In God We Trust
Authors: Jean Shepherd
A hardcover edition of this book was originally published in 1966 by Doubleday. It is here reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday.
In God We Trust. Copyright © 1966 by Jean Shepherd. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address: Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.
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First Broadway Books trade paperback edition published 2000
Chapters 2
,
8
,
14
,
16
,
24
,
26
,
30
originally appeared in
Playboy
,
Copyright © 1964, 1965, 1966 by HMH Publishing Co., Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76866-7
v3.1
The characters, places, and events described herein are entirely fictional, and any resemblance to individuals living or dead is purely coincidental, accidental, or the result of faulty imagination.
Jean Shepherd
To my Mother, and my Kid Brother
And the Rest of the Bunch …
THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO KINDS OF EDUCATION.
… George Ade
WE MEET FLICK, THE FRIENDLY BARTENDERI felt like a spy. It was the first time I had ever ridden a cab in my own hometown. When I had left it I was definitely not a cab rider. Now taking cabs was as natural as breathing or putting on shoes. I could see the cab driver giving me the eye in his rear-view mirror. He was wearing the standard Midwestern work uniform of lumberjacket, corduroy cap, and a red face.
“You from out of town?”
He caught me off guard. I had forgotten that out of New York people quite often spoke to other people.
“Uh.…what?”
“You from out of town?”
“Ah … yeah, I guess so.” Making one of my famous instantaneous decisions, I opted for being from out of town.
“Yeah, well, I could tell. Where ya from?”
“New York. Now, that is.”
He mopped his windshield with a greasy rag. The cab’s heater was making the windows cloud up. Outside I could dimly see the grimy streets lined with dirty, hard ice and crusted drifts covered with that old familiar layer of blast-furnace dust; ahead of us a long line of dirt-encrusted cars carrying loads of steelworkers, refinery slaves, and railroad men to wherever they spent most of their lives. He went on:
“Yep. New York. Me and my wife went there once. For two weeks. We saw the Fair. I sure don’t see how anyone can stand to live there.”
We continued to rattle through the smoky gray Winter air. I watched a giant gas works drift by our port side. On the starboard a vast, undulating sea of junkyards rolled to the horizon.
“It’s okay to visit.”
I guess he threw that in so as not to hurt my feelings.
“Oh, you get used to it.”
He blew his nose loudly into a red bandanna and laughed juicily.
“Yeah, I guess a guy can get used to anything. If he’s gotta.”
A crossing gate banged down in front of us, its flashers angrily blinking off and on. A warning bell clanged deafeningly as a giant Diesel locomotive swept across our bow, towing a short string of smelly tankers. Four brakemen clung to their sides, yelling to one another as they roared past.
“What was that?” I shouted.
“I SAID A GUY CAN GET USED TO
ANYTHING.”
He bellowed back.
The gate went up. We were off again. I fished into my briefcase, at last finding the onionskin on which I had written, for my own use, a thumbnail description of the town I was now riding through, my own despised hometown. As we roared and squeaked on, I read over what I had written:
Hohman, Indiana, is located in the extreme Northwestern corner of the state, where the state line ends abruptly in the icy, detergent-filled waters of that queen of the Great Lakes, Lake Michigan. It clings precariously to the underbody of Chicago like a barnacle clings to the rotting hulk of a tramp steamer
.
From time to time echoes of the Outside World arrive in Hohman, but they are muted and bear little relevance to the daily life of its inhabitants. Theirs is a world of belching furnaces, roaring Bessemer Converters, fragrant Petroleum distillation plants, and freight yards. Mostly, their
Social life is found in Bowling halls or Union halls or beer halls, not to mention dance halls and pool parlors
.
Theirs is a sandy, rolling country, cooled, nay, frozen to rigidity in the Winter by howling gales that got their start near the Arctic Circle, picked up force over the frozen wastes of Lake Michigan, and petered out in downtown Hohman, after freezing ears, cracking blocks, and stunting the Summer hopes in many a breast
.
In Summer the process is reversed, and the land lies still and sear under the blazing Midwestern sun. This is where the first faint beginnings of the Great Plains can be found. A gnarled cactus plant, rolling tumbleweeds; an occasional Snowy Owl. The residents of Hohman are hardly aware of this, although their truculent pride in being Hoosiers is seen everywhere
.
Under the soil of most backyards, covered with a thin, drifting coat of blast-furnace dust and refinery waste, made fragrant by the soaked-in aroma of numerous soap factories, lie in buried darkness the arrowheads, stone axes, and broken pots of the departed Indian. Where the tribes danced in Indian summer now grow Used Car lots and vast, swampy junkyards
.
Not far from downtown Hohman lie the onion sets and cantaloupe vines of the Dutch immigrant farmers, and then the endless, mile-after-mile monotony of the Indiana cornfields. To the West the sand dunes ring Lake Michigan almost to the border of Michigan itself. To the North—the Lake. And to the West and North—Chicago
.
It is a place people never really come to, but mostly want to leave. And leave they do, to go to the fabled East or to the unbelievable California coast. They rarely talk about where they have come from. There isn’t much to say. At night in Hohman the rabbits still hop through the backyard gardens. The trains thunder through the dark on their way to somewhere else. The sky is always lit by the eternal flames of the Open Hearths and blast furnaces
.
Nothing much has changed, probably least of all those who were born and formed by the Northern Indiana mill-town existence
.
Oh yeah? I answered myself. I have never been a fan of my particular style of Official Writer-ese, but, after all, it’s a living. It’s a hell of a lot better than working in the Tin Mill, which we were now passing.
We were getting into painfully familiar country: ragged vacant lots, clumps of signboards advertising paint, American Legion halls, bowling alleys, all woven together with a compact web of high tension wires, telephone poles, and gas stations.
Home is where the heart is. In fact, not more than two blocks from where we now waited for a light I had spent the festering years of my childhood.