(5)

After having been asked numerous times by some of people I work with at the factory, I finally agreed one night to accompany them back to the trailer park where they lived for a party after work.  The trailer in which the party was being held was owned by two sisters; they lived together there with their boyfriends, both of whom also worked at the factory.  In fact, almost all the people who attended the party were factory workers – there must have been about a dozen of us there all told.  Some of us sat in one or another of the frayed, sagging chairs that had been crammed into the trailer's tiny living room; others were stuffed in a bunch on an old, tattered couch, or sat about on the floor.  We drank some beer, passed a couple of joints around, smoked endless numbers of cigarettes, and shouted meaningless party talk at each other over the blare of the stereo, which had been turned up full blast.

I found it rather difficult to enjoy myself.  I was too conscious – as I am similarly conscious every time I go into work – of how ill-suited I really am to the company of these people.  To begin with they are, by and large, people who come from working-class families, whereas I come from the middle class.  Even now the small, rather shabby house I rent at the edge of town, one of a number of identical houses put up as a development project by the city several decades ago, has pretensions towards middle-class respectability.  I have a small yard and a garden for instance, which I keep well tended, and even a tiny cement deck to sit out on if I choose.  Then too, the people I work with are not well educated:  they either weren't bright enough to do well in school, or simply didn't care enough to try.  I, on the other hand, excelled academically and attended college.  They worked factory-type jobs because they were unskilled for anything else, and although the same could be said of me, in my case it had been more a matter of choice.  Years ago I decided to forgo the money and social prestige a professional career offered for what I believed to be the freedom of a working-class job, which (or so I'd imagined) you could leave behind you each day when you left for home.  But the people at the factory have made every attempt to embrace me to their lifestyle, despite our differences; indeed, I am far more aware of those differences – and far more worried by them – than they are.  This leaves me feeling rather tense whenever I'm around them socially, though I think that they think I am merely shy.  Even with a few drinks in me, and having gotten pretty stoned off all the joints being passed around, I sensed that there were barriers between us which could never be wholly overcome.

During the course of the evening one of the men in our group had a long fit of coughing, which left him looking exhausted and sounding hoarse.  He stared down at the joint he was holding, shook his head ruefully at it and said, "That'll be enough of that!"  He passed the joint on.  Then he took a cigarette out of the pack he kept in his shirt pocket, lit it – and started sputtering and hacking all over again.  That made everyone laugh.  "Better now?" somebody asked, and they all laughed some more.  The fellow with the cigarette, his face reddened from coughing, laughed right along with them.  The capacity to laugh at one's foibles is a feature much appreciated by these people and, despite the shadows under his eyes, the paleness of his skin and the yellow stains on his teeth, this man had a self-effacing sweetness about him that made him quite popular with men and women both.  Someone asked after his health.  He has a chronic lung condition and has been strictly forbidden to smoke; the doctors have warned him that if he does not quit, his lungs will continue to deteriorate and may eventually become seriously damaged.  He told us then the riddling little joke he'd told his doctor, and which I repeat here now, more or less in his own words:

"Why worry about it?" he said with a shrug.  "Like I said to the doctor, the only thing you need to worry about when you get up in the morning is what you're going to do with the day.  And if you're too sick to do anything, well, then, you don't have to worry about that.  If you're sick, the only thing you have to worry about is whether you're going to get better or die.  And if you die, you don't have to worry about that either.  Then the only thing you have to worry about is whether you're going to go to heaven or hell.  And if you go to hell, the only thing you have to worry about is what you're going to do with all your friends once you get there!"

This joke was greeted with cheers of assent all around:  everyone understood just what he meant.  After all, for these people the story represented more than just a joke; it formulated a major tenet of their lives.  "Anyhow," the fellow concluded, taking another long, ruminative drag on his cigarette, "I already know I'm going to hell.  So . . . why worry?"  This comment was greeted with yet more cheers and laughter, and the fellow looked dazedly about him, a happy grin on his face.  The laughter was meant to be friendly, and he took it as such.  I, however, did not.  I thought I sensed a callous quality to it.  For there suddenly swept over me the conviction that this man really meant it:  he really did believe in hell – the old Biblical hell of tormenting fires and eternal damnation.  Not only that, but he believed he was already condemned to go there, and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.  "This is a cold, cold world," he seemed to be saying, "and we all know it.  Weakness can neither be helped nor, in the end, tolerated.  But I am weak.  We are all weak.  And there's nothing we can do about it.  So . . . why worry?"

I found myself staring in wonder at this good-natured, and essentially good, young man.  He felt my gaze and glanced over at me, a fleeting, semi-embarrassed smile parting his lips.  I grinned back at him – felt my grin go wrong somehow – and averted my eyes.  There passed through me then a feeling of intense physical desire for him, a feeling that continued to course through me for the rest of the evening.  Through the impetus of pity – through the impetus of love – my lust had been aroused; and though he did not know it, I would gladly have gone to hell with him that night.  Had I been willing to surrender myself up to my lust, purely and wholly, I may even have convinced him to allow me.  But to rescue him from that hell he would not have allowed.  That would have required of him the sacrifice of his cavalier attitude towards life, death, and morality; and this was the only defense he had against his damnation.  Had I gone to hell with him, I would have had to stay there.  And that, for better or worse, I was not willing to do.

LOVE POEM FOR SOME YOU