A TRIP DOWN CANNERY ROW

...While sweating at my machine, alongside these people, taking breaks with them, sharing lunch and bumming cigarettes, I recalled reading a Saul Bellow comment that skid row purposely borders Wall Street...

...other times the driver's vision was so blurred he slowed up and even stopped right in the middle of the road...

...What the hell is a loser...

...After working a full night in the cannery, I was ready to drop in my tracks and I continually wondered how these people harassed by ill . health and various disabilities, ever made it...

...When a car passed us, its headlamps momentarily flooded the shell of the bus interior...

...Is that how a competitive system really works...

...But what about the people who simply are not physically, mentally, or emotionally able to compete for better positions...

...At the cannery, these local seasonal laborers mingled with Mexican-American migrant workers, most of whom had just arrived from harvesting crops in Texas...

...I watched the people, now in sweaters or ratty jackets bunched at the collars, huddled in stiff L-shaped seats...

...It is often difficult for people settled in a comfortable home and secure position to realize that there is that other world, an actual wilderness...

...During the weeks I was working in the canneries, I spent my mornings trying to escape by watching TV, but soon became nauseated with the game shows and giveaways...

...If so, it is not only the most un-Christian value ever held, but one of the most anti-Christian...

...If I came out of that experience with any conclusion, it was that our society, which still places so much emphasis upon competition, does not realize that the real beauty does not reside in pageants or pro-football games, but in its poorest members...

...A younger woman with hair scissored off to the ears and into raggedy bangs at the forehead was so deformed that she seemed wedged into her sleeveless blouse and pedal pushers...

...Obese women, skin chalked by their overload of starch consumption, huffed in the close heat, looking as if they had been dumped like mashed potatoes into their cheap print dresses...

...Although they were all Americans, I still looked upon them as refugees...

...The right front tire kept hitching off the edge of the asphalt...

...Leaving the employment office at 3:30 gave us just enough time to get to the cannery, unload, and punch in at the plant at 4:30 (no one was paid for the driving time...

...We were paid time-and-a-half but that added to a base pay of $2.10 still isn't much...

...He gnawed complacently on a cud of Redman chewing tobacco tucked inside his cheek and glanced vacantly about...

...During one of these unscheduled "rests" about half the passengers, fearful for their lives, disembarked, choosing to find their own ways home at 2:00 in the morning in the heart of the empty plains...

...One of my last nights in the cannery, the bus driver, a small man about the size and shape of a fireplug, got drunk on Thunderbird wine at the 10:30 P.M...

...Though herded onto the bus for the twenty-mile ride ' north to the cannery, each of these people, to me, possessed a unique set of credentials (not Bankamericard, credit cards, membership in the country club, gleaming car with sun denting off the chrome and angles, or even money), but there was something in their eyes-that soft luster that told one that these people had been properly humbled...

...They were mostly" young and healthy and their predicament was clearly the result of discrimination...

...Buttons displaying work numbers were pinned to blouses and shirts...

...However, the climate in which they worked in no way matched the romanticized versions of Stokeleyville, U.S.A., portrayed in popular television commercials...

...But generally, somehow, their plight did not unsettle me as much as that of the local folks who had been dredged up from God-knows-where to perform this very hard and unpopular work...

...Though most people continued to wrestle for sleep, a few would look up and their eyes, like an animal's when caught on the road in a car's headlights, leaked silver...

...When quitting time finally arrived, they struggled back to the bus with zombied expressions on their faces and I cynically thought how the employment service, which was originally so concerned about getting people onto the bus, had no interest whatsoever in whether these same people got home or not...

...The contrast with the conditions in which I was working was just too startling...

...It has always struck me as the ultimate irony that those most damaged, and therefore most sensitive, are, forced into the hardest labor...

...Although these were among the most destitute people I had ever met, they were not a miserable poor...

...An old man in faded overalls had stuck his button to his New York Yankees baseball cap...

...There was much poetry in these moments-in timid sidelong glances, in an old woman's sweater lapels meekly held together in bunched fingers, old couples hands entwined and snoring in rough unison, and occasionally someone crying...

...Memories of bent people tending machines in sweat-blackened clothes will always upset me...

...During the remainder of the ride home, the old man in overalls and baseball cap sat on the edge of the front seat and grabbed the steering wheel each time the bus headed for the shoulder...

...A TRIP DOWN CANNERY ROW RAYMOND BIAL There remain numbers of people who have been reduced to refugees Like refugees from a natural disaster or some foreign war, they bunched together toward the open accordion doors of the two yellow school buses...

...Nervous fingers itched with the wrinkled necks of paperbag lunches...

...I also thought of Dostoyevsky's discovery of such beauty in the poor...

...I think there is more than just a little significance in the fact that these two men, among other artists and thinkers, who achieved the highest distinction in civilization, possessed so much respect and dedicated so much of their attention to the weakest, poorest, least accomplished people...

...One boy, in t-shirt dazzling white against the sun, spoke proudly of his previous experience in the canneries-in a syrup-heavy voice that sounded like a victrola set a speed too slow...

...Nearly all of these people expressed some handicap-old age, near-retardation, a crippled foot, or simply a physical or emotional fragility that prevented them from competing for a better position...

...I was also sickened by the phenomenal salaries paid to professional athletes and film stars-not to mention those in business and the professions...

...Even when a hack cough flashed in the black silence of the bus, I kept thinking of Van Gogh and particularly his sketch and later painting in which he depicted European peasants, The Potato Eaters...

...Though there hadn't been much talk on the way to work, near-silence now prevailed-occasionally a muffled whisper, but mostly just the dreary hum of the bus tires on the pavement...

...Why should a society as rich as ours have any losers...

...People worked- either on the line or tending various machines...

...In a philosophical sense, they were perhaps displaced from themselves as they climbed shamefacedly out of the small-town holes that passed for apartments or out of some shack in the woods where they were hidden from the world and wishfully from themselves...

...The cannery itself was humid with steam from the cookers, noisy with the mad clank of tin cans routed down pipes to sealing machines, and virtually all available space in the building was jammed with contorted metal machinery that more closely resembled medieval torture devices...

...Though the sun was baking the pavement, sweaters and light jackets for the chill ride home were either wadded carelessly or folded neatly in bent arms...

...On several occasions, people who were late finishing up their work were actually left behind-twenty-plus miles from their homes with little traffic on the road, let alone taxi service or public transportation...

...For personal, first-hand evidence, one need only visit the lobby of the closest Greyhound bus station, that place where so many people try to escape one hardship by riding on the dream that another location and a fresh start will eventually bring them happiness...

...Nearly a hundred of these people entered the bus, one by one, as the State Employment Services representative counted them off...

...In an economic sense, they reminded me of Jack Kerouac's reference to a poor, aged hitch-hiker trying to survive in the "penniless wilds...

...It was also ironic that the canning companies, desperately in need of labor, did everything short of paying a decent wage to acquire seasonal labor and that the workers performed much harder tasks for much less pay than virtually all other workers in the country...

...From there most of these migrants would move north to Michigan to pick fruit, then down to Florida to harvest later crops...

...Despite our technological advances- and in part because of those advances-there remain numbers of people who have been reduced to aliens, genuine refugees in a country that professes to afford sanctuary to these same people...

...I had always appreciated the Olympics and certain forms of sports competition, but the work in the cannery was no game...

...As I listened to a popular Chicago radio station, I frequently heard the DJ cracking jokes about "losers...

...dinner ' break and on the way home couldn't keep the bus on the road...

...Despite advances in social legislation and more progressive social attitudes, that wilderness still exists...

...During a short stint working in a cannery in the Midwest, I came upon many of these modem displaced persons who were working to harvest and can sweet-corn, tomatoes, and pumpkin for the minimum wage...

...An attractive poverty would too threaten that business ethos...

...Since this was the second and last shift of the day we had, to work until all the corn that had been picked that day was processed-sometimes until three or four in the morning...

...But, of more concern, after the noise, monotony and exertion of ten to twelve hours, many people were so destroyed they couldn't have given a damn about anything...

...With clothes drained of color, knotted fingers, aged hands wobbling from the wrist, throats that warbled uncontrollably, moth-eaten sweaters natty with balls of fuzz, or workshoes clumped onto the wheelwells, they rode the yellow bus that lumbered up the highway like some primeval animal taken to the road...

...It may be an often used gauge, but if Christ were to come among us again today, we would find him, not sitting in the stadiums, but mingling with people who are strangers to most of us...

...More tragically, they were stranded after having worked a full shift...