Growing Up Working Class

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Growing Up Woking Class, or Why I Hate Your Fucking Guts.

Part One: A Green With Envy

    Most crazy people can't recall exactly what they were doing at the moment their minds snapped. I, however, can. I was lying in bed one Sunday, about three years ago, reading the "Living" section of the Inky. I was flipping from page-to-page when I came across a story called "A Tale of Two Proms". The piece compared the way that two different schools felt about their Senior Proms. The first school was private institution located on the Main Line. The other school was "CASH" aka Coatesville Area Senior High, aka my High School Alma Mater.
    OK, a quick word about my home town and, for that matter, my former High School: and that word is "Shit". That's right; I grew up in the angry little steel-town that is Coatesville Pennsylvania. Coatesville is what is known as a "Company Town", in other words, the entire community was tied to one industry - Lukens Steel (where my father worked). In the early 1970's the Japanese dumped a load of steel onto the US market and the local economy of Coatesville took a nose-dive. Everybody except my father and a handful of other steel workers lost their jobs. Coatesville, which had never really been the Riviera of southeastern PA, got even uglier. Alright, that's enough history for now. Let's get back to the story in the Inky and my nervous breakdown.
    The writer of the article did a great job of contrasting the two different attitudes towards proms. The students at the private, Main Line school had voted not to have a prom, but instead to put on play (I can't remember which play it was, but it's a safe bet that it was either by Beckett or Miller.). Meanwhile, over in Coatesville, barley literate teenage moms and dads spent money that they didn't have to outdo each other in the renting of stretch-limos and tuxes and the purchasing of hideous gowns. Deep inside my head, I felt something snap. I folded the paper, sat on the edge of the bed, and cried for about two hours. By the end of the day, I could speak whole sentences. Well, not whole sentences, actually, more like two words, two words aimed at no one in particular, two words spoken over-and-over again - "You bastards!"
   You bastards. I could've attended a school where I would've wrapped up my senior year with a production of Waiting For Godot instead of guessing which gang member was going to mug me in the parking lot after the prom. You bastards. I could've been accepted to a real college instead of the shitty little state school where I was again beaten up regularly only this time by jocks, frat boys, and an entire frat made up of jocks. You bastards. Right now, instead of banging this story out on a crappy crumb-littered keyboard in my cramped apartment, I could be in my mansion, dictating this piece to my twenty-two year old secretary - Suzie. And you can damn well be sure that this story wouldn't be called "Growing Up Working-Class". It would be titled "Growing Up Rich, Sophisticated, Literate, And Relatively Well Balanced - And Loving It…So Come Over Here And Carry Me To My Brandy Snifter, Goddamn Peasant!" YOU BASTARDS!
    I had been robbed of a play, an education and a secretary - somebody was going to pay. But who? (Or whom? Damn public school education). I quickly made a list of suspects:

Part Two: The Usual Suspects

Suspect(s) Number One: My Parents.
    OK, it's easy to blame everything on your parents. So, since I always take the course of least resistance, this was the natural place the start. Damn it, Mom and Dad, you had some cash lying around the house, why didn't you send me to private school - or, at least, to Europe. It's not like we were dirt poor. And that's true, we weren't. I grew up in a middle-class two-income family. However, while I didn't grow up dirt poor, both of my parents did. College (even a crappy state one) was never an option for them. They both had to go to work the day after they graduated High School. So I guess that they can be excused for not knowing what the SAT's were, or who Willie Loman was. Those things would've been as much a part of their world as snake charming and caber tossing are mine. And while I didn't make it to Europe until I was in my mid-twenties, my parents did make an attempt to give my sisters and I what they considered a cosmopolitan world view - by spending two weeks every year in Disney World. No, my folks weren't perpetrators; they were victims, just like me. Damn, that paragraph was a bummer.

Suspect Number Two: John Denver.
    Sure, he sang "Thank God, I'm A Country Boy", but he owned a plane. Truly a trader to his working class origins. Anyway, I'm glad he's dead. My only regret is that Creed weren't flying with him.

Suspect Number Three: Society / The Man.
    Millions of people blame all of their problems on Society / The Man. That many people couldn't be wrong, therefore Society / The Man was to blame.

    You'd think that identifying the culprit would be a cathartic experience, but all it accomplished was making me feel a little better about acting out in an anti-social manner since the age of eleven. A sense of melancholy still pervaded my being. (Wow, that last sentence was soooo Edgar Allen Poe.) I decided to do the one thing that a man should never do - talk openly about his feeling with his wife.
    Vienna was extremely understanding - until I got to the part about the twenty-two year old secretary. "No, honey, it's just a metaphor. Honey, where are you going? Aw, come back…"

    Desperate and depressed, I called my buddy, Fongo:

Fongo: Let me get this straight; you're chronically bummed because you didn't get to put on play in High School?
RA: Well, it's a little more complicated than that…
Fongo: You can't come over my house anymore 'cuz you are obviously the biggest queer on "Bob"'s green Earth.
RA: There's nothing gay about the theater.
Fongo:[After approximately 20 minutes of laughter] You got laid after the Prom, right?
RA: That's hardly the…
Fongo: Yes, or no?
RA: Yes.
Fongo: Think any of those Main Line kids got laid after their little play?
RA: Hell if I know.
Fongo: Seriously, you think any girls said "Wow, Eugene O'Neill makes me hot" and jumped on the guy who worked the spotlight.
RA: It does seem kinda unlikely.
Fongo: And you're all "Boo Hoo" 'cuz you got beat up a lot. Don't you think that there's bullying in Private School?
RA: Well, I've never seen a kid wearing a blazer with a crest on it walking around with a black eye and a chipped tooth.

Fongo with his new wife, Kitty

Fongo: Oh, there may not be much physical bullying, but you can bet your ass that there's a lot of intellectual and social bullying. How would you like to be surrounded by a gang of WASPs and taunted to the point of tears because you didn't know Ayn Rand's middle name or because your ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower?
RA: You may have a point…
Fongo: Fuckin'-A-Right I've got a point. Look, I've known you your whole life and the truth is that, although you like play the part of the intellectual, your lips moved, on those rare occasions when you did read, until you were sixteen. You went off to college knowing nothing about T.S. Elliot, but knowing the lyrics to every Fear song. Hell, I think you were twenty-five before you found out that there were authors other than Stephen King. I've seen your hand writing and, if I didn't know better, I'd think that you were a nine-year-old who suffered from constant epileptic fits. Christ, if it weren't for Spell Checker, these little "thought pieces" of yours wouldn't even exist. Maybe, if you'd grown up immersed in "High Culture" you wouldn't appreciate it now. Maybe you're just trying to find an excuse for that snobbish attitude of yours. Maybe you should just shut the fuck up. I don't know. But I do know that the next time you call me on a Saturday night it had better be to tell me that Rasputina are playing - naked - in your living room.

Oddly, that conversation made me feel a lot better. And I felt better for about a week, too. Then I happened to tell the whole story to my, friend, Judith, at a party:

Judith: So you actually think that nobody got laid after that play? Wrong. They probably rented three floors in a five-star hotel and had the kinda wild sex that we, as products of the working class, can only imagine.

[To illustrate her point, Judith called over a former rich kid (Now in his mid-twenties and living of a trust fund), who regaled us for forty-five minutes with the "Penthouse Letters" version of his youth.]

RA: [Wiping the sweat off my brow] Wow, I had no idea…
Trust Fund Guy: Yeah, you probably thought that we were all a bunch of effete bookworms, and dog breeding enthusiasts. Most working class people like to think that. Makes them feel a little better. The truth is, it's better to be rich.
RA: Please excuse me, but I have several guillotines to build.

Part Three: Final Thoughts

    Working Class / Poor people were once everywhere. Well, if not everywhere, they were, at least, visible. They went to the same plays, debates, and parks as the wealthy. Here in Philly, in the late 1800's a group of working class people rioted over the choice of the actor who was to play Hamlet at the Forrest Theater. Regular people rioted over Hamlet. You've heard of the Lincoln / Douglas debates, right? Did you know that each debate lasted seven hours? You know who went to those debates? Everybody. What The fuck has happened since then?
    Noam Chomsky blames, amoung other things - including Society/The Man - sports. His point is that working class people in other parts of the world discuss politics, but here in the good ol' US of A, working class people have been led to believe that they're not smart enough to talk about politics, so they talk about sports. He may have a point. In the nineteenth century sports were the exclusive pastime of the wealthy. The rest of us had to make conversation about what we read in books.
    By the way, these wealthy rowers, runners, and servant beaters were seen by the general public as a bunch of mental dullards, because, for the most part, they were. The rich, when they're not looking down their noses at us, are looking of their shoulders at us. They know that their antique clock is running out. Their inbreeding program, while it occasional produces a George Plimpton, often produces the likes of young Chadwell Denton Worthington-Cabot Lodge IV - why that's him over there. Drooling and beating himself and the butler about the head with a stick that he found while strolling the estate this morning.

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