“You havent got a little nip of liquor anywhere have you Herf? Dingo and I are extraordinarily thirsty. We came all the way from Boston and only stopped once for gas and water. I havent been to bed for two days. I want to see if I can last out the week.”
“Kerist I wish I could last out the week in bed.”
“What you need’s a job on a newspaper to keep you busy Herfy.”
“What’s going to happen to you Stan …” Jimmy twisted himself round so that he was sitting on the edge of the bed “… is that you’re going to wake up one morning and find yourself on a marble slab at the morgue.”
The bathroom smelled of other people’s toothpaste and of chloride disinfectant. The bathmat was wet and Jimmy folded it into a small square before he stepped gingerly out of his slippers. The cold water set the blood jolting through him. He ducked his head under and jumped out and stood shaking himself like a dog, the water streaming into his eyes and ears. Then he put on his bathrobe and lathered his face.
Flow river flow
Down to the sea,
he hummed off key as he scraped his chin with the safety-razor. Mr. Grover I’m afraid I’m going to have to give up the job after next week. Yes I’m going abroad; I’m going to do foreign correspondent work for the A.P. To Mexico for the U.P. To Jericho more likely, Halifax Correspondent of the Mudturtle Gazette. It was Christmas in the harem and the eunuchs all were there.
… from the banks of the Seine
To the banks of the Saskatchewan.
He doused his face with listerine, bundled his toilet things into his wet towel and smarting ran back up a flight of greencarpeted cabbagy stairs and down the hall to his bedroom. Halfway he passed the landlady dumpy in a mob cap who stopped her carpet sweeper to give an icy look at his skinny bare legs under the blue bathrobe.
“Good morning Mrs. Maginnis.”
“It’s goin to be powerful hot today, Mr. Herf.”
“I guess it is all right.”
Stan was lying on the bed reading La Revolte des Anges. “Darn it, I wish I knew some languages the way you do Herfy.”
“Oh I dont know any French any more. I forget em so much quicker than I learn em.”
“By the way I’m fired from college.”
“How’s that?”
“Dean told me he thought it advisable I shouldnt come back next year … felt that there were other fields of activity where my activities could be more actively active. You know the crap.”
“That’s a darn shame.”
“No it isnt; I’m tickled to death. I asked him why he hadnt fired me before if he felt that way. Father’ll be sore as a crab … but I’ve got enough cash on me not to go home for a week. I dont give a damn anyway. Honest havent you got any liquor?”
“Now Stan how’s a poor wageslave like myself going to have a cellar on thirty dollars a week?”
“This is a pretty lousy room. … You ought to have been born a capitalist like me.”
“Room’s not so bad. … What drives me crazy is that paranoiac alarm across the street that rings all night.”
“That’s a burglar alarm isn’t it?”
“There cant be any burglars because the place is vacant. The wires must get crossed or something. I dont know when it stopped but it certainly drove me wild when I went to bed this morning.”
“Now James Herf you dont mean me to infer that you come home sober every night?”
“A man’d have to be deaf not to hear that damn thing, drunk or sober.”
“Well in my capacity of bloated bondholder I want you to come out and eat lunch. Do you realize that you’ve been playing round with your toilet for exactly one hour by the clock?”
They went down the stairs that smelled of shavingsoap and then of brasspolish and then of bacon and then of singed hair and then of garbage and coalgas.
“You’re damn lucky Herfy, never to have gone to college.”
“Didnt I graduate from Columbia you big cheese, that’s more than you could do?”
The sunlight swooped tingling in Jimmy’s face when he opened the door.
“That doesnt count.”
“God I like sun,” cried Jimmy, “I wish it’d been real Colombia. …”
“Do you mean Hail Columbia?”
“No I mean Bogota and the Orinoco and all that sort of thing.”
“I knew a darn good feller went down to Bogota. Had to drink himself to death to escape dying of elephantiasis.”
“I’d be willing to risk elephantiasis and bubonic plague and spotted fever to get out of this hole.”
“City of orgies walks and joys …”
“Orgies nutten, as we say at a hun’an toitytoird street. … Do you realize that I’ve lived all my life in this goddam town except four years when I was little and that I was born here and that I’m likely to die here? … I’ve a great mind to join the navy and see the world.”
“How do you like Dingo in her new coat of paint?”
“Pretty nifty, looks like a regular Mercedes under the dust.”
“I wanted to paint her red like a fire engine, but the garageman finally persuaded me to paint her blue like a cop. … Do you mind going to Mouquin’s and having an absinthe cocktail.”
“Absinthe for breakfast. … Good Lord.”
They drove west along Twenty-third Street that shone with sheets of reflected light off windows, oblong glints off delivery wagons, figureeight-shaped flash of nickel fittings.
“How’s Ruth, Jimmy?”
“She’s all right. She hasnt got a job yet.”
“Look there’s a Daimlier.”
Jimmy grunted vaguely. As they turned up Sixth Avenue a policeman stopped them.
“Your cut out,” he yelled.
“I’m on my way to the garage to get it fixed. Muffler’s coming off.”
“Better had. … Get a ticket another time.”
“Gee you get away with murder Stan … in everything,” said Jimmy. “I never can get away with a thing even if I am three years older than you.”
“It’s a gift.”
The restaurant
