Collecting for the Hippies

I WASN'T A GREAT bill collector. Parts of the job I handled quite well, I think—the vague threats, the simple nastiness—but some of the other things I had to do confounded me.

I'd been working at a used-book stand in Philly. When it went out of business, I was adrift again. After a couple months of fruitless job hunting, the man who'd owned the defunct book stand called and suggested that there might be a job at the place where he was now working—a small publishing house in West Philly. That sounded okay by me, so I set up an interview.

They were looking for a bill collector, though they had a much nicer name for the position. The only criterion, it seemed, was whether or not I was capable of being firm with people. That's all they were looking for: someone who could be firm. I'd have my own office in which to be firm, and most everything I did would be over the telephone. That was good. Nobody could punch me over the phone.

The trick was, the publishing house was run by rich neo-hippies in their late 20s and early 30s who took their political correctness and social activism very seriously. They put out books about environmentalism, non-violent protest and the struggles of Guatemalan peasants. The place operated as a co-op (which meant nobody got paid much), and they packed their shipments with eco-friendly materials. They needed a bill collector because no one there had it in them to be "firm" with people who didn't pay their bills. What's more, they'd never had a bill collector before, despite being in business close to a decade.

The job definitely had its advantages. I could come and go as I pleased. I took two-hour lunches across the street at the Shamrock Pub. And if I wanted, I could close my office door and nap after coming back from the bar. They provided all their employees with boom boxes, and ran a very mellow ship. Voices were never raised, and orders were never given, only "suggestions."

Still, they drove me mad. The hallways were full of gentle, condescending smiles and soft voices, expensive Birkenstocks, peasant blouses and tie-dyed kerchiefs knotted around heads. The stench of Patchouli oil filled the air. Any time an employee had a birthday or a personal problem, we were all shuffled into the meeting room to celebrate or show our support. Cake and ice cream were often provided (proudly purchased down the block at the Angry Black Militant Bakery).

In between those and the endless meetings (hippies always have a lot of meetings), I tried to untangle 10 years' worth of screwed-up accounting practices. Complicating my job was the fact that I'd never done anything like this before. I had absolutely no experience. I didn't even balance my own checkbook. But I could be firm.

Still, I did what I could.

The fact that most of the people who were buying books from the hippie publishing house were hippies themselves made things at once easier and more difficult. Easy, in that they were very easy to frighten. All I had to say was, "We seem to have a little problem here…" and they went to pieces. I heard two complete nervous breakdowns occur over the telephone. One of them (an accounts payable manager at a Denver-based indie bookstore) even had to be taken to the hospital.

Their hippieness made things more difficult though, in that even after agreeing to, they still wouldn't pay their bills. This allowed me to make the threats in my follow-up call a little more blunt.

Being a cruel young man at the time, I found it all kind of funny, even if I didn't give a damn about clearing up the accounts. (Still, cruel as I could be, for the record I only once got the child of an AP manager on the phone and asked, "How do you feel about having a daddy who doesn't pay his bills?" That's an old, and very effective, bill collector's trick).

The hippies who ran the place didn't want to know what I said to people over the phone. They were just happy that the checks had started to come in.

As the months passed, my hatred for the people around me, their smugness, their self-righteousness and the controls they tried to place on the language began to overwhelm me. It was made very clear what we were and were not allowed to say, the terms we could and could not use around the office.

In my lifetime, I have worked for and with people of every political stripe—anarchists, libertarians, Democrats, communists, Republicans, Maoists, avowed fascists. And I've noticed that none of those right of center has ever tried to control anything I said or wrote, which is much more than I can say about those who leaned to the left.

(The fact that I ascribe to no political agenda whatsoever myself makes this easier to see and interesting to notice.)

I was happy to discover that there were a few other non-believers in the office with me, though they tried to keep it well-disguised. On the surface they were all sweet smiles and "let's go work on the mulch garden" and "I understand the pain of Chilean migrant workers," but behind closed office doors, the smiles turned wicked. They were as sick as I was at the massive "let's pretend" game going on among the rich kids in the well-appointed offices and the designer hippie duds.

The first of the two final straws came when I was told I could no longer listen to the likes of the Mentors in my office—no matter how quietly—because it brought a "bad energy" into the workplace and was beginning to mess with the chakras of the empty-eyed bitch who worked down the hall.

Then came the emergency staff meeting in response to some American military action or another. After it was decided that several people would stand on the corner outside holding "Honk if you're against the war" signs (which, I was sure, would quickly turn the tide), the question of civil disobedience arose, and whether or not people were willing to be arrested for standing up for something they believed in.

The resounding consensus was "hell, no!"

The scene just put the lie to the whole place for me.

"If you people really cared about stopping this thing, or about the people over in wherever the hell it was, you'd go burn down the recruiting office, or something," I suggested.

I was told that they didn't believe in such things. That's when I realized that they believed in about as much as I did at the time.

I continued trying to straighten their books for a few weeks more, continued making threatening phone calls to people who didn't pay their bills and continued to take longer and longer lunch breaks over at the Shamrock.

Then I moved to Brooklyn, and for the next year I was mean to people for free.