Job: A Comedy Read online

  In general I was no salesman. True, I had shown an unexpected talent for the complex skills that make up a professional money-raiser . . . but here I had no record, no reputation. I might someday do this again—but we needed cash today.

  What did that leave? I had looked at the help-wanted ads in a copy of the Nogales Times someone had left in the mission. I was not a tax accountant. I was not any sort of a mechanic. I did not know what a software designer was but I was not one, nor was I a "computer" anything. I was not a nurse or any sort of health care professional.

  I could go on indefinitely listing the things I was not, and could not learn overnight. But that is pointless. What I could do, what would feed Margrethe and me while we sized up this new world and learned the angles, was what I had been forced to do as a peon.

  A competent and reliable dishwasher never starves. (He's more likely to die of boredom.)

  ****

  The first place did not smell.good and its kitchen looked dirty; I did not linger. The second place was a major-chain hotel, with several people in the scullery. The boss looked me over and said, "This is a Chicano job; you wouldn't be happy here." I tried to argue; he shut me off.

  But the third was okay, a restaurant only a little bigger than the Pancho Villa, with a clean kitchen and a manager no more than normally jaundiced.

  He warned me, "This job pays minimum wage and there are no raises. One meal a day on the house. I catch you sneaking anything, even a toothpick, and out you go that instant—no second chance. You work the hours I set and I change 'em to suit me. Right now I need you for noon to four, six to ten, five days a week. Or you can work six days but no overtime scale for it. Overtime scale if I require you to work more than eight hours in one day, or more than forty-eight hours in one week."

  "Okay."

  "All right, let's see your Social Security card."

  I handed him my green card.

  He handed it back. "You expect me to pay you twelve dollars and a half an hour on the basis of a green card? You're no Chicano. You trying to get me in trouble with the government? Where did you get that card?"

  So I gave him the song and dance I had prepared for the Immigration Service. "Lost everything. I can't even phone and tell somebody to send me money; I have to get home first before I can shake any assets loose."

  "You could get public assistance."

  "Mister, I'm too stinkin' proud." (I don't know how and I can't prove I'm me. Just don't quiz me and let me wash dishes.)

  "Glad to hear it. 'Stinking proud,' I mean. This country could use more like you. Go over to the Social Security office and get them to issue you a new one. They will, even if you can't recall the number of your old one. Then come back here and go to work. Mmm— I'll start you on payroll right now. But you must come back and put in a full day to collect."

  "More than fair. Where is the Social Security office?"

  So I went to the Federal Building and told my lies over again, embroidering only as necessary. The serious young lady who issued the card insisted on giving me a lecture on Social Security and how it worked, a lecture she had apparently memorized. I'll bet you she never had a "client" (that's what she called me) who listened so carefully. It was all new to me.

  I gave the name "Alec L. Graham." This was not a conscious decision. I had been using that name for weeks, answered with it by reflex—then was not in a good position to say, "Sorry, Miss, my name is actually Hergensheimer."

  I started work. During my four-to-six break I went back to the mission—and learned that Margrethe had a job, too.

  It was temporary, three weeks—but three weeks at just the right time. The mission cook had not had a vacation in over a year and wanted to go to Flagstaff to visit her daughter, who had just had a baby. So Margrethe had her job for the time being—and her bedroom, also for the time being.

  So Brother and Sister Graham were in awfully good shape—for the time being.

  XIV

  I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

  Ecclesiastes 9:11

  ****

  PRAY TELL ME why there is not a dishwashing school of philosophy? The conditions would seem ideal for indulging in the dear delights of attempting to unscrew the inscrutable. The work keeps the body busy while demanding almost nothing of the brain. I had eight hours every day in which to try to find answers to questions.

  What questions? All questions. Five months earlier I had been a prosperous and respected professional in the most respected of professions, in a world I understood thoroughly—or so I thought. Today I was sure of nothing and had nothing.

  Correction—I had Margrethe. Wealth enough for any man, I would not trade her for all the riches of Cathay. But even Margrethe represented a solemn contract I could not yet fulfill. In the eyes of the Lord I had taken her to wife . . . but I was not supporting her.

  Yes, I had a job—but in truth she was supporting herself. When Mr. Cowgirl hired me, I had not been daunted by "minimum wage and no raises." Twelve dollars and fifty cents per hour struck me as a dazzling sum—why, many a married man in Wichita (my Wichita, in another universe) supported a family on twelve and a half dollars per week.

  What I did not realize was that here $12.50 would not buy a tuna sandwich in that same restaurant—not a fancy restaurant, either; cheap, in fact. I would have had less trouble adjusting to the economy in this strange-but-familiar world if its money had been described in unfamiliar terms—shillings, shekels, soles, anything but dollars. I had been brought up to think of a dollar as a substantial piece of wealth; the idea that a hundred dollars a day was a poverty-level minimum wage was not one I could grasp easily.

  Twelve-fifty an hour, a hundred dollars a day, five hundred a week, twenty-six thousand dollars a year— Poverty level? Listen carefully. In the world in which I grew up, that was riches beyond dreams of avarice.

  Getting used to price and wage levels in dollars that weren't really dollars was simply the most ubiquitous aspect of a strange economy; the main problem was how to cope, how to stay afloat, how to make a living for me and my wife (and our children, with one expected all too soon if I had guessed right) in a world in which I had no diplomas, no training, no friends, no references, no track record of any sort. Alex, what in God's truth are you good for? . . . other than dishwashing!

  I could easily wash a lighthouse stack of dishes while worrying that problem alone. It had to be solved. Today I washed dishes cheerfully . . . but soon I must do better for my beloved. Minimum wage was not enough.

  Now at last we come to the prime question: Dear Lord God Jehovah, what mean these signs and portents Thou hast placed on me Thy servant?

  ****

  There comes a time when a faithful worshiper must get up off his knees and deal with his Lord God in blunt and practical terms. Lord, tell me what to believe! Are these the deceitful great signs and wonders of which You warned, sent by antichrist to seduce the very elect?

  Or are these true signs of the final days? Will we hear Your Shout?

  Or am I as mad as Nebuchadnezzar and all of these appearances merely vapors in my disordered mind?

  If one of these be true, then the other two are false. How am I to choose? Lord God of Hosts, how have I offended Thee?

  ****

  In walking back to the mission one night I saw a sign that could be construed as a direct answer to my prayers: MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER DIE. The sign was carried by a man and with him was a small child handing out leaflets.

  I contrived not to accept one. I had seen that sign many times throughout my life, but I had long tended to avoid Jehovah's Witnesses. They are so stiff-necked and stubborn that it is impossible to work with them, whereas Churches United for Decency is necessarily an ecumenical association. In fund raising and in political action one must (while of c
ourse shunning heresy) avoid arguments on fiddling points of doctrine. Word-splitting theologians are the death of efficient organization. How can you include a sect in practical labor in the vineyards of the Lord if that sect asserts that they alone know the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth and all who disagree are heretics, destined for the fires of Hell?

  Impossible. So we left them out of C.U.D.

  Still— Perhaps this time they were right.

  ****

  Which brings me to the most urgent of all questions: How to lead Margrethe back to the Lord before the Trump and the Shout.

  But "how" depends on "when." Premillenarian theologians differ greatly among themselves as to the date of the Last Trump.

  I rely on the scientific method. On any disputed point there is always one sure answer: Look it up in the Book. And so I did, now that I was living at the Salvation Army mission and could borrow a copy of the Holy Bible. I looked it up again and again and again . . . and learned why premillenarians differed so on their dates.

  The Bible is the literal Word of God; let there be no mistake about that. But nowhere did the Lord promise us that it would be easy to read.

  Again and again Our Lord and His incarnation as the Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah, promises His disciples that their generation (i.e., first century A.D.) will see His return. Elsewhere, and again many times, He promises that He will return after a thousand years have passed . . . or is it two thousand years . . . or is it some other period, after the Gospel has been preached to all mankind in every country?

  Which is true?

  All are true, if you read them right. Jesus did indeed return in the generation of His twelve disciples; He did so at the first Easter, His resurrection. That was His first return, the utterly necessary one, the one that proved to all that He was indeed the Son of God and God Himself. He returned again after a thousand years and, in His infinite mercy, ruled that His children be given yet another grant of grace, a further period of trial, rather than let sinners be consigned forthwith to the fiery depths of Hell. His Mercy is infinite.

  These dates are hard to read, and understandably so, as it was never His intention to encourage sinners to go on sinning because the day of reckoning had been postponed. What is precise, exact, and unmistakable, repeated again and again, is that He expects every one of His children to live every day, every hour, every heart beat, as if this one were the last. When is the end of this age? When is the Shout and the Trump? When is the Day of Judgment? Now! You will be given no warning whatever. No time for deathbed contrition. You must live in a state of grace ... or, when the instant comes, you will be cast down into the Lake of Fire, there to burn in agony throughout all eternity.

  So reads the Word of God.

  And to me, so sounds the voice of doom. I had no period of grace in which to lead Margrethe back into the fold ... as the Shout may come this very day.

  What to do? What to do?

  For mortal man, with any problem too great, there is only one thing to do: Take it to the Lord in prayer.

  And so I did, again and again and again. Prayer is always answered. But it is necessary to recognize the answer . . . and it may not be the answer you want.

  ****

  In the meantime one must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. Of course I elected to work six days a week rather than five ($31,200 a year!)—as I needed every shekel I could garner. Margrethe needed everything!—and so did I. Especially we needed shoes. The shoes we had been wearing when disaster struck in Mazatlán had been quite good shoes—for peasants in Mazatlán. But they had been worn during two days of digging through rubble after the quake, then had been worn continuously since then; they were ready for the trash bin. So we needed shoes, at least two pairs each, one pair for work, one for Sunday-go-to-meeting.

  And many other things. I don't know what all a woman needs, but it is more complex than what a man needs. I had to put money into Margrethe's hands and encourage her to buy what she needed. I could pig it with nothing much more than shoes and a pair of dungarees (to spare my one good outfit)—although I did buy a razor, and got a haircut at a barber's college near the mission, one where a haircut was only two dollars if one was willing to accept the greenest apprentice, and I was. Margrethe looked at it and said gently that she thought she could do as well herself, and save us that two dollars. Later she took scissors and straightened out what that untalented apprentice had done to me . . . and thereafter I never again spent money on barbers.

  But saving two dollars did not offset a greater damage. I had honestly thought, when Mr. Cowgirl hired me, that I was going to be paid a hundred dollars every day I worked.

  He didn't pay me that much and he didn't cheat me. Let me explain.

  I finished that first day of work tired but happy. Happier than I had been since the earthquake struck, I mean—happiness is relative. I stopped at the cashier's stand where Mr. Cowgirl was working on his accounts, Ron's Grill having closed for the day. He looked up. "How did it go, Alec?"

  "Just fine, sir."

  "Luke tells me that you are doing okay." Luke was a giant blackamoor, head cook and my nominal boss. In fact he had not supervised me other than to show me where things were and make sure that I knew what to do.

  "That's pleasant to hear. Luke's a good cook." That one-meal-a-day bonus over minimum wage I had eaten at four o'clock as breakfast was ancient history by then. Luke had explained to me that the help could order anything on the menu but steaks or chops, and that today I could have all the seconds I wanted if I chose either the stew or the meat loaf.

  I chose the meat loaf because his kitchen smelled and looked clean. You can tell far more about a cook by his meat loaf than you can from the way he grills a steak. I took seconds on the meat loaf—with no catsup.

  Luke was generous in the slab of cherry pie he cut for me, then he added a scoop of vanilla ice cream . . . which I did not rate, as it was an either/or, not both.

  "Luke seldom says a good word about white boys," my employer went on, "and never about a Chicano. So you must be doing okay."

  "I hope so." I was growing a mite impatient. We are all the Lord's children but it was the first time in my life that a blackamoor's opinion of my work had mattered. I simply wanted to be paid so that I could hurry home to Margrethe—to the Salvation Army mission, that is.

  Mr. Cowgirl folded his hands and twiddled his thumbs. "You want to be paid, don't you?"

  I controlled my annoyance. "Yes, sir."

  "Alec, with dishwashers I prefer to pay by the week."

  I felt dismay and I am sure my face showed it. "Don't misunderstand me," he added. "You're an hourly-rate employee, so you are paid at the end of each day if that's what you choose."

  "Then I do choose. I need the money."

  "Let me finish. The reason I prefer to pay dishwashers weekly instead of daily is that, all too often, if I hire one and pay him at the end of the day, he goes straight out and buys a jug of muscatel, then doesn't show up for a couple of days. When he does, he wants his job back. Angry at me. Ready to complain to the Labor Board. Funny part about it is that I may even be able to give him his job back—for another one-day shot at it—because the bum I've hired in his place has gone and done the same thing.

  "This isn't likely to happen with Chicanos as they usually want to save money to send back to Mexico. But I've yet to see the Chicano who could handle the scullery to suit Luke . . . and I need Luke more than I need a particular dishwasher. Negras—Luke can usually tell me whether a spade is going to work out, and the good ones are better than a white boy any time. But the good ones are always trying to improve themselves . . . and if I don't promote them to pantry boy or assistant cook or whatever, soon they go across the street to somebody who will. So it's always a problem. If I can get a week's work out of a dishwasher, I figure I've won. If I get two weeks, I'm jubilant. Once I got a full month. But that's once in a lifetime."

  "You're going to get three full
weeks out of me," I said. "Now can I have my pay?"

  "Don't rush me. If you elect to be paid once a week, I go for a dollar more on your hourly rate. That's forty dollars more at the end of the week. What do you say?"

  (No, that's forty-eight more per week, I told myself. Almost $34,000 per year just for washing dishes. Whew!) "That's forty-eight dollars more each week," I answered. "Not forty. As I'm going for that six-days-a-week option. I do need the money."

  "Okay. Then I pay you once a week."

  "Just a moment. Can't we start it tomorrow? I need some cash today. My wife and I haven't anything, anything at all. I've got the clothes I'm standing in, nothing else. The same for my wife. I can sweat it out a few more days. But there are things a woman just has to have."

  He shrugged. "Suit yourself. But you don't get the dollar-an-hour bonus for today's work. And if you are one minute late tomorrow, I'll assume you're sleeping it off and I put the sign back in the window."

  "I'm no wino, Mr. Cowgirl."

  "We'll see." He turned to his bookkeeping machine and did something to its keyboard. I don't know what because I never understood it. It was an arithmetic machine but nothing like a Babbage Numerator. It had keys on it somewhat like a typewriting machine. But there was a window above that where numbers and letters appeared by some sort of magic.

  The machine whirred and tinkled and he reached into it and brought out a card, handed it to me. "There you are."

  I took it and examined it, and again felt dismay.

  It was a piece of pasteboard about three inches wide and seven long, with numerous little holes punched in it and with printing on it that stated that it was a draft on Nogales Commercial and Savings Bank by which Ron's Grill directed them to pay to Alec L. Graham— No, not one hundred dollars.

  Fifty-one dollars and twenty-seven cents.

  "Something wrong?" he asked.

  "Uh, I had expected twelve-fifty an hour."