@@@@@ Listen, I know this outfit we're up
@@@@@
Listen, I know this outfit we're up againstIf we strike they'll drop their recognition, fire the lot of us, and pull in a bunch of scabs, this's a mill town, don't forget
And we'll throw them right up against the NLRB
Sure, and after eight months there'll be a decision in our favor, and what the hell are the men going to do in the meantime?
Then why have started the union, and given the men all that bullshit? Because of higher politics?
You don't know enough about it to judgeThe CIO would have been in here next year, Starkley's outfit, Red all the way throughYou've got to build fences, you're being a kid about it, you want everything simple, do this and get that, well, I'll tell you it won't work that way, you got to build a fence around those boys
The editorship is out, and this too, and the others, he realizesA dilettante skipping around sewersEverything is crapped up, everything is phony, everything curdles when you touch itIt has not been the experience itselfThere was the other thing, unfocused, the yearning for what?
On an impulse he goes back to Chicago for a few weeks with his parents
Now, Bob, there's no use kidding around, you been out working and know what the goddam score is, you might as well come in with me, what with these war contracts with Europe, and the armies we're building I can use you, I'm getting so goddam big I don't even know all the damn factories I got a finger in, and it's gonna be getting bigger and biggerI tell you it's different from the way it used to be when I was a kid, everything's tied up now, you know, it sorta gets out of hand, I get a funny feeling when I think of how big the whole works is, it's all consolidated, I can tell youYou're my son, and you're just like me, the only reason you been dicking around is there ain't anything big enough for you to get your teeth inAnd he wonders, feels the stirrings of the deeper urgeI want to think about it
Everything is lousy, so at least why not do it in a big way?
He meets Sally Tendecker Randolph at a party, talks to her in a corner
Oh, sure, Bob, I'm domesticated nowTwo children, and Don (a prep-school classmate) is putting on weight, you won't recognize himIt brings back memories looking at you
After the preliminaries they have a casual affair and he drifts around on the outskirts of her group for a month, and then two(The few weeks have elongatedThey are nearly all married with one or two children and governesses and the children are sometimes seen at bedtimeThere is a migratory party almost every night from house to house along Lake Shore Drive, and the wives and husbands are always mixed, always drunkIt is all done in a random, rather irritable kind of lust, and the petting is more frequent than the cuckold