Just One Catch (18 page)

“The motives for my decision to go to the University of Southern California remain opaque, but they doubtless included the indispensable one that I was accepted there,” Joe recalled years later. “I don't doubt that they were also evasive in purpose, intended to delay, to buy time. I didn't want … to have to decide right away what I was going to do for the rest of my life.… I felt myself much too young.… Going to college was easier and more appealing than going to work and certainly … more respected.”

With a Pullman berth for a honeymoon bed, and his name in print in the magazine sticking out of his coat pocket, he snuggled with his wife. Together, they dreamed aloud about the far West's lovely hills.

PART TWO
Happy Valley

 

6.
Words in a Box

IT WAS A BLUSTERY
New York early-autumn day. Joe walked crisply across Washington Square Park. Rumor had it that Robert Moses, the parks commissioner, planned to remove the park's fountain and construct a turnout in the middle of the block that could accommodate eight to ten buses at a time. He'd been aiming to route traffic through Washington Square since before the war, despite the Villagers' protests. The man was like a desk general: no idea, and no interest in, conditions on the ground. NYU wasn't much better. Over the shouts and picket signs of the neighborhood's Save Washington Square Committee, the school was apparently going to raze the old bohemian row houses and tenements along the park's edges for a big new law school. It was easy to laugh—as many students did, shuffling by the picketers on their way to classes—at the neighbors' futile demonstrations. Still, the people's presence in the streets, yelling slogans, made for plenty of excitement.

Joe headed for the Education Block building, just east of the park. The latest figures he'd heard claimed NYU enrolled more veterans than any other university in the nation—over twelve thousand—and you could spot every last one of them: rumpled, prim—no longer
at attention
as they used to be in the army, but with tattered vestiges of the old discipline. Sleepless and serious. Above all, serious. They took too many classes. They wanted to learn.

On the corner of West Fourth and Washington Square East, Joe pulled from his coat pocket a letter in a familiar cream-colored envelope, which he'd received earlier that day. Again he read the note, dated September 8, 1947: “We feel compelled to say no to it … Somehow—and perhaps we're wrong—we find it hard to believe that a gang of boys would smoke marihuana [
sic
] right out in the open, especially in their home neighborhood.”

Was this guy kidding? Had he been to Coney Island? Did he ever leave his office?

Joe read further: “One little suggestion, though: are you writing out of your own experience? If you're not, I think it might be interesting for you to try—for a while, at least—to concentrate on people you know and emotions you share.” The letter was signed by Donald Berwick, for
The New Yorker.
The joke was that this latest short story, “Murdock, His Son, and a Man Named Flute,” was closer to Joe's experience than anything he'd tried up until now. It was straight out of Sammy the Pig's pool hall and Mermaid Avenue. He was proud of the story's symmetry: the way the father, a two-bit bookie, defends his racket by telling his wife if he didn't run the numbers, someone else would, and then hears a similar excuse from the man who sells dope to his son; the way Murdock beats on his boy and then gets manhandled by the doper. Well, maybe
The New Yorker
didn't like Runyonesque characters, though Joe had tried the magazine with everything he had, humor as well as grit. It seemed that every week, the cream-colored envelopes showered down on him. Berwick couldn't have taken the time to read these things, could he?

A gust of wind blew leaves along the curb. Joe pulled his coat collar up. On afternoons like this, he almost wished he'd stayed in California.

“Murdock, His Son, and A Man Named Flute”: A blocky title. Maybe it was a blocky
story,
step by telegraphed step. Was it too obvious, lacking evocative power? Still, the practical thing to do was to stick the story in another envelope, send it somewhere else. Don't even think about it. Keep the pages flying.

Early that evening, after classes, he caught the subway to West Seventy-sixth Street, heading to the apartment he shared with Shirley just off Central Park West, near the New York Historical Society and the American Museum of Natural History. Shirley's parents had helped them land this place after they'd returned from Los Angeles. A friend of Dottie and Barney's owned the building, a slim five-story brownstone with a nice new elevator. In their first year back, Joe and Shirley had occupied a small apartment here with a roll-out sofa; then a bigger space opened up, one floor above, with a full kitchen and bedroom. Dottie and Shirley decorated it immaculately, and Dottie often went over to cook for the couple: prime rib, pot roast. Barney helped with the rent, and with extra school expenses. Sometimes, Joe augmented his monthly income by working part-time, after class, in the circulation department of a magazine called
American Home.

Now, at the kitchen table, Joe spread the pages of his latest rough draft, a piece based on the tale he'd heard years ago, as a Western Union messenger, about the fellow delivering telegrams who meets a couple who wants him to make love to the woman while the man watches. He had in mind a story of lost innocence, the education of an adolescent, along the lines of Sherwood Anderson's “I Want to Know Why,” which he'd just read. But he couldn't find the right tone. He'd never been
that
naïve. And what was the point? The rich can be as morose as the poor? Everyone knew that, didn't they?

He wrote, “He had been kept close to home while his father was alive, and it was only recently that he had been allowed the freedom of observation. The world about him was beginning to unfold slowly in a vast and puzzling panorama, delighting him with each new revelation.”

He set the pages aside. He asked Shirley if she wanted to invite guests for dinner that weekend. She liked to entertain. What about asking his writing teacher, Buck Baudin? Buck was just six years older than Joe; he was starting to earn good money, selling stories to magazines. He'd had a couple of pieces in
Esquire
.
Good Housekeeping
paid him fifteen hundred dollars for a story.

It was a matter of writing quickly and steadily. Joe remembered he'd kicked out a draft of “I Don't Love You Any More” in about two hours. He'd fiddled with it quite a bit after that, but this wasn't such onerous work. You get an idea, you trust it, and you go with it. Or so he told himself.

In
The Fiction of Joseph Heller: Against the Grain,
David Seed notes the many direct echoes of Hemingway in “I Don't Love You Any More.” Like Krebs in Hemingway's “Soldier's Home,” Joe's war vet is disillusioned by what he's witnessed: He refuses to play the hero, just as Krebs feels a “distaste for everything that had happened to him in the war.” Like the bored couple in Hemingway's “Cat in the Rain,” Joe's young newlyweds don't know (or refuse to face) what makes them unhappy. It seems Joe had taken his structure from “Cat in the Rain”: The woman in Hemingway's story wants a kitten, just as Joe's veteran craves a pitcher of beer (clearly, kitten and beer are substitutes for
real
solutions to problems). At the end of each piece, the characters get what they asked for. In “I Don't Love You any More,” a cruel husband goads his wife into expressing her misery by refusing to state his own, as Nick does with Marjorie in Hemingway's “The End of Something” (love “isn't fun any more,” Nick finally admits—though he can't say why).

The truth is, Joe didn't kick out drafts; he labored over them carefully, with fine literary models in mind. Quickly and steadily would never be his method, as he was already beginning to suspect. But quickly was how he wanted success to land—perhaps this accounted for his swift abandonment of California: a restlessness, an impatience with the slightest thing that felt out of whack or appeared to impede what he wanted.

He glanced up from the kitchen table at his busy, pretty wife. It hadn't been a mistake. She, too, was glad to be back in New York. He was sure of it.

*   *   *

FROM THE BEGINNING
, Los Angeles had felt like a folly. Early October 1945: The first few days, they'd stayed at the grand old Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard. A celebrity palace (Charlie Chaplin, Rudy Valentino, Gloria Swanson, Kate Hepburn, on and on and on), it was the kind of place you could wander around in for days and never find your way out. Joe and Shirley danced—their official honeymoon—in the hotel's Coconut Grove nightclub, along with hundreds of other ex-servicemen and their gals. Late at night, they ordered room service from the lavish kitchen (in the pantry in which, twenty-three years later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy would be fatally shot). Splashy digs, but they couldn't live like that for long. They were burning through the money from their wedding.

Through the housing office at the University of Southern California, they found a rooming house on South Figueroa Street, near Washington Boulevard, in the south-central section of the city. Once a leg of Route 66, Figueroa ran north-south between the Pacific Coast Highway and the Ventura Freeway. Washington Boulevard extended nearly to the ocean. USC was close, and so was Watts. Faux-Moroccan and garishly painted Tudor architecture lined the streets. The smell of melted cheese and sizzling chili oil came from all the Mexican and hole-in-the-wall Chinese cafés in the neighborhood. The Hellers' landlords, an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter, belonged to an evangelical Christian sect, to which Mrs. Hunter tried to convert Shirley (apparently, she was afraid to approach Joe on the subject). The old woman also confided to Shirley that her husband had never satisfied her sexually, a calamity that sometimes led her to sit on a cake of ice. Shirley began to avoid the woman, and Joe didn't know what to say to the silent Mr. Hunter, who slipped about the property, wraithlike, always wearing a blue or a gray cardigan sweater.

The Hellers had no kitchen; politely, they declined their landlords' offers to come into the main house to use the stove. The newlyweds ate in a Greek coffee shop nearby, as well as in other cafés. Once, they spotted Rosalind Russell in the Brown Derby. But mostly, they noticed all the mortuary monuments on the sidewalks. Cemetery sculpture was booming in the area.

A few years earlier, in the midst of the Depression, bands of “wild boys,” as the locals called them, converged on South Figueroa Street, the site of a large government relief center. It housed itinerants (like John Steinbeck's Joad family) who had headed to California for agricultural work and wound up in L.A., where they scrabbled for jobs in the defense industry. In the mid-thirties, over twelve thousand transients a month descended on the city. These days, nearby Watts still reeled from too many immigrants. “Mud Town,” Watts was called; formerly a sandy, treeless area, it had once served as the L.A. water basin. Estimates said about two thousand people a month, most of them black, were moving in now, displacing the area's former residents, a mix of Chinese, Mexican, and Jewish families. An area covering two and a half square miles, it now had the highest population density of any place in Los Angeles County. Recently, the government had withdrawn its federal housing subsidies, leaving scores of people with mortgages they couldn't afford, and police and local officials trying to keep the lid on a pressure cooker. Sometimes, on his way to campus, Joe liked to digress and walk past the odd towers in Watts made of bottles, broken dishes, and seashells, rising ever higher inside a walled garden belonging to a man named Simon Rodia, an Italian immigrant who said he “wanted to do something for the United States because there are nice people in this country.” The towers redeemed Watts's ugliness, up to a point, turning waste into beauty, but Joe could feel the desperation and uneasiness in the area. Twenty years later, in August 1965, rioting and looting in Watts would claim the lives of thirty-four people. Simon Rodia left Watts and never returned. He wouldn't talk about the poverty and racism he had seen there. “If your mother dies and you have loved her very much,” he said, “maybe you don't speak of her.”

This was not the California Joe remembered from his military-training days. He recalled the pleasure of taking a bus down to Newport Beach and over to the Balboa Peninsula, a mini-Coney Island with amusement rides, pretty girls, and an exciting concoction he hadn't tasted before, frozen bananas covered with chocolate and candy sprinkles. By contrast, L.A.—or at least the patch of it Joe and Shirley squatted in—was, in Raymond Chandler's words, a “neon-lighted slum.” Here, “the bright gardens had a haunted look,” Chandler wrote in his novel
The Big Sleep.
The city offered “the most of everything and the best of nothing”; it was a place where “everything [was] like something else.”

Basically, L.A. was a federal garrison. Government money, feeding the production of military aircraft by Lockheed, Northrup, North American, and Douglas, had turned California's economy into the seventh largest in the world. The poverty recorded in Steinbeck's
The Grapes of Wrath
was augmented now by the frenzy of opportunism traced in Nathanael West's
The Day of the Locust
(intriguingly, both novels were published in 1939, when
The Big Sleep,
an elegy for a clean and peaceful urban West, also appeared).

Joe and Shirley took long walks under leafy carob trees, past neat and colorful stucco houses (as much to avoid the Hunters as to try to find beauty and serenity somewhere). In the mornings, they paused to admire willowy fog curling around bushes and cars. They did not make many friends. Joe was too busy studying to socialize with his classmates, most of whom were younger than he was. For a while, Shirley halfheartedly tried to develop an interest in football, but in the end, she had to admit she didn't give a damn about the Rose Bowl.