Chapter 2: Playing the Role

The trouble with a sixty-eight-year-old mind in an eighteen-year-old body lies in having too much information. Too many ambitions, too many plans, too many distractions. I had to settle down and get used to living in the summer of 1959. Just the thought of that gave me the "willies." How the hell was I going to exist in a world fifty years in the past?

In my "real life," I had been a customer service rep, a salesman, a sales manager, a product development manager, and the general manager of a manufacturing operation. Despite my lack of a complete college education, I had worked myself up through an organization by performance alone. When I retired at age sixty, I was running a plant with three hundred employees, and producing almost one hundred million dollars in product. We had never seen a losing year in my fifteen year tenure.

It was my forty-fifth birthday when I was given the promotion and a salary that I never imagined I could achieve. I was scared to death that I had stumbled into this job without the slightest clue whether I could handle it. But that was then, and this was now. Would I get the chance to achieve all that once more? Another unanswerable question.

In the two weeks before I started my summer job at the brewery, I had plenty of time to think. I was less than two months away from going back to college for the first time in fifty years. I wasn't ready for it. I had forgotten more of what I had learned than I remembered. I needed to catch up, and catch up fast.

I borrowed Mom's new car and drove out to the university to see what courses I could take, and which ones were mandatory. Mom's car wasn't really new, just new to her. It was a '57 Dodge two-door hardtop with a big, cast-iron V8, sporting a 4 barrel carburetor the size of a dinner plate. Why my father would buy this for her I had no idea. It was nothing short of a hot rod, and my mother drove in such a fashion as to be in danger of being arrested for loitering.

Anyway, I went with a list of questions to the registrar's office. Were there any pre-registration orientation sessions? Could I buy my books in advance? Could I select my electives now? If I knew my courses now, I could do some pre-study to catch up on what I would have long forgotten from my high school courses. I was in luck. There were no mandatory foreign language courses, one math course, one science course, and one English course. I was certain I would have to do some preparation for both science and math, but the English course was literature, and I was confident I hadn't fallen out-of-date on that.

I bought the necessary books and took them home to begin my crash course on catching-up. It turned out to be a smart decision. My former real-world job had forced me to have good work habits. Whether it was planning sales and marketing campaigns, working toward new product launches, or just running and planning the day-to-day operations at the plant, I didn't have trouble dedicating time to study, nor making it effective.

I don't know when Mom and Dad figured out that something was different about me. It could have been a number of things that tipped them off. I was using expressions that they had never heard before.

"You seem to be spending a lot of time in your bedroom studying, Lee," my mother observed.

"Yeah ... well ... just getting myself ready for college. Everyone says it's going to be a big adjustment."

"Maybe if you'd spent that time during high school, it wouldn't be such a hassle now."

Great! Now my mother was second-guessing my improved study habits.

"Look, Mom, don't get your panties in a knot. I'm just trying to be prepared, okay?"

"There's no need to use that kind of language with your mother, Lee," she said, walking off in a huff. I realized I had probably been a little over-the-top with the panties reference. I had to keep reminding myself not to use slang or references that weren't from the era I was now trapped in, or typical of what a teenager might use with an adult.

I suppose I wasn't behaving like a hormonal teenager, planning only his next female conquest. It's not that the urges weren't there, they were just being held in check as much as possible while I concentrated on preparation for college. I dealt with them on my own in the shower. My last few years with Belle had accustomed me to going without sex, so it was the recapturing of my youth that I had to deal with.

Not only was I taking my college future seriously, I wasn't watching TV very much. In all honesty, I figured I'd go blind watching a semi-focused black-and-white twenty-one-inch screen.

I didn't drive the car like a teenager. I had outgrown that when I was a sales rep. Too many hours in the lousy front seat of some broom-peddler's special cured me of it. I started talking about diet and nutrition with my mother. I was carefully trying to use my sales skills to see if I could get her to modify our diet to something a little more reasonable. Portions were too large (for me), too much fat in the meat, too much salt, overcooked vegetables, too much fried food. I'm not sure I had any influence on her, but she was polite enough to listen.

It was pointless to talk to my father about quitting smoking. I know he tried many times, but he was hooked, and nothing I said would help him get over the hump. If he made another attempt, I would look for a way to support him and encourage him. My mother smoked as well, but not anywhere near as much, so I knew if Dad quit, she would too.

The other thing I did was to pore over the newspaper each evening, gleaning everything I could about current events, the world economy, business in general, the stock market, sports, and almost anything that looked like it would be newsworthy. I had some serious catching-up to do, and realistically the newspaper was my best source.

I never realized how much I depended upon the Internet for information. Without it, I was almost lost. The thought of going to the library, or some other ancient source for information was frustrating, to say the least. I had become accustomed to instant gratification when it came to extracting data on almost any topic. I voiced my frustration more than once, and it caught the attention of my parents.

"Lee, I'm wondering if you shouldn't see a doctor about the after effects of your accident. You seem very different to your mother and me. It's not all bad, mind you, but it is different," my father said. The concern was written on his face.

"Sure, Dad. I think that's a good idea. Just to make sure, you know." I was smart enough to know that my response would end the conversation and give them some confidence that I wasn't being uncooperative. I knew I was acting very differently from the son they knew back in the day, but I had a different outlook on life now, and I was hoping they could get used to it.

With the tools and techniques available at the time, I was sure they wouldn't find anything wrong with me, and I could easily concoct a story about the accident being a life-altering incident that caused me to reassess both my outlook and behaviour. After all, my parents recognized my changes were for the better, so why mess with them.

My first day on the job at the brewery was a forecast of what would be a stupefyingly boring summer job. I was assigned to the packaging line. I was to sit on a stool, place two one-dozen cartons side-by-side directly on a platen, and press a foot pedal to raise the platen and the cartons up to a cluster of thin metal fingers. The top of the open cartons would trigger a release and twenty-four 12 ounce bottles would drop into the cartons. I would then release the foot pedal and the cartons full of beer would be lowered and pushed by hand down the conveyor. I would then reach for the next two cartons to repeat the process, and so on.

As I watched the operator work, I wondered how long it would take before I became a complete zombie at this job. I was quickly to learn that having any kind of thoughts about what I was doing was a direct hazard to the successful completion of my task. As I sat on the stool for the first time, I slowly went through the motions. Center the cartons, push the pedal, let the bottles drop, release the pedal, push the cartons, and repeat the process. Repeat the process over and over again.

The minute I started to think about this practice, I was in trouble. I could collect the cartons and press the pedal just fine, but if I let the pedal go too soon, the cartons would drop before the bottles. The chance of twenty-four bottles dropping directly into twenty-four snugly partitioned openings exactly right from two feet was zero. As a result, several bottles would fall off the carton onto the very hard concrete floor. Ker-Blammo!

Now, I had an under-filled pair of cartons, a mess at my feet soaking my pants and shoes in beer, and the line would have stopped. Fantastic! My previous experience told me that the ideal person to run this machine was mentally handicapped. It could be quickly taught, they wouldn't over-think the procedure, and all would be perfect. Unfortunately, anyone with a higher than average I.Q. would struggle. I struggled. All morning long, I struggled.

"Fuck, kid. Is this job too fuckin' hard for you?" my supervisor asked.

"It shouldn't be," I snarled. "I'm sure I can dumb myself down to handle it."

"Well, that better happen fuckin' soon, kid. You broke more beer than we sold today."

I looked down at the floor. He was right. I was soaking in beer from the knees down and my shoes were literally covered in broken glass. When I finally took a break, I leaned back and tried to remember if it was like this when I had this job fifty years earlier. It must have been. How did I cope then?

I figured it out later that morning. Think about anything except what you were doing. Become a human robot. It must have been how I coped back in the day, so I adopted the same plan now. It worked. By lunch time I was fine. I got a good working over in the lunch room, but I expected all the "newbies" got the same treatment.

What startled me was how well paid these guys were. They were making almost four dollars an hour. On top of that, they were getting benefits up the kazoo. Sick days, accumulated time off, medical, dental, free beer. Shit, they had it great ... way better than almost anyone but a longshoreman. So, listening to them talk about a strike that summer for even more seemed unreal.

I never asked what I was getting paid until I signed up. All I was told was I would get the same as any new union member, even though I wasn't in the union. They didn't want any "slave labour" in the plant getting less than they were. I was getting $3.15 an hour for doing a dumb-ass job. My best buddy, Mike, was only getting $2.50 an hour working for the Hydro company. I didn't have the guts to tell him how much I was earning.

I refrained from the "shorts" during the morning breaks, and not because I didn't like beer. In my many years in the manufacturing industry, I had seen the consequences of alcohol on the job. Too many calls to the paramedics for guys and gals who put their hands and hair and other body parts in the way of machinery. A half at lunch and a half at afternoon break was plenty.

It wasn't all alcohol related, but why would I have my hands two inches from machinery and think an accident couldn't happen. If I was going to drink beer, it would be after my shift. Since I wasn't of drinking age to begin with, I held my consumption down and kept a container of Sen-Sen in my pocket to keep my mother from smelling my breath. I don't know why I bothered, since inevitably my clothes smelled of beer anyway.

I spent my off hours preparing myself for college, and studying the stock market for opportunities. I had worked out a comprehensive budget on a hand-written spread sheet. It took me back over twenty years, but I remembered doing this for my sales forecasts. Computers in those days were big, cumbersome, room-filling machines that were good for accounting and sales statistics, but only if the input information was accurate. The average Joe didn't have access to them for their personal use. They would be years in the future for me.