Liberation

("Postcards from Nowhere")

"I signed up for college today," I told my father.

"Where?"

"There's a new one that just went up out on Storyman Road."

"Well, OK. That's something they can't take away from you."

And that was it. My father had no advice to give me about going to college other than that, and there wasn't much more to say. He was supportive and glad, I'm sure, that I had decided to go, but if I hadn't, that would have been fine, too. College had never been talked about in my house. Nobody in either family had ever gone, and I was not expected to go. I was entering new territory.

And as it turned out, it was a good thing. At work the next day, Bob gave me an orange flag and told me to go direct traffic out in the mud lot across from the trailer. My heart sank with that one. I was sure it had something to do with the Catfish incident. But there was nothing to be done. I put on a hardhat and went out into the heat. There was no traffic to direct, no road, just a big mud lot that people drove through, and I was being made to stand in it in the heat and humidity, banished from the lovely, dry air of the air conditioned trailer. It was bound to end sooner or later, I knew. But I would be out of here in a few weeks. That was the part they didn't know.

On Tuesday, I had an appointment at the clinic with the doctor. He took a look at my fingers and asked me how they felt. I told him that my ring finger was numb, that I couldn't feel anything. It was still twice as big as it should have been and shaped like a bulb. The nail was growing in oddly, smooth and shiny. It looked like something from a swamp animal, perhaps, maybe Gollum.

"It looks good," he said. "You'll have numbness for a while, but eventually you may start to get some feeling back in it. It might hurt then. But the bone is healed as much as it is going to be. You ready to go back to work?"

I looked at him for a moment, doubt and misery racing across my face and into my very hurt eyes.

"Well, I've only got a couple more weeks before I start college."

He smiled and nodded his head. "OK, then, I'm going to put down here that you can start back to work in two weeks."

It was a conspiracy between us, I felt, something shared by college men.

My orientation was in a big hall filled with hundreds of first time college students. People got up and spoke to us in false, bright voices the way sales people sound when they are trying to sell you encyclopedias, one after another. It didn't make much sense, and after a while, I got up and left with a lump in my stomach. It sounded like a hyped up high school.

The next day, I broke the news to Tommy.

"Hey, I'm not going to be working at the hotel after next week," I said.

"Why not?" He wondered if I'd been reassigned.

"I'm going to go to college."

He looked at me with the dead eyes of a boy who quit school in the eighth grade. I felt as if my telling him was the wrong thing to do.

"Don't say anything to anybody," I told him. "I just want to pick up my paycheck and let that be that."

"OK," he said.

The days went on, but I was already gone. They sent me to the lot to direct the non-existent traffic, but I would simply take a walk, go to the coffee cart, visit people up in the hotel. I was having a look around. I went out to the lake behind the hotel that was off limits. I had never been out there before. I saw some fellows I knew from high school out there.

"Why aren't you guys allowed near the lake," I asked one of them.

"They say that there are so many chemicals in the water that you'll get sick."

It was hot as hell, and I was glad I had been working in the hotel out of the sun.

"I hate this fucking job," he said. "I've saved up enough to by a Harley Sportster. When it comes in, I'm quitting."

"Yea, me too," I thought, but I didn't say anything.

I took the truck one day and drove around the park. I went to some other hotels, one with a Polynesian theme. It was becoming a wonder land, that was for sure.

The day before my last, there was a huge event. The Governor of the State and the head of the theme park were going to take the first ride on the Monorail around the perimeter of the Park. This was the main artery of transportation around the miles and miles of hotels, shops, and rides. It was a big deal.

And so as the train approached our hotel, as it was to enter the main floor, the fourth floor on which I had worked, it stopped. What was going on? Then we saw the engineers, the big German in the middle, all standing around the monorail entrance to the hotel. After a while, the monorail started up in the reverse direction, going back from where it came.

Later that day, word had spread like wildfire. They'd built the opening wrong. The specs were all off. The monorail wouldn't fit. This was hilarious, a grand and fitting joke, and the workers were wild with happiness. Who knows why? Maybe it was simply the idea that there would be more work, more overtime, job security for a little while longer. But it was something else, too. Long hours and seven days a week was sucking the life out of our bones. Everyone did it for the money, but after a time, the benefits seemed to exponentially deflate. Failure, it seemed, had become our victory.

My last day of work was the first day I was to go back to my old job. I was cleared to work. When I showed up that morning, Bob told me I was to report to the general foreman of laborers. I would not be going back to my old job, it seemed. They were going to give me a new foreman, one who did not care for me. And so I told Bob goodbye and went up to play it through. Upstairs, in the semidarkness of a large storage area, I sat with the other laborers in the morning's meeting.

"Look a here," I heard a smarmy voice call out. "The hippie's back." There was snickering and general threats all around. Things seemed meaner than they had a couple months before. The change was palpable.

When everyone was clearing out, the foreman told me that I would be working on the eighth floor. I would report to Tex.

"No man," I said looking at him with a grin. "I just came in to turn in my hardhat and pick up my check. I'm done. I start college next week." And with that, I turned my back and headed out to the big mud lot, down the stairs and past the giant cranes and then the coffee cart, out into the rising morning, keys in hand. As I pulled away, I looked back at the hotel where all the men were working wondering what I would do today. Maybe, I thought, I would see a movie.