The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [171]
Feeling tomorrow just like I feel today.
Stan Simonsky said he had to laugh when he thought that Studs and Les had gone tonight to the Y.M.C.A. Slug said he couldn’t understand what had happened to Studs. Stan added that he hoped Studs wasn’t losing his guts.
Barney told them to shut up while they heard the song. The black girl repeated the chorus, her voice throbbing with a mixture of despair and innuendoed sex. The house applauded.
A six-piece Negro jazz band went into action, producing an evil orgiastic jazz. The dance floor of the Sunrise Cafe on Thirty-fifth Street quickly crowded, and it became like a revolving wheel of lust, the dancers swaying and turning, every corner and floor edge filled with dancers who moved sidewise, inch by inch, socking their bellies together in quick rhythm and with increasing frenzy. The fellows watched. Their faces went tight with hostility every time a white girl went by with a Negro. They saw one beautiful blond girl with a coal-black, sweating nigger, and they said nothing, only because there were too many shines in the place. Slug said what the hell he was going to dance too. He left, and soon he was socking with a black girl. The others followed Slug’s example, and Red Kelly sat boiling sore, alone with Mickey Flannagan, who slept peacefully, with his head on the table. Red looked about at the empty tables. Then at the dancers. He saw Stan socking with a skinny yellow bitch. He thought the jazz would drive him nuts; the thick-lipped singing and shouts of the niggers grated until he was ready to jump. And the place was like the stockyards; he thought they ought to use a little perfume anyway. He called over a nigger waiter, paid his share of the bill, and got up while the dance was still going hot. As he walked towards the exit, he noticed the snottily suspicious glances he got from niggers, and Christ, how he’d have loved to have gotten a couple of them out on Fifty-eighth Street. At the door, there were four dicks, their faces drawn, waiting, as if they were expecting trouble. As he left, two white girls entered, laughing, with loudly-dressed buck niggers. The doorman told him to come again. Yes, he thought, he’d like to come with a machine gun. He took a cab to a white can house.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I
Studs’ eyes were attracted by a framed picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, around which was written the verse:
Heart of Jesus, my true friend,
Make me faithful to the end.
He wanted to substitute the word healthy for faithful. He looked at his feet where he had just dropped the evening’s copy of the Chicago Evening Journal that he’d been reading. He’d come across a squib telling of how a thirty-seen-year-old man had dropped dead of heart trouble at the ball game. He thought that he had been having pains in his heart, and down around his stomach of late, and he was gloomy and worried, because maybe he’d be having heart trouble and dropping dead, or having to have an operation for appendicitis, or be suffering from ulcers of the stomach or something like that. Maybe his plan to condition himself was just too late, and it was too bad for him. Health was the greatest gift and wealth that any man could receive or have, and when health was gone, all was gone.
He might be dead any day. He might drop dead in the street. He might have already torn all the lining out of his stomach with rotgut gin.
He wanted to live to be a hundred. He could see himself celebrating his hundredth birthday, with everybody he now knew dead, and his great-grandchildren and his great-greatgrandchildren surrounding him. He could see himself at a hundred, hale and hearty, having his picture in the newspapers and telling the reporters, while they took his picture, that he attributed his health to careful living, and explaining how when he had been twenty-two he had laid out a plan of careful living and exercise for himself, and he