Rick's August Tirade
Work
I greet you from the hub of the known universe -- the
corner of Broadway and 42nd Street on Manhattan Island,
three centuries and three quarters after a handful of
Dutchmen strolled upon its green shores and made a real
estate transaction. I'm caught in the high tide of rush hour
on a hellishly humid midsummer day, A.D. 2000. It's the kind
of day that glues your clothes to your body and drives the
Vanity Fair crowd to seek refuge in their Long Island beach
houses. With the privilegentsia out of town, New York has
been abandoned to those who sweat willingly: the poor, the
workers and the tourists. Rush hour belongs to the workers.
I'm a tourist.
You can't stand motionless during a Manhattan rush hour,
especially at Times Square; you're swept along by a great
wave of seething, overheated humanity, slithering and
pulsating like the world's most colossal living organism. Up
to now I've been defying the beast, walking east along 42nd
Street while nearly everyone else has been pushing westward
toward my point of origin, the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
I observe the onrushing crowd and peer at the individual
faces: the sharp-featured professionals and lumpy
subsistence workers, the successful and the damned, the
youngsters with giddy aspirations and the older ones whose
souls have already succumbed, whose inner lamps have been
extinguished -- all freshly liberated from the office and
headed into the wilderness of private life.
Amid the swell of workers' flesh and cell phones, a
bright face briefly emerges from the pack. She's
straight-haired and demurely pretty, with an air of wistful
contemplation; I speculate that she's an assistant editor at
a publishing house, not long out of Smith or Vassar. Her
name's probably Allison and she reads Jane Austen novels for
amusement. Once I would have dreamed of meeting her; now I'm
old enough to be her father, reminding me that a quarter of
a century has slipped away since I trod these same streets
as part of the colossal working organism. Have a good life,
Allison.
If I think hard enough, I can remember how it felt to be
young, well-read and eager to shine in New York. The feeling
lasted about three months. I had assumed in those days that
my acrobatic prose style, coupled with my robust education
in the liberal arts and journalism, would propel me to
eventual stardom in the New York publishing firmament. Sure,
I might be toiling at trade journals with absurd names like
"Rubber Age," "Plants, Sites &
Parks" and "Container News," but it was only
a matter of time before I'd escape to "The New
Yorker" and establish myself as a baby-boomer Benchley.
I hadn't foreseen what an impossible, impregnable
windmill the New York publishing world had become, and here
I was trying to tilt at it with my sophomoric pen; Quixote
should have been my middle name. More important, I hadn't
counted on the STRESS of working in New York, the barrage of
new and bewildering body signals: the shockwaves of
adrenaline, the random firing of neurons, the weird
sensation that my head was floating somewhere above the rest
of me and that the sidewalk was undulating like a sea
serpent beneath my feet. When I had to interact with
abrasive individuals -- and New York boasts the world's
greatest collection of abrasive individuals -- it felt as if
my brain was being grated like mozzarella cheese.
It didn't help that my boss, a former newspaperman named
Finnegan, was a veritable generator of stress himself. He
was forty-five and looked sixty, even with his hair dyed as
black as Shinola. I loved the guy, but to this day I've
never met anyone whose world-view was so thoroughly
saturated with the cold sweat of crisis. The man radiated
stress when he was harried by deadlines or advertising
shortfalls or the latest management imbecilities; he
radiated it even when he was merry, barking encouragement as
I clacked away at my cast-iron typewriter. "Make it
sing, Ricky boy, make it sing!" he'd yell. And I'd
strain to infuse sweet music into the news that Consolidated
Faucet Corp. had just leased a 90,000-sq. ft. warehouse
facility at Grapefruit City Industrial Park in Kissimmee,
Florida. By the time I turned twenty-five I was already
spent. All those grated brain cells add up.
I've had better jobs since then, and less stressful jobs;
I've enjoyed the occasional glimmer of satisfaction and rare
flash of triumph. But to this day I still don't understand
how the majority of hired hands throw themselves into their
work with such undiluted zeal. Teddy Roosevelt would be
proud of them -- the way they embrace the strenuous life
without concern for the daily bruises or the mental taxation
or the deteriorating condition of their arteries. The
working world is not for sissies.
Where does it come from, this general gusto for the
prolonged punishment of work? What drives the average
citizen to spend and be spent on the battlefields of
business, day after day for the better part of a lifetime?
Can it be simply the need for money, for financial
sustenance? No, that would only explain why they show up,
not why they RELISH showing up. You can pay workers to work,
but you can't pay them to love it. I've known far too many
colleagues who would appear daily at 8 a.m. sharp even if
they won the equivalent of George Steinbrenner's net worth
in the state lottery.
Is it the glittering promise of advancement that entices
them? Does the prospect of promotion feed some primitive
need to rise above our peers in the social hierarchy, to
peck our lower-ranking colleagues without fear of being
pecked in return? Are we simply chickens with opposable
thumbs? I suspect that many workers, if not most of them,
drive themselves to a state of chronic overachievement
because they'd like to nab a better job that hangs just out
of reach. Who can blame them? If your title had been
Production Coordinator for Repetitive Paper Products (an
honest-to-God position at my former workplace), wouldn't you
aspire to move upward? The fallacy, as Robert Frost once
pointed out, is that people who work eight hours a day would
rather be the boss so they can work twelve hours a day.
But not everyone requires motivation from the dangling
carrot of career advancement. At my last job I admired the
enthusiasm of the employees who toiled in the depths of the
printing and manufacturing plant. These sturdy uncomplaining
folk, most of them Pennsylvania Dutch, would hold the same
job for a lifetime: pouring ink into the printing presses,
attending to the collating or binding machines, stitching
covers, picking products off the shelves, packing shipments
in boxes or whisking them out the door. Often their grown
children would join them in the trenches when they came of
age. You'd think the endless repetition would boil their
souls away -- how many thousand times can you collate a
batch of personal organizer pages without going silly in the
head? -- but they appeared to derive genuine satisfaction
and even a ruddy glow of well-being from their labors. The
company eventually repaid their loyalty by shifting its
manufacturing operations to Mexico. But the fact remains
that the workers worked gladly and heartily with no sunny
enticements on the horizon -- no stock options or
profit-sharing plans or glitzy motivational conferences in
Aspen. To me their unrewarded efforts seemed heroic, even
miraculous. I would have withered in their place.
What kept their inner engines chugging all those years on
the dead-end express? How did they survive such
ill-compensated drudgery without growing spiteful, bitter,
depressed or dimwitted? Weren't they ever tempted to spike
the printing ink with molasses? No, their jobs gave them a
place to go, a routine to follow and useful tasks to
accomplish, all of which kept them from dropping out and
turning seedy in front of their television sets. For some
folks a job also creates a personal identity, much like a
T-shirt printed with the Planet Hollywood logo. The job
helps define who you are, just in case you're not sure; it
connects you to something heftier in the universe, more
substantial than the flesh-and-blood limits of your mortal
body. You can put your mind at ease when some brash
inquisitor asks you what you do for a living; "I'm a
claims adjuster," you can tell him with rippling pride
-- for you're actually telling him who you ARE. You've
anchored your place in the cosmos, and both of you are
relieved. In a world that takes a dim view of thinkers, you
are what you do.
But how to explain the LUST for work that burns inside
some employees? You've seen them in action, the favored few
who have found true love in their jobs. They've married a
soothing, stimulating partner that reflects their longings
and sustains them for life, short of doing their laundry.
They've funneled their soul and libido into their work, even
if that work consists of overseeing the mail metering
operations for direct-response promotional packages. These
are the ones who go places in the organization, the ones who
write purchase orders as if they were snowboarding down the
Matterhorn. They'd die if they were ever forced to give it
up. Yet the details of their careers would bore most of us
beyond stupefaction. What normal ten-year-old aspires to
sell advertising space for a living when he grows up? Who
would ever dream of becoming a director of materials
management? Granted, all work is useful to the company that
hires you; it's how we develop and promote new soft drinks,
toaster ovens, mousepads and jumbo jets. But where do the
hirelings learn to EMBRACE the job, to give themselves to it
with a heaving passion that transcends requisition forms,
deadlines, cramped cubicles and three-hour meetings with
only a blueberry muffin for solace? Who teaches them to open
their souls to the corporate mission statement? I wish I
knew. The business world teems with ardent lovers in the
unlikeliest of fields. As a cynic I have to wonder how many
of them are genuinely smitten and how many are faking it.
I wasn't lucky in love; I never went beyond a tolerant
affection for my work. I was squandering my peak creative
years writing catalog blurbs about personal organizer
products, and I knew it. As much as I liked to weave
romantic descriptions of supple full-grain cowhide binders,
invoking the spirit of Argentine gauchos or World War II
fighter pilots, I wasn't convinced I was blazing a trail to
literary immortality. Even if a few warped customers kept
some of my catalogs for bedtime reading, my job felt as
confining as a shrunken pair of Land's End jeans.
I never really took naturally to the world of work; even
the sound of the word always shot a slight chill through my
extremities. WORK. It's a short, harsh, nasty word, and it
doesn't sound any better in French ("travail") or
German ("arbeit"). I resented the way work
devoured my time, depleted my energy and kept me from
thinking about more relevant matters, like the origin of
monotheistic religion or whether ducks are more useful than
cabbages. I was by nature a reflective Type B personality
forced to adapt to deadline-driven Type A environments for a
quarter of a century, which probably doesn't bode well as a
longevity indicator. I had a limited tolerance for corporate
hierarchies; why should I be lower on the totem pole than
someone who doesn't know the capital of Norway, for example?
Yet I relished writing my beloved tirades and an occasional
book on the side; maybe work wasn't the problem so much as
the indignity of renting myself out on a daily basis. After
all, Julius Caesar and Napoleon weren't salaried employees;
neither were Rembrandt, Voltaire, Wagner, Genghis Khan or
Dr. Seuss. Imagine Beethoven sitting down with his boss to
discuss his annual performance review; picture Picasso
filling out a "Goals with Company" form. The idea
is absurd; original minds need room to exercise their
originality. Tigers and artists grow edgy inside a cage.
I had been growing edgy for years. Then a chance
convergence of two events changed everything: my workload,
already impressive, started accelerating like a chocolate
factory conveyor belt, almost to the point that I had to
start stuffing assignments down my shirt to keep from
falling behind. At the same time, my net worth suddenly
tripled as a result of a recent inheritance, giving me
enough loot to make my getaway and survive in the wilderness
as a writer and renegade. The cage door had swung open but I
hesitated; it was unexpectedly difficult to abandon the old
place, the old habits, the old people, the old headaches.
For several months I basked in the luxury of knowing I
could escape at will. Then I grew bold; I asked my vice
president to hire an extra copywriter to ease our workload.
He politely declined, so I announced my intention to go
part-time; that way he'd have no choice but to hire an extra
copywriter. But the VP proved to be almost as shrewd a
negotiator as those Dutchmen who bought Manhattan; he gave
me two options: stay full-time or leave full-time. He was
banking on the probability that any sane person would stay,
but he overestimated me. I gave two months' notice and we
parted on genial terms, complete with a farewell luncheon,
cake, balloons and a handsome personalized desk clock.
That was a year ago. Today, in Manhattan, near the corner
of Broadway and 42nd Street, I watch the rush hour spectacle
as a free man. Hundreds of employees are hurrying past me in
dense waves of muscle, shoe leather and determination. How
strange to be a mere observer of the timeless parade, an
almost spectral and irrelevant presence. Through these same
streets, long ago, passed eager businessmen in flat-topped
straw hats and celluloid collars; secretaries scurried by in
their cloche hats, fur collars and seamed stockings,
trailing the lost perfumes of distant decades. And yes,
there I am in my twenties, walking briskly in a double-knit
navy suit and broad tie, my hair full and black, pavement
swimming beneath my feet, mind teeming with archaic words,
Baroque music, unattainable women and eighteenth-century
authors.
I was one of the rush-hour people -- but never in my
heart, never happily. And now I've renounced their life of
daily discipline, of duty and obedience -- for what? For
more time to live, loaf, write, explore and enjoy the
pursuit of happiness. Will I begin to make my mark? Will I
grow stale, plump and soft-minded? Will I find my bliss
while I still possess a body? Who knows? I've taken a blind
leap into a great "maybe." All I know for sure is
that I drove myself daily for a quarter of a century, close
to my capacity and often beyond -- and now I've stopped. How
did I do it all those years? How does anyone?
