Unit 1: Generation > Section C > Text Total Words: 1,407 Bricklayer's Boy My father and I were at college back in the mid-1970s. While I was in class at Columbia, he was on a bricklayer's scaffold not far from the street, working on a campus building. Sometimes we took the subway home together, he with his tools, I with my books. We didn't chat much about what went on during the day. My father wasn't interested in Dante and I wasn't interested in buildings. We'd share a New York Post and talk about the baseball. My dad has built lots of places in New York City he can't get into, but it doesn't bother him. For him, earning the money that paid for my entrance into a good university was satisfaction enough. We didn't know it then, but those days were the start of a separation between us. Related by blood, my father and I are separated by class. I am the white-collar son of a blue-collar man. Despite the myth of mobility in America, the true rule, experts say, is rags to rags, riches to riches. According to Bucknell University economist and author Charles Sackrey, maybe 10 percent climb from the working to the professional class. My father has had a tough time accepting my decision to become a mere newspaper reporter, a field that pays just a little more than construction does. He wonders why I haven't taken a profitable job like a lawyer. After bricklaying for thirty years, my father promised himself I would take a better job and earn more money with an education. He didn't want his son to break blue-collar rule No. 1: Make as much money as you can, to pay for as good a life as you can get. He'd tell me about it when I was nineteen: "You better make a lot of money." In 1980, after college and graduate school, I was offered my first job, on a daily paper in Columbus, Ohio. I broke the news in the kitchen, where all the family business is discussed. My mother wept as if it were Vietnam. My father had a few questions: "Ohio? Where the hell is Ohio?" I said it's somewhere west of New York City. I told him I wanted to write, and these were the only people who'd take me. "Why can't you get a good job that pays something, like in advertising in the city, and write in your spare time?" "Advertising is lying," I said, "I want to tell the truth." "The truth?" the old man exploded, his face reddening. "What's truth?" I said it's real life, and writing about it would make me happy. "You're happy with your family," my father said, stating blue-collar rule No. 2. "That's what makes you happy. After that, it all comes down to dollars and cents. What gives you comfort besides your family? Money, only money." During the two weeks before I moved, he reminded me that newspaper journalism is a dying field, and that I could do better. Then he pressed advertising again, though neither of us really knew anything about it, except that you could work in Manhattan, the island polished clean by money. I couldn't explain myself, so I packed, unpopular and confused. No longer was I the good son who studied hard and did things as expected. However, after I said good-bye, my father took me aside and pressed five hundred-dollar bills into my hands. "It's okay," he said over my weak protests. "Don't tell your mother." When I broke the news about what the paper was paying me, my father suggested I get a part-time job to increase the income. "Maybe you could drive a cab." Once, after I was blamed by the editor for something trivial, I made a mistake of telling my father during a visit home. "They pay you nothing, and they push you around too much in that business," he told me angrily. "Next time, you gotta grab the guy by the throat and tell him he's a big jerk." "Dad, I can't talk to the boss like that." "Tell him. You get results that way. Never take any shit." A few years before, a guy didn't like the wall my father and his partner had built. They tore it down and did it again, but the guy still complained. My father's partner pushed the guy onto the freshly laid bricks. "Pay me off," my father said, and he and his partner took the money and walked away. Eventually, I moved on to a job in Cleveland, on a paper my father has heard of. I think he looks on it as a sign of progress, because he hasn't mentioned advertising for a while. When he was my age, my father was already married and had two sons and a house in a neighborhood in Brooklyn not far from where he was born. I live in a dormitory-like place in Cleveland suburb, in a student kind of unmarried and carefree way. I rent movies during the week and feed single women in restaurants on Saturday nights. My dad asks me about my dates, but goes crazy over the word "woman." "A girl," he corrects. "You went out with a girl. Don't say 'woman.' It sounds like you're taking out your grandmother." I've often believed blue-collaring is the more genuine of lives. My father is provider and protector, concerned only with the basics: food and home, love and children. I live for my career, and frequently feel lost, lacking the blue-collar rules my father grew up with. My father isn't crazy about this life. He wanted to be a singer and actor when he was young, but that was silly fancy to his Italian family, who expected him to live a steady life. My dad learned a trade, as he was supposed to, and settled into a life as expected of him. My brother Chris has a lot more blue-collar in him than I do, despite his management-level career; for a short time, he wanted to be a construction worker, but my parents persuaded him to go to Columbia. It was Chris who helped my dad most when my father tried to change his life several months ago. My dad wanted a bricklayer foreman's job that wouldn't be so physically demanding. There was a written test that included essay questions about construction work. My father hadn't done anything like that in forty years, but he worked very hard on it. Every morning before sunrise, Chris would be ironing a shirt, and my father would sit at the kitchen table and read aloud his practice essays on how to wash down a wall, or how to build a corner. Chris would suggest words and approaches. It was hard for my dad. He had to take a prep course in a junior high school three nights a week after work for six weeks. "Is this what finals felt like?" my father would ask me on the phone. "Were you always this nervous?" I told him yes. I told him writing is always difficult. He thanked Chris and me for coaching, for putting him through school this time. My father thinks he did okay, but he's still awaiting the test results. In the meantime, he lives his life in the usual way. When we see each other these days, my father still asks how the money is. Sometimes he reads my stories; usually he likes them, although he recently criticized one piece as being a bit sentimental. During one of my visits to Brooklyn not long ago, he and I were in the car, on our way to a supermarket, one of my father's weekly routines. "You know, you're not as successful as you could be," he began as usual. "You paid your dues in school. You deserve better restaurants, better clothes." Here we go, I thought, the same old stuff. I'm sure every family has five or six similar big issues that are replayed like well-worn videotapes. I wanted to change this topic when we stopped at a red light. Just then my father turned to me, solemn and intense. "I envy you," he said quietly. "For a man to do something he likes and get paid for it—that's fantastic." He smiled at me before the light changed, and we drove on. To thank him for the understanding, I bought the deodorant and shampoo. For once, my father let me pay.