Worthy

(first published by Ink Brush Press)

Chester, New York, spills off of the Palisades Parkway about seventy miles northwest of New York City. It rests, like Rip Van Winkle, in the foothills of the Catskill Mountain Range. When I first moved there after returning from the Vietnam War, the town and surrounding countryside was in the process of explosive change.

Generations of Dutch and German immigrants had built huge dairy farms broken up only by acres of pine forests, stone fences, and lazy streams. White barns stood beside white homes at the end of shaded lanes. The whole area resembled a pastoral postcard for over two hundred years.

Then, a generation of farmers went off to Europe and fought the Nazis. Those that lived to return home made the mistake of having children. The post-war baby boomer generation cultivated no patience for milking cows. Upon inheriting the land, they parsed it off to developers. Former farms and wild forests evolved into a sort of prefab suburbia.

Hundreds of New York City cops, firemen, sanitation workers, and low-level bureaucrats began to move their families into these aluminum-sided shells hoping to escape the hard drugs, random violence, frenetic pace, and high price of urban living. For many of them, grass was an acrid weed rolled in cigarette paper and smoked. They had no idea what country living entailed, only that it was cheaper and less dangerous than city living for their families.

Expectation aggravated by the loss of identity for both groups of people, the ones who grew up in Chester and the ones who moved there, created an atmosphere of chaos and culture shock.

A mile outside Chester and fenced off from the confusion a formidable cluster of concrete and steel buildings rose from the black earth. It was born as a women’s prison early in the twentieth century and with the idea that an institution of rehabilitation should be self-sufficient. In order to give the debauched and degraded female felons opportunities for learning job skills, the prison operated a vegetable farm, a canning factory for preparing the produce, and a train station to ship it off to commercial markets. However, like puberty, the depression created an obnoxious adolescent from its infant enterprise, a product consumers neither wanted nor could afford. The business of exploiting captive labor soon went belly up and the prisoners were moved to prisons with less overhead in other parts of the state.

After years of abandonment, the Department of Social Services in New York City came up with a solid plan to recoup the city’s investment. Interestingly, the idea coincided with the onset of social security payments to the elderly and the disabled. They sent out the municipal medical vans. Paramedics scooped up the ill and wretched and homeless alcoholics who lay around the alleyways in the Bowery, depositing them in the detox center on 3^rd Street.

Here, the men who were consumed and ravaged by their addiction went through delirium tremors and a number of other problems, any of which could be classified as a major health crisis, until they were steady enough to sign a form. The form allowed the city to apply for social security benefits on their behalf and collect the money for as long as the men were interned and attempts were made at rehabilitation. Enter the former women’s prison at Chester, New York, now remade into the benevolent Camp LaGuardia.

Dried out dregs of humanity got bussed constantly from the city to the country. Some men stayed a few weeks, some a few months, and some remained there until they died making pottery, walking the spacious grounds, drinking the bad coffee, and eating three square meals a day. The camp was always full and always in need of “aides” to watch over its inhabitants.

Having majored in sociology during the short time spent in college before enlisting in the Marine Corps and almost completing the degree after I got out, I knew a little something about this kind of “service to society” work, and I needed a job desperately for two reasons. The last of my savings was disappearing, and I felt the need to atone in some way for participating so enthusiastically in the Vietnam debacle. At the ripe old age of twenty-four, everything is not enough. The nightmares, the chaos, and the burgeoning symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder didn’t count as repentance.  

Not having finished that degree work in sociology by not taking the final senior-year exams meant The New York Department of Social Services could hire me at a salary barely above minimum wage. I became the perfect candidate for the opening labeled “recreational therapist” listed in the local newspaper. So, I drove to Camp LaGuardia hoping for employment.

Slightly apart from the cluster of rectangular buildings, a squat, square, gray one labeled “Administration” stood before me in the midst of Camp LaGuardia. Everything about it seemed hard and slightly intimidating, like the warden’s office it had been. As I stepped from the car, an elderly man flailed his hands at a huge tree, ranting in what seemed to be gibberish, but was, I learned later, Polish. In fact, the grizzled orator in a stocking cap and navy pea coat believed himself to be the ambassador from Poland. He reported to the tree every morning after breakfast. To him, the limbs and leaves were  convened as the general assembly of the United Nations.

Inside the building behind a glass wall, a receptionist named Rosemarie frowned at me and pointed to the visitors’ register. After signing my name, she ushered me into the camp director’s office to be interviewed. For some reason, which seemed odd to me, no one else waited to lay claim on this job. Was I the only person in Chester who saw the altruistic and economic potential inherent here? Was I the only unemployed veteran in New York?

A large gray man sat behind a metal desk. He pointed to a wooden chair and waved me into indifferently. The air in the office was a pale blue tint, almost the color of fresh milk after the yellow cream has been skimmed off. Clouds of cigarette smoke floated upward, sucked toward and then twirled around a squeaky ceiling fan. The smells of ashes, English Leather, sweat, and newspaper ink swirled around in the slight breeze created by the fan. The director lit a Camel, adding to the cloud cover. The nameplate on the desk read Roger Peckinpaugh.

“Mr. Peckinpaugh?”

The balding man with light, amber colored skin looked beyond me as Rosmarie backed out and shut the door.

“Call me Director. Why are you here?”

“I’m here for a job interview, Director.”

“What’s your name?”

“McGarrah. Jim McGarrah.”

“Well, McGarrah, what makes you think you’re qualified for this job? We take our work seriously here.”

The director frowned and I didn’t know quite how to respond. In reality, I knew nothing about the treatment of alcoholism or psychotherapy and even less about administration of a social program. Peckinpaugh released the frown into a broad grin.

“Just kidding,” he said. “If you can sit in one spot, watch a bunch of Bowery bums make pottery, listen to their sad stories, which are all basically the same, of life gone bad and not lose your own mind, you’ll be perfect for the job.”

Over the next several months Roger Peckinpaugh became my first major example of how mediocre bureaucrats put the Peter Principle into solid action.

He lit another cigarette and shooed me from the room as dispassionately as he had waved me in. Rosemarie stood with her elbows propped on a long marble counter, staring out the window into a vast open area filled with broken men who milled around aimlessly like cattle in a stockyard.

“I got hired. I’ll be here to sign in at seven-thirty in the morning.”

“Big surprise. We’ll see how long you last.”

Hair on the back of my neck rose slightly, and blood rushed to my head. My hands tingled. I had joined the great American workforce, my first attempt at a normal life since the war. I came to work the next morning and, after a brief orientation session, was assigned to supervise the men who spent their waking hours in the train station. Peckinpaugh gave me the title of “Recreational Therapist” and ignored me from that first day forward.

***   

The old train station where women used to load canned vegetables on boxcars before returning to their cells had been converted into a recreational facility by the addition of a couple of kilns for baking ceramic ashtrays and strange glazed birds, a newspaper press for publishing a camp newspaper, and a few woodworking benches complete with primitive tools.

Initially, I took my job seriously and did my best to rehabilitate my charges. I had always been a little like a Quarter horse, exploding from the starting gate at a dead run and gasping for air a quarter mile up the track. This personality characteristic traveled with me wherever I went and each job I took got my total devotion and energy for at least several weeks. Consequently, I began seeing the men at Camp LaGuardia not as they were, but as how I imagined them to have been, or worse, how I imagined they might be with my help. They told me stories of their downfalls and I envisioned returning them to their glory, staying with them past quitting time and laboring late into the night to devise new recreational therapies.

The Ivy League professor who had become a Bowery bum brought my explosive start to a winded halt at Camp LaGuardia in record time. I begged him to tell me the reason he fell from such a lofty perch. Day after day, I looked into his dead eyes, the color of impenetrable turquoise. Day after day, he pushed his black-rimmed glasses, taped at the bridge, high up on his crooked nose and simply replied, “It was a matter of decorum for the provost.”

A pudgy man, the professor spent most of his time at a corner table rolling cigarettes from Bugler tobacco and Tops rolling papers. He preferred Tops papers to the cheaper ones that came in the Bugler package. Those were his one extravagance. He would have preferred to continue smoking Nat Sherman Luxury Cigarettes, but the city of New York took his disability check directly from Social Security for room and board every month and credited him with five dollars at the canteen run by the camp to purchase toothpaste, shaving cream, soap, and any other so-called necessities that he could afford. The outrageous price of one dollar and fifty cents a pack for the fancy smokes was beyond his reach economically, especially at a two-pack a day habit. So, he sat with his constant companion, a near famous hairdresser of near famous people from Greenwich Village. Ostensibly, they worked on the camp newspaper the three of us had created as co-editors.

After four editions of the weekly paper were miraculously run off of our Xerox machine and distributed to the camp, I began to believe that my therapeutic exercise in journalism had cure them sufficiently to function without alcohol in the real world outside our gates. It was Peckinpaugh’s policy to get younger men (men in their thirties and forties) like these into jobs as quickly as possible. Employment proved the Camp’s rehabilitation efforts successful, which meant bigger budget allotments from the city, and, like any good bureaucracy, success got measured in numbers on paper, not in flesh and blood and bone, in quantifiable increments rather than quality of life. I had seen this same scam in Vietnam with daily body counts. On paper, we seemed to be killing more Viet Cong than could possibly have existed. But they just kept coming.

It was mid-morning in July. I walked across the sprawling campus and up the steps of the admin building. The cicadas rubbed their wings together and the electrical hum of summer rang in my ears. Allende, the recently democratically elected president of Chile had just been assassinated by Pinoche’s right wing butchers and Rosemarie’s radio blared the story across the hallway as I entered my boss’s office. That the coup had been backed by the Nixon government was obvious because the reporter kept repeating that the CIA had nothing to do with it. When the CIA denied something, it was a sure sign they were responsible, especially during this administration of solipsism that survived on misinformation and the undying illusion that a murderous rightwing dictator who was willing to allow U.S. corporations access to his country’s natural resources was a much better ruler than a liberal socialist who questioned our capitalistic, elitist agenda.

Peckinpaugh rose from his desk and poured a cup of coffee, then returned to a stack of papers as if I didn’t exist. Without raising his head, he said, “Isn’t it about time to send the professor out on a job?”

“It’s summer. There’s no college looking for teachers right now.”

“Oh God. You don’t really believe a college would hire him, do you? Some of the summer resort camps in the Borsht Belt are looking for kitchen help.”

“What would he be doing?”

“Washing the lettuce for salads and sweeping floors.”

“The man held one of the most prestigious jobs in the academy. There’s no way he can survive washing lettuce with Mexican migrants for minimum wage.”

“Listen McGarrah, we can’t cure these men. The best we can do is dry them out and hope they can become somewhat functional again. I’ve got a new bus load of clients coming from the city and I need the beds. We can’t coddle the ones that have the ability to work under their own steam. I’ve got a good deal with some of these resorts. We supply a lot of their labor for the summer…”

“…at a very low cost,” I replied.“…at a fair wage for services rendered. Get him packed. Besides, he’ll be back in a week or two anyway.”

“I don’t think so. I’ve done him a lot of good down in the train station working on the newspaper. He feels like a whole man again. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

“That’s why I like you youngsters so much. Everything is simple. You pay the cab fare when he returns. It’ll help remind you that life is more complex after you turn thirty.”

At first, the professor seemed hesitant to leave his hairdresser friend. He blanched and balked and I thought he might have a seizure until I told him he would have his own room at the resort and a weekly paycheck that no one would take away from him. Then, he calmed down, threw his few belongings into a duffel bag, and I drove him to the bus station in Chester. From there, he disappeared into the Catskill Mountains.

For a week, his friend Ralph refused to give any of the other men at the camp haircuts. Pouting in his corner, he drank sugar-laden coffee constantly and rolled dozens of cigarettes every day, which he simply counted and stacked unsmoked in a shoebox. The newspaper press squealed to a halt.

Exactly seven days, or one pay period, from the professor’s departure a taxi pulled up in front of the train station and deposited my rehabilitation effort on the cinder path without his duffel bag. His shirt was ripped to shreds, his jeans were soiled and stank of urine, and his left eye was black and blue. Two teeth had been knocked from his mouth, leaving a dark cavern between swollen lips. Ralph rushed to meet him. Throwing his arms around the professor’s bruised shoulders, Ralph kissed him gently on his florid cheeks. Hand in hand they approached me. I could still smell the cheap, sweet wine on the brilliant man’s breath.

“You people will never understand,” said Ralph. “Pay the taxi driver.”

“Understand what?” I answered, reaching in my pocket.

“Our kind can’t function in a world of ignorance.”

“The whole world’s ignorant of one thing or another.”

“But not of sexual preferences.” The professor hissed the words out of the space where his teeth had been. “Here I was yesterday with my first pocketful of money in years. What was I supposed to do? I bought a bottle of good Canadian whiskey and invited Miguel, the Puerto Rican I was washing lettuce with, back to my room for a drink. Now Ralph, explain to Master Jim what I like to do after a few drinks.”

Ralph giggled and with slender fingers caressed the back of the professor’s neck.

“I think I get the picture. Your Hispanic friend didn’t appreciate your advances.”

“Precisely. Not only that, but after he beat me up he stole my money. I didn’t mind getting smacked around, but I did mind getting all my money stolen. Of course, that latent queen who runs the resort then had to fire me, or all of his illegals would have quit. It simply isn’t fair.”

“It simply isn’t fair,” echoed Ralph.

The two men returned to their corner table in my makeshift rehab center. The Camp LaGuardia Weekly News returned to the makeshift press and my makeshift life went forward as before. But I had learned something about the professor. The battle he fought for acceptance of his homosexuality began as an external battle waged by employers, ministers, colleagues at the university, and the discriminatory culture he was forced to live in. It evolved into a much more deadly conflict. The professor bought into the hype and became his own caricature. He believed he was an aberration. I guess that might be called a low self esteem problem in this 21^st century age of enlightenment. In this era the professor was simply a pervert, an evil deviant who could never be trusted around children, in a men’s locker room after a round of golf, or to own a small puppy. He was a man unworthy of the company of other men.

A sociological theory from one of my college textbooks from college comes to mind now that I am past fifty years old, the Meade and Cooley looking glass self, which was really nothing more than the abstract intellectualization of a verse from an 18^th century poem by Robert Burns. “Oh, what a precious gift He gives us/ to see ourselves as others see us.” Worse, the professor acted on those internalized images by putting himself in situations where he could be humiliated and degraded by people and then by self-destructing with alcohol to compensate for his misery. His self-destructive path to death was simply penance for what he had come to believe was the crime of living. Of course, this episode with the professor bolstered Peckinpaugh’s long-standing opinion about the men he claimed unworthy and incapable of rehabilitation. I wish the professor and his partner Ralph were still alive in 2021 and capable of seeing that Congress passed an LGBT protection bill just yesterday affording them both some sort of protection against discrimination. I fear they are not as both would be at least 90 years old or more. They would be pleased that the bill passed, as I am, but sad that we still had so far to go.