Work Is Prayer
That’s a saying I heard growing up. Not at all from my parents. It was said by the old Kansas people around me.
I myself can’t help but hold it in reverence. It was something urgent in me that has transubstantiated into my writing, fiction and journalism. Writing is prayer. If I weren’t an atheist I could commit to that.
I’ve held 21 paid jobs in my life, before setting up my own business when I was 35, here in France. From then on I remained stubbornly self employed. I’d discovered a weakness in my personality. I can not be told what to do. I can not be a minion. It’s a serious flaw and one I can’t escape.
Too proud and independent by nature, too much pride by far that can be too easily chafed, too much anger then to contain. Throughout never once was I fired. Again, I was too proud for that disgrace. I quit all my jobs. When I’d found another that paid better or that I thought was better suited, or when I returned to school.
From the time I was 14 I was increasingly financially independent accepting only small sums from my parents. To do this I sometimes held two jobs at once.
At fifteen I bought my first old car with my savings. From then on I bought other cars. I paid for gas, maintenance. I bought my cigarettes, my beer and vodka, I took my girlfriends on dates. I bought most of my clothes, and anyway by 14 I was shoplifting a lot of them.
With my first job I worked for my middle brother Alan David Bell. He was seven years older, very handsome, played the tuba in the Concordia High marching band, worked out with weights, had a job in the meat department at the local Bogaarts super market—our father remarking that he had more cuts on his hands then were known to modern day butchers.
Alan also had a 1950 Studebaker Business Coupe. To this day for me it’s the sleekest and most beautiful car ever produced in America with its rocket nose and its swept back body in waves of sculptured steel. It had been painted a shiny cream by a previous owner with bright red tongues of fire licking lasciviously back along the door panels. Obviously only a high school boy could have bought that.
Two doors, one wide low window on each side. The car oozed sex as did Alan himself, although at that age I thought it was his after shave.
When he started working a second job delivering the special Sunday Edition of the Salina Journal newspaper to its subscribers in Concordia to my great excitement he asked to hire me as his helper. My parents agreed as long as I would actually wake up every Sunday consistently to help him.
Salina was our big town with an astounding population of 50,000. It was 55 miles away with nothing between, no villages, no gas stations, only a few abandoned farmhouses left to rot after the Great Depression. Nothing but rolling treeless prairie. Cattle country.
At 3 am the Sunday Greyhound bus from Salina delivered its two baggage holds full of newspapers. The load of papers arrived at the only hotel in Concordia, the Baron House, in the morning darkness of three a.m.
At that time Concordia was totally deserted. We were always the only car on the streets, all of them brick streets that lapped rhythmically under the Studebaker. Bricks that for me confusingly read ‘Coffeyville’ a town on the far side side of the state notorious for outlaws.
“Maybe they dropped the bomb,” Alan remarked often of the scene to make me even more spooked than I was by the desolation. Bombs were real.
Stephen Mancil Bell my oldest brother. Steve, who had by then disappeared for a few years somewhere far away, who no one talked about but who made mother cry. In his own time he’d worked his high school summers on building the underground silos for the Nike missiles that dotted the empty countryside about us. Protecting Cloud County?
Or just scaring the shit out of it. The atomic warheads were meant to be top secret but everyone in north central Kansas knew about them, prayed for them to sleep on in their giant silos. Let sleeping giants lie.
Going downtown, the few blocks of it, that in itself was an adventure to me. Especially as I had a passion for hotels. And the Baron House was perfect. It had been built of stone in the 1880s, with 100 rooms. By 1959 it had faltered considerably, yet sill operated for an occasional train crew, some sad looking salesmen, and of course what my brothers had already instructed me on graphically, the Kama Sutra coupling of adulterous couples performing their antique antics in its shabby rooms.
Downtown Concordia had not yet been destroyed by a Wal-Mart. So although Concordia itself was barely a population of 7000 (it has since indeed been Wal-marted, losing its stores and 40% of its population) it then served an entire kingdom of farmers and ranchers. There was the hulking Bon Marche department store where you still heard old ladies speaking French, the Brown Grand Opera (turned over to movies) and the largest building in town, the Nazareth Mother House of the Sisters of St Joseph, larger even than the Cloud County Court house. These gave Concordia grandeur in my innocent eyes. I have always been drawn to the grand. Faux and genuine. Thriving or dying.
The paper came in three sections, to be assembled by us, then stacked into the car. Then at home each one had to be folded lengthwise and folded again twice more into equal parts so that the ends could be tucked together. All to produced an object resembling in shape and thickness what would now be recognized around the world as a Big Mac box. Then there was no such thing as a McDonald’s anywhere in that lonesome stretch of northern Kansas, or in the State itself.
Alan I thought was brilliant at organization. We did it all to plan, from pickup at the bus depot to folding to delivery. At the end, returning home at about about 8 a.m. at the very latest, 7:30 was the goal we never managed to meet—later than 8:00 and the phone began ringing at the house with impatient subscribers demanding to know where their Sunday paper was.
The papers were folded on the kitchen table in Indian silence, we daren’t wake the Reverend, my Father on his busiest day of the week, we let our own sleeping giant lie. That task done, which alone I liked in my job, we’d haul it all out filling up the passenger side up front and the entire back seat area almost to the roof. Only enough space remained for skinny me to slip in onto of the folded Journals, riding on my stomach legs scrunched up into the back window. The necessity for a mini helper probably landed me the job.
Like that, we could go journeying into the still night time town delivering the esteemed Sunday Edition of the Salina Journal to the town’s front walkways and front porches, about 550 of them.
Cruising at a funereal pace along the route Alan threw from the driver’s side, me from the other. He had the addresses taped to the dashboard. The car’s design gave me scant space for a good throw. Also I was a terrible thrower to begin with. I detested and dreaded sports of any kind, baseball most particularly.
Alan had just cause to be perturbed by me. More than a few of the papers I folded came undone. Then too my throws would land on the wrong lawn or hit the dog barking in the yard, or worse, bang the subscriber out early to search in the shrubbery for the paper.
But done at last we’d head back to the house where mother had made fresh cinnamon buns for us. Then we just with time to get ourselves ready for church—scrubbing away at the printing ink that blackened our hands and streaked our faces.
Alan paid me my agreed to $10. Ten dollars for about 5 hours of not so easy work. I’d have sore arms from all the tossing and a lot of car sickness from riding in the backseat. My fingers ached from the folding. The skin of the fingertips were so sensitized I wanted to scream from nerve pain whenever they touched more paper and ink. However, I was truly ecstatic with my $10, and felt so manly from the work.
Best of all it at last brought Alan and I closer. We never had been. It was how I came to love my brother discovering what a tender soul he was. By temperament much like my mother calm and stoic. Yes he could be sharp with me driving me close to tears.
Like the rest of the family, however, he knew that I was morbidly sensitive. He too treated me so carefully that I felt shame for being what I thought was a weakling. Yet in my memory he never complained. Sometimes he would even ask me out of kindness to recite the Roman emperors in their order. Attention that made me happy.