In 1979 when I was seventeen, my father, recently divorced from my mother, picked me up in his silver Peugeot to take me to his apartment for dinner. On the drive he asked me if I had any plans for my future. I told him that at the gym I had met a couple of garbage men who said they had connections for me if I should ever want to work with them. I was tempted to take them up on their offer. After all, I had no specific college aspirations. And the thought of making thirty grand a year, a handsome salary in the 1970s, and being finished with my job by eleven A.M. appealed to me.
Shifting into fifth gear, my father looked at the road ahead of him with a knowing calm, then said: “There’s no way you’re going to become a garbage man. ”
“Why not?”
“Because someday you’ll be at a cocktail party and someone will ask you what you do. What are you going to tell him, that you’re a garbage man?”
That was the end of the discussion. My father knew that even though I was a confused adolescent full of sloth and harebrained schemes, that ultimately my vanity, my pride and my class consciousness would steer me clear from becoming a garbage man.
But my foolishness persisted. Six months later as we gathered ingredients inside a supermarket for another dinner inside my dad’s apartment, I told him I knew people at my gym who worked as cashiers at this same grocery chain. The money was good, the benefits were decent and the work seemed relatively easy.
“You’ll never become a grocery clerk,” my father said with serene confidence.
“Why not?”
He stopped pushing the shopping cart and told me to take a good look at all the employees with their box cutters, their feather dusters and their slack-jawed, lizard-eye expressions. Were these the kind of people I wanted to hang out with for the next forty to fifty years of my life? Were these the type of people whom I aspired to converse with and to befriend? Indeed not. These were Lifers, mushy-brained cookie-cutter personalities whose banal, predictable, culturally-bankrupt existence would drive me to existential despair.
However simplistic my father’s caricature description of the supermarket Lifers, I was suddenly averse to the idea of working all of my adult years at the generic supermarket chain. I decided to take my father’s advice to go to college and study English for a career in technical writing. The vocation was a modest one and it was doubtful I’d make as much money as a garbage man, but there was no shame in telling someone at a cocktail party that I was a technical writer--or a college English instructor.
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