but realizing that I wasn’t
an intellectual or a political
idealist
I backed off on that
one
later.
I was a reader
then
going from room to
room: literature, philosophy,
religion, even medicine
and geology.
early on
I decided to be a writer,
I thought it might be the easy
way
out
and the big boy novelists didn’t look
too tough to
me.
I had more trouble with
Hegel and Kant.
the thing that bothered
me
about everybody
is that they took so long
to finally say
something lively and/
or
interesting.
I thought I had it
over everybody
then.
I was to discover two
things:
a) most publishers thought that anything
boring had something to do with things
profound.
b) that it would take decades of
living and writing
before I would be able to
put down
a sentence that was
anywhere near
what I wanted it to
be.
meanwhile
while other young men chased the
ladies
I chased the old
books.
I was a bibliophile, albeit a
disenchanted
one
and this
and the world
shaped me.
I lived in a plywood hut
behind a roominghouse
for $3.50 a
week
feeling like a
Chatterton
stuffed inside of some
Thomas
Wolfe.
my greatest problem was
stamps, envelopes, paper
and
wine,
with the world on the edge
of World War II.
I hadn’t yet been
confused by the
female, I was a virgin
and I wrote from 3 to
5 short stories a week
and they all came
back
from The New Yorker, Harper’s,
The Atlantic Monthly.
I had read where
Ford Madox Ford used to paper
his bathroom with his
rejection slips
but I didn’t have a
bathroom so I stuck them
and when it got so stuffed with them
I could barely
open it
I took all the rejects out
and threw them
away along with the
stories.
still
the old L.A. Public Library remained
my home
and the home of many other
bums.
we discreetly used the
restrooms
and the only ones of
us
to be evicted were those
who fell asleep at the
library
tables—nobody snores like a
bum
unless it’s somebody you’re married
to.
well, I wasn’t quite a
bum. I had a library card
and I checked books in and
out
large
stacks of them
always taking the
limit
allowed:
Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence,
e.e. cummings, Conrad Aiken, Fyodor
Dos, Dos Passos, Turgenev, Gorky,
H.D., Freddie Nietzsche,
Schopenhauer,
Steinbeck,
Hemingway,
and so
forth …
I always expected the librarian
to say, “you have good taste, young
man …”
but the old fried and wasted
bitch didn’t even know who she
was
let alone
me.
but those shelves held
tremendous grace: they allowed
me to discover
the early Chinese poets
like Tu Fu and Li
Po
who could say more in one
line than most could say in
thirty or
a hundred.
Sherwood Anderson must have
read
these
too.
I also carried the Cantos
in and out
and Ezra helped me
strengthen my arms if not
my brain.
that wondrous place
the L.A. Public Library
it was a home for a person who had had
a
home of
hell
BROOKS TOO BROAD FOR LEAPING
FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD
POINT COUNTER POINT
THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER
James Thurber
John Fante
Rabelais
de Maupassant
some didn’t work for
me: Shakespeare, G. B. Shaw,
Tolstoy, Robert Frost, F. Scott
Fitzgerald
me
than Sinclair Lewis
and I considered Gogol and
Dreiser complete
fools
but such judgments come more
from a man’s
forced manner of living than from
his reason.
the old L.A. Public
most probably kept me from
becoming a
suicide
a bank
robber
a
wife-
beater
a butcher or a
motorcycle policeman
and even though some of these
might be fine
it is
thanks
to my luck
and my way
that this library was
there when I was
young and looking to
hold on to
something
when there seemed very
little
about.
and when I opened the
newspaper
and read of the fire
which
destroyed the
library and most of
its contents
I said to my
wife: “I used to spend my
time
there …”
THE PRUSSIAN OFFICER
THE DARING YOUNG MAN ON THE FLYING TRAPEZE
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN.
I made practice runs down to skid row to get ready for my future. I didn’t like what I saw down there. Those men and women had no special daring or brilliance. They wanted what everybody else wanted. There were also some obvious mental cases down there who were allowed to walk the streets undisturbed. I had noticed that both in the very poor and very rich extremes of society the mad were often allowed to mingle freely. I knew that I wasn’t entirely sane. I still knew, as I had as a child, that there was something strange about myself. I felt as if I were destined to be a murderer, a bank robber, a saint, a rapist, a monk, a hermit. I needed an isolated place to hide. Skid row was disgusting. The life of the sane, average man was dull, worse than death. There seemed to be no possible alternative. Education also seemed to be a trap. The
little education I had allowed myself had made me more suspicious. What were doctors, lawyers, scientists? They were just men who allowed themselves to be deprived of their freedom to think and act as individuals. I went back to my shack and drank …
Sitting there drinking, I considered suicide, but I felt a strange fondness for my body, my life. Scarred as they were, they were mine. I would look into the dresser mirror and grin: if you’re going to go, you might as well take eight, or ten or twenty of them with you …
It was a Saturday night in December. I was in my room and I drank much more than usual, lighting cigarette after cigarette, thinking of girls and the city and jobs, and of the years ahead. Looking ahead I liked very little of what I saw. I wasn’t a misanthrope and I wasn’t a misogynist but I liked being alone. It felt good to sit alone in a small space and smoke and drink. I had always been good company for myself.
Then I heard the radio in the next room. The guy had it on too loud. It was a sickening love song.
“Hey, buddy!” I hollered, “turn that thing down!”
There was no response.
I walked to the wall and pounded on it.
“I SAID, ‘TURN THAT FUCKING THING DOWN!’”
The volume remained the same.
I walked outside to his door. I was in my shorts. I raised my leg and jammed my foot into the door. It burst open. There were two people on the cot, an old fat guy and an old fat woman. They were fucking. There was a small candle burning. The old guy was on top. He stopped and turned his head and looked. She looked up from underneath him. The place was very nicely fixed-up with curtains and a little rug.
“Oh, I’m sorry …”
I closed their door and went back to my place. I felt terrible. The poor had a right to fuck their way through their bad dreams. Sex and drink, and maybe love, was all they had.
I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios … We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.
A small cat walked by, stopped at my door and looked in. The eyes were lit by the moon: pure red like fire. Such wonderful eyes.
“Come on, kitty …” I held my hand out as if there were food in it. “Kitty, kitty …”
The cat walked on by.
I heard the radio in the next room shut off.
I finished my wine and went outside. I was in my shorts as before. I pulled them up and tucked in my parts. I stood before the other door. I had broken the lock. I could see the light from the candle inside. They had the door wedged closed with something, probably a chair.
I knocked quietly.
There was no answer.
I knocked again.
I heard something. Then the door opened.
The old fat guy stood there. His face was hung with great folds of sorrow. He was all eyebrows and mustache and two sad eyes.
“Listen,” I said, “I’m very sorry for what I did. Won’t you and your girl come over to my place for a drink?”
“No.”
“Or maybe I can bring you both something to drink?”
“No,” he said, “please leave us alone.”
He closed the door.
I awakened with one of my worst hangovers. I usually slept until noon. This day I couldn’t. I dressed and went to the bathroom in the main house and made my toilet. I came back out, went up the alley and then down the stairway, down the cliff and into the street below.
Sunday, the worst god-damned day of them all.
I walked over to Main Street, past the bars. The B-girls sat near the doorways, their skirts pulled high, swinging their legs, wearing high heels.
“Hey, honey, come on in!”
Main Street, East 5th, Bunker Hill. Shitholes of America.
There was no place to go. I walked into a Penny Arcade. I walked around looking at the games but had no desire to play any of them. Then I saw a Marine at a pinball machine. Both his hands gripped the sides of the machine, as he tried to guide the ball with body-English. I walked up and grabbed him by the back of his collar and his belt.
“Becker, I demand a god-damned rematch!”
I let go of him and he turned.
“No, nothing doing,” he said.
“Two out of three.”
“Balls,” he said, “I’ll buy you a drink.”
We walked out of the Penny Arcade and down Main Street. A B-girl hollered out from one of the bars, “Hey, Marine, come on in!”
Becker stopped. “I’m going in,” he said.
“Don’t,” I said, “they are human roaches.”
“I just got paid.”
“The girls drink tea and they water your drinks. The prices are double and you never see the girl afterward.”
“I’m going in.”
Becker walked in. One of the best unpublished writers in America, dressed to kill and to die. I followed him. He walked up to one of the girls and spoke to her. She pulled her skirt up, swung her high heels and laughed. They walked over to a booth in a corner. The bartender came around the bar to take their order. The other girl at the bar looked at me.
“Hey, honey, don’t you wanna play?”
“Yeah, but only when it’s my game.”
“You scared or queer?”
“Both,” I said, sitting at the far end of the bar.
There was a guy between us, his head on the bar. His wallet was gone. When he awakened and complained, he’d either be thrown out by the bartender or handed over to the police.
After serving Becker and the B-girl the bartender came back behind the bar and walked over to me.
“Yeh?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeh? What ya want in here?”
“I’m waiting for my friend,” I nodded at the corner booth.
“You sit here, you gotta drink.”
“O.K. Water.”
The bartender went off, came back, set down a glass of water.
“Two bits.”
I paid him.
The girl at the bar said to the bartender, “He’s queer or scared.”
The bartender didn’t say anything. Then Becker waved to him and he went to take their order.
The girl looked at me. “How come you ain’t in uniform?”
“I don’t like to dress like everybody else.”
“Are there any other reasons?”
“The other reasons are my own business.”
“Fuck you,” she said.
The bartender came back. “You need another drink.”
“O.K.,” I said, slipping another quarter toward him.
We found another bar near the bus depot. It wasn’t a hustle joint. There was just a barkeep and five or six travelers, all men. Becker and I sat down.
“It’s on me,” said Becker.
“Eastside in the bottle.”
Becker ordered two. He looked at me.
“Come on, be a man, join up. Be a Marine.”
“I don’t get any thrill trying to be a man.”
“Seems to me you’re always beating up on somebody.”
“That’s just for entertainment.”
“Join up. It’ll give you something to write about.”
“Becker, there’s always something to write about.”
“What are you gonna do, then?”
I pointed at my bottle, picked it up.
“How are ya gonna make it?” Becker asked.
“Seems like I’ve heard that question all my life.”
“Well, I don’t know about you but I’m going to try everything! War, women, travel, marriage, children, the works. The first car I own I’m going to take it completely apart! Then I’m going to put it back together again! I want to know about things, what makes them work! I’d like to be a correspondent in Washington, D.C. I’d like to be where big things are happening.”
“Washington�
��s crap, Becker.”
“And women? Marriage? Children?”
“Crap.”
“Yeah? Well, what do you want?”
“To hide.”
“You poor fuck. You need another beer.”
“All right.”
The beer arrived.
We sat quietly. I could sense that Becker was off on his own, thinking about being a Marine, about being a writer, about getting laid. He’d probably make a good writer. He was bursting with enthusiasms. He probably loved many things: the hawk in flight, the god-damned ocean, full moon, Balzac, bridges, stage plays, the Pulitzer Prize, the piano, the god-damned Bible.
There was a small radio in the bar. There was a popular song playing. Then in the middle of the song there was an interruption. The announcer said, “A bulletin has just come in. The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor. I repeat: The Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor. All military personnel are requested to return immediately to their bases!”
We looked at each other, hardly able to understand what we’d just heard.
“Well,” said Becker quietly, “that’s it.”
“Finish your beer,” I told him.
Becker took a hit.
“Jesus, suppose some stupid son-of-a-bitch points a machine gun at me and pulls the trigger?”
“That could well happen.”
“Hank …”
“What?”
“Will you ride back to the base with me on the bus?”
“I can’t do that.”
The bartender, a man about 45 with a watermelon gut and fuzzy eyes, walked over to us. He looked at Becker. “Well, Marine, it looks like you gotta go back to your base, huh?”
That pissed me. “Hey, fat boy, let him finish his drink, O.K.?”
“Sure, sure … Want a drink on the house, Marine? How about a shot of good whiskey?”
“No,” said Becker, “it’s all right.”
“Go ahead,” I told Becker, “take the drink. He figures you’re going to die to save his bar.”
“All right,” said Becker, “I’ll take the drink.”
The barkeep looked at Becker.
“You got a nasty friend …”
“Just give him his drink,” I said.
The other few customers were babbling wildly about Pearl Harbor. Before, they wouldn’t speak to each other. Now they were mobilized. The Tribe was in danger.
Becker got his drink. It was a double shot of whiskey. He drank it down.
“I never told you this,” he said, “but I’m an orphan.”
“God damn,” I said.
“Will you at least come to the bus depot with me?”
“Sure.”
We got up and walked toward the door.
The barkeep was rubbing his hands all over his apron. He had his apron all bunched up and was excitedly rubbing his hand on it.