The Lost Weekend (15 page)

Thank God it was cool. Cold even. It would help keep him going as far as 58th and back. He hadn’t worn a top-coat on purpose, because he knew that by the time he reached the corner, only half a block away, he would be sweating like a man in a fever-cabinet. So he sweated now. He made the corner and turned north into the swarming clanging shouting hell that was 2nd Avenue on a Saturday morning.

He passed the liquor store without a glance (it could wait, he’d be back); the A & P where Mr. Wallace stood in the window and tried to wave to him, without a glance; the bar-and-grill of his friend Sam, without a glance; the delicatessen where he once owed and maybe still owed Mr. Schultz ten dollars, without a glance; passed all these places without noticing on purpose, because if he took his eyes off the objective before him he would sink to the sidewalk. The three dimly gold balls hung out over the street far ahead, three and a half blocks away, on his side of the street; but as long as he fixed them with his eye and doggedly put one foot in front of the other (taking deep breaths to still, if he could, the pounding heart), he knew they were drawing nearer. Overhead the L roared like tons of coal rushing down iron chutes.

At 56th he paused at the crosswalk. His nerves were so jumpy he didn’t dare trust his senses. He looked again and again at the traffic-light to make sure before leaving the safety of the curb, and even then wasn’t sure. He stepped down into the street, then quickly back up on the curb again. He was far from blind, he couldn’t ask anybody to take him across. He couldn’t have spoken to anybody to ask. He started again, and horns shrilled anger at him, brakes slammed on with a screech of rubber.

How many times on mornings such as this, mornings in other cities as well as New York, had he taken such walks. Mornings when he truly didn’t know if he was going to give way in a faint
after the next step, much less before he reached his destination—liquor store, pawnshop, bar, bed. Mornings of preposterous inexplicable panic because somebody was going to intercept his glance in an unguarded moment and look him squarely in the eye. Walking along the Esplanade in Boston, he saw a man emerge from a comfort-station and begin coming his way. The man was still some distance off but the two were going to meet and pass each other, there was no way out, how was he going to be able to go through with it, get by and past? If the man caught his eye, looked at him, spoke to him, he would fall down. He fixed his gaze on the Charles River bridge far off and walked on in a blind and dumb daze, his teeth tight shut, his hands clenched stiffly at his sides.… Starting out along Commercial Street in Provincetown to find one of the Portuguese fishermen and buy a pint of the grappa-like drink they called
prune
, what a haven the little alleys that ran off to the right, away from the sea, alleys in which he could idle or rest a moment till the approaching stranger or strangers, on their way into P-town, had gone by.… Here there was no escape from the crowd of looking strangers; you stared straight ahead and went on; and if you did not see them looking, perhaps they were not.

He smelled the oily pickly fishy smells of delicatessens. He passed the little antique shops of charming, chipped, expensive junk; in each, a faultlessly dressed immaculate young man idled in the window, watching the street. The chain-stores were so much like the chain-stores back home, with exactly the same red or yellow fronts of his home town, that he did not dare think of them. A man stood in his way and he turned to look at a window display of refined wedding-invitations, the Commercial & Society Print. Every few feet there was a bar—cottagey, some; others saloony like the old days. The sidewalks were thick with women with Scotties and dachshunds and women with kids.

He turned into the entrance of Rabinowitz’s and bumped into an iron gate. He stood back and looked up. An iron sliding-gate had been drawn and locked across the entrance to the shop.

He gazed at the windows stacked high with luggage and fishing-rods, baseball gloves, watches and jewelry, guitars. He looked at the locked gate. Was somebody dead? He turned north again.

A cruel and fiendish trick but somewhere along the way there would be another. The Avenue was lousy with pawnshops. He squinted far ahead into the distance; and sure enough, several blocks off, three golden balls hung over the sidewalk on the other side of the street. He started out, and at once ran into the inferno that was 59th.

Trucks with coughing klaxons speeded up, here, to make the grade to the bridge, the vast resounding grinding structure of the Queensboro bridge. The traffic was incoherent bedlam. Trolleys danged and clanged up the slope. Overhead the L exploded periodically with the supernatural rush and roar of a rocket-train out of the comics. His eyes fixed on his goal, he passed through it all like a sleepwalker in a nightmare, shaken by every insane noise but with one increasing purpose in his reeling mind: to reach the end of the dream and wake up.

He staggered up the slight rise of ground to 60th Street and into a sidewalk world again of vegetable and fruit markets like pushcarts; bakeries, florists, funeral parlors, stores for rent, tinsmiths and paint shops and thrift shops. The smells. The sights. The dyed-hair and wigs; the poor; the nigger-pink-and-green playsuits; the hatless bald men carrying groceries home; the blind musicians; the broad broad women, the million bandanaed women, the million pregnant women. The noise. And in the intervals between trains passing overhead, the sound of the L on 3rd Avenue a block away, like the faraway thunder of surf.

What fiend ever gave the name portable to a portable. It was a dead weight that dragged you down, held you back, it pulled your arm out of the shoulder-socket, it fixed you fast to one spot in the sidewalk. It was a solid block of lead, but lead that would become pure gold if only you could drag it far enough. The sweat
was running down his back in little trickles, he felt it drop from his armpits inside his shirt, his feet burned as if the sidewalks were hot lava.

The three golden balls were above his head. The entrance to the shop (not so good a one as Mr. Rabinowitz’s but a pawnshop all the same, with a cash-register in the rear) was shuttered with a grey iron gate, fixed with a padlock. He gave the place no more than a sidelong glance, fearful that somebody would see him looking, see that he had been thwarted, think “Sure, some drunk caught short, out to hock something so he can start over again.” He affected indifference; smiled to himself as if he were amused; he had only paused anyhow to see what these funny places looked like. Almost casually he shifted the handle of the typewriter to his left hand and went on.

Down each street to the right he caught glimpses of trees and lovely house-fronts, charming façades of grey or tan or pink or black, some with little white iron balconies: the tenement homes of the rich. He turned from these vistas and squinted into the distance ahead. He found what he was looking for. Perhaps five blocks away, maybe four—you couldn’t tell.

The vast dark-red structure set in the whole block of 65th and 66th—Cable & Power Station No. 1. It looked like the fort in the bay of Naples, looked older and more permanent than anything he’d ever seen in New York, built to remain long after the last pawnshop had been closed forever. Kids had covered the base of the walls with chalk, communicating to one another and to the adult indifferent world the gossip, imprecations, and yearnings of their kind. “Richard Adams loves Sandra Gold.” “F--- you!” “Miss Ellison of P.S. 82 is going to die next week—you watch!” He passed these by and left them behind.

Passed the wide doors of garages where fine cars gleamed and glowed inside in the dark; passed the diners and restaurants; the American flags and the red-white-&-blue bunting; the vacant shops; the barbers and hairdressers; the drugstores; the vision of
the future that was the New York Hospital down 68th and 69th Streets; the radio repair and electricians; the laundries, the tailors, the furriers, the cleaners and dyers; the bars (taverns, cafés, grills, casinos); the pushcarts, the bowling alleys, the trunk shops; the brau halls, the cider stubes, the lieder clubs, the turnvereins and singvereins; the one-arm joints; the movie dumps.

He wondered if there was anywhere in all this pushing mob one like himself. Did he too pass along with the awful calm desperation that lies just this side of the breaking-point? The unhuman control of the somnambulist? Would he too jump out of his skin or let go his bowels or drop in a sweaty heap on the sidewalk if someone approached to ask him a direction? Was he unnoticed too? Or spied upon, trailed, spotted every minute, watched but not watched over by someone in the crowd, who followed along behind, waiting for the collapse? But he did not collapse, he would walk like this till Doomsday if necessary, they were not going to see him fall. His whole frame shook as the L trains pounded overhead. It was like walking directly underneath a gigantic bowling-alley, with the bowls constantly thundering and the pins crashing together with ear-splitting
craacks
as the trains braked at the platforms.

He was reminded dully of a scene in
The Big Parade
years ago (was everything in fiction or in film more real to him than fact?) in which the American troops were shown advancing across a wooded slope into battle: walking slowly doggedly on, their guns in their hands, their grim faces set: plodding straight ahead in a kind of frightful and relentless monotony, undeterred by bursting shrapnel, smoke, gas, tank-fire, or their own dead.… He did not push his way through the crowds. He stumbled on, but carefully, moving clumsily but accurately for a gap or an opening, drawing himself up and turning sideways to avoid being pushed or bumped by the mountainous mothers; by the roller-skating terrors of brats; the carriages with the flushed sleeping babies; the busily chatting little girls, arms entwined, wandering absently
along as if in an open field of daisies; the pathetic little stringy-haired girls in glasses or braces; the healthy sexy aggressive little girls with red fingernails; the deep-throated boys; the men in polo shirts with bobbing breasts; the young sad snappish fathers; the cops; the darting, screaming, gawping or melancholy kids; the Germans, the Jews; the young women in satin dresses and black watered-silk; the fat women with high shoes; the old old-world women with faraway eyes; the skinny chalk-white women; the waddling broad enormous women like vats of flesh. An Italian woman suddenly dashed away from a pushcart, grabbed his arm and screamed in his ear, screamed in shattering dactyls: “
Mis
ter he’s
chea
ting me
Mis
ter he’s
chea
ting me
you
help me
you
help me
you
help me!” He recoiled in panic and stumbled off.

The grey iron gate was drawn across the entrance to the pawnshop. (He was Hans Castorp lost in the blinding suffocating snowstorm in the mountains back of the Berghof, returning after a bewildered circuit to the hay-hut or shepherd’s shelter he had passed before, describing some great silly arc that turned back to where it had its beginning, like the long weekend itself.) He fingered the small lock absently a moment, showing no trace of his growing rage. Who was insane? Not he! Pawnshops were open on Saturday, he wasn’t that crazy!
Sure
Saturday was their Sabbath but catch a Jew closing his shop on the best day for business in the week!

He gazed through the glass. Nothing in this world could look more pathetic than fishing-rods on 2nd Avenue. Dozens of them hung in the window, forming a fringe across the front. Back of and through the fringe could be seen violins, mandolins, banjos, guitars, zithers, musical instruments of all kinds. A gaudy hammered-silver cocktail-set, its monogram partly effaced (M. Mc.?), stood among the baseball gloves and the catchers’ masks. There was a portable typewriter plastered with the peeling souvenirs of European travel. An enormous accordion spilled itself out in the corner of the window like an exhausted Jack-in-the-box. Dozens
of glittering watches hung on little white cards. Hundreds of other white cards displayed the glass and flash of diamond rings. A mink lay curled up like a mink asleep on the round disk of a small ancient phonograph whose horn had been removed to bring it up-to-date. He raised his head and his own melancholy face gazed back at him from an old-fashioned shaving-mirror, exactly like the mirror of his father’s that still stood on the bathroom shelf back home in his mother’s house. His fingers were on fire from the burning pull of the leather strap in his hand. How near was the next one?…

The street to the left was strung with flags and electric-light bulbs for some neighborhood fair or religious holiday. A shoeless drunk lay half-in half-out of a stairway; mothers and children stepped over and around him, unnoticing. The second-story windows across the way bulged with leaning women, dirty curtains, stained bedding, men in underwear reading tabloids. The cruising cabs were like mobile individual gardens of red and yellow lights. An ambulance careened in and out of the L pillars, its dang-danging bell scarcely heard in the grinding roar from above. He studied the distance ahead for three golden balls, and an idiotic story came into his mind.…

A story from the 4th- or 5th-Grade Reader—a little boy in the late afternoon, in the early evening, at sundown, had strayed too far from home. He wandered over the neighboring yet foreign hills. On a hill in the distance he saw a house with golden windows: the lowering sun struck the house and fired the panes with gold. He descended into a little valley and climbed up to the house; and the house had panes of glass no more gold than his own drab house at home. But there, in the distance again, was another house with golden windows, and again he started out; and again the golden windows changed to colorless glass as he came near. But still another, on another hill—and so on; till finally he saw that his own house, far on the horizon, had windows of gold such as none of the others had had. Back he hurried;
and found them, alas, plain glass as always; but he was home, and happy, and safe.…

Idiotic and insulting and why in Christ’s name did he have to think of such a thing now! He was drenched with sweat, panting for breath, but so resolved, now more than ever in his desperation, to find that pawnshop open (they couldn’t
all
have a death in the family) that he did not even feel the hot ache in his calves and his back.