Dear Friends & Readers,
A few weeks ago I announced that I wouldn’t be writing political columns as frequently as I was during the run-up to the election. We won and I can now focus on something else: Learning to write fiction. I have a historical novel that I’m trying to learn how to properly get down on paper. It’s different from the craft of journalism that I’ve been engaged in for the last quarter century, and I’m finding it to actually be much easier than what I’m accustomed to, and a lot more fun. But still, there is a lot for me to learn.
When writing journalistically you have to stick to the truth (or at least the version of it you know) but with fiction writing, one is free to lie like at will. I’m liking it.
Attached is my first ever effort at short story writing. One day I might look back on it and be amazed at how much I didn’t know about the genre — but I’m willing to learn.
I’d like to get anyone’s feedback as long as they are honest comments. Believe me, I’m not fishing for compliments, I already know I can write.
But, with that said, I would value your time, opinion, and advice. Please send it to me via email at mansfieldf@gmail.com
Thanks in advance!
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Per Wikipedia, “Going postal” is an American English slang phrase referring to becoming extremely and uncontrollably angry, often to the point of violence, and usually in a workplace environment. The expression derives from a series of incidents from 1986 onward in which United States Postal Service (USPS) workers shot and killed managers, fellow workers and members of the police or general public in acts of mass murder. Between 1970 and 1997, more than 40 people were killed by current or former employees in at least 20 incidents of workplace rage. Between 1986 and 2011, workplace shootings happened roughly twice per year, with an average of 11.8 people killed per year.”
“Going Postal” by Mansfield Frazier
The heft of the recently purchased Browning 30-06 caliber hunting rifle felt good in his hands. Similar to other individuals lacking in real power in and over their lives, the gun made him feel strong, masculine … invincible. He liked the feeling.
Lem was in his basement practicing working the bolt action of the high-powered weapon as he pointed it at the office-style clock on the far wall ticking off the seconds. He needed to improve his speed so that he could get off five shots in less than seven seconds. So far, the fastest he’d been able to do it was ten. But he had time; now that he’d made up his mind as to what had to be done time was on his side. He was the one in control now — of the outcome, as well as his own fate. That thought was comforting.
“Squeeze the trigger son, don’t pull it,” said his patient father while Lem was being taught to shoot at around age seven. “Pulling the trigger is what’s causing your hand to jerk. It’ll throw you off your target.”
The lessons he’d learned from his father as a child about shooting had made him into a crack shot. Whereas the lessons he’d learned about life, fairness, and justice from the same man were the reasons he was in his basement practicing with the rifle.
Lem wished his father was still alive. Perhaps he wouldn’t be preparing to inflict such mayhem if the man he’d idolized all of his life hadn’t died suddenly of a heart attack a year ago. He would have at least had someone to talk his feelings out with, as he always had done in the past. He wanted to believe the man who’d raised him to harbor such strong opinions of right and wrong would be proud of what he was about to do. However, there was a 50/50 chance he would ashamed of the action his son was so calculatingly contemplating.
But, damn it, fair was fair and right was right. That’s what he’d been taught all of his life.
It fleetingly occurred to Lem that none of his childhood friends were planning such a heinous act. Yet they hadn’t had the benefit of a strong black father to inculcate in them the enduring values he’d been taught. Why him? But as soon as the thought crossed his mind he rationalized it away. Part and parcel of being raised with certain values caused, in him at least, a certain amount of mental rigidity. He possessed (or was possessed by) a somewhat dogmatic, uncompromising moral viewpoint by which one was to conduct their life and violations were to be taken seriously.
The monumental difference between his father and him, although he shared the same values, was simple. His father had lived, worked, and for the most part, functioned day-to-day, in an insular world of his own making. He ran his own small business.
His thriving beer joint was in the heart of a teeming black neighborhood — and, if the folks there were poor they certainly didn’t act like they knew it — so he didn’t have to deal with anything or anyone not of his liking. Since banks didn’t loan money to black businesses he had no one to answer to financially. He always paid in cash and had turned the money that rolled into his business into a bulwark of sorts against bigotry.
Everybody respected green, and he once had said to 12-year-old Lem, “Son, they print too much of this stuff down there in Washington for a sucker not to have as much of it he needs to get on with his life.”
However, the ebullient father was having such a grand time enjoying and teaching his two sons — that were born to him relatively late in his life — to be competent men he overlooked one important aspect of their education. He failed to adequately prepare them for the racism and bigotry they would eventually face in the real world. It could have simply been that he thought his love and caring could inoculate his sons against the bigotry he’d faced — and faced down — repeatedly over the years. He’d run the beast out of his own life with its tail between its legs and therefore thought that it couldn’t harm his sons. He was wrong.
* * *
The first rifle his father had given Lem at age seven had been a Winchester .22 bolt action. He would load both brothers, and a few other kids from the neighborhood, into his Chrysler and drive them to a spot down off Canal Road where they would practice shooting at targets set up against the hillside. A couple of years later Lem was shooting at pheasants with a .410 Mossberg over-under shotgun near the woods on the farm his father owned in Ashtabula County. He rarely missed.
So Lem knew the crack of the rifle — if not the first shot, then certainly the second — would scatter his targets like so much panicked game. Most of the men he planned to target routinely boasted about serving in World War II so they would probably try to duck for cover under their parked cars as soon as the first man fell.
The door to the building — and safety — would be too far away since he would wait until the men were in the open space of the parking lot, walking, lunch pails in hands, perhaps laughing and joking about what one of them had done to debase some unsuspecting black employee earlier that day. If any of the bastards panicked (like he hoped they would) and tried to run back in the direction of the door that would simply make them easier targets. Lem cared little if he shot them in the front or in their backs.
A rare smile, one that now only came to his face when he was practicing with his rifle, played at the corner of Lem’s lips as he peered through the Tasco rifle scope. He trained his sight on an imaginary target on the back of an imaginary victim, knowing that Steve Dumbrowski, his all-too-real supervisor, was soon to become one of his all-too-real victims.
In spite of his years of training and experience handling firearms, he nonetheless dry-fired the empty rifle to complete the imaginary act of killing. Such an action would have gotten him a disproving look from his father since he’d been taught to never fire a weapon without a round in the chamber — that could damage the firing mechanism.
But nonetheless, this was the only remaining pleasure he still managed to wring out of life: Planning mass murder.
* * *
“Lemuel, dinner’s ready,” his wife Janice called down to the basement. He gingerly placed the rifle back in its padded case. He accorded it all of the reverence it deserved since it would soon be the instrument by which he would bring about retributive justice. At least that’s what his troubled mind was telling him.
He would have rather stayed in the basement since the simple act of sitting across the dinner table from Janice at this point in their relationship would put him ill at ease. Of course it hadn’t always that way; there had been happier times but those now seemed so long ago they might as well have never existed. Try as he might he couldn’t bring them back into focus; all he could feel was the pain of the present.
Too many things had begun to go wrong in his life at the same time, overwhelming him, throwing him off balance and causing his brain circuitry to begin fraying. He might have been able to handle the twin demons of a failing marriage and trouble at work if they had come one at a time. But he was no match for the two of them ganging up on him, beating him to a pulp. All of this was occurring amazingly fast, within a year of his father’s passing.
A few weeks prior, as he turned onto the tree-lined street in the suburb where he and Janice had purchased their first home four years ago as soon as they reached age 21, he’d blacked out at the wheel from pain caused by the knot in his stomach. For months the pain had been intensifying the closer he got to home. Fortunately he was moving so slowly the vehicle stopped itself when it hit the curb and no one was around to witness the incident. His doctor had told him it was nothing but “nerves” but the truth was, at this point, he was virtually a walking basket case.
However, a decade prior, at age 15, things were completely different; he’d been considered one of the young “Princes of the City.” Although they were rarely called as such everyone knew who they were: The teenage sons of small business owners, numbers operators, and successful drug dealers in the black neighborhoods that were, as the saying goes, “shittin’ in high cotton.”
This was the mid-50s, the post-war economy was booming, and blacks had yet to be sold the bill of goods there was something inherently wrong with them living in their own vibrant neighborhoods. That deceit would come later. Back then, money kept circulating, recycling, in the black community over and over, creating various kinds of wealth that few outside the indigenous neighborhoods were aware of, realized, or understood.
His family connections — and his own hustling abilities — always assured that he had decent-paying after school and summer jobs, but even if he hadn’t been so industrious — had been more like his brother Rick — he still would have been the best-dressed dude in the entire school and would have had access to a cool set of wheels. His family was considered “nigger-rich.”
But, unlike some of his contemporaries who had access to a family car but no money to buy gas, he wasn’t all show. Since age 13 he’d always, like his father, managed to keep a bankroll in his pocket, even if it was much smaller. He wasn’t taught to worship money, but to respect it and realize its power for creating freedom.
His mother knew the guy, Bill, who ran the local shoeshine parlor, and got him a job there. He worked just three evenings a week, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but would average around $30 per night in tips. Meanwhile, the average take-home pay for a steel mill worker in Cleveland in 1958 was $71 per week. He liked that math.
So, while Lem wasn’t tall or particularly athletic, and of only average looks, starting when he began attending East Tech High School in ’59, he had more than his share of the 10th, 11th , and 12th grade girls. His mother’s admonishments weren’t taken to heart; he wasn’t as careful with sexual escapades as he should have been, and even after his 9th grade girlfriend had gotten pregnant (and had had an abortion), it didn’t cause him to be any more sexually circumspect.
Lem had began making preparations for college (his guidance counselor had secured him a scholarship to The Ohio State University to study psychology), but Janice had gotten pregnant, and she wasn’t about to have an abortion. His mother always felt that her son had fallen victim to a trap that had been set for him by a wily older woman — and to some extent she was right.
On New Year’s Day 1961, shaking violently inside, he stood at the altar of his family’s church and married Janice; he was 17, she was 17 going on 40. He would graduate high school six months later. Nonetheless he was determined to prove to his father (and the world) that he’d been raised to be capable of heading up his own household, even at such a tender young age.
As it would turn out the financial part of the marriage was spectacularly successful. They were well off, but as for the relationship part of the union — that was another matter altogether.
After the birth of the newlywed’s first child — which occurred prematurely almost immediately after they wed — Janice went back to school to study nursing. A second child, Rob, was born 16 months later. As he was picking her up from night classes one evening he ran into the guidance counselor who had obtained the scholarship for him.
“What you been up to?” Mr. Zagaria asked.
“I’m laid off from Alcoa but they’ll probably be calling me back in about a month.”
“Why don’t you go apply at the Illuminating Company?”
“The Illuminating Company? They don’t hire black folks.”
“Things are changing, young man,” the counselor said, “just go see.”
Historically, no one got hired by a public utility anywhere in the country unless they had a close relative already on the job — and this went for whites also. So at the time there was no way a black could land a job in the industry, unless it was for menial, dead-end work. The few blacks employed by the Illuminating Company worked primarily at the power-generating plants, shoveling coal. At the facility he worked at there was only one other black employee, a truck mechanic who had been there for over a decade.
But what Lem had no way of knowing, and didn’t find out until years later, was when John F. Kennedy got elected, he set about forcing change. One of the first things he had his attorney general brother Robert do was to approach public utility companies across the country and essentially “make them an offer they couldn’t refuse.”
Kennedy’s logic was simple: Everyone used the services provided by public utilities so the president thought this industry was the first one he should have his brother approach in regards to integrating their workforce. The companies could go along willingly, or the government would file a lawsuit. For the most part, the utilities went along, at least on paper.
Also, Lem didn’t find out until years later that when he took the exam given to all new employees his score had set a new curve. Nonetheless, he started out on a trash removal detail that wasn’t in his job description.
But things worked out. When Lem had started his working career at the aluminum foundry straight out of high school, one of the manager/owners of the amusement company which owed the jukebox and pinball games in the tavern stepped to him. The business was allegedly run by organized crime and they had a side hustle.
They had an operation set up that made copies of porno flicks. The Supreme Court had yet to rule that pornography was legal, so the 15-minute reels (you had to own a projector to view them) were hot, albeit expensive commodities. Illegality made them hard to come by. His connection would wholesale him ten reels for $200 and a few of the titles could be resold for upwards of $100 each. All that was needed was for someone to have a job where there were lots of workers with steady jobs who could be turned into customers. The problem for Lem was there were already three other guys selling similar films at Alcoa.
However, when he got to the Illuminating Company, there was no competition and before long he’d developed a brisk business that earned him twice as much as his paycheck some weeks. It was easy, safe, money since no law enforcement agency was policing the trafficking in porn. When he got called back to the foundry, he worked both jobs for a few weeks, that is, until he almost fell asleep at the wheel from exhaustion one day, so he quit the foundry.
The workforce at the power company was aging so there were opportunities for advancement and Lem moved up to a position of skilled craftsman in a relatively short period of time. Sure, being the first employee of color he encountered racism along the way but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle. His quick wit and sharp tongue tamed racist co-workers in short order. In fact, he’d grown to enjoy verbally sparring with the bigots, primarily because they were so stupid and slow he always won.
He grew to love the job.
However, after about five years in, he raised a question with the general manager, Bob Schmitz. “Bob,” he asked, “for the last year or so, you guys have been having me train new white guys that you then promote past me. What’s up with that?”
“Well,” Bob responded, “you certainly are the most talented of any of the young guys we have here Lem, but we can’t promote you to a position where you’d be a boss over white guys.”
Bob Schmitz had actually said that, right out of his mouth, in 1967.
Lem was devastated. He’d learned his craft well, and was, even by the company’s standards and measure, an exemplary employee. Now they were telling him that no matter how well he performed, no matter how good he was at his job, no matter how dedicated he was to the company … the game he’d been playing was rigged and it always would be.
“Devastated” was far too mild a word.
Having the temerity to question the general manager on a matter such as race was probably the kiss of death for Lem as far as him having any future within the organization. But he knew that before he opened his mouth. Nonetheless he couldn’t hold his tongue. His manhood demanded he speak out, to stand up for what was right.
Over an amazingly short time, the job he once loved going to turned into a place he hated to even think about setting foot into. The racism toward the “uppity nigger” became outright and pointed after the confrontation with Bob, but Lem threw it right back in their faces. Besides, the general manager was lying: The men he worked with day to day, virtually all of them white, were supportive of him moving into management.
But it was management that was hostile to Lem moving into their ranks, not the rank-and-file workers. It was management that was on the front line, manipulating the workers and keeping them at each other’s throats over race while they sat back, laughed, and grew wealthier.
* * *
His marriage, which was already on shaky ground, began to deteriorate more rapidly due to his situation at work. Recall, Lem was 17 when he had gotten married, while his wife was 17 going on 40. In simple terms, in short order, Janice had him completely pussy-whipped.
Try as he might to renegotiate the terms of their relationship, once he finally woke up, Janice wasn’t having any of it. She’d had things going exclusively her way for the last seven years and adamantly refused to relinquish — or even share — power. But once woke, Lem couldn’t back down, and before long the tension in the household was excruciating, almost incendiary.
Akin to many other individuals who felt trapped in a miserable job they hated and powerless to rectify, Lem was bringing his misery home with him. Some disgruntled workers kicked their dogs while others took it out on their undeserving spouses and kids, further fracturing already fragile relationships.
Thus he was amplifying an already tense and volatile situation. What didn’t occur to Lem, due to his inexperience was, given how extensive racism was in the American workplace, it was truly astonishing that someone didn’t go postal every goddamn day somewhere in the country. In a sense this was a testament to the resiliency of black and brown Americans.
* * *
One morning as he was walking out of their bedroom, Janice said, “Lemuel, today you’ve got to say something to that school bus driver. She was late again yesterday dropping off Robin.”
By this point he’d adopted an attitude of, rather than yelling or fighting, he sometimes simply mocked or ridiculed her. “Janice, you don’t know what you’re talking about … the roads were bad out there yesterday. That bus driver wants to get those bratty-assed kids home so she can park that bus and go home to her own family. She’s not being late just to piss you off.”
But the tone in which he said this achieved just what he wanted: It pissed her off.
“If you were any kind of man” — Janice started to say, but he rushed to finish the sentence for her — “then I wouldn’t be married to such a simple-minded, harping bitch, right?”
He left the bedroom and as he started down the stairs it finally happened: Janice rushed up behind him and walloped him on the back of the head with a closed fist. Hard. He grabbed her arm to prevent her from hitting him again and they tumbled down the stairs.
When he came to his senses he was straddling his prone wife as she lay on the floor, his hands around her throat. She was at death’s door, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. All of the pent-up years of putting up with her bullshit, the years of meekly remaining silent for fear of causing an uncomfortable confrontation, came tumbling out in the form of blind rage.
“Oh my god,” he thought as he let go, “I don’t love this woman this much, what the fuck am I doing?”
Janice had been raised in a large, disjointed family as the last of 11 children reared by a mother who had ran off three or four husbands due to her violent tendencies. She was from Mississippi and had passed down to her daughters her backward belief in “graveyard love.” Simply stated it meant “one of us is going to the graveyard, and the one of us is going to prison for murder.”
After talking it out for hours they agreed to never get physical with each other again, but nonetheless, a few days later, he stumbled upon the pistol she had just purchased. He took it and hid it in the garage.
A week later, as they were leaving his office of the marriage counselor they’d been visiting for over a year, the kindly man whispered in his ear, “You just have to leave, it’ll never work.” Lem had already known this, and he also knew it would be the hardest thing he could ever imagine doing, leaving his wife and kids. Just two years prior they were in the planning stages of building a summer home about 50 miles out from Cleveland — financially they had it like that.
The next day, feeling terminally trapped, Lem had made up his mind and purchased the Browning. The only way out of his dilemma — at least in his own mind — was to do what had to be done.
He’d already picked the roof of a closed machine shop that sat across the street from the parking lot where the men would be walking to their vehicles, and Lem even had purchased a ladder that he hid behind the building. The amazing thing was, he made no mental escape plans. After the deed was done he would simply drop the rifle, raise his hands, and go quietly — justice served.
Lem had scheduled a vacation day for the following Monday to allow himself plenty of time to get set up on the roof. A man who lived by his watch, he would be more than ready by the time the racist bastards exited the building at 4 p.m.
* * *
That weekend Lem began tidying up the loose ends of his life: He returned a long-overdue library book; he changed the oil in Janice’s car; and he took a pair of gardening shears back to their rightful owner.
Getting out of his car in Bobby Richardson’s driveway, gardening shears in hand, Lem walked up the short driveway and saw her sitting on the porch laughing at something Bobby or his wife Gwen had just said.
“I hope you’re laughing with me and not at me,” said Lem self-consciously as he climbed the stairs.
“Neither,” said Bobby, “we were just laughing at some of the stories Noel was telling us about the kids she works with. Noel, this is my friend and neighbor Lem. Lem, meet Noel.”
Sticking out her hand Noel said, “I know who you are, you’re Rob’s dad!”
“And how do you know that?” Lem responded.
“Because you look just like him.”
Her words, but most of all it was the smile, her dazzling smile, that made him feel like a wounded lion that just had a splinter removed from its paw. But all he could think of to say was, “You mean he looks like me.”
“No, I met him first so you look like him in my mind. I’m one of his teachers at Landerwood Preschool.”
“OK, I’ll go for that,” said Lem, desperately trying to think of some reason to stay so that he could get to know Noel, who seemed just as interested in him staying. He ended up being there for two hours and two-and-a-half six-packs — the most enjoyable time he had had literally in years.
Bobby and Gwen, for the most part, just sat back the whole time and watched living theater: two people, right in front of their very eyes, falling in love on the spot. Lem and Noel talked of everything under the sun, and sometimes nothing much at all, one just wanting to hear the sound of the other’s voice, as if checking to make sure this was real, was really taking place.
Walking Noel to her car Lem asked if he could give her a call sometime, and she didn’t play coy, she gave him her number. Driving home he felt a weight lifting off of his soul. He no longer felt the need to kill, let alone even hurt anyone.
God had sent him what he had desperately needed, one of His chosen angels by the name of Noel. She would provide Lem shelter from the storm under her wings while his soul healed.
From CoolCleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author at http://NeighborhoodSolutionsIn
One Response to “MANSFIELD: Going Postal”
Tara L
I really enjoyed your story. It is refreshing to take in such unabashed honesty.