The Road to Los Angeles (2 page)

I said, "That's funny."

"It's not here."

I checked his figures carefully three times. The ten was indeed missing. We examined the floor, kicking sawdust around. Then we looked through the cash drawer again, finally taking it out and looking inside the shaft. We couldn't find it. I told him maybe he had given it to somebody by mistake. He was certain he hadn't. He ran his fingers in and out the pockets of his shirt. They were like frankfurters. He patted his pockets. "Gimme a cigarette."

I pulled a pack from my back pocket, and with it came the ten dollar bill. I had wadded it inside the cigarette pack, but it had worked itself loose. It fell on the floor between us. Tony crushed his pencil until it splintered. His face purpled, his cheeks puffed in and out. He drew back his neck and spat in my face.

"You dirty rat! Get out!"

"Okay," I said. "Suit yourself about that."

I got my Nietzsche book from under the counter and started for the door. Nietzsche! What did he know about Friedrich Nietzsche? He wadded the ten dollar bill and threw it at me. "Your wages for three days, you thief!" I shrugged. Nietzsche in a place like this!

"I'm leaving," I said. "Don't get excited."

"Get out of here!" He was a good fifty feet away.

"Listen," I said. "I'm tickled to be leaving. I'm sick of your drooling, elephantine hypocrisy. I've been wanting to abandon this preposterous job for a week. So go straight to hell, you Dago fraud!"

I stopped running when I reached the library. It was a branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Miss Hopkins was on duty. Her blonde hair was long and combed tightly. I always thought of putting my face in it for the scent. I wanted to feel it in my fists. But she was so beautiful I could hardly talk to her. She smiled. I was out of breath and I glanced at the clock. "I didn't think I'd make it," I said.

She told me I still had a few minutes. I glanced over the desk and was glad she wore a loose dress. If I could get her to walk across the room on some pretext I might be lucky and see her legs moving in silhouette. I always wondered what her legs were like under glistening hose. She wasn't busy. Only two old people were there, reading newspapers. She checked in the Nietzsche while I got my breath.

"Will you show me the history section?" I said. She smiled that she would, and I followed. It was a disappointment. The dress was the wrong kind, a light blue; the light didn't penetrate. I watched the curve of her heels. I felt like kissing them. At History she turned and sensed I'd been thinking of her deeply. I felt the cold go through her. She went back to the desk. I pulled out books and put them back again. She still felt my thoughts, but I didn't want to think of anything else. Her legs were crossed under the desk. They were wonderful. I wanted to hug them.

Our eyes met and she smiled, with a smile that said: go ahead and look if you like; there's nothing I can do about it, although I'd like to slap your face. I wanted to talk to her. I could quote her some swell things from Nietzsche; that passage from Zarathustra on voluptuousness. Ah! But I could never quote that one.

She rang the bell at nine. I hurried over to Philosophy and grabbed anything. It was another Nietzsche: Man and Superman. I knew that would get her. Before stamping it, she flipped a few pages.

"My!" she said. "What books you read!" I said, "Haw. That's nothing. I never read folderol." She smiled good night and I said, "It's a magnificent night, ethereally magnificent." "Is it?" she said.

She gave me an odd look, the pencil point in her hair. I backed out, falling through the door and catching myself. I felt worse outside because it wasn't a magnificent night but cold and foggy, the street lamps hazy in the mist. A car with a man at the wheel and the engine running was at the curb. He was waiting to take Miss Hopkins back to Los Angeles. I thought he looked like a moron. Had he read Spengler? Did he know the West was declining? What was he doing about it? Nothing! He was a boob and a bounder. Nuts to him.

The fog wove around me, soaking into me as I walked along with a cigarette burning. I stopped at Jim's Place on Anaheim. A man was eating at the counter. I had seen him often on the docks. He was a stevedore named Hayes. I sat near him and ordered dinner. While it was cooking I went to the bookstand and looked over the books. They were dollar reprints. I pulled out five. Then I went to the magazine stand and looked at Artists and Models. I found two in which the women wore the least clothes and when Jim brought my dinner I told him to wrap them up. He saw the Nietzsche under my arm: Man and Superman.

"No," I said. "I'll carry it as it is."

I put it on the counter with a bang. Hayes glanced at the book and read the title: Man and Superman. I could see him looking at me through the plate mirror. I was eating my steak. Jim was watching my jaws to find out if the steak was tender. Hayes still stared at the book.

I said, "Jim, this pabulum is indeed antediluvian." Jim asked what I meant and Hayes stopped eating to listen. "The steak," I said. "It's archaic, primeval, paleoanthropic, and antique. In short, it is senile and aged."

Jim smiled that he didn't understand and the stevedore stopped chewing he was so interested. "What's that?" Jim said.

"The meat, my friend. The meat. This pabulum before me. It's tougher than a bitch wolf."

When I glanced at Hayes he ducked his head away quickly. Jim was upset about the steak and leaned forward on the counter and whispered he would be glad to cook me another.

I said, "Zounds! Let it go, man! It supersedes my most vaunted aspirations."

I could see Hayes studying me through the mirror. He occupied himself between me and the book. Man and Superman. I chewed and stared straight ahead, not paying any attention. All through the meal he watched me intently. Once he stared fixedly at the book for a long time. Man and Superman.

When Hayes finished he went to the front to pay his bill. He and Jim stood whispering at the cash register. Hayes nodded. Jim grinned and they whispered again. Hayes smiled and said goodnight, taking a last look at me over his shoulder. Jim came back.

He said, "That fellow wanted to know all about you."

"Indeed!"

"He said you talked like a pretty smart fellow."

"Indeed! Who is he, and what does he do?" Jim said he was Joe Hayes, the stevedore. "A poltroonish profession," I said. "Infested by donkeys and boobs. We live in a world of polecats and anthropoids." I pulled out the ten dollar bill. He brought back the change. I offered him a twenty-five cent tip but he wouldn't take it. "A haphazard gesture," I said. "A mere symbol of fellowship. I like the way you do things, Jim. It strikes an approving note." "I try to please everybody."

"Well, I'm devoid of complaints, as Chekhov might say." "What kind of cigarettes do you smoke?" I told him. He got me two packages. "On me," he said. I put them in my pocket. But he wouldn't take a tip. "Take it!" I said. "It's just a gesture." He refused. We said goodnight. He walked to the kitchen with the dirty plates and I started for the front. At the door I reached out and grabbed two candy bars from the rack and shoved them under my shirt. The fog swallowed me. I ate the candy walking home. I was glad of the fog because Mr Hutchins didn't see me. He was standing in the door of his little radio shop. He was looking for me. I owed him four installments on our radio. He could have reached out and touched me but he didn't see me at all.

Chapter Two

WE LIVED IN an apartment house next door to a place where a lot of Filipinos lived. The Filipino influx was seasonal. They came south for the fishing season and went back north for the fruit and lettuce seasons around Salinas. There was one family of Filipinos in our house, directly below us. It was a two story pink stucco place with big slabs of stucco wiped from the walls by earthquakes. Every night the stucco absorbed the fog like a blotter. In the mornings the walls were a damp red instead of pink. I liked the red best.

The stairs squealed like a nest of mice. Our apartment was the last on the second floor. As soon as I touched the door knob I felt low. Home always did that to me. Even when my father was alive and we lived in a real house I didn't like it. I always wanted to get away from it, or change it. I used to wonder what home would be like if it was different, but I never could figure out what to do to make it different.

I opened the door. It was dark, the darkness smelling of home, the place where I lived. I turned on the lights. My mother was lying on the divan and the light was waking her up. She rubbed her eyes and got up to her elbows. Every time I saw her half awake it made me think of the times when I was a kid and used to go to her bed in the mornings and smell her asleep until I grew older and couldn't go to her in the mornings because it reminded me too much that she was my mother. It was a salty oily odor. I couldn't even think about her getting older. It burned me up. She sat up and smiled at me, her hair mussed from sleep. Everything she did reminded me of the days when I lived in a real house.

"I thought you'd never get here," she said. I said, "Where's Mona?" My mother said she was at church and I said, "My own sister reduced to the superstition of prayer! My own flesh and blood. A nun, a god-lover! What barbarism!"

"Don't start that again," she said. "You're nothing but a boy who's read too many books."

"That's what you think," I said. "It's quite evident that you have a fixation complex." Her face whitened. "A what?"

I said, "Forget it. No use talking to yokels, clodhoppers and imbeciles. The intelligent man makes certain reservations as to the choice of his listeners."

She pushed back her hair with long fingers like Miss Hopkins's but they were worn with knobs and wrinkles at the joints, and she wore a wedding ring.

"Are you aware of the fact," I said, "that a wedding ring is not only vulgarly phallic but also the vestigial remains of a primitive savagery anomalous to this age of so-called enlightenment and intelligence?" She said, "What?"

"Never mind. The feminine mind would not grasp it, even if I explained."

I told her to laugh if she felt like it but some day she would change her tune, and I took my new books and magazines to my private study, which was the clothes closet. There was no electric light in it, so I used candles. There was a feeling in the air that someone or something had been in the study while I was away. I looked around, and I was right, for my sister's little pink sweater hung from one of the clothes hooks.

I lifted it off the hook and said to it, "What do you mean by hanging there? By what authority? Don't you realize you have invaded the sanctity of the house of love?" I opened the door and threw the sweater on the divan. "No clothes allowed in this room!" I yelled. My mother came in a hurry. I closed the door and flipped the lock. I could hear her footsteps. The door knob rattled. I started unwrapping the package. The pictures in Artists and Models were honeys. I picked my favorite. She was lying on a white rug, holding a red rose to her cheek. I set the picture between the candles on the floor and got down on my knees. "Chloe," I said, "I worship you. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep on Mount Gilead, and thy cheeks are comely. I am thy humble servant, and I bringeth love everlasting."

"Arturo!" my mother said. "Open up."

"What do you want?"

"What're you doing?"

"Reading. Perusing! Am I denied even that in my own home?"

She rattled the buttons of the sweater against the door. "I don't know what to do with this," she said. "You've got to let me have this clothes closet."

"Impossible."

"What're you doing?"

"Reading."

"Reading what?"

"Literature!"

She wouldn't go away. I could see her toes under the door crack. I couldn't talk to the girl with her standing out there. I put the magazine aside and waited for her to go away. She wouldn't. She didn't even move. Five minutes passed. The candle spluttered. The smoke was filling the place again. She hadn't moved an inch. Finally I set the magazine on the floor and covered it with a box. I felt like yelling at my mother. She could at least move, make a noise, lift her foot, whistle.

I picked up a fiction book and stuck my finger in it, as if marking the place. When I opened the door she glared at my face. I had a feeling she knew all about me. She put her hands on her hips and sniffed at the air. Her eyes looked everywhere, the corners, the ceiling, the floor.

"What on earth are you doing in there?"

"Reading! Improving my mind. Do you forbid even that?"

"There's something awfully strange about this," she said. "Are you reading those nasty picture books again?"

"I'll have no Methodists, prudes, or pruriency in my house. I'm sick of this polecat wowserism. The awful truth is that my own mother is a smut hound of the worst type."

"They make me sick," she said.

I said, "Don't blame the pictures. You're a Christian, an Epworth Leaguer, a Bible-Belter. You're frustrated by your brummagem Christianity. You're at heart a scoundrel and a jackass, a bounder and an ass."

She pushed me aside and walked into the closet. Inside was the odor of burning wax and brief passions spent on the floor. She knew what the darkness held. Then she ran out.

"God in heaven!" she said. "Let me out of here." She pushed me aside and slammed the door. I heard her banging pots and pans in the kitchen. Then the kitchen door slammed. I locked the door and went back to the picture and lit the candles. After a while my mother knocked and told me supper was ready. I told her I had eaten. She hovered at the door. She was getting annoyed again. I could feel it coming on. There was a chair at the door. I heard her drag it into position and sit down. I knew she sat with folded arms, looking at her shoes, her feet straight out in that characteristic way she had of sitting and waiting. I closed the magazine and waited. If she could stand it I could too. Her toe beat a tap on the carpet. The chair squeaked. The beat increased. All at once she jumped up and started hammering the door. I opened it in a hurry.

"Come out of there!" she screamed.