Ham on Rye: A Novel

My father liked the slogan, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.”

  But it hadn’t done any of that for him. I decided that I might try to reverse the process.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  Maybe if I masturbated to Miss Meadows?

  Too cheap.

  I wallowed there in the dark, waiting for something.

  47

  The first three or four days at Mears-Starbuck were identical. In fact, similarity was a very dependable thing at Mears-Starbuck. The caste system was an accepted fact. There wasn’t a single salesclerk who spoke to a stockclerk outside of a perfunctory word or two. And it affected me. I thought about it as I pushed my cart about. Was it possible that the salesclerks were more intelligent than the stockclerks? They certainly dressed better. It bothered me that they assumed that their station meant so much. Perhaps if I had been a salesclerk I would have felt the same way. I didn’t much care for the other stockclerks. Or the salesclerks.

  Now, I thought, pushing my cart along, I have this job. Is this to be it? No wonder men robbed banks. There were too many demeaning jobs. Why the hell wasn’t I a superior court judge or a concert pianist? Because it took training and training cost money. But I didn’t want to be anything anyhow. And I was certainly succeeding.

  I pushed my cart to the elevator and hit the button.

  Women wanted men who made money, women wanted men of mark. How many classy women were living with skid row bums? Well, I didn’t want a woman anyhow. Not to live with. How could men live with women? What did it mean? What I wanted was a cave in Colorado with three-years’ worth of foodstuffs and drink. I’d wipe my ass with sand. Anything, anything to stop drowning in this dull, trivial and cowardly existence.

  The elevator came up. The albino was still at the controls. “Hey, I hear you and Mewks made the bars last night!”

  “He bought me a few beers. I’m broke.”

  “You guys get laid?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Why don’t you guys take me along next time? I’ll show you how to get some snatch.”

  “What do you know?”

  “I’ve been around. Just last week I had a Chinese girl. And you know, it’s just like they say.”

  “What’s that?”

  We hit the basement and the doors opened.

  “Their snatch doesn’t run up and down, it runs from side to side.”

  Ferris was waiting for me.

  “Where the hell you been?”

  “Home gardening.”

  “What did you do, fertilize the fuchsias?”

  “Yeah, I drop one turd in each pot.”

  “Listen, Chinaski…”

  “Yes?”

  “The punchlines around here belong to me. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Well, get this. I’ve got an order here for Men’s Wear.”

  He handed me the order slip.

  “Locate these items, deliver them, obtain a signature and return.”

  Men’s Wear was run by Mr. Justin Phillips, Jr. He was well-bred, he was polite, around twenty-two. He stood very straight, had dark hair, dark eyes, brooding lips. There was an unfortunate absence of cheekbones but it was hardly noticeable. He was pale and wore dark clothing with beautifully starched shirts. The salesgirls loved him. He was sensitive, intelligent, clever. He was also just a bit nasty as if some forebear had passed down that right to him. He had only broken with tradition once to speak to me. “It’s a shame, isn’t it, those rather ugly scars on your face?”

  As I rolled my cart up to Men’s Wear, Justin Phillips was standing very straight, head tilted a bit, staring, as he did most of the time, looking off and up as if he was seeing things we were not. He saw things out there. Maybe I just didn’t recognize breeding when I saw it. He certainly appeared to be above his surroundings. It was a good trick if you could do it and get paid at the same time. Maybe that’s what management and the salesgirls liked. Here was a man truly too good for what he was doing, but he was doing it anyhow.

  I rolled up. “Here’s your order, Mr. Phillips.”

  He appeared not to notice me, which hurt in a sense, and was a good thing in another. I stacked the goods on the counter as he stared off into space, just above the elevator door.

  Then I heard golden laughter and I looked. It was a gang of guys who had graduated with me from Chelsey High. They were trying on sweaters, hiking shorts, various items. I knew them by sight only, as we had never spoken during our four years of high school. The leader was Jimmy Newhall. He had been the halfback on our football team, undefeated for three years. His hair was a beautiful yellow, the sun always seemed to be highlighting parts of it, the sun or the lights in the schoolroom. He had a thick, powerful neck and above it sat the face of a perfect boy sculpted by some master sculptor. Everything was exactly as it should be: nose, forehead, chin, the works. And the body likewise, perfectly formed. The others with Newhall were not exactly as perfect as he was, but they were close. They stood around and tried on sweaters and laughed, waiting to go to U.S.C. or Stanford.

  Justin Phillips signed my receipt. I was on my way back to the elevator when I heard a voice:

  “HEY, SKI! SKI, YOU LOOK GREAT IN YOUR LITTLE OUTFIT!”

  I stopped, turned, gave them a casual wave of the left hand.

  “Look at him! Toughest guy in town since Tommy Dorsey!”

  “Makes Gable look like a toilet plunger.”

  I left my wagon and walked back. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I stood there and looked at them. I didn’t like them, never had. They might look glorious to others but not to me. There was something about their bodies that was like a woman’s body. They were soft, they had never faced any fire. They were beautiful nothings. They made me sick. I hated them. They were part of the nightmare that always haunted me in one form or another.

  Jimmy Newhall smiled at me. “Hey, stockboy, how come you never tried out for the team?”

  “It wasn’t what I wanted.”

  “No guts, eh?”

  “You know where the parking lot on the roof is?”

  “Sure.”

  “See you there…”

  They strolled out toward the parking lot as I took my smock off and threw it into the cart. Justin Phillips, Jr. smiled at me, “My dear boy, you are going to get your ass whipped.”

  Jimmy Newhall was waiting, surrounded by his buddies.

  “Hey, look, the stockboy!”

  “You think he’s wearing ladies’ underwear?”

  Newhall was standing in the sun. He had his shirt off and his undershirt too. He had his gut sucked in and his chest pushed out. He looked good. What the hell had I gotten into? I felt my underlip trembling. Up there on the roof, I felt fear. I looked at Newhall, the golden sun highlighting his golden hair. I had watched him many times on the football field. I had seen him break off many 50 and 60 yard runs while I rooted for the other team.

  Now we stood looking at each other. I left my shirt on. We kept standing. I kept standing.

  Newhall finally said, “O.K., I’m going to take you now.” He started to move forward. Just then a little old lady dressed in black came by with many packages. She had on a tiny green felt hat.

  “Hello, boys!” she said.

  “Hello, ma’am.”

  “Lovely day…”

  The little old lady opened her car door and loaded in the packages. Then she turned to Jimmy Newhall.

  “Oh, what a fine body you have, my boy! I’ll bet you could be Tarzan of the Apes!”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “Pardon me, but he’s the ape and those with him are his tribe.”

  “Oh,” she said. She got into her car, started it and we waited as she backed out and drove off.

  “O.K., Chinaski,” said Newhall, “all through school you were famous for your sneer and your big god-damned mouth. And now I’m going to put the cure on you!”

  Newhall bounded forward. He was ready. I wasn’t quite
ready. All I saw was a backdrop of blue sky and a flash of body and fists. He was quicker than an ape, and bigger. I couldn’t seem to throw a punch, I only felt his fists and they were rock hard. Squinting through punched eyes I could see his fists, swinging, landing, my god, he had power, it seemed endless and there was no place to go. I began to think, maybe you are a sissy, maybe you should be, maybe you should quit.

  But as he continued to punch, my fear vanished. I felt only astonishment at his strength and energy. Where did he get it? A swine like him? He was loaded. I couldn’t see anymore—my eyes were blinded by flashes of yellow and green light, purple light—then a terrific shot of RED…I felt myself going down.

  Is this the way it happens?

  I fell to one knee. I heard an airplane passing overhead. I wished I was on it. I felt something run over my mouth and chin…it was warm blood running from my nose.

  “Let him go, Jimmy, he’s finished…”

  I looked at Newhall. “Your mother sucks cock,” I told him.

  “I’LL KILL YOU!”

  Newhall rushed me before I could quite get up. He had me by the throat and we rolled over and over, under a Dodge. I heard his head hit something. I didn’t know what it hit but I heard the sound. It happened quite quickly and the others were not as aware of it as I was.

  I got up and then Newhall got up.

  “I’m going to kill you,” he said.

  Newhall windmilled in. This time it wasn’t nearly so bad. He punched with the same fury, but something was missing. He was weaker. When he hit me I didn’t see flashes of color, I could see the sky, the parked cars, the faces of his friends, and him. I had always been a slow starter. Newhall was still trying but he was definitely weaker, And I had my small hands, I was blessed with small hands, lousy weapons.

  What a weary time those years were—to have the desire and the need to live but not the ability.

  I dug a hard right to his belly and I heard him gasp so I grabbed him behind the neck with my left and dug another right to his belly. Then I pushed him off and cracked him with a one-two, right into that sculpted face. I saw his eyes and it was great. I was bringing something to him that he had never felt before. He was terrified. Terrified because he didn’t know how to handle defeat. I decided to finish him slowly.

  Then someone slugged me on the back of the head. It was a good hard shot. I turned and looked.

  It was his red-headed friend, Cal Evans.

  I yelled, pointing at him. “Stay the fuck away from me! I’ll take all of you one at a time! As soon as I’m done with this guy, you’re next!”

  It didn’t take much to finish Jimmy. I even tried some fancy footwork. I jabbed a bit, played around and then I moved in and started punching. He took it pretty good and for a while I thought I couldn’t finish it but all of a sudden he gave me this strange look which said, hey, look, maybe we ought to be buddies and go have a couple of beers together. Then he dropped.

  His friends moved in and picked him up, they held him up, talked to him, “Hey, Jim, you O.K.?”

  “What’d the son-of-a-bitch do to you, Jim? We’ll clean his drawers, Jim. Just give us the word.”

  “Take me home,” Jim said.

  I watched them go down the stairway, all of them trying to hold him up, one guy carrying his shirt and undershirt…

  I went downstairs to get my cart. Justin Phillips was waiting.

  “I didn’t think you’d be back,” he smiled disdainfully.

  “Don’t fraternize with the unskilled help,” I told him.

  I pushed off. My face, my clothes—I was pretty badly messed up. I walked to the elevator and hit the button. The albino came in due time. The doors opened.

  “The word’s out,” he said. “I hear you’re the new heavyweight champion of the world.”

  News travels fast in places where nothing much ever happens.

  Ferris of the sliced ear was waiting.

  “You just don’t go around beating the shit out of our customers.”

  “It was only one.”

  “We have no way of knowing when you might start in on the others.”

  “This guy baited me.”

  “We don’t give a damn about that. That’s what happens. All we know is that you were out of line.”

  “How about my check?”

  “It’ll be mailed.”

  “O.K., see you…”

  “Wait, I’ll need your locker key.”

  I got out my key chain which only had one other key on it, pulled off the locker key and handed it to Ferris.

  Then I walked to the employees’ door, pulled it open. It was a heavy steel door which worked awkwardly. As it opened, letting in the daylight, I turned and gave Ferris a small wave. He didn’t respond. He just looked straight at me. Then the door closed on him. I liked him, somehow.

  48

  “So you couldn’t hold a job for a week?”

  We were eating meatballs and spaghetti. My problems were always discussed at dinner time. Dinner time was almost always an unhappy time.

  I didn’t answer my father’s question.

  “What happened? Why did they can your ass?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Henry, answer your father when he speaks to you!” my mother said.

  “He couldn’t hack it, that’s all!”

  “Look at his face,” said my mother, “it’s all bruised and cut. Did your boss beat you up, Henry?”

  “No, Mother…”

  “Why don’t you eat, Henry? You never seem to be hungry.”

  “He can’t eat,” said my father, “he can’t work, he can’t do anything, he’s not worth a fuck!”

  “You shouldn’t talk that way at the dinner table, Daddy,” my mother told him.

  “Well, it’s true!” My father had an immense ball of spaghetti rolled on his fork. He jammed it into his mouth and started chewing and while chewing he speared a large meatball and plunged it into his mouth, then worked in a piece of French bread.

  I remembered what Ivan had said in The Brothers Karamazov, “Who doesn’t want to kill the father?”

  As my father chewed at the mass of food, one long string of spaghetti dangled from a corner of his mouth. He finally noticed it and sucked it in noisily. Then he reached, put two large teaspoons of white sugar into his coffee, lifted the cup and took a giant mouthful, which he immediately spit out across his plate and onto the tablecloth.

  “That shit’s too hot!”

  “You should be more careful, Daddy,” said my mother.

  I combed the job market, as they used to say, but it was a dreary and useless routine. You had to know somebody to get a job even as a lowly bus boy. Thus everybody was a dishwasher, the whole town was full of unemployed dishwashers. I sat with them in Pershing Square in the afternoons. The evangelists were there too. Some had drums, some had guitars, and the bushes and restrooms crawled with homosexuals.

  “Some of them have money,” a young bum told me. “This guy took me to his apartment for two weeks. I had all I could eat and drink and he bought me some clothes but he sucked me dry, I couldn’t stand up after a while. One night when he was asleep I crawled out of there. It was horrible. He kissed me once and I knocked him across the room. ‘You ever do that again,’ I told him, ‘and I’ll kill you!’”

  Clifton’s Cafeteria was nice. If you didn’t have much money, they let you pay what you could. And if you didn’t have any money, you didn’t have to pay. Some of the bums went in there and ate well. It was owned by some very nice rich old man, a very unusual person. I could never make myself go in there and load up. I’d go in for a coffee and an apple pie and give them a nickel. Sometimes I’d get a couple of weenies. It was quiet and cool in there and clean. There was a large waterfall and you could sit next to it and imagine that everything was quite all right. Philippe’s was nice too. You could get a cup of coffee for three cents with all the refills you wanted. You could sit in there all day drinking coffee and they never asked you t
o leave no matter how bad you looked. They just asked the bums not to bring in their wine and drink it there. Places like that gave you hope when there wasn’t much hope.

  The men in Pershing Square argued all day about whether there was a God or not. Most of them didn’t argue very well but now and then you got a Religionist and an Atheist who were well-versed and it was a good show.

  When I had a few coins I’d go to the underground bar beneath the big movie house. I was 18 but they served me. I looked like I could be almost any age. Sometimes I looked 25, sometimes I felt like 30. The bar was run by Chinese who never spoke to anyone. All I needed was the first beer and then the homosexuals would start buying. I’d switch to whiskey sours. I’d bleed them for whiskey sours and when they started closing in on me, I’d get nasty, push off and leave. After a while they caught on and the place wasn’t any good anymore.

  The library was the most depressing place I went. I had run out of books to read. After a while I would just grab a thick book and look for a young girl somewhere. There were always one or two about. I’d sit three or four chairs away, pretending to read the book, trying to look intelligent, hoping some girl would pick me up. I knew that I was ugly but I thought if I looked intelligent enough I might have some chance. It never worked. The girls just made notes on their pads and then they got up and left as I watched their bodies moving rhythmically and magically under their clean dresses. What would Maxim Gorky have done under such circumstances?

  At home it was always the same. The question was never asked until after the first few bites of dinner were partaken. Then my father would ask, “Did you find a job today?”

  “No.”

  “Did you try anywhere?”

  “Many places. I’ve gone back to some of the same places for the second or third time.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  But it was true. It was also true that some companies put ads in the papers every day when there were no jobs available. It gave the employment department in those companies something to do. It also wasted the time and screwed up the hopes of many desperate people.