Going Straight

An excerpt from the nonfiction book “Misdemeanor Outlaw” (Blue Heron Book Works, 2017)

Every outlaw capable of emotion has visions of going straight. Even if the fear of being caught or guilt over the damage his behavior has done to others doesn’t motivate the desire into action, the need to feel normal in a way defined by his previous socialization will. Coming from a small, Southern Indiana town like Princeton and good-hearted parents, I was taught to believe that the road to happiness traveled on a direct path into the land of mortgages, families, and honest American work. My return to civilian life the first few years after the war had been disappointing. It consisted mainly of good drugs, bad relationships, mediocre outlaw activity, and meaningless employment. More than once I sat on a barstool, drank cheap whiskey, and wondered why I wasn’t dead. Sometimes I felt like I was dying. Of course, the Veterans Administration needed another decade of suicides, overdoses, psychotic rages, and night terrors from Vietnam veterans before they acknowledged Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as existing, even though Tacitus and Herodotus wrote about it in Roman legionnaires two thousand years earlier. My point here is that I had reached a stage where I needed to feel like what I thought was normal. That meant first finding a job in my hometown that resembled a permanent career. 

The problem with my job search was compounded by the fact that I never liked work. I don’t mean working in the sense of a particular task. I mean that the whole concept of work as a human necessity is flawed. People can and have lived long, happy lives without ever exerting themselves in the field of full-time employment, especially at the same mundane task day in and day out for a lifetime. I had felt this way since my eleventh birthday. During my eleventh year, which began in1959, Dad began making me cut our huge lawn once a week by myself. I should have cut the lawn on my tenth birthday. That was the year we got the power mower. But in 1958, my father was over-protective. Even though a mower was not a chainsaw, tools gasoline engines and sharp blades were new to my neighborhood, and in my neighborhood new ideas, like Communism and lawn mowers that ran by themselves, were considered dangerous.

Anyway, the point is, I never liked work and that was the day my antipathy began the way I remember things now.  Where does a man with no skills and even less desire to develop them, find work? I read the help wanted section of our local newspaper every morning. Detasseling corn seemed a bit over ambitious. A license was required to sell insurance, a degree to practice psychology, a certificate to teach, previous experience to paint houses, tools to lay carpet, something called a CDL to drive the garbage truck…finally, one ad caught my eye… Civil Service… paid holidays, great benefits, veterans’ preference, no experience necessary. Must pass civil service exam…

Exam taking was the one field of expertise I could claim as my own, having gotten an A in an ethics class once at Kentucky Wesleyan College without attending a single lecture. I showed up for the mid-term and the final, which were both multiple-choice tests, and by process of logical and principled elimination, wrecked the curve for my frustrated classmates. With my disabled veteran’s ten-point preference added to the final score, how could I go wrong on an exam created by the government? I couldn’t. I filled out the application and took the exam two weeks later, passing it with the highest score in the county. In two more weeks, the postal service sent a letter saying a position had opened for a part- time clerk/carrier in my hometown office and would I report for an interview. So, I did.

The post office in Princeton rose from a black sea of pockmarked asphalt. The rectangular building built from steel and cement stood on the corner of Prince and Broadway directly opposite the Broadway Christian Church one way and the police station the other. Everything about it seemed hard and slightly intimidating, like a prison or a tuberculosis sanitarium. Even the solitary female employee, named Glenda, resembled a piece of gristle gnawed on and spat out because it was too tough to swallow. In 1970, it was unusual to see a woman doing what everyone in the Midwest considered man’s work. Hell, women didn’t even venture into the Palace Pool Room—home of the best coney dogs in town—for lunch because of propriety, it being full of pool tables, cigar smoke, hog farmers, and construction workers. Yet, the woman who ushered me into the postmaster’s office for my interview fit well surrounded by steel chairs, sorting bins, marble counter tops and chrome drinking fountains.

“Look straight at the postmaster and speak slowly,” Glenda said. “If he seems to answer a question you didn’t ask, don’t worry about it.”

“Why not?”

“He’s got a metal plate in his head from the war.”

“Vietnam?”

“No, the real war, number two.”

“Shouldn’t he be retired, or on some kind of disability?”

“He is on disability as far as I’m concerned. He’s the postmaster. If the post office sent him home on a pension twenty years ago, they would have lost a lot of money because he’s lived way too long. It was cheaper to give him a title and sit him in here. That way they don’t have to pay him and a new postmaster both.”

In a small gray office at the back of the cavernous sorting room behind a metal desk sat a small gray man. He pointed to a wooden chair and waved me into it like a conductor waves the flute section into a symphony. The air in the office was a pale blue tint, almost the color of fresh milk after the yellow cream had been skimmed off. Cirrus clouds of cigarette smoke floated toward the high ceiling and congregated around a single fluorescent light. The smell of ashes, Old Spice and Xerox ink clung to my wool sweater. If this man represented the ultimate in a distinguished civil service career, I had found the right spot. The standards for excellence seemed exactly equivalent to my own work ethic. He lit a Camel, adding to the cloud cover. The nameplate on the desk read—William Smith—.

“Smith. My name is Smith,” he said, “but everyone calls me Willie or Bill. I mean everyone related to me calls me that. Are you related to me?”

“To you?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Well, then call me Mr. Smith. Why are you here?”

“I got the high score on the civil service test, plus a ten-point veteran’s bonus. I’m here for a job interview.”

“What’s your name?” “McGarrah. Jim.”

“Oh yeah. Your name’s McGarrah, Jim McGarrah. Right? I know your father. He sold me a car. War hero, right?

“Me or him?”

“You don’t look like a mailman. You look like a hippie. Are you a hippie?”

“Not since I left college.”

“You kill anybody in Vietnam? Never mind. Just don’t kill anybody here. If you take drugs, don’t take them while you’re working. I don’t know why I have to interview you. They’re going to make me hire you because of your score on the test and because you went to Vietnam. Dammit, I’d have to hire you even if you were a fairy. You’re not a fairy, are you?”

Something was missing. I spoke with a person. He spoke with a person. Why did it feel like we weren’t talking to each other? Bill’s feral left eye fluttered around the socket like a moth trapped in a jar and finally fixated on the upward drift of cigarette smoke.

I left him fingering his Camel and found Glenda. She stood with her elbows propped on a long marble counter, staring into a vast open area full of postal lock boxes and stamp machines. Her face, wrinkled by lack of estrogen and colored like chalk, reminded me of a lump of cookie dough framed in large black eyeglasses. I presumed she stood there to sell postage stamps, but the building lobby she stared into was an abyss. Even the work area echoed my footsteps, a barren aluminum and steel desert.

“Where is everyone? It’s only eleven in the morning.”

“The post office has a new policy. They hire people like us as so-called part-time clerks and carriers. Then they work only when they need us during the day. You can work from six to eight, then come back at ten to twelve, then come back in from four to six and still not get eight hours. It’s a real good deal for management. But I suspect you’ll find out that most everything’s a real good deal for management, if you got hired. Me, I’m just waiting for noon and my stamp customers.”

“I got hired. I’ll be here at six in the morning to unload the mail truck.”

“That’s how we all started. You’ll probably help carry some of the routes this week too. J.C. Penney catalogs and new phone books have to go out. Most of the regular carriers get the flu this week.”

Hair on the back of my neck rose slightly, and blood rushed to my head with the word catalog. My hands tingled. Did she say heavy and carry in the same sentence? I came to work the next morning and began re-learning something remarkable. Like a cockroach, the human mind has an uncanny adaptability to any circumstance, but only temporarily.

Note (This book is available from Amazon and makes an excellent Christmas present, and the royalties from sales allows the author to drink something other than cheap whiskey.)