selling your soul

That’s true there was no law against long hair, but what do you do if nobody will rent to you or give you a job? That’s the problem that affirmative action seeks to cure. Not that we hippies had anything like the problem that black people have. True there were some people that didn’t like us, but that was nowhere near the hostility that black people faced.

And we could always get a haircut. Of course that meant selling out. The first time I sold out was when I had dropped out of school and my girlfriend let me know that she wasn’t going to let me sponge of her until, I don’t know, the revolution. I sold out for minimum wage that time.

Years later I got a job at the post office making maybe four times minimum wage which was all I had ever gotten before. When you first start at the post office you are like their slave. You have no real position like the other workers have. You work where they put you and you stay there until they come and put you somewhere else. You work until somebody taps you on the shoulder and tells you to go home, and maybe you will work the next day or maybe they will tell you that you have it off, but you won’t know until they tell you when they tap you on the shoulder.

I came in at three and I worked until whatever. Last call in Champaign was one, and I was always hoping to get off before then. This one particular day I was tapped at eleven, and went into the locker room, and there was a Miller time attitude going on, laughing and joking when suddenly the poohbah stepped in the door and told us they had changed their minds. Everybody had to get back to work.

This was outrageous. We didn’t mind so much having to wait for the tap to go home, and never knowing when it was coming, but once we were tapped, we were surely free, and even more so once we were off the floor. This was a violation of our inviolable rights.

We all filed back to the floor. Nobody said a peep.

I stood there sorting junk mail deep into the wee hours of the morning, seething. Damn, I had sold my soul to the devil. But then I smiled a little when I remembered my hourly wage. At least I had gotten a good price.

They say Tricky Dick was a pretty good barracks gambler. He was such a lousy liar, you could always tell when he was lying, that I wondered how that could be, but then I remembered that he looked like he was lying when he was telling the truth too, so I guess you never could tell, which would make him a pretty good poker player.

About cavewomen having longer hair, that reminds me of one of my favorite Yogi Berra story. He was broadcasting some baseball game back in the time of the streak craze, and sure enough one of them ran across the field. His co-broadcaster had been out of the booth, and when he returned Yogi told him that he had missed a streaker.

“Oh yeah,” the guy asked, “Man or woman?”

“I couldn’t tell,” answered Yogi, “They had a bag over their head.”

Hitler moustache on the Germans, I don’t know. I picture all those Nazis charging a hill with those moustaches, and it just seems funny.