A CLASS ACT
By Tom Fallon
As a writer, what
class am I?
I should say,
literary person.
I have to be in the
middle or upper class, right?
I read serious
literature. Write serious literature. I take literature very seriously.
Heavy thinking, you
know.
Got to be upper
class then.
No, I cannot be upper class.
I have not won the
Nobel Prize so I can’t label myself upper class.
Upper middle class?
Well, I earned my
living in a paper mill as an hourly employee.
No, hourly worker,
that’s how we would express it in the mill.
Working man.
I was not on
salary, which fact was expressed with pride, separating that class from the
hourly working class.
We hourly class did
not have any pride about our status. We did know our place however.
We working men
simply worked for a living and went home to live life.
But we knew our
class.
With caustic humor
directed at the salaried class. The class above us.
(A lot of fun to be
had because they take themselves so very seriously.)
I did not earn my
living as a teacher, instructor, or professor, as most writers do.
So I certainly
can’t be classified as upper middle class then, can I?
Not upper middle
class.
My days, and some
nights, were spent in the working class, the lower class.
Yes, lower class.
But I read serious
literature. I wrote some serious literature.
(And in the mill I
wrote some of that serious literature whenever I could.)
Upper, middle,
upper middle, lower.
What am I?
This is confusing.
How did I, who take
literature seriously, very seriously I might reinforce in your mind,
(because I did, and do), come to earn my living as a lower class worker?
How did I become a
member of the LOWER CLASS?
Simple.
I wanted to.
I know you want to
know how it happened.
The education
process began young and it had more to do with my given personality than
it did with that education by my parents and my teachers.
I was given a
personality that did not classify people. I just did not.
Then I was taught
to classify people by my parents and teachers.
But, I felt at home
with anybody. Because I did not classify people, did not label, people.
I was taught
to classify people and to associate with those of a better class by my
parents and teachers to make something of my talents.
I was taught
that I was better than those people who were in the lower class.
My parents
were middle class Americans, hard workers, believers in the American
Dream. I was given every advantage that their middle class status could
offer.
I had a good
life growing up.
But, I didn’t
believe I was better than anyone else.
What
happened?
Well, I had a
talent for drawing.
And I read.
I was taught
to read by my parents and teachers, by the way. They did value reading.
And I began
to read about the life of artists and serious literature in the public
library.
I was given
complete freedom to read and think in the library.
I liked what
I read. I liked the freedom to think.
And it became
an issue when I was a teenager when I felt my parents and teachers were
pressing me to think in a way that I thought was alien to me.
And, I also
began to see the hypocrisies and flaws in the middle and upper classes. I
saw the discrimination, that offended me.
Add to the
disagreement that I was bequeathed my mother’s one flaw: intransigence.
I was also
gaining experience with life.
What I saw in
life was not what I was taught was life by my parents and teachers.
The class business
was absurd to me. Wrong. Unjust.
So I rejected the
middle class American values taught to me by my parents and teachers because
I felt they were wrong for me.
Wrong for me.
I liked the kid who
worked for my father in our restaurant who couldn’t read the
newspaper or sign his name to his check.
I preferred the
drunk who cleaned the restaurant at night.
I liked the
waitresses who would always be waitresses.
As people.
So I finally chose
people rather than class to live my way in the world.
I turned away from
the American Dream ladder, from college with its scholarships, from
suburbia, from the Golden Calf, to work in the paper mill, because of the
class system that I
found offensive.
And I married a
millworker’s daughter.
And I wrote. I
wrote. I read.
Heavy, man!
Pound. High class.
Yeats. High class.
O’Neill. High
class.
Pinter. Beckett.
Stein.
High class
literature.
Williams. Well, yes
and no.
Bought classical
music.
High class.
Jazz.
Not really. (That’s
black music really although today it is in Lincoln Center.)
Jazz is upper class
now.
So there is no
doubt that I am very serious about intellectual matters.
But I worked in the
paper mill all my life. I liked the people in the paper mill who were
lower class.
So I retired from
the paper mill and today collect a pension from the paper mill.
And I live in a
paper mill town, in a paper mill worker’s house, my father-in-law’s house.
I am a paper mill
worker.
I am classified as
a paper mill worker in this town.
Yes, I am
classified.
Labeled.
But, the literature
thing?
What class do I
belong to?
I will tell you.
I don’t believe to
any class. I do not believe in class.
We are all equal.
See you in the
cemetery.
As we used to say
in the mill.
In the cemetery, we
are all equal, baby!
And, you know,
that’s what I liked: black was black, a lie was a lie. Up front. Direct.
Lower class.
