Ham On Rye

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 go

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 Passes 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 fu

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 di

"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, gu