Train Tracks Read Online Free PDF Page A

going to be more conservative. How would you like to be the key player?”
    â€œSure, let’s do it.”
    And so I did and the rest is history. That’s how I got into radio.
    The moral of the story is, just do what you do best and try the best you can until the day you die, and eventually the train that you are riding will lead you where you belong.

TEN
    Achievements
    O ne of the stories in this book tells about a man on an island in Majorca who had threatened my life when I was young. The gangster. Well, if you remember that story as you read, you’ll see that, as I looked through his scrapbook, there he was with his two new Jaguars and a blonde on his arm, showing off his possessions. That was then. This is now. Today we are not allowed to show our possessions; we have to hide them. In those days a man worked as hard as he could to gain as much as he could. Sometimes doing good, sometimes doing bad, but he didn’t hide what he had achieved. At this stage of my life I have many things I cannot talk about: cars, planes, boats; but you don’t want to hear about it because no longer does success matter. Failure seems to be extolled. Poverty is extolled, not the honestly earned riches. It’s a world turned upside down.
    I began by thinking I would be a scientist. In fact, I still have the little antiquated brass microscope that I purchased when I was a high school teacher. Little did I know then that I would wind up behind the microphone.

ELEVEN
    Boy in the
Basement
    I t was a
market, see, and I apprenticed in there to the leader of them all, my little
father, Ben. From about the age of four or five until my seventeenth birthday,
that’s where I received my major training.
    I knew each one of the men in the market. It was
laid out just like a ship. A long corridor down the center with five or six
stalls on each side. Here we have Murray, and next to him was Fartser—Charlie
was right next to Murray. That was the stand I later occupied when I began to
sell antiques.
    I remember Charlie from his heyday of screwing
women downstairs in the basement—(all the rag dresses he’d given them) those
poor women he’d invite downstairs—and I’d be watching through a slit while I was
cleaning bronzes down there.
    See, I used to work down in the basement at the
sink. My father gave me cyanide solution to clear the patina off bronzes. They
used to kill men in San Quentin with cyanide solution, right? So my father’s
friends would come down and see this Dickensian little boy in the basement, me,
cleaning bronzes with a toothbrush. Scraping it off with the acrid, deadly,
cyanide solution, my eyes getting all irritated. They’d say, “Benny,” to my
father, “how can you do that? It’s your own son.” And he’d say, “Never mind,
it’s good for him, it’s good for his soul, it’s good for his character.”
    In a sense, he was right. My other world in later
years, the good suburban world of green-carpeted security, gave me little to
think about. But there, in that cold, dark, unheated basement of the market, I
had time to think, to develop the introspection of a prisoner. Basements still
do that to me; they encourage clear thinking. It must be the closeness to earth,
to origins, the security of walls without windows, the exposed supporting beams,
the ancestral memories of refuge in these elemental places.
    I remember my father’s story about czarist Russia,
where a basement saved the life of Uncle Philip. Invading troops came through
the village seeking pillage, food, and general mischief. The women clutched
their children and hovered near the small dwellings. As the leader passed my
grandmother on a large white stallion, he reached down and grabbed my father,
then a boy of three or four, from his mother’s arms. She began to shriek, but
the officer had a lighter end in mind. He simply pranced his horse around the
village for the