Author: Frank DeMarco

The women on the lines were getting tired too. I could tell by the way they pulled the boxes off onto the slide. There was a jerky impatience in their motions that hadn’t been there a few hours before. Awareness of the fact that the sift was coming to an end had brought them out of the comforting lull of monotony without freeing them.  When we got into the final hour – when the end was clearly at hand – we would feel our fatigue less. The shift’s seventh hour was the hardest.

Is this why Dave says I am too old? Because I saw this world before I went to college?

The light outside is pretty bright now, bright enough to dim the lights in here. Morning, out there.

That stupid sociology course I had taken, dividing America into classes: upper, middle, lower, and subdividing each of them into upper, middle, lower. “America doesn’t have classes,” I had said. My books had taught me that class was a European concept, and in America everybody is equal, everybody can get ahead. But when the teacher had passed out an anonymous questionnaire asking, among other things, what class we had been born into and what class we expected to die in, I had filled it in like everyone else.

She told us later that most students said they started “lower middle” and expected to end “upper middle.” I had said “upper lower” and “lower upper.” They wanted mobility? I’d give them mobility. But even as I filled in the questionnaire, I knew that the possible answers were too simple to be meaningful.

Farmers, for example, never had much money, but could anybody seriously compare a farmer to a wage earner? Farmers were labor and management in one. They weren’t the masters of their own fates (given the vagaries of weather, markets, shippers and governments), but they didn’t punch time cards, and they didn’t have to obey other people. Could you really consider my father “upper lower class” merely because he didn’t see $5,000 in any given year?

Plus, one thing the Catholic schools did was teach middle-class values, manners and habits. Could a product of the Catholic schools be considered upper lower class?

My mother’s father, my dead grandfather, the painter and Republican politician, and his staunchly Republican family, not a Democrat in the lot until John F. Kennedy lured me over. Did any of this fit with “upper lower”?

But if I was a product of the middle class, what was I doing in a glass factory? Why was I different from all my friends and classmates at college?  I could see, now, that if I was going to fit in, it would require conscious mimicry. Maybe going to GWU had stretched me farther than I had realized. Segal certainly wasn’t spending his summer throwing boxes.

Here came my relief. The eight o’clock shift had just punched in. I nodded to him – someone else I didn’t know – and made my way down to the punch clock, behind a long line of people who had been less absorbed in their inner world, more aware of the ticking of the clock. The line moved as quickly as people could punch their cards. When you’re paid by the hour and are docked for being a minute late going in, you don’t give them an extra minute on the other end.

I had made note of the slot where I had left my card., knowing better than to slow down the line fumbling. I plucked it out as I came opposite the “in” rack, hit the clock, heard the bell of freedom, and put the card in a slot in the “out” rack. Then I was among the knots of workers headed up the driveway toward the gate, blinking a bit in the morning sunshine.

One down.

I walked up to the little cafeteria at one end of the building, ordered two sausage sandwiches and a coffee. Too dark, too small, to be attractive as a place to eat. I took my food outside, and ate it sitting on a loading dock at 4:15 a.m., looking at the moon, thinking of nothing in particular.

This summer wouldn’t much resemble the one before. There was all the difference in the world between living on your own and living in your father’s house. Also between working in a congressman’s office – no matter how trivial the work – and working in a glass factory. Between nights spent slinging the bull on the steps of the fraternity house and nights spent throwing boxes. Between being in a city with all its opportunities, and being nowhere doing nothing.

volunteer congressional assistant !

I looked around at the lamplit stone and asphalt, and remembered the night at Dave Segal’s apartment, the first (and, as it turned out, the only) time he had invited me over . “I’ve got a new Beatles album you have got to hear,” he had said, with great emphasis. I hadn’t been a big Beatles fan. I had loathed their early teeny-bopper music, and had been quite surprised to find that most people in college were crazy about them. Also, I couldn’t remember ever talking about music to Dave. Why did he choose me?

The album was “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” not yet a cultural sensation. (Leave it to Seagal to get in on the ground floor.)  Dave had lit up a couple of candles and a stick of incense, and we sat in the darkened room and drank his wine and listened. As he had forewarned, one cut faded directly into the next without the customary pause. We listened to the entire side, and Dave got up to flip the record and we listened to the other side. An hour, call it. Not much time.

Break time was over. I walked back into the building, stuffing the coffee container and the papers form the sandwich into a trash can. As usual, all the lines were backed up, and it took several minutes to clear them.

“To tell the truth, Dave, a lot of it I couldn’t understand. I liked it, pretty much, but some of it was pretty strange.”

Segal had smiled. “That’s because you don’t have the key.” (And that was Segal, always ready to demonstrate how much of a man of the world he was. Well, compared to me, to what I knew of the world, it was easy enough.) I said, “So what’s the key? It isn’t in the liner notes.”

He had laughed his slightly mocking (and self-mocking) laugh. “No, it isn’t in the liner notes.” After I waited him out, he said, “Acid. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, get it? LSD. ‘I’d love to turn you on.’ It’s as plain as anything, once you have the key.”

And, as soon as he said it, it was clear. And then he had leaned forward earnestly. “The point is, I’ve got some, and it’s dynamite. Want to try it?”

I shook my head, remembering, and moved on to another lehr. I remember being unsurprised that Dave used drugs. It fit with his somewhat self-consciously bohemian lifestyle. And I suppose I was flattered that he thought I might an interesting person to get high with. But then, maybe he merely thought my reactions would be amusing. In any case, I told him, I didn’t think it was for me.

Segal, all energy and sweet reason, was sitting forward now. The candles made little highlights on his eyeglasses. “But if you haven’t tried it, how can you know? Frank, I’m telling you, this stuff is tremendous.”

“It’s also illegal.”

He brushed that aside. “So is off-track betting. So is speeding. So was drinking, during prohibition. So what?” I wasn’t about to say I didn’t want to risk getting arrested. And anyway, that wasn’t it. The fact was, the stuff scared me. I told Segal that doing drugs “wasn’t my thing,” and doing one’s own thing was as close to a universal commandment as college kids recognized.  But it didn’t stop Segal, or even slow him down. He was always different, even in his non-conformity. “Frank, you don’t believe the stuff you read, do you? Believe me, if I didn’t think it was safe, I wouldn’t fool with it.”

I was getting tired now. Maybe the sausage was slowing me down, but more likely it was the time of night. The hour before dawn was always hard. The boundaries between world blurred. I knew full well where I was, but the inner stage was a little more brightly lit, the outer a little less so. I saw boxes and strapping tape and the day’s first pale light coming through the distant windows. But mentally, I saw Segal and me in his apartment, discussing the pros and cons of drugs in general and acid in particular. And how much separated the two scenes? A few weeks, a few hours on the road, and certain incommunicable differences in background, income, prospects, outlooks, desires….

Maybe if I had understood that when I first went to college, I would have gotten along better.

The summers I turned 16 and 17, I had loaded and unloaded trucks and tractor trailers at the produce auction, half a mile from grandmom’s house. I would walk there every day after work, waiting for dad to pick me up. One memorable sunny August afternoon in 1963 and I had sat in her living room watching President Kennedy announce that “yesterday, a shaft of light cut into the darkness,” referring to the signing of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty.

Other times, I had come in for cookies and milk after plowing or discing or cultivating, and had sat and told grandmom of things I had been reading about. Earlier yet, I had been one of the 15 grandchildren who filled her house with noise and motion on her birthday and on some holidays. And before even that, back in the early fifties, my older brother and sister and I would sometimes come in, cold and wet from picking daffodils for the cut-flower trade, and grandmom would fix us hot chocolate. And cookies. She always urged cookies on you as if they were something good for you that you ate too infrequently.

Several lehrs down, a couple of people were arguing about something. I could see the hostile postures, could hear the angry sound, if not the words. I watched them for a moment, mildly curious, then turned back to my work.

I’d almost killed myself, one day, plowing. The plow had a three-point hitch, meaning that it hooked two chains to the hydraulic lifts at the back of the tractor, while the tongue attached directly below the seat, held in place by a pin, which was secured in turn by a cotter pin. One day, as I was plowing, the cotter pin got out, the pin worked loose, the tongue dropped and dug itself into the ground, and the rear end of the plow came flying up and forward toward my head. The tongue dug itself almost vertically into the ground, stopping the plow from going forward the few inches it would have needed to brain me. The tractor was shivering and bucking, its wheels still churning, until I put in the clutch. I backed it out, and the plow tongue came out of the ground undamaged. Walking back, I found the pin lying atop the furrow, rather than being buried beneath the earth, as I had feared. I never did find the cotter pin, but no harm, no foul, and I had a story to tell about the hazards of farming. But who would I have told? My fraternity brothers, coming out of their suburban backgrounds?

It occurred to me, rhythmically throwing boxes, that what I was doing wasn’t so different from most jobs where you worked with your hands. Most jobs had a groove, and the hardest part was finding it and settling into it. Like mixing mud, which I had been doing for the past few days.

Dad was renovating one of the farm buildings, and one aspect of the job was plastering the two-story exterior. He hired a couple of men, and he conscripted my cousin Warren and me as free labor. The three men did the plastering. Warren and I mixed the plaster (which everybody called mud) and kept it coming to them as they were ready for it.

There’s nothing particularly difficult about mixing mud: so much cement, so much sand, so much water from the hose. Dad’s cement-mixer had died long ago, so Warren and I  mixed by hand, pouring the materials into a six-foot by four-foot by one-foot slope-sided metal box, raking the stuff forward and back forward and back, using an oversized hoe with two large holes in the blade. We would mix and get a batch ready, then put it in a bucked tied to a rope attached to a pulley at roof level. We would swing the bucket of mud up to the men on the scaffold and they would empty it into a tray and we’d lover the bucket and refill it. Nothing fancy, but there was a rhythm to it. We had to mix the mud soon enough that they would have it when they needed it, but not too soon, or it would begin to harden. Since mixing took a good while, we had to start the next batch before the previous batch was used up. That meant piling the available mud at one end and the new materials at the other, trying to keep the water from flowing into the old batch so it wouldn’t’ get soupy.

My relief man arrived again, chatty as ever. “Lunch. Twenty minutes.”

One day drinking with my friends to celebrate the end of finals. The next day, starting a three-day job mixing mud at the farm. Two days after that, back at the factory.

How long did it take, really, to clean off a roller, even when it was full? A minute of double-time? Forty seconds? Not long. I cleared off the backlog and had time enough to stack three boxes from the slow line, the medicine bottles. By the time the towmotor had removed the full pallet and had left an empty,, that line was backed up a little, but it was just a matter of keeping an eye on things.

I’d never realized how different our backgrounds were till I saw Dave see the house I’d grown up in. I couldn’t envision his home, but I could nee what it must not have looked like. It brought me back to the Thanksgiving when I had invited Dennis home for the holiday, and he had driven us up. On the Friday night, I had brought him to the factory I’d worked at we had gotten in and out without being challenged, and in a few minutes it had shown him a world he’d never seen. “Puts a whole new light on my Thanksgiving,” he had said. Like me, he was working his way through college, but his father was paying his tuition, and he had no factories in his background.

The boxes came down the lines. I stacked them according to the posted patterns; tied up the completed stacks; began again. I was fully into an easy rhythm now, swinging from line to line, almost enjoying the newly familiar strain on muscles that had gotten unused to that kind of workout. By the end of the first shift, I’d be tired. For the first couple of days, maybe a week, I’d be sore. Then it would be as before.

No factories in their backgrounds. No farms, either. What Dave had said was true, I was different in dress and action and attitude. No wonder I was struggling. But it was hard to see what could be done about it. Should I make my life into a  long Halloween, with me always in costume?

I had been working about an hour and a half when my relief came. “Break time,” he said. “Ten minutes.” I nodded, knowing the drill. Every night one man spent the night going from man to man, relieving each in turn. I didn’t know this guy, and he clearly considered me just another college boy home for the summer, nobody worth exchanging a friendly word with. I went off to the rest room, and when I got back, he was gone and all three lines were stacked up. He hadn’t bothered to clean off the slow line even once. Nothing new there. I had never come back to find my lines cleaned off. It took about three and a half minutes of quick work to clear things.

“But if I don’t fit in at college, I don’t fit in at home anymore either.” Said silently, part of a long night’s argument.

I’d seen it on my first day home. Dad had had work to do at the farm, and had asked me – which amounted to telling me – to go along. So I had put on some old clothes and had ridden shotgun in his old GMC truck to the farm, which was  a few miles away. We didn’t have much to say to each other. What could I have talked about? Hearing “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” in Dave Segal’s apartment? Our fraternity house winning Most Improved House trophy? The irritating difference between life as my own man and life as a dependent in dad’s household?

Naturally, we first stopped in to see grandmom. Her eyes lit up behind her glasses, and I was hugged and kissed and fed with home-baked cookies from her pantry, and a glass of milk, just as if I were still a kid. She asked how school was going, and I gave the best non-answer I could think of. I had been so depressed that Spring that I had felt like dropping out, so depressed that for days on end it had become too great a bother to go to class. How could have had told her, or told dad, any of that? They’d have asked why, and I didn’t know why. Or, more likely, they would have said it was silly to be depressed at my age, with no family, no responsibilities to worry me. Think of all the people with real problems, they would have said. And at that, can’t say they would have been wrong to say it. The only thing is, it didn’t help.

Only two hours down, six to go, an eternity. And this only the first night of elven weeks of this. I reached for the cardboard to box up another stack.

I liked grandmom, and admired her. She had received little formal education, but she understood the world she lived in much better than I did mine. Years later, I would read of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s old age, connected to neighbors, town, family and countryside, and I would recognize grandmom’s life. But liking was one thing, relating was another. My new world of classes and fraternity and big-city life was something far from her experience, and I had no confidence in my ability to bring it to her, or to dad. Only decades later would I realize, I never made the attempt.

I could vaguely remember how hectic my days had been, my first week on this job two years before. But as soon as I began to throw boxes, I was back in the groove. The job wasn’t pleasant, exactly – too much noise, too much dust, too many echoes of last time – but within minutes I had reduced it to repetitive motion and petty decision-making, and my mind was free to roam.

Seeing dad’s house through Dave’s eyes was quite a revelation. We had driven into the driveway, that weekday morning, and I had gone in by the side door, and had been disappointed to find nobody home.

“Doesn’t your family lock the door when they go out?”

“This isn’t D.C., Dave.”

“I guess not. Well, let’s get your stuff out of the car so I can get on my way.” He had helped carry my trunk into the living room, and I had seen him glance around, and suddenly I saw it as he saw it: an old house, kind of dark, with old furniture, not stylish or modern. Not very middle class.

He had been gone within 10 minutes, as soon as I sketched out the easiest way back to the Turnpike. Probably he’d have left immediately, no matter what the house looked like, unless my mother had been there to offer him a cup of coffee and a slice of cake. He was anxious to get to his aunt’s in North Jersey, where he would leave the car before flying off to Iowa for the summer. He didn’t want to stay, he wanted to get home, nothing more.

But still—

I stacked the last box up above my head, and got one of the eight-foot sheets of corrugated cardboard off the stack. I bent it to wrap around one side and two corners of the stack, and leaned it there. I pulled off four double armlengths of strapping tape from the spool. I fixed the wire clip to one end of the tape, hooked it onto one end of the cardboard, and carried the tape around the stack, back to the clip. I pulled the clip off the cardboard, fed the free end of the tape through the clip and tightened it just enough to hold the cardboard loosely in place at the top.

Dave had been looking out the window at the Maryland countryside as I took my turn driving. “You might think about how you dress,” he’d said finally. “That kind of thing is important to girls.”

Doing 75 on the interstate didn’t require any particular attention, with mid-morning traffic so sparce. I had glanced over and seen his half-apologetic expression. “You think that would do it?”

A year of living in the same house had showed us that we spoke the same language, that differences between us were superficial rather than essential. Still, Dave seemed to hesitate, his voice came out very soft.  “Of course it won’t do it, but it would help.” When I asked what would  do it, and had repeated the question,, he’d said I dressed too old and acted too old. I had thought about it as we drove along, trying to get the sense of it.

I got the second cardboard, placed it against the stack’s opposite side, bent it into place. I slipped the top under the tape I’d left loose, then pulled the tape taut, snapping it twice to tighten it. I measured off another length of tape, cut it, hooked the clip to the bottom of the cardboard, walked the tape around, fixed the clip and tightened it, leaving the stack ready for pickup. Then I moved quickly to the next lehr, which was beginning to stack up.

I’d known what he meant, all right. From the very first days of Freshman year, I had realized that I was different from those round me. I wasn’t much given to introspection – in fact, painful high school years had taught me not to consider how others might react to me. I had learned to live within myself, in my own mind, my own room. But surely I’d gone beyond all that? Yet here was Dave, whose judgment I trusted, telling me I was still different.

“But Dave,” I had said, “what am I suppose to do? I am who I am. I can’t change that. Is it going to do any good to pretend I’m something I’m not?”

Dave was always reasonable. “Look, DeMarco, you asked the question. I can’t help it if you don’t like the answer.”