The other plum shift at Dan’s was any weekday after four thirty. That’s when the movers from Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage, located next door, would walk past the gas island and settle themselves along the steel median fence under the big tree at the far end of Dan’s lot to drink beer after they’d punched out for the day.
All of Dan’s gas jockeys were well acquainted with the Callahan men because we’d see them every day adding to the chain of beer can tops they’d been assembling for years between the trees. Building the chain of beer can tops was a sea change from the more ancient practice of simply throwing the empty cans up onto Dan’s roof, which had been flat with a big lip all around. That tradition ceased when it was time for Dan to replace his roof, and rather than move several thousand beer cans, the roofers just laid new plywood over the cans and made the roof flush with what had been the lip. After this improvement, the cans simply rolled off, so it was time for a new game. That’s when they started building the chain of beer can tops. At the time of my ascension from gas jockey to mover, the chain wound back and forth about six times along a distance of about sixty feet. I’ve no idea how many beers that represented, but I do know it wasn’t a true sampling of consumption, because every once in a while Dan would get pissed off at the movers for pulling some stupid antic and he’d rip down the chain and ban them forever from beer drinking on his property. That meant things would resume their normal tempo the following Monday.
I knew John Callahan, owner of Callahan Bros., because every morning he would park his car at Dan’s gas pump for one of us to fill the tank and check the oil. John would leave a quarter on the dashboard as a tip to whoever got to the car first. This would be, to my certain knowledge, the only Callahan Bros. vehicle whose oil level was ever regularly checked. The quarter was always an incentive for someone to stub out his smoke and service John’s car. John’s quarter wasn’t nearly as big an incentive as the crisp new dollar bill that Griff Harris, the insurance man and former mayor, left on the steering wheel, though. Griff Harris always had the newest-model Cadillac Eldorado, and the gas jockeys would often fight to get to it more for the privilege of driving his car the fifty feet to his parking space than for the dollar. Griff’s office was around the corner, and he and John Callahan constituted the summit of local royalty by being the only two people in Cos Cob who could drive up to the gas pumps and leave their car unattended without provoking a cataclysmic conniption from Dan.
Dan’s gas jockeys were ardent observers of the Callahan men and their habits. As I got a little older and saw the movers crossing the gas island over to the tree, their green T-shirts soaking wet with sweat or brine-encrusted with dried sweat, pounding beers in the late-summer sun, telling their stories of hard work done well, hard work done poorly, road trips, good moves, horrendous moves, my interest intensified. The gas jockeys were part of their scene in a distant kind of way, but it was abundantly clear we were not part of their world. Like the Post Road in front, and Dan’s next door, the gas jockeys were background music for the movers. We were younger, for one thing, and we didn’t do the same kind of work, for another. Especially that kind of work which was a source of pride for them and awe for us. Lots of people simply can’t do that kind of work, and we all wondered, if the day ever came, whether we would measure up and be dubbed “a good worker” or fail and be permanently dismissed as “candy-ass office muck.” We could see the scars, smell the sweat, and translate the banter. This was tough work for tough men. Because of that, no gas jockey would have dreamed of approaching the movers, initiating a conversation, or commenting on anything said, still less to helping himself to one of those frosty Schaefer cans peeking suggestively through the ice cubes in the coolers under the tree. On the other hand, the Callahan men could call a gas jockey over at any time and grill him for the entertainment of the other movers—on his sex life (nonexistent, if you don’t count masturbation), on how much pubic hair he had (also nonexistent for a late-blooming Celt), or on why he’s working for such a maniac (Dan) in such a chickenshit job (pumping gas).
For me, these periodic grillings were just another lesson in hierarchy similar to countless others I’d been subjected to at school, church, and home. It started to creep over me that maybe pumping gas wasn’t the right career for me. I’d had enough of dirty magazines, cheap talk, cigarettes, and Dan’s mercurial moods. Dan was bored, and like a caged tiger pacing all day in a circle, he exhausted his active mind with irrational acts of willfulness and racist screeds to pass the time. Dan had ended up on the wrong treadmill, and he hated that. By the time I was seventeen I knew I had to get out of there. Lucky for me, for the first and only time in my life I knew exactly where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do.
I wanted, in the worst way, to exchange my light blue polyester Mobil shirt with the red Pegasus on it for the green cotton sweat-stained T-shirt festooned with the white Callahan Bros. Moving & Storage logo and the little North American Van Lines tractor-trailer. Sweat was manhood. Sitting and drinking with the boys after work and sharing the secrets of their underworld looked like a brotherhood. My American Dream was to earn one of those shirts. I wanted the right to walk up to the tree, open a beer, casually hook the top onto the unbroken chain, and be at home and relaxed; to be in the cradle, so to speak. I wanted to be in some hierarchy where I wasn’t at the bottom. Looking back on it now, I must have started out pretty low to think that being accepted as an equal by a small group of working-class drunks was a move up, but there you are. It’s the truth no matter how pathetic it sounds.
My eighteenth birthday was May 22, 1976, and that afternoon, after school, I walked into the Callahan Bros. office, filled out an application, and was hired. When I told Dan I was going to work for Callahan, he shrugged and wished me luck. I wasn’t the first or the last guy to leave Dan to go over to the movers.