7 ½ Cents

by Richard Bissell

 

Chapter One

“Now, folks, I’m going to take you down that long line of canvas covers!”
-- Thomas Bancroft Roshek

When I woke up in the morning, even before I had my eyes open, I knew I wasn’t in Chicago any more. No, not in Chicago, or South Chicago either, or Gary or Hammond. These small towns smell different entirely. Then with breakfast, across the street at the Elite Café, I had to listen to this with the coffee and elastic toast:

“Was you to the dance last night out at the Royal?” says the waitress, talking through her nose.

“I was there, was you?” says a milk truck driver likewise.

“Yeah, I was there. I never seen you though.”

“Well I never seen you neither.”

“That’s funny, I was there.”

“Well, I never seen you.”

“Where was you at? I never seen you.”

“Well, it’s funny we never seen each other.”

A couple of months before, I had gone off my nut and taken a job as superintendent of the Sleep Tite pajama plant (Sleep Tite, the Pajama for Men of Bedroom Discrimination) in Junction City, Iowa, a trap consisting of fiftythousand dazed customers wondering what to do after five o’clock. Town was on the Mississippi River, at least that’s what they claimed — it didn’t look like the pictures of the Mississippi in our geography books when I was a kid over in Gary. It didn’t look like anything much. Neither did the town, unless you were interested in curiosities.

After breakfast I walked down Main Street, looking in the windows of the chain stores, and stopping to study any stray pajamas on display in other windows; then I turned to the right and up three blocks past the wholesale grocery house and the box factory and the Reliable Mfg. Co. and the Acme Products Co., and then there I was looking across the street and up six stories at The Plant. It was a red-brick building, such as you might see in the wholesale district in any big town, with fancy granite trim up to the third story, and a couple of polished red granite pillars flanking the main entrance; carved into the stone above the door it said:

Action Knee Pants Co.
1906

Action Knee Pants had gone bust in 1911 but had left its tombstone up there forever. Mr. T. J. O’Hara bought the building in 1912, created Sleep Tite, and in the next ten years he made a killing (what’s called a ‘killing’ in the garment industry isn’t what they’d call a killing in the Texas hotel lobbies, but it was a killing in a small Iowa town in those days) during World War I on army and navy contracts. Mr. O’Hara was a neat little dapper guy, a Yankee, now hitting his middle sixties, wore a high collar and combed his white hair straight back in a pompadour. He still ‘held the reins’, believe me. He had wandered out here as a drummer for a Boston shirt house, and he was tighter than the bark on a tree, so they said.

“I know how many dimes it takes to make a dollar,” was one of his favorite sayings, followed up with, “and how many pennies to make a dime, too.”

One of the most popular indoor sports in Junction City was speculating on just how much of the town he really owned and the probable extent of his cash assets. He was not mean, or any kind of a bastard though — had a ‘dry wit’, as they say, and quite an eye for the ladies. He was hardheaded all right but he was nice about it. He liked to give big parties and he liked beautiful, big, long, glossy black motor cars, so the legend of his being so tight was partially at least a hoax.

“He ain’t so dang niggerly as what they say,” as the sweeper used to remark.

He had a sap called Mr. Myron Hasler who did all his dirty work for him. Hasler was my boss.

It was about a quarter to eight, and the girls were going up the steps and pushing in through the double doors. Once inside, instead of going straight through a second pair of double doors, which would have taken them into the main office where the clerks sat around at old chewed-up desks getting sore about their wages, instead of going straight into White Collar Heaven, the girls took a left and began the climb up a wide, splintery staircase to the factory floors above.

“Well, what kind of a shape are you in this morning?” Mabel said, when I had walked through the plant and come into the office on the third floor labeled SUPERINTENDENT. “What you been up to since last night?”

“Went to the show and saw Roy Rogers riding on a horse. Went to bed.”

“This ain’t much of a place after Chicago, I bet,” she said. “I bet you had the times over there.”

“This town’s all right,” I said. “What’s doing?”

“Boiler blew up again. Guess Ralph has the steam fitters down there already.”

“Tell me something. I’m just a new young superintendent with a pair of squeaky shoes. Why don’t we buy a new boiler?”

“Oh don’t worry, they’ll buy a new one after this one blows out a few more times. This boiler was only just put in a few years back. Why that’s practically a brand-new boiler.”

“Oh now listen, when was that boiler put in?”

“That boiler was put in the day after President Harding was killed. For a boiler that’s not old.”

“It’s no newcomer,” I said. “And Harding just plain died, he wasn’t killed.”

‘Well, somebody was killed the same day. Anyways, Mr. Hasler says the boiler is like new.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It only blew up four times since I took this job. I’m glad it’s not worn out.”

I put my coat away and shoved up the black oak roll-top and sat down. The clock showed 7:50. Outside it still wasn’t Chicago. “Ralph down there on the boiler?”

“Um. Here’s your mail.”

Either I attract nuts or there’s more nuts around nowadays — anyway, I sure get my quota of crazy letters. If it isn’t a chain letter from Little Rock, where you run into a streak of bad luck if you break the chain, it’s a letter from Roy J. Sprengelmeyer with a big opportunity to acquire certificates on a perpetual-motion machine. I don’t know where the hell they get my name, but I’m the most popular boy in town when it comes to unloading a three-cent stamp.

The first letter I pick up this a.m. is in a dirty envelope with fancy Spencerian penmanship and the local postmark.

Superintendent of Factory and Personnel

Dear Sir:

In the game of life how you play it is the leading factor, the outcome of your success or score being merely secondary.

Due to clean living and despite a gall bladder complaint dating back to the year 1922 and under the care of leading physicians ever since but not such as to impair my productivity except as regards the unfair discriminations of unseen forces largely dictated by prejudice, political machines, and the increase of regimentation of individual liberties even in the greatest democracy on earth and the upheaval of the tax structure, being in spite of all capable of performing a fair days work for reasonable wages and desiring at all times to associate oneself with one of the local enterprises as a local property owner rather than to go outside as has so often been necessary in the past to earn a living wage due to the scheme of things in the local scene, and in spite of physical illness too numerous to mention (among them being gall bladder complaint, Dr. R. C. Levingston performing the major operation on February 16, 1922) being able and willing at this time to accept light factory work in clean surroundings and not accepting position involving somebody else taking all the credit and glory as well as higher salary, beg to inform you am open for an offer of employment on satisfactory terms and can guarantee satisfaction of any position requiring integrity and close attention to the importance of detail bearing on any subject. Therefore would welcome opportunity to discuss my capabilities for employment in above capacities and/or as tax expert and student of economics and world scene as of today.
 
Sincerely yours,
Roderick M. Lansd own
1498 Prairie Avenue

“Well,” I said. “Any time I decide to quit and go back to the big city I’ve got just the man to take over here as superintendent,” and I tossed the letter over to Mabel.

“Oh that old fool Joe Lansdown,” she said. “He don’t do a lick except to set around writing these here nutty letters for jobs. Sometimes I think he’s a little touched.”

“What ever gave you that idea?” I said. “He sounds like a perfectly normal guy, for this town.”

“There you go. I knew you’d come out with it in the long run. So that’s what you think of this town. Just what I expected.”

“Well, it’s not much like Chicago,” I said.

“What is?” Mabel said.

Mabel was about forty-three or forty-eight or fifty-one, hard to tell — one of these big energetic girls with a big bust, a lot of hair, and good-looking legs (but also solid), and she alternated between fancy printed dresses with everything on them that a sewing machine would hold together, and tailored suits, which she wore partly because she thought they made her look like a career woman such as Colbert or Roz Russell, and partly to annoy her husband. Hubby was at one of the mills, but was laid off most of the time and spent empty afternoons at Dugan’s Tavern up on West 13th Street, trying to figure out how many cards to draw.

Mabel had the goods on every operator, every cutter, and even the elevator boy, back to the first generation, including out-of-town connections and relations ‘on the other side of the family’.

“I see you got on your extra-special Sunday School dress,” I said, throwing the rest of the mail in the waste-basket. “You expecting your boy friend Hasler to visit us this morning?”

“As a matter of fact, I’ll bet he will be up this morning,” she said. “And this dress is over a year old.”

I went down to the boiler room where the chief steam fitter was making fifty dollars’ worth of noise while the two helpers were smoking cigarettes and leaning against the wall, cussing the wage scale.

“I seen Buster Novak’s pay check last night,” says one, throwing his cigarette on the floor. “A hundred and six bucks. I got a notion to go to work up there at his place if I can get in.”

“Yeh,” says the senior steam fitter, “and he probly put in a hunnerd and six hours. Hand me that wrench, if it ain’t no trouble to ya.”

“They say they’re paying a dollar ninety-three up at the packing house. That ain’t hay neither,” says the other helper.

“Yes, George,” says the senior steam fitter, “you only had nine jobs in the last two months chasin them high wages around. Why don’t you go up to the packing company? I hear they give every employee a Ford car after thirty days’ service, and 200-a-month pension after you been there eleven months. Here, hold the wrench, if you got the strength.”

“My cousin Earl he sold his herd of beef last week for forty-eight hundred bucks,” says George

“All clear profit, of course,” says the old man. “He got the feed for nothing and his two hired men of course they wouldn’t take no wages. Now, hold onto the wrench, boy, hold onto it, it ain’t red hot. And you, junior, I hate to interrupt them dreams of the big money and that important cigarette- smokin job, but would you please open that valve there? Not that one for god’s sake, the other one, want to blow this factory over to Jo Daviess County?”

“Hi Frank,” I said. “What’s the matter this time?”

“Why this blame burner is all wore out, that’s all, and the automatic is stuck again, and some of the flues is leaking, aside from that everything is just grand.”

“Looks to me like we could use a new boiler, burner, and maybe a new tank. Also some new steam lines. I was looking over the lines to the buck presses on the third floor the other day. Looks to me like they’re all ready to go.”

“This whole outfit was wore out five years ago. But I can’t seem to convince nobody here. In addition to being the world’s leading authority on what’s wrong in Washington, this here Hasler is also a boiler expert. He don’t know a boiler flue from a congressman, but he can stand right there and tell me why this here old kettle is in A-i shape.”

“I got twenty pressers upstairs, setting there drawing wages and waiting for steam,” I said. “How soon we gonna have some steam?”

“Half an hour, if these two bankers here don’t faint with exhaustion.”

I went out.

“They’re paying a dollar eighty-four up at the Casket Company,” says one of the helpers as I was going out.

“You’d be a sensation up there,” the boss said. “Maybe you could get a job as tester and just lay around in them coffins all day trying them out. But listen, you must be sick, you ain’t lit a cigarette for over five minutes.”

I went through the stock room, past the piled-up cases of piece goods — broadcloths and prints and rayon crepes, challis and windsor crepe, outing flannel, slubs, twills, acetates, percales — past the stock boy, who was unpacking and stacking buttons from Connecticut, and entered the elevator.

The elevator boy, who had quit school because he “wasn’t getting noplace there,” was sitting on a wooden machine box with singer printed on it, getting someplace by reading the funny paper.

“Second floor,” I said. “What’s the flash on Marvin Stacy, Master Sleuth?”

“Oh him and Buddy, the Boy Detective, why they got this here crook trapped in the elevator shaft. They musta nicked him a couple times already, see, he’s all blood to one side of his face.”

“Who’s the guy they got cornered this time?”

“Why this guy, his face is all like bark off a tree, they call him Bark Face.”

“Has a hell of a time with all those guys, Stacy has,” I said.

“Oh, him and Buddy got this here Bark Face two months ago, this here is an old Philadelphia paper I found in an empty packing case.”

“If you read up on that capture a few more times you can quit this elevator stuff and go into the detective business yourself,” I said.

“I been thinking of that,” he said, and stopped on second.

“Don’t let Mr. Hasler catch you sitting on that box reading comics,” I said, getting off the elevator.

“No fear,” he said.

“I don’t think he’d appreciate Bark Face,” I said.

The pressers were all standing around waiting for steam; they were leaning on their white tables talking or looking out the window. That little blonde O’Rourke girl was sitting on her table with her legs crossed, putting on fingernail paint. The old ladies were giving their feet a rest, sitting on the window sills.

“Well, here we are again,” the forelady, a big beefy old-timer with gray hair and bloodshot eyes, said to me. “They kick if we don’t get the stuff out, and then they shut the steam off. First we got steam all over the place and no pajamas coming down the chutes and I have to send the pressers home. Then we get pajamas up to the ceiling all at once and I call in the pressers and we got no steam. And I’m in the middle gettin yammered at by both sides. They must think I’m made of steam. What do I know why we ain’t got steam? I suppose I’m supposed to take care of the boiler too. Oh, my god,” she added in simulated terror, holding up her arms as though warding off the lash of a bullwhip, “I’d hate to think if Mr. Hasler should walk in on this and see them pressers setting there like they was at a band picnic. And O’Rourke painting her fingers! Oh, there’d be some terrible things said! I hate to think. Oh, there’d be some blood around here!” She swept her hands around indicating where the blood would flow — all over the stacked-up pairs of pajamas, across the oil-stained maple flooring to the door, and down the staircase in a crimson flood where it would knock down Ralph Budlong, the candy-machine man, and carry him right out into the street along with his stock of Dreem-Mallow bars, zestful peanutbutter crackers, and rainbow gumdrops.

“We’ll have steam in half an hour,” I said. The O’Rourke girl gave me the eye.

I went back up to the office.

“What’s doing?” Mabel said. She was standing by the window, looking down on the roof of the Acme Products Co., and across a lot of jumbledup buildings, toward the hills across the river. “Have a piece of gum?” she said.

“No thanks,” I said.

“What’s doing on second?”

“O’Rourke is painting up her fingernails,” I said, flopping down at the desk.

“I bet she is. But what about the steam?”

“I believe I’ll have a piece of gum after all,” I said.

 

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