The Lost Weekend (16 page)

The cigars, the glass shops, the hamburger joints, the cafeterias, the newsstands, the dishes in bushel baskets, dishes for sale; the Ruppert brewery stretching from 92nd to 93rd, looking timeless and European, like something you checked in the Baedeker and went around to see; the hardware, the framers, the upholsterers, the haberdashers, the key shops (Keys Made), the moving and trucking, the Soda & Candy, the dairies; the stockings set up on the sidewalks (the tables and tables of boxes and boxes of stockings); the chi-chi horror of the flea-markets; the milk-bars, the orange-juice stands, the weighing-machines, the gaping smelly dead fish; the 5 & 10’s, the linoleum and bedding, the cut-rates, the remnants; the Slavic faces, the Negroes, the beautiful Spaniards, the cross-legged idle bums, the cats, the kittens, the barking dogs; the furniture stores, the shoe stores, the pork stores, the stores to let; the analytical laboratories, the trusses and suspensories, the abdominal supporters, the surgical belts, the contraceptives, the sick-room supplies; the watch-repairing, the barber-poles, the million fire-escapes; the smells; the noise of the L like an avalanche of 4th-of-July torpedoes; the jewelry shops, the Chinese-American food, the sheet-metal places, the sport-shoes; the photo studios shedding lambent lavender livid lunar light on gorgeous wop-weddings; the konditerei, the pizzeria, the confiseries; the liquor stores; the closed pawnshops; the interminable glimpses of the Triboro bridge down every street to the right.…

Now wait a minute now wait a minute take it easy here’s one without a gate.

He approached cautiously. He found himself breathing so hard he was sure the panting must be audible. He looked around on all sides to see if he was noticed, then went into the entrance-way between the two show-windows, the entrance free of a gate. He touched the knob and turned it and rattled it and found it was locked. He stood back to get his breath.

He tried the door again. He leaned against it and pushed. He rapped on the glass, pounded the frame. He raised a hand to his eyes and peered in. He saw the banjos, the knives, the guns, the suits, the furs—he saw the cashier’s cage at the back where the money was. He pressed his nose and forehead to the glass, staring. No one looked out at him but a bright dummy in a Tuxedo with a red cummerbund. A raw electric light burned overhead.

He fell against the door as if in collapse.

Two little men in their Sunday-best, with derbies, leaned from a dark stairway next to the shop. “What’s the metter with you,” one of them called in a loud rapid whisper, “what do you want?”

His face broke up into wry wrinkles as if he were going to cry. Somehow he managed to control a helpless rage. He fought for breath, afraid that he would break into a wail if he didn’t hang on hard. He yanked at the doorknob (the glass shook and rattled) and gave way: “Why aren’t you open, what’s going on, why are you all
closed!
”

The two glanced at each other, incredulous, and then one darted his head farther out of the dark stairway and snarled, “What’s the metter with you, it’s Yom Kippur!”

He was stunned. Were they joking? He looked up, not comprehending; and when the man said “Go away!” he shied off, frightened, and turned back as if he had not meant to stop there at all, as if he had got the wrong place. He resumed his way, understanding only that he must walk back, now, go home. Who could have played such a joke as this—and what was the point of it, anyway, what was the point, he didn’t get it, he’d never be able to get it. The strap-handle cut into his palm and he shifted it to
his finger-tips, which at once began to burn. He fixed his eyes far down into the distance of the far swarming avenue and started out. He came to the first street-crossing on the way back and looked cautiously up to see the red or green light before stepping off from the curb. He saw instead the sign marking the street, and now he got it.

He paused, stupefied, and the sweat seeped out under his hatband and ran down all sides of his head—he felt it trickle warm and slow behind his ears. It was 120th Street. But the joke was beyond laughter—or it called for laughter so huge and ribald it was beyond mirth; so loud you couldn’t hear it; abhuman. He stood on the corner in a daze and marveled that he had been able to come so far. All this distance.… Sixty-five city blocks.… He marveled at it, remembering his exhaustion and panic as he turned the corner at 55th Street and started the journey up 2nd Avenue.

He supposed it was comic after all, but comic on a scale so vast there was no basis for human comprehension—it was only awful and stunning. Re-living the torment of those first few blocks (remembering how, at 59th, he couldn’t go another step, and did; recalling his fright at every street-crossing; seeing again in his mind’s eye how far the next pawnbroker’s sign had been, hanging far up the street; how much farther the next), he would never have believed he could have made it. Not all this distance. Soaked with the sweat of that inhuman effort, he stood in the uproar of the traffic almost in smiling wonder and marveled at his feat. People rushed by and around him, clanging trolleys lurched and ground on, klaxons screeched, trucks bounced with a roar on the pavement, overhead the L exploded like a series of land-mines.
What’s the metter with you?—

A joke, of course it was only a joke, they were joking, surely the man had joked, Yom Kippur was always good for a joke, it was just another one of those Jewish jokes; but at a time like this— How could they joke at a time like this? He stood feverish,
faint, his eyes bright and absent, and the typewriter pulling his arm from its socket was like iron drawn to some giant magnet buried deep in the center of the earth, a weight of acid that would burn its way down to China, dragging him with it. He was lost in a delirium of exhaustion, spent and consumed to the uttermost, dead on his feet; till suddenly the joke came again to his mind in all its final meaning: how was he going to get back.

Not all that distance. Not that many miles. What was it—twenty city-blocks to the mile? Or was it ten? Oh no, no, twenty was bad enough, inhuman enough, impossible enough—impossible without the enough, impossible period, not possible. It could not be done, it could not. A nickel was all that was needed, a nickel for carfare, but you might as well dream of a drink as dream of a nickel. You couldn’t have one or the other, you couldn’t ask. There was no one in this world you could face at that moment to ask. You couldn’t get back, that was simply all there was to it. But you couldn’t lie down on the street-corner either, you couldn’t lean against the pole here and gradually slide down till you rested comfortably on the sidewalk, you couldn’t do that, you weren’t a bum yet not yet, you’d never get a drink that way, nobody was going to walk up and hand you a drink, no not even if you were dying, and you were dying.…

Swaying there on the roaring corner, he went into a trance of time that took him at once many miles many years away. For some reason his mother came to his mind, out of the bedlam of noise and the street, and he welcomed the thought of her and thought of her. He leaned against the pole in a kind of daydream for a moment (but only a moment) and thought of her. The too-substantial pageant faded and there was his mother. It was as if she spoke to him; or more, were there and not speaking. There too was he, back in time, a child. He lay on his side in the porch-hammock, curled up in the pleasant chill of a rainy spring afternoon, a sweater thrown over his shoulders, his arms hugging each other across his chest. Some illness, fleeting as it was imaginary,
kept him from school for the afternoon, and his mother half suspected the deception and half played-up to it also—for what reason he never knew, when he did these things, unless it was too much trouble to argue or unless she liked the idea too. She came out once and angrily threw the sweater across his shoulders, murmuring something about catching his death; and later he heard her come to the front window a couple of times to see if he was still covered. He thought of the kids in the schoolroom looking at his empty desk, and he wondered if the teacher was wondering if he was all right. He felt sorry for her concern and loved her for it. He wondered too what they were all doing at the moment and missed them all very much, lovingly, every one. At rare intervals a car raced down the quiet street, its tires tearing through the mud and the wet. Between-times the rain was the only sound in the town. He lay hunched up, pretending to sleep, enjoying the luxurious sense of time-out, feeling the comfortable presence of his mother moving from time to time inside the house, listening to the lovely sound of the rain washing down through the heavy vines of the porch and bubbling and tumbling from the eaves, loving the whole timeless grey delightful careless day. Careless, without a care, not a care in the world, a marvelous dream. The L roared overhead like a bursting dam, but all he heard was the telephone ringing in the living room, his mother’s heavy step as she came from the kitchen to answer it, the familiar creak of the wicker-chair as she sat down, and her low rich good voice as she answered Hello? He unfolded himself to listen who it might be, and all the noise of New York poured back upon him.…

Not much more than half an hour later, very little more than thirty minutes, he dropped the typewriter on the bathroom floor (the case split open from the fall) and tore off his coat and his tie and his shirt and all his soaking clothes. He was working in a rush, in a panic, frantic to achieve his objective before total collapse overtook him. Working against time and exhaustion—beating breakdown, as it were, to the punch—he had fled down
1st Avenue in headlong blind staggering flight (not as fast as he believed it to be, but fast) and so got home. 1st Avenue had been a crazy lucky inspiration: the surroundings and background would be different, the same route not have to be retraced, the time go faster. Of the whole journey back he remembered not one single detail, he registered none of it, he had seen nothing, he had not even traversed it, so to speak, fleeing blind in a kind of vacuum, a deliberate self-imposed self-willed delirium—for if he had stopped to realize his condition, stopped to see the distance yet to go or even the street-signs ticking off his considerable progress, he would have fallen. He was only dimly aware that it was an incredible performance. He had not had the strength to get to 59th Street, he did not have the strength for the journey back from 120th, but he had done it all the same, by—by summoning something more than strength? by heeding something more than fear? It was drink that did it, he could not have done it if it had not been for drink—the lack of it and the need for it—and he might have been spared some of the torment if only he had had sense enough to remind himself of this when so often those waves of sickness and exhaustion seemed sure to drop him. With the promise of drink at the end of the journey, somehow, someway (he’d find that way yet, he always had), there was nothing he could not have gone through. He sprang into the too-cold shower and washed away the sweat.

In a few seconds he was dressed again in dry clean clothes—dressed enough to run down and borrow ten dollars from Mr. Wallace at the A & P, enough to run into the liquor store for a quart and bound up the stairs again with the bottle in his hand, tear off the wrapping, open it, pour, all in the space of five minutes. Listening to the sound of the liquor spilling into the glass, thinking of the ordeal he had been through during the past few hours, how long it had taken, how much it had cost in mental agony and physical sweat, his spirits rose. He held the glass in his shaking hand and almost did not need it. Why didn’t I do this in
the first place? he asked himself with a surprised smile. He had not even thought of Mr. Wallace till after he got back. Think what I could have saved myself. It was almost amusing! If he had been normal this morning, not befogged and benumbed with fatigue and shattering hangover, he would have thought at once of this easier quicker way. What a story that little jaunt would make someday, in the right company. How he would laugh and they would laugh. Don Birnam’s Rhine-Journey. Great! He drank.

Or if he had been normal at all during any part of that long ordeal, if he had not had to summon all of his concentration, all of his energy, merely to set one foot in front of the other at every step, merely to keep his balance and so keep on, he would have realized before he had gone five blocks that something was amiss besides himself. One pawnshop closed, or two—three at the most—would have told him that nothing was in league against him beyond the season, the holiday, the New Year of the Jews. It would not happen again in a lifetime, such a coincidence never happened to anyone, but it would happen to him and it did and it had. That would be the hard thing to explain when he told the anecdote (anecdote!). People would think he had made it up, had picked Yom Kippur to make the story a good one. In any case they wouldn’t care so long as it
was
a good one—any more than they would care to learn or hear of the real, the uncomfortable, the cruel and painful details behind the joke. These would only embarrass them, these they would believe even less than the hard-to-believe fact of the coincidence. And why should they—didn’t he look like anybody else, wasn’t he neat and clean, respectable? Did things like that happen to people like him or them—were they, or he, Bowery bums?

The new drink warmed his stomach, warmed all his whole tired frame, his arms even, his aching legs, and he felt a rising sense of well-being, heightened and hot, such as he had not felt, it seemed, for months. Well, truth is stranger than fiction, you could say—and just to prove it, just to make the story completely preposterous,
you could throw in that little detail of the frantic wop (and don’t forget the dactyls) who clutched at your arm and scared the daylights out of you by shrieking “
Mis
ter! he’s
chea
ting me!” Who would believe that? Nobody. And wasn’t it just as well? Wasn’t it even more fun—weren’t you liked even more—if they sort of got the teasing impression that maybe the story was true and maybe it wasn’t?—if you left it up to them, like the author’s point in
The Guardsman
? They would look at you with a faint tilted smile, one eye partly closed, trying to dope out if you were pulling their leg. You would look back—