I BEGIN MY CAREER

Somehow, in January of 1971 I landed an office job in Little Rock, Arkansas. It had nothing to do with my credentials or abilities but much to do with my ethnicity, connections, and the fact that I would work on the cheap. It promised to beat carrying a rifle for a living but didn't presage as much fun as riding a warship through a storm in the Atlantic. I'd give it try. I found a cheap apartment at State Street and Capitol Avenue from which I could walk to work and from where I could flee if things didn't work out. I dropped anchor.

 The first payday at my new job came and I was able to pay bills but not much else. I hated to delve too deeply into savings. Who knew what necessities lay ahead? I didn’t. I paid what I owed and obtained one of the world’s greatest treasures without spending a cent.

 I did it this way.

 The main library of the City of Little Rock sat only two blocks from where I worked. Can you imagine that? It was like an eight-year-old living a few hundred feet from the city’s largest free candy store.

 Before starting work, I’d gotten an updated driver’s license. With that, they, the nice folks at the library, gave me what appeared to be a card but which really was a key to an entire universe of delight. I augmented the assigned reading foisted on me by my mentors with masterpieces by the likes of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Dickens, Eliot, and Frazer. When I wasn’t off with one of the bosses at a planning commission meeting or such, the evening offered a soft blanket of calm and reflection.

 At work, I was getting along okay. At least they talked to me. There were some semi-good-natured pranks. One that I remember involved my trying to find Cantrell Road, one of the most popular and well-regarded corridors of the city, gateway to glorious entertainment and shopping venues.

 “Oh,” said the head drafter. “You live near it. Just go north on State Street a few blocks and you will run right into it.”

 I did. No Cantrell Road. Just a series of streets before State Street ran into the Arkansas River. I asked again next day.

 “Don’t see how you missed it. State Street intersects with Cantrell just a few blocks north. The other drafter smiled and nodded in agreement.

 Well, the joke was on me. Little Rock, Arkansas was the worst city I’ve ever known for situational nomenclature when it came to naming streets. Consider this example. Arkansas Highway 10 exited from Interstate 30 and headed west. After a few blocks, it became La Harp Boulevard, named after one of the early explores making harbor at La Petite Roche. I had found La Harp each time I headed north from where I lived, no problem there. But where the hell was Cantrell?

 What I didn’t know was that a few blocks further west, La Harp made a curve and headed up what is known from history as “Carpetbagger Hill.” The name was foisted on a subdued city by incoming northern victors following the insurrection of the 1860s. They built nice homes atop the hill, overlooking the train depot, and forced a stretch of the street to change from La Harp to Lincoln Avenue. That's Yankees for you.

 After descending from the posh neighborhood atop the hill, Lincoln Avenue became Cantrell Road. At some point, the exact location and impetus unknown, the corridor became Arkansas State Highway 10 again, a classic case of “where you are depends on where you’re at.”

 And so it went. There was some unknown giggling going on behind my back due to my discomfiture over being unable to find my way at times. I ignored it. I did that also when I found out about the advice I was getting, that I could probably find cheaper and better lodgings in the historic Capitol Hotel. A handsome structure, it is now a locally famous five-star hotel, proud of the fact that President Ulysses S. Grant and wife once stayed there and that he even gave a speech to city residents from its balcony.

 In 1971, it was pretty much a whorehouse as I found out to my great embarrassment when I mentioned, to a native of the city, the advice I had gotten from my co-workers about finding an apartment there.

 I took it all in stride. The jokes. The misleading advice about where one could find office supplies. The catty questions about why I wasn’t married and jibes about the joys I was missing. The still smoldering concern about why I chose to walk to work. The disdain about the age and condition of my apartment building. The insinuations about being a drug-crazed sociopath like my fellow veterans.

 I smiled through it all. Along with my nightly readings, I was teaching myself to type and trying to learn to read French. One phrase still lingers from those days:

  La vengeance est un plat qui se mange froid.

 Was the advice le français useful in the end?

 Bien sûr que oui.