Something about the weather shifted, and when I woke up at first light, I stayed awake,  A meander of thoughts eventually brought up the London fashion label, Hardy Amies. I had a Hardy Amies dress shirt in the late Sixties. It was the color of chocolate milk. The collars were rounded (Peter Pan!), and the buttons hidden by a fly front. I wore the shirt with a wide-wale corduroy suit, also light brown. The jacket was basically a double-breasted pea coat with a long, somewhat flared skirt, and the trousers belled slightly. The shoes that went with this were Bally monk’s-straps. Instead of transporting me to the world of glamour betokened by such striking duds, wearing this ensemble only reminded me how firmly planted I was in the professional class. I didn’t have what it took to be transformed by clothes into the person I thought I wanted to be.

Undoubtedly, that image was not very clear.

Remembering the clothes reminded me of the store where they came from: Sakowitz, in Houston. And this memory tumbled me into reminiscences of summer jobs. Ordinarily, when I remember those summer jobs, I regard them as irrelevancies, layovers in the course of life. I never sought them out; they were arranged for me by my father, or by people at my father’s office. I don’t think that I performed terribly at any of them, but neither could I say that I performed well. I was mediocre. I took certain primitive aspects of the jobs seriously enough: I tried to show up on time and I didn’t steal or tell lies. But I didn’t take the work itself very seriously at all, and instead of rising to the occasional difficulties, I allowed them to make me miserable. I was never diligent or careful — or only in little, arguably narcissistic bursts.

Here’s the strange thing: I felt much worse about these jobs lying in bed than I do now, writing about them. Writing about them, as usual, redeems me, because writing is what I do take seriously, have taken seriously all my life. Which is all very well, but I’d like to conjure this morning’s wretchedness.

The summer jobs fell into two groups, New York and Houston. In New York, my employer was always the same, the Empire Trust or the Bank of New York into which it merged. After a season in the mail room, I settled, year after year, in the bank’s large custodial department, where I worked as a clerk processing mutual fund payments. It was a very retail business. People of modest means — calling them “investors” would be trumpery, even though that’s what they technically were — would send in modest checks of $25 or $30 once a month. If they missed a payment, they were penalized, and if they wanted to close their accounts before whatever the fore-ordained maturity date, they lost significant percentages of their equity. It all seemed vaguely dishonorable to me, the way this business was run. Every now and then, a piteous, semi-literate letter would accompany the payment, and you could see not only how important the trifling sums were to the writers, but the precariousness of their hold on the substantiality that participation in a mutual fund seemed to promise. I worked at this for two summers, and then for a large part of 1966, after getting thrown out of Notre Dame. (I was allowed to begin again the following autumn.) I came back for a final summer in 1967.

The following January, my parents moved to Houston, so that’s where I went at the end of my sophomore year. A job had been arranged for me in the dispatching room of the Columbia-Gulf Transmission Company, a pipeline that ran from Louisiana to Kentucky. The dispatchers were responsible for overseeing the flow of natural gas through the pipeline. This entailed taking the pressure of the gas at various points and raising or lowering the compression provided by arrays of pumps, some of them old-fashioned reciprocating engines, some of them jets. There were computers off somewhere, but the dispatchers worked from a wall-sized panel that mapped the pipeline and showed the pressures with mechanical displays. The dispatchers controlled the pumps by calling up operators at the actual sites. I remember dandy little Wang terminals — in my idle moments, I “discovered” what I would later learn was the Fibonacci series of numbers. At the end of every day, though, I had to add up columns of six-figure numbers (indicating the cubic footage of throughput) and “prove” them by adding them sideways as well — with a crank-handled calculator. Rarely did I get the numbers right the first time.

I was the only tyro in the room. The dispatchers were seasoned old salts, blue-collar workers without higher education who had risen through the ranks to this clean, comfortable, and well-ventilated heaven where they didn’t mind wearing jackets and ties. They were mighty pleased with themselves. They tolerated me gamely instead of hazing me mercilessly, as I dreaded every minute they would. (For this crash course in Texas was also my introduction to blue-collar culture.) Somehow, however, they let me know that I wouldn’t be coming back the following year. Back in New York, my father’s contact had been stronger, and I’d gone back to the bank year after year — and not just for summers, in that one case. But Houston was a new town for Dad, too.

So, the next summer, I worked in men’s haberdashery, at Sakowitz, in downtown Houston.

***

When I imagine the exactitude with which Jonathan Franzen would recreate the elements of my summer job — presumably because he would already have been paying close attention to the details — I feel immeasurably careless about mislaying whole months of my life, but the feeling doesn’t last, because the job didn’t matter, and that’s what I remember. In bed, this morning, I felt that it ought to have mattered. But now, hours later, I’m not so sure. “Jobs ought to matter” is an equivocal statement, and I insist on both readings. Jobs ought to be taken seriously, but they ought to be worth taking seriously. There was something about the summer job — which I suppose would be called an internship today, and probably not pay as well (if at all) — that be taken seriously only by someone with a stronger sense of duty than I possessed (even if that duty was only to myself, as a future writer, paying attention and taking notes).

It’s a mystery to me, why I was such a “unmotivated” youth. And then, suddenly, the mystery completely clears up: there was really nothing attractive about the world, nothing that beckoned. It hadn’t occurred to me that I would have to find a way to make it interesting. Nobody ever suggested such a requirement. For all I knew, everyone else was just naturally “motivated.” The only thing that I could imagine as an object of motivation was suicide.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, March 4th, 2013 at 10:51 am.