The reasonable title 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 each missed blade of grass.
Another client never had the "change" to pay me, and so reimbursed my weekly prunning 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.
Like a rat lured repeatedly back to the danger of mild electric shock by the mystique of intermittent reenforcement, I kept moving by day in hopes of turning pages all night.
The summer I was eighteen a possiblity 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.
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 what would normally be fairly routine missions. The low point came on the first of August when I dilifently 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 be coordinated.
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 what was euphemistically called "the gym" and hate whatever Program I had planned for them. The Youth ranged in age from fifteen to five and seemed to have their sole common ambition the determination to smoke cigarettes.
This put them at immediate and on-going 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 at them, each boy and girl equipped with a Pall mall behind an ear, and we all knew it would be a long, struggle-charged battle.
It was to be a contest of wills, the hearty and wholesome vs. prohibitied vice. I stood for dodge ball, for collecting bugs in glass jars, for 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.
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 Hoppenfeld Theatre Party Agency, located above Sardi's restaurant in New York City.
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