In Between Two Worlds 01

After graduating from Maryhurst and before I left St. Louis in the summer of 1961 for Marynook Novitiate in Galesburg, Wisconsin, my younger brother Bill and I—well, truth be told it was mostly me—terrorized a Goodfellow Terrace policeman. It happened in the following manner.

One mid-July evening around 9:00 Bill and I were returning from a trip to the corner store at Stratford Avenue and Jennings Station Road when we saw the police car parked on the side of the road to trap unwary speeders. The Village of Goodfellow Terrace survived financially almost exclusively on revenue from speeding tickets. Everyone I knew hated those damned cops because they would give you a ticket for being two miles per hour over the 20 mph speed limit.

On the spur of the moment I decided to take the law into my hands and exact a small measure of revenge for all ambushed motorists. I told Bill to light a cigarette and hand it to me (I didn’t smoke). As we passed the police car I inserted the cigarette into the closed end of a book of matches and bent over as if to tie my shoes. I placed the match book and cigarette just under the trunk of the car and slid the two-inch salute I had been carrying in my pocket for just the right occasion into the other end of the match book so the wick was in direct contact with the match ends. And we casually sauntered away.

We hid in a clump of trees on a small rise overlooking Stratford Avenue and waited. To our consternation two or three minutes later the cop accelerated away from the curb, lights flashing, and pulled over an unwary speeder. We thought it was all over. But ten minutes later the cop finished writing the ticket, turned the police car around, and parked in the same spot that he had left minutes ago. We silently rejoiced, hoping beyond all hope that everything would work right.

Minutes later the fire-cracker went off with a tremendous roar, splattering rocks and pebbles and road debris against the undercarriage of the police car, which was enveloped by a cloud of dust and dirt. Inside the police car it probably sounded like an all out military assault. We could see the cop struggling desperately to open the car door. Finally, he threw open the door, trying simultaneously to leap from the car and pull his weapon to repel unseen assailants, and promptly sprawled face-first on the pavement.

What a sight that was. The guy lying prone in the middle of Stratford Avenue, his gun ready to fire and no one was around except the neighbors watching silently from their porches, hiding their laughter behind their hands. Bill and I laughed until our sides hurt so bad I thought we’d be sick. It was hysterical. Stupid, of course, but still hysterical.

*     *     *

After leaving Marynook Novitiate after two thoroughly miserable months, I discovered that living my high school days in the all-male atmosphere of Maryhurst Prep had ill-prepared me for normal boy-girl relationships. As recorded elsewhere, during the summers when I had been home from Maryhurst (which was a boarding school where I lived for ten months of each year) on occasion I dated JoAnn C., literally the girl across the street. But that was it. After leaving Marynook, JoAnn and I dated regularly but broke up several times for months on end. During those separations I went out with a number of other girls but was very insecure, nervous, and unsure of myself.

It was a new world for me, driving, dating, and working. One that took me quite a while to adjust to. And one in which I never felt comfortable in many telling ways. Well, not the driving part, that’s for sure.

The first year I was back home I took JoAnn to her senior prom at Incarnate Word Academy. That occasion marked the first time I went to a formal dance in a tux. Afterwards we stayed out until 4:00 AM, parked just up the block from her house, necking and engaging in all sorts of heavy breathing, groping, and so forth. Her parents were justly furious. I had to call her father the next day and apologize for keeping her out so late. Maybe I just should have reassured him by saying that we were safely parked only a half block away playing kissy-face and touchy-feely until I thought I was going to explode. Nah. Probably would not have been a good move. Then I had to tip-toe around when I picked her up from her house for a couple weeks until all was forgiven.

Less than two weeks after returning from Wisconsin I landed a low-level job at R.L. Polk that introduced me to the ways of the business world. I worked in the shipping and receiving department and also as a bonded messenger. One of my duties as a bonded messenger was to pick up checks for shipping and handling from our local clients since R.L. Polk was one of the country’s largest Yellow Page and fulfillment firms. Many times these checks would be for thousands of dollars so when I was first hired the company had me fill out all kinds of forms and become bonded. No big deal.

Because the company refused to allow me to drive the company car and they were too cheap to pay for taxis, I had to take buses. To keep from dying of boredom, I would always bring a book with me and read it while riding the bus.

One day, my boss’s boss, a pinched-face, mean-spirited, ill-tempered bitch from Hell if ever there was one, whose name I have mercifully forgotten, saw me returning from a client’s office with a book in my hand. She ordered my boss, Mrs. S., to reprimand me for reading on company time and to prohibit me from doing it again or be fired.

Mrs. S. was very angry with me, a situation that, in my innocence, I could not understand. I asked her why, if it was all right for me to stare out the bus window on company time, it was not appropriate to read. No reading on company time, I was told, or you’ll be fired. Period.

I thought that that was absolute bullshit. So from then on I brought books to work and either hid them down on the first floor loading dock or put them in plain sight on the workbench where I regularly had lunch. A couple days after the first incident the front office bitch from Hell came through the loading area around 10:00 and must have seen my book on the shipping counter. Not a minute later Mrs. S. reprimanded me and asked if I wanted to be fired. This time I was ready and told her with a smile that I read while taking the bus to and from work and on my lunch break. I innocently asked if the company had a policy of not letting their employees read during lunch. With Alma, our union shop steward, listening to her every word, what could she say?

The very next time I had to pick up a check I slipped a book under my shirt and belt and sauntered out as meek as a lamb. Nobody was going to stop me from reading. Fuck them and their ignorant attitudes. Up the rebels!

Things went okay for a couple months and then, of all things, I got fired. It was sometime in late March. To set up the story properly, you have to know a little about the building, which was located downtown at the intersection of Tucker Boulevard and Washington Avenue. It was an old building and in poor condition, especially in the shipping and receiving area where I worked. The wooden floor was a patch-work quilt of sections of new hardwood boards, old but seemingly adequate boards, and decaying, rotten, and sometimes splintered boards that made pulling the heavy skids of paper and envelopes difficult, even for strong young men like my co-worker Roger and me.

One morning Mrs. S. told me to load up a skid of boxes filled with printed materials that had been damaged in shipping. The company had received permission from its insurance carrier to destroy them and she had called the man we used to take care of our bulk trash. Roger wasn’t busy so he and I loaded the skid. It was difficult since the boxes were different sizes and shapes. Tying them together so they would be stable and not fall over when they were moved proved a difficult task. There were simply too many boxes of varying sizes. In addition many of the boxes had been damaged and were no longer rigid or square. I warned Mrs. S. that it would take two people to move the skid over the floor to the shipping elevator since the boxes were unstable, one to pull the skid lift and the other to stabilize the boxes so they wouldn’t fall.

Not long after that I was dispatched to the Post Office to deliver a check for postage. When I returned, the building’s head shipping and receiving clerk, an older fellow named Bill, laughingly told me that when I went upstairs they were going to fire my ass. What? I thought he was joking. But when I got upstairs Mrs. S. told me to leave at once. I was being fired for loading the skid wrong.

It turned out that right after she sent me to the Post Office, one of the main folding machines broke, and Roger rushed off to a hardware store for a replacement part. That’s when the guy came for the skid of damaged boxes. Naturally, instead of waiting for either Roger or me to return, Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell tried to move the skid across that uneven floor to the freight elevator. And equally naturally, the boxes fell from the skid as they moved it, injuring Mrs. S’s ankle. Of course she looked around for a scapegoat and found me. I protested that the boxes were damaged and of unequal sizes and they could not be loaded right in the first place and that I had warned her of that problem.

“You’re fired,” was all she said, not being the slightest bit interested in logic or rationality. I angrily asked her if Roger was being fired as well since we both loaded the skid. Fat fucking chance. His nose was too far up her butt for that. It was my ass that was toast.

That’s when Alma, our union shop steward, pulled me aside. I know she saw the tears in my eyes; I hated the unfairness of it all. She told me not to worry, the union would get me back on by threatening to file a grievance for me and the company would almost certainly have to reinstate me. Just go home and relax for a few days, she said. I felt absolutely terrible, upset, ashamed, hurt at the rank injustice. Such the innocent.

A week and a half later I was back on the job. It turned out Alma had been right. The union had raised the issue that it was against work rules for supervisory personnel, like Mrs. S. and the front office bitch from Hell, to move freight. And if they wanted a strike, they had one. Of course, the company backed down, knowing the union had them by the balls since everyone on the work floor had witnessed the two women moving the skid and said that it all was a misunderstanding. Certainly, that’s one reason I have been a strong union supporter all my adult life. Another, of course, is I'm a flaming leftist.

That next week I was back at work and was paid for the days I missed, I might add. But everything had changed; the atmosphere was absolutely poisonous. Mrs. S. spent most of her time trying to catch me doing something wrong and finding fault with everything I did, whether it was correct or not. She gave me every nasty and dirty job she could find and generally made my life miserable. It was brutal.

Roger’s head was so far up her ass you couldn’t see his shoulders and he stayed as far away from me as humanly possible and still work in the same place. Two months later they laid me off, ostensibly due to a lack of work. I was so exhausted from the stress and tension I was relieved and didn’t give a shit. Less than a month later I was working full-time with my brother, Jack, at the Dairy.