Jack Mayhew paced a hardwood floor that had been paced for a hundred years, bored and chilly, watching the snow waft down this mid-morning in mid-February. It had been over a decade since his last taste of winter, “with more of the white stuff coming to our neck of the woods!” the clownish mid-market weatherman blustered. The skinny deejay, known in the imagination of radio as Fatboy, was working the prime-time shift for the Quincy rock station that his best friend from LA via Seattle via northern Missouri started from scratch with a dream, an FCC license and a bank loan. Here he was, riding the storm out, waitin’ for the thaw out, in REO’s home state of Illinois, in a little place called Dallas City, ZIP code, EIEIO.
He laughed to himself at the monumental choice in life he had made—jilting Hollywood for fly-over country so his best friend’s friends and family could enjoy some decent music out here in the sticks along the river for once. Jack, thinking back, shocked himself in hindsight.
Yet the cultural regression seemed worth it—by fate or by luck, he had stumbled upon Julia, the smartest, most beautiful woman in the world, tucked away in this little town, a babe who more than adequately replaced his perpetual Pacific sunshine; who became his only sunshine when life is gray, like today, and every other day of the year.
Jack was in a reflective mood, lost in the swirling fluffs of lace floating down outside. Sock-skating to the stereo, he decided to break up the silence with some pre-work tunes to limber up the old eardrums by the band, Talking Heads, and smiled as David Byrne asks what many of us ponder at major turning points in our lives:
… And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself, “Well... how did I get here?”
Meditation comes easy while watching a gentle snowfall and when one isn’t constrained by the demands of time—that would become important later: Jack would have to leave home much earlier than the hour it usually took getting down to Quincy because driving on an icy two-lane road in the dark of winter was a bit more treacherous than driving on a rain-sprinkled freeway three times a year. And then there was the demand of time for the songs he would spin tonight from six til midnight—on the radio, a second of dead air is an hour—but for now, time was as fluid as the melted snowflakes that trickled down the window glass.
Jack had, indeed, found his “beautiful house, with a beautiful wife,” although their beautiful house was barely comparable to the Rathbuns’ spacious soon-to-be-realized-double-A-frame-on-the-bluff beautiful glass dream house. The Mayhew’s hut stood on 2nd Street, the town’s busy (a relative adjective) thoroughfare near the intersection of Cottonwood, and was a two-story, plaster-and-lathe, three bedroom structure with a bathroom barely large enough for a tub and toilet and with electricity provided by a single light socket. Theirs was the dream house of someone else a long time ago that was built on a locally hewn limestone foundation two decades before calendars turned 19.
“Well…how did I get here?” was the question in the song that really had him gobsmacked, though. Born and raised in small-town Nebraska but a California dreamer since he could remember, Jack felt growing up that the cornfields got more nurturing than he did, so couldn’t wait to kick the grain dust off his shoes, earn his degree from the uni in Lincoln, head out for the lower part of the Golden State, and prove the parents wrong that, hell yeah! he could reach for the rainbows!
Within a few years of arriving in LA, Jack had gone from bussing tables to a desk job at a television network and rubbing shoulders with the stars. Now he had closed the small-town circle, a prodigal son’s return to the village, one might say. To even imagine that someday he would chuck it all and be married and living in social isolation in a quaint village like Dallas City, Illinois—was too preposterous to even consider.
Every great while, preposterousness becomes reality.
2
Angela Rose, named after wife Julia’s maternal grandmother, was a seven-year-old firecracker from her first marriage–an angelic bi-product from Mom’s sprint down the courtroom aisle the day after high school graduation to marry her bad-ass boyfriend out of lust, and to get away from the parents. A baby soon followed; so did divorce.
The deadbeat whose only ambition seemed to be drinking a river of Pabst Blue Ribbon dry, or drowning his liver trying, was shown the door before Angie turned two. In a not-so-subtle nod that their marriage was over, Julia bought a two-seater sports car for their three-person family, a gesture even a beer-soaked Neanderthal could figure out.
A dimpled, brown-eyed blonde, Angie was a clone of her mother, in miniature. Both were all-girl tomboys: his step-daughter in the backyard with a garden trowel digging for moles in her brand-new school clothes; her mom, a fashion model in a black Spandex mini-dress and 3-inch stiletto heels, stopping along Carman Road to scoop up a dead fox off the highway. “The pelt is worth fifty bucks! It’s our lucky day!”
Life was as jubilant as a network show cracking the top ten once was.
3
Methihk-ennui
Many Americans go through life hum-drum. Not happy, not sad; on an even, boring, keel; wasting their time on Earth in a rut of perpetual listlessness.
Forced to rise far too early to sleepwalk through another eight or ten hour shift of a crummy little job they despise, but which affords just enough money after expenses to splurge on shoddily made tchotchke slapped together in China. (And more money needed for rent on a storage unit where they can store their old shoddily made tchotchke slapped together in China that they will, most likely, never use again).
When they get back home to their heavily mortgaged, strawhouse-built McMansions from their long commute spewing greenhouse gasses all the way, they gorge on ready-made dinners of processed foods. More junk is on the way when they retire to their mural-sized flat screens to insipid, lowest-common-denominator programming, or, worse, to cable news.
Those tuned in to the latter get their emotions aroused by the manufactured outrage spewed by handsomely paid political shills. For many, this is the only arousal they get in their dull, uninspired life. They might as well be listening to the radio as most will have the tv on for mere background noise; their true focus is on their electronic devices and texts and social media accounts. They stare into their devices, transfixed. Screen zombies.
After a few hours slumped half-awake and nearly as overstuffed as their recliners, they force themselves to bed for another hour/day/week/month/year/decade/lifetime of work at their crummy little jobs they despise, from which they will retire as broken-down wrecks—corporate throwaways.
They go to bed with cable news screeching an unholy lullaby—the political shills still pouring out outrage—then wonder why they toss and turn, too worried to slumber. In that case, it’s a sleeping pill (or two or three or a handful--they are highly addictive) for a few hours of artificial unconsciousness, then up-and-at-it, again, groggy, but awake enough for another week to muck through, until their well-deserved two days off. The weekend allows them more time as screen zombies, to consume more junk, to get older and heavier. Sicker. And although they have to shell out big bucks for medical bills when they do fall ill, many are terrified of socialized medicine— Obamacare!—which is ubiquitous among most other modern societies.
Many people don’t even see the roses, let alone smell them. They seem too busy with their hectic lives; too mesmerized by their screens to relax and notice nature--that’s reserved for their one or two weeks off a year when they cram campgrounds with comfy, gas-guzzling RVs. They are sure to bring along their screens to stare into while in the great outdoors. Keeping up with Internet gossip and political memes seems more enlightening than the wonders of nature.
Rather than being satisfied with their lives, Americans are exhorted by politicians, marketers, and corporate conglomerates to want more, more, MORE! This usually leads to only more anxiety, more work, more debt, and more wanton environmental destruction.
This is not a new phenomenon in the United States–only the distractions change. This was Mark Twain’s observation and admonition in his travelog, The Innocents Abroad, published in l869:
“In America, we hurry–which is well; but when the day’s work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us…we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which thy call a man’s prime in Europe…what a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!”
Cheers to the hopes and promises of Manifest Destiny! (Now take some pills, get glued to your screen, and chill…)
4
Jack Mayhew was now a river rat, a designation for those along the Mississippi who revel in living here. He enjoyed fishing with his girls and fixing up the house—the first priority, a new exterior paint job.
It was while he was balancing on the ladder’s top rungs slapping on the white semi-gloss latex, hell, might as well put up a picket fence and go full-tilt Norman Rockwell, he joked to himself, when he first met his neighbor, a retired chain-smoker of off-brand cigarettes and an imbiber of cheap vodka on the rocks.
Just a little past 10, she invited him over for her kind of breakfast: “Hey, new neighbor, according to my watch, it’s beer-thirty. Come on over and have a cold one,” she yelled from her backyard, her friendly voice sandblasted by decades of tar and nicotine. “Name’s Betsy Langdon, but everybody calls me Betz. What’s yours?”
The two sat at her old Formica table scarred with cigarette burns in her little kitchen and got to know one another; Jack regurgitating some of his best LA celebrity stories, talking easy with a couple beers in his bloodstream. Her favorite seemed to be the one about Lucille Ball: a stagehand in front of him let fly Studio 3’s swinging doors which, in rebound, splashed coffee all over his suit. Behind Jack was Lucy. She saw the caffeinated mess, declared, “sudden stops are a bitch, huh?,” and the two shared some jokes and laughs. Betz’s sense of humor, gravely voice and cackle reminded him a lot of Lucy’s.
Betz told Jack about her three grown kids all living in the area, but were all too busy to visit very often; about her late husband who died at work of heat stroke and how it left a huge financial hole in the budget. She drank a long draught and told how hourly peons rarely received fair compensation back in those days, let alone any benefits, unless they were union. There was no time off, no pension, no 401k. You either saved for a rainy day or got washed out when the flood came. It was an unfair workforce for men, sure, but especially for women, back then.
“I’m just grateful we never had to make glow-in-the-dark fountain pens, that’s all I got to say, New Neighbor.” Betz raised her can as if offering it up to the beer gods.
Why’s that?”
“Ya ever heard of the Radium Girls, Jack?
“No ma’am.”
“The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire?”
“No, squared.”
“Factory work in my day improved a lot, although the pay hadn’t, from the generation of girls who came up before us. Christ’s crackers, Jack, back then cheap labor and the lack of good jobs, especially for us with boobies, led to really shitty working conditions,” Betz said and tossed her aluminum empty into the wastebasket. “Deadly really shitty working conditions. Hang on a minute.”
She left the room and came back with the R and T encyclopedias and another round. “My old noggin can’t remember the details, but, here, Jack, read and learn.”
He thumbed through T, found the entry, and read aloud, appalled and sickened:
“On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City caught fire when a worker tossed a smoldering cigarette butt into a cloth scrap bin. The ensuing inferno killed 146 workers. It was one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable–most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The doors were locked to prevent workers from sneaking off for a cigarette break.”
Jack continued reading as he heard two beer can tops pop.
“It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrants who worked in a cramped line of sewing machines. Nearly all the victims were teenaged girls who did not speak English and who worked 12 hours a day, every day. Many died jumping out the 10th story window to avoid being cooked alive.” His voice was as raspy as hers as he finished the article. “Pathetic.”
“Which brings us to glow-in-the-dark fountain pens. Here’s R.”
Jack understood that companies put profits over people regularly, but this was way beyond the pale. He read the second entry slowly and petrified:
“… during and after World War I, companies produced watches and military dials painted with a material containing radium, a radioactive element that glows in the dark. Hundreds of young women were hired for the well-paying painting jobs because their small hands were well suited for the exacting, detailed work; however, they ingested the radioactive substance as part of their job, for they were instructed to use their lips to bring their paint brushes to a fine point. When they asked about radium’s safety, they were assured by their managers that they had nothing to worry about, but it wasn’t long before the girls began to experience the physical ravages of their exposure.”
“Among the first was Amelia (“Mollie”) Maggia, who painted watches for the Radium Luminous Materials Corp. (later the United States Radium Corp.) in Orange, New Jersey. Maggia’s first symptom was a toothache, which required the tooth’s removal. Soon the tooth next to it also had to be extracted. Painful ulcers, bleeding and full of pus, developed where the teeth had been. The mysterious malady spread throughout Maggia’s mouth and lower jaw, which had to be removed, then into other parts of her body. Maggia died on September 12, 1922, of a massive hemorrhage. Company doctors determined that she had died of syphilis.”
“To shame the girls into silence . . . and to discourage them from seeking further medical attention since there was no cure for the clap at the time,” Betz interjected.
Jack swigged, wiped away a tear that had found a path down his cheek, and continued:
“In growing numbers, other Radium Girls became deathly ill, experiencing many of the same agonizing symptoms as Maggia. For two years their employer vociferously denied any connection between the girls’ deaths and their work. The girls sued.”
“In 1927 attorney Raymond Berry agreed to accept their case. Many of the watch painters had just months to live and were forced to accept an out-of-court settlement. But, even then, companies working with the radioactive isotope denied their role, and women continued to get sick and die. It wasn’t until 1938, when a dying radium worker named Catherine Wolfe Donohue successfully sued the Radium Dial Co. over her illness, that the issue was finally settled”.
“The legacy of the Radium Girls can’t be understated. Their case was among the first in which a company was held responsible for the health and safety of its employees, and it led to a variety of reforms as well as to the creation of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration.”
“Holy hell, that’s unbelievable,” he sighed and closed the book. “I guess spinning tunes in an air-conditioned studio six hours a night ain’t so terribly heinous,“ he laughed, sadly. “I’ll never need OSHA because I have a clean, safe, easy gig, but, damn, what the labor force went through in this country—guess the history books forgot these stories when they were celebrating the wonders of capitalism.”
“Yep. Scientists say the bones in the girls’ graves will glow for a thousand years.”
“Damn.”
The two were developing a nice camaraderie: his first friend in town–a thinker and a good ol’ drinking buddy–a camaraderie that reminded him of the little gem of a film, Harold & Maude starring a spry, aging Ruth Gordon and very much younger Bud Cort.
Stories and laughter and “in all seriousnesses” ricocheted off the kitchen wallpaper of printed fruit hung during the Eisenhower administration as time drained away like the beers they were enjoying, kept cold in her avocado-colored refrigerator. By the time he got back to the job at hand, Julia forbade her wobbly groom to continue painting the second story masonite siding.
141Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡGy2CiqJGiH
