Girl of My Dreams (9 page)

When he was released Poor Jim went uptown and camped out. One of the friendly hoboes had told him he'd be welcome in Hoover Valley. “That was in Central Park near the Obelisk the rich people stole from the Egyptians. Someone at Bellevue handed me a dollar when I left, and me and my hobo pal feasted on it, in our way, for a couple of days. Lot of rich people in the city, I didn't see anyone jumping out of skyscrapers like they were saying. But I saw more people wandering like me, beggars and apple sellers, living lines of men and some women waiting for bread around a whole city block, soup kitchens. People asking me did I have a dime because their kids at home were having boiled water with half a potato for dinner. Pretty soon I'm begging myself.”

Jim Bicker talked like a tough man observing his life while he was living it. At times he became very agitated, choked with rage. That, I guessed, was the son of a ruined father. I asked him if he looked for a job while he was in New York.

“Yeah, I kind of looked for work all the time. Does this guy in the garment district need something hauled, a fish peddler want his garbage thrown out? Couple of day jobs in the flower district, then fixing tires in a repair shop. I didn't have the clothes to be a salesman or a waiter. I'd never realized you can't even apply for most jobs unless you have clean things to wear and someplace to bathe. I'd go to the public library, read till I fell asleep in the long room with the green lamps on every table. Librarians each had a different way to wake you up—curtly, icily, apologetically, gently. ‘This isn't a hotel, Mister.' Then I'd read some more—Chekov, George Eliot, Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos. Nights I'm back at Hoover Valley.”

When the police raided Hoover Valley, Jim went to a hobo jungle on the Brooklyn waterfront called Tin Mountain, where he met a woman he described as a pretty nice doll. She was on the run from a drunken father in the Long Island potato fields. I shivered—ignorant, shocked—when Jim told me about the father's abuses. “Andrea liked books herself,” he said, “and we read a swiped copy of
The Possessed
together, all those passionate death-loving fanatics trying to cook up a revolution in Russia. She told me she'd like to become a Communist, which I had no idea about, but I'd met a Jewish hobo if you can imagine that, and he'd told me about Soviet poets coming to the city.

“We went to an apartment on the Lower East Side where they read their poems. There was a poster advertising the Soviets—‘Friendship between the Great Experiment in Europe and the Great Depression in America.' We talked to the woman whose poems were about Mother Russia and the Revolution. Tatiana Etcherbina, a great large-eyed high cheek-boned beauty except for her teeth, which were a wreck. We told her what the Depression was doing to America. ‘This is what you call poberty?'—that's how she pronounced it. ‘I no believe what you call depression, your city is so rich. You don't know poberty, come to Russia I show you many million poberties, not few hundred. Socialism is big opportunity for us. I love position of artist in socialism so a man who deals in trucks don't sent here like you have big capitalists on Park Avenue, but I do sent here for read my poor poems.' When we hopped the subway back to Tin Mountain, Andrea was dead set for the Communists. Afterward I heard that when Tatiana Etcherbina got back to Russia they sent her to Siberia for being a holdover aristo.”

The police raided Tin Mountain, scattered all the men and arrested the women for prostitution. Jim went with a hobo who knew where they could stay on the top floor of a movie theater in Flatbush. In the night they sneaked downstairs into the show. “I saw a nothing picture with Pamela Miles in it. What a raving pity. She wasn't acting, she was impersonating. Badly.”

“She was someone else then, not herself,” I defended, knowing it didn't matter.

“She's better now, okay? I want her to use that talent, that intensity, to speak and yell and sing for justice, goddammit.”

“They say it's not safe. She's an alien, she could be deported.”

“My heart goes out to cowards, especially rich ones. So my hobo pal finds a telephone that hasn't been disconnected on the abandoned top floor of the theater, and the operator puts me through to Buffalo. My parents' landlord had a phone. The old man was still sunk, selling used clothing on the street, but they were glad to hear I was alive. My mother sobbed and wanted me home, but they were worse off than I was. When I asked if they'd heard from any magazines, she said there was a new pile of returned manuscripts.

“I tried to find Andrea again, but I couldn't. After the janitor flushed us out of the theater, every day was keeping away from cops, hiding in Central Park, Union Square, the Library. Finding some soft place to sack was the work of the evening as getting food was the work of the morning and late afternoon. A stray dog down by the Hudson, a cute little chow, attached himself to me, and we went around together because it was easier to get a nickel or two from a passing swell if I said my dog hadn't eaten. The truth was he ate better than I did. We'd sleep in a doorway or over a subway grating, and when we woke up butchers would throw the dog cuts of meat they couldn't sell and I couldn't eat.

“My last night with the chow we spent in Central Park down near the little duck pond, and we were attacked by a rat the size of Denver. That was enough for me. The next day was very hot and the chow and I were in the zoo's outdoor cafeteria looking for throwaway food when I spotted a suit jacket a man had taken off because of the sun. The guy went to the can and I lifted his coat. No wallet in it but at least I could look respectable. I said my goodbyes to the chow as I went into the Library's main entrance on Fifth Avenue, then ducked out the side exit on Forty-second Street when I was finished with Joe Conrad a few hours later.”

“You needed a suit jacket for a library?” I asked. “They kick out hoboes?”

“They don't but I was starving for better food than I could beg. I buttoned the coat to look as good as I could and took myself to a restaurant called Joubair's in the show district. French, snooty. I came in just when their theater crowd left so they were glad to have a new customer. A piss-elegant dame at the next table with her goddam perfume made me think of Andrea, who smelled like a real woman, but before I could work myself up the perfume was overpowered by butter, fish, steak, wine, garlic, every kind of sauce you can dream of. I started with snails, which of course I'd never tasted. Ordered a bottle of Château Margaux which I'd never heard of but it was over five bucks so I figured it had to be good and it was like heaven. Then I had a veal chop swimming in cream and mushrooms and sherry. Artichoke on the side. Dessert was pastry made out of rum and chocolate. Finished the Château Margaux and realized I hadn't been so satisfied with a meal since Thanksgiving when I was a kid. The check came and I was into Joubair's for seventeen dollars they couldn't have got out of me if they squeezed my bones into powder. I asked for the headwaiter and he came over and bowed like a servile lizard, asking me if anything was wrong, monsieur. I said no, the dinner was delicious, but I can't pay for it, so can I please wash dishes. The headwaiter pulls himself up like a duke, says ‘If you wish, monsieur, follow me
s'il vous plaît.
'

“He takes me back to the kitchen, turns me over to the chef, and disappears. I move to this big tub of a sink and roll up my sleeves when their real dishwasher, tattooed head to toe, takes me aside. Tells me what the headwaiter did about the last guy who thought he had dinner on the house. The dicks from the hotel next door took him into the alley back of Joubair's kitchen and when they finished with him he had no front teeth to chew with anymore and for their going away present they hit him so hard in the stomach he puked up the twelve-dollar meal he had just swallowed. I didn't need any more encouragement, so as these dicks were being led to the kitchen by the formerly cringing headwaiter I hightailed out the side door into the alley, jumped the iron fence onto the sidewalk, and mingled with the passing crowd. Within ten minutes I was back in the freight yards where I'd started four weeks earlier.”

“Close call,” I said, envying Jim. “Hell of an adventure. So you're back on freight cars. Nice way to see the country.”

“No, no, and no!” he thundered. “Are you an educable sap or just a sap! I was rolled, remember, after my first ride. It's a vicious, dangerous, putrid way to see the country.” He was spitting his words. “I wasn't back on the freights, nothing was moving in the yards that night so I made it over to Grand Central and hid in the restroom of a Chicago train until we got to Poughkeepsie where I hopped a boxcar carrying tractors and hoboes. What you call an adventure was staying just this side of the grave.”

“You still had the delicious dinner inside you, and no one beat you up.”

“Yeah and I had the sight and stench of rich people inside me too, infecting me like jungle rot. I hated them for the injustice of the whole thing even more than I was jealous of them. When I was jumped on the Baltimore & Ohio by two thugs, they let me go when they searched me and couldn't find a quarter. A long day and longer night and then I caught the Nickel Plate Railroad out of Altoona, the Lake Shore out of Cleveland, and a couple of toughs actually shared their meal with me, first thing I'd had to eat since I escaped from Joubair's, and I was so hungry it tasted just as good. When we finally hit the Dearborn Street Station in Chicago I saw a city even deader than New York and the cops meaner, clubbing anyone who looked like he needed a hand. I didn't last a night there but went over to the Bensenville Yards and latched onto a freight heading west. Not as much as a breadcrust among the hoboes in the boxcar.”

In Iowa Poor Jim picked up some change driving a truck for a bootlegger, but the money was stolen and he was arrested for vagrancy. “That night in the jail I thought I was in heaven,” he said, “a solid meal and a bunk with an actual mattress. They kick me out in the morning and I'm off on the Missouri Pacific, always in a boxcar since I learned my lesson in the gondola, and I make it all the way to the Sheffield Yards in Kansas City. A well-traveled knight of the road hooks me into a rough jungle near the Yards that's bubbling with hoboes. These places are like little towns with mayors. The mayor of this jungle knew the guy I was with and told me, ‘We don't trust no strange unless he comes in with someone we know.' The whole world to them was made up of pals and what they called stranges. Knives and fights were as common as laughter. Cops came in the week before and busted heads with their billies. ‘We kill one of those sumbitches and we stretch,' the mayor told me, ‘but they kill us and get a pay raise.'

“Second day I'm there a bunch of the tougher ones were sitting around a fire when a sweet-looking boy maybe fourteen limped into camp. He'd hurt himself jumping off a moving freight and he was so nervous he could hardly talk. ‘Hel-, uh, hello,' he said, ‘I was l-looking for some-, uh, something to food.' Kid scared out of whatever wits he had. ‘Wa-al lookee what my uncle's cat drug in,' one of the toughs said. ‘Got a hungry walk, don't he?' another said. I'm ashamed to tell you this, Jant, but I did nothing when three of these big bastards took that kid off in the woods and had him six ways from Sunday before they'd give him anything to eat. I heard him whimper, ‘Please, please let me back up, I think I'm split.' A jungle. ‘Let me back up,' that's all he said.”

I looked at Poor Jim Bicker and shook my head. Rape was a crime I'd scarcely heard of, an unimaginable activity. I didn't know whether he was trying to inform me or horrify me. “What happened to the kid?” I asked. “Did you take him to a doctor?”

“Sure, Owen, the place was swarming with doctors. I gave him half my dinner and led him off telling the others I was going to take my turn with him. About a mile away a church was having a social where I found a lady who could have been his grandmother, glad to take him in. I lit out on the Kansas City Southern heading for Tulsa, and it was a relief to be back on the rails. The engine broke down in a godforgotten whistlestop early the next morning. I walked around the main street looking for something to eat and saw a little closed bank. In the window there was deep brown velvet on the teller's counter, which I thought was odd. When my eyes adjusted to the bank's half-light I could see it wasn't velvet at all. It was dust. That bank had been closed long enough for it to accumulate. My first sight of the dust—and it was inside at that.”

When Poor Jim Bicker first began I thought he was telling me an idea for a movie because that's what everyone did. I even wondered if he wanted me to collaborate on it. Would there be a woman's part big enough for Palmyra? By the time I realized he was venting his spleen at the inequity, and iniquity, he saw in America, I saw he believed that if he vented in my direction I'd understand something he understood. Jim Bicker was bringing the Depression to Hollywood. Since he was hungry in his story I had the idea he might actually want breakfast, and I scrambled us some eggs while he continued.

“The train's engine still wasn't fixed so I put my sack over my shoulder to try my luck with my thumb. The wind was blowing dirt in my eyes when a man and a woman stopped for me in a rattletrap with broken windows. They looked no better than their car, all the starch gone out of them. Two squalling kids sat between them. Even from the backseat it appeared that every breath the parents took required a supreme effort. Their farm had been repossessed and they were trying to get to western Kansas where they had relatives who might take them in. The dust made the man turn on his headlights at three in the afternoon. Their car broke down in the town of Hutchinson, radiator burst. As bad off as I was I could see they were a lot worse, so I gave them a couple of quarters, which the man took hungrily, not gratefully. If he couldn't fix the car himself he might get a used fanbelt with one of the quarters, milk for his kids with the other.”