Pensive and defensive I relax into rhetorical remembrance:


I came up empty on the lottery…I’d rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy. I am thinking this morning about Stephen’s Ministries, a company I used to work for. My sister Sandy worked there doing data entry and light secretarial, she got me hired on as the after school custodian. I must have been sixteen. I developed a penchant for juggling trashcans, much to the delight of the office folk, but much to the chagrin of my various bosses, who clearly saw my antics as unwelcome distractions from the serious work of data entry. Stephen’s Ministries itself was an odd business built around marketing the ideas and influence of Kenneth Haguk (pronounced hauk), an ecumenical psychologist hard at work in the industry of group think (alternately called self help).

At the time I really didn’t think much about the product, it was very much a paycheck job. Kenneth would occasionally call me into his office and give me life advice, but honestly I couldn’t reconstruct one of those conversations if I tried – it all seemed so vacuous that I just took it in as a caricature of well meaning, but way off Christianity. More than anything the business seemed to be about book sales and Kenneth’s ego. I do remember that he had a bad arm and a large black chair, the combination of which reminded me of the villain from Inspector Gadget. These factoids set the scene, but are not germane to my point. There was a staff writer who worked there, I’ll have to get back to you on his name, but he was clearly a tragic figure for me with an accompanying rise and fall. I’ll call him Bill.

Bill’s “office” was in the backroom, where they kept the staff writers. He and this woman Ellen would spend their days churning out advertising copy and short articles on Stephen’s Ministries for any publication that would have them. He radiated an aura of boredom and when we would occasionally debate things, he and I (as my custodial supplies were proximate to his think tank) he would come alive and ask searching questions. He would try on opinions in true Socratic form, walk around in front of the mirror of our discourse and see what he looked like. I admired his mind, but recognized that he was marking time and hawking his gifts for Haguk, as much there for the paycheck as I was.

On breaks from school my ability with computers would garnish me extra wages as I would work full days, not as a custodian, but as a data entry guy who could trouble shoot their very simple network. I was thinking about going into computers at this point in my life and I noticed that I would often get stuck into a problem and work straight through my lunches and my breaks, forgetting to eat. My brother Phil said that this was a great thing about working with computers, but the speed with which my workdays would pass was more than a little frightening. I could imagine a life of little distracting problems that carried me along financially leading to a death of Ivan Ilych moment where I gasped out my last breath with a “what the fuck was that all about? I was busy with the glitch in the thing!”

During one of these breaks from school, when I was around more, I noticed the absence of Bill and I was informed that he’d been hired as an editorial writer for the new newspaper The St. Louis Sun. The paper was an ill fated venture that rose and set in this one paper town with the rapidity of a single day’s solar cycle, but it provided a brief moment “in the sun” for Bill (too heavy handed, I know). He came rolling into the office of a lunch hour to say his final goodbyes and collect the last of his stuff. He was in a new suit with a fresh haircut and he was wearing this long gray belted overcoat that was made of very fine wool. He was going to a place where his opinion mattered and he was shod as the warrior for king. I remember being impressed and relieved that he’d made it out of indentured servitude, I remember thinking that there is hope in this image of a well- groomed thinker escaping his bonds.

I’m not one to keep in touch with my archetypes and so all I can tell you of him is inference. The plastic on which he bought those new threads compounded monthly, so I hope his splash at the short lived rag was big enough to carry him forward, but I never heard of/from him again. I have a sense that I was witnessing Icarus’s lift off. Myself, I got fired for the unstoppable trashcan juggling, which would later translate well to the rapid and tricky inversion of booze bottles in a later career. I wrote, “Elvis has left the building” on the lunchroom erase board. I left the building. It was promptly erased. I was replaced by a high school friend named Casey: who won the heart of the beautiful Jessie by telling her how blue her eyes were in a simple poem, the old songs still work. On my last date with Jessie we braved a torrential rainstorm in my rag top convertible dune buggy to go see the third Indian Jones movie at the Galleria, the one with Sean Connery.