After a year of college (at Johns Hopkins) I dropped out because I thought that maybe I needed to take a more difficult path and get to know the real world. In those days, that was not something that college students with good grades normally did. In retrospect, I think that in a lot of ways the impulse behind this decision was a sound one. But in some other ways, it took my life in some directions that I came to regret.
In any case, I headed for the Midwest, Illinois in particular, primarily because that was unknown territory for me.
Unfortunately, that was the year of the great Eisenhower Recession. Most of the jobs I applied for had crowds of applicants, almost all of whom had been laid off from much better paying work and were fairly desperate. They clearly thought that I was out of my mind for voluntarily putting myself in their situation, and coming to live in a place where I had no family and no friends to support me.
In the Chicago papers there were a number of jobs advertised requiring essentially no qualifications and promising something like $50 per week, which in those days was probably about twice minimum wage.
Unfortunately, these were all door-to-door sales jobs, and the $50 "Guarantee" was simply a scam. The Holland Furnace Company, one of the first door-to-door sale companies I tried, was typical. We were paid by commission, and guaranteed at least $50 per week for three weeks. However there was a two-week delay before the checks were actually issued, which meant that one had to work for three weeks before one ever got the check for the first week's work. But if we weren't making sales they wouldn't let us stay for three weeks, so we'd wind up working for nothing. A lot of the guys, in fact, left after the first week, sometimes even after the first two or three days. I stuck it out for two weeks, although I don't think I ever made a sale.
We were trying to sell people on having the company clean their furnace, which was a legitimate service. But the main goal of the cleaning was to convince the customer that the furnace needed resealing, at the risk of of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Then when the crew came in to reseal the furnace, they would look for reasons to convince the customer that the furnace needed replacing. Of course in a lot of cases, furnaces really did need resealing. And sometimes people really did need a new furnace. On the other hand, there was a lot of pressure on workers to get new resealing jobs and sell new furnaces, and it was quite clear that no one was ever punished for trying to sell customers something they didn't really need.
A lot of people in Chicago had a pretty low opinion of the Holland Furnace Company, as I soon learned when I was sent out to knock on doors. I was told several times of cases where a crew had come to reseal a furnace and then refused to reassemble it unless the customer promised to buy a new one.
I was definitely a fish out of water among these laid-off blue collar workers who were struggling to find a way to survive. The fact that I spoke reasonably correct English, and read books, and had attended a university was a source of wonderment to them. They didn't all admire me, by any means, but many of them had an almost paternal attitude towards me, seeing me as someone who hadn't had the chance to learn what the world was really like, and needed a little protection or at least guidance.
There was one guy in particular who I knew for about two weeks, until we both gave up on the job. He was twenty-three years old and made no secret of the fact that he was married, but he was one of the most overt and constant woman-chasers I've ever known. He couldn't seem to talk to a woman without flirting with her, although if she was married herself he'd stop short of actually propositioning her.
One day when we were hanging around the sales office waiting for the boss to show up, he saw two good looking girls walking down the street and immediately ran out after them and started flirting with them.
When he came back, he reported that they were high school girls and he'd got one of their phone numbers.
The next day, he said that this girl was willing to go out on a date with him, but only if he could commandeer a car.
He didn't have a car. I did.
I refused to lend him my car, but said that if his new girl friend could come up with a date for me, I'd go on a double date with him.
The girl did come up with a date for me (who must have been the ugliest girl in that high school) and we all went to an amusement park and rode the roller coaster. I was very conspicuously not meshing with the other three, and felt like a total nerd. (Which, in fact I was, although the term was not used in those days.)
After that, he insisted that he had to go on a date with this girl without me tagging along. But I refused to lend him my car.
Somehow he managed to borrow a car and went on a second date, and reported back that he had scored with the girl, in the back seat of the car. She had put up some resistance, of course, he reported, but he hadn't let her get away with that. It was clear that in his view of the world, this was completely normal. He had done nothing wrong, as he told it, since there had been no blood stain left on the car seat, proving that she had not been a virgin.
The next thing I heard -- maybe it was the next day, maybe it was later on the same day -- he was really angry. He had called the girl up for another date and she had refused to even talk to him. She hung up on him.
What was this girl's problem? he was asking everybody. There was proof that she wasn't a virgin, so where did she get off making such a big deal of things?
He even made his complaint to the middle-aged waitress in a coffee shop we went to for lunch. He was quite open about the fact that the sex had been forced. For a moment, the waitress was outraged, but faced with his protestation, ``I didn't do anything wrong: she wasn't a virgin,'' she just shrugged and walked away.
Those were difficult days for young people trying to sort out sexual ethics. The authority figures had only one message: Sex is wrong unless you're married. Once you rejected that message, the only real guidance was from the attitudes of your peers. It was understood that rape was wrong, of course. On the other hand, males were expected to be fairly aggressive in their interactions with women. (After our double date, my coworker reported back that his date had told him that I had been much too timid with my date.) The way men usually talked about women expressed the attitude that the only reason for women to exist in the first place was to be fucked, and that a guy was less than a man if he went out with women and couldn't get them to put out. It was also pretty generally accepted that only a slut would actually say ``Yes'' to a request for sex without putting up a fight.
So young men and young women were left to sort things out as best they could. It was certainly something that worried me a lot myself, although since I so seldom actually had a date, it was not a matter of great practical concern.
In retrospect, from what little I can remember of that teenage girl, my guess is that she would probably have been willing to have sex with my coworker without much real coersion, if only he'd taken things a little slower. He would have had no problem getting to second base on that first date alone with her, and then by the third or fourth date he could have gone to third base -- putting his hand between her legs. And by the standards of those days, once woman let a man go that far it would be very difficult for her to keep refusing him sex on the next few dates.
But of course his problem was that he didn't have time to go slowly, because he could never know when he'd be able to have the use of a car again.
Well, that's a charitable way of looking at it. A more realistic judgement, from all I can remember of the guy, is that, even by the standards of his own time and his own milieu, he was simply a sociopath.