The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [402]
“Look at the rain, just like a silver stream from the heavens, Martha,” a sallow fellow with a ruined panama hat said to a girl.
Studs glanced at them, sneered. But she was nice.
“It just looks wet to me,” she said.
“But you don’t see it with the poet’s lyric eye.”
Poet. He better watch himself before somebody slapped his wrist and kidnapped him.
“Now, as a poet, what does it mean, this silver rain, these puny crawling little packages of wet mortality?”
“Oh, Alvin, please.”
Studs sneered at the nut, walked out of the entrance-way laughing to himself. Anyway, he wasn’t like that pansy. He tried to forget the discomforts of wet feet, soaked clothing, the feeling of dirtiness he had. That pansy poet. Silver rain. B.S. A cold rain-drop spattered on his cheek. Some day, some day, goddamn it, if he wouldn’t make the f n world take back everything it was doing to him. Some day he would make the world, and plenty of damn bastards in it, too, eat what he was eating, and in bigger doses. Some day, he, Studs Lonigan, was going to bust loose like hell on wheels, and when he did, look out, you goddamn world!
He lit a fresh cigarette from his soggy butt. He sneezed. He had to laugh, and couldn’t get over what that lily of a poet had been springing on the dame. Tell it to Martin tonight. He sneezed again, and the sneeze made him fear he was getting sick. He felt himself growing weak, and under the armpits he was sticky and clammy. He was afraid of poverty, and the fight he would have to make. He was afraid that he would get sick, die, from being exposed in this rain. He wished, with a weak will, that many things that had been done could be undone. If he had never met Catherine. If they’d never had that scrap and made up just the way they had. If he had never gone to that New Year’s Eve party in 1929. If he hadn’t drunk as much as he had in the old days. If he had only let himself get an education. If he hadn’t lost his dough in Imbray stock. He stepped into the crowded entrance-way of a music store near Van Buren Street and stood listening to radio music. He noticed the faces on the men about him, blank and dull and dreamy, hopeless-looking. They seemed half asleep on their feet. Mopes. Studs muttered to himself. Look out, boys, or you’ll wake up.
He slouched near a window, moped himself, and a sugary male voice sang.
Just a gigolo,
Everywhere I go,
People know the part I’m playing .. .
The song filled him with a soft kind of sadness, and he listened, forgetting things, feeling as if the music was a sad thing running through him.
When the end comes,
I know they’ll say,
Just a gigolo.
And he looked like he would be something of that, marrying Catherine without a job when she’d have more dough than he had. Hot, ragging, snappy jazz music broke loose, and Studs sneered at the sight of a kid of seventeen or eighteen, with down on his upper lip, snapping his fingers, shaking his shoulders, gyrating his legs to the music. Disconcerting and shrill static cut into the music, and then it beat again in quick rhythms. Studs tapped with his foot, dreamily thinking of himself as just going along the same as he had in the old days, strong and tough and with nothing serious to cramp his style and his fun. Studs Lonigan, hard as nails, chased by broads who just begged to lay down for him.
His lips twisted in a sneer at himself, and he thought that he was just a goddamn washed-up has-been. Sneezing again. He was catching cold, and he ought to go home and get in bed. The music softened into a slow and sighing sentimental tune, and it struck at Studs, made him brood with pity for himself, worry, regret. Lucy, Catherine, the days when he was a punk kid. A crooner sobbed with the music. Felt low, walking in the moonlight of a summer night, because she had left him. He now, well, he had gotten something else again. He smiled ironically. If Catherine had left him, he might have felt the song, but he wouldn