The Last Tomorrow

SEVEN

1

Here we are, New Hampshire Avenue, a narrow strip of asphalt lined with dark-windowed stucco apartment buildings, trees, and parked cars. For the moment silence covers the street like a blanket. Even the neighborhood cats seem to be sleeping. Then the rattle of a doorknob, a man stepping into the early morning. A bespectacled man with black hair and green eyes. He wears white pants, a heavily starched white shirt with short sleeves, and a black bowtie. Perched atop his head, a white captain’s hat.

The air is still and cool and the sky dark, though it’s already begun its morning fade to the milky blue-gray of daytime.

A block north Wilshire Boulevard stretches out empty across the land.

This man, just shy of six feet tall, taps an Old Gold cigarette from its crushed packet, lights it, and walks to his Divco milk truck, all white but for the fenders painted light blue, and, on the side of the truck, also in blue, the words,

H.H. WHITE CREAMERY CO.

In Business Since 1912.

In business since the year this man, this milkman, Eugene Dahl, was born. In business for fourty years. In business since milk was delivered by horse and carriage.

He steps into the truck and gets it started. He pumps the gas pedal to keep it running while the four-cylinder engine warms up. It takes a few minutes.

While he waits for the engine to start running smoothly he smokes his cigarette and looks out the windshield at his quiet street.

He spits a bit of tobacco off the end of his tongue.

It’s hard to believe this is where life has brought him: to a finicky milk truck in front of his one-bedroom apartment just west of downtown Los Angeles. Once he thought he was going to be something.

Once he almost was.

2

After a childhood of squalor in rural Kentucky, living in a shack with a dirt floor about thirty miles outside of Elizabethtown, surviving only on the meat he and his father could shoot — deer, wild turkey — Eugene made his way to New York to become a writer. He rented a room in Red Hook and got a job in construction. His skills were limited, but he could swing a hammer. After work he’d go home, sit at the typewriter with a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, and bang out stories with titles like ‘Planet 17’ and ‘The Black Ooze Had a Name’. Sometimes they’d sell to Astounding Stories or Weird Tales and he’d get a check for twenty or fourty bucks.

Usually they wouldn’t.

Every once in a while he pretended to work on a novel.

Then, in 1938, he got an idea for a comic book.

He’d spent many a Sunday in his youth learning to draw by copying the funnies, and later by writing and drawing comics to hand out to his friends, so, though he was out of practice, he thought he might have enough ability left in him to create on paper what existed as yet only in his mind.

It turned out he was right.

He spent hours writing and drawing after work. He checked out anatomy books from the library to help him, and books on architecture, and books on animal life. He almost always found an image that could work as a reference when his abilities or his imagination failed him, as they often did. If he couldn’t find a reference, or if something was simply beyond him, he drew around the problem.

It took him months to finish, months hunched over his small table after long days of swinging a hammer in the sun. He worked with aching muscles. He worked with blood-blisters throbbing on his fingers. He worked with gashes in the backs of his hands. Then one day he looked up and was finished. He had four seven-page stories written and drawn, and, as far as he was concerned, ready to be printed up and put on newsstands.

It was a superhero comic.

His superhero was called Rabid, but Donald ‘Don’ Coyote was the name of the man behind the mask. He was a bookstore clerk who spent his days and nights lost in tales of adventure. He lived with his mother, had a cat named Meow he fed every morning, had a crush on a girl at work he was afraid to ask out.

The first story began with Don Coyote being bitten by a rabid dog as he walked home from work. Over the next several days he changed. His cat noticed the difference before he did and began hissing at him when he walked by. Then his hearing improved. High-pitched sounds began to bother him. His teeth grew long and sharp. He began to crave raw beef, and eat it with his bare hands. His muscles doubled in size.

Then he went to work and learned that the girl he liked, Sue, had been mugged the night before. He asked where she’d been mugged and what the fellow looked like. That night he went hunting. He found the man who stole Sue’s purse and recovered it. Then he beat the mugger to a pulp and left him on the front steps of the police station with a note pinned to his shirt.

After creating his superhero and spending two stories developing him, Eugene introduced the villain who was to become Don Coyote’s arch nemesis.

His name was Reginald Winthrop. He was a heartless businessman whose plane had crashed on a remote island. For months he was presumed dead. His brother took over his business, married his wife. But Reginald wasn’t dead. After the crash, a witch doctor found him in the wreckage and nursed him back to health. He’d lost an arm in the crash, but the witch doctor replaced it with an airplane propeller.

He returned to the city. But he was no longer Reginald Winthrop. He now called himself the Windmill. When he tried to reclaim his old life, his brother had him declared insane. He was put into an asylum, but could not be contained. He broke out, smashed the wall to smithereens with his propeller arm — and anyone who got in his way. He went after his brother, demanding his wife and business back. His brother broke down crying and admitted he’d lost all the money. His wife refused him. The Windmill burned down their house with them inside it. He started robbing banks, convinced he could rebuild his empire. He just needed a little capital.

At the end of the last story, Don Coyote, while walking home from work, turned a corner and saw the Windmill leaving a bank with a sack of money hanging from his fist. The Windmill turned on him, propeller spinning. Don stepped back. The Windmill raised his propeller arm and took to the sky like a helicopter, escaping. Don Coyote went into the bank to make sure everyone was all right. His mother was there. She’d been killed, sliced to pieces. Don Coyote swore to himself then and there, and to his dead mother, and to God, that he would stop the Windmill at all costs.

Even if it was the last thing he ever did.

Eugene was immoderately proud of his creation. He flipped through the pages again and again, looking at it. He’d worked harder on this comic book than on anything else he’d ever done. He believed it might be his escape from poverty.

He knew people liked to say that in America anyone could do anything. With enough hard work a man born in the gutter could become a millionaire, or president. But the truth for most people was different. Poverty was a room with no doors. There were windows, you could see outside, but the windows didn’t open. If you hoped to escape you had either to break through the glass and into a life of crime or else dream a doorway into existence. If you could do neither of those things you’d be stuck in that room no matter how hard you worked. He believed Rabid! might be his doorway, and he planned to walk through it if he could.

The day after he finished the comic, he took the train into the city, determined to find a publisher. The first two weren’t interested. Then he walked into the offices of E.M. Comics on 42nd Street. After waiting for twenty minutes he was called into the publisher’s office. The publisher’s name was Michael Leonard. He was a thin man with prematurely gray hair, a nose like a snowplow, and a loose-skinned neck.

Eugene’s stomach was a knot of anxiety.

He handed the pages over.

Leonard flipped through them quickly, like someone browsing a catalogue with nothing of interest in it. Seeing Leonard scan the pages, seeing his bored expression, Eugene prepared himself for rejection. He prepared himself for another no, sorry, it just ain’t our thing. He started thinking about where he might go next. He’d made a list of comics publishers before leaving the house. As soon as he was down on the street again, he’d look it over, see what was close by.

But when Leonard flipped the last page he looked up and said, ‘Not bad. I’ll give you two hundred bucks for the idea, twenty bucks a story, and fifteen dollars a page for the art. I’ll tell you now you aren’t getting your own book right away. We’ll run these four stories in the next few issues of Bash! Comics, see if the kids respond to them. If they do we’ll think about it. And work on your drawing. You’re at the back end of good. Improve a bit and I’ll pay twenty bucks a page, but you ain’t there yet.’

Eugene stood silent, unable to believe what he’d just heard. He made a dollar twenty-five an hour doing construction — ten greenbacks a day — and this man had just off-handedly offered him hundreds.

‘Do we have a deal?’

Eugene simply nodded.

‘Good.’

He had his own comic book within six months. He wrote every story. He had notebooks full of ideas and was always adding more while refining the ones he’d already jotted down. Once each month’s stories were decided upon, Leonard would assign them to various artists. Eugene would draw one himself and oversee the completion of the rest. It was a productive, creative time.

Then the kids started to get tired of superhero comics.

Circulation dropped fast.

The last issue of Rabid! ran in April 1943.

As the superhero comics were sinking, crime comics were rising. Eugene stayed on at E.M. Comics to write and draw for Gutterguns, an anthology comic about lowlife criminals. He handled a story a month for a couple years, making enough to get by on, but not much more. Making less than he had in construction.

This was not the escape from poverty he’d imagined it would be.

In 1945, feeling depressed and creatively stifled by working on other people’s projects, he told Leonard he wanted to do a comic book of his own again. It would be a crime comic, but one that allowed him to stretch himself a bit. Every story would be set in a fictional place called Down City, where dark things were always happening. Criminals ran the place. Albino alligators survived in the sewers, living off the bodies of those unfortunate enough to have crossed the wrong mobster — or the corrupt police department. Each story would reference something that happened in another story, would reveal a previously undisclosed connection, until there was a network of fiction so elaborate that Down City seemed real, seemed a three-dimensional place that a person could step into.

The first issue ran in August 1945. The last issue ran in December 1949. It was never the most popular comic E.M. published, but it was a good run all the same, and Eugene managed to accomplish some of what he’d wanted to accomplish when he began. He’d even seen adults reading his work. Those were proud moments, moments when he felt he’d actually done something worth doing.

But by 1949 he’d been in the business eleven years. He was thirty-eight and he was tired of comics. He decided he wasn’t going to do them anymore. The quiet pride he sometimes felt wasn’t enough.

He had a little money saved. After eleven years of work in comics he had accumulated enough cash to keep himself out of the poorhouse for six months, assuming he was very careful, and if he really committed himself to it he thought six months might give him enough time to write a novel.

He’d come out here from Kentucky to make it as a writer, to make it as a novelist, but had not yet written a single book. Not even a bad one. He’d written a few dozen short stories, published six or seven of them, but he was still on page twenty-nine of the novel he’d begun in 1936. He wasn’t even sure where the manuscript might be. He hadn’t seen it since he moved apartments in 1947.

His eleven years in comics now felt like they’d been wasted, like they’d distracted him from what he really should have been doing. He’d made no money and the art he produced, if it could be considered art, ended up getting tossed into trashcans by bedroom-cleaning mothers and Sunday-school teachers. He could stay and continue to turn out tomorrow’s trash for twenty dollars a page, or he could do what he should have been doing all along.

But he didn’t think he could do it in New York. He needed a change of environment, a change of scenery. He decided to go to Los Angeles. He liked the idea of getting as far from New York as he could without first obtaining a passport. He would go to Los Angeles and he would live off his savings and he would write a novel. He would throw out his twenty-nine pages and start a new novel in a new place. He’d sit on a sun-lit porch or on the verge of a hotel pool with a portable typewriter on his knees and write a novel while sipping rum cocktails. And he wouldn’t go back to New York till it was finished.

That was his plan.

And a week later he stepped off a train in downtown Los Angeles, with a cardboard suitcase gripped in his fist and a small fold of cash in his pocket. He was in his new place and his future seemed bright.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

In two and a half years he has written not a single word unless the paper it’s typed upon has been promptly crumpled into a tight ball and thrown into a trashcan.

He still pulls out his typewriter after work sometimes and rolls in a sheet of paper, especially when he’s been drinking. But then he simply sits and stares. The blank page is somehow intimidating. He knows what he wants to put on it — it’s clear in his mind — but it won’t come. Something in him won’t let it out.

With comics it was easy. It didn’t feel like it mattered. He didn’t even sign most of his work. It was creative, sometimes he did something he was proud of, but in the back of his mind he knew it didn’t mean anything. He’d never sent a comic book home to Kentucky as he had the short stories he’d published. He’d never even told his father he was working in comics. Comics were disposable. No matter how good they were, they were trash. There was something creatively liberating about that. If what you do doesn’t matter, you can do anything. But this matters. This is his dream. And he knows that as soon as he slams his fingers against those typewriter keys, as soon as he commits to certain words in a certain order, he will have tarnished his dream.

He can’t bring himself to do that.

It’s better to wait.

Someday the right words will come and he’ll know they’re the right words because he’s been waiting on them for so long. When the time arrives he’ll sit down and write his novel. He will do what he’s always said he’d do.

Until then, he’ll be a milkman.

3

He makes a right onto Wilshire, heading east. The street is empty but for him, and its emptiness makes it lonesome. Like a dry riverbed, it feels almost sad. This isn’t how it was supposed to be. It was built for so much more. But he likes that feeling. He likes it because he knows it’s temporary.

This isn’t failure; it’s potential.

He rolls down the empty street, makes a few turns onto other empty streets, and finally pulls into an alleyway, driving along the backs of anonymous warehouses. Trash bins line the alleyway. Tractor trailers parked at docks. Homeless men with newspaper blankets. Then he arrives, rolls past a steep ramp, slams the truck into reverse, and backs up the incline, ignoring the engine’s high-pitched whine. He brings the truck to a stop, kills the engine, and steps out of it with a clipboard in hand.

The warehouse guys are sitting at a rickety table playing cards.

Once trailers are unloaded and product is inventoried and stocked, the warehouse crew merely wait around for milkmen like him to arrive so the day’s orders can be pulled and loaded. Then, after all the trucks are on their way, they sweep, check inventory once more, and shut the place down. By eight o’clock they’re headed home to sleep, or to a bar to toss back a few.

‘Eugene,’ says the warehouse foreman, Darryl ‘Fingers’ Castor, looking up from a fan of cards. ‘How’s the novel coming along?’

‘Slow and steady. What about last night’s gig?’

‘It was sweet, man. You should’ve been there.’

Fingers drives down to 57th Street every Saturday night to play trumpet, the only speck of white in a six-piece Negro bebop band. Eugene’s gone out to see them several times now. He was nervous, and got a few stares, the first time he showed up at the club where they play, but things loosened up once everyone realized he and Fingers were friends, and he ended up having a hell of a good time. Now when he goes, rare as that is, the regulars know him by name. He even took a date once.

‘Next time.’

‘All right, I’m holding you to it. What’s your load like today?’

When Fingers isn’t blowing his horn he’s usually got something else going on. He knows everybody and has his fingers in everything, which is how he got the nick. People come to him with goods they need to shift — one day it’ll be a truckload of Canadian cigarettes, the next a duffel bag full of heroin — and he gets a percentage if he can find a buyer. Doesn’t matter what it is, he always finds one.

He’s asked Eugene to help him out once or twice, just need you to drive a truck to the corner of Slauson and Crenshaw, park it, and walk away, but Eugene doesn’t have the temperament for criminal activity. Simply knowing he was driving stolen goods or illegal substances would make him sweat. One sideways glance from a cop and he’d crumble. The money’d be nice — the only people who don’t seem to know the value of money are those who’ve always had it — but Eugene’s simply too square for that kind of work, and knows it. He won’t even sell reefers off his truck, as some of the other milkmen do.

He glances down at his clipboard, looks over the orders.

‘Pretty full. You know Sundays. Everybody loading up for the week.’ He hands Fingers a carbon copy of today’s haul, written in his neat block lettering.

‘Dave, Gary,’ Fingers says, ‘help Eugene out.’

‘I’ll get the ice,’ Gary says, and heads off.

Divco manufactured a few hundred refrigerated trucks in 1940, but the Japanese ended production with Operation Z. After Pearl Harbor was bombed, Divco’s resources were instead diverted to the war effort, and despite the war being over for seven years now, the company has yet to pick up where it left off, so they use ice to keep everything cold while en route. And occasionally Eugene will chop off a small block for folks who don’t yet have refrigerators of their own. There are still a few people along his route who make do with their old ice boxes, setting their eggs and milk on chicken-wire shelves so the cold can permeate.

‘What’s first on the list?’ Dave asks.

‘Two hundred and fourty-three quarts of milk.’

Dave nods, then grabs the pallet truck and pulls it behind him, like an uncooperative dog, toward the walk-ins. As he approaches them, a stainless-steel door swings open and Gary emerges from a freezer with two large blocks of ice in a wheelbarrow. In just under fifteen minutes Eugene’s truck is loaded.

He thanks Dave and Gary, tells Fingers he’ll see him day after tomorrow, and gets into his truck. He starts the engine and rolls down the ramp, through the alley, and out to the street. When he hits his route he’ll swivel the seat aside and drive standing up so he can hop on and off the truck more quickly, but for now he’ll take the cushion.

He heads east toward Boyle Heights where he delivers, rolling past stacks of newspapers sitting on street corners, waiting for newsboys to arrive. In front of him the early morning light is creating a halo around the jagged urban horizon, the day finally beginning. It will be, he’s certain, a day like any other day. And he’s right.

Today will be a day to forget.

He’ll finish his route and grab lunch at a diner. He’ll sip coffee, smoke a cigarette, and read from a paperback novel while his food digests. Lunch will be followed by several drinks at the bar on the first floor of the Galt Hotel. If he meets a woman, he’ll take her to dinner at the Brown Derby just a few doors down, then home to his place for one last drink. If he doesn’t, he’ll simply stumble home, eat dinner from a can, and pull out his typewriter. He’ll stare at the blank page for a long time. He’ll probably even get a couple sentences down. But when he reads over them he’ll see how clumsy they are, how clumsy and false, and he’ll wish he hadn’t expended the energy it took to bang them into existence. He’ll tear the sheet of paper from his typewriter and throw it away.

A day like any other day. A day to forget.

We fall into patterns, boring and comfortable and predictable.

What he cannot predict is that by this time next week his life will be in turmoil.

While he slept two men were murdered, one with a gun and one with a knife, and each of those murders, like stones dropped into still water, sent ripples outward, and eventually those ripples will reach him, rock the small boat that is his life, and send him overboard.

He won’t know it till this time next week, but this life he lives is already over.