I let the wallet drop and put my hands on my head. Behind the blinding light was a Dallas cop with his gun out. He made me lie flat while he patted me down, then he let me sit up.

“You rolling this man, boy?”

“No, I was looking in his wallet to see who he was. I was going to call somebody.”

“Mmm.”

The cop was feeling the artery pulse in the man’s neck.

“He came down to take a leak and passed out,” I said.

“And you down here sipping a few cool ones and looking at the dirt. That right?”

“Yeah.”

“Where you live?”

“I don’t live in Dallas. I was just passing through.”

“Got money?”

“I got five bucks,” I said.

The cop holstered his gun. “Boy,” he said. “You was going to roll this man, and we both know that. But I don’t guarantee the night court judge will believe it, and I got a lot to do tonight, including getting this gentleman out of the gully here, and getting his car off the road. So you get up on that highway and start walking west, toward Fort Worth, and if I ever see you in Dallas I’ll slam your ass in jail. On sight.”

I scrambled up the gravel bank and started walking. It tended to fuse after that. A flat-bed truck hauling chickens. A railroad station in Santa Fe where I was two days before they kicked me out. A woman at night in a park telling me to go home and sober up. A drunk tank where some guy kept crying for Betty. Brackish water in a ditch, motionless white-faced cattle, Hershey bars and day-old bread, the taste of Four Roses whiskey from the neck of a quart bottle passed around in a Quonset hut outside Tacoma. I was picking cranberries by hand, not even a scoop, five cents a box. At night on the bare mattress on the folding iron cot the medicinal cheap whiskey was all there was. All of us drank it, men and women. All of us slept in the Quonset and used the latrine out back. The teenage Indian girl next to me slept every night in a man’s workshirt and by morning it was often twisted up around her waist. I looked at her pelvis blankly when I woke up in the morning. She had good thighs and a nice slope to her belly, but I was living so slightly and so deep inside that nothing much got through to the reduced quick of me. That night, though, when the whiskey was burning my throat and warming my stomach, I asked her to go out back and we copulated on the ground near the latrine without any talk at all. She was simply passive except when I was in her; then she humped up and down as if she were trying to buck me off. I had been a long time without sex, and the first time, I ejaculated quickly. She wiped herself between her legs with the bottom of her cotton dress and we went back into the Quonset. Most of the pickers were Indian, with some Negroes and a couple of Chicanos. I was the only white. After that we used to copulate most nights, but I had a lot of trouble ejaculating and usually had to roll off finally because I was exhausted. She would hump steadily until that time and stop the minute I did, and get up and go in without comment. I don’t know how long I was there, stooped over all day, drinking and humping at night. We took turns buying the bottle and passed it around in the fields during the day. It was shared without question and without reservation, and when it was gone, the man whose turn it was would get another one. The women weren’t expected to buy one, though they could drink as much as the men. Usually we’d nurse it, keeping a kind of steady buzz on all day, and not get really washed away until nighttime so we could sleep. Sometimes I would miscalculate and get drunk too soon and have to head back to the Quonset early, reeling as I went, to pass out on my mattress. On nights like that the things I wrote to Jennifer in the journal were barely legible, and very often made no sense.


A fly woke me. It buzzed and hummed as it circled my face, and then was silent when it landed. I could feel it walking along my cheek toward the flare of my right nostril. I brushed it away. The fly buzzed again and hummed as it flew. As I became conscious I could feel how hot I was, and how wet I was with sweat. I opened my eyes stiffly and saw a strange place. My head ached, I was thirsty, and as I shifted slightly, my whole body felt trembly. I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand. I looked at my hand. The fingernails were dirty and there was a scratch along the back of it that had a ragged scab on it. The fly came back and walked on my face again. I brushed at it and it flew a short distance away, and someone next to me slapped at it. I looked around. I was lying on a cement floor against a cinder block wall in the corner of a room with ten or twelve other men in it. Across the front wall were bars. I was in the drunk tank; I knew what a drunk tank looked like. I’d been in one before. How about this one? Had I been in this one before? No. I had never seen this one before. I didn’t know where I was. Across the room somebody was having the dry heaves in the single seatless hopper. I edged my way upright against the wall. A Mexican-looking guy next to me was smoking. I tapped my two fingers against my lips in a smoking gesture. The Mexican looked at me and looked away. The smell of his smoke made me want a cigarette badly. I felt in my pockets. There were no cigarettes. In fact there was nothing at all in my pockets. After a while a guard came and let us all out. They gave me back the tattered mass of notebooks that I kept, and we trooped down a long corridor and out onto a hot sunny street. It was a street I’d never seen. I didn’t know where I was. I walked down the hill in the heat. At a newsstand I saw the Los Angeles Times for sale, and the Herald Examiner. I was in L.A. and my last memory was a thousand miles north and five days ago. I felt shaky and sick. In a store window I saw my reflection. My hair was stringy and long; my face was half covered with a scruffy beard. One sleeve of my shirt was gone and the zipper on my fly was broken. My pants gaped. There were no laces in my shoes, which made it harder to walk, and as I moved away from the window I shuffled. I needed a drink. I needed cigarettes. I panhandled. By evening I’d gotten nearly a dollar and a half’s worth of change. I bought a pack of Camels and a bottle of port wine, and sat on a bench in a park off Broadway in downtown L.A. and smoked and drank my wine. After half a bottle I felt pretty decent. I studied my pants. I tried to figure out what they had been when I got them. I wasn’t even sure they were mine. They seemed big in the waist. They were so dirty that I couldn’t tell what color they were. The knee was ripped. I looked at my shirt. It might once have been khaki. Maybe an army shirt. I couldn’t tell. I sipped my wine, trying to make it last. The weather got a little cooler after it got dark. Somebody sat next to me on the bench. I gave her a cigarette. She had a bottle of muscatel, full. I gave her a sip of my port. She gave me some muscatel.

“Cops hassle you here?” I said.

“Nope, not if you’re quiet. They let you sleep.”

I nodded.

She said, “I know where there’s another bottle. You want me to get it?”

I said yes.

She said, “You let me have some of your smokes?”

“Yes.”

She was gone a bit and then she was back. She had a jug of sherry. We drank it all and smoked most of the Camels. Late in the night on the grass by the bench I remembered fumbling under her clothes.

The sun hit me full face when it rose. I was lying on my back. My shirt was still on, but my pants were off and I was exposed. She was undressed, too, her dress pulled up under her armpits, nothing on underneath. She was fat and there was grime in all the creases of her body. She had a pimple inside her left thigh and her toenails were long and dirty and broken. She was lying on her side with one arm across my chest. There was dried vomit on her face and on my chest and neck. She slept with her mouth open. Some of her teeth were missing, and a line of saliva drooled down and mixed with the vomit. Above me the bright blue sky was cloudless and the early sun was bright as it rolled in from the east. There was dew on the grass and all of me ached. I inched out from under her fat blue-veined arm and sat up. There was dried semen matting my pubic hair. I struggled upright and pulled my pants up. There were other derelicts sleeping all over the park. I began to walk. As I walked, the tears began to trail down my face and my breath came in the short gasps you get when you start to cry. A clock in a building showed ten minutes past five. I walked until I came to Wilshire Boulevard. Somewhere I had read that Wilshire ran all the way to the ocean. I walked along it, crying. When I came to a bench I sat on it. In MacArthur Park I sat for a while under a tree and rested. I reached Santa Monica about the time people were going home for supper, cars full of men in suits and hats, dressed-up young women, usually three or four to the car. Now and then someone would look at me, my dirty face streaked with tear lines, my clothes crusted and torn, my pace slow, bent, wobbly. They would always look away. I kept going, slowly, shaky, and desperate for a drink. I had smoked my last cigarette in MacArthur Park a long time ago. I ached for another one. Crying made my nose run and the mucus had dried in my unshaven mustache. I kept moving and there was the ocean. I had gone as far as I could. I sat down on the beach, and then lay back. I used the journal notebooks for a pillow and lay still with tears still flowing as the sun that had wakened me this morning, set out ahead of me, flooding the Pacific with its rose benediction, and then it sank from sight, as I had, and the darkness came and no one could see me.

Chapter Nineteen