"John Kessel - Buffalo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kessel John)

Kessel tries to ignore them.

"Whyn't you lay off him, Turkel?" says Cole, one of
Kessel's buddies. Turkel is a big blond guy from Chicago.
Some say he joined the CCCs to duck an armed robbery rap.
"He works too hard," Turkel says. "He makes us look bad."

"Don't have to work much to make you look bad, Lou," Cole
says. The others laugh, and Kessel appreciates it. "Give
Jack some credit. At least he had enough sense to come down
out of Buffalo." More laughter.

"There's nothing wrong with Buffalo," Kessel says.

"Except fifty thousand out-of-work polacks," Turkel says.

"I guess you got no out-of-work people in Chicago,"
Kessel says. "You just joined for the exercise."

"Except he's not getting any exercise, if he can help
it!" Cole says.

The foreman comes by and tells them to get back to work.
Kessel climbs another tree, stung by Turkel's charge. What
kind of man complains if someone else works hard? It only
shows how even decent guys have to put up with assholes
dragging them down. But it's nothing new. He's seen it
before, back in Buffalo.

Buffalo, New York, is the symbolic home of this story. In
the years preceding the First World War it grew into one of
the great industrial metropolises of the United States.
Located where Lake Erie flows into the Niagara River,
strategically close to cheap electricity from Niagara Falls
and cheap transportation by lakeboat from the midwest, it
was a center of steel, automobiles, chemicals, grain milling
and brewing. Its major employers--Bethlehem Steel, Ford,
Pierce Arrow, Gold Medal Flour, the National Biscuit
Company, Ralston Purina, Quaker Oats, National Aniline--drew
thousands of immigrants like Kessel's family. Along
Delaware Avenue stood the imperious and stylized mansions of
the city's old money, ersatz-Renaissance homes designed by
Stanford White, huge Protestant churches, and a Byzantine
synagogue. The city boasted the first modern skyscraper,
designed by Lours Sullivan in the 1890s. From its
productive factories to its polyglot work force to its class
system and its boosterism, Buffalo was a monument to modern
industrial capitalism. It is the place Kessel has come
from--almost an expression of his personality itself--and
the place he, at times, fears he can never escape. A cold,