Working Poor in Waltham: Part Two

As the summer in Waltham wore on, my car developed an alarming shake. The steering wheel vibrated so violently that its edges would blur. Apparently, Audi chassis of that era had a tendency to rot from within and the New England winter rock salt roads hadn't helped.

Worse, the thing was overheating, and a thermostat replacement had no effect. The temperature gauge would slowly climb into the red on the way to work, and just as the steam became threatening, I'd arrive. The car would cool, and eight hours later I'd drive home.

My Audi was literally falling apart. I had no money. I needed the car to last one more month.

After half a summer of working full-time and barely earning enough to survive, I asked my boss for a raise. He was a skinny guy with a new MBA who spoke enough Mandarin to broker parts deals with suppliers in China. The extra fifty cents an hour wasn't much, but it helped.

Meanwhile, the manager of the downstairs re-chroming operation — a lanky 6'5 African American whose deeply lined face, perpetually reddened eyes, and oil stained features gave him a vulcan aspect — took to harassing me for being gay.

Maybe it was the way I walked. Maybe it was how I talked. Maybe it was my long legs and the short shorts I often wore in the tropical heat of the warehouse. Whatever it was, this was a first, and my denials had little effect. Things became tense.

Eventually, I decided to respond in kind. My opportunity came when we were both in the air conditioned admin office and he started in. I pushed back hard. "I think you're gay," I shouted at him. "It's all you ever talk about. Just shut the fuck up and keep your faggoty bullshit to yourself. I don't want to hear it anymore."

The office went dead silent. His eyes narrowed murderously. Not another word was said. The harassment stopped.

Meanwhile, a new cold caller upstairs named Jeff had another sales gig on the side, and I was a prime prospect. Jeff was a Nichiren Daishonin Buddhist, and his belief system, which resembled an Amway pyramid, led him to pursue me relentlessly.

"Want to come to the Temple with me after work and chant for awhile," he'd say. Being basically polite, I never told him to fuck off directly, and being basically a sales guy, he never stopped asking. Eventually, I said yes.

My first exposure was at a private home in a walk-up near Fenway Park. Everyone was white, and appeared to be middle class and twenty-something. They knelt on a carpet before an alter with bowls of fruit, incense, and a beautiful scroll with Chinese calligraphy that they called a gohonzon. Chanting seemed to make them high.

This was prosperity Buddhism, and chanting, they said, brought them "benefit." A new car. A better job. That sort of thing.

I was lonely and my life kind of sucked. I bought a cheap gohonzon and a cardboard case with doors that could close when it was not in use. I chanted nam myoho renge kyo for an hour a day and more when I went to temple. I basically had no one to stop me.

My life continued to suck. I came close to finding a girlfriend, but it didn't work out.

Her name was Amy, and I met her at my gay Greek playboy friend's parents house, a beautiful beach front home in Northern Maine. We spent a weekend there. I remember little other than that we had the whole beach to ourselves.

I was long and tan and in great shape from a summer of running and work. She noticed. My beach reading was Camus' Stranger, which offered the illusion of being of her class. Amy was my age and worked at Shearson Lehman. I told her I was an aspiring journalist, which was a lie. We dated. Once.

She lived in a condo directly across from the Bunker Hill Monument, which provided the view from her living room window. The locals regularly vandalized her car. We got high and walked around Boston's North End and across the Charlestown Bridge back to her place, where we watched the sunset against the monument from her couch. The pot made me paranoid and quiet. I spent the night on her sofa. In the morning, she led me to her room.

I would only see her one more time. A week later, I came by after work. Since my car was only good for one way trips, I didn't go home to change. I arrived in my dusty work jeans and t-shirt. She wasn't impressed. I was no longer the sexy proto-journalist on the exclusive beach in Maine. I was now the working poor loser with the shit-box car.

After that, she stopped returning my calls.

Near the end of the summer, plans for college nearly went sour.

Before getting thrown out of the Air Force, I'd applied to UMass Amherst with two of my office buddies from Travel Pay. To my astonishment, we were all accepted. I was able to pull together a package of grants and loans to make it possible.

My parents agreed to help by co-signing a student loan. As fall approached, their signed paperwork failed to materialize. The deadline came and went and I called to see what had happened. They'd changed their minds. Were I to default, my mother explained, they might lose their house. They just couldn't risk it.

When I'd left home six years before, my parents made a big production of canceling my life insurance and "disowning" me. For me to ask for their help was a big reach. For them to renege was all the proof I needed that I'd made a mistake. It would be three years before I spoke to them again.

John Gallagher, the guy whose travel vouchers I'd pretended to audit as we worked nights in Travel Pay, rescued me from Action Crash Parts by loaning me the money I needed.

Near the end of August, as I was preparing to move on, I told the Buddhists I was leaving and that the whole chanting thing wasn't working for me. The last morning I was there, as I finished packing, two of them showed up at my door. They were a high pressure tag team and looked like they might be FBI. I finally relented so they'd leave.

"Let's chant on this," one said. We pulled my gohonzon out of a moving box and hung it on a nail. After an awkward moment, we all went to our knees for a quick ten minutes of nam myoho renge kyo.

They left, and John pulled up in his U-Haul. It took less than five minutes to load my stuff.

I drove my car to a supermarket parking lot, took off the plates, and walked away. We drove the U-Haul to Sunderland, where the three of us had found a cheap student apartment. Things were finally looking up.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

Working Poor in Waltham: Part One of Two

The summer between the Air Force and college was spent in a barely furnished third floor room in a Waltham SRO. There was a second floor bathroom shared by four of us. The landlord was a grizzled gray slob who had graduated to stretched out sweat pants. He managed a number of properties from a tiny Main Street storefront and would shove my weekly rent into a wallet the size of a doubled up fist.

Each week, the surly fat guy got about half my money. After a tank of gas, cigarettes, and food, the rest was gone.

I'd applied for state unemployment and been told that I didn't qualify, but might be able to get food stamps. I spent several hours in line, only to be humiliated by some state worker who looked at my military discharge and said "What's the matter? Couldn't you cut it."

That was enough for me. If this was what it took to get help, I didn't want it.

My hang-out buddy that summer was an impoverished gay balalaika-playing playboy who received a small stipend from his parents and lived on the floor below. His dad was a parking lot magnate in Maine. My new college dropout friend was embittered by the prospect of having to work for a living. His dad, he'd complain, should just give him one of the family lots. Then he'd be set.

This was 1983, and AIDS had yet to become a public issue. Anonymous, unprotected sex between gay men was still common. He told me how to flag down truckers for sex, and — during our long weekend bike rides — showed me the local cruising grounds at Prospect Park. This was a new world. I wasn't interested in the sex, but wasn't really put off either. He was someone fun to ride bikes and smoke a little pot with. I became his unattainable "het" friend.

I found work, and drove my decrepit Audi each day to an auto parts warehouse near Central Square in Cambridge. This being Boston, I made a game of seeing how many lights I could run in eight miles. My record was six.

One day, as I walked around the neighborhood on my lunch break, I wandered into Revolution Books, the storefront of the Revolutionary Communist Party. I didn't know what to make of the place, and struck up a conversation with the guy behind the counter. Confronted with a real live worker, the bespectacled young man knew just what to do. He gave me a copy of Lenin's Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, and asked me to come back and discuss my findings. I took the book, but never returned.

I didn't need the RCP to teach me about class struggle and capitalism.

My days were spent packaging up pallets of radiators and fenders and such and putting away stock as it came in. There was a re-chroming operation downstairs where non-english speaking immigrants and other people of color worked with noxious chemicals all day in temperatures that made my warehouse seem balmy by comparison. It was common knowledge that acid and other chemicals were being dumped into the Charles River.

I worked alone. Three sales guys manned the phones in the adjacent air conditioned office while I'd sweat out the hundred degree heat. The dust that hung in the air turned to mud on my skin. Three days a week I'd drive a parts run to Springfield and back. I learned to speed without getting caught.

The administrative area had large offices for the owner and the head supervisor that overlooked a half dozen sales and accounting desks. This area was clean, well-lit, and air-conditioned. Their bathroom had fragrant soap and soft toilet paper. The laborer's bathroom, on the other hand, was filthy, smelled horrible, and had only paper towels.

My complaints were not well received. I hadn't been hired to advise management. I made a point of peeing where I wasn't welcome. Occasionally, the boss would mention that my bathroom was upstairs. I'd nod, but my rebellion continued. I knew something they didn't. In late-August, I'd be gone. The knowledge made me cocky. I was a wage slave, but I was a wage slave that was leaving soon for college, and that made all the difference.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two

The Air Force Years: Part Four

By the time I was trying to get myself kicked out of the Air Force for drug use, I had moved to a house in nearby Waltham that was shared with three of my Airman buddies. We dealt enough pot to keep ourselves in supply. There was Mark the D&D guy, a trombone player from Florida named George, and an underground music junkie named Ron who turned me on to Captain Beefheart and Eugene Chadbourne. I'd ride my bike the four miles to Hanscom Field. Sometimes I'd walk.

Ron and I rode our ten speeds up to his hometown of Manchester, New Hampshire, where we partied with his acid casualty brother who still lived with his mom. We hardly saw her. She was either working or sleeping. We dropped windowpane for the ride back and did Manchester to Waltham in less than four hours. One of my peak experiences that summer was playing Frisbee on acid throughout an afternoon thunderstorm.

That was when I started playing guitar. I auditioned for and got the part of Judas Iscariot in a community theater production of Jesus Christ Superstar, but rehearsals ended once the promoters ran out of money and decided the drummer was an asshole. That was also the summer that I flirted with Scientology. The Church decided I was an immature and emotionally unstable genius, and convinced me for awhile that spilling my guts while hooked up to an e-meter was a fun way to pass the time.

In the fall I moved back to the dorms and fell in love with Cindy in Military Pay. She was cute, more than a little wild, and going through an ugly divorce. Though just 5'1, Cindy could out drink any of us. She was the kind of drunk who could be in a blackout and, to most people, appear more or less sober.

My drinking circle started to call itself the Ten Percent Club, and a friend who worked in the public relations office made us all framed certificates for our walls. The name came from a speech that the new Squadron Commander, Captain Tony Stankovich, made while we were standing in formation outside the dorms. He said that ninety percent of the squadron was doing a great job.

I started getting into regular trouble for doing stupid, impulsive things. I got into a screaming argument with a mechanic at the base auto garage, and rode a rolling chair down the sloping paved sidewalk by the dormitories and broke the thing. I received several reprimands.

My friends and I rented a Cape Cod vacation cabin owned by the Air Force and I got into a drunken fight with Cindy that involved smashing handfuls of spaghetti and meatballs into each other's faces. Later, when we tried scrubbing the tomato sauce from the walls, the paint came off as well. The Master Sargent in charge of rentals was not pleased.

The most serious incident involved assaulting a server at Patriot Dining Hall with a tossed salad.

We arrived back from the Cape in time for a basketball game between travel and military pay. I decided to play the mascot, and pulled together my Captain Cosmic outfit, which featured a plastic space helmet with prominent antennae, aviator sunglasses, skin tight red sweat pants, army boots, and a purple satin cape. I'd steal the ball, heckle the players, and occasionally retreat beneath the bleachers to neck with Cindy. After an hour or so, I rushed to lunch before the dining hall closed.

As I proceeded to the serving line, I was feeling very much in character. I surveyed the various offerings on the steam table and placed my order.

"Give me the plutonium buds and the some of that Venusian fried rat." I meant by this that I desired the mashed potatoes and chicken.

The server, an Airman Bickford, was unamused. Some heated back and forth ensued and he told me to get out. I screamed fuck you at the guy and hurled my little plastic bowl of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes over the glass. He dodged, and the bowl clattered harmlessly across the tile floor.

The following Monday, I was called in to see the Squadron Commander and given my first Article 15. For several months I arose early to pull weeds and such before going to work.

While I've somehow lost the paperwork, I can still remember part of Bickford's written complaint word for word. "His behavior was bizarre and unnormal, and if this is what the Air Force represents, then it gives me no pride in being here."

Cindy and I, who had taken to calling in sick together so we could drink, moved to an apartment in Waltham and made plans for marriage. Our relationship became increasingly stormy, and I started having gruesome dreams about being buried alive. One weekend, we hosted a keg and listened to Patti Smith's Radio Ethiopia over and over. One of my friends put me on the spot about announcing our marriage, and I couldn't bring myself to say the words.

Things dragged on for awhile, but that was really the moment the relationship died. Shortly after, Cindy was ordered into detox. Our break up was part of the cure, and she immediately rebounded to some guy she met in AA. The news threw me into a highly-agitated state of depression that felt like it would never end.

I was taking classes at night at Boston's Northeastern University and reading Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. The play revolves around a group of drunks who basically live in a bar and have an unspoken agreement to pretend that their pathetic and useless lives are going somewhere.

As I sat alone on the floor of my dorm room deconstructing the play onto index cards, Harry Hope's bar came to life as a metaphor for my own situation. I used to tell myself I wouldn't live to see thirty, but at twenty-one, I already felt old and tired. I decided I was done. The decision was like flipping a switch.

See also:
The Beginnings
Young, Gifted, and Miserable
Everybody Must Get Stoned
Life Begins at Seventeen
The Year of Living Dangerously
The Air Force Years: Part One
The Air Force Years: Part Two
The Air Force Years: Part Three
The Air Force Years: Part Four
The Air Force Years: Part Five
Working Poor In Waltham: Part One
Working Poor In Waltham: Part Two
Birth of a Student Radical
Harvest of Shame
The Owl of Minerva Flies at Midnight
The Road to Street
The Street Years: Part One
The Street Years: Part Two