Surveying my motley history of impromptu efforts to make money, I see something like a vast mural by Hieronymus Bosch in which all the victim characters distributed across the terrain of Hell are me. Many of my employers were decent people. Some were demons, but mostly my discomforts came from the nature of the work itself. After college, and after I had determined on being a writer, my choices of stopgap employment were shaped by the need to preserve free time to write.
It was my bad luck to learn absolutely nothing from any category of work. Wait, that’s wrong. I did learn that picking cherries for a week turns your hands almost indelibly black, and that my wife could pick cherries as fast as my brother and me combined.
To be accurate, I learned that there’s pathos almost everywhere in the world of work. Before leaving for college, I spent a period assisting my father in his endeavors as a salesman of primitive photocopying and laminating equipment to small offices. In demonstrating the laminator to a business in Modesto, California, he was proudly handed a letter to the owner of the firm, praising the owner for some service or other, and signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The letter emerged from the laminator perfectly encased in plastic, with the signature gone.
By the summer of 1955, I was always on the qui vive for employment that would allow me the time I wanted. At a marriage party given for my new wife and me in San Francisco by a then icon of mine, the poet Kenneth Rexroth, I got a good idea from Allen Ginsberg, who was then a snappily dressed, clean-shaven, and neatly coiffed part-time interviewer for a market-research outfit. He suggested I look for a similar part-time job back East. When, two years later, we moved to New York City, I found such work with a new company founded by a group of social-science academics who had earlier lost their jobs as a result of the McCarthyite persecution. For some reason, we were attempting to divine attitudes toward different, futuristic, as yet uninvented electrical devices. Each respondent received a five-dollar bill. My first interviewee was under the impression that the light bulb had been invented by a man named Con Edison. I had a feeling of hilarity about this job, because the assignment was to conduct interviews in the Polish-Ukrainian neighborhood around St. Mark’s Place, and communication was so difficult that on the report forms at times I resorted to sheer guesswork and to what is now referred to as creative nonfiction.
When my wife, Elsa, and I, and our infant son, found refuge immediately after college in a crumbling mansion generously given over to deserving writers and artists by a humanitarian patron of the arts, Mrs. S. M. Ruff, of sainted memory, my search for time-sparing pickup work had to be conducted in the vastness of the thinly populated woodland of Ulster County, in the Catskills. Manual labor was what there was, and it wasn’t easy to get. I agreed to clear a vast, overgrown meadow adjacent to the very fancy log cabin of an anarchist couple living in Bearsville, near Woodstock. We were situated about seven miles from their place. They must have been Luddites, because they had no mowing equipment and no car with which they might have come to pick me up for my task—me and my giant, vintage scythe, which Elsa had found under the porch and sharpened on an ancient whetstone that happened to be lying around. In any case, the job completed, I accepted fifteen dollars from the anarchists. It had taken all day, and involved fourteen miles of hiking in August and the discovery that there is something so frightening about a man carrying a large scythe that not one of the usually very friendly motorists on the Wittenberg Road would give me a lift. Our time in Mrs. Ruff’s art commune came to an end when animosity between an avant-garde writer and a genre writer turned alarming.
Exploitation by employers from whom you least expect it (I considered myself in those days a comrade of the log-cabin people, after all) is not exactly a red thread running through my memory, but it’s something like it. When I worked for Frances Steloff, the mistress of the world-famous Gotham Book Mart, in Manhattan, a basilica for worshippers of modern literature (she had an awful painting by D. H. Lawrence hanging on the wall of her office), I observed that the way she kept workers toiling for her, for years, despite the mean wages they were paid, was with the oft-repeated promise that she was going to die soon, and that the workers would inherit the Gotham as a co-op. Twice, I saw Steloff hit an aspiring poet, Bob, with her cane when he took longer than she felt he should to cart donkeyloads of books to the post office. He was still on the job when I left, after a disagreeable six weeks. In her defense, it must be noted that she did from time to time give Bob a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. ♦
