Blind love

Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison. Photo By Stacey Warde

Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison. Photo By Stacey Warde

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees. —Pablo Neruda

by Stacey Warde

At the Camarillo Amtrak station a young blind couple, walking arm-in-arm, slide the red tips of their seeing-eye canes along the platform next to the train.

The tips of their canes make a parallel search of the ground, tapping out the echoes of potential obstacles, swinging this way and that. Between the sliding sticks the pair are joined at their elbows.

I watch them from my vantage point above, through the window where I’m sitting on Train 777, or “Triple Seven,” as the conductor says in his announcements.

They have just stepped off the train heading north and west where the sun is beginning its low descent over the Pacific Ocean.

The setting sun casts an orange glow on their faces. Together they tap the ground, safely passing sign posts and cement benches, the blind lovingly leading the blind, in perfect tender unison.

I’ve never seen a blind couple as this making their way together. When I’ve observed the blind, often they have been alone, or accompanied by a service dog or friend whose vision is not impaired.

The pair turns tentatively toward the road, scouting the audibles, as a yellow cab slowly passes by, and they pause momentarily as if to hail the driver but another couple flags the car for themselves. How do they know that it is a cab? What bit of information causes them to turn at the same time to pursue what they cannot see?

They walk so closely and intimately that their bodies and minds seem as one. It’s a stunning scene. It’s touching. How did two blind intimates find each other? What brought them together? Did they meet in school? At a support group for the blind?

Their closeness, their intimate knowing and safety in being together unseats me, penetrates the armor I’ve worn to avoid the history and hurt of broken intimacies. An aching, bleeding feeling, as if something has begun to melt, washes through me, beginning inside of my chest.

My eyes well up with tears and, like the couple below, I put on a pair of dark sunglasses. I don’t want anyone to see my eyes. I don’t want anyone to know that I’m having a breakdown on the train. I want to avoid the appearance of a touched middle-aged man.

As Triple Seven pulls away from the platform, I watch the pair in a final desperate attempt to see what happens to them, and feel the cauldron of losses bubbling inside of me, streams of tears burning down my face.

Perhaps I’m romanticizing the idea of a blind love that isn’t blind at all but sees everything, knows everything, and moves in unison with the melodious voices of departing passengers, the low hum of cars in the distance, the passing of a cab, and the shared need to find a safe passage home.

Perhaps I’m a fool for thinking that such passage gains more from the company of another who is willing to share the risks and responsibilities of navigating through the darkness, guided by some other light that cannot be seen.

This coupling desire to be joined at the elbows and to walk in unison with another in a different kind of blind trust doesn’t go away easily, not even after one has passed his prime and love can seem so cruel and foolish.

“When does it stop?” I asked a friend once. “When do you stop wanting the company of a woman? When do you stop feeling like there needs to be another?”

“A great love poet,” he responded, “once said that it wasn’t until he was 70 that he realized the feminine no longer had power over him.”

It’s not merely the feminine, however, that haunts and wields power over me. Something more than charms and pleasure has broken through the walls of my resistance to love.

What moves me now is the formidable intimate knowing that is built on trust, the eagerness to hold space with another, even when there is darkness all around, the willingness to traverse obstacles despite the handicaps, to do with that one what spring does with the cherry trees.

The dark sunglasses do not hide my tears. I remove them to pat my cheeks dry with the sleeve of my jacket. Amtrak Triple Seven roars into the night and my view outside the window is blurred from blinding tears. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice

JUNKYARD AL ON THE RIVIERA, 1996

Wheelhouse

Al has unpaid tabs at bars and liquor stores all over Morro Bay, where Happy Jack’s is. Water color: Wheelhouse by Steve Santmyer: www.californiawatercolor.com/collections/steve-santmyer

by Dell Franklin

Around noon of a Saturday, Junkyard Al shows up in his rattling, rumbling, grease-smudged 20-year-old, four-door Buick bomber with wife and child to put in a water pump and radiator from the yard where he plies his trade, free of charge. Since Al is banned for life from every bar in the county but I allow him to drink in Happy Jack’s where I tend bar, he feels obligated to be my personal mechanic. He is also interested in reviving my non-operational ’76 Olds Cutlass and ’50 Chevy pick-up, which have collected dust in my driveway for over a year. I feel Al has his eye on both beasts. Al manages the largest junkyard in San Luis Obispo and takes advantage of every broke, desperate wretch who comes looking for a deal on parts. An ace mechanic, Al knows everything about every car ever manufactured in the world.

The fastest talker I’ve ever known, Al is wearing his usual filthy T-shirt, crusted Levi’s and boots. His coal-black hair is greasy and he needs a shave. He is stocky, with a gut at around 40. Having observed Al in Happy Jack’s, he seems to size everybody up as a potential enemy to fight or a schnook to scam. He cannot fight a lick. He incited a brawl in Happy Jack’s with some hopped-up young white supremists and was knocked semi-conscious with one punch and hid under a table while I took on three of them with a bar stool.

His heap is parked behind my ‘79 bumperless Chrysler Cordoba on the street. I’ve lived here on what can be determined in this beach burg of Cayucos’ Riviera for a couple years now and my neighbors across the street at the beach access, a retired dentist and retired CEO of a department store, and their wives, are not happy with my existence in one of the last one-bedroom beach cottages on the Riviera. The dentist, with his gray Marine hairdo, has accused me of single-handedly lowering real estate values and turning the neighborhood into a Third World trash heap.

Al peers at my crackerbox. “Swank pad, dude,” he observes. His wife, who resembles an overfed bullfrog, sits in the Buick with child. “How you afford this pad workin’ at the bar?”

“I know how to manage my finances, Al.” I leer at him, because Al has unpaid tabs at bars and liquor stores all over Morro Bay, where Happy Jack’s is, and Cayucos, and has currently moved to a rundown motel in San Luis Obispo on a weekly basis.

Al has his extensive tool collection out, along with a Styrofoam cooler, into which he reaches and takes out a beer, guzzling half of it down.

“Why you drinkin’ light beer, Al?” I ask. “That stuff’s for sorority girls in San Luis.”

Al ignores me and punches the back window of the Buick. “Go down to the beach, Sara, and take the kid!” he hollers.

They get out, hunched and glum. “Can I have some money for the store?” asks the wife, solicitous.

Al withdraws a crumpled greasy wad and hands her a ten and turns around to me. “What’s with the duct-tape on yer jalopies? You can plug those cancer holes real easy. I can do it for yah.”

“I prefer duct-tape, Al. If it disintegrates, I can always replace it with more duct-tape.”

He peers at me dubiously, knows that, among other deficiencies, I am a mechanical moron. “Whatever.” He swigs, watches his wife and kid tootle the few blocks to the little local market. He puts his beer down and withdraws a boom box from his trunk, slips in a tape, turns it on, and an explosion of shrieking, grating rock rents the quiet, golden afternoon. He places the boom box on the hood of his beast and goes to my Cordoba and yanks open the hood and peers in. “This thing’s pretty clean,” he remarks. “Compared to the outside.”

“I get it lubed every three thousand miles.”

“You can go four easy with synthetic oil.”

His music jangles my senses. The professors next door, who teach at the college in San Luis Obispo and are friendly with me because we have cats, peer over, for the violent sounds are ripping into their favorite—Mahler. Both play the piano. They appear pinched and drawn and frazzled at the discordance of Junkyard Al’s music. I ask Al to please turn it down. He gazes at me, disgruntled, but turns it down a notch or two. “Okay?” he asks, very sarcastic.

His hands are permanently grimed. Already there are two empty beer cans on my lawn. I take a seat on my sofa out front of the cottage and start the difficult LA Times Saturday crossword puzzle. Halfway through it—a real grind—the wife and kids return with a grocery bag of goodies and approach Al, whose head is deep in the well of my Cordoba. He withdraws his head like a turtle and yells at them to stop pestering him while he’s at work. He tramps angrily to the trunk of the Buick and tosses them a blanket, pail, shovel, beach ball, and orders them to the beach. They comply, straggling hangdog past the CEO and dentist, both clad in off-the-links golf apparel, and their wives on their terraces, and down the beach access stairway.

Al changes a tape. More shrieking calamity. “Mind if I turn it up?”

“I think not, Al.”

“Suit yerself. Wanna beer?”

“Nah, gotta go to work at five.

“So? Yer gonna get drunk back there anyway. What the fuck?”

Al’s got the radiator and water pump out. He is skilled. Often, his wife and child linger at the doorway of Happy Jack’s during Al’s drinking hours in the poolroom, the child restless, crying, the wife long-suffering. She will come in and beg him to leave, but Al will snap at her to cease fucking with his “reward for working all goddamn day to feed your stupid asses.” Al supposedly owned a junkyard in Modesto. But I never know if I should believe half of what Al says. For instance, he claims to be a decorated Vietnam vet, but he’s far too young, at least ten years younger than I. He claims to have lied his age and gone in at 15. Al carries a pistol on his ankle. He works really fast.

I finish the crossword. Takes me around an hour. There are six cans on the lawn. The wife and kid return, the kid gnawing on licorice. The kid’s always eating, face smeared. When the wife timidly approaches Al with some sort of question, he explodes, tells her to get the fuck out of his sight. “I told yah t’ go to the goddamn beach! I told yah t’ STAY on the goddamn beach til I’m done. Do I look like I’m done? Huh? Go back to the beach!” Al orders.

“But the sun burns us, daddy,” the kid whines.

Clearly annoyed, Al tramps to the Buick, opens the door, withdraws a ball cap with SLO JUNK on the crown and shoves it down over the kid’s ears. He tosses his wife a mangled straw hat and orders them to the beach, and they straggle across the street, the retirees now on their terraces and on the pathway, hands on hips, stern and miffed.

I sit back on my sofa. I’ve got a book, but Al’s antics make it impossible to concentrate. Al pops open another beer and returns to the Coredoba, muttering about the trials and tribulations of husbandry and fatherhood.

“Don’t fucking marry the bitches,” he warns me out of the side of his mouth as he goes wrenching in the engine well.

“Never have, never will, Al. Confirmed bachelor.”

“Don’t knock ‘em up, dude.”

“I’ll try not to, Al. So far, so good.”

“You got it knocked, man. Me, I got nothin’ but wall-to-wall grief with that squaw and that munchkin. Why you think I’m in hock up to my ass? I could be a cool swingin’ dick like you, man, if I didn’t hafta support ‘em.”

“Know what Somerset Maugham said, Al?”

“Who?”

“Somerset Maugham. Great English writer.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He said, ‘There’s no object more deserving of pity than the married bachelor.’ That’s my anthem, Al.”

“Dell, I got some hosing in my trunk. You need new hoses. Can’t be usin’ duct-tape on every fuckin’ thing, man. I’ll put ‘em in.”

Al continues working and drinking. I do a load of laundry. Come back out. Al’s wrapping things up. He’s drank a 12 pack. I ask if he wants a shot of Jack. Hell yes he does. We do a shot on the porch. Then: “Where the fuck’s my fuckin’ family? I tole ‘em I wanted ‘em fuckin’ back, goddammit!”

He starts across the street, swinging his shoulders and arms, springing up on his toes, legs splayed outward, head bobbing. The retirees back away as he stands at the top of the stairway, cups his hands to his mouth, and bellows, “GET YOUR GODDAM ASSES THE FUCK UP HERE NOW!” Then he starts back. The ex-Marine dentist barks something at him, as does the ex CEO, but Al, without dignifying their presence or lowering himself to their standards, says nothing, merely flips both of them a quick no-look double-barrel finger as he continues along the pathway and across the street.

The wife and kid tootle up and obediently climb into the back seat of the Buick. Al gets behind the wheel. It won’t start. Groans and groans. Al gets out and kicks the side of the car. I get up and start my Cordoba and pull it alongside the Buick, and Al’s out with the jumper cables, yelling at his wife to turn the fucking key to the engine, and she does, and it catches instantly. Al disengages the cables and tosses them in the trunk and slams the trunk hard and jumps in the Buick, waves to me and rumbles off, leaving a dark smoke plume in his wake.

Al’s absence leaves a mesmerizing silence. Birds chirp, my cats come out of hiding. I collect beer cans. With the exception of myself, I can’t think of a single person in Happy Jack’s who can stand Junkyard Al. §

Dell Franklin worked many years as a bartender at Happy Jack’s in Morro Bay, once considered one of the roughest fishermen’s bars on the West Coast. He’s the founding publisher of The Rogue Voice, and author of The Ball Player’s Son.

 

Trampling the First Amendment in a small town by the sea

Even the chamber of commerce asked us to remove our rack from its vicinity. Images by Stacey Warde

Some readers felt we had crossed a line. Even the chamber of commerce asked us to remove our rack from its vicinity. Images by Stacey Warde

by Stacey Warde

In the early days of the Rogue Voice, when it was still merely a monthly newsprint journal, we published a story about what prisoners do when they get horny.

Tito David Valdez, Jr., doing 25-years-to-life for conspiracy to commit murder, wrote an essay about “Hittin’ it,” an intimate look at the secret ways inmates find opportunities to masturbate or get off without being observed in a well-guarded penal institution.

We also learned about lady boys in mini-skirts who look fabulous and would by all appearances seem to be real women, except for the fact they weren’t, and how most inmates, like David, avoided unnecessary drama and complications in prison, by not getting involved.

It was an informative and educational narrative. David’s column, a regular known to readers as “Life in the Cage,” and all his other subsequent columns, gave taxpayers a close-up, insider’s view of how their dollars were being spent to incarcerate convicted felons.

But one meddlesome mom from our fair village by the sea didn’t like his column. She felt we had stepped over the line, and offended the community standard for frank talk about prison sex in ‘06.

As any good moralist, she decided to take action. She meant to protect her teenage daughter and other impressionable youth in our town from the adult content, and unseemly influence of our magazine, which was then in 2006 only four months old.

Like an enormous huffing beast, she stormed into the coffee shop where I was talking with a friend and barreled into the rear of the shop where we kept stacks of our magazine. I felt her rage as she passed by me.

Seconds later, she came back our way, a full stack of Rogue Voices stuffed under her arm. “Hey, wait a minute!” I demanded. “Where do you think you’re going with those?”

“I’m going to make a barbecue out of these,” she fumed, heading for the door.

“No you’re not!” I answered. “I work my ass off to put out those damned magazines. Put them back, right now!”

She harrumphed, breathing loudly and laboriously through her nose. I felt as if she were about to punch me, but she turned away, with close to 100 of my magazines stuffed under her arm, and walked out the door of the coffee shop.

A sheriff’s deputy arrived. The barista, a contributor and editor and supporter of the magazine, had called for law enforcement to protect my First Amendment right to free speech.

The angry mom had stolen that right. She was violating state, federal and constitutional law.

The deputy dutifully questioned me, asked me what was the problem, and I told him that a woman had walked out of the coffee shop with a stack of my magazines and threatened to burn them.

“Well, why should I help you,” he said finally, “when you write negative stories about law enforcement?”

Dell Franklin had recently written a first-hand account of the City of San Luis Obispo’s fascist policing operation to intimidate Mardi Gras revelers by bringing in hundreds of police from around the state to control the unruly student mob.

By many accounts, including Dell’s, the police, called upon to keep order, were as likely to create disorder—randomly shooting bean-bag rounds into parties, freely harassing passersby on the street, detaining and questioning revelers—as students were to misbehave by celebrating the centuries old annual tradition of upending the conventions of culture.

Dell’s article offered graphic evidence of police going a bit too far, terrorizing college students who were minding their own business.

Tired of moralists trashing our publication, we ran a full-page ad reminding them of another standard.

Tired of moralists trashing our publication, we ran a full-page ad reminding them of another standard.

“Your job,” I reminded the deputy, “is to protect my First Amendment right to free speech. It doesn’t matter whether you like what I print.” I pointed my finger in the direction where I’d last seen the angry mom walking out the door with my property: “She’s violating my right to free speech. What she’s doing is illegal.”

He thought for a moment. “It’s a free magazine, isn’t it?”

“That doesn’t mean she can take the whole stack!”

In fact, state Assemblyman George Plescia, a Republican from San Diego, had recently authored, and the legislature passed, a bill, AB2612, protecting free newspapers and magazines from abusers lifting full stacks off the racks. Apparently, San Diego was having the same problem. The offense carried a sizable fine.

“We must work to ensure that no one is able to deprive others of their First Amendment rights,” then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in a statement on AB2612. “The freedom of the press is one of the most precious freedoms that Americans enjoy.”

The deputy left, presumably to consult with the offending party, and asked me to wait. He returned and informed me that the woman had been reminded that it’s my right to publish what I want and that she didn’t have the right to refuse it.

“Where’re my magazines?” I asked.

“They’re gone,” he said.

I was too angry to press the matter about the fate of that stack of magazines. I did not want to be thrown in jail for harassing or assaulting an officer.

I wrote a letter to Plescia, thanking him for protecting my First Amendment rights, while local law enforcement and would-be protectors of community standards thought less of those rights than they should.

“I edit and publish a free monthly literary journal,” I noted after thanking him, “which has had its share of vandalism from those who object to its content.

“Until now, our only support [has come] from readers who do not want others deciding for them what they can or cannot read.

“Thanks for your support. We lift our hats to you, Mr. Plescia, for your defense of our First Amendment right to a free press.”

As regards community standards and federal guidelines for offensive material, we avowed again in our pages the value of reading, of determining for oneself whether there are any redeeming qualities in our content, which would then guarantee its full protection under the law.

Not content with literally trashing our magazine, the angry mom rounded up a herd of like-minded matrons to pester local businesses to cease advertising in our magazine or to quit displaying the Rogue Voice on their premises, which is their perfect right.

The Cayucos Chamber of Commerce, coerced, asked us to remove our rack from its vicinity. We lost one advertiser while another said: “Tell those gals to get a life!”

Those “gals,” I noted in a 2006 February column titled “Our naughty little rag,” were going about town, raging to this or that business owner, “to protest its unseemly content, and to protect our impressionable teens from words like ‘fuck’ and ‘titty.’”

We were amazed that our troublesome youth had given up the internet and cell phones to go in “search of colorful language in the pages of our…morally reprehensible rag. It’s hard to imagine youngsters,” I mused, “pulling themselves away from their computers to actually read a newspaper; more terrible to think they’re reading one with naughty words.”

Oddly, or perhaps not so odd, the small-town upheaval came on the heels of an earlier trashing of another publication in which it seemed everyone everywhere in the county felt they had a moral duty to censor content they didn’t like.

Local alternative weekly New Times had published a story about methamphetamine by Alice Moss that also included a recipe on how to make the stuff. Residents went berserk, lifting the rag off racks throughout San Luis Obispo County and sending them to the landfill.

An eery absence of the weekly could be seen on virtually every rack in the county. Not one New Times could be found any where. The article itself had been informative enough and may have actually had some redeeming social value, despite its loony and irresponsible instructions on how to make meth.

A better method for informing readers about the ease of making meth would have been to take a photo of and list the ingredients. Let some fool decide how to put it all together. Good citizens, meanwhile, took it upon themselves to protect hapless individuals from the dubious joys of meth-making by eliminating the newspaper’s presence from our community.

The hysteria broke national news.

Amid the frenzy of throwing newspapers into the trash, KVEC hometown radio host Dave Congalton asked me and Dell to go on the air to discuss the issue. Many callers agreed that while they may not like what our publication prints, it’s our legal right to publish as we see fit. In fact, despite our “liberal” label, as some claimed, our most vocal defenders were more often conservatives.

It wasn’t the last time hoodlums took it upon themselves to sabotage our publishing efforts. Throughout the county, we continually heard reports from our friends that individuals were helping themselves to stacks of our magazine and making them disappear.

Finally, we’d had enough and ran a full-page photo on the back cover of the Rogue Voice showing nothing but a bible sitting on our rack, no magazines, with the headline, “Thou shalt not steal.”

It may not have made any difference in whether people trashed our magazine but it made us feel better, and we got a good laugh out of it. More importantly, we continued to publish, 32 more editions in all, without apology, and with a commitment to give voice to those who don’t often have a voice, protected by the First Amendment. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of TheRogueVoice.com. 

From the publisher

the road home

THE ROAD HOME Rogues go their own way, choosing roads that aren’t always easy or meet general approval but contain all the joy and terror one might wish to have in one lifetime. Photo by Stacey Warde

One month has passed since we began publishing online, a new venture for two guys who started their writing careers on manual typewriters.

We’re learning as we go, just as we did when we began publishing in print nearly 10 years ago, figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

We love stories and that’s always been our focus. We started out wanting to publish news and quickly grew into a forum for artful and memorable expressions of life lived differently, whether it’s driving a cab, doing time in prison, or window washing one’s way across country.

We got our name from the belief that some people, wise or not, like to go their own way, running against the grain, pursuing dreams of their own choosing.

If you’re one of those people, we’d love to hear from you.

So far, we’ve heard from many who like (and some who don’t like) what we’ve posted. In the short month we’ve been online, we’ve had more than 2,000 views, which Dell and I consider a milestone.

Recently, hometown radio host Dave Congalton, whose movie “Authors Anonymous,” premiered in San Luis Obispo last week, brought us on the air to talk about our new project. If you missed the program, you can listen to the podcast at 920kvec.com.

We’re fortunate to introduce a new voice belonging to author Ruth Rice, whose poems “ritual” and “no need of boxes” went up this week. We were introduced to her through an old friend and past contributor Larry Narron. Thank you, Larry, for the introduction.

Ruth has three books published by PoetWorks Press and has contributed in numerous anthologies, including “Bravura,” for which she also edited. As well as writing poetry, Ruth is a ceramic artist, water colorist, metal smith and fabric artist who spends her days with filthy hands and a glad heart, making art.

We revere those who get their hands dirty, making themselves glad, creating art. Welcome, Ruth. We look forward to hearing more from you as well as others who dare to go their own way.

Watch for more of these new and familiar voices in the days and weeks ahead.

—Stacey

ritual

summoned at the altar
with the host of wine and flesh
she lifts her lace and lights a votive
waiting for the voice
el dia de los angelitos esta pasado
this night belongs to the dead.

unlike the spanish from her mouth
that drowning soft unloosened song,
this hymn marches on agave feet
feeds her body peyote dreams
while the forbidden words
of a forgotten language
sund her eyes with spirit tears.

condemning, cajoling, questioning,
the souls gather a flock as birds
thrown across the moon
madly twining the night into stars.
she sleeps safely beneath the altar,
smoke seeping from her hair.

—Ruth Rice

no need of boxes

let the soil touch my face
in a final sharing of stored light
for it is the dirt of this earth
that gave me birth
let it take me home again

i will sing with the worms
lift blades of grass
as fingers to the wind
raise saplings to catch the rain
i will speak from stones
beneath a broken moon

let me crawl into the earth
and she into me
we will make love, eternal
as the crickets sing

—Ruth Rice

WHITE COLLAR HELL

Wall art on Clarion in Street San Francisco

by Dell Franklin

Fall, 1968

I was dwelling like a mole in a subterranean garret in San Francisco and trying to land a bar-tending gig after working the past summer at Harrah’s in Lake Tahoe as a bar boy. But I soon found out San Fran was a union town and there was no chance for a 24-year-old newcomer to break in. In short order, my priorities were finding a good watering hole, a job, and a woman, or, better yet, getting laid, as I’d been on a brutal drought.

The city economy was booming and I went to an employment agency where a savvy lady felt since I was clean-cut and an army veteran and scored high on an aptitude test and cheated to pass a psychological evaluation, I was prime salesman material.

Meanwhile, after considerable searching in the meat-market bar scene, I found Danny’s in the Marina, a hallway size affair with a pool table in back, and a blue-collar, working-class crowd I instantly forged a rapport with. Danny himself was enthused I’d found a job as salesman with Graybar Electric, a huge corporate supply company in the industrial belt across Market Street.

I reported to work in the same cords and white short-sleeve shirt and snap-on tie I wore to the agency interview and with the man who hired me, Bernie, to whom I reported at the monstrous drab three-story building after a night of celebratory boozing in Danny’s. The level on which I was to be employed was lined with desks of typing secretaries and salesman talking on phones, scribbling on invoices, or paging through telephone-book size catalogues of items and prices. Everybody was terribly busy. They smoked and drank coffee. There was no conversing among employees. Alongside this hive were private offices where older, rather portly men in beautiful suits signed papers, talked on the phone and, from time to time, patrolled the room, visiting, asking and answering pertinent questions, attempting amiability to boost morale. Pictures of these men were displayed along walls above their offices. I was issued a corporate handbook in which there were capsule biographies of these men, along with an outline for success within the corporation.

“To begin with, Rick,” Bernie said. “This is not exciting work. It can be confining for a restless person. You are always at your desk, working the phone, consulting the catalogue. This can be tedious and demands patience and persistence.” He watched me stifle a yawn. “Of course, after a while, you can move from the desk to the road. You’ll have an expense account, travel. I’ve done both. At this point in my life, with wife and kids, I like it here. I see you’re not married.”

“Not yet, Bernie.”

“Okay. Well. I’m going to start you out with one of our top salesman—Bill Rogers. He started out like you, and last year he was employee-of-the year throughout the country!”

I sat next to Bill at his large steel desk that was a-sprawl with manuals, invoices, and the giant catalogue. He was pale, clean-cut, chipper. A framed picture of his wife and two children stood at the corner of his desk. His handshake was solid. He was busy, working his phone, calling on trade in all parts of America, displaying an easy familiarity and rapport with each person, like old friends.

After a while, I asked, “You ever meet any of these people?”

“Oh no.”

“Don’t you want to meet them?”

He paused. “If I go to a convention. But I’m not one for conventions. I’m not a drinker or a partier. I’m a family man.”

“So they’re just voices…without faces or bodies, huh?”

He seemed impatient with my questioning, wanted only to discuss my training. He was not one iota interested in me as a person, like I was not a face or body. I was just a project.

“Some of these secretaries are cute. Do you have company parties, where I could meet some of them?”

He sighed. “No. Now, Mr. Kelso, the first thing you might do is take home a copy of our catalogue and study it.”

He was actually too busy to train me the first day. I paged through the handbook, reading bios. A striking red-haired man around my age, swinging his ass, dropped Bill off a cup of coffee and appraised me with fleeting distaste before dropping off more cups to other salesmen.

“Who’s the haughty queen?” I asked Bill.

“Edward.”

“What’s his problem?”

He sighed. “Just read the catalogue, okay?” He returned to his phone. Time crept by slowly as I grew bored with the catalogue and handbook. I peered around in hope of finding an interesting face. There were no blacks, Latinos or white low-brows.The handbook contained no pictures of blacks or Latinos. I felt perhaps there were minorities in the packaging and shipping area downstairs.

At lunch I attended a room of long tables where dozens of secretaries and salesmen ate box lunches or food from the automat. Edward hung with the girls. The salesmen talked about clients, mortgages, their kids, vacation deals, the 49ers, etc. Bernie, among them, kept an occasional eyeball on me. From time to time he conferred with Bill. Some of the secretaries appeared uneasy and flashed me dirty looks when I stared at them too long, trying to keep my boner down as I fantasized fucking them in my miserable garret. Edward also shot me a look if disdain. So I polished off my sandwich and returned to the desk where Bill was still nonstop busy and I spent the next four hours watching the hands of the big clock on the wall inch toward 5. I was never so exhausted.

Afterwards I drank at Danny’s and later had a chili cheese dog at the Doggie Diner and passed out and reported to work at 8. Early on, I found myself closely studying not only the offices of the executives as I took little strolls to break up the monotony of studying the catalogue, but their smiling yet sober visages on the walls. One of these men caught me observing him, and I nodded as he peered up from his desk from paperwork, and he nodded back, but I could sense he was not impressed with me.

“Bill,” I said, after lunch the second day. “You like this job?”

He was very, very busy, since Christmas was near. “Of course.”

“Are you passionate about your work?”

He sighed, dropped his pen. “Listen, do YOU like the job?”

“I’m trying to.”

I kept drinking coffee, because there was nothing else to do. I became jittery, started sweating. I switched around a lot and cleared my throat and rubbed my itchy nose and made several trips to the water fountain and restroom to piss. After my second day I was so drained I could barely drag myself across the industrial blight and catch a bus to Danny’s, where I got drunk, forgetting to eat. Everybody wanted to know about my new job as I sat with tie in pocket, shirt open at the throat. Next morning I arrived at work an hour late with nicks on my face, some of which were clotted with dabs of toilet paper. I sat down beside Bill and he cringed at the sight and smell of me. I was sweating cold bullets. The red-headed queen flounced by me, sniffing sourly.

“Edward!” I called. “Get me some coffee!”

He halted in his tracks, hands on hips. “Pardon me?”

I flashed him a look of icy malevolence and he quickly slammed a cup of coffee on the desk and huffed off before I could thank him. Bill was on the phone and I blindly paged through the catalogue with quivering fingers when I was not staggering—on the verge of puking—to the drinking fountain to gulp copious spouts of water as salesmen and secretaries and Bernie at the big desk up front peered over. I finally visited the john to puke violently into a toilet. When I returned to the desk, Edward, to his credit, brought me another cup of coffee and appeared sympathetic. I had slept in my sweat-and-coffee-and-beer-stained shirt and now Bernie repeatedly glanced at me. I began to shake uncontrollably. My clothes were bathed in cold seat. My scalp itched and burned. I scratched at it like a man aflame with lice. My legs went numb. My heart beat like a parakeet’s and I gulped for breath.

San Francisco wall art on Clarion Street

Wall art on Clarion Street in San Francisco

“Bill!” I said, standing. “You’d better call the paramedics for me!”

He was on the phone, covering it. “Not now!”

“I need a fucking doctor, man.”

“Listen, jackass, what are you doing here?”

“I don’t know, Bill, but I gotta get the fuck outta here. I can’t breathe.” Sweat dripped off my face. A foul stench emanated from me—a toxic effluvium equivalent to a dead seal rotting on shore. I careened across the room, bouncing off desks like a runaway pinball while employees cringed and ducked for cover or stood to observe my demise. I arrived at Bernie’s desk gnashing my teeth.

“Bernie, I gotta get outta here!”

He stood. “Mr. Kelso, please calm down!”

“I can’t! I’m going nuts in here. I suffer claustrophobia.”

“Perhaps this is not the right job for you…”

“No job is right for me!” I ripped off my tie and hurled it at one of the walls. All the executives were out of their offices, stood at the doors. I reached out and shook Bernie’s hand with my clammy paw. “You’ve been more than fair.” I dashed to the door.

“We’ll send you a check in the mail,” Bernie called.

“You don’t have to. I did nothing but sit.”

“We have to.”

“Okay, okay.” I fled the place. Dashed across the industrial blight and caught a bus to Danny’s. The sweat dried up on me and I ceased shaking. Danny fed me two hotdogs and everybody bought me drinks and I told them I could not handle a white collar job and quit. Soon they were all advising me on finding a new job. I never found one I liked, and never got laid, and ended up thumbing across the country and working on a riverboat out of New Orleans. §

Dell Franklin tended bar and drove a cab for a living for many years before retiring to his hovel in Cayucos to write full time, and care for his very needy rescue dog, Wilbur.