There is Such a Thing as a free Lunch

if you are devoted, pure of heart and don't mind standing in the unemployment line for two hours every other week

We called him Charge, because he was your hard-charger species of young American go-getter businessman, but he was so contained the first time he showed up, we almost didn't notice him. Also, Corbin was late, and since she's the punctual type, we wondered if she was a no-show, or what?

I recall me, Holland and Boyle was there already. I think Boyle must show up at the curb in the dark dawn like the Rose Parade was coming. Me and Holland pull in a couple minutes early, while Pyken, who used to be a bookkeeper at J. C. Penney's, appears at 10:15 like he was attached to the minute hand. Then it's usually Corbin, Frazier and Pappas, and finally, of course, Pullman storming in like a hippo with a hard-on, outraged because the goddamn state wouldn't have the decency to deliver his goddamn unemployment check to his goddamn door, and telling everybody in the building with normal hearing about it.

That was pretty much the 10:15 Core, except that Marquez and his buddies was in on and off, depending on what the canneries was up to, and Carmichael, Borden, a lot of the black guys, you never knew when they'd be back on a job for a couple days. And I guess you could count Brooks, the skinny little women's libber who works at the Sweet Sweet-back Massage Parlor, and Waldo, the freak who writes. They're the kind you're never sure what they're up to, but you know they haven't kicked work and will come in on and off goddamn forever.

Anyhow, this Charge was breathing hard through his nose and tapping a foot and hugging himself, obviously a rookie with a cloud of a temper who wasn't (continued on page 136)Free Lunch(continued from page 125) used to lines or waiting. He had ex--upwardly mobile wrote all over him. He was about 26 but had been running so hard achievement-wise that his face was pushed forward into his early 30s. Pappas started talking to him, as he often will to first-timers, he being the missionary sort. The guy had just got sacked off a brokerage, it seems--blown out of 35 grand a year--and was a bit shook up. He was telling Pappas how his boss done it to him:

"I guess he thought 'You're fired' was too cold and direct," says Charge. "But "You're terminated'----" He shook his head, whewed. "It sounds so drastic and permanent."

"Forget it," says Pappas. "Being out of work is like being out of cancer. The longer the better."

"Huh?" The guy's eyes pop out. "Standing in line with simpletons and bums in this craphole for a hundred ten a week?"

Pappas shrugs. "One man's craphole is another man's calling."

"Some calling. It's indentured servitude. It's degrading!"

"Who you calling servants?" snaps Miz Frazier. She's one of them sweet, doughy, quiet types who'll astonish you now and then by the way she takes no shit. "I'm no servant. If you don't like it here with the F-ten-fifteens, why don't you just go find another Core?"

"He's new here," Pappas tells her. "Just got canned."

"Oh, well, isn't that wonderful, then?" she says, all motherly. "I hope you'll be with us a long time, dear."

"Jesus Christ!" The guy looks at Pappas. "There's a real cancer-ward attitude in this place;misery loves company."

"Hey, asshole," says Boyle, thrusting his bizarre expression into the conversation. "You already called us degrading and simpletons, and now we're miserable, too." Boyle is no more than 25, but he's been in the 10:15 Core since I can recall, and was, in fact, one of the earliest long-hairs in the place. He sounded half-gassed, as usual, since I gather he don't sleep the night before appointments but stays up involved with liquor and drugs. As a result, his appearance has been compared to tornado damage and he can produce a glower that has drove more than one stranger from the Line and even the building. Boyle give the kid a look. "I guess if shit was diamonds, you'd have the runs. Well, if our Core don't appeal to you, you can always switch to a Tuesday, with the fucking three-day-weekend snobs."

Charge just shook his head with amusement. "I don't know what the hell you're talking about."

"Our Core," said Pappas. "On your Claimant's Handbook schedule page, you're given a day and time to report to pick up your checks. In this state, you come in every other Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, to window C or F, in fifteen-minute clusters, from eight A.M. to four P.M. You wound up in the Odd Thursday F-ten-fifteen group. In every such group, you'll find two types of person--a few dedicated lifers and a large changing periphery of short-timers. The latter we call the transients. The former are known as the Core. Welcome to Core F-ten-fifteen."

Holland, who resembles a randy Stan Laurel, goes to his wallet and comes up with one of these little green business-style cards we had printed a couple years ago for a laugh that say:

The Odd Thursday F-10:15 Core

Spatium Obsidemus

which is Latin for "We take up space."

"Miz Frazier thought it up. You can sign the card on the back, if you want."

"Mothering damn," says Charge. "You act like it was the Kiwanis you've got here."

"We're a damn sight more exclusive than the goddamn Kiwanis," says Pullman, whose voice can tilt pictures on the wall.

That was a fact, and I told the guy: "You won't find one person in ten that'll last over a year at one stretch on the Line."

"Over a year?" he says. His head comes forward out of his collar, eyes darting. "You people have been here together drawing unemployment for over a year?"

We hadn't added it up in a while, we realized, and started figuring: me, Pyken and Boyle since '70, Pappas and Miz Frazier since '71, Holland only since '72, Pullman going back God knows how long, the others mostly from the recent influx; it came to something like 45 collective years, and Charge's mouth is open and he wonders if the Guinness Book of World Records knows about this.

"You poor sons of bitches." He is struck with pity.

"Poor?" says Holland. "We're pulling down a hundred and ten dollars tax-free for a two-hour week. Pakistan should be so poor."

"Yes, but Christ, look at the process of humiliation you have to go through, at the beck and call of moronic civil servants----"

"What ingratitude," Pyken deadpans, coming off the Line with his check.

"This is his first day," Pappas points out. "Hi, Doris," he smiles, for she's clerking F window today, and hands her his cards and turns back to us. "He's been in Information all morning."

"Hi," she says. "Hey"--she pulls out a crossword-puzzle book, a craze of hers--"what's a six-letter word starting with B for highwayman?"

"Banker," he smiles, "but they probably mean bandit." She says thanks and he winks, comes off the Line. "I can see where you'd get a bad impression from Information; it's the Dracula of Government lines; but if you can get through that one, you're halfway home," he tells Charge.

"Are you kidding?" says Charge. "I can't believe the help here; they don't speak English, they speak Regulation. They've got assholes like air locks. Jesus, bureaucrats are the meat loaf of humanity. And the lines. Half the city must be in here!"

"Keeps 'em off the street," says Boyle.

"How can you waste whole chunks of your life standing in these lousy endless glacial lines?" He throws it up to us.

Well, the quickest way to get a Core lifer talking is to raise the subject of Line Strategy, and instantly there's line-shortening tactics flying at him on how a pro can thin out the transients faster than a cattle prod when things bog down. You know, saying you saw a Cutty Sark truck overturned a block away, taking out a hypodermic kit and asking if anybody wants a little bang, faking the dry heaves, painting red blotches on yourself, asking if anybody minds if you play with your pet wasps, fiddling with your privates; you know. The basic ploys. Charge's jaw is hanging.

By now, Boyle is getting his card signed by Doris, who wants to do a bit of business with him. "I'm pretty negative on downers," he's advising her. "A lot of dudes have taken the long count on reds and wine, Dorie."

"Well, what's a good recommended amount?" she leans forward on the counter conspiratorially, a card up hiding her mouth.

"None is my recommendation; but that's just a personal attitude," says Boyle. "I ain't into life at thirty-three and a third is all."

"Well," she decides, "bring me a dozen next time, anyway, just to see."

"You got it," Boyle tells her.

I draw my check and ask her about her Chihuahua and then, coming off the Line, I see Charge looking like he's just been told he was adopted and I figure it's three to one we'll never see him again.

•

He was back two weeks later, though. His face was either leaner or longer or both, and the cut of his hair, which had not been exactly long to begin with, was now on the order of what Boyle liked to call the Baptist Athlete look. I says hello to him and ask, you know, Whatcha been doing? and he gives this ironic little laugh and says, "Nothing."

"Well"--it's my stock answer--"the world could use a little more nothing. Too much of everything as it is."

He drew back; obviously thought that was a stupid thing to say. "Sentiment is no substitute for income," he mutters.

"Only the dead are wealthy," says (continued on page 144)Free Lunch(continued from page 136) Pappas, behind him. "They have no worries."

"What're you talking about?" he snaps, but he don't really want an answer; just folds his arms and says, "I don't understand you people. Do you really live like this, standing in line every two weeks for years, just killing time waiting for your survival money?"

"It's frighteningly like work, isn't it?" Holland says.

"I don't see how you can do it," Charge snorts loftily.

Well, I tell him, you don't need a whole lot of scams going. I mean, Congress is already talking about a fourth legal extension. And you can always take off in the fall, run up to the farm belt and work out in the sun a couple weeks to tone the muscles, build up the wind, qualify for the 26-week minimum. Then another two weeks during the Christmas rush as extra help downtown--which, if you got fast hands, is definitely the season to be jolly.That's another 26 weeks. And they got so many extensions going now, if you can't turn that into65 weeks at full rate, you should probably be getting permanent disability anyway. And there's never any shortage of small businessmen ready to run a Boomerang, where you front the dough for your "employer's" unemployment-insurance payments and then get laid off and nearly double your money, less his five percent, twice a year. And so on, ad infinity. Unethical? I'm talking about the Government, remember, which is the approximate Vatican of hustlers.

By that time, you been showing up here for a year and, if you're smart, you're in a Core and got some action with at least one clerk, and the other staff all know you, so they lose kill sheets, change figures, sign nonsense, write clearance requests just right, etc. It's just a matter of what Pullman calls "financial symbiosis," which means that Pyken helps the office staff with their taxes, and Holland gives them medical advice, and I tell them how to train their Doberman, and Pullman tutors their kids, and Boyle does what he does.

"Other things, too," adds Holland with this look of cocky discretion, which means sex is concerned.

He's right, you know; it's enough like work to scare you.

"What did you used to be?" Pullman asks the guy.

"I was a tax-free-municipals consultant, but--"

"Oh, man," says Boyle, "there's so many Important People's kids out of that line of work, you're probably looking at an eighteen-month ticket up front."

"That's not what I mean." He looks at us like we're such simpletons it hurts his stomach. "I don't see how you can demean yourselves like this, month after month. Self-respect is the marrow of the personality, you know. Christ, there's no excuse; you all speak English, you're white--"

"This is true," says Holland, his voice lowered. "You notice that the Core isn't exactly riddled with minorities?"

Well, this was common knowledge, and Boyle told him. Black folks are OK, but I don't think they got the will power of Caucasians; they can't get off work and stay off work; they sooner or later gotta get back on a job. Nobody's saying a lot of whites ain't just as bad, but it's a rare black you'll find on his third extension, and most'll be lucky to make it the first 26 weeks without hitting the classifieds. When they get hooked, they get hooked. They'll come in first time on the Line, laughing, waving their handbook and two-week card, grinning like a cat eating shit. But in five weeks, you know they're gonna be making calls to places, trying to score, have trouble sleeping, all that.

"White people, now," says Boyle, "they get off the stuff and they can stand back and take a good hard look at what they used to be, that whole strung-out scene."

"I'm talking about work, not heroin," Charge snaps.

"Heroin is Kool-Aid next to work," says Pappas.

"You think if there was a serious smack shortage half the country would start sweating?" Boyle demands. "Haw! Just take a look at it. Waking up every morning about three hours earlier than could possibly be good for you, stupid with sleep and probably spastic from an alarm that Chinese interrogators would kill to have, nerves like piano wire, in such a fit to get to your goddamn job you don't even eat. Who could keep food down, anyway, thinking how your ass'll be fired when the son-of-a-bitch seven-fifteen don't show up till seven-thirty-three? Wearing a goddamn suit, dying from booze lunches, taking crap from everybody in sight, worried, vulnerable, unhealthy, going nuts--a lousy Work Junkie. A Jobbie, who if he don't get his daily fix goes all to hell and often as not turns to crime or suicide. Is that a way to live?

"So, anyhow, white folks get two, three checks under their belt and they look back and they say, 'Jeez, if that's self-respect, give me degradation and ninety-five dollars a week.' And that's why you see whites in here for four, five extensions-- maybe eighteen months--and why there's almost no blacks and chicanos in the F-ten-fifteen Core."

"Jesus shit!" Charge whaps his forehead with the heel of his hand, can't believe it. He flaps his arms, gurgles: "A country-club attitude on the bread line."

"Not to brag"--Pappas inspects his nails--"but if there are levels of legitimacy in unemployment, we are the distilled spirits, as it were. The cream."

"How do you reckon a thing like that?" he snorts.

"Booth's Law," says Miz Frazier. This was explained to him. It wasn't an easy thing for him to accept.

You have to know about Morris T. Booth, who not only did 91 weeks at $75 and in the late Sixties, but in Seattle; and is sort of the DiMaggio of reformed Jobbies. They say he's pulled checks in more cities than the Actors Guild. He ran a Workers Anonymous Clinic in L.A. for a while and he's got a couple books out, Always Bring Your Handbook and Claimants Please Read. They ain't easy to get. I had an uncle had Claimants he used to read me from, and of course Pullman has Handbook. Pullman's copy is autographed, too, and I'll tell you something else. Him and Booth were both Tuesday 1:45s at Oakland in 1965 for about four months. Pullman was window F and Booth was H and they'd talk now and then and Pullman says you'd be floored how Booth was down to earth as the guy next door.

You don't see that much anymore, either. People are colder nowadays, stick to their own Line; you hardly know anybody in your neighboring Cores, even.

Anyway, Booth had come up with these laws over the space of his years on the Line, and law number three was that the earlier in the morning you were, the smaller your Core would be and the bigger your transient-turnover rate. A lot of people had noticed that, of course, but it was Booth figured out it was because the closer to eight A.M. you were scheduled, the more you were gonna be caught in commute traffic and the harder it'd be for you to resist the pressure, to stay cool, Jobbies all around you, rushing to work. Hell, a lot of people break just seeing the want ads or watching What's My Line? But the commute traffic, Jesus, it takes a special type of personality to come down here in the middle of all those lunatics and still be able to smile and relax.

Charge smirks condescendingly. "I guess it would be a lot easier to take working people's money if you didn't have to look them in the eye while doing it," he says, very bone-assed about it.

"Oh," booms Pullman, "much easier. The Government is proof of that." He harrumphs for attention and steps into a space between Lines, throws his arms out and makes like Billy Graham being interviewed by the Main Clerk: "Thank God for the American Way of Life, where burdens are shared, the pioneer spirit lives and our most precious freedom is the freedom from want, bop-shebop!" He gets a big round of applause from the usual large crowd of persons with nothing else to do currently.

Me and Boyle had got our cards signed now, and Elma, who was working F window and had lost some of that weight off her can with Holland's diet, signed Charge's and he turned and did a little (continued on page 214)Free Lunch(continued from page 144) ramrod of self-righteousness and told us, "You know what a Core is? It's a group of people who've been out of work so long they've become irrational!"

Says Boyle: "I told you we should of cut his throat."

•

Boyle was full of shit, of course, and just talking for Charge's benefit, and Charge was no idiot, so he must have apprehended that. But he was no-show two weeks later and two weeks after that. Holly in Delinquencies told Pappas that he'd filed by mail both times, on the grounds that he was locked up with job interviews all week and couldn't get in. This excuse is to unemployment what the headache routine is to marriage, but in Charge's case, I think it might have been genuine. We'd named him well. He was a pure type A. He was crazy for work.

You could also argue that he just wasn't of a mind to associate with our cruddy, unproductive ilk, either from repugnance or because it bloodied his dear self-respect to view himself in the Line, on the take, maybe even one of us. You'd be surprised how many people shun the dole simply because They Aren't That Kind of Person and will sooner stick their hand in a fan than become one.

But he finally showed up on the sixth week, and let me tell you! I had a cousin once, had the impacted piles and couldn't shit for three weeks. Charge was a ringer for my cousin at about the 15th day. Corbin said he looked like the poster boy for Alcoholics Anonymous. Disheveled, stub-bled, matted, lined; the works.

"No luck yet?" Pappas asks him after a minute.

The guy does a little Are you kidding? half-laugh take.

"You see?" says Pappas. "Something there is that does not love employment."

"No, it's just--" He sighs, pockets his hands, tries to put his finger on what it's just. "Business is bad these days," he insists to himself.

"Business is always bad," says Pullman. "There's no such thing as good business." Pullman couldn't stand what he called the wholesale domination of the U.S.A. by business. He contended that the basic trade of America was manufacturing rubbish, and he'd argue it to anybody who could keep their eyes open. "America is the first country that started and expanded on the franchise basis."

"You're quite an expert on business, for somebody who doesn't have any," sniffed Charge.

"An anarchist who doesn't understand business is like a mongoose who doesn't understand snakes." Pullman draws himself up.

"You call yourself an anarchist?" Charge thinks this is hysterical.

"Of the Nestor Makhno school, actually," says Pullman.

"Some anarchist! What're you doing here?"

"Are you serious?" Windows are rattling. "They give away money here!"

Charge enjoys a grunt of contempt. "What kind of anarchist takes money from the state?"

"A smart one!" Pullman struts in a tight circle of impatience, arms out. "Did you think anarchy was mental illness?"

"That's not funny." The guy's mouth is tight.

"What are you so worried about?" Pappas sets a calm tone.

"These days," Charge admits, "I'm worried about tomorrow."

"Fuck it," says Boyle. "Worry about that tomorrow."

"Maybe you can laugh it off, but I'm getting payment-due notices in the mail like Christmas cards."

"Relax," says Holland. "You're not in trouble till you start eating instant breakfasts for dinner."

"Who said I was in trouble?" The guy comes after all of us with his eyes. "I'm not in trouble." He shook his head. Anybody believed him shouldn't play poker. "I've got some calls out, making contacts in a whole new ball park, screw the market. Versatility, babes; land on your feet." He points his finger like a .45, clicks his tongue, winks, is nuts. He laughs, dismisses us with a wave. "Include me out, friends. If a little item I have in the oven starts to rise, I'll be off this soup line in a week and really headed somewhere."

"Yeah, you're headed for the cemetery, like everybody else," said Corbin, who we think has some inheritance action on the side, though she don't miss many appointments. "Don't fight it. Work is an idea whose time has gone. Tear the I Fight Poverty I Work sticker off your Ford and pin that Win button on your fly. Join the mainstream. We are the future." She gave him the eye. "We do nothing. We've kicked work."

"You better start using a new shampoo, lady," he grins. "Whatever you're rubbing in there now is shorting out your brain."

"Jobbie humor," Pappas points out to us.

"This fantasy that you can live on unemployment forever, that there's no final accounting to the world outside--it's preposterous idiocy."

"Well," says Pappas, "just the expression of some preposterous idiocy these days gives it an excellent start in life. Today's flight of fancy is tomorrow's scheduled airline."

"It's not just ridiculous; it's a dangerous, insane idea."

"A lot of great innovations started out as dangerous, insane ideas." says Holland.

"So did a lot of dangerous, insane innovations!" You would not lend the guy a gun right now."You can't base the labor concept on people being paid not to work!"

"Why not?" Miz Frazier wanted an answer right now. "They pay farmers not to grow crops, they pay dairymen to pour milk in the sewer, why not pay people not to work when there's more workers than jobs? It's the same principle."

"Principle my ass!" He's outraged. "You people are bloodsuckers! Parasites! Taking money from honest working people."

"Who isn't?" asks Pyken. He's usually quiet, as you might expect from an ex-accountant, but he's fun when he gets going. "We're doing nothing illegal. We've just learned to use certain technicalities to have our lives underwritten by the Government. We're not doing anything the power-money types don't do. Wealth is now migrating from the vast poor to the few rich at the rate of five billion dollars a year, so who's robbing whole? You could support every jobless adult in the country with that and buy Idaho with the change."

"To hear opportunity knocking," says Boyle. "you gotta own a door."

"Five billion?" Charge croaks. Pyken nods. "That's amazing. Christ." Charge laughs through his nose at himself. "You learn something new every day."

"You do if you start out stupid enough," Pyken agrees.

Charge draws into himself, pulls the Holy Stoic Shroud of helpless integrity around his mind's shoulders. "Maybe I am stupid," he says with clipped dignity. "I should probably be furious about inequity, deceit, exploitation. But I'm not a political animal. I'm not even external; I live in my head. But I know that I need a purpose, some point to my life. I can't just sit around waiting for the biweekly meeting of the Odd Thursday F-ten-fifteen Club."

"Core," corrected Miz Frazier.

"Core, shmore," he said. "Don't you people ever miss the good old days? When you performed some significant function?"

"Significant function!" Pullman's voice turned every head on the block. "Holland, come here," he said. Holland came over with a big smile. "What'd you used to do, Holland?"

"Puffy thumper," said Holland.

"What?" said Charge.

Holland tells him. He'd been a puffy thumper at the Veterans Hospital in Elk Lawn. See, when the nurses made their morning rounds, they had to wake up the patients, and a lot of the patients in the Veterans Hospital wake up with erections, which is pretty awkward for nurses and veterans. So Holland had the job of going just ahead of the nurse and giving each patient a little snap on the tip of the pecker with his fingernail. The erection would go down like you was lowering the flag, every time. The theory was if you hit anything on the head hard enough, it would collapse. It was developed by the Army. His official job title was Detumescence Engineer Fourth Class.

Charge just looked at Holland like a guy seeing his first kangaroo. Finally, slow and mechanical, he asks: "How could you lose a job like that?"

"They started making us use little rubber hammers to bap the patients. I objected, because the hammers removed the personal touch. They said I had a problem. 'But how would you like to wake up to a hammer on the dong?' I asked them. They fired me."

For some reason, Charge looks at me. "Is this the truth?" he asks. He's got eyes on him like gearshift knobs.

I said yeah, it was. "Shit," I said, "tell him. Corbin."

"I used to sew the Do not Remove Under Penalty of Law tags on mattresses for the Beautyrest people," she said.

"I always wondered who did that," said Charge. He was pretty glassy-eyed now. "What happened?"

"I accidentally sewed one on upside down and they caught me tearing it off to resew it."

He shook his head. "You're probably lucky they didn't give you a week in jail," he laughed emptily.

"Ten days," she informed him. "At the City Women's Wing."

We all told him.

Pyken was the guy who rejected credit applications solicited by Penney's, until the volume demanded machinery faster than human. Frazier was a purchasing agent for 26 years but kept going to night college, and when they found out she'd acquired a master's in history, they sacked her, said she was overeducated and wouldn't be likely to make the job a permanent one. Pullman had been a teacher, but they wouldn't let him teach kids what he called "the genuine skills of guile, stealth, greed, scorn and indifference," and fired him for trying, and so he says the only school worth a shit is the street. Pappas was a lawyer. He calls law school the last avenue for intellect without skill. Boyle had been on the line at the Ford plant. He says the parking lot was 80 percent VWs, Datsuns and road bikes. His job was to drive finished Mustangs off the end of the line and into the holding lot.

"If the motherfuckers would start," he told Charge, "which they not always did. They caught me putting joints of super Thai in the ashtrays. Who looks in ashtrays? You try the radio; it works, you buy the car. Five, six hundred miles, you check the ashtray. Wup, hel-lo. You check the lighter. Puff, puff, well, well. You drive to Anchorage. I Figured: Dope in the cars--Ford has a better idea. Ford cans me. Some better idea. No wonder the Mavericks ain't movin'," says Boyle.

As for me, I used to watch dogs screw. I was a handler for a basset-hound breeder. You know, basset hounds are so unnaturally short you got to give them a literal hand up or they can't make more basset hounds.

"Is that your idea of performing a 'significant function'?" Pullman asks the guy, who was at the window by this time. Madge was working F today.

"You're going to have to reinterview," she told him.

"Huh?" says Charge, his mind still a lap behind.

"The computers at the state capital found an inconsistency in your base period and suspended your claim," she said. "Hi, Al," she smiles at me over his shoulder.

"Madge," I nodded. "How'd that flea spray work on Yummers?"

Charge whirled around and waved his arms in my face, eyes open and red. "What's she talking about?" he roared.

"They screwed up something in your file. Probably just a miscopied Social Security number. You gotta start over again. They'll run it through until it works itself out, don't worry. When bureaucrats become crucial, they ignore rules."

"What do you mean don't worry? What do I tell Master Charge, to go break the computers' fingers? Start over again! Because the system stepped in its own shit? In a pig's ass I will! Where's my money?"

"Your money!" Pullman haws. "It's honest working people's money!"

Charge staggered back a few paces at this and then kind of jerked his body around to help himself talk, like his speech was bouncing around inside him on its way up and out his head. "That's what's wrong with this sick fiction of hustling the system, this borrowed-time Stepin Fetchit 'Core' of yours: currying the favor of drooling imbeciles just to maintain a grip on the public tit. Well, I don't eat state shit." He went to the door. "I'll take my chances with reality! Out there!" He pointed.

"Oh," asks Pappas, "the shit taste better out there?"

•

Next time we saw him was six weeks later. He looked like hell. His face was the color of whey and every line he had slumped. He rattled around in his clothes.

"Nada?" said Pappas, giving him a light.

"It's all falling apart," the guy confessed. His voice was glass breaking. "I go out there and they might as well all be speaking Portuguese. I'm not geared for desperation psychology, dealing from need. I can't make anything happen. It's like the dream where you can't get your legs to move. Jesus!" He shook his head, could make no sense of it. He looked at us, he was grasping, the money wasn't even mainly why he'd come in. You could see. It was us.

Boyle put an arm on his shoulder. "Everybody's had them days when you decide to go to the dentist and have him leave the teeth and pull the head."

"It could be a hell of a lot worse," adds Holland. "In fact, it is."

"Yeah, it could get worse," Charge agreed ominously. His hand came out of his coat pocket holding a bottle of sleeping pills like he'd been thinking about taking them. He made a delirious little face that said, "See?"

"Hey"--Pullman was using his bear-like burl to manifest calm--"a lot of suicides are college grads who buckle under the first blast of the outside world. It's birth trauma, man, and not everybody can handle it. Same with you, blown out of the womb of work. Maybe it's a curse you can't make it out there, and maybe it's a blessing. Who knows what'll keep you alive longest?"

"Well, I can't just drop out. I'd go nuts."

"The only dropouts I know are people who give themselves totally to work, security and the pursuit of status," Pappas informs him.

Charge looks right at him and is very important and serious about it. "I'm not just talking philosophy. This is the big squeeze, and if everybody doesn't grab the ropes, the whole thing's going to come down. And if the structure out there goes, so does Moneyland, here."

"Screw the structure out there," says Corbin. "It doesn't need your concern and it obviously doesn't need you."

"Despair has always been pretty stylish," Pappas announces. "Our generation's merely added good marketing and promotion."

"Where's your faith in America?" Pullman humphs. "Our basic social psychology is 'Don't look back'; salvation through momentum. The bottom line of manifest destiny: If you crash around in the dark long enough, you're bound to find the lights."

"Look, I can't run from failure." He was beat but digging in. "I need the satisfaction of having cut it. This is just a clever version of surrender."

"Bullshit," says Holland. "Life should be more than just keeping your part of the gear lubricated. 'He that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes.'--Bible, Haggai, one:six."

"The main cause of not doing what would make you happy is not knowing what would make you happy," Pappas reminds him.

"Oh, no." He starts backing off like he's just come across a tarantula in the sink. "I know this--choosing death doesn't make it life. You believe that, you people are nuts."

"We're nuts?" says Holland. "You're the one with the pills!"

"I may be confused and scared shitless," he rasps. "But working people aren't junkies; they're just unimaginative and routinized. That's your delusion, and so are Cores and Booth's Law and this building and its function. They can't last and staking your future on them is a surer suicide than anything from Upjohn."

Pappas goes right up to his face and says with that voice that only somebody with courtroom or con-game experience has mastered: "Delusions your ass. This is our occupation. Half the civil servants in the country exist only to pick up their pay checks already. You think me frivolous, but as long as there are persons with no jobs, an entire Government industry is maintained and thousands are given work within it. We agree to live meagerly so that others are enabled to work and live well. When we finally weary of the taste of the state's ass, then the house will fall. Seriously, pal--this Line is reality as long as people show up on both sides of the counter. Supply plus demand equals economic survival."

The blood had gone down in the guy like he was a thermometer in a daiquiri. His whole body seemed to clench itself like a great fist, and he was thinking harder than dried cat shit, and I figured, oh, good, here's where the son of a bitch goes round the bend, but suddenly he relaxes and this beatific attitude descends over him and he smiles to himself and kind of meanders out the door.

That's it, says Corbin; you couldn't find the guy's mind now with a telescope. Another one snapped by the tugging.

•

It was eight weeks later and we'd just about forgot the guy altogether. Boyle was back in the Line, talking to Pullman, and so I was first in the Core to see, clerking the window, neither Doris, Madge nor anybody else.

It was Charge.

He had the blank, impassive eyes of Government employ, but there was a shard of triumph in them, of being in the last free space in the game. The eyes directed me down to the counter, to where his palm half-concealed one of our Spatium Obsidemus cards. He winked and took my stuff and started signing it. "How y' been doing, Al?" he says, and then pauses. "Hey," he looks up, "y" know, I've been thinking of buying a dog...."