The Essential Noir Bundle, page 166
When I stopped talking to light a cigarette Lola asked, “Where’d you go?”
Tony said, “Sh-h-h,” to her.
“Back to Spokane, because they gave me a railroad ticket there and I wanted to see some people, then over to Seattle for a week or two—it was a noisy city but I liked it then—and down to San Francisco for what I meant to be at most a two-month stay before going home to Baltimore. But I stayed in San Francisco seven or eight years, and never did get back to Baltimore except on short visits. But what I’m getting at is,” I was talking to Tony and Tulip again, “that out of all this I got only one brief and fairly pointless story about a quiet lunger going to Tijuana for a placid day’s outing. And that’s more writing material than I got out of wars and prisons. And you”—to Tulip—“can only bring me that kind of stuff: in one way or another your whole lousy life’s been like that, which may be fine and dandy but it’s not for me. I don’t know what to do with it.”
“As a matter of fact,” Tulip said, “I’ve never had t.b. and the three guys I remember called Whitey were different from yours, though one of them managed a semi-pro ball team I played third base on one summer and gypped us out of our share. But I can see why none of the things that happened to you were any good. They were happening to the wrong guy. You’ve got to think everything comes through the mind, and of course things get dull when you reason the bejesus out of ’em that way.” He looked at Tony. “Isn’t that right, kid?”
Tony looked at Tulip and at me and didn’t say anything.
“You and your immature emotions that can’t bear the weight of sense,” I said somewhat didactically because I was tired of this accusation. “No feeling can be very strong if it has to be shielded from reason. Drunken wife-beaters crying over a lame bird.”
Lola asked, “What about this Whitey that managed the baseball team?”
Tony sh-h-hed her again.
Tulip said, “I don’t always know what you’re talking about, Pop. But couldn’t you just write things down the way they happen and let your reader get what he wants out of ’em?”
“Sure, that’s one way of writing, and if you’re careful enough in not committing yourself you can persuade different readers to see all sorts of different meanings in what you’ve written, since in the end almost anything can be symbolic of anything else, and I’ve read a lot of stuff of that sort and liked it, but it’s not my way of writing and there’s no use pretending it is.”
“You whittle everything down to too sharp a point,” Tulip said. “I didn’t say you ought to let your reader run hog-wild on you like that, though I can’t see any objections to letting them do your work for you if they want to, but—”
“Not enough want to make it profitable,” I said, “though you’re likely to get nice reviews.”
“Money, money,” Tulip said, which would have been funny from him except that we were arguing and in arguments you are inclined to say things that will help your side win.
“Sure, money,” I said. “When you write you want fame, fortune and personal satisfaction. You want to write what you want to write and to feel that it’s good and to sell millions of copies of it and have everybody whose opinion you value think it’s good, and you want this to go on for hundreds of years. You’re not likely to ever get all these things, and you’re not likely to give up writing or commit suicide if you don’t, but that is—and should be—your goal. Anything less is kind of piddling.”
Do, who was seriously preparing herself for approaching womanhood and thought that women tried to keep men from quarreling, said, “I told Donald we’d have an early lunch. Is that all right?” while Tony scowled at her.
I said, “It’s all right with me,” and looked at my wristwatch: 11:54. “Want to go back to the house now?”
Tulip said, “Pop, did I ever tell you there were certain points on which I don’t see exactly eye to eye with you?” as we stood up.
The dogs had disappeared into the woods beyond the pond. We went back up the path with Tulip and Do ahead, Lola, Tony and I walking abreast behind them. When we were past the old stone pumphouse—now a smokehouse—and cutting across the back lawn towards the house, Tony said, “You didn’t finish what you were getting at, did you?”
“No, I’m not sure I got at it at all. I think I got myself sidetracked. Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of thinking in the world: that you use to try to make points, win arguments with, and that you use to find out things. We’ll try it again sometime.”
Lola asked, “Can I listen?”
I said, “Sure,” with Tony giving me a quick smile because he thought I didn’t mean it.
I got to thinking then about the first time I had ever seen Tulip, at Mary Mawhorter’s house in Baltimore in 1930. I had gone down to Baltimore for a week on my way from New York to my first job in Hollywood—my father was still alive then and my sister lived in Baltimore too—and had of course looked up Mary, who was now a pediatrician, and Tulip was one of the people at her house the night I went over there. He was bossing a gang of Negro stevedores, I think, on the Sparrow’s Point piers of the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the way I remember it is that he had been a third baseman in the Yankee farm system but had quit because there was no future in that line of work as long as Red Rolfe held on. However, Red Rolfe didn’t come up to the Yankees till later and must have still been playing shortstop at Dartmouth when I first met Tulip, so the chances are I’m getting Tulip mixed up with an Army sergeant I ran into on the rifle range at Sea Girt in 1942. I drank a lot in those days, partly because I was still confused by the fact that people’s feelings and talk and actions didn’t have much to do with one another, and a great many of my memories are hazy. The Red Rolfe pattern fits Tulip, though, even if the dates let him out.
He liked Mary—she was a tall white-skinned brunette and very attractive and nice—but, out of male vanity or his kind of humor, was trying to get to her the hard way and not at that time making much progress. She was a good-humored girl but she took her profession very seriously and he didn’t. He said he needed a physical examination and wanted to come to her as a patient and she said she didn’t treat grown-ups and anyhow he only wanted to “play doctor” with her and that was kid stuff, and they made this their principal bone of bantering contention at the moment. She talked about him a good deal when I went back to her place later after the others had gone. She always talked a good deal and never used a three-syllable word when she could find a four-syllable one to take its place—that professional jargon you get a lot of from doctors and from others who think there is something esoteric about their line of work—but she was nice and didn’t mind if you just lay there and smoked a cigarette and said, “Uh-huh,” once in a while and let her babble on. She was a nice girl. She seemed to like Tulip.
He was then in his late twenties—just a couple of years older than Mary—and already had the idea that his life had been interesting and somebody ought to write about it. I didn’t mind that so much because I had been writing for eight years and was used to people telling me stories and plots and things, to which I would pretend to listen politely while thinking of something else, but I suppose I was still a little touchy about the common notion that all writers had to be pallid bookkeeperish folk sitting at desks doing paper work, and it seemed to me that this husky youngster was putting it on pretty thick and rubbing it in, so we didn’t get along very well. It wasn’t so much that I was quarrelsome when I drank as that I forgot not to be. I don’t know whether he was drunk, too; people have to be pretty drunk for me to notice it, even now that I don’t drink.
This is how I remember the significant part of what was done and said that night, though it was a long time ago and I don’t know how much I may have changed things around to make me look better or to prove my case. Anyhow, there were perhaps a dozen people there and after I got through the introductory bows and handshakes and words Mary left me in a corner with Tulip while she went to get us something to drink, and he said, “So this is your hometown, huh?”
“Yes. I grew up here except for a little while in Philadelphia, though I was born down in the southern part of the state.”
“Been away long?”
“Ten or eleven years, I guess.”
“You’ll find it a pretty dull town now.”
“It was then.”
“But it’s uglier now,” he said and I asked, “What town isn’t?” and he said, “But that isn’t what I want to talk to you about,” so I knew he wanted to talk to me about something.
Mary came back with our drinks then and a little brown-eyed girl from Catonsville who said she wanted me to look up a friend of hers in Pasadena but kept talking to me for Tulip’s benefit. She finally wandered away and he said, “Look. You write and I don’t, but you come pretty close to being my kind of writer and I’d like to talk to you.”
That was all right. I liked Tulip and still like him, though not as much as he supposes.
“I get around a lot more than you do,” he said, “and I see a lot of things.”
It stopped being all right. In the first place I didn’t think he got around much more than I did, and in the second place even then I didn’t think that was the answer unless you wanted to write railroad timetables from actual experience. Everybody has twenty-four hours a day, no more and seldom less, and one way of putting in the time seems as filling to me as another, depending of course on your own nature, so I said, “Yes?” and began to look around the room.
“Look,” he insisted, “I don’t mean you just know libraries and colleges and things. I wouldn’t be picking on you if you were that kind of writer. But I’ve got a lot of stuff in here,” and he actually thumped his chest.
I thumped my head. “Then find a writer with a lot of stuff in here,” I advised him, “and you’ll make a good pair.”
He said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” disgustedly and Mary, who could see we were not making out together very well, came over to see how we were making out. “Your friend is kind of touchy,” he told her.
“Your friend is kind of touching,” I told her.
Mary laughed and put a long white arm around each of us. “Want to tell me?”
I said, “No,” and Tulip said, “No,” and then he said to me, “Let me give you an example, tell you one of these things so you’ll see what I mean.”
“If it’s not too gruesome why don’t you let him tell you?” Mary said, and I knew she was being very earnest about something because she hadn’t used any word with more than two syllables in it and only one of those, and that wasn’t her natural way of talking. “Here, I’ll get you something to drink,” and she took our glasses and went away.
I said, “All right, then,” and he told me the first of the many stories he told me or tried to tell me from then on.
This one was about some poor people in Providence who all seemed to have the right kind of feelings about everything that happened to them or around them, and a lot happened, but they kept having the proper feelings so none of it meant very much to me. Mary came back with our drinks and stood listening to the last two-thirds of the story. Tulip didn’t say anything when he had finished telling it and neither did she.
“It’s nice,” I said, “but isn’t it kind of literary?”
Tulip’s face reddened a little, it seemed to me, under the deep sunburn he had got working on the docks, and he said, “I guess I did dress it up a little, maybe too much,” and then when I didn’t say anything, “But it really did happen, you know,” and then when I still didn’t say anything, “How do I know how much to dress things up?”
Mary said to me, “It’s not necessary to be so insufferable,” which was closer to her normal way of talking and made me think she had been anxious for me to listen to Tulip, but didn’t care much one way or the other what I thought about him.
“What do you want?” I asked them.
Mary laughed and said, “You know what I want. Hand it down,” while Tulip scowled at me and ran a big thick-fingered hand back through his hair. “How long are you going to be in town?” he asked.
“Three or four days more. Maybe a day or two after that, though I’d like to get out to Santa Monica to see my kids.”
“How many have you got?” he asked.
“Two. A boy of eight and the girl must be about four now. A lot of people stop when they’ve got one of each.”
The Catonsville girl came over and said, “You’re two such nice men and here you’ve been hiding in this corner all evening just talking to each other.” She said it mostly to me and mostly for Tulip, so I let him have her presently, moving away with Mary.
Tulip called after us, “I can get hold of you through the doctor, can’t I?”
Mary and I nodded yes, and I asked her, “What’s eating him?”
She shook her head. “It’s difficult to conceive of anything eating him. I should imagine that what engaged him back there was his preoccupation with congruity. He devotes considerable attention to the various theories that a somewhat consecutive—though not necessarily chronological—course of events—no matter how dissimilar they may seem—gives life—or any life, for that matter, including perhaps most importantly his own—a—or it may be the—form. But nothing’s exactly eating him.”
“Oh,” I said, “and he wants me to sort out the beads and string them for him?”
“You or somebody.”
“What does he suppose people try to do with their own lives?”
“Surely you’re not naïve enough to expect people to have any conception of what occupies other people or even to possess any awareness that other people have any interior occupations,” she said, and she was pretty enough and I’d had enough to drink to make what she said seem sensible to me, so I changed the subject and we began to talk about us, and that was nice, and then some other people joined us or we joined them, and that was nice too. Everything was nice at that time.
Later Tulip found me in a small sort of sitting-room affair in the back second-story—Mary had an old three-story house just off Cathedral Street—with a small semi-blonde girl named Mrs. Hatcher or something of the sort, and after she had gone away he said, “I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t mean to bust up anything.”
“To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether you did or you didn’t.”
“Oh, all right, then,” he said and sat down, and started to offer me a cigarette and saw I had one, and I refilled the semi-blonde’s glass and gave it to him. This was the Prohibition era, of course, and Baltimore seemed to be drinking more Scotch and less rye than I remembered. “We don’t get along, do we?” he said after he had taken a drink, “and it’s a shame because I think we could do each other a lot of good.”
I must have shrugged then—I always like to shrug—and said something about one of the nice things about being a man was that mankind could survive anything.
“Sure, sure,” he said. “I’m not saying it’s important. I’m just saying it’s a shame, not even a big shame if that bothers you, but a little one like only having brown shoes to wear with blue pants.”
I didn’t believe him—or I don’t now, and it’s now that I’m trying to remember what went on at that time—so I kept quiet except for whatever noises I made breathing or smoking. I don’t mean that I didn’t believe what he said, but I didn’t believe that he felt it, and even back then, the first time I met him, and full of alcohol as I was, I had a wary feeling that he might come to represent a side of me. His being a side of me was all right, of course, since everybody is in some degree an aspect of everybody else or how would anybody ever hope to understand anything about anybody else? But representations seemed to me—at least they seem now, and I suppose I must have had some inkling of the same opinion then, devices of the old and tired, or older and more tired—to ease up, like conscious symbolism, or graven images. If you are tired you ought to rest, I think, and not try to fool yourself and your customers with colored bubbles.
* * *
Two or three months later I heard Tulip was in a Minneapolis hospital, where he had had a leg amputated. I went out to see him and showed him this.
“It’s all right, I guess,” he said when he had read it, “but you seem to have missed the point.”
People nearly always think that.
“But I’ll read it again if you want me to,” he added. “I hurried through it this first time, but I’ll read it again kind of carefully if you want me to.”
THE BIG KNOCKOVER
I found Paddy the Mex in Jean Larrouy’s dive.
Paddy—an amiable con man who looked like the King of Spain—showed me his big white teeth in a smile, pushed a chair out for me with one foot, and told the girl who shared his table, “Nellie, meet the biggest-hearted dick in San Francisco. This little fat guy will do anything for anybody, if only he can send ’em over for life in the end.” He turned to me, waving his cigar at the girl: “Nellie Wade, and you can’t get anything on her. She don’t have to work—her old man’s a bootlegger.”
