I mean, how stupid can you be?
I had wanted to save money, and I was saving it, but I was making, say, fifty dollars a week and saving twenty, and at the rate I was going, in twenty years I would still be making fifty a week and still saving twenty, and if you save twenty dollars a week, it will take you approximately a thousand years of steady work to save a million dollars.
(This is figured without what the savings bank ads call The Miracle Of Compound Interest. According to them, if you put your money in a savings account you can’t help winding up rich. I remember seeing a billboard telling what Washington’s silver dollar would be worth today if he had put it in the bank. The figure was something ridiculously high, so I got a book from the library on coin collecting to find out what the same dollar would have been worth if Washington had kept it, and it turned out he would have been better off. But for all the good it did Washington he was even better off throwing it across the river. Or in it. So much for The Miracle Of Compound Interest.)
The thing is, I wasn’t making real progress, and I wasn’t looking for a real opportunity. And it was the same with my sex life, if you stopped to think about it, which most of the time I didn’t. Because while I was having all this pleasure I was still as much a virgin as ever, and I wasn’t coming any closer to not being a virgin. In fact I was actually locking myself out of any chance of losing my virginity, the same way I was keeping myself from any chance of getting a job with a future. See, I was getting satisfied with what I had with Aileen, and in the same way I was getting satisfied with that stupid job and everything else.
That was one thing about the kids in the Horatio Alger books. They were never satisfied. No matter how well things started shaping up, they had the decency to go on wanting more and more and more. So they kept pushing, and whenever opportunity knocked they ran to the door and answered it. If opportunity knocked on my door I never would have heard it because I would have been too busy putting blurry yellow cards in people’s hands or putting my own blurry little hands on Aileen.
Not that I had these thoughts all the time. That was the worst of it — that I didn’t. That I was content with the way things were going. Take a man who is content with what he does and the way he lives and what have you got?
A happy man, obviously.
But that’s not exactly right, either, because I wasn’t really contented, because I didn’t have what I wanted. I was settling for less, that’s what I was doing. I was having little off-in-left-field climaxes with Aileen when what I really wanted to do was slide into home plate. I was getting by in a dumb job when I really wanted to get ahead. And no matter how comfortable that couch was when Aileen was on it with me, and no matter how often that happened, sooner or later I would have to be bothered by the way things were going.
On Memorial Day, a veteran sold me a poppy. He stuck that poppy into my hand just as neatly as I had learned to stick the yellow cards into the jerks’ hands, and I took it like any other jerk, only I couldn’t just drop it on the ground and keep walking. Or maybe I could have done this, but then he would have been within his rights if he brained me with his crutch. I gave him a quarter and he said something about the Last Of The Big Spenders. I stuck the stupid poppy in my buttonhole. That way at least I didn’t have to buy another one.
But when I walked another block, it hit me that I was more a cripple than the guy who sold me the poppy. I don’t know how I made the connection. It came in one quick flash and once I had it I couldn’t let go of it. I kept seeing myself with a leg missing, lurching through life like that.
And I couldn’t stick around with an image like that in my mind.
I waited until the weekend was over. The Sunday paper was filled with want ads, and I bought it and sat in a diner and went through it, and I found what I wanted. It wasn’t a job with a future, either, but it was one that would take me out of Chicago, and I had enough sense to know that I couldn’t stay in Chicago if I wanted to get out of the tender trap I was in. I had to travel, and then I could concentrate on Getting Ahead and all the rest of it.
Monday was a work day, but I took a long lunch hour, and during that lunch hour I went over and applied for the job. And got it. (No big deal — you had to have two heads or something for them to turn you down. They were easier to get into than the Army. More later.)
And Monday night, after old Gregor went night-night, I did everything possible to score with Aileen. I tried to break those silly rules of hers and get something straight between us once and for all, and as usual it didn’t work. I had more or less fixed up a game in my mind, making a bargain with myself that if I laid her I would stay in Chicago but if I didn’t I would go. I gave it the old Upper Valley try and when it didn’t work I took Aileen’s motherly advice to behave myself and be a good boy and make sweet love with her. I got on top of her and rubbed the two of us together in a way we had both grown to enjoy no end. I made sweet love all over her stomach and she danced off to wash away the sweet love I had made, and she pecked my cheek and told me I was her sweet baby and to sleep tight, and she went into her bedroom and got back in bed with the State Street Shutterbug.
I got dressed in the dark and put my extra clothes and stuff in a paper bag. I thought about leaving a note, but I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t either hopelessly corny or slightly nasty, and I didn’t want to be either. I told myself I would write her a letter someday. You can tell yourself things like that as often as you want and it doesn’t cost you a thing.
I sat up all night in different crummy diners, drinking so much coffee that I kept shaking and peeing and shaking and peeing. I was downtown in plenty of time to catch my ride in the morning, and when our car left the city limits of Chicago it wasn’t even noon yet.
So that was three months, and my $27.46 had turned into $191.80, which is better than it could have done through The Miracle Of Compound Interest. And I had spent more time on third base than Ron Santo.
That toddling town.
Chapter six
When i rang the doorbell, the chimes played the first two bars of a hymn. I couldn’t tell you which one. I stood there patiently, wanting to ring it again but holding off, and eventually I heard the pitter-patter of little old feet. I timed myself so that I was whipping off my little blue-visored cap just as she was opening the door.
She wasn’t the girl of my dreams. When you are young enough and horny enough (like me, Chip Harrison, for instance) you can’t even open a Coke bottle without hoping there will be a beautiful girl in it. And on this job I kept waiting for the time one of the doors would be opened by a Neglected Young Housewife, or a Wanton Suburban College Girl Home From School, or an Off Duty Whore. And instead the doors kept being opened by women who stopped thinking about sex the day Hayes beat Tilden.
This one must have gone to school with Tilden’s grandmother, from the looks of her. She was a tiny wrinkled little lady with bright eyes the color of frostbitten lips. Her face cracked into a smile.