And it struck me that I had done this myself maybe a million times, except for the lunchbox and the overalls but in all those times it hadn’t occurred to me that there were people who made a living going around selling urinals, or that other people made their living buying them. I had just never really given much thought to the way people made their livings. But now, as an orphan with twenty-seven dollars and change, the whole subject of work seemed more significant.
I found about a thousand questions to ask him. About the different models of industrial bathroom fixtures, and the colors they came in, and how you got into that kind of business, and, oh, everything that came to me. Now and then I would see him giving me funny little looks, as if he maybe thought I was putting him on by pretending to be interested in such a ridiculous subject. But I guess it was easier for him to believe that I was interested than to accept the fact that his work was all that boring, so he told me a lot more about his field than anyone in or out of it would really care to know. And he got a kick out of it, I guess, maybe because no one else thought he was so interesting. His wife, he told me at one point, didn’t give a whoop in hell about his life’s work. In fact, he said, she seemed ashamed of it, as though there was something dirty about sinks and toilets and urinals, when, in point of fact, the world would be infinitely filthier without them.
I wasn’t faking a thing. I was really interested at the time. Honestly.
He picked me up in western Pennsylvania, where the school was. We took the Pennsylvania Turnpike west. It turned into the Ohio Turnpike, and we went about halfway through Ohio before he had to turn off. He left me on the pike. I had said I was going to Chicago, and while I didn’t have a great reason to go there, I was stuck with the story.
Before he left me off, he stopped for gas and bought me a meal at the restaurant. He went to the john, and when he got back to the table, he was all excited and took me back to the john to show me all the plumbing fixtures and explain various things about them. We got some very funny looks from the others, let me tell you.
Through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois I talked to a lot of different people and had a total of six more rides. The conversations were something like the one I’d had with the salesman. I won’t bore you with what the various drivers did for a living or where they picked me up and dropped me off, or the makes of the cars and appearance of the drivers. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember it all that clearly. They tend to run together in my mind. Anyway, none of it was that sensational.
I got to Chicago a little before noon. My last driver dropped me north of town near the lake, and I spent almost an hour trying to hitch a ride back toward the center of the city. I suppose it must have been a whole lot less than an hour. In that wind, though, it seemed like forever. Finally a cop car came along and a uniformed cop stuck his head out and said something about hitchhiking. I didn’t catch the words, but it didn’t take an IQ up around the genius level to get the message, which was that hitchhiking was frowned upon. If he hadn’t told me this, I might still be there, frozen solid, with my thumb out.
Now, though, it occurred to me to take a bus, which cost me a quarter and which was the first expenditure I’d had since I left school.
Sitting on that bus, all I could think of was the damned quarter. I mean, after all, I had gone something like twelve hundred miles and eaten three times and all I was out so far was a quarter. You’d think I would be thrilled, for Pete’s sake. But I kept thinking that my $27.46 was now down to $27.21. And that I could afford to take the bus a hundred and eight more times, and then I’d have twenty-one cents left, which would buy me two cups of coffee and a gumball. The point being that I had no money coming in, so any going out was something to worry about.
I kept planning to ask the driver to let me out when we got to the center of town, but I couldn’t think of a way to do this without sounding like a hopeless hick, and for some stupid reason I didn’t want to. So I just kept looking around and waiting. I had been to Chicago before with my parents but couldn’t remember much about it. Except that we went shopping at Marshall Field’s and stayed, I think, at the Palmer House — though when I went to take a look at it, I didn’t notice anything familiar about it. I guess I must have been eight or ten at the time.
Anyway, I recognized the Loop when we first hit it, and when we got to State Street, I remembered that it was the main drag, or else I just recognized it from the song. The street signs have State Street and under it That Great Street. When I noticed this I was tremendously pleased. A point of recognition, as if the street sign was some old school buddy or something. Later, after I had walked all over the damned street, I began to realize how incredibly simple it was of them to put something like that on the dippy street signs. If everybody who goes to Chicago could just see one of those signs once, that would be fine. But to just have them there always, so that even the people who live there have to look at them—
I got off the bus at State Street and started walking around. I mostly stayed right there on That Great Street because it was a nice familiar name and if I left it I was afraid I might never find it again. I walked up and down and looked in store windows at things I didn’t need and couldn’t buy anyway. I kept seeing things that for no reason at all I suddenly wanted. A combination nail clipper and pocket knife, for example, which I needed like the Venus de Milo needs gloves. And although a guy had bought me breakfast just a couple of hours before, I kept getting these dumb yens for food. I couldn’t pass any place that sold anything edible without starting to drool. I stood in front of a restaurant where the cheapest dish on the menu was over four dollars, and I actually stood there reading the whole menu as if I could go in there and dive into a steak. I mean, even if I was fool enough to waste the money, I wasn’t dressed for the place.
Eventually I got annoyed and bought a candy bar just to kill my appetite. They had the nerve to charge six cents for a stinking nickel candy bar.
$27.15.
Two hours later I was stretched out on a bed in a room in the Eagle Hotel ($3.50 a night), reading the want-ad section of the Chicago Tribune (free, out of a trash can). I used a yellow chewed-up pencil stub (found at the curb) to mark the ads that looked promising.
There were jobs all over the place. Just looking at those listings, you wouldn’t believe there was anyone in the country who wasn’t working. The only problem was that none of the advertisers wanted to hire a seventeen-year-old kid with three and a half years of high school, no experience whatsoever, and not an awful lot of ability, either.
Not that they seemed to care too much about ability. The main thing seemed to be experience. I would say that ninety-eight ads out of a hundred wanted to hire people with experience, and what they were really hot to hire was someone who was already doing a much more important job at higher pay in the same field. I didn’t blame them, but how could anybody get experience if you had to have it to get a job?
Another thing you had to have was an education. Judging by the ads, if the job was one where you might come up once a week against a two syllable word, they wouldn’t touch you unless you had a college degree, and they wouldn’t be happy about it unless you had a master’s. For less intellectual jobs, like picking ticks off horses, they were willing to settle for you if you had a high school diploma.
It was very goddamned discouraging, let me tell you. I folded the paper and put it down and sat up on the bed — $3.50 a night doesn’t buy you much of a bed, incidentally — and said, aloud, “I’ll bet that fucking truck won’t be there, either.”