Walt and I sat down. Walt’s chair, I noticed, was nearer to Bill’s side of the desk than mine.

“Boone, we’ve got some problems,” Bill said. He looked at Walt.

Walt said, “You are a hell of a creative guy, Boone. I mean that, a hell of a creative guy.”

“But,” Bill said, “you’re not fitting in.”

I nodded.

Bill had a page of lined yellow paper on the desk in front of him. He glanced at it. “Last October you went out to Secaucus to do a picture story on the district office out there and showed up wearing neither suit coat nor tie.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I nodded.

He looked at his paper again. “And you ran the picture of the Negroes without clearing it with Walt, or me, or Pat Jones.”

I nodded. I had a sense where this was going.

“You refused to work on the United Fund campaign.”

Nod.

“And now” — Bill looked up from his list and looked full at me. Mr. District Attorney — “we have the year-end listing of conference qualifiers and there’s a dozen mistakes in middle initials, spelling of last names, district office codes...” He shook his head.

Walt said, “It’s just not enough to be creative, Boone.”

“Boone,” Bill Reardon said, “we’re going to have to let you go.”

I shrugged and stood up.

“You want to say anything, Boone, in your — ah — defense?” Walt said.

I shook my head. “Nope,” I said.

“You’re just going to leave like that?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got two weeks pay coming, Boone.”

I pointed my index finger toward the sky and made a circular motion. “Whoopee,” I said.

Dear Jennifer,

Getting fired is more depressing than I thought it would be. I hated the place and had no respect for it, or the people in it, but when they decide they don’t want you there, somehow it makes you feel undesirable, or wanting, valueless, maybe. But, anyway, it’s done. Too bad I didn’t protest about the Negro business, or something dignified, matter of principle, you know? But I got fired for being careless and sloppy in proofreading a list. It’s hard to be proud of that. On the other hand, how can I care about anything, let alone the middle initial of some meatball in Newburgh, New York, who sold a million dollars worth of life insurance? The scary thing is that I don’t see how I’ll be able to care about anything, ever, except you, and you’re gone. What will I do? I don’t want to get ahead. I want to go back.

I love you

Chapter Eighteen

I had been lunching on ketchup soup at the Automat for a couple of days when I finally got a job with a company called Conray in Cleveland. Conray advanced me the plane fare. I stiffed my landlord two months rent, spent most of the plane fare on beer, and hitchhiked to Parma with ten bucks to my name. I was a tech writer. We were supposed to be writing maintenance manuals for maintenance equipment used to service a solid-fuel missile called Cardinal. Neither the missile nor the maintenance equipment had been built yet, and we were supposed to write the manuals by reading blueprints and schematics and engineering drawings. Nobody in my technical writing group knew how to read them. My supervisor was a Negro named Earl Toomy, who had once been a junior high school science teacher and understood the task at hand no better than I did. I had been hired because I had technical training in the army, though my mastery of international Morse code never did prove useful in understanding a stepdown transformer. Earl decided that we should go to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, one week, and he got us travel advances and reserved the company plane and had the conference and travel department reserve us rooms at the Redstone Holiday Inn. I never knew exactly why we were supposed to be going. When we registered at the Holiday Inn the desk clerk explained to us with some courtesy that it was against Alabama law to domicile whites and Negroes under the same roof. He said it the way you would tell someone that it was illegal to keep chickens in a hotel room. Earl complained, which in retrospect was probably what we went down there for. The argument escalated to include middle- and upper-level management of Conray, and concluded when the plant supervisor told me to rent a car and drive Earl immediately to the nearest free state. Conray knew the makings of an incident when they saw one. I thought it would make more sense to get on a commercial airline plane and go back to Cleveland. Earl agreed, and we landed in Cleveland at 11:15 that night drunker than three goats. The Conray people fired Earl for some other official reason shortly thereafter, but they thought I was a hero, like I’d saved the company from scandal. They promoted me. Being a group leader made it easier to conceal the fact that I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. There was some strain in not knowing, but it was alleviated a bit by the fact that as far as I could tell nobody knew what he was doing. It struck me that I may have stumbled upon life’s mainspring. Adams’s Law, I wrote in Jennifer’s journal. Nobody knows what the fuck he’s doing. It might be the law of nature.


One Tuesday morning I woke up with a brutal hangover and didn’t go to work. I stayed in bed and read the Plain Dealer and drank beer and ate some bologna sandwiches and watched the Indian game on TV. I liked that so much I did it the next day and then the next, and by Friday I’d stayed out too long without calling in to explain what had happened and I realized I’d quit. The rent was due on my room, so I left without paying and took a bus to Cincinnati.


I was working in a machine shop near the river and being trained. Until I was trained I couldn’t join the union and until I joined the union I couldn’t actually make anything usable on the machines. So all day I made useless pieces of metal — zigzag shapes, donuts, rhomboids, and crescents — on the jig borers and metal lathes and evenings I got drunk, and ate four-way chili if I had any money left over.


Just before Thanksgiving I was working a metal lathe and sneaking a few drinks from a hip flask and it seemed like it would be funny to make a three-foot metal dildo. It was funny, but no one knew it except me. The shop super fired me, and called me a goddamned pervert. I didn’t get to keep the dildo either. In Chicago I worked in a Coca-Cola bottling plant on the south side near Comiskey Park. I was drunk most of the time. I was okay loading the trucks; I’d done it before during summer vacation from school. It didn’t take precision, but the fine motor work on the production line needed more sobriety than I was bringing to work. The shipper found out I’d worked in a Coke plant before and moved me up to the production line. I was the relief man, filling in for the people on break, so that every fifteen minutes I moved to a different spot on the line, until my break came. The job I liked best was screening the bottles. You sat and watched the empty bottles rattle by on the conveyor as they came out of the washer. They passed against a brightly lit white background and you kept a sharp eye peeled to detect any foreign substance in there, like the legendary mouse, or that’s what you were supposed to do. I rested. It was the casing table that gave me trouble. The full bottles of Coke came off the line onto a rotating table in black identical procession and piled up. The job was to take them, three in each hand, and put them into the crosshatched wooden cases twenty-four to the case and shove the full case onto the final run out to the stackers. If I caught that job early in the day, before I was too drunk, I could manage it, but once I got to it after lunch. The bottles began to pile up all at once and after five minutes I got dizzy and sat down on a low stack of cases and closed my eyes and waited till the dizziness stopped. The line kept its implacable progress and before the dizziness stopped there were broken bottles and newly made Coca-Cola in a sharp-edged sticky swamp all over the area.


In Dallas I worked a couple of nights washing dishes in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant on McKinney Street. It was hot and I didn’t show up the third night. Instead I took a six-pack and sat in the gravel slope beneath an underpass off Elm Street and blanked my mind the way I did and felt the beer seep into me. I was on my fourth beer of that six-pack when a man scrambled over the guard rail above and stumbled down the side of the overpass and started to take a leak with his forehead pressed against the cement and his feet backed off and braced to keep himself steady. Even then he swayed and before he was finished urinating he slid down the wall and passed out in the recently created mud. I looked at him. His left arm stretched out toward me was in the small splash of light that spilled from the headlamps of his car parked with the motor running on the road above. He wore a wristwatch. Maybe it was expensive. Maybe the guy was rich. I drank some more beer. I got up and walked over toward him, my feet sliding a little in the gravel. Only that left arm was lighted. Above in the dark the cars swooshed by; the man’s car motor still idled. Faintly I could hear music from his car radio, hillbilly stuff. I stood looking down at him. He wore a suit. I poked him with my toe. He didn’t move. I squatted down and shook his shoulder. “You okay?” I said. He groaned a little and burrowed his head into the wet gravel. I patted his hip pocket and took out his wallet. A flashlight beam hit me with a force that was almost physical. I squinted into it.

A voice said, “Boy, you put both your hands on top of your head and don’t you make another move.”