“Intermediary between students and faculty. Evaluates requests for money. Mouthpiece for the chancellor. Depends on what you’d be dean of.”
“I’m not smart enough that way and could never raise money or haggle over it. I don’t even know my own field well enough to talk coherently about it. I strictly dribble out what I know, while I’d think deans would have to show real expertise, or give a convincing show of it, and polish. Most chairmen and teachers are clever cookies and would read right through me. I’ve been lucky so far. Got the job because my own chairman thought he knew better about my deficits than I did. And since then have hidden from observation, torn up the more unfavorable student evaluations and written a few good ones for myself; things like that. One of the reasons I want out. It’s too bad it’s too late to be a fireman. When I lived with Lulu she urged me to become one. They had two openings in this town’s one firehouse and would train you. She knew two of the men in the company and said she’d speak to them. I could have done it. For a while it sounded exciting and the possible camaraderie with the men also appealed to me. Lulu had slept with both of them and I think twice a year or so still did it with one. She had so many things going I didn’t know about. Would have been interesting though.”
“Fire fighting?”
“Three men in a truck racing to put out a fire, hanging by the handstraps in back, all having slept with the same woman and maybe at that moment — wind whipping their rubber coats; well, I don’t want to build it up too much — talking about it. You get very close to your fellow firemen I understand — your lives depend on one another and so on. Three days on, four days off — something like that. So you eat and sleep with them, cook for them — I see them shopping together in A&P, big fire truck waiting outside. I’d be retired now also, or almost, after twenty years. It’s been that long since she suggested it.”
“Why didn’t she think it’d be dangerous? Little houses, probably. You stand on a stepladder and squirt out the fires. No. But you could have got a lot of reading done waiting for alarms. You could even still be with Lulu, married, children, be a grandpa, or close. You also would have become an even better cook than you are now. Or a more efficient one, just luncheonette-style cooking, which could have opened up another profession for you.”
“I did that during college at a coffee shop. Opened the place up mornings. Filled the steam table with water. Made bacon and eggs and such for early customers while I set up behind the counter. Fourteenth or Twenty-third on Broadway or Eighth Avenue. I remember a subway stop was right outside on the corner. That was supposed to be good for business. Steam smoking up the windows the first hour and then dripping down them, because I opened up just when the building’s heat was going on. It was also a drugstore. I wouldn’t do it again. Was run ragged. My legs wouldn’t hold me now. Same with waiting and bartending. You know, did it for a while till I was almost forty. Good work in that it didn’t take much brains and time flew if you were busy, which I usually was. A million things to do. Keep the sugar dispensers clean and filled, etcetera. Coffee, always making coffee, even at the bar. Could never get comfortable shoes. Actually soaked my feet in epson salts most times I got home.”
“I hate saying it, but plumbing. You’re your own boss or could become one eventually, as you said your father always told you to be.”
“I now wish I had become the dentist he wanted me to be most of all. ‘We’ll have a joint practice,’ he said. ‘Or we’ll open a second office — in the Chrysler Building.’ He said he had a friend there who could get us a good office. ‘It’s classy, not like the Garment Center. You work out of there, I’ll keep the old office. When I die you inherit them or sell whichever one you want or both and retire at fifty, fifty-five.’”
“You’re afraid of blood, or recoil from it every time one of the girls cuts her finger or lips.”
“I’d have adapted. A psychiatrist then. Or just a plain therapist. No, I don’t think like that. But they get paid fairly well, sit most of the time, hear lots of interesting stories, and you can do it in your own hours. Too much back-to-school involved. And do I really want to help people? I’m too self-interested. I’m only trying to find time for myself. But it wouldn’t take that much of an effort to become a plumber, I don’t think. First two years might be tough — schooling, apprenticing, adjusting to it, making mistakes. But that’s why you’re an apprentice. Senior plumbers work over you. But suppose he was some very dumb crude guy and twenty years younger than I? I could get through it. And customers would trust me, and I’d be patient — it might work. Because I can’t teach anymore. I’m a fake. I’m not giving the kids their money’s worth. I don’t care if they learn or not. I’m tired of it, that’s all. It’s the first job I’ve held for more than two years and it’s going on eight. I get along with just about no one there. It’s too connected to what I really do, as you said.”
“You’re exaggerating. But look in the paper tomorrow. See what’s doing. Call around. The Yellow Pages. Various plumbing schools. Maybe it’s even easier than we think.”
“But if the toilets are really stopped up? The floors covered with it? Not just shit but slop and gook of every kind. Tampons. A hand. Dead cats. Who knows what people throw down there.”
“Everything, I’m sure. Speak to plumbers first. Maybe you don’t need such a strong stomach. Maybe they draw the line about what they have to clean up. And for the bigger things that get stuck, they have equipment to push them all the way through to the sewer.”
“But if the customer’s an invalid? Dainty homes, where nobody touches anything dirty? Carpentry’s out of the question. I was always bad at it, even in Shop. Electricians do well but every now and then they get a terrific shock. Sometimes knocked off their feet and where their teeth chatter. They take it with the job. The anxiety of when I’d get it would stop me. I’ve had a couple. One when I was a boy where I couldn’t speak for minutes. Literally, my tongue wouldn’t function. What else is there? Typewriter repairman. One I go to charges twenty-two fifty an hour. But so intricate, and no doubt boring, and it would ruin what’s left of my eyes.”
“Postman. But your feet, and you’re probably too old. Stay at what you have for the time being. Something might turn up. Or become a plumber and just accept cleaning up crud once or twice a week and every so often putting your hand in something horrid.”
“Garage mechanics always have oily hands and grease under their nails. Even those who wear gloves. I couldn’t come home to you and the kids like that every day. Even when they wash their hands raw with heavy-duty soap. After they quit the job or go on vacation it takes a few weeks for their hands to get normal again. That’s what Norton said. He did it for a year. If my hands were like that I doubt I could sleep. I’d sense them or would always be scratching the oily hand cracks. But maybe they like just about everyone else at his job gets used to those things too. Of course they do — they have to. Anyway, we should drop it for now — I should. It’s getting late.”
“Just one thing. What did you mean before by ‘better intellectual sex’?”
“‘Intellectuals have better sex’? Slower, more sensitive and imaginative, less taken in by family and institutional proscriptions. There was something else. But I’m probably all wrong.”
13. Frog Made Free