From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [86]
He stood in the doorway of the pool alcove that was also deserted now at ten o’clock, an hour before Taps, wondering why in hell he had come down here, looking at the deserted pingpong table at the far end which as far as he knew had never had a net and would not be bothered now until next Payday for a blackjack game, looking at the deserted radio at the near end that had been on the blink now since a week before last Payday, looking out through the screens at the rainy street and the railroad beyond and at the tin roofed sheds beyond the railroad, the places where all the money was and that had been going full blast since Payday and now were tapering off in the middle of the month to one game among the few who had been the heavy winners. Life on the Inside was not measured by hours but by Paydays: Last Payday, Next Payday, and then there was the inbetween that lasted very long but never was remembered.
The plywood magazine rack had been pulled in from the outside wall too, and he went over to it and scanned the heavy cardboard covers made to look like leather but which never did, reading the Company’s and Regiment’s designation embossed on the blank rectangle in the center. He took out a stack of them and sat down with them in a chair as far from the dripping water as he could get, and started thumbing through them.
They were all there: Life, with its cross-section pictures of the world and “The March of Time Marches On” air about it; Look, that was so obviously a second-rate imitation that had got on the gravytrain; Argosy and Bluebook, with their adventure stories about lovely ladies with smudged faces and strategically ripped dresses lost in jungles with aviators who protected them from pygmies; Country Gentlemen, with its Buick owning farmers dressed in tweeds; Field & Stream, with its comfortable hunters in sharp looking coats and breeches carrying fine shotguns and smoking pipes; Colliers, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, American, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Saturday Evening Post, and all their starving young actresses and producers, who looked wellfed in the drawings, the young mountain men carrying cap and ball rifles and looking very bronzed and masculine, all of them bound together with a running theme of High-, Middle-, and Low-Class Americana on their cover pictures and that overflowed occasionally into a number of the advertisements.
They were all there, subscribed to by the Company, paid for by the Company Fund, provided for the recreation of the men.
And he thumbed through them all, not bothering to read the stories that always bored him with their unreality, looking at the pictures, and the ads.
“There’s a Ford in your future,” they told him. “‘What this country needs . . .’ . . . is a good money-saving motor oil for 25¢.” “This is the Jones family admiring young Johnny Jones, aged 4 days, 6 hours and 23 minutes—through a protective wall of glass at the hospital.” “Let me tell you why Jimmy is doing better in school—he eats Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.” “I like my sleep, says Al Smith—go Pullman.” “Rubber does it better.” (He got a grin from that one.) “NOW! You can own a Cadillac. Only $1345.00.” “The Red Horse is the People’s Choice.” “Give her the American kitchen of her dreams.”
In Harlan when he was a kid, in the outhouse, they had a Sears Roebuck catalog that his mother called “The Wishing Book.
There was one old issue of the Post, battered and rolled and curled and torn and dated back to November 30, 1940, that was a gold mine, a fine opium, with much food for thought.
Its cover, one of those Norman Rockwell paintings of Americana, Prew studied for a long, long time. It showed a young man lying on his topcoat on the ground, strumming on a uke and smoking on a pipe, with his shoeless