Maybe I'd be a bank robber. Some god-damned thing. Something with flare, fire. You only had one shot. Why be a window washer?
I lit a cigarette and walked further down the hill. Was I the only person who was distracted by this future without a chance?
I saw another one of those big black spiders. He was about face-high, in his web, right in my path. I took my cigarette and placed it against him. The tremendous web shook and leaped as he jumped, the branches of the bush trembled. He leaped out of the web and fell to the sidewalk. Cowardly killers, the whole bunch of.them. I crushed him with my shoe. A worthwhile day, I had killed two spiders, I had upset the balance of nature - now we would all be eaten up by the bugs and the Hies.
I walked further down the hill, I was near the bottom when a large bush began to shake. The King Spider was after me. I strode forward to meet it.
My mother leaped out from behind the bush. "Henry, Henry, don't go home, don't go home, your father will kill you!"
"How's he going to do that? I can whip his ass."
"No, he's furious, Henry! Don't go home, he'll kill you! I've been waiting here for hours!"
My mother's eyes were wide with fear and quite beautiful, large and brown.
"What's he doing home this early?"
"He had a headache, he got the afternoon off!"
"I thought you were working, that you'd found a new job?"
She'd gotten a job as a housekeeper.
"He came and got me! He's furious.' He'll kill you."
"Don't worry, Mom, if he messes with me I'll kick his goddamned ass, I promise you."
"Henry, he found your short stories and he read them!"
"I never asked him to read them."
"He found them in a drawer! He read them, he read all of them!"
I had written ten or twelve short stories. Give a man a typewriter and he becomes a writer. I had hidden the stories under the paper lining of my shorts-and-stockings drawer.
"Well," I said, "the old man poked around and he got his fingers burned."
"He said that he was going to kill you! He said that no son of his could write stories like that and live under the same roof with him!"
I took her by the arm. "Let's go home. Morn, and see what he does
…"
"Henry, he's thrown all your clothes out on the front lawn, all your dirty laundry, your typewriter, your suitcase and your stories!"
"My stories?"
"Yes, those too…"
" I'll kill him!"
I pulled away from her and walked across 21st Street and toward Longwood Avenue. She went after me.
" Henry, Henry, don't go in there."
The poor woman was yanking at the back of my shirt.
"Henry, listen, get yourself a room somewhere! Henry, I have ten dollars! Take this ten dollars and get yourself a room somewhere!"
I turned. She was holding out the ten.
"Forget it," I said. "I'll just go."
"Henry, take the money! Do it for me! Do it for your mother!"
"Well, all right…"
I took the ten, put it in my pocket.
"Thanks, that's a lot of money."
"It's all right, Henry. I love you, Henry, but you must go."
She ran ahead of me as I walked toward the house. Then I saw it: everything was strewn across the lawn, all my dirty and clean clothes, the suitcase flung there open, socks, shirts, pajamas, an old robe, everything flung everywhere, on the lawn and into the street. And I saw my manuscripts being blown in the wind, they were in the gutter, everywhere.
My mother ran up the driveway to the house and I screamed after her so he could hear me, "TELL HIM TO COME OUT HERE AND I'LL KNOCK HIS GOD-DAMNED HEAD OFF!"
I went after my manuscripts first. That was the lowest of the blows, doing that to me. They were the one thing he had no right to touch. As I picked up each page from the gutter, from the lawn and from the street, I began to feel better. I found every page I could, placed them in the suitcase under the weight of a shoe, then rescued the typewriter. It had broken out of its case but it looked all right. I looked at my rags scattered about. I left the dirty laundry, I left the pajamas, which were only a handed-down pair of his discards. There wasn't much else to pack. I closed the suitcase, picked it up with the typewriter and started to walk away. I could see two faces peering after me from behind the drapes. But I quickly forgot that, walked up Longwood, across 21st and up old Westview hill. I didn't feel much different than I had always felt. I was neither elated nor dejected; it all seemed to be just a continuation. I was going to take the "W" streetcar, get a transfer, and go somewhere downtown.
54
I found a room on Temple Street in the Filipino district. It was $3.50 a week, upstairs on the second floor. I paid the landlady - a middle-aged blond - a week's rent. The toilet and tub were down the hall but there was a wash basin to piss in.
My first night there I discovered a bar downstairs just to the right of the entrance. I liked that. All I had to do was climb the stairway and I was home. The bar was full of little dark men but they didn't bother me. I'd heard all the stories about Filipinos - that they liked white girls, blonds in particular, that they carried stilettoes, that since they were all the same size, seven of them would chip in and buy one expensive suit, with all the accessories, and they would take turns wearing the suit one night a week. George Raft had said somewhere that Filipinos set the style trends. They stood on street corners and swung golden chains around and around, thin golden chains, seven or eight inches long, each man's chain-length indicating the length of his penis.
The bartender was Filipino.
"You're new, hub?" he asked.
"I live upstairs. I'm a student."
"No credit."
I put some coins down.
"Give me an Eastside."
He came back with the bottle.
"Where can a fellow get a girl?" I asked. He picked up some of the coins.
"I don't know anything," he said and walked to the register.
That first night I closed the bar. Nobody bothered me. A few blond women left with the Filipinos. The men were quiet drinkers. They sat in little groups with their heads close together, talking, now and then laughing in a very quiet manner. I liked them. When the bar closed and I got up to leave the bartender said, "Thank you." That was never done in American bars, not to me anyhow. I liked my new situation. All I needed was money.
I decided to keep going to college. It would give me some place to be during the daytime. My friend Becker had dropped out. There wasn't anybody that I much cared for there except maybe the instructor in Anthropology, a known Communist. He didn't teach much Anthropology. He was a large man, casual and likeable.
"Now the way you fry a porterhouse steak," he told the class,
"you get the pan red hot, you drink a shot of whiskey and then you pour a thin layer of salt in the pan. You drop the steak in and sear it but not for too long. Then you flip it, sear the other side, drink another shot of whiskey, take the steak out and eat it immediately."
Once when I was stretched out on the campus lawn he had come walking by and had stopped and stretched out beside me.
"Chinaski, you don't believe all that Nazi hokum you're spreading around, do you?"
"I'm not saying. Do you believe your crap?"
"Of course I do."
"Good luck."
"Chinaski, you're nothing but a wienerschnitzel."
He got up, brushed off the grass and leaves and walked away…
I had been at the Temple Street place only for a couple of days when Jimmy Hatcher found me. He knocked on the door one night and I opened it and there he was with two other guys, fellow aircraft workers, one called Delmore, the other, Fastshoes.