We grow up experiencing summers as intermissions, and once we hit our teens it is during these breaks in our regimen that we initially taste the satisfaction of remuneration that is earned, not merely doled. Tasks defined as ”work” not only are graded, they are compensated; they have a worth that is unarguable because it translates into hard currency.
Wage labor-and in the beginning, this generally means a confining, repetitive chore for which we are quickly overqualified-paradoxically brings a sense of blooming freedom. At the outset, the complaint to a peer that your business supersedes your fun is oddly liberating-no matter what drudgery requires your attention, it is by its very nature essential, serious, adult.
At least that`s how it seemed to me. When I was growing up we were far from wealthy. My eagerness to contribute to, or at least not diminish, the coffer was countered by the arguments of those whose salaries kept me in school: My higher education was a sound group investment. The whole family was adamant that I have the opportunities they had missed, and no matter how much I objected, they stinted themselves to provide for me.
Summer jobs were therefore a relief, an opportunity to pull a share of the load. As soon as the days turned warm, I began to peruse the classified ads, and when the spring semester was done, I was ready to punch a clock. It even felt right. Work in June, July and August had an almost biblical aspect: In the hot weather your brow sweats, just as God had ordained. Moreover, summer jobs had the luxury of being temporary. No matter how bizarre, how onerous, how off my supposed track, employment terminated with the falling leaves, and I was back on neutral ground.
So during each annual three-month leave from secondary school and later from the university, I compiled an eclectic resume: lawn cutter, hair sweeper in a barber shop, lifeguard, delivery boy, temporary mail carrier, file clerk, youth program coordinator on my Montana Indian reservation, ballroom dance instructor, theater party promoter, night-shift hospital records keeper, human adding machine in a Paris bank, encyclopedia salesman, newspaper stringer, recreation bus manager, salmon fisherman.
The stolid titles disguise the madness of some of these occupations. For instance, I seemed inevitably to be hired to trim the yards of the
unconventional. One woman followed beside me, step by step, as I traversed her yard in ever tighter squares, and called my attention to every missed blade of grass.
Another client never had the ”change” to pay me, and so reimbursed my weekly pruning with an offering culled from his library. I could have done without the Guide to Artificial Respiration (1942) or the many well-worn copies of Reader`s Digest Condensed Books, but sometimes the selection merited the wait.
The summer I was 18, a possibility arose for a rotation at the post office, and I grabbed it. There was something casually sophisticated about work that required a uniform, about having a federal ranking, even if it was GS-1 (Temp/Sub), and it was flattering to be entrusted with a leather bag containing who-knew-what important correspondence.
Inhale and push on
Every day I was assigned a new beat, usually in a rough neighborhood avoided whenever possible by regular carriers, and I proved quite capable of complicating normally routine missions. The low point came on Aug. 1, when I diligently delivered four blocks` worth of welfare checks to the right numbers on the wrong streets. It is no fun to snatch unexpected wealth from the hands of those who have but moments previously opened their mailboxes and received a bonus.
After my first year of college, I lived with relatives on an Indian reservation in eastern Montana and filled the only post available: coordinator of tribal youth programs. I was seduced by the language of the announcement into assuming that there existed youth programs to coordinate. In fact, the youth consisted of a dozen bored, disgruntled kids-most of them my cousins-who had nothing better to do each day than to show up at what was euphemistically called ”the gym” and hate whatever ”program” I had planned for them.
The youths ranged in age from 5 to 15 and seemed to have as their sole common ambition the determination to smoke cigarettes. This put them at immediate and ongoing odds with the coordinator, who on his first day, naively encouraged them to sing the ”doe, a deer, a female deer” song from ”The Sound of Music.” They looked at me, that bleak morning, and I looked a them, each boy and girl equipped with a Pall Mall behind the ear, and we all knew it would be a long summer.
I stood for dodgeball, for collecting bugs in glass jars, arts and crafts; they had pledged a preternatural allegiance to sloth. The odds were not in my favor, and each waking dawn I experienced the lightheadedness of anticipated exhaustion, that thrill of giddy dissociation in which nothing seems real or of great significance. I went with the flow and learned to inhale.
`Fiddler,` it wasn`t
The next summer, I decided to find work in an urban setting for a change, and was hired as a general office assistant in the Elsa Hoppenfield Theatre Party Agency, located above Sardi`s restaurant in New York City. The agency consisted of Elsa Hoppenfield herself, Rita Frank, her regular deputy, and me. Elsa was a gregarious Viennese woman who established contacts through personal charm, and she spent much of the time away from the building, courting trade. Rita was therefore both my immediate supervisor and constant companion;
she had the most incredible fingernails I had ever seen-long, carefully shaped pegs lacquered in cruel primary colors and hard as stone-and a zealous attitude.
The goal of a theater party agent is to sell blocks of tickets to imminent Broadway productions. The likely buyers are charities, B`nai Briths, Hadassahs and assorted other fundraising organizations. We received commissions on volume, and so it was necessary to convince a prospect that a play, preferably an expensive musical, for which we had reserved the rights to seats would be a boffo smash hit.
The object of our greatest expectation that season was an extravaganza called ”Chu Chem,” a saga that aspired to ride the coattails of ”Fiddler on the Roof” into entertainment history. It starred the estimable Molly Picon and told the story of a family who had centuries ago gone to China during the Diaspora, yet despite isolation in an alien environment had retained Orthodox Jewish culture and habits. The plot revolved around a man with several marriageable daughters and nary a kosher suitor within 5,000 miles.
For three months Rita and I waxed eloquent on the show. We sat in our little office, behind facing desks, and every noon while she redid her nails I ordered out from a deli that offered such exotic (to me) delicacies as fried egg sandwiches, lox and cream cheese, pastrami and tongue. I developed of necessity and habit a telephone voice laced with a distinctly Yiddish accent. It could have been a great career. But come November ”Chu Chem” bombed. Its closing was such a financial catastrophe for all concerned that when the following January one Monsieur Dupont advertised on the placement board at my college, I decided to put an ocean between me and my former trusting clientele.
Au revoir
Dupont came to campus with the stated purpose of interviewing candidates for teller positions in a French bank. Successful applicants, required to be fluent in francais, would be rewarded with three well-paid months and a rent- free apartment in Paris. I headed for the language lab and registered for an appointment.
The only French in the interview was, ”Bon jour, ca va?” after which Dupont switched into English and described the wonderful deal on charter air flights that would be available to those who got the nod. Round-trip to Amsterdam, via Reykjavik, leaving the day after exams and returning in mid-September, no changes or substitutions. I signed up on the spot. I was to be a banquier, with pied-a-terre in Montparnasse!
When I arrived with only $50 in traveler`s checks in my pocket (the flight had cleaned me out, but who needed money, since my paycheck started right away), no one in Paris had ever heard of Dupont.
At the Gare du Nord train station, I considered my options. There weren`t any. I scanned a listing of Paris hotels and headed for the cheapest one: the Hotel Villedo, $10 a night.
The place had an ambiance that I persuaded myself was antique, despite the red light above the sign. The only accommodation available was ”the bridal suite,” a steal at $20. The glass door to my room didn`t lock, and there was a rather continual floor show, but at some point I must have dozed off.
When I awoke the church bells were ringing, the sky was pink, and I felt renewed. No small setback was going to spoil my adventure. I stood and stretched, then walked to a mirror that hung above the sink next to the bed. I leaned forward to punctuate my resolve with a confident look in the eye.
The sink disengaged and fell to the floor. Water gushed. In panic I rummaged through my open suitcase, stuffed two pairs of underpants into the pipe to quell the flow, and before the dam broke, I was out the door. I barreled through the lobby of the first bank I passed, asked to see the director, and told the startled man my sad story.
For some reason, whether from shock or pity, he hired me at $1.27 an hour to be a cross-checker of foreign currency transactions, and with two phone calls found me lodgings at a commercial school`s dormitory.
A sight to see
From 8 to 5 each weekday my duty was to sit in a windowless room with six impeccably dressed people, all of whom were totaling identical additions and subtractions. We were highly dignified with each other, very professional. Monsieur Saint presided, but the formidable Mademoiselle was the true power;
she oversaw each of our columns and shook her head sadly at my American-shaped numbers.
My legacy from that summer, however, was more than an enduring penchant for crossed 7`s. After I had worked for six weeks, Saint asked me during a coffee break why I didn`t follow the example of other foreign students he had known and depart the office at noon to spend the afternoon touring the sights of Paris with the Alliance Francaise.
”Because,” I replied in my halting French, ”that costs money. I depend upon my full salary the same as any of you.”
He nodded gravely and said no more, but on the next Friday he presented me with a white envelope along with my check.
”Do not open this until you have left the Societe General,” he said ominously. I thought I was fired for the time I had mixed up kroner and guilders, and, once on the sidewalk, I steeled myself to read the worst.
”Dear Sir,” I translated the perfect script. ”You are a person of value. It is not correct that you should be in our beautiful city and not see it. Therefore we have amassed a modest sum to pay the tuition for a two-week afternoon program for you at the Alliance Francaise. Your wages will not suffer, for it is your assignment to appear each morning in this bureau and reacquaint us with the places you have visited. We shall see them afresh through your eyes.”
The letter had 30 signatures, from the director to the janitor, and stuffed inside the envelpe was a sheaf of franc notes in various
denominations.
I rushed back to the tiny office. Saint and Mademoiselle had waited, and accepted my gratitude with their usual controlled smiles and precise handshakes. But they had blown their Gallic cover, and for the next 10 days and then through all the days until I went home in September, our branch was awash with sightseeing paraphernalia. Everyone had advice, favorite haunts, criticisms of the alliance`s choices or explanations.
Paris passed through the bank`s granite walls as sweetly as a June breeze through a window screen, and ever afterward the lilt of overheard French, a photograph of Sacre Coeur or the Louvre, even a monthly bank statement, recalls to me that best, finally most instructive, of all my summer-job summers.
