Tom says he’s tired of New York, he’s going to Detroit where he knows people and he can make good money working on assembly lines in car factories. He tells me I should come with him, forget college, I won’t get a degree for years and even if I do I won’t make much money. If you’re fast on the assembly line you’re promoted to foreman and supervisor and before you know it you’re in an office telling people what to do, sitting there in your suit and tie with your secretary in a chair opposite tossing her hair, crossing her legs and asking if there’s anything you’d like, anything.
Of course I’d like to go with Tom. I’d like to have money to drive around Detroit in a new car with a blonde beside me, a Protestant with no sense of sin. I could go back to Limerick in bright American clothes except that they’d want to know what kind of work I was doing in America and I could never tell them I stood all day sticking bits and pieces into Buicks rolling past on the assembly line. I’d prefer to tell them I’m a student at New York University even though some would say, University? How in God’s name did you ever get into a university, you that left school at fourteen and never set foot inside secondary school? They might say in Limerick I always had the makings of a swelled head, that I was too big for my boots, that I had a great notion of myself, that God put some of us here to hew wood and draw water and who do I think I am anyway after my years in the lanes of Limerick?
Horace, the black man I nearly died with in the fumigation chamber, tells me if I leave the university I’m a fool. He works to keep his son in college in Canada and that’s the only way in America, mon. His wife cleans offices on Broad Street and she’s happy because they’ve got a good boy up there in Canada and they’re saving a few dollars for his graduation day in two years. Their son, Timothy, wants to be a child doctor so that he can go back to Jamaica to heal the sick children.
Horace tells me I should thank God I’m white, a young white man with the GI Bill and good health. Maybe a little trouble there with the eyes but still, better in this country to be white with bad eyes than black with good eyes. If his son ever told him he wanted to quit school to stand on an assembly line sticking cigarette lighters into cars he’d go up to Canada and break his head.
There are men in the warehouse who laugh at me and want to know why the hell I sit there with Horace during lunch hour. What is there to talk about with a guy whose grandparents just fell out of a tree? If I sit off at the end of the platform reading a book for my classes they ask if I’m some kind of a fairy and they let their hands go limp at the wrists. I’d like to sink my baling hook into their skulls but Eddie Lynch tells them cut it out, leave the kid alone, that they’re ignorant slobs whose grandparents were still in the mud and wouldn’t know a tree if it was rammed up their asses.
The men won’t answer Eddie but they get back at me when we’re unloading trucks by suddenly dropping boxes or crates so that my arms are jerked down and there’s pain. If one is operating the forklift he’ll try to pin me to the wall and laugh, Whoops, didn’t see you there. After lunch they might act friendly and ask how I enjoyed my sandwich and if I say fine they’ll say, Shit, man, didn’t you taste the pigeon shit Joey spread on your ham?
There are dark clouds in my head and I want to go after Joey with my baling hook but the ham rises in my throat and I’m throwing up off the platform with the men clutching each other and laughing, the only ones not laughing are Joey at the river end of the platform looking at the sky because everyone knows he’s not right in the head and Horace at the other end watching and saying nothing.
But after all the ham comes up and the retching stops I know what Horace is thinking. He’s thinking that if this were his son, Timothy, he’d tell him walk away from this and I know that’s what I have to do. I walk to Eddie Lynch and pass him my baling hook, making sure to offer him the handle to avoid the insult of the hook itself. He takes it and shakes hands with me. He says, Okay, kid, good luck, and we’ll send your paycheck. Eddie might be a platform boss with no education who worked his way up but he knows the situation, he knows what I’m thinking. I walk to Horace and shake hands with him. I can’t say anything because I have a strange feeling of love for him that makes it hard to talk and I wish he could be my father. He doesn’t say anything either because he knows there are times like this when words have no meaning. He pats my shoulder and nods and the last sound I hear at Port Warehouses is Eddie Lynch, Get back to work, you bunch of limp pricks.
On a Saturday morning Tom and I ride the train to the bus station in Manhattan. He’s on his way to Detroit and I’m taking my army duffel bag to a boarding house in Washington Heights. Tom gets his ticket, stows his bags in the luggage compartment, steps up on the bus and says, Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to come to Detroit? You could have a hell of a life.
I could easily get on that bus. Everything I own is in the duffel bag and I could throw it in there with Tom’s bags, get a ticket and be on my way to a great adventure with money and blondes and secretaries offering me everything, anything, but I think of Horace telling me what a fool I’d be and I know he’s right and I shake my head at Tom before the bus door closes and he makes his way to his seat, smiling and waving.
All the way up to Washington Heights on the A train I’m caught between Tom and Horace, Detroit and New York University. Why couldn’t I just get a job in a factory, eight to five, an hour for lunch, two weeks vacation every year? I could go home in the evening, take a shower, go out with a girl, read a book when I felt like it. I wouldn’t have to worry about professors mocking me one week, praising me the next. I wouldn’t have to worry about papers and reading assignments from fat textbooks and exams. I’d be free.
But if I traveled on trains and buses in Detroit I might see students with their books and I’d wonder what kind of a fool I was to give up New York University for the sake of making money on the assembly line. I know I’d never be content without a college degree and always wondering what I missed.
Every day I’m learning how ignorant I am especially when I go for a coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich in the cafeteria at NYU. There are always crowds of students who drop their books on the floor and seem to have nothing to do but talk about their courses. They complain about professors and curse them for giving low grades. They brag about how they used the same term paper for more than one course or they laugh over the ways you can fool a professor with papers copied directly from encyclopedias or paraphrased from books. Most of the classes are so big the professors can only skim the papers and if they have assistants they don’t know from shit. That’s what the students say and going to college seems to be a great game with them.
Everyone talks and no one listens and I can see why. I’d like to be an ordinary student talking and complaining but I wouldn’t be able to listen to people talking about something called the grade average. They talk about the average because that’s what gets you into good graduate schools and that’s what the parents fret over.
When they’re not talking about their averages the students argue about the meaning of everything, life, the existence of God, the terrible state of the world, and you never know when someone is going to drop in the one word that gives everyone the deep serious look, existentialism. They might talk about how they want to be doctors and lawyers till one throws up his hands and declares everything is meaningless, that the only person in the world who makes any sense is Albert Camus who says your most important act every day is deciding not to commit suicide.
If ever I’m to sit with a group like this with my books on the floor and turn gloomy over how empty everything is I’ll have to look up existentialism and find out who Albert Camus is. That’s what I intend to do till the students start talking about the different colleges and I discover I’m in the one everyone looks down on, the School of Education. It’s good to be in business school or the Washington Square College of Arts and Sciences but if you’re in the School of Ed you’re at the bottom of the scale. You’re going to be a teacher and who wants to be a teacher. Some of the students’ mothers are teachers and they don’t get paid shit, man, shit. You break your ass for a bunch of kids who don’t appreciate you and what do you get? Bubkes, that’s what you get.
I know from the way they say it that bubkes isn’t good and that’s another word I have to look up along with existentialism. It gives me a dark feeling sitting there in the cafeteria listening to all the bright talk around me knowing I’ll never catch up with the other students. There they are with their high school diplomas and their parents working away to send them to NYU to be doctors and lawyers but do their parents know how much time their sons and daughters spend in the cafeteria going on about existentialism and suicide? Here I am, twenty-three with no high school diploma, bad eyes, bad teeth, bad everything and what am I doing here at all. I feel lucky I didn’t try to sit with the clever suicidal students. If they ever found out I wanted to be a teacher I’d be the laughingstock of the group. I should probably sit in some other part of the cafeteria with future teachers from the School of Education though that would show the world I’m with the losers who couldn’t get into the good colleges.
The only thing to do is finish my coffee and grilled cheese sandwich and go to the library to look up existentialism and find out what makes Camus so sad, just in case.