by Jerome Gold
Once when my son was in the war he and his friends—the other soldiers he was with—were ambushed. His best friend—another boy from the neighborhood, but who Junior knew only casually back home—got killed in the ambush. They had been through so much bad together and now he had got killed. And after he died, immediately after, and maybe some others had died too, Junior and the other soldiers who remained sat down to eat while they waited for the helicopter to come. And as Junior ate his lunch, his best friend watched him with his dead eyes. And my son said to me a year later, or maybe two, that he hadn’t felt a thing but tired as he ate his lunch. Not then, anyway. I do believe, I am absolutely certain, that my son took his own life because he couldn’t forgive himself for not closing his friend’s eyes, for not allowing him his earned peace.
Maybe that is why it was so important to me to close this poor girl’s eyes, so that no other child would have to see them, although it was not clear to me then why I needed to do this. But I wish I had been alone. I wish my granddaughter had not been with me. I wish this poor girl who could not have been fifteen years old had not died, nor my son, nor any other mother’s son or daughter.
Reagan Years
I found a part-time job selling Time-Life Books over the telephone. Four hours a day in the morning, Tuesday through Saturday, I went to the office on the north side of Lake Union, just west of Gasworks Park, got my assignment from my supervisor, sat down on a plastic chair in a cubicle, and made my calls. We called the towns and cities of the Pacific Northwest, from Seattle east to Montana, from Vancouver, British Columbia down to northern California. I did well at it, probably because they were books I was selling. I doubt I would have done as well trying to sell vacuum cleaners or paring knives.
There were fifteen or twenty of us at the phones and almost everybody was gregarious, as you would expect from phone sales people. A few kept to themselves. One of the latter was a former university professor—I never learned which discipline—whose department had been abolished during the Reagan recession. Another was a Metro driver who came directly to the office after his graveyard shift on a bus. Time-Life was his second job and he was always tired. One of the more gregarious was a man who didn’t speak in complete sentences, at least when he was on the phone, but uttered key words and phrases and sentence fragments. He sold more books than anyone else. Still another man had been an executive in a sales organization. He had taken early retirement so he could watch the baby while his wife established her career as a corporate attorney. It was his second marriage and he was quite a bit older than his wife. He took the job with Time-Life for extra income, but primarily because he missed the social aspects of the workplace.
I made two friends there and we would take our breaks together, always finding something to laugh about over our coffee. One was named Jerry. He had served five years in a federal prison for selling LSD, the first person convicted under the then new law prohibiting its sale. He said he hadn’t been selling it; he was giving it away at a Grateful Dead concert, as he had done at many of their concerts. One of the people he gave it to was an FBI agent who later lied about Jerry’s asking for money.
My other friend was named Bob. He had recently graduated from Gonzaga Law School and was in Seattle studying for the bar exam. He was a nice-looking man, tall and boyish and a little soft, though not overweight. This in contrast to Jerry who was shorter and darker and older than Bob and whose face had the marks of hard experience.
Of the three of us, Bob was the most entertaining, consistently coming up with funny, often ironic stories. One day he asked if either Jerry or I had met anyone on the phone during our calls who had come on to us. Both of us had. A woman in Portland had invited me out for a drink, but I had declined, mainly because I had not wanted to drive down to Portland to go out with someone I had not already met in person.
Bob said he’d made a date in Vancouver for this weekend with a woman he’d met on one of his calls. Jerry and I were surprised at Bob’s audacity. It would be like going on a blind date without anyone having vouched for the character of the person you were going out with—and to drive a hundred and forty miles for a first date? Bob said he would let us know how it went.
He was not at work on Tuesday. He did not come back until Thursday. He had some small nicks and scratches on his face and he looked very tired. He said he had gotten in a fight in a bar in Vancouver. At our break I asked him how his date had gone. It had gone well, he said. The woman was attractive and she was very nice, but he didn’t think he would see her again; Vancouver was just too far to drive to make a habit of it. It was after the date that he had gotten in the fight. He laughed ruefully. I did not see the connection between a date that had gone well and a fight in a bar, but did not say anything. He did not have a funny story for us.
He was at work again on Friday and then I did not see him again. He didn’t show up the following week or the week after that. I asked our supervisor about him, but he didn’t know what to think: Bob hadn’t called or picked up his check.
Months later I read about him in one of the newspapers. He had been arrested and had confessed to attacking a woman in Vancouver. Unlike what he had done to several women in Washington, he had not succeeded in killing this woman and she had been able to identify him. He was asking to be kept in prison for the remainder of his life. He was afraid he would rape and kill someone else if he was ever released.
I enjoyed the Time-Life job but it was part-time and I needed more money than it paid. For a while I worked a second job, as a security guard, but security work of that kind is done mostly at night and I wanted to be home when my son David was there.
I found a job in Bellevue doing market research by telephone. It was interesting at times, but it paid minimum wage and men were required to wear a suit and tie to work, and women a dress or a skirt and blouse, which meant that we had to buy these items if we did not already own them, and I did not own a suit.
The company occupied a small house at the edge of what had been a residential area but was now zoned for light industry. While the interior had been more or less converted for office use, from the outside the building appeared to be an old residence set anomalously beside modern office buildings.
Employees working the telephones got a ten-minute break every two hours and a half-hour for lunch. There wasn’t enough time to go to a restaurant to eat, so we brown-bagged it. While we were on the phone, supervisors strolled the aisle behind us, observing. Sometimes they listened in on our calls. The sense of oppression was like something you would find in a Dickens novel.
There were two office workers, the bookkeeper and a secretary, who were designated to open the building in the morning two hours in advance of the other workers’ arrival; they would deal with a number of administrative tasks before the day became hectic. One day they arrived to find the door unlocked. They could see someone through the window and he wasn’t anyone they knew. They called the police who arrived in time to apprehend the burglar, and they called Mr. Herbert who, with his wife, owned and managed the company. When the rest of us arrived for work, the police were just leaving. Herbert had gotten there only a few minutes before us.
While we telephone workers filed inside, he remained outside with the two women who had discovered the burglary. By mid-day, word had spread throughout the building that Herbert wasn’t going to pay them for the two hours they had spent waiting for the police to arrive and catch the burglar and then go through the building as a crime scene. His excuse was that they hadn’t accomplished the administrative chores he required them to do.
That evening, as the last three or four of us were leaving work, Herbert came out on the porch where we were putting on our coats and lighting our cigarettes, those of us who smoked, and asked if any of us were going by a post office on our way home; he had forgotten to mail some important papers. None of us replied. No one even made an excuse. Then a man who had been terminated from his job at Safeway two years before he could retire asked, “Do
we get overtime?”
“No,” said Herbert.
“Sorry,” the man said.
The rest of us remained silent.
“I’ll guess I’ll have to do it myself,” Herbert said. He walked back inside.
Alone again, someone said, “The post office isn’t that much out of my way.”
Someone else said, “I wouldn’t do anything for that son of a bitch.”
One of my colleagues spoke very slowly when he was on the phone. Also, his voice was not clear and the words often came out indistinct. For a reason or reasons I cannot now recall, and which I probably did not understand at the time, he irritated me—his slowness, his seeming lack of competence—and during our breaks I began to criticize him. After a few days of this, he asked me why I was giving him such a hard time. “I’m trying to do my job, just like you are,” he said.
I didn’t have a response. The supervisors must have been satisfied with his performance. He was still employed, after all. What business was it of mine? His question dug at something in me, something I couldn’t identify. Finally I said, “You’re right. I’ll stop.”
He was stunned. His eyes grew wide and he stared at me. His mouth formed the smallest smile. It was as if someone had told him to confront me and he had done it because he had not known what else to do, but without expectation that it would work. And it had worked!
The next day he brought a portable chess set to work and at lunch he asked me if I wanted to play. I did, and from then on, we played chess during our lunch breaks.
He knew I lived in Seattle. One day after work he asked me to give him a lift home. He lived near Gasworks Park, across the street from a house where I had once lived.
“I know the place,” I said. I didn’t say anything more. It was a kind of group home for men who had disabilities of various kinds.
On the way, he told me that he used to do drugs, especially LSD, and that finally something happened. Something went wrong in his brain and he found himself alone in a hospital from which he could not leave. Then he went to another place where he was with people, many of which weren’t going to get better, but some of which would. He was lucky, he said. After a few years he was able to transfer to this group home. The job at the market research company was the first job he’d had since his brain went wrong. He liked it. He asked me if I liked it.
It was okay, I said. It could pay better.
The pay wasn’t important to him, he said. What mattered was that he was working.
A Night at the IHOP
There used to be an IHOP on the corner of Brooklyn and h Northeast Forty-third in the University District, just down from the Neptune Theater. This was years ago. Decades. It was there and then it closed, and then it was torn down in order to expand the parking lot that had once served it.
One evening I took my son David there after a movie. We sat in a booth by a window looking out on the bare asphalt and mostly vacant stalls of the parking lot, and behind me, in the adjacent booth, were three kids. Not kids exactly—they were maybe nineteen or twenty years old—but a lot younger than me and only a few years older than David. As we ate our sandwiches I eavesdropped on the kids’ conversation. David knew not to talk to me when I was eavesdropping and he silently concentrated on devouring his hamburger and then his fries. Oddly, he always ate his fries after finishing his sandwich.
It was apparent that the boy and one of the girls behind me were a couple and the other girl was a friend of theirs. There was some gossip about people who weren’t there, all of whom the boy was sour on. It appeared that these three shared a house with some other people. This was common during the Seventies and early Eighties when money was tight, the divorce rate was climbing, and Seattle’s population was growing again after the Boeing Bust of the early Seventies. Perhaps the boy was sour on their housemates because he and his girlfriend hadn’t been together for very long and he wanted to sequester her from them.
After they gossiped, the boy and his girl began teasing each other about sex, about what she liked and what he wanted. All of the talk about sex was done through euphemism and allusion, as if by not speaking directly about it, they would prevent anyone listening to them—their friend; me, if they were aware or cared that I was eavesdropping— from knowing what they meant. There was some shuffling around on the seat behind mine as they seemed to be feeling inside each other’s clothing, or trying to. Perhaps only the boy was groping, because after thirty seconds or a minute, the girl said, “Don’t do that,” and the sounds of movement ceased. Then she said, “I have to use the bathroom,” and then I saw a young blonde woman of average height or taller, with a pleasing figure, walk past me.
When she got up, she left what seemed like a vacuum of silence, but this was filled in a moment by the other girl announcing, “I’m pregnant.”
Immediately the boy said, “It’s not mine.”
“I don’t think it’s yours,” the girl said.
There was silence again, but it didn’t feel like a vacuum this time. Rather, there was a kind of energy that occupied it. The boy said, “It doesn’t cost much to get rid of it nowadays.”
“I know. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” the girl said.
“It can’t be mine.”
“I don’t think it’s yours. It probably isn’t.”
“It can’t be. When do you think it happened?”
“Around the time we did it that time by the fireplace.”
I heard the boy sigh. “It isn’t mine,” he said.
“It probably isn’t,” the girl said. Then she said, “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
That kind of energetic silence again. The girl said, “I should probably move out.”
“I don’t have any money,” the boy said. “You don’t have to move.”
“No, I’m going to move out. I don’t expect you to do anything. Maybe help me move. Carry boxes and things, I mean.”
“Thank you,” the boy said. “When do you think it will be?”
“The baby?”
“I meant the move.”
“Oh. I haven’t even looked for a place yet. I might move back with my sister.”
“That’s probably a good idea. If you need help. You might need help.”
Neither of them had spoken with either cynicism or irony in their tone.
The boy’s girlfriend came back from the restroom. She sat down and said something about something written on the wall in the stall. The boy said something but didn’t laugh, and then he said, “Let’s go.”
He was very tall and rangy and had long hair a little darker than his girlfriend’s. The other girl was shorter. She was thin and had mouse-colored hair.
After they left the restaurant I asked David if he had heard them. He had heard some of what they said, but hadn’t been able to make sense of it.
“The boy and the blonde girl are boyfriend and girlfriend,” I said.
“I got that,” David said.
“But the dark-haired girl is pregnant, and the baby may be his.”
“Really?” David’s eyes widened. He was shocked.
I nodded.
“What’s going to happen?” He said it as though he were responding to a movie or a melodrama on TV.
I shrugged. “He already has a girlfriend.”
“That’s mean.”
“Yes. For everyone.”
“He should leave his girlfriend and marry the one that’s pregnant and then he should make his first girlfriend pregnant and leave his other girlfriend, or his wife, and marry this girlfriend—the first one.” David laughed. Then he said, “What’s she going to do?”
“She doesn’t know. She can get an abortion. That’s what the boy wants her to do. Or she can have the baby. If she has the baby she can either keep it or give it away.”
“Who would she give it to?”
“I don’t know, but there are agencies that help with that sort of thing. They would try to find parents for it.”
“Like orphanages?”
“Some are. Or the baby may go to foster parents until it’s adopted.”
While we were talking, a thin man with sharp features ran into the restaurant followed by another man who looked almost like him. Both men were in their twenties or early thirties. The second man had a short-bladed knife in his right hand and the man he was chasing ran around to the far side of the table nearest the entrance. David saw my eyes shift and he turned and together we watched the two men. Other than a waitress and two cooks, the only people in the restaurant besides us were a young man and woman in a booth on the other side of the dining room who were absorbed in conversation.
The man with the knife ran to his right around the table to try to get to the other man, but the other man ran just as far to his right around the table as the man with the knife ran. Then, as though by agreement, they reversed and ran to their left, keeping the same distance between them. All the while, both men were yelling angrily at each other in a foreign language and the man with the knife was also crying.
Then the unarmed man broke out of the circular path he was following and ran over to the counter in front of the kitchen where there were coffee pots and a silverware tray and grabbed a steak knife out of the tray and returned to the table where his pursuer had stopped and was watching him. The newly armed man began to chase the man with the short-bladed knife to the right and then to the left until both men ran out of the restaurant, one after the other, still screaming. I couldn’t see whether or not the one was crying still.
When they were gone, the waitress rushed to the door and locked it. Then she started yelling about everybody being crazy and said she had had it, this was her last day, they could get someone else to do her job. She came over and asked if I wanted more coffee and said those two guys— Iranians or Arabs or something, she really couldn’t tell the difference and honestly didn’t care what they were—they came in last week and the same thing happened. It was over a woman, of course. Wasn’t it always? The waitress, a young woman who had short, spiked hair, part of which was green, the rest a deep, rich brown, and who was about the age of the kids who had been sitting behind me, really didn’t understand what it was about because she didn’t speak their language, but they used to be friends, and they used to come in here a lot until the thing happened that made them enemies and one of them told her it had to do with the other guy’s wife or sister or something, and a lot of it had to do with their culture, he said.