Robert B. Parker (10 page)

The sun hit me full face when it rose. I was lying on my back. My shirt was still on, but my pants were off and I was exposed. She was undressed, too, her dress pulled up under her armpits, nothing on underneath. She was fat and there was grime in all the creases of her body. She had a pimple inside her left thigh and her toenails were long and dirty and broken. She was lying on her side with one arm across my chest. There was dried vomit on her face and on my chest and neck. She slept with her mouth open. Some of her teeth were missing, and a line of saliva drooled down and mixed with the vomit. Above me the bright blue sky was cloudless and the early sun was bright as it rolled in from the east. There was dew on the grass and all of me ached. I inched out from under her fat blue-veined arm and sat up. There was dried semen matting my pubic hair. I struggled upright and pulled my pants up. There were other derelicts sleeping all over the park. I began to walk. As I walked, the tears began to trail down my face and my breath came in the short gasps you get when you start to cry. A clock in a building showed ten minutes past five. I walked until I came to Wilshire Boulevard. Somewhere I
had read that Wilshire ran all the way to the ocean. I walked along it, crying. When I came to a bench I sat on it. In MacArthur Park I sat for a while under a tree and rested. I reached Santa Monica about the time people were going home for supper, cars full of men in suits and hats, dressed-up young women, usually three or four to the car. Now and then someone would look at me, my dirty face streaked with tear lines, my clothes crusted and torn, my pace slow, bent, wobbly. They would always look away. I kept going, slowly, shaky, and desperate for a drink. I had smoked my last cigarette in MacArthur Park a long time ago. I ached for another one. Crying made my nose run and the mucus had dried in my unshaven mustache. I kept moving and there was the ocean. I had gone as far as I could. I sat down on the beach, and then lay back. I used the journal notebooks for a pillow and lay still with tears still flowing as the sun that had wakened me this morning, set out ahead of me, flooding the Pacific with its rose benediction, and then it sank from sight, as I had, and the darkness came and no one could see me.

“Conduct,” Scott Fitzgerald had written, “may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes.” The phrase was with me as I woke at sunrise. I sat smelling and crusted, with sand layered over the dirt and vomit, the nasal drainage and the dried semen, and thought about the phrase and about
The Great Gatsby
and marveled at how it could come back through the years since I’d read it, just like that, as clear as if I’d read it this morning. “Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes.” I got to my feet unsteadily with my body shrieking for a drink and my throat clenched with the desire for a cigarette. In front of me the Pacific was calm in the early light and entirely empty to the horizon. I felt my stomach turn. I sank to my knees, then hands and knees, and vomited. There wasn’t much down there, so not much came up. But it took a long time. When it was over I felt dizzy. I crawled toward the ocean and then got to my feet and walked toward it and into it. There was night chill to it and the shock of it centralized
me a little. I kept moving as the water came up over my thighs and then sat down in the water, neck-deep a yard from shore. The silence seemed to stretch up to the arch of sky and echo back. My wet clothes seemed to be shrinking in on me and I tore them off and threw them from me toward the open sea, shoes and all. I had a sort of a festered sore on my stomach and the salt water stung it sharply. The sensation was one of the first I’d felt, and I liked it. I began to take handfuls of clean, fine sand from the sea floor and scrub myself with it, scouring my face and hair and body with it, and as I felt the faint tingle of it where the sand scraped my skin and the salt water worked on it, I began to scour harder, all over, everywhere, again and again. I sank my face and head underwater and scrubbed it with the sand and then rinsed it with violent rubbing. For maybe an hour, until the sun was full above the horizon, I scrubbed and rinsed until my body was sanded clean. I gargled with seawater again and again, and finally dove beneath the sea and stayed under as long as I could, rolling slowly in the water. When I could stay under no longer, I stood up with my wet hair plastered to my scalp and the water streaming off my body. Conduct had been too long in the marshes. I stared at the shore and beyond it, eastward across the almost endless range of the republic toward Jennifer.
I will get you back
, I said.
You will be the rock
.

To my right was a small pier and on one of the pilings someone had left a bathing suit to dry. I waded over and stole it. Up close it turned out to be a pair of cut-off jeans and not really a bathing suit. So much the better. They were a little large, but they covered me. I walked
back and retrieved my journal, a collection of cardboard-covered notebooks packaged together with string. They were dog-eared and stained, but I had hung on to them since I’d begun them, even when the blackout periods started coming. It struck me that I didn’t know how long I’d been keeping them because I didn’t know what year it was. I couldn’t even remember the date I’d seen on the newspaper yesterday—or was it the day before? The sun was high enough now to dry me. The sore on my stomach looked clean for the first time in months. It had started as a simple boil. I walked up the beach and across a short stretch of grass to the road that ran along the water. I had no money. I was on my second day without a drink or a smoke. In the daylight my bare upper body was thin and flabby.
Hard to be both
, I thought.
Takes a lot of careful planning to be skinny and fat together
. My forearms and hands and face and neck were tan; the rest of me was grayish-white except the pinkish flare of the sore on my stomach. But I was clean. I found a newspaper in a trash barrel that said it was September 12, 1961. I was twenty-nine.

In the window of a coffee shop a hand-lettered cardboard sign said
KITCHEN HELP WANTED—INQUIRE WITHIN
. Outside, a bulky man in a clean white T-shirt was hosing down his sidewalk. There were tattoos on both forearms, blue with red highlights. Snakes and knives, and nude women.

I said, “I know I look weird, but I was sleeping on the beach two nights ago and somebody stole everything I had, car, wallet, clothes, razor, everything.”

The bulky man said, “Yeah?” He had graying dark
hair cut very short, and his face glistened from his morning shave. His fingernails were square and clean. There was a wedding ring on his left hand.

“I need a job. Would you hire me?”

The bulky man swept the hose back and forth carefully in front of the shop, washing yesterday’s trash inch by inch toward the gutter.

“What’s that?” he said, nodding at my journal.

“I’m trying to be a writer,” I said.

He nodded again. The stream from the hose moved the last line of leaves and papers over the curb.

“Wash dishes?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll hire you by the day. You work out today, I’ll hire you back tomorrow.”

“Okay.”

“Buck and a half an hour and meals. I pay you at the end of the day.”

I nodded.

“You want breakfast. I got the grill on. We open at seven.”

I said, “What time is it?”

He looked at his watch. “Six twenty.”

Inside the coffee shop the bulky man said, “Tom Hernandez.”

I said, “Boone Adams.” We extended hands. His grip was hard and the muscles in his bare arm bunched as we shook.

Tom cooked scrambled eggs on the grill and I ate them with toast, and drank coffee thick with cream and sugar. I turned down bacon. My stomach was edgy and I
didn’t want to try it too soon. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten from a plate.

Tom lit a cigarette and the smell of the smoke made my stomach tighten. He offered me one. I shook my head.

“Don’t smoke?” he said.

“Trying to quit,” I said. I hadn’t realized that I was until I said it.

When the first customers came at seven I was in the kitchen at a deep pair of set tubs. The dirty dishes were shoved through a small opening at one end of the counter and I washed them in one sink and rinsed them in another and let them drain in a big rack on the drainboard. The dishes during the breakfast rush came faster than I could wash them, but I kept enough clean so they could keep serving. Tom’s wife worked the counter and Tom ran the grill. He did eggs or pancakes with bacon, ham, or sausage, and home fries on the grill along with English muffins and toast, which he did eight slices at a time in a big old silver pop-up toaster. The coffee he drew from a big silver urn. Fruit juice was canned. After nine the breakfast rush dwindled and I caught up on the dishes in time for lunch. At 11:15 I took ten minutes and had a ham and cheese sandwich on rye bread and two glasses of milk. Lunch was mostly sandwiches plus hamburgers or grilled cheese. The dishes were easier to clean. Tom closed at three o’clock in the afternoon. I finished washing up at 4:30.

“I only pay you for the hours I’m open,” Tom said. “Otherwise you could stall around till midnight.”

I nodded. He gave me a ten and two ones. My legs ached with exhaustion.

“There’s some sandwiches made up and left over in the icebox,” Tom said. “Where you sleeping tonight?”

“On the beach.”

Tom said, “Wait a minute.” He went out through the back door and came back in two minutes with one of those folding plastic mattresses that fit in the back of station wagons. He put it on the floor in the kichen in front of the sink. “You want to sleep here?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d appreciate it.”

“If you go out, make sure the door’s locked. Key’s on a nail behind the shutter on the left.” He showed me.

“What size shoes you take?” Tom said.

“Nine.”

“I’m nine and a half, but maybe I got some old sneakers you could have. Board of health would shit if they seen you in here barefoot.”

I nodded. My head was woozy and I was so tired I couldn’t focus on Tom.

“I took the cash with me,” Tom said. “No point looking for any.”

“I wouldn’t,” I said.

“Anyone would,” Tom said. “I’ll be in around six to get ready for breakfast.”

I put the twelve dollars in my pocket. Enough for three cases of beer, twenty bottles of Pastene port. I could imagine the beer going in and seeping through me, washing clear and clean into all the parched cells. In my imagination my body tautened and enlarged like a watered plant, revitalizing like a dried sponge dipped into a spring. I could get a couple of six-packs and put them in the freezer to get really chilled and I could lie on the mattress here and drink them and be whole again. It
seemed a long walk to the store. I was head-swimming tired. I could rest a little, then get up and get the beer. I lay down on the mattress, and fell asleep with the late afternoon sun shining on the wall above my head.

I woke up soaked with sweat in the small hot kitchen. The sun still shone in through the window, but it was on the opposite wall. I looked at the clock above the counter in the front of the shop: 5:40. Another day without a drink or a smoke. Two days? Three? I couldn’t quite be sure. I got up and got some bar soap from the lavatory and walked down to the beach. I stripped off my clothes and waded in and washed with the soap. It didn’t lather much in the salt water, but it got the sweat off. I put my stolen jeans back on over my damp body and walked back up to the coffee shop. I got the key from behind the shutter and let myself in. I ate a leftover tuna sandwich and drank milk. Then I opened up the front door to let the air in and found the mop and a bucket and washed down the floor. Tom arrived while I was at it. He gave me a pair of white Keds and a clean white T-shirt. The sneakers were a little big and the T-shirt, one of Tom’s, was very big, but at least I was covered. Tom showed me how to get the big coffee urn ready and started for the
day. He showed me how to turn on the grill and how to get the deep fryer going. I had two cups of coffee before the first customers arrived at seven and I started washing dishes.

After that I had everything ready to go in the morning by the time Tom got to the shop and after three days he took to coming a little later. After five days I had sixty dollars in my pocket. I got a haircut, bought a razor and a toothbrush and some salt-water soap. I hadn’t had a drink or a cigarette since I’d started with Tom.

Tom closed Mondays, and I had my first day off. I took a bus downtown and bought myself a pair of chino pants and white shirt with a button-down collar. Then I went back to the shop and got my journal and sat on the beach to write in it. I hadn’t written in a while and I started to reread a little to pick up the thread. The journal was a mess. There were stains on it from ketchup and pickle juice and grease, and spilled beer or wine. The pages were soiled and creased and wrinkled, all of them were ripped, and some were nearly torn in two. Much of it was barely legible. As I looked at it my eyes filled until the pages were bleary in front of me. I wiped them clear.
Okay
, I said,
okay. I’ll start with this
. I got up and walked back to the shop and put the journal on a shelf above the sink. Then I went out and down the block to a dime store and bought a dozen spiral-bound notebooks and four ball-point pens. Then I went back to the shop and sat at the counter and began to rewrite the journal.

Every morning I went down and bathed in the sea and as the weeks went by and I kept saving money, I added another pair of pants and another shirt and two T-shirts and a pair of sneakers to my wardrobe. Every afternoon
after the shop closed I sat at the counter for an hour and restored the journal, printing painstakingly because my handwriting was messy. It had been a month and a half since I’d had a drink or smoked a cigarette. I was going to sleep at nine o’clock at night and eating three meals a day and putting on weight. One morning before I bathed in the ocean I jogged a little ways along the beach until I got tired. It wasn’t very far. But the next morning I did it again, and the next morning I went a little farther. By December I was running three miles a morning and had dropped ten pounds.