win window.
“Number six,” I said, “once.”
It was my last two dollars. . . .
Six paid $23.40.
I watched my horse go down into the Winner’s Circle like I do all my winners, and I felt as proud of him as if I had ridden him or raised him. I felt like cheering and telling everybody he was the greatest horse that had ever lived, and I felt like reaching out and grabbing him around the neck, even though I was two or three hundred feet away.
But I lit a cigarette and pretended I was bored. . . .
Then I headed back to the bar, kind of to see how she took it, intending to stay pretty far away. But they weren’t there.
I ordered a double backed by a beer, drank both, ordered up again and drank at leisure, studying the next race. When the five-minute warning blew, they still hadn’t shown and I went off to place my bet.
I blew it. I blew them all. They never showed. At the end of the last race I had 35 cents, a 1938 Ford, about two gallons of gas, and one night’s rent left.
I went into the men’s room and stared at my face in disgust. I looked like I knew something, but it was a lie, I was a fake and there’s nothing worse in the world than when a man suddenly realizes and admits to himself that he’s a phony, after spending all that time up to then trying to convince himself that he wasn’t. I noticed all the sinks and pipes and bowls and I felt like them, worse than them: I’d rather be them.
I swung out the door feeling like a hare or a tortoise or something, or somebody needing a good bath, and then I felt her swinging against me like the good part of myself suddenly coming back with a rush. I noticed how green her dress was, and I didn’t care what happened: seeing her again had made it O.K.
“Where’ve you been?” she said hurriedly. “I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“What the hell is this?” I started to say, “I’ve been looking—”
“Here comes Tommy!” she halted me, and then I felt something in my hand and then she walked out, carefully, slowly to meet him. I jammed whatever it was into my pocket and walked out toward the parking lot. I got into my car, lit my next-to-last cigarette, leaned back and dropped my hand into my pocket.
I unfolded five one hundred dollar bills, one fifty, two tens, and a five. “Your half,” the note said, “with thanks.” “Nicki.” And then I saw the phone number.
I sat there and watched all the cars leave, I sat there and watched the sun completely disappear; I sat there and watched a man change a flat tire, and then I drove out of there slowly, like an old man, letting it hit me, inch by inch, and scared to death I’d run somebody over or be unable to stop for a red light. Then I thought about the nickel I’d thrown away and I started to laugh like crazy. I laughed so hard I had to park the car. And when the guy who’d changed his flat came by I saw his white blob of a face staring and I had to begin all over again. I even honked my horn and hollered at him.
Poor devil: he had no soul.
Like me and one or two others. I thought about Carl Larsen down at the beach rubbing the sand from between his toes and drinking stale beer with Curtis Zahn and J.B. May. I thought about the dollar I owed Larsen. I thought maybe I’d better pay it. He might tell J.B.
Unpublished
Hell Yes, the Hydrogen Bomb
He felt tremendously bored and disgusted; his back ached from being in bed all morning. He folded the paper and threw it into the cubbyhole behind his desk. He tried the second best thing: he got up and opened all the drawers, took the papers out, and spread them on the bed. Sometimes on things you started and couldn’t finish, sometimes you took two or three things like that, put them together, and by knocking off the edges you could get an unusual story—they’d never know, they’d think it was the same thing straight through. As long as the lines had blood in them. . . . Sometimes you could take all the lines that had blood in them . . . or you could get away from subjectiveness by making the musician a barber, and your lines of bemoaning would be forgiven because they’d think it was he instead of you.
He lit a cigarette and began to read the various sheets. There were dozens of them—wild scrawlings, neat printing, pencil, ink—and he’d forgotten most of them, and reading them again, there was something hellishly funny in them—one grows, you know, gets over extravagances. The drawers were always full because he was afraid to throw the stuff into the wastebaskets, and when he did, he tore the papers into very small sections and then swirled them all around with his hands:
. . . there’s no telling when something will break. You can’t believe the voices, or the faces of the voices . . .
. . . I said, automatic profusion
. . . I lit a cigarette but found it was an ember bud and threw it away.
. . . I cower before the look of eyes . . . this fat whore says, I’ve had nine glasses of port since this morning . . . the whore turns away, a little frozen . . . I shake my beer and look down into the glass . . . I phone my father from the Culver City Courthouse. I understand I am in the judge’s chambers. The operator gives me the wrong number. A well-dressed woman stares at me. My hands tremble. I have a three-day beard and a hole in my pants . . .
. . . sickened, in a rage . . . rattle of glass . . . water pouring . . . her cough . . . footsteps . . . winding clock . . . washing dishes . . . eating . . . frying things . . . opening, closing drawers . . . vacuuming . . . strange sound, like a spray . . . night . . . snoring . . . her goddamned room, her pot lids, her spoons . . . that doesn’t matter. She’ll be dead by the time they get there. I don’t want to wait till she’s asleep . . . this is a thing to be done now . . . Rain. It rains. You’ll see them hurrying in the rain . . .
. . . too often a brilliant mind makes a brilliant face, alas, alas. (These lines were underlined.)
. . . the guitar has been played too violently . . . lost another job drinking . . . 55 cents left . . . it’s snowing and the want ads look terrible . . . Christ!—to be a fat, rich bastard with bullfrog eyes! . . . end product of American industry: the dead end: fear. 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1936, 1937 . . . fear, fear, fear! . . . everything (march, boys!) to the job: the body, the voice, the soul . . . this type and nothing else . . . a suggestion of weariness . . . Hell yes, the hydrogen bomb! Break the tables, as N. said . . .
. . . Saroyan . . . didn’t speak the truth . . . reason he didn’t burn his 500 books in a tub when he was freezing in San Francisco was not because he saw value in the cheapest, most false book, but because he was afraid the fire would make the room too damned smoky and the landlady would raise hell . . . if he had 500 books and did think of burning them . . .
. . . Christ, what time is it? My feet are asleep!
. . . Iron Curtain, politics in Art . . . I, and them, and all, at last with pinch-bud faces, lost count, seeking electric altogether . . . brain suspends spirit like a hoyden insect . . . when waitress drops a plate I cry . . .
. . . he’d evidently had an education of some sort, and when I saw him there eating, I walked over and sat down across from him, “What are you doing in a dump like this?” . . . frightened,
