This time it didn’t break me up in the slightest. I went back to the paper and kept finding the two percent of the ads that I almost qualified for. Things like passing out handbills on the street, sweeping the floor in a grocery store, jobs that were either temporary or part-time and that didn’t pay all that well anyway.
When I was done, I stretched out on the bed and closed my eyes. The hotel must have been made out of secondhand egg cartons. You could hear absolutely everything, Whenever a toilet flushed anywhere in the building, it was like being next to Niagara Falls. Sometimes I could hear conversations, either two people talking together just low enough so that I could make out every fifth word, or else some drunk shouting at the top of his lungs. I don’t know which was worse.
But lying there I realized what I was going to do.
I was going to Succeed.
Of course you can’t just succeed. You have to succeed at something, and I wasn’t quite sure what that something might be yet. But the impression I got from the men I hitchhiked with was that one job wasn’t all that different from any other. Once you got past the slave level and actually got somewhere in business, the idea was to take something and sell it to someone else. And it didn’t really make very much difference whether the thing you were selling was advertising space or snake oil or industrial bathroom fixtures. The object, whatever it was, was to wind up with more money than you started out with.
I sat up in bed. I thought of my father and mother, and the life they had led, and where it in turn had led them. I would arrange my life differently. I would be honest and hardworking and stable. I would take as my own personal day-to-day objective the same goal that made all those hitchhikers the same — to finish each day with more money than I’d started the day with. If I had to pass out handbills or sweep floors or pick ticks off horses, I would do it for the time being, and I would make damn well sure that each day’s work brought me at least as much as I needed for my meals and rent.
And meanwhile I would find some job that had some kind of real Opportunity For Advancement. That was a phrase that appeared in a great many ads, and they couldn’t all be playing games. I’d find a job with an Opportunity For Advancement, and I would work long hours and apply myself and go to night school to get that high school diploma and then go on to take night courses at college and put myself through college, and work my way up the corporate ladder in the good old American way, using hard work and pluck and luck and good old common sense and elbow grease to make my way to the top.
And there would be women every step of the way.
My brain spun at the thought. Of course there would be women, I realized. The cheap-but-vital women in whose rough arms I would learn the rudiments of love. The secretaries and career girls with whom I would share idle moments of brief but intense pleasure. And, when I found her, the Right Girl who would share my hopes and dreams, and with whom I would climb the long ladder rung by rung and hand in hand, until together we would enjoy the fruits of success crowned by True Love.
I thought of the joys of True Love, and glowed at the thought. And then I thought of the Untrue Love that would come first, with the career girls and secretaries and cheap-but-vital women, and I began to be moved by these thoughts. The thoughts became quite vivid, as a matter of fact, and quite moving.
But then someone in a room down the hall was seized by a coughing and spitting fit, and that ruined the mood completely.
I burrowed under the covers. A cockroach scooted out from beneath the radiator, which had begun clanking. It seemed to be giving off a whole lot more noise than heat. The radiator, that is. Not the cockroach. Well, maybe the cockroach too, for all I knew. Or cared.
I settled my head on the pillow, such as it was. If there were more than thirty-five feathers in that pillow, they must have been very small ones. The man with tuberculosis (my diagnosis) did his number again.
I fell asleep. Which should give you an idea how tired I was.
Chapter three
The man was mostly shoulders. He wasn’t really big, I was taller than he was, but he had these wide shoulders and no neck at all, and he was wearing a sinister short-brimmed hat and a black suit, and he looked like a Chicago gangster. Maybe he was nothing more desperate than a Chicago mutual funds salesman, but I don’t really think so. I think he was a Chicago gangster. If not, he’s in the wrong line of work.
In which case I know exactly how he feels.
He came toward me, and I picked up the rhythm of his walk and got my timing into gear. When he was just the right distance away, I took the pasteboard slip from the top of the stack and thrust it at him. If it had been a knife, and a couple of inches longer, it would have pierced his left lung.
But it was just a piece of paper and it never touched him. And amazingly enough he never touched it, either. He just kept right on walking and went past me as if I were invisible. I turned to look after him.
“Stay awake, Chip!”
I spun around. Gregor clicked the shutter, and I opened my hand and let the piece of pasteboard float to the ground. My gangster friend had missed his golden opportunity, all spelled out in smudged black letters on a yellow card, and saying:
HELLO THERE!
Your candid photo has just been taken by Gregor the Pavement Photographer! Your picture will be ready within twenty-four hours! Bring or mail this card with the some of one ($1.00) dollar to Gregor the Pavement Photographer, 1104 Halstead! Find out what you look like to others! See yourself as the world sees you!
It was a pretty tacky little slinger, no question about it. And even if you dropped the excess exclamation points and spelled sum right and printed the message in unsmudged ink on a less gaudy stock, it would still be nothing that most people would want to carry with them forever. That few of them were so moved was readily seen by a glance at the pavement to my rear, where any number of the yellow cards presently reposed.
In plain English, there were little yellow slingers all over the place, some of them crumpled, others just plain dropped. Most people dropped them without even finding out what they were, but almost all of them did take the cards when I shoved them at them. The gangster was rare. The average person has trouble not taking anything you hand him. It’s a reflex, I suppose. I don’t know whether the gangster had lousy reflexes or tremendous cool, or whether he was so tied up in his own little world that he hadn’t even seen me. Nor did I have time to worry about this, because I had to pass the next card to the next person, who would in due course add it to Chicago’s littering problem.
The gangster came by around a quarter after four, and there wasn’t another memorable person for the rest of the day. This was my sixth day working for Gregor, and by now a person had to be pretty remarkable in order for me to take any real notice of him. Every day I would see tens of thousands of people, and I would poke yellow slips at thousands of people, and I would poke yellow slips at thousands of them. At first it was such a constant parade of new faces and bodies that I started getting a headache from it. But then it straightened out and smoothed out and the pedestrians lost their individuality. They were just part of the crowd, and I found myself tuning them out the way you tune out anything that’s always there. I no longer really noticed the traffic noises, and I no longer smelled the smell of State Street, and in the same kind of way I no longer noticed the swarm of people. Every once in a while one of them would manage to be more than just another shadow in the crowd. The gangster type, and an occasional cripple, and particularly attractive girls, for example.