Firmin Read Online Free PDF Page B

and Luweena crunching on something in the darkness up ahead. They didn’t share, and when I came up all I found was a piece of lettuce. It tasted like Jane Eyre . We came out of the alley on Hanover Street, directly across from the bright blaze of the Casino Theater. On a jutting marquee, in yellow lights that ran round and round, were the words GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS and BEST IN BOSTON. Beneath the marquee, on either side of a glass ticket window, were life-sized black-and-white photos of what I have since learned to identify as good-looking women. They were not wearing any clothes except for high-heeled shoes and diamond tiaras in their hair, while two long black rectangles blocked out their breasts and the tops of their thighs. One woman had light hair and one had dark hair. They each had one foot lifted. Caught by the camera in the midst of dancing, they floated frozen in midstep: the stroke of the shutter had severed them from time like a guillotine. Mama and Luweena had paid them no attention at all. They had gone instead right up to the theater door under EXIT and were now busy stuffing their cheeks full of the popcorn someone had spilled there. Luweena clearly had a natural gift for scrounging and scraping. I did not even try to join them this time. I just stood there looking up at the posters, one foot in the air. Despite my wide reading, even my digestion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I had only a pale intellectual’s grasp of this aspect of the world. I had not actually experienced anything like it before. Now, looking back over my life, I can see that this moment, when I stood gaping at those almost naked creatures, those angels, marked what biographers like to call a turning point. I shall do the same and say that on November 26, 1960, in front of the Casino Theater on a side street off Boston’s Scollay Square, my life path turned. But of course I did not know that yet. At that point I did not even know I was in Boston.
     
    Luweena and Mama having scooped up all the popcorn, we went on down Hanover, sliding along the gutter to the nearly deserted Square. The Square was, as people liked to say, a cesspool, and indeed the damp asphalt glistened under the streetlights like water. A woman, followed closely by a man, passed without seeing us. Walking rapidly, they turned and disappeared into a doorway under ROOMS. I shall never forget the sound the woman’s heels made against the sidewalk. We crouched in a drain till they had gone inside, the door closed behind them. Then, following Mama’s lead, we raced across the broad expanse of the Square as fast as we could go, as fast at any rate as Mama could go. In those days Luweena and I were still light on our feet. Reaching the opposite sidewalk, Mama found a puddle of beer, and she and Luweena refused to go on until they had lapped up every drop of it. My anxiety had by then migrated from the margins of my consciousness to dead center and I was beginning to quiver with fear. I thought, To hell with food. I wanted to run back home to the warm safety of the bookstore, but I was terrified of being separated from Mama. I was especially frightened by the trucks that now and then went thundering past us, their headlights throwing enormous shadows against the walls, though Mama did not even look up, and after a while neither did Luweena. And then we went on down the street. We passed in front of the darkened gothic-windowed hulk of the Old Howard, which had once been a famous theater but had been closed for years. A lot of low-class rats lived there. It was, Mama said, a good place to get killed. In the end, after more lapping and licking at sidewalk puddles, we found food - hot dogs, pickles, buns, ketchup, mustard - in the big blue bins in back of Joe and Nemo’s. Other rats were there too but we stayed away from them. We are not a close-knit species. Then it was back out by the Red Hat Bar, and more puddles. Most of these were urine, but there were enough booze pools as