The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [109]
Okay, I'm movin', take it easy.
You ought to know better than to stay here, Mac.
In the false dawn of four A.M. the milk trucks are advancing' slowly down the silent streets. Red watches the horse chomp at his feed bag, and walks down toward the railroad. At an all-night hash house, across from the black iron mangle of the railroad yards, he nurses a cup of coffee and a doughnut until it is morning. For a long time he stares at the dirty floor and the white marble counter with its coffee rings, the round celluloid cake covers. Once he falls asleep with his head on the counter.
Aaah, I been doing this too long. It's no good steady, and it's no good bumming. Ya lose whatever you want when you start goin' for it.
At first it looks like his period of relative prosperity and then like the tail of the comet, but it turns out to be neither. He catches a job as a truck driver on an overnight freight route from Boston to New York, and holds it for two years. Route 1 wears a furrow in his mind. Boston to Providence to Groton to New London to New Haven to Stamford to the Bronx to the markets, and back the next night. He has a room on West 48th, near Tenth Avenue, and he can save money if he tries.
But he hates the truck. It's the coal mines in open air, it jars at his back and in a thousand, a million tiny jounces, his kidneys begin to go and his stomach is too tricky in the morning to chance breakfast. Maybe there has been one park bench too many, maybe there was too much rain in too many open places, but the truck route is no good. The last hundred miles he always drives with his teeth clenched. He drinks a lot, drifting along the bars on Ninth and Tenth Avenues, and sometimes he spends his free time in one movie house after another, the tawdry second-runs on 42nd Street.
One night in a bar he buys an ordinary seaman's card for ten bucks from a drunk who is about to go under, and he quits his job. But after a week of hanging around South Street, he gets tired of it and goes on a long drunk. After a week, when his money is gone, he sells the seaman's card for five bucks and keeps going for an afternoon on the whisky it buys.
He wakes up that night in an alley with a blood crust on his cheek. When he grimaces he can feel the crust shredding into cracks. A cop picks him up and sends him to Bellevue, where he is kept for two days, and when he gets out he panhandles for a couple of weeks.
But there is the happy ending. He catches a job finally as a dishwasher in a fancy restaurant in the East Sixties, and he gets friendly with a waitress there, ends up by living with her in a couple of furnished rooms on West 27th Street. She has an eight-year-old kid who likes Red, and they get along well for a couple of years.
Red switches to a job as night clerk in one of the flophouses on the Bowery. It's easier than dishwashing, and pays him five bucks more, twenty-three a week. He holds on to it for the last two years before the war, drifting along through the liquid fetid heat of summer in the Bowery and the chill damp winters when the walls leak and the brown plaster becomes stained with gray. Long nights pass in which he thinks of nothing, listening dully to the periodic wrangling passage of the trains on the Third Avenue el, waiting for the morning so he can go home to Lois.
Several times a night he passes through the main room where forty or fifty men are sleeping uneasily on their iron cots, and he listens to the constant soft coughing and smells the harsh styptic formalin and the bodies of the old drunks, a crabbed smell, glum and soured. The hallways and the bathroom stink of disinfectant, and over the urinals there is almost always a drunk retching his liquor, holding dreamily to the porcelain near the flush lever. He closes the door and goes into the card room, where a few old men are playing pinochle around an old round table, the floor under them black with grease and cigarette ends. Red listens to their talk, mumbled and unfinished.
Maggie Kennedy was a fine figure of a woman, she said to me, now, what was it she said?