Ham on Rye: A Novel

  “I like this joint. I might move in here.”

  I walked to the refrigerator and brought back a new six-pack.

  “I’m one tough son-of-a-bitch,” I said. “You’re lucky I let you hang around me.”

  “We’re friends, Hank.”

  I jammed a can of beer under his nose.

  “Here, drink this!”

  I went to the bathroom to piss. It was a very ladylike bathroom, brightly colored towels, deep pink floormats. Even the toilet seat was pink. She sat her big white ass on there and her name was Clare. I looked at my virgin cock.

  “I’m a man,” I said. “I can whip anybody’s ass.”

  “I need the bathroom, Hank…” Jim was at the door.

  He went into the bathroom. I heard him puking.

  “Ah, shit…” I said and opened a new can of beer.

  After a few minutes, Jim came out and sat in a chair. He looked very pale. I stuck a can of beer under his nose.

  “Drink up! Be a man! You were man enough to steal it, now be man enough to drink it!”

  “Just let me rest a while.”

  “Drink it!”

  I sat down on the couch. Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn’t become obvious yourself.

  I looked over at Jimmy.

  “Drink up, punk.”

  I threw my empty beer can across the room.

  “Tell me some more about your mother, Jimmy boy. What did she say about the man who drank her piss in the bathtub?”

  “She said, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’”

  “Jim.”

  “Uh?”

  “Drink up. Be a man!”

  He lifted his beer can. Then he ran to the bathroom and I heard him puking again. He came out after a while and sat in his chair. He didn’t look well. “I’ve got to lay down,” he said.

  “Jimmy,” I said, “I’m going to wait around until your mother comes home.”

  Jimmy got up from his chair and started walking toward the bedroom.

  “When she comes home I’m going to fuck her, Jimmy.”

  He didn’t hear me. He just walked into the bedroom.

  I went into the kitchen and came back with more beer.

  I sat and drank the beer and waited for Clare. Where was that whore? I couldn’t allow this kind of thing. I ran a tight ship.

  I got up and walked into the bedroom. Jim was face down on the bed, all his clothes on, his shoes on. I walked back out.

  Well, it was obvious that boy had no belly for booze. Clare needed a man. I sat down and opened another can of beer. I took a good hit. I found a pack of cigarettes on the coffee table and lit one.

  I don’t know how many more beers I drank waiting for Clare but finally I heard the key in the door and it opened. There was Clare of the body and the bright blond hair. That body stood on those high heels and it swayed just a little. No artist could have imagined it better. Even the walls stared at her, the lampshades, the chairs, the rug. Magic. Standing there…

  “Who the hell are you? What is this?”

  “Clare, we’ve met. I’m Hank. Jimmy’s friend.”

  “Get out of here!”

  I laughed. “I’m movin’ in, baby, it’s you and me!”

  “Where’s Jimmy?”

  She ran into the bedroom, then came back out.

  “You little prick! What’s going on here?”

  I picked up a cigarette, lit it. I grinned.

  “You’re beautiful when you’re angry…”

  “You’re nothing but a god-damned little kid drunk on beer. Go home.”

  “Sit down, baby. Have a beer.”

  Clare sat down. I was very surprised when she did that.

  “You go to Chelsey, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Jim and I are buddies.”

  “You’re Hank.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s told me about you.”

  I handed Clare a can of beer. My hand shook. “Here, have a drink, baby.”

  She opened the beer and took a sip.

  I looked at Clare, lifted my beer and had a hit. She was plenty of woman, a Mae West type, wore the same kind of tight-fitting gown—big hips, big legs. And breasts. Startling breasts.

  Clare crossed her wondrous legs, a bit of skirt falling back. Her legs were full and golden and the stockings fit like skin.

  “I’ve met your mother,” she said.

  I drained my can of beer and put it down by my feet. I opened a new one, took a sip, then looked at her, not knowing whether to took at her breasts or at her legs or into her tired face.

  “I’m sorry that I got your son drunk. But I’ve got to tell you something.”

  She turned her head, lighting a cigarette as she did so, then faced me again.

  “Yes?”

  “Clare, I love you.”

  She didn’t laugh. She just gave me a little smile, the corners of her mouth turning up a little.

  “Poor boy. You’re nothing but a little chicken just out of the egg.”

  It was true but it angered me. Maybe because it was true. The dream and the beer wanted it to be something else. I took another drink and looked at her and said, “Cut the shit. Lift your skirt. Show me some leg. Show me some flank.”

  “You’re just a boy.”

  Then I said it. I don’t know where the words came from, but I said it, “I could tear you in half, baby, if you gave me the chance.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “All right. Let’s see.”

  Then she did it. Just like that. She uncrossed her legs and pulled her skirt back.

  She didn’t have on panties.

  I saw her huge white upper flanks, rivers of flesh. There was a large protruding wart on the inside of her left thigh. And there was a jungle of tangled hair between her legs, but it was not bright yellow like the hair on her head, it was brown and shot with grey, old like some sick bush dying, lifeless and sad.

  I stood up.

  “I’ve got to go, Mrs. Hatcher.”

  “Christ, I thought you wanted to party!”

  “Not with your son in the other room, Mrs. Hatcher.”

  “Don’t worry about him, Hank. He’s passed out.”

  “No, Mrs. Hatcher, I’ve really got to go.”

  “All right, get out of here you god-damned little piss-ant!”

  I closed the door behind me and walked down the hall of the apartment building and out into the street.

  To think, somebody had suicided for that.

  The night suddenly looked good. I walked along toward my parents’ house.

  44

  I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn’t particularly want money. I didn’t know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn’t have to do anything. The thought of being something didn’t only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother’s Day…was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep.

  My father had a master plan. He told me, “My son, each man during his lifetime should buy a house. Finally he dies and leaves that house to his son. Then his son gets his own house and dies, leaves both houses to his son. That’s two houses. That son gets his own house, that’s three houses…”

  The family structure. Victory over adversity through the family. He believed in it. Take the family, mix with God and Country, add the ten-hour day and you had what was needed.

  I looked at my father, at his
hands, his face, his eyebrows, and I knew that this man had nothing to do with me. He was a stranger. My mother was non-existent. I was cursed. Looking at my father I saw nothing but indecent dullness. Worse, he was even more afraid to fail than most others. Centuries of peasant blood and peasant training. The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains. Not a man in the line who said, “I don’t want a house, I want a thousand houses, now!”

  He had sent me to that rich high school hoping that the ruler’s attitude would rub off on me as I watched the rich boys screech up in their cream-colored coupes and pick up the girls in bright dresses. Instead I learned that the poor usually stay poor. That the young rich smell the stink of the poor and learn to find it a bit amusing. They had to laugh, otherwise it would be too terrifying. They’d learned that, through the centuries. I would never forgive the girls for getting into those cream-colored coupes with the laughing boys. They couldn’t help it, of course, yet you always think, maybe…But no, there weren’t any maybes. Wealth meant victory and victory was the only reality.

  What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?

  Throughout high school I tried not to think too much about how things might eventually turn out for me. It seemed better to delay thinking…

  Finally it was the day of the Senior Prom. It was held in the girls’ gym with live music, a real band. I don’t know why but I walked over that night, the two-and-one-half miles from my parents’ place. I stood outside in the dark and I looked in there, through the wire-covered window, and I was astonished. All the girls looked very grown-up, stately, lovely, they were in long dresses, and they all looked beautiful. I almost didn’t recognize them. And the boys in their tuxes, they looked great, they danced so straight, each of them holding a girl in his arms, their faces pressed against the girl’s hair. They all danced beautifully and the music was loud and clear and good, powerful.

  Then I caught a glimpse of my reflection staring in at them—boils and scars on my face, my ragged shirt. I was like some jungle animal drawn to the light and looking in. Why had I come? I felt sick. But I kept watching. The dance ended. There was a pause. Couples spoke easily to each other. It was natural and civilized. Where had they learned to converse and to dance? I couldn’t converse or dance. Everybody knew something I didn’t know. The girls looked so good, the boys so handsome. I would be too terrified to even look at one of those girls, let alone be close to one. To look into her eyes or dance with her would be beyond me.

  And yet I knew that what I saw wasn’t as simple and good as it appeared. There was a price to be paid for it all, a general falsity, that could be easily believed, and could be the first step down a dead-end street. The band began to play again and the boys and girls began to dance again and the lights revolved overhead throwing shades of gold, then red, then blue, then green, then gold again on the couples. As I watched them I said to myself, someday my dance will begin. When that day comes I will have something that they don’t have.

  But then it got to be too much for me. I hated them. I hated their beauty, their untroubled youth, and as I watched them dance through the magic colored pools of light, holding each other, feeling so good, little unscathed children, temporarily in luck, I hated them because they had something I had not yet had, and I said to myself, I said to myself again, someday I will be as happy as any of you, you will see.

  They kept dancing, and I repeated it to them.

  Then there was a sound behind me.

  “Hey! What are you doing?”

  It was an old man with a flashlight. He had a head like a frog’s head.

  “I’m watching the dance.”

  He held the flashlight right up under his nose. His eyes were round and large, they gleamed like a cat’s eyes in the moonlight. But his mouth was shriveled, collapsed, and his head was round. It had a peculiar senseless roundness that reminded me of a pumpkin trying to play pundit.

  “Get your ass out of here!”

  He ran the flashlight up and down all over me.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I’m the night custodian. Get your ass out of here before I call the cops!”

  “What for? This is the Senior Prom and I’m a senior.”

  He flashed his light into my face. The band was playing “Deep Purple.”

  “Bullshit!” he said. “You’re at least 22 years old!”

  “I’m in the yearbook, Class of 1939, graduating class, Henry Chinaski.”

  “Why aren’t you in there dancing?”

  “Forget it. I’m going home.”

  “Do that.”

  I walked off. I kept walking. His flashlight leaped on the path, the light following me. I walked off campus. It was a nice warm night, almost hot. I thought I saw some fireflies but I wasn’t sure.

  45

  Graduation Day. We filed in with our caps and gowns to “Pomp and Circumstance.” I suppose that in our three years we must have learned something. Our ability to spell had probably improved and we had grown in size. I was still a virgin. “Hey, Henry, you busted your cherry yet?” “No way,” I’d say.

  Jimmy Hatcher sat next to me. The principal was giving his address and really scraping the bottom of the old shit barrel. “America is the great land of Opportunity and any man or woman with a desire to do so will succeed…”

  “Dishwasher,” I said.

  “Dog catcher,” said Jimmy.

  “Burglar,” I said.

  “Garbage collector,” said Jimmy.

  “Madhouse attendant,” I said.

  “America is brave, America was built by the brave…Ours is a just society.”

  “Just so much for the few,” said Jimmy.

  “…a fair society and all those who search for that dream at the end of the rainbow will find…”

  “A hairy crawling turd,” I suggested.

  “…and I can say, without hesitation, that this particular Class of Summer 1939, less than a decade removed from the beginning of our terrible national Depression, this class of Summer ’39 is more ripe with courage, talent and love than any class it has been my pleasure to witness!”

  The mothers, fathers, relatives applauded wildly; a few of the students joined in.

  “Class of Summer 1939, I am proud of your future, I am sure of your future. I send you out now to your great adventure!”

  Most of them were headed over to U.S.C. to live the non-working life for at least four more years.

  “And I send my prayers and blessings with you!”

  The honor students received their diplomas first. Out they came. Abe Mortenson was called. He got his. I applauded.

  “Where’s he gonna end up?” Jimmy asked.

  “Cost accountant in an auto parts manufacturing concern. Somewhere near Gardena, California.”

  “A lifetime job…” said Jimmy.

  “A lifetime wife,” I added.

  “Abe will never be miserable…”

  “Or happy.”

  “An obedient man…”

  “A broom.”

  “A stiff…”

  “A wimp.”

  When the honor students had been taken care of they began on us. I felt uncomfortable sitting there. I felt like walking out.

  “Henry Chinaski!” I was called.

  “Public servant,” I told Jimmy.

  I walked up to and across the stage, took the diploma, shook the principal’s hand. It felt slimy like the inside of a dirty fish bowl. (Two years later he would be exposed as an embezzler of school funds; he was to be tried, convicted and jailed.)

  I passed Mortenson and the honor group as I went back to my seat. He looked over and gave me the finger, so only I could see it. That got me. It was so unexpected.

  I walked back and sat down next to Jimmy.

  “Mortenson gave me the finger!”

  “No, I don’t believe it!”

  “Son-of-a-bitch! He’s spoiled my
day! Not that it was worth a fuck anyhow but he’s really greased it over now!”

  “I can’t believe he had the guts to finger you.”

  “It’s not like him. You think he’s getting some coaching?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  “He knows that I can bust him in half without even inhaling!”

  “Bust him!”

  “But don’t you see, he’s won? It’s the way he surprised me!”

  “All you gotta do is kick his ass all up and down.”

  “Do you think that son-of-a-bitch learned something reading all those books? I know there’s nothing in them because I read every fourth page.”

  “Jimmy Hatcher!” His name was called.

  “Priest,” he said.

  “Poultry farmer,” I said.

  Jimmy went up and got his. I applauded loudly. Anybody who could live with a mother like his deserved some accolade. He came back and we sat watching all the golden boys and girls go up and get theirs.

  “You can’t blame them for being rich,” Jimmy said.

  “No, I blame their fucking parents.”

  “And their grandparents,” said Jimmy.

  “Yes, I’d be happy to take their new cars and their pretty girlfriends and I wouldn’t give a fuck about anything like social justice.”

  “Yeah,” said Jimmy. “I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.”

  The golden boys and girls went on parading across the stage. I sat there wondering whether to punch Abe out or not. I could see him flopping on the sidewalk still in his cap and gown, the victim of my right cross, all the pretty girls screaming, thinking, my god, this Chinaski guy must be a bull on the springs!

  On the other hand, Abe wasn’t much. He was hardly there. It wouldn’t take anything to punch him out. I decided not to do it. I had already broken his arm and his parents hadn’t sued mine, finally. If I busted his head they would surely go ahead and sue. They would take my old man’s last copper. Not that I would mind. It was my mother: she would suffer in a fool’s way: senselessly and without reason.

  Then, the ceremony was over. The students left their seats and filed out. Students met with parents, relatives on the front lawn. There was much hugging, embracing. I saw my parents waiting. I walked up to them, stood about four feet away.