Work Text:
Of all the holidays in creation, and there were a great many that society saw fit to shove up your ass, he knew, Harry saw the most useless as being the one they called Labor Day.
It's very existence as a holiday contradicted itself to the very void: Why should anyone devote a day to working and then tell everyone that they needn't work a single hour of that very day?
It was stupid, preposterous, an arcane oxymoron of a holiday and he was only grateful that a great many bars in town didn't call themselves faithful enough to the whole obscene idealogy to abide by its contrary commandment.
The priest of one such establishment he frequently frequented was luckily one such heretic. The door was opened by noon, as always, and Harry found himself strolling in to be unanimously greeted by the regulars, already seated at the bar and on their third or fifth rounds. He might have joined them if they didn't let him bring his beer to the back, by the pool table, which was always his preferred destination.
Getting the cue off the rack, his eyes rolling over it as smoothly as soon the balls would be, Harry surmised he observed Labor Day better than most. While half the losers whom would head back to work or school come the next day were off sleeping or throwing parties, he was back to the old grindstone, seeing what new prospects there were for cash, which 'clients' he could find. Today they would be mostly tourists to the city or those same losers not out working but whom considered pool just for fun...
It was his job to teach them better.
And he had to work.
He had to work if he wanted to pay for his beer.
Eventually, at least, when the tab ran too high and the barkeep refused to do his own job to pour him another.
Harry stopped to admire the green felt of the table.
It was a beautiful thing.
The most beautiful thing in the world, besides a woman opened up before him, her own bush not needing to be trimmed half as neatly.
When he had been younger, his mother had obsessed over the lawn, wanting the grass to be always just the right length. If she could have used a ruler to be sure of it, she would have, but she was never the type of woman to easily go on her knees and hands. She wanted it to be short enough to look like the carpet inside, the same stupid thing she spent endlessly vacuuming.
His dad grew to hate that lawn.
He could remember his pinched face everytime summer came around and his wife's voice would hand out the decree, "The lawn's getting too high again, Reggie. You better give it a cut."
Maybe, if once for his trouble, she'd sucked the old man as nicely as she did the rugs in the house, it might have given him a reason to stay, her son had later reasoned.
Wiping his nose with the back of his hand, Harry thought of the day his dad had left. It had really only meant one thing to him by that time, his respect for the man long dwindled like the stale, coffee grounds forever left in the old pot in the kitchen: now he would be the one she nagged to cut the damn lawn.
Staring at the pool table's expanse of green, though, he smiled.
Here was a lawn that never needed cutting and one that was diametrically perfect enough to please his mother. He'd bested the both of his parents by finding the perfect yard hidden away in a bar. He had also sweetened the deal, after closing hours, by either sleeping on friend's couches or living in an apartment so other people had to deal with the grass and not him.
There was, after all, only one type that was really any good.
The man played by himself for a while until some poor Joe walked through the door and he learned him out of twenty of his hard earned dollars. That they had been hard earned, Harry could tell by the way the man stood, as if his back was broken from working day in and lousy day out at some forsaken factory that made his face look like a road map and his eyes seem like hollowed and bloodshot lightbulbs that had burned out long ago.
His hands had given him away too.
They were gnarled, arthitic things that Harry doubted could even feel anything at all past the inch thick calluses on them.
If he would ever get calluses, Harry thought after his brief bit of work, counting the bills with those same smooth fingers, it would be from the pool cue and that would be unlikely. It had become almost as smooth as his cock when he'd jerk off, a living part of himself that rarely if ever hurt him.
Could one aquire calluses from skin? He'd never thought of it before. It seemed highly unlikely, especially considering the amount of sex he had had and never developed one. If humans toughened each other up it was a spiritual endeavor not a physical one. Another's soul scratched up against your soul enough until your heart was too thick to feel, like his parents in their house with its perfect little lawn.
Harry knew he'd bettered that whole process.
He'd put the callus there himself so that nobody could ever do it for him.
Neal walked through the door sometime about five. His hands were inside of his jeans and his face bore the guilt of someone in a day devoted to work whom knew he was not be as decent of a follower as he should be.
"Hello brother," Harry greeted his friend, making an easy shot.
"I knew I'd find you here," Cassady replied, leaning against an empty stool. No doubt, he'd been hoping it would not be so empty, that some young piece of jailbait would be sitting there before school commenced and she'd have to sit instead at a desk and learn her useless facts to help her get a job if she could not get herself a husband.
"I am working on this fine day," Harry announced. "Always working."
"I've never seen you work a day in your life," his friend scoffed in amused annoyance.
"This is work," Harry laughed and took a drink from the mug perched oh so precariously on the rim of the table before he returned it to an even more dangerous position. "I consider it work of the highest calling infact. Who else would there be to teach an arrogant working class of fools that they can be duped out of their cash so easily? I am a teacher, no a minister of the highest order and lordy ain't it hard."
He made another shot, more difficult this time and took a drag on his cigarette after narrowly missing failure.
There was no comment in retaliation, just silence. Harry made two more moves before looking at his companion, the man whom was too lazy to keep up his side of the deal lf companionship.
There was a frown that was no sun but a cloud of doom on his features, about as close to becoming in time those of the day's early hustle as the mug was to falling off the table and on to the floor.
Cassady's relationship with Joan wasn't going easy at all apparently.
"You look old, ugly and tired," Harry remarked.
"What else would I be after dredging away in a tire factory?" Neal angrily commented.
"And then you work away on your poetry," he laughed brittley in return.
"That isn't work, that's freedom," Neal Cassady replied.
Harry studied his friend's face and placed the cue between the sudden ground made of his own touching shoes. He folded his hands atop of it and then rested his chin on top of them too, looking off thoughtfully and in consideration. Suddenly, he broke into rhyme, as if to prove he too was free. "Work is too laborious, I'd rather be victorious, dig up some Dolores, then ravage her clitoris."
Neal broke out in raucous laughter, delighted. "You make that up yourself, Harry?"
The barfly nodded and turned his eyes on to the lawn of green with its colorful and always moving set of round houses. "Either that or I read it on a bathroom wall somewhere."
The white ball struck again, the houses gone moving on the green, and Harry wished that all pieces of real estate could be like that. And when you got tired of one, you simply sent it off to some corner pocket.
Eventually, Neal tired of waiting for some piece of pie to walk through the door and joined him in a game. It was obvious to Harry that his friend was nearing a crossroads of sorts: to either choose a lawn that needed cutting or that which never did.
It didn't need to be green even. It could be gray and and forever moving under you.
As long as it was always moving and had no fences.
Soon Neal Cassady would need to choose and Harry sighed wearily, knowing it was up to him to be the road sign which pointed him in the right direction.
His work was never done it would seem.