet by the window and read my Bucky Bug comic.
Automat, Berenice Abbott
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