U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [34]
for lights and everybody ran to their rooms and you got into bed with your head throbbing and you were crying when Gummer tiptoed in an' said you had him licked Jack it was a fucking shame it was Freddy hit you that
-85-time, but Hoppy was tiptoeing round the hal and caught Gummer trying to get back to his room and he got his MAC
By Thanksgiving Mac had beaten his way to Sacra-mento, where he got a job smashing crates in a dried fruit warehouse. By the first of the year he'd saved up enough to buy a suit of dark clothes and take the steam-boat down the river to San Francisco. It was around eight in the evening when he got in.
With his suitcase in his hand, he walked up Market Street from the dock. The streets were ful of lights. Young men and pretty girls in brightcolored dresses were walk-ing fast through a big yanking wind that fluttered dresses and scarfs, slapped color into cheeks, blew grit and papers into the air. There were Chinamen, Wops, Portuguese, Japs in the streets. People were hustling to shows and restaurants. Music came out of the doors of bars, frying, buttery foodsmel s from restaurants, smel s of winecasks and beer. Mac wanted to go on a party but he only had four dol ars so he went and got a room at the Y
and ate some soggy pie and coffee in the deserted cafeteria down-stairs. When he got up in the bare bedroom like something in a hospital he opened the window, but it only gave on an airshaft. The room smelt of some sort of cleaning fluid and when he lay down on the bed the blanket smelt of formaldehyde. He felt too wel . He could feel the pranc-ing blood steam al through him. He wanted to talk to somebody, to go to a dance or have a drink with a fel ow he knew or kid a girl somewhere. The smel of rouge and
-86-musky facepowder in the room of those girls in Seattle came back to him. He got up and sat on the edge of the bed swinging his legs. Then he decided to go out, but before he went he put his money in his suitcase and locked it up. Lonely as a ghost he walked up and down the
streets until he was deadtired; he walked fast not looking to the right or left, brushing past painted girls at street-corners, touts that tried to put addresscards into his hand, drunks that tried to pick fights with him, panhandlers whining for a handout. Then, bitter and cold and tired, he went back to his room and fel into bed.
Next day he went out and got a job in a smal print-shop run and owned by a baldheaded Italian with big whiskers and a flowing black tie, named Bonel o. Bonel o told him he had been a redshirt with Garibaldi and was now an anarchist. Ferrer was his great hero; he hired Mac because he thought he might make a convert out of him. Al that winter Mac worked at Bonel o's, ate
spaghetti and drank red wine and talked revolution with him and his friends in the evening, went to Socialist pic-nics or libertarian meetings on Sundays. Saturday nights he went round to whorehouses with a fel ow named
Mil er whom he'd met at the Y. Mil er was studying to be a dentist. He got to be friends with a girl named Maisie Spencer who worked in the mil inery department at the Emporium. Sundays she used to try to get him to go to church. She was a quiet girl with big blue eyes that she turned up to him with an unbelieving smile when he talked revolution to her. She had tiny regular pearly teeth and dressed prettily. After a while she got so that she did not bother him so much about church. She liked to have him take her to hear the band play at the Presidio or to look at the statuary in Sutro Park. The morning of the earthquake Mac's first thought,
when he got over his own terrible scare, was for Maisie. The house where her folks lived on Mariposa Street was
-87-stil standing when he got there, but everyone had cleared out. It was not til the third day, three days of smoke and crashing timbers and dynamiting he spent working in a firefighting squad, that he found her in a provision line at the entrance to Golden Gate Park. The Spencers were living in a tent near the shattered greenhouses. She didn't recognise him because his hair and eye-brows were singed and his clothes were in tatters and he was soot from head to foot. He'd never kissed her be-fore, but he took her in his arms before everybody and kissed her. When he let her go her face was al sooty from his. Some of the people in the line laughed and clapped, but the old woman right behind, who had her hair done in a pompadour askew so that the rat showed through and who wore two padded pink silk dressing