The Road to Los Angeles Read Online Free PDF Page A

any pride, any sense of human dignity? Why should you see him after he treated me with such levantine scurrilousness? Do you want to disgrace the family name too?"

    She was dressing in the bedroom. Mona laughed and fingered her hair. I went in and pulled off my mother's stockings and tied them in knots before she could stop me. Mona shook her head and tittered. I put my fist under her nose and gave her a final warning not to butt in. My mother didn't know what to do next. I put my hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. "I am a man of deep pride," I said. "Does that strike an approving chord in your sense of judgment? Pride! My first and last utterance rises from the soul of that stratum I call Pride. Without it my life is a lusty disillusionment. In short, I am delivering you an ultimatum. If you go down to Romero's I'll kill myself."

    That scared the devil out of her, but Mona rolled over and laughed and laughed. I didn't say more but went back to bed and pretty soon I fell asleep.

    When I woke up it was around noon and they were gone somewhere. I got out the picture of an old girl of mine I called Marcella and we went to Egypt and made love in a slave-driven boat on the Nile. I drank wine from her sandals and milk from her breasts and then we had the slaves paddle us to the river bank and I fed her hearts of hummingbirds seasoned in sweetened pigeon milk. When it was over I felt like the devil. I felt like hitting myself in the nose, knocking myself unconscious. I wanted to cut myself, to feel my bones cracking. I tore the picture of Marcella to pieces and got rid of it and then I went to the medicine cabinet and got a razor blade, and before I knew it I slit my arm below the elbow, but not deeply so that it was only blood and no pain. I sucked the slit but there was still no pain, so I got some salt and rubbed it in and felt it bite my flesh, hurting me and making me come out of it and feel alive again, and I rubbed it until I couldn't stand it any longer. Then I bandaged my arm.

    They had left a note for me on the table. It said they had gone to Uncle Frank's and that there was food in the pantry for my breakfast. I decided to eat at Jim's Place, because I still had some money. I crossed the schoolyard which was across the street from the apartment and went over to Jim's. I ordered ham and eggs. While I ate Jim talked.

    He said, "You read a lot. Did you ever try writing a book?"

    That did it. From then on I wanted to be a writer. "I'm writing a book right now," I said.

    He wanted to know what kind of a book.

    I said, "My prose is not for sale. I write for posterity."

    He said, "I didn't know that. What do you write? Stories? Or plain fiction?"

    "Both. I'm ambidextrous."

    "Oh. I didn't know that."

    I went over to the other side of the place and bought a pencil and a notebook. He wanted to know what I was writing now. I said, "Nothing. Merely taking random notes for a future work on foreign trade. The subject interests me curiously, a sort of dynamic hobby I've picked up."

    When I left he was staring at me with his mouth open. I took it easy down to the harbor. It was June down there, the best time of all. The mackerel were running off the south coast and the canneries were going full blast, night and day, and all the time at that time of the year there was a stink in the air of putrefaction and fish oil. Some people considered it a stink and some got sick from it, but it was not a stink to me, except the fish smell which was bad, but to me it was great. I liked it down there. It wasn't one smell but a lot of them weaving in and out, so every step you took brought a different odor. It made me dreamy and I did a lot of thinking about far-away places, the mystery of what the bottom of the sea contained, and all the books I'd read came alive at once and I saw better people out of books, like Philip Carey, Eugene Witla, and the fellows Dreiser made.

    I liked the odor of bilge water from old tankers, the