After my year in unskilled-labor limbo, I did finally go off to college, and those years did change my life. But in the middle of that transformation, I spent the summer before my junior year back in South Jersey, doing shift-work at the glass factory I had left two years earlier. Two years earlier, I had watched the college boys come into the factory for the summer to make money for the next year’s expenses. Now I was one of them, and yet I wasn’t at all sure that this, or something like it, would not be my future.
You might think that someone already halfway through his college years would know that upon graduation he was going to move into another world. But I had no way to imagine life post-college. I was going through college the way I had gone through all my schooling, following arbitrary and inescapable rules, being carried along in a current: drifting. I didn’t have sense enough or initiative enough to seek counseling. Instead, I sleepwalked. So I couldn’t imagine what might follow college.
Years later, in a never-to-be-completed nonfiction novel I was going to title Graduation, I wrote up my state of mind that long solitary transitional summer, and I offer it here as a window into the mind of that boy, who was on the verge of so many changes in the summer he turned 21.
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- First Shift
During the two years that I’d been away from the glass factory, the external mechanism – the vast compound of human beings and machinery and brick and glass that was the factory – had continued to function as it had long before I’d first arrived. I’d expected that it would. What surprised me was that a corresponding internal mechanism had remained in existence when I had left for school. Apparently it had slept, unnoticed, within me, biding its time.
That internal mechanism began to awaken at quarter past 11 p.m., as I put on the dungarees, the flannel shirt, the old shoes, that was my uniform for a summer of throwing boxes. It stretched, limbered up, as I found a spot and parked mom’s car in the second of the three sprawling parking lots – full, as always a shift-change time — and stepped out of the car at 11:45 and looked across the street at the glass plant.
There it was, a great clump of interconnected one- and two-story buildings, dominated by the 40- or 50-foot high glass house that was the heart of the place. The office-building windows were dark, of course, at midnight, and those of the mold shop. But the packing house windows were lighted, and light came from the doors open to the night. Spotlights lighting the asphalt driveways showed me a towmotor truck carrying a full pallet to the great barn-like room where loads accumulated before being shipped out in tractor-trailers or railroad boxcars. Mainly, I saw the orange glow – 40 or 50 feet in the air – as seen through the windows far above the glasshouse floor.
I hadn’t even yet gotten inside the fence, and it was all coming back. I could hear the muted roar of the furnaces, could sense the pervasive presence of dirt. could hear the whining hum and electrical clicks of the battery-powered forklift trucks, and the clatter and rattle of glass jars and bottle being packed into boxes, and the jouncing of fully-packed boxes sliding down metal roller trays. I could hear snatches of half-shouted conversation among human pieces of the vast machine. It all came back, so clearly. Reason for dismay.
The midnight-to-eight shift would be my first since I had quit to go to college two years earlier. The good thing was, it would be the first in only a limited number of shifts before I would quit again and return to college. I was only summer help. I would be getting out of here again. Surely that would make a difference.
Surely it would, but that assurance did not make it any easier to walk across the parking lot and across the street and through the open gate in the eight-foot-high iron fence. I knew hat I was returning to, and I wasn’t entirely sure I would ever really escape. Escape was what college supposedly was all about, but when all was said and done and attended and paid for, would it really make the difference? Or would I gravitate, from lack of better opportunities, back into this constricted world?
I had had that question on my mind the week before, as I had been driven home by my friend Dave Schlachter, but I hadn’t talked about it. Dave would have dismissed the fear out of hand, finding the idea inconceivable. But he hadn’t come out of the world of manual labor, and managerial disdain and short paychecks. You don’t fear returning to something you never knew.
I had wondered: Was I going back for a final look at a life I was about to leave forever? Or was it a reminder that what I was trying to leave behind would be waiting for me when escape came to an end? I felt like T.E. Lawrence, pacing up and down in front of the recruiter’s station, nerving himself up to sell himself into uniformed slavery for a term of years.
But, it had to be done. To return to school, I had to have money. To get it, I had to save as much as I could. That meant living at home and working fulltime, with as much overtime as I could handle. So here I was, re-entering Armstrong Glass Company at a few minutes to midnight on the Thursday after my return from D.C.