been unskilled jobs after leaving school-a bus boy, shoveling snow,
washing cars. Then in 1957, when Detroit was hit by a national
recession, there were no jobs of any kind and he drifted into idleness,
punctuated by shooting craps, hustling, and his ftrst conviction: auto
theft.
The interviewer asked, "Do you have a police record, Mr. Knight?"
"Yeah."
"I'm afraid I'll need the details. And I think I should tell you that
we check up afterward, so it looks better if we get it correctly from
you first."
Rollie shrugged. Sure the sons-of-bitches checked. He knew that, without
being given all this grease.
He gave the employment guy the dope on the auto thef t rap first. He was
nineteen then. He'd been put on a year's probation.
Never mind now about the way it happened. Who cared that the others in
the car had picked him up, that he'd gone along, as a backseat pas-
senger, for laughs, and later the cops had stopped
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them, charging all six occupants with theft? Before going into court next
day, Rollie was offered a deal: Plead guilty and he'd get probation. Be-
wildered, frightened, he agreed. The deal was kept. He was in and out of
court in seconds. Only later had he learned that with a lawyer to advise
him-the way a white kid would have had-a not guilty plea would probably have
got him off, with no more than a warning from the judge. Nor had he been
told that pleading guilty would ensure a criminal record, to sit like an
evil genie on his shoulder the remainder of his life.
It also made the sentence for the next conviction tougher.
The interviewer asked, "What happened after that?"
"I was in the pen." It was a year later. Auto theft again. This time for
real, and there had been two other times he wasn't caught. The sentence:
two years.
"Anything else?"
This was the clincher. Always, after this, they closed the books-no dice,
no work. Well, they could stick their stinking job; Rollie still wondered
why he had come. "Armed robbery. I drew five to fifteen, did four years
in Jackson Pen."
A jewelry store. Two of them had broken in at night. All they got was a
handful of cheap watches and were caught as they came out. Rollie had been
stupid enough to carry a.22. Though he hadn't pulled it from his pocket,
the fact that it was found on him ensured the graver charge.
"You were released for good behavior?"
"No. The warden got jealous. He wanted my cell." -
The middle-aged Negro interviewer looked up. "I dig jokes. They make a
dull day brighter. But it was good behavior?"
"If you say so."
wheels-1 53
"All right, I'll say so." The interviewer wrote it down.
"Is your behavior good now, Mr. Knight? What I mean is, are you in any
more trouble with the police?"
Rollie shook his head negatively. He wasn't going to tell this Uncle Tom
about last night, that he was in trouble if he couldn't keep clear of
the white pig he had spooked, and who would bust him some way, given
half a chance, using scum bag honky law. The thought was a reminder of
his earlier fears, which now returned: the dread of prison, the real
reason for coming here. The interviewer was asking more questions,
busier than a dog with fleas writing down the answers. Rollie was
surprised they hadn't stopped, baffled that he wasn't already outside
on the street, the way it usually went af ter he mouthed the words
"armed robbery."
What he didn't know-because no one had thought to tell him, and he was
not a reader of newspapers or magazines-was that hard core hiring had
a new, less rigid attitude to prison records, too.
He was sent to another room where he stripped and had a physical.
The doctor, young, white, impersonal, working fast, took time out to
look critically at Rollie's bony body, his emaciated cheeks. "Whatever
job you get, use some of what they pay you to eat better, and put some
weight on, otherwise you won't last at it. You wouldn't last, anyway,
in the foundry where most people go from here. Maybe they can put you
in Assembly, I'll recommend it."
Rollie listened contemptuously, already hating the system, the people
in it. Who in hell did this smug whitey kid think he was? Some kind of
God? If Rollie didn't need bread badly, some work for a while, he'd walk
out now, and screw
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lem. One thing was sure: whatever job these people gave him, he wouldn't
stay on it one day longer than he had to.
Back through the waiting room, in the cubicle again. The original
interviewer announced, "The doctor says you're breathing, and when you
opened your mouth he couldn't see daylight, so we're offering you a job.
It's in final assembly. The work is hard, but pay is good-the union sees
to that. Do you want it?"
"I'm here, ain't IT' What did the son-of-abitch expect? A bootlick job?
"Yes, you're here, so I'll take that to mean yes. There will be some weeks
of training; you get paid for that, too. Outside, they'll give you details
-when to start, where to go. Just one other thing."
Here came the preaching. Sure as glory, Rollie Knight could smell it.
Maybe this white nigger was a Holy Roller on the side.
The interviewer took off his horn-rimmed glasses, leaned over the desk and
put his fingertips together. -You're smart. You know the score. You know
you're getting a break, and it's because of the times, the way things are.
People, companies like this one, have a conscience they didn't always
have. Never mind that it's late; it's here, and a lot of other things are
changing. You may not believe it, but they are." The chubby, sports-
jacketed interviewer picked up a pencil, rolled it through his fingers,
put it down. "Maybe you never had a break before, and this is the first.
I think it is. But I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't tell you that
with your record it's the only one you'll get, leastways here. A lot of
guys pass through this place. Some make it after they leave; others don't.
Those who do are the ones who want to." The interviewer looked hard at
Rollie. "Stop being a damn fool, Knight, and grab this
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chance. That's the best advice you'll get today." He put out a hand. "Good
luck."
Reluctantly, feeling as if he had been suckered but not knowing exactly
how, Rollie took the proffered hand.
Outside, just the way the man said, they told him how to go to work.
The training course, sponsored jointly by the company and through
federal grants, was eight weeks long. Rollie Knight lasted a week and
a half.
He received the first week's paycheck, which was more money than he had
possessed in a long time. Over the following weekend he tied one on.
However, on Monday he managed to awaken early and catch a bus which took
him to the factory training center on the other side of town.
But on Tuesday, tiredness won. He f ailed to wake until, through the
curtainless dirty window of his room, the sun shone directly on his f
ace. Rollie got up sleepily, blinking, and went to the window to look
down. A clock in the street below showed that it was almost noon.
He knew he had blown it, that the job was gone. His reaction was
indifference. He did not experience disappointment because, from the be-
ginning, he had not expected any other outcome. How and when the ending
came were merely details.
Experience had never taught Rollie Knightor tens of thousands like
him-to take a longterm view of anything. When you were born with
nothing, had gained nothing since, had learned to live with nothing,
there was no long-term view -only today, this moment, here and now. Many
in the white world-nescient, shallow thinkerscalled the attitude
"shiftless," and condemned it. Sociologists, with more understanding and
some
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sympathy, named the syndrome "present time orientation" or "distrust of
the future." Rollie had heard neither phrase, but his instincts embraced
both. Instinct also told him, at this moment, he was still tired. He went
back to sleep.
He made no attempt, later, to return to the training center or the
hiring hall. He went back to his haunts and street corner living, making
a dollar when he could, and when he couldn't, managing without. The cop
he had antagonizedmiraculously~lef t him alone.
There was only one postscript-or so it seemed at the time-to Rollie's
employment.
During an afternoon some four weeks later, he was visited at the rooming
house, where he was still sharing space on sufferance, by an instructor
from the factory training course, Rollie Knight remembered the man-a
beefy, florid-faced explant foreman with thinning hair and a paunch, now
puffing from the three flights of stairs he had been forced to climb.
He asked tersely, 'Why'd you quit?"
"I won the Irish Sweep, man. Doan need no job."
'-fou people I" The visitor surveyed the dismal quarters with disgust.
"To think we have to support your kind with taxes. If I had my way..
." He left the sentence unfinished and produced a paper. '-fou have to
sign here. It says you're not coming any more."
Indifferently, not wanting trouble, Rollie signed.
"Oh, yes, and the company made out some checks. Now they have to be paid
back in." He riffled through some papers, of which there seemed to be
a good many. "They want you to sign those, too."
Rollie endorsed the checks. There were four.
"Another time," the instructor said unpleas- wheels 157
antly, "try not to cause other people so much trouble."
"Go screw yourself, f atso," Rollie Knight said, and yawned.
Neither Rollie nor his visitor was aware that while their exchange was
taking place, an expensive, late-model car was parked across the street
from the rooming house. The car's sole occupant was a tall,
distinguished-appearing, grayhaired Negro who had watched with interest
while the training course instructor went inside. Now, as the beefy,
florid-faced man left the building and drove his own car away, the other
car followed, unobserved, at a discreet distance, as it had through most
of the afternoon.
chapter ten
"C'mon baby, leave the goddam. drink. I gotta bottle in the room."
Ollie, the machinery salesman, peered impatiently at Erica Trenton in the
semidarkness, across the small black table separating them.
It was early afternoon. They were in the bar of the Queensway Inn, not far
from Bloomfield Hills, Erica dawdling over her second drink which she had
asked for as a delaying device, even though recognizing that delay was
pointless because either they were or weren't going through with what they
had come here for, and if they were they might as well get on with it.
Erica touched her glass. "Let me finish this. I need it."
She thought: He wasn't a bad-looking man, in a raffish kind of way. He was
trimly built and his body was obviously better than his speech and
manners, probably because he worked on it-she remembered him telling her
with pride that he went to a gym somewhere for regular workouts. She
supposed she could do worse, though wished she had done better.
The occasion when he had told her about workouts in the gym had been at
their first meeting, here in this same bar. Erica had come for a drink one
afternoon, the way other lonely wives did sometimes, in the hope that
something interesting might happen, and Ollie had struck up a con-
versation-- Ollie, cynical, experienced, who knew this bar and why some
women came to it. After that, their next meeting had been by arrangement,
when he had taken a room in the residential section of the inn, and
assumed she would go to it with him. But Erica, torn between a simple
physical
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need and nagging conscience, had insisted on staying at the bar all
afternoon, and in the end left for home, to Ollie's anger and disgust. He
had written her off, it seemed, until she telephoned him several weeks
ago.
Even since then, they had had to delay their arrangement because Ollie
had not come back from Cleveland as expected, and instead went on to two
other cities -Erica had forgotten where. But they were here now, and
Ollie was becoming impatient.
He asked, "How about it, baby?"
Suddenly she remembered, with a mixture of wryness and sadness, a maxim
on Adam's office wall: Do Ii TODAY I
"All right," Erica said. She pushed back her chair and stood up.
Walking beside Ollie, down the inn's attractive, picture-hung
corridors-where many others had walked before her on the same kind of
assignation--she felt her heart beat faster, and tried not to hurry.
Several hours later, thinking about it calmly, Erica decided the
experience was neither as good as she had hoped for, nor as bad as she
had feared. In a basic, here-and-now way, she had f ound sensual
satisfaction; in another way, which was harder to define, she hadn't.
She was sure, though, of two things. First, such satisfaction as she
had known was not lasting, as it had been in the old days when Adam was
an aggressive lover and the effect of their love-making stayed with
her, sometimes for days. Second, she would not repeat the experience-at
least, with Ollie.
In such a mood, from the Queensway Inn in late afternoon, Erica went
shopping in Birmingham. She bought a few things she needed, and some
others she didn't, but most of her pleasure
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came from what proved to be an exciting, cballenging game-removing items
from stores without payment. She did so three times, with increasing
confidence, acquiring an ornamental clothes hanger, a tube of shampoo,
and-especial triumph I-an expensive fountain pen.
Erica's earlier experience, when she had purloined the ounce of NoreU,
had showed that successful shoplifting was not difficult. The re-
quirements, she decided now, were intelligence, quickness, and cool
nerve. She felt proud of herself for demonstrating that she possessed
all three.
chapter eleven
On a dismal, grimy, wet November day, six weeks after the meeting with
Adam Trenton at the proving ground, Brett DeLosanto was in downtown
Detroit-in a gray, bleak mood which matched the weather.
His mood was uncharacteristic. Normally, whatever pressures, worries
and-more recently -doubts assailed the young car designer, he remained
cheerful and good-natured. But on a day like today, he thought, to a
native Californian like himself, Detroit in winter was just too much,
too awful.
He had reached his car, moments earlier, on a parking lot near Congress
and Shelby, having battled his way to it on foot, through wind and rain
and traffic, the last seeming to flow interminably the instant he sought
to cross any intersection, so that he was left standing impatiently on
curbs, already miserably sodden, and getting wetter still.
As for the inner city around him... ughl Always dirty, preponderantly
ugly and depressing at any time, today's leaden skies and rain-as
Brett's imagination saw it-were like spreading soot on a charnel house.
Only one worse time of year existed: in March and April, when winter's
heavy snows, frozen and turned black, began to melt. Even then, he
supposed, there were people who became used to the city's hideousness
eventually. So far, he hadn't.
Inside his car, Brett started the motor and got the heater and
windshield wipers going. He was glad to be sheltered at last; outside,
the rain was still beating down heavily. The parking lot was crowded,
and he was boxed in, and would have to wait while two cars ahead of him
were moved
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to let him out. But he had signaled an attendant as he came into the lot,
and could see the man now, several rows of cars away.
Waiting, Brett remembered it was on such a day as this that he had first
come to Detroit himself, to live and work.
The ranks of auto company designers were heavy with expatriate
Californians whose route to Detroit, like his own, had been through the
Art Center College of Design, Los Angeles, which operated on a trimester
system. For those who graduated in winter and came to Detroit to work, the
shock of seeing the city at its seasonal worst was so depressing that a
few promptly returned West and sought some other design field as a
livelihood. But most, though jolted badly, stayed on as Brett had done,
and later the city revealed compensations. Detroit was an outstanding cul-
tural center, notably in art, music, and drama, while beyond the city, the
State of Michigan was a superb sports-vacation arena, winter and summer,
boasting some of the lovelier unspoiled lakes and country in the world.
Where in hell, Brett wondered, was the parking-lot guy to move those other
cars?
It was this kind of frustration-nothing major-which had induced his
present bad temper. He had had a luncheon date at the Pontchartrain Hotel
with a man named Hank Kreisel, an auto parts manufacturer and friend, and
Brett had driven to the hotel, only to find the parking garage full. As
a result he had to park blocks away, and got wet walking back. At the
Pontchartrain there had been a message from Kreisel, apologizing, but to
say he couldn't make it, so Brett lunched alone, having driven fifteen
miles to do so. He had several other errands downtown, and these occupied
the rest of the afternoon; but
wheels-163
in walking from one place to the next, a series of rude, born-happy
drivers refused to give him the slightest break on pedestrian crossings,
despite the heavy rain.
The near-savage drivers distressed him most. In no other city that he
knew-including New York, which was bad enough-were motorists as boorish,
inconsiderate, and unyielding as on Detroit streets and freeways.
Perhaps it was because the city lived by automobiles, which became sym-
bols of power, but for whatever reason a Detroiter behind the wheel
seemed changed into a Frankenstein. Most newcomers, at first shaken by
the "no quarter asked or given" driving, soon learned to behave
similarly, in self-defense. Brett never had. Used to inherent courtesy
in California, Detroit driving remained a nightmare to him, and a source
of anger.
The parking-lot attendant had obviously forgotten about moving the cars
ahead. Brett knew he would have to get out and locate the man, rain or
not. Seething, he did. When he saw the attendant, however, he made no
complaint. The man looked bedraggled, weary, and was soaked. Brett
tipped hint instead and pointed to the blocking cars.
At least, Brett thought, returning to his car, be had a warm and
comfortable apartment to go home to, which probably the attendant
hadn't. Brett's apartment was in Birmingham, a part of swanky Country
Club Manor, and he remembered that Barbara was coming in tonight to cook
dinner for the two of them. The style of Brett's living, plus an absence
of money worries which his fifty thousand dollars a year salary and
bonus made possible, were compensations which Detroit bad given him, and
he made no secret of enjoying them.
164-wheels
At last the cars obstructing him were being moved. As the one immediately
ahead swung clear, Brett eased his own car forward.
The exit from the parking lot was fifty yards ahead. One other car was in
front, also on the way out. Brett DeLosanto accelerated slightly to close
the gap and reached for money to pay the exit cashier.
Suddenly, appeanng as if from nowhere, a third car-a dark green sedan-shot
directly across the front of Brett's, swung sharply right and slarnmed
into second place in the exit line. Brett trod on his brakes hard,
skidded, regained control, stopped and swore. "You goddam maniac I"
All the frustrations of the day, added to his fixation about Detroit
drivers, were synthesized in Brett's actions through the next five
seconds. He leaped from his car, stormed to the dark green sedan and
wrathfully wrenched open the driver's door.
-fou son-of-a It was as f ar as he got
before he stopped.
"Yes?" the other driver said. He was a tall, graying, well-dressed black
man in his fifties. "You were saying something?"
"Never mind," Brett growled. He moved to close the door.
"Please wait I I do mind I I may even complain to the Human Rights
Commission. I shall tell them: A young white man opened my car door with
every intention of punching me in the nose. When he discovered I was of
a different race, he stopped. That's discrimination, you know. The human
rights people won't like it."
It sure would be a new angle." Brett laughed. "Would you prefer me to
finish?"
"I suppose, if you must," the graying Negro said. "But I'd much rather buy
you a drink, then I can apologize for cutting in front like that, and
wheels-165
explain it was a foolish, irrational impulse at the end of a frustrating
day."
"You had one of those days, too?"
"Obviously we both did."
Brett nodded. "Okay, I'll take the drink."
"Shall we say Jim's Garage, right now? It's three blocks from here and
the doorman will park your car, By the way, my name is Leonard Wingate."
The green sedan led the way.
The first thing they discovered, after ordering Scotches on the rocks,
was that they worked for the same company. Leonard Wingate was an
executive in Personnel and, Brett gathered from their conversation,
about two rungs down from vice-president level. Later, he would learn
that his drinking companion was the highest-ranking Negro in the
company.
"I've heard your name," Wingate told Brett. "Y ou've been
Michelangelo-ing the Orion, haven't you?"
"Well, we hope it turns out that way. Have you seen the prototype?"
The other shook his head.
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