Mitla Pass - Leon Uris [21]
And then the dawn came up like thunder from the hoary hills of Oakland cross the bay!
We were mainly living on dreams, youthful ignorance, and veteran’s and unemployment benefits. I thought he would plunge into his novel. He tried for a short time, but finally threw it into a drawer and seldom took it out. Some call it writer’s block. I call it fear. He couldn’t admit to that.
Gideon embarked on a series of gigantic ventures, guaranteed to change the world. Only the world wasn’t quite ready for him. He formed a bogus Marine veterans’ organization with a membership of five, which enabled him to get a charter from the state, giving him nonprofit status and a number of veterans’ perks. The little bastard went out and rented the San Francisco Opera House to present his new play. He hustled scenery, costumes, got feature articles in the newspapers, received a waiver from the musicians’ and stagehands’ unions, passed out handbills, elbowed his way onto radio programs, wrote rave reviews in which he quoted from nonexistent papers in Chicago and New York. Result: seventy-four dollars in the box office and a thousand-dollar debt.
This shook him up so, he hid away in a fight gym in the tenderloin, played pinball machines every day, all day long, for three months.
Next, it was a veterans’ newspaper. This afforded him space to write. He wrote the entire paper, including four columns under different names. He telephoned far into the evenings, hustling ads from local businesses. It took six months for this enterprise to sink and add another thousand dollars to our debt.
Next came publication of a magazine offering “job opportunities” all over the world. The bunko squad came looking for him.
After which he wrote skits for a number of cabarets around North Beach. These were quite funny social commentaries. Unfortunately, the customers liked their entertainment a little more in the raw.
I was so damned in love with the guy that I believed each and every one of his cockamamy schemes right up to the day they busted.
And then I confronted him with those two magic words, “I’m pregnant.”
A COUPLE OF fight trainers he had befriended at the gym sent him to a Teamsters local and Gideon became circulation district manager for the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, an afternoon newspaper. He had between thirty and forty newspaper boys working for him in home delivery. Between my morning sickness and Gideon having a regular job, we were back in the real world and little by little climbed out of the hole. I had hoped that he would return to writing his novel, but the early disasters had left him gun-shy. He did write constantly, every spare moment, but they were short fiction and nonfiction pieces. He kept between fifteen and twenty of these constantly circulating in the mails from publication to publication. In the next two years, he collected four hundred and twenty-two rejection slips.
MOTHER AND I had kept in touch through the occasional letter and phone call. As I went into the eighth month of my pregnancy, we received a sudden message that she and the Admiral were going to pay as a visit. Panic city!
Our apartment, such as it was, was scarcely large enough to hold my belly. It had a closet-sized kitchenette, a one-person-at-a-time bathroom, and an all-purpose room with a pull-down Murphy bed. We ate at a card table on fold-up canvas director’s chairs.
I had dolled the place up with a couple of my own splashy paintings, some wild color, posters, and gypsy wall hangings. In addition to its collection of saloons, muggers, hookers, and other sleazy characters, the tenderloin had a number of flea market-type shops and used book and record stores. Some polished-up bric-a-brac and filled bookshelves gave the place a kind