The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow [182]
job; I'd be in better shape in the open ah- among simpler people. It wasn't the people that I complained of, but the clinking on a brick and that melancholy percussion of fifty hammers at a time. But I went to apply because she felt obliged to take care of me, making me her responsibility, giving me money, and as we weren't lovers this would be unfair. Anyhow, I was certified and got a strolling kind of job that was about as good as I could expect. I was with a housing survey, checking on rooms and plumbing back-of-the-yards. I could fix up my own time card and soldier considerably, as everyone expected me to do; in bitter weather I could pass the time in the back booth of a coffeepot until the check-out hour. Also, the going into houses satisfied my curiosity. It was finding ten people to a room and the toilets in excavations under the street, or the rat-bitten kids. That was what I didn't like too much. The stockyard reek clung to me worse than the smell of the dogs at Guillaume's. And even to me, as accustomed to slums as Indians are 1 to elephants, it was terra incognita. The different smells of flesh in all 1 degrees from desire to sickness followed me. And all the imagination, passion, or even murder you could conceive were wrapped up in apparent simplicity or staleness, with elementary coarseness of a housewife feeling cabbages in a Polack store, or a guy who lifted a glass of beer to his white, flat-appearing face, or a merchant hanging ladies' bloomers and elastics in the drygoods window. I stayed with this deal until the end of winter, and then Mimi, who was always up on these things, had an idea that there might be something for me in the CIO drive that had just started. This was soon after the first sitdown strikes. Mimi was an early member of the restaurant workers' union CIO. Not that she had any special grievance where she worked, but she believed in unions and she was on fine terms with her organizer, a man named Grammick. She brought us together. This Grammick was no rough-and-tumble type but had points of similarity with Frazer and also Sylvester. He was "a college man, softspoken, somewhat of a settlement-house minister doing his best, meek with the punks but used to them, and causing you a sense of regret. He ^1 had a long chest but his legs were relatively short; he walked quickly, ^^ toes in, slovenly in his double-breasted long jacket, a densely hairy,. mild, even delicate person. But he wasn't an easy man for opponents to deal with. He couldn't be caught off balance, he clung hard, he was ^clever, and he knew a thing or two about deceit himself, Grammick did. ^* I produced a pretty favorable impression, and he agreed I might make an organizer. In fact his behavior toward me was very sweet. I had an idea that my good impression wasn't all my doing, but that he was trying to make time with Mimi. But I got to value Grammick for various reasons. Though he was so inconspicuous that he could come and go, not specially noticed around hotel lobbies and service passages, still when a matter came to a head he could act with authority and not be frightened by a situation he had created. I appreciated his consciousness in advance of rights and wrongs that hadn't risen to view yet. "Yes, they're hiring organizers. They want experienced people, but where are they going to find them? The problems are piling up too fast." 'Augie is the kind of person you ought to have," said Mimi, "somebody who can speak the workers' language." "Oh, really, does he?" said Grammick, looking at me. It made me laugh to hear this advertised of me, and I said I didn't know whose language I spoke. It couldn't have made less difference I soon learned when I began to work at the job. People were rushing to join up, and it was a haste that practically belonged to nature, like a change of hives, and, bent on their ends, they had that touchiness from being immersed in the sense of their own motion that causes striking and stinging. It must have resembled a migration, land race, or Klondike. Except that this time the idea was about justice.