behind in my rent. I couldn’t even come up with thirty bucks a month.
My landlady was a bigger threat to me than the Japanese. Everybody was waiting for the Japanese to show up in San Francisco and start taking cable cars up and down the hills, but believe me I would have taken on a division of them to get my landlady off my back.
“Where in the hell is my rent, you deadbeat!” she’d yell at me from the top of the stairs where her apartment was. She was always wearing a loose bathrobe that covered up a body that would have won first prize in a beauty contest for cement blocks.
“The country’s at war and you don’t even pay your Goddamn rent!”
She had a voice that made Pearl Harbor seem like a lullaby.
“Tomorrow,” I’d lie to her.
“Tomorrow your ass!” she’d yell back.
She was about sixty and had been married five times and widowed five times: the lucky sons-of-bitches. That’s how she’d come to own the apartment building. One of them left it to her. God had done him a favor when He stalled his car one rainy night on some railroad tracks just outside of Merced. He had been a travelling salesman: brushes. After the train hit his car they couldn’t tell the difference between him and his brushes. I think they buried him with some of his brushes in the coffin, believing they were part of him.
In those ancient long-ago days when I paid my rent, she was very friendly to me and used to invite me into her apartment for coffee and doughnuts. She loved to talk about her dead husbands, especially one of them who’d been a plumber. She liked to talk about how good he was at fixing hot water heaters. Her other four husbands were always out of focus when she talked about them. It was as if the marriages had taken place in murky aquariums. Even her husband who’d been hit by the train didn’t merit much comment from her, but she couldn’t say enough about the guy who could fix the hot water heaters. I think he was pretty good at fixing her hot water heater, too.
The coffee she served was always very weak and the doughnuts slightly stale because she bought day-old stuff at a bakery a few blocks away on California Street.
I’d have coffee with her sometimes because I didn’t have much to do, anyway. Things were just as slow then as they are now except for the case I just got but I had saved up a little money that I’d gotten from being in an automobile accident and settling out of court, so I could still pay my rent, though I’d given up my office a few months before.
In April 1941 I had to let my secretary go. I hated to do that. I spent the five months she worked for. me trying to get her in the sack. She was friendly but I barely got to first base with her. We did some kissing at the office but that was about it.
After I had to let her go, she told me to buzz off.
I called her up one night and her parting shot at me over the telephone went something like this: “. . . and besides not being a good kisser, you’re a lousy detective. You should try another line of work. Bellboy would suit you perfectly.”
CLICK
Oh, well . . .
She had a lard ass, anyway. The only reason I hired her was because she would work for the lowest wages this side of Chinatown.
I sold my car in July.
Anyway, here I was with no bullets for my gun and no money to get any and no credit and nothing left to pawn. I was sitting in my cheap little apartment on Leavenworth Street in San Francisco thinking this over when suddenly hunger started working my stomach over like Joe Louis. Three good right hooks to my gut and I was on my way over to the refrigerator.
That was a big mistake.
I looked inside and then hurriedly closed the door when the jungle foliage inside tried to escape. I don’t know how people can live the way I do. My apartment is so dirty that recently I replaced all the seventy-five-watt bulbs with twenty-five-watters, so I wouldn’t have to see it. It was a luxury but I had to do it. Fortunately, the apartment didn’t have any windows or I might have really been in trouble.
My apartment was so dim that it looked like the shadow of an apartment. I wonder if I always lived like this. I mean, I had to have had a mother, somebody to tell me to clean up, take care of myself, change my socks. I did, too, but I guess I was kind of slow when I was a kid and didn’t catch on. There had to be a reason.
I stood there beside the refrigerator wondering what to do next when I got a great idea. What did I have to lose? I didn’t have any money for bullets and I was hungry. I needed something to eat.
I went upstairs to my landlady’s apartment.
I rang the doorbell.
This would be the last thing in the world that she would expect because I’d spent over a month now trying to elude her like an eel but always being caught in a net of curses.
When she answered the door she couldn’t believe that I was standing there. She looked as if her doorknob had been electrified. She was actually speechless. I took full advantage of it.
“Eureka!” I yelled into her face. “I can pay the rent! I can buy the building! How much do you want for it? Twenty thousand cash! My ship has come in! Oil! Oil!”
She was so confused that she beckoned me to come into her apartment and pointed out a chair for me to sit down in. She still hadn’t said a word. I was really cooking. I could hardly believe myself.
I went into the apartment.
“Oil! Oil!” I continued yelling, and then I started making motions like oil gushing from the ground. I turned into an oil well right in front of her eyes.
I sat down.
She sat down opposite me.
Her mouth was still glued shut.
“My uncle discovered oil in Rhode Island!” I yelled across at her. “I own half of it. I’m rich. Twenty thousand cash for this pile of shit you call an apartment building! Twenty-five thousand!” I yelled. “I want to marry you and raise a whole family of little apartment buildings! I want our wedding certificate printed on a NO VACANCY sign!”
It worked.
She believed me.
Five minutes later I had a cup of very weak coffee in my hand and I was munching on a stale doughnut and she was telling me how happy she was for me. I told her that I would buy the building from her next week when the first million dollars’ worth of oil royalties arrived.
When I left her apartment with hunger abated and another week’s housing assured, she shook my hand and said, “You’re a good boy. Oil in Rhode Island.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Near Hartford.”
I was going to ask her for five dollars so that I could buy some bullets for my gun but I figured I’d better let well enough alone.
Ha-ha.
Get the joke?
Babylon
Uh-oh,
