It was 12 hours a night, plus supervisors, plus clerks, plus the fact that you could hardly breathe in that pack of flesh, plus stale baked food in the “non-profit” cafeteria.
Plus the CP1. City Primary 1. That station scheme was no– thing compared to the City Primary 1. Which contained about 1/3 of the streets in the city and how they were broken up into zone numbers. I lived in one of the largest cities in the U. S. That was a lot of streets. After that there was CP2. And CP3.
You had to pass each test in 90 days, 3 shots at it, 95 percent or better, 100 cards in a glass cage, 8 minutes, fail and they let you try for President of General Motors, as the man said. For those who got through, the schemes would get a little easier, the 2nd or 3rd time around. But with the 12 hour night and canceled days off, it was too much for most. Already, out of our original group of 150 to 200, there were only 17 or 18 of us left.
“How can I work 12 hours a night, sleep, eat, bathe, travel back and forth, get the laundry and the gas, the rent, change tires, do all the little things that have to be done and still study the scheme?" I asked one of the instructors in the scheme room.
“Do without sleep,” he told me.
I looked at him. He wasn’t playing Dixie on the harmonica. The damn fool was serious.
Other works by Charles Bukowski...
