In The Clutches Of A Company Man

I'll admit I'm a day dreamer and perhaps on occasion even delusional. Take for instance the morning I saw an ad in the Atlanta Journal Constitution for a traveling portrait photographer. Right away I drifted off and saw myself as the next Annie Leibovitz with lavish photo spreads in the pages of Vanity Fair. The fact that I was lacking in any photographic skills did not damping my revelry. For the ad even said No Experience Necessary. Perhaps that part should have tipped me off and brought me back down to earth. I was not about to embark on a future directly leading to hobnobbing with the stars. Still. You never know. Even Annie had to get a start somewhere. So I answered the ad with a dash of boldness. Three days later on a Saturday I was on the road with a pro who would show me the ropes.

He had a face that reminded me of the scarecrow's in The Wizard of Oz. His hair was thin and straw-like too and he had a vocal tic in which he was constantly vocalizing eh, eh, eh as if he were clearing his throat in order to impart something important. As we traveled to our first assignment he made it abundantly clear with uncensored babbled that he was proud southerner and everything that was wrong in the country was the direct fault of the "darkies." Ever the coward and not wanting to jeopardize my job on the very first day I said nothing in return. Instead I bided my time with the thoughts I'd soon be out of his clutches.

Our first shoot was at a Florida Big Lots a couple of miles off of highway 85. We set up our camera and strobe lights and baby blue backdrop along with a stool in a space cleared out in the children's underwear and shoe isles. There was soon a milling throng eager for their moment in front of the camera. They had been lured in by the promise of a free picture. Our job as photographers was to take six different shots of each sitter. A Salesman from the company would later do his best to convince folks that each of the six photos was so wonderful that they should buy additional pictures to go along with their free one.

My tutor was professional I'll grant him that. He treated each and all regardless of race or color with courtesy and efficiency. He kept that long line moving with a calm and welcoming demeanor. I marveled at how, racist as he was, he did not let his prejudice interfere with the business at hand. He got his six shots of every sitter.

Later that night after a soggy meal at a Picadilly we retired to our shared room. My tutor pulled down the bedspread and sprayed the entire bed with disinfectant. Then he lay down under the comforter without undressing. He went to sleep still dressed head to toe in shoes and suit and tie.

The following weekend I manned the camera and marshaled the murmuring line. It was stressful and I found myself soon feeling miserable and wanting the day to end. But I soldiered on, and try as I might to keep things moving that line was soon bellyaching, What's taking so long? As each sitter or couple or family sat for me I fumbled with the camera and also the inserts that when developed placed the sitter seemingly inside a brandy snifter, or in a celestial body of stars. The line was unrelenting. And I couldn't keep up like my tutor with a bing bang boom. Both the line and I moved haltingly and I was nearly gritting my teeth every time I said Smile.

A couple of days later I was called into the office to see the results of my shots. Hardly a one was of someone honestly smiling. In frame after frame the sitter looked grim. I was told the salesman was going to have a hell of a time selling any of my work. With a verbal pat on the back however I was told that now that I'd seen the error of my ways I would no doubt do better the coming weekend.

That Saturday we were once again in a Big Lots and I was manning the camera. But my heart was not in it. I was never one to be all that gregarious to begin with and under pressure to keep things moving I sulked and became reticent. The task at hand called for a showman with zip and a smile. In other words not me. A couple of hours into it I gave up. I turned the camera over to my tutor. The next day I left the bulk of the shooting to him. I'd decided it would be my last day as a traveling portrait photographer. I spent the next few hours wandering around Big Lots and chomping down candy-bars. At the end of the day there was one the last sitting, two teenagers in cowboy hats and western wear and their mother in a floor length dress. The first shot went off without a hitch. But on the second shot when the strobe light flashed the mother went into twitching seizure and collapsed to the floor. One of the cowboys cried out, Ma. And I yelled to a salesgirl at a nearby register to call for an ambulance.

By the time it arrived the woman had regained most of her wits but she was still obviously a bit dazed. The paramedics insisted she be transported by gurney to a nearby hospital. As they were wheeling her away my tutor stepped over to her and said, "We still have four shots left to go." I bursted out laughing. In between guffaws I told him I couldn't believe what he said. He denied he said it. When I told him I'd heard him he reluctantly shook his head and confessed, "I guess in the end I'm just a company man."

Some of the old gang

Peter S had a surname easily altered into the nickname Scribbles. Like me he was at age sixteen a high school drop out. He was also likewise bereft of any ambition beyond getting stoned each morning and watching I Love Lucy and playing air guitar along with the likes of Led Zeppelin Two and Johnny Winter And. Months into our slothful revelries however we were spurred on by parental demands to go in search of jobs. We managed in doing so to get hired together at Rail Road Salvage a retailer of carpets and goods that were in deed salvaged from fires and close outs and all manner of minor catastrophes. It was the perfect job for a couple of stoners. Management was lax. For instance one employee managed each day to take a nap in a space he'd burrowed in the stacks of carpet. Somehow he was never missed. Our duties too amounted to little more than pushing brooms, tidying shelves and going out to the parking lot to retrieve shopping carts. The latter we undertook any time we felt like smoking a joint. As little demanding as the job was we lasted only a couple of weeks. Peter was fired when he caught a football that someone tossed at him after calling out his name. The manager who canned him could not be persuaded by Peter's argument that his dismissal was a gross injustice. I got canned shortly thereafter for lollygagging too long in the parking lot.

Freddy K was swarthy with a chipped front tooth and a ready grin. He had the hairstyle of a television depicted Apache. One day while he was working on a tobacco farm two older boys stripped him bare for one reason or another. Utterly naked he covered his genitalia and butt with two of the largest tobacco leaves he could pluck and took refuge on the bus that had transported him to work. Naked but for the leaves he rode the bus back to where he'd been picked up that morning. Then doing his best to keep the leaves in place he scurried through the streets to his family's apartment. Some years later Scribbles and I dropped by to pay Freddy K a visit. He was seated at the kitchen table with his stepfather who was shucking oysters and slurping them down. Egged on by Freddy his stepfather downed an entire quart bottle of Black Label beer in something like three seconds flat. A minute or so later without warning the stepfather inexplicably hurled the shucking knife with intentions it seemed to hit Freddy in the face. The knife stuck in the kitchen door with a thwack no more than two inches to the right of Freddy K's head.

Debbie D from very early on was called Debbie Depresso and she seemed forever in a sulk. One night when she was seventeen she came to after passing out from too much to drink. When she did so she found herself naked with Paul D. atop of her. And it was in this manner that she lost her virginity.

Tom C loved drugs. He imbibed whatever was available twenty four seven. When he ran afoul of the law in his early twenties he opted to join the navy to avoid imprisonment. A couple of years into his tour of duty he came home on leave. He had with him dozens upon dozens of photos taken around the world. Every photo shared a common theme: in some he was standing among marijuana plants some eight feet high, others showed him beaming while holding ounces of hash, there were photos too of mounds of cocaine and piles of variously colored pills, also included were snapshots of Tom completely wasted. After he was out of the navy he had us read his official discharge papers. They attested to his being an enthusiastic and able bodied seaman, but, it was duly noted, due to his frequent trouble with drugs he was not recommended for reenlistment. Tom really got a charge out of that.

Steve L we called Screwy Louie. One night while exceedingly drunk he managed somehow to drive himself home where he immediately passed out in his driveway. A short time later he came to and had no idea where he was. In a panic he pulled out of his driveway and sped off. He did not get far as he promptly smashed into a car parked on the street some four or five houses away. The accident shattered his jaw. In turn he had it wired shut. A couple of days later there was a gathering of friends at my parent's house where Steve tried drinking wine through a straw. When the alcohol hit the lacerations inflicted by his accident you should have heard his clamped mouth scream.

Mark D was running full bore and looking over his left shoulder when he caught the spiraling football pass. The very next second as he turned to look in the direction he was running he smacked head first into a solid tree some some eight feet in circumference. The impact sounded like the mighty crack of a bat when a slugger puts one out of the ball park. For the next several minutes Mark lay sprawled on the ground frothing at the mouth and biting his tongue.

John W who was tall and passive and good natured to boot had a terrible car accident that altered his personality ever after. Post collision he took to carrying an eight inch long serrated steak knife that he called Little Johnny. Over the ensuing years he brandished the weapon ad nauseam without provocation. The look on his face when he did so was a fright mask of seething dementia.

Steve S was another guy who really loved drugs. One bright and sunny day I happened to see him on the opposite side of the road as I drove by. He had the look of the utterly lost with his mouth agape and his eyes bulging out. Later that night I saw him at our usual partying spot in the woods. He still looked disturbed. As best as he could in his addled state he told us how he'd gone to court that morning after swallowing enough animal tranquilizer to dope a dozen people. All he could remember of that morning's proceedings was the judge's mouth moving. He had no idea what the judge said. Some years later Steve died of exposure after passing out on downers one frigid night in those very same woods.

Working Tobacco

My adolescent peers and I rose before dawn and stepped from our homes with our brown paper bagged lunches and rallied in the parking lot of a nearby gas station. A short wait later a dull green bus arrived and the more rambunctious of us boarded while jeering one another to hurry up. The driver was a weather ruined old codger wearing a blue sweat lined baseball cap. He told everyone to settle down and we were soon on our way to the tobacco fields of a nearby town where we would with Hollywood derived antebellum visions of slavery labor away at what we called "Working Toblacko."

This was in 1969, when I was twelve and shade grown tobacco was still a viable product of New England. At that time you would see acre upon acre of tobacco plants protected from the sun by off white netting some eight feet high. (Four years later under a luminous moon while drunk and stoned two friends and I attempted to run atop the netting. Every three or four feet we fell through and smashed to the ground. Bruised and delirious we laughed it off and climbed back up to try it again.)

On the ride to the field that morning I barely spoke. I was at that time in my life not given to carousing. Instead I stared out the window as the sun rose and gave shape to the world.

The bus pulled off the paved road and ambled down a dirt one between two different fields protected by nets. We came to a halt. The driver told us to leave our lunches on our seats. As we stepped off the bus a field hand asked our names and wrote them down on a sheet of paper affixed to a clipboard. Once we were all off the bus the field hand explained that we were to remove the small leaves called suckers from the tobacco plants and put them in the baskets that each one of us was going to be outfitted with. The baskets were canvas and metal affairs three feet long by two feet wide and two feet deep. We were to pull them behind us with a four feet long wire a quarter of an inch thick. It had a hoop handle at one end and a hook at the other.

We were then led by the field hand to the rows of plants. There was a gully between each row. I was instructed by the field hand to get down on my butt in the gully I'd been led to and scoot backwards while dragging my basket behind me. I was to fill it with the suckers I pulled off of the plants on either side of me. He told me to pick all the way down to the white pole. Then he walked off. I looked at the plants at either side of me and I realized at once that I was in trouble. Every leaf looked relatively the same size to me.

All around me my cohorts went at it, hooting and hollering at one another as they advanced dutifully backwards down the rows. I did not know what to do. I sat there stymied.

After a spell I reasoned I'd pull off the the lowest two leaves on each plant. I went at it slow and deliberate while fearing at any moment the field hand would return and berate me for screwing up. As I went at it the voices of my cohorts loss their volume and seemed further and further away. I'd been at it a good half hour when I turned around to see how much further I had to go. Some fifty yards away was a pole with a white stripe around it. A hundred yards beyond that was a pole painted entirely white. I hoped the white striped pole was where I was suppose to stop. I picked on.

By the time I reached the white striped pole I couldn't hear my fellow pickers at all. There was no one near to ask if this was as far as I should go. I sat there and poked at the earth. I just couldn't figure out what to do. I don't know how much time passed but suddenly the field hand barked, "What the hell do you think you're doing?" Before I could say anything he said, "Sitting on your ass is what I see. And we ain't paying you to sit on your ass. Now get out of there and get back on the bus. You're fired."

I got on the bus and the old codger got behind the wheel and drove me back to the gas station. On the ride there I hung my head and wondered how I was going to explain to my father that on my first job outside of being a paperboy I'd gotten fired in under an hour.

When I got home my father reacted in a way that he would do so for some years to come by giving voice to an oft repeated lament. What are we going to do with you? My mother ever the comforter told me not to worry. There would be other jobs. History would prove that to be an understatement. For over the proceeding years I would quit or be fired from a seemingly unending succession of jobs. But none would end so quickly as my stint in the fields of tobacco.

And Then Death Took Steve

Among my Cargo of Despair band mate Steve's arsenal of laughter, giggles, snickers, and guffaws was the yuk yuk yuk of Popeye the sailor. He let it go most often at the arc of good humored digs between two people. I can hear it clearly at our practice space when our musical cohorts Huls and Scott turned from debating a point to playfully jabbing one another with damning charges that each other was mired in stubbornness. But the verbal conflicts were not just between those two. They were in fact rife among all four of us. A heated contention would occur in the midst of an evening given to jamming and practicing songs. Words would be exchanged over some trifle, and they would heat and escalate to the point where you thought it was a matter of honor to protest and that there was some point to be won. Frequently it was Steve who was on one side of the divide. One time for instance he and Huls were at loggerheads over whether Coca Cola would be almost solid if in fact it was 90% sugar. But it did not matter which of the four of us was verbally battling. Steve would still let go at the argument's height with a yuk yuk yuk.

Steve grew up in a neighborhood not far from mine but I did not meet him until I was in Jr high school and our two circles of friends overlapped. He marched as Thoreau put it to a different drummer than most of those I knew. His clothes were more outlandish and his taste in music was beyond our kind. There was a story too among us spoken in a kind of reverence heralded by laughter that he had taken his bike one day up on to the top of his parent's house and rode it off the roof, crashing to the ground. Years later while skiing at Mount Tom I encountered Steve in the lift line. He pulled me aside and whispered that he had jumped a ramp and landed on another skier. Ten minutes later as I rode the lift up there was the skier still splayed upon the snow.

In a simple way Cargo of Despair was the circular progeny of Steve. For it was through the influence of his two man group the Larry Mondello Band that our foundering member Carl B. enlisted Huls to start a band. A year later upon seeing Cargo of Despair's first performance Steve asked to join our band. Thus was a circle completed.

A couple of years later Huls and Scott and I went to see Steve's mainstay the Larry Mondello Band at Mather Hall on the campus of Trinity College. The music that night was maniacal and oozing with dread.

Such were not the qualities however that he brought to Cargo of Despair. With us he had a lighter and more buoyant touch. He exuded enthusiasm and passion for what we were doing and was always up for whatever direction whim might take us. Be it drums, guitar, bass, or vocals he gave it his unschooled all. And when we performed before an audience he had no qualms about appearing in a diaper if that was what the song called for. Thus over the years I saw him donning a Hitler moustache, laid out on a gurney, dressed as a caveman, and inside the skin of a soft-shoe dancing six foot tall plastic godzilla.

He was always a drinker. I can't remember him not having a six pack with him when meeting at our practice space. It did not strike me then as excessive. He seldom appeared drunk. Sure there were those times when he fumbled with things. But that seemed born of his nature rather than the results of too much drink. There was one time however when I rode home with him after a practice and we parked in the driveway of my parent's home. He spoke in a way I could not completely follow but knew he was in his way unburdening himself. The night was cool and I could smell the beer on his breath and he spoke at length. But I was unsure of the point he was trying to make. I only know that afterwards we shook on it and his grip was warm and firm.

Some years later after our band had folded and we'd all gone our seprate ways I would hear third or fourth hand that while carrying on with his duties delivering mail as a U.S. postal employee he was suddenly surrounded by gun bearing authorities who ordered him to get on the ground and spread 'em. The story goes that a disgruntled debtor to Steve had phoned in a lie that Steve had threatened to go postal with a gun. He was suspended without pay and in his collapsed world he took steadily to drink and later on suffered the ravages of crack.

I also heard it told that some months later while Steve was on his deathbed at the hospital his superior appeared at his side to tell him his name had been cleared and he could have his job back. But it was too late. Steve died a day or two later.

Now here we are some ten years hence and I find myself almost bereft of words to describe the bond we wove together while making music with each other. But try I will. It was it strikes me now in a spiritual state of blissful awe that we wrestled at times out of dissonance and feedback compelling melody. We would look at each other in that altered place derived from sound and nod our heads knowing that we had in those moments out-shined our limited means. And there would be Steve his face lit up with a beaming smile.