No Beast So Fierce (8 page)

As I grew stronger, he grew weaker. He lingered, semi-invalid, for thirteen years. I became the visitor, stopping by the drab room or park for a few minutes, wishing I felt more. My feeling was more pity than love. While I was in reform school he had another coronary and was placed in a home for the aged to wait for death. The carpenter's union and social security paid for it, I guess. He was in this home the last time I saw him. It was while I escaped from reform school, prowling the streets with Joe Gambesi. The home was near where I now stood, a gabled Victorian building with large grounds. Tiny bungalows had been built in the back yard. A cleaning woman directed me to one of these. The interior was dark and gloomy, shades drawn to deny the sun and the flowers outdoors. A stench of human decay pervaded the bungalow. Half a dozen old men were in pajamas. Their faces were sagging, wrinkled flesh and stubbled beard. Their eyes all had a vacant glaze.

The visit was an agony. My father did not recognize me, and when I reminded him who I was it registered dimly. He began a whining harangue about the food, the other old men, and the people who ran the place. Someone had stolen the few dollars in change he had for cigarettes and he wanted some. They'd taken his watch, too, but he didn't seem to care about that. It was a big, gold pocket watch, the only valuable thing he'd ever owned, and he'd carried it for forty years. I gave him cigarettes and the few dollars I had. He begged me to take him away, reversing the role of half a dozen years before when I'd begged him. I was helpless as he had been. I was fifteen years old, escaped from reform school, and had five dollars in my pocket. I was crying enraged tears of frustration when I left. My father had become a baby, helpless, mindless, and alone. At fifteen the concept of death was unreal, but I understood loneliness with vivid clarity. And in the brief episode I saw human destiny starkly illuminated. This was the human condition, far from the glory of books and histories. I came away enraged at the universal indifference.

It was the last visit, the last time I saw him. On the way out I met a nurse. Her eyes widened, she blurted that the police had been there looking for me. She started for the telephone and I started running.

Two years later I was back in reform school when the chaplain showed me a telegram. My father had died. The chaplain glanced at his wristwatch, told me that he had to leave in fifteen minutes, but I could sit in his office and cry for that long if I wished.

Occasionally, when I saw an old man in khakis, such as the one coming from the liquor store, these memories were stirred. But nobody will remember my father when I die. He might just as well have never lived for all the meaning it had. I don't even know where he's buried.

Before returning to the furnished room, I telephoned Leroy's sister. A babysitter answered. I left no message. Through the glass booth I could see the city's lights beginning to go on. To spend the night in my barren room was too much like a prison cell. I tried the pool hall number L&L Red had given me, planning to have him come for me. A Mexican girl answered. Red had left an hour before.

I thought of walking downtown to the hangouts of ex-convicts, but walking was impossible because of my blistered feet. I bought two frayed paperbacks at a secondhand bookstore, picked up a newspaper, a can of beer, and cigar at a liquor store, and went back to the room.

6

M
ERELY
looking for a job was agonizing, in several ways. The blistered feet made every step a limping torment. The heat wave, unrelenting and ferocious, sucked away strength and held down the polluted air so that my eyes watered constantly. Yet the worst part was psychological—the asking for work. No matter how often I told myself that uncounted millions of men had asked for work, it was new to me. Each office was frightening because it would expose the hollow desperation of need. I was, beneath whatever exterior I displayed, begging for a job. Only the trickle of money from my pocket—a dollar for lunch, two dollars for a second shirt, forty cents for carfare—kept me going, for I was terrified of going broke, of what I would do. I resented being thus driven, and perhaps it showed. I was ashamed of having to tell each prospective employer that I was an ex-convict, and perhaps I hid that shame with a note of defiance.

For three days I searched downtown, limping, full of self-doubt, torn from every personal tie that had ever bound me, trying to find the bedrock on which to commence building a new life. As the nickels and dimes trickled away, I felt the inexorable pressure of time. Nowhere could I find work. Being an ex-convict eliminated job after job, even menial ones such as delivery driver and janitor, because those jobs offered a chance to steal something, and nobody wanted to risk giving me that chance. I sat in stifling offices and air-conditioned offices, filled out forms, left my address. A giant insurance company gave competitive examinations. Knowing it was useless, nevertheless I took the examination and passed with the highest score in a group of thirty applicants. But when I told the interviewer that I'd been in prison, he said frankly that no company would bond me, and the job required bonding.

Back to the hot sidewalks and cramped buses—and to the crummy furnished room to count the dollars that remained.

Rosenthal came by on the third evening. He disliked the hotel's location: the neighborhood “smelled” of heroin. I wanted to talk to him about a job, ask him to let me be quiet about my record, but he was concerned only that I would appear at the nalline testing center on Friday.

Finally, a corporation that had a string of parking lots said they'd give me a job (the personnel manager had served time), but I would have to wait a month until they opened a new location. I was down to thirty-three dollars.

The temporary office help agency was on Wilshire Boulevard, on the eleventh floor of a blue skyscraper. It was the lunch hour and nobody was visible except a young woman at a rear desk. She flashed an impersonal, business smile and came forward to meet me. She was in her mid-twenties, and though not naturally pretty made excellent use of makeup. She had nice legs. They showed advantageously in a high, tight skirt. She made me ill at ease. After so long in an all masculine world, a sexually attractive woman made me nervous.

Efficiency personified, she ascertained my purpose, found that I could type, and had me at a typewriter for a test. She set a timer and went back to her desk. I pressed too hard for typing speed, made errors, cursed myself. The skill had served me well in prison, for I'd supplied my need for toiletries, coffee, and tobacco by typing football pools, petitions for habeas corpus, and letters for other convicts. Now I was doing less than my best work, yet reached the last line when the timer sounded. The girl came over, checked the copy and commented that I'd done very well. She was explaining that it would be easier to keep me working if I had other skills or would take other work. I only half listened. My jaws were tight. I felt shame for having a skill so trivial that thousands of halfwitted stenographers could do it.

She gave me an application form. Irritation smoldered as I filled it out. Where questions were asked about past work experience, I left the spaces blank. When I returned the form, a frown marred her smooth forehead. “There's something you left out,” she said. “Where you worked.”

“I haven't worked.”

“Well, if you were self-employed, or in the armed services.”

I shook my head.

“What did you do?”

“I was in prison.”

She was looking down. Her eyes flashed up in surprise. Her pink lips formed an astonished O, and her eyes looked at me rather than through me. I stared into them and she blushed. They were dark blue eyes, with tiny coronas of gray around the iris. She averted them quickly. She pursed her mouth. Her long fingernails tapped a rhythm on the form.

“I need a job pretty bad,” I said, gratified that I'd become a person to her. Superficially I'd told her the truth in order to comply with Rosenthal's rules, but a deeper need was to elicit precisely this response—this acknowledgment of some identity.

“Well, I guess we can leave it blank,” she said, looking up with a sincerely warm smile. “We'll get you some work, don't worry. Do you have a telephone?”

“Yes, but I don't have the number with me.”

“Call in and leave it with me. I'll call you a day in advance and tell you where to go. What about transportation?”

“I have a car I can borrow,” I lied, sensing that it would open more jobs to have transportation.

“That does help,” she said, marking the form. “Well, this is Thursday. Tomorrow and Saturday we usually get calls for the following week. I'll keep your name right here on top of my desk and you should hear from me over the weekend.” She went on, “I don't mean to be personal, but … what, why were you? …”

What crime might sound other than a crime? Now she saw me as a sufferer, but if I aroused the wrong image she would see me as a perpetrator. Compassion would turn to horror if the truth were known.

“I … had some marijuana.”

“
That long
for that?” She was incredulous.

“This is California. There was a public panic about marijuana.” My lie could have been the truth. A jazz musician I knew had served ten years for possessing a speck of marijuana so small that it had to be placed in a jar of clear oil and floated so the jury could see it.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I didn't mean to pry.”

I muttered something unintelligible, ducking conversation. Other employees were beginning to filter back from lunch. The girl gave me her business card. Her name was Olga Sorenson.

While riding down the elevator, I felt as if an actual physical weight had been diminished. The work would be too trivial sooner or later, but for now it was a lifesaver.

Wilshire Boulevard shimmered in heat bounding off glass and concrete. The asphalt radiated heat waves, and the sidewalk burned through the soles of my shoes. My eyes ached in the harsh glare. A clock read 12:20. At 2:00 another possible employer was holding interviews for salesmen on the sixth floor of a Hollywood hotel. It was half an hour away by bus, which left me an hour to kill.

Hancock Park was nearby. I decided to rest on the grass for a few minutes and tour the county art museum, which was in the park. Sweat was running down my back as I found a shady spot beneath a tree and sat down. My shirt collar was wet and limp. The cheap suit had gone shapeless and would have to be cleaned and pressed during the weekend. My feet throbbed. Removing my shoes, I found that the heel blisters had burst. The flesh was raw. New blisters had formed along the ball and big toe. It was ironic. I'd anticipated all kinds of problems on getting out, but not blistered feet. And they were crippling me. The art museum was out of the question. Art can hardly be appreciated with pulsing blisters.

In the distance I could see the hills above the Sunset Strip, a short bus ride away. The idea came that I could go there, look up someone I knew, and get some money from them. They would feel obliged, if not on their own initiative, then on urgings with implied threats from me.

I sat a few more minutes, watching three girls eat lunch and giggle. Then I moved on.

Across from the bus stop on Wilshire Boulevard was a men's shop. I remembered buying a sixty-dollar sweater there, mainly because it had cost so much. It was long ago, shortly after my graduation from delinquency to crime—before I was accustomed to expensive clothes and high living.

While riding the bus, I thought back to the two years before prison, to the Sunset Strip and, especially, to its vice underworld. The Strip underworld, with call girls that looked like ingenues and pimps that looked like young movie executives, was buffered from the savage underworld of the slums by location and money. My first awareness of it came from a downtown junky streetwalker. She had a notebook with several hundred telephone numbers, many of them well-known celebrities. Heroin had stolen her youth prematurely, and when she was beaten and thrown out for hiding money from her pimp, nobody else would take her. She told me how the top girls made seventy thousand dollars a year. The streetwalkers I knew made enough to buy dope and pay the rent. I was making good money with merchandise burglary, but there was risk involved, and certainly less money than what she talked about. She loved to tell stories and while I listened I sensed weakness in those who ran the racket. Nobody was organized—but the hint of possible weakness lay in their success. She told me they owned cocktail lounges, cigarette vending routes, and one had an eighty-foot yacht he chartered out.

I began frequenting their hangouts. Soon I decided that I was going to organize the call girl prostitution and take a percentage. The plan was to gather information about them, bring in some henchmen and show them that resistance would destroy everything. Force and fear would be necessary, but more important was the psychology of force and fear. They had to be confronted with something outside their experience, a knife-wielding maniac who raved about cutting their hearts out, who put a shotgun barrel in their girls' mouths and left no doubt that it was not bluff—let them know that their bars and businesses would be bombed, and the girls' tricks would be hassled over the phone, ruining the business. And the other part of the psychology was to show them that they weren't being ripped off, but were joining an organization that was beneficial. Floating whores and pimps would be kept from the territory, and if anyone gave them trouble they had muscle.

The main problem was getting help. The pimps, though un-organized, had money and could hire someone to eliminate one man. And getting help proved a stumbling block. Ragamuffins dragged from the slums would be ludicrous, especially if they were young, as were most of my friends. Junkies' horizons were too short—shoplift half a case of cigarettes to buy a spoon of heroin
now.
Older criminals wouldn't listen to someone my age. Some others I passed over as being inadequately violent. Others were too violent to direct themselves to a goal. They'd want to rape the girls, who were much more desirable than the faded creatures to whom they were accustomed.