Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [104]
Well, he would fling it in their teeth. He drank off about half the pint, jammed the bottle into his hip pocket, and took off for Market Street. When he left his room he was angry, and determined to make trouble, but by the time he got down to Market he felt just fine and sauntered along with the early evening crowd, savoring the pure freedom of it, the way people all dressed differently, the way the women looked and smelled, the way the streetcars sounded, the glitter of the lights, the strange, exciting music from the hot-dog joints, the corniness of it all, the cheapness, the vulgarity which is vulgar only if you haven’t been away for such a long time and in a place so dull as prison; there was a lot of stuff in the newspapers about “cleaning up” Market Street, and Jack wondered why they wanted to do it. Didn’t they know how beautiful it was? Didn’t they understand that for some people the opera, the drama, the ballet, were only boring, and yet a peepshow on Market Street was art? They want to make everything gray and tasteful. Don’t they understand how awful good taste seems to people who don’t have it? Ha, what do they care about people with bad taste! Nothing! But I do. I love them. They wear cheap perfume and carry transistor radios. They buy plastic dog-turds and painted turtles and pennants and signs that say, “I don’t swim in your toilet, so please don’t pee in my pool!” and they buy smelly popcorn and eat it on the street and go to bad movies and stand here in doorways sneaking nips of whiskey just like I’m doing, and they’re all so nice.
At the moment, glowing with whiskey, Jack loved everybody. He even loved that policeman, damn him, who made Jack hide his bottle for fear of being sent back to San Quentin for three years. But the policeman, damn him, went away and Jack took another nip. I aint going to get drunk and mug my fellowman. And go back to prison. Hell no, I’m gonna get drunk and go to a movie, some cheap Technicolor Western full of noise and easy choices, or maybe even pick up one of these beautiful sleazy-looking broads....
He was suddenly very dizzy. He was not used to liquor any more. But it wasn’t that. It was the idea of having a woman that made him dizzy, and he knew it. He leaned up against a building, watching the people surge past him, and took another drink without thinking. The bottle was empty. He made his way across the sidewalk to a trash receptacle and dropped the bottle in. A couple of sailors went past, and one of them looked at Jack, made a face, and stopped.
“Say, buddy,” the sailor said, “where can a man get a piece of tail in this town?”
“I look like I ought to know,” Jack said.
“Yeah, you look like you ought to know. Do you?”
“Nope. Less ask a cabbie.”
“Why didn’t you think of that, Normie?” the sailor said to his buddy. “You’re supposed to be so goddam hip.”
Three hours later they were all filthy drunk, and were asked very politely to leave a bar deep into the Spanish Mission District. The bar was full of Mexicans, and the two sailors and Jack put their heads together and in whispers and giggles admitted that it would be foolish to start a fight. They left and wandered down the street until they found a cab. When they were in back one of the sailors said, “Where to now? Less find that whorehouse.”
“Nearest whorehouse is in Stockton,