Ham on Rye: A Novel

  I wrote pages and pages about the Baron’s dog fights, how he would knock down three or four planes, fly back, almost nothing left of his red Fokker. He’d bounce down, leap out of the plane while it was still rolling and head for the bar where he’d grab a bottle and sit at a table alone, pouring shots and slamming them down. Nobody drank like the Baron. The others just stood at the bar and watched him. One time one of the other fliers said, “What is it, Himmlen? You think you’re too good for us?” It was Willie Schmidt, the biggest, strongest guy in the outfit. The Baron downed his drink, set down his glass, stood up and slowly started walking toward Willie who was standing at the bar. The other fliers backed off.

  “Jesus, what are you going to do?” asked Willie as the Baron advanced.

  The Baron kept moving slowly toward Willie, not answering.

  “Jesus, Baron, I was just kidding! Mother’s honor! Listen to me, Baron…Baron…the enemy is elsewhere! Baron!”

  The Baron let go with his right. You couldn’t see it. It smashed into Willie’s face propelling him over the top of the bar, flipping him over completely! He crashed into the bar mirror like a cannonball and the bottles tumbled down. The Baron pulled a cigar out and lit it, then walked back to his table, sat down and poured another drink. They didn’t bother the Baron after that. Behind the bar they picked Willie up. His face was a mass of blood.

  The Baron shot plane after plane out of the sky. Nobody seemed to understand him and nobody knew how he had become so skillful with the red Fokker and in his other strange ways. Like fighting. Or the graceful way he walked. He went on and on. His luck was sometimes bad. One day flying back after downing three Allied planes, limping in low over enemy lines, he was hit by shrapnel. It blew off his right hand at the wrist. He managed to bring the red Fokker in. From that time on he flew with an iron hand in place of his original right hand. It didn’t affect his flying. And the fellows at the bar were more careful than ever when they talked to him.

  Many more things happened to the Baron after that. Twice he crashed in no-man’s-land and each time he crawled back to his squadron, half-dead, through barbed wire and flares and enemy fire. Many times he was given up for dead by his comrades. Once he was gone for eight days and the other flyers were sitting in the bar, talking about what an exceptional man he had been. When they looked up, there was the Baron standing in the doorway, eight-day beard, uniform torn and muddy, eyes red and bleary, iron hand glinting in the bar light. He stood there and he said, “There better be some god-damned whiskey in this place or I’m tearing it apart!”

  The Baron went on doing magic things. Half the notebook was filled with Baron Von Himmlen. It made me feel good to write about the Baron. A man needed somebody. There wasn’t anybody around, so you had to make up somebody, make him up to be like a man should be. It wasn’t make-believe or cheating. The other way was make-believe and cheating: living your life without a man like him around.

  35

  The bandages were helpful. L.A. County Hospital had finally come up with something. The boils drained. They didn’t vanish but they flattened a bit. Yet some new ones would appear and rise up again. They drilled me and wrapped me again.

  My sessions with the drill were endless. Thirty-two, thirty-six, thirty-eight times. There was no fear of the drill anymore. There never had been. Only an anger. But the anger was gone. There wasn’t even resignation on my part, only disgust, a disgust that this had happened to me, and a disgust with the doctors who couldn’t do anything about it. They were helpless and I was helpless, the only difference being that I was the victim. They could go home to their lives and forget while I was stuck with the same face.

  But there were changes in my life. My father found a job. He passed an examination at the L.A. County Museum and got a job as a guard. My father was good at exams. He loved math and history. He passed the exam and finally had a place to go each morning. There had been three vacancies for guards and he had gotten one of them.

  L.A. County General Hospital somehow found out and Miss Ackerman told me one day, “Henry, this is your last treatment. I’m going to miss you.”

  “Aw come on,” I said, “stop your kidding. You’re going to miss me like I’m going to miss that electric needle!”

  But she was very strange that day. Those big eyes were watery. I heard her blow her nose.

  I heard one of the nurses ask her, “Why, Janice, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m all right.”

  Poor Miss Ackerman. I was 15 years old and in love with her and I was covered with boils and there was nothing that either of us could do.

  “All right,” she said, “this is going to be your last ultra-violet ray treatment. Lay on your stomach.”

  “I know your first name now,” I told her. “Janice. That’s a pretty name. It’s just like you.”

  “Oh, shut up,” she said.

  I saw her once again when the first buzzer sounded. I turned over, Janice re-set the machine and left the room. I never saw her again.

  My father didn’t believe in doctors who were not free. “They make you piss in a tube, take your money, and drive home to their wives in Beverly Hills,” he said.

  But once he did send me to one. To a doctor with bad breath and a head as round as a basketball, only with two little eyes where a basketball had none. I didn’t like my father and the doctor wasn’t any better. He said, no fried foods, and to drink carrot juice. That was it.

  I would re-enter high school the next term, said my father.

  “I’m busting my ass to keep people from stealing. Some nigger broke the glass on a case and stole some rare coins yesterday. I caught the bastard. We rolled down the stairway together. I held him until the others came. I risk my life every day. Why should you sit around on your ass, moping? I want you to be an engineer. How the hell you gonna be an engineer when I find notebooks full of women with their skirts pulled up to their ass? Is that all you can draw? Why don’t you draw flowers or mountains or the ocean? You’re going back to school!”

  I drank carrot juice and waited to re-enroll. I had only missed one term. The boils weren’t cured but they weren’t as bad as they had been.

  “You know what carrot juice costs me? I have to work the first hour every day just for your god-damned carrot juice!”

  I discovered the La Cienega Public Library. I got a library card. The library was near the old church down on West Adams. It was a very small library and there was just one librarian in it. She was class. About 38 but with pure white hair pulled tightly into a bun behind her neck. Her nose was sharp and she had deep green eyes behind rimless glasses. I felt that she knew everything.

  I walked around the library looking for books. I pulled them off the shelves, one by one. But they were all tricks. They were very dull. There were pages and pages of words that didn’t say anything. Or if they did say something they took too long to say it and by the time they said it you already were too tired to have it matter at all. I tried book after book. Surely, out of all those books, there was one.

  Each day I walked down to the library at Adams and La Brea and there was my librarian, stern and infallible and silent. I kept pulling the books off the shelves. The first real book I found was by a fellow named Upton Sinclair. His sentences were simple and he spoke with anger. He wrote with anger. He wrote about the hog pens of Chicago. He came right out and said things plainly. Then I found another author. His name was Sinclair Lewis. And the book was called Main Street. He peeled back the layers of hypocrisy that covered people. Only he seemed to lack passion.

  I went back for more. I read each book in a single evening.

  I was walking around one day sneaking glances at my librarian when I came upon a book with the title Bow Down To Wood and Stone. Now, that was good, because that was what we were all doing. At last, some fire! I opened the book. It was by Josephine Lawrence. A woman. That was all right. Anybody could find knowledge. I opened the pages. But they were like many of the other books:
milky, obscure, tiresome. I replaced the book. And while my hand was there I reached for a book nearby. It was by another Lawrence. I opened the book at random and began reading. It was about a man at a piano. How false it seemed at first. But I kept reading. The man at the piano was troubled. His mind was saying things. Dark and curious things. The lines on the page were pulled tight, like a man screaming, but not “Joe, where are you?” More like Joe, where is anything? This Lawrence of the tight and bloody line. I had never been told about him. Why the secret? Why wasn’t he advertised?

  I read a book a day. I read all the D. H. Lawrence in the library. My librarian began to look at me strangely as I checked out the books.

  “How are you today?” she would ask.

  That always sounded so good. I felt as if I had already gone to bed with her. I read all the books by D. H. And they led to others. To H. D., the poetess. And Huxley, the youngest of the Huxleys, Lawrence’s friend. It all came rushing at me. One book led to the next. Dos Passos came along. Not too good, really, but good enough. His trilogy, about the U.S.A., took longer than a day to read. Dreiser didn’t work for me. Sherwood Anderson did. And then along came Hemingway. What a thrill! He knew how to lay down a line. It was a joy. Words weren’t dull, words were things that could make your mind hum. If you read them and let yourself feel the magic, you could live without pain, with hope, no matter what happened to you.

  But back at home…

  “LIGHTS OUT!” my father would scream.

  I was reading the Russians now, reading Turgenev and Gorky. My father’s rule was that all lights were to be out by 8 p.m. He wanted to sleep so that he could be fresh and effective on the job the next day. His conversation at home was always about “the job.” He talked to my mother about his “job” from the moment he entered the door in the evenings until they slept. He was determined to rise in the ranks.

  “All right, that’s enough of those god-damned books! Lights out!”

  To me, these men who had come into my life from nowhere were my only chance. They were the only voices that spoke to me.

  “All right,” I would say.

  Then I took the reading lamp, crawled under the blanket, pulled the pillow under there, and read each new book, propping it against the pillow, under the quilt. It got very hot, the lamp got hot, and I had trouble breathing. I would lift the quilt for air.

  “What’s that? Do I see a light? Henry, are your lights out?”

  I would quickly lower the quilt again and wait until I heard my father snoring.

  Turgenev was a very serious fellow but he could make me laugh because a truth first encountered can be very funny. When someone else’s truth is the same as your truth, and he seems to be saying it just for you, that’s great.

  I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.

  And my father had found a job, and that was magic for him…

  36

  Back at Chelsey High it was the same. One group of seniors had graduated but they were replaced by another group of seniors with sports cars and expensive clothes. I was never confronted by them. They left me alone, they ignored me. They were busy with the girls. They never spoke to the poor guys in or out of class.

  About a week into my second semester I talked to my father over dinner.

  “Look,” I said, “it’s hard at school. You’re giving me 50 cents a week allowance. Can’t you make it a dollar?”

  “A dollar?”

  “Yes.”

  He put a forkful of sliced pickled beets into his mouth and chewed. Then he looked at me from under his curled-up eyebrows.

  “If I gave you a dollar a week that would mean 52 dollars a year, that would mean I would have to work over a week on my job just so you could have an allowance.”

  I didn’t answer. But I thought, my god, if you think like that, item by item, then you can’t buy anything: bread, watermelon, newspapers, flour, milk or shaving cream. I didn’t say any more because when you hate, you don’t beg…

  Those rich guys like to dart their cars in and out, swiftly, sliding up, burning rubber, their cars glistening in the sunlight as the girls gathered around. Classes were a joke, they were all going somewhere to college, classes were just a routine laugh, they got good grades, you seldom saw them with books, you just saw them burning more rubber, gunning from the curb with their cars full of squealing and laughing girls. I watched them with my 50 cents in my pocket. I didn’t even know how to drive a car.

  Meanwhile the poor and the lost and the idiots continued to flock around me. I had a place I liked to eat under the football grandstand. I had my brown bag lunch with my two bologna sandwiches. They came around, “Hey, Hank, can I eat with you?”

  “Get the fuck out of here! I’m not going to tell you twice!”

  Enough of this kind had attached themselves to me already. I didn’t much care for any of them: Baldy, Jimmy Hatcher, and a thin gangling Jewish kid, Abe Mortenson. Mortenson was a straight-A student but one of the biggest idiots in school. He had something radically wrong with him. Saliva kept forming in his mouth but instead of spitting on the ground to get rid of it he spit into his hands. I don’t know why he did it and I didn’t ask. I didn’t like to ask. I just watched him and I was disgusted. I went home with him once and I found out how he got straight A’s. His mother made him stick his nose into a book right away and she made him keep it there. She made him read all of his school books over and over, page after page. “He must pass his exams,” she told me. It never occurred to her that maybe the books were wrong. Or that maybe it didn’t matter. I didn’t ask her.

  It was like grammar school all over again. Gathered around me were the weak instead of the strong, the ugly instead of the beautiful, the losers instead of the winners. It looked like it was my destiny to travel in their company through life. That didn’t bother me so much as the fact that I seemed irresistible to these dull idiot fellows. I was like a turd that drew flies instead of like a flower that butterflies and bees desired. I wanted to live alone, I felt best being alone, cleaner, yet I was not clever enough to rid myself of them. Maybe they were my masters: fathers in another form. In any event, it was hard to have them hanging around while I was eating my bologna sandwiches.

  37

  But there were some good moments. My sometime friend from the neighborhood, Gene, who was a year older than I, had a buddy, Harry Gibson, who had had one professional fight (he’d lost). I was over at Gene’s one afternoon smoking cigarettes with him when Harry Gibson showed up with two pairs of boxing gloves. Gene and I were smoking with his two older brothers, Larry and Dan.

  Harry Gibson was cocky. “Anybody want to try me?” he asked. Nobody said anything. Gene’s oldest brother, Larry, was about 22. He was the biggest, but he was kind of timid and subnormal. He had a huge head, he was short and stocky, really well-built, but everything frightened him. So we all looked at Dan who was the next oldest, since Larry said, “No, no I don’t want to fight.” Dan was a musical genius, he had almost won a scholarship but not quite. Anyhow, since Larry had passed up Harry’s challenge, Dan put the gloves on with Harry Gibson.

  Harry Gibson was a son-of-a-bitch on shining wheels. Even the sun glinted off his gloves in a certain way. He moved with precision, aplomb and grace. He pranced and danced around Dan. Dan held up his gloves and waited. Gibson’s first punch streaked in. It cracked like a rifle shot. There were some chickens in a pen in the yard and two of them jumped into the air at the sound. Dan spilled backwards. He was stretched out on the grass, both of his arms spread out like some cheap Christ.

  Larry looked at him and said, “I’m going into the house.” He walked quickly to the screen door, opened it and was gone.

  We walked over to Dan. Gibson stood over him with a little grin on his face. Gene bent down, lifted Dan’s head up a bit. “Dan? You all right?”

  Dan shook his head and slowly sat up.

&n
bsp; “Jesus Christ, the guy’s carrying a lethal weapon. Get these gloves off me!”

  Gene unlaced one glove and I got the other. Dan stood up and walked toward the back door like an old man. “I’m gonna lay down…” He went inside.

  Harry Gibson picked up the gloves and looked at Gene. “How about it, Gene?”

  Gene spit in the grass. “What the hell you trying to do, knock off the whole family?”

  “I know you’re the best fighter, Gene, but I’ll go easy on you anyhow.”

  Gene nodded and I laced on his gloves for him. I was a good glove man.

  They squared off. Gibson circled around Gene, getting ready. He circled to the right, then he circled to the left. He bobbed and he weaved. Then he stepped in, gave Gene a hard left jab. It landed right between Gene’s eyes. Gene backpedaled and Gibson followed. When he got Gene up against the chicken pen he steadied him with a soft left to the forehead and then cracked a hard right to Gene’s left temple. Gene slid along the chicken wire until he hit the fence, then he slid along the fence, covering up. He wasn’t attempting to fight back. Dan came out of the house with a piece of ice wrapped in a rag. He sat on the porch steps and held the rag to his forehead. Gene retreated along the fence. Harry got him in the corner between the fence and the garage. He looped a left to Gene’s gut and when Gene bent over he straightened him with a right uppercut. I didn’t like it. Gibson wasn’t going easy on Gene like he’d promised. I got excited.