Essays

As we all know, this newsletter has no more news in it than you’ll find on a rock into which a caveman carved three meaningless symbols twenty thousand years ago. Instead of reportage, I have been writing what I like to think are short, snappy pieces filled with humorous observations that usually include a line or two about my current book. Many of you have said you enjoy the newsletter just the way it is, but frankly I don’t care. You might be lying or just trying to be nice. How would I know? So This month and maybe next, I’m going to change things up and write about real experiences I’ve had, all true even if recounted in a light tone of voice. This one is regarding my first job when I was thirteen:

My father was an alcoholic with a hot temper, held 44 jobs in 34 years, and became unemployed at times because he punched out the boss or otherwise sabotaged himself. Therefore, he strove to be a successful self-employed entrepreneur because, if he punched himself out, he couldn’t be fired.

One of the businesses he started was a steam-cleaning company. Not carpets. Carpets sounded like women’s work to him. He proposed to steam-clean car and truck engines, supermarket shopping carts, as well as monuments and gravestones stained with bird droppings. Koontz Kleaning Kompany was launched and closed in the same summer. Yes, the initials were KKK, which had connotations certain to offend most potential customers, but my father was no better a marketer than he was an entrepreneur.

The steam was under pressure, and when it came out of the nozzle at the end of the wand, it was hot enough and moving fast enough to peel the finish off your shoe and cook your foot, should you misdirect it. The machine had been bought from some outfit that no doubt had a major investment in a catastrophic-burn hospital, so it profited both from the sale of the machine and the consequences of using it.

That summer, I was thirteen and largely useless. I wanted to get a job to earn spending money, but I had no skill to sell. My habit was to visit the town library twice a week, and I asked the librarian if she knew of any job where a person was paid to read books. In my adolescent fantasies, a very rich old blind man waited in a spectacular mansion for an earnest boy who was willing to read aloud the novels of Robert Heinlein for pay.

Instead, I went to work for the Koontz Kleaning Kompany for no pay. My job—as my father’s chief and in fact only assistant—was to do anything that I was called upon to do except control the steam wand. My father reserved for himself the job of Wand Administrator, not because it was the most dangerous part of the work, which it was not, but because no other position in the company had such prestige.

The most dangerous task at our little cleaning company was to vent the steam when the ungoverned compressor overperformed so aggressively that the machine was in danger of exploding. You might think that the steam-cleaner would have a pressure-release valve to ensure against explosion, and you would be right. You might also think that such a valve would be fail-safe, with redundancy, but this time you would be wrong. During the cleaning of a single truck engine, the machine over pressurized two or three times, requiring the chief and in fact only assistant—moi—to knock open the pressure-release valve.

The first indication of excess pressurization was a high-pitched whistle that would have shattered fine crystal if for some reason we’d had fine crystal sitting around while we steam-cleaned truck engines. The second sign of dangerous pressure came when the machine began to bounce on its rubber casters and roll this way and that as if agitated by an itch that it could not scratch. You might think the pressure gauge, atop the machine, would provide the first sign of trouble, but you would be wrong, because this gauge did not work, which was one reason my dad got such a great deal on this equipment.

When the whistling began, I prayed that the stuck valve would release. But when instead the machine began to vibrate as if it were a sociopathic R2-D2 with vengeance on its mind, I grabbed a hammer and rapped on the side of the vent cap until it popped up. When it released, hot steam whooshed in fierce plumes, so I had to wear a thick glove and avert my face to avoid a mishap that would have left me with an appearance as memorable as that of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera.

A couple of times during the summer, when I rapped repeatedly on the side of the vent cap without being able to free it, when the whistling and vibrating escalated until dogs two counties away were howling in misery, I dropped the hammer and ran. On those occasions, cursing my cowardice, my father threw aside the prestigious wand and sprinted to the machine, which was gasoline-powered, and killed the fuel feed. Then we took shelter behind the vehicle that we were cleaning—or kleaning—and waited to see if the contained steam would cool and condense, thus reducing pressure in the boiler, or would instead suddenly blast shrapnel in every direction.

On those occasions when we were sheltered from the shrieking machine, I prayed that it would detonate, bringing an inglorious end to the enterprise. Instead, Dad’s dream of riches evaporated when the trucking companies and other businesses that he imagined would be our best customers realized that keeping the exterior of an engine as shiny as might a hot-rod enthusiast did not improve performance or ensure fewer mechanical problems.

As nimble as any small business must be, we shifted our target audience to the dead. Eager to have the operators of a for-profit cemetery recommend to the bereaved families of the deceased that they contract for a four-times-a-year steam-blasting of the grave marker, we arranged a demonstration for members of the board. What grieving widow or widower could resist a small quarterly fee to ensure a gleaming headstone? An effective salesman when, from time to time, he landed a job selling life insurance, Dad delivered a pitch for our services that almost made you want to be dead so that you could lie beneath a tombstone steam-polished by the Koontzes once every season.

With our audience of three standing to one side, we began with a grave marker in which was embedded an oval porcelain plaque featuring a portrait of the deceased. The jet of steam erupted from the wand with a fierce hiss, and the trio of observers appeared both impressed and apprehensive. All went well for five seconds, perhaps even six, but then the porcelain plaque erupted from the granite and whisked through the air like a lethal martial-arts disc weapon.

Startled and afraid of further damaging the headstone, my father pointed the wand overhead—and instantly stripped the leaves from one limb of an overhanging tree. Steam billowing through the green boughs frightened a flock of crows from their higher perches, and they threw themselves into the sky, shrieking in terror.

As the crows flew, the pressure-release valve stuck, whistling urgently, and I rushed forward with my hammer. Our luck held: The valve would not relent, and the whistling rose to an apocalyptic pitch. Following standard operating procedure, I abandoned my post and ran.

The three members of the cemetery board were already hurrying away. The woman cried out, “Ah, ah, ah, ah,” and one of the men waved his arms as if swatting the shrapnel he expected at any moment. They appeared to be fleeing from a swarm of bees.

Killing the fuel feed and silencing the compressor, my father roared blasphemies that ought to have peeled more leaves from the tree above him, and ahead of me the woman fell. As I halted at her side, intending to help her to her feet, she looked up wide-eyed at the hammer I held in my asbestos-gloved hand. She wailed, “Nooooo,” and scrambled away from me, as if convinced that the demonstration had been but a ruse to lure them to a lonely corner of the graveyard where we would hammer them into submission and scald them to death.

Eventually my father found a buyer for the treacherous machine, a hapless soul who had been convinced that he would succeed at building a steam-cleaning empire where we had failed. To show him how easy it was to make sparkly an engine encrusted with filth, my father fired up the machine one last time—after assuring me he had finally found a fix for the pressure-release valve—and he began to clean the engine of our prospect’s pickup.

You might suppose that the pressure-release valve stuck once more and that this time the machine blew up, but you would be half wrong. The valve did not stick, but for reasons never ascertained in the postmortem, the machine caught fire. Because we had nothing at hand to put out the blaze, we stood staring at it in dismay until we realized that the small gasoline tank might explode. My father and I sprinted for cover, as the would-be buyer of the machine climbed into his pickup and sped away.

From my perspective, the important thing is that I lived and became a writer and eventually had a monthly newsletter in which I could announce that my newest novel, Going Home in the Dark, is more fun than most people can handle. So after you buy a hardcover or an eBook or an audio, strap yourself in your chair to avoid injury.