In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

C H APTER 25 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 Licking Down My Lunch in Fayetteville WHEN I ARRIVED AT FAYETrEVILLE IN AT AGE TWENTY-TWO WITH MY NEW WIFE and some sticks of furniture and a few boxes, for the first time in my life I wasn't living with my parents. I had commuted to Lamar from Nederland, and I had worked at a series of jobs to finance my attempts at achieving a collegiate experience, but I slept every night in the house my father rented. In the late afternoons, I was the janitor at the administration building of the Nederland Independent School District and early in the morning at the Agricultural Stabilization Office in Beaumont. In the summers, I sold CoWer's New Encyclopedias door to door, and I worked for the J.D. Chester Construction Company, which subcontracted for the Stlll Oil Company, the outfit that had fired my father in 1948 and set in operation our exodus to East Texas. I was a TV cameraman at the new ABC affiliate in Beaumont, channel twelve, a non-union concern looking for cheap and untrained labor willing to work for nothing. I was all that, and my first day on the job, I shot the local evening news with the first camera I had ever seen, much less touched. At all of these jobs, I was not a good employee, terrible in fact except for the camera-man gig, which did engage my interest. It was show business, after all, and the idea of that allowed me to inflate the importance of what I was doing sufficiently to concentrate my attention. I began the janitor's job well, cleaning the assigned areas to a gleaming finish, but that didn't last. I left both janitor jobs one step ahead of being fired. The job with the construction company taught me the habit of licking down my hmch in view of my fellow workers to keep them from eating my sandwiches and banana cakes when I wasn't l

Share