I was sitting with the general sales manager in Lee’s office. Lee, being president, had an office with walls and a ceiling. He had a secretary with a good-looking ass, and he had a mahogany desk as big as a manager comma’s office. He looked kind of small sitting behind it, sort of like a white-haired cherub with bright pink cheeks. Probably too long under the sunlamp. Lee was looking at the current issue of Discretionary Pulse, the twelve-page four-color sales promotion toilet paper that I wrote and edited once a month. He was not pleased.

“Pat,” he said. “You sign off on this magazine every month. Am I right or wrong?”

There was a faint gloss of sweat on the upper lip of the general sales manager. He looked like he needed to urinate. If Lee turned up the volume a little, I thought he might, right through the fabric. Did the Brooks Brothers guarantee cover urine stains? Now, for Busy Executives, Our New Fearproof Suit. Wet Your Pants in Our Three-Button Model Elegantly Tailored in Our Own Workrooms.

“Yes, I do, Lee,” the general sales manager said, “but I never saw this.”

“It’s your business to see it, Pat.” Lee looked at me. He had bright blue eyes under white eyebrows and he looked a little like a mean Santa Claus.

“Boone,” he said to me, “what’s the company policy on selling to Negroes?”

“We discourage it,” I said.

“Then why do you have a picture of one of our agents delivering one of our policies to a Negro couple in this month’s Pulse?”

“I was reading that copy you had me write for your speech to the Life Underwriters Council. That part about it being not only the right of every American to have life insurance protection, but the obligation of every life insurance professional to provide that protection. I thought you were including jigaboos.”

Lee bent forward toward me over his desk. “There will be no racial slurs in this office, or, by God, in this company. We do not encourage the sale of life insurance to Negro men and women because they are a poor business risk. Was that explained to you?”

I nodded.

Lee looked at the general sales manager. “Was it, Pat?”

Pat sat very straight in his chair. “Absolutely, Lee. I checked on that personally with Bill Reardon and he told me that Walt Waters had absolutely touched base with Boone on that score. No question about it.”

“It has nothing to do with race or with racial prejudice,” Lee said. “It is a simple matter of dollars and cents, Boone.”

I nodded. The general sales manager said, “Absolutely.”

Lee eased back in his chair. “Boone,” he said. “I was your age once. I know how you feel. You’re full of piss and vinegar about equality, and I admire that. But when you’re older you’ll come to see that you can’t run a business on theory. When the Negroes become acceptable actuarial risks, I’ll be the first one to say, ‘Sell ’em, and keep selling ’em.’ ” Lee smiled at me. He was probably an excellent actuarial risk. Unless they rated you for being a blow. “Okay?” he said.

I nodded.

“So, let’s not have any more foul-ups, Pat,” Lee said.

“Roger,” Pat said.

“Wasn’t his fault, anyway,” I said. “I slipped it by him on purpose.”

Lee smiled some more. “That’s behind us,” Lee said. “Water under the dam.” He leaned briskly forward. “Let’s get back to work,” he said. The general sales manager and I got up and went out.

As I waited for the elevator the general sales manager said, “It was pretty decent of you to take the blame.” His voice was full of wonder.

I shrugged. “It was my fault,” I said.

“Lee can come down pretty hard,” the general sales manager said.

I nodded. The elevator came. I got in. The general sales manager said, “Well, let’s get to it. Let’s get this thing oiled up.” He walked down the hall toward his office with walls and a ceiling (only a little smaller than Lee’s) with a spring in his step. I went down in the elevator.

Dear Jennifer,

There is very little room in the corporate world for dignity. I saw the second- or third-ranking guy in a major corporation sweating with fear over a minor mistake because the president was scolding him. I suppose because he’s making a lot of money he then has a lot to lose by getting fired and so has more reason to be scared than I do. But it seemed more like he was simply scared that the boss was mad, the way a timid little kid is in elementary school, afraid of the teacher getting mad, not of what the teacher will do. I have a lot of trouble caring about the corporate goals... which are, after all, to make money for the stockholders. Probably a fine ambition, but I don’t really give a shit about the stockholders, and in fact, in my heart, I kind of want the corporation to lose.

I love you

Chapter Seventeen

I was working on a promotional page in Pulse. The headline on my promotional page read, “1955 Is a $ales $ellabration = $ell Like $ixty in ’55.” The artwork was an oversized insurance agent with a briefcase under his arm, driving a tiny car at a high speed along a winding road made of dollar bills. At the end of the road was a Miami Beach moorish-castle hotel labeled 1955 SALES CONFERENCE: MIAMI. While I was admiring this, Walt Waters came to my desk, putting on his suit jacket as he walked, and asked me to go into Bill Reardon’s office. Reardon was the Director comma Advertising, Public Relations, and Sales Promotion. His office was twice as large as Walt’s (exactly — I had measured them both one night when I worked late and no one was around), and the partition walls were twelve inches higher. In the safety of his office Bill had his coat off and his shirt cuffs turned up. But his tie was still snugged up to his collar and his coat was close. At the first sign of a superior he could whip down the cuffs and slip on the coat.

Walt and I sat down. Walt’s chair, I noticed, was nearer to Bill’s side of the desk than mine.

“Boone, we’ve got some problems,” Bill said. He looked at Walt.

Walt said, “You are a hell of a creative guy, Boone. I mean that, a hell of a creative guy.”

“But,” Bill said, “you’re not fitting in.”

I nodded.

Bill had a page of lined yellow paper on the desk in front of him. He glanced at it. “Last October you went out to Secaucus to do a picture story on the district office out there and showed up wearing neither suit coat nor tie.” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.

I nodded.

He looked at his paper again. “And you ran the picture of the Negroes without clearing it with Walt, or me, or Pat Jones.”

I nodded. I had a sense where this was going.

“You refused to work on the United Fund campaign.”

Nod.

“And now” — Bill looked up from his list and looked full at me. Mr. District Attorney — “we have the year-end listing of conference qualifiers and there’s a dozen mistakes in middle initials, spelling of last names, district office codes...” He shook his head.

Walt said, “It’s just not enough to be creative, Boone.”

“Boone,” Bill Reardon said, “we’re going to have to let you go.”

I shrugged and stood up.

“You want to say anything, Boone, in your — ah — defense?” Walt said.

I shook my head. “Nope,” I said.

“You’re just going to leave like that?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got two weeks pay coming, Boone.”

I pointed my index finger toward the sky and made a circular motion. “Whoopee,” I said.

Dear Jennifer,

Getting fired is more depressing than I thought it would be. I hated the place and had no respect for it, or the people in it, but when they decide they don’t want you there, somehow it makes you feel undesirable, or wanting, valueless, maybe. But, anyway, it’s done. Too bad I didn’t protest about the Negro business, or something dignified, matter of principle, you know? But I got fired for being careless and sloppy in proofreading a list. It’s hard to be proud of that. On the other hand, how can I care about anything, let alone the middle initial of some meatball in Newburgh, New York, who sold a million dollars worth of life insurance? The scary thing is that I don’t see how I’ll be able to care about anything, ever, except you, and you’re gone. What will I do? I don’t want to get ahead. I want to go back.

I love you

Chapter Eighteen

I had been lunching on ketchup soup at the Automat for a couple of days when I finally got a job with a company called Conray in Cleveland. Conray advanced me the plane fare. I stiffed my landlord two months rent, spent most of the plane fare on beer, and hitchhiked to Parma with ten bucks to my name. I was a tech writer. We were supposed to be writing maintenance manuals for maintenance equipment used to service a solid-fuel missile called Cardinal. Neither the missile nor the maintenance equipment had been built yet, and we were supposed to write the manuals by reading blueprints and schematics and engineering drawings. Nobody in my technical writing group knew how to read them. My supervisor was a Negro named Earl Toomy, who had once been a junior high school science teacher and understood the task at hand no better than I did. I had been hired because I had technical training in the army, though my mastery of international Morse code never did prove useful in understanding a stepdown transformer. Earl decided that we should go to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, one week, and he got us travel advances and reserved the company plane and had the conference and travel department reserve us rooms at the Redstone Holiday Inn. I never knew exactly why we were supposed to be going. When we registered at the Holiday Inn the desk clerk explained to us with some courtesy that it was against Alabama law to domicile whites and Negroes under the same roof. He said it the way you would tell someone that it was illegal to keep chickens in a hotel room. Earl complained, which in retrospect was probably what we went down there for. The argument escalated to include middle- and upper-level management of Conray, and concluded when the plant supervisor told me to rent a car and drive Earl immediately to the nearest free state. Conray knew the makings of an incident when they saw one. I thought it would make more sense to get on a commercial airline plane and go back to Cleveland. Earl agreed, and we landed in Cleveland at 11:15 that night drunker than three goats. The Conray people fired Earl for some other official reason shortly thereafter, but they thought I was a hero, like I’d saved the company from scandal. They promoted me. Being a group leader made it easier to conceal the fact that I didn’t have any idea what I was doing. There was some strain in not knowing, but it was alleviated a bit by the fact that as far as I could tell nobody knew what he was doing. It struck me that I may have stumbled upon life’s mainspring. Adams’s Law, I wrote in Jennifer’s journal. Nobody knows what the fuck he’s doing. It might be the law of nature.


One Tuesday morning I woke up with a brutal hangover and didn’t go to work. I stayed in bed and read the Plain Dealer and drank beer and ate some bologna sandwiches and watched the Indian game on TV. I liked that so much I did it the next day and then the next, and by Friday I’d stayed out too long without calling in to explain what had happened and I realized I’d quit. The rent was due on my room, so I left without paying and took a bus to Cincinnati.


I was working in a machine shop near the river and being trained. Until I was trained I couldn’t join the union and until I joined the union I couldn’t actually make anything usable on the machines. So all day I made useless pieces of metal — zigzag shapes, donuts, rhomboids, and crescents — on the jig borers and metal lathes and evenings I got drunk, and ate four-way chili if I had any money left over.


Just before Thanksgiving I was working a metal lathe and sneaking a few drinks from a hip flask and it seemed like it would be funny to make a three-foot metal dildo. It was funny, but no one knew it except me. The shop super fired me, and called me a goddamned pervert. I didn’t get to keep the dildo either. In Chicago I worked in a Coca-Cola bottling plant on the south side near Comiskey Park. I was drunk most of the time. I was okay loading the trucks; I’d done it before during summer vacation from school. It didn’t take precision, but the fine motor work on the production line needed more sobriety than I was bringing to work. The shipper found out I’d worked in a Coke plant before and moved me up to the production line. I was the relief man, filling in for the people on break, so that every fifteen minutes I moved to a different spot on the line, until my break came. The job I liked best was screening the bottles. You sat and watched the empty bottles rattle by on the conveyor as they came out of the washer. They passed against a brightly lit white background and you kept a sharp eye peeled to detect any foreign substance in there, like the legendary mouse, or that’s what you were supposed to do. I rested. It was the casing table that gave me trouble. The full bottles of Coke came off the line onto a rotating table in black identical procession and piled up. The job was to take them, three in each hand, and put them into the crosshatched wooden cases twenty-four to the case and shove the full case onto the final run out to the stackers. If I caught that job early in the day, before I was too drunk, I could manage it, but once I got to it after lunch. The bottles began to pile up all at once and after five minutes I got dizzy and sat down on a low stack of cases and closed my eyes and waited till the dizziness stopped. The line kept its implacable progress and before the dizziness stopped there were broken bottles and newly made Coca-Cola in a sharp-edged sticky swamp all over the area.