The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [401]
“Is it! Say, I could hang myself out on the line today, I’m so wet.”
The girl left the car at the third floor. Studs became more and more anxious as one of the other fellows walked out at the fifth floor. The other two followed Studs out at the eighth floor. He walked along the narrow, tiled corridor, hearing the clicking of typewriters from behind glazed glass doors. Finding the door to the Personnel Department, he entered, followed by the other two fellows.
It was a wide office with dark rubber flooring. A freckle-faced office boy sat behind a closed gate, within which there were two large, unused desks. A line of applicants sat waiting on the two benches panelling the walls outside the gate, and seeing them, Studs’ hopes again sank, and he wished that he had tried some other place. He walked hesitantly toward the office boy, permitting the two fellows who had entered with him to speak first, and then he immediately cursed himself for having let them get ahead of him.
“Is the Personnel Manager in?” he asked when his turn came.
“Want a job?” the office boy asked. Studs nodded his head.
“There isn’t much chance. We’re not hiring,” the office boy said officially, handing Studs a card. “Fill that out and return it to me.”
After waiting for the fellows ahead of him to fill in cards, Studs sat at a small desk in the corner by a water cooler and wrote in his name, age and address. The blank space for the reason he wanted to work with the Nation Oil Company stumped him. He noticed that another applicant was behind him, also waiting to fill out a card, and, feeling a mounting pressure within him, he wrote down in semi-legible hand-writing that he needed a job with the prospect of a future in it. He returned the card.
“Take a seat,” the office boy said, and Studs frowned, resenting this punk’s snotty manner.
He noticed that the applicants on the benches were nervous and anxious. A gray-haired man with a kindly, friendly face sat in the center of the bench by the right wall, and beside him a thin-faced chap. From his looks, Studs decided he was a wise-guy bastard. Studs sat at the end of the opposite bench, and noticing the bull-necked applicant on the left of the wiry-looking skinny fellow, he guessed he must be in his thirties. He was dark-haired, with big ears and thick brows, a straight, long nose, and wide, thin, irregularly slanting lips. He sat as if holding himself together, giving off the effect of persistent sneering. Suddenly, his expression seemed to alter from a sneer to a pout. Studs decided he was a big sack of mush, and shifted his eyes to the floor, uneasy because he had stared so long at the fellow. Beside him, a weak-shouldered little man sat, nervously folding and opening his fingers, his wrists narrow and powerless, his face blown with yellowish unhealthy fat, a tb face. He wondered what about this fellow, and the bull-necked one, and the gray-haired man, and the others? They all must be hoping for a job, and maybe they needed one just as much as he did. If he got a job, it would mean some of them would be s. o. 1. Well, the same would apply to him if they got jobs. It was just the breaks. A dark foreigner hurriedly emerged from an inner door on the right, crowded through the gate with eyes on the floor, probably to avoid meeting the questioning stares of the waiting applicants. He departed. No soap for that guy, Studs could see. The office boy barked out a name, and a little fellow in a loud shabby gray suit swung through the gate and disappeared in-side the inner door on the right.
Studs felt let down because the fellow who had just come from his interview hadn’t, it seemed, gotten anything. If these fellows ahead of him couldn’t, how could he? Still, if he was to land something, most of these others would have to get the bums’ rush, and each one who did meant one less rival. He tried to hope. And looking around, he could see the others must be thinking much the same as he was, because they all sat waiting, their faces hardening, their muscles tight, alert, scraping their feet, making all sorts