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Page 21.

The indignant mosquito-like keening of his dirty-white alarm clock, coupled with a damp, cold, greasy wind on his bare back, summoned him into gray dawn. Heavy-headed, he swung into a sitting position and enumerated the ways in which a Sonoma red wine could taste muffy, fluffy, nauseous, and thirst-burning the morning after.

Jon Harney stumbled on aching feet over the dusty wooden floor into the kitchen where thankfully a pitcher of ice water was in the refrigerator. He quaffed deeply, draining perhaps a quart from its echoic hull. He’d read that most of one’s taste comes from smell buds. There it was: he winced in distaste at a rankling descent into ripeness and over-ripeness of variously refrigerated baloney and onions and browned lettuce.

Ahh… thus a bachelor pad, or what say ye?

He was on time for work. Wiping condensation from the car windows and stepping into its moldering artificial interior, he sought the ordered rhythms of work.

Let there be lawn mowing and hedge trimming.

The growing day’s warmth would dispel the soggy corona of a summer stored in bloody wine—all too briefly a summer’s resigned hope.

He was summoned into the tiled and damp interior of the foreman’s supply room where Armand Artiglio rested a grim mien and a pudgy thigh upon a worn dark wood desk. “I hate to tell you the bad news, son, but there’s no putting it off. There has been a cutback in funds and naturally since you are the lowest on the union list you are affected directly.” Armand, wearing checkered pants and a dark blue windbreaker, nervously shuffled papers—which needed no shuffling—on his desk .

“Wait a minute,” said Jon Harney, struggling not to drop his cup of acrid and rubbery-smelling machine coffee.

“I’m sorry,” Armand said afraid to meet his eyes. The hard, distanced look, the stanced attitude, in Artiglio’s eyes threatened the rest of what had to be said.

“You can pick up your pink slip at the union office,” Armand said, shuffling his papers aimlessly. “Even though you ain’t one of the union.”

“I understand,” Jon Harney said, leaving his coffee steaming on the hard chipped desk as he rose and started wonderingly out of the tiled office.

As he left, he saw in the fuzzy environs of Armand Artiglio’s office a darkly coiffeured man of indeterminate age, wearing a frown and a dashing gray suit.

This had been set up cutely. His next step should have been the union. Since he had not worked here long enough to qualify for membership, that would gain nothing. The union steward, a balding little man with conspiratorial eyes and ever so boyish cynicism, passed him in the parking lot; probably no accident; a gesture of sympathy, “Sorry…”

Jon Harney paused under a cloudy skyline and surveyed his ruined thoughts.

As he stood on the street, numbly, almost guilty because right about now he should have been sitting on the assignment truck with the rakes and lawnmowers, he saw that silent man leaving the office: tiptoeing on hushed & puppied soles, his suede-patch elbows raised at an indignant angle, shoulders hunched so his school tie dangled, Ivy League mane scraping his collar, and dark eyes peering poisonously; so Jon Harney perceived him. After that fraction of a glance, the man entered a little yellow Le Car (license plate KD5978) and tooled away into the dense traffic. Jon started speculatively after the little yellow car, memorizing its license plate.

Survival before information: Jon had a quick cup of coffee and planned a strategy to avoid both starvation and depression. A quick check of the newspaper revealed that “20 men were needed right away” and all that sort of thing, but unless you had experience in a trade or profession it was clearly an uphill fight to land a beginning job. He left the paper in a trash can and went to the employment office. Between there and the unemployment office, he wasted precious time well into the afternoon.

Well, there’s always the taxi company if all else fails.

It was nearly five in the afternoon when he pulled to a stop outside his apartment on Edgerton Street. He had no appetite, but forced himself to eat a cheap chef salad in a small air-conditioned diner downtown. The city—emptying of its daytime multitude of suburban working people—took on a sleepy, bated empty atmosphere in-between time. It was Happy Hour in the bars.

Here’s proof: there is really an Unhappy Hour.

At night, a totally different sort of traffic coursed through its old veins, but it wasn’t dark yet. He escaped the stifling heat and basking streets, relieved that the day’s struggle was over, almost happy to say to himself he’d done enough and enter the leafy, sunlit half-world of suppertime in the city’s residential areas.

In the quiet, breezy stairwell of the building in which he lived, Jon opened the fourth-floor mail box and sifted through envelopes large and small. The mail of his fellow renters aroused in him a mix of jealousy, boredom, and joy.

He was jealous because a lot of their mail, related to their job-seeking, came from important-sounding firms eager to draft Yalies.

He was bored by the company names—dry-sounding law firms, conglomerated canners, incorporated shoe design, creative wretches, executive searchers, and the like.

He was downright joyous at times that he wasn’t interested in hooking up with Undulant Design, Marketing Associates, cardboard box manufacturers in Montana, a chemical company in Jersey, or anything else redolent of Gray Flannel Suits.

In the mailbox were several items for him. One was a postcard from Aunt Mavis, aged sixty-seven, in Bermuda; she sent love and kisses, and he nodded to her in spirit.

He found two bills to pay, and an offer to join a book club. The Randolph R. Bumsted Poetry Society’s current offering was Delphic Zones by one Ziskin DelShoot. After scoffing, he decided such an esoteric name would properly baffle his roommates, even make them jealous and curious. He stuffed the item back into the common mail box out of spite.

Ah! Here was a big manila envelope addressed to him by his misspelled name John, from The Booker, Publishers Inc. They were, at the moment, a key poetry publisher in the U.S.. He tore the envelope open with trembling fingers. It had been six months since he’d submitted 25 poems. He sat down on the stair step and read:

Dear JH: You write well and show much promise. However, you should know that publishing is a flihty business. Your poetry is genuine and full of a haunting classical quality and I imagine maybe we could have published. Our editors for the most part wanted to say yes but then came the marketing folks and they tell me we couldn’t possibly go ahead with an unknown. So you’ll have to keep trying with the magazines until your name becomes famous. If you’re still interested by then. My advice is keep trying. Don’t quit your day job.

Charles Egeny read and re-read the letter with outrage and disbelief.

What in hell is a flihty business?

He tried to read between the lines but there was nothing there which was clear.

Did they say these things in every rejection slip?

Should he try them again, or should he simply keep trying every publisher in general and not them in particular?

Is publishing a flighty or a flitty or a filthy business?

The typos annoyed him. Who was KNG? Some sweaty elf in a business suit who was afraid to commit himself even when he thought the writer was ‘genuine’ and ‘haunting’ and ‘classical.’ Finally the Catch-22, namely, they wouldn’t publish you if you didn’t have a name and you couldn’t get a name unless you were published.

“You idiots,” he said to himself, walking heavily up the stairs.

Stallion, his black typewriter, like everything else in his room, sat where Charles Egeny had left him.

Still wearing his shoes, he threw himself across the bed, rumpled bed sheets only half covering the striped mattress. Somewhere a stereo was throbbing.

He drifted heavily into sleep.