Morgan 1
Harvey Abrams
The Wal-Mart Professor
By Ian Morgan
English 301M
October 27, 2010
Interview Paper
“My favorite weapon is the spoon,” says Harvey Abrams in a nasally Philadelphia accent that hasn’t been home in a while. He turns the utensil in his hand as he stares at me across the table. “It’s inconspicuous. You can’t walk around with a butter knife in your hand; but a spoon! Nobody suspects a thing.” I hadn’t asked about knives, spoons or any other cutleries, but I had no choice but to listen intently: I was already in his kill zone. Never mind the limp he walked in on or the cane that supported him, he told me I was in his kill zone and I believed him. From his Pepsi with no ice he pulls a plastic straw, bending it in half and holding it up between us. “This is another one of my favorites,” he says as he mimes a jab to my eye, “Just like that, you’re dead.”
I chuckle nervously and scour the Eat n’ Park dining room for possible witnesses. I don’t count on finding any: it seems everyone in the restaurant knows Harvey by name, reputation or both. When we entered at 12:15 AM, the host had greeted us as if we had reservations.
“Harvey! Is it two tonight?” he had asked. They proceeded to pick up on a conversation which had been left off a few days before. And he wasn’t the only one. As we walked across the North Atherton Wal-Mart plaza thirty minutes prior, after the graveyard shift had let out, it seemed every passerby was old friends with Harvey.
“Hey Harvey,” said a hefty man in a Loony Toons t-shirt balancing on his shopping cart in the parking lot next to his wife of an identical description, “This one’s got an autograph.” He motioned to a deck of baseball trading cards he had apparently just purchased. Harvey grinned and seemed used to meeting people who had had him as their cashier in Lane 5.
“Oh yeah, you want me to wipe it off for you?” Harvey joked, peering through his rectangular glasses to examine the card more closely.
“No,” the man shook his head and laughed, “I don’t think you could.” We left the couple examining the remainder of the deck.
“That guy is a real collector,” said Harvey when we were out of earshot, “He always comes in for cards.” Staring straight ahead, there was no sarcasm in his voice and he jumped to the next topic that caught his attention, which was where we were going to eat.
“Do you want to go to McDonalds or Eat n’ Park? The staff knows me just as well at both places.” He walked briskly, jamming his cane into the ground with a grudge. Short and thin, he had not a menacing build; but any respect lost on first appearance was reclaimed on conversation. Harvey is a talker, first and foremost. “I should have been a lawyer,” he says a little later, and I can’t disagree. Along with a personal estimation of over forty law suits in his lifetime, Harvey can and will command a discussion for hours. Our first meeting was spontaneous, but that didn’t stop Harvey from spewing his life story from midnight till four AM. I should have expected as much from a former Penn State instructor.
Harvey warns me from the outset of our meal, and frequently thereafter, that almost all of the information about his past can be found on his “vita” through a hidden link on his web page: “I made it complicated to find just in case anyone was looking for it that I didn't like.” Harvey's life is filled with these unnecessary dramatic supplements. When I first met him and proposed the interviews he responded with a straight face: “I can tell you 90%, but the other 10% can only be published when I'm dead.” The “vita” is a spanning word document that covers everything from his high school education to a comprehensive list of any person who has ever interviewed him, ever. Still, it provides a carefully crafted snapshot of Harvey's life.
Graduating from Penn State in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in Health and Physical Education, Harvey went on to receive a Master of Arts in Teaching degree in 1973 from the University of Missouri, completing a thesis titled “The History of the United States Olympic Wrestling Team from 1896 to 1920.” Harvey began wrestling as an undergraduate, although he never showed an interest for the sport before: “I wanted to be a professional baseball player.” He lettered at Penn State and became a devoted student and teacher of self defense for the remainder of his life: a fact that explains his “kill zone” perimeter. Much of the mid seventies were spent substitute teaching in central Pennsylvania and failing to qualify for the United States Olympic Wrestling team. In 1977, Harvey decided to return to State College to become a Ph.D. candidate; although he finished all of the coursework, his dissertation remains a work in progress today.
Harvey’s eighties were defined by a five year stint at the John F. Kennedy School in West Berlin, where Harvey taught physical education classes and simultaneously worked for the American and German governments. Although his description of this period is vague and sprinkled with winks and nods about classified information, Harvey seems to reminisce with genuine pride. It was here that he met his ex-wife, the mother of his two children; it was here that he almost assassinated an old Nazi for the U.S. government; it was here that he was important. But after five years abroad, Harvey was “dreaming in German” and decided it was time to return to the United States. With his American-born, German-raised wife, he settled back in State College and picked up on his dissertation and subbing jobs. After the birth of his two children, however, Harvey’s tight new domestic life began to unwind. He couldn’t find a steady job and any spare money was getting wrapped up in a growing rare books business he had established in the seventies.
His young wife, sixteen years his junior—“I was 37, she was 21”—was discontented in America and in 1993 filed for divorce after the birth of their second child, leaving Harvey with both children. In 1996 the divorce was finalized, Harvey waiting the statutory two years before agreeing to the separation. Since then, Harvey has spread himself out. In 2001 he became founder and president of the International Institute for Sport and Olympic History (IISOH, an incredibly ambitious design for a museum), and in 2007 he began working nights and weekends at Wal-Mart. In the midst of everything, Harvey has been plagued by bankruptcy, divorce settlements, and an unending string of legal battles which would really irritate him if he didn’t love to argue so much.
Currently, Harvey finds himself in three separate lawsuits. The first is between the IISOH and the International Olympic Committee regarding the use of the word “Olympic” in the Institute’s name: “It’s a battle for the First Amendment and as scholars we cannot afford to lose.” The second is between himself and a former friend who claims that Harvey owes him money: “I counter sued him for $30,000 for defamation.” The third and final lawsuit is against Penns Valley School District for age discrimination: “My lawyer says this is a much stronger case….”
The waiter brings back our meals and begins an extended wipe down of the table next to us as he discusses his children with Harvey. “Bad and getting worse,” he jokes and Harvey laughs. It's late, very late, and my hand is cramping. As they draw their conversation to a close, I can see Harvey ready to jump back into his narrative. I stop him. “I think I'm going to have to review all of this,” I tell him. Harvey nods as I stand up and shake his hand. “I'm going to stay here and finish my meal.” Beyond a few fries, his plate hasn't been touched in hours. I leave him sitting there, smiling at the staff at 4:30 in the morning.
Cash registers beep and pulse, printing receipts in the bleak fluorescent lighting of Wal-Mart as eclectic lines of pajama-clad college students and nocturnal locals form behind the few open registers. The smell of new products, freshly wrapped in clear plastic a thousand miles away, wafts from carts pushed forward toward the exits. Some carts leave packed with a month's worth of groceries, others carry just a few essential items that one finds necessary at midnight on a Thursday; luckily time has no meaning in a 24 hour Wal-Mart.
Through the commotion cuts Harvey's clear diction. It rises with each new customer entering his lane, engaging, asking questions, lecturing. And if the ventilation system that buzzes incessantly at all times drowns Harvey's voice, one can always tell his lane from the others because of the lines. Even as midnight nears, and with it the end of Harvey's shift, groups seem to gravitate to the fast talking cashier that they've heard stories about. “He's an old professor,” says one student, “and he's working at Wal-Mart to do research.” “He's a lawyer,” says another, “He told me he's looking for interns.” And my personal favorite, upon hearing a student refer to an eccentric Wal-Mart cashier: “Are you talking about Harvey Abrams?” I ask. “No, it's not Harvey,” he replies “It's Harvé.” Penn State is a glutton for folklore, be it JoePa, Mike the mailman, or Mrs. Atherton's ghost, and Harvey seems to fit right in: he is the Wal-Mart Professor.
The banter surrounding Harvey's lane in the store is always geared to the customer. A girl approaches the line, her only purchase a giant “Happy Birthday” balloon. “I expect an invitation,” Harvey greets her and she giggles. Another customer is Asian and Harvey tries to engage him by speaking a language I don't understand, but the man responds in agitated English, “Ah, no, I'm not Chinese.” Harvey tries again in another indistinct Asian language and this time the man responds in a similar foreign tongue before leaving. Yet another customer is sent toward the exit, Harvey yelling after him “Wrong answers are automatic disqualifications!” It's unclear what they were talking about.
Harvey claims to be unlike any of his co-workers, who are primarily uneducated, weathered looking men and women “living soap opera lives.” He recounts his first year working when a specific piece of tragedy struck the North Atherton Wal-Mart: “One of the cashiers that I work with every single night was murdered by her son. She was the one who was beat to death with a bar bell and then while she was laying there he stabbed her; and then while she was dying he was reading the bible to her.” Instances like this are why Harvey chooses to “be totally Swiss” when it comes to the social atmosphere of Wal-Mart. He avoids involvement with “management groups, employee groups,” or any other groups that may force him to show his hand to his co-workers. There exists “a very high level of secrecy” between Harvey and the other employees because, even after three years, he refuses to be sucked into the employee network of Wal-Mart.
The first thing anyone notices upon stepping up to Harvey’s lane is his assertiveness. Be it aggressive bagging or passionate argumentation, Harvey is always staged for some sort of conflict. This defining character trait stems from several obvious and not-so-obvious places. Of course Harvey was a fabled wrestler in college, which is what he attributes his competitive streak to; but his upbringing offers a more subtle development. Harvey’s father, a former boxer, killed a boy in a schoolyard scrap and was forever a “pacifist who was afraid to get in a fight with people.” On Harvey’s seventh birthday his father bought him a pair of boxing gloves and tried to practice in the family basement: “I didn’t like it. I cried. ‘I don’t like Daddy hitting me,’ and he felt really bad and I never saw the gloves again.” After working much of Harvey’s youth in a pawn shop job he’d held since the Depression, Harvey’s father got a job literally selling lots and headstones for a cemetery. The irony of a pacifist selling graves was wasted on Harvey, who was more concerned with the fact that he “made a lot of money for the cemetery and himself.” Much like his wife, Harvey’s mother seems to have played a passive role in his life, or at least in its retelling. However, Harvey reveals an old foe who was both instrumental in his development as a fighter and a diplomat: “the Bitch.”
The word “Bitch” is capitalized because, for a time, it was the only consistent proper noun given to describe Harvey’s estranged sister, Sheila Marcus. “I hated, and still hate, my sister,” he says. Growing up in the same house, a house which was inherited and is now owned by Sheila, confrontation between Harvey and his sister was a frequent occurrence. Harvey recalls being asked to tell Sheila to come downstairs for dinner: “She’d scream and rant and curse and yell and I’d go downstairs and say, well she’s yelling again and let my parents deal with it.” Minor disputes like this were formative for Harvey’s approach to conflict resolution. As a personal defense instructor, Harvey teaches his own students to “believe in diplomacy and backing away as the first rules of self-defense.” These ideals, although promoted by most self-defense schools of thought, reflect directly on the environment in which Harvey experienced his first arguments. Over the years, Harvey has maintained some contact with his sister, but the atmosphere has remained hostile to say the least: “If my sister died tomorrow I would cremate her and flush her ashes down the toilet.” Diplomacy be damned; sometimes a well founded grudge is just as important.
But Harvey bears no similar grudges toward his employer. Unlike many of his former university colleagues, Harvey lacks the standard academic animosity toward the Wal-Mart Corporation. Sounding more like a pitch man than a professor, Harvey earnestly believes in the Wal-Mart business plan: “I am a business man; I see things from Wal-Mart’s company point of view. They are trying to sell vast quantities of products that appeal to the majority of the buyers at a certain price point. It’s not Macy’s.” Yet Wal-Mart exists and is thus not impervious to Harvey’s scrutiny. “They have no idea how to do it internationally,” he says, “and I think that is partly because they are from Arkansas.” Despite a shared business plan, Harvey wants no part of the Wal-Mart management ladder. “I work there as if I own the store, but I do not. I’m comfortable where I am,” he says with a shrug. Perhaps Harvey is more comfortable than ever: today at his annual review, he received a forty cent raise and health insurance.