The Turnaround Read Free Page A

Most important was what he learned from watching his father. Work was what men did. Not gambling or freeloading or screwing off. Work.
    Alex took the back door to a hallway that held a utility closet and a janitor’s bathroom that the help used (he and his father used the bathrooms in the office building above them). He went up a short flight of stairs to the back exit and stepped out into an alley. The alley was fashioned as a T and had three outs: N Street to the north, Jefferson Place to the south, and 19th Street to the west. Alex’s first stop was the Brown Building, a boxy structure so called because of its color, housing government workers, at 1220 19th.
    The money was good. It was better than any buck-sixty-an-hour minimum-wage thing he could have gotten on his own. His father paid him fifteen dollars a day. He cleared another fifteen, twenty in tips. As he did with the other employees, his father paid him weekly in a small brown envelope, in cash. Alex paid no taxes. Unlike his friends, he had walking-around dollars in his pocket all the time.
    After all these summers, he knew every alley, every crack in the sidewalk in the blocks south of Dupont. He had been working as a delivery boy for his father for six summers. He had started when he was eleven. His father had insisted on it, though Alex’s mother felt he was too young. He had surprised himself when he found that after a few shaky days, he could do the work. His father was never easy on him. When he came up short on cash a couple of times in the first few weeks, his father took the shortfall out of his pay. Alex was mindful after that to carefully count out the customer’s change.
    At eleven he had been a typical head-in-the-clouds kid. He was distracted easily, stopped to look in store windows on the Avenue, and often fell behind. He was naive to the ways of the city and its predators. That first summer, as he made a delivery up by the Circle, an older man had pinched him on the ass, and when Alex turned around to see who had done this thing to him, the man winked. Alex was perplexed, thinking, Why did that man touch me like that? But he knew enough not to tell his father about the incident when he returned to the store. His father would have found the man out on the street and, Alex was certain, beaten him half to death.
    Many major law firms were situated around the shop. Arnold and Porter, Steptoe and Johnson, and others. Alex didn’t like the way some of the attorneys, men and women alike, talked down to his father. Didn’t they know he was a marine and a veteran? Didn’t they know he could kick their soft asses around the block? Some of them clearly thought they were better than his father, which placed a longtime blue-collar chip on Alex’s shoulder. But just as many were kind. Often they nursed coffees at the counter just as an excuse to talk to his old man. John Pappas was more than quiet; he was a good listener.
    These law firms needed secretaries and mail room eccentrics to make them run, and Alex grew friendly with the girls and the oddballs, bearded guys wearing shorts and Transformer T-shirts, along with the garage attendants who watched their employers’ cars. On Jefferson Place, a narrow street of residential row homes converted to commercial, were smaller firms and associations that took on causes like Native American rights and higher wages for grape pickers. Fancy hippies, his dad called them. But they were not like the hippies, those few who remained, up at the Circle. These people wore shirts and ties. And the women who worked on this street seemed to be on equal footing with the men. Braless with short skirts, but still.
    In the earlier years, Alex had been in his own dreamlike state, but as his hormones kicked in, he began to notice the young workingwomen, just about the time that rock and roll and soul music began to mean something to him. He knew elementally that all of it was connected in some way. He would sing the songs he