The Compass Spins

"Hi, I'm one of the boys in the neighborhood, and I was wondering if you would mind filling out a survey. . . ." I held out a form with a list of magazines. The woman in front of me said, "No, that's alright," and quickly closed the door. It was dusk and the lights shining from the windows looked yellow and warm. I walked to the next house and knocked on the door. "Hi, I'm one of the boys in the neighborhood, and I was wondering if you would mind filling out a survey. . . ." It didn't seem that I would ever get past that first line of the script I had memorized the day before. I was working for two young guys from Boston who sat in the car at the end of the street. One was small, dark and quick, the other larger, blonde and laconic. The both wore their slick hair in D.A.s and shiny, sharkskin suits. They shared a hotel room downtown. They were the closers.

"Sure, I'll help you out." Finally, someone had taken the slip from my fingers.

"Just check off the magazines you look at sometimes in the drugstore or at the doctor's office, not the ones you already get at home." She took the pencil and began checking boxes.

"The reason we're doing this is we're trying to raise money to help out disadvantaged boys. If you want to subscribe. . . for only pennies a day."

But she was already shaking her head and closing the door.

We were working the poorer neighborhoods in town where the houses were packed in tightly, "bunny huts" the closers called them. We would work a couple streets and then go back to the car and move to the next part of the neighborhood.

"Here's one," Steve said. He had actually done it, gotten someone to agree.

"Man or woman," asked the quick, dark one.

"Woman."

"OK, I'm going up to get her to sign the contract. What happens a lot is that if the husband isn't there, he blows his top when he comes home and won't make the payments. You guys keep working this street and that one. I'll meet you back here."

It went like that for about a month, each night canvassing neighborhoods for a couple of hours, then riding around with the closers smoking cigarettes and listening to them crack wise.

One day when we showed up for work, though, the boss told us we weren't allowed in the building any longer. We would have to stay out on the sidewalk. One of the attorney's on the floor had complained.

As it turned out, the closers didn't like the attorney for some reason and had changed the sign on the frosted window of his office door by rearranging the little sticky-back letters. The sign which had once read, "Richard Voss, Attorney at Law," now read, "Richard W. Vay, Rotten Ass."

The job didn't last much longer. The outfit packed up and the closers went back to Boston. I earned enough money to buy a reel to reel tape deck and my parents got a year's subscription to Life and Look magazines.

In January, we switched some of our classes at school and got to choose one elective. All the boys took shop or farmer's ed. Neither of those appealed to me, and I decided to be a wise ass. I chose Home Economics. Nobody could believe it. No boy had taken the class before, but I couldn't understand why. Every day, I went to a room full of girls, a crazy room with a stove and drapes and sewing machines. I made a pillow and some cookies and waved to the guys through the big picture window every day surrounded by The Future Homemakers of America.

But there was trouble all around. Steve had gotten caught breaking into a house with some of his friends, and he was sent to a detention center. In juvenile court, he was found guilty and given a probation officer. He was on some sort of restrictions for a year. But a few days later, he and Wayne decided to run away from home, so they bought bus tickets to another town and checked into a hotel there. Within a few days, though, they were hungry and dirty and out of money and had to come home. When they came back, Steve was on real lock down and had to be supervised whenever he went out. Luckily for him, his sister would take us places. One night, she took us to see a movie called "The Fox." It was a real shocker. All I remember now was that there were women kissing and feeling one another up and that Sandy Dennis masturbated on the bathroom doorknob. Why they let us in, I don't know.

At school there were rumors. And there was truth. I had begun hanging out with Cindy's next door neighbor, Mike. He was a cute and popular boy at school who hung out with the Tri-Hi-Y/Civitan crowd, those kids who had Levis Cords and Gant shirts and Skirts with Crocodiles on them, and his girlfriend won the superlative "Best Looking" voting for the yearbook. But Mike was a devilish sort, and people said that his girlfriend would get naked for him. One day, I came into possession of the truth--a picture strip from a photo booth with Mike and his girl, the last two frames showing her bare chested and smiling! She was a cheerleader, for god's sake, and a good student to boot. The thought of her stripping off her shirt and bra in a photo booth at a department store. . . . 

No matter where I turned, it seemed, the weirdness of the world was there.

One day watching The Merv Griffin Show, I saw a comedian named Biff Rose.  He sat at a piano and sang and told jokes. . . and then he sang something that nothing in my life had prepared me for:

"I'd hang on the cross too,
If I knew what Jesus knew."

My moral compass began to whirl.