22 June 2007
I wrote a play which premiered in London in 1985. It was set on the receiving dock of a warehouse, and was reviewed by a critic from the Financial Times who damned it as “a typical woman’s view of men’s work”. This both hurt and annoyed me, as it was based on the time I spent working on a receiving dock in 1971.
Bill and I had made it to Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington D.C. after being dropped off in Pittsburgh by the armed robbers from Colorado. We had slept under a bridge where we had watched, with a certain amount of satisfaction, as the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up accidentally dropped his rolled up sleeping back down the embankment, into the Allegheny River, and had to sleep covered only with his clothes. We had said goodbye to him the next morning and hitched to Washington D.C.
We spent the next few weeks sleeping rough or at his friends’ houses when their parents were away. But one night we made camp in a small wood, building a lean-to to protect us from the coming rain, and Bill went off to cadge some food off a nearby friend. While he was gone, the heavens opened up and a huge electrical storm hit. Water was battering down so hard it flowed through the lean-to and I watched, screaming (as if anyone could hear me!) as lighting seemed to be hitting the forest floor. When Bill came back I was a gibbering wreck and we decided we really were going to have to find somewhere to live. Which meant finding a job.
A brand spanking new “Atlantic Department Store” was opening in Langley Park and they were advertising for floor sales and stockroom staff. I turned up to a mass interview in which anyone with a pulse was being hired on minimum wage. I was given a job on the receiving dock where huge trucks dispensed whole loads of varied stock that had to be unloaded, checked, ticketed and sent to the sales floor. It was my first job and paid the minimum wage which was then $1.25 per hour.
The only place Bill and I could afford on that kind of money was an efficiency apartment, one of a set of three rooms, sharing a small kitchen and a bathroom, which were strictly to be rented only to single men with absolutely no pets allowed. So my dog Methedrine and I entered and left the place via the window. (Though, looking back, I wonder why we thought that coming and going via the window was any less suspicious than coming and going via the door!) And it was there, with the cheap headboard knocking against the wall alerting the rest of the residents, that I joyously surrendered my virginity.
It was the height of summer, hot and humid and the dock at Atlantic Department Store had no air conditioning. The trucks came in at the end of a journey of maybe hundreds of miles and, when the doors were opened and you went in to start unloading, the heat would suck the air from your lungs. I was small and spry, so it was often my job to scamper up to the top of the cargo and start handing it down.
The biggest shipments were off the Eastern Toy Company trucks, which came in from New York carrying all manner of heavy goods, not just toys; and usually arrived just before lunch. So we hated them. None of us had ever heard of Eastern Toys and, as the top bosses of the company were in the habit of calling each other “paisano”, we did wonder about them.
It was my job to check the shipments before they were signed for, and to ticket the goods before they were sent to the floor. (This was well before bar codes!) I worked with two other women, Little Betty and Joyce.
Little Betty was a matronly looking single mother with a disabled daughter struggling to make ends meet. I didn’t think she was all that little because she was the same height as me. (I have always been in denial about my size.) Joyce was in her mid-twenties, loud, argumentative and totally outrageous. Joyce had been married to an efficiency expert for the US Army. (Try as I might I could not picture this.) He had done his best to contain Joyce’s exuberance and finally gave her an ultimatum.
“Either you straighten up or you can walk out that door right now!” he said. So Joyce picked up her purse, walked out and never went back. I asked her why she hadn’t taken anything else.
“All I needed was the purse. Because it had all his credit cards in it and I could charge anything I needed!”
Which is exactly what she had done. Her husband was frantic and had been calling Joyce’s mother every time he got a credit card statement to shreik, “You won’t believe what she’s done now!” By the time he managed to get all his cards stopped, she had set herself up and got this job. It didn’t pay much and she missed a lot of the accoutrements of her former life, but she had found a boyfriend called Bobby who was “always good for a free meal” and kept her “in the style to which I would like to become accustomed.”
Little Betty didn’t have a sugar daddy. One day at break time we went to the snack bar as we always did. A turnover was fifteen cents but a piece of toast was ten cents and we deliberated at some length about the advantages and disadvantages of spending that extra nickel on the turnover. The normally mild Little Betty seemed to snap.
“I am so sick of being poor!” she said, “All those rich guys with all the money they have! What do they do with it? Why do they need all that? It should be shared around better!” I laughed.
“Careful!” I teased, “That sounds like socialism!”
“I don’t care what it is!” she replied, “That’s what I think!” It’s a conversation that has stuck with me all my life.
I was in love with Bill the way you can only be once in your life; with total abandon and no insight whatsoever. My plans to start at UCLA that September went out the window as surely as I did in the morning on my way to work. Bill and I settled down to a life of low-income domestic bliss, for all the world like a young married couple; and his mother, a spookily quiet and harried looking woman who looked old beyond her years, used to bring trays of lasagne to feed us up, and we bought cheap clothes on my employee discount at the store. But Bill didn’t find the domesticity as blissful as I did.
He became moody and frustrated with the poverty we were living in. He hooked up with a friend who was growing marijuana upstate and one day I came home from work to discover eighty garbage bags full of freshly cut weed that he had agreed to dry and bag up to earn some money. He was also being supplied with cocaine which seemed to make him increasingly irritated. He would fly into a rage when the dog left her “calling cards” on the carpet when she was left alone in the apartment. Bill eventually made me take her to work with me. I had no choice but to tie her up in the woods while I was there. Although we continued to have some glorious times, Bill was also becoming irrationally jealous and possessive, unable to deal with me going out on my own.
Then one day, when Joyce was at a loose end because Bobby was away on business, she asked me if I wanted to go see a movie. She even volunteered to pay. I told her I couldn’t, though, because Bill would suspect I was sneaking around. She laughed.
“I’ve got the perfect solution to that,” she volunteered, “You tell him you think you’re pregnant and you have to go the free clinic for a test. He’ll be so freaked out, he won’t want to go with you. When you get back and say you’re not pregnant, he’ll be so relieved he won’t ask a lot of questions.”
So that’s what I decided to do. Bill bought it, so I left the dog in the apartment and headed off to see “The Summer of ‘42” with Joyce; the first time I had been out to just have fun in a long time.
When I came home, Methedrine greeted me, wagging her tail, among what can only be described as the wreckage of our apartment. She had torn up the trash, carpet, a pair of shoes and left her smelly calling cards everywhere. Bill had come and had obviously stormed out again, leaving a furious message that left me in no doubt that there was going to be a lot of shouting when he got back. I decided I couldn’t face it, so I packed up a few things and left with the dog, leaving a note.
Except that I had nowhere to go. I walked and walked around the neighbourhood wondering what I was going to do now.
Bill came home at midnight, found my note and felt immediate remorse. He put on his jacket and went out to try and find me, roaming the nearby streets shouting my name like a madman and ignoring complaints from some very unsavoury neighbours that might well have battered him for waking them up. But he didn’t seem to care. When he found me he was in a frantic state. He held me, saying over and over again that he was sorry. And that’s when I realised he was crying.
He wiped the tears away with an unexpected rage and started cursing himself. I didn’t understand. And then it all came out.
Bill was only seventeen. But I’d guessed as much. He was a “push-out”, the name given to kids who are not runaways by choice. His father was a big man who regularly beat his mother. And when Bill, who was skinny and small, realised he couldn’t protect her, he cried. His father was disgusted with him acting so effeminately. And somewhere in the fight they had about it, he was thrown out. He had been homeless since then, living rough and with friends, and still trying to go to school. My God, I thought, he’s still in high school.
We went back to our apartment and he cried freely in my arms. We made love. And I knew it was for the last time.
My dog and I went back to Los Angeles together shortly after that. I started at UCLA and went on to a totally different life. I only saw Bill once after that, on a visit to Washington a year or so later. We had dinner in a restaurant together for the first time since Berkeley, only this time he paid.
He told me he was working with some other thieves and that they were snatching bags which was pretty lucrative. I often wonder what happened to him after that.
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I wrote a play which premiered in London in 1985. It was set on the receiving dock of a warehouse, and was reviewed by a critic from the Financial Times who damned it as “a typical woman’s view of men’s work”. This both hurt and annoyed me, as it was based on the time I spent working on a receiving dock in 1971.
Bill and I had made it to Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington D.C. after being dropped off in Pittsburgh by the armed robbers from Colorado. We had slept under a bridge where we had watched, with a certain amount of satisfaction, as the Maoist Communist Fuck-Up accidentally dropped his rolled up sleeping back down the embankment, into the Allegheny River, and had to sleep covered only with his clothes. We had said goodbye to him the next morning and hitched to Washington D.C.
We spent the next few weeks sleeping rough or at his friends’ houses when their parents were away. But one night we made camp in a small wood, building a lean-to to protect us from the coming rain, and Bill went off to cadge some food off a nearby friend. While he was gone, the heavens opened up and a huge electrical storm hit. Water was battering down so hard it flowed through the lean-to and I watched, screaming (as if anyone could hear me!) as lighting seemed to be hitting the forest floor. When Bill came back I was a gibbering wreck and we decided we really were going to have to find somewhere to live. Which meant finding a job.
A brand spanking new “Atlantic Department Store” was opening in Langley Park and they were advertising for floor sales and stockroom staff. I turned up to a mass interview in which anyone with a pulse was being hired on minimum wage. I was given a job on the receiving dock where huge trucks dispensed whole loads of varied stock that had to be unloaded, checked, ticketed and sent to the sales floor. It was my first job and paid the minimum wage which was then $1.25 per hour.
The only place Bill and I could afford on that kind of money was an efficiency apartment, one of a set of three rooms, sharing a small kitchen and a bathroom, which were strictly to be rented only to single men with absolutely no pets allowed. So my dog Methedrine and I entered and left the place via the window. (Though, looking back, I wonder why we thought that coming and going via the window was any less suspicious than coming and going via the door!) And it was there, with the cheap headboard knocking against the wall alerting the rest of the residents, that I joyously surrendered my virginity.
It was the height of summer, hot and humid and the dock at Atlantic Department Store had no air conditioning. The trucks came in at the end of a journey of maybe hundreds of miles and, when the doors were opened and you went in to start unloading, the heat would suck the air from your lungs. I was small and spry, so it was often my job to scamper up to the top of the cargo and start handing it down.
The biggest shipments were off the Eastern Toy Company trucks, which came in from New York carrying all manner of heavy goods, not just toys; and usually arrived just before lunch. So we hated them. None of us had ever heard of Eastern Toys and, as the top bosses of the company were in the habit of calling each other “paisano”, we did wonder about them.
It was my job to check the shipments before they were signed for, and to ticket the goods before they were sent to the floor. (This was well before bar codes!) I worked with two other women, Little Betty and Joyce.
Little Betty was a matronly looking single mother with a disabled daughter struggling to make ends meet. I didn’t think she was all that little because she was the same height as me. (I have always been in denial about my size.) Joyce was in her mid-twenties, loud, argumentative and totally outrageous. Joyce had been married to an efficiency expert for the US Army. (Try as I might I could not picture this.) He had done his best to contain Joyce’s exuberance and finally gave her an ultimatum.
“Either you straighten up or you can walk out that door right now!” he said. So Joyce picked up her purse, walked out and never went back. I asked her why she hadn’t taken anything else.
“All I needed was the purse. Because it had all his credit cards in it and I could charge anything I needed!”
Which is exactly what she had done. Her husband was frantic and had been calling Joyce’s mother every time he got a credit card statement to shreik, “You won’t believe what she’s done now!” By the time he managed to get all his cards stopped, she had set herself up and got this job. It didn’t pay much and she missed a lot of the accoutrements of her former life, but she had found a boyfriend called Bobby who was “always good for a free meal” and kept her “in the style to which I would like to become accustomed.”
Little Betty didn’t have a sugar daddy. One day at break time we went to the snack bar as we always did. A turnover was fifteen cents but a piece of toast was ten cents and we deliberated at some length about the advantages and disadvantages of spending that extra nickel on the turnover. The normally mild Little Betty seemed to snap.
“I am so sick of being poor!” she said, “All those rich guys with all the money they have! What do they do with it? Why do they need all that? It should be shared around better!” I laughed.
“Careful!” I teased, “That sounds like socialism!”
“I don’t care what it is!” she replied, “That’s what I think!” It’s a conversation that has stuck with me all my life.
I was in love with Bill the way you can only be once in your life; with total abandon and no insight whatsoever. My plans to start at UCLA that September went out the window as surely as I did in the morning on my way to work. Bill and I settled down to a life of low-income domestic bliss, for all the world like a young married couple; and his mother, a spookily quiet and harried looking woman who looked old beyond her years, used to bring trays of lasagne to feed us up, and we bought cheap clothes on my employee discount at the store. But Bill didn’t find the domesticity as blissful as I did.
He became moody and frustrated with the poverty we were living in. He hooked up with a friend who was growing marijuana upstate and one day I came home from work to discover eighty garbage bags full of freshly cut weed that he had agreed to dry and bag up to earn some money. He was also being supplied with cocaine which seemed to make him increasingly irritated. He would fly into a rage when the dog left her “calling cards” on the carpet when she was left alone in the apartment. Bill eventually made me take her to work with me. I had no choice but to tie her up in the woods while I was there. Although we continued to have some glorious times, Bill was also becoming irrationally jealous and possessive, unable to deal with me going out on my own.
Then one day, when Joyce was at a loose end because Bobby was away on business, she asked me if I wanted to go see a movie. She even volunteered to pay. I told her I couldn’t, though, because Bill would suspect I was sneaking around. She laughed.
“I’ve got the perfect solution to that,” she volunteered, “You tell him you think you’re pregnant and you have to go the free clinic for a test. He’ll be so freaked out, he won’t want to go with you. When you get back and say you’re not pregnant, he’ll be so relieved he won’t ask a lot of questions.”
So that’s what I decided to do. Bill bought it, so I left the dog in the apartment and headed off to see “The Summer of ‘42” with Joyce; the first time I had been out to just have fun in a long time.
When I came home, Methedrine greeted me, wagging her tail, among what can only be described as the wreckage of our apartment. She had torn up the trash, carpet, a pair of shoes and left her smelly calling cards everywhere. Bill had come and had obviously stormed out again, leaving a furious message that left me in no doubt that there was going to be a lot of shouting when he got back. I decided I couldn’t face it, so I packed up a few things and left with the dog, leaving a note.
Except that I had nowhere to go. I walked and walked around the neighbourhood wondering what I was going to do now.
Bill came home at midnight, found my note and felt immediate remorse. He put on his jacket and went out to try and find me, roaming the nearby streets shouting my name like a madman and ignoring complaints from some very unsavoury neighbours that might well have battered him for waking them up. But he didn’t seem to care. When he found me he was in a frantic state. He held me, saying over and over again that he was sorry. And that’s when I realised he was crying.
He wiped the tears away with an unexpected rage and started cursing himself. I didn’t understand. And then it all came out.
Bill was only seventeen. But I’d guessed as much. He was a “push-out”, the name given to kids who are not runaways by choice. His father was a big man who regularly beat his mother. And when Bill, who was skinny and small, realised he couldn’t protect her, he cried. His father was disgusted with him acting so effeminately. And somewhere in the fight they had about it, he was thrown out. He had been homeless since then, living rough and with friends, and still trying to go to school. My God, I thought, he’s still in high school.
We went back to our apartment and he cried freely in my arms. We made love. And I knew it was for the last time.
My dog and I went back to Los Angeles together shortly after that. I started at UCLA and went on to a totally different life. I only saw Bill once after that, on a visit to Washington a year or so later. We had dinner in a restaurant together for the first time since Berkeley, only this time he paid.
He told me he was working with some other thieves and that they were snatching bags which was pretty lucrative. I often wonder what happened to him after that.
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