Atop an Underwood (10 page)

In this quiet baseball scene something happened. Freddy Burns sulked to his seat in the dugout, and found the leering face of Nick Vickers in his face.

“Listen, Busher, now that you know where you stand around here, you had better get the hell off this ball club tonight!”

Freddy Burns looked up quietly, tiredly. He had played 17 innings of ball, and he was weary.

“I'll do whatever the manager, Mister MacNeill, tells me,” he answered quietly.

“Yeah!” Vickers spat. “Well, I'm telling you right now. So don't you forget, Punk!”

Freddy looked out at the ball field, at the diamond, the scene of long and dusty, the nervous, scared afternoon. Then he looked at his agitating heckler. The bombshell burst. Freddy jumped to his feet.

“Look! I don't know why you hate me, but I do know that you're just a pain in the . . .” and instead of saying where the pain was, Freddy Burns whipped a hammy fist right flush into the red face to emphasize his point. The result was uproarious.

“Red” Vickers, the terror of the League, staggered back, blood streaming out of his big nose. His blue eyes fired with rage. Like a bull, he charged forward, both hands closed into big bony fists.

There was the dull, sickening impact of bone on bone—Vickers ran right straight into a perfect uppercut—and that was the end of his afternoon. He lay there on the dugout cement, breathing hard, knocked out cold!

[....]

You embark upon the Voyage, face eager, eyes aflame with the passion of travelling, spirits brimming with gaiety, levity, and a flamboyant carelessness that tries to conceal the wild delight with which this mad venture fills you. You sit in the train, and you begin to feel yourself eased away, away, away . . . . . and the gray home town is left behind, the prosaic existence of 18 years is now being discarded into the receptacle of Time. You are now moving along more rapidly, and the old town slips by in level undulance. You see the old familiar things: streets with time-worn names, houses with barren roofs and upthrusting chimneys, staring tiredly at the same old sky, the same old heavens, the same old ashen emptiness. You look at all this and you tingle. You can feel a shudder of expectancy course through your tense, vibrant body. Your eyes swell with what you think is joy. You envision the Big City—and you squirm in your seat happily.

“I hope you have a nice trip on the way over, John,” your old pal said to you at the station. “And be sure to study hard, now, and get some good marks at College. And write to me!”

“Sure, Fouch,” you told your old chum. “I'll write some tremendous documents and tell you all about College in detail.”

And then you remember with poignant inklings of a new regret the mist in your mother's eyes as she fluttered her kindly hands all over your coat, brushing off specks of dust and infinitesimal strands of hair with a meticulous nervousness and a taut hopelessness that kindled a hot fire within your inner entrails. You don't know just what to call this hot fire which had burned your very eyes and caused them to unleash molten love in searing rivulets. Probably, you think, it is because you are leaving your Mother for the first time!

As a matter of fact, when you left your loved ones at the station, you didn't know much—all you knew was one thing: that you were leaving home, and going to College, and that a new and glittering existence awaited you, far-off and shimmering and towering into clear, lucid skies, shrieking out into space with an exultant triumph!

“Ah!” you say now, seated in the roaring train, the last remnants of your old home-town suburbs scattering by in sparse bits, as if completely blown to non-existence by the fact that you are leaving it. “Ah!” you repeat to yourself, “Now I am heading toward my goal—and I am hurtling through the land to my destination. I am no longer immovable. I am now alive!” You dream of these fond sayings with a puerile, knowing smile.

Ah, my poor little madman, still a child, why don't you open your eyes and look about you in the train. Look carefully at your fellow passengers. See those seamy, lined expressions; those tallow grimaces of mobile resignation, weariness, and impassiveness. These fellow-passengers of yours, little madman, why don't you study them carefully. Why don't you remove the mist of youth from your unassailed, unpummeled young eyes! Why don't you do this! Why must you wait for Life to beat it into you with its blunt hammer, its vulpine leer glutting above you with a fresh new triumph!!!!! But wait.....

Now, it is four months later, and there is a blinding blanket of snow covering the earth. A train is wailing its mournful whistle across the alabaster wastes, and our little madman is seated in the train, going back home for Christmas, four months of College under his belt.

He is thinking of the City Hall clock, as it has winked in the night for eighteen years. He is thinking of the smell of his cellar at home; of the murmurous hush of the river at night; of the wail of the winds through the backyard trees . . . . . and then he jumps with a delighted start! For the train has begun to slow down, and he sees the familiar old Mills, stolid and bowed in the blanket ebony of the night sky, silhouetted against the whiteness of the snow. To him, they look as though they have been patiently waiting his arrival. He feasts his eyes upon them, but leaves his thirst only partially satiated. Now the train is really slowing down, and our little madman takes up his grips and rushes down the aisle. There is more to come, more miracles to be beheld, and more wonders to stun him!

“Homeville!” croaks the conductor in his wooden weariness, going to the door of the train and spitting out into the night air. Our little madman stands behind the conductor, eyes riveted upon the broad blueness of his back, the maddening bulk of this man thrust between himself and the glorious happiness which awaits him at the station.

Now! The train is easing to a crawling stop, and you wait while the torturous engineer blasts all the atoms of your existence with his damned preciseness! Slow, slowly—please get out of my way, Mr. Conductor, I want to see my old Home Town, I want to consume the sight of it, to masticate it, to slurp up its blood . . . .

At last, the blue-uniformed conductor swings down to the platform, and everything is unfolded to your clouded gaze. You see a group of old familiar faces, and you think of God as you watch the radiance and warmth sing up to your very soul. You see all that God-like essence come up to you from the dark night, and your Faith is redeemed. You see God before you, emblazoned in all those loved faces like a starry tarpaulin. The all-encompassing, all-loving God!

With all the nonchalance that you can muster, in an effort to betray your College experience, you step down from the train, your hands trembling wildly. You kiss the lovely cheek of your mother and sister, and you shake hands warmly with your father, a stout stone of integrity; and you clasp the wiry hand of your best pal.

[Y]ou realize that a man can take a train and never reach his destination, that a man has no destination at the end of the road, but that he merely has a starting point on the road—which is Home. You see it all, this epic of mankind, before your eyes; it is a limpid and awful truth, it has a naked and beautiful reality. You are now a man, little madman. When you left, four months ago, you were but a child—you with your high ideals and mad dreams. Now, I hope that you see everything, that you will from now on read it in the faces of the passengers of the world, the faces that comet across the surface of the Earth, forever searching for the destination. I hope, little madman, that you realize that the destination is really not a tape at the end of a straight-away racing course, but that it is a tape on an oval that you must break over and over again as you race madly around. And whether you give up the race after circumventing the swarming oval once, or whether you continue through the marathon alleys of life—whichever you do, little madman, you shall always return to the place where the road began.

For the place where the road began is composted of infantine hallucinations and youthful ambition, and these are deathless elements that remain within you forever.

This Home that I speak of, madmen, may be anywhere on earth. It is the soul of Man, I think, and it is a component, a mixture, a swarming vat-like concoction of all the ideals of Man, embodied upon one portion of the Earth's crusty integument, and thrust upwards in a gesture of terrible finality and beauty that shall forever beckon.

Outside, in the street, the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines of the place. You leave the street and enter New York's night life—a sudden rush of festivity, not the wild dark festivity of Spain, but a cultured, toned festivity borne along by the nostalgic improvisations of a guitar, or the rich round moans of a Billie Holiday. There is the eternal smoke of cigarettes, the fine smell of bars ranged with colorful displays of bottles, gowned women, tuxedoed men, and those who reminisce, wrangle, and cry at the bar. You look down the bar—it is not like an ordinary bar, for there is something about the New York bars that no other bar can capture—and you see a gallery of faces, each as interesting as the other. Millions of dancing illusions cloud your eyes as you search into the eyes of these barflies—that one there looks a lot like a bookie, and the other much like an actor, and there is a high-priced harlot. Books and novels could be written about the lives of these rangy faces, these pouting velvet faces, these red lips, these dark mysterious faces, these jovial open-faced faces, these drunken dull-eyed faces. The bartender, looking a lot like a performer with the light of his brilliantly arrayed bar shining up to his face and softening it like footlights do, is mixing drinks. There is the hardness of the city in him—hardness, a certain look of hectic suspicion, a tinge of awed dismay, and an obviously false certainty that is helped along by the most mundane manipulation of a cigarette.

I remember once when I was quite childishly eating a hot fudge sundae at a fountain back home. It was raining, and I was as virile and masculine as anyone else in the place. But I was perched up on a stool and drooling in my fudge and cream like a child. I was self-conscious. Then in walked a fellow attired in soda pop clothes, a driver of the Coca-Cola trucks. He walked up to the cigarette counter with a preoccupied stride. The soda jerk recognized him:

“Howdy Joe. Just pull in?”

(Just pull in, I think. A truck driver, just pull in. Just pull in, the rain was slashing at his windshield. Just pull in, the hero. Wearing drivers' clothes, just pull in, and the rain.)

The truck driver looked carefully at his questioner, pulling out some money from his pocket and smoking knowingly on his cigarette. He answered, very curtly and with much competent authority, almost a scowl:

“Yeah.”

(Oh boy, I sneer to myself. The great man, just pull in.)

I looked at him. He bought the pack of cigarettes, letting his last cigarette butt hang from his twisted mouth and spiral smoke up to his scowling eyes. He walked out, still preoccupied. A sort of false preoccupation designed to befuddle everyone with whom he communicated. Preoccupied with his paltry little truck universe, as if it were the only universe in the place. The big man, cigarette butt hanging from snarling mouth, Yeah, curtly scowling at the world, women and drink and trucks and the hell with anything and everything else.

Where is the naked unquestioning sincerity in this world today?

You buy yourself a Coke and take a table in an obscure corner. You light your cigarette and look around you. The music will soon begin—the little negro trumpeter is almost ready, but never quite begins. He holds the horn in his chubby black hands, with white fingernails, and he talks to friends and musicians around and below him. He smiles, and blows through his trumpet to emit a small round tone. Then he talks some more, jokes, maddeningly producing his horn to his mouth only to let it drop again in order to say something to the inevitable someone who is always around him. The music will never start, you say. And suddenly he starts playing on his trumpet.

[...] In the Spring, I was back on the field working with the varsity backfield (Governali, Will, Wood, and I). There were glowing reports in the papers about me, but when the Fall of 1941 came, I did not return to Columbia. I had spent the entire summer writing and studying feverishly, and wanted to keep that up rather than return to a college education interrupted by dozens of immaterial activities, such as football, N.Y.A. jobs, meal jobs, typing agencies, ghost-writing and whatnot. I left Lowell and got a job in a gas station in Hartford, Conn., away from my disconsolate and reprimanding parents.

Curiously enough, I enjoyed my new status in life: it was peaceful to contemplate not being a Golden Boy of football, and to devote all my energies to writing. I wrote like a fiend, sending one radio script to Orson Welles which was never returned to me, even to this day. In the space of two months, I wrote about two hundred short stories.

A little play in several acts and scenes.

Date: March 23, 1941 Time: 1 A.M. (Date and time of writing. This is mentioned because I feel that it will be illuminating to people to know that this thing was written at one o'clock in the morning of March 23rd, 1941. Why, I don't know. It doesn't make any difference. As long as we get a little kick out of life, it's all right. There's no harm done.)