Love and Glory

Chapter Twenty

I woke up soaked with sweat in the small hot kitchen. The sun still shone in through the window, but it was on the opposite wall. I looked at the clock above the counter in the front of the shop: 5:40. Another day without a drink or a smoke. Two days? Three? I couldn’t quite be sure. I got up and got some bar soap from the lavatory and walked down to the beach. I stripped off my clothes and waded in and washed with the soap. It didn’t lather much in the salt water, but it got the sweat off. I put my stolen jeans back on over my damp body and walked back up to the coffee shop. I got the key from behind the shutter and let myself in. I ate a leftover tuna sandwich and drank milk. Then I opened up the front door to let the air in and found the mop and a bucket and washed down the floor. Tom arrived while I was at it. He gave me a pair of white Keds and a clean white T-shirt. The sneakers were a little big and the T-shirt, one of Tom’s, was very big, but at least I was covered. Tom showed me how to get the big coffee urn ready and started for the day. He showed me how to turn on the grill and how to get the deep fryer going. I had two cups of coffee before the first customers arrived at seven and I started washing dishes.

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.