Hard Rain Falling (29 page)

Saul Markowitz often recruited his bakery help from San Quentin; they would come, work, be with him for a few weeks or months, and then move on. He would always get another. Jack could not understand at first what it was Mr. Markowitz wanted of him. He knew that Mr. Markowitz had a reputation for a special kind of wit: perhaps hiring ex-convicts was witty. Mr. Markowitz had been asked by Herb Caen why he had named his bakery “Rosenbloom’s” and had answered, according to the item in the column, “Who’d come to a place called `Markowitz’s?”’

But Jack was glad for the job and grateful to Saul Markowitz; he worked hard and made no trouble. There were two bakers, and Jack was the helper. He wore a white tee shirt, white duck trousers, and a white apron, and most of the time his face was smeared with a mixture of sweat and fine flour. He hauled sacks of flour around, greased pans and put them in the oven and pulled them out, stocked the display shelves, washed pots and trays, and stuffed himself with baked goods. It was a good job, hard hot work and fair pay, but after a while the smell of the place sickened him, especially when he would have to bend deep into the lard barrel and get the last handfuls of dead white lard from the bottom. The bakers were a pair of noncommittal types whose only conversation, aside from giving orders and cursing, was about union matters. They did not appear to have any life outside the bakery. They left Jack alone and he left them alone.

No one at all, in fact, paid any attention to him. He worked his shift, went home to his furnished room on Pine Street, read, went to movies, visited his parole officer, and that was about it. He did not violate his parole for two weeks—in his case, one of the conditions was no drinking—and when he did he carried it off as if it were a desperate caper, walking several blocks to buy the pint of whiskey, hiding the package under his jacket as he walked back up the hill, locking the door to the room—all with the heavy sense of dread and expectation of a teen-ager visiting his first prostitute. He sat on the edge of the bed and uncapped the bottle and took a quick swig, and almost immediately lost his temper. It was disgusting that he should have to sneak around like that, just to have a little drink.

Well, he would fling it in their teeth. He drank off about half the pint, jammed the bottle into his hip pocket, and took off for Market Street. When he left his room he was angry, and determined to make trouble, but by the time he got down to Market he felt just fine and sauntered along with the early evening crowd, savoring the pure freedom of it, the way people all dressed differently, the way the women looked and smelled, the way the streetcars sounded, the glitter of the lights, the strange, exciting music from the hot-dog joints, the corniness of it all, the cheapness, the vulgarity which is vulgar only if you haven’t been away for such a long time and in a place so dull as prison; there was a lot of stuff in the newspapers about “cleaning up” Market Street, and Jack wondered why they wanted to do it. Didn’t they know how beautiful it was? Didn’t they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don’t they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don’t have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing! But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog-turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, “I don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in my pool!” and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I’m doing, and they’re all so nice.

At the moment, glowing with whiskey, Jack loved everybody. He even loved that policeman, damn him, who made Jack hide his bottle for fear of being sent back to San Quentin for three years. But the policeman, damn him, went away and Jack took another nip. I aint going to get drunk and mug my fellowman. And go back to prison. Hell no, I’m gonna get drunk and go to a movie, some cheap Technicolor Western full of noise and easy choices, or maybe even pick up one of these beautiful sleazy-looking broads....

He was suddenly very dizzy. He was not used to liquor any more. But it wasn’t that. It was the idea of having a woman that made him dizzy, and he knew it. He leaned up against a building, watching the people surge past him, and took another drink without thinking. The bottle was empty. He made his way across the sidewalk to a trash receptacle and dropped the bottle in. A couple of sailors went past, and one of them looked at Jack, made a face, and stopped.

“Say, buddy,” the sailor said, “where can a man get a piece of tail in this town?”

“I look like I ought to know,” Jack said.

“Yeah, you look like you ought to know. Do you?”

“Nope. Less ask a cabbie.”

“Why didn’t you think of that, Normie?” the sailor said to his buddy. “You’re supposed to be so goddam hip.”

Three hours later they were all filthy drunk, and were asked very politely to leave a bar deep into the Spanish Mission District. The bar was full of Mexicans, and the two sailors and Jack put their heads together and in whispers and giggles admitted that it would be foolish to start a fight. They left and wandered down the street until they found a cab. When they were in back one of the sailors said, “Where to now? Less find that whorehouse.”

“Nearest whorehouse is in Stockton,” the cabbie said over his shoulder.

“I got to go home,” Jack muttered doggedly. He told the driver his address, and they moved off.

“Go home,” one of the sailors said. “Why do you have to go home? We got to find a whorehouse an get fucked.”

“No fucking,” Jack said. “Too drunk to enjoy it. First one has to be good. I got to go to work tomorrow. Thass why.”

They couldn’t talk him out of it, and had to let him off on Pine Street, in front of his place.

“We goin to Stockton,” one of them said. He was sticking his head out the back window, and abruptly he vomited down the side of the cab, just as it moved off. Jack gave them a salute and went up the stairs, drunk and afraid. When he got in bed, the fear subsided a little. He was safe now. Nobody could pick him up and put him in jail. He was safe. But he could not go out and get drunk like that again. He could get in a fight or get braced, and go to jail, and back to San Quentin. They had him. He was free, but he couldn’t do anything. Those sailors. Talking about their 72 hours of
freedom
. What did they know? He fell asleep.

In the morning he had a vicious hangover, far out of proportion to the pleasures of the evening, and he went about his work dully. Out in front, while he was putting a tray of cherry tarts (which smelled disgusting) into the display case, a group of late partygoers were seating themselves around a couple of the little tables, and Jack saw beyond them a Rolls Royce parked in the yellow zone. What attracted Jack’s attention was a pair of men’s shoes sticking up out of the back window. Jack grinned painfully and hoped the man in the car felt worse than he did. He straightened up after placing the tray on the shelf, feeling the needles of pain back of his eyes, and found himself face-to-face with a woman, one of the party outside, pretty, disheveled, her eyes glassy. She looked rich and expensive, and young. Her lipstick was freshly applied and dark against her skin, but her mouth was puffy and reddish around the edges. She was staring at Jack from behind dark glasses. She pointed down into the case.

“Gimme one of those fucking tarts,” she said in a bored but expensive voice.

Mr. Markowitz and the counterboy were both out at the tables, hovering over the drunks, but Jack said, “I don’t do that,” and went back into the bakery. The woman’s vulgarity had irritated him, perhaps because he had always supposed the rich had their own vocabulary to go along with their money. But then maybe the woman wasn’t rich at all, but just ran with the rich. Maybe none of them were rich and had just stolen the Rolls. Maybe the guy inside was dead, a couple of bullets in his chest. Ha ha. Maybe the woman will take pity on me and buy my freedom.

Mr. Markowitz came into the bakery, his face composed and intent. He came up to Jack, who was greasing pans.

“Look here, my boy,” he said, “one of the customers said you insulted her. What happened?”

“Nothing,” Jack said. He kept on greasing the pan. “She asked me to wait on her and I said I didn’t wait on people. That’s all.”

Mr. Markowitz shrugged, his eyes blank. “I’ll tell her it’s a union regulation or something. You sure you didn’t do anything? She’s kind of funny.”

Jack reported the conversation as accurately as he could, feeling nauseated from the smell of lard and irritated with Markowitz for not just taking his word and getting the hell out of there.

“Well, it sounds like her all right. But we got a business to run. You should have helped her. Suppose you trot on out there and apologize to her. Okay?” He patted Jack on the shoulder, smiling.

“Do I have to?”

Mr. Markowitz looked at him carefully. “No, you don’t
have
to. But what the hell...“

“Okay,” Jack said. He went out to the tables, wiping the lard off on his apron.

There were three women and two men, and one of the men, with curly gray hair and a gray mustache, looked embarrassed. The other man was younger, slouched down in his chair, his face bearing an expression of righteous indignation. All three women were unapproachably beautiful, and drunk. The man with the gray hair did not look drunk.

“I’m sorry if I said anything wrong,” Jack said to the woman.

The younger man said, “Is that your idea of an apology, sonny? Just because you’re an ex-convict doesn’t make you exempt from manners. Let’s hear you apologize.”

“John,” said the man with the gray hair, “for heaven’s sake.”

Jack looked at Mr. Markowitz and said, “Yeah.” Mr. Markowitz was expressionless, not even wearing his usual smile.

“Well, it just infuriates me to see some
thug
insulting a woman like Sally, that’s all,” the younger man said. He had a nasty voice, irritating and cultured.

Sally herself was grinning up at Jack crookedly, drunkenly. She said, “I don’t mind it at all. Maybe that’s what bothers you, John. That and the fact that you’re chicken-livered.”

“Oh, dear,” the man with the gray hair said mildly.

Jack felt impotent. He knew he had been called out here as an exhibit, something for these people to amuse themselves with; and he knew he was probably expected to lose his temper. Mr. Markowitz had obviously told them all about him. The younger man was getting up, rockily, as if he were ready to fight Jack. Everything was disconnected; Jack still felt sick and hung over, and he did not want to lose his job. He looked at Saul Markowitz, who simply looked back at him.

“You goddam thug,” John said to Jack. He had moved out onto the sidewalk and was standing in a half-crouch.

Jack said to his boss, “Who are you going to back up?”

“What a tragic choice,” Sally said.

“Nobody,” Saul Markowitz said. He turned to John. “I think you’ve had too much to drink, John. Maybe you’d better go home. The tab’s on me.”

“Okay,” John said, not moving. “But what about your ugly thug? Is he going to apologize to me, or do I have to take him apart?” He grinned loosely, and suddenly threw a wild, roundhouse punch at Jack.

Jack parried it easily with his left and crossed sharply with his right. John went back, on his feet, for a dozen or more steps, and then collapsed on the sidewalk, his knees drawn up, his arms out.

“Well, that was easy,” Sally said into the silence.

“John is eighty-six,” Saul Markowitz said, “and you’re fired.” He got out his fat wallet and peeled off two hundred dollars and handed it to Jack. “I’m sorry. But you could have handled him without that.”

Jack took the money, counted it, and stuffed it into his ducks. The gray-haired man came up to Jack. “I’ll take you home,” he said.

“I have to get my other clothes,” Jack said.

“I’m sorry about all this,” Mr. Markowitz said.

“Yes, I suppose you are,” the gray-haired man said. Jack went inside and got his clothes out of his locker and said good-bye to the bakers and came back out front. They had picked John up and put him in the back seat of the Rolls, along with the passed-out man and two of the women. Jack and Sally sat in front, Jack by the window. He had never been inside a Rolls-Royce before; it wasn’t as luxurious as he had supposed, but he liked the smell of the leather.

“What a sullen, rotten, depressing morning,” Sally said. “Like every fucking morning of my fucking life.”

“Why don’t you shut up?” the driver said gently. “You started it, you know.”

“I know,” she said. She put her hand on Jack’s leg and squeezed. “I just wanted to see this piece of meat in action. And John’s so easy to get riled. All you have to do is attack his fucking
macho
, and he’s off.”

“Do you have to use that word so much?” the gray-haired man asked. He wheeled the silent automobile up the hill and into Pacific Heights. “We’re going to get the idea that you don’t really understand the implications.”

The two women in the back seat had been talking to the passed-out man, and one of them leaned forward and said, “We’re going to have to have help with Charles.”

“I’m going to KILL MYSELF!” a voice bellowed from the back.

“No you’re not, Charles,” the woman said. “We’re going to take you into the house and give you a nice bath.”

“I am going to CUT MY THROAT!” Charles yelled.

Sally giggled and leaned close to Jack. He could smell her perfume faintly. Her hand was still on his leg, which he did not mind at all. He minded none of it. First he had been the sideshow, now they were.

They stopped in front of a large white house on Pacific Street, with a red tiled roof and wrought-iron balconies from the third-floor windows, and Jack and the gray-haired man helped Charles into the house. A Negro woman dressed in black opened the heavy paneled door, and said “Oh, dear,” and helped them get Charles up the stairs and into the largest bedroom Jack had ever seen in his life. The whole bedroom was done in crimson and soft white, and while they undressed Charles his wife came in and pulled back the drapes, and Jack saw the whole marina below them, the yachts, the brilliant blue bay, and beyond, looking so close, Alcatraz. On their way back to the car, Jack said, “Does he own this place?”