It's not exactly relevant, Kenneth but it does stir up memories of taking a blue collar job to augment an a burgeoning white collar existence. In my case, it was a plastic factory in Hawthorn for six weeks, earning money before the next year at uni. My Laura the bookkeeper was Greek-Australian smock-wearing Jenna, writing with black crayon on cardboard boxes full of stacked toilet seat lids 'Six only, black'.
Bill
On 27/10/2012, at 3:51 AM, Kenneth Wolman <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It's an old poem. Still strikes me. If it's relevant, that's scary.
>
> ALLEGHENY REALTY CORP.
>
> A collection man had shown me a door,
> right by a dingy fileroom on the 3rd floor
> Allegheny Realty Corp. it said, in black stencil.
> Behind the door was a broom closet.
> It was some slumlord's rent-check mail-drop:
> a place he could go without fear of getting shot
> by some tenant-in-arrears.
>
> Downstairs, on Two, we worked the tenants who owed our client:
> a Su Credito Es Bueno Aqui jewelry store on the street floor
> that gave Easy Terms, sold the Norteamericano White Man's Dream
> to cleaning girls from Bayamon, Black countermen,
> day-laborers without Union books:
> the Olympic TV, sapphire ring, Gruen watch, or set of silverplate.
> We ogled Laura, the hourglass body Puerto Riquena bookkeeper,
> said she was worth a sterling silver diaphragm,
> and that we'd fight to install it ourselves.
>
> Divorced guys and a high-school kid: me.
> I knew where I had come from: an upstairs neighbor
> fixed an off-the-books summer job for a kid
> with a future in English Lit'ra'cha.
> But I never dreamed what fate had brought these
> wrinkled collars and dollar ties to this place.
> I wondered only why these middle-aged men looked at me with envy
> or anger, snarled "Kid, why the fuck are you here?"
> as they hung up from a minimum wage debtor
> who'd told them to burn in hell for the hundredth time that week.
>
> They always fell behind, our clients,
> so we garnished them because that's what the job was:
> called the Brooklyn Civil Court and kept a magistrate hopping:
> The buff cards of broken dreams were piled floor to ceiling,
> scattered on desktops, wedged under phone books.
> We worked the horn to work out terms: but got false addresses,
> disconnected phones, crazed accented voices telling us to
> make much too good friends with our mothers,
> or to put our fates in the hands of the gods
> as those we garnished had put theirs.
>
> At noon I'd cross the street, sit in the old Pennsylvania Station,
> marked by '61 for the wrecker's ball,
> look up at my glass ceiling,
> and thank God that my ticket was punched,
> that I would go to college in the fall,
> forget this place, forget the vengeful phone calls,
> forget the cursing manager who struck out last night
> and took it out on a widow,
> forget my sticky virgin night-fantasies of Laura the bookkeeper,
> and inhabit a world of high art, of poetry
> that would soar into an Avalon of misty hills and kings.
>
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