"Don't overfill it," I tell the new guy. He stops pouring gas into the mower and looks up at me. He senses the tension in my voice, and I'm annoyed at myself for betraying my irritation, and at him for noticing. When you cut as many as 70 lawns a day, gas is liquid money. You can never have enough and can't afford to dribble it over the lip of the gas tank, as new guys invariably do.
I'm also annoyed that I had to stop my Weed Eater to make sure he heard me. I had started it only seconds earlier and will now have to restart the temperamental machine. But luck is with me. Two sharp pulls of the cord coax it back to life. The machine shakes in my hands, fighting to stay awake. As I sweep it along the driveway and around the house and trees, it settles down to a steady drone.
It is 7:30 a.m. or so, and I will be running a trimmer or mower until 8 p.m. Thankfully, the boss has enough men that I have to endure these hours only three or four days a week. Even without this luxury I would be OK. I've done this work since I was 15, and the years have hardened my body to the grind. My skin seems impervious to the sun. I glance again at the new guy, knowing the nasty ultraviolet rays will savage his fair skin today.
We cut half a dozen lawns, load the equipment onto the trailer, climb into the back of the F-150, and rest for 15 minutes while the boss drives to the next neighborhood. I take a long drink from a gallon jug of water and put my head between my knees.
These intervals between neighborhoods, when the machinery is silent, are moments of introspection. Fatigue tugs at me, but it is not physical and won't be for another 30 lawns. As a Ph.D. in history who has been unsuccessful in seven years of attempts to land a tenure-track position, I am weary of the poor job market in academe.
I'm tired, too, of the incessant chatter that envelops it. We've all heard the big disciplinary societies fret over the irresponsibility of programs that pump out Ph.D.'s without regard to the market. One imagines these groups with files full of dour statistics -- academe's casualties. Despite this hand-wringing, nothing changes. Every year new Ph.D.'s face the same ghastly odds of landing a tenure-track job. Every year bright young men and women grow old as rejection letters deluge their mailbox and erase their dreams.
The acrid odor of marijuana wafts my way. Skip, the guy beside me, inhales the noxious smoke. It's part of his morning ritual. An egalitarian, Skip passes me the joint. "Have a smoke, old man," he says. I smile at Skip, 16 years my junior, and pass the joint to Tony without fortifying myself. The truck stops at our next swath of green to cut. Tony puts out the joint as we climb down from the cab. My Weed Eater starts with a roar.
Does anyone in academe wonder what happens to Ph.D.'s who don't become an assistant professor at Midwestern Research University or at one of its lesser competitors? The standard answer is that they carve out a niche in an alternative career. The Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation swells with pride at the success of these go-getters. The Ph.D., it turns out, can catapult one into the managerial elite.
But what about those Ph.D.'s with no real experience, the ones who have trudged through a swamp of menial jobs? Where, for example, does my landscaping go on my CV? I don't work for a business but for a man in a bleak neighborhood who owns six mowers and four Weed Eaters (only two of which work). If I were to list the job on my CV, my skills would not mark me as an academic or as anything white collar. Perhaps "skills" is the wrong word, but let's consider them:
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An ability to walk for 13 hours with brief respites, while performing mundane tasks.
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A willingness to kill snakes, rats, moles, and other vermin. You'd be surprised at the number of businesses that hire us to cut their vacant lots and at what we find in these places.
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The good sense to wear little more than shorts and work boots. Extra clothes accumulate grass clippings, which the washer distributes to all other clothes. Grass soon clings to everything, and everything smells of grass.
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An ability to sweat profusely and thereby dissipate heat. (Some people really do sweat more than others.)
Who would write me a letter of recommendation? The boss? Tony? Skip?
Junk jobs, like grass clippings, have a way of sticking to you. My first day in graduate school I met another new grad student. "Man you're dark," he said as though he had never seen a white guy with brown skin. Word of my prowess as a landscaper worked its way up the hierarchy. Two professors approached me. Autumn was near and with it the chore of hauling away leaves in addition to grass. They weren't satisfied with their "help" and wanted me to set matters right.
I didn't know what to say. A first-year grad student, I couldn't risk alienating anyone, least of all a full professor and an associate professor. But I hadn't clawed my way through college and into grad school to be the department's landscaper. I refused. The professors disappeared, never to say another word to me during my seven years in graduate school.
They didn't get it. Nobody who grows up in a home where the sole wage earner makes $13,000 a year wants to perpetuate that existence. Academics, particularly those in the humanities and social sciences, talk a good game. But the reality of class seldom penetrates their convictions. They're ensconced in the middle class. Most, I suspect, have never been destitute.
Academics are like everyone else. They're comfortable among their own kind: people who had the opportunity to attend good schools and elite universities. These are the people hired by search committees. How can someone from the lower class, the place no American wants to inhabit, compete? Someone who attended a series of urban public schools? When does someone who toils away his existence cutting grass have the time, energy, or opportunity to network with the scions of the middle class?
While I was in grad school a museum hired me during summers to cut grass. I had to trim tracts where poison ivy was the dominant flora and run the mower up the steep slopes that led to the tomb of an Ohio president. As June turned to July and the grass no longer grew fast enough to occupy me, the director entrusted me with additional duties. With a broom I swept debris from all 110 steps that led to the tomb. I swept the sidewalks and the entire parking lot, a job that took all day and that I repeated every week. Then in 1995 the curator of the museum's science wing took another job. With a bachelor's in chemistry, a Ph.D. in history (with a concentration in the history of science) and publications in hand, I applied for the job. The director never interviewed me. He hired a 22-year-old communications major but promised me work as a landscaper and all-purpose cipher as long as I wanted it.
He reinforced an important lesson I learned long ago: Class trumps everything else. I was not part of the middle class and never would be.
Camus was right: "There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn." If academe, the system that shaped me, disdains me as one of the huddled masses, I repay its contempt with interest. The academy will not hire me, but it cannot crush me.
