Special Duty

EVERY YEAR around this time, I have to live through an ordeal. I am sitting at the lunch table, listening to the usual idle chatter about Proust's toenails and the meaning of life, when suddenly it starts:

"What did you do this summer?" I try to cram down the rest of my tostada as the question sweeps along the table like a prairie fire. "Oh, I cured cancer. What about you?"

"Me? I did an internship as Pope. What about you?"

"I won the Americas' Cup," the person next to me answers as I try to roll out of my chair, and then drops the grenade in my lap: "What did you do this summer?"

Blood rushes to my face and I stammer. "Me? Oh, I ehm...worked."

"Oh, I've heard of that," someone in the gathering crowd says. "Which bank?"

"Ehm...actually, it was in a warehouse...I moved stuff." Having made my confession, I slink off into exile, leaving them looking like a bunch of children who have just learned their grandmother is a transvestite.

For the last three summers, a dizzying lack of connections, coupled with an even more dizzying lack of qualifications and initiative, has put me among the ranks of the manual laborer.

Although it has been rather tiring, sticky and unpleasant working on a lawn crew, or on an assembly line, or even in a warehouse, these brief but terrifying glimpses of the real world have also been educational. The first thing I learn each summer is that I hate to work, and I am absolutely incompetent when I do.

Each job has been different, but the pattern remains the same. On the first day of work, I find I have been given a special duty not described in my contract, like graverobbing or defusing bombs. On the second day, I learn the first day was a piece of cake. It goes downhill from there.

From the moment I punch in or step into a warehouse, I feel as if I have entered the Tower of Babel: nothing makes sense. For instance, when my foreman tells me to "cut the grass down thar between that patch of goober weeds and them stink weeds," I am at a complete loss.

Twenty minutes later, surveying a massacred patch of flowers, he hits me with the inevitable line: "You go to HARVARD and you don't know the difference between goober weeds and stink weeds?!!! Gawwwwdamn!!!"

THIS IS ACTUALLY one of the milder forms of humiliation which results from being a college student. Every summer, right after I start working, I run into a certain kind of person, and become locked into a conversation very much like this:

"Hey, somebody tole me you was a college boy."

"Uhm, yes," I say apologetically.

"Where do you go, Yooveeyay?" In Virginia, where I live and work, this is a vague insult to one's virility.

"No! I go to, uhm,...Harvard."

"HARVARD!!! Well, I'll be damned... You know, I heard everyone up there was faggots and commies."

"Oh, really?" I say, edging towards the nearest blunt instrument, "I hadn't heard that."

"Nuthin' personal or nuthin'. I mean, that's just what I've heard..."

Usually, this person will not say another word until the last day, when he shuffles up to me and growls "You may be real good with them books and tests and stuff, but you ain't shit with a weedeater."

While many would consider factory work "educational," I am living testimony to the fact that the Tolstoyan concept of the warmth and nobility of the working class, doesn't always apply to their treatment of "college boys." In fact, in my case, it was a bunch of stinkweed.

Although the majority of people I worked with do not lounge decadently behind a desk all day or drive expensive, decadent cars and take even more expensive, decadent drugs, nearly all of them expressed a strong desire to do so if they could afford it.

This is not to say that the atmosphere was completely hostile; in fact, I have met a great number of benign and even friendly people, some of whom were actually eager to talk to me.

Unfortunately, the presence of such people cannot soften the impact of another harsh lesson one learns on an assembly line. Manual labor is not edifying, and it does not bring one closer to God or nature. It destroys the mind.

If you've ever wondered what life must seem like to a tree, assembly-line work will give you a very good idea. There is a certain atrophy of the brain which sets in after about a week of working a hole puncher, one which makes things like breathing and blinking seem like complicated, fascinating processes.

After a month, you can feel your hairs grow, second by second; after two months, you notice when one of your cells dies.

I have tried a number of things to combat the all-encompassing boredom which attacks the mind, such as thinking up novels or trying to unlock the primordial secrets of my brain through meditation, but such things usually resulted in stapling my hand to something or accidentally working through lunch.

After a while, the mind becomes desperate for any diversion--mistakes, accidents, wars, etc. Like a drowning man clutching at straws, it reaches for anything, any stimulus to keep it alive.

IT IS AT THIS point that one makes the fatal mistake of asking if anyone knows a good joke. In such an environment, the response can be devastating.

In fact, one of the most difficult aspects of my summer jobs has been making myself laugh at horrible jokes. A random assortment of suicide notes would be far more amusing than anything I have heard. Although the majority of them are so ethnically and sexually offensive that even printing them would touch off a series of riots, it is possible to convey a little bit of their essence.

One day, counting cases of jock straps in a warehouse, I heard this gem. Next to a story about three nuns and an exercise bike, it is the worst attempt at humor I have ever seen. It goes as follows:

"Thar was three bars--Mama Bar, Papa Bar, and Baby Bar. They was all sittin' on a block of ice. Mama Bar said 'I got a tale to tell.' Papa Bar said 'I got a tale to tell.' Baby Bar looked up and said 'My tale is told.'"

Although it seems horrible enough, I guess there is a positive aspect to the torture which I go through each summer. After about a week of bolt-grinding, I begin to miss the shuttle bus. After a month of ditch digging, I could sit through a English 10 lecture without screaming, and finally, by the beginning of September I love Harvard, and can't wait to be back. Even the Lampoon reads well after a summer with Baby Bar.