Rise and Shine

The vulgarity was embarrassing. Each morning, not quite conscious, I heard myself uttering, Fuck! The intensity was off-putting, even to myself, as I rose to stop the assault of the clock-radio alarm. It read 6:00 AM. I was seventeen years old and trapped in a full-time job.



I lived with a dozen family members who were of little concern to me, apart from two sisters with whom I shared a bedroom, bathroom, hairbrushes, makeup, and clothes. ‘Shared’ is a generous term for the grappling and snatching of those early hours. Once adequately dressed, we piled into my cousin’s sky-blue Volkswagen bug and headed for West Monroe Street in downtown Chicago to stuff envelopes for delinquent gym members. We sent 30-day notices as a gentle reminder that they had missed a payment. The 60-day notices were a command to pay. The 90-day notices were a threat to either pay up or go to COLLECTIONS. 

One of my cousins, a single mom at twenty-one, drove a stick shift, smoked Virginia Slim Menthol Ultra Lights, and cranked John Cougar Mellencamp on the AM/FM dial while she swerved around potholes and double-parked cars on the side streets of Bridgeport. Humidity seeping through the cracked windows frizzed up the curls I had earlier straightened using only a Sassoon hair dryer, tap water, and Aqua Net.

I planned to save enough to go to college in the fall, like my sister. She had long blonde hair and camped with her boyfriend on a Florida beach for spring break.

The girl-energy in the smoky VW lifted my morning funk as we took turns venting.

So, I drop off the baby at my mom’s, go to use the bathroom, and stupid Helen is in there taking a bubble bath! Can you believe it! There are eight people in that house trying to get ready. 

 She’s fourteen and clueless.

I just bought this skirt, and the damn button fell off. Who has a safety pin?

My brother stunk up the whole house this morning and doesn’t give a shit. 

Or does he? Ha! Here, I got a safety pin.

So, I got out of the shower, and of course, there were no towels. I had to use a stupid washcloth to dry my whole body!

Ha! I hate when that happens! 

By the time we reached 31st, the real gossip began. 

So, did you hear about Timmy O’Shea? He was laying in the middle of Wallace last night outside of Kelly’s Bar, saying- ‘Just kill me, run me over.’ I guess

Shelly tried to break up with him.

Oh my god, do yous guys remember the time he cracked a beer bottle over his head?

Yeah, and Shelly thought it was hysterical. 

Someone needs to tell her to run for the hills.

My cousin had given up on the father of her child and was in an on-again/off-again situation with an electrician. None of the hard-drinking, softball-playing guys showed much interest in me. I blamed my frizzy red hair and my ‘you’re-not-fat-just-a-little-chubby’ body. 

Did anyone notice the way Lump-Lump stares at us when he’s wasted? It’s a little creepy.

Guys are pigs. Whatever.

And so it went until we reached 26th Street, when my cousin shifted into second. There, we encountered a man on his front porch who was maybe forty, or maybe seventy – it was all the same to us. He drank coffee while sitting on the top step, wearing a woman’s fluffy white robe. We soon discovered he wore only a fluffy white robe, as was evidenced by his preferred seating position: knees wide open. 

And there it was — every morning. Since it was 1982, many opportunities to view male body parts did not exist. Once, a show-off from Mt. Greenwood brought a Playgirl to our all-girls high school cafeteria. I peeked at the erect penis as she passed the magazine around the table of fascinated and suddenly perturbed Catholic girls.

My cousin eased up on the gas, and a hush came over the car.

He’s probably gonna be there again. 

Oh, he’s gonna be there, alright.  

We leaned toward the passenger side. Due to the contrasting morning sun and the darkness beneath the robe, things were a bit shadowy. But there it was; the full Monty. We glided past in silence. As a pothole caught the front right tire, we exploded.

Oh, my god! That is disgusting!

Repulsive!

What is with that guy? 

I haven’t had my breakfast yet. I don’t need this shit!

And the next morning, we’d do it all again. 

He’s a fucking pig, that’s what he is.

Somebody should call the cops on that sick fuck!

Sure, in retrospect, a Volkswagen full of outraged office girls was exactly what that man was waiting for. In the end, we decided he was just a pervert, and we carried on with our summer. 

After the 90-day notice, the now assumed overweight gym member received a call from COLLECTIONS, a chain-smoking, caffeinated hodgepodge of misfits including a gay Puerto Rican, a round, lonely grandmother who cleaned the office coffee mugs, and several hardened single women approaching forty with smoker’s coughs. A career in COLLECTIONS was the very fate my cousin, who got me the job, hoped to avoid. At twenty-one, she had a tight body, but when she reached for the phone, eyes squinting from a cigarette between her lips, I saw the same angry COLLECTIONS expression as the others. 

In late August, my blonde sister went to college, but I did not. I hadn’t saved enough money. Plus, I never completed the application. Hey, let’s just start next semester, my supposed future roommate said, offering an implausible lifeline through my parents’ kitchen phone. 

I was promoted to Filing and Copying. It felt good to move around the carpeted office with floor-to-ceiling views of surrounding skyscrapers. Once, the grandmother didn’t show up, so I filled the sink and rinsed out the coffee mugs after an important meeting in the glass office. And then I began making out with one of the neighborhood guys on my front porch on weekends. He stacked shelves at a Hardware store but really wanted to be a runner at the Board of Trade.

Two girlfriends replaced my sister in the VW, leaving four of us in the back seat, the skinniest on my lap. As the days grew shorter, the mind-numbing boredom of each weekday grew stronger. By October, the pervert was gone. Most likely, it was too cold to sit outside in a robe, but we hoped someone had finally called the cops. I pictured him sitting in jail somewhere, knees spread. I saw the future runner, kneeling in the hardware store in a dingy apron: he pretended not to see me. As my desperation grew, so did my waistline, fueled by McDonald’s French fries, my only midday reprieve from the joyless grind.

In late November, I got the letter. I was accepted to college. My mom said we could take our black-and-white TV, and I have a boom box, too. My roommate promised. I took the bus to Drover’s Bank at 47th and Ashland and asked the teller for a student loan application. And there they were, in a stack on a green marble countertop, free for the taking, waiting all along. When I asked my mom for help completing the parent section, she put down her dishtowel, reached behind to untie her apron, and sighed, Get my glasses.

On a dark January afternoon, I moved into a cinder-block dorm room of a state college. My cousin got engaged for Christmas; her fate as the aging debt-collector was spared. I had my own bed, a class schedule, and one semester’s tuition. What I didn’t have was a chosen major or my posse of cousins, girlfriends, and sisters. My roommate and I, excluded from the social circles formed on campus that fall, created a warm bond that protected us from the arctic winds racing across cornfields and swirling between modern buildings as we plodded to class through frozen snow. We rolled our eyes when the rugby players did beer bongs. And despite our protective belief that we were cooler than anyone from “the burbs,” we managed to make a few friends. In the spring, someone left her boombox out in the rain, destroying the cassette player but providing fodder for a twist on the Donna Summer’s song for years. 

That summer, I returned to stacks of envelopes and hours of monotony. Since I decided French fries were allowed only on Fridays, I’d join my mom as she made lunches under the grey light of the curtained window above the kitchen sink. She’d shoo me away. You get ready, I’ll do that. My father got the leftover roast beef, but I was good with my bologna sandwiches, flattened by an accompanying apple. After work, us girls walked to the park to watch the guys’ softball games. Afterward, everyone went to the bar. I went home. 

As the summer help, I was again confined to a desk. Ruminating over which major to declare, in robot-like motions, I walked through the forty soul-sucking hours each week. Any envy I felt toward the little round woman and the freedom she had to gather coffee mugs after the big meeting was quelled by the awareness that my cousin wasn’t the only one whose fate had been spared.