Odd jobs have a different meaning for me. I'm am the classic factotum. Please, someday, read Charles Bukowski's book, Factotum, especially if you grew up with any comforts of middle class at all. I was young and couldn't stay still. I'd been that way since the first time I ran away from home at the age of four. I had a small collection of belongings wrapped in a bandanna that was tied to a pole slung over my shoulder. Classic hobo of the forties, now known as homeless or something more derogatory. I made it about a half of a mile from my great uncles house when the cops found me. Not far, but I had my first on the road experience before Jack Kerouac wrote the book.
Then he wrote the book (1957). I was hooked and unfortunately I had a ready made partner in crime; we'll call him PB, for pin-bladder...he had to pee after every beer. We hitch-hiked from Greenwich, CT to Cape Cod when we were fourteen. That was the first time there was ever an APB out on me. I didn't know until quite a bit later, but that trip should have scared the road out of my ass pronto! We were picked up by a couple of exceptionally drunk transvestites in the middle of the night, and thought they were older babes coming on to us. The term "cougar" was a half of a century away from daily use. I'll spare those details, but we managed to escape unscathed. We spent the night after that under route 128, way under. The next day we hitched home, having completely avoided the All Points Bulletin. Aside from being more knowledgeable about the variances of sexuality (don't you love that Billy Bragg song?) our appetites for hitching were whetted beyond belief. It would be interesting to know the amount of miles PB and I hitch-hiked over the years. Times were different, that mode of travelling was still viable. I digress, but you couldn't hitch-hike on Maui in the sixties, but, if you sat at the side of the road, reading a book, that was the signal that you needed a ride.
Back to the oddest job. The summer of my nineteenth year I had a rather pedestrian position as a laundry truck driver. I guess it wasn't pedestrian because I was driving. I drove this clumsy step van filled with paper wrapped laundry through the wealthy back country of Greenwich. Everything from ball gowns to jockey shorts. It wasn't a hard job...until I took my first turn, then the load shifted, everything was out of order, and delivering the proper sheets to the proper house became a problem. I generally turned a six or seven hour job into ten. The best times were showing up at some gabled mansion...and not having a thing in the truck for them. Back-tracking, and trading packages with maids was really tough, and embarrassing. The part of the job that was scary, were the dogs. There were no electric fences in the sixties, but there were big, scary ass dogs. Little ones too. I always had a big box of Milkbones by my side and it was a sight to see me running, with the laundry on my shoulder, throwing handfuls of biscuits at canines that were trying to attach themselves to my leg before I made it to the house. But that wasn't the odd job.
By this time PB and I had Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity ( On the Road's main characters) fully ingrained in our subconscious. We were in a bar in Port Chester, New York one night and we must have been itching for a road trip. I said to PB, "If this song (Like a Rolling Stone) comes on the juke box again, we're going to Dayton , Ohio." Sure. Well, sure enough, it did and we went home to get a limited amount of fresh clothes, leave notes for our parents and split. The Dayton part was due to a woman that I knew, not particularly well, but she had said to me that she wouldn't mind a visit if I was in the area. At that time people who lived in New England weren't in Ohio that often. So we headed out for Dayton.
One really sad (or hilarious) oversight; it was Saturday night, and my laundry truck was fully loaded in the back yard for Monday's deliveries. My step-father, in his Brooks Brother's suit and brogans had to drive the truck down to the laundry on Monday morning. We've never talked about it at length, but it isn't one of his better memories.
So PB and I were on the road by about one AM. I had a VW bug by the time, so we weren't thumbing it. Along the Pennsylvania Turnpike PB quoted directly from Road, "We're ballin' that jack..." Not quite like Sal and Dean in their great American behemoth of a vehicle, but we were going down the road on four wheels. Early in the morning we were sideswiped, I was crumpled up and asleep in the back, the passenger door was tied shut for a long time. Not a great impression when we landed in Ohio. The Dayton part was sort of disaster, well, not sort of. My woman friend fixed up PB and we went to a down club in Dayton, Little Mickey's Twist Palace. It was a great place, but a bit raw for country club girls. We lasted a couple of days, and were back on the road.
What to do next? We were too old for our parents to put out APB's, and going home voluntarily was out of the question. But, we didn't have the balls, or money to complete a cross country run. So we did what came naturally, we went to Cleveland. I'm and Indians fan, and PB had friends there. Drinking eighty-nine cent six packs from the super market and twenty-five cent hot dogs from street vendors we we coming perilously close to running out of money. Somebody said you can always get a job at Lake George, New York, so we filled the car with gas and beer and headed to Buffalo where PB had some more friends. He specialized in having friends in the rust belt in those days.
And that's where we ran out of money. I rememeber spending my last, what thirty-five, fifty cents on a bottle of cheap beer in a smokey bar in downtown Buffalo. Bumming cigarettes was our only source of anything at the moment. PB's friends were broke too. Then somebody came said they found us some work...as professional pall bearers! Have any of you ever even heard of that job? I don't even remember Kerouac or Cassidy even tackling that type of employment.
The deal was this. Lynettes Funeral Home in Buffalo was having two funerals the next day and they needed a few strong arms to bury a couple of nuns. And they were willing to pay us six dollars each for two burials! A veritable jackpot for PB and myself, we'd get to Lake George with money to spare (it was the early sixties), and get some jobs.
It went off with just a couple of minor problems. Both PB and I had to wear ill-fitting winter, dark suits that we borrowed from his friends on the sweltering Saturday afternoon. And I fumbled the Holy Water trying to hand it off to the priest during the second internment. Other than that our careers as professional pall-bearers went well, and we retired.
More gas, more beer and the crippled car headed for Lake George. We made it and worked the summer there, and believe me, it was also another Sal and Dean experience. We started out living in a disabled '57 Dodge convertible (the bug was just too small for double occupancy) outside of a bar, and it went up and down hill from there.
Maybe sometime I'll tell you about training rhesus monkeys (don't worry, it didn't last long, the anti-vivisection got to me quickly, one again, it WAS the sixties) on behavioural apparatus for a management consulting firm in Boston...later, biff
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