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So, when he got the chance, he studied his idols: The downtrodden, the
tempest-torn, the rag-tag, the ugly. He had picked up an understanding of
the human race, by the time he reached managerial status at Sears, White
Oak, that was extremely well-rounded. Surprisingly, he was still basically

an optimist.
One related occurrence happened to him before he reached Sears; he was

working at Vita Foods, where he stuffed pickles into jars, and smoked her-
hing into cans. He worked with about twelve people, one of whom was
about fifty-five, and a well-wrinkled geezer at that. He was a drunk, but he
loved stuffing pickles into jars and drinking pickle juice to sober up. He
would claim to the immediate world that the sobering effect of pickle juice
was God's greatest gift to man, next to Jesus. By lunch he would be sober,
and blue, but he'd be in at nine the next morning, with breath that could
wake anybody up better than three cups of coffee.

One day this man came back from lunch more sober and more bummed
out than ever before. Rufus, on a heroic impulse, decided to try some
instant rapport with the guy, and cheer him up a little. This geezer's wife
had totaled his '58 Chevy pick-up and she was all right when he got home
and heard about it, not a scratch on her from the accident. Now she was
in the hospital with a broken jaw.

Rufus slid up to the old guy and asked, "Got the blues Jerry?"
Jerry whirled around and almost choked, "Jesus Christ, the blues are for
niggers an' fuckin' long-hairs ain't they? Shit."
Rufus didn't say a word. He quit his job at Vita Foods that afternoon.
He went to work at Sears, in White Oak. White Oak is in Montgomery
County, a classy county touching northwest Washington, D. C. He fled to
there, because he felt the people there would be less likely to have "nigger"
in their vocabularies; it being a supposedly socially enlightened area. Also,
with long, long hair being a trend in the more densely populated areas, he
would be less likely to hear "hippie" affixed with an evil connotation. For
the most part, he was proved correct by experience. Montgomery County
had indeed taken good care of itself; there were no inexpensive houses, no
massive crime rate, just quiet people living simply and lushly off of the
uncountable number of government jobs available to executive-types. There
were also many places like Sears to get good, average jobs.