Robert B. Parker (11 page)

For Christmas Tom and his wife gave me a six-month membership in the Santa Monica YMCA. And Tom, who worked out there regularly, took me down and showed me how to lift weights. I could barely bench-press seventy-five pounds that first day, but Tom didn’t laugh at me, and I went with him every other afternoon after work, before I wrote in my journal.

From the time I woke up until I finished writing my journal in the late afternoon I was fine. Running, working, lifting weights, re-creating the journal, occupied my mind. But by six o’clock I had finished the journal and eaten my supper and cleaned up the dishes and it would be three or four hours before I’d fall asleep. In that time it was hard not to drink and hard not to smoke.

I went over to the branch library in Santa Monica and took out a card and brought home a copy of
The Great Gatsby
. I read it in two evenings, and reread it in two more. The quote I remembered hadn’t meant quite what I’d remembered it as meaning, but it was true in spirit to the book. I was startled at how good the book was. Grinding through it in sophomore English survey, I
hadn’t realized. Then I went back and got
Go Down, Moses
by Faulkner and read “The Bear” and found myself nearly breathless at some of the writing. As the evenings unfolded I read Hemingway and Steinbeck and Dos Passos. I read
Moby Dick
and
The Scarlet Letter
, and
Walden
and
The Ambassadors
and
Hamlet
and
King Lear
and
Othello
. I read
Othello
in one of those casebook editions for colleges and read the essays also. It led me to literary criticism and I read Richard Sewall on tragedy and Tillyard on the Elizabethan world picture and Lovejoy on the great chain of being. I read R.W.B. Lewis and Henry Nashe Smith and then I read
Walden
twice more. I read books on nutrition and I read
The New York Times
and
The Boston Globe
and the L.A. papers, the
Times
and the
Herald Examiner
.

I was up to five miles along the curve of the beach every morning, and doing two-hundred-pound bench presses and working on the last ten pages of my journal restoration when Tom told me he was closing the shop.

“They’re going to buy the whole business block and tear it up and rebuild the fucker,” he told me while we were at the Y. “I got a job cooking at a place in Torrance.”

I nodded. “That’s tough, Tom, to have the thing sold out from under you.”

He shrugged. “Don’t matter. I’ll probably make more cooking for somebody else. What about you?”

“I got five hundred bucks put away,” I said. “It’ll hold me till I find something.”

That night I finished rewriting my journal and packed the six neatly filled-in spiral notebooks in the bottom of my gym bag. I put my extra pants and shirt in on
top of them, and my shaving stuff and toothbrush wrapped in aluminum foil. Then I read
The Big Sleep
until bedtime.

In the morning I said good-bye to Tom and his wife. The wife, who hadn’t said twenty words to me in seven months, cried and hugged me and kissed me on the mouth.

I said to Tom, “I think I might have died if I hadn’t seen you last fall washing off the sidewalk.”

Tom nodded. “You’ve come a way,” he said. We shook hands, and I left them closing up the shop and headed for Colorado Street. On the corner I stopped and looked at myself in the black glass facade of a drugstore. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I was tanned from my morning runs and my stomach was flat. I weighed 170 pounds and my biceps stretched the sleeves of the T-shirt. Tom was right. I’d come a way. But I had a way left.

I walked up to Wilshire and caught a bus downtown.

I got a one-room furnished apartment with kitchenette and bath in a building in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue near Kenmore. The day I moved in I went to Ralph’s market on Sunset and bought groceries and made myself steak and salad with French bread. I bought a bottle of red wine to go with the meal. It had been eight months since I had had a drink. It was time to find out. I drank two glasses of the wine with my meal, and sipped the rest of the bottle afterward while I read the
Times
and the
Herald Examiner
classified pages, looking for a job. There were three openings for a carpenter’s helper and I marked them for the morning. Then I washed up the dishes and went to bed with a mild buzz and a full stomach.

I could still taste wine in my mouth the next morning and my head ached enough to take aspirin with my orange juice. But I didn’t feel bad, and I didn’t feel like I needed a drink. Maybe next week I could try a couple of beers. I did a careful journal entry after breakfast, and
then took a bus downtown to a temporary office in a storefront on the corner of Seventh and Hope to interview for the carpentry job. The job was with a big construction firm that was putting up houses in the Toluca Lake area in North Hollywood. They hired two of us, probably because we were sober, me, and a muscular black man named Roy Washington. A half-hour later we were in the front seat of a pickup truck with a carpenter named Henry Reagan heading for the job.

Henry was a thin, drawn, old man, over sixty, with skin that had weathered to a permanent reddish tone. He wore glasses with gold rims and a sweat-stained baseball cap.

“You know anything about carpentry?”

I said, “No.” Washington shook his head.

“You own any tools?”

“No.”

“Jesus,” Henry said. “How am I supposed to teach you anything if you don’t have any motherfucking tools?”

Washington and I looked at each other.

“I’ll lend you some, but as soon as you get paid, you sure better buy your own,” Henry said. “What’d you boys do before?”

“Boxer,” Washington said.

“How come you’re not boxing now?” Henry said.

“Can’t get no fights,” Washington said. “People ducking me. My manager’s working on it. But in the meantime I gotta eat.”

Henry glanced at me, sitting in the middle between him and Washington.

“How about you? You fight too?”

“Not if I can run,” I said. “I was washing dishes in a
place out in Santa Monica. Somebody bought the building and is gonna tear the place down.”

Henry nodded, still sidelonging me as he drove.

“You didn’t get the upper body rinsing dishes,” he said.

“I work out a little.”

“You’ll be working out a lot more by the time I get through teaching your asses,” Henry said.

Washington looked at Henry’s narrow arms and winked at me. Henry turned the truck into the dirt road of a construction site and parked in front of a row of newly poured concrete slabs.

“Okay, boys,” Henry said. “Time to start learning. I’m going to make first-class fucking framers out of you, and I’m in a hurry.”

He didn’t succeed by evening of the first day, but neither Washington nor I laughed at the thinness of his arms again. He gave us sixteen-ounce hammers and nailing aprons and we filled the aprons with handfuls of tenpenny nails from a fifty-pound keg that he had in the back of the truck.

“Okay,” Henry said. “We’re going to frame this house. I’m going to show you how and you’re going to do it. You can expect to fuck it up a few times until you get the feel of things. Don’t let it bother you. If you do it wrong, I’ll straighten it out. Let’s get the cocksucker going.”

And we did. We built sections of the frame on the floor of the slab, and then raised them into position and nailed them together. Henry could drive a ten-penny nail full in with two strokes of the hammer. Washington and I took ten or twelve bangs apiece to get one in. We bent
half of them. Henry made us pull out any bent ones. He made us hold the hammer down at the butt end instead of choking up, and he showed us how to take a full-armed swing with it instead of small taps.

“Hit the cocksucker,” he said. “Two swings and it’s in. No sense tiring yourself out with ten bangs. Let the hammer do the work; let the weight of the head do it. You know how to let the head do the work, don’t you?”

He was inexhaustible. He drove nails steadily all afternoon, varying it only to cut the studs to size, driving the circular saw through the wood with a clean, sharp, single movement. When Washington and I did it the saw would bind and the smell of friction-seared wood was sharp.

By five o’clock, when we stopped, Washington and I were soaked with sweat and my arms were shaking tired. I had hit myself on the thumb four times. Henry looked exactly as he had, his thin, reddish body moving with the same tight alacrity it had when he’d picked us up in the morning.

“We start at eight,” Henry said. “Punch in at the field shed. If you’re late, the foreman will take a bite out of your fucking ass.”

We put the hammers and the aprons in the tool box in the back of Henry’s truck and got in. He drove us down to Hollywood Boulevard.

“I’m heading for West L.A.,” he said. “I’ll drop you boys here.”

Washington and I went into a bar on Hollywood near the corner of Wilton and had a beer. I was so drained and thirsty, I forgot for a moment that it was the
first beer since last fall. It was cold and it filled me as I had always imagined it would.

“Where you staying?” I asked Washington.

He shrugged. “Around,” he said.

I looked at him in the mirror behind the bar. He had a wide mouth and a little mustache like Ray Robinson wore. I didn’t see any sign of damage on his face except a horizontal scar maybe two inches along the cheekbone under his right eye.

“You need a place to stay?” I said.

“Naw, man, I’m fine,” he said.

“Then how come you’re staying ‘around,’ ” I said.

“Don’t get too pushy, man,” Washington said.

“Why don’t you stay with me for a while,” I said. “I slept in too many parks to think it’s fun.”

“Where you staying?” Washington said.

“Up on Franklin Avenue,” I said. “Near Kenmore.”

His eyes were hazel, with a lot of white around the iris. “They let me in up there?”

“They let me in,” I said.

“I ain’t the same color as you,” Washington said.

“I noticed that,” I said. “Let’s integrate the fucker.”

Washington grinned. He raised his beer glass toward me. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.” So we did.

Roy Washington trained in a gym on 103rd Street, near Alameda on weekends, and sometimes, if we weren’t too tired after work, I went with him and he taught me to box a little, so that when we sparred, he could get a workout. The neighborhood was black, and most of the men in the gym were black, but nobody paid me much attention, and I felt comfortable enough as long as I was with Roy. When we weren’t working out evenings, we’d drink a few beers and read. I was the first person Roy had known socially who had been to college.

“Lucky you flunked out,” he told me once, “or I’d never understand nothing you said.”

Race relations were fermenting in the early sixties, but Roy and I were okay. We did a lot of honky–nigger humor, taught each other the things we knew (Roy knew more useful things than I did), and got a chance to observe firsthand that the great issues often have little to do with the individual ones.

“I don’t want you honkies giving me what I get,” Roy
told me one night. “I want to take it.” We were at the gym taking turns on the heavy bag on a hot night. The sweat glistened like oil on both our bodies. I was holding the bag, and as Roy hit it, the bag bucked and shuddered against me.

After the workout, showered and dressed, we walked to the bus stop carrying our gym bags, through a populace uniformly black. Hazel eyes looking at me without response.

“How you feel walking around Watts?” Roy said on the bus.

“I wouldn’t do it without you,” I said.

“Good idea,” he said.

“Even with you,” I said, “I feel, you know, alien. Like I don’t know the score.”

“I feel that way most of the time,” Roy said. “Laws and marches and stuff don’t seem to change that.”

“So what will change it?” I said. “So what can we do?”

“We?” Roy grinned. “Who the fuck you talking for? You white folks?”

“Aren’t you speaking for the coons?” I said.

“I’m speaking for me,” he said. “I ain’t trying to change anything. I’m trying to get a good life going. I’m trying to make money, and I’m trying to take no shit from anybody.”

I nodded. “Yeah. I understand that,” I said. “The ‘we’ was asshole.”

Roy looked at me next to him on the bus. “You already done what you can do.”

I got to be a good framer that summer, and a decent all-purpose carpenter. I learned enough about fist fighting
to go three rounds with Roy without getting badly hurt. Though I always wore the headgear and Roy never really aired it out. I was able to drink three or four beers a night and stop. I was able to do it and not smoke. When I could, I still lifted some weights at the Y. Roy and I ran in Griffith Park some mornings before work. I had a book on nutrition from the library. I worked on eating right and every night I tried to read at least a couple of chapters in something worth reading. Roy did most of those things with me.

In early June I met a girl, a librarian that I got talking to as I checked out
The Portable Faulkner
. I was on my way home from work wearing work shoes and jeans, a sweaty T-shirt and a Dodgers baseball cap. The hammer holster was still attached to my belt.

“Have you read Faulkner before?” she said.

“Yeah, I’ve read
Sartoris, Intruder in the Dust
,” I said. “And
Knight’s Gambit
, and
Pylon
and ‘The Bear.’ ”

She had longish honey-colored hair and a slim figure. She wore a frilly white shirt with a round collar and a black bow tie, sort of. Her fingernails were short and pointed and done in a neutral polish.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” she said.

“Can’t judge a book by its cover,” I said.

She smiled. “Let that be a lesson to me,” she said.

After that we used to joke about her assumption every time I went in, and one night near closing, I said, “Would you care to get something to eat, or a drink, after work?”