Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (87 page)

In a way I did disrupt. It’s the kind of thing Gandhi or Thoreau or Christ would say. If you really want to strike a blow at the corruption of society, come into eternity. I have to concede that a human being who sits down and meditates—tries to get in touch with God or whatever—is the most threatening fucking thing of all. On a physical plane, I wasn’t interfering with them at all. But the fact that I sat with my back straight and most people at their jobs don’t sit with their backs straight, that’s weird. They looked at me and they felt guilty. I wasn’t trying to irritate them. I wasn’t trying to throw any magic their way. I was just looking at the flowers.

Most of all, I wanted to be touched by these flowers. I stroked a couple of petals really gently. I was trying to reach out and say, “Hey plant, I know you’re here in this office and it’s probably a drag and you’re lonely. But I love you.” I took a couple of petals that had fallen off the table and put them in my pocket.

 

 

. . . was about my shoes. He said, “It’s entirely unacceptable to have tape on your shoes.”

 

 

No. On Monday morning I called up the paper and said I’d be fifteen minutes late and I was fifteen minutes late. Tuesday morning I called and said I’d be fifteen minutes late and I was fifteen minutes late. He said that was entirely unacceptable. So he gave me a written memo.

 

 

No. Originally they pissed about my clothing. I said, “When I wore my good clothes they got ruined here, tearing against the typewriters. You ought to provide some kind of smocks.” Surprisingly, he accepted the idea and gave us smocks. Hell, it was hot and it was summertime. So I started wearing just the smock and no shirt. And he said that was entirely unacceptable. “Suppose somebody comes in and sees you. This is a business office.”

Nobody complained about my work except the head copy boy, and I made a deal with him. I said, “Let me do all the paper rounds and I won’t be in the city room.” I hated the way they treat you in the city room.

I got great satisfaction from the paper rounds, far more than going to a library or hanging around the city room. I’d go down and fill up the cart and that fucking thing’s heavy. I’d have to push it and it would take strength and I’d sweat. It’s like 250 or 300 papers to go around on each edition. I liked it ’cause I sweated and I got into conversations with people. I’d get done and I would say, “I did something.”

I’d do the rounds and go sit outside in the flower garden. After a week or so, the head copy boy said, “Look, the other copy boys see you sittin’ around while they’re working and it makes them uptight.” I said, “Okay, I’ll come back, do more work, but I won’t do all the paper rounds.” They were uptight not because they saw me sitting around—because dealing with these reporters, these pigs, who called them “Boy!” all the time,
they
wanted a chance to get out.

 

(
Mumbles
)
Then it wasn’t the shoes or the samurai position or the flowers or being late . . . ?

 

No. I was going through all this upset. I said to the head copy boy, “I’m going through all this weirdness and I haven’t gone to lunch. I might as well leave early.” People do that kind of shit all the time. Come five’, I started getting my stuff together and changing. I would come to work in blue jeans and change into a pair of pants and a shirt. At the end of the day I could change back into blue jeans. At five thirty, I would just (snaps fingers) walk out the door.

At five thirty somebody walked in and said to me, “Here are some clips. Can you go and get ’em?” I said, “No, I’m leaving.” Another copy boy says no, too. The next morning the editor came to me and said, “You left early . . . blah, blah, blah, blah . . . And you refused to get the clips.” I said, “Let me explain.” And he said, “That’s entirely unacceptable. This is the straw that broke the camel’s back.” To me it was more like the one that broke the pig’s back.

I had been thinking for months, What will I do when I get fired? Will I smoke a joint in the city room? Will I meditate in the library? I wanted to do something to show, Hey, I’m better than you motherfuckers. I’m getting fired because I’m different. I don’t want to be a cipher. I was thinking, How could I show that? By kidnapping Marshall Field? By shooting him? I had to think fast, so I looked at the editor and said, “I hope you can live with the conditions you’re creating.” And I just turned around and walked out and started to cry.

He hurried after me and said, “Wait a minute. I’m not creating these conditions, you are.” I said, “No, no, no, I’m not the one that has the power. You’re the one that has the power.” I walked out of there. Then I hung around the office most of the day selling copies of
Rising Up Angry.
⁶³
(Laughs.)

I’ve gotten myself on unemployment. They were nice to me the first few times, then a woman told me to get a number. I wanted to tell her, Fuck you. I can wait outside your apartment and knock you over the head and steal your money. Fuck your money. It’s not your money in the first place. It’s mine. I worked for it. And if you don’t give it to me, I don’t give a fuck, ’cause I’ll live anyway. When I was younger and applied for a job and the guy wouldn’t give me a reason for not hiring me, I would say, “It’s okay.” I wouldn’t yell at him, “You’re a racist pig.” I’d think, Fine. Mao Tse-tung will hire me to kill you. Or I could be a bank robber. But that bitterness, I don’t like being bitter. I’m a pacifist.

I have picked a career for myself. I want to practice the kind of traditional medicine that is more spiritually oriented than modern Western medicine. I want to learn herbs and massage and things like that, and meditation. I don’t want to be dependent on other people. This notion of self-reliance is peculiar today. The frontiersman lived by his own effort. Today nobody does that. I want to be a frontiersman of the spirit—where work is not a drag.

 

I went to work when I was nine years old. I used to get up at three-thirty in the morning and deliver four hundred newspapers. I was bored by school and left in the last year. I was never afraid of working. I always enjoyed the challenge and I always enjoyed the reward. I did all kinds of things.

I was a bus boy when I was thirteen. It took me six weeks of steadily looking for a job. It was high unemployment at that time in Canada. I realized then the only security a person has is what he himself can do. There’s little security in a job, working for somebody else. I like to control my fate as much as possible.

I don’t believe the answer lies in making money. It didn’t for me. By the time I was twenty-one I was driving a Cadillac and I could afford a fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-month seashore apartment in Florida, go to shows, and spend two hundred dollars a night and take my mother out, my grandfather, and live like a king. But I was more frustrated than when I was making thirty-four cents an hour delivering for a drugstore in Toronto.

I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t happy. Happiness is not related to money. Being successful at what you’re doing is the measure of a man. The measure of a man is standing on his own two feet. To succeed by himself without leaning on other people to support him.

My quest I have already found. I found that in the Bible. Until I was twenty-four, I never read the Bible. But I heard that God had a plan for every human being and I could have a direct contact with God through Jesus Christ. I asked Christ to come into my life. At that point, I realized what life is all about. My life became really worth living.

Before I found Christ, I learned how to ski, how to sail, how to fly, how to speak French. All these things I dropped after I had a mastery of it, because they didn’t satisfy me. You can master making money like you can master algebra. After you get the basic essence, any person can do it.

Before I accepted Christ, I didn’t feel I had a good deal until I really crushed a guy and squeezed the last penny out of it. So when I accepted Jesus, I realized I was a slave to this money. I called up Patrick, who was my partner at the time in another venture, and I told him I wanted to get out. We were in publishing. We were selling books through the mail. Self-improvement, educational, sex manuals. Quite acceptable, normal for the trade. We had a very successful campaign selling the book. We sold about 150,000 copies. It was a very profitable item. But I would not do it today.

I feel I could start any business. It boils down to a formula. You find there’s a need for something. Then you supply that need. There is a spread between what it costs you and what you sell it for. That’s what’s called a profit. I don’t know a fairer way of rewarding a man than by profit. What a man sows, so shall he reap.

Each man has a calling. The gifts God has given me is to be a businessman. To be able to organize, to be able to sell, to be able to understand figures and what not. I want to use these gifts for the glory of God. I don’t want to do anything in my business life that would shame my Saviour. So I always look to guidance from the Bible on how the business should be run. My principles of doing business have changed altogether from two years ago.

Previously my guideline was: what you could get away with, that was right. The only mistake you could make is to get caught. You had this gut fear inside: What did I tell this guy last time he was here? That no longer worries me. I always tell the same story to everybody. Everything I do in business must be aboveboard—must be something I can face God with once I appear before Him after I die.

 

Patrick Garrard reflected another point of view: “Steve doesn’t like unions. I merely have a mild distaste for them because they’re bureaucratic. Steve regards the article as getting back at unions
—
let’s sock ’em. To
me,
it was a good story, that’s all. I was a bit worried about it because it was the only one in all our issues that could be construed as a right-wing kind of story. I don’t want our magazine to get that reputation.”

 

We’re different from other business publications.
Fortune
and
Forbes
and
Business Week
talk about corporations and corporation executives. We talk about individuals and small companies. We have a lot of subscriptions from prisoners, who transfer nine dollars from their commissary account for the
Capitalist Reporter.
It’s a substantial amount of money when you make twenty-seven cents a day. Many prisoners are natural entrepreneurs that have gone outside the accepted norms that society has set, and they’ve ended up rightfully where they are.

We have kids coming in here, long-haired hippies, who are very excited and want to buy back issues of the magazine or run an advertisement in it. I think a lot of hippies today have decided it is more fun to be successful than to be a failure. (Laughs.) I think it’s become a fashionable thing now to be successful.

There are two kinds of people—some are gifted leaders, some are followers. The young leaders in the past few years have been negative, nihilistic, destructive—have run their course. Young people are now looking for other ways. Why am I alive? One answer is: A person must support himself. He can’t expect people to bring him everything on a silver platter. The unhappiest people are the young ones who have everything at home.