After that I had everything ready to go in the morning by the time Tom got to the shop and after three days he took to coming a little later. After five days I had sixty dollars in my pocket. I got a haircut, bought a razor and a toothbrush and some salt-water soap. I hadn’t had a drink or a cigarette since I’d started with Tom.

Tom closed Mondays, and I had my first day off. I took a bus downtown and bought myself a pair of chino pants and white shirt with a button-down collar. Then I went back to the shop and got my journal and sat on the beach to write in it. I hadn’t written in a while and I started to reread a little to pick up the thread. The journal was a mess. There were stains on it from ketchup and pickle juice and grease, and spilled beer or wine. The pages were soiled and creased and wrinkled, all of them were ripped, and some were nearly torn in two. Much of it was barely legible. As I looked at it my eyes filled until the pages were bleary in front of me. I wiped them clear. Okay, I said, okay. I’ll start with this. I got up and walked back to the shop and put the journal on a shelf above the sink. Then I went out and down the block to a dime store and bought a dozen spiral-bound notebooks and four ball-point pens. Then I went back to the shop and sat at the counter and began to rewrite the journal.

Every morning I went down and bathed in the sea and as the weeks went by and I kept saving money, I added another pair of pants and another shirt and two T-shirts and a pair of sneakers to my wardrobe. Every afternoon after the shop closed I sat at the counter for an hour and restored the journal, printing painstakingly because my handwriting was messy. It had been a month and a half since I’d had a drink or smoked a cigarette. I was going to sleep at nine o’clock at night and eating three meals a day and putting on weight. One morning before I bathed in the ocean I jogged a little ways along the beach until I got tired. It wasn’t very far. But the next morning I did it again, and the next morning I went a little farther. By December I was running three miles a morning and had dropped ten pounds.

For Christmas Tom and his wife gave me a six-month membership in the Santa Monica YMCA. And Tom, who worked out there regularly, took me down and showed me how to lift weights. I could barely bench-press seventy-five pounds that first day, but Tom didn’t laugh at me, and I went with him every other afternoon after work, before I wrote in my journal.

From the time I woke up until I finished writing my journal in the late afternoon I was fine. Running, working, lifting weights, re-creating the journal, occupied my mind. But by six o’clock I had finished the journal and eaten my supper and cleaned up the dishes and it would be three or four hours before I’d fall asleep. In that time it was hard not to drink and hard not to smoke.

I went over to the branch library in Santa Monica and took out a card and brought home a copy of The Great Gatsby. I read it in two evenings, and reread it in two more. The quote I remembered hadn’t meant quite what I’d remembered it as meaning, but it was true in spirit to the book. I was startled at how good the book was. Grinding through it in sophomore English survey, I hadn’t realized. Then I went back and got Go Down, Moses by Faulkner and read “The Bear” and found myself nearly breathless at some of the writing. As the evenings unfolded I read Hemingway and Steinbeck and Dos Passos. I read Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, and Walden and The Ambassadors and Hamlet and King Lear and Othello. I read Othello in one of those casebook editions for colleges and read the essays also. It led me to literary criticism and I read Richard Sewall on tragedy and Tillyard on the Elizabethan world picture and Lovejoy on the great chain of being. I read R.W.B. Lewis and Henry Nashe Smith and then I read Walden twice more. I read books on nutrition and I read The New York Times and The Boston Globe and the L.A. papers, the Times and the Herald Examiner.

I was up to five miles along the curve of the beach every morning, and doing two-hundred-pound bench presses and working on the last ten pages of my journal restoration when Tom told me he was closing the shop.

“They’re going to buy the whole business block and tear it up and rebuild the fucker,” he told me while we were at the Y. “I got a job cooking at a place in Torrance.”

I nodded. “That’s tough, Tom, to have the thing sold out from under you.”

He shrugged. “Don’t matter. I’ll probably make more cooking for somebody else. What about you?”

“I got five hundred bucks put away,” I said. “It’ll hold me till I find something.”

That night I finished rewriting my journal and packed the six neatly filled-in spiral notebooks in the bottom of my gym bag. I put my extra pants and shirt in on top of them, and my shaving stuff and toothbrush wrapped in aluminum foil. Then I read The Big Sleep until bedtime.

In the morning I said good-bye to Tom and his wife. The wife, who hadn’t said twenty words to me in seven months, cried and hugged me and kissed me on the mouth.

I said to Tom, “I think I might have died if I hadn’t seen you last fall washing off the sidewalk.”

Tom nodded. “You’ve come a way,” he said. We shook hands, and I left them closing up the shop and headed for Colorado Street. On the corner I stopped and looked at myself in the black glass facade of a drugstore. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. I was tanned from my morning runs and my stomach was flat. I weighed 170 pounds and my biceps stretched the sleeves of the T-shirt. Tom was right. I’d come a way. But I had a way left.

I walked up to Wilshire and caught a bus downtown.

Chapter Twenty-One

I got a one-room furnished apartment with kitchenette and bath in a building in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue near Kenmore. The day I moved in I went to Ralph’s market on Sunset and bought groceries and made myself steak and salad with French bread. I bought a bottle of red wine to go with the meal. It had been eight months since I had had a drink. It was time to find out. I drank two glasses of the wine with my meal, and sipped the rest of the bottle afterward while I read the Times and the Herald Examiner classified pages, looking for a job. There were three openings for a carpenter’s helper and I marked them for the morning. Then I washed up the dishes and went to bed with a mild buzz and a full stomach.

I could still taste wine in my mouth the next morning and my head ached enough to take aspirin with my orange juice. But I didn’t feel bad, and I didn’t feel like I needed a drink. Maybe next week I could try a couple of beers. I did a careful journal entry after breakfast, and then took a bus downtown to a temporary office in a storefront on the corner of Seventh and Hope to interview for the carpentry job. The job was with a big construction firm that was putting up houses in the Toluca Lake area in North Hollywood. They hired two of us, probably because we were sober, me, and a muscular black man named Roy Washington. A half-hour later we were in the front seat of a pickup truck with a carpenter named Henry Reagan heading for the job.

Henry was a thin, drawn, old man, over sixty, with skin that had weathered to a permanent reddish tone. He wore glasses with gold rims and a sweat-stained baseball cap.

“You know anything about carpentry?”

I said, “No.” Washington shook his head.

“You own any tools?”

“No.”

“Jesus,” Henry said. “How am I supposed to teach you anything if you don’t have any motherfucking tools?”

Washington and I looked at each other.

“I’ll lend you some, but as soon as you get paid, you sure better buy your own,” Henry said. “What’d you boys do before?”

“Boxer,” Washington said.

“How come you’re not boxing now?” Henry said.

“Can’t get no fights,” Washington said. “People ducking me. My manager’s working on it. But in the meantime I gotta eat.”

Henry glanced at me, sitting in the middle between him and Washington.

“How about you? You fight too?”

“Not if I can run,” I said. “I was washing dishes in a place out in Santa Monica. Somebody bought the building and is gonna tear the place down.”

Henry nodded, still sidelonging me as he drove.

“You didn’t get the upper body rinsing dishes,” he said.

“I work out a little.”

“You’ll be working out a lot more by the time I get through teaching your asses,” Henry said.

Washington looked at Henry’s narrow arms and winked at me. Henry turned the truck into the dirt road of a construction site and parked in front of a row of newly poured concrete slabs.

“Okay, boys,” Henry said. “Time to start learning. I’m going to make first-class fucking framers out of you, and I’m in a hurry.”

He didn’t succeed by evening of the first day, but neither Washington nor I laughed at the thinness of his arms again. He gave us sixteen-ounce hammers and nailing aprons and we filled the aprons with handfuls of tenpenny nails from a fifty-pound keg that he had in the back of the truck.

“Okay,” Henry said. “We’re going to frame this house. I’m going to show you how and you’re going to do it. You can expect to fuck it up a few times until you get the feel of things. Don’t let it bother you. If you do it wrong, I’ll straighten it out. Let’s get the cocksucker going.”

And we did. We built sections of the frame on the floor of the slab, and then raised them into position and nailed them together. Henry could drive a ten-penny nail full in with two strokes of the hammer. Washington and I took ten or twelve bangs apiece to get one in. We bent half of them. Henry made us pull out any bent ones. He made us hold the hammer down at the butt end instead of choking up, and he showed us how to take a full-armed swing with it instead of small taps.